by Nafisa Haji
There was a prayer, at the end. “Ya Illahi,” it began. “Oh, God, we pray that no grief other than the grief of Karbala should touch our lives or the lives of others. We pray for peace, we pray for solace. Ya Illahi, we seek refuge in our remembrance of you and those who sacrificed for you, we pray for justice over oppression, wherever it is found.”
Back at Sadiq’s after the majlis, over lunch, Asma Auntie almost hugged herself as she said, “Deena! Do you know that no less than three women came to ask me, in whispers, how old Jo is?”
Deena paused with a bite of food halfway to her mouth, then put the fork down and laughed.
Asma Auntie saw my mystified look and explained, “Three women, Jo. Three mothers of eligible sons. They were making inquiries.”
I frowned.
“During the Muharram season, prospective mothers-in-law scan and scope, looking for wives for their sons.”
“But—I—oh,” I spluttered.
“I’m not surprised,” Deena said. “My granddaughter is beautiful.”
“No doubt about that,” said Jaffer Uncle. “Beautiful. Intelligent. Well-mannered and respectful. Who could resist all those qualities—topped off, as they are, with the bonus of her American passport.”
“After Muharram and Safar, when proposals fly from families of young men to families of young women, you’ll see. Offers for Jo will pour in,” said Asma Auntie with a girlish giggle.
Later, in the night, Jaffer Uncle and Haseena Auntie invited us out for dessert. Like everything else I’d experienced in Karachi, it was an adventure, at midnight, like going to an old-fashioned drive-in, the kind you see in old movies and shows about life in America in the 1950s. Except, instead of Al’s or Melvin’s, the name of the place we went to was much more poetic—Rehmat-e-Shereen, which means “The Mercy of Sweetness.” We stayed in the car—in three cars, actually, parked next to each other: one car where I sat with Jaffer Uncle, his two kids (who, they were happy to explain, were my second cousins, the first in my life that I’d ever met), and his mother, Asma Auntie; the second car containing Haseena Auntie, Nasir Uncle (who was Asma Auntie’s rather quiet husband), and another cousin I’d just met; the last car holding Sadiq, Akeela and her daughters, and Deena—and waited until a server came to take our order, which he would then serve us in the car.
“What will you have?” Jaffer Uncle asked us all.
“Kulfi!” the kids shouted. “Are you going to have kulfi, Jo?”
“Is it good?”
“Oh, yes,” the older one, Batool, said.
“Only if you don’t get it with all the slimy noodles on it. Then it’s like ice cream,” said Zain, the younger, fussier one, who reminded me of Chris.
“What a way to describe it!” his grandmother, Asma Auntie, scolded.
“I’ll try it,” I said, with a wink at the children, “but without the slimy noodles.”
When the plates of kulfi arrived, we were all quiet for a while, concentrating only on consuming our delicious, mercifully sweet desserts.
Then Asma Auntie said, “It was so lovely to hear Deena’s voice again. In the majlis today. No one else has as much dard in their voice as Deena.”
“Dard?”
“Yes. Pain.”
“I understand. But— I’d never heard the word used that way before. It’s a good thing?”
“Oh, yes. Like having spirit. Soul. You know what humdard is, Jo? In Urdu?”
“Sympathy?”
“More than that.”
Humdard. A compound word. Us-pain. “More like empathy?”
“Yes. I suppose.” Asma Auntie changed the subject. “So, Jo? You and Deena are leaving next week?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling the dread rise up inside of me, dread of going back and facing the questions from Chris that I knew were only beginning.
“So soon? I wish I could convince you and Deena to stay longer. Maybe if you do, you will help me talk that reckless man, your father, out of going on his trip.”
“What trip?”
“What?! You don’t know? That he’s going? And where?”
“No. Where?” I asked.
Jaffer Uncle answered for his mother. “To Iraq! For ziarat—pilgrimage. For Chehlum—which is forty days after Ashura. They call it Arbaeen in Arabic. He is going to Karbala and Najaf. He went last year. Has been going every year for the last few.”
