American Dervish

by Ayad Akhtar

  “You’re not sick, are you?” Mina asked, her hand to my forehead.

  “No,” I said, noticing the book before her. The Tropic of Cancer. The cover showed a large, gray menacing crab. Why is she reading about cancer? “You’re not a doctor, are you, Auntie?” I asked.

  Just then, Mother appeared in the doorway leading to the hall and stairs beyond. “What’s the problem? Hmm? He’s not still complaining about that godforsaken ice cream social, is he?”

  “The godforsaken what?” Mina asked.

  “Ice cream social. Some Christian silliness.”

  “It’s not Christian,” I objected.

  “I said no!” Mother snapped.

  “What’s an ice cream social?” Mina asked.

  “They sell ice cream to raise money for the church,” Mother said with derision.

  “That’s not true. It’s free,” I said.

  Mother shot me a warning look. “Nothing in this country is free. The sign in front says the proceeds go to the parish. Proceeds from what? From free ice cream?” She snickered. “We don’t need to be giving money to Christians.”

  As I saw it, we gave money to Christians every day. At the mall, at the grocery store, at the post office. What was the difference?

  I was about to say as much when Mother lifted her finger and pointed at me. “Hayat, I don’t want to hear another word about that damn social.”

  Then she turned and walked out.

  Once she was gone, Mina took my hand, tenderly. “You really wanted to go, didn’t you?”

  I nodded. Mina’s tone brought a sore knot to my throat.

  “Hayat, let it out.”

  “Let what out?” I said with a cough.

  “What you’re feeling. If you hold it in, it stays there. If you let it out, that’s the only way it can go away.”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. Mina leaned in and took me by the shoulders, her gaze piercing me. “Let it hurt, Hayat. Don’t fight it.”

  “Let it hurt?”

  “Don’t fight the pain you’re feeling. Just let it be. Let it be there. Open to it, inside yourself…”

  “Okay,” I said. I held her gaze.

  I could feel the aching in my heart. I stopped resisting it. Almost at once, something inside me crumbled. My throat swelled. My face contracted. Up bubbled searing tears.

  Mina took me in her arms and held me. I released, crying into her shoulder. The comfort of her embrace felt like nothing I could remember.

  When the tears stopped, Mina used her sleeves to wipe my face dry.

  “Better?”

  I nodded. I did feel better.

  “If you hold it in, it stays in. And then all sorts of bad things can happen to you.”

  “Like what?”

  “The worst thing that can happen? If you hold on to the pain for too long, you start to think you are this pain.” Mina studied me for a moment. “Do you understand, behta?”

  I nodded. What she was saying made sense to me.

  “And if you think you are this pain, it means you start to think that what you deserve is pain. Quran always says Allah is al-Rahim. Do you know what ‘al-Rahim’ means?”

  I shook my head. For though I’d heard the words on Mother’s lips countless times, she’d never explained to me what they meant.

  “It means Allah is forgiving. He forgives us. And it means that we don’t deserve that pain we keep inside us. Allah loves us. He wants us to let it go…”

  I was losing the logic, and she could tell. She wiped again at my face with her sleeve, speaking now with a sudden bright tone: “Isn’t there something you want to do…other than watch me read my book?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think about it.”

  “Think about what?”

  “If there’s something you want to do right now…”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When you don’t know what you want, there’s an easy way to find out.”

  “How?”

  “You make the small voice inside you speak.”

  I was perplexed.

  “I’ll show you. Close your eyes…”

  I did.

  “What are you hearing now?”

  “Your voice.”

  “What else?”

  I listened. There was the muffled hum of a car passing along the road outside. “A car outside,” I said.

  “What else?”

  I turned my head to one side, listening more deeply.

  “Do you hear something else?”

  “No.”

  “Your own breath, behta? Do you hear that?”

  I kept listening. I could hear it. Gentle and steady. Going in and out of me. I nodded.

  “Keep listening to your breath,” she said softly.

