“Certainly, I am disappointed in you.”
“Me?” I’d done nothing, except for writing in his defense.
“I read your work.” He picked up his copy of the school newspaper. My story was visible and covered in red marks. He tossed it in my direction and it landed on his desk in front of me. “It is my opinion that it was a cohesive, commendable and well-constructed argument for the free discussion of ideas. I thought that part was very well done.”
“But?”
“However, the manner in which you took on the Muslim Students Association—the MSA, is it?—was rather merciless.”
I couldn’t help but grin. “That was exactly what I was going for.”
“So I assumed. Tell me, Mr. Faris,” the professor said, taking off his glasses and setting them aside before regarding me from over steepled hands. “Do you think the article was effective?”
“What do you mean?”
“Let me ask you this instead. What was it that you hoped to accomplish?”
I shrugged. “I wanted the MSA to see that they were being—”
“You were looking to change their minds and their behavior then?”
“Of course.”
“And do you think you succeeded? I suspect you’ve offended them. I know you’ve shamed them in public. However, I would be astounded if you’ve actually managed to convince any of them that you are right. All in all, therefore, are you not forced to agree that whatever the merits of your argument, you failed to effectively present it?”
My ears felt warm, my face hot. I wasn’t sure if it was anger or embarrassment or a mix of both.
“Anvar,” Professor Herman said, his voice kind, “you’re a bright and winning man. You’re also very young. I know this all seems like a big deal to you now but—”
“But I was right. Wasn’t I right? Nothing I wrote was untrue.”
“It isn’t enough to be right. When you raise your voice to speak, you must speak the truth, but you should speak it in the most persuasive way possible. You could make a difference in your community, Anvar. You could be a leader. You have all the gifts. People will follow someone like you, if you stand for something.”
“I did.” My voice was louder than it should have been. “I stood for you.”
“What you wrote was not about me. It was about showing everyone how very smart you are. It was about how you are morally superior to your peers, despite all their religion. It was petty. I expect better from you.”
I should’ve said something clever. Actually, I could have just repeated his last sentence back to him. That would have worked. Instead, I think I managed to nod at him, grabbed my backpack and rushed out of his office.
Within the hour, I’d dropped his class too.
* * *
—
Zuha was waiting for me when I got back to the dorm. She had a couple of pieces of paper in her hand, and she was reading them when I walked in. She looked up. She didn’t smile. Beside her, on my bed, lay a copy of the school paper.
“You couldn’t help yourself, could you? You just had to go after Shabana and the others. I asked you—I begged you—to do one thing for me.”
“Technically, you asked me not to do one thing, just so—”
“Shut up.”
I started to say something I would have instantly regretted, took a deep breath, then held up a hand to stop her. “Can we talk about this later please?”
She didn’t reply. Instead she shoved the papers she’d been holding up at me. I took them. “…with his poisonous pen, Mr. Faris spits venom at those who believe, perhaps to mask the reality that he truly has no beliefs himself. His self-satisfied, smug sneering…” I read out loud. I was about to ask her what this was, when I realized that she’d handed me the second sheet first. Looking at the first page, I realized it was a letter to the editor. “The alliteration is a bit much. You wrote this?”
Quietly she said, “The MSA leadership asked me—”
“You mean, Shabana asked you. At least have the courage to—”
“I’m here showing this to you before the world sees it, which is more of a courtesy than you gave anyone, Anvar, so don’t lecture me about courage.”
“How can you be on their side? You don’t believe what they believe.”
“Stop telling me what I believe.” She shook her head, as if trying to shake loose her own thoughts so that they would make sense. “I’m figuring that out. I’ll tell you what I don’t believe though. I don’t believe in stabbing my friends in the back and doing it in public.”
I held up the letter she’d just handed me. “Could’ve fooled me.”
“That’s a cheap shot.”
I crumpled up her pages and tossed them at the wastebasket in the corner of the room. They sailed wide. “Anyway, they’re not my friends.”
“I am. And I’m one of them. Why can’t you get that through your head?”
“You’re not one of them. You get up from my bed in the middle of the night to pray? Does that make you pious now? What kind of Islam is that? What do you think your MSA friends would say if they knew—”
“Stop. Stop. Stop talking. I don’t want this to be how I remember us. Please.”
Then it hit me. It was a heart punch. I sat down across from her, on Nico’s bed.
“You’re breaking up with me. This is you breaking up with me.”
She nodded, her eyes barely holding on to tears. She whispered, “Yes.”
“No. No, Zuha. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I hated the desperation in my own voice, but I couldn’t keep it out. I didn’t know my world without Zuha Shah in it. I wouldn’t recognize it. She was so intertwined with my sense of being that to lose her was unthinkable. “I’ll tell Shabana I’m sorry. I’ll write it in the paper. I’ll—”
“Anvar, it isn’t about the MSA.”
“Then what is it? What did I do? Tell me what I did.”
