American Dervish: A Novel

by Ayad Akhtar

  I didn’t understand what she was saying, but I was emphatic: “Yes, Mom. I will. I promise.”

  She nodded, looking unrelieved. “What do you say to a man who pays no attention to you? Or your feelings? What can you tell such a man?”

  Her tone was insistent. Pleading. But I didn’t know what to answer. She went on, her voice faltering with another surge of emotion:

  “This morning we were together, behta…And he won’t speak to me. Not a word. I want him to talk about himself, tell me what he’s thinking, feeling…Anything. But he won’t do it.” Her darting eyes stilled, settling on a thought. “It’s his mother, you know. What a horrible woman. You’re so lucky you weren’t cursed with a monster like that. It’s one thing you can never overcome, kurban, a terrible mother. And then when his sister died, the woman only got worse. Sitting on a prayer rug morning, noon, and night. She wasn’t even a mother, really, when you think about it. It destroyed him. There are so many things he is missing. Missing pieces. That’s why I’m working so hard to give you the pieces he doesn’t have. So you can have a wonderful relationship with a wonderful woman someday. Having a good partner is the greatest blessing in life. The Prophet said it! And so did Freud! Your father has a wonderful partner and he doesn’t even know it!”

  She looked up at the ceiling as she continued: “What he really wants, truly…I will never know. I mean, this morning we had such a beautiful moment together.” She turned to me, her eyes suddenly glistening. “When you grow up, kurban, you’ll understand the kinds of things a man and woman can share. Beautiful things. We were sharing such a beautiful moment together. All I wanted was to know how he was feeling! That’s all! And if he didn’t want to say anything, he should just tell me. But no! Instead he finds a way to hurt me. He’s a cruel man. All he had to do was not say anything instead of what he said…”

  I was confused. I thought she was upset because he hadn’t spoken when she wanted him to. Now she was complaining that he had spoken and shouldn’t have.

  “When you grow up, sweetie, and when you’re with a woman, a good woman, be sure you learn this lesson: Never talk to her about other women. She should be the only woman for you. And even if you are thinking about another woman, for whatever reason, don’t tell her about it. Keep it to yourself. It’s cruel and cowardly to do anything else.”

  She paused, her gaze narrowing as she looked into me deeply.

  “He doesn’t like my mouth, he told me. Not the way he likes the mouths of his white prostitutes. Free hearts, free minds, free mouths, he said. Not like Eastern women, who are heavy and dark and mentally imprisoned,” she said, mocking his delivery. “What the filthy man really means is that they’ll put their mouths anywhere, like animals. So he can put his mouth anywhere. Like an animal. That’s what they want and that’s what they like. It’s disgusting.” She paused, her own mouth contorted with pain. “If that’s what he wants, so be it. But he’ll never get me to do it.”

  I didn’t understand. Where did Father want to put his mouth?

  She went on: “Listen to me, Hayat. Listen to me and never forget what I’m telling you. If you give yourself to filth and garbage, you will become filth and garbage. You will become the sum of what you desire. Your desires make you what you are.” I was still trying to figure out where Father wanted to put his mouth, and as I heard her say “filth and garbage,” an image popped into my mind: Father, with a white woman by his side, both of them leaned over a heap of garbage, picking at pieces of trash with their teeth.

  “Promise me, behta. Promise me you won’t end up like him. That you won’t live your life like him. That you won’t do things that you know you shouldn’t do. Promise me, kurban. Promise.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  Mother started to cry again, now burying her face in my pillow. Her sobbing shook the mattress. I held her tightly. When she finally stopped—my neck and arm dripping wet from her tears—we fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  That afternoon, Nathan showed up looking like he’d heard about my reaction to his decision to convert: He was wearing a white knit skullcap, he hadn’t shaved, and when he greeted me, it was with his hand held over his heart and a quiet “Salaam alaikum.” Somehow, his complexion looked different to me now than it had on the night of July Fourth. In his skullcap, with the reddish stubble growing in along his chin and cheeks, Nathan looked swarthier. Healthy. More like one of us.

