American Dervish: A Novel

by Ayad Akhtar

  “That’s right.”

  “The reception area is this way, sir,” the young man said curtly. The defiance in his tone was unmistakable. He lifted his arm and pointed down the hall. “Allow me to show you the way.”

  “Go ahead, young man!” Mirza offered, warmly, stepping forward to stand between Father and the tuxedoed man.

  “Will you take Hayat with you?” Father said to Mirza. “I’m stepping out.”

  “Very good, Doctor-sahib.”

  Father turned to me. “If your Mother asks where I am, tell her I had to make some calls.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I looked over at Farhaz. He was staring at me. I tried to keep staring back, but I couldn’t.

  “Let’s go, boys,” Mirza said, patting me on the back as he led us off.

  The Atwater’s chandelier ballroom was impressive. As you walked in through the twenty-foot-high mahogany double doors, it hung there before you: the enormous glittering chandelier—easily the size of a small elephant—for which the room was named. It sparkled, like a diamond in the sun, filling the room with white light.

  The room’s paneling was—like the doors and much of the hotel’s woodwork—a deep mahogany hue. The flooring was a lighter, elm shade. Two sets of a dozen tables each had been set up—tables for the men on one side, for the women on the other—each covered with a green tablecloth and a light blue vase at the center, filled with fresh white peonies. Along a wall of windows to the left, a dais had been raised, on which three chairs and a table stood, all draped with golden fabric. We were not the first ones there: Caterers were setting up trays and stacks of plates along the far end of the room; a young man was standing behind the dais at a mixing board, testing the PA system; and there was a heavy-shouldered woman in a head scarf wandering among the tables and placing tiny cards before the chairs, with a girl who must have been her daughter—also in a head scarf—walking along in tow.

  Mirza led us to a table, but he looked unsure. He turned to his son. “Go find out from your auntie Neema where we’re supposed to sit.”

  Farhaz lumbered off toward the woman and her daughter.

  “Where are you from, behta?” Mirza asked me.

  “We live here.”

  “That’s convenient. We just drove in from Michigan. Seven hours’ drive and not a scenic minute. Seven hours! My back is killing me.” Mirza looked over at his son, who was consulting a sheet of paper the large woman was holding. “Oh, all this fuss for nothing. I’m just going to sit…So what’s your name, again, behta?”

  “Hayat.”

  “Hayat. What a nice name. You are a hafiz, too, behta?”

  “Not yet.”

  “But you’re on your way, no?”

  I nodded.

  Mirza looked over at his son again, who was now making his way back toward us. “It took him three years. He had a very good teacher…But don’t get the wrong idea. I paid for every minute of that man’s time. It cost me a fortune.” Mirza paused, considering. “But it’s worth it. Heaven is worth every penny and a hundred million more.”

  “Dad, we’re at table fifteen,” Farhaz said, approaching.

  “Which one is that?”

  “Says by the bouquet. This is table twelve. Fifteen’s over there,” Farhaz said, pointing.

  “What a lot of fuss,” Mirza complained as he rose.

  “I don’t know what table you’re at, though,” Farhaz said to me.

  “I’ll just sit with you.”

  He shrugged. I followed them to the new table, where we all settled in.

  “So, Farhaz,” Mirza said. “Our young friend here is studying to be a hafiz.”

  “I know, Dad. Uncle Sunil told us. I’m not deaf.” The boy’s tone was surprisingly dismissive. His father didn’t look pleased, but instead of saying anything, Mirza just looked away.

  People were appearing at the double doors. “There’s Salman!” Mirza exclaimed. He got up and went over to embrace a man with a thick handlebar mustache and a beige Afghan hat.

  “So how far are you?” Farhaz asked me. His expression was as blank as his tone.

  “Huh?”

  “How many juz have you got through?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Just nineteen more, huh? That’s pretty cool.”

  I nodded.

  “Boy, am I fucking relieved that’s over. What a fucking nightmare.”

  “What?”

  He looked at me, confused. “Memorizing that stuff. Like drinking castor oil every day for three years. Jeez-fucking-Louise.”

