by Ayad Akhtar
Mother sat down. She was shaking. I thought she was about to cry, until she spoke again and I realized she was trembling with anger.
“Hayat! All she said to him was, Do you think it’s such a good idea to say something like that to your cousin? That’s all! She’s trying to give that fool some good advice! And what does he do? You should have seen her face, Hayat! Thank God he wasn’t home when I got there. Thank God! Because if he was, I would have broken his head open! I hate these Muslim men. I hate them!… Not that Najat is any better. Do you know what she said to your Mina-auntie?”
I shook my head again.
“In front of your Mina-auntie and me, she tells us that the Quran says it’s all right for husbands to beat their wives. ‘Bullshit! Bloody bullshit!’ I said.” Such language on Mother’s lips was surprising. Her anger made her seem strong and alive. “So you know what Najat does? She goes and gets the Quran and opens it and shows me some verse in the fourth surah. About beating your wife?…”
I nodded. The fourth surah was one from which I’d recited at the walima. I spoke the verse:
Men are in charge of women for He has endowed them with greater resources.
Good women will obey and guard what He ordains.
Those whose rebellion you fear, reprove them; then leave them alone in bed; then beat them.
If they obey, do not harm them.
Mother stared at me for a long moment, a puzzled look on her face. It was as if she was noticing something about me she had never seen before.
“That was the one,” she finally said. “I didn’t know it, but there it was right in front of my eyes, written to give every Muslim man ideas…And then Najat says to me something you will never believe: ‘Ghaleb beats me, too,’ she says. Almost like she’s proud! Can you believe it?”
I didn’t know what to say. But Mother wasn’t waiting for me to say anything.
“So what do I do? I ask her, like any normal person would, ‘Why, Najat, does your husband beat you? Hmm?’”
Mother was absorbed in the moment, as if reliving it.
“‘Because we need it,’ she says. ‘Because it’s something about our nature. Something that needs to know its limits.’ My jaw hit the floor, Hayat. I looked at her and thought to myself, this is an insane asylum…”
Mother paused. And then she added, her chin slightly raised, her tone hushed and heavy with a sudden philosophical cast: “It was the first time I realized maybe I don’t have it so bad with your father. Maybe, all these years, I haven’t had it so bad, after all…”
For the next two days, I tried not to think about Sunil beating Mina, but it didn’t work. In my mind’s eye, I saw that small rodent of a man repeatedly hitting her with his closed fists. I tossed under the covers at night trying to forget what Mother said about Mina’s face being swollen, but I couldn’t. It made me angry. But not only angry. I felt responsible. I hadn’t had any reason to think about what I had done since Sunil entered the picture. Everything was supposed to turn out for the best. But that wasn’t happening. And if it hadn’t been for me and that afternoon in the Western Union office, she never would have ended up with this man.
But what could I do now?
All I could think of was either crank-calling the Chatha house—which I did more than a dozen times—or praying. So I prayed. I prayed that her husband wouldn’t beat her. I prayed that she not suffer. But with time, my prayers would prove as ineffectual as the crank-calling. As the bad news continued to pour in about Mina’s new husband, my doubts about the power of my prayer began to grow.
A month later, Mother had another alarming development to relay: She’d been trying to get Mina to leave Sunil and come back to live with us. But Mina wasn’t going to do it. The thought of another divorce made her want to die. She’d made her choice and that was that; now she had to live with it. Whatever the consequences. Which meant (and this was the bad news): She was moving to Kansas City.
Sunil had gone ahead and imprudently demanded the equal business partnership from his cousin, and now Ghaleb was no longer speaking to him. So Sunil decided to pack up the family, to go back to being an eye doctor, and to move the family back into the house he still owned in Kansas City. Mother didn’t like it. “She thinks it will get better. That once he’s out of his cousin’s house and back home, he will feel more like a man. Like he’s in charge. What is it about these Muslim men that they need to feel in charge all the time?! What is the big deal? My God!” She looked up at the kitchen ceiling, as if hoping for a response from the Lord Himself. She shook her head and went on: “Your auntie keeps talking about how good he is with Imran. That he’s taken to him like his own son. But how happy can the boy be if he sees his mother getting beaten by his father? Hmm? How happy can he be? Behta, I have a terrible feeling about them moving back to Kansas. That’s where he had another wife who left him. God only knows why. I mean, who knows if he didn’t beat her to shreds? After all, Muslim women are not like white women. They don’t run away for nothing.”