  Mother took Imran to the grocery store, leaving me with Mina and Nathan. Mina made three cups of tea, one for each of us, and told me I could have mine only on the condition that I didn’t tell Mother about it.

  That was fine with me.

  “You want sugar, Hayat?” Nathan asked.

  “Sure.”

  Nathan dropped a spoonful in my cup. Then turned to Mina: “Meen?”

  “Sure, Nate. But after you.”

  “No. Tell me how much.” Nathan’s spoon was showing a small half teaspoon’s worth.

  “That’s good.”

  “A little more?” he asked with a smile. Mina held his gaze, smiling as well.

  “Just a bit,” she replied coyly. Nathan dipped the spoon into the small sugar jar again, then dropped it in Mina’s cup of tea.

  “There you go,” Nathan said with a flourish.

  “Thank you, Nate.”

  “Don’t thank me…Just return the favor,” he said, pushing the jar across to her. He was performing. So was she. But I wasn’t sure who for.

  “How much?” she asked.

  “One is good.”

  Mina held his gaze, dropping the spoon into his cup and stirring.

  Nathan didn’t break eye contact as he lifted the cup to his lips and sipped.

  “Mmm. Perfect. You’re so sweet, Meen. You know that?”

  Mina chuckled. “Nate, that was a terrible pun.”

  “It’s not a pun. It’s the truth. You are sweet. The sweetest thing I know.”

  Now Mina sipped, still holding his gaze. “You’re the one who’s sweet.”

  “No, you are.”

  “No, you are.”

  “No, you are…”

  “Okay. We’re both sweet.”

  I found it hard to believe that it took them so long to notice me glaring. But as soon as they did, they shifted in their chairs. Nathan cleared his throat.

  “How’s your tea, Hayat?” he asked.

  “Good.”

  “So listen, Hayat. I was thinking, there’s a story I want to tell you.”

  “What is it?”

  “About Abraham.”

  “Hazrat Ibrahim, behta,” Mina added. Nathan looked over at Mina.

  “Right, Ibrahim as he’s called in the Quran…I wanted to tell you a little bit about the man that the Prophet, peace be upon him, respected so much. He used to call Ibrahim the true father of Islam.”

  I turned to Mina when he said this. She nodded.

  So Nathan proceeded with his story of Ibrahim, the man he described as the one destined to bring the truth of the one and only God to the world. He told the story I would later read in the Quran: Ibrahim, son of a builder of idols, who, even as a young boy, thought the statues his father made were ridiculous. He couldn’t understand why people expected a piece of stone or wood to help or harm them. The statues never ate the offerings worshippers laid before them; they couldn’t move or talk. Why did anyone believe these idols had any power at all?

  One day, young Ibrahim went up into the mountains. And it was here Allah would reveal the truth to him. While staring at the sky, Ibrahim realized that some people worshipped stars and others the moon and others still the sun, but that there was only One who had created all these things that appeared and disappeared. And Ibrahim realized this One was God, the one and only Lord of the Universe. And in that very moment, Ibrahim heard the heavens say his name:

  “O Ibrahim!”

  And he knew it was the Lord speaking to him.

  Ibrahim fell on the ground, crying out: “I submit to you
, Lord of the Universe!”

  Ibrahim went back to his people to share the truth with them. He reasoned and debated and bore witness to the miracle he’d experienced. No one listened. His enraged father threatened to stone him if he rejected the idols. But Ibrahim didn’t relent. He went to the riverfront altars, where the idols had been gathered for a religious holiday, the food offerings laid out before them. “Can you eat this food?” Ibrahim yelled at the statues. They kept silent. “What is the matter with you that you don’t speak?” he mocked.

  And then he raised his ax and smashed the false gods.

  Ibrahim was arrested. The people decided to burn him alive for what he’d done. They dug a deep pit and filled it with fire, then threw Ibrahim inside. But the flames didn’t burn him, for Allah had decreed that the fire be only coolness and safety for him. And so Ibrahim sat in the flames and did not burn, and when he emerged, the people were amazed. He told the king the truth of our Lord, and finally people started to follow him. And so it was that Ibrahim became the first prophet of Islam.

