American Dervish: A Novel

by Ayad Akhtar

  She pulled away, surprised. “You did? When?”

  “At the hospital. He looked just like how you said he would. He even had the gap between his teeth.”

  “My God, Hayat, what a blessing… ,” she said, her hand on my head.

  “Okay, okay…enough of that,” Father interjected from behind the trunk. “Everybody’s hungry. Let’s get lunch.”

  I smiled at her. She smiled back.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” Father pressed as he marched past us for the front door. “What are we waiting for? Let’s get going.”

  “You’ll tell me later,” Mina said to me quietly once he’d gone inside. “Your father doesn’t want to hear us talking about that…so you’ll tell me later, okay?”

  At lunch there was an argument. The phone rang as we were eating. Mina was sitting closest to it, but she refused to get it. Finally Father did; it was Nathan.

  “No, no, Nate…you’re not interrupting. We’re just having some lunch. She’s right here. I’ll put her on.”

  Father held out the phone to Mina.

  She shook her head.

  Father’s face darkened. He put his palm over the mouthpiece. “What are you doing, Mina?” he asked with a hint of aggression. He didn’t look entirely surprised.

  “Naveed,” Mina pleaded. “Please.”

  “Please? What…You won’t speak to him?”

  “Naveed, please,” Mina insisted. She looked away, resuming her lunch.

  “Unbelievable. Just unbelievable,” Father muttered as he brought the phone back up to his ear. “She’s in the middle of lunch, Nate. I’ll have her call you back. Okay?…I will. Don’t worry… ’Bye.”

  Father slammed the phone back into its holder on the wall.

  “He doesn’t understand,” Father said after a long pause.

  “Not now, Naveed,” Mother said, commanding.

  Father turned to her sharply, suddenly seething. “I’m going to say this once and only once. Don’t you ever tell me what to do or when to do it. Do you understand?”

  Mother recoiled, shocked at his tone.

  “Bhaj,” Mina interjected. “It’s okay…let me handle this.” Mina turned to Father. “Nathan understands. He just doesn’t want to accept it.”

  “Well, help him accept it.”

  “And how do you propose I do that?”

  “By talking to him.”

  “I don’t see the point. We’ve talked enough.” Her tone was cold. Dismissive.

  “Don’t see the point? Two days ago this is a man you were going to marry. Now you don’t see the point of speaking to him? What did he do to deserve that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So tell him that.”

  “I did. I told him it has nothing to do with him. It’s me. But he doesn’t want to accept it.”

  “Who would?!” Father exclaimed, throwing up his hands in frustration. “None of it makes any sense.”

  She wasn’t going to marry him? It was the first I was hearing of this. An effervescence bubbled up inside me.

  “It won’t work,” Mina said. “It can’t work.”

  Father bit his lip, nodding slowly. “Because he’s Jewish?”

  “Not only.”

  “Not only?!”

  “I said not only.”

  “What else?” Father asked as he angrily crumpled up his napkin. “Huh? What else?” His lower lip was glistening with saliva.

  Mina held his gaze, then calmly looked down at her plate and broke off a piece of bread, using it to scoop a morsel of meat into her mouth.

  “What else, I said!” Father shouted. He looked over at me, glaring, and my sudden happiness gave way to alarm as the conflict grew.

  “Why are you raising your voice?!” Mother burst out. “Everyone is worried! You’re not the only one. One would think you were the one calling off a marriage!”

  Father turned to Mother, and for a second, I thought he was going to hit her. “That is an option I should have taken more seriously.” He stood up abruptly, addressing Mina. “For my sake, for the sake of the hospitality I’ve extended you—​at least you could have the dignity to tell the man that you won’t speak to him because he’s a Jew. Please tell him you would rather have him wiped off the face of the planet like every other mindless Muslim than say another word to him!”

  Father held her gaze. And though Mina was clearly reluctant, Father’s insistence forced a response. “He’ll never be one of us,” she said quietly. “And I’m the only one who doesn’t care. But that doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter that I don’t care. I’m not the one that matters.”

  “Who matters?” Father asked, glancing at me again.

  “Everybody else,” Mina replied. Father looked away. After a long silence, Mina added: “I think it’s best I leave.”

  Father exploded: “Did I say that? Is that what I said? You’ve been here more than a year! I welcomed you. You’ve been my family! Muneer’s never been so happy! I’ve never been so happy! Neither has the boy! This house has been your house! I gave you my brother!…”

  There was a pause.

  “If only he had been your brother,” Mina muttered to herself, but still loud enough for us to hear.

  Father stood frozen, his face suddenly wearing a pained, vulnerable look.

  Mina held his gaze. “I’m sorry, Naveed,” she finally said.

  The phone rang intermittently through the afternoon and evening that followed. No one picked it up. Finally, Mother took it off the hook.

  Father wasn’t home for dinner. Mother put together a couple of plates of leftovers for Imran and me, and sat us before the television before disappearing upstairs into the dining room to continue a discussion with Mina that had lasted most of the day already. I didn’t see Mina again until that night, when she came into my room to tuck me in. She looked exhausted. “Tell me your dream, behta,” she said with a weary smile as she settled in beside me.