About Sunil’s first wife, Mother’s intuition would turn out to be right.
Upon Mina’s arrival in Kansas City, she received an afternoon visit from one of Sunil’s first wife’s friends. The woman—a local Pakistani—came by when she was sure Sunil wouldn’t be home to alert the new wife about what had happened. His first wife had indeed left him because of the abuse. And Sunil’s history of domestic violence was well documented enough that a court had denied him any meaningful custody rights regarding his son. This, of course, was not the tale Sunil had told Mina. According to him, his ex-wife’s exposure to the American lifestyle had turned her into a sex-crazed maniac, and her conscience could no longer handle life with a God-fearing man like himself. When Mother found out about all this, her worry started to eat away at her stomach lining. For months, she complained about Sunil and about the pain in her belly. When she was diagnosed with an ulcer, all she kept saying was: “At least I can take medicine for this. But what medicine can they give Mina for a man who’s going to make her life a living hell?”
For a time, Mother continued to speak on the phone with Mina daily, learning each new alarming detail of Sunil’s bizarre behavior almost as soon as it surfaced. As Mother had suspected, rather than stabilizing him, Sunil’s return to his former haunts only fueled a paranoid fear that Mina would leave him just as his first wife had. So he took precautions. He had Mina dispense with the hijab and take up the full-body chador. Now she was forbidden to address a man, even at the local mosque, which the family started to frequent every weekend. Mina didn’t fight him, but despite her compliance, Sunil’s jealousy only grew more unruly: Mina’s passing look at a male driver stopped at a traffic light in the car adjacent was enough for Sunil to lose his temper. On one occasion, an argument in the car escalated to the point that Sunil, in his howling rage, shouted—as he recklessly pulled at the steering wheel, and swerved the car toward the highway’s concrete median—that he would kill all three of them before ever losing her to another man.
Mother’s support was untiring, but so was Mina’s resolve to stick it out. She claimed Sunil was no longer beating her, and she was quick to make excuses for him: His professional life back in Kansas City was not going well. He was having more difficulty rebuilding his practice than he’d expected. Never particularly good with finances, he’d mismanaged his seed capital, and was steadily inching toward insolvency. Then Mina got pregnant. She and Mother both hoped this good news would soften Sunil. It didn’t. In fact, Mina’s pregnancy only made him more paranoid. Now, Mina had to wear the full, face-covering burqa. She was forbidden from leaving the house unless she was accompanied by him, even for groceries. And he didn’t even want her answering the door, an injunction he would test by having male friends come by and ring the bell to see if she would answer. “He’s got her under house arrest,” Mother moaned after getting off the phone with her dearest friend. “He’s going to drive her into the ground.”
Herself poisoned by
the latest toxic twists in Mina’s life, Mother became sicker. Now her stomach ached constantly. For hours at a time, she would hold her gut, doubled over in pain. Father suspected another ulcer, and he was right. But it wasn’t just that, for even once Mother made the necessary adjustments to her diet and her pain subsided, she still wasn’t well. She never spent all that much time out of the house, but now she really never left. She was so depressed. And seeing Mother’s anguish—just the echo of Mina’s own—solidified my certainty that I was to blame: Had I not said those things about Jews to Imran on that fateful night, had I not sent that telegram, Mina would likely have married Nathan. I couldn’t understand anymore what I thought would have been so wrong with it. At least she and Mother would have been happy now. And even if Mina’s father had broken her bones over such a marriage, wouldn’t this have been better than the soul breaking she was getting from Sunil on a regular basis?