  For a second, what he was saying just didn’t compute. And once I realized he was talking about the Quran, I didn’t know what to say.

  “What do you say we hit this shit hole?”

  “We do what?”

  “You’re a little wet behind the ears, aren’t you? I said: Let’s check out the hotel, see what they got goin’ on.”

  “Oh—okay,” I said.

  We got up from our places, but before we left, Farhaz went over to the girl laying out the place cards, said something to her, then pointed at the double doors. She nodded.

  Farhaz looked pleased as he returned. “She’s gonna meet us when she’s done,” he said. “I told her we’d be scopin’ out the joint. Let’s go.”

  The long, mirrored hall was filling with guests, men in shalwars or suits, women in long, loose-fitting clothes, almost all of them with head scarves and holding or corralling young children. We passed an adolescent in a white skullcap. “What’s up, Hamza?” Farhaz called out.

  The boy looked over. His eyes sparkled with recognition. “Farhaz!”

  They greeted each other with high-fives. To me, the boy looked a little like Farhaz, the same wide jaw and small eyes. But he wasn’t losing his hair.

  Farhaz turned to me. “This is Hamza, my cousin. Hamza, this is Hayat.”

  “Hey, Hayat, what’s up?”

  “Nothing,” I replied.

  “So what’re you guys doing?” Hamza asked.

  “We’re gonna check out this hole in the wall,” Farhaz said. “See if this place’s got any action. Wanna come?”

  Hamza looked back at his father, another wide-jawed man with tiny eyes, who was in the midst of a conversation with an elderly man in a gray Nehru jacket. “I’munna go with Farhaz, Abu.”

  “Farhaz, behta,” said Hamza’s father. “Nice to see you. How are you?”

  “Fine, Uncle Imtiaz. How are you?”

  “Good, good. So where are you boys going?”

  “We were just going to take a look around.”

  “Okay—but don’t get into any trouble.”

  “We won’t. Don’t worry.”

  Hamza’s father nodded and returned to his conversation.

  Farhaz led us both to a large, sweeping marble staircase at the end of the hall, and we sat down at the first turn of the steps, where we had a clear view of the guests filing into the reception room.

  “Let’s wait for Zakiya,” Farhaz said. “She said she’d meet us.”

  “Zakiya, huh?”

  “I haven’t seen her in like two years. The rack she grew on her!”

  “She’s got tits. That’s for sure. But she’s our cousin.”

  “So what? We can marry our cousins in Islam.”

  Hamza shrugged. “You don’t have to spend time around her. She’s annoying. And I don’t like her face.”

  “Hate to break it to you, Hamz. But you don’t fuck a face.”

  “True.”

  Hamza looked at me. “You know what fucking is, right?”

  “Huh?”

  “Fucking. Do you know what it is?”

  “Sure,” I said. I didn’t have a clue.

  Hamza shook his head, turning back to Farhaz. “He doesn’t know. Should we tell him?”

  “Let’s do him the favor.”

  “He may get pissed off at us, like what’s-his-face.”

  “That guy’s a fucking moron.”

  “What was hi
s name?”

  “I don’t even fucking care.” Farhaz turned to me. “You’re not gonna be a moron if we tell you what fucking is, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not gonna go tattling to your mommy and daddy that the boys you met were talking dirty to you, are you?”

  “No.”

  No sooner had I replied than Farhaz had already started in: “So fucking is how you got here. It’s when your dad put his dick in your mom.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “You do know what a dick is, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “And you do know that girls don’t have dicks, right?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  Farhaz studied me for a moment. If my reply had sounded less than confident, it wasn’t because I wasn’t aware that girls didn’t have dicks, but because I wasn’t sure what they had instead. Aside from that night more than a year prior when I spied the dark triangle between Mina’s legs in the bathroom mirror, I’d never seen a naked woman.

  Farhaz was looking at me closely. “You know that’s what makes them girls, right? That they don’t have dicks. You know that, right?” he asked, insistent.

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  Farhaz kept staring at me, then turned to Hamza, exasperated. “He doesn’t know that they don’t have dicks. What is wrong with this kid?”

