by Sheba Karim
The unmarked graves of our footsteps
In every street
Of your city—and mine
The wounded, wounding stars
Of your night and mine
The roses of our mornings
That are torn and torn and torn again
All these wounds without a cure
All these tears undarnable
On some the ash of moonlight
On some the blood of dew
Tell me whether this even is
Is it real, or merely a web
Spun by the spider of my delusion—and yours
If it is, then what do we do
If it is not, still, what do we do
Tell me tell me
Tell me tell me
After reading the Faiz poem, I felt like crying. It was incredibly sad, and devastatingly beautiful. I hadn’t asked my father for a detailed explanation of the blackberry poem, and couldn’t believe he’d responded with a long letter about that and the traditions and tropes of Urdu poetry. Sure, it was poetry, but he’d still made an effort for me.
When I went downstairs, my father was on the couch, watching TV. His sabbatical had begun, which he apparently planned on spending in his study with the door closed, or on the couch in the den, eating fried papad and directing barbs at the boob tube.
As I poured myself cereal, I could hear the news filtering in from the den: strikes in Greece, civil war in Syria, a humanitarian crisis in Somalia. It made me think of a line from the Faiz poem: the roses of our mornings / that are torn and torn and torn again.
I joined him with my breakfast. “I really like the Faiz poem.”
“Oh yes?” He looked genuinely pleased. Of course he was. Urdu poetry was his best friend. “Would you like to read more?”
I hadn’t considered it, but now that I had a handwritten introduction to the genre, I might as well. “Sure.”
A correspondent was reporting on the dire conditions in Syria. He stood in front of a pile of rubble that was once an apartment building, explosions in the background.
My father frowned. “Bloody Assad!” he said. “Bloody dictators!”
Commercial break. A dyed blonde in a poofy fuchsia dress and heels praised the ability of her dishwashing liquid to cut through grease. “No spots, and no need to rinse! Spend less time cleaning, and more time doing things you love—like eating salt and vinegar potato chips!” she exclaimed, hopping onto the kitchen table and digging into a bag of chips.
“Do we have any potato chips?” my father asked.
“No,” I lied, knowing he’d be too lazy to go look.
He grunted and flipped to an Urdu news station, where there was a reporter standing in front of a pile of rubble that was once a Shia mosque in Pakistan.
“Bloody zealots!” my father said.
I glanced at my phone. Six hours until I saw Jamie.
This morning couldn’t move fast enough.
Eight
THIS TIME WHEN JAMIE arrived, I was actually reading, trying to make sense of my father’s dense Urdu poetry notes, which included diagrams, quotations from poems, rhyme schemes, and an introduction to Islamic mysticism.
“Greetings,” Jamie said. “Your curls look nice.”
My hand flew up to my hair. “Really?” I said, as if I hadn’t spent half the morning washing my hair, applying a deep moisture treatment, plopping it with a microfiber towel I’d bought online, and using a diffuser.
“My first girlfriend had curly hair,” he said. “Sixth grade. Dana Parker. She broke my heart. I’ve been a sucker for curls ever since. The darker, the better.”
Dana Parker may have been a fool, but she had served me well.
Jamie sat down, draped his arm along the bench. I dared to lean back a little, imagining the slim margin of air between my body and his hand, an inch, maybe even less. An inch was nothing. An inch was an ocean.
The distance of desire.
He pointed at the pages in my lap. “That’s some handwriting,” he commented.
I loved how he noticed details, that he thought me and my possessions were worth paying such close attention to. It encouraged me to open up to him, but it also made me nervous, like what if after getting to know me, he decided I was no longer so interesting?
“What is it?” he asked.
“A letter my father wrote me.”
“Where does he live?”
“What?” I said, and then laughed. “Oh, no, he lives with us. It’s not a letter like that, it’s more of a lesson.”
“A lesson?” he said. “What about?”
“Urdu poetry.”
