“I thought it was about forgiveness.”
“Could you find such forgiveness within yourself for a man set against you, you think?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted.
“Do you think Abu Fahd could?”
I did not know the answer to that question either, so I did not volunteer one. Instead, I asked a question of my own. “Did you give him the good Muslim discount too?”
Bhatti gave me a sidelong glance. “Something like that.”
“How many of your tenants are getting discounts? And what kind? Most of them aren’t Muslims.”
He seemed to think about how to answer for a moment—or maybe he was thinking about if he was going to answer at all. “Everyone is getting some discount. Now that you’ve found that out, you’re going to be wanting to know why I do it. All very predictable, Barrister Faris. No person understands why a man would not care about making lots and lots of money.”
“Have you tried explaining it to them?”
Hafeez Bhai smiled. “No.”
“Will you explain it to me?”
“Already I have given you so much rich wisdom today. Too much more and you’ll be feeling like vomiting wisdom all over the street.” After a long pause, he went on. “I am not like other people, sir. There is something wrong inside my heart.”
“Are you ill?” I asked, constructing in my mind the story of his life. He was a rich man, perhaps, who discovered he had a fatal illness and was now being generous to make amends for his own perceived greed. Ebenezer Scrooge finally face-to-face with the specter of a mortal future that haunts us all and that, somehow, we usually manage to forget.
With his next words, Bhatti made it clear that I had gathered the pages of his life up all wrong.
“Not in my body. I am superhealthy, but I have not been able, in my life, to love anyone or to hate anyone or to have any junoon about anything. You know what is junoon?”
I nodded. “Passion.”
“Mad passion, yes. Fire. I haven’t ever had any part of it, though I have wanted it always. I married a nice woman, you know, and she was rich and I lived with her for many years. It was fine when she was there. It was fine when she died also. Actually, it was not so fine. I began to realize that I missed something when I was no longer around her, and it wasn’t her, not really. It was being able to see that fire that I had been chasing in my life in someone’s eyes, in someone’s acts, in someone’s talk. So, I purchased Trinity Gardens. It was not to make money. It was to meet people, to be around people, who had what Allah had never seen fit to give me.”
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
“You don’t always have to be saying something, Barrister Sahib,” the old man said. “It is a modern disease this one, to always be speaking. Never have I told anyone these things. Do you know why I tell you? You are the opposite of myself. Very interesting. The fire inside you, Mr. Faris, I saw it from the first. You could set the world alight. Yet you choose to always try to put it out. You are afraid of being burned, yet to burn, to burn on and on and on until there is nothing left of me, that is all I’ve ever wanted.”
“I am sorry,” I said because that was the only thing I could think to say.
“Do not be sorry, my friend. Be brave.”
* * *
—
When I saw Azza a few hours later, it was immediately clear that she’d been crying. Her eyes were swollen, her veil incapable of keeping their secret.
“What happened?” I stepped away from the door to let her into my apartment.
She didn’t answer. She pushed past and headed to the bedroom. I followed her. Azza took off her niqab in silence, facing away from me. Her hands were shaking. She was wearing a tank top underneath. Her bare shoulders and arms had livid pink welts running across them.
“Jesus, Azza. What—”
“I’m fine,” she whispered, her soft voice now so low that I could barely hear her. I was reaching for my phone to call for help when her words registered. “Come to bed.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Azza, you need to go to the hospital. We need to report—”
“Stop it!” The shriek ripped from her small frame like the last scream of a tortured angel. “You don’t tell me what to do.” Her eyes turned to me now and I could see that they were drowning in wrath. “You have no right.”
I stepped back. Azza’s face was contorted with fury. She stared at me, but her gaze was strangely unfocused, almost as if she was looking through me, beyond me, at someone else. When she spoke, her voice was calm but her tone cold. “Just shut up,” she said. “Please, do what I ask.”
I stood there for a moment, trying to process how to deal with the flash flood of fury that poured out from her. My heart raced. It knew how to deal with anger and love and lust and fear, but what I was feeling then was something different entirely. Pity? No, not just pity. It was something else. Something I didn’t know how to name, much less process.
Azza spoke again. “Please.”
I turned off the light and, once she lay down, joined her on the bed. I wanted to hold her but I didn’t want to hurt her, so I stroked her dark hair. Time passed. I am not certain how much. I am not certain it mattered. Her breathing slowed and became nearly even. She’d fall asleep soon.
“It was your father, wasn’t it?” I finally dared to ask, remembering what Bhatti had said about Abu Fahd. I listened for a reply in the moonlit darkness and a second eternity passed, silent except for the muffled sounds of a drowsy city. When she didn’t respond, I said, “I can help you.”
There was a tainted, poisoned amusement in her voice when she spoke. “What makes you think you can help, or even that you should?”
“I know someone hurt you. It was either your father or it was Qais.”
“Maybe I deserved it.”
“That can’t be true.”