  Hamza explained, more gently: “Girls have a slit. Like someone came and cut off their dicks and cut them open between the legs. That’s all they’ve got. That slit. And that’s where you put it in.”

  What he was saying didn’t square with what I remembered between Mina’s legs. I didn’t recall a cut or a slit. Just that dark, triangular patch. I was confused.

  “Right,” Farhaz went on. “So when your dick gets hard, you put it inside a girl’s slit, that’s what sex is. And it’s fucking killer.”

  Sex. I’d heard the word so many times. They were both nodding like they knew what they were talking about, but what they were describing sounded so improbable, so unnecessary. It didn’t make any sense.

  “Why would you ever do that?” I asked.

  “You have to. That’s how you make a baby. You put your dick in a girl’s slit and squirt your sperm in there. That’s fucking.” Farhaz turned to Hamza. “That’s what nikah means in Arabic, by the way.”

  “What?” Hamza asked.

  “Fucking. My buddy told me. He’s an Arab. I told him I was going to a nikah, and he told me it means ‘fucking.’”

  They both laughed.

  I wasn’t really listening to them anymore. My mind was clearing with a sudden, alarming thought.

  “Sperm?” I asked. “What does it look like?”

  “White and sticky,” Farhaz answered. “Like Elmer’s Glue.”

  “But it smells more like bleach,” Hamza added.

  They laughed again.

  All at once, I realized that the white milky fluid that came out of my penis that afternoon I touched myself was sperm. He wasn’t lying. And the dawning truth that I could not escape whatever they were describing dislodged a torrent of unease inside me.

  “It all sounds disgusting,” I replied, angry.

  Farhaz held my gaze for a moment, then shook his head. “What’s wrong with this kid?” he said to Hamza.

  “He thinks that’s disgusting. Wait’ll he hears about blow jobs.”

  Farhaz looked at me and laughed. “That’s when you put your dick in a girl’s mouth and she sucks on it.”

  Now I was sure they were making fun of me.

  “Did you ever have a dream with the Prophet, Farhaz?” I asked, defiant.

  “Did I what?”

  “Did you have a dream with the Prophet, peace be upon him?”

  Farhaz frowned, looking confused and not a little annoyed. “No. What’s your point?”

  I shrugged. “I did.”

  “So what?” Farhaz asked.

  I shrugged again, feeling inwardly triumphant.

  Hamza was looking at me, his gaze newly glistening with interest.

  Farhaz snickered, turning away. “There she is,” he said getting up. Zakiya was standing at the bottom of the staircase.

  “Hey, guys,” Zakiya offered cutely as she made her way up toward us. Sensitized to the matter, I had to admit her chest was big. Very big. “So what are you guys doing?”

  Farhaz was smiling. “Just having a little discussion. Little Hayat here was ignorant about the birds and the bees…”

  Zakiya smiled. “And is he still?”

  “We did our best. Gotta hope for the rest…What d’you say we split up and go exploring?”

  Zakiya smiled, nodding eagerly.

  Farhaz turned to Hamza. “You take the kid and scope out the downstairs, Zakiya and I’ll take the upstairs. Meet back here”—he looked at his watch—“in half an hour.”

  “The walima’s going to start,” Zakiya objected.

  “They can stick their walima in the shitter.”

  Zakiya giggled.

  (After the official ceremony, called the nikah—and which took place in private with only two witnesses and an imam—the walima, or reception, followed. It was the guests’ first opportunity to see the new groom and bride.)

  “So what d’you say, Hamz?” Farhaz asked, gazing down at us.

  “Fine,” Hamza said.

  “Let’s go,” Farhaz said to Zakiya, moving up the steps and gesturing her on. She giggled some more as she hopped up the stairs after him.

  Hamza turned to me. “You ever go down to the lake?”

  I nodded. I was having a difficult time looking him in the eye. I felt troubled, exposed. I didn’t know how to shake the discomfort Farhaz had awakened in me.

