Aamir snorted. “You are not. You just don’t care about anything.”
“Whatever. Stop worrying so much about Dad. Even if he’s serious and we really leave, we get to go to California. Do you know what they have in California that they don’t have here?”
Aamir shook his head.
“Blondes. There are a lot more blondes in California than there are in Karachi.”
“Astaghfirullah. You’ve got such base thoughts.”
I rolled my eyes. “Sure. Because I’m the one who watches Baywatch when Ma and Dad aren’t home.”
“That was one time,” Aamir said. “I thought it was a show about exploding boats.”
“Uh-huh.”
Aamir glowered at my disbelief. Then, displaying that widely praised maturity of his, he changed the subject. “You can pretend it doesn’t bother you, but there are things you’d miss if we left Karachi.”
“Like what?”
He gave the triumphant smile of someone who is about to win an argument. “Like Naani Jaan.”
“True,” I said. “I’d get over it though. Because blondes.”
“I’m telling Naani Jaan you said that.”
“Of course you are, you—”
A cry of “how’s that?” went up in the field before I could make things worse for myself. The batsman playing had been given out, and I was called to take my place at the center of the field.
* * *
—
Aamir had a bad habit of doing what he said.
The next time we visited Naani Jaan, he told on me. He was good at telling. It was the one thing that was true about him. He was obedient because he was taught to be obedient, and he studied hard because he was supposed to. Yes, he prayed a bunch and liked to spend time at the mosque, but if he’d been born in another part of the world, or even in a different family here, he’d have gone to temple or to a gurdwara or anywhere else he was supposed to go. Everything Aamir did, he did because people wanted him to do it.
Except being a tattletale. That he did all by himself, despite having been told that it was a bad habit. It was just who he was. It was almost hard to be angry with him when he told on you, if you knew him, because he couldn’t help himself. You don’t get angry at the desert for making you thirsty. That’s just its nature.
Naani Jaan stared at Aamir in silence with unblinking, sharp eyes after he was done complaining. It was as if she was expecting him to go on. Aamir, with nothing more to say, stammered out a closing argument. “He really said that. That he wouldn’t miss you because there’d be blond girls around. That…I mean, he’d forget you for something like that.”
Still Naani said nothing.
“I…I thought you should know.”
Finally, the old woman took a deep breath, held it for a long time, and let it out in a barely audible whistle. “How wonderfully religious you are.”
That was precisely the right thing to say to cut Aamir. He looked down.
“How does the flesh of your brother taste?”
According to Naani Jaan, in the Muslim version of hell, that was the punishment backbiters got—they had to eat their own brothers for eternity. That didn’t make sense to me. It sounded a lot worse for the brother being eaten than the brother doing the actual backbiting. Aamir bought it though. He never had the luxury of doubt. He didn’t even bother pointing out that, technically, he wasn’t backbiting at all, because I was right there.
“I’m pretty sure I’d be delicious,” I said, just to help out. When Naani’s baleful attention turned on me, I held up my hands in surrender. “Sorry.”
“Tell me, Aamir,” she said, deciding to ignore me. “What would make you forget me?”
“Nothing,” he said quickly.
“You would forget me for nothing?” Naani asked.
Aamir stumbled around for an answer long enough for me to take pity on him.
“I didn’t really mean it,” I said. “I was just trying to make Aamir feel better.”
“And why did you need to make him feel better?”
“He’s worried that we might move to America.”
Naani tilted her head a little, regarding Aamir more closely, as if she’d just noticed something interesting about him for the first time. Then she sat down on her favorite plush chair and reached for her dainty silver purse, which usually carried precisely one thousand and one rupees, three lighters and one pack of cigarettes. She’d taken up smoking when she’d given up colors.
“I thought you’d want to leave.” She lit up and took a long draw. “You like religion. You follow the prophets and messengers, don’t you? None of them stayed where they were from. Even Adam and Eve were immigrants. The first man and woman, the first ones to leave the place they were born.”
“Hazrat Adam, May Peace Be Upon Him, wasn’t an immigrant,” Aamir said. “He was an exile.”
“It’s the same thing.”
Aamir opened his mouth to argue, but our grandmother gestured for him to be silent.
“My point,” she said, “is that all your heroes were wanderers upon this earth. Moses, Jesus, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Ishmael, Muhammad…The history of the world is the history of people who went places. People who walked to the horizon. If you get the chance, you should be glad to be one of them.”
“Not that we’re going anywhere,” I said.
Our grandmother chuckled, looking past us, through the open window behind me, and through time perhaps at a land she had left fifty years ago, when she’d been young, probably around my age, to make her home in a new country. “You’ll be surprised,” she told me, “at how many people have said that to me in my life. My children, how wrong they’ve all been…”
* * *
—
The first time anyone ever touched my balls, so far as I can remember, was at the behest of the United States government. It turns out that one doesn’t simply get on an airplane and start a new life in America. It’s much more complicated than that. You have to go to a doctor, who makes you take off your pants, cups your testicles in a cold, clinical hand and asks you to cough. Then you get to go on a plane and start a new life in America.
