Laughing All the Way to the Mosque

by Zarqa Nawaz

  “Nice choice,” said the owner as he put my outfit in a bag. “Pink works well with your skin tone.” Only in a halal meat shop will you get fashion advice from the butcher.

  “Thank you,” I replied, adding a few bangles to my purchase. “I feel I’m forgetting something though.”

  “Sometimes people come here for meat.” Meat! Yes! This man was a genius.

  “Do you carry boneless, skinless chicken thighs?” I asked confidently, hoping that my voice alone could conjure up these rare pieces of meat.

  “What do you need them for?” he asked.

  “To fill potholes,” I quipped.

  The owner just stared at me. I felt that Brian would have appreciated my sense of humour.

  “I’m making butter chicken for Eid,” I told him. “I’m having an open house.”

  “We only carry the boneless, skinless thighs in a fifty-pound box.”

  “That’s perfect. That exactly how much meat I need.” I didn’t know if it was, but it sounded like a lot, which was more than I currently had.

  “You sure? It’s normally a restaurant special order. How many people are coming?”

  “Over a hundred. It’s for the whole community. I’ve asked everyone I’ve met to come over, even people I don’t know very well.” The owner continued to stare at me. I realized he must wonder why he didn’t count as somebody I hardly knew.

  “Would you like to come?” I asked. “Here’s my address.” I scrawled it on a piece of paper.

  After getting directions to my house, the owner sold me the box of meat for the wholesale restaurant price of $220. It was an Eid miracle.

  I came home and showed Sami the hot-pink shalwar kameez.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “Is it edible?” asked Sami. I ignored him and put out the meat to defrost.

  The next morning, I set to work. I tossed the garlic, ginger and onions into the blender. Inspired, I set aside the mortar and pestle, and instead pulsed the spices in my coffee grinder. Like a miracle, they were perfectly crushed. I was going to be fine.

  I marinated my meat in a mixture of yogourt, cumin, coriander, black pepper, lemon pepper, paprika, garlic and ginger.

  The next day, I took out the marinated pieces, started the barbecue and balanced the meat on the wobbly grills.

  Once the meat cooled, I chopped it into bite-size pieces and then made the curry, mixing the spices, onions, ginger and garlic and then adding the meat. Now for the delicious fat—cashew butter, regular butter and whipping cream—and a few teaspoons of sugar. My stomach was growling like crazy. This was going to be great.

  “Can you make curry chickpeas too?” asked Zayn. They were his favourite. I couldn’t say no.

  I opened five cans of chickpeas and emptied them into another pot while cooking the butter chicken. The key to curry chickpeas is to add gravy from the chicken to the chickpeas to make it taste richer, and then to throw in a little fresh tamarind. Technically, you’re supposed to push the brown thick substance through a sieve to separate the sour, thick juices from the pulp, but I was in too much of a rush so I threw in chunks of tamarind instead.

  “There are brown lumps rising up in your chickpeas,” said Maysa.

  “I can take those out,” I said and scooped them up with my strainer.

  I grew cocky with my success with the chicken and chickpeas; I tried to make curry meatballs the next day. Maysa helped me shape the meatballs and I cooked them, but in my haste I had overspiced the ground beef and the meatballs were too salty and pungent with spices.

  “My throat burns,” said Maysa.

  My mother-in-law, the wise sage, had me add potatoes and boiled eggs to the meatball pot to absorb the extra salt and spices. The dish was tolerable if you didn’t sop up too much of the gravy. I surveyed my new mountain of food. Sami stood beside me and for the first time looked impressed.

  “Good job,” he said.

  “And you doubted me,” I replied smugly.

  “Mama, can I invite the guy who’s pruning our tree?” asked Zayn.

  “Of course you can. See, our kids will always remember this,” I told Sami. “A mother who can cook for her entire community.”

  “He says he’s vegetarian,” said Zayn, coming back in. I looked at my meat-based and meat-infected food. Zayn looked at me expectantly.

  “I’ll cook a vegetarian dish,” I told Zayn.

