by Ayad Akhtar
I stopped and gazed at the trees. Where was their comfort? I wondered.
I made my way to the front door. Imran pushed at the doorbell. The curtains were drawn at the front bay windows, and there were no lights on inside. Around back, we peered in at the kitchen window. It was dark there, too. The Gartners’ cat—a Persian with marbled lapis lazuli eyes—was poised on the counter, staring back at us, placid, inscrutable.
We went around back to the set of trees whose massive trunks were capped and bridged by the interlocking boxes of the elaborate tree house some twenty feet above us. Imran turned to me for permission. I nodded. He darted forward, taking hold of the ladder with his small hands, and started to climb. I didn’t move. I watched him. His small shoes squeaked on the ladder’s wet rungs as he rose.
Why had they built a tree house? I wondered. What did they need it for?
Imran disappeared into the entrance cut into the tree house’s floor, his head then appearing through one of the window openings.
“Come on, Hayat,” he said, waving me up.
I lifted my arm, showing him my cast.
“When do you take it off?” he asked with a grimace.
“Day after tomorrow,” I said.
He shrugged and disappeared inside.
I looked about. Trees on the surrounding lawns didn’t look like trees at all. Mostly bare, trunks wet and black in the slate-gray light, they looked like they were made of stone. Even the houses seemed hardened in the chilly drizzle. It was a cold, callous, slippery world, and I was losing the only thing I’d ever loved to it.
15
The Farewell Begins
The wedding was set for the day after Thanksgiving. Mina had been insistent that she wanted a small, discreet ceremony, but Chatha was sparing no expense in marrying his cousin: He and Najat invited more than two hundred and fifty people; he’d booked the opulent chandelier ballroom at the posh Atwater Hotel downtown for the reception; he even flew in a cook from their local village in Pakistan to prepare the meal. When Mina found out about the cook, she and Sunil had their first argument.
She complained to Mother over dinner one night about all the money Ghaleb was spending, and was visibly surprised by Mother’s response.
“Ghaleb and Najat know what he’s been through…You’re a catch. Look at you. They want to show you off. Heal his wounded pride after what that last wife of his did to him… Maybe there’s more wisdom in it than you realize. If it makes him feel stronger to have a big wedding, what’s the problem? They’re footing the bill! Live it up!”
“I don’t want them to think I’m after his money.”
“But you are.” Mother laughed.
“Bhaj. Please. It’s not even his money…”
Mother scrunched up her face. “Have you completely lost your sense of humor?”
Mina shrugged. “You know why I’m doing this. For Imran.”
“Then bite the bullet. It’s not the end of the world.” After a pause, Mother added: “Could be worse. You could be one of four.”
Mina chuckled. “You don’t realize how unbearable Najat really is…”
“The in-laws are always unbearable.”
“But they’re even terrible with Sunil. He’s always complaining about how Ghaleb bosses him around.”
“Ghaleb is paying the bills.”
“Which is nothing to say about what they think of Naveed and you.”
“What do they say about me?”
“That you’re harebrained.”
“Harebrained?” Mother repeated. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Hare as in rabbit?”
“I think.”
“Najat’s the rabbit. Not me.”
“She won’t leave me alone about my skin.”
“Well, there is something wrong with your skin. You’re not eating properly.”
Mina sighed. “I just want to get this all over with and behind me.”
“Harebrained?” Mother repeated again.
“It’s nonsense, bhaj. They can’t understand a woman like you.”
“Like us. You’re the same as me. Probably worse.”
There was a long pause. “You’re right,” Mina finally replied.
I stopped by Mina’s room that night, hoping for a story. I found her sitting in her bed, a book open in her lap, her eyes red and swollen.
“Are you okay, Auntie?”
“Fine, behta,” she replied with a weary shake of the head. “Can you get your auntie some water, please?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
I went down into the kitchen, filled a glass with tap water, then brought it back to her room. She blew her nose into a tissue, tossing it to the floor. I handed her the glass.
