A Familiar Stranger

By the final semester of her MBA, Antares had stopped believing people who said university was supposed to be the best time of your life. She suspected nobody who said that had ever done an MBA.

At eight thirty on a Tuesday morning she sat on the second floor of the university library in Kuala Lumpur, watching a financial model produce numbers that had not existed the night before.

The presentation was tomorrow. The model was the presentation. She had gone to sleep with a working file and woken up to a document that now believed their hypothetical company would generate four hundred million ringgit in its second year of operations, which would have been excellent news if it were true, or even possible.

“Danish.”

He did not look up from his laptop. “Yes.”

“Tell me you didn’t change my model.”

“I corrected it.”

“That was not the question.”

“You had the growth rate linked to the wrong Spreadsheet cell.”

“It was linked exactly where I wanted it.”

“That is what worries me.”

Antares scrolled back through the assumptions tab, which had also acquired opinions overnight. Buried somewhere among the changes was the hour and a half she had spent on Sunday getting the terminal value to behave. Across the table, Afifa lowered her coffee with the expression of a woman settling in to watch something she had already seen twice this month.

“You could both just talk to each other,” she said.

“I am talking to him.”

“You are threatening him.”

“I have not threatened anyone.”

Danish turned his screen around without comment. The corrected model sat there, tidy, defensible, and entirely his. Antares looked at it for a long moment. It was better. That was the irritating part. It was better and it was no longer hers, and she now had eighteen hours to learn the model well enough to defend it in front of a professor who asked questions in the tone of a man conducting an autopsy.

“Fine,” she said.

“Fine?”

“Fine as in I am accepting the model. Not fine as in I forgive the process.”

“I can work with that.”

The final semester had turned everyone into a slightly worse version of themselves. Sleep had become theoretical. People who had once arrived for class looking like functioning adults now appeared in sweatshirts, mismatched socks and the hollow expressions of people who had been personally betrayed by the semester.

The library tables had accumulated coffee cups like archaeological evidence of a civilization that had once believed eight hours of sleep was possible. Antares had three presentations, one report, two meetings and an exam between now and Friday. It was Tuesday. She had decided not to think about Friday. Friday could defend itself.

Outside the wide library windows, Kuala Lumpur was preparing for rain. Clouds had been gathering above the city since early morning, heavy and grey but doing nothing to cut the heat. From where she sat, she could see the tops of several towers beyond the trees, their glass surfaces losing colour beneath the darkening sky. She had lived in Malaysia long enough to know what came next. The first drops would be polite, and then the sky would attempt murder.

When she had first arrived in Malaysia for the MBA, almost everything about Kuala Lumpur had seemed excessive: the heat, the rain, the towers, the traffic, the food courts large enough to lose relatives in, and above all the air conditioning. Malaysia, she had discovered within her first week, believed indoor temperatures should be maintained somewhere between northern Europe and refrigerated vegetables. She had arrived expecting tropical heat and spent half her first semester carrying a cardigan into every classroom.

Now Kuala Lumpur had settled into her body in smaller ways. She knew which café stayed open late enough to tolerate postgraduate despair, which train door put her nearest the escalator at her stop, and which supermarket occasionally carried the kind of olive oil she considered acceptable without requiring a minor bank loan. She knew how rain changed the smell of the roads before it changed their colour.

Somewhere between exams, work, friendships, homesickness and learning exactly how much sambal she could tolerate before regretting all her life choices, the city had stopped feeling foreign. Somewhere along the way, home had become a plural thing. North Africa was still part of it, but so was this city now, with its rain, its heat, its impossible air conditioning and the life she had built between them.

Her phone vibrated against the table.

Haris: Dinner tonight?

A smile arrived before she had authorised it. Afifa, who missed nothing and forgave less, looked up immediately.

“There.”

“There what?”

“That is the Haris face.”

Antares turned the phone over. “I am allowed private happiness.”

“Not during group work.”

She turned it back.

What time?

8 PM. I booked that place in Bangsar you like.

That narrowed absolutely nothing down. Antares had approximately forty-seven places she liked.She typed Which place? then deleted the question mark to indicate seriousness. The reply made her put the phone down flat on the table.

Haris: Wear the green dress.

She looked at it for slightly too long. Afifa was already leaning across the table.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Your face has never once said nothing.”

Antares lasted eleven seconds. “He told me to wear the green dress.”

Afifa sat back with the deep satisfaction of a woman whose theory had just been confirmed by the universe itself.

Danish, who had not looked up in four minutes, shut his laptop with the expression of a man whose civil liberties were about to be suspended.

