by Lucy Ferriss
“All filled with women,” said Jeff.
“Well, that’s it, isn’t it?” said the lacrosse player. “Girls like those machines. The guys—they press weights and they’re done with it.”
“Which isn’t exactly healthy,” said Ethan. “Those guys who do nothing but weights,” he went on when he caught Lissy’s grateful smile, “stop lifting when they hit thirty. That muscle goes straight to fat, clustered around the heart.”
“Keeps my beta blockers in business,” said Jeff.
“All the top colleges have fancy fitness centers,” said a woman next to Ethan who had looked bored up to now. “Take it from me. I’ve got a senior in high school, and she didn’t apply to Enright.”
“And that was why?” asked the lacrosse player.
The woman shrugged. “They’re all the same, otherwise. Good professors, swishy housing.” She raised a glass, as if toasting Lissy. “It comes down to the squash team and the fitness center.”
“I heard about that squash team!” said Jeff. “There’s some world contenders you’ve got, there.”
“Not a single American on it,” said the lacrosse player.
Lissy beamed at him and Jeff both. You had to move carefully toward the Ask, shedding insults like water. “I’ll take any good American I can find,” she said lightly. “But wherever they hail from, they need a fitness center.”
Soon there were glasses being tinkled, the microphone being tested. Lissy excused herself and wove between the tables. Shahid was seated toward the back, at a table of elderly donors with one other student, a pale boy with enormous glasses and a shock of red hair. “You ready, champ?” she asked.
“Tell me what to say, Coach.”
“Just charm them. You know, remote village in Pakistan, lucky break in junior competition, generous scholarship from Enright, you love Enright, you love Enright.”
“Tell them the truth, you mean.”
“That’s my man.”
Her name was being announced. She stole a swig of water from Shahid’s glass and approached the podium.
“What a privilege it is to share this evening with you,” she began, leaning into the mike. “Not just because I admire the dedication to Enright that I see around this room, but also because of the dizzying array of accomplishment represented here. At Enright, in the Department of Athletics, we are all about accomplishment. I’ve brought proof of that to you this evening, in the form of a remarkable student athlete.”
And then she nodded at Shahid, the string to her bow, her ace in the hole, knowing he wouldn’t let her down.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Long before his father’s mud-brown Suzuki crossed the river into Charsadda district, Shahid’s head had started pounding. Talk, talk, talk. Ever since they left Northampton, all he and Afia had done was talk. None of it had gotten them anywhere. Stubborn, that was his sister. With his own eyes Shahid had seen that photo. So who’s the guy? he’d asked her, shoving his laptop under her nose. Just a guy, Afia had said. A guy at a rally against bigotry, they were all holding hands, no one asked if they could take her picture, and who cared? That shrug, she’d picked it up from the American girls like a mimicking monkey.
A man’s hand in hers. On the Internet. A man with reddish body hair, touching her. Did she think this was funny? She didn’t put it there, she claimed. Oh, right. Didn’t she know people would see this? That there would be consequences?
She didn’t put it there, was all she would say. Or else: Please, Shahid, don’t be like that, it’s nothing, an accident. When he tried to ask how she’d drawn the photographer’s attention, she gave him that look. That Afia look. Her head tipped to the side, her blue eyes narrowed, chin thrust forward. The look that made him feel as if he were dripping snot or drooling from the side of his mouth.
Just before they’d left baggage claim in Peshawar—both of them stretched thin as wire by the long flight, the changeover at Abu Dhabi, the crap food, the endless bottles of holy water riding by on the baggage carousel, waiting for the hajj pilgrims to pluck them off—Afia had tried to make amends. She’d touched his elbow. By then she was already in shalwar kameez, her silky dupatta looped over her hair and wound across her chest and shoulder. No one in our family, she’d insisted in her feathery voice, ever looks at the Internet. They can’t get to my Facebook page. We’re coming home for Maryam’s wedding, that’s all anyone will want to talk about.
Dotting the riverbank now were the thatched fishhouses fronted by dories unloading their morning catch. “They look like party favors,” Shahid said, his hot forehead resting against the cool window.
From the front seat, his mother, Farishta, twisted around. She wore a black niqab, which she never wore when she used to come with Baba to pick him up in Peshawar. Her brown eyes loomed large in the almond-shaped space between scarf and face veil. “What looks like what?”
“The boats. You know.” He turned to Afia for support. “Like those pastel cellophane things kids pull apart at American parties, and there’s candy or something inside. Look at the roofs.” It was true. The bright, fringed canvas tops, the sparkling streamers and little flags made the boats gay, like toys for giants’ kids rather than leaky vessels for men who scraped their living from travelers who stopped, as the Satars did, to gather their lunch at roadside.
“They’re always like that.” Afia had shut her eyes. Her face, framed by dupatta, looked once again like the face of his little sister, smooth and sweet, that teardrop mole on one broad cheekbone.
Pulling over, Baba found a likely seller and ordered enough trout for the whole household, back home. Shahid stepped out and stretched. The brisk air felt warm compared to the bone chill of Massachusetts. Dozens of times, Baba had taken him home over this road, stopping always for fish. He waved a boy over and gave him a handful of coins. “Naan,” he ordered, “and three chai.”
