Clocks cannot measure time.
They can count seconds, minutes and hours, but those are not accurate measures of our experience of time. A day of hunger is longer than a day when you’ve eaten. How quickly time passes isn’t constant. An hour can stretch out and seem unending. A year can pass you by before you know it.
Abu was late coming home from the mosque that Eid. At first, I barely noticed. Then the sun began to sink, and my fears began to rise with the coming dark. I thought of those two explosions I’d heard earlier and wondered where he’d been when they happened.
I walked through the house and did all the small chores I had been putting off. I fussed over Fahd until he shooed me away. I did everything I could not to look at the time because it was running away, faster and faster, and Abu still wasn’t home.
My feet were aching when finally the bell rang. I ran out to the gate barefoot, head and face uncovered, and without wondering why my father didn’t just let himself in, called out, “Abu?”
A moment of hesitation. Then a familiar voice said, “No, my dear girl. It is I, Dr. Yousef. Let me in, Safwa.”
I hurried to open the gate, and before he could speak, I said, “Abu?”
It was still a question. Just a different one.
Dr. Yousef cast his eyes to the ground and said nothing.
“Abu?” I asked again, more desperately this time.
“He’s gone, Safwa.”
The words hit me with the force of the explosions I had heard but been spared earlier. I stepped back.
Dr. Yousef’s next words were a balm and a toxin. “I heard they took him.”
He was alive. At least he was alive. I took a deep breath.
“They?” I asked. There were so many “they” nowadays. Too many.
“The Americans. My dear girl, the Americans took your father.”
“Where?”
Dr. Yousef shook his head. Of course, he didn’t know. The Americans did what they wanted, and they answered no questions. They had arrested many people. The families of the disappeared had no idea where their loved ones had been taken. There was no one they could ask. No one who would even say that they were alive.
Most of these disappearances had happened right after the invasion. Some were released. Others were not.
A few of those who returned told stories about what they’d seen, what they’d heard, that would make the desert sun go cold. These were only whispers though, and I’d only heard them in passing through Abu and Dr. Yousef. I wished, at that moment, that I knew more about the world, that I was more a part of it, so I would know what to do.
“What happens now?” I asked.
Dr. Yousef glanced up at the sky, at the moon becoming visible in it yet again. “Now,” he said, “a long night begins.”
ANVAR
It was only natural that Zuha and I planned on attending San Francisco State to major in English literature. It was, after all, the first thing we loved together. Of course, I had to convince my parents to let me waste my life by pursuing a liberal arts education.
Every kid from the subcontinent knows that there are three acceptable career paths you can walk down. You can become a doctor, you can become an engineer or, if you are painfully slow, you can study economics or finance.
Being an English major is not on the menu and, just in case it wasn’t clear, you can’t order anything that isn’t on the menu.
I went to my father and said, “Isn’t this why we are here?”
“So that you can open an English clinic and correct people’s spelling mistakes?”
“No.” I pulled out the thin book he had given me in Karachi, all those years ago, and showed it to him. I could see that he recognized it. “We came here for Jefferson, didn’t we? We came for the pursuit of happiness. This is what I want to do, Dad. This is what makes me happy.”
“That’s world-class emotional blackmail,” my father said. “You’re sure you don’t want to be a lawyer or something decent like that?”
“Positive.”
“Then who am I to stand in the way of Thomas Jefferson?”
Bariah Faris didn’t have any patience for talk of happiness. She continued to protest but, eventually, finding no support from her husband, lapsed into a scowling, disapproving silence.
* * *
—
I was in love with San Francisco. In love with the not-really-golden bridge and the water it sat on and the sight of Alcatraz on the horizon. I was in love with my classes and in love with the libraries those classes made me seek out. I was in love with the paths that led up to those libraries, and with the trees lining those paths, and the leaves on those trees, and the birds in the branches that carried those leaves singing their unimaginably beautiful songs into the heart of the wind.
I was in love with the world because Zuha Shah was in it.
And, of course, I was also in love with Zuha Shah.
We were hopeless book nerds with few friends because we were so immersed in each other, and in the minds we could experience through the words they had left behind. Together we were befriended by the Romantics and colonized by the Victorians. We spent days upon days, sometimes skipping classes entirely, with Milton and Shakespeare and Goethe and Wilde. We got drunk with Ghalib and were elevated by Rumi and Hafiz.
There may have also been some kissing. Or a lot of kissing. I hear a gentleman does not tell.
Besides, not telling was a bit of a habit of ours. We were friends in public and nothing more, because the desi aunty spy network had informants everywhere, and neither one of us wanted to deal with the family drama that would ensue if our romance became known within the community. Our reputations would be tarnished forever. We’d always be those kids who’d done that thing…though we hadn’t actually done that thing yet. We hadn’t even discussed it.
