American Dervish

by Ayad Akhtar

  Father rolled his eyes and took another sip.

  “I’m happy to teach him, if that’s not a problem for you,” Mina said to Father.

  I brightened, turning to Father. But he didn’t look enthused. “You’ve already got him obsessed with that book.”

  Like clockwork, Father’s lack of enthusiasm gave Mother her lead. “Well, I think that’s a wonderful idea!” she said brightly.

  Mina watched Father’s reaction to Mother’s sudden glee. “But I really don’t want to intrude…”

  “You’re not intruding,” he said. “If Muneer thinks it’s fine, go ahead. Teach him.” He turned to me. “But I don’t want to see you end up as a maulvi, Hayat.”

  Maulvi was another name for an imam.

  Mina chuckled. “It’s just namaaz, Naveed. I hardly think teaching him to pray is going to make him end up as a maulvi. Who would he become a maulvi for? This is not Pakistan.”

  “Trust me,” Father replied. “There are idiots enough here for someone to lead. You just haven’t met them yet. Chatha and all those stooges with their masjid on the South Side. Be grateful you don’t know any of them yet.” He turned to me again: “All I’m saying to you is: Don’t end up as a maulvi.”

  It didn’t take me long to learn the prayer and its various intricacies: the texts, the movements that went with them; how many times to repeat each part; how to sit, right foot propped under one’s behind, left turned in and resting on its side; the seven points that needed to touch the ground when you prostrated yourself (both knees, both hands, the chin, the nose, the forehead); and the meaning of holding up your right index finger during the prayer’s final section: another way to remind oneself that there was no God but Allah.

  I was a quick study, but Mina was insistent that the forms were not what mattered. And until I learned to understand what she called prayer’s “inner aspect,” she wouldn’t let me pray for real; I could only practice. I had to sit and listen to my breath, just as she had taught me to do that afternoon of the ice cream social. In the silence, she would make me focus on God. “Always imagine him close to you when you pray,” she explained. “If you think of Him as near, then that’s where you will find Him. And if you think of Him as far away, then that’s where He will be.”

  One day Mina finally decided I was ready. Much to my surprise, Father—who actually seemed proud of me—suggested an excursion to the same South Side masjid about which he always complained. That way, he said, I could offer my first prayer with the congregation, just as he had done as a child. But that Sunday, when we got to the mosque, there was a sign on the door announcing flood damage in the basement prayer room; the day’s worship had been cancelled. We went back home, where Father had another uncharacteristic idea: that we create our own congregation by offering prayers together as a family. Surprised as they were, Mother and Mina both thought it was a wonderful idea. So Father and I tied muslin to our heads—Imran wanted to join us, so we tied a piece to his head, too—then laid out prayer carpets in the living room. Father and I stood shoulder to shoulder, and Mother and Mina prayed shoulder to shoulder behind us. Imran sat off to one side, happy to mimic our movements.

  Afterwards, Mother was teary-eyed. Father pulled out his wallet and handed me a twenty-dollar bill.

  “What’s that for?” I asked.

  “You’re a man now. A man needs to have money in his pocket,” he said, clapping me on the back.

  “Just because you have it doesn’t mean you have to spend it,” Mother interrupted.

  “Let the boy be,” Father retorted, though more warmly than usual.

  Mina took me in her arms, cooing her congratulations: “Behta, I’m so proud of you!”

  “Thank you, Auntie,” I said.

  “Did you do like I taught you? Did you imagine Allah before you as you prayed?”

  I realized I’d entirely forgotten. Mina read the response in my blank expression.

  “It’s the only reason to pray, Hayat,” she said. “To be close to Allah. If you just do forms, it’s useless. Even sitting quietly on the school bus and remembering your intention to be with God—even that is a hundred times better than just going through the motions.”

  “Okay, Auntie,” I said. “I won’t forget again. I promise.”

  For Mina, faith really wasn’t about the outer forms. She didn’t wear a head scarf. And since her troubles with food as a girl—she would stop eating when she was unhappy, and ended up in the hospital more than once because of it—she didn’t fast. But she still found a way to be true to the intention of Ramadan as she saw it: She would deprive herself of things she loved, like reading, in order to feel that quickening of the will—and the deepening of one’s gratitude—that she said were the reasons we Muslims fasted. Mina was an advocate of what we Muslims called ijtihad, or personal interpretation. The only problem was, the so-called Gates of Ijtihad had been famously “closed” in the tenth century, a fact I was aware of from a footnote in the Quran Mina had given me. The note explained that personal interpretation led to innovations, and that these innovations created chaos in the matter of knowing what it meant to obey God’s will. I asked Mina about it one day, and she explained to me—at teatime, with Mother at the table—that as far as she was concerned, these “gates” could never be closed, because they were the gates that led to the Lord.

  “Somebody just said they were closed. I walk through them as I please,” she added.

  “But since when is that for you to decide?” Mother asked, surprised.

  (I was surprised myself that Mother even knew what ijtihad was.)

  “Who else can decide, Muneer?” Mina said with passion. “Some mullah from a thousand years ago? When we’re told that the Quran says we are not equal to men, is it true? The Quran’s laws are more progressive than what the Arabs had before Islam. That was the intention. To move things forward, to create more freedom. How can the rule matter when it is not true to the deeper intention?”

