American Dervish: A Novel

by Ayad Akhtar

  Late that spring—just over a year since Mina and Imran had come to stay with us—we were all sitting around the kitchen table one Thursday evening. Father, Mother, and Mina drank tea as they read and exchanged sections of the evening newspaper. Imran and I sat before an array of broken crayons, coloring pictures. At some point, Mother looked up from the paper.

  “They’re saying it’s going to be seventy-five degrees and sunny on the weekend,” she said brightly. “First day of summer weather. They’re saying it’s a perfect day for a barbecue.”

  “Is that what they’re saying?” Father mumbled, inching the business section higher to hide behind it.

  Mother turned to Mina. “We should make shaami kababs and Lahori ginger marinade for the chicken. We should make it big. And invite lots and lots of people! To celebrate the change of seasons…What do you think, Naveed? Hmm? Saturday?”

  The question dangled in silence, unanswered.

  Father lowered the paper just enough to gaze over its edge. His expression was dim. “You’re the one who has to prepare the food. I just put it on the grill. You want a big barbecue? Be my guest.”

  “But then you have to invite some people, too.”

  “Fine,” he said, returning to his paper.

  Mother wasn’t convinced. “Naveed, look at me when I talk to you.”

  “What is it, Muneer?” Father asked, annoyed. “What do you want from me? Hmm? Why can’t you just drink your tea and enjoy your life for a change?”

  “Don’t be patronizing.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I was asking you a question. I want you to invite people, too.”

  “I said okay.”

  “Like who?”

  “I’ll invite Nathan.” Nathan Wolfsohn was Father’s colleague and research partner at the University Medical Center, and in many ways his best friend.

  “Good. Who else?”

  “Who else do you want me to invite?”

  “The Naqvis, the Khans, the Buledis…and why not the Chathas?”

  Mother was referring to the Pakistani families scattered throughout Greater Milwaukee, people we barely spent any time with because Father hated them. He called them sheep, claiming that they gathered like herd animals as a way of avoiding the fact that they were no longer in Pakistan. Father found their ceaseless complaining about the godlessness of American life particularly tiresome. He couldn’t understand what they were still doing here if they thought it was all so evil.

  “Chatha?” Father asked, incredulous.

  “Why not?”

  “Why not?”

  “Yes. Why not, Naveed?”

  Mother was needling him. She knew Father despised Ghaleb Chatha, a Pakistani-born pharmacist and entrepreneur, the owner of a growing pharmacy chain that bore his name, and—due largely to his immense wealth—the undisputed nucleus of the local Muslim community. At Mother’s insistence, we’d spent some time with the Chathas a few years prior—going to their house for dinner on a few of the religious holidays, having them over to our place once—but no mutual friendship ever developed. Father couldn’t bear Chatha’s religiosity, announced not only by his appearance—a skullcap, box-form Islamic beard, and a knee-length Nehru coat he never seemed to take off—but also his conversation. Chatha loved to talk about what God was going to do to American unbelievers on Judgment Day: “Allah will turn them this way and that,” Chatha would joke, flipping his flattened palm back and forth like a patty in a skillet. “He’ll fry them just like one of their fishes at their church Friday fish fries!” And if Chatha’s disdain for unbelievers wasn’t enough to turn Father against him, there was always the fact that Chatha made his wife, Najat—a college-educated woman—wear the full burqa in public, complete with a cloth screen that entirely covered her face.

  “I know you don’t like him,” Mother said, backing off as Father glared at her. “But you’re the one always talking about how one has to play politics to succeed…So maybe you should take your own advice and make the effort. Say whatever you want about him, but Najat is a wonderful person.”

  “Wonderful? How would you know? Do you even know what she looks like?”

  “Of course I know what she looks like.”

  “You’re one of the few,” Father retorted. “Just barbaric,” he muttered to himself as he went back to reading.

  “Who’s Chatha?” Mina asked.

  “The pharmacist I was telling you about,” Mother said. “The one with the divorced cousin? Remember?”

