by Ayad Akhtar
My afternoon babysitting excursions didn’t really solve the problem anyway. Just as often as not, when I got home with the boy, Nathan would still be there, and the expected tantrum was sure to bring his visit to an abrupt end. Then Father had an idea: Sundays. It was his day off, and he figured if he took Imran out for the day—to the zoo, or fishing (in which case I usually went along, too)—that would allow Mina and Nathan at least one full, worry-free afternoon each week. It worked perfectly.
In mid-June, four Sundays into their courtship, Nathan took his chances for the first time and stayed into the evening. He joined Mina and Mother in greeting us as we returned from a day on the lake, our cooler filled with the day’s fishing haul. Father pulled out the trophy of our catch—a one-pound green-and-black crappie—and held it up, bragging to everyone that the boy had caught it. (He hadn’t; Father had.) Nathan offered his hearty and heartfelt praise and, back inside the house, treated Imran to a surprise basket full of new toys. They played together for an hour after dinner, and Imran was on his best behavior. He didn’t hurl any of his new toys at Nathan’s face; he didn’t whine or wail when Mina put him to bed and came back downstairs to spend more time with Nathan.
Encouraged, that week Nathan came over after work on Wednesday. But it was too much too soon, and Imran responded with an amazing fit of petty rage. He screamed so loudly, and for so long, I wondered how it was possible for anything—man or beast—to make so much noise. Two days later, on Friday afternoon, Mother pulled me aside and asked me to watch the boy again. Nathan was coming over that night.
“Mom? Why don’t they just meet outside the house? Why does he always have to come over here?”
“Stop complaining.”
“I’m not complaining.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“I’m asking.”
“Asking what?”
“Why don’t they see each other somewhere else? So Imran doesn’t know…”
Mother’s reply was dismissive, as if she thought I should have known the answer to this already: “Because your Mina-auntie is a Muslim woman, and Muslims don’t date.”
“But they are dating.”
Mother frowned.
“Aren’t they?” I asked.
Mother shook her head. Then paused and nodded. Then she shook her head again. “Not exactly,” she finally said. And she went on to explain that she’d promised Mina’s parents to safeguard their daughter’s honor, and that though she was encouraging the relationship with Nathan, she’d imposed a strict limit on it as well: She never left the couple alone; she had to be present whenever they were together. According to Mother, this meant it wasn’t real dating.
“When they go to her room, they leave the door open. I check every ten minutes. If they want to watch something on TV, I sit here in the kitchen, listening. Last Sunday…when they wanted to go to Red Lobster? Do you think I let them go alone? Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“I did not. I went with them. They sat in the booth. Mina didn’t want me to be able to hear their conversation, so I sat on the other side, watching every move they made. Nobody in their right mind would call this dating. Hmm?”
I guessed she had a point.
It was late June.
Mother stopped in one night to check on me before heading to bed. As she peered in at the door, I turned over in bed, hoping she would notice I was still awake.
She stepped inside, whispering: “What’s wrong, meri-jaan?”
“I don’t know.”
“Up late reading?”
“No.”
“So what’s wrong?”
“Not sleepy, I guess.”
“You want your ammi to come give you some attention?”
I nodded.
“Aww,” she purred as she came and sat down next to me. She reached out and ran her fingers along my forehead. For a long, quiet moment, we stared into each other’s eyes.
“Is everything okay with Mina-Auntie?” I finally asked.
“She’s good, behta—a little confused, but good…”
“Why is she confused?”
“Things are getting serious.”
“Things?”
“For once, your father did an honorable thing. He told Nathan he should figure out his intentions. Things can’t go on like this forever. After all, Mina is an Eastern girl…” Mother paused, shaking her head ever so slightly, a wistful wetness in her eyes. “You know what that sweet man said?”
“No.”
“That he considered himself lucky she’s been so open with him. He didn’t expect she would agree to see him the way she has. And he’s grateful. He’s such a sensitive man. So intelligent. I really don’t know why he is so close to your father. What do they say? Opposites attract? Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde…”
“That’s supposed to be the same person.”
“Hmm?”
“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are the same person…I think.”
“Don’t be cheeky. My point is, Nathan is a good man. That’s what matters. That’s what I keep telling her. And a good man is hard to find. I mean, she doesn’t need to be told that. She’s seen it firsthand in her own life. And she sees it here in this house, every day.” Mother was still running her fingers along my forehead. “She’s worried because he’s Jewish. I mean, of course there’s Imran, too. Who keeps telling her he doesn’t want a white father. But that’s nonsense. She can’t make a decision about something like that because of what a five-year-old is saying.” Mother paused, drawing her hand away as she looked off. “Now she’s fixated on the fact that the man’s a Jew and what will people back home say and what will their children be, Muslim or Jewish. I keep telling her she shouldn’t be worried about that kind of thing. But she is so headstrong. Just fixated.” She chuckled, adding, almost more to herself than me, “Dr. Freud would have written quite a case study about your Mina-auntie.” Now Mother turned to me again, a sudden light in her eyes. “I keep telling her the fact that Nathan’s Jewish is a good thing. They understand how to respect women, behta. They understand how to let a woman be a woman, to let her take care of them. They understand how to give a woman attention. I told Mina-Auntie that he will give her a life she can never dream of with a Muslim man. Muslim men are terrified of women…all of them.” She leaned in, kissing me on the nose, her face just inches from mine, her soulful eyes swollen with abounding love. “That’s why I’m bringing you up differently, so that you learn how to respect a woman. That’s the truth, kurban: I'm bringing you up like a little Jew.”
