American Dervish

by Ayad Akhtar

  After eight years of marriage, the stress and strain would finally end when she was diagnosed with a terminal case of uterine cancer that had metastasized to the bone. Mina’s illness would make Sunil repent his ways. He called Mother to deliver the news himself. He confided that he felt he was responsible for her sickness. Mother agreed—she was to give Sunil a great deal of grief during Mina’s last months—but Mina herself didn’t. Though she appreciated Sunil’s change of heart—and probably didn’t mind him bearing the brunt of Mother’s outrage—to Mina, her own illness could only be Allah’s doing, another station on the path, as she called it.

  During the last eight months of her life, Mina and I spoke on the phone at least a dozen times. And I saw her two months before she died.

  Mother had already been to visit her once, and as she planned her second trip, I told her I wanted to go as well. At that point, there was little doubt Mina was dying, and I knew I had to see her.

  Mother and I took a plane to Kansas City, where Sunil picked us up from the airport in the late afternoon. It had barely been eight years, but he seemed to have aged at least twenty. His small face was covered with wrinkles, and his head with white hair, and I’m not sure I would have thought it was the same person if he hadn’t taken my hands and pressed his fingers into my palms the way he had when we first met, speaking with the same distinctive, distracting drawl which, once heard, was difficult to forget: “Your Mina-auntie will be so haappy to see yoou, behta. She always looved you so much.”

  We sped along the freeway to the hospital, Mother in front with Sunil, me in back watching the houses and businesses pass outside the window. Quranic tapes quietly played over the car speakers as Sunil spoke, mostly about Mina’s imminent passing. He seemed to be working himself up into a state, repeatedly saying that his wife was the only person he was one hundred percent certain was headed directly for Paradise. At one point—as we pulled into the hospital lot and parked—he broke down. Mother put her hand on his shoulder. “What I put her through, bhaji,” he repeated through his tears. “I don’t know how she can forgive what I put her through…”

  Upstairs, on the eighth floor, at the end of the hall, was Mina’s room. She was awake, propped up on pillows, machines humming quietly around her. Her skin was ashen and she was thin, as thin as I’d ever seen her, even at her worst. But her eyes sparkled when she saw us. However sick she appeared, she looked no less alive. When she saw me, a wry smile came across her face. “My goodness, Hayat.”

  “What?”

  “A heartbreaker. I’ve seen pictures…But in person, you’re even better…”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “I don’t know if you remember…that’s the first thing you ever said to me.”

  “And it might be the last,” she joked, wincing from the pain her laughter caused her.

  “Stop it,” Mother said.

  Mina ignored her. “Eyelashes like that?” she coughed, lifting the arm from which an IV drip snaked to point at me. “Wasted on a man! Just look at those!”

  Mother sat down beside her, taking Mina’s other hand. “Man? I don’t know about that yet.”

  “He’s a man, bhaj. He’s a man, all right.”

  Mina looked over at Sunil, who was watching from the corner. To me, he looked sheepish, even cowed. Seeing the two of them together now—after all this time, after all the tales—was strange. It was difficult to imagine that the man had ever had any power over her.

  Sunil left the three of us to be together. Mina was eager for details of my life at college: my classes, what I was reading, and then—when Mother got up to go to the bathroom—she wanted to know about girls.

  “None yet,” I told her.

  “Just as well. Because when you get started…” She laughed again, wincing. When Mother returned, Mina said she was getting tired and needed to sleep. Mother leaned in to kiss her. I got up and did the same. But as we were about to leave, Mina put out her hand to stop me. “Hayat. You can stay. If you want. Bhaj, if it’s okay, do you mind if he stays while I sleep? I don’t want him to go yet…”

  “If he wants to, it’s fine with me,” Mother said.

  “I’d love to,” I said.

  I would end up spending the night, much of it watching her sleep from the armchair beside her bed, thinking about what I had come to say. (Mother had gone back to Sunil and Mina’s home for the night, and planned on returning in the morning with both Imran and Imran’s younger sister, Nasreen.) At daybreak, she roused and looked over, clearly in pain. “You’re still here?” she asked.

  “I didn’t want to leave.”

  She smiled through her pain.

  The nurses came in, and I stepped out. I went down to the canteen to get a cup of coffee. When I returned to the room, she was sitting up in bed, a small plastic cup of apple juice before her. She looked better, and she was eager to talk. We chatted more about books. She showed me a quote from what she was then reading, a collection of Fitzgerald’s letters:

  The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

  She seemed so pleased to share it with me, and so interested in what I thought of it. I remember not telling her what I was really thinking: that she herself was a paradox I couldn’t resolve, my opposing ideas of her—enlightened and devout; intrepid and passive—only ever colliding, and never sitting comfortably enough for me to hold them at all, let alone function.

  At some point, she said she could tell I had something on my mind. I told her I did, and then I mentioned my regret over the things I had said about Nathan to Imran that night.

  “How many times have we talked about this, Hayat? It’s okay. You did it. You learned from it. That’s life.”

  I was quiet.

