American Dervish: A Novel

by Ayad Akhtar

  “Bearing with him is one thing. Being abused is another.”

  “Abused?” Mother said with a smile. “How is that possible?”

  Father shot her an intense look. “If you’re looking for trouble with me, Muneer…trust me, you’ll find it.”

  “I just asked what he said to you.”

  “If you had any idea what he really thinks of you, you wouldn’t be so sympathetic to that idiot.”

  “What did he say about me?”

  “That I don’t keep you in check. That I’m setting a bad example. That he won’t let Mina have anything to do with you if I don’t stop you from putting ideas in her head.”

  “What?!”

  “You still want me to bear with the idiot?”

  Mother looked over at the window. Sunil was headed up to the house.

  “He’s coming,” she said.

  “And I’m going,” Father said, leaving.

  The patio door opened, this time gently, and Sunil walked in holding Imran. “Where’s Naveed?” he asked in his usual unctuous tone. I was surprised Sunil was so calm, given how irritated Father had been by their conversation.

  “He went out…,” Mother replied, hesitating before she added: “For groceries.”

  Sunil smiled. Mother smiled weakly back, chewing on the inside of her cheek.

  “Is there something you want to discuss with me, bhai-jaan?” she asked.

  “Discuss? Like whaaat, bhaaji?”

  “Is there something on your mind? About me, maybe?” Mother’s voice was tense.

  “Absolutely not,” he said with a smile. “But if there’s anything you wish to discuss, pleeease let me know. You’re like her sister. So you’re like my own sister, too. I don’t have any sisters.”

  Mother didn’t seem in the least bit appeased. “I am her sister, Sunil,” Mother announced. “Her sister in spirit. Which is stronger than blood.”

  “Of course you are,” Sunil affirmed, with a bobbing nod.

  Mother held his gaze. “Don’t forget it,” she warned.

  “Forget?” Sunil asked, blinking. “How could I ever forget?”

  Mina’s father was ecstatic to find himself in America. Up early every morning, he went for long walks. He visited the post office, the grocery store, city hall, the library, the local high school. For breakfast, he had pancakes—American-style parathas, he called them—at a local diner, and then made his way to the mall across the road to wander for hours in the shops. “Everything is so big,” he kept remarking. “The roads, the cars, the trees, the houses, the people. Even the children are huge. I saw a group of boys with arms thicker than my legs. From a distance I thought they were men. But when I came up close, they had faces of babies. I asked one of them how old he was: ‘Sixteen,’ he said. Sixteen! And already as big as a monster!” America’s size impressed him, and so did its cleanliness. He remarked one night at dinner: “There’s no garbage anywhere. No dust. The roads are so clean, you could eat a meal on them. How do they do it?”

  “They take care of things,” Father replied, gruff. He was spending even less time than usual at home now. It was clear enough he didn’t like Rafiq. And it was clear Rafiq felt the same way about him. “Unlike us Pakistanis,” Father added, “Americans know how to make the world a better place.”

  Rafiq didn’t reply to Father’s provocation. At least not until dinner the following night, when he broke into a colorful tale of how, that afternoon, he’d wandered into a funeral home and found himself in an empty room with an open coffin. Rafiq described his shock at stepping up to the coffin and discovering inside it a dead young woman in a tight-fitting dress, her face covered with mounds of makeup, and reeking of perfume that couldn’t quite mask the unpleasant odor her body was giving off.

  “Like she was getting ready to go out!” Rafiq mocked. “Who is she going to meet? She’s dead!”

  “It’s for the family and friends,” Mother explained. “They have a party for everyone to see the body one last time before they bury it. It’s their ritual.”

  “Party?”

  “It’s not a party,” Father corrected. “It’s called a wake.”

  Rafiq frowned. “Well, Naveed-behta. As you said, they do know how to take care of things—but do the dead need this kind of taking care?” Rafiq’s tone was a challenge. Father met it with silence. Finally, he shrugged and looked away.

  Rafiq looked pleased. He turned to Mina. “She happened to look a little like you, behti. Dark hair…but not such a bag of bones.”