The moment I was asked to take my pants off was the moment I realized that we were actually going to move to the States. This was in part because that directive—to take off your pants—is always a prologue to whatever is about to come next. It brings with it the certainty that something is about to happen.
More important, I was convinced that my father wouldn’t have subjected me or Aamir or himself, for that matter, to such a rude medical exam if he wasn’t absolutely committed to fulfilling all the onerous requirements of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service.
I think Aamir knew that as well. Neither one of us spoke much on the drive back from the doctor’s office, each looking out our window, looking at Karachi with eyes that suddenly had goodbyes in them.
I don’t really know much about the paperwork my father had to complete to get us out of Karachi. My involvement was limited to being fondled, fingerprinted and photographed. I saw his late nights sitting at the dinner table, filling in forms. I overheard him speaking long-distance to his friend Mr. Shah about a job and a visa. He took me once to an attorney’s office in Saddar, where I had nothing to do but wait in an empty room full of the sound of typewriters.
It was strange. We were home and yet about to head home at the same time.
* * *
—
They say that the wife is always the last to know.
To be fair to my father, he’d told his wife precisely what he was about to do before he went chasing after a new country. She simply hadn’t believed him. The one thing Bariah Faris knew was that Bariah Faris knew everything, and she certainly knew the capabilities of her husband, who I think she’d always assumed to be a m
an of rather limited ambitions.
When you’re young, you don’t often think about the relationship between your parents. You see them existing together but never touching, not even talking to each other that much, and you assume that is the natural order of things. Now I recognize that maybe my parents should’ve never been paired off with each other, that their marriage should never have been arranged, because they were so different.
Yet, even though I doubt there was much passion or even love in their relationship, there was a fondness and understanding that comes with time. So maybe my mother can be forgiven for thinking that, even if she didn’t always admire the round, jolly man her knot had been tied to, she at least knew what he was.
Then he surprised her.
Was she truly devastated about leaving Pakistan or was she just angry that Imtiaz Faris could still manage to shock her, after she was so sure she’d figured him out?
I haven’t asked. I wouldn’t dare. Back then all I knew was that my mother didn’t want to move. I never actually saw her weep, but I could tell, from her puffy, red eyes, that she did and did so often.
Some nights, I could hear her screaming at my father, even though their room was clear down the hall from mine. It was a sin, she claimed, to move from a Muslim land to a country of infidels. She worried that Aamir and I would go astray, start drinking, dancing and doing drugs before marrying white girls, forever and irrevocably ruining the family tree.
She wanted to be buried next to her parents, where she already had a piece of land waiting for her shrouded body, not in a wooden box that would rot, and not next to strangers.
On and on her concerns went, like a monsoon of rage and fear and anxiety, but, uncharacteristically, my father remained unmoved by all that rained down upon him.
I was there when her crusade ended, as most crusades in the history of the world have ended, in failure. That morning, we sat at the breakfast table. A kettle whistled on the gas stove, signaling that the water for my parents’ tea was ready. I was struggling to finish a greasy, overcooked omelet Ma had made for me. It smelled eggier than normal, as if it had stayed inside the chicken longer than actually necessary. I felt a little queasy. My mother stood up to fetch the kettle and some tea bags and, out of the blue, said, “You know, Anvar, you’ll always be a second-class citizen in America. They will always think of you as different from themselves. Inferior.”
My father set down the newspaper he was reading and looked in her direction. She wasn’t meeting his gaze, focusing her complete attention on the tea she was preparing. In a quiet voice, he said, “You’re bringing the children into this now? That’s it. The water is over my head. I can’t take any more. So that’s enough.”
And just like that, somehow, it was enough. I don’t understand why but, after that moment, my mother didn’t complain or try to argue against our pending immigration. She remained unhappy, but she remained unhappy in silence.
To me, my father said, “All men are equal.”
“What?”
He picked up a piece of toast and began to butter it. “The Americans. They say that. All men are created equal. You won’t be bloody second-class.”
I thought about that. “Everyone was made equal,” I agreed. “Except for Aamir. He was made special. With a stick up his butt.”
My mother pursed her lips in stern disapproval, but Imtiaz Faris laughed that huge laugh of his and went back to the news of the day.
About a week later, from somewhere, my father brought me the only book I actually owned while I was in Pakistan. It was a thin, unmarked text, bound in worn blue leather. I opened the first page and saw from the title that it was The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.
* * *
—
In our house, there was never music that wasn’t mine unless, of course, my father was home. Except for one day, when I heard the soft, mournful words of a poem I’d heard often, but never managed to remember, coming from my parents’ room. I was going somewhere, doing something, but I stopped. It was singing. My mother was singing.
