The Bad Muslim Discount

by Syed M. Masood

  It was a question that started a friendship which completely altered my father’s experience of America. Joseph Good introduced him to all kinds of music he’d never heard of or given a chance to before.

  “You’ve heard of rap?” Dad asked a few weeks later, popping his head into my room. “There is cursing in the songs, Anvar. They just say the words and no one stops them. It’s incredible. Don’t tell your mother.”

  That little ice cream parlor rescued me from the long walks I’d been dragooned into taking. It made my father happier than he’d been since leaving his home and gave him a place to belong. It also made him diabetic, but I suppose nothing worth having comes without a price.

  * * *

  —

  “Did I tell you that Sam asked me to prom?” Zuha asked.

  I shifted uncomfortably on the cheap plastic chairs that were standard in our spartan school cafeteria. I’d known Sammy Chang was going to ask Zuha out. He’d told me—asked me, actually, if it was okay for him to do so, because Zuha and I were together all the time and everyone assumed we were sort of a couple, and he didn’t want to get in the middle of anything.

  I’d said it was fine, of course, because I knew that she’d shoot him down. Besides, it wasn’t like Zuha and I were really together. We couldn’t be. Muslim kids aren’t allowed to date.

  Even so, I had the sudden urge to give Sam the stink eye. I looked around for him but couldn’t spot him in the rush of other students lining up to buy their lunch. I contented myself with a grimace aimed at no one in particular.

  As usual, the cafeteria smelled of reheated meatloaf and aging lettuce. The constant clatter of silverware around me and the loud, enthusiastic conversations of the other students made this one of my least favorite places to eat.

  “Did you hear me? Sam asked me to prom.”

  “He left it a little late, don’t you think?” I said.

  “He asked me weeks ago.”

  “Whatever. He’s still an ass.”

  “Other boys asked me too. Josh and Mark and Alejandro.”

  “Dick. Turd. Douchebag.”

  Zuha chuckled, picking at her garden salad. “Aren’t we charming today?”

  I glowered in response, first at my soggy peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then at the student body of my school as a whole. No one seemed to notice my discontent, so I bit into my lunch viciously and ate in silence.

  After a moment, Zuha said, “I’ve decided to go.”

  “You can’t!” My voice was loud enough to cause silence to descend on the large room. Everyone turned to stare at our table. I ducked my head and ignored them as best I could.

  “I can,” she said, perfectly calm. “And I think you should ask me to go with you.”

  I stared at her. “What…wait—you want to go to prom? With me?”

  “No. You want to go to prom with me.”

  This was true. I hadn’t considered going to prom because of the miniature apocalypse that would ensue should my mother find out that I was even thinking about it. However, now that I did think about it, there was nothing else in the world that I wanted to do more, nothing else on which all my happiness depended, except taking Zuha to prom.

  There was, of course, the possibility that my mother would kill me, but that seemed like an acceptable risk. After all, if I didn’t take her, Zuha might actually go with someone else.

  “I really do,” I said. Incredibly, my voice didn’t tremble.

  “Fine.” Zuha appeared focused entirely on her salad, as if going on our very first date was no big deal. “We’ll just meet here then.”

  * * *

  —

  Zuha made it sound simple. It wasn’t. I had committed myself to a complicated, dangerous mission against a formidable opponent, and now my life was at stake.

  I didn’t really know what my parents would do if they found out what I was planning, but the vague dread that kept me in line through my childhood had firm roots in fact. Years ago, there had been a Muslim kid in our neighborhood who had fallen in love with a non-Muslim girl. He’d gotten careless. He’d written her indiscreet notes, which had been discovered.

  When his parents found out, they packed all of his belongings and put him on a flight back to Pakistan. Last I heard of him, he was enrolled in a medical school in Rawalpindi or Quetta or something.

  I suppose that boy deserved his fate because he failed to take the one precaution that should be gospel for both white-collar criminals and naughty brown-skinned children—never, ever, under any circumstances, leave a paper trail. Even so, I felt sorry for him and was pretty certain that, given the approval with which Ma spoke of the remedial actions taken by his parents, I too could end up on a plane, exiled from the United States, if I was not very careful about how I lived my life.

  Ma was an effective, skilled dictator, who seemed to hear everything and know everything going on under her roof. To understand what it was like to be her child, imagine Oceania from Orwell’s 1984, with a head of state called Big Mother.

  To dress up, to escape the house unchallenged without providing a detailed itinerary, I needed my mother to be distracted by something else or, as it turned out, someone else.

  I needed a plan.

  * * *

  —

  Aamir was in the living room, watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for what must have been the hundredth time. The large bowl of popcorn he’d made had the entire house smelling of buttery, seductive goodness.

  The VHS tape on which the movie was recorded had started to wear thin and warp from constant use. The print was getting worse every time Aamir sat through the film, with lines of static appearing and disappearing randomly at the top and bottom of the screen.

  Surly-looking orange dwarfs with green hair were pouring sugar into a river of chocolate as I walked up to Aamir and said, “Can I borrow your laptop? I need it for homework.”