  Rabia looked up from her meal with surprise. “What a terrible thing to say, Rafiq!”

  Rafiq now shrugged.

  “And look at her,” Rabia continued, pointing at her daughter, “she’s eating.”

  It was true. Mina was working her way through her meal, and already half-finished.

  “Awake,” Rafiq said to himself after a pause. “What a strange thing to call it. The person is not awake. She’s dead. But they still want to pretend that she’s awake.”

  “It’s not one word, sahib,” Father said. “It’s two words.”

  Rafiq looked confused.

  “Not awake,” Father explained. “But a wake.”

  Rafiq waved his hand dismissively at Father. “One word or two, it doesn’t matter. Nothing will change the surprise in store for that poor woman when she finds out where she’s really headed once the party is over!”

  Mother was depressed. Mina’s stay with us had been her lifeline, not only a healthy distraction from her bête noire—Father’s affairs—but also a sustaining reprieve from the punishing loneliness she felt living in America. She didn’t speak about it much, but she suffered terribly from homesickness—a conclusion I would draw once Mina was long gone and Mother populated her life with reminders of her homeland: shelves filled and walls covered with Pakistani arts and crafts; ghazals lightly playing on the stereo all day long; and the Indian films into which she would disappear, it seemed, for days.

  Mother’s doleful, grieving mood that autumn was only compounded by the fact that she’d been completely excluded from the wedding preparations. To some extent, so had Mina. And though Mother had been advising her best friend to let the Chathas handle things as they saw fit, when Ghaleb and Sunil stopped making any attempt to hide their blatant disregard for our family, Mother had difficulty taking her own advice. She realized somewhat too late that her earlier attempt to draw the line with Sunil was backfiring. Sunil’s counter to her claim of centrality in Mina’s life came in the form of the very sort of interdiction Mother feared: He told his fiancée he didn’t want to hear Mother’s name spoken in his presence. When Mother heard this, she humbled herself. She called Sunil to apologize. But his response was less than gracious: He told Mother that while he wouldn’t stand in the way of her friendship with Mina, he himself didn’t see any reason for him and Mother to have anything more to do with each other.

  Mother’s difficulties with Sunil turned Najat against her as well. Mina had wanted to reach out to the Buledis in the wake of what had happened. Father had convinced her that Sonny couldn’t have had anything to do with the telegram—being a supposed kafr himself—and Mina concluded it would be appropriate to extend to the Buledis the goodwill gesture of an invitation to the wedding. The only thing was: She didn’t want to broach the matter herself with her in-laws. So she asked Mother to do it.

  When Mother phoned the Chathas and left a message on their machine making the suggestion, Najat didn’t call back. Mina brought up the matter with Najat a day later, and Najat used the opportunity to make a point: Unbelievers like the Buledis had no place at the wedding (it was bad enough Naveed would have to be there), and if Mina’s “friend”—by which she meant Mother—didn’t like it, “no one was forcing her to come either.” Mina was shocked. And it took every ounce of her will not to give Najat a piece of her mind.

  Mother, too, was shocked on hearing what Najat had said—and more than a little dismayed—but she remained adamant that Mina wa
s doing the right thing by keeping quiet. There was no use, she kept repeating, in fighting a battle one could only lose. And so, practicing what she preached, Mother decided she was going to stay home on Thanksgiving Day, when the Chathas had planned a party at their house, an all-day function for Mina and her mother to try on the clothes and jewelry Najat was having made for the nikah. Mina was to get her hands covered with patterns of henna, and the Alis would meet for the first time much of the extended Chatha family that had come from out of town to attend the ceremony. Mina didn’t want Mother to stay home, but Mother had made up her mind.

  “It’s what’s best,” she insisted. “I’ll be fine.”

  But at breakfast on Thanksgiving Day, Mother wasn’t fine. She looked utterly defeated. And as we all munched on Rabia’s supremely buttered and inimitably tasty parathas—Mother’s were good, but these were stupendous—Mina wanted to revisit the question.