  “You don’t have to do this,” said Sami.

  “Yes, she does,” said Zayn. “I fasted a whole month and I deserve a party.”

  “Plus, it’s tradition,” I said.

  “Not really,” replied Sami, and went out to make sure the local soccer stadium was ready for the Eid prayers. It was the largest open space in the city. I waited till he left and then phoned my mother-in-law.

  “Make curry French-cut green beans,” she said. “It’s easy.”

  French-cut green beans come frozen in plastic bags. I bought ten. As I cooked them in curry spices, the phone rang. It was my friend Ruby.

  “There’s a sale on chafing dishes at the local co-op,” she said. “You need to buy at least five.”

  “Why do I need those?” I asked.

  “You have too much food to just put out,” she said. “It’ll keep getting cold and you can’t keep warming stuff up in the microwave.” She was right. We planned a trip together to pick up the food warmers. When I hung up the phone, I realized I had lost track of time. The green beans on the stove had transformed from a bright green bundle into a swampy brown mess.

  “That’s not an appetizing colour,” said Maysa as she inspected the food. I called my mother-in-law immediately.

  “Chop up red bell peppers and add them to the green beans,” she said. “It’ll make them brighter. And put in a cup of pine nuts.”

  I did as I was told and the vegetables perked up. The tree pruner had his food. I could relax. Eid was in two days but I felt like I had it under control.

  In the evening, Sami came home.

  “Where’s all the food?” he asked, looking at the huge mess in the kitchen.

  “In the backyard,” I replied. It was September and we were having a cold snap, so the backyard worked perfectly as cold storage, since there wasn’t enough room in the fridge for all the food.

  “Don’t worry, animals don’t like curry,” I told Sami.

  “That’s not what I’m worried about,” he replied. “But now that you mention it, that could be a problem too.”

  Faeeza came over to retrieve a cooking pot that she had loaned me.

  “Do you remember that one year when you left all the food for your dinner party outside?” she asked.

  “Sure, it was winter,” I said. “Everything stayed cold.”

  “We had a few days where it got warmer.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Your food melted and refroze several times,” she said.

  “You still served that food?” asked Sami incredulously.

  “No one died,” I replied.

  “That’s your litmus test for a good dinner party?” asked Sami.

  “I only ate what I brought,” said Faeeza. I assured both of them that according to the weather forecast, there weren’t any warm days or nights coming up.

  “Saudi Arabia just declared Eid for tomorrow,” said Sami, checking his email.

  “What?” I yelled. “Ramadan is supposed to be thirty days!”

  I should have known better.

  Ramadan can last either twenty-nine or thirty days, depending on when the new moon is sighted to signal the end of the month and the beginning of a new one. We aren’t content with having a shifting date—we also argue ferociously about how to determine what constitutes a new moon. There are two sides to the debate: those who would calculate the birth of the new moon using relative angles of the horizon, and those who argue that we must use the naked eye, as the Prophet would have done. But then the argument gets mired in where the moon is being sighted. Is the moon sighted loc
ally (how you define “locally” is another debate) or do we go with the first sighting globally? And which council of Muslims determines the validity of the sighting? Both methods are religiously valid, and since we don’t have a pope or central authority, each year we rehash the familiar arguments. And each year, there’s confusion about when to begin Ramadan and when to end it. So sometimes you’ll have two or three Eids in one community, depending on how divisive things get.

  Most Muslims agree that the problem, as usual, is Saudi Arabia. The Saudis declare Eid regardless of calculation. They’re kind of like the Americans when it comes to the moon: They believe everyone should just follow them. This year, they’d screwed me up. I phoned my friend Zabiba.

  “I will do this only for you and no one else,” she said. I brought over my extra ground beef, onions and cilantro—enough for a hundred samosas.

  Ruby agreed to pick up the chafing dishes for me. Faeeza took a few things home to her fridge to keep them safe. Sami and the kids went on a cleaning marathon. I had planned to use the next day to sort out the house but now we had just lost twenty-four hours. Zayn had to call his friends who didn’t know Eid was tomorrow because Muslims hadn’t known either until a few hours before.