“Urdu poetry,” Jamie repeated. He took a Swiss Army knife out of his jeans pocket and an orange out of his shirt pocket, and started peeling the orange, cutting strips that went all the way around, falling into a neat pile on the bench.
“Will you teach me about it?” he asked, offering me an orange slice.
“About what?”
“Urdu poetry.”
“What do you want to know?”
“What do you think I should know?”
“Umm . . .” I wasn’t sure how to answer this, given that I was only learning myself, but I didn’t want to disappoint Jamie. “I guess the first thing you need to know is a little about Sufism.”
“Sufism?”
“Mystical Islam.”
“Okay.” Jamie popped the last orange slice in his mouth, tossed the peels into the garbage can a few feet away, wiped his palms on his jeans. “I’m all ears.”
“All right. Well, the traditional form of Urdu poetry is called the ghazal, and it’s inspired by the Sufis. The Sufis were, and are, I guess, Islamic mystics who saw themselves as lovers of God. They were literally mad with love for God—that’s where the whole whirling dervish thing comes from, because some of them were so madly in love with Allah that they would dance in circles, for hours and hours, sometimes.” I paused, realizing he might not understand the whirling dervish reference, but he nodded as though he did.
“The Sufis’ ultimate goal is to destroy their ego, their materialistic desires, and become one with Allah. So they devote their whole lives to Him, praying, meditating, singing His praises, dancing, but of course they can really only become one with Allah when they die and go to heaven. A day a Sufi dies isn’t called his death anniversary, it’s called his wedding anniversary, because that’s the day he’s finally joined his beloved, as in God. I think that’s pretty beautiful. I mean, a lot of the time you’re taught to fear Allah, because on Judgment Day He might send you to hell, like He’s a big, scary dude. But the Sufis, their relationship to Allah is centered around love. They worship Him because they love Him. To love is to worship, to worship is to love. They write poetry for Him, and dance and sing.”
“Awesome,” Jamie agreed. “Go on.”
“So, Urdu poetry is inspired by Sufi poetry. All of Sufi poetry is about longing for the beloved, and you can’t truly be with the beloved until you die, because your beloved is God. The Urdu ghazal is the same. The narrator is longing for the beloved he can never really have, at least not until he dies. Except you can read it on two levels, that the narrator’s beloved is a human, or that it’s Allah.”
“So it’s kind of metaphysical,” Jamie said.
I wasn’t quite sure what metaphysical meant, so I kept talking. “And, according to my father, the narrator of the poem is pretty much always male, but sometimes his beloved is a woman, and sometimes it’s a handsome male youth. And time is basically divided into two types, the days and nights of separation, when the lover longs for the beloved, and the days and nights of union, when they come together, though this union never lasts long.” I searched my father’s notes. “The night of separation is painfully long, the day of union never long enough,” I read. “However, without separation, what would become of the union? What is desire without distance? What is love without longing?”
“Your father wrote that?”
“Yes, whi
ch is weird because he’s not like this in real life.”
“Real life?”
“I mean, he sounds romantic here but he’s not in real life, only in his poetic life.”
“At least he’s romantic in some life,” Jamie said. “My stepfather’s idea of romance is buying my mother a box of Russell Stover chocolates from CVS every Valentine’s Day.”
“At least he remembers Valentine’s Day,” I replied.
“Well, it’s all really fascinating,” Jamie declared. “I’d like to hear one of these ghazals.”
“My father translated an Urdu poem for me; it’s not a ghazal, but it’s really good,” I said. “I can bring it tomorrow.”
“I’d love that, Morning Dew,” he said, and checked his watch. “But now we gotta move.”
Nine
THE NEXT DAY, AS I read Jamie the Faiz poem, he listened intently, eyes closed, head tilted back, only one foot in motion. When I read the lines, “Tell me whether this even is / Is it real, or merely a web / Spun by the spider of my delusion,” my voice wavered a little, because this was the very question I had. I felt as though Jamie liked me, the way he looked at me, the way he listened, but until he said so, how could I know if it was real?
