Radiant Fugitives

by Nawaaz Ahmed

  “You could have come to Irvine first.”

  You’re on the brink of tears. Why hadn’t Tahera suggested that earlier? You knot and unknot the edge of your saree, biting into your lower lip to stop it from trembling. Tahera is a blurred outline.

  But her voice is sharp, knife-edged. “Is it our fault she’s alone? Did we ask her to call herself a lesbian, then get married, then have a baby after deciding to get divorced? She’s always done what she wanted. Yet it’s Seema you come to spend your last days with, while I, who’ve always done what you wanted, am treated like an afterthought, like I don’t matter.”

  Words fail you. They’ve always failed you. When you need them the most, Grandmother, they shrivel up somewhere deep within you and die.

  Seema’s voice cuts through the moment; neither of you noticed her return. Peeking warily into the kitchen, she says, “Who doesn’t matter?”

  “Nobody.” Tahera plunks down the knife and sweeps the beans onto a plate. “We’re just gossiping about Chennai.” Her eyes are downcast and hooded, but you can’t miss their angry glitter.

  You soak up your half-formed tears with your saree before showing your face to your daughters.

  17

  How airless the apartment feels that afternoon, how strictly its space seems carved up among the three women.

  After a meal that is almost as uncomfortable as the previous night’s, Nafeesa tosses restlessly in the bedroom, Seema shifts restively in her seat by the window in the living room, while Tahera, trapped in the kitchen, speaks to Khadija, her partner, in whose charge she’s left their family practice in Irvine.

  It’s Nafeesa who suggests a walk, giving up on the elusive nap, not able to unhear Tahera’s accusations from the morning.

  Seema and Tahera leap at the idea. But will the walk be too tiring for their mother? It’s obvious she will not be turned down. Tahera has to finish her asr namaz first, though.

  The mid-October sun drips honey, doling out its warmth liberally, San Francisco’s vaunted fog still crouching behind the hills to the west. The two sisters flank their mother, each holding on to one of Nafeesa’s hands.

  “Like when we were kids, no?” Seema says.

  Tahera concurs warily, because she has contrived to take hold of Nafeesa’s right hand. As girls they’d squabble over who got to walk on their mother’s right, settling the matter by taking turns the way out and back. But Seema has forgotten this preoccupation from their childhood, and Tahera relaxes, gripping her mother’s hand, a hard-won, justifiable trophy.

  What a picture they make! Tahera covered hair to foot, black gown billowing in the breeze; Seema rotund in a tight ochre top and flowing brown pants; and sandwiched between them, Nafeesa’s slight figure in a green saree and white sneakers, pink sweater and blue shawl, a combination completely deficient in color coordination. The sisters burst into laughter on catching sight of their reflection in a storefront window.

  “What?” Nafeesa says, baffled by their sudden mirth, but they don’t stop laughing. And though Nafeesa knows she’s in some way involved in their merriment, perhaps even the target, she is secretly delighted.

  Some tension is eased, some old intimacy begins to take hold as they stroll through the Mission’s sun-drenched streets, past multicolored murals and buildings painted orange and purple and cyan, past grocery stores and florists exhibiting brilliantly hued wares on sun-splattered pavements. An almost natural chitchat springs up among them, Seema sharing lively anecdotes about the landmarks they pass, and Nafeesa and Tahera listening and pointing and inquiring with an almost natural enthusiasm.

  They’re walking slowly—Seema slower than her pregnancy dictates, keeping an eye on her mother for signs of exhaustion. Before long they find themselves crossing Market Street and are confronted with the rolling hills of Lower Haight.

  “Shall we turn back?” Seema asks.

  Nafeesa denies fatigue, wanting to prolong the truce the outing seems to have fostered. They continue, stopping at each intersection to pick the direction with the easiest incline. Even so, her breathing soon grows ragged, and she has to remind herself not to grip her daughters’ hands so tightly every time she feels the need to take an extra deep breath. When she finally agrees to take a break, her daughters exchange glances of relief.