  Mina didn’t seem to recall.

  “The one whose wife ran away with the American?”

  “Oh,” Mina said with a nod.

  “Hypocrite is what he is,” Father said.

  “Whatever he is, whatever he isn’t, Chatha is the hub of the community,” Mother said flatly. “It’s no wonder we don’t have any friends from back home. We never make the effort.”

  “Do what you want. Call them yourselves. You don’t need me.”

  Mother glanced at Mina, then me. She looked surprised, pleased: Father was giving unexpected ground. After a pause, she began again, her tone now oily and sweet: “But if you do it, Naveed…they’ll think heaven and earth are moving. ‘Dr. Shah is calling us for a barbecue? We can’t miss that!’ ”

  “Hardly, Muneer. Those people don’t like me. Or you, for that matter…”

  “They may not like you, but they admire you. Everyone does. Even Chatha. You are the smartest one here. And they know it.” It was odd to hear Mother flattering Father like this, but she must have known what she was doing. Father visibly softened.

  “Fine,” he finally relented. “I’ll call them.”

  Mother turned to Mina, beaming. “And you, too. Get some of your friends from the salon to come.” Mother was referring to the salon where Mina now worked four days a week, and where she’d already made enough money to buy herself a used Dodge sedan.

  “I’ll ask Adrienne.”

  “Is that the fat one?”

  “Bhaj,” Mina warned. “She’s a good person. She only has nice things to say about you.”

  Mother grinned, with a carefree expression that implied that had she known Adrienne was saying nice things about her, she might not have said what she said, but she was still going to think it. “Well, ask some of your other friends there, too…not just Adrienne.” Mother turned back to Father. “And be sure to invite Nathan.”

  Father grunted.

  “Did you hear me, Naveed?”

  “How could I not hear you?” Father droned. “I already said I would invite him.”

  “So you’ll do it?”

  “If I remember.”

  “He’s such a gentle, intelligent soul! Why can’t some of his influence rub off on you, Naveed?”

  “Muneer… ,” Father said firmly.

  “I’m going, I’m going,” Mother said placatingly as she rose from the table and shot a look at the clock over the stove. “Seven-thirty,” she muttered to herself. “Not too late to make some calls.”

  And off she went.

  What always struck me most about Nathan Wolfsohn was that he never seemed as small as he actually was. At barely five and a half feet, with narrow shoulders and a small head covered with curly strawberry-blond hair, Nathan should have looked dwarfed alongside Father—whose tall, wide-shouldered brawn was one of the things Mother always said had attracted her to him—but he didn’t. Blessed with a warmth and expansiveness you could spy from the joyous, jagged glint in his eyes, Nathan was a man with a wider sense of things, an intangible largesse that, I believe, made him seem bigger than he was.

  At only twenty-eight, Nathan was something of a medical wunderkind, a specialist in a new technology known as MRI. It had been Father’s idea to approach Nathan about imaging the brains of patients on antidepressant medications, and in only a few years, their work had catapulted them to the front ranks of research neurology. Father liked to refer to the two of them as “the pioneers,” a label that didn’t sit well with
Nathan. I remember a night at a downtown pizzeria around the corner from their lab—I was seven or eight; Mother and I had gone to join them for dinner after work—when Father used the term. Nathan was quick to correct him.

  “We weren’t the first to do what we’re doing, Naveed.”

  “Technicalities, Nate. Technicalities.” Father waved his comment away.

  “You keep saying that, but we weren’t. Not by a long shot. And you know it.”

  “Okay, Nate. Maybe we weren’t the first”—Father jeered, his mouth hanging open as his unfinished retort dangled in the pause he clearly let form for effect—“but you can’t doubt we’ve been the best, can you?”

  “I didn’t know it was a competition.”

  “Everything is a competition, Nate. Everything.”

  “How depressing. How do you get up in the morning with an attitude like that?”

  Father didn’t reply, a mischievous smile creeping across his face.

  “Oh, no.”