  He frowned up at me. “Desktop isn’t working?”

  “The monitor is acting up.”

  This was true. My brother could’ve walked up to the study and seen the malfunction for himself. Had he done so, he would have realized the problem was ridiculously easy to fix. The VGA cable, which connected the CPU to the display, had somehow gotten a bit loose.

  I knew he wasn’t going to do that though. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was on.

  “Fine,” Aamir said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “It’s in my room.”

  “Thank you.”

  I bounded up the stairs, nearly tripping in my hurry, and retrieved the laptop that was so necessary to my scheme. It was a thick, bulky unit made of cheap plastic. I carried it and the massive power brick it came with to the study, to plug the machine into the modem.

  My plan to get to prom involved taking some of the shadier exits on the information superhighway. I glanced around the small, cramped room. It was not decorated, like most of our home, in an ostentatiously Islamic fashion but, even so, an elaborate prayer rug, made of some kind of soft, faux velvet material, lay on my right. There was a black painting with silver Arabic calligraphy on the wall directly in front of me, the sweeping and curving characters imbued, somehow, with a sense of being divine.

  I fixed my eyes on the computer screen and prepared to wander into forbidden virtual spaces. I wanted to get this done quickly, and not just because I was afraid of getting caught looking at pornography.

  I was never comfortable with porn. The prospect of having nudity, and more, available at the click of a mouse should have been enchanting to a teenager, and I know it was for some of my friends. For me, the experience involved too much prayer to be very exciting.

  Aamir’s chunky laptop hissed, shrieked and beeped its mechanical anxiety as the dial-up connection attempted to link it to the internet. The panicked sound a computer made in the early days of the in
ternet, before cable and before wi-fi, was the swan song of solitude.

  Dial-up internet was slow. This meant that pictures took forever to load. While computers across the world were chattering away, describing models to each other in binary code, I was a sitting duck, tethered to the study, unable to escape or hide from the prying gaze of an apparently omniscient mother. It was an enterprise so perilous that I could not help but pray constantly to Allah that I wouldn’t be discovered doing what I was doing, which felt like the kind of thing you weren’t supposed to ask of the Almighty. By the time the women on the screen had toes, all I felt was guilt.

  I used the most popular of all search engines, AltaVista, and typed in the dirtiest words I knew. I clicked the first site that popped up and was immediately faced with a choice of genre. I went with the most vanilla stuff I could find, not just because Aamir was a vanilla kind of guy but also because I was trying to frame him, not get him killed.

  Once I had downloaded enough images to be damning, I hid them deep within folders Aamir was unlikely to ever look through. I returned the laptop to him just as Willy Wonka was telling Charlie, “Don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted.”

  Aamir gave a sigh of satisfaction as the credits began to roll.

  I smiled at him. “Why do you like that movie so much?”

  He shrugged. “I like the way it ends.”

  “When Wonka lies to Charlie?”

  “What are you talking about?” Aamir asked, suddenly sitting up with a frown. “Charlie lived happily ever after.”

  “Trapped in a job that Wonka hated? I mean, he gave away a magic chocolate factory just so that he could change careers.”

  My brother stared at me, eyes wide with horror. “That isn’t what the movie is about. Why do you have to ruin everything?”

  I shrugged. “What do you think it is about?”

  “It’s about justice,” Aamir said. “About how if you’re good, if you withstand the tests put before you, you’ll end up winning.”

  “That isn’t how the world works.”

  “You’re in high school. You don’t know anything about how the world works. Look at me, Anvar. I follow all the rules and, alhamdulillah, nothing bad happens to me.”

  I was careful not to look at the laptop I had set on the coffee table before him. “I wouldn’t count my chickens,” I whispered, more to myself than to him. He didn’t hear me. He was already rewinding the tape before putting it back in its case, as he always did without fail to every video he ever watched.

  * * *

  —

  A few hours before prom, Ma was in her kitchen, where the air was thick with the cozy, comforting smell of beefy stew. Something must have been off, because she was scowling at the nihari she had bubbling away in an oversized steel pot, as if she could glare the ingredients into proper proportions.

  I cleared my throat as I walked in. “I need to talk to you about something, Ma.”

  Bariah Faris turned her threatening gaze—and her irritation—away from the nihari and fixed it on me. “What?”

  “I…well, my computer wasn’t working—”

  “Talk to your father about it.”

  I laced my fingers together, unlaced them and then scratched the back of my head. “No, I’m saying, my computer wasn’t working, so I borrowed Aamir’s laptop and…I found some things, Ma.”

  My mother carefully covered the steaming metal pot with a lid and stepped toward me, her long neck craning forward as she peered into my face. “What things?”

  “Pictures.”

  “What kind of pictures?”

  “Um…dirty pictures,” I said, hoping that I was coming across as truthful. “I just thought you should know. Anyway, I’m going to go to the library to return some—”

  “These pictures,” Ma hissed, her tone low and venomous, her dark eyes wide, “they were of women?”

  “And men?”

  “Men!” Her shriek was like the end of the world. “Aamir is looking at dirty pictures of men?”

