by Ayad Akhtar
“Tell me,” she said.
Book One
Paradise Lost
1
Mina
Long before I knew Mina, I knew her story.
It was a tale Mother told so many times: How her best friend, gifted and gorgeous—something of a genius, as Mother saw it—had been frustrated at every turn, her development derailed by the small-mindedness of her family, her robust will checked by a culture that made no place for a woman. I heard about the grades Mina skipped and the classes she topped, though always somewhat to the chagrin of parents more concerned with her eventual nuptials than her report card. I heard about all the boys who loved her, and how—when she was twelve—she, too, fell in love, only to have her nose broken by her father’s fist when he found a note from her sweetheart tucked into her math book. I heard about her nervous breakdowns and her troubles with food and, of course, about the trove of poems her mother set alight in the living room fireplace one night during an argument about whether or not Mina would be allowed to go to college to become a writer.
Perhaps it was that I heard it all so often without knowing the woman myself, but for the longest time, Mina Ali and her gifts and travails were like the persistent smell of curry in our halls and our rooms: an ever-presence in my life of which I made little note.
And then, one summer afternoon when I was eight, I saw a picture of her. As Mother unfolded Mina’s latest letter from Pakistan, a palm-sized color glossy tumbled out. “That’s your auntie Mina, kurban,” Mother said as I picked it up. “Look how beautiful she is.”
Beautiful, indeed.
The picture showed a striking woman sitting on a wicker chair before a background of green leaves and orange flowers. Most of her perfectly black hair was covered with a pale pink scarf, and both her hair and scarf framed an utterly arresting face: cheekbones highly drawn—gently accentuated with a touch of blush—oval eyes, and a small, pointed nose perched above a pair of ample lips. Her features defined a perfect harmony, promising something sheltering, something tender, but not only. For there was an intensity in her eyes that belied this intimation of maternal comfort, or at least complicated it: those eyes were black and filled with piercing light, as if her vision had long been sharpened against the grindstone of some nameless inner pain. And though she was smiling, her smile was more one concealed than offered and, like her eyes, hinted at something mysterious and elusive, something you wanted to know.
Mother posted the photo on our refrigerator door, pinned in place by the same rainbow-shaped finger magnets that also affixed my school lunch menu. (This was the menu Mother consulted each night before school to see if pork was being served the following day—and if, therefore, I’d be needing a bag lunch—and which I consulted each school morning hoping to find my favorite, beef lasagna, listed among the day’s offerings.) For two years, then, barely a day went by without at least a casual glance at that photograph of Mina. And there were more than a few occasions when, finishing my glass of morning milk, or munching on string cheese after school, I lingered over it, staring at her likeness as I sometimes did at the surface of the pond at Worth Park on summer afternoons: doing my best to catch a glimpse of what was hidden in the depths.
It was a remarkable photograph, and—as I was to discover from Mina herself a couple of years later—it had an equally remarkable history. Mina’s parents, counting on their daughter’s beauty to attract a lucrative match, brought in a fashion photographer to take pictures of her, and the photo in question was the one that would make its way—through a matchmaker—into the hands of Hamed Suhail, the only son of a wealthy Karachi family.
Hamed fell in love with Mina the moment he saw it.
The Suhails showed up at the Ali home a week and a half later, and by the end of their meeting, the fathers had shaken hands on their children’s betrothal. Mother always claimed that Mina didn’t dislike Hamed, and that Mina always said she could have found happiness with him. If not for Irshad, Hamed’s mother.
After the wedding, Mina moved south to Karachi to live with her in-laws, and the problems between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law began the first night Mina was there. Irshad came into her bedroom holding a string of plump, pomegranate-colored stones, a garnet necklace and family heirloom which—Irshad explained—had been handed down from mother to daughter for five generations. Herself daughterless, Irshad had always imagined she would bestow these, the only family jewels, on the wife of her only son someday.
“Try it on,” Irshad urged, warmly.