  After the morning Eid prayers, our family rushed home to set up the food. I filled the chafing dishes with boiling water and lit two cans of fuel under each. I watched the stream of people come through the door, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Even my children’s teachers came. Mr. Lloyd, Maysa’s physics teacher, arrived with his family. He sat with a group of Muslim men and asked an innocent question.

  “So why do Muslims insist on seeing the moon, when we can calculate its birth?” He inadvertently started a violent conversation. I made a mental note to give white people topics to avoid on Eid. We mixed up the men and women and Muslims and non-Muslims. No one seemed to mind.

  In my Eid panic, I had forgotten to make dessert, but people brought lots of sweet things as hostess gifts. I had also forgotten about tea and coffee, but Faeeza and Ruby, veterans of my botched dinner parties, boiled water in a large pot and went next door for the cream and sugar. They knew me by now. Maysa ran the dishwasher a couple of times since we were using real cutlery and dishes. (I had accidentally abandoned the disposable ones in my rush out of Walmart. I told myself I was being environmentally friendly.) The kids were busy serving friends and family. Against all odds, they were able to hang out with all the people that mattered in their lives—and some that didn’t.

  As I watched people eat food that I had cooked and not choke and throw it in my face, I felt a sense of pride. Our house was packed to the gills with people who didn’t have enough space to sit, partly because I had forgotten to get extra chairs, but they sat on the staircase all the way up, and in the bedrooms. It was a sort of controlled chaos. I had created a tradition that was only a year old but I had to start somewhere. My mother-in-law came up to me.

  “You did well,” she said. “I know it wasn’t easy.”

  “Thank you for all your help,” I replied, grateful beyond words. “I couldn’t have done it without you. You’re the only one who had faith in me.”

  “Of course I did. It was self-serving. I am now officially retiring from Eid dinners because you can do it.”

  I could do it. Sort of. I had no idea when the next Eid was but it didn’t matter. Right now I just wanted to bask in my semi-chaotic glory.

  After the endless parade of people finally left our home around 1 a.m., I lay on the couch while Sami rubbed my aching legs, which were sadly still hairy.

  “You did it,” he said a little incredulously.

  “And you doubted me.”

  “Yep,” he said. “But you have a way of being resourceful.”

  “Your mom was a huge help.” I looked at the pile of hostess gifts in the corner. Sami opened one. It was a prayer alarm clock. I got up and quickly pulled a large cardboard box from the storage cupboard. I put the alarm clock in it along with other tacky gifts that we had received.

  “Hey, a very nice man from the halal meat store gave that to us,” said Sami. “He said you were staring at it a lot in his shop.”

  “Only in hatred,” I replied. “I give all that stuff to the props department of Little Mosque. They use it to decorate the fake mosque and the fake Muslim homes.”

  “Is that where Aunt Nazneen’s gift from Bangladesh went? I can’t find it anywhere.” It was a framed picture with bamboo pieces spelling out “Allah” in Arabic.

  “It’s hanging on the wall in Baber’s house,” I replied. “She’ll never notice.”

  “I hope not.”

  “I want to do this again for next Eid. One day, in the future, my children will tell their grandchildren, ‘Our mom cooked Eid dinner from scratch without any casualties.’”

  “Except for the barbecue,” said Sami nostalgically.

  “Sorry about that,” I said. “We’ll get it fixed. But I promise to be totally prepared in the future. When is Eid next year?”

  “Google it,” replied Sami.

  Dying, Muslim-Style

  I learned about death from a mouse.

  One January I was cleaning out the storage room in the basement when I saw tiny droppings. In the freezing cold Saskatchewan winter, a mouse had found refuge in our basement and had survived on a forgotten bag of chocolate coins.

  “That was dumb,” I chastised myself for forgetting about the candy tucked in amongst the Eid supplies.