“No,” he said.

“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”

“I know the shape of it.”

“He is going to propose,” Afifa said.

“He is not proposing.”

“How long have you been together?”

“Almost a year.”

“Exactly.”

“That does not mean exactly anything.” Antares reopened the model, which had the advantage of being a problem with a correct answer. “He books dinner all the time. He likes that dress. These are not clues. These are Tuesdays.”

Afifa let a silence happen. She was extremely good at silences, having grown up in a large family where she had learned that sometimes the best way to be heard was to make everyone else uncomfortable first.

Antares held out for most of it.

“What.”

“When did you and Haris last talk about after graduation?”

“Why does everyone keep asking me what happens after graduation?”

“Because graduation is happening.”

“I have noticed.”

“So?”

“So I graduate.”

“And then?”

Antares put both hands flat on the table. “There. That. That is the entire problem. The and then.”

For months now, every conversation with anyone who felt entitled to an opinion had eventually arrived at the same place. Her professors asked. Career services asked. Friends asked. People back home called and asked in more elaborate forms, usually wrapped inside questions about her health and whether she was eating properly. Would she return? Would she stay in Malaysia? Was she applying elsewhere? Had she considered Singapore, the Gulf, Europe? What kind of company? What role? What industry? What was the five-year plan?

Apparently completing an MBA was no longer sufficient. One was also expected to emerge from the graduation hall carrying a fully documented strategy for the remainder of one’s natural life.

Antares did have a plan. Sleep. Eat food that had not come from a campus café. Spend one entire day without opening a slide deck. It was, she thought, an ambitious strategic roadmap.

“I don’t know yet,” she said.

Afifa nodded as though that were a perfectly respectable answer, which was one of the reasons Antares loved her.

Danish said, without looking up, “You could stay.”

“Visa. Work. Life. Minor administrative details.”

“You’ll find something. You always do.”

It was said so casually that it landed harder than encouragement usually did.

Antares was still deciding what to do with it when Afifa’s phone buzzed, then Danish’s, then hers, in the particular cascade that only ever meant one thing.

Afifa read hers first.

“He moved the deadline.”

“Which deadline?”

“The report.”

“To when?”

“Thursday.”

Antares looked up at the library ceiling for a moment, out of respect.

“That is a violation of international humanitarian law.”

“I don’t think it is.”

“It should be.”

The first heavy drops struck the windows. Within seconds, the city beyond the glass began disappearing behind water, the towers dissolving one after another until there was nothing out there but grey and the sound of rain.

Nobody at the table said anything for a while. They worked.

It was, Antares thought later, the last completely ordinary hour of her life, and she spent it arguing about a terminal value.

⁂

She left the library at eleven for a lecture in the faculty building across the walkway, her laptop held against her chest and her cardigan draped over one arm, because the rain had stopped and the air conditioning had not.

The atrium was full. It was always full at that hour, students moving in loose currents between the entrance and the lifts, a delivery rider stranded beside the security desk trying to identify whoever had ordered enough bubble tea for an entire faculty.

Antares crossed without looking up. She was rereading the assumptions tab on her phone as she walked, which was how she had once walked directly into a glass door in front of eleven witnesses.

She reached the far stairwell, went up, and noticed nothing at all.

⁂

He had come through the main doors two minutes earlier.

He had no reason to stop.

He was there to collect a document from an administrative office on the third floor, a task so minor that it had been given to him because he had offered, and he had offered because he had spent nine days in this city being polite in air-conditioned rooms and would have volunteered for almost anything that involved walking.

He knew the building. He had been there twice before. He was halfway between the entrance and the lifts when something in the moving crowd caught hold of him and stopped him where he stood.

A woman was crossing the atrium with a laptop held against her chest and a cardigan bundled on top of it. She was reading something on her phone, not looking where she was going. She was perhaps twenty metres away. There was nothing remarkable about her. There were hundreds of people in the building, many of them carrying laptops, many of them staring at their phones.

His hand closed around the strap of his bag.

It was not attraction. He had felt attraction, and it did not do this.This was lower and older. It arrived in his chest with the flat certainty of recognition, the way a name arrives, the way you know a room in the dark because you grew up in it. Somewhere beneath his ribs, something turned over and told him, with total confidence and no evidence whatsoever, that he knew her.

He did not.

He was certain he did not. He had never been in this country before last week.

She reached the stairwell on the far side, went up, and disappeared. He stood in the middle of the crowded atrium with his heart going as though he had been running, knowing two things with equal certainty: he should go after her, and he should leave the building immediately and never come back.

He left the building.