  They rest on a bench in a bus stop for a brief moment before a store selling baby apparel across the street catches Nafeesa’s eye. Inside, she flits from shelf to shelf, exclaiming over blankets and sweaters, socks and shoes, despite Seema’s protests that the baby has all the clothes he needs. Nafeesa’s taken in by a particularly soft blanket, sky blue and embroidered with a smiling moon and many winking stars. She has brought clothes for me from India but nothing she thinks will last me beyond the first few months. Alas, she has left her purse behind in Seema’s apartment. She strokes the blanket, reluctant to give it up.

  “I have baby blankets already,” Seema says.

  “I’ll get it,” Tahera says. “I didn’t get anything for the baby yet.” She takes the blanket from Nafeesa, glad to make up for her behavior that morning. She’s shocked at its price—she’d never have bought anything as expensive for Amina or Arshad. “What else would you like, Ammi?”

  Over Seema’s objections, she leads Nafeesa through the store, and they rummage through baskets and racks, adding to their purchases—a nightcap and a pair of gloves and socks for me, the same blue as the blanket, bibs, and sleepwear.

  Next door is a bookstore. Nafeesa, energized now and finding a ready ally in her younger daughter, begins browsing the children’s section.

  Seema follows reluctantly, leery now that her mother and sister have joined forces. She’ll have to put her foot down, or she’ll be railroaded by them the rest of their stay. “My son is not going to read books any time soon,” she tells Tahera.

  “Stop saying that,” Tahera whispers sharply. “It will remind Ammi and make her sad. Let her do what she wants. See how happy she is.”

  Indeed, Nafeesa darts around with an armful of books—alphabets and numbers, farm animals and fairy tales—unable to stop herself, intent on showering me with an entire childhood’s worth of books.

  The store has an international section too. There are no books from India, but Nafeesa finds a shelf with a smattering of books from England. “Look, they have the entire Faraway Tree series.” These are the books her daughters read repeatedly—about three siblings who find magical lands at the top of a tall tree reaching into the clouds—before they moved on to more mature fare. There are still shelves in their home in Chennai lined with books they’d devoured during their school years, even if the lending libraries they’d frequented had one by one disappeared.

  Tahera exclaims over the series, pulls out her favorite, and sits down to read. Nafeesa searches for Seema to tell her of her discovery and finds her in the poetry section.

  “They’ve changed the names,” Tahera complains when Nafeesa returns with Seema. “Bessie is now Beth, and Fanny is Frannie.”

  The disappointment is fleeting. Soon both daughters are flipping through the books, reading snippets to each other, recalling other favorite passages that they must read immediately, and even—here Nafeesa chokes up, for it has been years since she’s witnessed anything like this—even peeking over each other’s shoulders to read a page. How often she saw her daughters reading this way as children. Her heart pounds with the pleasure of the sight.

  Seema buries her nose in the pages and inhales, green apple and dried wood. There’s something so essentially bookish about that smell that she can convince herself it’s the same smell her own well-thumbed copies once possessed. Were they still there gathering dust on some shelf? Or did her father get rid of them as she’d been told he got rid of everything else that belonged to her?

  She collects a copy of each book in the series. “Tahera, will Arshad and Amina like these?”

  Tahera ponders the question. Amina is the right age for the series. But magic and pixies and goblins
? She has not permitted Arshad the Harry Potter books, which have been hard to ignore, with posters everywhere of the movie series, dark images of grimy kids and wizards and witches brandishing knobbly wands. Ismail is not concerned they’d corrupt Arshad, but he leaves decisions about books and movies to her.

  “No, they don’t read such books,” she tells Seema. There are probably better—more Islamic—books she could buy for Amina. She resolves to look for these when she’s back in Irvine, reshelving the book she holds in her hand.

  “I’ll buy them for myself then,” Seema says.

  They find the city transformed when they leave the bookstore. The sun has sunk behind the hills to the west, the blue of the sky replaced by pale pinks and violets. A faint mist, the beginnings of fog, has nosed its way into the neighborhood. Lights dot the streets, and farther east blink hazy lights across the bay. The flushed city of the afternoon is no more.

  “This is beautiful,” Nafeesa says, but she shivers.

