“Not at the moment. I just went—”
“Don’t be gross.”
“You used to like it when I was gross.”
Zuha shook her head. “No. I really never did.”
“Sit. I’ll get your coffee.”
“I can do it.”
I got to my feet and gestured gallantly to the empty chair across from me. “Please.”
“Sure. Okay. Cream and—”
“Two sugars. I remember.”
As I walked back with her drink and an almond butter toast, I noticed she was texting. I tried not to wonder who, since there was a possibility it could be Aamir. Their engagement party was tomorrow. Still, I smiled at Zuha as she looked up from her phone and thanked me. “You come here often?”
“All the time.”
“I would’ve thought they’d teach you to be a better liar in law school.”
I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms over my chest. Then, realizing my posture was intensely defensive, I tried to relax. Zuha had always been able to read me far too easily.
“I’m not sure you’ve heard, but I’m not a very good lawyer.”
“Fair point. I’ve seen where you live.”
“Nice.”
She set her phone down on the table and looked at me, her eyes earnest. “Did you come here just to see me?”
I nodded.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I felt bad about yesterday and I was thinking…Actually, I have no idea why I am here. Not really. I’m sorry. I just couldn’t sleep and there was all this herbal tea and—I don’t know why, but this just seemed like what I should do.”
Zuha nodded, accepting the explanation, such as it was, and sipped her coffee.
“I really am sorry,” I told her, just to kill the growing silence, “about yesterday. I was rude.”
She chuckled. “We’ve apologized to each other more in two days than we have in our entire lives.”
“This is our new normal, I guess.”
“I kind of hate it.” She said it with the air of someone who had lost something important.
“It won’t be so bad. We won’t be around each other that much.” She raised her eyebrows, so I explained. “Aamir and I still aren’t that close.”
“I gathered.”
“Mostly because he remains a horse’s ass.”
“He is not.”
“Is so. Always has been. Frankly, I can’t believe you said yes to him.”
“I guess I have a type, Anvar.”
I placed a hand on my heart, both in jest and not in jest. “Now you’re just being hurtful on purpose.”
We drank our beverages quietly for a while. This was going much better than it had yesterday. She couldn’t know, from the way I was behaving today, how erratic my heartbeat felt in her presence, how desperately an insane part of me had been hoping that our hands would touch, momentarily, when I handed her coffee to her.
“Are you going to your parents’ place today?”
I looked up at her, startled by the question. “Tomorrow. I try to spend as little time with my family as possible.”
“That’s horrible.”
“You only say that because you don’t know them that well yet.”
Zuha shook her head. “I’d forgotten how much I missed you.”
“I never forgot.”
She looked away from me, suddenly very interested in the pastry display across the room. Then she said, “You’re going to stop talking like that soon, I hope.”
“Of course.”
“We were friends once.” She looked back at me. “Right? We can be again.”
I wanted to tell her that was impossible. I wanted to tell her that some associations are indelible and that the scars inflicted by love do not heal. At least for me.
“Sure,” I told her. “Absolutely. I’d like that.”
If she saw through my lie that time, she did not tell me.
AZZA
My niqab kept my scowl a secret as I served a smiling Qais and Abu tea. Qais picked up a cup from the plastic tray and I stepped away, wanting to hurry back to my room, to the journals I’d been writing since those chickpeas had rained down upon me. Qais stopped me.
“Your birthday is coming up, isn’t it?”
I glanced at Abu, who nodded, obviously pleased that his future son-in-law had managed to remember his daughter’s birthday. I couldn’t remember Abu ever making a fuss over Mama’s birthdays. There were never any flowers or any cards. I wondered why I’d never thought of it before.
Dr. Yousef had always come by.
“What present would you like for your birthday?” Qais asked.
“I want a gun,” I said.
Both men stared at me.
“Look at what is happening,” I said. “People hate Muslims, and a lot of them have weapons. If they have guns, we should have guns too.”
I wouldn’t have to argue with them. The lives they had led did that for me. Qais nodded once, thoughtfully, and said, “That is true. Maybe I should get one for myself as well.”
“For Abu too,” I said. “The more guns, the better. We are Americans now.”
* * *
—
“I’ve got a moral question.”
Anvar looked up from his laptop. He’d been reading the news a lot more lately. He’d been trying to get me to read it too, but it wasn’t for me.
For Anvar and Americans like him, their election was the most important thing in the world—and maybe that was fair—but these people, who claimed to be leaders of the free world, didn’t know the world at all. They didn’t understand its nature or its size. They thought it was smaller than it was, and that they were bigger than they were.
“What?”
“A moral question,” I said.
“I’m probably not the best person in the world to answer those.”
“You’re the best person I know,” I told him.
