“Slow down.”
In the hallway, a few feet away from home, I spun around and saw that Zuha had come after me. I shook my head. Nothing this woman did made sense. I turned and kept walking away from her. When I got to the door and had to stop to pull out my keys, she caught up to me.
“I’m sorry I followed you.”
“Then stop.”
That drew a small smile from her. “I just wanted to apologize for…I don’t want anyone to get hurt because of me—”
“Except for Anvar.”
“I…” She shook her head, then took a deep breath. “I’m not talking about him. I don’t know what you and Anvar have and—”
“We don’t have anything. I don’t have anything, which is how it’s always been.”
“You don’t have to cover for him. Whatever he told you happened between us was a long time ago, and it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s the past.”
I laughed. It came out sour. “He hasn’t touched me—not in that way—since he saw you again. So, either you’re lying to me, or to yourself, or you’re stupid. And from everything he has told me about you, you’re not stupid.”
She looked overcome when I said that, like someone witnessing the vastness of the desert, or the vastness of the ocean, for the first time.
It made my voice softer than it had been before. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
It took a moment for Zuha to process what she wanted to say and, in that moment, I heard a familiar, heavy step on the stairs. Before she could speak, I reached over and gripped her wrist in a forceful, urgent warning.
“Even though class was canceled, and Abu isn’t expecting me back, I never go anywhere without telling him where I’m going. We have to wait for him.”
Zuha blinked. “What?”
“I know it seems strange to you, but it’s one of his rules. Come in and sit. Can I make you some tea? Oh. There he is. As-salamu alaykum, Abu.”
My father—the man who raised me, anyway—frowned at my cheerful tone. It must have seemed incredible to him after the painful way our last talk had ended, but then his gaze found Zuha and he seemed to understand that I was putting on a show.
“Who is your friend?”
“She’s a teacher at my school,” I said quickly, at the same time Zuha told him her name.
He studied her more closely then. “That is a Muslim name, is it not?”
She nodded.
“Yet you are not modest like a Muslim woman. Your dress betrays what is in your heart.”
Zuha was wearing a simple long-sleeved shirt with dress pants. No one, except for Abu and his friends, could have had any objections. I was certain, however, that he thought her pants highlighted her legs too much, and her shirt emphasized her waist more than necessary.
I was still thinking about what to say when Zuha answered him. She spoke sweetly, but her words had the edge of a knife. “And your gaze betrays what is in yours.”
I couldn’t help myself. I gasped.
Abu looked like he’d just been slapped. For all that was made of how Muslim women had to dress, little was ever said of how Muslim men were supposed to look away when they saw what they weren’t supposed to see.
For the first time in my life, I’d seen Abu’s practice of his religion challenged.
His face flushed and he stepped toward Zuha, looming over her. She looked completely unconcerned. I understood then why Anvar liked her so much.
“How dare you speak to me that way!”
“I’ve got no reason to be afraid. You can’t hit me and get away with it.”
She said it with a glance in my direction, just to make sure Abu knew she knew. How did she know though? How had she figured out it was Abu who’d beat me after being around him for only a few seconds?
She wasn’t stupid.
Abu hesitated, then stepped away from Zuha, toward our front door. He didn’t turn away from her, however, before snarling “leave” in her direction, and waving for me to follow him. She was definitely not the kind of person he wanted his “daughter” to associate with.
ANVAR
I called Zuha to explain myself—actually, I called her to point out how completely absurd it was that I should have to explain myself to her, given that she was currently engaged to my brother—but she didn’t answer. Perhaps that was fortunate. It wasn’t a conversation that was going to go well.
At least Azza came back the next night, though she pretended that nothing unusual had happened. That seemed to be her preferred method of dealing with the world.
I too was in the conflict-dodging game, ducking all the calls my mom made to speak to me. When she stopped calling, I was initially relieved. Then I began to wonder if I had managed only to stave off the inevitable, and if her fury was now building toward an apocalyptic fallout. Just when I was becoming convinced that she was essentially the human equivalent of the San Andreas Fault, her agent, my father, came to find me. He insisted on taking me for a drive.
When the mafia wants you to take a ride with them, it’s bad. When my father wants you to do it, it’s worse. Imtiaz Faris, despite his deep voice and intimidating girth, has never really been comfortable with disciplining his children. Both Aamir and I recognized early that our mother was the stronger, more involved, dominant parent.
Every once in a while, however, when things were going so badly that he could not stomach it, my father would enter the parenting arena and take us for a drive. He would turn the volume up on the car’s stereo and pop in the mixtape he had prepared for the occasion. The mishmash of songs he chose was somehow always topical, and our childhood featured a heavy dose of weepy old Indian music. As my father’s tastes diversified, however, the songs got more eclectic. I got Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” after my first speeding ticket. Aamir swears that when he started gaining weight during the long nights of medical school, he got “Milkshake” by Kelis and “I Want Candy” from Bow Wow Wow.