  I paid close attention, listening. I thought I heard something hollow inside me filling and emptying with a soft, dark sound.

  “Do you hear the silence, behta?”

  “Silence?”

  “At the end of your breath. When you get to the end.”

  I breathed and listened. She was right. At the end of each inhale, each exhale, there was quiet. I nodded.

  “When you hear that silence, behta, just stay there. And then ask the question ‘What do I want to do?’ Just say that to yourself in the silence: ‘What do I want to do?’ ”

  I inhaled and exhaled, waiting for the silence at the end of my breath. It was a glowing quiet, bright and pulsing, alive.

  What do I want to do? I whispered to myself.

  And then I saw something: my red Schwinn Typhoon one-speed. Its bars were gleaming, clean as the day my parents had brought it home.

  My eyes shot open. “I want to wash my bike!” I exclaimed.

  “Good, behta. Go. Go and clean it. And then go for a ride. Enjoy yourself.”

  I bolted out the door and into the garage. I pulled my bike onto the driveway and filled a bucket with soap and water. I lathered down the bars and wheels, then doused it all with water from our garden hose. When I was done, my bike looked exactly as it had in my mind’s eye: red, bright, glistening.

  I hopped on and pedaled off. I was rapt. I’d completely forgotten about the ice cream social. And if the ride around the subdivision that followed was anything but routine, it wasn’t because of some new and remarkable encounter along the way, but because the satisfaction I’d felt cleaning my bike now developed as I rode. I was taken with the plainest pleasures: the blur of the speckled macadam passing beneath my wheels; the breeze in my face; the pressure of the pedals against my soles. Sensation itself was enough. More than enough. I felt complete. And I couldn’t remember feeling anything like it.

  3

  The Opening

  Imran was strange. Uncommonly reclusive for a four-year-old, he was given to hours of silent play in his room surrounded by the crayons and colored pencils that appeared to be his only pleasure. I had difficulty believing he was Mina’s son, and not only because he shared nothing of her exuberance or magnetism. Dark, with tiny eyes and short, sharp features crammed tightly into the middle of his face, he looked nothing like her. Mother wanted me to take him under my wing and treat him like the little brother I didn’t have. I did my best. I played with him. I lent him my special catcher’s mitt, which I lent no one. I put up with the tantrums he threw when he lost pieces in our games of checkers and chess. I read him stories—even though I didn’t enjoy it—in the forts we built down in the family room out of sheets. But no matter what we did, I never seemed to have his full attention. Sooner or later, Imran would grow bored and head off to his room. More than once, I followed him there to find him lying on his bed, a coloring book open in his lap, as he mumbled to the black-and-white picture that stood propped against his bedside lamp.

  Noticing me at the doorway, he would turn and say, proudly:

  “That’s Hamed, my dad.”

  Imran’s picture of his father showed a well-groomed man in a white oxford shirt peering out at the v
iewer with a paradoxical expression I found striking for the fact that I’d already seen it on Imran’s own face countless times: a pair of small eyes wide with what looked like fear, but gazing out from beneath a smooth brow that showed not a ripple of worry; and down at the bottom of the face, another conundrum: a mouth dangling open, slack-jawed, unconcerned, but with the tip of a pointed tongue tensely curled around the bottom of the top teeth, as if nervously seeking its way into the small gap there.

  Almost from the moment Imran could speak, he’d been asking about his father. And, sensing there was more to know than the vague, unsettling outline of a story his mother told him—that there had once been a man who had been his father, but then he’d left, and so was his father no more—Imran turned to others for answers. Indeed, it wasn’t long before each new male visitor to the house would find himself besieged by the young boy; Imran would climb up a leg and into the man’s embrace. “Are you my dad?” he would ask.

  When Imran was three, Mina finally decided to show her son her only photograph of her ex-husband. As she feared, the picture fueled the boy’s obsession. Now, nightly, Imran refused to sleep until his mother pulled out the picture and propped it against the lamp by his bed. He would talk to the photo, asking it the questions his mother was never able to answer: Where was he? When was he coming back? It broke Mina’s heart to see her son talking to a picture, and so now when she tucked him in, it was always with a promise: that she was going to find Imran a real man to be his father someday.

