Radiant Fugitives

by Nawaaz Ahmed

  “Recite a little louder,” Ismail tells Arshad, although it could wake Amina up.

  Arshad starts out softly, with the surah he’s memorized for the Quran recitation competition in the fundraiser, his voice thin and high. As he grows more confident, he grows louder. Arshad has been learning Quran recitation in his Sunday school and plans to memorize the entire Quran. The class is run by Imam Zia, who’s complimented Arshad on his progress. Arshad’s tajwid has improved remarkably since he started practicing pronunciation accompanying the computer program his mother found for him, which displayed renderings of the correct shape of the mouth and placement of the tongue alongside the corresponding syllables. Arshad’s control of pitch and tune, though, is still diffident and unsteady. It will take years, of course, to master that, but even so, Ismail can already hear Imam Zia’s characteristic vocalizations in Arshad’s fledgling style.

  Arshad stumbles a few times in recalling some ayats. But there’s an earnestness to his efforts, a natural piety to his recitation, that fills Ismail with pride. Subhan’Allah, this son of his is truly a blessing, an example of how to practice faith in this day and age. How much time Arshad is willing to expend on his desire to master the Quran, time that his friends squander on video games and the internet. That too of his own volition, with no compulsion from his parents.

  Isn’t this the reason why the community center is important? Would Ismail have wasted his youth if he’d had access to such a community? All those years straying away from the true path of Islam, not knowing what he was missing, not even realizing how he was harming himself. Yes, there are challenges—and is not what’s happening in America now just such a challenge?—but challenges are meant to be faced, not run away from, and surely Allah, subhanahu wa ta’ala, would steer His believers to safety, as He had steered the Prophet, peace be upon him, through those dark initial days at Medina. There’s no reason to be beset by doubts—his son’s faith puts his to shame. He listens to Arshad, marveling at the quiet poetry, wishing the moment never to end.

  But it does. Arshad finishes and falls silent. Ismail notices that Amina’s grasp has slackened. Her brother’s voice has succeeded where his had failed, although her forehead is puckered, as if she’s still concentrating on what she’s heard. He smoothes the creased skin and, rising, tucks her blanket around her.

  He places a kiss on his son’s forehead. “Go to sleep. We have a long day tomorrow.”

  When he turns off the bedside lamp, the stars and galaxies burn instantly brighter, as if the universe has come to life. And emblazoned across its skies are Allah’s verses.

  21

  Seema has asked her friend Fiaz to take them sightseeing around San Francisco. She’s counting on him to entertain her mother and sister and act as a buffer and deterrent. Surely the three women will have to behave themselves in the presence of an outsider.

  Fiaz arrives at ten on Saturday morning, punctual as always. He’s sharply dressed, colorful: gray jacket, maroon shirt, teal jeans, brown shoes.

  “What?” he says, catching Seema’s look as she lets him in. “I did tone it down.”

  And he has, for he looks irreproachably harmonious. The gray in his jacket is streaked with just the right hint of the dark teal of the jeans, and his maroon shirt is echoed by the rich mulch brown of his shoes.

  He gives her a peck on her cheek, before looking around and mouthing, “Where are they?” As though he’s inquiring about aliens from outer space.

  Seema is forced to laugh. “Ammi, Tahera—Fiaz is here.” She’s eager to hurry everyone out of the confines of the apartment.

  But Tahera is still getting ready, and Nafeesa will not allow Fiaz to leave the apartment without offering him something. “But Fiaz is being so good taking us around. It’s terrible if we don’t offer him even chai. It’ll only take a moment.”

  “Don’t put yourself out, Aunty,” Fiaz says. “I like being a tour guide. That’s the only time I remember how beautiful San Francisco really is.”

  Fiaz works with Seema. But he’s more than just a colleague—he’s also her oldest and best friend in the city. Nafeesa has already met him; he accompanied Seema to receive Nafeesa at the airport and drove them home.

