American Dervish

by Ayad Akhtar

  Mina smiled at me again. “Come and see me later, behta,” she said as Mother led her out.

  At bedtime, I went to see her, Quran in hand.

  “Is it okay if we do a story tonight instead of diniyaat?” she asked with a whisper. She pointed: Imran was lying on his bed, sleeping.

  “Sure, Auntie,” I whispered back.

  Mina threw open the covers, inviting me inside. She asked me what story I wanted to hear. Something new, I said. She took a moment to think, and then her eyes lit up.

  “I’m going to tell you about a dervish. That’s someone who gives up everything for Allah.”

  “Gurvish?”

  “Dervish. With a d, not a g.”

  “Dervish,” I repeated, nodding. But an image had already been born from the word incorrectly heard: Mr. Gurvitz, the old janitor at my elementary school, a bald, skinny man who doddered, hunched, along the halls trailing a trash can on wheels.

  “So I want to tell you about a dervish who was wandering the world by foot. He wandered and wandered, thinking only of Allah all day long. He’d given everything up in search of God, behta, to the point that he was depending completely on the kindness of strangers for his meals, sleeping at night on the open road, under the open sky—”

  “He’s a homeless guy,” I said.

  “Not just homeless, Hayat. I’m talking about a Sufi. A Sufi dervish. Whose whole life is devoted to Allah. It was his choice to give everything up.”

  What she was saying made no sense to me. “Auntie, why would anybody choose to be homeless?”

  “Because by giving everything up, his home, his family, his job, nothing is in the way anymore. Nothing between himself and God.”

  Mina could tell I wasn’t following.

  “What is special for you, behta? Is there something you would never want to lose?”

  “You, Auntie.”

  She smiled. “That’s so sweet, Hayat.” She ran her fingers along my forehead. “You love being with me…in this moment…”

  “So much, Auntie. So much.”

  “You don’t want it to end, right?”

  “Never.”

  “It’s the same with our dervish. He feels this kind of love with Allah. He doesn’t ever want it to end. Just like you and me right now. Everything else, television, school, chores… those would take you away from me right now, right?”

  I nodded.

  “So that’s what the dervish does, gets rid of his television and his school and his chores. Everything that takes him away from Allah’s love.”

  “I understand, Auntie.”

  “But in this story, the dervish gave up everything, but he still felt sad and confused. He still felt he was holding on to something that took him away from God’s love.”

  “What?”

  “He didn’t know. And he was asking himself that question over and over. For years he wandered and searched and prayed for an answer. And he couldn’t figure out what it was…

  “Then one day, the dervish lost hope. After looking for so long, he was so tired. He sat down on the side of the road. Exhausted. With no idea what to do anymore…”

  I was still seeing Gurvitz in my mind’s eye. And I saw him now, in tattered clothes, defeated, sitting beside an empty road.

  “Just as he was sitting there, two men came walking along, eating oranges. They came closer and saw the old dervish, and one of them said: ‘What a filthy old man.’ And the other said: ‘Look how he’s staring at our oranges. With greedy eyes!’ They laughed. And as they passed the dervish, they tossed the orange peels at him: ‘Here, old man, eat the peels if you’re so hungry!’

  “Now, behta. If that happened to you or me, we would get angry. We would get up and say something, or throw the peels back at the men. But not this dervish. He didn’t get angry. Instead, he got up and took both of them into his arms.

  “ ‘Thank you, brothers! Thank you for giving me the answer!’ The men were confused. ‘What answer?’ they asked. ‘The answer I’ve been waiting for my whole life!’ the dervish said.”

  Mina paused.

  “It’s a difficult story, behta. I know. But I think you can understand it…

  “What the dervish found was true humility. He realized he was no better, no worse than the ground itself, the ground that takes the discarded orange peels of the world. In fact, he realized he was the same as that ground, the same as those peels, as those men, as everything else. He was the same as everything created by Allah’s hand.

  “What was in his way before? He thought he was different. But now he saw he was not different. He and Allah, and everything Allah created, it was all One.”

  I didn’t understand what she was saying at the time. But I would never forget it.

  Saturday night, our doorbell rang an hour before dinner. Mother came hurrying out of the kitchen. “Get the door, Hayat,” she said, pulling her cooking apron from her waist as she headed for the stairs. I was in the living room with Imran playing chess, or at least trying to.