“I’m flattered, I suppose. If you think about it, though, that’s either really funny or really very sad.”
I tucked a strand of hair that had been acting out all day behind my ear. “You want to make jokes, or do you want to help?”
He smiled in surrender. “What’s the question?”
I glared at him, just to make sure he would take me seriously. He had a bad habit of thinking everything was funny.
“Should we be guided by our limits or our priorities?”
I was proud of the way I phrased that. I couldn’t just come out and ask him how he felt about what I was planning to do. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to understand.
I tried to explain. “It’s like your thing with your brother’s fiancée.”
“Zuha.”
“Right. I mean, you could try to stop the engagement tomorrow. You could tell your parents about Zuha’s past. Or tell your brother. Or just make a big scene at the party. You could make a mess of the whole thing if you wanted to. But you’re not doing any of that. Is it because of your own personal limits? Society’s limits? Or is it because of your priorities? Like family first or literally bros before hos, as they say on TV.”
“Well, Zuha is not a ‘ho,’ so not really literally.”
“Whatever. Well?”
“I haven’t really thought about it,” he said.
“Yes. You have. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Every action we take is a balancing act between these two things, isn’t it? How far are we willing to go to get what we want? You must have thought about it. You must have.”
Anvar looked at me like I was odd. “I haven’t. You know what they say, the examined life is not worth living.”
I shook my head. I should’ve known better than to ask him. He took nothing seriously…and that was attractive so
metimes, but it could also be really annoying.
“Hey,” he said. “What is this about anyway?”
I’m going to end Qais Badami.
I’m going to make sure he can never hurt me again.
I just don’t like what I have to do to make it happen.
I didn’t say any of that.
“Just go back to doing whatever you were doing,” I told him. “It isn’t important.”
ANVAR
The thing that surprises you when you enter a Pakistani home after a long absence is the smell. The aroma of desi food is a problem, mostly because of the amount of fried onions it requires. Some people simply do not bother to control the odor and are content to let it soak into their clothes. They sit beside innocent civilians on subways and buses and assault their noses with memories of old curry.
Most desis, however, take great pains to make sure that all traces of food remain confined to their kitchens. To this end they use air fresheners and scented candles; they leave windows open and light incense. The result is that their homes have a smell to them—it varies from household to household, depending on what scent has been used and how long ago—however, the constant is this perfume in the air, a gesture of care and courtesy, lingering just behind the door to welcome you in.
My parents’ house always smells of saffron and lemons.
It is a small suburban home that still has an empty room set aside for me, as if my family is not sure when I will need to move back in. Aamir’s room had been left similarly undisturbed, and he’d returned to it after his last residency, so my parents probably thought that my return was also inevitable.
I found Aamir in the living room, sitting cross-legged on a sofa. He was dressed in a white kurta over faded jeans, a small cap on his head. There was an ostentatiously large Quran nestled in his lap. He gently rocked back and forth as he read it out loud in an unnecessarily melodious manner. He gave no answer to my greeting, except that the volume of the recitation went up and the pitch rose an octave.
He could’ve recited the Quran in the privacy of his own room, of course, or sat quietly here and read it to himself, but that was not how Aamir did things.
“Stop glaring at your brother,” my mother said, as she walked downstairs. I was struck by how much the world had changed, first becoming digital and now strangely virtual, while Bariah Faris remained the same. She was still that slender, severe woman I had always known. “Tell me why you are late.”
I followed her into the modest kitchen. “Does he have to do that out there?”
“It’s good to hear the Quran,” she snapped, though her heart was not really in the admonishment. One of the benefits of a pending wedding in the family was how it preoccupied my mother. As she reached for a large wooden ladle, she whipped around, however, and asked, “When was the last time you even opened a Quran?”
“Yesterday.” The lie came to my lips automatically, prompted more by muscle memory than by actual thought.
She regarded me with dark, narrowed eyes. “Really?”
“Absolutely. I’m pretty far in on my current reading.” I hoped that the added detail made my story sound more convincing.
“You are reading with a translation, of course.”
“I mean, yes, obviously,” I said with a put-upon air. Something about that damn house always made me feel like a teenager again. “I have to understand what it is saying, after all. To better apply the teachings to my own life.”
My mother made a noncommittal sound and then shrugged. “That’s a good boy, then.”
“Thank you. That makes me feel very validated.”
She spared me an irritated look and then began to hunt around a cabinet for precisely the kind of pot she wanted. “By the way, what are you wearing?”
I glanced down at the battered, gray Barenaked Ladies T-shirt that I wore over faded blue jeans. My mother and I had fought a long and brutal jihad over the scandalous nature of the band’s name, years ago. I won the right to wear their merchandise when I was a teenager and, over the years, had accumulated a closet full of shirts like this one in order to relish a rare victory over my mother’s tyrannical will. For a horrible moment, I wondered if that old battle would once again have to be joined.
