American Dervish

by Ayad Akhtar

  “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:

  When the Trumpet finally sounds,

  It will be a terrible day for the Unbeliever.

  I will visit calamity on him!

  For he who thought and planned,

  Woe to him!

  Inflated with pride, he said:

  “This Quran is nothing but magic,

  Nothing but a tale told by a mortal!”

  I will throw him into Hell’s Fire!

  And what will make you see what this Fire is?

  It leaves nothing and spares nothing.

  Burning to black mortal skin!

  As I stood there looking at Sonny, I felt moved. There was nothing in his round, pleasing face—or in the warm, intelligent eyes peering over his glasses’ wire frames—to explain how such a likable man could have come to such an extraordinary and unfortunate conclusion.

  “How long do you grill the thighs?” Sonny asked Father.

  “Now there’s a worthy topic…Depends on the heat. But in this case, maybe four minutes each side. Not too long. You want to make sure you don’t dry them out.” Father picked at the chicken again with his tongs. “Still pink at the bone. Another couple of minutes.” Father glanced over at Nathan. “What’s going on over there, Chief? You look confused.”

  “Confused?” Nathan asked, looking abruptly away from the patio. “No… just enjoying the afternoon.”

  “Enjoying the afternoon?” Father repeated, perplexed. He looked over at the patio himself now, where Adrienne was giggling as she talked to Mina, stealing looks our way.

  Father turned to Nathan with a wry smile. “Sneaky,” he teased.

  “What are you talking about, Naveed?”

  “No need to get touchy. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “Wrong with what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Nate. I wasn’t born yesterday. I don’t blame you…she’s a pearl.”

  “Who?”

  “Who do you think?” Father said sarcastically, shaking his head. “Her name’s Mina. She’s Muneer’s best friend from childhood. I’ve told you about her. She’s the one who’s been living with us.”

  “Oh,” Nathan responded, blankly.

  “She is a beauty. That’s for sure,” Sonny added.

  “Yes, she is,” Father replied with sudden, uncharacteristic softness. He was looking down at the grill now. “She reminds me of my sister sometimes,” he said quietly.

  “Huma?” Nathan inquired, with sudden concern.

  Father nodded. I was surprised Nathan knew the name of the sister Father had lost to pneumonia when they were both in their late teens. He’d only spoken of her to me once. Losing her, Mother used to say, was the one thing he never got over and probably never would.

  Father lifted his tongs abruptly and pointed them playfully at Nathan. “That woman wastes almost as much time staring at paper as you do. The two of you will get along…how do they say it? Famously?”

  “Staring at paper?” Sonny asked.

  “Naveed’s got a thing about reading,” Nathan answered. “That’s what he calls reading—staring at paper. I don’t know how he gets away with it. I mean, the man was first in his class in medical school…”

  “Not by reading.”

  “Then what?”

  “Chief. When you need to get something done, you figure out a way.”

  Nathan’s eyes lit up with a thought. “You cheated?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Then?”

  “Let’s just say…I got other people to read for me…”

  Nathan and Sonny laughed.

  “Staring at paper,” Sonny muttered to himself as he shook his head.

  “Am I right? Or am I right? Sonny?” Father was smiling, broadly.

  “For the record, I don’t think you’re right. But that’s not really your point, is it?”

  “Good man! Smart man!” Father said, now pointing his tongs at Sonny. He turned to me. “Can you hand me that plate, behta?”

  I gave him the long serving tray that lay on the table beside me. He started picking the pieces of chicken off the grill.

  “The point is, Nate, you and Mina could actually enjoy wasting your time together.”

  “Which is actually the recipe for domestic bliss, in my opinion,” Sonny added.

  “Something I wouldn’t know too much about,” Father joked. He glanced at the patio. “They’re looking over here. Go over. Talk to her. Now’s your chance.”

  “Maybe later,” Nathan said. “She looks busy.”

  “She is busy. Busy with the kababs that you should go and get from her. Tell her I was asking for them. There’s your excuse.”

  Nathan laid a long look on Father.

  “Go. Go on…”

  “You’re something else, Naveed,” Nathan said, shaking his head. Then he headed off in Mina’s direction. I watched him as he went up to her and put out his hand. She held her own hands up with a shrug, both covered with the ground meat she and Adrienne had been fashioning into kababs. Just then Adrienne got up, bringing over the very kababs Nathan was supposed to have asked Mina for. With Adrienne gone, Nathan asked her another question. She laughed. Nathan pulled up a folding chair and sat down beside her.

  My heart was pounding.

  “Hey, Hayat!” I heard. It was Otto—Sonny’s round, freckled son—huffing over to the grill. “Satya’s gonna take us ninja exploring. Wanna come?”

  “Go on, kurban,” Father said. “Play with your friends.”

  I looked back at the patio. Mina twirled her head to one side. Nathan was talking. I turned my back on both of them and followed as Otto waddled away.

  Satya Buledi was only a year older than me, but he was big for his age, tall, broad across the shoulders—he looked like he was already in high school—and with a striking head of straw-blond hair that gleamed appealingly against the darker, caramel hue of his skin. The girls apparently loved him.