  “Take your time and think about it,” I said to Imran as I stood up. “You’re close to checkmate.”

  Imran stared at the board for a moment, then threw his arm across it, scattering all the pieces. “I win!” he cried out.

  “You didn’t win,” I shot back. “You don’t know the rules, so you don’t even know what it means to win. And after what you just did, you won’t ever win, because I’ll never play with you again!”

  Imran squealed now, tossing the board into the air. He threw himself onto his back and started to kick and scream.

  The doorbell rang again.

  “What’s going on down there?!” Mother shouted, peering out from the upstairs bathroom. Mina’s face appeared over her shoulder.

  “What happened?” Mina shouted out to her son in Urdu.

  “Nothing!” I shouted back.

  “Stop making trouble, Hayat,” Mother said, sharply. “Go see who’s at the door!”

  “Yeah, I wonder,” I muttered to myself. Mina and Mother had been in a frenzy all afternoon in anticipation of our dinner guest, Nathan. I opened the front door.

  “Hey, Hayat!” Nathan said brightly. He was wearing a brown sport coat, a yellow buttondown oxford, and khakis. Everything was perfectly pressed, and he looked like he’d just come from a haircut. He was patting at his forehead with a handkerchief.

  “Hi, Dr. Wolfsohn,” I mumbled back. Nathan reached down and picked up a box lying at his feet.

  “How’s life treating you, Hayat?” he asked as he stepped inside.

  “Fine.”

  Behind us, Imran dashed past, racing up the steps. He was crying.

  “Everything okay?” Nathan asked.

  “Don’t ask me,” I answered with a shrug. “The kid’s always crying about something.”

  Nathan nodded. “Well, can’t be easy for him to be in a new country…”

  “It isn’t that new. He’s been here awhile.”

  “I guess… so, um, Hayat, where’s your dad? He’s been pestering me all week for these.” Nathan indicated the box he was holding.

  “Out back. In the garden.”

  “Mind if I go ahead and set this down?” Nathan stepped into the living room, looking about. He turned to me, nodding at the armchair. “You think it’s okay if I put it over there?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  As he made his way to the chair, his foot caught under the edge of the pink-and-red Persian carpet that covered much of our living room floor. He tripped, and the box flew from his grip. The films inside spilled everywhere. It was just like when he’d dropped the soda at the barbecue, I thought.

  “Shit!” he cried out, and then shot me a look of concern. “Sorry about the language. I didn’t mean…”

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  Nathan and I started collecting the spilled scans. Each showed four oval images of the human brain, and though each oval was somehow differently shaded, they all looked the same. There were literally thousa
nds of them. I couldn’t understand what he and Father spent so much time looking at.

  Nathan stuffed the films into the box and got to his feet. “Thanks for helping,” he said as he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face; he was covered in sweat. “Where is everybody?”

  “Upstairs.”

  He sat down on the couch. He patted at his face again, now lifting his arm to sniff at his armpit. Realizing I was watching him, he lowered his arm and smiled weakly. “Is it hot in here, or is it just me?”

  “I guess it’s hot,” I said.

  “Yeah, it is. Isn’t it?” He looked about the room, distracted. All at once, he turned to me, exclaiming: “Oh! I just remembered…I got you something!” He fished in his coat pocket, pulling out a slender golden package. “Here. Open it.”

  I took it and tore off the gold gift wrap. It was a book. The Call of the Wild.

  “Jack London,” he said, “was one of my favorites when I was your age.”

  I leafed through its pages, stopping at an illustration of a dog against a barren landscape.

  “It’s a special edition. You probably don’t know what that is yet, but if you take good care of it, someday it’ll be worth a lot of money…Doesn’t mean you can’t read it, though. I mean, that’s the whole point, right? To read it?”

  “Thanks, Dr. Wolfsohn.”

  “My pleasure, Hayat…Remember, I told you, you could call me Nathan?”

  “Sorry…Nathan.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I hope you enjoy it.”

  “What do you have there, behta?” It was Mother’s voice. I turned to look. She was standing in the living room doorway, transformed. Only minutes before, she’d rushed from the kitchen, her hair tied back in a messy bun, in a blouse and slacks beneath a kitchen apron covered with curry stains; and here she was now in a baby-blue shalwar-kameez covered with sequins, a turquoise-and-silver scarf draped around her neck, her brown-black hair loose and tumbling in a shapely wave about her shoulders. She was lovely.