  I kept looking over at Mina as Nathan told his tale. She nodded all the way. When he was finished with the story, he had this to say: “Ibrahim had two sons, Hayat. Did you know that? One of them was named Isaac…”

  “And the other was Ismail,” I said, completing his sentence.

  “Right, Ishmael…So from Isaac’s sons came the Jews, and from Ishmael’s sons came the Muslims. That means all of us here at this table are children of Abraham.”

  Mina was watching him, proud. She reached out and took his hand, pressing tightly.

  He smiled at her, then at me.

  I wasn’t sure what to make of it all, but I smiled back.

  Nathan was staying for dinner. Which meant when Mother got home from the store—looking almost as miserable and beat up as she had that morning while crying in my bed—the task of babysitting Imran fell on me. I took him down into the family room, where we built a tent from bedsheets taped together and held up at various points with poles pilfered from the mudroom’s mops and brooms. I called this motley construction our castle keep. We transferred enough of our things inside—toys (for him), a Quran (for me), and a chess board and pillows (for both of us)—to have no foreseeable reason to ever leave again.

  We started with a game of chess. I’d since relented on my vow to never play with him again, and he’d been doing his best to abide by rules that, in fairness to him, could not have been easy for a five-year-old to learn. But he was working at it. Like his mother, Imran was intelligent, and now that he actually wanted to learn, he was playing better chess than anyone could have expected for his age.

  Imran had already heard my basics of chess strategy many times, the three rules I’d learned in Mr. Marshak’s third-grade chess club: get your pieces out; protect your pieces once they’re in play; control the center of the board. We went through the rules again that afternoon before beginning a new game, and a few minutes into it, I asked him if he remembered them. He repeated the first two rules back to me, but couldn’t recall the last. So I went over it again. And when, after another move, I asked him to repeat what I’d taught him, he still couldn’t remember the last rule.

  “You don’t have a very good memory, do you?” I sniped.

  He looked confused. I leaned forward and took hold of his arms. “Control. The. Center. Of. The. Board.”

  “Control the center of the board.”

  “Repeat it,” I said.

  He did. But it wasn’t enough for me. “Don’t forget it,” I said, still holding his arms.

  “I won’t, bhaiya,” he replied, starting to whine. I’d been ignoring the fact that he’d recently been calling me “brother,” but the fact was, he was starting to feel like a little brother after all.

  “You want me to play with you, right?”

  “Yes,” he whimpered.

  “Then don’t whine, bhai.”

  He nodded, his eyes lighting up to hear me use the word.

  I held on, tighter.

  “I want you to remember something else, too,” I said, grave. “Look around you. Do you see this? Do you see the sheets? The castle keep? Do you see all this?”

  He nodded, alarmed.

  “We are in our castle keep. We are here, inside it. It is around us. I want you to remember this moment right now. I want you to remember and never forget it for the rest of your life.” I repeated it over and over. He kept saying he wouldn’t forget. Something in me finally satisfied, I let him go.

  Mina appeared at the entrance. “How beautiful,” she said. “Can I join you boys?”

  “Is it okay?” I asked Imran. He thought for a second, then nodded, and Mina came crawling in on all fours.

  “Where’s Nathan?” I asked.

  “He went home, behta,” she said as she took up one of Imran’s Star Wars figures and began to play with her son. Imran took the figure from her hand and showed her how to hold it. “Like this,” he explained, frustrated, “not like that.” Mina looked at me, shrugging. She couldn’t really tell the difference.

  Drifting down from the kitchen was a vaguely unpleasant, slightly ammoniac odor.

  “What’s that smell?” I asked.

  “Your mom’s cooking kidneys, Lahori style,” Mina said with eagerness.

  “Smells like rubber.”

  “Maybe. But they don’t taste like that.”

  “Never had them.”

  Mina’s expression contracted with disbelief. “I don’t believe that, behta. You must have had them. They’re your father’s favorite meal.”

  “So why is she cooking them?”

  “What do you mean, behta?”

