Yusuf Azeem Is Not a Hero

by Saadia Faruqi

  “It’s about to get harder,” Yusuf replied, looking over his shoulder. A group of boys stood near the entrance in a tight circle, laughing loudly. Someone was in the center of that circle, but all Yusuf could see was a head of black hair. “Who is that?”

  A minute later, the circle began to move, and then morphed into a line. The black head in the center came into view. Cameron. He was laughing with his mouth open, his T-shirt untucked over too-loose pants. His hair was spiked with what seemed to Yusuf like a ton of gel. He wasn’t the only one, though. All the boys in the group looked the same. They moved like a school of sharks through the cafeteria, Cameron in the middle. One boy purposefully bumped into a table, spilling milks and juices. Another boy snatched a cap off someone’s head and put it on his own. Cameron laughed some more.

  “What is his problem?” Danial whispered furiously.

  “What do you mean?” Yusuf was still staring at the group.

  “He acts so . . . white.” Danial said the last word as if it was an insult. “Like, changing his name, talking in an accent, hanging out with those guys . . .”

  Yusuf looked at his friend in surprise. “What do you care who he hangs out with?”

  “I don’t care. I’m just pointing out that it’s not very smart. Does he think they like him? They all probably make fun of him behind his back.”

  The bell rang. Lunchtime was over. Danial stood up, a hard look on his face. “Like they probably make fun of all of us.”

  Yusuf paused. “Not all of us.”

  Danial gave him a pitying look. “Keep fooling yourself, my friend. Just because you’re your father’s son doesn’t mean you’re golden.”

  Yusuf wanted to protest, but then he thought of the paper in his locker and closed his mouth.

  5

  Frey, Texas, was a small town of eight point five square miles, approximately two hundred miles from Dallas and fifty miles from Houston. It lay closest to the city of Conroe, off Interstate 45, but you needed to take a two-lane farm road for another ten miles before you got to Frey. The local population, including Yusuf and his family, was 12,845.

  Yusuf knew the story of the town as well as any resident: how two brothers, George and Henry Frey, had traveled there from England in 1832 with their families. Their portraits hung in the entryway of the city hall building, two mustachioed and bearded men with identical frowns and faraway looks in their eyes. The original village didn’t have a name, but it had an orchard, a winery, and a cotton gin. And cattle, of course.

  Yusuf always wondered if the Frey brothers were ranchers in England, but Abba told him ranching was a Texan thing. They must have learned, though, and quickly. The village grew, and with it the Frey family. And sometime in the early 1900s, they gave their home an official name: Frey, Texas.

  Frey boasted a lot of typical small-town things. A nineteenth-century courthouse that now also included the Frey Family Museum. A corn maze that was open all night in the fall, if you dared to enter it. A still-functioning stone fountain and three quaint little bed-and-breakfasts. Groves of peaches that supplied many of the grocery stores in southeast Texas. And sixteen churches in a variety of denominations.

  The Freys were Quakers. The church they’d built in 1835 was still standing in the middle of the town square. Over time, the town had grown, and many people with different traditions had settled here. Abba often talked about the Hindu family that lived next door to them when Yusuf was a toddler. Gita and Krishna Bannerjee, their three sons, and Krishna’s eighty-year-old father. They’d moved away when Gita got a medical residency in Conroe. The last thing they told Abba before they left was, “This town is only big enough for one kind of people.”

  “What did they mean?” Yusuf had once asked Abba, and Abba only shrugged with sad eyes. There were a total of eleven Muslim families now, up from five in 2001. They prayed together on Fridays and took every opportunity to mingle. The children went to Sunday school on the weekends, every single one of them, even if they didn’t want to. That was how things were done.

  On Friday night after dinner, Yusuf showed Amma the flyer about the robotics club. She shook her head firmly. “Nahi beta. I’m sorry, but I won’t let you miss Saturday classes just so you can go to a LEGO club.”

  Yusuf felt his heart thud in his chest, but he went on anyway. “Amma, please. You know how hard we’ve been working to prepare for the championship. It’s a great opportunity.”