  “What?”

  “That look you’ve got.”

  “Just remembered a joke.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know if you’re going to like it.”

  “Another Jew joke.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “Because if it is, I don’t want to hear it.”

  “You’re right. You’re right.”

  “Okay, what is it?”

  “I thought you didn’t want to hear it?”

  “Just get it over with, Naveed.”

  “So why do Jews have big noses?”

  Nathan groaned. “C’mon, Naveed. That’s the oldest one in the book.”

  “Okay. So what’s the answer?”

  “Because air is free?”

  Father’s face filled with delight. His head and trunk jittered as he gave off a joyous wheezing sound. It was an odd laugh he had, but infectious. Soon we were all laughing. Even Nathan.

  They were contraries in so many ways: Nathan was from Boston, Jewish, urbane, and pleasantly gregarious; Father was from a third-world village, Muslim, rough-hewn, and sardonic. Their colleagues at the hospital called them the Odd Couple. And for good reason. The countless hours Father and Nathan spent together in the radiology lab gave them ample opportunity to hone a routine their coworkers liked to call the Show, which was mostly composed of Nathan playing the straight man to Father’s often questionable silliness. Father teased Nathan constantly: He made fun of his appearance; of his New England accent; of his inability to stomach our spicy food; and yes, of the fact that he was Jewish. But the butt of most of Father’s jokes was Nathan’s love for all things cultural: the theater, symphonies, art museums, and above all books.

  “How’s Dr. Wolfsohn?” I remember Mother asking over dinner, only to have Father erupt with irritation.

  “That stooge! Can you believe he spent an hour at lunch reading a novel? What a waste of brain energy!”

  Father made no secret of his disdain for books. He believed his success—unlikely as it was, considering the modesty of his Pakistani-village origins—was too hard-won not to be an example to all; and this success, he claimed, was the result not of “book smarts” but “street smarts.” He would loudly boast he’d never read a single book, not even in his field of specialty, a strange comment, and one which could have been taken in any variety of ways—as a pledge of his allegiance to the American tradition of making oneself through deeds and not thoughts; as a revealing instance of his mostly winning grandiosity; as a measure of a quite genuine disregard he had for books in general and for novels in particular—but whatever way it could be taken, it certainly couldn’t have been a statement of fact: How do you not read a single book and end up editing or contributing to fifteen of them?

  As with most of Father’s shenanigans, Nathan knew exactly how to handle it. Whenever Father offered his unlikely claim, Nathan pushed back.

  “That’s silly, Naveed. Your office is filled with books. I don’t buy it for a second.”

  Sooner or later, Father would relent, but always with a wily smile, still enjoying his bending of the truth. “I’ve read articles, Nate. And chapters. I read what I had to”—and now he would be laughing, joyous—“but I was never stupid enough to read a whole book cover to cover!”

  Father made the calls as promised, but only to discover that Ghaleb Chatha was holding a fund-raiser for the South Side Islamic Center that very same Saturday. Which meant most of the other Pakistani families Mother mentioned wouldn’t be able to come to our barbecue either. Father was pleased at how this was all turning out.

  There was one Pakistani family at our house that weekend, or at least half-Pakistani: the Buledis weren’t invited to the Chathas’, for while psychiatrist Sonny Buledi had been born in Karachi, he’d been mostly shunned by the local Pakistani community. His Austrian wife, Katrina, made more than a few enemies by showing up at functions in sleeveless blouses and knee-length skirts, and talking freely about the fact that she served her kids pork.

  A number of our neighbors showed up; so did Adrienne, Mina’s friend from the salon. Adrienne was dressed in a satin wine-red shalwar-kameez that she was delighted to report “made her look more full-figured than fat,” though I’m not sure this was the impression she made on me. I had only ever seen her briefly—on the few occasions she’d come by to pick Mina up for outings to Red Lobster, their favorite—and there was no other way to put it than to say: She was gargantuan. The loose-falling kurta and the neck scarf may have made her seem not quite so outsized as her more tightly fitting Western clothes did, but if so, the effect was minimal. As for the most distinctive aspect of her heft (at least to me)—her layered neck, its bulbous folds of flesh stacked successively, like scoops of a sundae, and topped with a round, reddish head so much smaller than the rest of her—the Pakistani clothes didn’t change that one bit.