I tiptoed to the master bedroom’s door like I was approaching a wisp that might flit away at the sound of my steps, and I listened.
Bariah Faris could sing.
I don’t remember the words. I don’t think it was Urdu at all. It was Punjabi, maybe, or perhaps Sindhi. Whatever the language, I knew instinctively that the song was very old, and it echoed around the almost barren room like a ghost seeking something it could not find.
My mother’s voice was gentle and melodic, like I’d never heard it. She’d always recited nursery rhymes in a monotone, like she was reading out of a cookbook, and had never indulged us with lullabies. Until that moment, I hadn’t considered it possible that the woman would even be able to carry a tune.
Yet now she was doing justice to a song that seemed to reach back centuries, into the heart of the place she was about to leave.
I didn’t want her to stop, but I knew that she would if she found me here. So, I tried to step away, and in doing so I must have made some noise, because as unexpectedly as I’d found the song, I found it gone, leaving behind a silence that seemed to remember it.
My mother wiped at her eyes, though I saw no tears there, and cleared her throat. “Music,” she said, her manner as stern as ever, “is different from poetry.”
“Okay,” I said.
“The Prophet liked poetry. The human voice, you know, it is used in the—”
“Do you really not want to go?” I asked, and not just because I wanted an answer, but because I wanted to cut off the lecture I could sense coming for something that I hadn’t even been doing.
She smiled a little. “Life is not about what we want.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you do what you want—if you get what you want—then there is no one to blame if things go wrong. Your world, if you make it what you want it to be, becomes your responsibility.”
I shook my head, not because I disagreed, but because I had no idea what she was talking about.
“You’re too young to understand,” my mother said. “Think what would happen if I got your father to stay here.”
“Well…we’d keep living here.”
“And with everything that is going on in this city, in this country, what if one day something happens to Aamir? Every house on this block has had burglars break in, hold the families at gunpoint. The Grace of Allah has kept us safe, but what if it happens to you? Who would your father blame? Who would I blame?”
“Well,” I said, perhaps not entirely helpfully, “there is always God.”
“Always you have to talk nonsense,” she snapped. “Who would dare blame God?”
It seemed perfectly reasonable that if you were going to thank God when good things happened, you could blame Him if bad things did, but I knew better than to say that out loud.
“We have to be careful in this world, Anvar. The things we do—and the things we don’t do—we pay for them all.”
“Like checkers,” I said.
“Uff. Yes. Fine. Like checkers. You spend too much time with your grandmother. I worry that she will fill your head with too much nonsense.”
“You shouldn’t talk about your mother like that,” I said.
Bariah Faris glared at me, though her shoulders shook a little, with suppressed laughter, perhaps. “You want to get out of my sight now, unless you want me to show you what I mean when I say that actions have consequences you can regret.”
* * *
—
My father thought we should each choose one last place to visit in Karachi before we left—a quick little goodbye tour to the places that meant the most to us. Ma declined to make a pick. Aamir thought going to visit our deceased grandparents’ graves would be a fun time, I guess because that was the k
ind of thought that won him praise from grown-ups. I wanted to go to the beach.
The sea speaks to you when you’re born by the ocean. It sings to you. If you stand still, just out of reach of the water for long enough, you begin to sense a small echo of the infinite inside yourself, and in the violent crashing and breaking of waves you begin to feel at peace. It was something I would miss.
Aamir said that was silly because there were plenty of beaches in California, and this is true, but I’ve yet to find one like Clifton Beach, where you can buy a ride on a camel or horse and walk back over their hoofprints barefoot in the black, tarry sand.
Anyway, since my parents agreed with Aamir that the beaches in California were better, I said that I’d like to go to Naani’s house earlier than we had planned, so I could get in a few extra games of checkers. I was fairly certain that on this last day, of all days, my grandmother would let me win once.
She did not.
I did get close though, bringing Naani down to her final piece, a single solitary king, before she started counting. Then she moved that infuriating little monarch all over the familiar board with practiced ease, until she got to the magic number of twenty and the draw that came with it.
The look on my face when victory slipped away from me must have been something because my grandmother started to laugh. “I told you,” she said. “Checkers is like life. Just when you think you’ve got everything you wanted, it all slips from your fingers.”
We were sitting on her takht—a large, low wood bench covered with a bedsheet that was, in my opinion, only marginally more comfortable than the ground—and we were alone for the moment. The family had gone to look through the house again one last time. I stayed behind. I didn’t care about the house.
She looked at me with something sad in her eyes.
“What?” I asked.
“It would be better for you, my child, if you were more like your brother.”
I rolled my eyes. I’d heard that one before.
Naani chuckled. “I mean it. The world is difficult sometimes for restless minds and imaginative hearts. Things go easier for you if you do what you’re told, when you’re told, and never ask any questions.”
The Bad Muslim Discount Page 3