Asma Auntie shook her head. “No. He didn’t go the year the war began. It was too soon after Baghdad fell. Too unsafe.”
“And now? It’s safe now?” Jaffer Uncle laughed.
“Of course it’s not. You know, Jaffer, that I have been trying to tell him—tried to stop him last year, also. But he won’t listen. Not even to Akeela.” Asma Auntie turned from her seat in the front, to look at me. “Before the war, we all went together. Jaffer and Haseena, my mother and my father, also. Before his stroke. It was a wonderful trip. I understand why he wants to keep going. I wish I could, too. And I will go again, Inshallah, when the war is over. But we must also be practical. There are too many reports of violence. It’s too dangerous. You must convince him, Jo. I am tired of trying. He will listen to you. He has to. He’s your father.”
I was getting used to these assertions. I had no choice. Asma Auntie, when she spoke to me, always referred to Sadiq as “your father,” not noticing the way I had shrunk from her words in the beginning. At the majlis, earlier in the day, she’d introduced me to everyone as Deena’s granddaughter, Sadiq’s child. For her, I couldn’t just be Jo. Introductions had to be defined in the context of a wider circle that was feeling less and less strange to me.
What she said now was like a light shining out on the dark path in front of me, guiding my way forward. I didn’t say anything then, just finished my kulfi and waited for my chance to speak with Deena, later that night. In bed, the giant one I shared with her, I waited until she turned out the light before I brought up the subject.
“Did you know Sadiq is going to Iraq?”
“Yes. He told me. He went last year, too. Something he forgot to mention in his monthly phone calls,” she said with an exasperated sigh.
“I want to go, too.”
“What?” Deena sat up in bed and turned the light back on. “What on earth for?”
It was the first time I voluntarily raised the subject of Chris. Not the part I had been unable, so far, to share. About the color of his eyes. Only what was relevant now. Only that I knew that Sadiq going to Iraq, my going with him, was a way to give Chris what I’d gained for myself in meeting Fazl. We spent a long time talking. She wasn’t convinced.
The next morning, I told Sadiq what I wanted to do. He shook his head. “No. It’s not safe.”
“It’s safe for you, but not for me?”
“It’s not the same thing. For me, it’s a matter of faith. For you— what is it that you want to go for, Jo? I don’t understand.”
So I told him what I’d told Deena the night before. About Chris. About his tour in Iraq. What he’d written in his journal. His “accident.” And what needed to be done to make it safe for him to remember.
Sadiq tried to do what his aunt had wanted me to do to him, spending a long time convincing me that I shouldn’t go. But I refused to take no for an answer.
“You said it’s a matter of faith. For you. Can’t you understand? That it’s a matter of faith for me, too? I have to do this. I know. It’s the reason I’m here. I know that. I have to do this for my brother.”
In the end, after a lot more arguing and with a lot of obvious reluctance, Sadiq gave in, saying, “All right, Jo. Chris is your brother. Because of that, he is something to me, too.”
That was when I should have said something. Like so many other times before. But I didn’t.
Sadiq was still talking. “If this is something you feel you must do, for him, then I will help you. But if you’re going, I’ll have to get you a Pakistani passport. It won’t be safe to travel as an American.”
“Then you�
�ll have to do the same for me, Sadiq,” said Deena. “I’m not letting you two go without me.”
Within a week, it was all arranged. I wasn’t at all afraid. And now that she’d decided to go, too, Deena was happy.
She said, “I’ve always wanted to go to Karbala, since I was a little girl. You know, my grandmother, who I never met, is buried there. Ever since the war in Iraq began, with Karbala and Najaf in the news all the time, I have felt a peculiar calling. I think you’re right, Jo. This is meant to be. I only hope you find what you’re looking for there. For your brother’s sake.”
