Mariam Sharma Hits the Road

by Sheba Karim

  Ghaz stood in front of the broken gourmet coffee machine, frowning at it as if that might get it to work.

  “Cheetos? Starburst?”

  “No Starburst,” Ghaz said, so vehemently that we both turned to look at her. She shrugged. “It’s personal.”

  Umar settled on Snickers for all.

  We returned to the main building, which had a cozy room with rocking chairs next to a stone fireplace decorated with a wreath and featuring a wall of information about the Civil War. No one else was there so we took it over. As we had our sodas and Snickers, the combination of chocolate and caffeine and the rocking motion of the chair allowed Ghaz to relax a little.

  “Sorry I snapped in there,” she said to Umar.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You know, that stuff that’s happening with your parents, it’s going to happen to my parents, too, when I come out. I bet there will be men who stop shaking my dad’s hand in the masjid. They all see me as the sweet boy who does the breast cancer walk with his mother every year, who will be a successful doctor like his successful parents. Imagine the gossip when they find out otherwise. At least my dad, he only cares about the respect of people he holds in high regard, but my mom, she wants it from everyone. She loves the admiration from the community, being the model Muslim family. From white people, too. When the local paper wrote an article about my parents’ charity missions, she was so psyched. There was some other Pakistani guy who came out; he’s much older than me so I don’t really know him. Some people started saying, ‘I always thought he was a little strange’; other people wondered if it was because of something his parents had done. My parents had a party a little while after everyone found out and I heard people say stuff like, ‘Such a shame. Very handsome, too. Such a waste.’”

  “Screw the community,” Ghaz said.

  “It’s my community, too. And if you leave the community, how can you ever make it better? Anyway, even if I did distance myself, there would still be . . .”

  “What?”

  “Allah.”

  I glanced around to make sure we were still alone. I knew I shouldn’t care, but people got kicked off planes for simply saying the Arabic name of God.

  Ghaz groaned. “Oh, Umar, come on.”

  “The Quran says—”

  “The Quran also says a woman’s testimony is worth half a man’s,” she cut in.

  “Ghaz,” I said softly, “let him talk.”

  Umar folded his Snickers wrapper into one-fifth its size as he spoke. “You know I grew up thinking homosexuality was a sin. I was, like, eight when I realized I liked guys.”

  “How did you know?” I asked, realizing we’d never talked about it in detail.

  “I don’t know . . . I always found men more aesthetically pleasing. I wanted to look at them more. But I knew it was wrong, so I tried not to think about it, but then puberty hit, and I’d be in the masjid at Friday prayers and I’d see this guy I thought was beautiful, and I’d feel so guilty: here I was in the house of Allah admiring other men. I started to hate myself. My mother was always asking me why I was so sad. But I also kept thinking, Allah wouldn’t have made me this way if He didn’t want me to be this way. Who I am is Allah’s will. But I didn’t know how to reconcile this with the fact that according to Islam, it’s a sin to have sex with other men. I still don’t really know.”

  “I’ll tell you how,” Ghaz said. “Forget about Islam. I say pull an Ayaan Hirsi Ali and never look back.”

  “Come on,” I objected. “Even you don’t mean that.”

  “I don’t want to leave Islam. I love Allah. I love the Prophet,” Umar said.

  “So what will you do, Umar?” Ghaz said. She was starting to become agitated again, as she was wont to do about Umar’s insistence on maintaining his faith. “Get to Cornell, go to the gay party Thursday night, and attend jumma prayers with the MSA the next day?”

  “Maybe Cornell has a progressive MSA,” I said.

  “What does Islam give you, besides guilt?” she continued.

  “Lots of things,” Umar replied. “A sense of peace. Guidance. Community. Identity. Come on, Ghaz, even you like some parts of it.”

  “Yeah,” she retorted. “Like eating all day on Eid.”

  “And I’ve been reading this book by a gay Muslim scholar,” he added. “There’s really only one part of the Quran that addresses homosexuality, the story of Prophet Lut, and he argues that you can interpret it so that what it’s condemning isn’t homosexual sex, but male on male rape.”

