by Sheba Karim
“You know, I’ve never been to New York,” she told us.
“Oh, you gotta go,” Ghaz said.
“I know, sweetheart. It’s on my bucket list.”
“What else is on your bucket list?” Umar asked.
“Well, let’s see.” She began counting on her fingers. “The Grand Canyon. One of those Caribbean cruises where you can watch the world go by and drink all day by the pool. I’ve always wanted to try fly-fishing, ever since I saw A River Runs Through It. Oh, and going to one of the honky-tonks in Nashville and riding the mechanical bull. I’ve come close to doing it, but I get so nervous. I don’t know why—the guys who control the bull usually throw the men off but are nicer to the ladies.”
“You probably need to get drunk first,” Ghaz suggested.
She grinned. “Believe me, when I do it, I’ll have to ask my friends to take a video because I’ll be so drunk I won’t remember! I’m so old I just hope I don’t fall and break my hip.”
“You don’t look old,” I said. She didn’t—mid-forties, maybe. My mother’s age.
“Oh, bless your heart,” she said. “I’ve got three grandchildren.”
“No way,” Umar said.
“I think the Lord sent y’all in here to boost my ego today!” she said. “Anyway, enjoy your meal. Emma will be over shortly to take y’alls order.”
“I love her,” Umar said after she’d walked away.
“I know, she’s so warm and fuzzy,” I said.
Ghaz held up the menu. “Fried chicken, chicken-fried steak, fried okra, fried pickles, fried shrimp, fried catfish. This is why people in the South are so overweight,” she said, switching to Urdu.
“Eat local,” Umar reminded her.
It was true that everyone in the restaurant, except the teenagers who’d already left, were not exactly the picture of health.
The dining experience went swiftly downhill after Sylvia. Our server Emma was sullen and curt. Umar’s fried chicken was too dry, the gravy too salty, Ghaz’s fried shrimp was mostly bread with a hint of shrimp, my green salad a bed of wilted iceberg. Ghaz pronounced her coffee undrinkable. Umar began to eye what little remained of the kid’s Big Mac.
Scary camouflage man finished all his fries. The blond kid did, too, and ordered a gloppy soft-serve hot fudge sundae.
When we walked up to pay at the register and Sylvia asked us how we liked the food, we lied and told her it was delicious.
“My favorite is the fried catfish,” she told us. “Have y’all ever had catfish?”
“I have,” Umar said. “It’s good.”
“Not pretty to look at, but darn good to eat,” she declared.
“Like eels,” Ghaz said.
“I’ve never tried eel.”
“They’re delicious,” Ghaz told her.
“Well, I’ll have to add that to my bucket list, then. Y’all have a lovely trip. Come back again one day. Maybe by then I’ll have ridden that bull.”
We left a big tip, partly because of Sylvia, partly to leave a good impression on behalf of all desi people.
“God, I’m so full,” Ghaz announced as we stepped outside. “Fried foods always make me feel a little sick.”
“Dude, you’re in the wrong part of the country then,” Umar said.
Ghaz made a barf face. “I have to do yoga.”
“What, now?” I said. “It’s like a hundred degrees.”
“Hot yoga, baby. Extended triangle pose is good for digestion. Pop the trunk.”
Most people would have done their triangle discreetly, but not Ghaz. Instead she unrolled the fuchsia yoga mat she’d bought in Philly right along the side of this country road in small town Tennessee, because Ghaz always had be a little performative. After centering herself in mountain pose, she spread her legs apart and twisted toward the street, one arm reaching toward the sky.
A pickup passed. The driver’s tanned arm hung out the window, his fingers drumming against the door to a country song, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips. Seeing Ghaz, he slowed down to stare.
“I’m sure this is a first for this town,” Umar said.
I opened the car door. “Let’s sit in the AC. I’m sweating.”
We kept an eye on Ghaz in the rearview mirror. After she finished with one side, she rose gracefully, rested again in mountain pose, switched feet, and bent forward from her lithe waist, twisting to face the parked cars.
“What the fuck!” she yelled.
