A Sister to Honor

by Lucy Ferriss

  “What, no Wellingtons?” he said when she slid in.

  “I bought some last year. They leaked.”

  “Where’d you buy them?”

  “I think it’s called Payless?”

  He chuckled. “Silly sister. Those are cheap, you can’t expect them to last.” He glanced at the clock on the dash. “We’ll swing by the outlets,” he said. “Get you something for rain and snow too. What’d you wear last winter for the snow?”

  Afia shrugged. She didn’t want to tell him she had ruined her sturdiest leather shoes, the only ones that could keep her warm enough. She couldn’t expect a brother to notice such things. That he thought she could buy anything at all was odd, since he didn’t know about the grocery job—but even with her own money, she was a burden. Shahid had had to ensure she was safely transported and cared for on weekends and school breaks. He had to answer to Moray and Baba for any tarnish on the gleam of her promise in America.

  “They have good boots here,” said Shahid, pulling up in front of Clarks. “Britisher boots, rains all the time there.”

  Afia hung back while he pulled one model after another off the shelves and examined them critically. Her eye was drawn to a pretty pair with a buckle on the side and a stacked heel, but she let Shahid ask the saleswoman questions about waterproofing and warmth. “Here,” he said in English when the woman had fetched her size, “try these.”

  He handed her a pair of strangely elegant workmen’s boots. They laced up from a padded toe but ended in a flap of shearling. When she stood up in them her feet felt hugged. “These are the kind Patty wears in winter,” she said in Pashto.

  “That’s the idea. They’ll keep you dry and warm too.”

  She glanced at the tag dangling off the shelf. “But Shahid,” she said, “these are more than a hundred dollars. You can’t spend this on boots!”

  He snorted. “You don’t know what Uncle Omar sends me for allowance, do you?”

  “But that money’s supposed to be for you—”

  “Do you like them? Do they fit?”

  Her eyes strayed to the pretty pair. But they were even more and would not keep the rain off. Her toes began to feel the way they felt when she wiggled them in front of a fire. “They’re perfect,” she said.

  The rest of the way to Northampton—her boots on in the car, her feet a pair of little ovens—they talked about Maryam’s wedding, the tickets Shahid would buy with Baba’s credit card, the dates they would each be finished with exams. Afia was excited to fly home in the middle of the year. She had told the other girls in her suite about Maryam’s wedding. She had even told her favorite professor, Sue Glasgow, about it. It would be fabulous, Professor Glasgow said, for her to see her family. She didn’t ask, the way the girls did, how long Maryam had known her fiancé; she didn’t ask if Afia liked this young man. Professor Glasgow taught biology, but she understood a lot more about the way families could be organized than the members of Al-Iman, which Afia had been invited to join when she arrived at Smith last year. The Al-Iman girls were mostly Jordanians, and they wore the hijab in the Turkish style, not at all like Pakistanis. The famous Muslim feminists they talked about were from the Middle East, and they all seemed wealthy, with winter vacations on the Black Sea or in Cancun. She didn’t have any more in common with these students, she complained to Shahid, than with the women in the South Asian club, who were all Indians and Sri Lankans.

  “It’s the same for me,” Shahid said. “The only one who even starts to understand is Afran, and he’s from Turkey. That’s practically Europe.”

  “So strange they are bringing us home now,” Afia said. “Our cousin Geeta was married when we were on spring break, but they didn’t even talk about flying us back. It’s so expensive.”

  Shahid’s mouth twisted. “Baba probably wants to talk to me about the farm.”

  “He’s not ready to turn over the farm!”

  “No. And when he is, it should go to Khalid. He’s Baba’s true son.”

  “Baba doesn’t think that way. He’s never made a distinction.”

  Shahid shrugged. “Khalid’s the oldest. And I have no interest in the farm.”

  “So why—”

  “Baba will dangle something. To persuade me to return, not now but sometime, maybe with a Harvard degree.”

  Afia’s stomach hollowed out. “And you won’t?”