Mina did. And as they both stared into the mirror, Mina couldn’t help but notice the silvery thinning of Irshad’s eyes. She recognized the envy.
“You shouldn’t, Ammi,” Mina said, pulling the stones from her neck.
“I shouldn’t what?”
“I don’t know…I mean, it’s so beautiful…are you sure you want to give it to me?”
“I’m not giving it to you yet,” Irshad replied, abruptly. “I just wanted to see how it looked.”
Bruised by Irshad’s sudden shift, Mina handed the necklace back to her mother-in-law. Irshad took it and, without another word, walked out of the room.
So Irshad’s enmity began. First came the snide comments offered under her breath, or in passing: about how headstrong the “new girl” was; how she ate hunched over her plate like a servant; or how, as Irshad put it, Mina looked like a “mouse.” Soon to follow were changes to the household routine intended to make Mina’s life more difficult: servants sent up to clean Mina’s room when she was still asleep; the expunging from the family menu of the foods Mina most enjoyed; the continued flurry of mean-spirited remarks, though now no longer offered sotto voce. Mina did all she could to appease and placate her mother-in-law. But this only stoked Irshad’s suspicions. For as Mina tried to ply Irshad with submissiveness, the elder woman felt the change of tack, and read it as evidence of a cunning nature. Irshad now started rumors about her daughter-in-law’s “wandering eyes” and “thieving hands.” She warned her son to keep Mina away from the male staff, and warned her staff to keep their valuables under lock and key. (Neither Hamed nor his father—both terrified of Irshad—did anything to address the growing conflict.) And when the pleasure of verbal abuse wore thin, Irshad resorted to the physical. Now she slapped Mina, for leaving her dirty clothes strewn around her bedroom, or talking out of turn in front of guests. On one occasion, hearing an insult in a comment Mina made about dinner not being as spicy as usual, Irshad grabbed her daughter-in-law by the hair and dragged her from the dinner table to throw her out into the hallway.
Fourteen months into this growing nightmare, Mina conceived. To escape the abuse and bring her pregnancy to term in peace, she returned north to her family home, in the Punjab. There, three weeks early, unaccompanied by her husband—who would not join her for fear of suffering his mother’s wrath—Mina gave birth to a boy. And as she lay in the hospital bed exhausted from her daylong labor, a man in a long dark coat appeared at the doorway just moments after her mother left the room to fetch a cup of tea from the canteen. He stepped inside, inquiring if she was Amina Suhail née Ali.
“I am,” Mina replied.
The man approached her bedside, an envelope in hand. “Your husband has divorced you. Enclosed are the papers that make this divorce official. He has written in his own hand—you will recognize the writing—that he divorces you, he divorces you, and he divorces you. As you well know, Mrs. Suhail—I mean, Ms. Ali—this is what the law requires.” He laid the envelope across her belly, gently. “You have just given birth to Hamed Suhail’s son. He has chosen the name Imran for the boy. Imran will stay with you until the age of seven, at which point Mr. Hamed Suhail has the right to full, undisputed custody.” The lawyer took a step back, but he wasn’t finished. Mina squinted at him in disbelief. “All that I have shared with you is in accordance with the law as it stands, this date of June 15, 1976, in the land of Pakistan, and you are entitled to a custody trial by law, but I would advise you to understand, Mrs. S
uhail—I mean, Ms. Ali—that any fight will be a useless one for you, and will simply cost your family resources it does not have.”
Then the lawyer turned and walked out.
Mina cried for days and nights and weeks to follow. Yet, devastated as she was by Hamed’s brutality—and terrified by his menacing promise to take her son away someday—when she stared down into her infant’s eyes, she nevertheless cooed to him with the name that her now-ex-husband had chosen without her:
She called the boy Imran.
I first heard that Mother wanted to bring Mina to America in the winter of 1981. I was ten. The hostages in Iran had just come home, and American flags were burning on the nightly news. It was a Saturday afternoon, teatime, and my parents were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table, silently sipping from their cups. I was sitting at the other end, my back to the glass of milk Mother had set before me. I was watching a half dozen flies butting at the window overlooking the backyard.
