The Bad Muslim Discount

by Syed M. Masood

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “You have no right to say that, you know.”

  “That I’m sorry?”

  “That I don’t care for you. You don’t have children, so you don’t understand. Who was up with you all night when you got a fever, haan? Who taught you to speak? To walk? Who changed your dirty nappies? We didn’t have disposable diapers back then, you know, so it was cloth nappies, till you were three and a half.”

  “Okay. I get it. Like I said, I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “But you did, and I am telling you that you are wrong.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Just be wrong. Just sit there with your mouth closed and be wrong.”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “I still expect an answer,” she said. “You think you know best in everything. Then tell me, you’ve lived your life just like you wanted, and what have you to show for it?”

  “I found things I love.”

  My mother sniffed, the sound laced with disdain. “That’s it? For all your life, that is all you have to show?”

  “What more is there?”

  “Everything. Are you crazy, Anvar? You can’t eat love. You can’t put love over your head when it rains. Love is not an accomplishment. It is worthless.”

  “I disagree.”

  “Then I don’t understand you.”

  “I know,” I said as gently as I could.

  “And you made me miss my exit.”

  I thought that was the end of the conversation. We would loop around, just as my mother was looping around on the freeway by taking the next exit, and we would just go back to the way our relationship had been before this conversation. We would pretend, as we always had, that we were fine. Indeed, my mother was quiet for a while.

  Then she said, “Explain it to me.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. You should explain it to me.”

  It was an astonishing moment. In my life, I had never heard Bariah Faris admit she did not know something, much less actually ask someone to explain something to her. I sat there for a while, unable get past my surprise, until she prompted me.

  I tried to figure out how I could tell her what I was trying to say. In order to make her understand my perspective, I would have to see the world as she saw it. I had to find something in her experience, anything, that would capture what I felt. If I relied on words or images or metaphors that resonated only with my world, she would remain unable to see what I was trying to show her.

  “Do you remember when you were teaching me to pray? During namaz, you said, my soul should be full of wonder. Elevated. Reverent. As if I was in the presence of Allah. As if I could see Allah himself.”

  “I remember.”

  “Religion has never really made me feel that way. Not in any mosque, not in any prayer. Sometimes when I am reading a particularly beautiful line of prose or I hear a passage of lovely music—”

  “Astaghfirullah.”

  “I know you think it blasphemy, but in those moments, I feel that there is something more, something good, in the universe. The possibility of something being divine opens up for me. That is why I love literature. The human imagination is a miracle, and it is possible that this miracle is a gift from a Creator.”

  “And what about Zuha?”

  “When I see Art, the divine feels possible. When I am with Zuha, the divine feels certain. I’ve been apart from her for a decade and, in all that time, I tried to do other things, to make a life for myself. Some parts of that life you actually approved of, but the truth is I haven’t really been happy. I think she is necessary for me. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  “I understand that you are probably going into the hellfire,” my mother muttered.

  “You know, I’m actually going to start praying that I don’t end up in hell, just because I want you to be wrong. I’m going to be the only person in heaven who got there out of spite.”

  “You’re going to start praying? I think that means I am a good mother.”

  “Yes, Ma. You’re fine.”

  “Good. Don’t forget to tell your father.”

  * * *

  —

  “My thinking is that the newspaper coverage has very much been poorly done,” Hafeez Bhatti told me as he led me through the dimly lit corridors of his apartment complex. “Muslim tries to honor-kill own daughter in San Francisco? I could call it the shit of bulls, my friend, but even that is useful as fertilizer. They know next to nothing about Abu Fahd, but they rush to label him. I told the one reporter who had the sense to come to me with questions that he was no Muslim at the end.”

  “Maybe you should write a letter to the editor.”

  Hafeez Bhai chuckled. “I don’t think so. It has been a few days, so the hubbub is not so much anymore. No reason to dig it all up again. Though I tried to be a writer when I was a young man. I don’t even know how many stories I started but simply couldn’t finish. I would always end up telling my wife about what happened and with that went the pressure…the drive, you know, to actually be writing. The story was told. That was the important thing.”

  “You could write now.”

  Hafeez Bhai snorted. “I am much too wise to write now.”

  “Humble too.” As always, my sarcasm appeared lost on the older man.

  “Most humble.” He nodded so vigorously that I was afraid he might hurt his neck. “At being humble, I am best. Ask anyone and they will tell you.” He stopped and exclaimed, “Here we are.”

  My landlord had led me to an empty apartment. It was, I think, the farthest he could get me from my old place and still keep me in his building.

  “Yes,” he told me with his preternatural cheerfulness. “Number 701. Now you have to please keep in mind that the last people, they were not good. Not good at all. Trying to grow the pot and the weed, if you can believe it. I had to kick them out on their bums.” Opening the door, he led me in. “They did not take it so well.”

  I looked at the wrecked apartment. “Hafeez Bhai, you have a talent for understatement.”

