by Nafisa Haji
“Uh—no.”
“That’s good. They’re handsome devils, some of them. But barbarians, the lot, when it comes to women. May I ask, then, why exactly you are taking Arabic?” he asked, frowning a little.
“I—uh—I love languages.”
“An admirable sentiment,” he said, his voice dripping with the kind of sarcasm that only a British accent could convey. “But why Arabic?”
“No particular reason.”
“Hmm.” His eyes, under the shadow of a pair of straggly eyebrows, narrowed with amusement. “An Ian Fleming fan, Ms. March? Or is Le Carré more to your taste?”
“Excuse me?”
“Russian would have been the choice only a few years ago. How circumspect of you to choose Arabic. See me when you’re ready to discuss career options, my dear. I have some connections that might be helpful.”
For Urdu, there was just one professor. A native of Minnesota, with a much milder, gentler personality than Professor Crawley. Professor Dunnett—who was tall and thin-faced, with soft, white hair—had spent many years in India and some in Pakistan. Some of the other students in his classes, Indian and Pakistani Americans trying to reconnect with their roots, said his accent was amazing. That if you listened to him with your eyes closed, you’d never know he was white. He was the one who introduced me to Devon Avenue—a long street on the other side of the city, cut up and nicknamed in sections that represented a diverse range of Chicago’s ethnic populations. At the end of the first semester, he took me and the other students there. We passed the Mahatma Gandhi and Golda Meir sections of the avenue to eat in a restaurant on the Muhammad Ali Jinnah block, where the stores and restaurants had as many signs in Urdu as in English, a great place to practice reading. The restaurant, which Professor Dunnett said was his favorite, became one of mine, too
Unlike Professor Crawley, Professor Dunnett never asked why I was taking Urdu. And because he didn’t, I told him one day, in my second year in Chicago, over chicken biryani at Mashallah Restaurant. “I want to be a missionary.”
“Ah,” he said, smiling, with none of the smugness of Professor Crawley. “My parents were missionaries. You’re taking Arabic, too?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’ll have to tread carefully. They don’t take kindly to proselytizing in the parts of the world where Arabic and Urdu are spoken. Can’t blame them really—given the history. Missionary work in the Muslim world is necessarily cloak-and-dagger. You’ve certainly chosen two very challenging languages to learn. Though you’re doing quite well, I must say, in Urdu at least. You have the ear, which is important—you can never really master a language until you learn the rhythms of its intonations. And your tongue is flexible enough to master the sounds.”
“Thank you.” I flushed with pleasure, remembering Grandma Faith saying almost the same thing.
“Of course, the real test of proficiency comes when you get to the stage of poetry—in any language one undertakes. Poetry touches on truth beyond words. Almost impossible, really, to ever fully understand poetry in a foreign language. Almost. It’s too difficult to translate, you see, because there’s so much more to it than the definition of words. In poetry, words are meant to bypass our normal ways of understanding—to skip the mind altogether and pierce the heart. One must fully live in a language before truly comprehending its poetry—to know it from the inside, to feel it rather than understand it. In the Eastern world, this is even more true, because poetry there is a living thing. Not something you learn about in a class in college. Here, when we think of poetry, we think of dusty old sonnets and verses written long ago by people no longer living, or by strange, solitary people who write their words in privacy, to be read privately, too, out of a book, silently, to yourself. Poetry in the East has to be recited and sung out loud in public to be considered really alive. The written form of it is only a record, to help people remember how the words go. Here, you don’t see people writing music to go with Shakespeare’s sonnets or Wordsworth or Yeats. A pity. In India and Pakistan, the ghazals of Ghalib are still sung out loud. In Iran, Hafez comes alive in the mouths of children, through songs that everyone knows.”
While I was at college, I went home as little as possible. I took a trip to Northern India one summer, volunteering at a Christian mission—an orphanage—to practice my Urdu. I went to the Middle East, too. Professor Crawley, who seemed to take a liking to me though his sarcasm never softened, arranged for me to stay with some friends of his in Lebanon, wealthy Christians who showed me around Beirut. From there, I went to Syria and Egypt, my eyes wide-open, breathing through my mouth the whole time, just like Grandma Faith had talked about. When I did go home, when I had to, I tried my best to slip back to a time before Mendel, living with Mom and Dad and Chris as if nothing had changed. If Mom wondered why I was studying Arabic and Urdu—she must have!—she never said anything about it.