“You know, kurban, your Mina-auntie might be coming to stay with us,” Mother finally said. “Kurban?”
I turned to her. “When?” I asked.
“The sooner, the better. Her family is driving her crazy back home. And that boy needs to get out of the country…or his father will take him. The truth is, they both need to get out.”
Mother paused, glancing over at Father. He was thumbing through a fishing magazine, oblivious.
I looked back at the flies, buzzing blackly along the cold glass.
“All these flies! Where are they coming from?!” Mother suddenly shouted out. “And there’s so many of them up in the attic! God only knows how they got up there!”
Father looked up from his magazine, annoyed. “You say that like we haven’t heard it, like it’s the first time you’re saying it. It’s not the first time. I’m dealing with it.”
“I wasn’t talking to you, Naveed.”
“Then who are you talking to?” Father asked, sharply. “Because the only other person here is the boy, and I don’t know what he has to do with it.”
Mother stared at him, her face blank. Father’s hazel-green eyes glared coldly back at her. Then he buried himself again in his fishing magazine.
Mother got up from the table and went to the fridge. “It’s not going to be easy, kurban. Even if we could arrange it, who knows if her parents will let her come. Sometimes I wonder if they just want to keep her around so they have someone to torture. You know what her father did? He sold her books! Can you imagine? Mina without her books!”
Mother glanced at Father, then looked at me, expectant. I knew she wanted me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say.
“Why did he sell her books?” I finally asked.
“Because he thinks books are the reason for the divorce. Books encouraged her fast mouth…that’s what he always said about her intelligence. ‘All it does is give her a fast mouth …’ ” Mother sneaked another glance at Father.
He just shifted in place, turning a page in his magazine.
Mother grunted as she pulled a pitcher from the fridge. “Hayat, her intelligence has been the curse of her life. When a Muslim woman is too smart, she pays the price for it. And she pays the price not in money, behta, but in abuse.” Mother paused, waiting for Father to react. He didn’t. “You know what Freud said, behta? That brilliant man?”
I didn’t know much more about Freud than that Mother liked to tell me what he said from time to time. “He said silence kills. If you don’t talk about things…you get all screwed up inside.” She stole another look at Father.
Now he looked up, but not because of anything she’d said. He threw back his head and emptied the rest of his tea into his mouth. Mother slammed the fridge door shut behind him. Father set down the teacup and turned another page.
“I’m telling you these things because today you are my behta, my child…but one day you’ll be a man. And these are things you should know…”
I looked back at the window, behind which a scarlet sun was setting beneath tufts of purple-pink clouds hanging about the horizon like clumps of cotton candy. The flies were still stabbing at the glass.
“They are so annoying. Where are they coming from?” Mother complained again as she poured.
Again, silence. Until I finally heard Father’s voice behind me: “Here.”
I turned to find him holding out the rolled-up magazine toward me. “Kill them and get it over with.”
“Don’t make him do that,” Mother said in an odd, pleading tone. “You do it, Naveed.”
Father didn’t budge, still pointing the magazine at me.
I took it and turned to the window. Aiming, I swatted. The glass shook. One fly fell; the others sputtered frantically. It took me a dozen more blows to get them all. When I was finished, I looked down, where the flies lay dead on the kitchen linoleum.
“Good job,” Father said, taking the magazine back. Standing, he tore the cover off and crumpled it, sticking the ball into his empty cup of tea. Then he walked out.
Mother dumped her unfinished glass of water in the sink. “Next time, you don’t do what he says,” she hissed at me. “You do what I say.”
My parents’ marriage was difficult almost from the start. They’d met and fallen in love in Lahore, while they were both in college, Mother studying psychology, Father completing medical school. They married, and Father—who topped his medical class—was offered a spot in a program that brought him to Wisconsin to train as a neurologist. Mother left school to join him—it was always her great regret that she didn’t wait to finish her degree—ending up far from home, in Milwaukee’s rural westerly suburbs, a stone’s throw from dairy country, where the landscape was flat as a table and covered for months with snow. It was a place she didn’t understand. And she was with a man who started cheating on her almost as soon as they arrived in America. In short, by the time I was ten, she’d been miserable for years.
