Love from a to Z

by S. K. Ali

  Ayaan got an e-mail asking her to come see Kerr Monday morning. Sent on a Friday evening, the e-mail was.

  From the principal’s own e-mail address and NOT info@alexanderporter.

  Fri. Day.

  Oh. No. Do you think it has something to do with you-know-who?

  Probably. We can’t figure out what else it could be. Ayaan is quaking.

  Quaking happening here, too. You have to let me know what it’s about as soon as you find out.

  I don’t know if Ayaan will fill me in. She’s become quiet around me at school. And then does one-word replies to texts.

  Gulp. My fault. Crying.

  I wrote the words that got you in trouble. Crying more.

  Okay, I believe in prayers, so I’m praying that she doesn’t get in trouble for her part in #EatThemAlive. I’m okay with trouble. But Ayaan is our purest star. She must be protected by all, at all costs. Let me falter, let me fall, but let Ayaan rise above us all.

  Wow, poetry.

  No, it’s a prayer. Just made up now. Hey, did you hear back from SAIC admissions?

  No. I’m getting worried. I keep thinking maybe I shouldn’t have included the picture of a skateboarding seahorse in my portfolio. It wasn’t good quality.

  If they say no, I say we do a sit-in at the admissions office. Holding your drawings up as protest signs.

  Wish you were back here. I went to check out the Purdue campus with Nhu yesterday, and the whole time we filled in what *you’d* be saying if you were with us. ONE BATHROOM FOR THREE LECTURE HALLS? NO WHEELCHAIR RAMP TO THE CLOSEST DOORS?

  DO NOT MAKE A COLLEGE DECISION WITHOUT ME, GIRL.

  WE won’t. Though we are going to see the rest of the campuses during break.

  Without me.

  Hey, you have Doha.

  I do. And so far, it’s been okay.

  I sent her the picture of the three Emmas and me. And Adam.

  Looks like fun?

  All of them are named Emma.

  Even the guy looking up?

  No, that’s Adam.

  She shared a picture of her and Nhu making faces at each other through the openings of a holey sculpture on the Purdue campus, and it looked like real fun.

  • • •

  The weekend in Doha is Friday and Saturday, so Auntie Nandy said we should go to Souq Waqif today, before she went back to work on Sunday.

  Thankfully, she first let me sleep in in complete silence and only turned on her music—very obviously seventies-sounding music—when I emerged from my room at two p.m.

  In the dining room, everything was loud and tinny and plucky and distinct and strangely groovy, too.

  “Wow, is this what they call disco?” I began gathering a plate of food—food shivering while it awaited me to transport it to the warmth of the microwave. When the words of the song began, I paused on my way to the kitchen. “Wait. Is that Urdu? Or, I mean Hindi? Seventies Bollywood music?”

  “I’m going to pretend it is.” Auntie Nandy, sitting at the table with her laptop, smiled. Then she whispered, as though the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had her place bugged, “It’s actually from 1980. But isn’t it great? Nazia Hassan singing ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’? ‘Aap jaisa koi meri zindagi’!”

  She got up and began dancing. Raising one hand in the air, she shook it a few times then swung it down across her body dramatically before lifting it up again in a sudden whoosh, all the while shaking her shoulders and hips. Her eyes were closed, but her expression was serious.

  Auntie Nandy’s hips and shoulders looked like they belonged to two different people, while her arms didn’t seem to know whether they were taking turns flailing for help from a helicopter hovering over a deserted island or pointing earnestly at something someone lost on the ground.

  I couldn’t look away, so I stood in the doorway of the kitchen, holding my plate up to my chest, trying hard to keep my lips at an appreciative-smile level and not let them venture where they wanted to: side-splitting, bust-out-laughing, this-is-perfectly-too-funny-to-be-cringey level.

  But then came a point when she twisted-shimmied her way down while one hand did jazz hands and the other tried to pull her pants up, and I had to run to the table and put my plate down to use both my hands to cover the laughter exploding from my mouth.

  She saw me and tried to straighten gracefully, giggling at the way she had to yank her pants before she made it even halfway up. “Oh, so you think I don’t know how to dance? Or is it you think you know how to dance?”