“You’re very certain for a man who didn’t know my real name until yesterday. You should know by now that you don’t understand what’s happening.”
“I want to understand.”
“You can’t. The lives we’ve lived, the lives we live now, they’re too different. You won’t get it. What I’ve done, what I’m going to do…You belong to this place, Anvar. I am an alien.”
I didn’t respond. I didn’t know how.
I thought about what Hafeez Bhatti had said about young people having a limited perspective.
They say there are over seven billion people on Earth. The stars are probably unable to count us, just as we are unable to count them. Each person has her or his own story. Not to mention the uncounted legions who are dust. Each one a protagonist. It is a scale beyond epic. It is past comprehension.
Amidst all of that, however, was this one woman next to me. Was it possible that she too was beyond comprehension?
I could try to uncover her past, to know where she came from, and maybe I could even find out who she was. I might be able to convince her to tell me what happened to her and I could probably compel her to inform the police. For a brief moment, I could change the course of her narrative.
I had no right to do that though. Her story was not mine. Her mind, her soul were indeed, as she’d said, alien to me. I could never experience the world as she experienced it. I was blind to the light in which she saw everything, including me and even herself.
The mystery of the universe is not just grand, it is also small. It is not just vast, but also particular.
Should I have tried to read those pages of her life she excluded me from?
Maybe.
I thought then that it was more respectful to read what I have been given and become comfortable with the knowledge that behind every truth I sought was another truth, and none of them, ultimately, led to understanding.
AZZA
Anvar didn’t get up when
I rose before dawn. His sleep was the sleep of a man who had never known true fear.
He must have stayed up longer than I had. There were pills and a covered glass of water on the nightstand beside me. I smiled, but these medicines were no cure for pain and I didn’t take them. They didn’t heal. They simply made people numb and let them forget, a little, how bad their hurts were. The name—painkillers—was a lie we told ourselves and nothing more.
It was important to call things what they really were. Abu told me how Allah had taught Adam the names of all things. It was the first thing human beings had been taught, according to the Quran. It was important knowledge. How had we become so careless with it?
I went to the living room and made my way to the bag I carried with me. I’d started using it to carry books for school, but I rarely managed to study these days. There would be time enough for that later, when Qais was gone.
I couldn’t complain too much about false names. I was, after all, not really Azza. Was I?
And Abu wasn’t Abu.
He wasn’t my father.
Every small thing I’d missed or ignored over the years between Yousef Ganni and my mother taunted me now, asking me how I could have been so blind as to not see what was obvious.
If I could’ve been satisfied with the easy answer—that I’d been a naïve child—I don’t think it would have hurt as much as it did.
But I knew the truth.
I’d never known my mother.
I’d thought her a weak woman, resigned to her fate, suffering in silence. The thought that she might rebel against destiny, that she might defy God to seek happiness, that she might risk everything she had for a few moments of freedom had never occurred to me. Even now, it seemed barely possible.
For the first time ever, I was seized by the desire to speak to her, to ask for her advice, to get her blessing for the horrible and necessary things I planned to do.
I’d had no use for her when I thought her a saint. I needed her now, when I knew she’d been a sinner. A sinner I could understand. A sinner would understand me.
From my backpack, I pulled out the notebooks that I’d been filling up with deception.
The idea for them had come to me a while back, when I’d tipped the jar of chickpeas onto myself. I’d remembered Anvar saying something about “chickpeas of steel,” about how his mother’s friends had been reported to the government as terrorists by mosque crawlers who didn’t like them. Anvar’s mother had lucky friends, because there had been nothing to prove their guilt. If there had been, they might have been disappeared by the government.
It was possible in this country to be rid of people one didn’t like—people like Qais—if one reported them and produced evidence against them.
It was not required that the evidence be true. All that was required was that it be believable. Americans were credulous people, even though they lived in a world of lies and illusions. They took a lot of painkillers.
My notebooks called Qais a terrorist and recorded in detail how he’d told me his plans to kill as many innocent people as possible. They talked about the fact that he’d gotten his hands on guns to further his schemes and that he wanted to get many more. I’d gathered other information as well, like maps marked with “targets,” the works of radical preachers from the internet. I had everything the Americans would need to put Qais away forever.
Some part of me—the part that was still Safwa—had feared I’d hesitate when the time came to actually contact Homeland Security and accuse Qais of what he hadn’t done. That girl knew me no better than she’d known her mother though. As I took up my pen for the last time, my hand did not shake, my fingers did not tremble.
It was as Abu had said. Only misery comes from weakness.
* * *
—
The time for morning prayer came and went. I sat in place as the sun rose, eyes fixed on the thin, unmarked envelope that still sat on Anvar’s coffee table. It was difficult to put away, difficult to look away from. It was a beautiful and terrible thing.
In that small, fragile piece of paper was all the power I’d ever held over anyone. I’d never decided anyone’s fate before.
