More Than Just a Pretty Face

by Syed M. Masood

“What?”

  “It’s super weird how much you like that stuff.”

  “Everybody loves cardamom.”

  That had not been my experience, but there’s no accounting for taste, I guess.

  “How’s it going in here?” His hand slithered toward a plate of samosa filling with the speed of a venomous snake, but I pulled the potato mixture away in time.

  “Back off,” I warned him.

  Sohrab held up his hands in surrender. That was when I noticed that his eyes were a little red and he looked tired.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes. I didn’t get a lot of sleep. I was reading and lost track of time.”

  “Reading? Sometimes, dude, I just don’t understand you.”

  “I could say the same thing,” Sohrab said, looking pointedly at the stove. “How do you keep from eating while you’re cooking?”

  I smiled and went back to stirring the milk.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “I wanted to apologize for not hanging out with you and Zar the other day. I’m committed to that Quran class.”

  “It’s cool. We understand. You were doing something important.”

  Sohrab gave a serious nod. Can a nod be serious? It can when Sohrab does it, because everything is serious with him. He’s a serious nerd, a serious student, and a serious member of the Muslim Students’ Association, a social club organized around religion that has a presence in pretty much every major school, college, and university in the States.

  I was technically a member. I’d gone to a couple of their pizza parties, but because Intezar thought the club was full of tools, we didn’t really hang out with them that much.

  “What did you guys end up doing?” Sohrab asked.

  “Not much. My mom called me home for a rishta meeting.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “The usual,” I told him.

  “Not interesting?”

  “Too interesting, actually.”

  Sohrab grinned. “Well… I am glad you’re taking the meetings. We should look to find what is good for us in this world, don’t you think?”

  “What do you mean?”

  My friend opened his mouth to speak. Then seemed to think better of it. When he eventually spoke, he said, “I was reading Al-Baqarah last night—”

  “Wait. You were up late reading the Quran?”

  “Of course. What did you imagine?”

  “I don’t know. A novel or something.”

  “What is the point of a novel?”

  “To… have fun, I guess?”

  Sohrab harrumphed—it sounded awfully like one of my dad’s grunts—and said, “Anyway, there is a part of that chapter where God says that sometimes you think you love something, but it isn’t good for you. And sometimes you don’t want something, but that thing ends up being best for you.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “I am just saying that you should keep taking the rishta meetings. You haven’t found what is best for you yet, even if you think you have.”

  Was he talking about Kaval? No way. I was so careful to never let on that I liked his twin sister. We’d been friends forever. I didn’t want to make things weird between us.

  I was caught so off guard by Sohrab’s advice that I almost missed his hand sneaking toward a plate of kababs. “Step away from the food, yaar. You know what? Get out of my kitchen.”

  “It is actually my kitchen,” he reminded me.

  That was a fair point, but I still scowled at him hard.

  “Fine. I’ll see you at the party,” Sohrab said. “You’ll have fun. Your fan club is going to be there.”

  Mrs. Sabsvari was known throughout the Bay Area for her amazing kofta korma. She told everyone the recipe for it was ancient, passed down to her from her great-grandmother in exchange for a promise that it would never be shared with anyone who did not also share her blood.

  I’d actually come up with this particular recipe during an econ test. I’d been pretty sure my variation of the classic dish would turn into something special, but I hadn’t been able to try it out until Mrs. Kapadia had graded our papers and returned them a whole week later. I’d failed. Apparently, Mrs. Kapadia didn’t have much of a culinary imagination.

  Still, I loved making the dish, especially because I got to use the Sabsvaris’ massive, exquisitely crafted Moroccan clay tagines. Humming and bopping along to the latest Spotify playlist Zar had sent me, I rolled out beef meatballs seasoned with cilantro, mint, green chilies, ground Kashmiri and red peppers, pureed roasted onions and all.