We swiveled in our seats. Ghaz was standing up, hands on hips, her face contorted with anger. There was no one else around, nothing we could see that might cause such alarm.
“Do you think she’s being dramatic?” Umar asked.
“We’ll find out,” I said. “She’s walking back to the car.”
Except instead of joining us inside, she lifted the trunk, took out the softball bat and ran.
We got out, rushed toward her. She was at the end of the row of parked cars, waving the softball bat at a silver pickup truck like she might smash the bumper.
“Ghaz!” I cried.
As soon as she heard me, she stepped back, dropped the bat on the ground, and covered her face with her hands. Her whole body was shaking. I comforted her as Umar picked up the bat, holding it safely out of her reach.
“What is it?” I asked, rubbing her back. “What happened?”
“Look at the back of the truck,” she sniffed.
TITAN, it said in bold letters. My eyes moved downward, and I understood.
There, below on the bumper, a sticker.
Guns Don’t Kill People, Muslims Do
“Oh, man,” I said.
“Okay, that’s frigging disgusting,” Umar said. “It must be scary camouflage man’s truck. But why the hell did you pick up the bat? Were you trying to get us all arrested—or killed? That’s not the way to handle things.”
“Umar, give her a break; she didn’t actually do anything,” I said.
Ghaz wiped her eyes. “No, he’s right. It’s not the way to handle things.”
She started running, this time toward the restaurant.
“What are you doing?” I yelled, chasing after her and grabbing her arm. “You realize scary camouflage man probably has a gun!”
“Yeah, we are not going back in there,” Umar said.
“Screw him and his gun!” Ghaz cried, spit spraying from her lips. “He needs to know how hurtful that is!”
“Ghaz, please,” I pleaded. “Nothing good will come out of this.”
She yanked her arm away and dashed into the restaurant.
This time, when we entered, everyone looked up and kept on looking.
“Who owns the silver Titan pickup truck?” Ghaz cried, chest heaving.
Umar and I watched scary camouflage man, bracing for him to stand up and reveal his weapon of death. I could hear Umar praying under his breath, the first Quranic sura my grandmother taught me, and the only one I still remembered.
Alhamdu lillahi rabb ilalameen . . .
But scary camouflage man said nothing, did nothing, only watched us over his ketchup-streaked plate.
Sylvia stepped forward, wiping her hands with a towel.
“It’s mine,” she said.
No.
“Yours?” Ghaz asked.
“Yes. Everything all right, sweetheart?” she continued.
Sylvia. Warm, fuzzy, grandma Sylvia.
Maybe she’d borrowed the truck from a racist friend.
“That’s . . . your truck?” Ghaz said.
“Yes, darlin’. What’s the matter?” Sylvia asked with such concern, though surely by now she’d figured it out. What if we’d walked in wearing headscarves and skullcaps? Would she have greeted us with sweetheart then?
“Your bumper sticker,” Ghaz said.
Sylvia neatly folded the hand towel, setting it down gently on a table before stepping forward. “But it’s not meant for you, dear.”
“But I’m Muslim,” Ghaz said. “We’re Muslim
.”
After Ghaz dropped the M bomb, there was a moment of uncomfortable silence, and then the blond kid said, “Daddy, you said Muslims are dirty. They don’t look dirty.”
“Shut your mouth, boy.” The father reached over and smacked the kid across the head.
“You seem like good people,” Sylvia said.
“So are most Muslims,” Ghaz replied.
“I’m sure some are,” Sylvia said. “I don’t have a problem with Muslims personally. It’s the religion that’s the problem.”
She said this as though it made perfect, logical sense.
“It doesn’t fit in with the values of this country,” she continued. “I’m not a racist. I believe anyone can be a good American—black, brown, yellow, blue—as long as they have American values. Now, you don’t have to be Christian to live here, but you have to understand this is a Christian nation, and everything that means.”
Ghaz made this crazy noise like a cat dying.
Even though I knew there was no point in arguing, that you could respond to her in a hundred different ways, point out her logical fallacies, offer facts and statistics, appeal to her humanity, and none of her uninformed, bigoted beliefs would change, I couldn’t stay quiet.
