I saw Abu Fahd, though. He came by without warning to announce a party to celebrate the fact that he and Qais had agreed on a date for Azza’s wedding, which would happen in a couple of weeks. He sheepishly added that he also needed an extra pair of hands to help with the arrangements and didn’t know who else to ask.
So I found myself carrying a tray of kabobs back to his apartment from a nearby Afghan restaurant. Abu Fahd walked beside me, carrying a load of groceries, grousing over how little Azza was helping with this event. It was heavy, he told me, this weight on a father alone. He let it slip that he thought Azza would be more helpful if she were actually looking forward to her marriage. I did not know what to say to him, the memory of Azza’s ugly bruises difficult to reconcile with this pleasant, almost diffident man.
He looked around us, at the living, eternal bustle of San Francisco, at the billboard advertisements hawking stylish, skinny jeans, at the unceasing variety of goods offered by the storefronts we passed. There was no wonder in his voice when he spoke. “It is difficult in these times, raising children. So many ideas, so many temptations, so many ways of life, akhi. Difficult to get them to choose the right one. Especially my daughter. Always strong willed. Soon though, she won’t be my problem anymore. She will be happy with Qais. He is a good man. A good man.”
I didn’t ask him if he was trying to convince me or if he was trying to convince himself. “I certainly hope she is happy.”
Abu Fahd seemed touched by either the sentiment or the sincerity of the words. “Inshallah. The pen has been lifted and the ink is dry, my friend. No one can escape. We can only hope and resign ourselves to the will of Allah.”
Resigning myself to the will of Allah was not one of my many skills, but I didn’t say so. My mother had taught me it was best not to argue with piety.
“Silence in the face of wisdom,” he said, “is also wisdom of a sort. I like you, Anvar. I can see why Taleb Mansoor trusted you.”
“This is the second time you’ve brought him up. Why does that case interest you so much?”
“Some of my friends knew the boy. We speak of it often. Some thought such a thing would not happen to an American. They haven’t forgotten that they were wrong.”
I nodded and he went on.
“Come and meet them tonight. They will all love to hear about your heroics in the Mansoor case.”
“There were no heroics,” I said. “But I look forward to meeting Mansoor’s friends.”
That was a lie. I had no real desire to talk about my deceased client and, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have considered going to a celebration Azza obviously didn’t want. It would, however, give me the chance to see her and make sure she was fine.
“I would not admit that you weren’t a hero at dinner, were I you. One should not disappoint an audience.”
“Even if the cost is the truth?”
“When you are telling a story, akhi, you have to be above such trivial considerations.”
* * *
—
I waited outside of the apartment while Abu Fahd went in to make sure Azza put on her niqab. It wasn’t long before he let me into his sparsely furnished home.
The small kitchen and the old appliances were identical to those in my place. The living area was a little bigger and bedsheets had been laid out on the floor for guests to sit on. There were two other rooms, and Azza stood by one of them. I could tell from her eyes that she was smiling at the sight of me. I bowed my head a little in her direction.
“This is Anvar Faris. The lawyer I told you about, remember?”
“I remember,” she said, then turned to me. “As-salamu alaykum.”
“Yeah. It’s nice to meet you,” I said.
“Abu said many good things about you. Are any of them true?”
“They must be.” I shrugged. “If your father said them.”
The older man seemed inordinately pleased with this remark, but Azza rolled her eyes.
“Help us set up,” Abu Fahd said, in the tone of a man expecting an argument. “Then go to your room and stay there. There will be a lot of men here tonight. It is not a place for a young woman.”
I was about to point out that this was her home and so the demand being made of her was ridiculous. In fact, as I’m sure my mother—or if she were alive, Naani Jaan—would be quick to point out, it would’ve been a ridiculous demand even if it weren’t her home.
Azza shook her head at me, ever so slightly. Instead of putting up a fight, she walked up to me and took the food I was carrying. Her fingers brushed mine more than was necessary for the transfer to take place.
I helped lay out the food on dishes and watched as Azza made a plate to take back with her to her room.
“I’m fine,” she said.
Abu Fahd frowned. “What?”
“If any of your friends ask, you can tell them I will be fine.”
“What else would I tell them?”
Azza just nodded in my direction. “Mr. Faris.”
“Miss…” I started, then drew a blank on her last name, which underscored how profoundly surreal this entire situation was.
“Saqr,” she reminded me.
“Right. I’ll see you around.”
Eventually, guests filtered in until there were around twenty men in that small space. Most were bearded, with hard eyes and skin weathered by cruel winds and a harsh sun. All of them were dressed in shalwar kameez and kept laughing at jokes in Pashto, which I couldn’t understand. A few of them smiled at me politely, but it was clear that they were part of a circle I was intruding upon.
By the time we sat down to eat, Abu Fahd had teamed up with Qais to tell everyone that I was the attorney who defended or, more accurately, failed to defend, Taleb Mansoor. The respect that came with that information was palpable. One of the men, reaching for a piece of naan, commented that it was an honor to eat with someone who defended an innocent man.
