by Ayad Akhtar
One night after dinner Mother and Mina were talking over tea. I was sitting at the end of the table. Father had been gone an entire day and night, and Mother was complaining. After listening for a while, Mina stopped her. “I’m the problem, bhaj. I have to leave.”
Mother was quiet.
I looked at Mother, surprised she wasn’t saying anything.
“But you can’t go, Auntie,” I finally blurted out.
Mina turned to me. “Behta, your auntie has to live her own life now.” She said it drily; her tone left no room for debate.
“He hasn’t called yet, has he?” Mother asked after another long pause.
Mina shook her head. “But they’ve been asking.”
I suddenly worried they were talking about Hamed. “Who?” I asked.
Mother turned to me, sharply. “Mind your own business, Hayat…Take your milk and go somewhere else.”
Two days later, the phone rang. I picked it up. But before I could speak, I heard Mother’s voice on the line. (She’d gotten it upstairs.) It was Ghaleb Chatha calling. I stayed on and listened. After chilly greetings, Chatha got to his point: He wanted permission for Sunil to contact Mina. The intent would of course be matrimonial, he explained.
Mother told him curtly it was fine.
Chatha’s response to her was just as curt. “Muneer. I appreciate the fact that you approve. But I really should speak with the man of the house.”
There was a pause.
“He has no say on the matter. I’m the one you need to speak with.” Mother’s tone was acerbic.
“All the same…Is Dr. Naveed-sahib there?”
“He’s not.”
“Would you have him call me, please?”
“Not likely, Ghaleb,” Mother replied. “There’s no love lost for you as far as Naveed goes.”
“Then I should speak with her parents directly.”
“Suit yourself.”
There was another pause.
“Do you have the number, Muneer?”
“You’ll have to speak to Mina about that.”
“Well, I would prefer not to. If you could get the number and call Najat with it…”
“Fine,” Mother said. There was a click. She’d hung up the phone.
Mother had no intention of following through with Chatha’s request—“I won’t be bossed around by that beard on a stick,” she complained that night—but Mina would force her to.
Two days later, sometime before sunrise, our phone’s tinny toll shattered the sleeping quiet, ringing and ringing. Someone finally picked up. After a brief silence, Mother’s bedroom door flew open and she scurried down the hall to Mina’s room.
“Call from Pakistan!” Mother hissed. “Your parents!”
“Is everything okay?” Mina asked, alarmed.
“I think Chatha called,” Mother said through the door.
Mother was right. Chatha had called her parents in Pakistan and secured the permission he wanted, by way of a proposition: He would not only waive the dowry but he would also foot the bill for the entire wedding, including the Alis’ airfare to America to attend it. Rafiq, Mina’s father, was overjoyed. And he was calling the house now to persuade his daughter not to squander this second chance at a “normal life.” He must have been pleasantly surprised to find his daughter wouldn’t need persuading.
My first interaction with Sunil was over the phone. He and Mina had been speaking regularly for about a week when I picked up the phone one afternoon. From the other end came a peculiar, high-pitched drawl:
“Hulloo?”
“Hello?”
“This is Sunil? I’m loooking for Mina Alee?”
“Who?”
“Minaa?
“Mina?”
“Yesss?”
The voice was strange. It spoke with the same unvarying lilt, elongating sounds for no apparent reason, making every phrase sound like it was a question, even when it wasn’t.
“Who’s calling?”
“Sunil?” He paused. “Is this Haayat?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“I’ve heard about yoouu? I’m looking forward to meeting you?”
I couldn’t understand why he was speaking like this.
“I would like to taaalk to your auntie Mina?”
“Okay. I’ll get her.”
“Thaank you, behta?”
I looked down into the family room, where Mina was sitting on the couch, her hand already on the receiver.
“It’s for you, Auntie.”
“Sunil?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, sweetie,” she said.
I was grateful to Allah that things looked to be turning out right. Mother explained that if Sunil and Mina married, then Mina would have no difficulty staying here in America, and Imran would be safe. And so it was with gratitude and renewed devotion that I now began to pray regularly, certain not to miss even a single one of the five daily prayers. But since I wasn’t able to be seen praying at home, I concocted a new way to worship. Taking my lead from Mina’s insistence on intention, I shed the traditional verses and movements of our namaaz. Instead, I would sit quietly at the appointed prayer times, my eyes closed, imagining I was in the presence of Allah Himself. Sometimes I thought of Him as a cloud in the sky; sometimes as the golden throne on which I imagined He sat; sometimes as simply an enormous white light. Whatever the image, I would imagine Him close to me. And then I would wait, listening to my breath, until the silence came. And I would mutter:
“I give myself to You.”
That was all. I don’t know where it came from, but it felt right. It felt like what I needed to say to God.
I did it everywhere: On the school bus. During recess or lunch. In class. In the backyard. In my room. At the mall. I would sit quietly with my eyes closed, and mutter to myself: “I give myself to You.” At times, I emerged from this prayer feeling something—a warmth, a light—I could tell others noticed in my eyes. I relished knowing that they hadn’t the slightest idea what it was, or how it got there. No one knew what I was doing.