  What Seema has not told Nafeesa is that Fiaz is gay. He lives in the Castro with Pierre, his French boyfriend of many years. Seema met Fiaz when she’d moved to San Francisco the first time, at a potluck hosted by Trikone, the first South Asian gay and lesbian organization in the United States, or in the world, for that matter. It was Fiaz who’d alerted her to an opening in his firm when she was considering returning to San Francisco, after breaking up with Ann, the girlfriend she’d moved to Boston for. Fiaz is one of the few friends from Trikone who remained after she married Bill.

  Nafeesa makes chai, while Tahera clears away her things in the living room. Fiaz and Seema sit across from each other at the dining table, like kids awaiting punishment.

  “How’re you holding up?” Fiaz whispers.

  “We’ll talk,” Seema signals. Conversation is difficult, given the two extra pairs of ears.

  “How do you like San Francisco so far, Aunty?” Fiaz asks, taking the proffered cup.

  “I’m happy to be here,” Nafeesa says.

  She does look happy, for this simple act of making and offering chai. Nafeesa fusses over Fiaz, over the amount of sugar and milk in the chai, thrusting cookies at him. Fiaz submits gracefully to her ministrations. He compliments her: “This is the best chai I’ve had in San Francisco, Aunty!” He keeps up a lively spiel about the places they’re going to visit and is a fount of amusing anecdotes about the history of the city and the gold rush that propelled its growth. Seema relaxes. The day will go smoothly enough, she thinks. Her mother is clearly smitten: Fiaz can be very charming.

  His charms don’t work on Tahera, though. Entering the kitchen in her jilbab and hijab, she replies to his greeting with a brusque salaam, ignoring the hand he holds out to her. She accepts Nafeesa’s offer of chai but drinks it in large gulps, as if swallowing a tonic. Fiaz attempts to engage her in a conversation, asking about her last trip to San Francisco, offering to alter the itinerary if she’s visited any of the spots he’s planned for them, but she declines: “Ammi hasn’t seen them. It’s kind of you.” She smiles perfunctorily at his jests—“What do Texans think of our Muslim president?”—and replies to other inquiries with monosyllables.

  Soon Fiaz gives up. “Shall we leave?” he asks, putting his cup down. “The car is parked around the corner.”

  Tahera and Nafeesa go down first. Fiaz helps Seema lock up and follows her.

  “What have I got you into?” Seema tells Fiaz.

  “Relax, just relax,” Fiaz says. “Everything will be okay.”

  22

  Grandmother, you watch Fiaz help Seema into the passenger seat as he holds the door open and waits till she buckles her seat belt before shutting it, and you think: What a sweet man! He’s handsome and obviously fit. His black hair is glossy and slicked back, his eyes sparkle. He sports a precisely fashioned beard. But he’s younger than Seema, you think, probably by five years.

  You wonder how he got to the United States, to San Francisco. There is a confidence to him, a way of carrying himself that suggests he is native to the city and the country. Yet he speaks flawless Urdu, without an accent.

  “Seema’s Urdu is poor,” he says. “She should be ashamed of herself.” He says this in Urdu.

  Seema swats him but cannot deny the allegation. Neither can you, Grandmother, and you’re ashamed too: your daughters never learned to read or write Urdu when they were children. The Urdu they grew up with is colloquial and mongrel, with English and Hindi handily substituting for words they didn’t know and couldn’t be bothered to learn, despite all your attempts to instruct them.

  They were never interested. They went to an English-medium convent school. They grew up on books from England—beginning with Enid Blyton’s adventures, before progressing into the world of Charles Dicken
s and Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, then Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, Byron and Shelley and Keats. All their father’s influence.

  You have a BA in Urdu literature and would have continued with an MPhil, or even a PhD, if you hadn’t married my grandfather. His love of everything English easily drowned your own love for a language that was “only good for love poetry,” as your husband put it after marrying you, though he didn’t deny it was your recitation of Urdu ghazals the evening he came bride-seeking that had so captivated him.

  “That’s the only woman I want to marry,” he’d said, turning down many flattering offers from prospective fathers-in-law with account balances large enough to bankroll a hospital for him. And you, Grandmother, flattered by his lovesick adamance, allowed your whole world to be turned upside down. Giving up Urdu was only one of the sacrifices you made—and perhaps the most unnecessary, for couldn’t you have continued in your love for the language, even if you’d been forced to give up dreams of making a career studying and teaching it?