  “I actually do, Auntie Nandy.” I laughed. “And you actually don’t.”

  “This is disco, Zoodles.” She pulled my arms to get me to join her on the carpet. “Listen to the rhythm. It’s different from your music.”

  I laughed again and reached for my phone. “My friend Nhu’s mom runs a dance studio. And she even teaches disco. I’m going to FaceTime her to show us some real moves.”

  “Perfect. Let’s hit it from the top!” Auntie Nandy pressed a remote, and her sound system started again.

  • • •

  Kavi, I like disco music.

  Also, here’s the best song: “Aap Jaisa Koi.”

  Aap jaisa koi meri zindagi mein aaye.

  Which means: If someone like you entered my life . . .

  • • •

  Souq Waqif was beautiful at night. We ate at Damasca, a Syrian restaurant, and then wandered the bustling market.

  The cobblestone streets, polished smooth, were lit by lights attached to the buildings, in alcoves and atop the structures as well. The buildings themselves were traditional Qatari style, low and with wraparound balustrades and second-story balconies overlooking the market below.

  There were all sorts of shops selling everything from trinkets like camel key chains to rugs to perfumes and pure-gold jewelry. And clothing shops with tons of scarves stacked in piles near their entrances.

  I couldn’t stop myself from buying a few hijabs.

  I bought one for tomorrow’s field trip with Hanna’s class.

  It was the color of the sky before a storm, a sort of grayish baby blue, but the best part was the print on it. Darker gray silhouettes of tiny birds flying.

  When we reached the car in the parking lot across from the souk, I draped the hijab around my head to model it for Auntie Nandy. “Good for a trip to an animal sanctuary?”

  “Perfect.” She put our purchases in the trunk. “We leave at seven thirty, so get to bed as soon as we get home, Zoodles.”

  “Yes, Mom-sub.”

  On the road, she turned off the radio. “I should tell you something about Adam. You’ll be spending time with him tomorrow.”

  I looked at her. It was like her voice had become muffled. Or dropped an octave.

  The glistening in her eyes told me it was sadness. She blinked a few times, and a tear dropped.

  Whoa, that was sudden.

  I didn’t say anything and instead focused on the palm trees lining the avenue we were driving down. The night sky was visible between the buildings behind the trees, and I thought about the photo of Adam looking at the same sky yesterday.

  Yes. There was something sad in his eyes.

  And now maybe I was going to know why.

  I glanced at Auntie Nandy again. She was still blinking.

  Then she turned the car into a plaza parking lot and reached into the glove compartment for a tissue box.

  I pulled my arms in tight and clutched myself while she blew her nose, wondering if I should hug her or something.

  Auntie Nandy drew a breath. “Adam’s mother passed away when he was in my class in the fourth grade.”

  “Oh God.” I gripped myself tighter. “That’s so sad.”

  “It was obviously devastating for him, for the whole family. She was diagnosed with her illness, MS, many years before, in her late twenties, and she coped, even did well, but then, after she had her second child, it progressed rapidly.” She began crying again.

  I reached my hand out and rubbed her ar
m. She wiped her face with a folded tissue and swallowed before turning to me. “I’m telling you because Tuesday is the anniversary of her death, and I see it in him, the remembrance of it.”

  “Thanks for letting me know.”

  “She was one of my closest friends. She taught at DIS too. High school art.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m usually not like this. I think it was just seeing Adam again last night after not seeing him for months.” She started the car again. “Anyway, just a heads-up. In case you see him quiet.”

  “Hanna must have been really young?”

  “One and a half years old. Of course she doesn’t recall Sylvia.” We were waiting to turn onto the road from the parking lot, so she looked at me for a moment. “Adam was nine, and he’d been very close to his mother.”

  The rest of the way to the apartment we were quiet, me looking at the sky the whole time, unable to imagine his pain.

  Daadi’s death in the fall had been traumatic beyond belief.

  But then, Mom?

  She and I fought sometimes, but she was also the number one reliable factor in my life, Dad being inaccessible at times due to his busyness as one of the few ophthalmologists in town.

