Hana Khan Carries On

by Uzma Jalaluddin

  “I was looking over photos and video to send home when I realized my camera had been recording the entire time when those men tried to attack us. I uploaded the video to YouTube and Facebook last night, and it already has thirty thousand views!”

  My heart stuttered. What had he done?

  Oblivious, Rashid was scrolling down the comments, reading some out loud. “People are so angry about this video. I’ve received so many messages of support from strangers.”

  I read a few of the comments over his shoulder. They seemed to be evenly divided between righteous outrage on our behalf and ugly bigotry. “You don’t know what you’ve started,” I said. I looked at the video again, a profile shot of me in my blue hijab, another of Aydin stepping in front of me. The confrontation was there for anyone to see, comment on, and share. I buried my face in my hands.

  “This is a good thing, Hana Apa,” Rashid said, brow furrowed in confusion at my reaction. “Those men thought they would be able to hide in the shadows, but I have exposed them to the mob. Let’s see how much they enjoy the spotlight.”

  “But people will come after us as well,” I said quietly.

  Rashid might be the son of a New Delhi Mafia boss, but I was a broadcaster in training, and I knew how quickly stories like that could spin out of control. What had happened to us downtown had been ugly, but the fallout might be worse.

  “Hana! Are you all right?” Fahim asked, coming up to us. “I just heard about the attack. Why didn’t you tell us what happened?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “It was nothing.” The last thing I needed was for my family to start worrying about me.

  Fahim looked at Rashid, and for once he wasn’t smiling. “You should have been more careful,” he said. “Women in hijab are often targeted in Toronto.”

  A flash of something hard crossed my cousin’s face and he folded his arms. “They are often targeted around the world,” he said evenly. “In India also. Which is why I posted the video, to show what hatred looks like up close, so we may confront it directly. I had the situation well in hand. Those men were nothing.”

  “They could have been armed. They could have hurt her.” Fahim looked down at me, fear clear on his face. “You have to be more careful when you’re walking around the city.”

  I looked from Rashid to Fahim and back again. “That confrontation would have happened whether I was being careful or not,” I said slowly. “It didn’t happen because I was wearing hijab. None of it was my fault.”

  Both men had no answer to my words, but I had more to say to my cousin. I turned to Rashid. “You posted that video without asking my permission. Now you’ve exposed me too.”

  “People will be on our side, Hana Apa,” Rashid insisted. “We are forming alliances. People want to support communities who have been wronged. Don’t you want to help your mother, your sister, and Fahim? This is how you build a dam and counteract hate.”

  I shook my head. He didn’t understand what he had done, but my brother-in-law did.

  We helped Baba into the car in tense silence.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Baba noticed how quiet we were on the ride home. As we helped him up the stairs to the house, he asked what was wrong.

  “Nothing, Baba. Everything is fine,” I replied, but he wasn’t convinced.

  I looked up the post on my phone once we settled Baba in the kitchen. Fahim had disappeared into Fazeela’s room, Rashid to the basement. I sat on the sofa and watched the video in its entirety, reliving a moment I had hoped to forget.

  The picture was remarkably clear, but I watched the events as if from a great distance. I noted the surprised and then scared expressions on Aydin’s and my faces. A flash of Rashid’s calm voice as he mocked our attackers. I relived the impact of my fall, Aydin’s fear as he crouched down beside me, the look of malevolent delight on our attackers’ faces at my pain.

  I put down my phone, shaken once more by the randomness of the attack. My bruises hadn’t yet healed, and I realized that trying to ignore the incident hadn’t helped either. I picked up the phone again and looked at the view count on YouTube. It hovered near forty thousand already.

  Footsteps on the stairs; Fahim poked his head in. “Fazee wants to talk to you and Rashid.”

  I hadn’t spent a lot of time with my sister lately. She had mostly kept to her room, and I had been busy running around fighting fires. But looking at her now, I realized the cantaloupe had grown a lot and my sister looked more rested. The circles under her eyes had started to disappear; the old fire was back in her eyes.