  “Just something I found for him at the bookstore around the corner from my place. I know how much he loves books. That was one of my favorites when I was his age.”

  “You shouldn’t have,” Mother said, approaching. The sweet scent of her sandalwood fragrance drifted in along with her. Mother took the book from me, thumbing at its pages, though appearing to pay little attention to what was on them. To me it seemed she was more interested in the fact that both Nathan and I were looking at her. “God, this is so wonderful!” she said in a honeyed tone.

  “It isn’t much,” Nathan replied. “I hope he likes it.”

  “And you’re modest, too!” Mother added with a theatrical nod. She turned to me. “Did you thank Dr. Wolfsohn, behta?”

  “Oh, of course he did,” Nathan interjected. “And…​Muneer, please call me Nathan.”

  Mother smiled.

  Nathan reached into his other coat pocket, pulling out a smaller package wrapped in the same golden paper.

  “What’s that?” Mother asked.

  “For Imran,” he said.

  “How thoughtful,” she said, her eyes softening. Now, as she spoke, her head bobbed subtly side to side in typical Indo-Pak style. “Sooo thought-ful. Sooo, sooo thought-ful…” Abruptly, she turned back to the hallway and yelled out: “Imran, behta! Come here, honey! Dr. Wolfsohn has a present for you!”

  The boy appeared at the top of the stairs, whimpering. “Look what Dr. Wolfsohn got you, kurban,” Mother said, holding out the small package. Imran didn’t budge. “C’mon, sweetie,” she coaxed.

  “Hayat is there,” he whined.

  Mother looked at me. “What did you do to him?”

  “Nothing.”

  Mina emerged from the bathroom, coming up behind her son at the top of the stairs. She was dressed in yellow and gold, a cream-colored shawl draped loosely around her head. She began making her way down the steps with Imran, her hands on his shoulders. I glanced over at Nathan. He looked enchanted.

  “Imran, behta—what did Hayat do so wrong?” Mother asked.

  “I didn’t do anything,” I snapped. “He doesn’t want to learn the rules and then he acts like a brat about it.”

  “Hayat, he’s a child,” Mina said, descending the stairs. “Let him play in his own way.”

  “His own way is not chess,” I shot back. “If he wants to do that, he can play it by himself. He doesn’t need me.”

  Mother turned to me sharply. “What did you say?”

  “I said it’s not chess. I said I don’t want to play with him if he doesn’t want to play by the rules.”

  Imran and Mina were standing in the doorway now, and Imran had a satisfied smirk on his face. Mother glared at me, chewing on her lip. “Don’t talk back to your elders! Make yourself useful. Go outside and tell your father Dr. Wolfsohn is here!” She turned to Nathan, her tone abruptly softening: “I mean Nathan, of course…”

  Outside, the lawn was covered with long shadows. The sun was setting. I stopped and looked up at the sky. Red and orange clouds burned, strange and wonderful, against the dark blue of approaching night.

  I was halfway down the backyard when I suddenly heard Mother’s frantic voice crying out behind me: “Naveed! Naveed!” She was standing at the patio door. “Come quickly! Come now!”

  Down at the garden, Father’s form appeared from behind a row of waist-high tomato plants. His arms dangled at his sides, tipped with yellow gardening gloves.

  “Come quickly! Quick!” she cried out again, then turned and disappeared inside.

  Father stepped over the fence, pulling off the gloves. He started up the lawn with an unhurried jog. “God only knows what she wants now,” he grumbled as he passed me. “You coming?”

  Back in the living room, we found Nathan splayed on the armchair, his hand over his eye. Mina was leaned over him, her face almost as red as the bright scarlet stain along the edge of her cream-colored shawl.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Father asked.

  “Dr. Wolfsohn got Imran a toy car…”

  “Muneer, please…”

  “Sorry, Nathan…and Imran threw it at his face.”

  “He hit me in the eye,” Nathan said calmly. “But I think I’m fine.”

  “Then what the hell are you lying down for? Like you’re dying…”

  “I’m not dying, Naveed.”

  “Where’s the toy car?” Father asked Mina.