  Ghaz threw her hands up. “This is what I don’t get! If Allah is all-knowing blah blah, and the Quran is the word of Allah, then why would He leave us with a book that was like, interpret it this way and homosexual sex is a grave sin, but interpret it this way and it’s cool? Why wouldn’t He say straight out that it was okay? You know why? Because it was a text meant for a desert tribe in the seventh century. Applying it in a way that makes sense to the twenty-first century is ridiculous, and forces you to jump through all these interpretive hoops. And anyway, the Abrahamic God is a total douche.”

  “You’ll never understand,” Umar argued.

  They could go on like this for a while.

  “So how will you reconcile it, your faith and your sexuality?” I asked, hoping to steer the conversation to some sort of resolution.

  “Well, I figure, what’s repeated the most in the Quran? That Allah is all-forgiving, all-merciful. Before you eat or start a journey, you even say aloud that He’s merciful. So I don’t think it’s a sin, but I figure that He’s so merciful that, even if it did turn out to be a sin, He’d forgive me.”

  “Umar! The fact that you even think Allah might have to forgive you! I need to get some air.” Ghaz rose so vehemently that her rocking chair continued to sway in anger after she’d gone. I reached over and stopped it with my hand.

  “What’s with her?” Umar said. “Why is she acting so militant?”

  “You know it isn’t really about you. She’s upset about her sister’s email and she’s taking it out on you.”

  “Yeah.” Umar rocked back with a sigh, lifting the frayed edges of his scarf and gently laying them in an X across his chest.

  “I’ll go find her. In the meantime,” I said, gesturing at an illustrated panel depicting The Confederacy’s Last Gasp in Tennessee—in which the Union and Confederate armies faced each other, only a few feet between their pointed rifles, the Confederate side depicted as both larger and more organized—“you can learn about the Civil War.”

  Ghaz had climbed up the small hill behind the vending-machine building and was sitting in the shade of a lone tree, her long legs to one side, one hand toying with her necklace as she gazed toward the horizon. Her hair was loose, and she wore no makeup, and her eyes were dark and sad. There were still moments, like now, when her beauty gave me pause.

  “Hey,” I called out as I walked up the hill.

  She crossed her legs to make room for me in the shade. I reached for her hand, and we listened to the sizzle of crickets and the distant strains of bluegrass music.

  “Can I ask you something?” Ghaz said.

  “Of course.”

  “What did you really think of the billboard?”

  I wasn’t sure what question I’d been expecting, but this wasn’t it. “Well, you looked beautiful.”

  “That’s a cop-out. And you always think that. You were thinking it a second ago when you were walking over here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Ninety percent of the time, you’re an open book. Come on, tell me the truth.”

  “Honestly, I don’t have a straight-up answer. On the one hand, I’ve never been a fan of the Brooklyn Attire campaigns, the way they sexualize young girls, turning them into some sort of empty vessel for a man to fill with his fantasy. I’m not a fan of how women’s bodies are used as commodities to sell practically everything. I mean, you hardly ever see men selling watches half-naked on their knees. But I also don’t believe that a
woman’s worth should be measured in what she does or doesn’t wear. The people who think women should remain fully clothed, who equate being covered with female modesty, they’re also sexualizing women’s bodies. It’s two sides of the same coin. My point is, I don’t have an answer to your question because it’s complicated. All that really matters anyway is how you feel about it.”

  “How I feel about it,” she repeated. “I don’t know. I had this idea that the billboard would change my life, that maybe some talent agent would contact me and tell me I was the next big thing, but the few agents who contacted me offered to represent me only if I pay them first. God, I even thought maybe some Bollywood director would see it and insist I star in his next movie. Instead, I had to deactivate my Facebook account yesterday because I was getting friend and message requests from random desi men, some were creepy stalker, some gross lewd, some you bring shame to Muslims and are going to hell. And then there’s the fallout with my family. If I’d at least been paid some decent money maybe I’d feel better about it.”