  Nathan was there, too.

  I was standing with Father and Sonny by the grill in the middle of the lawn when he made his memorably awkward entrance. Mina and Adrienne were sitting on the back patio, their hands buried in a bowl of ground kabab meat between them. The patio door slammed shut with a resounding thwack, and I looked up to see Nathan on the patio, three large bottles of soda held against his body, a confused look on his face. Father noticed him and waved. Nathan made some sort of gesture resembling a nod back. He hesitated as he made his way past the two women, and, stepping off the patio, he stumbled. All at once, he was on the ground, the sodas gliding across the grass around him. Nathan got up and shot a look back at the patio. Adrienne giggled. “Sorry,” Nathan said, sheepishly. He collected the bottles, then headed down toward us, his beige pants sporting fresh green stains at the knees.

  “You okay there, Chief?” Father teased.

  “Yeah…fine.” Nathan set the bottles on the table by the grill and brushed himself off. “You might wait before opening those.”

  “We can handle it, Chief.”

  Nathan nodded. “Hey, Hayat,” he said, stealing another quick glance back at the patio.

  “Hi, Dr. Wolfsohn.”

  “Call me Nathan, Hayat.” He smiled. “I’ve told you that before…”

  “Okay.”

  “Nathan. This is Sonny Buledi. Sonny Buledi, Nathan Wolfsohn. Sonny is a psychiatrist at the Medical College,” Father said. “Nathan and I work together at the hospital.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Sonny said, extending a hand.

  “Likewise.”

  “Sonny was just telling me a horror story about some of these local Pakistanis here in town,” Father said, rearranging the pieces of chicken on the grill with his tongs. “They don’t like Mr. Buledi very much…”

  “I could live with that,” Sonny said, “if it wasn’t for the way they treat my children. We were at a dinner a few weeks ago for the Medical College…The Naqvis were there…”

  “Anil Naqvi, the anesthesiologist,” Father noted for Nathan’s sake. “You know him, right?”

  “I know w
ho he is.”

  “And the Naqvi kids were calling Satya and Otto zebras. Because their mother is white and I’m Pakistani. Can you believe that?”

  “Of course I believe it,” Father said. “Praying all day long. Nothing to show for it. They’re hypocrites.”

  He pronounced the final word with relish as he poked at the meat on the grill.

  “What does that mean, Dad?” I asked.

  “What? ‘Hypocrite’?”

  I nodded. I’d heard him use it so many times.

  Father lifted the tongs, pointing them at me. “When a person pretends to be something they are not, that’s a hypocrite. Like Chatha, pretending to be a good Muslim, but who is really just filled with poison for others.”

  Sonny nodded, clearly agreeing. “Speaking of poison, you know what else Otto told me? One of the Naqvi kids was talking about how to blow up a church by filling it with gasoline and lighting a match.”

  “What?” Father was incredulous.

  “That’s the message the Naqvis are sending their children. That churches should be destroyed because Christians are kuffar…When I heard Otto say that word I just exploded.”

  “Revolting,” Father muttered under his breath.

  “What does it mean?” Nathan asked, looking back from the patio.

  “Unbelievers,” Father responded.

  “At this point, I just tell them all I’m an atheist,” Sonny said. “Just to be sure they stay away. Keep them as far from me as possible.”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard Sonny say he was an atheist. But that afternoon, I heard it anew, understanding—I thought—for the first time what it really meant. Not just that he didn’t believe in God, but almost more important, that he thought there was nothing more to life than what we were living now. For if there was no God, then there was no afterlife. And if there was one thing I’d learned from my new studies in the Quran, it was that the penalty for not believing in the afterlife was dire: