The Bad Muslim Discount

by Syed M. Masood

  I sighed even as I decided what to do. “Do you know the story of Musa and Khidr?”

  Zuha seemed confused by the quick change in topics. “What?”

  “Musa and Khidr, the wise man in green? Musa wanted to travel with him and Khidr—”

  “Said that Moses could, if Moses promised not to ask any questions,” Zuha finished. “I remember.”

  “Do you think you can do better than Musa?”

  “Sure,” Zuha said. “After all, there’s no way you’re as interesting as Khidr.”

  I had to shake my head at that. They were flowers from the same garden, she and Anvar. I could see why they recognized each other, liked and loved each other. I, however, was from the desert.

  We stopped at Bhatti’s office first.

  Qais had wrecked the place. Bhatti’s desk was smashed, the wood splintered under heavy, relentless blows. Cushions on his chair had been ripped open. Papers and broken picture frames littered the ground, and there was dark green paint splattered all over the walls. It was a disaster.

  And it was lovely. It was lovely because there were twenty other people there, with brooms and brushes and hammers and smiles. It was a chance for them to pay their landlord back for all the discounts he’d given them.

  “What happened here?” Zuha asked.

  “That’s one,” I told her, reminding her of our arrangement. Khidr had given the Prophet Musa three chances to rein in his curiosity before Khidr parted company with him for good.

  She rolled her eyes.

  Bhatti’s eyes lit up when he saw us together, and he clapped his hands, as if delighted. “Vah yaar, lagta hai Anvar Mian ki kahani mein serious twist aya hai.”

  I looked at Zuha, but she didn’t translate for me.

  “There is no need for you to volunteer, my dears. As you can see, here there is house full. So many kind hearts care for this old man. Amazing, no?”

  I stayed silent. I didn’t want to admit that I hadn’t come to help out with the cleanup, but just to check on him.

  “I don’t see the police here,” Zuha noted.

  Bhatti glanced at me, very briefly, then said, “The police ask questions.”

  “Of course,” she said. “That’s their job. That’s what you want them to do.”

  “Maybe so,” Bhatti agreed. “But what if they ask the wrong questions? Or get answers I do not like? Hmm? No. It is much better, I think, to let sleeping dogs snore, as long as no one is hurt.” He turned his attention to me. “No one was hurt, right?”

  “No one was hurt this time,” I agreed.

  “For the moment, I fear, that will have to be enough.”

  To Zuha’s credit, she managed not to ask what that exchange was about. As soon as we said our goodbyes to Bhatti, however, she asked, “So where are we going?”

  “Two,” I said.

  She made an irritated sound but didn’t say anything else.

  I asked her to take me to a post office. Zuha waited in her car as I went in, dug through my backpack and pulled out the envelope I’d addressed to Homeland Security. It was funny, really. This was the most intriguing part of this trip, and Zuha seemed to think it was just a routine chore. She hadn’t even seemed curious about what I was doing. Then again, she had no reason to be.

  Mailing the letter to seal Qais’s fate wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t immediately change anything. The burdens I carried felt just as heavy as they had before.

  I still wasn’t free. Not yet. Too much could go wrong. This was a step, nothing more. I had no faith that anything in my life would work out the way I had planned. My will and God’s will had too often been at odds for me to believe that, suddenly, He would be on my side.

  “Let’s walk from here,” I told Zuha when I went back to her.

  She started to ask why but caught herself, and I showed a little mercy.

  “Because, if you can, you should use your feet on a pilgrimage.”

  I’m not sure that made things any clearer for her, but she wasn’t confused for long. This was, after all, her city and as the hills got steeper, my legs started aching, and breathing became a little more work than usual.

  “We’re going to the Painted Ladies,” she said.

  I nodded, just as the sloping green park that I’d seen for all those years, in simpler, darker times, came into view. Across the street, a big crowd took pictures of the serene and tranquil houses that I’d come to see.

  I heard different languages and I saw different forms of dress on people from all over the world. They’d come from everywhere to visit this one place that had been shown at the beginning of every episode of Full House.

  These people were like Mama, drawn to a dream of perfect love, perfect understanding and a perfect family that was, I imagined, out of reach for many of them.

  Heaven was out of reach for a lot of people too. That didn’t stop them from going for Hajj.

  These were my mother’s people, people with whom she would’ve belonged, who would have understood her like I never had. It seemed incredibly unfair that I had gotten to come here, and she hadn’t.

  “Why are we here?” Zuha asked.

  “To honor a sinner,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  I let out a small laugh. “You’ve used up all your questions and have failed the test of patience. Like Musa and Khidr, we’ll never see each other again.”

  Zuha frowned. “You’re a strange person.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know, Moses did get answers to his questions from Khidr, before they said goodbye.”

  I nodded at a bench. This was true.

  As Zuha led me up into the park, on the grass, she began humming the theme song to Full House, just like Mama would.