  I couldn’t imagine my rock being removed from me.

  As I got out of the car, I blinked away my own tears.

  • • •

  After Maghrib and Isha prayers, combined, I lay in bed but couldn’t go to sleep.

  Maybe it was jet lag. And how I’d slept in today.

  I sat up.

  Not jet lag.

  It was Adam.

  I think I felt something I hadn’t felt since I swore off feeling this way.

  It was just a twinge and felt very buried, but it was there.

  Like a pull inside whenever I thought of him.

  After Yasin, this guy who hung out with Ayaan’s brothers, who I’d met at her house, I hadn’t felt it again. That was a year ago.

  I’d liked Yasin, and he had liked me back, and then just like that, after three months, he had stopped liking me. Because he said he didn’t know why everything was an issue with me.

  What he meant was he hadn’t liked me asking why he’d written a whole screed on how hijabi girls who wore makeup canceled their hijabs.

  After Yasin, I’d decided nobody was going to get me interested in them unless they had something real to stand for. And brains.

  That was my number one criterion.

  That and a sense of quiet mystery?

  I looked at the photo of Adam again.

  He was sad.

  MARVEL: RESOLUTIONS

  Exhibit A: The Better Me manifesto I wrote in the middle of a Doha night.

  Tomorrow I was going to be poised and peaceful.

  Maybe quieter, too. Well, quieter in the sense that I was going to listen more than talk. Not jump to conclusions.

  Just let things unfold. (More than I’d done yesterday; and yesterday, with Madison, I’d really pulled punches.)

  I will have to pretend to love animals, however unpredictable they are. (Even though I am deathly afraid of dogs, because I was chased and bitten on my ankle by a Doberman when I was eight. And scratched by numerous cats belonging to friends. Not to mention the three instances of bird poo finding its way onto my head.)

  Animals are unpredictable creatures for sure, not dependable like my Squish, but I will let them be so.

  I am going to be a better version of myself, because this isn’t the time for my shenanigans anymore.

  Somebody grieving is going to be in my vicinity tomorrow.

  I need to rein me in.

  ADAM

  SUNDAY, MARCH 10

  MARVEL: PHOTOS

  HANNA KNOWS MOM THROUGH THE stories I tell her. A third of the way into whatever I’m sharing about Mom, she’ll say, “Stop,” and then go and get one of the many framed photos of Mom around the house. She’ll hold it and gaze at Mom’s picture while I finish the rest of the story.

  Last night, when I gave Hanna the case I’d made for her rock collection, I filled her in on the time Mom and I made a house and garden in a jar. This was after we’d been living in Doha for a year, when I was seven, before Hanna was born, before Mom’s disease took hold of her.

  At the time, I’d kept telling Mom I wanted to go back home, to our backyard in Ottawa. So in our Doha apartment kitchen she propped up a picture of our old house and built a model of it out of toothpicks. Then we worked together to make a yard for it that matched the one I missed so much. We placed the entire thing into a widemouthed jar to preserve it.

  Hanna stared at Mom’s picture, the one where Mom is sitting on a swing, while I told her this story.

  “Where is it? The jar with the backyard?” she said.

  “That I don’t know. We moved into this house soon after we made it, and then things got busy when Mom had you. Then it got even busier when she got sick.” I finished fitting the wooden grid together inside the rock display case and flipped it up to show Hanna the interior. “You can put twenty-four rocks in here.”

  “Thanks.” She took it from me and put it on the kitchen table we were at. “I wish I could see the jar.”

  I leaned back in my chair. “What about a bird? Do you want to see a bird?”

  “I see a lot of birds.”

  “A bird Mom made?”

  Her eyebrows rose high under her bangs. “Where? Is it in a jar?”

  “It’s behind you.”

  She turned around to another of Dad’s photographs on the wall. A sculpture of a goose, a Canada goose, midflight, hanging on invisible wire.

  “Mom made that?”

  “Out of clay.”

  She stared at it, holding Mom’s photo up high against her shoulder, so high it was like Mom was looking back at me.

