The Bad Muslim Discount

by Syed M. Masood

  “Sounds boring.”

  “There are worse things in life than being bored,” she told me.

  “No. There aren’t.”

  Naani laughed just as my mother led the rest of the family back in. Bariah Faris smiled at the scene and shook her head. “You laugh more with him than I’ve ever seen you laugh in my life.”

  “She didn’t used to,” I said before I could think to stop myself, “until she started wearing white.”

  That killed my mother’s smile, because nothing can kill a smile faster than the truth, and my father winced. Everyone started looking at anything except my grandmother, who just nodded, not at me, but at the checkers board.

  “I know that your parents will want me to impart some wisdom to you, Anvar, before you leave, so…You’re going to meet all kinds of girls there in America, I think.” She leaned over and swatted my arm when I grinned widely at that. “Be careful. More than anything else, falling in love with the right person will bring you happiness. Failing to do that…” She took a deep breath. “Love is blind, beta, but be careful.”

  I wanted to ask Naani what she meant, but my mother spoke instead.

  “He wasn’t a bad man, Amma.”

  “No,” Naani agreed. “He wasn’t a bad man.”

  Aamir stepped forward, all eagerness. “What about me, Naani Jaan?”

  “What about you?” Naani asked.

  “Any advice for me?”

  “Oh.” She seemed to think about it for a while and then shrugged. “No. You I don’t worry about.”

  Aamir grinned. It was the nicest thing Naani had ever said to him.

  * * *

  —

  As frustrating as delayed flights and security checks can be, it would be a better world if more of the human experience was like being at the airport. People move around looking for things—loved ones, bags, boarding gates—and generally find them. Those who are lost are easily guided, directed to where they are supposed to be by people who sit behind counters and peer over eyeglasses and usually know the answers to the most pressing questions presented to them.

  Airports are places of certainty and purpose. Those things are difficult to find.

  Of course, when you’re leaving behind the only country you’ve ever known, walking away from a caravan of first cousins and second cousins and close friends who have gathered to see you off, possibly forever, it is hard to appreciate that. I didn’t feel very certain of much that day at Jinnah International.

  “We’ll meet again soon,” Naani Jaan promised, as I pulled away from her embrace. She smelled like stale perfume, smoke and time. “All separations are temporary.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Then smile.”

  I tried.

  “When you’re walking away,” Naani said, “remember not to look back. If you look back, you turn to stone.”

  She was talking about Lot’s wife, the woman who had looked back at the city she was leaving when she wasn’t supposed to, and who had been punished for her disobedience by being turned to stone.

  I felt something like kinship with her then, that woman centuries removed from me, abandoning her city in distress, leaving her home to its perilous fate. How could she have been expected to resist a glance back, and why had her punishment, for so small a transgression, been so severe?

  My mother was standing by me, so I knew not to give voice to the question. It is one thing to relate to sinners. It is another thing to say that out loud. One must, after all, pretend virtue whenever possible.

  I’ll admit that I shared in the weakness of Lot’s wife—Edith, they say her name was—because I couldn’t keep myself from glancing back either, at my extended family, at the sun-soaked city where I’d been born, at the frail old woman who always played to win. Was there a chance that looking back could have turned me to stone? I didn’t think it mattered. Anyone who didn’t look back, I realized then, was stone already.

  SAFWA

  I didn’t kill Fahd.

  It’s not my fault my brother’s dead.

  Back when I was a different person, when I was still called Safwa, I did leave him alone in Baghdad. This is true. Maybe it’s also true that if I’d stayed with him, Fahd would have lived longer than he did. But he still would’ve died. There was no way to save him, so I saved myself.

  For that, our father never forgave me.

  He never blamed me, not out loud. With words, he only ever blamed Dr. Yousef.

  Dr. Yousef Ganni was a small, thin man with little hair who always smelled of rosewater. He had a crooked nose and a bad limp. His being small wasn’t my father’s fault and neither was the sweet perfume he used too much of. The limp and the broken nose, those Abu had given him.

  They were best friends. People said they were like brothers. Sometimes, Dr. Yousef came to our house when Abu wasn’t there and didn’t tell Abu. My mother didn’t want Abu to know she was sick.

  I was ten and still Safwa when I managed to fake a fever convincingly enough for Mama to let me stay home from school. I wasn’t enjoying my day off. School was boring but staying home and pretending to be ill was boring too. There was nothing to do, so I sat in front of our small television, watching my mom’s videotapes of the American show Full House. It was her obsession. She could quote passages of dialogue from some episodes word for word. She hummed the theme song all the time, sometimes without even realizing it, which irritated Abu.

  Abu said it was all nonsense, that the kind, caring American characters of the show, full of love and empathy and compromise, existed only on screens. Abu had seen plenty of Americans during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when he’d fought on their side against the Russians.

  “I know how they really are,” he told my mother.

  Abu was a tall, powerful man who did that kind of thing—went off to fight other people’s wars. Of course, to him, Afghans were not other people. They were Muslims.