We traveled with a big group of pilgrims, most of us starting out from Karachi. On the passport that Sadiq had made for me—at no small cost in bribes, I’m sure—my name was Jamila Mubarak. That way, he said, they could still call me Jo. We stayed in Dubai for a night and met up with other pilgrims who would be in our group, all of them of Indian and Pakistani origin, hailing from Canada, Africa, and England. There were almost 150 of us altogether.
The flight from Dubai to Baghdad was a charter, the only passengers on it being those in our group. The mood among the other pilgrims ebbed and flowed, alternating between a reflective, meditative quiet and a kind of a festive spirit—like a bunch of kids on a school field trip, even though the pilgrimage was supposed to be a somber one. At those times, people handed around cookies, nuts, chips, and chocolates, sharing the foodstuff they’d brought. In the quiet moments, I would close my eyes and hear, as if he were speaking out loud, the words of Chris’s journal, uncannily intersecting with what I experienced throughout our very different journey to the land where he had served and killed and suffered as a Marine.
One of the things I most remember about the trip was how much time we spent waiting. Waiting around at the airport in Dubai. Later, waiting to board the buses that would get us to where we were going, waiting to get off the buses, waiting for people at rest stops to use the bathroom, waiting to meet up with the others in the lobbies of our hotels and at meeting points in and around the places we visited.
Chris, too, had spent a lot of time waiting, months in Kuwait, anticipating a war that got more and more inevitable.
Waiting, still, here in Kuwait, he’d written. There’s no doubt about where we’re going. Everyone knows the war’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of when. In the meantime, Ku-wait-wait-wait-wait!
There was a man, Dr. Salman, and a woman, Mrs. Waleed, who were kind of the leaders of the group. People went to them with questions—practical and religious. Some of the people sitting together, toward the back of the plane, started reciting nohas almost as soon as we took off from Dubai. Soon, everyone joined in, beating their chests like they were clapping along. It felt like camp. Except the songs made people cry instead of laugh. In between, they’d chant the names of the martyrs and other imams, calling out the name of Ali—the first Imam, Husain’s father—the loudest. Deena sat next to me, whispering explanations the whole time. Until someone requested a noha from her and she obliged, her voice having the same hushing effect that I’d already observed at the majlis in Karachi.
Chris had used his voice the same way when he was in Iraq. The guys have started calling me the choir boy. Because of how many times I start to sing gospel songs and hymns without even realizing it. They tease me about it. But no one ever tells me to shut up. So I guess they don’t really mind. I sing stuff from Christian March and old, traditional hymns, too. I also lead them in prayer sometimes, which some of them seem to really like, calling me Preacher March. Choir Boy and Preacher March. I laugh with them and tell them preaching runs in the family. Some of them have seen Uncle Ron on TV.
Landing in Baghdad was surreal. As soon as we got off the steps leading down from the plane, we were met by American soldiers. They ordered us to line up on the tarmac. It was the first time I realized how well I blended in with the others in the group. The soldiers looked at me the same way they looked at them. Not in a good way. They had dogs sniff at our bags and then at us. When we got on the bus that would take us to the terminal, one of the soldiers got on with us. Someone in the group shouted something loud and long, and everyone answered, Ya Ali!
The soldier with us on the bus yelled, nervously, his hands holding his gun as if he might need it at any second, “What are you guys shouting?!” and the male leader of the group, Dr. Salman, said, “We are calling out the name of our Imam.”
The soldier’s lips formed an O, as if he understood, but I wondered. I was going to get used to that chant over the next week. The more I heard it, the less strange it became, feeling more and more like people at church, in Garden Hill, shouting out hallelujahs.
At the airport terminal, there was a lot of hustle and bustle. Most of the people there were U.S. military. You could tell which ones were going home just by looking at their faces. And, I’m guessing, if you got close enough—which no one in our group tried to do, keeping as much distance between themselves and the soldiers and Marines as they could—by their breath, too. The ones going home looked and acted like they’d started celebrating a little early—the only shop in the duty-free was a giant liquor store, so it wasn’t hard to guess how. The ones arriving in country looked pissed.