“But what you’re saying is racist!” I exclaimed.
“She’s right,” Umar chimed in.
There was a squeaky noise behind us. I turned to see scary camouflage man had stood up, a frown on his square-jawed face. I thought he’d say something, but instead he walked out of the restaurant.
Sylvia’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Is it right to kill—”
“Please, stop,” I interrupted her. “We came in to tell you we were hurt by your bumper sticker, not to get into a debate. Guys, let’s go.”
As we headed to the door, Ghaz turned around. “You know what are American values? Tolerance and secularism.”
I pushed her out the door before Sylvia could reply. What we needed to do at this point was get the hell out of there, but when I opened my purse I couldn’t find the car keys.
“No, no, no,” I said.
“Please tell me you didn’t lose them,” Umar begged.
“They were in here—”
“Oh my God, you guys,” Ghaz said. “He’s coming.”
Scary camouflage man was heading toward us. We all froze, and then Ghaz and I stepped forward to shield Umar, but he pushed his way to stand between us, resuming his whisper-prayer.
As far as I could tell, scary camouflage man’s hands were empty. Surely this guy couldn’t be crazy enough to cold-bloodedly shoot us in broad daylight.
Please don’t let him be crazy enough to shoot us in broad daylight.
“No need to worry,” scary camouflage man said, his gruff voice matching his face. “I just wanted you to know not everyone ’round here thinks like that. I served in the army for twelve years, and I know that truth is way more complicated than what can fit on a bumper sticker.”
Umar’s sigh of relief was embarrassingly audible.
“Thank you,” Ghaz said.
Scary camouflage man nodded. “Y’all take care,” he said, and walked away.
When I opened my purse again my less-panicked eyes immediately spotted my keys at the bottom.
None of us spoke until we got back on I-40. If there was a bright side to this, I wasn’t so scared of the speeding trucks anymore; they seemed a lot less dangerous than humans.
“We don’t want to be stereotyped, but I guess we stereotyped camouflage man,” Umar said.
“Yup,” I agreed. “I hope he wasn’t too offended.”
“Sylvia seemed so nice,” Ghaz said.
“It’s not like racist people snarl all the time and have horns on their heads,” I replied. “Like she said herself, she doesn’t even consider herself racist.”
“True. But seriously, Ghaz, why the softball bat?” Umar demanded. “Were you trying out for a Beyoncé video? I can’t get arrested! And I definitely don’t want to get arrested in a small town in the most Islamophobic state in America.”
“I know. When I saw the bumper sticker, I got so frigging angry. Come on—I was never actually going to hit the car, or anything else for that matter.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I mean, it’s not fine, but you know. Next time you get that angry, take a walk. Without any sports equipment.”
“Yeah,” Umar said. “What happened to kill ’em with kindness?”
“Do you think we should have argued with her more?” she asked.
“No point,” I said. “We wouldn’t have changed her mind.”
I didn’t belong to the Muslim Student Association at Swat, but Doug and I and a few friends had gone with them to Berks County to counterprotest a group that was opposed to settling Syrian refugees. The signs they waved were as disgusting as Sylvia’s bumper sticker. They’d shouted things like “Terrorists go home!” “Stop sharia now!” They’d also taunted members of our group, asking one girl in hijab if her father gave her permission to be outside, and another girl in hijab, who was black, if she wore it to cover her kinky-ass hair. Of the protests I’d been to, it was the ugliest by far. I cried in Doug’s arms that night, for the first and last time.
We turned quiet again, Ghaz holding child’s pose in the back seat, Umar’s forehead pressed to the window. I knew that he was having a one-sided argument with Sylvia inside his head, telling her all the reasons she was wrong, a mental exercise that would bring him no relief because he’d never see her again, she’d never apologize, there would be no resolution.
Something needed to be done.
I took the next exit, pulled into a McDonald’s, and parked in an empty corner of the lot.
“What are we doing?” Ghaz asked.
“I don’t think I can eat,” Umar said.