  “Any other day would be fine,” she replied, turning away as if the matter was decided. “Saturday mornings are busy for all of us.”

  He could feel his eyebrows gather together into a scowl. “Why can’t we have Sunday school like before? It’s not fair.”

  She gave him a sideways look. “You know why. Everybody’s busy at the construction site on Sundays. We all have to sacrifice something to build our new mosque.”

  He opened his mouth, but she beat him to it, saying, “Bus, end of discussion.”

  He closed his mouth with a snap. What could he say? Amma’s face softened, and she turned back to hug him. “It’s not forever, jaan. Soon the construction will finish and we can go back to the way things were before.”

  He stood tense in the circle of her arms. He didn’t tell her it would be too late by then. He just swallowed his feelings.

  Saturday school had an odd sound to it, but that was how they’d been meeting for the last two years. Their “mosque” was a dingy mobile trailer at the back of Abba’s dollar store. It was small and hot and dark, and smelled like old newspapers even when you opened every single window at the back. It was no longer a viable option, as Abba was fond of saying. Yusuf was sure the option had been unviable for at least a decade. The number of Muslims living in Frey had grown and grown until they spilled out of the trailer and into the parking lot at Friday prayers.

  Mayor Taylor Frey Chesterton, great-great-greatgreat-grand-nephew of the original Freys, had come around to Abba’s dollar store three times last year to tell him something must be done. He liked to remind people he’d worked hard to establish the town as a modern, state-of-the-art place. “It’s unseemly to be praying like heathens in the parking lot of a decent business,” he’d said gently one time. “It may scare away the customers.”

  Abba didn’t tell him that they were Muslims, not heathens. In Frey, anyone not worshipping at a church with a pointy steeple was a heathen. “No offense,” Mayor Chesterton assured Abba. Everybody always assured Abba that they loved him, that he was their favorite store owner ever. “Our hero,” the Frey Weekly had proclaimed him in last year’s report on the local economy.

  Abba had nodded and smiled and told the mayor that they were building their very own mosque more than a mile away from town, near the railway tracks. “That’s far,” the mayor had replied, pleased. “How long you reckon it will take to build?”

  The mayor should have known all this. He’d approved the plans and signed all the permits just months before. Still, he always spoke with everyone with the utmost respect, leaning down until you could see the white hairs growing out of his nose. So Abba told him, “Not long now.”

  Yusuf knew the truth. Nobody was sure how long the mosque would take to build, because they were all building it together. Cameron’s father was a construction foreman, and he was the only one who had any clue about what they were doing. He’d brought a small crew with him in the early days of building. They’d done the major work like laying the foundation and putting in the plumbing. After that, Mr. Khan’s fundraising efforts had stalled, and the crew had stopped coming every day. On the weekends, the crew worked twelve hours. That’s when the entire Muslim community—men, women, and children—showed up to help.

  In the meantime, Sunday school continued. That week, Amma was the only teacher. The other teacher, Sameena Aunty, had a terrible cold. “No Busybody Aunty today,” Danial whispered gleefully to Yusuf. “I hope she never recovers.”

  “That’s awful!” Yusuf whispered back, but secretly he agreed. Sameena
Aunty was a dragon, handing out punishments with righteous glee. She knew everything about everyone: who was sick and who’d gotten all As and which family was going on vacation six months from now. It was freaky how much she knew.

  “Your mom is the best teacher, dude.”

  It was true. Amma gave out candy to anyone who sat quietly or answered correctly. She made all the kids seem smart. “MashAllah!” She beamed when a child recited the Arabic alphabet. “Good job!” she told the class when they did even a little bit of their homework.

  Yusuf always did his homework. Danial always copied off him in the parking lot before they took deep breaths and entered the trailer. Today was no different. Check homework, breathe deeply, enter, take your shoes off, say salaam.

  Today Amma was wearing a long checkered blouse and black pants, with a black hijab covering her head casually. She only wore it in the mosque and when praying, unlike Sameena Aunty, who wore it 24/7, even in 110-degree weather. Danial speculated that she even wore it to sleep. Yusuf told him that was ridiculous, that he was no better than those people on TNN whose information about Muslims was 100 percent incorrect.