Our first destination was Karbala. It took twelve hours to get there by bus, even though it’s only about sixty miles south of Baghdad. Dr. Salman said that part of the reason it took so long was because we had to avoid the most direct routes, which were the most dangerous, sticking instead to smaller, out-of-the-way roads, making the journey safer but more circuitous.
There were a total of six buses for our group. We had to go very slowly. The roads weren’t very good and we stopped and pulled over a couple of times for U.S. convoys going by, many more times for checkpoints. Dr. Salman had warned the group about how to behave at those checkpoints. No cameras. No cell phones in sight. And if American soldiers boarded, he urged us not to stare at them, not to look angry or upset or scared, to do what they asked, to open bags and get off the bus if they ordered us to, without arguing.
We were boarded only a few times. When it happened, a small group of U.S. soldiers would walk up and down the aisle of the bus a couple of times, staring sternly into each of our faces, making everyone nervous. At the sight of them, I couldn’t not think of Chris, who was the reason I was there. Again, I was struck by the fact that none of the soldiers recognized me as American. That felt strange. And scary, once, when one of them stopped and yelled, fiercely, at a woman in the group who had forgotten to put away her video camera. He nearly took it away from her. By now, she was crying. Dr. Salman came over, apologizing profusely, until the soldier got off the bus, still muttering angrily to himself.
Until that one soldier yelled, I had had the nearly irresistible urge to stand up and wave and say, “Hey, guys! Where are you from? I’m from California!” After that, I sank low into my seat, glad not to be noticed. If Chris were among those soldiers and Marines, would he recognize me?
On our way to Baghdad, Chris wrote. Finally! We hardly see any women in the towns and villages on the way into Baghdad. Those we do are all in black. The people—men and women—look at us suspiciously. We look at them the same way. I guess they’re afraid of us. I would be, too. In our uniforms and tanks, we must look pretty scary. Truth is, we’re scared, too.
I was wearing a black abaya, like the other women. We’d all had to practice wearing them, at Dubai, since it was an Arab form of clothing and none of the Indian and Pakistani people normally wore them. Most of the women in our group—other than Deena and a couple of others—did normally cover their hair, wearing the scarf they called hijab, but not the abaya. From what Deena said, this was an unusually religious bunch of people. Obviously. I couldn’t see irreligious people wanting to go on a pilgrimage in a war zone.
Everyone in our group that I talked to said the same thing with regard to the danger, when I asked about it. They weren’t afraid. They were at peace. The Imam would see to their safety. And God.
All the way to Karbala, we passed burned-out cars on the side of the road. And bombed-out buildings. There were gutted grooves in the road, too, that one of the translators on the bus said, darkly, were the marks of American tanks.
Almost there. It’s been a mess getting there. We had to stop and clear the road a lot, from all the bombed-out cars, trucks, and debris. A lot of the buildings, too, are damaged. Our bombs got here before we did. We see people, too. A lot of them, waving white flags.
Also along the way, we passed other pilgrims, on foot, who were walking from other parts of Iraq to get to Karbala for the Arbaeen holiday. In every town and village we passed, there were tents set up for the pilgrims to sleep and rest in and stalls where water, tea, and food were served at no charge.
“That’s the traditional sabeel,” Sadiq said. “In Karachi, too, people line up on the sides of the Ashura procession, serving water and tea to the people walking in the juloos. Feeding the hungry and thirsty is a way people remember the thirsty children of Karbala.”
There were a couple of translators on each bus that Dr. Salman had hired and arranged for, along with the buses, who had joined us before we left Baghdad. When one of them heard Sadiq explaining to me about the sabeel, he bitterly said, “This tradition wasn’t allowed under Saddam. For Iraqis, none of the traditions of Muharram were allowed, though the regime allowed foreign pilgrims access to Karbala. It was a tourism thing—good for business. But it was different then. Government people were all over Karbala, limiting the interaction between the foreigners and the locals. The Shia in Karbala and Najaf were Saddam’s biggest threat to power. And they suffered for it, too. But now, everything is different. The Americans saved us from the tyrant!”