  I told her about the woman in the veil chasing me and how the Prophet saved me by taking me to a mosque in the mountains where he asked me to lead the prayer. Beyond this, I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to tell her about the figures coming to life, or about the fact that I’d gotten bored and left.

  “What else happened?” she asked.

  “Nothing, really,” I said.

  “It’s a sign, behta,” she said after a pause. “You’re only the second person I’ve ever known to see the Prophet in a dream.”

  “A sign?”

  “You’ve been chosen. You’re going to be a leader. A leader of our people,” she said flatly. I nodded. I knew she wouldn’t have said this if I had told her the rest.

  Mina reached out and touched my cast. Her eyes had sunk deep into the dark circles that were opening around them; the paste on her face was fading, and underneath it, the skin around her left eye was blue-black and swollen from where Mother had hit her. She looked so sad. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about this.”

  “You already said you were sorry, Auntie.”

  “I know. And I really am.” She paused. “How is your arm feeling?”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you still have pain?”

  I nodded. The dull ache along the bone was a constant.

  “I feel terrible about it.” She paused again. “I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you in the hospital.”

  “You sent me those flowers.”

  Mina smiled. “You liked them?”

  “They were beautiful,” I said.

  I remembered how they had looked in that special light I’d seen after the operation. I wanted to tell her about that light. But before I could, Mina started to speak:

  “I want you to know something, Hayat…What you told Imran was wrong. It was wrong for me to do what I did. It was wrong for me to hit you. But it was wrong for you to say what you said. It’s not what is written in the Quran.”

  “Yes it is, Auntie…it says it in—”

  She cut me off: “You’
re too young to understand some things. It was my mistake not being careful.” Her tone was brusque, impatient. “The Quran says many things. And some you will not understand until you’re older.”

  I looked away.

  “Look at me when I am speaking to you, Hayat,” Mina insisted, her finger leading my chin back to face her. It occurred to me that this—and not the dream of the Prophet—was the whole reason she had come to talk to me in the first place. “Nathan never did anything to you. He was only good to you, to me, to Imran. To this family. As far as you knew, he had a good heart. He had good intentions. He did not deserve to be treated the way he was treated. He did not deserve for you to say those things about him.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. I was feeling at once ashamed and defiant. I knew looking away from her would make her think she was right.

  “I want you to think about it,” she said. “Okay, behta?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Did you hear me, behta?” she repeated.

  She can’t make me speak, I thought as I stared into her face.

  13

  Acts of Faith

  I would regret most what I did next.

  Though Mina had been so insistent about not speaking to Nathan again, her resolve would not endure. I overheard her talking to Mother about seeing him. And a day later, I saw her on the phone, the cord stretched across the kitchen and out the window, where she sat on the patio, hunched over the receiver into which she tenderly spoke. I knew it was Nathan. And as I stood in the back of the kitchen, watching her through the window, something dark and obscure moved through me, like black dye suffusing my veins. I went upstairs to my bookshelf and grabbed the book Nathan had given me earlier that summer. I went out to the garage and threw it into the trash. But seeing that book heaped on the stinking pile of white twist-tie trash bags didn’t make me feel like I wanted. I felt helpless.

  And then I had an idea.

  I went back inside and went upstairs to Mina’s room. My eyes couldn’t move quickly enough along her shelves. And then I found it. The thin tome without a label along its spine. I searched for the page where I recalled seeing the address with Mina’s name from when she was married to Hamed.

  There it was.

  I took the book into my room and sat at my desk. My right arm still in a cast, I copied the address with my left hand. It took a while. As I walked back to Mina’s room to return the book to its place, the blackness in my blood moving, the idea was changing. A letter wouldn’t work. It would be too easy to figure out it was me. And then I suddenly remembered the day Mina had sent word of her flight.

  A telegram.

  I went back to my room thinking: Ten words or less.

  At my desk drawer, I rummaged for the remains of the twenty dollars Father had given me a year ago. I’d spent nine of it, all on candy, and still had something shy of eleven dollars left. I put on my sneakers and went out again to the garage. I had some difficulty getting onto my bike and finding my balance with my cast, but once I did, I pedaled off.

  In the twenty or so minutes it took to ride to the mall, I came to a conclusion. I couldn’t call him a Jew. It would be too easy to guess that I had been the one who’d sent the message. Instead, I would call him a kafr. The word the Quran used so often: “Unbeliever.”

  I set my bike along the bushes outside the mall entrance. Inside, the Western Union was empty. I walked up to the window. Sitting before me was the man with searing blue eyes and the violet stain across his face who’d brought us Mina’s telegram. He was peeling an orange. He looked up.

  “How can I help you?” he asked blankly. I couldn’t tell if he remembered me.

  “I need to send a telegram.”

  “Overseas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here,” he said, wiping his hands on his sleeve and then pushing a form through the small opening at the bottom of the window. “Fill it out and bring it back. Flat rate of six dollars for ten words or less. Every word after that is another seventy cents. Punctuation counts.”

  “Okay.”