  “There’s nothing for me there. I love home, Afia. Just as much as you. But I can’t be a doctor, tending to poor women in the tribal areas. I’m not going to be an engineer. And I don’t see myself at the Peshawar Sports Academy.” They were turning up Afia’s narrow street. Shahid’s wipers squeaked across the windshield; his headlights shone on a carpet of wet leaves. “Inshallah, Baba could find you a husband who’s emigrating to America,” he said. “Another doctor, or something.”

  “What, so I’ll stay in America and keep you company? It never works that way, Shahid. When does Moray see Uncle Omar?”

  “She sees him.”

  “Well.” He’d pulled over in front of her dorm. She gathered up her cloth bag of books and her old shoes, and hoisted her pocketbook over her shoulder. “I have almost three years still to go,” she said. “Let’s not talk about being separated yet.”

  Impulsively, she leaned over and planted a kiss on her brother’s cheek. He turned to her, his eyes wide with shock. “What’s got into you?”

  “Thank you,” she said, “for my boots.”

  “Thank you for my essay.”

  She made her way up the puddled walk and through the old-fashioned foyer of the dorm, so much cozier than Shahid’s. Gus had not reentered her thoughts—not since she had glimpsed him in Shahid’s room, and not yet, not until the tie to Shahid loosened and this strange life of her own slipped in. She climbed the curving stairs to the third floor, where her room was open. On the floor sat Patty and Taylor, eating pizza. “Hey, girlfriend,” Patty called out. “I hear your bro did good.”

  “He did. About Chase, I am sorry he loses, Taylor.”

  “’S’okay,” Taylor said, not taking her eyes from her laptop screen. “Chase is a punk.”

  “They had a fight,” Patty explained.

  “Oh! I am sorry.”

  “But look here,” Patty went on. “You’re a total celeb, my hijabi roomie.”

  Afia sat on her bed and pulled off her boots. They were not beautiful boots, but she would treasure them. Already, on the thin carpet, her feet began to cool. That Chase and Taylor would fight seemed a tragedy, but no one in the room was acting that way. “What is a celeb?” she asked.

  “A famous person! Look here.”

  They made room for Afia by the coffee table. At Patty’s nod, she lifted a slice of the pizza. Then she peered at the screen Taylor tilted toward her. “This is Smith College,” she said.

  “Look closer. Look at the faces. It’s like a slide show.”

  Chewing, she watched while a photo of a girl in a graduation cap gave way to one of a girl hitting a hockey ball, which faded to a pair of girls with a professor—she recognized Sue Glasgow—staring at a test tube. That image, too, rolled away, and there was a crowd of excited young women, holding aloft pieces of cardboard with slogans: We are Smith! Diversity = Strength! There, at the right edge, stood Afia herself, her right hand in a high five with a girl from Somalia and her left holding a hand—oh, Allah be merciful, a man’s hand—that connected to a figure who had been cut from the frame. She remembered the event, in late September. She remembered Gus’s hand.

  “Roll it back,” she said, the pizza slice poised in the air, halfway to her mouth. Though what she wanted to say was, Take it back, erase it.

  “Just wait,” Patty said. “It’ll come around again. Cool, huh?”

  As the photos rotated through, a knot of fear gathered under Afia’s rib cage. The rally appeared again. “Cool,” she m
anaged to say.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Waiting outside Coach Hayes’s office the first week of December, Shahid drummed his foot on the tight carpet. He had the itinerary in his back pocket. The past three Januaries, he had played the Tournament of Champions in New York, with Coach Hayes at his side, the week before spring classes began. It was a so-called amateur tourney, but the best in the world came to America for it, and he had the chance to see guys he’d played in the juniors, now struggling like him to figure out their next path to glory. This year, as luck had it, Afia could not leave Smith before December 22. Baba would not hear of a visit shorter than two weeks, and the championships were four days after New Year’s.

  He loved squash. It was difficult to say why, to put the feeling into words. Only to say that if he couldn’t play squash, he wasn’t sure how he could live. He would miss this tournament, not that he had any chance of winning, but just for that pulse of life beating within its glass cages.