“It isn’t about you either. The pregnancy scare was a sign from God. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. For a while, I haven’t felt good about us. I don’t feel good about being in a relationship. The more I study what Allah wants, the more I realize that I don’t want to sin anymore. I want to be a better Muslim. It’s nothing you did, Anvar. You’re the same as you ever were, but I’m not. I’m still becoming who I’m going to be.”
I don’t know how long we sat there together, in silence, her tears falling at a distance from mine, until eventually she walked over, kissed my forehead and was gone.
SAFWA
Khalti Rabia’s garden outside of Basra was an unlikely little thing. Getting that many flowers to consistently bloom in that heat, with the salt-tinged waters of Shatt al-Arab, was difficult for a poor woman with few resources.
My mother once said that her parents had made a mistake in naming their youngest daughter Rabia, after one of the most famous women in Islam’s history. Like Rabia Basri, the holy woman of old, my aunt had little use for things from the world of men or for men themselves. She’d never married, never even bothered to hope for love from what I’d heard. She seemed content to draw colorful miracles from the earth, which seemed happy to give her what her gardener’s heart desired.
Like my mother, Khalti Rabia didn’t talk much, but you could tell it was because she didn’t have much to say, not because she was being silenced. She was rarely interested in what I was doing, or why, and never asked me to do anything at all. For the few months that I lived with her, I might as well have been alone.
So maybe it is not surprising that I miss her petunias more than I miss her, and that I miss how free I was then most of all. Still she was kind to me when the world was cruel and gave me refuge when I had no home. It is difficult not to love someone who does that for you, even if they are indifferent to your existence.
Khalti Rabia took me with her t
o Basra itself just once. She didn’t tell me what her errand was, and I think she liked that I did not ask. I was more than happy to get a chance to walk along the city’s canals, which my mother had recalled so fondly from her own childhood. Of course, my mother had described them full of flowing water, like the veins of a living, breathing thing. Now the water in the canals seemed still and filthy, with garbage floating on top.
The world of my mother’s memories had not outlived her.
Dr. Yousef called three times while I was living with my aunt.
The first time he called to make sure I had arrived safely.
The second time he called to tell me my brother had died.
The third time he called, he told me he’d heard that Abu was free.
* * *
—
Abu was different than I remembered. It wasn’t just that he had lost a lot of weight, or that his beard had grown long and wild. It wasn’t just that the fingers on one of his hands were swollen, his fingernails gone. It wasn’t even the fact that his eyes looked like the windows of an empty house, sad and haunted. It was his shoulders. He wasn’t as tall as he had been once. He was hunched over, as if unable to stand up straight anymore.
And there was blood on his shirt.
I ran to him barefoot across the path leading up to Khalti Rabia’s home, the sunbaked concrete searing my skin. I called out his name and wrapped my arms around his chest. He did not respond. He stood rigid, like stone, and I had to pull away, a sudden, surprising sadness rising in my heart.
“Abu?”
He was looking past me at Rabia, who had come to the door. “I’ve come to take this one with me.”
In her usual soft manner, and as if she was only mildly interested, my aunt asked, “Is that your blood, Abu Fahd?”
I could hear his teeth grinding at the name. Father of Fahd. Father of a boy who no longer was. I stepped away from him.
“No.”
“Then whose blood is it?”
“The blood on this shirt is the blood of Yousef.”
I gasped, stepping back again, and nearly stumbling. “What did you do?”
Still Abu did not look at me. “Men will come asking about me.”
Rabia nodded once.
“What happened to Dr. Yousef?” I spoke louder this time.
My father looked down at his big hands. I noticed not just the missing fingernails, but the bloody, skinned, bruised knuckles. “He left Fahd to die. My son died alone, in the dark, and no one was with him.” Abu did look at me then, with dark eyes that had become lifeless—no, not lifeless…wilted, like Khalti Rabia’s plants that could not bear the heat to which they were exposed. “No one. For that there is no forgiveness.”
“Abu, I had no choice.”
“You had a choice. You made a choice.”
“I would’ve died there too.”
“Then,” he roared like a sandstorm, his voice somehow seeming to echo all around me, and through me, “You. Should. Have. Died.”
Something like a whimper came to my lips, and I felt my tears, and I stepped back again, and this time I did lose my balance, and I did fall. Abu didn’t move to help me. He turned back to Rabia, speaking normally again. “She is my daughter. I’m taking her with me.”
“If she decides to go with you,” my aunt said, “then she is yours.”
Abu looked down at me. “Get your things.”
I scrambled to my feet and ran inside.
I’ve thought a great deal about that moment over the years. I think, maybe, my aunt had offered me something I could not then recognize. A chance to live my own life. I think that if I had said I did not want to go with my father, she would have stood up for me. I’m not sure if it would’ve done any good. I’m not sure if Abu was capable of listening to reason then. He would’ve probably tried to take me anyway.
As it was, I simply obeyed Abu’s command, and I left the garden behind.