  “I didn’t realize it was so late,” Tahera says, flustered. “I must get back for the maghrib namaz, then call Amina and Arshad before they go to bed.”

  And Seema, who’d wished earlier that the day would pass quickly, is sorry that it’s ended. The past has been an oasis.

  They hail a cab, and squeeze in, quiet now. Nafeesa has suddenly shrunk, as though with the light—the sky has turned a deep unrepentant purple—her strength has drained away. She sits huddled between her daughters, clutching to herself the blanket and the books and a fluffy yellow duck she persuaded Tahera to buy for me. Each sister looks out a window, lost in her own thoughts. Each sister lurches between vexation and hope that the cab will take all evening to arrive.

  18

  Tahera is folding the janamaz after the maghrib prayers when Seema holds out a book, smiling. “For you. I got it at the bookstore.”

  “What is it?” Tahera continues folding without glancing at the book.

  “Poetry,” Seema says. “I remembered how much you liked Keats. Your favorite poet, no?”

  “I don’t read poetry anymore,” Tahera replies, which is true, if one didn’t count the Quran. She has neither the inclination nor the time to waste on frivolous, self-serving indulgences.

  “It has that poem you loved—There was a naughty boy. Only you changed it to girl whenever you recited it.” Seema flips through the book trying to find the poem.

  Tahera’s first impulse is to deny Seema, pretend she doesn’t recall. How dare Seema invoke their shared history after renouncing all rights to it. She already regrets her sentimentality from earlier, the false comfort of those books from their past, the delusion of continuing sisterhood. But the opening of the Keats poem comes back to her too vividly to ignore.

  “There was a naughty girl, a naughty girl was she, she would not stop at home, she could not quiet be,” she recites involuntarily, taking the book from Seema.

  “You used to recite it everywhere. You did that funny skip at the end, hopping from one foot to the other. How did it go?”

  “She stood in her shoes and she wondered. She wondered. She stood in her shoes and she wondered.”

  “You could teach Amina the poem. She’d look sweet doing it.”

  Tahera thumbs through the book. The complete poems and selected letters of John Keats. Her father had many collections of Keats’s poems, but none that claimed to be complete. She recognizes many of the titles, some of her favorite poems. How foolish she’d been, so taken with poetry, convinced there was nothing more important in the world. And surely Seema is raking it up now to make some disparaging point, to attack and ridicule her. She’d seen the look on Seema’s face when she declined the Faraway Tree books on her children’s behalf, as if she pitied the children their close-minded mother.

  She thrusts the book back at Seema. “All that is in the past. You should keep it for yourself. Or for your children.”

  Seema’s thwarted expression is very satisfying.

  Besides, she’d never been the naughty girl in the poem. The poem fit Seema better. It was Seema who initiated the scrapes they got into, who created a scene if she didn’t get what she wanted, who finally ran away from home.

  “I have to call home,” Tahera says, turning away. “Amina will be waiting.”

  19

  Hearing her mother’s voice, Amina becomes teary-eyed again. But the busy evening, errands with their father topped by dinner at Hot Breads, where her brother let her have the bigger share of chicken nuggets, has mostly succeeded in distracting her from the approaching motherless weekend.

  “I miss you,” Amina says to Tahera. “Do you miss me?”

  “I miss you too, Ammu,” Tahera says, blowing a kiss into the phone.

  “I love you,” Tahera says to Amina. “Do you love me?”

  “I love you two, Ammi,” Amina says.

  This is a game they play often. Amina giggles, playing along with her mother.

  I love you ten, like a chocolate bar.

  I love you hundred, like a pickle jar.

  I love you thousand, like a room full of dolls.

  I love you million, like a sky full of stars.

  20

  Lately, my could-be father Ismail has visited the mosque most nights after the children go to bed to participate in discussions of the Quran, led by Imam Zia. Tonight he cannot. Their mother isn’t home, and Amina insists he stay by her bedside. She has sniffled her way to sleep, but her hold on his hand hasn’t loosened enough to extricate himself.