  Satya was into comic books, Daredevil in particular, where he’d recently discovered ninjas. Ninjas, he explained, were not like samurai. They were spies and assassins, and they didn’t fight out in the open or follow the rules of war. The most important thing, he said, pulling a napkin from his pocket, was that ninjas covered their faces. That way, no one could ever know who they really were. Satya tied the napkin to his face. Now we were all going to become ninjas together, he said, but ninjas who fought for the good. He asked me if there were any wrongs in the neighborhood that needed righting. I hadn’t a clue, though I did tell him about the empty house at the end of the block that the neighborhood kids said was haunted. So we tied napkins to our faces and snuck through a succession of backyards to the home in question, though once we got there, Satya was disappointed to see through its windows only empty rooms filled with debris and dust.

  “You said it was haunted.”

  “I said some of the kids said it was.”

  “Why doesn’t anyone live here?”

  I shrugged. I had no idea.

  “Well, whatever happened here—and it must have been something—it’s too late to fix now.”

  Satya led us along bushes and across more yards, and had us slinking up on neighbors’ windows. There were lots of housewives preparing meals or lemonade in their kitchens, and a smaller number of husbands with their sons watching baseball in their family rooms. But that was about it.

&
nbsp; On our way back up the road, Satya disappeared behind the Kuhlmanns’ house, a green-and-white split-level that stood across the street. He climbed up a tree, and—peering in at one of the bedroom windows—finally looked like he’d found something worthwhile.

  “Hayat, you gotta check this out.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong…”

  “So what is it?”

  “A girl, and some guy. They’re making out.”

  “That’s Gina. And her boyfriend.”

  “No kidding. You gotta see this.”

  “I wanna see it, too,” Otto whined.

  “Stop eating so many Doritos, then,” Satya snapped. “Maybe then you’ll lose enough weight to climb a tree.”

  “I’m not too fat to…”

  Satya interrupted him: “Stay down and watch the kid, Otto. Hayat, you come up here…”

  I looked over at Otto with a shrug, then reached out and grabbed the trunk, pulling myself up along the knobs.

  “Make sure your ninja mask doesn’t fall off, Hayat,” Satya said.

  Imran moaned down below that he wanted to climb, too.

  “You can’t climb the tree by yourself,” Otto said to him. “You’re too small.”

  I pulled myself up into the tangle of branches, finding the footing that led me to the branch where Satya was perched. In the window directly facing us, Gina was sitting on her bed with her boyfriend, kissing.

  “She looks cute,” Satya said.

  “She is,” I said.

  I didn’t know Gina well—she was three years older than me—but she’d lived across the street from us for almost two years now, and for most of that time, she’d been going out with the stocky, curly-haired boy sitting on her bed. I didn’t know his name—Gina didn’t talk to me, or any of the younger neighborhood boys—but I knew they were together because I used to see him walk her home from school. My own school, Mason Elementary, got out before the junior high did, and there were more than a few times when I would be out on the front lawn and see them appear at the end of the street, Gina with her books pressed to her chest, that boy by her side, slowly pushing his bike along. And there were also times when, passing through the living room—which had a clear view of Gina’s garage—I would find the two of them standing in the empty bay, kissing.

  One afternoon, as I watched at the living room window, Mother came up behind me. “Look at that,” she said with disgust, “the training of a white woman…How old is she?”

  “I don’t know…Fourteen?”

  “Fourteen?”

  “I think.”

  “Fourteen,” she repeated, “and look at her.”

  Gina’s boyfriend was caressing her hair now as he stared into her eyes, the two of them looking lost in dreamy oblivion, enveloped in a sweet and perfect mist.

  Mother continued, sharply: “Already using herself, using her body to get men. It’s shameless. They’re like animals…No…They’re worse than animals. Even animals have some self-respect.” Then she turned to me abruptly. “Go to your room. You don’t need to be staring at prostitutes. You’ll end up like your father. Go…go!”

  Back in the tree, Satya had inched his way farther out onto the branch, trying to get a better view. Gina’s boyfriend was now reaching beneath her pink sweater as he pecked at her lips. “Check it out,” Satya said. “He’s going to second base on her.”

  “Second base?”

  “First base is kissing. Second’s up the shirt. Third’s down the pants. A home run’s all the way.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. “All the way?” I asked.

  “Sex? You know what sex is, right?”

  I stared at Satya, not knowing what to say. All I knew was that I’d heard the word.

  He smiled. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what sex is?”

  In the window, Gina’s boyfriend had lifted her sweater to reveal her smooth, flat belly and a white bra above it.

  “What’s going on in there?” Otto asked in a whining voice, peering up at us.

  “Shut up,” Satya hissed. I watched him, his eyes wide with wonder over the napkin he still wore over his nose and mouth. I wondered if that’s what my eyes looked like when Mother caught me at the window. Staring at prostitutes, she’d called it.

