by Sheba Karim
“There’s no car in the driveway,” I noted.
“Could be in the garage,” Umar said.
“You don’t think they would hurt her, do you?”
“There goes her modeling career.”
“Not funny.”
“I know.” We’d been parked for five minutes, but Umar was still gripping the steering wheel. He was wearing his lucky scarf, soft white cotton printed with tiny navy butterflies.
“All right,” I said. “Here goes.”
Umar closed his eyes and began to recite a prayer. As I walked up to the house, I observed the curtains, wondering if someone was peeking from behind, noting my hesitant approach. I rang the doorbell. No one answered. None of the curtains moved.
I glanced back at the car. Umar had sunk down in his seat, but I knew he was watching.
I rang the bell again.
This time, Ghaz’s mother opened the door halfway. I’d only met Uzma Auntie once. Though she’d been civil, there was a definite sharpness to her, an air of discontent. But the woman at the door seemed overwhelmed by exhaustion, pale-faced, sunken-cheeked, dark circles framing her red, weary eyes. I was actually relieved by her appearance, because the weaker she was, the less likely it was she’d beaten Ghaz.
“Salaam, Auntie,” I said, trying to sound casual, unconcerned. “I’m Mariam, Ghazala’s friend. Is she home?”
Uzma Auntie shook her head. “She’s not here.”
“Oh. Where did she go?”
“She’s visiting relatives.”
“Okay. She’s not answering her phone.”
Uzma Auntie frowned. “Why do you want to see her?”
“Uh . . . because she’s my friend.”
“Your friend,” she repeated slowly. “Your full name is Mariam Sharma, hai na?”
“Yes.”
“You’re Hindu?”
“My father was—” I bit my lip. “My father is Hindu.”
“Did you give her the bindi?”
I was confused for a moment, and then realized she was talking about the bindi Ghaz wore in the ad.
“No. I don’t even own a bindi.”
This was true, but it felt like the wrong answer, like I was playing into her prejudice against Hindus.
“Did you know she was going to do this?” she demanded. “If you’re her friend, why didn’t you stop her?”
“I didn’t know about it,” I answered. And I hadn’t known about the billboard, though she had told me about winning the audition. It may have been a half lie, but to someone accustomed to telling the truth, it tasted bitter on my tongue.
“Of course she wouldn’t tell anyone, so no one could tell her no,” Uzma Auntie said, switching to Urdu. “She’s been stubborn since the beginning, and now she’s destroyed her reputation. She’s a stupid girl. Better for her, and you, if you stay away.”
“But—”
“Good-bye.” Uzma Auntie shut the door in my face.
She may have been exhausted, but she’d still managed to commandeer the conversation.
“What happened?” Umar exclaimed when I returned.
“She said Ghaz is away visiting relatives—total lie, I think. She was upset that I hadn’t prevented Ghaz from ruining her reputation. She didn’t give me a chance to stick up for Ghaz, and now she might have the impression that I also think what Ghaz did was wrong. Man. People think my mother’s intimidating, but Ghaz’s mother . . . she’s intimidating and unkind.”
“Do you think it’s wrong?” he asked.
“What Ghaz did? Unwise, maybe, given her circumstance, but not wrong. Why—do you?”
He didn’t respond.
“Umar? Come on, you don’t, do you?”
“No . . . I mean, I think she should live her life the way she wants, but why would she try out for a Brooklyn Attire ad campaign? It’s not like she wants a modeling career, she was only doing it for kicks, and she knew it could devastate her family. But then, who am I to judge? One day, I’m going to devastate mine.”
Umar rested his head against the steering wheel with one of his trademark deep sighs, his shoulders rising and collapsing with his breath. I reached over and toyed with his mass of ebony hair, so thick that when you ran your hand through it your fingers disappeared. It was the longest I’d seen it, past his ears, curling cutely at the tips.