  “How much did they pay you?”

  Ghaz sighed. “Three hundred bucks.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah, I mean, they have this open call, and they get all these excited nonprofessional young girls, and you feel honored just to have been picked. If I’d asked for more money they had a hundred other girls willing to take my place.

  “Ugh,” she said, tossing her head as if to clear out the sadness. “In more pressing concerns, I was mean to our darling Umar.”

  “It’s okay. He understands you’re hurting. He wants you to talk about it, too.”

  “What’s the point in talking about it more than we already have? It’s not going to change the past, or who my parents are.”

  “No,” I said, “but it might make you feel better.”

  “I want to do some tree pose. Will you do it with me?”

  As I trembled next to Ghaz, I marveled at her ability to be completely steady and rooted to the earth even on one leg, transitioning into a more complicated version I didn’t dare attempt. When she was finished, she said, “I can’t believe he still worries that Allah thinks it’s a sin. I wish I could unburden him of his guilt.”

  “I know,” I agreed. “But he’s got to figure that out with his God. No one else can do it for him.”

  Twenty-Nine

  UMAR WANTED TO EAT barbecue for lunch because Alabama was famous for it so once again I’d capitulated to the carnivores. We were in Big Bertie’s BBQ, inhaling the pungent aroma of vinegar and meat. The restaurant’s dozens of award ribbons and framed press clippings covered an entire wall in the restaurant. There were four different types of barbecue sauce on the table: white, hot, traditional, and Hawaiian. Umar had already sampled them, pouring them onto his plate and dipping in with his finger, since neither our utensils nor our waitress had arrived yet.

  “Is it because we’re brown?” Ghaz speculated.

  But it was lunchtime, and the restaurant was crowded. Next to us was a group of eight white, middle-aged men, employee ID badges clipped to their button-down shirts, conversing in thick Southern accents. There were a lot of white people, a few black people, us, and a stooped, elderly Asian woman who limped behind a cleaning cart, clearing off and wiping down tables.

  “Oh, man,” Ghaz said as the woman passed us. “I really wish there was dim sum in her cart instead of dirty plates.”

  “You’re telling me,” I muttered.

  “Gimme your phone,” she said. “I need to check email.”

  As Ghaz and Umar got sucked into the internet abyss, I tried not to think about the amount of antibiotic-laden pig that was being consumed in this establishment and instead focused on those doing the consuming. It was nice to see multigenerational tables, with kids, parents, and grandparents eating together, and that the old people weren’t all staring at some ugly carpet in a nursing home, which Umar said was his mother’s biggest fear. It had always been a pain to take my grandmother out to eat. She only ate halal meat and disliked vegetarian, so we’d have to go to an Afghani or Iranian or Turkish or desi restaurant, which would have been fine except no matter what she’d ordered, she’d proclaim that she could make it better at home and all we were doing was needlessly wasting money, and the amount we’d spent on the check would have better invested in gold.

  Behind me was a table of women, dressed in hats and floral dresses like they were attending a high tea, and when they burst into laughter I leaned back, trying to eavesdrop.

  “Those Asians, I tell you,” one woman said.

  “They are industrious people,” another said.

  I assumed they were referring to the very industrious Asian woman bussing the tables, but then the first one said, “The last time she did my nails, as I’m walking out the door, she yells ‘You got boyfriend?’ I love her. For Christmas, I’m going to get her a wok.”

  I hoped she was kidding.

  “Shit!” Umar exclaimed, looking down at his phone. “Remember how an uncle was murdered a few weeks ago while walking to Fajr prayers? Yesterday, some guy beat a Pakistani woman in Ohio with a crowbar so badly she almost died. He said he did it so she wouldn’t give birth to more terrorists, except she was like a seventy-year-old grandma.”

  “Seriously? Even being a grandma can’t save you?” Ghaz said. “What the hell. We’re not safe anywhere.”

  “How come you don’t consider yourself a Muslim but when it comes to stuff like this you say, ‘we’?” Umar asked.