Chris was attending Shepherd’s College of San Diego, having decided, after that trip to Africa, that there’s no place like home, no food like Mom’s, and no other place he could have gone where his bed would be made for him, his laundry folded. To call him a mama’s boy would have thrilled Mom and not bothered Chris at all, since nothing really ever did. School had never been a priority for him anyway. He was serious only about one thing—his music and the Christian rock band he’d formed when he was still in high school. Christian March, it was called, which was his name, and which his friends, the other guys in the band, had decided was too good not to use. Chris was the lead singer, and they were working on getting enough material together to do an album.
He came to visit me in Chicago for a long weekend at the beginning of my last year in college. I showed him around the city—Navy Pier, the Sears Tower, the Magnificent Mile, and the Field Museum. And talked him into trying Pakistani food, taking him to Mashallah Restaurant on Devon Avenue.
The restaurant was crowded and we had to wait a few minutes before getting a table. When one opened up, Zahid, the restaurant owner, who I’d gotten to know over the past couple of years, seated us, handing us menus. I showed off my Urdu, asking him about his family—his mother and father in Karachi, his sister in New Jersey. Chris looked obligingly impressed.
Zahid asked, “The old professor isn’t with you?” referring to Professor Dunnett.
“No.”
He looked at Chris, curiously, and asked, in English, “This is your boyfriend?”
“No. You’ve seen my boyfriend. This is my brother, Chris. He’s visiting from California.”
Zahid nodded and then turned, in a hurry, to put some tables together for a huge Pakistani family that was waiting at the door.
Chris said, “You and Dan getting serious?”
“I don’t know. I guess.” Dan was a friend of Chris’s from high school. He’d asked me to the prom at Christ Academy and we’d been together, chastely, ever since. He was going to school at Wheaton and came out to spend the day with me, now and then, in Chicago. He’d spent most of the weekend with us.
Chris said, “He’s a good guy. But I’m kind of glad he couldn’t come tonight. Haven’t had a chance to talk to you alone all weekend.”
I looked at Chris, smiled, and nodded. I’d invited Dan along with us everywhere on purpose.
“What’s up with you, Jo?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re so— far away. You have been, really, ever since you started college. Haven’t been to PPSYC since high school. You used to love camp.”
“I’m not a kid anymore.”
“Oh, so I am?”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“You hardly ever come home. When you do, it’s like you’re not really with us. Everyone’s noticed. Mom and Dad, I mean.”
I had no answer. None that I was free to share. “Has— did Mom say anything about this?” I knew the answer. She’d never raised the subject of the silence that had grown between us since she’d told me the truth. And I’d never told her ab
out meeting Sadiq.
“No. But I know she’s hurt about it. It’s like you’re avoiding us or something.”
“I—I don’t know what you mean, Chris,” I lied.
I was relieved when Zahid came to take our order.
Chris scratched his head doubtfully at all of my suggestions, saying to Zahid, “Not too spicy, okay?”
“Oh, but Pakistani food is spicy, my friend,” said Zahid.
“Well, go easy. I can’t take spicy food.”
“It’s good for you, my friend.”
“Maybe so. But it’s not in my genes.”
Zahid laughed and said, “Your sister. She can eat food so spicy that it would make me cry. Isn’t that so?” It took me a second to rustle up the chuckle he was expecting in response. My mind was still on what Chris had said about his genes.
Zahid left to pass our order on to the kitchen, and I brightened up, forcefully, saying, “So, tell me about the new version of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ that you and the band are working on.”
That kept Chris talking until dinner arrived. I had another little conversation, in Spanish this time, with the Mexican waiter who served us.
As I helped myself to some curry and tikka and naan, Chris said, “I’m proud of you, Jo.”
“Huh?”
“I wish I could be as focused as you are. I mean, you decided what you wanted to study right from the get-go. You stuck with it. And you have something to show for it. Four languages.”
“Five,” I said. “English counts.”
“Well, five then. That’s how many times I’ve changed majors. So far. I have no idea what I’m doing at school. And you’re gonna be done at the end of the year.”
“You have your music.”
“Yeah. But who knows if that’ll go anywhere? And I have no idea what else to do with my life.”
A little later, my plate nearly empty, my belly full, I watched Chris cautiously pop some naan into his mouth. Then he pushed some curry around on his plate.