“I don’t know that he was innocent.”
“Didn’t you tell a judge he hadn’t done anything wrong?”
“It didn’t come up.” They looked incredulous, so I explained. “Whether he was guilty or not wasn’t relevant to the case I put on for his family.”
An old man glared at me through impossibly thick glasses. He said he’d been a judge once. He spoke in a low, dry voice, which sounded like two pieces of sandpaper brushing against each other. “Justice is no more than finding out if guilt lives. When I gave my rulings, the only thing that mattered, the only thing I took into account, was if a person had done something wrong.”
“With all due respect,” I said, “that’s probably not true. I don’t know a lot about Islamic Law, but the punishment for, you know, adultery…” I stumbled upon my words a little, when I remembered I was in Azza’s home—and whom I was with. I glanced at Qais, and he smiled at me encouragingly. I cleared my throat. I was committed now, though I couldn’t help but wonder if Azza could hear me. “What is adultery called in Arabic again?”
“Zina.”
“The punishment for which is death by stoning. But you can’t just take anyone who you suspect of adultery and stone them. You need a witness.”
The old man held up four shaking fingers.
“Right. You need four witnesses to see the actual act. It isn’t even enough to see people under bedsheets. It is inconceivable—it certainly was inconceivable at the time of the Prophet—that the punishment would actually be carried out.”
I paused as many of the men whispered “Peace Be Upon Him” at the mention of the Prophet. “The process involved in implementing the punishment made it largely theoretical. It was meant to be a deterrent. Plus, the character of the witnesses had to be impeccable, yes? The presence of a proper authority to actually enforce the law was also necessary. All this is due process.”
“Technica
l arguments,” the old judge muttered.
“Our food would’ve tasted very different if I’d made it. Fortunately for all of us, someone trained in a restaurant did instead. Technique is important.”
“What you are saying is that these Americans, they disregarded their own laws when they murdered Taleb?” Abu Fahd said. When I nodded, he raised his hands to the heavens in a gesture of both supplication and defeat. “Wallahi, it is a curse to have an enemy without honor.”
“They think they have honor,” Qais declared in a loud, clear voice. “But they are wrong.”
Several men muttered their agreement, while nearly everyone else nodded along, as if the words were widely accepted as a fact.
Qais went on. “They use words, labels, to pretend what they are doing is okay. They fool their people and maybe they even fool themselves.”
He sat straight, his eyes bright and shining, a conflagration in his voice. I could feel the fire catching in the minds of the other men. “They wrongly killed Taleb like they’ve killed thousands. They’ve made us fear the blessings of Allah. We fear bright days, and the shining sun. We pray for storms now. They killed my young brother with their drones. What crime had he committed? My grandmother burned with him. What crime had she committed? Yet they are afraid of us? We’re terror for them, when they come to our lands and, just by saying the magic word of ‘terrorism,’ justify killing our families? And what does all this blood buy them? What kind of honor is this?”
I had no answer for him. Neither did anyone else.
“Taleb was a good boy,” the judge said, finally. “It is a shame you did not say so.”
“I didn’t know him, and I didn’t know what he had or hadn’t done. It doesn’t matter, don’t you see? He could have been innocent, but because he was executed without a trial, we’ll never know. That’s the tragedy here.”
Qais barked a laugh. “The tragedy isn’t that the man is dead?”
“There can be more than one tragedy in a case. In fact, there usually is.”
None of them seemed at all impressed with me anymore. I guess it made sense. They’d known Taleb Mansoor. They’d seen him grow up. They’d known his mind, and some of them may have known his deeds, whatever they had been. It was personal for them because they felt that the law of man had let Mansoor down.
That bothered me as well. I hadn’t known Taleb Mansoor, but I’d thought I knew the law. I’d studied it. I’d truly thought it meant something.
Abu Fahd cleared his throat. “Come. This is a time for happiness, and Qais’s thoughts, though true, are not the thoughts a young groom should dwell on. There is no happiness for us in the near past.”
“Or in the distant past,” the judge chimed in with a morose chuckle.
“And not in the future,” Abu Fahd said. “For as Allah says, ‘Everyone upon the earth will perish, and there will remain the Face of your Lord, Owner of Majesty and Honor.’ Tonight, however, we are here together, and that is cause enough to celebrate.”
“Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” I quoted from a different scripture. “And it shall be well with us.”
The men muttered their appreciation.
Qais held up his glass of water in mock salute and drank.
* * *
—
I was the only one who volunteered to help Abu Fahd clean up, so I ended up alone with him after everyone was gone. Azza was still hurt, and I was fairly certain that if I didn’t tidy up the place, the job would fall to her.
Abu Fahd insisted that I have some more tea before going home. He preferred to drink it like the Persians do. They place a sugar cube in their mouth and hold it there, letting the tea flow over it when they drink.
“A little sweetness and then a little bitterness. In this way we can understand life,” he told me, “through the small things in the world.”