What Mother said that night about Jews I’d heard before. She said these sorts of things about them—as she liked to refer to those of Jewish faith—often enough: how they were smart; how they understood the nature of money; how they never let their own kind down; how they honored the place of the mother; how they loved books; how sensitive their men were; how their souls were more potent; and what a special breed they were, which was why everyone else envied them, etc., etc., repeating without exception the litany of clichés familiar to us all, which she heard first not as clichés, but as praise from the lips of her father, who instilled in his children a belief that Jews were the special people, blessed by God above others, difficult to bear at times, perhaps—like spoilt children in general—but with much to teach us all.
I never met my grandfather—he died soon after I was born—but I heard a lot about his respect for Jews, respect which stemmed from his experience living in their midst as a student in England in the years after the Second World War. As Mother told it, he’d been particularly impressed by what he called the Jewish respect for real learning, not the rote memorization and mindless regurgitation of tradition he saw as common to Muslims. Among the tightly knit London communities of Jews who had fled the horrors of Hitler’s Final Solution, my grandfather discovered a group of people who, though they had every reason to harden themselves—for survival’s sake—against any self-doubt or self-questioning
, on the contrary debated all kinds of issues, especially religious ones. He spent a great deal of time with one family in particular, the Goldenbergs, who lived next door and befriended the then-young man from Pakistan studying to be a barrister. Years later, my grandfather would regale his children with tales of the Goldenbergs, how they and their guests used to kiss books, even ones that weren’t holy; how they would joyously sing their ritual songs before and after dinner; and how openly they would discuss everything from the meanings of their customs to recent developments in science and their implications for what was taught in the Torah. This intellectual curiosity was shared by many of the Jews my grandfather came to know while living in London’s slums, an engagement with ideas that did not prevent the Goldenbergs or any of their friends from offering prayers or invoking God at meals or keeping to their worship. My grandfather discovered from his contact with these London Jews that thinking did not have to weaken one’s bond to tradition, but could actually strengthen it. It was not what he learned in his own religious upbringing at Punjabi mosques, where he, like so many good Sunnis, was taught that pursuing knowledge for its own sake was the sure sign one had fallen from the straight path leading to God.
But whereas my grandfather’s respect for the Jewish culture was specific to certain qualities of mind he believed to be authentic enlargements of life, Mother’s admiration for things Semitic was considerably more quirky. Case in point: There was the time she discovered the only kosher butcher shop in town. It was on the North Side, a thirty-minute journey if traffic was good, and we’d passed it by chance one day. She stopped the car to peer through the window, oddly intrigued—even enchanted—by the sight of Jews, young and old, chopping and buying meat. The next day she was back to purchase lamb chops she cooked for us that night, announcing to Father and me that the meat was “not only holier, but better, too.” (Holier, she could claim, because Jews slaughtered their animals as we Muslims did, by bleeding them to death as an imam or rabbi stood over the animal and spoke God’s name.) And so despite the considerably longer drive, we began eschewing the packaged cuts at the local grocer for Yakov’s Kosher Meats, and it wasn’t simply the sanctity (or quality) of the meat that made up for the inconvenience. At Yakov’s, Mother enjoyed herself perhaps more than a patron ever did at a butcher shop. She would linger, speaking to Yakov Brustein and his two sons about everything from the weather to the meaning of Yom Kippur.
I remember the latter conversation vividly, for it lasted more than a half hour, and in its wake, Mother decided the Jewish Day of Atonement was as fine an idea as there had ever been about a holiday, and that everyone, Jewish or not, should also be celebrating it. Which meant, of course, that we should be celebrating it. That fall, she kept me home from school on the appointed day, but we didn’t really atone for our sins, unless you consider heading for the mall and enjoying plain slices at the pizzeria atonement. After pizza, we made our way to the department store to buy me a new pair of corduroy pants, the same pants, incidentally, that I wore to school the next day with a note folded into a back pocket explaining that I had been kept home for a religious holiday. Mrs. Ike, my third-grade teacher—a woman whose Nordic facial physiognomy was as forbidding and severe as her soul was gentle and joyous—asked me with innocent curiosity what holiday it had been.
“Yom Kippur,” I replied, feeling a curious relish.
Mrs. Ike was confused. “But you’re Moslem, aren’t you?”
I hesitated. Somehow, I don’t think it had fully dawned on me—though it would, and forcefully so, in the coming months—that you couldn’t be Muslim and Jewish at the same time.
“Yeah. We’re Muslims,” I said.