  “So what do we learn from the story of Prophet Moses?” Amma asked the class.

  “Pharaoh’s a baddie?” Aleena guessed.

  “Correct!” Amma smiled a huge smile and handed her a snack-sized Twix. “What else?”

  Danial raised his hand. “Prophet Moses was so brave. He couldn’t even speak properly, but he gathered the courage to go before the king.”

  Amma beamed and handed him a tiny Mars bar. “Faith makes us strong, doesn’t it? It helps us do scary things because we believe in our mission.”

  Yusuf couldn’t really imagine a young Moses going before the Pharaoh to demand anything. It seemed impossibly terrifying. He watched Danial unwrap his Mars bar and gobble it up.

  “Anything else?” Amma prodded, looking at Yusuf.

  He shook his head, and Amma went back to her book. Danial rolled his eyes and whispered, “Forgot the lesson, did you?”

  Yusuf glared at him. “You have chocolate on your teeth.”

  6

  Abba was cleaning the plaque on the wall when Yusuf came into the store. Rusty the cat sat in the window, ignoring the humans around her. A football game played on the little television in the corner. “It’s not dirty, Abba,” Yusuf told his father severely.

  Abba stood back from the plaque and read the words as if they weren’t etched into his heart already.

  TO MOHAMMAD AZEEM,

  FOR YOUR COURAGEOUS BRAVERY

  IN THE FACE OF DANGER.

  APRIL 18, 2011

  “It’s not dirty because I clean it every day, my son.”

  “More like twice a day.”

  Abba sniffed at him. “Do you want to watch the security camera footage from that day? It will help you understand.”

  Yusuf groaned so loudly he startled Rusty. She stood up and stretched. “I’ve watched that thing a thousand times, Abba!”

  It was true. He had, because Abba wanted him to. How could he ever forget the image of the masked man, his hand in his jacket pocket, shouting at Abba to give him money. The customers crouching down in the aisles, fear in their eyes. Abba hitting the man in the stomach with a cricket bat he kept under his cash register, then standing over him with legs wide apart while dialing 911 on the store phone.

  “A thousand times is not enough to understand what a great day that was! What a blessing in disguise that robber was.”

  “Amma says he was a horrible man with a gun. How can he be a blessing?”

  Abba put away the dusting cloth behind the counter. “See the way the people of this town treat me—us—because of that man?” His voice rose with excitement. “A robber came to terrorize us with a gun, but I was stronger and braver. And I defeated him!”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Abba smiled and patted Yusuf on the head. “Inshallah, one day you can also be a hero like your father. I have faith in you!”

  Yusuf doubted that could ever happen. “Abba, do you have any work for me? Amma will be back from Conroe soon, and then I have to go do my science homework.”

  Abba threw an annoyed look his way. “Yes, yes. My useless assistant is off today.” He started walking toward the aisles. “Aisle three is a mess. We need to clean it and make room for new stock.”

  Aisle three was the paper aisle. Yusuf knew all the aisles backward and forward. Aisle three had notebooks, envelopes, greeting cards, and printer paper. It was a section that depended heavily on tidiness and structure, things Abba loved.

  “I’ll be right there,” Yusuf called.

  Rusty came over to Yusuf. He knelt and scratched her back with gentle hands. She was orange and scrawny, living off the trash in the back parking lot, which wasn’t a bad thing because the visitors to the mosque trailer always left behind delicious treats like chicken bones with the flesh still hanging off, and beef tendrils, and lamb hoofs. Plus, Amma always brought back the fat trimmings from her weekly treks to the halal meat market in Conroe. “Amma will be back before you know it, Rusty,” he murmured to her.

  She meowed loudly.

  Yusuf scratched harder. “A couple of hours, max,” he assured her, thinking about the cat in Uncle Rahman’s journal. What was her name? Silky. What a weird name.