  “I’m not religious, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel solidarity for my community if they’re attacked. That could have been my mother. Besides, if they come for us, they’re coming for me, too.”

  “When they do, show them your billboard,” Umar said.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Ghaz bristled.

  “It was only a joke.”

  The waitress, a droopy-eyed brunette, her lips a startling shade of fuchsia, arrived with our utensils. “Y’all ready?” she said, not glancing up from her pad as we ordered.

  “So much for Southern hospitality,” Ghaz breathed after she’d walked away.

  “Hey, listen to what my mother wrote,” Umar said. “Maybe you shouldn’t go to the IANA convention. What if something bad happens?”

  “Like what?” Ghaz said.

  “Like a bunch of guys with machine guns standing outside pointing their guns at you in a menacing manner,” I offered.

  “Yeah, but we can’t act all scared. That gives them power,” Umar objected. “That’s what they want, to subdue us, for us to cower in fear.”

  “I’m not saying we aren’t the victims of Islamophobia,” Ghaz said, “but the Muslim community also needs to deal with their own racism. You know the kinds of things our parents say about black people that make you wish you were deaf. And they’re all like, ‘Muhammad Ali! Such a great Muslim,’ like that somehow proves that the community isn’t racist.”

  “We’re all racist on some level,” I said.

  “I’m not,” Umar protested.

  “Oh, come on. I’ll ask you a question, and I want you to answer it honestly. If you’re walking down the street at night, and are passed by a young black guy or a young white guy, who would you be scared of?”

  “What are they wearing?” Umar asked.

  “Oh, please, like you’d look at their clothes first,” Ghaz interjected.

  “It is Umar,” I said.

  “We’re all conditioned by society to be racist,” she continued.

  “Maybe, but that doesn’t make it right,” I said. “What about the people ‘conditioned’ to see a brown guy with a beard and get scared because they think he’s Muslim?”

  “We can’t only fight Islamophobia,” Ghaz stated. “We have to fight all kinds of discrimination.”

  “No one’s disagreeing with you,” Umar replied. “I don’t see IANA making statements condemning violence against the LGBTQ community, unless it was a Muslim who did it.”

&
nbsp; Our food arrived: beef brisket for Umar, pork ribs for Ghaz, and a salad for me.

  I groaned. “This salad has bacon on it.”

  “Here,” Ghaz said. “Have my mac and cheese.”

  “There’s bacon in that, too,” Umar pointed out.

  The party of women behind us got up, hugging one another effusively amid peals of laughter. The middle-aged corporates also stood, shaking hands across the table.

  In the midst of their good-byes, Umar’s prayer app went off, the call to prayer blaring loudly from his phone.

  Allahu akbar Allahu akbar

  Aaaaaallahu aaaakbar Aaaaaaallll—

  It took Umar till the fourth Allahu akbar to shut it off. The women and the corporates now stood in complete silence. The entire restaurant was staring at us, including the elderly Asian woman.

  “No need to be alarmed,” Umar announced. “It’s only the call to prayer.”

  “You’re not helping,” Ghaz whispered.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he whispered back.

  “Let’s talk to one another normally, like we’re normal,” she replied.

  “We are normal,” I said.

  We picked up our forks and played with our food. No one approached us, though when the other tables resumed their conversations, it was with lowered voices. People kept glancing in our direction.

  “I can’t eat,” Umar murmured.

  Ghaz set down her half-gnawed pork rib. “Eat, both of you!” she insisted. “You don’t want them to think you don’t like their food.”

  “There’s nothing here I can eat,” I reminded her.

  The waitress returned.

  “Y’all enjoying the food?” she asked.

  “Delicious,” I said.

  “You know those ribs are pork?” she said to Ghaz.

  “I know.”

  “Thought I’d check—I know your kind don’t eat pork.”

  “Actually, she does eat pork,” Umar said. “Thank you, though.”

  “I’ll leave the check here. And listen, I wouldn’t be playing that Allah song if I were you. A lot of people around here won’t take kindly to it.”