As for my goal of becoming a hafiz, I not only persevered, I worked even harder than I had before, the dawning certainty of Mina’s eventual departure fueling a new kind of fervor in me, as I sought now in faith what I was losing in her. The school library had its own copy of the Quran, a small red tome translated by one Ronald McGhee. The edition had a preface that should have troubled me more than it did, outlining the necessity for an “unbiased version of the Bible of the Moslems” that would help Westerners to understand once and for all how “truly barbaric, even animal,” these “Moslems” were, and why “Christendom needed to prepare for a renewed crusade.” Perhaps I should have been bothered by this, but I wasn’t. As I saw it, beggars couldn’t be choosers, and McGhee’s renditions of verses I already knew were recognizable enough for me not to care about his opinions. I just needed the words. I checked it out and kept it in my desk at school, renewing it every three weeks on the due date stamped on the slip affixed to the inside of the back cover (which slip, incidentally, showed that the last time the book had been checked out before me was twenty years earlier). I spent many a recess sitting in a corner of the playground quietly working my way through new surahs. My classmates teased me at first, but after a few weeks—my Quranic half hour by then a mainstay—I ended up no more conspicuous to them than any of the new-planted maples in the school courtyard. Of course, there were times I didn’t feel like going on, times when I longed to join the midday games of kickball or football. But I knew what I was doing was more important than any game. If the Quran was clear on one thing it was that life on earth was passing, and that to pretend otherwise was the only lasting mistake one could truly make. This was how I started to think of it: Life was like watching a show you loved. You didn’t want it to end. But it would end, sooner or later; that’s just the way it was. And when the show was over, you had to get on with things. The sooner you started getting yourself ready for what was comi
ng after, the better.
It was early one Sunday morning in mid-October. After waking at sunrise to sit at the edge of my bed and pray in my new way, I went downstairs to the family room with a bowl of cereal to watch TV. At some point, I heard Father grumble a greeting from the top of the steps, disappearing into the kitchen to make himself tea. There was a brief clanging of pots and pouring of liquids, and shortly, Mother joined him. Moments later, Father was shouting:
“I don’t care! I don’t want to be here for it! And I won’t! I have better things to do with my life! If she won’t listen to me about that fool, at least I don’t have to be a party to it!”
“Calm down, Naveed!”
There was a loud, metallic crash. I looked over at the stairs leading up to the kitchen. Father was standing at the cabinet where he and Mother kept their keys.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Mother asked in a pointed tone.
“Fishing. That’s where.”
Father glanced down into the family room and our eyes met. For a moment, I thought he was going to ask me to go fishing with him. But he didn’t.
I would gather what the argument had been about later that morning as I lingered in the kitchen while Mina and Mother took breakfast: Sunil was supposed to be coming over to visit. It wasn’t the first time Mina and Imran had seen him; they’d been to visit at the Chathas’ with Mother a few times in the past weeks. But this was the first time Sunil would be coming to our home. The real idea had been for Sunil to meet Father, but Father wasn’t having any of it. He was still upset over what had happened between Nathan and Mina, and he thought this new development with the “Chatha cousin”—as Father referred to Sunil—was laughable.
Mother didn’t care that he wouldn’t be around, but Mina was concerned.
“This is not good, bhaj,” Mina said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter,” Mina said, putting her piece of toast down and pushing her plate away.
“You’re not finished, are you?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You’re not eating anything these days. You’re starting to worry me. You don’t look good…Isn’t that right, Hayat?” Mother asked, turning to me. It was true that Mina looked like she’d been losing weight, and she didn’t have much to lose. The skin on her face was starting to look taut and drawn in a way that looked unnatural. But I didn’t want to say that and hurt her feelings.
“The tea is enough,” Mina replied.
“Hayat, bring her a glass of milk.”
“Bhaj…”
“Finish your toast,” Mother said firmly.
“Fine,” Mina muttered, picking up the half-eaten piece of bread to take a bite. I poured a glass of milk and brought it to her. She took a sip.
“You haven’t been this bad since we were kids,” Mother said.
“It’s nothing. It’ll pass. There’s a lot on my plate.”
Mother looked down at Mina’s plate. “Not as much as there should be.”
Mina laughed. Mother did, too. Then all at once, Mother wasn’t laughing anymore. She held Mina’s gaze, suddenly grave. “Are we doing the right thing?” she asked.
“The right thing?”
“Do you really want to do this?”
“Muneer. We are doing this.”
Mother nodded, her chin dropping to her chest. There was a long pause.
“So what are we going to do about the Chathas?” Mina asked.
“About what?”
“Two women having a strange man over to their house? With no man of the house here? If Najat hears about this…”
Mother looked puzzled. “What?”
“What do you think?”
Mother scrunched her face. She didn’t know.
Mina turned away from me, lowering her voice. “They’ll say we’re loose.”