I suffered my blame in silence. I still had told no one about the telegram. And there was some solace, I found, in keeping my secret. This, at least, was something I could control. It made my pain somehow fully my own, a pain that now began to inform my choices. My first year of middle school, I overheard someone in the hall mentioning that Simon Felsenthal, the shy boy with thick glasses in the back of social studies class, was Jewish. Though I’d barely noticed Simon before, I now worked to make him my best friend, but only to discover that I was actually more preoccupied by his faith than he was. Simon was all about the video games. He weaned me off Atari and introduced me to the subtler pleasures of Intellivision. Simon’s was the first house I ever slept over in, and I remember thinking that his parents—vital and bickering—weren’t all that different from mine. I thought back to the morning I’d awoken from my dream about the Prophet in the hospital room, confused over why Allah hated the Jews so much. It made even less sense to me now.
With the passing years, Mina’s situation only worsened, and by the end of high school—some five years into her marriage to Sunil—the simple mention of her name would be enough to send me into a depression that could last for days. And it was no longer just Mina. My soul was outgrowing the child-sized raiment with which my Islamic childhood had outfitted me. But I wasn’t ready for the terror of nakedness. Out at an ice cream shop one night with my friends, I noticed that the woman serving ice cream was wearing a thick layer of foundation, and that the area around her eye was swollen. My gaze lingered there, and I could tell the skin was black and blue underneath. Someone is beating her, I thought. It made me sick. I took the ice cream and went out to the parking lot with my friends. My sickness turned to nausea and then to grief. Before long, I had wandered off, leaving everyone behind. I sat by a dumpster behind the local grocery store, where I cried and cried. When my tears had run their course, I looked up into a dark, still sky, stippled with tiny, twinkling lights—like the fireflies that so delighted Father. My heart yearned to pray. I put my hands out before me in the Muslim style and tried to conjure the heartfelt fire I knew so well from back when Mina lived with us. But my words rang hollow. Like sounds spoken to the deaf, or worse, to no one at all.
Now, when Mina called, I left the house. I couldn’t bear her increasingly wan, fragile voice, in which all I heard was my own blame. I had tried countless times to apologize to her on the phone for what I’d said about Nathan—I never mentioned the telegram—but Mina was insistent. It was all behind us, she would say. I should move on. So I tried. I asked Mother not to tell me any more about what was happening to her best friend. “It’s too painful,” I confessed. Mother seemed to understand. And for a time, I didn’t have to think about my aunt Mina or be reminded of what I’d done. I could merrily play at becoming the sort of American boy—embracing a bright future, unhampered by his Muslim apprenticeship in the necessity of pain—that my childhood would not have promised. I worried about my brand of jeans and my style of hair. I listened to the latest by U2 and R.E.M. on my Walkman as I sat on the bus to school. But the shadow of Mina’s misfortunes always loomed. I may have hoped for a reprieve, but I didn’t have to have read Emerson to know that I’d done nothing to deserve such mercy. Indeed, what I had done bound me to her in a way I couldn’t simply leave behind. And what’s more, Mother’s life was completely enmeshed in Mina’s. When Mother moped about the house, weighed down by the latest unfolding horror in her best friend’s life, of course she couldn’t turn to Father. She had only me. I had no choice but to listen.
After a second financial collapse, Sunil sold his professional assets to cover the debts, and he was forced to take the only offer he could find: a junior partnership at a local practice. Unable to adjust to the office hierarchy and its frustrations, Sunil became suicidal. One night, he emptied into his mouth Mina’s bottle of Valium—which she’d been using to manage her anxiety ever since the day of her nikah—and would have ended up dead had he not confessed to his wife what he’d done as he drifted off to sleep. Mina called an ambulance, and for once she didn’t bother with the burqa as she left the house to accompany him to the hospital, where he had his stomach pumped. Mina and Mother couldn’t agree about what the meaning of Sunil’s attempted suicide was. Mina thought it was a cry for attention. Mother told her it was just another, even more pernicious attempt to terrify her into further submission. What Sunil did next would prove they were both right.