  He hadn’t felt this way at first. It had been Uncle Omar’s idea, one weekend when he’d come to Nasirabad. Squash, Omar had said to Baba. That’s the sport for Shahid. We have a great training center, right in Peshawar. Makes champions. Were not the two greatest squash players of all time Pashtun?

  That first week at Omar’s home had been an experiment, a strange bed and a new routine, lessons with Coach Khan every morning at the Peshawar Sports Academy. But when he returned home to Nasirabad, Shahid hadn’t been able to sleep at night, for missing the din of the city. Cars had honked and people shouted inside his ears, their strange accents like distant music. The town of his birth had seemed arid and lifeless. Then he had taken the new squash racquet Omar had given him and shanked the hard rubber ball around the high-walled courtyard by the grammar school. He lost himself in the movement of the ball, the way it came off all the walls, the angles and spins. It was like getting to know a person—if you sent him that way, he bounced up, over, and low on the back wall; if you sent him this way, he hit the corner and shot back to your forehand. The ball answered you back. It surprised you. It caught you from behind, unawares. When Omar’s BMW pulled into Nasirabad a month later, Shahid’s bag had already been packed. His mother’s eyes shone with tears. His father hosted the neighborhood for tikka. To the world championships, they toasted. To the Olympics one day!

  Finally the door to Coach Hayes’s office opened. Margot, number one on the women’s squad, was heading out. Coach patted her back, murmuring something. “Hey, Shahid,” Margot said. “How was your Thanksgiving?”

  He rose. “I got caught up on work. Coach fed us turkey.”

  “I hear that’s quite a feast,” Margot said to Coach Hayes. “Can I count as an international student next year?”

  “You and everyone else from New York,” Coach said.

  Shahid exchanged grins with Margot as they passed. He would have liked to have her at Coach’s Thanksgiving because she would have made Afia feel less alone. The other guys—Afran, Chander, Carlos—were all from countries where people knew how to keep a respectful distance, which was good. Still, Afia had spent most of her time in the kitchen helping Coach’s husband or on the floor playing with Coach’s three-year-old daughter, Chloe. She said she enjoyed it, but Shahid thought she would rather have been with her Smith friends.

  That had been a stroke of genius, he admitted to himself with a nice dollop of pride, finding Smith College for her. After she took her O levels in Nasirabad, her teachers had recommended the university in Peshawar. But she could never have stayed with Uncle Omar, who had no wife. In America, Shahid had declared, he could keep a close eye on her. She could get her medical degree at a women’s university and come home to attend to the women in Nasirabad who needed doctors, women who could not be seen by men. Baba had doubted there were such places in America. But Shahid was persuasive, and Afia’s eyes shone. She had sent in the application for a scholarship, and the letter had come back by express, an acceptance. Their mother had clapped her hands even as she wept.

  There were men on her campus, he knew. But the place was designed for women, sensitive to women. Afia would have been horrified by what went on at Enright during the weekends. She would have felt tainted—no: She would have been tainted. As it was, she had returned home last summer the same innocent she had been when she went away. Moray and Baba had been pleased beyond measure. They’d told Khalid so when he came down from the mountains and tried to persuade them to keep Afia home before Amreeka stained her namus, her purity. This fall, when school had started up again, Shahid had felt easier in his heart, able to let his sister live her college life without checking up on her every other day.

  “I hear you got a B-plus on that Shakespeare paper,” Coach was saying as she led the way into her office. “Good job.”

  He smiled sheepishly. “Thanks to my sister.”

  “Afia?” Coach’s blond eyebrows went up. “Thought she was all about science.”

  “She’s better at everything that is not a matter of hand-eye coordination.”

  “Don’t put yourself down, Shahid. When you apply for that Harvard job, you’ll be giving them a GPA that speaks for itself.”

  “Does Coach Bradley really think I am qualified?”

  “I know he wants you. It’s a question of the business school. You don’t want to be a squash coach all your life.”

  “I could be an A.D. Like you.”