  The soul of this salan was ground almonds and cashews, which added a beautiful texture and richness to the curry. Whistling, I whipped them together with yogurt, poppy seeds, coconut, and dry spices. Once I’d sautéed the yogurt mixture, I’d add cream and water, and then wrap up the prep by trusting the oven with a tagine full of everything I’d prepared, along with the beating hearts of pretty much all desi food: ginger and garlic.

  I could tell it was going to be good before it was done. I loved that feeling, that certainty in the excellence of my own work, which I’d only ever found in a kitchen. Sure, I got a lot of attention for looking good, but the ability to create something beautiful was so much better because it was something I’d earned, not something that I’d just been given.

  As awesome as the food can be, dawats still suck. Men sit in one part of the house and women sit in another. So while there are all these pretty, dressed-up girls near you, you don’t actually get to talk to them much. Instead, you get heavy uncles having heavy uncle conversations about religion and politics—international, federal, state, and mosque—and other stuff that no one cares about. The amount of information I’ve ignored about the Indian and Pakistani cricket teams from the seventies and eighties could fill the Internet.

  Thankfully, if you’re young enough, you’re usually allowed to sneak off after a while to hang out with people your own age, so Zar, Sohrab, and I can chill. But it also means that we have to be around other guys, some of whom are totally uncles in training. Zar thinks that Sohrab is becoming one of them. It is the curse of brown boys everywhere. We either die young or we live long enough to see ourselves become uncles.

  At least some of Sohrab’s cute cousins—my “fan club”—were invited to this dawat. They found all kinds of excuses to walk past where I was sitting to say hi, and then, as soon as they’d gone a few feet, they’d burst into whispers and giggles. Both Sohrab and Kaval thought they were ridiculous, and Zar was always irritated they didn’t want to talk to him.

  “I like your shirt,” one of them said shyly when she stopped by. “Looks good on you.”

  “Everything looks good on me,” I said with a grin.

  She laughed and laughed.

  As she drifted away, Sohrab rolled his eyes so hard that I was worried he’d hurt himself.

  “What?” I asked. “I’m hilarious.”

  “No. You really aren’t.”

  “I’m funny and charming. Ask anyone. Right, Zar?”

  Zar didn’t answer, studying the peas in the samosa he was holding like they were works of art.

  Sohrab added, “You know that girls only laugh at your jokes because they find you attractive, right?”

  “Whatever. No one thinks that. Right, guys?”

  When the uncles in training all just sat there in silence, I jumped up and walked off in a huff.

  The problem with walking off in a huff is that it isn’t really effective if you don’t have anywhere to go.

  I didn’t want to sit with the uncles because they were talking about boring stuff like the fate of the world or whatever. I couldn’t go hang out with the aunties because I was a dude, even though all aunties loved me. And I couldn’t go hang out with the girls because… well, I don’t know what would happen, actually, because no one I know had tried, but it probably wouldn’t be good.

  I also couldn’t go to the kitchen. Mrs. Sabsvari was very clear that I was to steer clear of it in order to avoi
d suspicion.

  So I made my way outside. The Sabsvaris had a sprawling backyard with a massive pool and a concrete half basketball court. As I walked toward the hoop, laughter and talk from the dawat got quieter and quieter until, for a second, it felt like I was all alone, under a dark night sky.

  That was when I heard the dull thwap of a basketball hitting the ground. I looked behind me and Kaval was there, her shimmery shalwar kameez, trailing dupatta, and high heels all at odds with the casual confidence with which she was dribbling.

  “You look lost,” she said.

  “Usually am, I guess.”

  She didn’t smile. Not even a little. Maybe Sohrab had been right. Maybe I was having an off night bringing the funny. Instead, she asked, “What were you thinking about?”

  “Nothing. Just… I don’t know.… There aren’t any stars out. It seems like there are fewer stars in the sky than there were when we were kids, don’t you think?”

  “They’re still there. Our lights are just so bright now that we can’t see them.”

  I’d never thought of it that way. I was trying to figure out how to respond, when Kaval whipped the ball toward me and it smacked into my chest, startling me. “Want to play?”