“So what do we do now?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I suppose we wait, and hope her father isn’t beating her. My guess is that her mother is only lashing her with her tongue.”
“Her father is shorter than her,” Umar pointed out. “Though I guess that doesn’t matter, if you have a baseball bat.”
“Umar! Why do you have to go there?”
“Because she could possibly be there,” he replied.
“Should we call the police?” I said.
He sat up, an indent on his cheek from the leather steering wheel. “I don’t think her dad would beat her, but . . . what do you think?”
“I think if we don’t hear from her by Friday, we go back to her house. If her mother doesn’t let us see her then, we go to the police,” I said.
“Okay,” Umar agreed.
“I am a firm believer in nonviolence,” I told him, “but if comes to it, we’re bringing our own damn baseball bat.”
Five
UMAR GOT A CALL from Ghaz at three thirty a.m. that night. She had managed to convince her somewhat sympathetic younger brother to sneak her his phone for five minutes. She assured Umar that she was okay, but her parents had taken away her phone and laptop and literally locked her in her room, and were trying to convince her to complete her college education in Pakistan and not return to the US until she was married. They knew they couldn’t force her or keep her locked up, but they were so angry and freaked out they couldn’t think straight. She didn’t want to call the police because there’d already been enough drama. She said she’d been biding her time, planning her escape, and she’d finally figured out how. All she needed was for us to come get her.
“We set the day and time of escape,” Umar said, lowering his voice though no one else was home. “Next Thursday night, two a.m.”
“That’s, like, a week away!” I said. “Why so long from now?”
“Because I have a plan. It’s kind of crazy, but I think it’ll work.”
These were not typical Umar words. Of the three of us, he was the most risk averse, the most intimate with inertia, perfectly content to spend an entire weekend in his bedroom, eating ice cream, jerking off to gay porn, watching reruns of RuPaul’s Drag Race. The fact that he’d come up with not only a plan, but a crazy one, was a testament to how much he loved Ghaz.
“Do tell,” I said.
“Well, my high school graduation is this weekend, and two days later my parents are leaving for three weeks on one of their medical missions to Pakistan and Bangladesh.”
Among his many accomplishments, Umar’s renowned reconstructive plastic surgeon father had also founded a medical charity. Every few years they’d visit Pakistan and Bangladesh with a team of doctors. His father would perform reconstructive surgery on women who’d had acid thrown in their faces by husbands or relatives or men they’d refused to marry, and his ophthalmologist mother removed poor people’s cataracts. Whenever Umar spoke to us of his father, it was with admiration, sadness, and longing. He wanted desperately for his father to be proud of him, but his father was unapologetically homophobic. When gay marriage was legalized, he’d called it an abomination of nature.
“So by next Thursday you’ll be parent free,” I said. “What then?”
“We rescue Ghaz and go on a road trip,” Umar said.
“Really?”
“I’m going to tell my parents I’m driving to New Orleans to attend the annual IANA convention,” he explained.
“The what?”
“The Islamic Association of North America convention. It’s the biggest Muslim convention in North America.”
“And they’re do
ing it in New Orleans?”
“This year, yes.”
“Who will you tell them you’re driving with?”
“Myself.”
“They won’t object to you driving alone?”
He shrugged. “I’ll tell them it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. They have no reason to suspect anything.”
“Wow. I’m impressed,” I commended him. “A road trip, blatant subterfuge—this isn’t the Umar I know.”
“Tell me about it,” Umar said, and for a moment I thought he might cry. The only time I’d witnessed him shed actual tears was when we watched Lion and the son reunited with his mother after a lifetime apart. “It was her voice, Mars. She sounded scared . . . I’d never heard her that way. And when she said, ‘Umar, please, you have to get me the hell out of here,’ she didn’t just mean down the block.”
“Are you sure you’re okay with this? Your parents will flip if they find out.”
Umar shrugged. “They won’t. Find out, I mean. If we’re careful.”