  “If they’re Dad’s favorite, why is she cooking them?”

  “She wanted to do something nice for your father.”

  “Why?” I asked, sharply.

  “Why?” Mina looked surprised at my question.

  “Forget about it,” I said, crawling out of the tent.

  If Mother’s intention had been to please her husband, she succeeded. He sighed with pleasure, shoveling kidneys and chapatti into his mouth, looking over at his wife between bites. “Just like in Lahore, Muneer. Just like back home.” She was glowing. He took another bite, shaking his head. “Magic…just magic.”

  “I’m glad you like them, Naveed,” Mother said.

  Father swallowed the morsel in his mouth. “What would I do without you?”

  Mother shrugged, seeming both eager and embarrassed by the directness of the question. Father was relishing the moment.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said, brightly. “I would lose myself. That’s what would happen.” Father turned to Mina. “This woman keeps me honest.”

  “That’s a good thing,” Mina said.

  “And not only that… ,” he said, mischief in his eye as he reached out and touched Mother’s arm.

  She blushed, looking down with a schoolgirl giggle.

  Was I dreaming? That morning, she’d sobbed in my arms over Father and his mouth—a conundrum that still eluded me—yet here she was now, blushing and grinning and giggling as if nothing had ever happened.

  Father looked over at me, chewing. “How do you like them?”

  “They smell like rubber. And they taste like it, too.”

  “All the better for me. I’ll have them for breakfast tomorrow,” he said in a strange high-pitched voice, as if playing some comic character. He just sounded silly to me.

  “Take them,” I said, pushing the plate away.

  Mother reached for the bread basket to take a chapatti. “Here,” she said. “Finish this with your yogurt and then you can go.”

  “I don’t like kidneys either,” Imran added.

  For once, Mina wasn’t accommodating. “You finish your food, Imran. Everything on your plate. No discussion.” Her tone was firm.

  Imran stared at her, and then looked over at Father, who leaned in over his plate and started to coo. “Mmm, so good,” Father hummed, licking his lips. Imran st
arted to laugh as he watched Father push another morsel into his mouth and begin to chew with exaggerated zeal. “Mmm,” he continued, pointing at everyone’s plate, “I’m going to finish these and finish those…and I’ll have those, too. I’ll have them all!” he growled with a gravelly faux-monster grumble. And as he reached out for Imran’s plate, the boy leaned forward and tossed a bite into his own mouth, chewing through a wide smile.

  Mother giggled some more. Mina laughed, too.

  I wanted to pinch myself.

  As we wrapped up dinner, Mina told my parents she was going to take care of the dishes. So Mother and Father got up and did something else they never did:

  They went for a walk together.

  After loading the dishwasher and wiping down the table, Mina whisked me up to her room, where she lavished on Imran and me the tale of the Prophet’s night journey to Paradise. She recounted the trip made on the back of a magical horse called the Burak, a creature with an eagle’s wings and a lion’s head who, with a single bound, flew the Prophet from Arabia to Sinai to see where Moses spoke to God, and with another bound landed at the spot in Bethlehem where Jesus was born, and finally to Jerusalem, where a gleaming ladder descended from the heavens.

  The Burak—with the Prophet on its back—​climbed its hundred rungs, ascending into Paradise.

  Through gates of emerald and pearl, the Prophet rode the Burak through heaven, beholding every splendor it had to offer, the palaces of gold set into the clouds, the fountains and rivers of milk and honey and wine that inspired without intoxicating, the hordes of virgins and praising angels and each and every one of the Almighty’s human prophets. Muhammad greeted them all, and they prayed together in a diamond mosque. Then he climbed again on the Burak and they flew farther and farther upward, through veils of light upon light, to the limit of creation itself. Finally, they came to the place where the Burak would go no farther.

  Here the Prophet looked up and saw a tree as large as the universe. This was Sidrat al-Muntaha, the farthest tree of the farthest boundary. Now the Burak left him. No one, not even Gabriel, had ever ventured so far. This was where Allah lived.

  Our Prophet stepped forward and entered the Lord’s presence.