  If it hadn’t been for his willingness to go to war, Abu wouldn’t have been Abu at all. At the very least, we would’ve called him something else. Abati or Abba or perhaps Baba. In Pakistan he’d heard children call their fathers Abu. The name we called him by was a souvenir he’d brought back from battlefields he’d left behind.

  “You can’t judge a people by how they act in war,” my mother had said.

  “That’s the only way to judge a people,” Abu told her.

  My mother hadn’t argued. That wasn’t her way. She was a wilting flower of a woman, and she should’ve married a kind, caring gardener. Instead, she had married the blazing sun.

  Mama rarely gave voice to her opinions, and when she did, Abu would get upset. I don’t think he understood how his wife could disagree with him about anything. He must have known that she couldn’t help but have her own thoughts. He just didn’t see why he, or anyone else, should be burdened with them.

  When my mother did speak, and was told she was wrong, she offered no defense. It kept peace in the house, and some peace, as those who remember fondly the days of Saddam will tell you, is better than war.

  I found it hard to believe that Dr. Yousef and my father had ever fought over Mama, and so viciously that Abu left his rival with a hip broken in three places. Maybe she’d been beautiful once. Any hint of that beauty was gone though. All that was left was a lean face, hungry for what I do not know, and dull dark eyes that had no spark I could see.

  It would’ve been nice to have a picture of her from when she was young, to see what she had looked like, to get an idea of what she had been, but my father had burned all our family photographs after he came home from Afghanistan. He’d been taught there that pictures were not permitted in Islam.

  Anyway, I was watching Full House when the doorbell rang. As I got up to see who it was, I reached for the niqab Abu made me wear. I was young enough that no one thought
I needed it, but Abu insisted that habit was character, and made me put it on whenever I stepped outside.

  I decided it wasn’t necessary. The visitor was probably one of the women in the neighborhood, coming to chat with my mother or to ask to borrow some sugar or salt.

  I walked out into the sharp sunlight and crossed a small courtyard to our iron gate. “Who is it?”

  There was a moment of silence, as if the visitor hasn’t been expecting an answer. Then a man cleared his throat, and a familiar voice said, “It is I. Let me in, Safwa.”

  “Dr. Yousef?” I asked, undoing a heavy, lightly rusted bolt. It screeched in protest at being disturbed. “Is something wrong?”

  “I am sure many things are wrong, dear child. They always are, in this wonderful and terrible world.”

  I let out a sigh, which probably made him think I agreed with him. The truth was that I just hated the flowery way he spoke.

  “Aren’t you growing up to be a lovely creature? I’ve never understood why you Muslims hide what little beauty there is in the world.”

  I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t a “creature” but instead I said, “How do nuns dress again?”

  He chuckled at that and patted my cheek with one of his delicate, soft hands. “Clever too. Where do you get that from, I wonder.”

  I shrugged.

  “Maybe the same place you get your eyes?”

  I shrugged again. No one else in my family had my pale green eyes. In fact, no one I knew had eyes like mine…well, except for Dr. Yousef, of course, but his eyes were different than mine were. They were calm and old, the eyes of a man who had learned to accept his place in the world.

  “Did you need something?”

  “Your mother called me. She said she wasn’t feeling well.”

  I frowned. My mother was always unwell, often in bed or complaining of pain in her back. “Is it worse than usual? She will be better soon?”

  “We shall see, my dear. I must examine the patient before I can give you a diagnosis, much less a prognosis. I do not believe that is at all unreasonable.”

  “Sorry, Dr. Yousef.”

  “Not at all, I am sure,” he said, with a deep bow of his head.

  “It’s just that she didn’t seem all that sick this morning.”

  “The weather can change quickly, Safwa.”

  I wanted to tell him that wasn’t really true, not in Baghdad, where the heat could seem unending, but I knew what a metaphor was, even if it was a bad one. “I’ll go tell—”

  “No need. She is expecting me, and I know perfectly well where her bedroom is.”

  * * *

  —

  About an hour after Dr. Yousef left without saying goodbye, my mother called me to her room. It was dark, with thick, maroon curtains drawn against the light, but even so my mother was lying in bed with a pillow over her head. I felt my heart beat a little faster as I walked in. Seeing her lying there, unable to bear even a little bit of the sun, worried me. Then I reminded myself that she’d been fine—well, almost like herself anyway—in the morning. It was probably just a bad headache.

  She reached out for my hand when I sat down on the mattress beside her. She didn’t uncover her face.

  “I’m okay,” she said, her voice muffled. When I took her hand in mine, it felt cold. “Don’t tell you father Yousef was here.”

  “Do you need anything? I can make some tea or—”

  “I don’t want your father to know I’m not feeling well,” she said. “He’ll worry.”

  I raised my eyebrows at that. Abu wasn’t the worrying sort.

  “Safwa, promise me you won’t tell your father Yousef was here.”

  “I promise,” I said. I knew Abu wouldn’t react well to a man being in the house, even someone harmless like Dr. Yousef, when neither he nor Fahd was home. It wasn’t proper. “But if you’re sick—”

  “I’ll be fine, light of my eyes, I’ll be fine, if Allah permits it. Don’t worry. It’s nothing at all. I’ll be fine. That much I promise.”