  I frowned. “Now? With you?”

  “Sure,” Kaval said, stepping out of her heels and pulling her dupatta from around her neck. As she tied the long piece of delicate fabric around her waist, she added, “Unless you’re scared.”

  “Terrified.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll go easy on you.”

  I nodded toward the house and the “party” going on inside. “What if someone sees us? All the aunties will freak out.”

  “If you’re not scandalizing aunties, Danyal Jilani, what is even the point of your life?”

  That was impossible to argue with, so I tossed her the ball. “First to get to twenty-one?”

  “Sure.”

  That was when Kaval Sabsvari, sugar and spice and all things nice, stepped behind the three-point line and drained a jumper that would’ve stunned Steph Curry.

  “What was that?” I exclaimed.

  “What was what?”

  I grinned and shook my head, jogging up the court to get the ball. Typical Kaval. Always a badass. As I passed it to her, she went for another jumper that, even though it clanged around the rim a bit, ultimately dropped through the hoop.

  “I can do that all night, Jilani. You’re going to have to get closer and actually guard me.”

  “Oh.” It came out squeakier than I would have liked. “How… um, how close can I get?”

  Kaval crossed her arms behind her back and walked up to me, slowing down as she got closer, until her chest was almost touching mine. I wasn’t sure if my heart had ever beat as fast as it was beating now.

  “How close do you want to get?” Her eyes were shining with the intense promise of being up to no good.

  How was I supposed to respond to that?

  “There you are.”

  I jumped so high at the sound of Sohrab’s voice that, had an NBA scout been around, I would’ve gotten signed right there. Kaval, however, stayed exactly where she’d been standing, somehow not startled by her brother’s interruption.

  Sohrab had a vaguely disapproving frown on his face, but that was kind of how he always looked. Zar, who was following him, flashed a wicked smirk that I desperately hoped he would put away as soon as possible.

  “Mom is looking for you,” Sohrab told his sister.

  “Really?” Kaval said in “I Don’t Believe You Times a Hundred” font.

  “Yes.”

  Kaval narrowed her eyes at Sohrab, then glanced at Zar, who gave her a “what’re you looking at me for” shrug. “Fine,” she said, turning to me. “But we’re not done talking.”

  “What? Oh. Right. Sure,” I said. “Talking at school, then. We’ll talk, I mean at…” Kaval didn’t wait for me to finish. She picked up her heels and marched across the grass barefoot. I turned to my friends. “We were just… talking.”

  “About what?” Zar asked, not at all helpfully.

  “Nothing. Just, you know, stars.”

  “Stars?” Sohrab asked.

  “Yeah. I was telling her that it seems like there are a lot fewer of them now. Remember when we were kids? The sky was beautiful then.”

  “Maybe you’re just standing in the wrong spot and looking in the wrong place,” Sohrab suggested.

  That made zero sense, just like his “advice” in the kitchen earlier. At least, I thought so. Zar, however, nodded along like he understood. So maybe it was just me.

  “Come on,” Intezar said. “We came to find you because they’re serving dinner. Let’s eat. You know the food is always amazing here.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure it’s all right.”

  Work the next day was super stressful but being around Chef Brodeur could be like that sometimes. I’d started working at Remarquable part-time three years ago, when I was sixteen. My mother knew the saucier somehow—often it seemed like she knew the whole world—and she’d told him how much I wanted to work in a restaurant.

  He’d said they were looking for a dishwasher, and I’d jumped at the chance. Since then I’d been bumped up to a line cook, and last year to something like an apprentice. As such, I was required to learn every position in the kitchen. At least, that’s what I was told. So far as I could tell, I was the only apprentice the relatively small restaurant had ever had, so they were probably making the rules up as they went along.

  Anyway, Chef Brodeur, a lean, hawk-eyed Frenchwoman, was sharp with her criticism, so days when you weren’t perfect could be rough. My coworkers said she wasn’t as tough on me as she was on them, but I think that only seemed true because I wasn’t considered worthy of the night shift.