Our dorm rooms, where we had both been blessed with non-Muslim, non-desi roommates, were our refuges. The only places we could be what we were to each other.
It was in those dorms that I first learned how to love someone. I mean, sure, obviously I loved Naani Jaan, my parents and, to some extent, Aamir, but it was Zuha who taught me how to be in a relationship.
Turned out that being with someone is an acquired skill. There is an art to it. Basically, you have to watch your partner take a chisel—or a war hammer, depending on the day—and chip away at the ideal version of them that you’ve created in your mind. The person you fall in love with is always slightly different from the person you need to stay in love with. More real and more flawed, but also more complex and better defined.
There were a few things about Zuha that bothered me. I adored that she was smarter than I was, but she could slice me to pieces with her wit whenever she wanted. I’d always known this about her, but her words when they were sharp—whether because she was in a mood or because she was just being careless—now cut deep when before they’d just stung. I could also be carelessly mean. It was something we were learning to live with.
She was surprisingly human in other ways too. Her hands were bitterly cold, her pretty long hair somehow got everywhere, and her incurable lust for shawarma wasn’t ideal. Garlic breath is real, after all.
The thing about being in love is that if you can endure the sight of the idol you’ve fallen for crumbling before you, and learn to love the truth of who your partner is as you discover it, then you’ll have someone to take your hand as she’s reading, and who’ll lean over and whisper in your ear, “Let us be true to one another…”
* * *
—
My first thought when I opened the door to my dorm room for Aamir was relief. If Zuha were here, it would’ve been hard to explain. Fortunately, Aamir had showed up at my door drenched in rain at one o’clock in the morning.
What was he doing there this late? I stared at his unsmiling face a
nd saw the lost sleep and sorrow in his eyes, and I knew something was wrong. Very wrong.
“Who?” I asked.
“Naani Jaan got sick…”
“Is she going to be okay?”
Aamir looked past me at Nico, my roommate, who’d paused the second Knights of the Old Republic game he was playing. They nodded to each other.
“You need to pack. I came to get you. You need to be home.”
“What hospital did they take her to? Agha Khan? What’s wrong with—”
“Anvar.” Aamir placed a hand on my shoulder. “She’s gone.”
I remember being unable to respond as Aamir pulled me into a bear hug. His clothes were wet and his eyes were wet and I did nothing because nothing was all I could do.
“You should sit down,” my brother said, as Nico got me a glass of water and asked me if I was okay. I nodded. I’m not sure why.
They threw some of my stuff into a duffel bag, and Aamir guided me out of the room holding my arm. Nico followed us to the exit of the building and said to let him know if I needed anything, because that is what people say when these things happen.
A slow, even drizzle was falling on us as we walked to our father’s silver Camry. It was an ugly night and it made the city seem ugly and I hated it. I couldn’t imagine that I’d ever thought San Francisco beautiful. It was a place of wealth and privilege that still had streets that reeked of urine. Homeless, forgotten, broken souls shuffled past us, and I wondered why, in one of the greatest cities in the world, they could find no solace and no aid. It was a cold night for them. It was a cold night for me too, and I should have worn a jacket, but I didn’t care about being comfortable now.
“You haven’t said anything,” Aamir said, once he’d taken the driver’s seat and turned on the heat in the car at full blast.
“What is there to say?” I asked.
“Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un,” my brother reminded me.
From Allah we come, and to Allah we return.
It was what you were supposed to say when someone died, a reminder that death was expected, that your grief was not unique, and that the departed were where they truly belonged.
They were good words. Prescribed words. Ultimately, however, they were just words, and they were not enough. Not for this. Not for me.
* * *
—
It was just after dawn when I learned that I couldn’t go to Naani Jaan’s funeral. My parents were going to fly out in the evening. It was too expensive for all of us to go on such short notice. My father looked nervous when he told me, like he’d been asked to defuse a bomb. I understood. It was the way things were. There was nothing he or I could do to change that.
Friends and family had descended upon the house, bringing food and sorrowful smiles, nods designed to convey empathy and understanding, and old words of wisdom that had been vetted by generations. It is easy, in a way, to know what to say when someone dies. Humanity, as a whole, has a lot of practice in dealing with death. Only individuals struggle with it.
“So sorry for your loss.”
“She was such a wonderful woman.”
“Celebrate her life more than you mourn her death.”
“Here if you need anything.”
“Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un.”
“You’ll see her again soon in heaven.”
I have to admit that the last one was my favorite. Not only was it a stunning mix of piety and audacity, but it also sounded like a threat. Naani Jaan would’ve approved.
They floated through the house, dressed either in black or in white, depending on where they were from, what traditions they’d grown up with, and gave us their condolences.
There was only one face that I wanted to see, that I needed to see. Eventually, I heard my father open the door and greet Mr. Shah.
Zuha was there. She looked at me and in those bright brown eyes of hers, I could see she desperately wished she could embrace me, gather me up, pull me together. She couldn’t. Not here.