  Weeks into their stay with us, I noticed Imran had taken to sitting every evening at the bottom stair in the front vestibule, waiting for Father’s return. And once he heard the rumble of Father’s car coming up the driveway, and the thrum and whir of the garage door yawning open, Imran would already be on his feet, jumping about in front of the door he was so eagerly waiting to see open. And Father would appear, dropping his briefcase to his feet as he lifted the boy aloft with a kiss to the cheek. “You’re home!” Imran would squeal with glee. So began their evening jaunt through the house, like cricket groundskeepers making the rounds on a pleasant, summer evening. They checked on Mother and the dinner being prepared in the kitchen, peering over the steaming pots and into the oven, where naans usually lay in neat rows, heating. They stopped at the bedroom doorways—mine, Mina’s—where they would linger, Imran bouncing about in Father’s embrace, to inquire about our activities and our days. Then they would disappear into my parents’ room, where Father sat Imran on the bed while he changed into jeans and a sweatshirt, and where they giggled and joked and played until mealtime.

  Father saw much of himself in the boy, and he wasn’t the only one to think that, even at the tender age of four, Imran resembled the man more than I, his real son, did. Mother constantly pointed out resemblances in their hands and feet, their shortish fingers and toes and stubby nails that never grew very much, as well as in the narrow cast of their uncommonly light-colored eyes. Mother said there was an intensity to their gazes that pointed at a stewing intelligence she hoped Imran would find better uses for than Father had.

  It was strange to see Father behaving so warmly toward the boy. The stinging I felt when I first heard Father use the term of endearment “kurban” for Imran would recur, and I would grow accustomed to it. But if I was able to make peace with my envy at the attention Father showered on Imran, it had everything to do with an inner compensation that helped my pain make sense:

  The boy could have him, as long as I had Mina…

  Every night, half an hour before bedtime, Mina would come and find me. She would lead me into her room, getting into bed, where she propped two pillows, one for each of us—sometimes a third if Imran was still awake—as we settled in. After dimming the bedside lamp and huddling in closer to set the mood, with an eager look in her eye, she would begin:

  “Once upon a time…”

  I loved her voice. And I loved being so close to her. My days now revolved around the anticipation of that nighttime hour, when I would lie beside her, taking in the vaguely sweet, jasmine scent she wore, listening—my eyes closed—to her breathy voice as she told bedtime tales.

  If Imran was with us, Mina would begin with a story about djinns. Djinns were creatures described in the Quran made not of mud—like us humans—but fire, able to change form at will. Mina told us tales of djinns as tall as trees, and others dressed in black robes with bells for hands, and still others that ran as fast as the wind, chasing Punjabi farmers from their fields at the crack of dawn. She told us of a djinn called Pichulpari—famous throughout the Punjab—who roamed the forest roads of Islamabad as a woman in a scarlet shalwar. Pichulpari waved in distress to passing drivers, luring kind souls to the shoulder, where she then attacked them. Some of her victims, Mina said, died of fright from their encounters. Mina even knew a man who’d seen Pichulpari with his own eyes. He’d described a woman who looked nothing like a real person: a creature with a long, lupine face and the grotesque oddity of its feet and hands affixed to its limbs backwards. Imran loved these stories. I did, too.

  But I loved her tales of the Prophet more.

  Most Muslim kids my age would have already known the stories of Muhammad’s life that she told me. But neither of my parents was particularly religious, and I heard more tales from Mother about Father’s mistresses than anything else. Deep down, Mother was a believer, but the years she’d spent with Father—who thought religion was for fools—had trained her, I think, to check her religious impulses. According to Mother, Father’s antipathy for the faith came from the fact that his own mother used devoutness to abuse her children, beating them out of bed for their morning prayers, not feeding them if they didn’t put in their hours of daily religious study. “But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still believe in Allahmia,” Mother would add, assuringly. When Mina discovered how little I actually knew about Islam, she was delighted to fill the gap.

