Aamir opened his mouth to argue but then closed it again. He had been raised by the same woman who had raised me. He knew he was trapped. With a scowl, he handed me the spicy spoils of my victory, which I proceeded to devour.
* * *
—
Back then there was only one person in the world who I knew preferred me to Aamir, and I know that because she told me so. I’m pretty sure Naani Jaan, our mother’s mother, told Aamir so too. She didn’t give a damn about anyone’s feelings. As far as she was concerned, if someone was a pedantic little son of an owl—the insult loses something in translation—they ought to be informed of that fact. After all, if you didn’t do people the service of pointing out their flaws, how could you reasonably expect them to improve themselves?
Naani Jaan was a severe-looking woman who rarely smiled and almost never laughed. With narrow, serious eyes she surveyed the world as she found it and, generally speaking, found it wanting. I loved her because she loved me, of course, but also because she never changed, and it is comforting to have constants in your life. Her gray hair was always pulled up in a tight, painful-looking bun, and she only wore a plain white saris, which she said was the appropriate dress for a widow.
My mother, appalled by Naani’s adherence to what she considered a non-Islamic custom, lavished Naani with saris of every color imaginable, but the old woman wouldn’t even try them on. When she died, Naani left behind a rainbow of never-worn, out-of-fashion clothes in her cupboard.
When you are young everything seems eternal, even if you’ve killed more than your fair share of goats. I thought the days of sitting by Naani Jaan’s window watching the rain come down and playing checkers while spearing sweet slices of Chaunsa mango with her dull silver forks would never end.
I was twelve when I got good at checkers, but I never got good enough to beat Naani Jaan, who refused to teach me all her tricks because that was her way.
“I’m like a cat,” she said. “And you’re a young lion.”
“What?”
“I’ll teach you everything I know,” Naani said, “except how to climb a tree. That way, I can always get away when I need to.”
I shook my head. “I’m pretty sure lions can climb trees, Naani Jaan.”
“But how high can they go?” she asked, a rare, broad smile on her frown-lined face as she plucked my final piece off the board and left me, once again, at a loss in her favorite game.
I groaned.
“Another one?” Naani asked.
“What’s the point? I always lose.”
“Losing is good for the soul.”
“What about your soul?”
Another smile. “My soul is not your concern. Set up the board.”
I started placing the red and black pieces on the board, which I’d been told was a task beneath the dignity of a winner. “I wish I was better.”
“I wish you were better too.”
I grumbled under my breath but didn’t dare complain further. Naani was the only person I couldn’t beat at checkers. She really had taught me well. Aamir wouldn’t even play me anymore, and none of my friends were any threat. I didn’t want to offend Naani Jaan and lose the only worthy opponent the game still had left to offer me.
“At least I’m getting better,” I said, mostly to console myself, as I put the last piece in place, the board ready for another round.
“You aren’t.”
I looked up at her. “I’m not?”
“Not really.”
“But Ma says that practice makes perfect.”
“Don’t listen to your mother. She doesn’t know anything.” After a moment, Naani added, “Don’t tell her I said that.”
“Tell me why I’m not getting better and I won’t.”
“Cheeky and irreverent.” She didn’t sound upset about it.
“Yes, Naani. The game?”
The old woman scratched at her left eyebrow with her pinkie finger, which I knew was something she did when she was thinking. Just now she was probably trying to decide if the secret of my weakness was something she wanted to share with me or if it was an advantage worth keeping. Finally, she plucked a round, red disk from the board and held it up for me.
“Checkers is the game of life,” she said. “Idiots will tell you that chess is, but it isn’t. That’s a game of war. Real life is like checkers. You try to make your way to where you need to go and to do it you’ve got to jump over people while they’re trying to jump over you and everyone is in each other’s way.”
“Okay, I guess. But—”
“I’m getting to it, boy,” Naani Jaan snapped, and I ducked my head to show that I’d been suitably chastised. “Now, as I was saying, just like in life, right when you think you’ve got victory in your grasp, people screw with you by stalling the end as long as possible and generally making a nuisance of themselves.”
“Not helpful, Naani Jaan.”
“Life,” she went on, as if I hadn’t spoken, “requires risk. It requires that you sacrifice safety. You have to have courage, Anvar, to get what you want. You have to be bold. You have to, not to sound like your know-nothing mother, dare.”
“I’m not brave enough? In checkers?”
She nodded. “You play like a wet cat.”
“I thought I was a lion…”
Naani sounded weary. “Just play like you’ve still got your dangly bits. Stop being defensive. You never move the last row until you have no choice. It’s too late. You think that makes you safe. It doesn’t. It just makes you weak.”
I eyed my rear guard, the wall they formed my only defense against Naani’s men transforming into kings, and tried to figure out if my grandmother was just making all this up to ensure easier, faster victories. Her advice could be a ploy. She was not at all a trustworthy person when it came to important things like games.