  “Most definitely. I am the best at understatements.” He dabbed at the sides of his mouth with his peek-stained handkerchief. “And also overstatements.”

  I walked through the marvel of destruction that Hafeez wanted to make my new home. The prior tenants had gone out of their way to trash the place. Several of the doors and walls were busted through. Light fixtures had been torn out and electrical wires dangled from the ceiling, limp and useless. Spray-painted racist slurs directed at Bhatti decorated the walls. I stepped over the shattered legs of a broken chair and headed to the bathroom. Predictably, perhaps, the faucets were bent and misshapen, their handles ripped off.

  “I hope you didn’t give them their deposit back.”

  Hafeez chortled, and his large belly jiggled in time with his mirth. “What to say? This is what happens when you misjudge people. Anyway”—he slapped his beefy hands together in a thunderous clap that echoed through the nearly empty space—“what are you thinking?”

  “How long has it been vacant?”

  “A few months. I didn’t have the funds to be making major repairs. For you, however, Mr. Anvar Faris Barrister Sir, I will find the money.”

  “That’s very generous, Hafeez Bhai, but you don’t have to do that.”

  He waddled over to where I stood.

  “I haven’t yet seen how your story ends, yes?” Putting his hands on my shoulders, he added, “I never had a son, Anvar, and I have to say that if I had ever had a son, I would most certainly hope he wouldn’t have to be living in this shithole. For you, however, I will make it perfect.”

  * * *

  —

  “You look terrible.”r />
  “Flattery, my dear, will get you everywhere.”

  Zuha ignored the feeble joke. “I’m serious. You look like the before picture in an ad for an energy drink.” I began to respond but surrendered, instead, to a yawn. “Come on, Anvar, how long are you going to stay at that crappy motel? You’re not getting any sleep there.”

  She was right. The motel was terrible. Unfortunately, it was all I could afford for an extended stay. Besides, while it was true that the paint was loud, the walls thin and the old mattress I tried to sleep on alarmingly lumpy, none of that was what kept me up at night.

  “Hafeez Bhai says I can move in within a week.”

  “From what you’ve told me, that sounds wildly optimistic.”

  Also true. I sighed and tried to stretch the kinks out of my back. Zuha, for her part, launched into a now familiar lecture about how I should move back in with my parents for the time being. My mind wandered to memories of dreams stained a dreadful red, which felt like breathing in the horrific metallic tang of blood in every breath.

  Zuha snapped her fingers in front of my face, forcing my attention back to the moment.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “I just…” I took a deep breath. “I’m a little distracted.”

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “How pretty you are.”

  “Wow. That was weak.”

  “I’m a little off my game.”

  “You haven’t taken any of Aamir’s calls.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He wants to come to the funeral. He wants to know if that would be—”

  “It’s fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  I nodded. The cold fury I had initially felt toward my brother had started to thaw a bit. Without his interference, without his telling Abu Fahd where Azza was staying and what we had done, it was possible this tragedy would have been avoided. However, the chain of causation was not something I had any wish to dwell upon. I was the one who had listened to Azza and failed to report the violence she had suffered. Then I hadn’t listened to her and told Qais to run, which had resulted in her getting hurt. Hell, I was the one who slept with her in the first place. A great deal of the blame was mine to bear.

  “And he’s off again,” Zuha said.

  “No. I’m right here. I was just remembering something I heard once. John Greenleaf Whittier wrote: ‘Of all sad words of tongue or pen…’ ”

  I left the quote unfinished because I could see in her smile that she knew it.

  “If you really don’t want to go to your parents’ place, I’ve been thinking that you could, you know, maybe crash at my place.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her and she blushed furiously. A sleepover was skirting dangerously close to the fruit she had forbidden us both.

  “I mean,” she said, “if you intend to behave yourself.”

  “No hanky-panky is what you’re saying?”

  “Hanky-panky? You’ve been spending way too much time with your Hafeez Bhai. If you start chewing paan all the time…”

  “It was a serious question.”

  “It really wasn’t.”

  “Maybe it could have been phrased better.”

  “You think?” Zuha asked. “But yes. I mean, no. The hanky part is fine. It’s the panky stuff that gets us into trouble.”

  “Maybe you should draw me a diagram, you know, of where it is okay to touch you. Just so there is no confusion.”

  “Ass.”

  “Okay. Where else?”

  “Fine. Whatever. If you don’t want to—”

  “No, thank you. I think that would be…great. I’m having trouble getting out of my own head when I’m alone.”

  She held out her hands and I took them in mine.

  “Well,” she said. “I might just be able to help you with that.”

  * * *

  —

  “I think I might vote with the populists this time. They’re right about some things. If people like your crazy neighbor can come here and try to kill people, don’t you think that’s a problem?”

  “I haven’t seen you in forever,” I reminded Jason Backes. “In which time, I nearly got murdered, and that’s the first thing you have to say to me?”