  The tale of our Prophet’s childhood brought tears to her eyes no matter how many times she told it: a young Arab boy who’d lost everything a boy could lose, with a father already dead when he was brought into the world, and a mother who died when he was six. And yet, despite his misfortunes, young Muhammad was never sullen. Everywhere he went, people would remark on his good nature, his unusual poise and calm, and on the special light they saw shining in his eyes. This light, Mina said, had been put there by God shortly after young Muhammad’s mother’s death. One afternoon, as he was playing with a group of friends, three mysterious figures enshrouded in veils of light—they were angels—appeared and whisked him off to the top of a distant mountain. There, the first angel reached into Muhammad’s breast, and cut the boy open to the belly. Young Muhammad felt no pain as he watched the angel’s hand disappear inside his body and bring forth the goopy tangle of his intestines. The angel cleaned the organs with fresh snow from a magical green vase. Now the second angel approached and plunged his hand into the boy’s still-open chest. He took young Muhammad’s heart out and searched inside, removing a tiny black clot. This clot, Mina explained, was the seed of evil contained in all human hearts, but no longer in Muhammad’s. The third angel stepped forward to put the boy back together, restoring his organs and sealing up his chest. This angel declared that the mission was complete, and young Muhammad was now returned to his playmates, none of whom, oddly, had even noticed he was gone. The whole miracle had taken place in the time it took to blink an eye.

  Two years later, when Muhammad was eight, the man he now called Father, his grandfather, also died. Mina was always saying that God loved Muhammad more than anyone else, but I didn’t understand how that could be the case: Why did Allah take everyone Muhammad loved away from him?

  “To teach him to depend on Allah only,” Mina explained.

  “But why?” I asked.

  “Because it is the truth, behta. Not a truth most can handle, but truth all the same: God is the only One we can depend on, truly.”

  And while I didn’t doubt she might have been right,
I remember thinking I didn’t want to lose my parents—or Mina either—just to find out something that was true. No matter how true it was.

  My favorite of Mina’s stories of Muhammad’s life took place in a cave. It was the tale of how he became the Prophet of Islam. Already forty, he was a married man. He was a merchant by trade, but Mina called him a seeker of the truth by nature. And during his travels along the trade route to Syria, Muhammad met Christian and Jewish holy men from whom he’d learned about Abraham and his teachings about the one and only true God. It was from these elder Christians and Jews, Mina claimed, that Muhammad learned to pray. And it was while praying quietly one night in a dark cave at Mount Hira, not far from his home, that Muhammad heard a voice.

  “Recite,” it said.

  Muhammad opened his eyes and found hovering before him a blinding light in the form of a man. It was Gabriel, God’s archangel. Muhammad opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

  “Recite!” the figure repeated, the command echoing ominously through the cave.

  Muhammad tried, but still couldn’t speak.

  Now Gabriel pressed in closer, the cloud of light growing brighter as he did, more unbearable. Muhammad felt as if his heart were going to explode.

  “Recite!” Gabriel commanded again.

  “I don’t know what to recite!” he finally cried out, trembling.

  Gabriel now took the mortal into his arms of light. Just as Muhammad was about to faint with terror, it happened. Words blossomed on his tongue, words he didn’t know were inside him. And what he spoke that night, Mina said with pride, were the first words of our great Revelation.

  The Quran.

  It was late August, the evening of my eleventh birthday. Mina came to get me earlier than usual from the family room. “I have something for you, behta,” she said, eagerly. Once we were in her room, she shut the door, pulling up the shawl around her shoulders to cover her head. She stepped over to the bookcase and reached for the green book that sat by itself on the highest shelf. She brought it to her lips, kissing the cover, then turned to me. “It’s time you had a Quran of your own. But before I give it to you, I want you to go and wash your hands. Respect for our holy book begins with cleanliness.”