“We’re going to scream,” I said. “All of us.”
“What?”
I explained how this climate change scientist had given a talk at Swat, and someone had asked him how he personally dealt with the fact that no matter how many studies came out, the deniers kept denying and ecological disaster loomed ever closer, and he said he screamed. It was some primal therapy thing, and at the end of the Q&A he had us all do it, close our eyes and scream and scream, and afterward I felt lighter, because when do you ever scream, like really really scream?
“So you want us all to scream to help us process what happened with Grandma Bigot?” Umar said, peeling his forehead from the window.
“Yup.”
“It’s not so simple,” Ghaz objected.
“I’m not claiming it’ll fix anything,” I said. “Only that it’ll help.”
“Ah, why the hell not? I’m down,” she said. “Let’s Edvard Munch it up in here.”
“Good. Everyone close their eyes,” I said. “Now, all that anger, all that frustration, all that hurt and fear, all the stuff that’s riding on the surface but also the things you keep way underneath, all of it, let it rise up and let it all go, from the deepest darkest depths, push it all out. Let the scream start from your belly, not your throat. Don’t hold back. Ready? One, two, three.”
Ghaz and I got into it right away. Umar’s scream was weak at first, but listening to Ghaz and me unleash the beast compelled him to do the same, and soon the entire car was reverberating with the resounding pain of Grandma Bigot and having your parents lock you in your room and deadbeat dads and homophobic dads and lost loves and the rising temperatures of oceans and islands of floating trash, of the trials of being young and trying to find your place in such a screwed-up world. If anyone else heard, I bet they understood, because one of life’s sad truths is that not all of us receive love but every single one of us knows pain. After a few minutes, we fell back, spent, breathless.
“I do feel better,” Umar said. His window was foggy from his breath, and he had tears in his eyes. “Well, less mad and more sad.”
“That was a good idea, Mars,” Ghaz said. “I love you guys.”
“I l
ove you, too,” I said. “And Ghaz, please sit up and put on your seat belt. It’s a four-lane highway now, in case y’all haven’t noticed.”
Twenty-Two
GHAZ HAD FOUND US a one-bedroom Airbnb in Nashville close to Vanderbilt University, a popular spot for off-campus housing, judging from the small, boxy apartment windows displaying Vanderbilt paraphernalia, the tiny patios decorated with plastic outdoor chairs and charcoal kettle grills, beer cans sticking out of the grass. Our apartment was small, the bedroom separated from the living room by a sliding glass door, and the décor was sparse, but so were our needs. In the kitchen was a sign that said I Believe in Nashville, with red-and-white stripes and a blue center circle with three stars in it.
“That’s not the Confederate flag, is it?” I said.
“No, silly. The Confederate flag has an X,” Ghaz said, pulling up a photo on Umar’s phone. “That’s probably the Tennessee flag or something. Do you really think there’d be a Confederate flag hanging in the kitchen of an Airbnb?”
“I would hope not,” I said. “But after a day like today . . .”
“Wait till tomorrow,” Ghaz said. “Family reunion of a lifetime.”
“At least Hannah Rae Tipple can’t be that racist, if she married my dad,” I said.
“It’s so weird that you have a stepmother,” Umar said.
“Maybe she’ll be like Julia Roberts,” Ghaz offered.
“What?” I said.
Ghaz rolled her eyes. “Stepmom? You really need to watch more movies. Bollywood, Hollywood—you’re missing out on entire cultural conversations.”
“Have you seen any of the Harry Potter movies yet?” Umar asked, smacking his forehead when I replied in the negative.
Stepmother. A woman named Hannah Rae Tipple was my stepmother.
The road trip effect was starting to feel more akin to The Twilight Zone.
I still hadn’t told my mother. We’d been texting, but I’d ignored her call last night, because it felt devious to have a conversation with her and not speak of my quest for my father. But it was equally devious to avoid her. I’d never kept a secret from her, not any that mattered.
I couldn’t meet my father without telling her first.
“Earth to Mars.” Ghaz waved her hands in front of my face. “Return to orbit.”