  When my cousin walked into the room, she aimed that fire right at him. “What did you do, Rashid?” she asked in a dangerously pleasant voice.

  Uh-oh. I hadn’t seen that version of Fazeela in a long time. My cousin was so dead.

  Rashid looked at her in confusion. “I posted a video of the fight we had downtown. Didn’t your sister tell you?”

  Fazeela whipped her head toward me. Shit. Now I was in trouble too.

  “It wasn’t that bad. I was showing Rashid the city, and these guys started hassling us. I fell down but I’m fine,” I said, babbling.

  “Hanaan, what the hell were you thinking, keeping this to yourself? You were the victim of a hate crime. You should have reported it to the police immediately. Thank God nothing worse happened.”

  “As I said to Fahim Bhai, we had things well in hand—” Rashid began, but my sister pinned him with a look so full of protective rage I nearly felt bad for him.

  “What you did was worse. By posting this video you have exposed our entire family to possible attack. Instead of it being an isolated incident that could have been dealt with appropriately, you have opened us up to the world. All this without seeking my sister’s consent! Rashid, you cannot post videos without permission.”

  “I was trying to shame those men online, and also to raise attention for Three Sisters.”

  “Even you can’t be that naive. Let me show you what you have done,” my sister said, her voice icy. She pulled up the video on YouTube and read a few of the comments posted in the past five minutes. They were vile and threatening.

  When she looked up, Rashid had paled. “I am sorry, apa,” he said in a low voice. “I wanted to inform the public about what had happened and use the attention to help our business.”

  My heart softened at Rashid’s motives, and I reminded myself that he was eighteen years old, that he had acted impulsively but with good intentions. He had joined the fight for Three Sisters wholeheartedly, and he had been calm in the face of our downtown attackers. Fazee and Fahim hadn’t been there to see that, but I remembered.

  My sister was less impressed by his words. “I’ll be telling the rest of the family about the downtown attack and this video, including Kawkab Khala,” she said ominously. “In the meantime, Rashid, if you pull anything like this again, you’ll answer to me. Let’s just hope we can manage the fallout of your action.”

  She looked at me next. “And no more secrets, Hana. Staying quiet about our problems is how we got into this mess with Three Sisters in the first place, and I’m sick of it. Now, get out. Fahim and I need to talk.”

  By midafternoon the view count had risen to fifty thousand, and I couldn’t stop reading the comments. Rashid had been right—many were positive. But many were also negative and scary. I jumped from post to post, from hate to support, from “ban all immigrants, especially Moslems” to allies trumpeting their encouragement. I read until the roiling unease in my stomach forced me to turn off the screen. It was time for my shift at Three Sisters anyway.

  Fazee must have called ahead, because Mom cornered me the minute I walked into the nearly empty restaurant. “What is going on, Hana?” she demanded. “Were you attacked when you went downtown with Rashid? Your sister told me about the video, and people have been calling.” Her face was full of concern and worry.
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  I took a deep breath and filled her in, downplaying our encounter with the men. When I finished, she was quiet.

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” she said. “Are you sure you are all right?”

  I nodded, and she shrugged. “When we first moved to Canada, people were unkind all the time. More than once strangers yelled things at me, obscenities and profanities I didn’t understand. One time in the grocery store, a woman rammed me with her shopping cart. I thought she did it by accident and apologized for being in her way, and I bent down to help pick up the apples that had fallen out of her cart. She told me to return to my home country.” Mom smiled. “I was so new, so ignorant, I thought she was advising me to visit my mother in India. That was when Nani was sick, remember?”

  She shrugged again, and I stared at her. “You never told me that,” I said.