  * * *

  —

  My mother didn’t keep her promise. Allah didn’t permit it.

  She died.

  It was sudden. Thyroid cancer that became metastatic bone cancer. Change gone wrong upon change gone wrong until there could be no more change. Three days after I promised to keep her secret.

  Three days.

  “It was too late when I saw her,” Yousef Ganni told me at her funeral, speaking in a whisper, keeping a secret the subject of which was beyond caring. He looked worse than Abu or Fahd or I did. His eyes were swollen and red, and he smelled so strongly of mint that I wondered what smell on his breath he was trying to cover up. I noticed his hands were trembling as he spoke, and his gaze was wet with tears. Somehow, he kept his voice steady. “I am so sorry, dear girl, but she must have been very ill for a long time. She hid it well.”

  I nodded but I knew it wasn’t true. She hadn’t hidden it well. She’d always been in pain, always weak, always having to lie down. None of us had worried about her. I think that Abu was used to it, and Fahd and I…well, I don’t know about Fahd, but I’d never truly believed my parents were mortal. I knew, of course, that they would die one day, because everyone dies, but in my mind it wasn’t real. I think maybe that awful knowledge isn’t truly real for anyone, until it is real forever.

  * * *

  —

  On the fourth day after my mother died, there was a knock on my bedroom door. It was Abu. I knew because of the way he knocked. Two quick, hard raps on the wood frame with his knuckles, and then silence. He wouldn’t try again.

  I hadn’t spoken to anyone since the funeral. I’d said things, of course, because a lot of people had visited, all of them offering words of condolence that made nothing better. I’d responded to them all properly because I’d been brought up to say the right things at the right times, but all I wanted was to be left alone.

  I didn’t feel like talking to Abu either. I wanted to stay in my dark room, thinking my dark thoughts, and remembering. I thought about pretending to be asleep. He wouldn’t enter until I told him he could. That was his way.

  I sat up in bed.

  “Come in.”

  Abu opened the door slowly, carefully, as if he might break it, and then stepped inside. He looked down at the mess in the room and the mess that was me, at the unmade bed, the clothes on the floor, the tearstains still on my face, the uncombed state of my hair, and scowled.

  A wild part of me almost hoped he would dare to say something, so that I would have an excuse to yell at him, to scream at him, because that’s all I’d wanted to do since he’d told me what had happened, and had held me as I broke into little pieces that fell from my eyes.

  She wouldn’t have died if you’d kept her happier. She wouldn’t have died if you’d known her enough to know she was sick.

  When Abu finally spoke, he said, “There is nothing to eat.”

  I frowned. “What?”

  “People were bringing food for the past few days, but now there is nothing to eat in the house.”

  “So?”

  “You’re the woman of the house, Safwa. The kitchen is yours. The days of mourning are over. Time to go back to living now.”

  I laughed, a shrill sound laced with disbelief. “It’s only been three days.”

  Was that how grief worked? Three days for three days?

  “You are forbidden to mourn more than three days for the loss of anyone. That is what the Prophet said.”

  “How long do you think the Prophet mourned when his mother died?”

  Abu actually gasped. “Safwa! Such words about the Prophet? Such disrespect! I cannot believe it came from a daughter of mine. You must beg Allah for forgiveness.”

  “Fine,” I said just to make him go away, collapsing back onto m
y bed. “I will.”

  Abu didn’t leave though.

  “The kitchen, Safwa.”

  Maybe I should have gotten up like he wanted and just made something for him. That’s what my mother would’ve done. She would have kept the peace.

  But I wasn’t my mother.

  And I didn’t want to be my mother. I wanted to be nothing like her. I definitely didn’t want to live like she had lived, or to die like she had died, in silent pain. I wouldn’t do it.

  So I said what my mother hadn’t said to Abu in years, if ever.

  “No.”

  I saw anger in his eyes, and even as I shrank back from him, I wondered if his heart was as raw as mine was. Abu stepped toward me, and I was sure he would hit me, which he’d never done before, when out of the corner of my eye I saw Fahd at the door.

  “I’ll make something, Abu,” my brother said.

  Abu stopped where he was, but he didn’t look away from me. “That is not work meant for you. She has to learn to do it.”

  “Maybe not today,” Fahd suggested, his voice measured and reasonable.

  “The permitted period of grieving is over.”

  “True,” my brother said, “but she is a child. Remember that those who do not show mercy will have no mercy shown to them.”

  Those were the Prophet’s words Fahd had used. Abu backed down before them, his head slightly bowed. “So it is. Remember to pray for forgiveness, Safwa.”

  “I will,” I promised.

  Despite my resolution to not be like my mother, however, I was still her daughter.

  I did not keep my word.

  * * *

  —

  Hours later there was another knock on my door. It was softer and most insistent. Fahd. I asked him to come in, and he stumbled through, carrying a plate of food covered with some flatbread. It smelled of burnt meat. I wrinkled my nose.