She crossed her arms behind her back, bowed her head a little, and asked softly, “How are you?”
“Like…this world that lies before us like a field of dreams, so beautiful and so new, has really neither joy nor help for pain.”
My father gave a little sigh. “Incredible, isn’t it, how loss turns everyone into a poet?”
“It’s Matthew Arnold,” Zuha said.
My father looked around, frowning, searching for the long-dead Victorian. “Who? Where?”
“No, Dad, it’s who I was quoting.”
“Misquoting,” Zuha whispered, and though moments before I’d been convinced that it would never happen ever again, entirely without meaning to, I smiled.
* * *
—
My parents left for Karachi, and Aamir went to Davis, drawn away by some medical school test or exam that couldn’t wait. I was alone.
After I dropped my parents off at the airport, I came home and wandered through the house. I wasn’t really looking for anything, I don’t think. I just didn’t want to sit still in the dark silence. I flipped switches wherever I went and soon every room was bathed in light. It was the kind of waste that would’ve typically had my mother screaming at me, but I didn’t think she would mind tonight. Eventually, I lay down on my own bed, staring up at the ceiling fan, hands behind my head.
Ma had been quiet, somber and obviously moved by her mother’s passing, but everyone treated me like they expected me to be the broken one. I suppose I was closer to Naani Jaan than she had been and that thought was a little terrible. I wondered what had happened between them, and when, to make them…not estranged, exactly, but soul strangers—people too different to connect, to ever understand each other. Would it be the same for me when Ma died? Everyone would assume, probably correctly, that Aamir was the one most in need of comfort.
I’d never learn more about the relationship between Bariah Faris and Naani Jaan. It was not a story my mother would ever tell, and maybe it wasn’t a story for me to hear.
The high-pitched chime of the doorbell went off. I considered ignoring it and pretending I wasn’t home. However, I had just turned on every single light in the house, so that wasn’t really going to be a believable excuse.
I trudged downstairs and opened the door. Zuha stood there, holding a large, unmarked cardboard box.
“Hi,” she said.
I looked past her at her car to see if anyone else was with her. “You’re here alone?”
“Yes. I’m scandalous like that. Got you pizza.”
“I can see that.”
“Let me in before someone we know sees me and I get branded with the scarlet letter, will you?”
“The scarlet letter wasn’t a brand. It was—”
“Shut up,” Zuha snapped when I closed the door behind her. I raised my eyebrows. “How could you not call me?”
“I didn’t have the chance.”
“You could have texted. How long does that take?”
I took the pizza from her. The smell of the baked crust made me realize how hungry I was. “Sorry. You’re not actually mad, are you?”
Zuha shook her head as she walked to the kitchen. “No. I just wish I could’ve been there for you.”
“You’re here now.”
She turned around and glared at me, but I could see the mischief in her eyes.
“What?” I asked.
“I hate it when you say exactly the right thing. A girl likes to have the last word, you know. So…what can I do to make you feel better?”
“You can tell me there is no pineapple on this pizza.”
“If I did, it would only be half the truth,” Zuha said. As I started reaching for plates, she walked over to me and took my hands. Her eyes were serious now, as she reached up and ran a hand th
rough my hair. “Hey.”
“Hi?”
“I’m sorry I never got to meet your Naani Jaan. I think I would’ve liked her.”
“You would have.”
Zuha took a deep breath. “I don’t know what else to say, Anvar.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
She stood on tiptoe and kissed me lightly on the lips. Then, drawing back, she said, “Now that I’m here, what do you want to do?”
* * *
—
Zuha growled as I took the last three of her pieces in one elegant move. “You’re ridiculously good at this.”
“Thank you. I know.”
“I’m not sure that was a compliment.”
I folded my arms and nodded at the checkers board between us. She rolled her eyes and tossed one of the small plastic disks at me. It bounced off my nose before I could react, and then off the bed. Zuha smothered a laugh as she hopped down to pick it up off the carpet.
“Hey,” I said. “Respect the game.”
“You’re taking this way too seriously.”
“It’s the game of life.”
She frowned. “I thought that was chess.”
I shook my head, as if profoundly disappointed by her ignorance.
“How’d you get so good?”
“Practice,” I said. “And Naani Jaan taught me.”
That turned her tone serious. “Really?”
“Yeah. She was the best at the game. Checkers, I mean. Not life.”
Zuha started to arrange the board for another round.
“I don’t even know why she liked it so much. It wasn’t like she loved board games or something. She never really played anything else. This was it. I never got to beat her, you know. She never let me win.”
“That’s kind of awesome.”
I nodded. I’d always thought so.
She picked up a piece as if to make her first move, seemed to reconsider and put it back down. “Can I ask you something?” Then, without waiting for me to answer, she said, “What’s bothering you?”
The Bad Muslim Discount Page 9
