by Sheba Karim
“Umar!” I hissed.
“I think I stepped in shit,” he groaned, lifting his shoe.
“Shhh. We’ll deal with it later.”
I checked the time: 1:59 a.m. We bent down low and tiptoed along the side of her house, my heart jackhammering my rib cage. The last time it had pounded like this was when Doug and I were on opposite ends of the whispering bench at Swat and he whispered, “Would it be okay if I kissed you?” The second it took him to cross the bench was the longest of my life.
Umar and I simultaneously sighed with relief when we saw Ghaz’s bedroom light was on. I glanced at my phone: 2:04 a.m.
We waited for Ghaz to appear.
“Where is she?” Umar said.
“I really hope she’s not operating on desi standard time,” I said.
“And how is she planning to get down? Jump?”
“Too risky,” I said. Except what if the time she’d spent imprisoned had addled her brain, made her so desperate to escape she would forgo common sense? I glanced around for anything that could break her fall. There were a few chairs on the deck to our right, but that might make it worse.
“Look!” Umar exclaimed.
I’d never been so happy to see Ghaz, standing in the bedroom window, greeting us with a wave and a thumbs-up. The window opened slowly, and she dangled a duffel bag outside. As it fell, Umar rushed forward to catch it, swearing as he stumbled backward, clutching the bag to his chest.
“Shhh!” I chastised him, bracing for lights in the house to turn on, for Ghaz’s parents to come running into the backyard. Ghaz’s mother looked like she’d stopped sleeping long ago.
But the rest of the house remained dark, and I kneeled next to Umar.
“I think I pulled my groin,” he moaned.
“You didn’t need to catch it,” I said. “It’s not like she packed her fine crystal.”
“Where’d she go?” Umar said.
A moment later, Ghaz reappeared at the window holding a braided rope, which she lowered down until the end dangled several feet above the ground. Dressed in cutoff jean shorts and a tank top, she climbed out the window and, knees bent, the rope between her legs, began shimmying down like she’d spent her childhood retrieving coconuts. We held our arms out, in case, but a minute later, both her feet were on the ground.
“Let’s go!” she said, and we ran like hell.
Eight
GHAZ, UMAR, AND I lived in different towns, went to different schools, and may never have become friends, if, during my junior year, I hadn’t decided to try cooking Pakistani food and visited the Indian grocery store, where I’d seen an announcement for an Eid Milan party celebrating the end of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, pinned to the bulletin board. Along the bottom it stated, in bold letters, Musical Entertainment: Hamid Jafri. Hamid Jafri was an old Pakistani singer that Naani, my mother’s mother, used to listen to. After my father left, she moved in, helped take care of us while my mother attended law school. She died of pancreatic cancer when I was seven. During her illness, Hamid Jafri’s voice was one of the few things that gave Naani solace.
I asked my mother if we could go to the party. She said no. I said, “Why? I know it’s to celebrate Eid, but it’s a banquet with music; it doesn’t seem that religious.”
She said, “It’s not the event, it’s the community that comes with it.”
Because my dad abandoned us, I never knew the Hindu side of my family, and my mom kept her distance from the Muslims. My mother, brother, and I became an island to ourselves, religionless, stateless, living more like white people than anything else. I didn’t grow up watching Bollywood, I never had to lie to my parents, I wasn’t expected to become a doctor or engineer. If it hadn’t been for my grandmother, I would hardly know a word of Urdu.
My mother’s last interaction with Naani was an argument in which Naani asked, “What answer will I give Allah when He asks why my daughter isn’t a Muslim?” and told my mother that because of her atheism, my mother would be turning circles in her grave as she awaited Judgment Day rather than resting in peace. Naani was the sole person who could cause my normally unflappable mother to lose her cool. Though I was only able to truly understand it later, when my grandmother died I could sense both the immensity of my mother’s guilt, and the depth of her relief.
It was the guilt that made her finally say yes to the Eid banquet.