“Thank you,” she said quietly. Imran was sleeping in his bed.
“You’re welcome, Auntie. Are you okay?”
Almost at once, tears appeared in her eyes. She reached for another tissue, bringing it to her face. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just something I’m reading.”
“What is it?” I asked, looking down at the open book. It wasn’t in English—it looked like Arabic to me—but it wasn’t the Quran either.
“Jami’s Nafahat.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s about the lives of the great Sufis. I was reading about Kharaqani, and …” She stopped suddenly, choking up again.
“It’s okay, Auntie. You don’t have to tell me.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I want to…Here. Sit down next to me.” I took a place beside her. “I’m going to translate it for you.”
“What language is it, Auntie?”
“Persian.”
“Persian? I didn’t know you could read that.”
“There’s lots of things you don’t know about me, sweetie.”
I was quiet. It had never occurred to me that there might be something more about my beloved Mina than what I already knew of her. That there were things I didn’t know—and might never know—made my heart ache.
“So this is a story about Ansari,” she said, pointing at the page. I noticed she wasn’t wearing the ring she’d had on during Sunil’s visit. “Ansari was one of the great Sufi poets, Hayat. When he was a young man, he had a teacher, a wise old man named Kharaqani. And Ansari learned all about what it meant to be a Sufi from Kharaqani.” She started to translate from the text, slowly: “‘If I had never met Kharaqani,’ he says, ‘I would never know God. From Kharaqani I learned that you can’t judge a Sufi by what he wears. One is not a Sufi because he wears broken clothes, or has a beard or because he carries a prayer mat.
“‘To be a Sufi,’” she continued, “‘means to give up the world and everything in it. To be a Sufi means to depend on nothing, to want nothing, to be nothing. A Sufi is a day that needs no sun, a night that needs no moon, no stars. A Sufi is like the dust on the ground, not the stones that hurt people’s feet when they walk, but the dust that no one knows is even there.’”
Mina started to cry, and this time she didn’t try to stop herself. I reached out and held her. Her bones were hard, with little flesh to pad them. She sobbed quietly into another tissue. “This is what life does to us, behta. It grinds us. Grinds us to dust. The Sufi is just someone who doesn’t fight it. He knows that being ground to nothing is not bad. It’s the way to God.”
I didn’t really understand what she was saying. But as with the tale of the dervish and his orange peels, I wouldn’t soon forget the bizarre pairings of images, days without sun, nights without a moon, God and dust, and, of course, the startling notion that being ground to nothing was the true way to our Lord.
Mina wasn’t eating. For weeks it seemed she subsisted almost entirely on a diet of tea alone. Mother did what she could, often forcing Mina to linger at the dining table once everyone else had finished, trying to get her to nibble a little more at meals she would barely touch anymore. I saw Mother sit beside her, putting forkfuls of ric
e and curry into her best friend’s mouth. But even when Mina took in the nourishment, her body would reject it. More than once, I heard her in the bathroom after dinner, retching. My parents were terribly worried. Father brought home powdered glucose from the lab for her to mix into her tea; Mother took her around to a host of specialists. All the doctors thought Mina’s problem was psychological, and that she needed therapy. Mina didn’t agree.
“Therapy is not the solution, bhaj,” she told Mother. “It’s getting the marriage done and behind me. I’ll be fine once this is over.”
“If you make it that long,” Mother joked, blackly.
It was true that one had to wonder if she could make it that long. By mid-November, some ten days before the wedding, Mina really started to look strange. The flesh on her face had ebbed to reveal the outlines of the forbidding, boxlike structure of her skull underneath, its flattish planes covered with skin drawn like a sickly, matted yellow membrane across the bony surface. Even her once-bright gaze had a jaundiced hue. She looked more and more unreal, and this transformation of her features endowed her face with something uncanny, something which held my attention as avidly as her once-vital and devastating beauty used to. Perhaps I was just stunned at the erosion taking place before my eyes—the change in her appearance was so startling that even her parents wouldn’t recognize her at the airport when she picked them up—or maybe there was truly something newly bewitching about her, something at once desperate and alive, a woman who sensed defeat approaching, but whose glow only brightened at the prospect, an incandescence quickened to its brief, brilliant zenith, a prelude to the decline she must have sensed was ahead.
