I had to stop that from happening. I didn’t want to stay here. I wouldn’t. Not after the price I’d paid for this chance. I wouldn’t let Abu make it all for nothing.
“We should go,” I said.
My father turned to look at me, his lips parted. It had been years since I had last said a word to him. In his stunned expression, I could see the earthquake shaking his soul at the sound of my quiet voice.
“I don’t want to live here. Abu. Abu, please. We must go. I’m begging you. Take me from this place.”
He didn’t say anything. I’m not sure that, at that moment, he was capable of saying anything. He was blinking fast, his breathing was uneven.
“Please,” I pressed. “I’ll do whatever you want. I won’t ask you for anything ever again. I swear it, but please…Please. We must take this chance. It is a gift from Allah.”
Abu looked down at the ground, taking deep breaths, until he seemed to regain some control over himself. It was to Qais that he spoke again. “Why would you do this for us?”
“It is the bride price I offer. When we are in America, when my best friend and cousin who lives there can attend, I want to marry your daughter. She just said she would do anything. Have her marry me.”
I must have made some kind of noise because they both turned to look at me. I tried to speak but I couldn’t figure out what to say, or how to say it. What treachery was this?
Then, very slowly, my father smiled. “I see now why you spoke of destiny. Very well, Badami, you shall both have what you want from me. My word is given, and my word is fate.”
* * *
—
“I’m not going to marry you.”
I spat the words at Qais. It was another night, another dark meeting between us. He’d taken me completely by surprise by asking Abu for my hand. He’d gone on about how a virtuous father could only have a virtuous daughter, and how lucky he was to have secured for himself a bride raised by a good man.
“Do you really think I’d want to marry you?” he asked. “After what you agreed to last night, you’re not worthy of it.”
“Then why’d you lie to him? Why tell him—”
“I want to make sure you don’t escape, Safwa. Do you think I haven’t come to know you in all this time? You’re a vile little thing. You’d break your promise to me the first chance you got. I was sure that when I got you to the States, the first thing you would do is run. I’d lose you.”
“I don’t owe you anything anymore. You got what you wanted.”
He shrugged, an easy, casual gesture. “I want more.”
“You promised it was one time.”
“No,” Qais said. “What I promised you, you’re going to get. I keep my promises. I’m a man of honor, just like your father.”
I tried to think of something to say, anything to say, that would make this right. I’d given Qais too much. There was nothing I could do to stop what he was doing.
His chin jutted out, and he looked down at me. “You’re mine now, Safwa, until I don’t want you anymore. Don’t forget it. Now that you are promised to me, Abu Fahd won’t try to marry you off. He won’t let you move far from me. He’ll keep his word. You’ll always be available for me, when I want you.”
“That isn’t going to happen.”
Qais spread his arms wide and stepped back. “As you wish. I’ll walk away then. No passport. No visa. Stay here and rot. Is that what you desire?”
I didn’t answer him. We both knew he’d won.
THE CROWNING
2011–2016
A single piece, by itself, is predictable. It can only go in one direction. When two pieces come together—when one of your men leaves home and travels the length of the board to earn a crown and becomes a king—it becomes harder to know what will happen next. Experience, you see, can be lethal to certainty.
—Naani Jaan
ANVAR
My mother expected me to use my newly acquired attorney powers for “good.” She told me that there were some people in the Muslim community who, in her opinion, were due for a reckoning. She said, “You need to make these wrongdoers chew chickpeas of steel.”
“That sounds very unpleasant, Ma.”
“They are very unpleasant people and you need to go after them. Like the Rajas. Do you know what they did?” I didn’t say anything because, obviously, she was about to tell me all about the Rajas. “They named names.”
“You’ve been watching Seinfeld reruns again?”
“This isn’t a joke,” my mother said. “Some people are like camels. There isn’t a straight bone in their body.”
“The Rajas are gay?”
My mom slapped the back of my head. “What is wrong with you? Just listen. The Rajas had a dispute with their neighbors over the property line between their homes. Now two Muslim families, you would think they would work it out.”
“Would you think that?”
“Anyway, the fight grew worse and worse and then, suddenly, the FBI came and started asking the neighbors all these questions, as if they were terrorists. Can you believe it? It was the Rajas who made the accusation, I am sure of it. Only they would dare do such a thing.”
“You have no way of knowing that.”
“Everybody knows. It is happening all over. Don’t like a family member? Report them to the FBI. Say they are a terrorist and, with one phone call, all your problems are gone.”
“Tempting.”
This time my mother grabbed my left ear and twisted it painfully. I winced and, through years of practice, managed not to curse. After a few seconds, she released me from her hold. “Anyway, it is becoming a big problem. White people on the television say Muslims don’t report on other Muslims. I’ve been hearing things at the mosque and sometimes it’s the opposite. There is too much reporting going on, all for personal gain, and you, my son, you are going to stop it.”
“How?”