  “Hey, Hayat,” Hamza prompted, briskly. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t worry about Farhaz,” Hamza said, patting me on the back. “My mom says he’s like that ’cause his mom died.”

  “His mom died?”

  “Yeah. When he was like nine.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “Yeah, it is… How about we head out to see the lake? Looks pretty cool.”

  “Okay.”

  The hall was filled with folks like us, and so was the lobby: Our various hues of brown, our baggy clothes, our skullcaps and beards, our shawls and head scarves on full display. If the help behind the desks and at the doors hadn’t been white, one could have imagined being in Cairo or Delhi or Baghdad: some architectural remnant of colonial times repossessed by the natives for their own inscrutable purposes. The young man in the tuxedo was looking on unhappily. “Keep! It! Moving! People!” he shouted as if addressing a crowd he wasn’t sure understood what he was saying. “To! The! Back!” he yelled again, exasperated. But the crowd paid him no mind. It was a growing, unruly mass, jabbering and moving about aimlessly. The young man finally gave up and returned to his perch beside the concierge’s podium, where he buried his head in his hands.

  Outside, Hamza and I made our way along the sidewalk lined with shops and bars and restaurants leading down to the lakeshore. Above us, the cloud-swept sky was grim, dark—night was falling—but along the lake, the warm yellow lights in the windows and the muffled sounds of patrons dining and enjoying the evening offered a picture of life as warm, inviting. As Hamza and I walked, I noticed a woman with sandy-blond hair move past us quickly. She was wearing a thin, black overcoat, which her fingers—painted bright red—clutched at the lapels. As she hurried along, I caught the faint trace of a familiar lilac scent. The woman stopped at the door of a restaurant, and as she turned to pull it open, I realized I knew her face. I wasn’t sure why.

  She disappeared inside.

  “You cold?” Hamza asked.

  It was chilly, but I was wearing a heavy sweater. I shook my head. We walked on, now passing the windows of the restaurant into which the woman had disappeared. I glanced inside. I didn’t see her.

  “So what’s the deal
with this dream? You really saw the Prophet?”

  “Peace be upon him,” I added.

  “Right. Peace be upon him.”

  “I had a dream he saved me from this crazy woman who was chasing me. He took me to a mosque and then we led the prayer together.”

  “You led prayer with the Prophet? Jeez. That is so cool… I heard that if you see the Prophet in a dream you’re gonna go to heaven.”

  The conversation was only making me more uneasy. More than ever, I wanted the dream to mean what Hamza was saying, but I knew it didn’t.

  We wandered farther on, toward the railing along the lakefront. “So what’d he look like?”

  “Who?”

  “Who do you think? The Prophet.”

  I waited.

  “Sorry,” Hamza said, adding, “Peace be upon him.”

  “I don’t know. He looked good.” Then I added: “He had a gap between his front teeth.”

  “I’ll bet he was a badass,” Hamza said, nodding. “That’s what my dad always says. That if the Prophet was still around, we’d be running the show. Like Bo Svenson on Walking Tall. You ever see that show?”

  I shook my head.

  “He’s this sheriff and all he has to do is carry a stick and everybody listens to him. My dad says that if the Prophet was alive today—sorry, peace be upon him—then we wouldn’t have any problems in Israel. He says Palestinians are babies. They want someone to take care of them. The Prophet would never let anybody—sorry, peace be upon him—the Prophet would never let anyone treat him that way. He would have taken over Israel by now if he was around.”

  I heard what he was saying, but I wasn’t really listening. We were looking out at the lake now. Its surface rose and fell gently, like a slow steady breath. It was beautiful.

  “Pretty cool,” Hamza said. “It’s one big lake. Sure looks like an ocean to me.”

  “I guess.”

  “You cold?” Hamza asked.

  “Kind of.”

  “We should go back. My dad’s gonna be pissed if I’m gone too long.”

  “Hold on,” I said as he pulled away. “Is it true what he was saying about putting your dick in a girl’s mouth?”

  Hamza nodded. “Sounds weird, doesn’t it? What’s even weirder is some guys put their mouth in a girl’s slit. They stick their tongue in there.”