  “So they shouldn’t be able to marry four wives?”

  Mina considered, a smile slowly appearing on her lips: “Or we should be able to marry four men…”

  “God forbid!” Mother exclaimed with a laugh. “One is enough!”

  Perhaps it was her belief in her purity of intent that made Mina think she could enroll herself in a training program for beauty salon technicians and somehow remain unsullied by the cosmetic ruses of white women. How else to explain what she was thinking when she decided to make her living here in America by learning the very outward wiles so at odds with the feminine modesty central to our Islamic faith? But perhaps it was precisely in the contradiction where the appeal lay. After all, here Mina was, now living in a world where a woman’s life was truly nothing like the life she’d known. What did it mean? What was it like to be a woman in America? What were the sorts of thoughts that passed through the minds of the large-boned, blonde, and blue-eyed Amazons she saw driving their children to tennis lessons and soccer practice; who wandered the malls, their arms covered with shopping bags; who shuffled along the grocery aisles, pushing carts filled to overflow? Mina must have wondered. And perhaps it was at the local grocery—where she and Mother went weekly—while standing in line and taking in the spectacle of white women with their intriguing and unfamiliar frozen dinners, deli cheeses, Hostess snack cakes, and the forbidden bottles of wine and beer in different shades of brown and green (and of course, the shocking cuts of pork, pink like human flesh); perhaps it was there that Mina first noticed the selection of magazines showing American beauties with impossibly wide smiles, their hairstyles gorgeously tousled by the breeze of freedom that seemed to blow across every glossy cover. For it was from those photo-thick fashion journals—Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and Cosmopolitan—that Mina would get the idea of becoming a beauty salon professional.

  But if it had truly been her intention simply to learn the beauty secrets without using them on herself, she would fail miserably. Within weeks of starting her education, the
habitual Pakistani garb—the loosely fitting shalwar pants, kameez tunics, and dupatta head coverings—gave way to not-so-loose-fitting blouses and jeans. She had to dress appropriately for school, she explained to Mother, an excuse that only forecast further innovations in her appearance. Now she started to let her new friends at the Institute for Women & Beauty—a storefront school at the local mall—make her up not only with lipstick and blush, but mascara, foundation, and eye shadow. And even if she usually wiped all the “face paint” off before coming home, leaving only the vaguest traces for us to discern, there were a few times she hazarded the full-frontal display, stepping into the kitchen, her eyes wide with defiance. Thinking back, I can only imagine that in moments like these, Mina was casting herself as the testing adolescent, and Mother as her parent. But if Mina expected resistance, Mother gave her none. She loved the fact that Mina was exploring. Likely, it was this very permission Mina had been seeking for much of her life.

  Barely two months into her training, she went all out and had her hair completely redone, coming home one evening in Sue Ellen’s latest, her sensuous tresses gone, the hair on top of her head spiked with gel. (Mina—like Mother, Father, and I—was an avid watcher of Dallas, and a devoted admirer of the lovely, long-suffering Ewing wife played by Linda Gray.) We must have looked shocked, for Mina turned red and immediately began to explain in embarrassed tones that one of her fellow students needed someone to practice on and that no one else had volunteered. But Mina didn’t need to fear. Our shock was really just astonishment. The fact was: she looked incredible. With her new do, Mina was, if possible, even more beautiful. Or I should say, beautiful in an entirely new way. Her fashionable hairstyle made her a modern woman, an American woman, an astonishing prospect to folks like us who never would have thought we could look like that.

  Mother spent most of dinner commenting on what the hairstyle did to her best friend’s face: the way it brought forth her bone structure; further elongated her almond eyes; created space to appreciate the fineness of her features. Father was impressed, too. At one point, he pointed at Mina’s head as he addressed his wife:

  “Maybe you should try something like that.”

  But Mother wasn’t keen on the idea. At least not yet. It would be years before she would attempt anything even vaguely like Mina’s modern makeover. For now, Mother’s hair would remain as it was: straight, falling halfway down her back, subject only to the luxury of an occasional henna coloring or permanent to give it body. Mother was more than content to live vicariously through her best friend, whether this meant purchasing Mina a vanity case filled with the latest cosmetics for her first birthday here in America, or driving her to the mall to peruse the racks for the latest styles. Mother enjoyed these outings tremendously, but she was always sure to make it known she was just “tagging along.” It was all just for Mina’s sake, of course.

  For once, life in our home was settling into a peaceful, lively rhythm which none of us was accustomed to by nature or experience. I’m not convinced we were prepared to be happy. After all, we were formed and informed (to various degrees) by an Eastern mythos profoundly at odds with the American notion of happily-ever-after. For though we longed for happiness, we did not expect it. This was our cultural text, the message imprinted in even the movie videos my parents rented from the local Indo-Pak grocer—the only place you could find Indian films in town—lavish tales of unconsummated love, or love consummated at the price of death. These films were so unlike anything a paying American audience could ever have taken seriously as the truth about life. Americans would only have laughed in disbelief.