  Sitting in the back seat with Tahera, you try to remember what you can of phrases and courtesies that had once slipped easily off your tongue but now feel so strange that you’re afraid you’ll trip over them, should you be called on to exhibit your past mastery. But your daughters seem to have forgotten all about your degree, just like you had until this moment.

  The first destination is the Golden Gate Bridge. Fiaz points out various landmarks as he maneuvers the car through the light weekend traffic, but you’re not really paying attention. You’re lost in past drives with your daughters and their father—always this same way, father and elder daughter in the front, mother and younger daughter in the back, the father holding forth on some topic or the other. Fiaz’s voice rolls over you, and the city sinks into the earth with you barely noticing, to be replaced by trees and shrubs and rocks and water.

  You’re at the Golden Gate Bridge, under its looming skeletal towers and massive cables. To the left and the right are the Pacific Ocean and the San Francisco Bay, two hundred feet below. You’re more excited by this glimpse of the Pacific than you’re impressed by the bridge. You can’t believe that the sliver of water you see between the two tongues of land is really the largest ocean on earth. That sliver extends all the way west, wrapping itself around the globe and merging into that other ocean by your homeland’s feet. You’re transported in an instant to Kanyakumari, to that tip of India’s peninsula where three bodies of water meet.

  You’re standing on the stippled beach with your daughters and husband. Your daughters each hold on to one of their father’s hands as the trio edges toward the waves, churidars and pants rolled up to their knees. You’re guarding their footwear.

  “There,” he says, pointing toward the east, lifting one of the girl’s hands along with his, “that’s the Bay of Bengal.” Now lifting the other daughter’s hand: “That’s the Arabian Sea.” Finally, lifting both their hands, and gesturing to the south: “And there’s the Indian Ocean.”

  “Where, Abba?” asks Tahera.

  “How can you tell?” says Seema.

  “Can’t you see?” he says. “Look, the Arabian Sea is muddy. The Bay of Bengal is green. The Indian Ocean is blue.”

  Seema claims she sees the difference, but Tahera can’t. Father and eldest daughter take turns waxing on how blue, how green, how muddy each is, until your youngest daughter is reduced to tears. She comes running back to you, asking whether you can tell the seas and ocean apart.

  “No, I cannot.” You console her. “It’s just the sun.” The sun is in the west and the waters closest to the sun glint differently.

  “It’s just the sun,” Tahera shouts to her father and sister, who have waded a little deeper into the water by now. “You’re both lying.”

  She runs after them, skirting the edge of the waters, jumping back every time a wave advances. “Abba, Seema, I want to come too.”

  They eventually return for her, and the trio stands for a long while in the churning seas, as the sun is slowly swallowed up by the hungry line of the horizon. Father and daughters are an outline silhouetted against it, distinguishable only by their height.

  The ground beneath you shifts, as though the earth is being drained away, and in a flash you’re standing on the Golden Gate Bridge again.

  Tahera holds your hand to steady you against its sway and steers you around a couple by the railing, kissing. “Careful, Ammi.”

  A chill wind has begun blowing. You clutch Tahera’s hands for warmth but also as a precaution—as if the wind could carry you away, over the bridge and across the bay.

  Seema and Fiaz stand in the shelter of a tower, leaning into each other as they share a laugh. They smile, beckoning you and Tahera to join them.

  “How good they look together!” you’re moved to exclaim.

  23

  “Your sister is nothing like you,” Fiaz says. “But anyone can tell you’re sisters.”

  “Really?” Seema grimaces. “How?”

  “Your voices. Your eyes. You both have similar expressions.” He studies Tahera approaching them. “Does your sister ever smile?”

  “I suppose she must.” Surely there were moments when Tahera should have smiled, not a mechanical curving of the lips, but a genuine transfiguration of her face—on birthdays, while receiving prizes after winning competitions, on vacations, at treats. “She was always serious.”

  Had Tahera really been so solemn, or had Seema paid so little attention to her sister that she can’t recall even one joyful image of her? The thought is distressing.