* * *
—
I was lost. Abu wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t tell me where we were or where we were going. He just drove his rusting pickup in silence. We went through deserts I cannot name, past rivers I do not know and mountains I did not recognize. We went through cities and, occasionally, villages, and when we were stopped or asked questions, he seemed to always know what to say and how to say it.
I realized then that he had made this journey before. Abu was taking me to a place he was familiar with, on a road he had walked before.
He was going back to an old battlefield, a place where he’d fought a war, and had emerged, at least in his own mind, unbroken.
* * *
—
We were in Pakistan or Afghanistan, but I don’t know the name of the village we went to. Not just because I didn’t care to find out, but also because I couldn’t speak the local language and very few people had any English or Arabic except for the Quran they’d memorized.
We lived in a small hut of bricks, with oil lamps for light and a stove on the floor for a kitchen. There was nothing for me to do there. An old woman had mimed that she could teach me how to knit, but I’d turned her away by shaking my head. At least, I think she was old, because of the wrinkles around her eyes. Women rarely left their homes there, and when they did, it was never without their niqabs.
It was a land of serious men, who sometimes rode out with weapons, and who often prayed when there were explosions close by.
When Abu was home, he wouldn’t say a word to me, no matter how I begged, even though he was all that was left of the world I’d once known.
One day I said, “This is not what Fahd would’ve wanted.”
Abu struck my right cheek with the back of his hand, and my head twisted sharply. This had never happened before. Shame and anger and pain and humiliation made my eyes water, and I saw it then, though it was only there for a moment. I saw the horrible smile that flickered across Abu’s face. And I knew. I knew he was going to hit me again.
And he did, though he didn’t hit my face. He struck my back, and he punched my stomach, and when I went down he kicked me and kicked me and kept kicking me and screaming for me to be silent, to never say his son’s name again, until I could hear the words but make no sense of them.
Until I could hear nothing at all.
* * *
—
I think I woke, for a moment, and heard Abu weeping. Weeping as if he were Job himself, afflicted with all the sorrows of the world, through no fault of his own. Or, maybe, it was a dream. I can’t be sure.
* * *
—
It is difficult to measure time when you cannot stay awake, and when pain is always there. I didn’t speak Fahd’s name again, but it didn’t matter. Abu would hit me for any reason at all, for things I did, for things I failed to do, until I stopped speaking when he was home, until I was afraid to move at all around him.
And then he hit me for my silence, screaming at me to speak, and it would have been easy to speak, to say something, to beg some more.
It would have been easy. It would have been so easy.
I did what was hard.
* * *
—
“Keep at this, Abu Fahd, and you will kill the girl. Most excellent. A model father you are. I think that indeed Allah must be most satisfied with you.” It was a woman’s voice, a very old voice, and it was somehow full of both laughter and sorrow. “You know, in Arabia, before the Prophet Muhammad, they used to bury baby girls alive when they were born. Allah sent a messenger to put a stop to it. If you are looking to bring the practice back—”
“Enough. Please. It is enough, Bibi Warda.” It was Abu. “You cannot make me feel worse than I already do.”
“I am willing to try. One never knows until one tries, you know.”
A great, shuddering breath came from Abu. �
��I don’t know what happens to me, Bibi. I just…when I hit her, it makes me feel…”
A long quiet. I felt a cold, wet cloth being laid on my forehead, and realized that I was burning up and that it hurt to breathe. It hurt to be awake.
“I don’t know what they did to me, bibi. I didn’t know you could hurt a man’s body and change his heart. They would strip…people, bibi, and bend them over, take a tube and…”
They ran out of words again. A gentle, light hand caressed my hair.
Who was this Bibi Warda I was with? It was incredible that Abu would speak of these things to her. Even if he knew her well from a life I’d never seen him live, it wasn’t like him to tell stories like this to anyone, especially a woman.
Then again, Mama used to tell me a fairy tale about a servant girl who was suffering under a cruel master. She had no one to complain to, so she would go tell her sorrows to a statue. Maybe there was a limit to how much pain a human being could carry around before they had to share it. Unlike the servant, who’d been overheard by a prince and rescued, I didn’t think Abu would find any help here.
“They put diapers on us and laughed when we pissed and shat ourselves. They would cut off our clothes, drag us through the halls and beat us. They kept us standing, wouldn’t let us sleep. The things they did to me, bibi, I am ashamed to say that I endured them. Better that I had died.”
“Certainly better for your daughter, I think,” she said from beside me. “Abu Fahd, I’ve known you a long time. You fought with my son when the Soviets came. I haven’t forgotten. No one here has forgotten who you are. So why have you forgotten?”
“I have spoken to an imam. He has said that I must fast and that I must pray. I will go to Mecca for Hajj. At the door of my Lord, I will beg for forgiveness and restraint.”
“Mecca is a long way away, and you have wandered far on the Earth, Abu Fahd. There is forgiveness to be found here, I suspect, if you would but seek it.”
The Bad Muslim Discount Page 12