Shoaib didn’t want to come, but my mother, who rarely insisted, gave him no choice. She dragged a suitcase out of her closet and chose saris for herself and me. She hadn’t worn one in so long, we watched a YouTube video to learn how to drape it. My mother struck a graceful, elegant figure in hers, but I felt like a poseur, worried that the pleats my mother had folded for me would come apart, the long bolt of silk unraveling before one thousand aunties and uncles, exposing me as a fraud.
The party was held in a Marriott hotel in central New Jersey, and they had set up a photographer to take family portraits near the ballroom entrance. When my mother, Shoaib, and I stepped in front of the white cloth backdrop, the photographer lowered his camera.
“Is your husband coming?” he asked in Urdu.
“Take the photo, please,” my mother said coolly, and the photographer knew better than to argue.
The ballroom was a cacophony of guests dressed in brightly colored outfits and heavily ornamented jewelry that shimmered beneath the chandeliers, the women’s hands decorated with reddish-orange mehndi. Though the bling factor was too high for my taste, many of the women, and their clothes, were beautiful. By contrast, the uncles were dressed in more sober colors: blacks, whites, browns. Like the aunties, they greeted one another with an enthusiastic “Eid Mubarak,” hugging thrice, tossing their heads with each hearty laugh. Shrieking little kids chased one another around the tables, and packs of teenagers roamed the perimeter, pausing to take selfies.
There were dozens of round banquet tables, and no assigned seating. We walked along the farthest row, my mother in front in her lovely teal chiffon sari, giving off her don’t mess with me vibe; my Bollywood-beautiful brother, in jeans and a baseball cap, glued to his phone; followed by me, wincing because one of the safety pins securing my sari pleats had come undone and was jabbing me in the waist. Some aunties regarded us strangely, like we were a lost tribe trying to assimilate into civilized society. I watched as an elderly woman, deeply wrinkled, heavily stooped, leaning on a cane, regarded my mother with a diamond-sharp stare.
I’d forgotten about the staring. When Naani saw a person who was disabled or deformed or scantily clad, she had no qualms about taking a good look, at least until the person stared back.
“When some of these women die, the last thing to go will be their eyes,” I said to my mother, and she laughed.
We chose a half-empty table toward the back. Shoaib didn’t look up from his phone. He didn’t know Hamid Jafri; he had only a few vague memories of rapidly deteriorating Naani, a slightly loopy, absentminded though still argumentative woman who once put her dentures in his orange juice. He didn’t remember the Naani who was cuddly and affectionate with us but harsh with her judgment, unwilling to go one step beyond the boundaries of right and wrong she’d created from her culture and convictions. He didn’t remember how once in a while she’d tell us terrifying stories about jinn and witches right before bedtime, how he’d come sleep in my arms afterward.
It was weird, to think that I was the only holder of those memories.
The auntie closest to my mother was wearing a fancy emerald-green shalwar kameez, emerald-green eye shadow, emerald-green heels, and paisley-shaped emerald-and-pearl earrings. An emerald-green silk clutch embossed with crystals lay next to her water glass.
She started asking my mother questions, fishing for her status, her husband, her class, her career, her religious sect, markers by which she could judge her. My mother answered tersely, and I began to wonder if Hamid Jafri was worth all this. He was probably going senile by now anyway.
Shoaib nud
ged me, gesturing at the auntie with his chin. “Someone should tell her it’s Eid, not Saint Patrick’s Day.”
I withheld a laugh.
“Your husband didn’t come?” asked Auntie Leprechaun.
“No,” my mother said.
“He has night rounds?”
“No.”
“Not feeling well?”
“He’s dead,” my mother replied.
“Oh.” She paused, and I thought, at least that should end her inquisition. “So sorry. Heart attack?”
I knew I ought to stay and support my mother, but I couldn’t bear to hear the two of them speak any further about my father’s “death.”
“I’m going out for a bit,” I told my mother, and ran off before she could protest.
Outside the ballroom, the photographer was taking a photo of a proper family: mother, father, three children, a grandmother. In the hotel lobby, three Pakistani kids were lounging on the couch playing on their devices, too cool for the ballroom social scene. One of them had a shaggy haircut and was wearing Converse with his nicely starched sherwani. Already a hipster and not even twelve.