  “Reconsider, bhaj. I know you want to be there. I want you there. As long as no one gets into discussions—and you don’t even have to worry about Sunil. He’s not going to be there. He’s going with Ghaleb to the hotel to check on things…”

  “Why not, Muneer?” Rabia said brightly as she returned from the stove with a new plate of steaming, buttered bread. “It’s only right. You should be there.”

  “Not a good idea,” Rafiq announced as he reached across to grab a fresh paratha. “Not a good idea at all.”

  “Why not?” Mina asked.

  “Yes. Why not?” Rabia added.

  “He’s right,” Mother mumbled before Rafiq could reply.

  Rafiq turned to Mother. “Behti,” he began, gently, “I know it bothers you. It bothers me, too. My own sons are not here. How do you think that makes me feel? These are the kinds of things that arise in life. The situations. And what matters is not so much what these situations are, but how we deal with them.” Rafiq paused. He was gazing at Mother warmly. “You know Rabia and I love you like a daughter. You’re like my own daughter. You are family. You know that.” Mother’s eyes were filling with tears. “I don’t need to tell you these things are complicated. You know that from your own experience. Let’s do what’s best. Let’s be sure our dear child is settled and happy. And when we’ve accomplished that, then we attend to the politics. Hmm?”

  Mother nodded, still fighting her emotions. But across from her, Mina was crying. “Bhaj,” she keened, reaching out and pressing her hand into Mother’s.

  Their eyes met, and Mother crumpled.

  “Ladies, please,” Rafiq said. “We should be celebrating. Laughing, not crying.” His comment went unheeded, as his own wife was now tearing up.

  Mina got up and went to hold Mother. Rabia did the same. And now, enclosed in the women’s embrace, Mother released her pain. The sounds she made were round and deep, full of sorrow. Imran, alarmed, started to cry, too. Rafiq reached across and caressed his grandson. “Your Muneer-auntie is just a little sad,” he said, sounding a little choked up himself.

  I watched it all with the only dry eyes in the house.

  I didn’t cry, but maybe I should have.

  That afternoon was the first time I got a sense of what life would be like with Mina gone. Mother had locked herself in her room, buried beneath the covers. Father had returned from a morning at the hospital, but he didn’t linger long inside. He went out to the yard to rake leaves in the rain. I tried to join him, but he didn’t want me. “You’re going to get sick and then I won’t hear the end of it with your mother. Don’t you have any homework to do?” he asked with that familiar light lisp in his speech—and that subtle blur in his gaze—that implied he’d been drinking.

  I did have homework. I went inside to the kitchen table, pulled out my math book, and got to work. I started in on the next day’s assignment, but I couldn’t concentrate. A thick, insistent silence pressed in, demanding to be heard. I kept trying to work, but even the scratching of my pencil’s lead tip seemed like an unwelcome affront.

  I put the pencil down and I listened.

  I heard a baseboard creak. I heard a clock ticking in the next room. I heard a car drive by the front yard. And when the refrigerator’s electric hum came to a sudden stop, and when I noticed there was no more rain tickling at the windows, I heard the silence itself. A cold, dead, bone-still quiet.

  What it would sound like once Mina was gone.

  16

  Nikah

  The afternoon of the wedding, Father and I were standing in the splendid lobby of the Atwater Hotel when a short man in a red suit and wavy salt-and-pepper hair came through the revolving front door, a boy about his size by his side. The man noticed us and approached. “You’re here for the wedding?” he inquired with a thick Pakistani accent.

  Father nodded. The man reached out his hand: “Mirza. Mirza Hassan.”

  “Naveed Shah,” Father said, shaking his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  “This is my son, Farhaz…”

  The boy reached out his hand to Father. Then to me.

  “Farhaz?” I asked, surprised. “The hafiz?”

  “Yep,” he replied, coolly. He was nothing like what I’d imagined: I’d been seeing him in my mind’s eye as tall, much taller than me. With a wide, strong face. And piercing eyes that gazed down on me, now with compassion, now with contempt, but always bright with glory. I’d even pictured him, like the Prophet in my dream, with a gap between his teeth. But here he was, not much taller than me, his eyes small and lackluster, his teeth covered with silver braces. And he was losing his hair: His scalp clearly showed beneath the sparsely growing, oily strands that barely covered the top of his head. Had it not been for the braces and the red splotches of blooming acne across his face, I would have guessed he was at least five years older than he was.