He said, “So. You really like this stuff?”
I realized that apart from some naan, he hadn’t eaten a bite.
“We’re going to have to stop and get you a burger on the way home, aren’t we?”
He grinned. “Yup.”
I finished my last bites in silence, slightly annoyed with him, and even more with myself for dragging him there.
When Zahid came with the bill, he stopped to chat some more with Chris, teasing him about how little he’d eaten. Then he asked, “Which one of you is older?”
“She is,” Chris said. “But only by a half an hour. We’re twins.”
“Twins?” Zahid stared at both of us more closely.
I asked, “How do you say ‘twins’ in Urdu?”
“Jurwa. It means ‘joint.’ Half-hour’s difference, eh? But you don’t look like each other! Except for the eyes, of course. Both brown.”
I knew Chris was rolling his at me, the way we always did when people said things like that, not getting the difference between identical and fraternal. But I couldn’t look up to roll mine in response. I studied the bill carefully, hoping that Chris wouldn’t see through the careful blankness of my face.
Suddenly, before I could stop myself, I asked, “Do you know who Mendel is, Chris?”
“Nope. Should I?”
Hesitantly, I asked, “You took biology in high school, didn’t you?”
“Sure.” Grinning, he said, “You know I was never very good at paying attention in science. Or math. Or English or history for that matter. What’s the deal?”
I stared into his eyes, brown like mine, on the edge for a few long seconds—before backing off, shaking my head. “Never mind.” It was the closest I ever came to sharing the secret that belonged to him as much as it did to me.
Days after Chris came to visit me in Chicago, the flight path of four airplanes changed the world.
When I talked to him on the phone that week, Chris said, “Everything’s different now, Jo.”
“I know.”
“Remember how I said I didn’t know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life?”
“Yes.”
“I do now, Jo.”
I heard the conviction in his voice and envied it. In a world now flooded with fear and doubt, I wanted what he had, dismissing what Grandma Faith had said about the dangers of certainty.
Professor Crawley called me into his office a few weeks later. He told me about the career options that were more lucrative now, and more in demand, than when he’d first mentioned them. I grabbed at the sense of conviction that he offered, leaving behind all the reasons I’d wanted to study languages in the first place—to do what Grandma Faith did, to connect with people so that I could help them. What I’d intended to do before—Grandma Faith’s whole approach to life—seemed suddenly naïve, too simple for what the world had become. Because now, among the people who spoke one of the languages I’d stumbled into studying—fresh from the strangeness of Sadiq’s story—there were some who were even less comprehensible than he had been, the source of a hatred I couldn’t fathom, no matter how well I understood their words, the source of mass murder in the name of a god that could have nothing to do with the One I worshipped.
Language, Professor Crawley told me, was a weapon now. And I could use that weapon to help in a war that my country hadn’t asked for. I applied for the job. And got it.
Signing all the contracts was scary. Confidentiality clauses galore. All the secrecy involved made me hesitate, wondering what exactly I was getting myself into—national secrets, now, on top of the personal ones I already kept, buried deep inside the color of my eyes and Chris’s. But I didn’t dwell on the doubts hidden in that hesitation. For the second time in my life, I climbed over them, taking on a role I’d never imagined I’d want. And, just like before, the doubts came with me, eventually forcing a reckoning far more difficult than the one I’d dealt with before.
Angela
The sinning is the best part of repentance.
Arabic proverb
It seemed like a lifetime ago, that weekend when Chris went to visit Jo in Chicago. I worried my heart out that she would give away the secret I’d asked her to keep—the truth that had driven Jo away from me no matter how much we both pretended things were the same. Now, both of my babies were gone. For the first time in more than twenty years, I was back where I started. Confused. Not knowing who I was, now that I didn’t have either one of my children around to define me. I had nothing to do but mope around the house, dwelling on the past, on the life I had before I had them, on the details of that life, which I’d shared with Jo, laying them all out for her, hoping she would understand.
How lonely it had been, before I became a mother. How dull.
Don’t be so dull, child! No one buys a dull-looking doll. Put a smile on that face of yours—paint it on if you have to!” my grandmother, Grandma Pelton, used to say to me when I was young. She’d clap her hands. “Liven up, liven up, Angie!” Dull was the very worst thing a person could be in Grandma Pelton’s eyes. She herself was anything but—a bustle of noise and energy that wouldn’t tolerate any dullness around her.