“That’s what I thought your mother told me,” Mrs. Ike added, still confused. And then she continued, with a bright tone and a sudden smile intended to make clear she was not judging, just interested: “I didn’t realize Jews and Moslems celebrated the same holidays. That’s so neat. You learn something new every day, now, don’t you?”
Yet Mother’s mostly amusing penchant for all things Jewish was not the whole story about our relation to the Semites. For while my family’s feelings toward those of the Jewish persuasion was different than that of many Muslims I’ve known in that there was a lighter side to it, the more pervasive, darker strain of Muslim anti-Semitism was something I was exposed to many times, and with particularly memorable—even decisive—intensity one December night when I was nine.
My parents had been invited to a dinner at the Chatha house (Ghaleb Chatha, the affluent pharmacy owner whom Mother was always trying to get Father to befriend). There’d been heavy snow that evening, and I recall sitting in the bay window of the Chathas’ palatial living room peering out at a sky that seemed to be breaking apart into tiny white pieces and drifting down everywhere.
“Is it still snowing, behta?” Chatha asked me as he returned from the hall. He was a tall, gaunt, ashen-brown man whose acne-scarred face was framed by a white curtain of a beard, a thick, manicured strip running from ear to ear. His arms were long and so were his thin, wrinkled fingers. As he patted me on the head, I nodded, perplexed he’d asked me a question for which the response was right there in the window before him. He smiled, then returned to his place in an armchair at the center of the room, where the men were gathered. Father was there; Chatha; Sonny Buledi, the psychiatrist with the Austrian wife (this was back before Sonny had taken to calling himself an atheist and made himself persona non grata in the local Pakistani community); and two others I didn’t know: a portly engineer named Majid; and a bald, skinny, nervously intense man named Dawood. The men were sitting separate from the women, who were in the kitchen. I was the only boy there that night. Satya and Otto Buledi were with their mother, who hadn’t come along.
“Where’s the family tonight?” Dawood asked Sonny. “Why didn’t you bring them?”
“They’re in Austria,” Sonny replied. “With my wife’s family.”
“Why aren’t you with them?” Dawood asked.
“Work. But I’ll be going next week.”
“For Christmas?”
Sonny looked hesitant.
Chatha looked over. “Buledi-sahib, don’t tell me you’ve started celebrating Christmas?” he asked, pointedly. His accent was odd, its thick, mannered, British overlay deforming—but not at all concealing—the Punjabi click and lilt underneath.
“I don’t celebrate it,” Sonny said, defensive.
“But you let your kids celebrate it.”
“It’s a cultural holiday, as I see it. A chance for the kids to spend time with their mother’s family.”
“Cultural holiday,” Dawood said with a nod. “I like that. I think that’s completely right. Not a religious holiday at all anymore. They’ve taken it and turned it into something else completely. Merchandise. Capitalism.” Dawood glanced at Chatha. “That’s the real purpose of Christmas now.”
Chatha nodded, agreeing. “They don’t even think about their prophet anymore. Just about buying and selling things. Retailing…”
“You know, it reminds me of a book I read,” Dawood said. “By a chap named Max Weber. You should take a look at it, Dr. Buledi.”
“Not The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism?” Sonny asked, surprised.
“Exactly!” Dawood exclaimed with a delighted clap. And then, all at once, he was frowning. “You mean The Christian Ethic…don’t you?”
“It’s called The Protestant Ethic…”
Majid chimed in from his place across from Sonny and Father, who were sitting side by side on the couch, “It’s the same thing. Protestant just means Christian.”
“Not quite,” Sonny replied. “There are different kinds of Christians. Protestants are one kind.”
“They’re all the wrong kind,” Chatha offered, flatly.
Sonny looked over at him, as if wanting to respond. But he held his tongue.
Dawood continued in the pause, enthusiastically: “So you know about this Max Weber, Dr. Buledi?
! The fellow is impressive. He really tells it like it is!” Dawood turned to the others. “You’d never find a Muslim like him, someone who could stand up against his own people and tell the truth behind all the lies.” Dawood gesticulated with glee. “Weber shows how Christians created capitalism! He shows you that capitalism is their real religion! He even says it! That it’s all a conspiracy! Everything is an excuse to make money!”
“That’s stretching things, Dawood,” Sonny corrected. “It’s not really what he’s saying.”
“It’s what I read. And trust me: I was paying attention.”
“Be that as it may,” Sonny said with a shake of his head. Up until now, he, like everyone else, had been speaking the usual English-and-Urdu hybrid that most in our community spoke—but now he spoke only English, and his tone was cold, academic, with a hint of disdain: “Weber is talking about how a certain mind-set, a certain Protestant way of thinking and being, had the effect of making people invest their money instead of spend it.” He spoke slowly, as if uncertain those he was talking to would understand. “One of the differences between Protestants and Catholics, Weber says, is that Protestants just don’t give their money away to the Church the way the Catholics do. And they also don’t seem to want to spend money on themselves. So what ended up happening was that Protestants would make money and just continue to save it. And over time, they built larger and larger pools of money. Of capital. Which they had to put somewhere. So they would invest it. And this, Weber is saying, is how capitalism really started.”