“All right. I’ll call my internship and ask if I can start later.”
“You mean your internship at Screw the Children?”
“Funny. It’s Save the Children. And my internship isn’t there, it’s at Safeways.”
“The grocery store?”
“That’s Safeway! Safeways is an anti–child trafficking group. And I was going to waitress at Olive Garden again. Hopefully they’ll let me start later, too.”
“Keep the change!” Umar declared.
The Olive Garden I worked at was popular with desi families, many of whom were demanding customers and bad tippers. Last summer, an Indian family got seated in my section, stayed for nearly two hours, spilled a drink, sent back a dish, requested a full basket of breadsticks after they’d finished eating and then asked me right away to pack it. At the end, the father paid the check and said, very gallantly, “Keep the change!” He’d given me a one-hundred-dollar bill. The check was for ninety-seven dollars. Since I’d told Umar the story, it had become a catchphrase of his.
“Ooh,” Umar said, opening the top drawer of my dresser. “These jeans are new. I’m trying them on.”
“You really need to stop stealing my jeans. I have, like, two pairs left.”
“You really need to stop buying jeans that perfectly mold to the contours of my buttocks,” he countered.
It was a relief to hear Umar joking again. And in a week, Ghaz would be safe, and we’d be laughing together as the open road stretched ahead, leading us toward infinite possibilities.
I even had an idea as to what one of those possibilities could be: my father had a brother who lived in Virginia. I’d never even corresponded with him, but now that we were heading south, it seemed to be a sign, a green light from fate.
“Hey, do you think we could drive through Virginia?” I asked.
Umar pulled my jeans over his hairy, skinny legs, reaching his hand inside to smooth out his boxers underneath. “Sure. What’s in Virginia? Someone gay and cute?”
“Ha. I’ll tell you later. Need to figure some things out first.”
He walked over to the mirror, fluffed his hair, lifted his shirt, sucked in his stomach, and shifted from side to side, assessing the fit.
“Seriously, why do my jeans always look better on you than me?” I said.
Umar tossed one end of his scarf over his shoulder. “Can I help it if Allah made me sexy?”
Six
THE LAST TIME I’D TALKED to my mother about my father, she was driving me to see a shrink. One day my junior year of high school, my boyfriend, Sasha, a black-clad overachiever who name-dropped Foucault and Beckett as I acted suitably impressed—though when I’d tried to read Madness and Civilization I’d immediately fallen asleep—unceremoniously dumped me.
“We get along well enough,” he informed me, “but I need to be with someone who challenges me, who acts as a flint for my intellect. I want my girlfriend to be more dynamic, a defibrillator for my mind.”
After nodding in agreement, I hid in the locker room and cried.
My way of processing the painful inanity that is life was to lie down, close my eyes, and breathe deeply until I began to disengage with my surroundings. After a while, I’d experience the sensation of sinking, like I was entering a peaceful, subterranean womb where I could safely allow my thoughts to meander, expand, and intensify and, on a good day, crystallize into some semblance of clarity. The day Sasha broke up with me, I lay on the couch and thought about the devastation humans were causing to the oceans; how islands of plastic trash bigger than Texas were choking the oceans; if it was weird that Sasha had never wanted me to take my bra off; why I’d baked peanut butter cookies, not once, but thrice, for this guy who’d treated me like a doormat. I didn’t hear my mother come home, and she let me be, but when she returned two hours later and I was still in corpse pose, she insisted I go see a shrink.
On the drive there, I said, “Can I ask you something?”
“No need to preface a question with a question,” my mother replied. “Unnecessary delay.”
“Did my father ever do what I do? You know, lie still to think? Do you think I got it from him?”
Her expression was unreadable, but her accidental turning on of the windshield wipers gave away her surprise. “Not that I remember.”
“Well, you would remember that, wouldn’t you?”
“I believe I would.”