I sat on the ground across from him, leaning uncomfortably against a wall, as he spoke to me of teas. He marveled at the milky pink tea of Kashmir, garnished with pistachios and almonds, and told me that he adored the musky fragrance of a good Darjeeling. He spoke of Ceylon and Shizuoka and of Black Dragons and jasmines. He spoke of memories that were fragrant and warm.
“My father,” he said, “he loved good tea. He taught me to love it, to seek it out, to taste the secrets of the land where it is from. Of course, that was a long time ago. Now I make do with whatever is cheapest at the grocery store.”
Just like that, I knew more about their family than Azza had ever told me.
“Sounds like he was an interesting man.”
“The tea was the most interesting thing about him. He was a soft, uninspiring man who lived a simple, uneventful life. I went to Afghanistan during the jihad, you know, to escape him and his painful mediocrity. By the time I returned to Iraq, he was gone. Strange, is it not, what pleasant things we flee from? You should never forget that the oppression of love is better than the oppression of war. There is no freedom from oppression.” He poured himself another cup of the tea. “These leaves have to burn, after all, so that there can be tea.”
“That’s very poetic,” I said, for lack of anything else to say.
He ignored the comment. Picking up another cube of sugar, he held it in his mutilated fingers and turned it around, examining it from all sides. “My father wouldn’t have understood the man I became in Afghanistan. I became a hard man, yes, but a man of honor. I never compromised it, except once. The memory of that decision will cause me pain until I die.”
I had no idea what he was talking about or why he should say any of this to me. It reminded me, oddly enough, of those long walks I’d been forced to take with my own father, when we’d first come to the States, before he’d found a friend at Joseph Good’s ice cream shop. Though Imtiaz Faris and Abu Fahd could not have been more different, I recognized the loneliness that had once been in my father’s voice in Abu Fahd’s voice now.
So I kept drinking tea, letting him say what he needed to say, because I got the feeling there was no one else he could say it to.
“There was a man in Afghanistan I knew who found out his daughter was sleeping with a boy in the neighborhood; he shot them both in the head and then he shot himself as well.”
I grimaced. That was not at all close to home or at all terrifying. Hindsight, as they say, is perfect, but I probably should’ve always had a policy of not getting involved with women whose fathers spoke this fondly of murderers.
“You don’t like that? It is what a man of honor does.”
“I guess I prefer sanity to honor.”
“Every man thinks he is sane,” Abu Fahd said dismissively. “I am sorry about Qais. He gets angry and zealous and forgets himself sometimes. He has just had to live through a great deal.”
“As have you,” I said. “From what I’ve heard.”
“He told you that the Americans imprisoned me, did he? Other brothers suffered more than I did, but to be left naked in a cold room, forced to listen to loud, obnoxious music…There was no dignity in that. While I was held, my family starved. My son died.”
He exhaled forcefully and got to his feet. “Now I am here, among these men, these men the likes of whom looked at me and saw only an animal to be caged and declawed. I live on their land. It has been a strange life. I realize now that it was no small thing, to live and die like my father did, quietly and in his own home. That is a path Allah has closed to me now.”
Abu Fahd grunted as he got up off the floor. “My young friend, you should go home and get some sleep. Tomorrow is a new day, for better or for worse.”
* * *
—
At around midnight, my doorbell rang. I went to open it, assuming it was Azza, but instead found a young woman and an alarmingly thin middle-aged man I didn’t know standing there. They were wearing suits. She was in dark, solid gray, while his
suit was a much lighter shade and, unfortunately, made from material that gave it a shiny sharkskin appearance.
Though I didn’t know them, there was something about the way they stood and the way they nodded that I recognized. “Officers,” I said by way of greeting.
“My name is Awiti Hale,” the woman replied. “We just need to ask you some questions. May we come in?”
“No,” I told her. “You’re fine where you are.”
Hale’s partner, who hadn’t introduced himself, huffed. He might as well have spat out “lawyers” and rolled his eyes, but he didn’t.
For her part, Hale seemed unfazed by my response. “Mr. Faris, we’re with the Department of Homeland Security and we have reason to believe that you are in possession of information about a credible threat against these United States. We are, sir, fine where we are. You, however, may not wish for this conversation to take place where your neighbors can hear.”
I stared at her, trying first to understand what she had said. All the words made sense, of course, but…what were they saying? A credible threat? Terrorism? They were here about terrorism? That was—
“What the lady is saying, son, is that you really ought to let us in.”
“Seriously?” I asked. “This is the routine you guys settled on? You’re the bad cop?”
“No,” Agent Hale assured me, breaking in, irritation evident in her voice. “That’s just how Agent Moray is. All the time.”
He tipped an imaginary cap in my direction.
“I’d like to see your badges, please.”
That drew a grimace from Moray, but they both complied. They were who they said they were. I stepped back into the apartment a little and gestured for them to come in. There was nothing to hide here, so keeping them out in the corridor served no purpose.
“Finally.”
“Thank you, Anvar. May we call you Anvar?”
“Anyone ever told you that you live in a shithole, boy?”
The Bad Muslim Discount Page 29