  She went on: “I’ve told you. You’re not responsible for what happened to me. It was my own choice. And it was all for a reason, behta. You need to accept that.”

  There was another silence. And then I said: “There’s something you don’t know, Auntie. Something I never told you.”

  “What is that?”

  “The telegram? To Hamed? That was me. I sent it.”

  “What?” Her eyes widened with surprise. There was silence. The answer to her long-unresolved question was taking some time to make sense. “But how did you…”

  I completed her thought. “You had a book. It had your address from when you were in Karachi. I went to the mall and sent it.”

  “Enterprising,” she said after a brief moment.

  “I don’t know about that.”

  Again there was silence. Mina took a deep breath. “So that’s why you won’t let this thing go.”

  “If I hadn’t sent it, you might still…”

  She lifted her hand to stop me.

  “It doesn’t change anything, behta. It was my choice. I made that choice. If I was going to make a different choice, I would have made it anyway.”

  “But why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why didn’t you make a different choice?”

  “You could say it’s who I am, Hayat. What I experienced in my life, and that made me what I am. Or you could say it was Allah’s will for me.” She paused. “In the end, both ways of looking amount to the same thing…”

  “They’re not the same thing,” I began. I wanted to tell her that I had been giving up on Islam little by little for years, and that now there was barely anything left.

  But somehow, it didn’t seem like this was what needed saying.

  “You say Allah’s will. Fine. But why follow His will? So you can go to heaven or something like that? I mean, isn’t it all a little silly? Isn’t it more moral to be good and to do the right thing for its own sake? Isn’t that really the sign of the good?”

  She smiled. I thought she almost looked proud of me. “Absolutely,” she said.

  “Then I don’t understand.”

  “Faith has never been about an afterl
ife for me, Hayat. It’s about finding God now. In the everyday. Here. With you. Whether I’m living in a prison or in a castle. Sick or healthy. It’s all the same. That’s what the Sufis teach. What comes our way, whatever it is, that is the vehicle. Every single life, no matter how big or small, how happy or how sad, it can be a path to Him.”

  What are all these Sufi tales, I thought, but fictions she’s using to shed a redeeming glow on a life scored with pain, pain I caused her, pain Sunil caused her, and that she should have sought not simply to bear, but escape?

  She could tell I didn’t agree. She wanted me to speak my mind.

  So I did. I made my point with all the force I could muster. Humiliation, I told her, was not a vehicle to anything but senseless injury. And to say otherwise was to let a world filled with pain go its own way, unchecked, unredeemed.

  As I spoke, I had the distinct feeling she was relishing every moment of what was happening, the discussion, my turmoil and passion, the apple juice she was slowly sipping.

  I finally put the question to her as directly as I could:

  What did the suffering she had gone through over the past eight years at her husband’s hands—and for that matter the suffering she was experiencing now, as she lay dying—what did any of this have to do with finding God?

  I should have expected she would reply with another anecdote pulled from a dervish’s life.

  “When Chishti was dying,” she began, “he was in pain all over his body. His followers didn’t understand how a man who Allah loved so much could be put through so much pain… Do you know what he told them when they asked him why Allah was making him suffer so?”

  “What?”

  “‘This is how the divine is choosing to express Himself through me.’” Her eyes glistened with eagerness to make the point that was—I would later come to see—something like the boiled-down essence of her life. “What he meant is that everything, everything, is an expression of Allah’s will. It is all His glory. Even the pain…” She paused. “That is the real truth about life.”

  Epilogue:­ 1995

  This story ends in Boston.

  I ended up dating Rachel my junior and senior years, and after college we moved to Boston together, into an apartment in Kenmore Square. Our wonderful and troubled interfaith romance is a tale for another time, but there’s still something that needs to be said to finish this one: It was in Rachel’s arms—and it was with her love—that I finally discovered myself not only as a man, but as an American.

  She was working at a clinic in Brookline; I was interning at the Atlantic on North Washington Street. On Saturdays, I would take the Green Line to the Red Line, and the Red Line to Harvard Square, where it was my habit to spend the afternoon and evening at the Algiers Coffee House, writing. There was something about the place—its oriental woodwork, its mirrored ceiling dome, the mint tea and the Arabic music—that put me in the frame of mind to set words to paper. It was on the Algiers’s second floor that I would write my first short story. And it was on that same second floor that I would run into Nathan.

  I was sitting at a corner booth when a short, striking man came up the stairs, coffee in one hand, a plate of baklava in the other. I recognized Nathan almost immediately. It had been more than a decade since I’d last seen him, and aside from looking a little more weathered—his head of woolly hair was finely shorn and peppered generously with dashes of gray—he looked the same. He was standing at the top of the stairs, surveying the cramped room for a place to sit, when he noticed me looking right at him.

  “Dr. Wolfsohn?” I asked, standing. Nathan’s brow crinkled and his eyes narrowed as recognition seemed to dance across his gaze. “It’s Hayat Shah,” I said.

  “Hayat… My God,” he said, a hint of wonder in his voice as he approached. “How you’ve grown. You’re a man.”