  “No. I mean, yes…I mean, the men and the women, they’re not, you know, alone. They’re together doing…”

  “What?”

  I started to speak, then stopped myself. I hadn’t realized that I might have to use the word “sex.” That would not go over well. Desi kids grow up around sanitized marriages, with little or no physical intimacy. I’d seen my parents hug each other once, and that was after my grandfather had died. Other than that, there had been a concerted effort to ensure that we never saw the genders touch. It was inevitable in the States, of course, to see couples kiss in malls or even in lines at the grocery store, but my mother was always sure to clear her throat loudly and disapprovingly at such times, making it known that what these other people were doing was not appropriate for us to do.

  After an upbringing like that, one doesn’t simply say the word “sex” to one’s mother. The more graphic variations were, obviously, out for the same reason. In fact, I eliminated the letter “f” from consideration entirely, just to be safe, as I tried to find some way to express what I wanted to say, some phrase that was innocuous but had the right cadence to describe the act.

  “Well?”

  I tried to think of how Aamir would say what I needed to say, because he’d know the right words to use. All I could think about in that moment, however, was a song I’d recently heard him listening to. One phrase sounded just about right for what I needed to describe.

  “Oompa loompa.”

  “Oompa,” Ma thundered, as if I had said the worst words in the English language. She understood perfectly well what I meant. “Loompa?” She stepped past me, calling at the top of her voice, “Aamir. Aamir Faris, get down here right now. Right now. Aamir?”

  I ran up the stairs past her at full speed, my mother calling out after me to send Aamir down. I nearly ran into my brother when I got to the top of the stairs.

  “What’s going on?” Aamir asked.

  “No idea,” I replied without slowing my pace. I ran to my room and grabbed the backpack I had prepared minutes ago. It contained one of my own belts and a tie I’d stolen from my father’s wardrobe the day before. There was no time to lose. As soon as Aamir began offering explanations, my scheme would start to unravel.

  I went to Aamir’s room. The moment of truth. I tried the doorknob and it turned easily in my hand. I smiled. It had worked.

  A few years ago, when Aamir had decided it was his duty to wake me up for Fajr prayers at dawn every morning, I’d gotten back at him by hiding fourteen alarm clocks in his room, set to go off at thirty-minute intervals after midnight. He’d responded to that long night by getting a lock for his bedroom door, which he religiously utilized whenever he was out of the house. The only way to get into this room, therefore, was to do it while he was around.

  I went to his closet and threw open the doors. I saw my prize, the reason for all the plotting, the object of my mission—the cheap black wool suit my parents had purchased for Aamir for his college interviews.

  Going to prom meant getting a tux. I simply didn’t have the money for one of those, so Aamir’s suit would have to do. I couldn’t just ask him for it though. He would’ve wanted to know what I needed it for. I didn’t trust him enough to tell him the truth. Unable to think up a satisfactory lie, I’d done the only thing I could do. I had found a way to occupy him while he was home, so that the door to his room was unlocked, and I could borrow his suit without being reported to Ma.

  Without bothering to take the suit off the hanger, I zipped open the backpack and stuffed it inside. Then I raced downstairs, where the forest fire I had set was just starting to catch.

  “I’m going to the library,” I called out as I rushed through the front door. Given how loudly my mother was demanding Aamir show her what was on his laptop, I don’t thi
nk they heard me. I didn’t entirely catch what she was saying, but it sounded like Aamir was trying to explain to her that oompa loompas were not perverts. My heart, the part of it that was not cheering at the prospect of dancing with Zuha, wished him luck and wondered how I would make this up to him.

  For now, the necessary mischief had been managed, and rather neatly at that. I ran almost the entire way to school and went straight into a bathroom to change.

  As I began to dress, I realized there were a few minor flaws in my plan. A worsted wool suit is apparently not meant to be roughly shoved into a backpack. It came out horribly wrinkled. I had forgotten to grab a button-down shirt, which was unfortunate, or dress shoes, which was worse. I put the oversized, disheveled suit on top of my worn T-shirt and wore my white sneakers with the outfit. I did put on the tie because…well, I don’t really know why. It seemed like the thing to do.

  I emerged from the bathroom and, within moments, someone began to point and laugh. The laughter became an epidemic, spreading to everyone around me. I knew how I looked, so I told myself to be good-natured about the whole thing, but still I felt my ears grow hot.

  Before I could snap at someone, I saw Zuha, and somehow forgot to feel humiliated.

  She too was ridiculously underdressed. Instead of taffeta or silk, she was wearing a simple white cotton dress, just long enough to cover her knees.

  No one was making fun of her though.

  Incredibly, when she looked at me with those bewitching eyes of hers, she did not laugh. Instead, she took my hand and guided me into the gym, which pulsed with music.

  I got to hold her close for the first time as we prepared to dance. Her body was soft against mine, her slender arms light around my neck. Her perfume made her smell like wild roses. I placed my hand at the small of her back. Heat radiated off her through the thin, textured fabric of her outfit.

  I cleared my throat. “You look nice.”

  “I like your devastatingly eloquent compliments. They sweep a girl right off her feet.”