  I’m proud of you doing your best to keep everyone happy was what Mom’s eyes said to me.

  • • •

  We got to DIS early on Sunday due to riding down with Dad. As head of the school, he was hands-on. Which meant he made sure to get to school an hour early to check on everything in the office and do a school walk-through before greeting parents dropping their kids.

  Hanna took off for the schoolyard. I hung around the foyer talking to the reception secretaries, but then they decided to ask a million questions about London and university.

  I got away and headed to Hanna’s class to wait for her teacher, Mr. Mellon.

  Zayneb stood just outside the door to the classroom, reading something on the wall beside it. When she saw me, she beamed and waved the hand that wasn’t holding a travel mug.

  Then she opened her mouth as if she was going to say something. But nothing came out, and she turned back to look at the display, taking a slow drink from the mug.

  I came to stand beside her in front of a bulletin board of student projects on historic discoveries.

  I laughed.

  Zayneb turned to me, eyebrows raised.

  “Hanna did the same project I did in fifth grade. Our dad has mine framed in his study at home. She’s pretty efficient, using my research like that!” I chuckled again.

  “The Pinhole Camera Based on Ibn al-Haytham’s Camera Obscura by Hanna Chen?”

  “Her drawings are much better than mine, though.” I nodded at the sketches under her write-up.

  “Yeah, she’s really good. That’s one cool panda being projected through.”

  “That’s Stillwater, her stuffed panda.” I turned to Zayneb. She was almost my height, maybe just a couple of inches shorter. “He’s like a third sibling. Sits at the table, gets blamed for stuff, pretends to do chores, everything.”

  She laughed loudly. And then closed her mouth quick, with a big smile, but looked away.

  I’d been staring. Ugh.

  I looked back at Hanna’s project.

  “So how does a camera obscura work?” Her voice was upbeat, eager—like she absolutely wanted to know. “Which I feel bad not knowing. Ibn al-Haytham is h
uge at home, because my dad’s an ophthalmologist.”

  “It’s the capturing of light entering through a hole. Images of objects in front of the hole get projected inversely onto a surface. In the case of a pinhole camera, the surface would be the film inside the camera or, like in Hanna’s project, a box. Pinhole cameras came about because of the camera obscura discovery.”

  “A-mazing.” She peered at Hanna’s drawing of an upside-down Stillwater. “My sister and I have this theory that photos are some kind of magic. Or little jinns—or maybe angels?—anyway, some kind of beings, sitting inside devices, making things happen. Shh, don’t tell my dad.”

  Her blue-hijabed head, light grayish blue today, turned to me. I don’t know what she saw on my face, but she quickly added, “I’m talking about digital photos being magic. Not pinhole ones.”

  I tried not to laugh, didn’t want her to think I was laughing at her, but I couldn’t stop a chuckle. “Sorry, not laughing at you. Just the idea. Of little beings in my phone.”

  “It’s okay. I know it’s crazy. We just like to attribute everything we can’t figure out to the unseen realm. Controlled by the greatest unseen being of all, of course.” She took a quick drink from her mug and smiled. “Which, I just realized, I’m comfortable saying to you, knowing that you’re Muslim.”

  “Makes complete sense to me. For life in general.” Like meeting you again, I thought, looking at her bent head as she turned the lid of the travel mug to close it.

  I liked that she wore a hijab with birds for a trip to be with animals.

  Serendipity?

  This would be a good time to bring up the weirdness of meeting her. And our journals.

  But when I looked at her again, she was texting on her phone, so I stepped away a bit.

  “No, it’s okay. It’s nothing. Just my mom.” She looked up, mug in the crook of her elbow, thumbs paused midair over her phone, face stricken.

  Oh.

  Oh yeah.

  Of course Ms. Raymond must have told her about Mom.

  “Go ahead. I’m going to go into the classroom. The teacher, Mr. Mellon, will be cool with it.” I tried the door.

  Damn. Locked.

  I turned to her. “Look, it’s okay. I’m okay if you mention your mom, moms in general, or even my mom in particular. Actually, I’m more than okay if you mention my mom.”