He bought a gun, which—Mother suggested—had the advantage over pills that it got him the sort of frightened, all-consuming attention he sought without a trip to the emergency room. Now, all he had to do was brandish the pistol and put it to his head for Mina to get down on her knees and tell him—which she did, on more than one occasion—that he was her master.
Sunil started bringing the gun downstairs to dinner. He laid it by his plate, alongside the silverware. Having it there calmed him, he said. It kept her “fast mouth” in check. If he didn’t like something she said, all he had to do was raise the gun and point it at himself, or—increasingly—at her. This kept her quiet. But even with his wife’s silence at dinner ensured, Sunil would find new uses for his weapon. Too much turmeric in the ground beef curry was a reason to aim the revolver at her face. So was an empty pitcher of water that needed filling. Training the gun on his wife became the way Sunil prefaced whatever orders he had for what should be done at the table, or in the house. More than once, Imran himself closed his fist and extended his thumb and index finger to form a pistol with his hand, pointing it at his mother to make a demand or complaint.
When Mother told Father about Sunil’s shenanigans with the gun, he was outraged. He picked up the phone and called Ghaleb Chatha to tell him what was going on. For once, the two men were in agreement on something: Sunil had gone too far. Ghaleb promised Father to put pressure where it counted. He called his cousin and told him to get rid of the firearm. If he didn’t, Ghaleb said, the monthly checks that now composed a significant portion of Sunil’s modest income would stop coming. So Sunil had no choice. He sold the gun. But not before forbidding his wife from ever speaking to Mother again.
Mother did her best to circumvent the interdiction, but soon enough, there was another reason they stopped talking. They got into a series of arguments—Mother growing more and more strident about pushing Mina to leave Sunil; after all, now she was a legal resident, and there was no chance she was going to lose Imran anymore—and Mina retaliating by saying the sorts of nasty things only one’s best friend could.
One day, I found Mother at the kitchen table looking out at the smooth blanket of glowing snow covering our backyard. She wasn’t moving. It didn’t even seem like she was breathing. I asked her what was wrong.
“Your auntie and I got into a fight,” she said quietly.
“Again?”
“I told her to leave him. She doesn’t need the bloody man anymore. She has her permanent green card. But she doesn’t want to hear it. She’s had his child now, she says, and she’s not leaving…”
“Ammi. This isn’t new.”
Mot
her paused. “She said something else, too. She said I’ve been miserable most of my life.” She paused again. “And that I’ve made everyone around me miserable, too…Is it true?” Mother asked, weakly. She looked like she was going to cry.
“Mom. Of course it’s not true.”
“Maybe it is.”
“You made her happy, didn’t you? You helped her when she needed help, right?”
She nodded, unconvinced. “But what about you?” she asked. “Did I make you happy? You know what Freud says about—”
“I don’t care what Freud says,” I replied, interrupting.
“I make you happy?” she asked, her voice cracking.
A sudden knot was forming in my throat. “Of course you do, Ammi. Of course you do.”
“Oh, Hayat,” she keened, reaching out to me.
The next day Mina called to apologize. But almost immediately, the two of them got into yet another argument, and this just as Sunil was getting home from an uncharacteristically early day. When he realized Mina was on the phone with Mother, he flew into a rage and ripped the phone from the wall.
And so it was that Mina and Mother lost contact for three years…
Of all the stories that Mina told me as a young boy, the ones that stayed with me most were the ones about dervishes: the first, in which a dervish sitting by the side of a road has orange peels tossed on him by a couple of passersby and, in that moment of ill-usage, awakens to the fiction of the personal self that imagines it is any different from the peels or the passersby, or God Himself; and the tale that suggested being ground to dust was the way to our Lord.
Whether Mina, like one of her dervishes, found God, I can’t say, but in marrying Sunil I certainly believe she found someone to ill-use her, someone who would eventually grind her to dust.