Then I shrugged, and began to play, for the first time in my life using all the pieces at my disposal.
I still lost.
“What was that?”
“What?” Naani asked, the very heart of innocence itself.
“You still beat me.”
“Of course. I’ve been playing the game properly for a lot longer than you have. You just started. You know, someone really wise once said, practice makes perfect…”
* * *
—
While we played the game of life, the games of death went on around us. Karachi became a casualty of the Kalashnikov effect, a geopolitical twist on chaos theory principles through which an automatic rifle fired in Afghanistan during a Soviet invasion can dramatically alter the character and destiny of the largest city in Pakistan, thousands of kilometers away.
The Kalashnikov effect created the Taliban. It brought down the Twin Towers. It maimed Iraq and Syria and Yemen, and unleashed a wave of terror on the world it was unprepared to deal with.
Let’s not blame butterflies is what I’m saying.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan created a new front in the Cold War. In response, American money and arms flooded into Pakistan, and from there were smuggled north, across the border, to supply the resistance.
Money and arms alone, however, have never won a fight for freedom. A resistance requires fighters. To boost recruitment, campaigning against the Soviets was advertised as a jihad, a holy struggle. It was billed not as a simple annexation of one country by another, but rather as an invasion of Muslim lands by foreign nonbelievers. Taxpayer dollars, along with Saudi oil money, were used to push this narrative. Madrassas were built to create warriors willing to take up arms for what was declared a holy struggle.
Islam was weaponized for the Cold War.
It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
The hard-line version of Islam taught by these madrassas, largely foreign to the subcontinent, metastasized. It fe
d on anxiety and fear created by the Muslim world’s modern decline. It argued that this decline was a direct result of moral decay in society, Allah’s punishment for deviation from the true path. In order to improve their fortunes, Muslims needed to regain God’s favor, and they could do that only by practicing the faith as it had been practiced by the Prophet and his Companions in medieval times.
A return to the way things were done before would surely bring a return to the glory that had come before. It was how, preachers claimed, Muslims could make Islam great again.
Hijabs started appearing in middle-class social circles more often than before. Preachers became icons. I started hearing arguments that music was a forbidden thing. It was even said that miswak, a twig from an arak tree, was better for dental hygiene than toothpaste. After all, miswak was what the Prophet had used. What chemical formula could compete with such a divine endorsement?
When my mother tried to get us to use miswak sticks, my father asked her if she wanted to sell our car and buy a camel instead. After all, he said, a camel was what the Prophet had used to get around.
Simply put, sexy was not back. Islam was back. It was rejuvenated. Tossing out fourteen hundred years of history and progress will do that to a religion, I guess.
Through the early part of the nineties, violence and unrest became common in Karachi, as weapons and returning jihadists flooded in, taking over industries, and bringing with them a gun culture that shifted the tectonic plates of sectarianism the city was built on. The sounds of distant Kalashnikovs being fired became the lullabies I fell asleep to at night.
My mother had always been religiously inclined, but usually reasonable. Unfortunately, as parties where society women would get together to listen to preachers became common, she discovered that what she’d thought was Islam was not Islam at all. She became reeducated and recommitted. It was around this time that she became convinced that wearing a head scarf was an obligation, not an option, after a peddler of piety told her that angels would drag women who did not cover their hair into hellfire by their exposed locks on the Day of Judgment.
My father was different, immune somehow to religiosity and chaos. I always felt safe, despite the growing lawlessness around us, because I knew he was there. He was not physically strong, but he was ideologically sound. The spirit of the age would never possess him.
His appearance was reassuring as well. Imtiaz Faris looked and sounded like a brown Santa Claus, with a deep voice and a big laugh. His presence served as a reminder that there were still solid, pleasant things in the world.
My earliest memories of my father are tied to music. He loved old, classical ghazals—short, poignant poems, usually about love and loss, set to music and sung in crooning, mournful voices. He would sit listening to them on his creaking, discolored teak rocking chair, parked next to an old gramophone, eyes closed, a wistful smile on his face. Sometimes I would sit by his feet. We would not speak, but every once in a while he would ruffle my hair with an affectionate hand.
He had a few English records as well, but broke those out only on special occasions, like a birthday or an anniversary. Then, with Dean Martin or Elvis singing in the background, he would rouse his heavy, pudgy body into a sort of comic jig, shaking his wide hips and wagging his eyebrows up and down, skipping and hopping, occasionally tipping an imaginary top hat to my mother, who often sat by, rolling her eyes but also, I think, trying not to laugh.
I last saw him dance in Pakistan while celebrating New Year’s Eve and the coming dawn of ’ninety-six. It was almost midnight. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald were belting out “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” I was singing along. My mother was knitting something and Aamir was shaking his head as my father twirled around the room with a goofy grin on his face.