  Instead, I worked during lunch on the weekends, and sometimes helped prepare for the dinner rush, though I always had to be out by six. I kept waiting for Brodeur to tell me I was good enough to work at night, but that hadn’t happened yet.

  Whatever. My toque was off, and I didn’t have to think about work for a while. Instead I tried to figure out what I’d make when I got home. It’d have to be something basic. My father wasn’t an adventurous eater. According to Ahmed Jilani, if you had to use your imagination to make it, it wasn’t really food.

  I’d just resigned myself to making a korma or something and serving it with defrosted naan like a barbarian when my phone rang. I was driving and I didn’t recognize the number, so I shouldn’t have answered it. Not sure why I did. Maybe that’ll be the title of my autobiography: I Don’t Know Why I Did That.

  “Hello?”

  A deep voice replied, “As-salamu alaykum.”

  And just like that, the chances of it being a wrong number went down to nearly zero.

  “Wa’alaykum,” I said as I pulled out of the BART station and onto the street. “This is Danyal.”

  “Yes, Danyal, this is Jaleel Akram.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Bisma Akram’s father. Why was he calling me? “Uh… yes, sir.”

  “We came over to your parents’ place a couple of weeks ago. About my daughter’s hand in marriage.”

  “Of course.”

  Silence.

  “Mr. Akram? Are you still there?”

  “I’m here,” he said. “Bisma made you aware of her… situation?”

  “Umm… yes, sir.”

  “I got your number from your mother. I… just wanted to thank you. After you met with her was the only time we’ve come back from one of these rishta meetings and I haven’t had to watch my daughter weep.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that.

  “You’re a very decent young man. I wanted to let you know that I appreciate it.”

  “Thank you.”

  There was another pause. Then he said, “I was wondering if you could come over to our place to talk.”

  I let out a deep breath. “Mr. Akram, Bisma seems wonderful, but I’m not… This is really so
mething you should discuss with my mother and—”

  “I have a business proposition for you,” he interrupted. “I think you’ll find it interesting.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “You’re into cookery. Let’s say it is about the cookery business.”

  “Okay.” I tried to keep the skepticism out of my voice but… well, I was skeptical.

  “We’ll expect you after school on Friday, if that works. I’ll text you the address.”

  He hung up.

  I stared at the stylized H on the van’s wheel and shook my head.

  “Okay,” I told the aging machine, since there was no one else around to talk to, “that’s going to super suck.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Kaval walked up to me in chem. She somehow managed to look glamorous in the protective goggles we had to wear that day. “Hey, partner,” she said.

  “Part… where’s Aaron?”

  Our chemistry teacher had assigned lab partners at the beginning of the year, and I was supposed to work with Aaron Mendes. We got along fine, mostly because he actually knew what he was doing, and I tried my best not to touch anything that looked like it might explode.

  “We switched for today.” A little smirk played on Kaval’s lips. “You’re not complaining, are you?”

  Me? Complain about working with her? Impossible. “Of course not. I thought we weren’t allowed to switch, though.”

  “I asked nicely. Mr. Jang said it was fine. He was very sweet about it.”

  I frowned. Our chemistry teacher had never been sweet to me. I looked around the classroom, and sure enough, Aaron was clear on the other side of the room, and Mr. Jang didn’t seem like he had a problem with it. In fact, he didn’t seem to care about anything but his plans for Renaissance Man, which he was discussing intently with Trinity Selassie, whom he’d picked to represent chemistry.

  I let Kaval take the lead as we set up the experiment. She was a better partner than Aaron, in that she didn’t hesitate to order me to do things. Aaron usually did everything, even though I was happy to help. I wasn’t lazy. It was just that I usually only had a vague idea of what I was supposed to do. Today I lit the Bunsen burner when Kaval told me and fetched the test tubes we needed.