A week or so after the episode with the flies, I awoke in my bed in the middle of the night, not sure if I was dreaming. My room glowed and pulsed with a flickering orange light. Outside, people were shouting. The roar of an engine seemed to shake the air. I got up from bed and went to the window. Through a veil of swirling flakes, I made out a chaotic sight: a car in flames, and beyond it, two bright beams of light through which figures in black came and went. It took me a moment to realize it was a fire truck. The firemen were scattered about the flames, pulling at a white hose. All at once, there was a loud hissing sound, and the white hose stiffened along uneven joints, spewing an unruly, milky foam.
I still wasn’t sure if I was dreaming.
“Get back in bed,” I heard behind me. I turned to see Mother in the doorway, her eyes—like the car outside—ablaze. “One of your father’s white bitches set fire to his Mercedes.” She approached, coming to stand alongside me. Together, we watched the firefighters douse the flames. It didn’t take long. Almost at once, the fire was out, and the car’s wet, windowless carcass was giving off weak smoke.
Mother turned to me, her eyes still gleaming, though the room was now dark. “That’s why I always tell you, behta…Don’t end up with a white woman.”
She led me back to bed and tucked me in with a kiss. When she was gone, I got up and went back to the window. I spied Father’s tall, hulking form marching through the falling snow. He led the firefighters into the house. I crawled back into bed and fell asleep to the murmur of men’s voices drifting up the stairs.
All night, I dreamt of fire.
The next morning, when I came down for breakfast, Father wasn’t there.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked.
“Work,” Mother replied. “Had to take my car,” she added with a satisfied grin as she brought two plates of parathas and eggs to the table.
“Parathas?” I asked. She usually only made parathas on the weekends.
“Eat, sweetie. I know it’s your favorite.”
Mother sat down across from me, tearing a piece o
f the ghee-soaked fried bread I so loved, and used it to poke at her egg and release the yolk. “Another of his white prostitutes decided she was sick of his promises,” Mother began. “God only knows what he promised this one. He gets drunk and runs his mouth, and probably doesn’t remember a thing he says.” Using the piece of paratha, she took a scoopful of the running yolk into her mouth and started to chew. “That’s why we don’t drink, kurban, because it impairs you. It makes you foolish.” Drops of viscous yellow-orange dotted the edges of her lips as she chewed and spoke. “Give a Muslim man a drink and watch him run after white women like a crazed fool!”
I’d been hearing about Father’s mistresses since the night Mother dragged me through the streets of Milwaukee as a five-year-old, searching for Father, who we eventually found at the apartment of a woman he worked with at the hospital; I waited in the stairwell as she and Father shouted at each other on the upstairs landing. Throughout my childhood, Mother spared me little detail about her troubles with Father. And at ten, I already knew myself well enough to know that if I listened too closely to what she said, my blood would start to boil.
I kept my head down, hoping she would lose interest, but that was unlikely. She was buoyant that morning. Even her appearance—usually unkempt, her round face increasingly drawn and gaunt from bitterness, her thin brown hair often tousled well into the evening as if she’d just risen from bed—was different. She’d showered and dressed for the day as if she actually planned to leave the house. “But now he has a chance to do the right thing,” she said, breaking off another piece of paratha. “Now he’ll have the chance to help someone in need. Your Mina-auntie needs someone to help her and that boy…I just lose sleep every night thinking about what she’s going through. The boy is already four. They have to be thinking now about how to get out. Or it will be too late.” She took another bite and chewed, shaking her head. “You don’t humiliate your wife and child in front of the world without consequence. He’s not sure about this, he’s not sure about that. Now he doesn’t have a choice. She’s coming and he’s not going to stop it. After last night, he owes me.”