Shouting erupted nearby. It took me a moment to realize that it was directed at our house. I looked out from a nearby window and…well, I don’t know how many people constitute a mob, but there were ten, maybe fifteen men outside our house. They were young, probably in their twenties, and they were loud. A few of them were carrying field hockey sticks with ill-disguised ill intent, and chanting, as if at a rally, demanding that we turn off the music. My father came to stand beside me, the smile struck off his face.
“What’s their problem?” I asked.
My mother answered. “New Year’s is a holiday made up by infidels. We are forbidden to celebrate it. Also, music is the instrument of Shaitan. Those are pious young men.”
Aamir hurried over to the gramophone and turned it off.
My father stood by the window until the mob, satisfied with the silence they had forced upon our home, moved on to shepherd other straying believers back into the fold they were creating.
Once the last of them disappeared from view, he whispered, maybe to me, maybe to himself, “I can’t breathe here anymore.”
* * *
—
Almost no one took my father seriously when he said he wanted to leave Pakistan. For one thing, Imtiaz Faris was simply not the kind of man whose resolutions people believed. For another, leaving the country of one’s birth isn’t an easy thing. Not only do you have to leave everything you’ve ever known—family, friends, streets littered with memories of your childhood and homes that have walls imbued with memories of generations—behind, you also have to find a place willing to take you.
It is a difficult business, uprooting yourself from the soil in which you’ve been planted. Few trees try it and more than a few never bloom again when they do. Everyone, especially my mother, knew that Imtiaz Faris was likely to wither in the face of such emotional, financial and filial trauma. So, she only nodded complacently as he explained that he had a school friend in California, a man he called Shah, who had his own business and who might be interested in hiring my father on a work visa.
“Do whatever you think is best,” she said for perhaps the last time in her life.
When the process of immigration first began, with nothing more alarming than new passport-sized photographs, the only person taking it seriously aside from my father was Aamir. I didn’t realize he was actually worried about the prospect of moving until he brought it up while we were waiting our turn to bat in an impromptu cricket match boys in the neighborhood had put together at Kokan Park.
Kokan Park wasn’t much of a park at all. In fact, we called it Kokan Ground, which was a much more accurate description of the barren, grassless piece of empty land surrounded by a wall a few feet high. There was a concrete patch in the middle of the property, which served as a cricket pitch, but the rough, sand-covered lot had little else to recommend it as a playing surface.
Of course, since our only other choice was to play on the street and stop the game every few minutes to allow cars to pass, we were happy to claim it for our own when older kids weren’t monopolizing it.
Just then, we were definitely not supposed to be there. A paiyya jam had been called by the opposition party, probably because of some outrage or slight committed by the government. It was, essentially, a cross between a traffic jam and a general strike. No tires were allowed to roll—they were jammed, hence the name—which meant that the powers calling for these demonstrations didn’t want anyone on the roads.
Obedience to these calls for civil disobedience was secured, at times, in the most uncivil of ways, that is to say, with violence.
These strikes had become ridiculously common over the last few years. We missed a lot of school because our parents didn’t want to risk sending us out into the world when a hartal was in effect. They wanted to keep us safe, but we still snuck out to play cricket because being safe was boring.
I was next up to bat, so I was paying pretty close attention to the game when my brother started talking. “Aren’t you going to miss cricket?” Aamir asked.
I looked back at him. He was leaning against the rusted gate that let visitors onto the
ground. It had probably never ever had occasion to actually be locked. “What?”
“They don’t have cricket in America, do they? They’ve got baseball.” He made a grimace. “That’s like cricket, I guess, for people who don’t know what cricket is.”
“What are you talking about?”
“California, Anvar. What do you think I’m talking about?”
I shrugged. “I never know. Anyway, don’t worry about it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it is like the time Dad wanted to start changing the oil in his own car, or when he decided to learn how to make proper Hyderabadi biryani. It isn’t going to happen. Remember when he thought carrying a cane made him look like Charlie Chaplin?”
“Like Fred Astaire, I think,” Aamir said.
“Doesn’t matter. My point is that he’ll be tired of it in a month. In two months he’ll forget all about it.”
“It’s been six months now.”
“Fine. Worry if you want.” I picked up one of the spare balls that was lying next to me. It wasn’t made for cricket. It was a tennis ball covered with white electrical tape. The tape was meant to dull the bounce of the ball on a concrete pitch, letting it mimic how a proper cork ball acted on grass. It was almost as good as the real thing, except it didn’t sound right when you played your shots and the weight was wrong, so you always knew that you weren’t playing with the genuine article.
I rotated the ball in my hands, looking for flaws in the way it had been wrapped, or for cracks in the tape, which often broke down after the ball was thrashed around the park by a good batsman. This one looked pristine. I dropped it back to the ground. “But I think everything will be fine. Then again, I’m a total optimist.”
The Bad Muslim Discount Page 2