  Mom looked away. “It didn’t matter. What they said—what anyone said—it didn’t hurt so very badly. Because I was here, you see? By then we had you and Fazeela; we had started our businesses. We knew that things would get better when our roots had gone a little deeper, when we had settled more firmly into the soil of this country.”

  I tried to swallow past the sudden lump in my throat. “But I am settled,” I said. “I was born here. And it’s still happening.”

  Mom squeezed my hand. “Only once in so many years? Hana, that is nothing. I know your sister is concerned, and Rashid was wrong to post the video online, but things will calm down soon.”

  My mom’s perspective was based on her expectations as an immigrant. She believed that enduring some hatred was inevitable, that it was the price one paid for living as a minority in a new and sometimes hostile country. I understood her perspective, but I didn’t agree. I changed the subject. “Who has been calling?” I asked.

  “Some of the neighbors. Also some radio stations and local media. They want to speak with you.”

  The phone rang and Mom picked up. After listening for a moment, she passed the receiver to me.

  A reporter from one of the city’s big newspapers was on the line. She asked me about the incident, and I related the details as best I could, confirming the video and our names. The next call was from the police station that serviced the downtown core. A polite officer took down details of what had happened and promised to be in touch. A few more newspapers called, and a local radio station asked for an on-air interview, which I declined. I knew Marisa would be upset if I appeared on another station, and I didn’t want to talk to her again about the incident. I knew things had become serious when a twenty-four-hour news channel called for more information and said we would be making the evening news.

  Rashid had been at least partially right. The journalists were sympathetic about what had happened. But talking about the attack over and over with curious strangers was exhausting. I was grateful the restaurant was empty, as it gave me space to think.

  The online comments continued to be polarized. When I checked a few hours later, the view count for the video was close to a hundred thousand, and it had been shared nearly ten thousand times on Rashid’s Facebook page alone.

  In the afternoon my cell phone rang. It was Marisa; I had been expecting her call.

  “Why didn’t you tell me there’s video of your downtown confrontation?” she said in lieu of a greeting. “Clever girl, uploading the recording to the internet.”

  “That was my cousin’s doing, not mine,” I said.

  “Oh, the one who threw the phone into the hands of that rather gorgeous young man?” she asked. I didn’t know how to respond to that, so Marisa continued. “I’m calling to let you know we can have you on the radio this afternoon. A full interview, where you can relate your side of the story, followed by a phone-in segment. Isn’t that exciting?”

  “Thank you for calling to check up on me,” I said through gritted teeth. “As I told you before, I’m not comfortable talking about this on air.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to speak to those sharks at the all-news station. Remember, you work for us. Loyalty above all things, Hana.”

  I watched the evening news on the small TV set we kept in the kitchen. The white male newscaster looked grim as he played Rashid’s grainy handheld footage. The video captured my shocked expression, the determined one on Aydin’s face when he stepped in front of me. The report wrapped up with a brief mention about the rise of hate groups in Ontario.

  I peeked again at the comments section below the video and immediately wished I hadn’t. The comments were starting to get more personal, questioning what we had been doing walking around downtown Toronto and whether we were actually Canadian citizens, while others wondered why Rashid had been filming in the first place.

  The most liked comment was posted by someone with the username Alt_RightDungeon, and it made my heart sink. Somebody had copied into the comments section the flyer Rashid had posted on Facebook, and Alt_RightDungeon was suggesting that the “Brotherhood” visit the neighborhood, maybe attend the “terrorist-halal-fest” and hold a counterfestival of their own, serving bacon, ham, and pork sausage.

  A few comments later, someone named AnarchyNow! had figured out who we were.

  AnarchyNow!

  Hana Khan, Aydin Shah, Rashid Khan. Aydin Shah is the son of Junaid Shah, CEO of Shah Industries, the man who helped decimate the West Coast housing scene by buying up properties in working-class neighborhoods, driving up rent and gentrifying. I bet they’re in town to do the same thing to Toronto’s east end.