“Tell me tell me,” I concluded.
After I finished, Jamie was silent for a minute. I watched his Adam’s apple move with his breath. His neck was brushed with light golden stubble, and there was a small, claw-shaped scar in the space between his collarbones.
“The hundred thousand waits that / are in your gaze and mine,” he recited suddenly. “Not a hundred, or a million, but a hundred thousand. I like it. A hundred thousand waits. A hundred thousand steps. A hundred thousand climbs.”
He took such pleasure in the number that I didn’t tell him “hundred thousand” was a common unit of counting in Urdu.
“A hundred thousand pies,” I offered.
“That’s a lot of pies,” he said. “Is the ghazal a lot different from what you read?”
“I’m not sure,” I confessed. “My dad hasn’t given me one yet.”
“Can I keep the poem?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Do you write poetry?” he said.
“Me? No.”
“Do you speak Urdu?”
“Badly.”
“And your father’s name is Irfan Qureshi?”
“Irfan,” I said, turning his short a into a long one. “But how do you know his name?”
“It says ‘translated by Irfan Qureshi.’”
“Oh. Right.”
“He must be pretty cool,” Jamie said. “I’d like to meet him one day.”
I must have looked incredulous, because he said, “What?”
“I doubt you’re going to meet my parents. My mom would freak out that I was friends with a boy.”
“And your dad?”
“My dad would talk your ear off about poetry but wouldn’t even remember your name.”
“What if I introduced myself like this?” He bowed, with a dramatic hand flourish. “Greetings, Mr. Qureshi. I am the hundredth thousandth Jamie. I am the lizard king, I am the maker of pies.”
“Pie wallah,” I said.
“What?”
“If you make or sell a particular thing, then you add wallah at the end. Biscuit wallah, newspaper wallah.”
“So that means you’re also a pie wallah,” Jamie said.
“Yeah, I guess I am.”
“The prettiest pie wallah in a hundred thousand miles,” he pronounced.
I didn’t know whether to thank him, or offer a return compliment, or a witty parry, so I stayed quiet, flushed and excited and wearing what was surely a stupidly happy smile.
Jamie checked his watch. “The pie wallahs need to move.”
We were running late, so after we unloaded the pies—apple walnut, chocolate cream, and cherry bourbon—Jamie bowed again and left. I put on “Fake Empire” by The National, my favorite song from Jamie’s most-played playlist. Like “Karma Police,” it began with piano and built up to an awesome frenzy of piano and guitar and drums, but the best thing about it was the lead singer’s voice—deep, sexy, alluring.
As I was about to lift the shutter, the door to the shack swung back open. Jamie was back.
“Hey, I love this song!” he exclaimed. “The pies can wait. Play it from the beginning and crank it up.”
As the singer sang, “Stay out super late tonight, picking apples, making pies,” Jamie and I looked at each other and laughed. Then he started to groove. There wasn’t much room to maneuver, but he danced with ease, and I marveled at how confidently he navigated every space he encountered, narrow shack, big wide world, like it was all some playground for him to move through, fast and sure-footed. I felt inspired to do my own mini-groove, swaying my head and rocking a little, though I wished I could dance in front of someone with his same abandon. Even watching him made me feel happier, more free.
“It’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky . . .”
When the song ended, Jamie slapped his thigh and proclaimed, “Great song.”
“Great song,” I echoed.
Jamie raised the shutter all the way. There was a customer waiting outside, a fellow alumnus a few decades my senior, who’d finished an intense run, judging from the streaks of sweat on his gray Lincoln Prep T-shirt.
“Sorry about that,” Jamie said to him. “Sometimes you just gotta dance.”
Then he disappeared as suddenly as he’d returned.
Ten
I WAS IN LOVE with Jamie. He was my last thought before sleep, my first thought upon waking. He had conquered my heart, my mind. I danced to “Fake Empire” on repeat in my room. Stupid-happy smiles became my norm, even before 10:00 a.m., to the point where my mother jokingly asked me if I was on drugs.