There was a sharp knock on the door. I was on my feet in an instant, my heart suddenly running though I was standing still. Was it Abu? That was impossible. Wasn’t it?
I looked around for places to hide, thinking that I should wake Anvar, tell him what was happening…There was another knock, and then a third, more uncertain one followed. My breathing started to slow. It was almost certainly not my father. I’d never known him to knock more than once. Besides, if he thought I was here, he’d be hammering away at the door, not waiting patiently for a response.
Even so, I had every reason to be careful. I tiptoed to the door to see who was there, to make sure I was safe.
Through the peephole, I saw a woman.
I had no reason to recognize her. But I did.
I stood by the door, staring hard, struggling to study her face. I couldn’t see her properly. I couldn’t see any magic about her that made her so special to Anvar that he still bled from wounds she’d left him with a decade ago.
She knocked again, then looked at her phone. If she didn’t get an answer, she would leave, and I’d never figure out why she deserved a life so much better than mine. Before I could think to stop myself, I moved to let Zuha Shah in.
THE BLITZ
2016
We’re going to try something different now. Remember how I told you that checkers is the game of life? That’s never more true than when you play a blitz, where the time you have to make your moves is limited. When the world starts spinning faster and faster around you, Anvar, you either learn to run or you fall.
—Naani Jaan
ANVAR
I woke to the buzzing of my phone, followed moments later by the sound of a voice I hadn’t woken up to since college. Back then, Zuha’s words had been either sweet or playful or chiding, but never as restrained, as cool, as they were now. Of course, she wasn’t talking to me.
I jumped out of bed with more agility than I’d had occasion to call upon for some time, and in my rush to get out to the living room, I slammed my toes against the bed frame. I grimaced, hopped around but managed not to swear, all the while running my hands through my hair in a desperate attempt to make it seem like I hadn’t just gotten up. I don’t think I succeeded, but I’m not certain success would’ve improved my morning. After all, spending the night with Azza and not sleeping with her was certainly worse, in this situation, than spending the night with her by actually sleeping.
When I finally made it out of my bedroom, Zuha and Azza were speaking intently by the front door. When Zuha saw me, her warm brown eyes went a little arctic.
“Good morning?” I said.
Azza turned to face me, her brow furrowed. She looked somehow confused and frustrated and guilty and angry at the same time.
“Hi,” I tried again, when I got no response from either of them.
“What happened?”
It took me a moment to understand Zuha’s question. Azza was still in her tank top, the vicious marks on her skin very much visible.
“I’m fine,” Azza said in the tone of someone who was repeating herself. “I should go. I shouldn’t have—”
“No. Please,” Zuha assured her. “I just thought Anvar might want to get some breakfast. I didn’t realize I’d be interrupting—”
I opened my mouth to say something, but all I could think to say was “This isn’t what it looks like,” which was beneath me. Not only was it untrue, it was also a cliché. If you’re going to lie, you absolutely must have the courtesy to do so in a creative fashion.
“I’m his brother’s fiancée,” Zuha said, managing an exculpatory statement that was also honest.
Azza, who had grabbed her niqab and
was rushing to put it on, answered with just a hint of venom: “I know exactly who you are.”
Zuha raised a questioning eyebrow at me. I looked away from her, glancing around the room for anything remotely interesting that I could study, anything that would give me a plausible reason not to meet her gaze.
I noticed an envelope on the coffee table that I was pretty certain was not mine. Grateful to have something less than awkward to say, I walked over to it, took it and held it up. “Azza, is this yours?”
Her green eyes snapped toward me. She hesitated for a moment, then came and snatched her letter from my hand. Grabbing her backpack, she then rushed past Zuha, out into the morning.
Her departure was followed by a hard silence.
“Well,” I said, “that didn’t go as badly as it could have.”
Zuha glared at me for a considerable fraction of an eternity, then spun around and stalked out of my apartment. The door slammed behind her.
“Or”—I was talking to myself at this point—“maybe it did.”
AZZA
I’d imagined Zuha would be beautiful. A lot prettier than me. That would explain why Anvar was, after all the years they’d been apart, still crazy about her. It would explain why she had found love in this world.
But Zuha was nothing special. She was ordinary. I don’t know why that upset me. I don’t know why it made the world seem even more unfair than it had been before.
Why did she have so much? It was like God had painted her life with brighter, richer colors than he’d used on mine. She’d gone to school. She got to live life how she wanted, untouched by war, in safety.
It wasn’t that she was unusually lovely or even all that kind. Agreeing to marry Anvar’s brother had been a cruel thing to do, after all. So, if she wasn’t exceptional, if she wasn’t better than me in any way, then why did God love her more than He loved me?
What had I done wrong, before I’d even drawn breath, to be sent from heaven to Iraq, in this time, to Abu’s house? Zuha Shah could’ve been me and I her. When we had started our lives, there must have been very little difference between us, except where we’d been born and whom we’d been born to.
The Bad Muslim Discount Page 26