That day, my lot consisted of a few emotional Indian songs including “Dost Dost Na Raha,” followed by Dire Straits’s “Brothers in Arms” and then Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle.” When a song from the movie Hum Saath—Saath Hain began to play, I broke. “All right. I’m sorry, okay? I’m really sorry. Please make it stop.”
My father turned off the music and drove, as he always did in these situations, to his friend’s shop, A Pretty Good Ice Cream Parlor.
“Hi, Mr. Good.” I greeted him in the same sullen fashion I’d been greeting him since I’d been a teenager. “How’re you?”
“Won’t complain,” Joseph answered with a grin. “You staying out of trouble?”
“No,” my father announced, “he is most certainly not staying out of trouble.”
“Ah, it’s one of those visits,” the shopkeeper said, chuckling. “All right, all right. One bubble gum coming right up.”
“Two scoops, Joseph,” my father said, “and sprinkles.”
Mr. Good whistled low. “Must have really messed up.”
Dad nodded emphatically, and then ordered for himself.
This was another Imtiaz Faris punishment technique. He’d bring you for ice cream and get you the one flavor he knew you hated. For me that’s always been bubble gum.
Joe heaped an ungodly amount of sprinkles on my unnaturally bright blue ice cream, then handed me the pureed Smurfs in a cone. “Don’t worry, son,” he said, like he’d done for decades, “this too shall pass.”
Following his ritual to the letter, my father then ate his ice cream in the car, while I was made to stand outside in the chill wind until mine was finished. Finally, he unlocked the passenger door and I climbed into his beat-up Camry, which still smelled like dead goat.
“You ready to talk seriously now, you little pecker?”
“Yes, Dad. I…”
“
What the constantly burning bloody hell, boy? Is your mind in your bum, you stupid donkey fellow?” He was shouting at me, his arms flailing around the car in wild, expansive gestures that were too big for the cramped space. “Did you shit out all your brains? No, I’m seriously asking you, yaar, what the what, man?”
“I made a mistake.”
“A mistake? That wasn’t a mistake. That was a goddamn mountain of stupidity you dropped on us. Why? Why couldn’t you just come to me and say, Dad, Aamir shouldn’t marry this girl. I stuck it in her pooch?”
“Cooch.”
He frowned. “Really? I was pretty sure it was…”
“No. I’m right about this one.”
“Fine. Be that as it may, you could have just told us. Of all the pigeon shit…”
“Chicken shit.”
“Stop correcting me when I am correcting you.”
“I said I was sorry. You guys didn’t tell me until after everything had been agreed.”
“That’s fine, you stupid son of a rabid dog…”
“Dad.”
“I know,” he snapped. “Let me finish. We hadn’t told Tom, Dick and Harry and their kuttya grandmother, haan? All this wasn’t public knowledge. Now when we break it off, there will be a thousand and one questions. What if someone finds out what you and that girl did, haan? Since you were frolicking around for Allah knows how many years with each other, that isn’t, you know, out of the question.” When I didn’t respond, he prompted me. “You had the chance to stop all this before it got this far. True or not true?”
“I didn’t know what to do.”
“That’s when you come to me, you brain pedestrian. You come to me and ask me what to do. When did you stop doing that?”
“I never did that.”
He sighed, glanced away and said gruffly, “I know. That is why I put the song about the cat and the cradle in there.”
“I heard it.”
“If ever there was truth in music, I tell you….You want another ice cream? You can pick yourself.”
I shuddered at the thought. “No. I’m done with ice cream for a while.”
He turned on the ignition. Then he turned the car off again. This time he did not look at me when he spoke. “I never even realized I was going wrong with you. You were always so damn clever. Always smart. Smarter than me. I relaxed with you, and by the time I figured out that I did have things to teach you, it was too late. Time is a bitch. A real bitch.” His voice was quiet. It made my eyes sting. “I just don’t know when we got to the point that you think you can’t even come to me to say, please, don’t give this one away. I love this one. This one belongs to me.”
“It would have been…” I paused and cleared my throat, forcing the words out in a steady fashion. “It isn’t like that. It isn’t that simple.”
“That’s because you are an evergreen fool,” my father said gently. He held out a card. It had Zuha’s number on it. I decided not to tell him that she wasn’t taking my calls just then. That would require an explanation I most definitely did not want to give. “You call her. Speak to her and figure it out.”
“What about Aamir?”
“This is your shit. Be a man and fix it.” He turned to look at me again. “I’m serious, Anvar. Fix it.”
“Yes, sir.”
He started the engine up again.
“Is Mom really angry?”
“She is now. Since you’ve been avoiding her calls. She wasn’t upset with you about not saying anything about the girl though.”
“Really?”
“Somehow she thought you did the right thing. Something about how we have to conceal the sins of people who repent. It was the Muslim thing to do. She was proud of you.”