To “liven” me up, she’d hustle me into the kitchen and scoop me up some ice cream—with a look over her shoulder to make sure the coast was clear. Grandpa Pelton didn’t approve of snacking between meals. He didn’t approve of a lot of things. Not that it mattered. He spent most of his time in his study—reading and writing, preparing the sermons he delivered every Sunday in the nondenominational, evangelical church he’d founded when he settled back in the States. He was from another time—old-fashioned and formal. I never saw him out of his shoes and socks, not even first thing in the morning. And he never left home without a tie around his neck.
In the kitchen, Grandma Pelton would tell me all about her and Grandpa Pelton’s travels around the world, about China, where Mom was born. Her words sparkled, bouncing off the kitchen walls, like light reflecting o
ff the sequins of one of her favorite Sunday sweaters—always pink or baby-blue. Grandma Pelton’s head was a smooth, shellacked helmet of steely gray, stiffly flipped just above her shoulders. The whole package of her appearance might have looked ridiculous to someone who didn’t love her like I did. To me, she looked sweet as candy.
I spent more time with her than I did with my own mother, more nights at my grandparents’ house than at our own small apartment three blocks away, because Mom, after she went to night school to get her nursing degree, mostly worked the night shift: the pay was better.
Grandma Pelton was the only one who ever talked about my father, who’d left my mother when I was a baby. The subject was off-limits with Mom. The few times I’d asked her about him, the shadows in her eyes made me feel bad for bringing him up.
Grandma Pelton told me that Mom was a junior in high school when she met my dad—Todd Rogers.
“It was love at first sight,” Grandma Pelton told me. “They got engaged right after high school. Your grandfather didn’t like him at first. He thought he was too coarse. Too common. But Todd’s people were good, churchgoing folk and your grandfather came around, eventually. Your father joined the Marines, like his father and grandfather before him. I remember Todd’s graduation from boot camp—we all drove down together to attend. Oh, my—he was so handsome in his uniform. And your mother and he were so in love. They got married a few months later, living like gypsies for a while, on bases all over the place, coming home for Christmas sometimes. They were so happy. Even happier when Ron came along. When the war in Vietnam started, you were barely on the way. Your father got sent over right at the start. That’s how it is with those Marines, first ones to get sent in when there’s trouble in the world. So he wasn’t here when the stork flew you in. Your mother came home with Ron to be with us while he was over there—I took care of Ron when your mother went to the hospital to have you.
“I don’t know what happened when your dad came back. But he was different, that was clear. Todd’s father had died while he was away. He might have been able to help with—whatever it was that was bothering him, having fought in a war himself. Your mother never talked about any problems they were having. Instead of staying on in the service, like he’d planned to—to make a career for himself in the Marines—Todd decided to get out. Your parents got themselves an apartment around the corner—same one you live in now. He was barely home—two months, maybe three?—and then, suddenly, he was gone. It was a real shock to all of us. Faith, naturally, was brokenhearted. And none of the rest of us could make any sense of it. Not even Todd’s mother. Your grandma Rogers. She died a couple of years later. We didn’t even know how to get in touch with him to let him know his mother had passed, so he missed the funeral. I tell you, the man just packed up and left everyone and everything behind, no looking back. It was a hard time for your mother. Divorce is a mighty serious thing—a tragedy. A national one now, the way it’s spreading through homes today. Like a wildfire. It’s all because women won’t let men be men anymore. But with Faith—it wasn’t her fault, I know. She was a good wife to him, the way we’d raised her to be, following his lead, giving him the respect she owed him as a good Christian wife, never trying to be the boss. And he repaid her by abandoning his duty as a husband and a father. Broke our hearts, too—your grandpa’s and mine—to see her marriage crumble. Well, your mother went through a dark patch. Stayed away from church for a while. Said she couldn’t stand all the pity. As if sympathy were a bad thing! She moped around for a couple of years, trying to put the pieces back together. But you can’t do that when one of the biggest pieces is gone, can you? And moping doesn’t get you anywhere. Don’t you become a moper, Angie. Didn’t raise your mother to be one, either. She got through it, eventually. Picked herself up after a time and made the best of it. Went back to school. Got a job so she could support you and your brother. Not the way things should be. Not even close. But she made the best of it.” Grandma Pelton always nodded approvingly at that part.