Outside, I fixed the errant safety pin and began to walk, aimlessly, toward the farther end of the parking lot. The cars’ windshields reflected the soft light of dusk. In the distance, you could hear the frenetic whir of a New Jersey highway.
Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us due to his gloomy and tragic death . . .
I had the first page of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky practically memorized. I’d picked it up off our bookshelf years ago, the cover creased, one edge slightly torn. Inside was an inscription written in elegant cursive, each word ending in a flourish. To my dearest pari Tasneem, Love, Rahul. Tasneem was my mother’s name, Rahul my father’s. “Pari” means fairy. My mother had highlighted some of the passages in the first three chapters; I could tell it was her from the extremely straight, double underlines, except she’d done it in purple ink. The mother I knew would never use purple ink. I didn’t dare show the book to her: she’d get rid of it. So I kept it in my nightstand drawer, and tried several times to read it, but, like my mother’s highlighting, I never made it past the beginning chapters. One day, I realized I had no intention of reading it, that the story of the book would remain as much a mystery as the story of my parents. Still, I kept it close, because it was one of the few pieces of my mother, my father, of their shared past, that I could actually touch.
Unlike Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, my father wasn’t really dead. My mother would have told us; his family would have contacted us. Though they’d never been in touch in all the years since my father left. But still, if he’d died, surely someone would have let us know.
My sari’s fanned pleats had loosened and were beginning to drag along the concrete, so I gathered them with a fist as I walked, wishing I could take the sari off, wishing I’d never come here.
I heard someone cough and turned. A row away, a girl was sitting on the hood of an SUV, smoking. She was statuesque, with long, silken hair and high cheekbones, huge, deep brown eyes, and full pouty lips. Her outfit was stunning, a lengha woven in a shimmering spectrum of pale to dark red, hemmed with gold-bordered red brocade, a matching red brocade bodice with a heart-shaped neckline, a filigree gold necklace in a V-shaped leaf pattern, gold bangles circling her slender arms. Naani had once watched a TV drama called Anarkali, set in a medieval Mughal court, about a beautiful courtesan who tragically falls in love with a prince, and it almost seemed as though this girl had dropped down from the sky from another era, when all of South Asia was India, and princesses wandered palace harems.
The cigarette, though, killed the effect.
My father, apparently, had been a chain-smoker. My mother hated the smell of tobacco. I did, too.
The girl blew a stream of smoke out the corner of her lips. “Trouble with your sari?”
I looked sheepishly at the swath of silk bunched in my fist. “Never wore one before.”
“I couldn’t tell,” she said, but then smiled. “What brings you out here?”
“It’s not really my scene in there,” I confessed.
She made a hmmm sound while exhaling, and I waved off the smoke from my face before realizing this might be insulting.
“Not a fan?” She put out the cigarette on the side of the hood, and I tried not to look too relieved.
“Big Tobacco is evil,” I told her.
“They’re American Spirit. Got anything against Native Americans?” she asked.
“Uh, no. Though I think American Spirit is actually corporate.”
“You’re one of those do-gooders, aren’t you?”
I shrugged. “Kinda.”
“It’s okay, I think cigs smell worse than an unwashed asshole after a Taco Bell dump,” she said. “I don’t even know why I’m smoking one, except that it’s giving me something else to do besides having a smile plastered on my face for five hours and pretending I’m someone I’m not, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said, though whenever I’d pretended to be anyone but myself, it was due to insecurity rather than cultural restraints.
She did a sweep with her eyes, and I hoped she didn’t notice my scuffed shoes. “I’ve never seen you before.”
“We don’t usually come to these things.”
She extended her hand. It was decorated with mehndi, a peacock’s tail ringed with flowers. “I’m Ghazala. You can call me Ghaz.”
“Mariam.”
“Mariam, excuse me while I freshen up.” She reached into her sparkly gold clutch, popped two Altoids, offered me one. After liberally unleashing a pink bottle of Victoria’s Secret body spray into the space between us, she hopped off the car and stepped into the chemically sweetened mist.