  “What’s your son’s name?” Mirza asked Father.

  “Hayat,” Father replied. He turned to me. “Don’t be rude.”

  I held out my hand to Mirza, then to Farhaz.

  “So you’re a hafiz?” I asked again. I was having a tough time believing it.

  “I already said I was.”

  “Indeed.” Mirza turned to Father and added proudly: “The first in our family.”

  Father ignored the comment.

  “So what do you do, Naveed?”

  “I’m a physician.”

  “Fantastic! I’m in medical sales!” Mirza said enthusiastically, pulling out his wallet. “What specialty?”

  “Neurology.”

  “Aha! Great stuff, great stuff.” Mirza removed a business card and handed it to Father. “Mostly cardiac equipment. But you never know, Dr. Shah…”

  Father gazed at the card blankly, then shoved it in his pocket.

  “What a place this is!” Mirza remarked as he peered about the lobby atrium. It was three stories high, with two sets of dark, mahogany balconies held up by ornately carved columns. Along the lobby’s walls, paintings hung neatly side by side. Mirza pointed at the canvases. “Someone was telling me this is all real Victorian art. Worth hundreds of thousands.”

  Father feigned interest, his gaze drifting to the glass and latticework skylight above, which showed a gray-white, overcast November day.

  At the revolving doors, Sunil appeared, unwrapping a new pack of cigarettes.

  “There’s the man of the hour!” Mirza exclaimed. “Ready for the big day?”

  “Now I am,” Sunil joked, holding up a cigarette as he approached. “Naveed? You waaant one?”

  Father shook his head.

  Sunil nodded, lighting up. “Naveed Shah, Mirza Hassan.”

  “We’ve met,” Mirza said.

  Sunil looked over at the reception desk, exhaling smoke. Imam Souhef and Ghaleb Chatha were standing there, watching us, Souhef in a resplendent jalabiyah that ballooned around his impressive girth, Chatha in a tailored Nehru.

  Sunil held up his finger to indicate he would be right there. “Sooo…the young scholars have met?” he asked, turning to Farhaz and me.

  F
arhaz stared blankly back at him, not seeming to understand.

  Sunil explained, smoke pouring from his mouth: “I told you about Hayat, behta. He’s studying to be a haaafiz like you.”

  I could feel Father seize up beside me. I stole a glance at him. He was eyeing Sunil with contempt.

  “Better Muslims than we’ll ever be,” Mirza joked.

  “You’re mistaken,” Father said abruptly. “The boy has given up his studies.” Father turned to me. I winced, suddenly afraid he was going to hit me. Sunil noticed.

  “Better Muslims than we will ever be, indeed,” Sunil said softly, still holding Father’s gaze. “They’re waiting for me,” he finally added, blowing smoke. “Have to prepare the room for the nikah.”

  “Oh! Good luck!” Mirza said, excited.

  “Next time you see me, I’ll be marrieeed,” Sunil said as he turned and headed for the reception desk to join up with Ghaleb and Souhef.

  “It warms the heart to think that such things are possible,” Mirza said, watching Sunil go. “It’s a miracle after what he’s been through… just a miracle. Mashallah! Mashallah!”

  Father was looking off now, simmering.

  “So what’s your relation to the family?” Mirza asked.

  Father made no attempt to hide his disgust. “Friends of the bride.”

  “I see.” I couldn’t tell if Mirza was doing his best to ignore Father’s behavior or just didn’t notice it. But whatever it was made him seem like a good man. “What a wonderful story that is. After what she went through. And now the boy has found himself a magnificent father!”

  Father shrugged, grunting a reply.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” we heard, looking over to find a young blond man in white gloves and a tuxedo addressing us. “We’re expecting quite a few of you people, and we’d like to keep the lobby clear. The reception area is this way.”

  Father didn’t move. He just held the young man’s gaze. “A few of us people? What people, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Sir, correct me if I’m wrong…you’re with the Chatha–Ali wedding, no?”