  She ignored this. She knew him too well—better, in some ways, than either of his parents. She knew he couldn’t care, as she did, about twenty or thirty young people at once. He cared deeply about a few. And he was too proud to be a great coach. When he listened to Coach’s honor talk every year, the parts that stuck with him were loyalty and courage because they echoed pashtunwali, the code of the Pashtuns, of his tribe, which he would never shake off, Harvard or no Harvard.

  “So,” Coach was saying, glancing over his itinerary. “You miss the Tournament of Champions. Well, they’ll survive.” Her mouth, though, was tight.

  “I’m sorry, Coach, but my parents—”

  “Don’t worry about it. Let’s look at the schedule for when you’re back.”

  She turned to the wide screen on her desk. It was open to the website for Smith College. “Why are you looking at my sister’s school?” Shahid asked, surprised.

  “Oh, that’s Margot. She’s lesbian, you know. And Enright’s such a straight place. She’s thinking of transferring, so we were looking it over together.”

  “Margot is—” he started to say, shocked at the word lesbian, which he’d heard before but never about an actual girl he knew. But then his eye followed the photos that drifted across the screen below the Smith College logo. “Wait, Coach,” he said, as her hand went to her mouse.

  “Shahid, it’s not what you think, they’re not all gay. I wouldn’t have suggested you send Afia there if—”

  “Wait.” He put his hand on her wrist. “Look,” he said.

  He pointed to the screen. A photo bloomed into being: a rally of some kind, and his sister, his sister, her mouth open, shouting something, and her hand holding another hand, definitely, yes, he sat clutching Coach’s wrist while the photos looped through and he could see it again, a big hand attached to a muscular arm. A man’s hand.

  He slapped at the screen with the back of his hand. “What the hell is this?” he shouted. He stood up. His head felt full and tight. “What is she doing?” He looked at Coach, who had a strange, pale look.

  “Shahid, calm down,” she said. “That’s Afia, right? You’re upset because—”

  “Turn it off! Turn the bloody thing off!”

  She peered once more at the image as it loomed up, then closed down her browser. She stood to face him. “She’s at a rally,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong. You’ve had your picture on the Enright site. She’s not being inflammatory or anything. If you want me to talk to her . . .”

>   “It’s not what she’s doing, Coach. It’s what she is holding.”

  She frowned. She looked confused. Three years now, she’d been his coach. So long he’d almost forgotten how horrified he’d been when he first laid eyes on her. When he wrote home about life at Enright, he never mentioned having a female coach, much less a female A.D. They would have thought him disrespected, or thought squash was not just unpopular in the States but reviled. Even Uncle Omar, who had spoken with Coach Hayes on the phone, thought she was an underling, and Shahid had never set him straight.

  But whenever Coach fixed him with her knowing eyes, Shahid couldn’t imagine an authority greater than hers. She never barked, like other coaches; she didn’t need to. She went to the heart of the matter, whether it was the joint you’d smoked the night before or your showing off for the girl in the third row. Even when you were at your worst, she would know at least one thing you were doing right. She never dissed your opponent. You’ve got his attention, she’d sometimes say. Now earn his respect. The year before Shahid came, Enright had landed Jean-Louis Nèves, a top recruit from Belgium. When Nèves got caught DUI, she suspended him without a blink; when three others threatened to quit, she opened the door to usher them out. They came back the next day, Nèves the next year. He told Shahid that Coach had kept him in therapy every week; he’d hated the bitch, he said, and yet he owed her his life.

  Now, though, she was recoiling. “Shahid,” she said, “you had a girlfriend, last year.”

  “This is nothing to do with that. Did you not see?” He waved at the blank computer screen as if the picture were still on it, his sister’s hand in that paw.

  “Shahid, you and Afia are in the States now. If she wants to have a boyfriend—”

  “Does she? Does she have one?” He was shouting at her now, at his coach. Coach Khan had caned boys who shouted back.

  But only a flicker of something—disapproval? doubt?—disturbed her gaze. Then she said, “I don’t know, Shahid. It’s none of my business. I’m not sure it’s yours.”