  It struck me then, the reason why I’d decided to bring Zuha here with me—why fate or Allah or chance or luck or the universe had made this moment happen. It was a thought that made it impossible to keep walking. I stopped, and Zuha turned back to me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I stared at this woman who had two men fighting over her, brothers with a bond being tested. Would she marry the wrong one, like my mother had? Was I meant to tell her what would happen if she did?

  “Azza?”

  “Why did you do it?” I asked without meaning to ask, my voice urgent and raw. “Why did you say you’d marry someone you don’t want to marry? It could ruin all your lives. It could ruin everything.”

  Zuha looked confused, as if thrown by my intensity, but she didn’t understand what I was asking or who I was asking it of. Mama, who held the answer I wanted, could not give it to me.

  “I…I was just angry that Anvar would let it happen, that he wouldn’t stop Aamir from—”

  “That’s a child’s answer.”

  “It hurt me that he would—”

  “So you wanted to punish him. That’s why you did it. And you did it because you had hope, didn’t you? You thought, maybe if you were with him, had an excuse to be around him, if you were in his life, somehow it would all work out. You used Anvar’s brother.”

  There were tears in Zuha’s eyes. “It wasn’t a plan or anything, I just…I thought he would step in. I thought he would finally, for once in his life, speak and say what I needed him to say. I thought, this time, he’d fight for me.”

  “And if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be worthy of you anyway. He’d get the misery he deserved.”

  “It’s all so messed up now. I’m sorry. I’m awful and I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for everything.”

  I went up to her and, ignoring the stares of everyone around us, took her hands. “It’s okay. I get it. I’m awful too.”

  That drew a broken chuckle from her.

  I felt the presence of the Painted Ladies behind me.

  “Do you love him?”


  Anvar would have made a joke. He would’ve told me I’d already used up my three questions. Zuha, however, was not Anvar.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It isn’t that simple. Not anymore. I told you, I messed it all up.”

  “You can fix it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Because you’re here, in this place, now, against all odds, with me.

  Why would Allah make that happen for no reason?

  “Because,” I said. “I read in a book once that God does not play dice.”

  “Right,” Zuha said, finding her smile again. “He plays checkers instead.”

  ANVAR

  I met Zuha for dinner at Mathilde, a little French bistro near Powell Street station. The candlelit atmosphere, the upscale decorations and the dressy attire of the patrons all signaled that this was a restaurant significantly out of my price range. I tried not to look concerned.

  Zuha, for her part, seemed enchanted by everything about the place—the pleasant smell of baked bread, the faint, murmured conversations between the other patrons and the accent of our unnaturally blond waiter.

  As he took us to our seats, the waiter smiled at both of us and said, “Charmant.”

  Zuha blushed, obviously pleased.

  “What, are you in a Tolstoy novel or something?” I asked, as soon as our server left to get our drinks—ice cold water for Zuha, a Napa Valley cabernet of a recent year for me.

  “He was being nice.”

  “Too nice.”

  “You’re saying I’m not charming?”

  “I would never say that.”

  Zuha smiled, then looked down at her hands, which had started idly folding and unfolding her napkin. She set it aside deliberately and looked up, as if unsure of what to say next.

  “I was surprised you asked me out,” I said. “Given that you were dodging my calls.”

  “I didn’t ‘ask you out.’ This is just dinner. And I wasn’t dodging your calls. I just needed time to think. You’re still familiar with the concept, right?”

  “Of course. I just do it a lot faster than you do.”

  “You’re the worst.”

  “And yet, you invited me here.”

  “I got some unexpected clarity. Also, I’ve got something I want to celebrate.”

  “Aamir ended your engagement?”

  “Can you spare me your stupid assholery for like five minutes?”

  I considered pointing out that “stupid assholery” seemed redundant but didn’t. “Fine. What are we celebrating?”

  “I got promoted. You’re looking at the new assistant manager for accounts receivable at Roselin Interiors.”

  “Just what you always wanted to do with your life.”

  “We can’t all be penniless lawyers.”

  I had no response to that.

  “I’m sorry, Anvar. That was unnecessarily—”

  “So what I’m hearing is that you’re paying for this meal.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish you’d told me that before I picked the cheap wine.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “I’m broke.”

  “Not the wine,” she said. “Why did you become a lawyer? All you ever talked about in college was becoming an English professor.”

  “I discovered I didn’t like debating literary minutiae ad nauseam every single day of the week.”

  “You did that with me all the time.”

  “I did,” I agreed.

  The waiter appeared with our drinks. Zuha ordered a filet mignon with sautéed potatoes. I said that I would have the same.

  “So why did you call me?”

  “Temporary insanity,” she said. “Obviously.”

  “There isn’t someone else you’d rather celebrate with?”

  She shook her head. Her eyes were disconcertingly earnest.

  “So,” I said. “No alcohol, no sex, but you’re not doing the whole halal meat thing?”

  “The beef here is halal. The farm that supplies their steaks…What do you care anyway?”