  Tonight, Ismail especially wishes to visit the mosque. There’s the fundraiser tomorrow, and perhaps a conversation with Imam Zia, and an extra namaz there, would dispel his anxiety.

  Imam Zia is a recent addition to the mosque and Islamic center. He’s from Pakistan but brought up and educated in England, with a PhD in Islamic theology. He has won several international competitions, both in Quran recital and in Quranic exegesis. Since his arrival two years ago, he has instituted many activities: besides the Friday sermons, there are nightly discussion groups and regular lectures and study sessions. He even maintains a blog on living a life of Islam, answering anonymous questions from the congregation.

  Another innovation: weekly soccer matches. Imam Zia is an avid soccer fan. Every Tuesday, after the isha namaz, carpools from the mosque drive to a rented indoor soccer field, where he leads a training session, followed by a match. Imam Zia is thirty-eight, but he runs faster and dribbles more wickedly than those half his age. The soccer matches have attracted many Muslim men from Irvine and the surrounding towns. Ismail, too, has become a regular at them.

  Imam Zia is keen to develop the grounds around the Islamic center for sports—a soccer field and volleyball and basketball courts—and to extend the center to include a gym with locker rooms and showers, to make the center a place where the youth can congregate, find community and Allah, while having clean fun at the same time. Imam Zia believes such a space is essential to ensure the youth don’t stray from their faith, and that they—including the girls—grow up strong and confident. A plan has been drawn, and Ismail is on the fundraising committee, spearheading its efforts, to culminate in the event planned for tomorrow, in less than twenty-four hours.

  Ismail now considers himself Imam Zia’s right-hand man. He has worked hard the last few months, calling on Muslim businesses and wealthy members of the community to ask for donations and pushing the organizing committee to implement as many fundraising ideas as possible—securing sponsors for the event in exchange for publicity, a magazine to sell advertising space, a silent auction, etc.

  The target is finally within reach. Ismail is no longer anxious about the fundraising itself. The logistics of the event are also under control. What perturbs him now is the potential for trouble. They’ve heard no reports of specific protests planned for tomorrow, but recent incidents in Manhattan, Murfreesboro, and Yorba Linda have been very disquieting.

  Ismail believes that hatred of Obama is being exploited to revive the fear of Muslims
and Islam that had appeared to fade slowly in the decade following 9/11. How else to explain the widespread belief that Obama is a Muslim or that Islam is taking over America? Though he’d been excited by Obama winning the presidency, even tantalized by the possibility that Obama’s win was a sign of Allah’s intentions for America, Ismail has since come to the conclusion that Obama’s background is not just a distraction but a setback for Muslims everywhere. Obama, though born to a Muslim and stepson to another, is no Muslim, and despite Obama’s many speeches regarding tolerance and respect, Ismail does not expect him to pursue any policy that would put American interests second, especially regarding the Middle East. America will always want more oil and will always support Israel. But what Obama’s presidency has done is to rally half the country against him, and the American right wing—hardcore Christians and Jews—has seized this opportunity to further its crusade against Islam.

  Sitting in the children’s bedroom—Arshad and Amina share a room, Amina still unwilling to sleep alone—Ismail can feel the dread weighing him down. If only he could do something—go for a drive, go to the mosque, talk to Imam Zia, pray. But he’s stuck here. Of course Tahera must go to her mother’s side, like any caring daughter, but did it have to include this weekend, knowing that anything could happen at the fundraiser tomorrow?

  Across the room, Arshad isn’t yet asleep. He’s lying rigid in his bed, knees up, staring at the ceiling as though it holds mysteries. Which in a way it does, for glowing faintly green—faint because the light from the bedside lamp is overwhelming—are glow-in-the-dark stickers of constellations and galaxies that Arshad had Ismail fix to the ceiling above his bed years ago. Glimmering amid the ghostly universe are Arshad’s favorite verses from the Quran, a more recent addition, projected onto the ceiling. There’s the ayat Al-Kursi from the surah Al-Baqarah, and the last three surahs from the Quran—Al-Ikhlas, Al-Falaq, and An-Nas. His son’s lips move, as though he’s reciting.