On the Saturday before the wedding, Mina’s parents arrived. I was struck as I stood at the living room window, watching two small, slight men at the trunk pulling out bags, both with narrow shoulders and thick heads of bushy black hair; I knew one of them was Sunil and the other was Mina’s father, Rafiq, but at first, I couldn’t tell which one was which. And the similarities didn’t end there. Over tea at the kitchen table, I was surprised to discover that both of them had the same annoying habit of blinking a lot. No doubt it was a meaningless coincidence, but it left a troubling impression: as if the most important men in Mina’s life were somehow similarly distracted, unreliable, unsteady.
Tea that Saturday afternoon was a lively affair. Rafiq was worked up about the trip he and Rabia had just completed, which, already a strain at over twenty hours, had been truly insufferable with an eight-hour layover—due to the airplane’s mechanical problems—in Paris. He was still seething over a meal at the airport cafeteria that the airline had served a flight full of mostly Muslim passengers. “It’s the middle of the night. Everything is closed. They had to make us something…So they throw together some soup of green peas with pieces of meat in it.” Rafiq was a natural entertainer, and his expressions and tone were as animated as his hands, which didn’t stop moving as he spoke: “Arey…at that point everyone is starving. We’ve been sitting there five hours. Five hours! The people are hungry. So they start eating. Children are eating. Parents are eating. Old people are eating… But what are they eating? I’m the only one with a brain to ask the woman: ‘What are you serving?’ No English. Not a word. She gives me my food, and I see something floating in the soup. ‘What are these pieces?’ I ask her. ‘Lardo,’ she says. ‘Lardo.’” Rafiq repeated the words a few times with a blank face, imitating the waitress’s expression. Spying the amusement on my face, he turned to me: “Lardo? What is lardo? And then I realize: Maybe it’s lard. ‘Is it a pig?’ I ask her. No concept. She couldn’t be bothered. Looking at me like: Be happy and eat what you’re given, you dog.” I was having difficulty squaring my initial impression of Mina’s father as a man who wanted to break all his daughter’s bones with the very likable and gregarious fellow seated before me. I kept looking over at Mina to see how she was feeling. As far as I could tell, she appeared to be enjoying Rafiq as much as I was. He went on with his story, pointing to his wife now, a plumper, older, less arresting version of her daughter: “But then this one has the brilliant idea of making mooing sounds. The waitress shakes her head and makes some other sounds. ‘Oink, oink,’ she makes. ‘What is oink, oink?’ I ask. And then somebody’s child, born here in the States, says ‘That’s the sound of a pig!’ Can you believe it? They’re serving peas with pork to a full flight of Pakistanis!? When people found that out, it was a riot. Running to the bathroom to wash their mouths. Others trying to throw up. A real zoo!” He was laughing. We all were, except Father, who looked like he wanted to be elsewhere. “The airport staff sees all these junglis running around. They’re terrified. So they lock us into the gate. Won’t let us out. Throwing us bits of bread and cheese like people in jail. That for another two hours! Three hundred people, coughing, passing gas. I’m a sixty-year-old man. She’s a sixty-year-old woman. It was a nightmare!”
Rafiq settled back into his chair and looked at Mina, the mood at the table shifting. His eyes slimmed as he considered his daughter. “And after all of that, to get off the plane and …”
“Please, Rafiq,” Rabia interjected. “Don’t start.”
“Don’t start? Our daughter looks like a bag of bones!”
“Abu,” Mina said. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You look like a bag of bones.”
Mina picked up a tea biscuit from the plate at the center of the table and took a bite. “See. I’m eating.”