  I moved off to the side and started to fill out the form. I wrote out the message carefully, taking the time to make sure all the letters were legible:

  MINA MARRYING A KAFR STOP HIS NAME IS NATHAN

  When I was finished with that, I pulled out the piece of paper with the Karachi address on it and filled out the space for the addressee:

  Hamed Suhail

  Dawes Lines Rd 14

  Karachi, Pakistan

  There was another box under it for the sender’s information. I hadn’t thought of this. I considered making up a name and an address, but then I realized I didn’t know any addresses other than those in the part of town where we lived.

  Something inside me was whispering this wasn’t going to work.

  I looked over at the window and saw the man staring at me as he chewed. “You need help?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Nothing. Just thinking.”

  He nodded and turned away, disappearing. I heard a radio, the static giving way to the faint sound of someone talking.

  I looked about the office. There were torn scraps and crumpled forms littered on the linoleum, piles of dust pushed into the corners. At the end of the counter on the opposite wall was a yellow pages.

  Addresses, I thought.

  I went over to the phone book. Opening it at random, I scanned the page, a red-and-blue advertisement for a Chevrolet dealership catching my eye:

  Seastrom Chevrolet

  2710 Nebraska Avenue

  Milwaukee WI 53215

  I copied the address onto the form, but I still didn’t have a name to put to it. I read the message I’d written out again.

  Kafr.

  I suddenly saw Sonny Buledi in my mind’s eye. The only true kafr I knew.

  I wrote his name in. “Sonny Buledi.” And then I walked back to the window.

  The man with the stain on his face was standing in the open doorway leading to a back office, listening. A strident voice was coming over the radio, speaking of the Lord and Jesus. Then he noticed me. “Done?” he asked, approaching.

  It wasn’t until he was reaching for the form that I felt my first hint of regret. The drabness of the office, the crying out of the voice on the radio, the stain on the man’s face…I suddenly wanted nothing to do with any of it. As the man took hold of the paper, my grip lingered. He pulled. For a moment I thought it might tear. And then I let it go.

  He didn’t seem to notice anything was amiss.

  “Six dollars for this,” he said, reading it over. “With tax, six thirty-one.” I counted out seven dollars, pushing the bills through the opening. “What’s that mean?” he asked, pointing at the message.

  “What?”

  “Kafr?”

  “It means…uh—” I stopped. I wasn’t sure if I should go on.

  “Yeah?”

  “Someone who doesn’t believe in God.”

  The man snickered to himself, disgusted. He looked at me, a frigid light in his blue eyes, and for a moment I felt relieved at the thought that he was going to tell me he couldn’t send it.

  “People like that?” he finally said. “They’ll find out soon enough. When the fires of hell open up and they don’t know what hit ’em.” He looked at me—holding up my form—and faintly smiled. “I’ll get this off for you. Right away.”

  What followed didn’t take long to unfold.

  I have a vague recollection of a ruckus that night, a commotion that woke me briefly. The following morning I found Mother sitting at the kitchen table, grave.

  “You won’t believe it, behta,” she said. “Hamed knows about Nathan. And he’s threatening to take the child back.” Mother shook her head. “I mean, I don’t think there’s any way he can do it…at least not while she’s here in this country…” She looked away. “Oh God,” she sighed.

  I was shocked. This was not at all what I
had in mind.

  “That man called her parents and told them. And then they called here in the middle of the night. ‘Who is Nathan? What is going on?’ Of course she didn’t tell them. Of course, she lied. She said there was no one named Nathan…You know what her father said? That if she ever married a kafr, they would have nothing more to do with her.” Mother paused. “Actually, he said more than that. He said he would come and break every bone in her body. And he’s broken a few of them before.” She paused again, getting up. “Well, now it’s over for sure. That’s that. I don’t know what I was thinking. A fool for fantasy. That’s what I am, behta. Always have been.” She stopped and pointed at me, suddenly. “And it’s something I see in you. Something you have to know about yourself. Fantasies are for fools, Hayat! Fools! Don’t be a fool!” She turned away, a perplexed look on her face as she continued, mostly to herself now: “Sonny Buledi? Of all people? Why? How did he even know where to send it?”

  Mother wasn’t looking at me. If she had been, she would have noticed that I was starting to feel very uncomfortable.

  “Where is Mina-Auntie now?” I asked after a long pause.

  “Your father took her to see a lawyer this morning. She was in hysterics…you can understand. That bloody man threatened to take her son!” Mother shook her head again, still dumbstruck. “Sonny Buledi…What was he thinking?”

  Mother went to the stove to start breakfast. As she cooked eggs, she repeated the same few details of the story, her telling inflected now with self-recrimination, now with anger, and now with her incredulity that any of these things could have come to pass. As I heard it again and again—that Mina might lose Imran, that her father was going to break her bones—it made me dizzy.

  What had I done?

  Mother tossed a plate of eggs and toast before me but I couldn’t eat. She wasn’t having any of it. “Things are bad enough right now. Don’t make them more difficult for me, Hayat.”

  I ate a few bites. I popped the yolk on my eggs. I moved the food around and made a mess on my plate. She finally let me go.