“Sue these people. Sue them and then sue them some more. Make them chew…”
“Chickpeas of steel. Yes, Ma, I got it, but you can’t go around suing people just because you don’t like what they are doing. You need to have standing.” I realized, as she opened her mouth to object, that she had no idea what that was, so I added, “You have to have a personal stake in the lawsuit. I mean, someone has to have done something wrong to you, not just to other people.”
“Have you not heard that the Prophet said that all the Muslim ummah is like one body? That if even one little finger is hurting, then the whole of the body is in distress? What happens to my Muslim sisters and brothers does have an effect on me. Therefore, I think I have standing.”
“By that logic, what you’re saying is that the Rajas were really just hurting themselves?”
My mother seemed to have not considered that. She thought about it for a minute and then said, “You’re my least favorite child.”
I leaned forward and kissed her cheek. “Yes, Ma. I know.”
* * *
—
For the next few years, Ma got to see me stand up for the cause of a wronged Muslim. I took on the defense of Taleb Mansoor. I’ve never seen her so proud.
It was a strange case, one in which I never got to meet my client. I learned a valuable lesson by taking it on though, a lesson they should teach you in law school. I learned that you should never represent a man who might be innocent.
They didn’t teach me that at William and Mary. There, they taught me to be a citizen lawyer, a “Jefferson lawyer.” They taught me to believe in the ideals of our legal system, in the sacrosanct nature of the United States Constitution.
“It is easy to be a lawyer,” they said. “We’d rather be role models.”
Except it isn’t easy to be a lawyer. It is certainly not easy to be a lawyer when you come across someone accused of a crime they did
not commit.
I have spoken to other attorneys who’ve represented clients they believed with fierce certainty were innocent, and most of them fear ever encountering that certainty, that innocence, again. They have learned the hard way that the weight of innocence can crush you. The thought that you will lose when you should not, when you must not, can break you. It can shatter your soul. It can make you ask, again and again and again and again, that question most fatal to a litigator: “What if I make a mistake?”
The case that broke me was different, I suppose, in that it didn’t end up being about my client’s innocence. It ended up being about mine.
I don’t know if Taleb Mansoor was guilty or not. He never got a trial.
I shouldn’t have taken his case. I had recently passed the bar and had only a few cases under my belt when a college classmate contacted me. She’d heard I was a lawyer now and she was calling because her brother, Taleb, needed help. Apparently, he was in “a shitload of trouble.”
That was a bit of an understatement.
Taleb Mansoor was an American citizen, born of Yemeni parents. A perfectly innocuous young man, apparently, until he was radicalized by Islamic State propaganda on the internet. At least, that’s how the story went. The government claimed he’d then moved to Syria and started shaping the very propaganda machine that had perverted his own worldview. This made him a high-value target. The United States made it clear he was being hunted—“targeted” is the word they used—for assassination.
Actually, they called it an “extrajudicial killing,” which is different only in that it seems cleaner and so doesn’t need as much detergent when it gets thrown into the news cycle.
Taleb’s family told me that he’d become deeply religious and that he’d gone to Syria to study Islam. They wanted me to file a lawsuit to stop the manhunt, to plead for a trial, for an actual determination from a legal tribunal that their son, their brother, their loved one, was truly guilty of something.
Like I said, there was no trial.
One day, probably a Tuesday, the President of the United States decided, based on secret evidence to which I never had access, that a drone should execute this man. There was no due process, no court of appeal, no jury of Taleb Mansoor’s peers to judge him. The White House had marked him for death and the decree of the White House was final.
Taleb Mansoor died in a ball of fire somewhere, murdered by his president.
I was his attorney and he died defenseless.
I stopped practicing then, at least in any meaningful sense of the word. I still made money doing document review and legal research for big firms and took on odd jobs, but I simply could not bring myself to stand up in a court and argue, despite the pleas of my family to continue what should’ve been a lucrative career.
This was not a sacrifice or a grand statement of superiority. It was an admission of my own weakness. The women and men who continued to fight for truth and justice and the American Way, who continued to challenge oppression when they encountered it, they had my admiration and my awe.
As for me, I decided that I would not spend my life fighting for a lost cause. I would leave the battlefield and live a quiet life.
There was no heroism in such desertion. There was only cowardice.
* * *
—
I became something of a local celebrity after the Taleb Mansoor case. It seemed like everyone at the mosque knew that I’d represented him. They probably did, now that I think about it. My mother, having finally discovered an achievement of mine she felt she could justifiably boast about, told everyone who would listen that I, her lawyer son, had valiantly tried to save an innocent man. She embellished the details, I’m sure. People were under the impression that I had made a brilliant, passionate argument in court, as if I were Clarence Darrow with a really good tan.
I’m not complaining. It was nice to be known for a little while as something other than just the black sheep of a proper and respectable family. In fact, my newly burnished reputation helped me find an affordable apartment in San Francisco.
My landlord was Hafeez Bhatti, or Hafeez Bhai as he liked to be called. He was chewing noisily on a stale paan when I first walked into his office to sign a lease, orange-red betel nut juice dribbling from the corners of his wide mouth. He looked like he had just been through a passionate make-out session with a clumsy, twisted clown. In fact, if his toupee had been red instead of jet black, he would’ve passed for Ronald McDonald’s morbidly obese Indian half brother.