Rafiq shook his head, blinking now—if at all possible—with even more frequency as he looked over at Sunil, and then at my parents. “I have to thank you, Naveed and Muneer, for everything you’ve done. God only know she’s not easy to deal with…but honestly, you could have taken better care of her…”
Father didn’t respond. Not even with a nod. He’d retreated completely, ceding the table and the afternoon to the elder Rafiq.
“Abu, it has nothing to do with them,” Mina said. “It’s me. I’ve not been feeling well.”
“And why is that?” Rafiq asked.
Mother jumped in: “Rafiq-Uncle, she’s been through a lot.”
“Really?” Rafiq asked, his voice thick with sarcasm. “Like what? She meets a nice man…,” he began, looking over and trading a smile with Sunil, “who accepts her for who she is and wants to give her a new life? What is so difficult about that?”
“Stop it,” Mina said to her father, firmly.
Rafiq turned to her, shocked.
Sunil spoke up now, addressing Mina sharply: “He’s concerned for you. And I am too.”
Mina’s gaze darted back and forth between them. “Fine,” she said, taking a sip of her tea.
Rafiq continued to stare at her.
“I said fine, Abu,” Mina repeated.
Rafiq seemed to let it go. He turned to Sunil, blinking briskly. “I’m expecting you to fatten her up, behta.”
Sunil smiled, blinking back.
“First class, Abujee. First class,” he replied with sudden, unaccountable glee. “Don’t you worry about it one bit, Ali-sahib.” Sunil reached out for the tray, picked up a biscuit, and laid it on Mina’s plate. “Have another,” Sunil said to her.
Rafiq smiled widely, baring a top row of thick, yellowing teeth. He looked back at Mina, waiting to see what his daughter would do.
Mina stared at her father, the tension palpable between them.
“Do as your husband-to-be says,” Rafiq said quietly. “Eat it.”
Mother stole a glance at me. Father was looking down at the table.
Finally, Mina looked down, picked up the biscuit, and put it in her mouth.
“What a tyrant,” Mother complained once tea was over and the Ali parents had gone upstairs to my room to rest. (I was to sleep in the family room during their two-week stay.) “Forcing her to eat that biscuit! He used to do things to her like that all the time. Never to his boys, but always to her. And did you see Sunil sitting there? Enjoying every second of it? I wanted to reach over and smack
that grin off his face.”
We were standing at the sink. I was drying the porcelain; she was scrubbing the inside of the teapot. Through the kitchen window before us, I could see Sunil and Father in the backyard, talking. Sunil was holding Imran’s hand as he spoke.
“Rafiq has a Napoleon complex,” Mother said. “You know Napoleon, don’t you?”
I knew enough to see in my mind’s eye the image of a military man from another century with a hand pushed into his coat. But that was about it.
“A tiny man. Just this high,” Mother indicated, her hand showing a height not much taller than mine. “And this midget takes over Europe. He could have been the ruler of the world. Do you know why? Because a man like that, who thinks the world looks down on him—and let’s be honest, it does—a man like that stops at nothing to make the world respect him. He’ll take it over just to prove a point! So you see, you have to be careful with these small men! They’re all trying to take something over!” She handed me the teapot to dry. “That’s a Napoleon complex, kurban. Put it into a Muslim man, and you have complete disaster! I hope to God Sunil will at least be a good father to the boy…and there’s no reason to think he won’t. He has been tender with him.”
She looked out the window. The discussion between Sunil and Father seemed tense, heated. Father didn’t look pleased.
“What could they be talking about?” Mother muttered. “I hope your Father doesn’t say anything we’ll all regret.” She turned to me, suddenly worried. “Don’t mention anything about Nathan. Under any circumstances. His name doesn’t need to come up. Her parents don’t know anything about him. Neither does Sunil…”
“You already told me,” I said.
Just then, the patio door flew open. It was Father.
“What a nonentity!” he fumed.
“Naveed. I asked you to bear with him. Please.”