“Hey!” she said. “Isn’t that Umar?”
I followed her gaze a few cars down, where a teenage guy was leaning against a Jeep, looking intently at his phone. He was cute, dressed in a well-tailored black sherwani, a black-and-red scarf loosely wound around his shoulders.
“Who’s Umar?” I asked.
“His dad is this famous plastic reconstructive surgeon, a community hero, and his mom is a successful ophthalmologist. I think they donated half the money for their masjid’s renovation. And his older sister is a doctor who married another Pakistani doctor, every parent’s dream, and of course Umar is going to be a doctor, too. In a few years, he’ll be the community’s most eligible bachelor. Umar is such an achha bachcha, so nice, so polite, so smart, so fair, blah blah,” she said, mimicking an auntie. “Do you think he saw me smoking? I bet he’s a tattletale, the little prick.”
“He seems nice,” I said.
She gave me a quizzical look. “What’s he doing out here anyway? Let’s investigate.”
She bent down and started moving between the rows of cars, her dupatta slipping off one shoulder, a diaphanous red snake trailing the asphalt. I bent down and followed her, holding up her dupatta so it wouldn’t get dirty.
Umar was so riveted to his phone that he didn’t notice the two of us comically creeping toward him.
When Ghaz drew close enough to catch a glimpse of the screen, she shrieked, “No way!” and snatched the phone from his hands.
“Hey!” he cried, but Ghaz had ducked behind a neighboring car. The other end of her dupatta had fallen off her shoulders, and I gathered it in my hands, smiling awkwardly as Umar looked at me with terrified big brown eyes.
Thankfully, Ghaz reappeared a moment later.
“Here,” she said, returning his phone, and then surprising him again with a kiss on the cheek. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to frighten you. And I shouldn’t have taken your phone. But I love that you’re watching sexycubs.com outside the Eid Milan party.”
“Cubs, like the baseball team?” I asked.
Ghaz laughed. “No, cubs, like bears, but younger, and not as large, and
maybe a little less hairy.”
It took me a second to figure out she was referring to men. “Oh.”
Even in falling darkness I could make out the pink flush of Umar’s cheeks. “Please don’t tell anyone,” he pleaded. “I won’t tell anyone you were smoking a cigarette.”
“Don’t worry!” she declared. “Believe me, we all have secrets, and wa’Allahi, yours is safe with us. Right, Mariam?”
“Right,” I said.
After regarding us warily, Umar sighed deeply, realizing, I supposed, that whether or not he trusted us wouldn’t change the fact that we knew.
“Gay boys are my jam,” Ghaz continued. “My ex and I got along so much better after he came out.”
After a moment of silence, we started laughing. I barely knew Umar and Ghaz, but it gave me pleasure to hear them laugh, to see Ghaz link arms with him like they were already the best of friends.
“You know,” she said, “I think this is the beginning of something beautiful. There’s a diner across the street. Let’s get some crappy coffee and apple pie à la mode?”
Umar hesitated. “I’ve already been gone awhile.”
“This thing is going until midnight at least. Come on, a half hour tops. Trust me, it’ll be the best decision you’ve ever made, and if it’s not, at least you got to eat pie!”
He didn’t protest as she grabbed his wrist and led him away. How could he? Ghaz’s exuberance could wash over you like a tidal wave, sweeping everything, your heart, your laughter, occasionally your better judgment, out to glorious sea.
But she hadn’t grabbed my wrist, and so I stayed behind, uncertain, wondering if I should remind her I still had her dupatta.
A few cars later, Ghazala spun around, her lengha elegantly twirling.
“Mariam!” she cried. “What are you waiting for?”
Hiking my sari to my knees, I dashed forward to join them.
Nine
WE HAD DIFFERENT METHODS of dealing with the adrenaline spike that followed Ghaz’s successful jailbreak. Umar drove fast, Ghaz lay in the back seat, kicking her feet against the roof and releasing howls of glee, while I kept my eyes closed and my palms braced against the glove compartment, waiting for Umar to feel we were far enough from danger to slow the hell down.