  The mouse had to go. I figured if I cut off her supply of chocolate, she would move on to more fruitful pastures somewhere else. It worked. The droppings disappeared. A few days later, I noticed droppings in the kitchen upstairs. With four kids leaving their own food droppings, the mouse had hit pay dirt. Her biggest problem was whether she would die of diabetes or a heart attack.

  Gross, I thought as I swept away the mess. My sister-in-law Sabreena told me to get glue traps—they were effective, with the caveat being the mouse would still be alive when she stuck fast to her gluey grave. I was fine with that—I could handle a mouse. And there was no way I’d catch her before Sami got home from his shift that night.

  As I watched TV in the living room after the kids had gone to bed, I heard a muffled squeaking sound coming from the kitchen. It couldn’t be. I really hadn’t thought the trap would work, but now that it had, I was panicked. As I slowly opened the cupboard door, I could make out a mouse shape on the pad before I screamed and ran back to the couch. I called Sami at work.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, concerned. “You’re out of breath.”

  “Can you do me a favour when you come home from work later?”

  “I’ll be pretty late, but sure. Do we need some milk?”

  “No, there’s a mouse caught in a trap in the cupboard,” I said. “I want you to kill her.”

  I would have made a terrible assassin, outsourcing the dirty work to others. But Sami knew I was anxious to get that mouse out of our home. I had read about all the diseases a mouse carries, and as cute as she was, she had to go.

  The next morning at breakfast, as I was pulling a container of milk out of the fridge, I asked Sami how he had killed the mouse.

  “I just took the trap, put it in a plastic bag and threw it in the garbage can outside,” he said. “It was minus forty, so the mouse wouldn’t have lived long.”

  As the horror of what he said seeped in, I felt a little dizzy. I forgot about the milk and sunk slowly into a chair, speechless. This was my first experience with death and I had botched it completely. I hadn’t seen my mouse through till the end. She had died alone and afraid and very, very cold, all because I had wimped out. My mouse had had a horrible death and I was to blame.

  “But you could have killed her first,” I said, trying to keep the trembling out of my voice.

  “I was tired,” said Sami. “It was 2 a.m. and I wasn’t in the mood to look for a two-by-four to smack a mouse on the head.”

  I was pretty sure that mouse murder wasn’
t an actual crime, so there was no point in calling 9-1-1. And why was I blaming poor Sami when I had set the whole thing in motion in the first place? I had chickened out on death. But I learned a valuable lesson that day: Death was scary and final and needed to be treated with respect—and a two-by-four when needed.

  The memory of the mouse slowly started to fade, only to be replaced by a morbid fascination with death rituals for humans. A few months later, I attended a funeral with Sami and my friends Faeeza and Ruby. We sat hushed in the Victoria Avenue Funeral Home’s pew-like seats. It almost felt like a church as I closed my eyes and listened to Dr. Muhammad Musa’s son give a short talk about his father. This was the first Muslim eulogy I’d ever heard. We pop our dead bodies into the ground before they even have a chance to get cold, so we don’t get much chance to put pen to paper. But Dr. Musa’s son had managed to write a few words, and they were lovely.

  I turned to Faeeza. “Can I give your eulogy when you die?”

  “I’m not dying in Regina,” she replied quickly.

  “That’s the perfect opening sentence: ‘Faeeza Moolla said she would never die in Regina, Saskatchewan, and yet here we are today.’” I needed to write that down quickly before I forgot. God only knew I wouldn’t get enough time after she was dead. I pulled out a pen from my purse and scrawled my sentiment on the back of a Safeway receipt.

  Ruby, also from South Africa, thought it was time for Faeeza to accept her fate. Regina had become her permanent home now too.

  “If we die here, we have to be buried here,” she told Faeeza.

  The old Muslim rulebook has pretty firm dictates on death: You die in Vegas, you get buried in Vegas (although you may want to leave a note explaining what you were doing in Vegas to your conservative Muslim relatives). And if someone you love dies, you’d better move quickly—Muslims do not wait for far-flung relatives to show up before holding a loved one’s funeral. That one sticks a bit for me. I understand the need to bury as soon as possible, but sometimes I think this practice is taken too literally.