  Her sister and mother tread ponderously. Nafeesa’s shawl and Tahera’s jilbab are plastered to their bodies, the edges fluttering wildly. There’s the same concentration in their faces, the same determination as they struggle against the wind. How small and fragile they look, like birds stranded in a storm. She left them behind in order to speak with Fiaz alone. She’d only have memories of silent, serious faces if she kept fleeing from them this way.

  “Isn’t this lovely?” she calls out, smiling a welcome at them, and gesturing toward the red towers and the cables, the blue skies and the water. “The last time I was here was with your children, Tahera.”

  She’d ended up here with Amina and Arshad as the sun set, unexpectedly happy with their day together.

  She’d been beyond surprised when she’d received a call from Tahera in March. Their last conversation was more than a decade earlier, when she called Tahera to wish her well on her marriage to Ismail, after Tahera moved to Dallas to join her husband. The letter Tahera wrote her after made it clear she wanted no more contact.

  It turned out Tahera was in San Francisco attending a conference hosted by the American Academy of Family Practitioners, invited to give a talk on healthcare for Muslim women. Her husband had accompanied her, for a day of meetings at his company’s Silicon Valley headquarters in Santa Clara. They’d brought the children along.

  Then: “I heard you’re getting divorced.”

  So the call was clearly obligatory, imposed on Tahera by Nafeesa, their go-between, relating news of one sister to the other. Yet, hearing Tahera’s voice after such a long time, Seema immediately yielded to the lure of the past, craving that sympathy from her younger sister, so soothing and familiar from her childhood. She found herself narrating details of the breakup—brave and telling—calculated to arouse that past sister’s solicitude. She even considered disclosing something she’d learned barely a week earlier, and was still grappling with—that she was pregnant as well.

  But Tahera displayed neither sympathy over the phone nor exulting vindication, only the sense of duty. Seema was to be denied any satisfaction—neither the knowledge that her sister was gloating at her misery, nor the catharsis of reconciliation.

  After listening mostly in silence, Tahera asked, “Do you need any help?”

  “No, I’m fine,” Seema replied, hearing the effort it took Tahera to frame the question. To prove to Tahera, and to herself that she was
really fine, she’d agreed to meet the visiting family for dinner.

  I had been all of an inch then, my presence made real only by the accompanying symptoms—morning sickness, heartburn, the ripening tug of my to-be mother’s breasts. She had no concept of me except as cells quickening in her body, cells she could still choose to expel if she wanted. I was a to-be child she hadn’t decided yet to keep.

  What did she see in her sister’s children that trip that made up her mind?

  24

  At the Thai restaurant by their hotel, Tahera and her family are already seated when Seema arrives. Tahera stands up as though for a hug, but changes her mind and scoots over to make space for Seema. Ismail raises his hand to his forehead in a silent salaam.

  Tahera introduces Seema to her children. “This is your Seema Aunty. Remember I said Ammi has a sister? Say salaam.”

  “Assalamu Alaikum, Seema Aunty,” the children intone. They are seated opposite Seema, with their father between them. Amina is shy, and hides her face in her father’s kurta. Ismail smooths her hijab over her head and asks her not to behave so bashfully—what will her aunt think of her?

  The more interesting question: What do they think of Seema?

  Tahera hasn’t seen Seema for fifteen years. She first notes what Seema’s wearing: a long skirt and a demure full-sleeved top, brown and beige. She’s both relieved and irritated by Seema’s choice—she’d expected Seema in jeans or pants and in brighter colors. She wonders what Seema makes of her own attire, of Amina’s hijab.

  In the quick appraising glance Ismail gives Seema, he sees that she is stylishly dressed, poised, sure of herself, matching Tahera’s various accounts. The prospect of a divorce seems to have had little effect on her—she is cheerful, unflinching, unabashed.

  Arshad can’t stop staring. He notes the differences: his mother is in a hijab, his aunt isn’t; there are dark circles around his mother’s eyes, while his aunt’s face has makeup and lipstick. His mother is like a moth, his aunt like a sparrow, sharply etched. “This is your sister, Ammi?” he asks.