  How ironic, then, that such disbelief was what Mina and my parents felt for the relentlessly hopeful narratives they would sit through at the local multiplexes just then opening their doors for business in the early eighties: They couldn’t see in Hollywood’s rosy pictures of life’s possibilities anything other than, at best, wishful thinking and, at worst, childish distraction. As a vision of life, they couldn’t have taken it any more seriously than the popcorn they ate during the show could be taken for a meal. Instead, it was to the Indian weepies that they went to experience the pathos and color that felt to them like the truth about life. These were the moving pictures that had given shape and sound to their souls, stories painted from a darker palette, limned with haunting songs and built from images of elegiac beauty that conveyed an unvarying message:

  Do not expect anything other than loss, pain, sorrow.

  Like the odor of masala lingering along our hallways, the expectation of unhappiness hovered in the air we breathed, and even though Mina’s presence among us had opened a window, brightening our lives, she was from the same world as my parents. And confident as she claimed to be in Allah’s ultimate goodwill toward humanity, I think she fully expected things to turn against her in the end.

  It was late December. After my lesson with Mina one evening, I spent another few hours at my desk with the Quran. By midnight, I was in bed. But I wasn’t sleeping. I stared up into the darkness as I quietly cycled new verses on my lips:

  Have We not opened your heart

  And removed your burden?

  Have We not remembered you?

  Truly, with hardship comes ease,

  With hardship comes ease!

  I heard something in the hall. I stopped and listened. It was something like a voice. I got out of bed and stepped to my door, quietly pulling it open. A thin sliver of light bled through the partly open doorway of the bathroom down the hall.

  Someone must have left the light on, I thought.

  I stepped out and made my way to the door. As I reached my hand to the knob, I heard a sigh from inside. I stopped and pressed my eye to the crack. In the mirror, Mina stood, naked. Her breasts hung, smooth and ample and round, tipped with large dark nipples. Her skin gleamed a taut, pale brown. I had never seen anything so perfect as her naked body, its swelling at the chest and hips, the tapering between and down along her legs. My heart stirred. Something inside me was already burning.

  Her eyes were closed, her left hand pushed in between her legs. She moaned softly to herself, her right hand touching her right nipple. She moaned softly again, continuing to rub her hand between her legs, more intensely now as her lips parted and she seemed to disappear inside herself. And then, all at once, her body tensed. She pulled her hand away to reveal a dark triangle between her legs. I was shocked. And then I realized:

  She was looking at me.

  Abruptly, she brought her right arm across her breasts and cupped her left hand over the darkness between her legs. Then she kicked the door shut.

  I went back to my room and listened. A door opened. Another shut farther down the hall. I was in turmoil. I tried to sleep, and then I finally did. I tossed and turned through the night, the verses I’d learned echoing in my mind, the perfect form of Mina’s naked body—and that shocking darkness at the top of her legs—haunting my dreams.

  Had it not been for the awkwardness at breakfast the following morning, I might well have wondered if I hadn’t dreamt the whole thing. But when I saw her sit at the table and attend coldly to her breakfast without even a look in my direction, my shame erupted—viscous, punishing. And her arctic reply to my sole attempt at bridging the sudden gulf between us—I asked her if she wanted me to pass her the salt for her eggs—sent a shudder of remorse through me.

  After breakfast, she disappeared into her room. I followed her upstairs, but she wouldn’t let me in. I was desperate. “I’m sorry, Auntie,” I said, crying. She held the door barely cracked, just enough for me to see one eye and part of her mouth as she whispered back with a damning hush: “Hayat. We are not to talk about that. Don’t ever mention it again. To me. Or anyone else.” She paused, easing the door open just a crack wider to pin me with a silvered, watery gaze.

  And then she shut the door in my face.

  Book Two

  Nathan

  5

  Love at First Sight

  It was
a silent, despairing winter that followed my discovery of Mina in the bathroom. Her cooling toward me lasted weeks, and then months; her fatigue from long, late hours at work was now the excuse she used for avoiding our Quranic study hour. Whatever time we did spend together was not the same, troubled now by a discomfort whose source we both knew too well. I wished it had never happened. I prayed to God to wipe the memory of that night from both our minds. And prayer wasn’t the only magical thinking to which I resorted. After reading an article in one of Mina’s magazines about how we created what happened to us in our lives with our thoughts—and, particularly, by what we chose to remember—I tried to change my memory of that night. I would lie in bed, imagining it all again: the sounds in the hall that had gotten my attention, but this time I didn’t get out of bed to check; or sometimes I did, but only to find Mina in the bathroom in her pajamas, brushing her teeth, looking up at me in the mirror with a smile. As the article explained, if I could only imagine a different ending, perhaps I would forget what had really happened.

  But it didn’t work. The image of her perfect form was never far from my mind, drifting into consciousness like smoke from a fire that just wouldn’t go out.

  So I tried something else. If it had been so wrong to see her private parts, I surmised, then I would stop looking at my own. It was conclusion based on a syllogism that occurred to me without effort, and brought me curious relief:

  Seeing her nakedness was wrong.

  So nakedness was wrong.

  So my nakedness was wrong.