  She handed Father a small red matchbox racer. “Nate got it for him as a gift.”

  Father sat on the chair’s armrest, leaning in to inspect. “Let me see,” he said, pulling Nathan’s hand away from his face. His eye was shut, and a steady trickle of blood poured out along the eyelid’s corner.

  “Open it, Nathan,” Father prodded. Nathan’s eye popped wide open. “Can you see?”

  “Just fine.”

  “Can you move it?”

  Nathan’s eyeball darted about in its socket. He blinked a few times. “Yeah, fine,” Nathan said.

  Father took hold of Nathan’s head, turning it and peering closer to study the cut. “You’re fine,” he said. “But just by a hair. It’s a nasty cut. But the eye is fine.”

  “Thank God,” Mother said, releasing a sigh of relief. “So his eye is okay?”

  “Fine. Just clean it and put on a Band-Aid.” Father stood. “Where’s the boy?” he asked Mina.

  “Upstairs.”

  “I’m going to have a talk with him,” Father said as he headed out.

  Mother was glowering at me. “Next time you irritate the boy like that, I’ll fix you for good.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just walked out.

  Up in my room, I pulled out my Quran. Smarting, I opened it to the surah I’d begun memorizing that day:

  Oh, the striking of the Last Hour!

  What is the striking of the Last Hour?

  And what can make you see what the striking of the Last Hour will be?

  A Day when men will swarm lik
e moths,

  And mountains become as strands of wool…

  He whose weight of good is heavy on the scale

  Will have a good life.

  Whereas he whose weight is light on the scale

  Will be devoured by the abyss.

  And what can make you see what the abyss will be?

  A blazing fire!

  I read the lines to myself again and again. The words calmed me. The events downstairs began to fade. How trivial it all seemed in the light shed by the recollection of God’s fire. I remembered the view of the sky outside, burning and majestic. I felt a shudder of fear and awe. And I felt relief that I had been reminded of the only thing that mattered.

  If others don’t want to know, let them burn. But don’t you ever forget.

  7

  Jews and Us

  Dinner that night was not an easy affair. The mood at the table was heavy. Mina was withdrawn. But Nathan was doing all he could to amuse and engage her. I thought he looked ridiculous, his left eye partly covered with a Band-Aid, twitching and blinking as he spoke and ate. And though Mina was trying to enjoy the attention, her mind was clearly elsewhere. At some point, Father rolled out his standard Nathan-mocking fare to lighten things up, but even Father’s own amusement—he was always the first to laugh (and heartily) at his own jokes—seemed dimmed by the leaden mood.

  After dinner, Mina and Nathan went into the living room together. No sooner had they sat down than Imran started another tantrum. He wailed at the top of his lungs for his mother, his cries piercing, like sounds of pain. Mina didn’t hold out very long before going upstairs to calm him down. Half an hour later, she returned to say good night. She and Nathan got up and went to the front door. I went upstairs to my room and watched out the window as they made their way down the driveway. Standing by his car in the moonlight, Nathan leaned toward her. She put her arm around him, her hand finding the back of his head. They held each other for a long moment.

  It hurt me to watch.

  That evening was a preview of coming attractions: Mina and Nathan’s courtship was under way, and Imran’s troublemaking would be the unvarying obstacle. With my summer vacation now started, Mother charged me with getting the boy out of the house for Nathan’s visits. I did what I could. The first time I got lucky. On my way to the baseball diamond behind the Fahls’ house—my preferred summer-afternoon destination, where there was always a game in progress—I ran into Denise and Mandy Robinson, identical twins with curly brown hair and close-set eyes. They thought the boy was “cute as a button.” They were headed to the Gartner tree house, a sprawling complex of tiny rooms connected by ladders and ropes that I’d told Imran about many times. He was eager to see it; I was eager to get rid of him. That afternoon went well—Imran loved playing with the girls. And afterwards, the Robinson twins brought him to the baseball diamond when they were all done. Unfortunately, my luck would not repeat itself, and those first couple of weeks I ended up having to bring him along to the baseball games. Try as I did to make Imran just sit and watch, he never cooperated. He distracted and pestered us until someone gave him a mitt and let him stand in the middle of the outfield, where, of course, he couldn’t catch a ball. Even if it was tossed to him from three yards away.