  Rusty wasn’t any better, though. She’d gotten her name because she’d wandered into the back room of Abba’s store one day last year from God knows where. She was just a kitten, and on her third day in the back of the store, she’d swallowed a pallet nail from the floor. They’d thought she wouldn’t survive. But she’d recovered, and Yusuf had begged to keep her. Aleena had asthma, and being around cats was bad for her lungs, so Abba allowed Rusty to stay in the shop. Yusuf thought she probably didn’t mind. Rusty seemed allergic to people most of the time, unless she was hungry.

  Abba sat hunched in aisle three, sorting the notebooks. A small pile of price tags lay on the floor next to him. Yusuf sat down next to him, legs crossed, and began fixing the tags on the shelves the way he’d been doing for years.

  “How was school this week?” Abba asked without looking at him.

  He shrugged. “Okay. Robotics club is starting next week.”

  “Good. Maybe you can make a robot to clean up my store.”

  Yusuf didn’t like how Abba made that into a joke. “I could probably do that if I put some time into it.”

  “Really?” Abba looked half amazed and half disbelieving.

  “Not right now, but maybe if I studied robotics for a few more years.”

  “That’s good. I like that plan. Stay in school, study hard, all that good stuff.”

  Yusuf debated if he should ask about Saturday school. Abba didn’t really have control over his after-school activities. Those were Amma’s realm, and she was the tyrant queen. Yusuf decided to keep quiet.

  The bell on the door rang, and Abba stood up quickly. “Ah, a customer.”

  There were several. A blond woman with a toddler wanted to see if there were any diapers on sale. A man with a tired face wanted a greeting card. Abba knew all the customers by name, and he smiled and asked about their families and offered the toddler a lollipop from the big jar he kept on the shelf above his counter.

  Yusuf cleaned up aisle three by himself. He affixed all the new price tags and then picked up the old products and took them to the storeroom. The supply truck came from Houston every two weeks, and as far as Yusuf remembered, the next one was due in just a few days. The storeroom was a mess, so he sighed and cleaned that up too. Rusty slid between his legs as he worked.

  When he came out, the blond woman and the man with the tired face were gone, but someone else was talking with Abba—an old woman with white hair tied in a bun and gnarled hands she waved around as she talked. “I need that potting soil, Azeem; my flowers won’t grow without it.”

  Abba nodded in time with her words. “Yes, yes, Mrs. Raymond. A few more days, I promise. The truck will be
here next week. I will call you as soon as it gets here.”

  “See that, Jared? That’s what I call good service.”

  Yusuf hadn’t seen a boy standing next to the woman, still as a statue. Jared Tobias. He’d seen this boy in Mr. Parker’s science class. He was tall, and thinner than a rake with long brown hair that fell almost to his shoulders. Yusuf couldn’t help but be impressed. There was no way his parents would ever let him grow his hair long.

  Abba waved Yusuf over. “This is my son, Yusuf. Say hello, beta.”

  Yusuf wished he could be anywhere else at that moment. “Hello.”

  The old woman beamed. “Well, hello, handsome fellow. You look like my Jared’s age. This here is my grandson. He’s staying with me now.”

  Yusuf nodded to Jared, then offered a little smile. “Hi.”

  Abba was ringing up Mrs. Raymond’s purchases as he spoke. “How is your garden doing this year, Mrs. Raymond?”

  “Oh, this heat is not doing us any favors! I’m keeping my precious roses in a special greenhouse this year. They’ll be needed for the parade, I’m sure.”

  “Good idea.” Abba paused, as if not knowing what to say, then continued. “Twenty years, eh?”

  The woman shook her head. “I know, I can’t believe it’s been that long. Seems like yesterday. I still remember what I was doing when the planes hit those towers.”

  Abba didn’t say anything. He jabbed a finger on the keys of his cash register as if they had something rude written on them.

  Yusuf tried not to stare at Jared. He hadn’t seen this boy in elementary school. Where had he lived before coming to Frey Middle? Yusuf had a dozen questions in his mind, but he kept quiet.

  Mrs. Raymond chatted some more, then took her purchases and left. “Don’t forget to call me when the soil gets here!”

  When they’d gone, Abba whispered almost to himself, “Twenty years. So much time, but things haven’t really changed at all.”