  My friend, who was loading boxes from his Prius into his food truck, paused, thought for a moment, then shrugged.

  “Yeah. Are you going to stand there or actually help?”

  “I’m just going to stand here,” I told him. “I wouldn’t want you to think I’m trying to take your job, being a brown and all.”

  Jason rolled his eyes. “Hilarious.”

  “I’m known for it.”

  “I’m not joking, Anvar. We have to take the country back, you know?”

  “From who?”

  Jason opened his mouth, then closed it without answering me.

  “Do whatever you want. I have to tell you though, it’ll be tough to run a halal food truck after there is a Muslim ban in place.”

  “Come on. It doesn’t matter what any candidate for president says. There’s never going to be a Muslim ban. The Supremes wouldn’t allow it.”

  “Don’t put too much hope in the Court. Liberty lives in the hearts of men and women, and when it dies there, no law can save it.”

  “Sounds like a quote,” he said.

  “It was Judge Learned Hand.”

  “That’s a dope name.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Actually, I’ve thought about names a lot since I became a lawyer. I’ve thought a lot about the story of Adam.”

  “Like Adam from the Bible?”

  “The Quran’s version of his story is a little different. In the Quran, when God decides to create Adam, the angels question Him. Adam, they say, is not as pure as they are. Adam, they say, will bring destruction to the Earth. It’s light supremacy.” Jason did not react, so I decided to explain. “It’s a joke. Because, you know, they’re made of…”

  “I get it.”

  I shook my head at his lack of appreciation but went on. “Anyway, God created Adam and taught Adam the names of all things. Then He asked the angels to tell Him the names of those same things and the angels couldn’t. In response, God commanded the angels to bow before Adam.”

  “Why?”

  “Exactly. Maybe it was to humble them. I was taught it was because mankind is superior to all creatures, including angels. Now, I think it is because if you control the names of things, if you can master how to twist and turn words, you can control a narrative. I don’t think it’s an accident that from that point on all the stories in the Quran are about Adam and his children, the human race.”

  “Okay. That’s cool, I guess, but we were talking about who I was going to vote for.”

  “What I’m saying is that we should be honest about who we are and what we do. We should tell the truth about things, even when it doesn’t sound good or feel good or sell well. It’s not enhanced interrogation, it’s torture. It’s not an extrajudicial killing, it’s murder. We should call things by their real names.”

  “This is where you tell me that populism in the United States is racist even though no one admits it, right?”

  “I would never presume to tell a white man what is and isn’t racist.”

  Jason scowled. “You were funnier before you were shot at.”

  “Probably. I’m just saying, look for the truth. Look past the slogans and the spin and what people say their motivations are. Look at what they are actually trying to do, at the world they really want to create, and once you know the truth about them, if you still want to stand with them, to vote for them, go ahead.”

  “That’s it?” Jason demanded, after I stopped talking. “That’s all? I thought for sure you were going to try to get me to vote for a liberal candidate.”
/>   “Why? You’re Californian. No one cares how you vote.”

  * * *

  —

  I got to the mosque early. No one else had arrived yet for Abu Fahd’s funeral prayer. Except Aamir. When my brother looked up at me, I saw that he was pale, his eyes were red and heavy with exhaustion. It was obvious that he had not been sleeping well either. I was surprised to see him so shaken. Even his typically perfect hair, always arranged with meticulous care, was disheveled. I’d started to believe that was not possible.

  He got to his feet when I came in. His expression was anxious and he said, formally, “As-salamu alaykum.” I nodded, trying to figure out where to sit. If I sat with Aamir, I might have to talk to him, and I wasn’t sure I had anything to say to him just then. Sitting away from him seemed like a cruel rebuff. Before I could make a decision, he spoke again.

  “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

  “I know.”

  “I did the right thing.” I had heard that from him before in my life many times. However, for the first time that I could remember, Aamir didn’t say it like a statement. He didn’t say it with conviction. He said it like a plea.

  “You always do.”

  That wasn’t what he wanted to hear. He pulled his brittle, pained gaze away from mine.

  “This isn’t how things are supposed to go, Anvar. What Abu Fahd did…that isn’t what I would’ve done. It wasn’t right.”

  I wanted to tell him that not everyone was like him, that a man like Abu Fahd was incapable of handling the information that his daughter was sleeping with someone in the same manner Aamir would. I’m not sure what he’d imagined would happen. Knowing Aamir, he probably hadn’t thought it through at all. He’d probably done what seemed right to him in that moment. Telling grown-ups when something forbidden was happening had always been second nature to him.

  Now he couldn’t understand how it had gone wrong, because we were both taught to live in a world where things were black and white. Good prevails over evil. The virtuous act, the upright act, the religiously prescribed act, always brought triumph. I had stopped believing that world was real, so when I stumbled while doing what seemed like the right thing, it hurt but I did not bruise.