  “Not quite,” I joked. “But it sure has been a while.”

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I come here a lot on the weekends. I’m interning at the Atlantic.”

  “Good for you,” he said with an abundant smile. He kept looking at me, shaking his head gently in disbelief. My limbs were weak. My heart was racing. I was completely disarmed by how happy he was to see me. And all at once, it occurred to me for the first time that the apology I’d been trying to make to Mina all of these years was really one intended for him.

  “Listen, Dr. Wolfsohn… ,” I began, hesitant.

  “Call me Nathan, Hayat.”

  “Right. Nathan. Do you—uh—wanna sit for a second?”

  “Sure,” he said, putting his cup of coffee and his plate of dessert down on the table between us. He pulled out a chair and sat. I sat down, too.

  “I’m not sure how to say this exactly…”

  “Just go ahead, Hayat,” Nathan said. He was looking directly at me, something grave—even stern—in his gaze.

  “I never got a chance to talk to you after what happened…I mean, I was pretty young and…” I stopped myself. My words somehow didn’t seem right. I looked up at him. He was still listening.

  “I guess what I wanted to say was… I’m sorry for what happened. I didn’t exactly understand what I was doing, and…I can’t believe that I said those things.”

  Nathan held my gaze for a moment, then gently nodded. He shifted in place, softly clearing his throat. “You know…​I always knew that you would say that to me. One day. I always knew it…Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I quietly replied.

  There was a long silence between us. I was about to say more—to tell him about the telegram—when he asked me about my parents.

  “My dad’s not so great. I don’t think he ever got over going into private practice. He drinks a lot. More than he should. Not that he admits it… My mom suffers, not quite in silence, as I’m sure you can imagine.”

  “She has her hands full with him,” he said with a smile. “Naveed is a stubborn man.”

  “Indeed.”

  “But a good one. I owe him a call.”

  “Do you still speak?”

  “From time to time.”

  “I think a call from you would be great. He still talks about you…”

  “Does he?” Nathan asked, a sudden brightness in his tone. “What does he say?”

  “You know—remembering the good times you used to have at the lab together. He still laughs about you not being able to tell a joke…or eat spicy food.”

  “Well, that’s changed. At least the spicy food. He got me hooked. He…and Mina, of course.”

  “She died,” I said. I don’t even think I realized I had spoken until I heard my voice say the words.

  But there was no surprise. Nathan nodded, quietly affirming that he knew.

  There was another long silence.

  Until he finally spoke: “There’s something you should know, Hayat. It might make you feel better.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Mina and I were in touch.”

  I was shocked. “You were?”

  Nathan nodded. “I got a letter from her a year after everything that happened between us. Sent to my parents’ house. She still had their address from a letter I’d written her from their place.” He smiled to himself, remembering. “Getting that letter was, I think, the biggest surprise of my life.”

  “What did she say, if it’s okay for me to ask?”

  “It was basically her version of what had happened. Her explanation. I mean, I think the real meaning of it was to let me know she regretted the decision she made…but she wasn’t going to come out and say it…Though she did later.”

  “She did,” I said, meaning to ask a question, though it didn’t come out that way. And the clear relief in my reply was as much a surprise to Nathan as it was to me.

  He held my gaze for a long moment, nodding. “That man she was married to was insane,” he added with visible anger.

  “He got sick, did you know?”

  “No, I didn’t. What h
appened?”

  “Something with his lungs. He’s out of breath all the time. Has to carry oxygen around with him wherever he goes. It happened right after Mina died. Imran takes care of him.”

  “How is Imran?”

  “Fine. I saw him a few years ago. I mean, his mom was dying, so he wasn’t too talkative. But I think he’s okay. He’s in high school. He and his sister are both going to an Islamic school in Kansas City. The girl looks just like her mother. Her name is Nasreen.”

  I paused.

  Nathan shook his head. “You have no idea how many times I told her to leave him, Hayat.”

  “Why didn’t she?”

  Nathan shrugged. “You probably understand that better than I do. It has to be a cultural thing…My own feeling was that she knew if she wasn’t with him, she’d come back to me. And she knew I would take her back…” He stopped for a moment. “I never got over your aunt. She was, and always will be, the love of my life.”

  Nathan held my gaze a moment longer before looking away. I suddenly felt close to him. I wanted to tell him that my girlfriend, Rachel, was Jewish. But I didn’t. His eyes were full, alive with memory. I didn’t want to interrupt.

  Nathan cleared his throat. “We were lucky. The postal worker who delivered her mail was a black woman named Sheniqua. Somehow, she and your aunt got to be good friends. Mina would make that famous tea for her, and they would talk. Your aunt must have told her all about Sunil, and I guess at some point she told her about me as well…”

  Nathan paused, remembering.

  “So when Sheniqua found out about me, she offered to be the go-between for our letters to each other. I would send them to her, and Sheniqua would send Mina’s letters to me. And she would only bring them over when Sunil and the boys weren’t around. Mina would read them and give them back to Sheniqua. Sheniqua held on to them. All of them.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “I don’t know how she kept it from her husband all those years, but she did…”