I raised my eyebrows at that little revelation. I had never heard, to the best of my recollection, any such emotion attributed to my mother in my life. That she should be pleased with me in these particular circumstances was a little incredible.
“I guess that was a side effect of your shitty decisions, not your goal.”
“Obviously.”
“Now that I think about it, she was fine until the part about what you had actually done with Zuha sank in. Then she was furious. I’m not ashamed to say, it was a little scary.”
“You think I should keep avoiding her?”
“That is what I would do.” He sighed. “Unfortunately, that’s never really been an option for me. Come on. Let’s have one more song.”
“I already said I was sorry.”
“Trust me. It’s a good one.”
It was a good one. It was Farida Khanum singing “Aaj Jaane Ki Zid Na Karo.”
“I remember this song. You played it for me once before, when you grounded me for sneaking in after curfew. Back in high school.”
“Don’t remember, but that makes sense. You say you were late and this is a song about time. Now, can you shut up, so we can listen?”
For once in my life, I was happy to do what I was told.
I listened to those old lyrics that had danced with many souls before mine. I listened to the lament of a poet begging his beloved to not insist on leaving, asking her to stay with him, to sit with him, because her talk of leaving was sufficient for his death and his ruin.
Our lives, I was reminded, are hostages held by time. We are free only for a few moments. What we choose to do in those moments, who we choose to spend them with, defines who we are.
I thought of Zuha.
I thought of Azza.
I let the song color my memories of them until the music ended and I was left wondering if the poet got what he so desperately desired.
AZZA
Days Abu was off work were miserable at the best of times. They meant that he was around to keep an eye on where I was going and for how long. Qais came over often when Abu was there, and stayed as long as he could, making the apartment seem even smaller than it was.
After Abu’s revelation of who my father had been, things were tense. They were made a lot worse by Zuha Shah biting off a piece of Abu’s pride and spitting it out into the mud. He spent his time fuming, warning me not to let my horrible teacher influence me and asking if the other Muslim women in the community here were as awful as Zuha had been.
It wasn’t until Qais came over with the news that someone had ransacked the office of Hafeez Bhatti that Abu finally found something else to talk about.
“Who would do such a thing? All that man does is help everyone.”
“I think,” Qais said, a smirk on his face, his gaze fixed on me, “maybe he helped the wrong person. Some people are in trouble they cannot ever escape, no matter who protects them.”
“Except for God,” Abu said, earnestly pious.
“Yes,” Qais said. “But not everyone finds protection with Him, do they? Some people are too vile to be saved.”
“For all of our sakes, my friend,” Abu said quietly, “we should hope that is not true.”
Qais didn’t answer, but there was joy in his eyes that day, like he’d won a great victory. I knew he’d try to speak to me alone soon, to gloat properly and openly, to remind me how much power he possessed. He liked tormenting me too much to stay away.
The next morning, as I was locking up the apartment before heading out, I heard his footsteps behind me.
“Leave. Me. Alone.” It came out louder than I’d intended, almost like a scream, but I didn’t regret it. I wanted to scream it, over and over, until it finally sank into Qais’s shriveled soul and took root.
There was a pause.
Zuha Shah said, “Okay. That’s fair. Harsh, certainly but—”
I whirled around to face her. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see Anvar, but then I thought I should see how you were instead. Me pissing off your father probably did not do yo
u any favors.”
“I’m fine,” I told her. She didn’t seem convinced, but she didn’t say anything more either. She just kept looking at me, expecting me to go on. I hesitated, then, partly to have something to fill the silence she had created and partly because I was curious, asked, “So you haven’t seen Anvar?”
She shook her head.
“Okay.”
“You think I should?”
“I don’t care.”
My answer seemed to amuse Zuha, which I found irrationally aggravating.
“What?”
“Are you seriously telling me you don’t care about Anvar Faris? That seems impossible.”
I made a face. “Sounds like something he would say.”
Zuha grinned. “It is.”
For a second, I smiled back, not that she could see it through my veil. Then I shook my head and started to walk past her. “Excuse me. I’ve got to go pretty far and Abu always wants me back for lunch—”
“Let me drive you,” she volunteered.
I narrowed my eyes. “Why? You know we’re not friends, yes? We will never be friends.”
“Because of Anvar?”
“We can’t be friends because I don’t understand you,” I told her. It was the truth. I hadn’t really been around girls and women my own age since Baghdad. The last person I’d been close to who hadn’t been a man had been Bibi Warda, and it felt like she had died so long ago that it might as well have been the beginning of time.
“I’m not all that complicated.”
“You agreed to marry Anvar’s brother. That doesn’t seem simple.”
That cut Zuha. She looked away, and in that moment, if she’d said something in her defense, I would have walked on and never thought about her again. In her wordlessness, however, in that wounded look in her eyes, for a small moment, I saw the reflection of my mother. A few days, at the start of a different journey, that would have been irrelevant. It seemed like everything now.
The Bad Muslim Discount Page 27