I was aching to tell someone. Ian and Danny had left on their epic cross-country road trip, which, judging from their Instagrams, involved diners, drag queens, and lounging by hotel pools with frozen drinks. But even if they were here, it wouldn’t have mattered, because the person I really wanted to tell was Farah. The silence between us was the sole dark cloud in these otherwise sunniest of times. But a little darkness was easy to ignore. I’d watched my mother do it for years. My khala, my mother’s sister, had told me once that my mother had always wanted a big family, four kids. When I’d asked my mother if this was true, she said, “What does it matter? I have you. There are people in this world who can’t have any children.”
Last month, when my khala had come for my high school graduation, she told me my mother had had four miscarriages. My first thought when I heard this was I couldn’t believe my parents had had sex five times.
My mother had only told me that the doctors said she couldn’t get pregnant and then she did, with me. Her miracle baby. She’d never mentioned any miscarriages. Too unpleasant.
Outside, the lawn mower emitted a death groan. I glanced out my bedroom window. My father was struggling to cut the grass; when it came to work around the house, he was like an appendix; useless, a pain in the gut. Despairing, shoulders hunched, bits of grass pasted to his sweaty scalp, he labored to restart the mower, trudging behind it like condemned Sisyphus pushing the stone up the mountain.
I turned off “Fake Empire” and brought him lemonade.
He gulped it down so fast half of it spilled down his undershirt. “There are people who will do this for a small sum of money,” he complained.
“Well, Mom’s frugal, and you’re on sabbatical,” I said.
My father wiped his forehead with his undershirt, exposing the whole of his pale, hairy belly. “You look like you’re nine months pregnant,” I said.
“Biologically impossible,” he stated.
“I didn’t mean it literally.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t understand. How come you’re an expert of figurative speech in Urdu poetry but can’t understand it in real life?”
“Urdu poetry makes sense
. Most conversation is idiotic.”
“Is this conversation idiotic?” I demanded.
My father blinked. “Too early to say.”
I’d lived with my father too long to take it personally. “Well, this might interest you—I’d like to read a ghazal.”
Hearing one of his favorite words perked him up immediately. “Certainly,” he said, abandoning the accursed mower. “But you should know that ghazals don’t read like Western poems.”
“What do you mean?”
“The ghazal is made up of two-line verses, and all of the verses share a meter and rhyme scheme. But they don’t share, how do you say, a narrative. Thematically, each two-line verse is separate. Each verse can be read completely on its own.”
“So why even put them together?”
“Because they share a meter and rhyme, something that is lost in translation. Reading Urdu ghazals in English will likely feel unsatisfactory. And you need to understand the tropes or it is hard to appreciate.”
“Tropes?”
“Tropes. The most well-known is the rose and the nightingale.”
“The rose and the nightingale?” I repeated.
My father cleaned the sweaty fog from his glasses with his lemonade-stained shirt and, exhausted from his mowing efforts, slowly lowered himself to the ground. Now that I was used to Jamie’s lean fluidity, my father seemed even more plodding and out of shape, though he was weirdly flexible. Right now, he was sitting cross-legged with his feet resting on the opposite thighs, like a fat, grassy Buddha.
“The rose and the nightingale,” my father said. “The rose is the symbol of perfect beauty, and the nightingale is in love with it. Even though the rose is cruel, and does not love him back, still the nightingale longs for the rose. It sings to the rose of its love. Each season, the rose blooms, it dies, and the nightingale mourns until a new rose, beautiful, cruel, takes its place.”
“Sucks to be the nightingale,” I muttered.
My father either didn’t hear my comment or chose to ignore it.
“Would you like to hear a verse from a ghazal by the great Mirza Ghalib?” he offered.
“Yes, please.”
My father recited the verse in Urdu. I only understood a few words, but then he translated it.