With some trepidation, I asked, “What’s wrong with my clothes?”
“Not right now. What’s bigger? Your brain or a cow?”
I’ve always been pretty sure that question, which my mother is fond of asking, loses something in the translation, but I’ve never bothered to ask for an explanation of what it might possibly mean. The answer is, one would think, self-evident.
After a moment, she said, “What are you wearing to Aamir’s engagement party, I mean to ask.”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Were you planning on thinking about it?”
“Not for very long, no.”
“How old are you? Do I still have to pick out your clothes for you? Are you a boy or a pajama?”
Another question that, I assumed, somehow made more sense in the original Urdu.
“You don’t have to pick out my clothes for me.”
She sniffed. “Wrong. I had to do it. Already picked out a nice shalwar kameez for you to wear.”
“Thank you?”
“You really should do this yourself.”
“I would’ve,” I said as she turned her attention back to the cabinets, looking at the wide selection of lentils at her disposal.
“Well go change and show me how it fits. Aamir looks really good in the one I got for him. He couldn’t stop talking about it for a whole day. He even had me take a picture and sent it to all his friends on Instantgram.”
“Never heard of it. Is it like Instagram?”
“Why is it always the glib answer with you? Aamir isn’t like that. How many times have I told you to try to be more like him?”
“Way too many times.”
“Yet do you listen? You always have to be a smart donkey.”
“Smart ass, you mean.”
She whirled around to face me with impressive alacrity for a woman her age, her horrified eyes wide. “What did you say to me?”
“The expression. It’s not ‘smart donkey,’ it’s sm—”
I realized what I had done.
“Astaghfirullah. What is wrong with you, boy? Don’t use filthy language in my kitchen. You know the Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him, said that a believer does not swear, don’t you?”
I could have tried to explain I had not said a swear word. I could even have done a Google search to prove that “ass” is another way of saying “donkey,” but I knew from long and exhausting experience that it wouldn’t make any difference.
I hit my head lightly on the nearest wall for effect. “All right. I’m sorry. I’ll go change.”
As I turned to leave, though, she spoke up again. “What was the last thing you read?”
“What?”
“In the Quran. You remember what the last thing you read was about?”
I cast around desperately for an answer. I didn’t even own a copy of the Quran. My mother drummed the ladle on her granite countertop expectantly.
“It was…about how there is no compulsion in religion,” I said. That was one of the few parts I remembered. It had appealed to me, even when I was a child.
“Ah yes,” she said, her voice dangerously low. “From Surah Baqarah. Very strange.”
“Why?”
“The Chapter of the Cow is at the beginning of the Quran. As you well know, it is the second chapter.”
“As I well know.” I slowly backed out of the kitchen.
“I thought you said you were, how did you put it, ‘pretty far in,’ was it?”
Not for the first time in my life, I wondered if the wrong member of the family had gone to law school.
“I meant I’m pretty far into the chapter, Ma.”
“That makes sense. Because you wouldn’t dare lie about something like that, would you? You wouldn’t dare.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“May Allah forgive you. Don’t you talk to me about crosses.”
“Sorry.”
“And you know that verse you’re talking about only applies to non-Muslims, right? It means you can’t force someone to accept the religion. Once you are in, a different set of rules applies. You have to do everything you’re told or there is hell to pay.”
I grinned at her. “It’s a lot like this family then.”
She sighed in the profoundly tired way that old people can sigh. “Go change, Anvar. Please change before it is too late.”
* * *
—
I didn’t manage to change in time. Guests had already started to arrive by the time I showered, shaved and donned the deep turquoise raw silk kurta and blood-red shalwar my mother had picked out. It wasn’t something I would have worn if left to my own devices, but I had to admit that it suited me.
Aamir was freaking out a little about our running late and Ma was trying to calm him down by reminding him that no one was rude enough to show up to a Pakistani party on time.
Now that I was ready, the thirty-odd people who were squished into my parents’ small house, decked out in fine clothes and sparkling like the shiny happy creatures they always pretended to be at these occasions, began dividing themselves into groups. They’d all assembled here and would travel in a procession to the hotel ballroom where the engagement was supposed to take place. There was mild chaos as they tried to decide which cars to take and who would drive.
“If we’re so worried about being punctual,” I told my father, “we should’ve all gone directly to the party.”
That wasn’t what Imtiaz Faris was concerned about. “Are you all right?”
“Me?” I cleared my throat and stood up to my full height. “Sure.”
“You look like you’re in pain.”
“I mean, I have to be around Aamir, so I guess I am a little. No more than usual though.”
The Bad Muslim Discount Page 22