  “I’m just trying to measure the depth of your Islam.”

  “What about you? Are you eating pork now?”

  “No.”

  “But you drink. You’re just as much of a hypocrite as anyone else.”

  “Are you encouraging me to eat pork?”

  “You always think you’re right, Anvar. Like, always. And you’re not. Life isn’t that different from literature. There are no right or wrong answers. I’m not wrong to choose to live my life the way I do. I’m not wrong to pick and choose which parts of my faith I’m going to practice and which I won’t. At least, I’m no more wrong than you are. You do the same thing.”

  I watched her take a sip of water before I responded. “I never said you were wrong.”

  Zuha set her glass down on the table, with a little more force than was warranted. “Not today.”

  “Are you really going to hold a thirty-year-old man responsible for his opinions when he was twenty?” When she didn’t reply, I went on. “Muslims—our generation, in the West—are like the Frankenstein monster. We’re stapled and glued together, part West, part East. A little bit of Muslim here, a little bit of skeptic there. We put ourselves together as best we can and that makes us, not pretty, of course, but unique. Then we spend the rest of our lives looking for a mate. Someone who is like us. Except there is no one like us and we did that to ourselves.”

  She shook her head. “Then we’re all doomed to never find our soul mates.”

  “Some people lead pretty off-the-rack lives. Aamir will be reasonably happy with any proper Muslim girl he marries.”

  “But not me?”

  “Did you ask him who his favorite author was?”

  “Of course.”

  “Was it God?” I said, and Zuha rolled her eyes. “Because the Quran is the only book I’ve ever seen him read.”

  “He said he liked Shakespeare,” Zuha admitted, that little twinkle of amusement lighting up in her eyes. “I’ve met a lot of single Pakistani men who like Shakespeare.”

  “You’ll be miserable with someone who doesn’t read.”

  “When Percy Shelley died, Mary Shelley had his heart calcified, wrapped it in his poetry and kept it in a desk.”

  I frowned. “I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about how that went down.”

  “Really? It doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is that two souls probably can’t be more compatible than theirs were and yet they had a pretty miserable marriage.”

  “The Brownings?” I ventured.

  “Browning resented Elizabeth Barrett’s success because it overshadowed his own work.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Maybe the secret to a decent marriage is just mundane stuff, not passion or even common interest. Maybe it’s the color of the baby’s poop and the weird mole on your back that won’t go away. Maybe there is no such thing as a soul mate.”

  “You’re just flat-out wrong about that.”

  “How can you know for sure?” Zuha asked.

  The answer to that was simple. “I know because I met you.”

  Our food came and we ate in silence.

  “So. Azza seems interesting,” Zuha said.

  “Sure,” I said, as careful as an angel carrying a prayer up to God.

  “It’s her father who hits her, you know. He’s—”

  “Wounded,” I supplied quickly, happy to push the conversation along in the direction it was going.

  “I was going to say monstrous.”

  “He was captured in Iraq, arrested without recourse. He was tortured. Doesn’t that earn him some grace?”

  “No. Not for hurting her.”

  “You’re right.” I
took a deep breath. “But Azza won’t go to the police. If the authorities find out who he is—who they thought he was once—then he’ll be gone, forever. There’s no justice in that.”

  “This isn’t Taleb Mansoor. Her father isn’t a client of yours, and he isn’t a young, innocent man who is going to get blown up by a drone.”

  “What would you have me do?” I asked.

  “Stop seeing Azza.” My expression must have betrayed my surprise. “I’m not saying that because of me. If this is how her father treats her, what do you think he’d do to her if he found out about you? Anvar, she’s putting herself in danger. You need to stop.”

  “Was I ever able to make you do anything?”

  Zuha collapsed back into her chair.

  “It would have been nice though.”

  “To have a college girlfriend who blindly did whatever you asked?”

  “No,” I said. “It would’ve been nice if you wanted me to stop seeing Azza because of you.”

  She looked down at her glass and took a sip of water. Then she said, “I don’t have the right to ask you that. Not anymore. Just like you don’t have the right to ask me to end things with Aamir. We broke who we were a decade ago, and maybe that is forever now.”

  “It’s not fair.”

  “You’re an attorney. Are you even allowed to talk about fairness?”

  “It isn’t encouraged. It’s the Abu Fahd problem though, isn’t it? There is no justice in punishment that does not end and is doled out without measure. That’s just torment. But that seems to be the way of the world now.”

  “And how does one survive in an unjust world?”

  “That,” I told her, “is the only question I do not know how to answer.”

  Zuha gave me a look that told me my statement was too absurd for words.

  “It is, at the very least, the only question I’m willing to admit I don’t know the answer to.”

  “Let me know if you figure it out.”

  “I will,” I told her. “I promise.”

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t see Azza over the next few days. She’d made it clear from the very beginning that we were not necessary parts of each other’s lives. If she hadn’t been so bruised the last time I’d seen her, I wouldn’t have worried.