“As-salamu alaykum, Mr. Anvar Faris Barrister Sir,” he said with extravagant, false enthusiasm. “What a pleasure to see you. I was just now expecting you. Welcome. Welcome. We spoke on the phone, yes? You are here for 221?” He pointed to the wobbly chair across from him. “Sit down. Sit. Some forms for you to fill out.”
He beamed at me from across his large desk as I sat down and slid a thick stack of documents over toward me. “All formality, of course. I would never turn you away, my friend, for I know you are a good Muslim.”
As I did not know that myself, I was surprised to hear it. “Really?”
“Most certainly. You are the one who defended Taleb Mansoor, are you not?”
I nodded. “Not very effectively, I’m afraid.”
Bhatti made a dismissive sound at the back of his throat. “The fight matters more than the outcome.”
My former client would have probably disagreed with that statement, but I decided not to say so. “You give low-rent housing to…”
“Good Muslims exclusively.” He smacked his lips and continued to chew on the thick wad of spices, wrapped in a betel nut leaf that was held together with slaked lime. I’m not sure how he managed to speak with that thing stuffed in his mouth. He’d obviously had years of practice. Unfortunately, he hadn’t entirely managed to learn how to keep the red juice of the concoction from escaping his mouth as he spoke, so he was forced to be diligent in his use of a handkerchief. “Everyone else pays standard rate.”
I hesitated, out of self-interest more than anything else, before saying, “I’m not an expert on housing law, but I’m pretty sure that’s massively illegal.”
Hafeez Bhai snorted in response and then coughed as he choked on a piece of areca nut from this paan. “What do I care for man’s law?” he managed to croak out, once he had recovered a little. “It is unjust. Look at what they did to you.”
“They? Did to me?”
“Yes, sir. Brilliant young lawyer like you. Coming up. Now see, they won’t give you job. You’re stuck doing small-time projects because they won’t give you jobs.”
“Right,” I said slowly, deciding not to tell him that the pitiable state of my legal career was a result of my own decisions, not a nefarious plot by some unknown, mysterious “they.” I really wanted to live in the city. “Anyway, can we go look at the apartment?”
“Why?”
“To see if I like it.”
“What does it matter? You have no other options, yes?”
I sighed. “Yes.”
“Excellent,” Hafeez Bhai chirped, dabbing at his mouth with his ratty, stained handkerchief. “Here is a pen. You fill out the forms. Now just for your information, there is a small problem with this particular unit. Not to worry, for it is temporary only and I will fix it soon. You see, I had some difficulties with the last tenant. Don’t stop writing, Barrister Sir, keep writing.”
I complied, and he went on.
“The last one in there was a finicky sort. Complaining of mold in the wall. He complained, you see, and I don’t like complaints. Now, the tenant is gone but the mold is still there. I wanted you to know that in case you have any asthma issues or something. You grew up in Pakistan, yes? You’ll be fine. We all have iron lungs. Not like these white folk, panicking over a few little black spots.”
“But you’re going to deal with the mold, rig
ht?”
“Sure. No problem,” Bhatti replied. “I will shortly have this fixed for you. Rest easy.”
“How many days do you think—”
“No problem. Soon, okay, everything will be fine. Don’t you worry, sir, you just trust me. You can fill the rest of the forms later. Don’t forget the Eid al-Adha disclaimer. Best to make sure you’re aware that the killing of animals in the courtyard is very much frowned upon.”
“Is that a problem here?”
“It never hurts just to be clear is all I am saying. I’m sure for you, it won’t be a problem. It’s a very nice place to be living. Don’t look so worried.” He peered at me intently, as if trying to figure out if I had bought his assurances. Apparently, he decided that I hadn’t because with a grimace, he went on. “Fine, so one time it happened that a guy got a dumba, what they call a lamb, yes? One time someone did the sacrifice right here in the courtyard. Since then, I like to be clear about the whole business for when that time of the year rolls around. There will even be a reminder on the notice board when Eid comes around. Don’t worry.”
I paused a little over the final signature line. I had known, of course, before I ever called Hafeez, that the apartments were terrible. However, I could afford nothing else in San Francisco. This place was within my budget only due to the accident of my religion and the bigoted largesse of Hafeez Bhatti.
I executed the lease not knowing what taking up residence in Trinity Gardens would mean for my life.
AZZA
Abu and I had to change our names when we left for Mexico hoping to cross the border into the United States. Qais was worried that the Americans, when they had captured Abu, had entered his information into one of their all-knowing computer systems. It was necessary for us, therefore, to become new people.
It was strange. We got to choose who we would be. Abu became Saqr ibn Jameel, though everyone would still call him Abu Fahd—the Father of Fahd—as that was his title. Qais didn’t think Abu needed to change that. I don’t think he would have. I certainly wouldn’t have asked him to do it.
The Bad Muslim Discount Page 15