“Because Naveed isn’t here?” Mother replied, her voice lowered as well.
“Do I really have to explain this to you? This can’t really be news to you, bhaj?”
Mother rolled her eyes. “I didn’t think people could still think that way. You’ve been to their house on your own with Imran now, I don’t know, a half a dozen times…”
“But Najat is there…”
“So?”
“So, she’s the one who would be spreading the tale. I would never think of showing up if she wasn’t around. She already has her doubts about me.” Mina paused. “She was asking me how I could live so long under one roof with a man like Naveed.”
“Not a bad question,” Mother joked.
“I’m serious, Muneer. He doesn’t have the best reputation with them…”
“Hmm…”
“So I lied. I told them I wore the veil at home and kept to myself. That he never addressed a word to me unless you were present.”
Mother recoiled with a frown. She held Mina’s gaze for a long, pregnant moment. “What are you getting yourself into?”
For a moment, Mina didn’t seem to know how to respond. And then she said: “He loves Imran, bhaj. He’s a humble man. He’s made promises. I can live with the rest. It’s not the end of the world.”
Apparently Sunil didn’t mind that Father wasn’t there. He just didn’t want Mina to mention it to either Ghaleb or Najat. And so it was that I got to meet him for the first time.
I felt bad for thinking it, but to me he looked like a field rodent. He had a narrow face, a small round nose, and wide cheekbones brushed with fine black hairs, like tiny whiskers. And there was his posture, too: As he sat in our living room that afternoon—on the armchair where, four months earlier, Nathan had been laid out with a bleeding cut along his eye when Imran threw a matchbox car at his face—Sunil’s thin wisp of a body slouched and seemed to vanish into the loose beige suit he was wearing; and the suit’s beige pattern blended cleanly enough into the armchair’s beige shade that he looked engulfed by the fabric that surrounded him, a dark brown head peering out from a swollen swath of beige cloth, not unlike a prairie dog surveying the world from its burrow.
“Hayat,” he said to me from across the room. I stood in the living room doorway, no less startled by Sunil’s appearance than by what Mina was wearing: a tightly fitted veil, like the ones we were seeing in Iran on the evening news. I had never seen her in anything like it. Whenever she covered her head, it was with an Indic dupatta, which never really concealed all that much and, paradoxically, had the effect of rendering a woman’s femininity, if anything, even more palpable than if she wasn’t covered at all. But as for the strict, face-framing navy-blue hijab on her head now, there wasn’t much allure in it. To me, she looked like a nun.
“This is Sunil, sweetie.”
“Behtaaa?” Sunil cooed. I stared back at him, blank. I remembered the brief conversation we’d had on the phone. His lilting intonation and elongation of syllables made no more sense now than when I couldn’t see his face. He blinked at me insistently as he gazed, like there was something irritating his eyes. “Hoow are youuu?”
“Fine.”
“Meen has been telling me all about your studiees? I’m so prouud to know a young hafiz-to-be…”
“Thank you, Uncle.”
“How faaar have you gotten, behta?”
“Ten juz.”
“Ten?!” Mina exclaimed.
“A third of the waaay?” Sunil said, still blinking. He looked over at Mina, impressed.
“How did you already get through ten?” Mina asked, shaking her head.
“At school. I work at it during recess.”
“Recess?” Mina looked at Sunil, then back at me. “Your dedication is inspiring, behta.” She turned again to Sunil. “You remember what I told you about Naveed?”
Sunil nodded, his head bobbing side to side in traditional Indo-Pak style, blinking away as he did. “How impressive. Not only self-motivated? But under such diiif-icult conditions.” Sunil leaned forward and reached out his hands to me. “Come to Uncle…” I approached, but I could o
nly step so far; Imran and his toys were laid out all around Sunil’s feet. Sunil reached both his hands out farther, over Imran’s head. I couldn’t tell what he wanted me to do.
“Give me your haaands,” he said.
I did.
Taking hold, he pressed into my palms with his fingers. It was weird.
“You remind meee of my nephew,” he said, still kneading my palms. “Only fifteeeen years old and already a complete hafiz.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Farhaz…Maybe you will meet him soon,” he said, turning to Mina with a smile.
I looked over at her. She brought her hand to her forehead to push a strand of hair peeking out back beneath the veil. That was when I saw the enormous, glimmering white diamond she was wearing on her left hand’s ring finger. She noticed me notice the ring. “Oh… Sunil-Uncle just gave this to me.” She held out her hand for me to see. “An engagement ring.”
“It’s big,” I said.
Sunil pressed into my palms again. “So maybe you’ll get to meet Farhaz sooner than you think…”
Imran moaned, feeling left out. Sunil dropped my hands and leaned down for the boy, lifting him into his lap. Parted from his toys, Imran now squealed, even though he’d been the one seeking the attention. Sunil ruffled his hair affectionately and kissed him on the cheek, and all at once, Imran softened into Sunil’s embrace like there was nowhere else in the world he wished to be.