  “Useless rich immigrants,” another poster added, and I shook my head. Either we were being criticized for not fitting in and sticking to traditional beliefs or we were being hounded for chasing capital.

  I closed all my browsers, told my mom to take a message if more media called the restaurant looking for me, and left Three Sisters. The day had been difficult and overwhelming. I had been so consumed with handling the backlash for my family, I had completely forgotten about the third victim of the attack. If the media had gotten hold of my contact information, they were likely calling Aydin as well.

  I had to find him and Rashid. We had to discuss what was happening online and the impact it might have on Golden Crescent. Things were spiraling out of control, everything happening too fast, and my head hurt. I needed backup. It was time to close ranks before something worse happened.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Aydin wasn’t at his restaurant. He wasn’t at the baseball diamond or the Tim Hortons either, and he didn’t pick up his phone when Rashid called. We finally found him at the mosque, speaking quietly to Imam Abdul Bari.

  My cousin kept shooting me nervous looks while we waited. “Have I ruined everything, Hana Apa?” he finally asked.

  “Everyone makes mistakes,” I said shortly.

  “I feel terrible about the position I have put you in.”

  “You exposed Aydin too,” I retorted, and my cousin shut up.

  Imam Abdul Bari smiled as he walked over, Aydin following behind. “Please let me know if you or your family need anything, Sister Hana,” the imam said, then returned to his office, leaving the three of us to stare at one another.

  Rashid broke the silence, surprising Aydin with a hug. “You must forgive me!” he wailed, hanging from Aydin’s shoulders. “I thought you would both be pleased I had posted the video. My friends back home are jealous I have gone viral so easily. They thought it would take me at least a few months.”

  Aydin and I exchanged bemused looks as he disentangled himself from Rashid’s embrace. “I know you didn’t intend this reaction,” Aydin said. “Maybe something good will come out of it.”

  I filled them both in on the latest news, and Aydin confirmed that he had been getting media requests as well. “It’s all been too much,” he admitted. “The online rumors about Wholistic Grill, the delay with the construction, and now this . . .” He trailed off, face grim. His
usually sleek clothes were rumpled, I noticed. I wondered when he had last slept.

  “We need to divide and conquer,” I said. “For the next few days, forward all media requests to me. We need to separate the attack from the businesses on the street. I’ll keep an eye on the online comments too. Rashid, you and Aydin continue to work, and let Zulfa handle the PR for the launch of Wholistic Grill. All this attention and sympathy might even help our businesses.”

  A look of relief washed over Aydin. “You’re going to help me?” he asked, voice uncertain.

  “We’re going to help each other,” I said firmly. “If we’re very lucky, this will all blow over soon.”

  * * *

  • • •

  A message on Aydin’s voicemail forwarded all media requests related to the “CN Tower race attack,” as the media had dubbed it, to me, and I spent the next few days responding to queries from all over the province. The constable who had recorded the details of the downtown confrontation was in touch again the next day; the police had not identified our attackers but they were working on it.

  Marisa finally convinced me to do a brief on-air account of what had happened to the three of us downtown, but I drew the line at a phone-in segment. Reading the online comments had been painful enough; I had no wish to hear hateful words or mean-spirited conjecture spoken out loud.

  I managed to record and post another episode of Ana’s Brown Girl Rambles and put in more time on Secret Family History. When I checked the view count on Rashid’s video a few days later, it still hovered around one hundred thousand, and the comments had slowed to a trickle. I had been right—things were finally returning to normal.

  I did one last thing. I deleted my fake Instagram and Facebook accounts and scrubbed my timeline of all rumors related to Wholistic Grill. I even posted a few comments under my own profile, refuting the pile-on commenters and their swirling rumors. The food at Wholistic Grill will be halal, I wrote. The owner’s family is Muslim, and his restaurant is a welcome addition to the Golden Crescent neighborhood. I wasn’t sure if it would do any good, but it went some way toward righting my wrongs.