I had no memory of my father; he’d left when I was two and my mother was pregnant with Shoaib, but I’d always been curious, unlike Shoaib, who hated him for abandoning us, or my mother, who preferred to act like he never existed. Maybe it was because I resembled him, the same round face with a slight point to the chin, thin nose, straight across eyebrows, deep-set eyes.
My mother changed the subject, and I met with the shrink. He concluded that since my behavior was not affecting my ability to perform at school or my relationships with friends and family, I did not merit a diagnosis. I was, he said, a sensitive person who needed to occasionally disengage with the world to understand it.
After ghosting on Doug this spring, I wanted more than ever to understand my father, because I was now guilty of bailing on someone like he’d done to us. I’d become haunted by questions of what he was like, which other of his unsavory traits I may have inherited that had yet to surface.
Now, after a lifetime of wondering, this road trip presented an opportunity to seek out answers.
On the night we left to rescue Ghaz, Umar waited outside in his Prius as my mother and I said good-bye. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d lied to my mother, but I hadn’t told her about my potential plan to meet my uncle in Virginia. I figured I’d tell her after the fact, if I actually went through with it.
I gingerly pressed my cheek to hers, our version of an embrace. I loved her nighttime scent, almond oil and rose water.
“Don’t forget that we can recycle number six plastics now,” I reminded her.
“I wouldn’t dare,” she said. “Drive carefully.”
“We will.”
“Try to have some fresh fruits and veggies every day. Encourage Umar to do so as well. I know he likes his junk food.”
“We will.”
“Ghazala might be going through a lot of different emotions. Sometimes it’s hard to know when to listen, and when to offer advice.”
“We’ll do our best.”
“Text me every day.”
“I promise.”
“And Mariam?”
“Yes?”
My mother took a step back and smiled. “Have a rollicking good time.”
Seven
WHEN I OPENED THE TRUNK of Umar’s Prius, I had to push his Louis Vuitton suitcase to the side to make room for my small duffel bag that said No One is Illegal, a freebie from one of my mother’s legal conferences.
“Since when do you have a Louis Vuitton suitcase?” I said.
“Don’t knock it, it’s vintage,”
he replied. “And are you seriously bringing that backpack? It’s a road trip, not a library excursion.”
I’d had this backpack since freshman year of high school. It was a gift from my mother, monogrammed with my initials. Though I didn’t consider myself a material person, I did have a few objects I was attached to. One was my canary yellow backpack, the other two were tucked into a pocket inside.
“I don’t leave home without it.” I looked at him. For his Ghazala-jailbreak outfit, he’d chosen formfitting black pants, a black V-neck T-shirt, and a green kaffiyeh scarf.
“You look like a member of Hamas,” I told him.
“Like you, I believe in nonviolence,” he declared, gesturing toward an object in the back of the trunk.
“Is that a baseball bat?”
“Softball. My sister used to play.”
“Don’t you think having a bat in our trunk will make us more likely to engage in violence?” I said. “Studies show that the minute you start keeping a gun in your house, your chance of experiencing gun violence within the home increases by thirty percent.”
Umar shrugged. “We could leave it at your house.”
“No, it’s fine.” I pointed to the navy water vessel next to the bat. “Is that a lota?”
“Yup.”
In the interest of cleanliness and hygiene, Muslims, and most desis, like to use a lota to rinse their private parts after going to the bathroom. “You’re bringing your own lota on the road trip?”
“Why not? There’s enough space in the trunk. I don’t want to walk around with a dirty stank ass if I don’t have to.”
“Well, between the softball bat and the lota, I guess we’re pretty much ready for anything,” I said.
Umar squeezed my arm. “Then what are we waiting for?”
We parked a few doors down from Ghaz’s house. Aside from a dog barking plaintively in the distance, all was quiet in suburbia. Fortuitously, the streetlight closest to Ghaz’s house had gone out, cloaking the sidewalk in relative darkness. As we crept along, Umar let out a cry.