  Satya realized I was looking at him. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “I don’t know what you’re looking at me for. You’re missing the real action.”

  “I don’t want the real action.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  I pulled the napkin from my face and started to climb back down the tree.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home,” I said with disgust.

  Back at the house, Mina and Nathan were still sitting on the patio. Even at twenty yards, I was struck by her. She looked different. Sharper. Even more magnetic than usual. Her face held my gaze, and I felt a stinging tug in my stomach, an urgency. She was separate from me, and I needed to close that gap, to seize her somehow, to make her my own.

  I didn’t understand it.

  I stepped up onto the patio, heading for the kitchen, but as I passed their chairs, Mina reached out, pulling me to her. I felt her legs close in and hold me in place. She lifted her lips to my cheek for a kiss. “He’s like my second son…,” she purred, radiant. Her dupatta scarf was draped loosely around her head, its translucent silk gleaming in the late afternoon sun. “And if I have my way he’ll end up a bibliophile just like the two of us.”

  “Already on his way—aren’t you, Hayat?” Nathan asked with a lazy smile. He had a dazed, goofy look I found almost as unsettling as Mina’s newly arresting beauty. “With a little luck, you’ll keep the tradition going and end up as a thorn in your dad’s side,” Nathan added with a laugh. Mina laughed, too.

  “Wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, would it?” Nathan continued. “If anyone can get him to read a book someday, it’ll be his own son. Don’t you think?”

  “I doubt that,” Mina said, her eyes sparkling.

  Something was happening, but I couldn’t tell what it was. There was a charge in the air, like a cloud of whirling gnats between them.

  Mina went on: about how smart I was; how I’d begun to memorize the Quran; what a good surrogate brother I’d been for Imran. Not only was she talking about me, but I was standing locked between her legs, her arms about my waist…and yet she seemed more separate from me than ever. “I have to go to the bathroom, Auntie,” I finally said, pulling myself free.

  “Okay, kurban,” she said.

  I went through the patio door, making a point of slamming it shut behind me. But when I looked back through the window, neither of them seemed to notice.

  They were already laughing about something else.

  6

  The Dervish

  That week, the phone rang every night about half an hour after dinner. Mother would come bounding into the kitchen to grab it. “Hi, Dr. Wolfsohn…,” she would coo, “sorry, I meant… Nathan…I’m fine, Nathan. How are you?…Of course. I’ll get her…” Then Mother would put her palm over the mouthpiece and yell out: “Meen! For you! Dr. Wolfsohn!” And soon enough, Mina would appear at her side, hovering on her tiptoes as she took the phone and chirped into the receiver: “Hi, Nathan.” But before the conversation went any further, she would turn to me—I was usually still doing the dishes—and inquire, always tenderly: “Behta, is it okay if I use the phone for a little while…alone?”

  I would nod and head off to my room.

  More than once that week, I emerged an hour or so later—after homework and some verses—hoping to bypass any unfinished dishes in the sink on my way down to the family room for some television. Invariably, I’d find Mother perched at the stairs, barring the way. And over her shoulder, down on the couch at the family room’s far end, I would see Mina curled up on the corner cushion, the phone cradled lovingly against her face.
r />   “Don’t be nosy,” Mother would scold.

  “I’m not.”

  “Go finish the dishes.”

  “Fine,” I would say.

  There was no need to be nosy. Mina’s peals of joyous laughter—easy to hear, even over the sound of running water as I finished up at the sink—and her dreamy gait as she came up the stairs after her calls were over left no doubt about what was happening:

  She was smitten.

  On Thursday night, as I sat at my desk, I heard Mina screaming at someone downstairs. I came to my doorway and saw her crying as she stormed into her room and slammed the door shut. Mother would later tell me Mina’s parents had called. They’d learned of a divorced Pakistani, a dentist in South Carolina, who was looking for a wife. Without mentioning it to their daughter, the Alis had sent the man Mina’s picture. Now he wanted to meet her.

  Mina lost it. She told her parents that not only was she not interested, but there was no chance she would ever even consider another arranged marriage after what had happened with Hamed.

  Her father started screaming. She screamed back. And then he hung up on her.

  The next morning, as I readied for school, Mina was still in bed. This was odd. She was usually up early, helping Mother with breakfast, getting Imran ready for nursery school. When I left for the bus that morning, her bedroom door was shut, and when I got home that afternoon, Mother complained that Mina hadn’t come out all day. At teatime she finally emerged, shuffling along the hall and down into the kitchen, where Mother was pouring tea. Mina looked drawn, downcast, her eyes wide and sunken into darkened, cavelike sockets.

  “Hi, Auntie,” I said, trying to be cheery.

  “Hi, behta,” she mumbled.

  “Can I come see you tonight?” Since the weekend—and the subsequent nightly calls from Nathan—we’d had no time together with the Quran.

  “Don’t make your auntie’s life difficult, Hayat,” Mother said abruptly.

  “It’s fine, bhaj,” Mina said with a faint smile.

  “Let’s go,” Mother said to her friend brusquely, as she handed Mina her tea and took her by the hand.