Only since Shahid went pro had the journeys been from the airport. Before then, Baba would fetch him for weddings or funerals or Ramadan from Uncle Omar’s walled compound in Peshawar. Until he went to America, Shahid had never been gone from Nasirabad for more than four months at a stretch. He tried, again, to think this homecoming was just a sign his parents had missed him and Afia, or that Baba did want to talk to him about the farm. Nothing more.
The roadside boy brought a tray. Shahid gave him another coin, opened the rusted doors of the Suzuki, and passed glasses in to his mother and sister. “I want to sleep,” Afia said, her hand waving the tea away.
“You know the family won’t let you, not till tonight.”
Sighing, she straightened up and took the tea. It felt to him like her peace offering. Moray took hers as well, and sipped it underneath the face veil. They all broke off chunks of the naan, just baked in the ash oven under the lean-to. The elastic heart of the bread, with its tang of salt and deliciously charred edges, melted in Shahid’s mouth. Bringing his tea and bread to where his father oversaw the gutting and cooking of the fish, he breathed the familiar stench of river weeds and the fishermen’s kerosene fires. “These airline tickets have set you back, Baba,” he said. “This wedding must be important.”
His father smiled, showing the one gold tooth where he used to let Shahid see his tawny reflection. “An excuse,” he said, “to see my precious children.”
“Everything is all right, then? At home? The farm?”
“Oh, yes.” Baba frowned. His heavy mustache had twice the gray as when Shahid first went to live with Uncle Omar. His cheeks were descending to jowls. “Your brother has come down from the mountains,” he said.
“To stay?” Shahid tore the bread with his teeth and chewed it, to disguise his nerves. He had not laid eyes on Khalid in two years.
“For the wedding. But inshallah, we will talk about the farm.” He laid his large hand on Shahid’s forearm. “He is my first son, and of my own seed,” he said. “Though, if you g
et that business degree . . . you could bring the place into the twenty-first century—”
It was a question Shahid used to talk about with Afia. Did you go away from your people in order to bring the world back to them? Or did you go away to shed the world you once had? Afia had always been firm: She would come back to do medicine, to help the women in the mountains. Whereas the only gift Shahid could offer his family was the stories they could tell about their famous son, out in the world. And so, bit by bit, he had let the world take hold of him. “The farm should be Khalid’s, Baba,” he said.
“If he will leave off jihad and take it. The village is more to his liking now than when he left.”
“Still that way, then? Practicing purdah?”
“More and more.” Baba stepped back from the fishmongers. He leaned toward Shahid. “I grow concerned about our ghairat.” He jerked his head toward the car. “Your sister.”
“Afia?” Shahid sipped tea to hide the catch in his breath. “I watch her, Baba.”
“I know. But perhaps it would be best. . . . Ah. Thank you.” A skullcapped grandfather bowed as he handed over the hot cooked fish. Near him, a pair of children drew pictures in the dirt. Behind the hut, next to a high stone wall, two fishermen laid out their prayer rugs, facing west. “We will have time to talk,” Baba continued, lifting the package to smell the hot, spicy fish as they returned to the car. “You must not be burdened in your last year. American championships, yes?” He squeezed Shahid’s shoulder.
Afia was dead wrong, Shahid thought as they made their way back onto the highway, gaudy autorickshaws honking around them. Internet service had been available in Nasirabad for five years. Maybe Farishta and Tofan Satar paid it no mind, but at the wedding there would be cousins from Peshawar with iPhones. Khalid used to love video games. Before he went to the mountains, he always went to the Internet café. And now Baba was talking about ghairat, about honor.
Shahid’s father laid on the horn as they navigated the roundabout off the highway. Motorcycles crowded the lanes, women sitting sidesaddle on the back of the seat with packages or children in their laps, their husbands dodging the wildly painted buses where workers sat cross-legged on top. Back in Devon, Massachusetts, Shahid had missed this life-threatening bustle, where no one felt compelled to stay in his lane and vehicles swarmed like a school of fish. As they climbed through fields of sugarcane into Nasirabad, he felt homesickness bloom through his veins like cream in coffee. His village—the hoarse calls of its vendors, the rough bricks of its streets—suited him now. Khalid would have the farm; he understood that. But he wanted to run through the alleys the way he had as a kid, racing the other boys to the river. Baba drove the Suzuki slowly, avoiding cats and goats. With the window rolled down, he stopped every few houses to shout to whoever sat outside their mud wall—“My son, Shahid! Forty-eighth in the world in juniors, you know! Back from America, now! Going for the number one there. What a boy, hey?”
“Husband, please,” Moray said quietly after glancing back at Shahid. “You’re embarrassing him.”
“It’s all right,” Shahid said. Though it wasn’t really. What, after all, was forty-eighth? Not first, certainly, and not tenth, and Shahid was four years away now from having played in the juniors. That was why he had taken the scholarship to Enright, wasn’t it? Because he hadn’t a chance of a career as a professional. Omar had told him so, soberly and with great sympathy. Only in America, where the universities gave out money to athletes—and why? No one could say—did he have a second chance. Without such a push, he’d have resisted the call of the West. He’d have come back here after his training, learned the running of the farm, readied himself to help Khalid—or, should Khalid become a holy maulvi after all, to step into his stepfather’s shoes.
But Baba had always needed a hint, a glint, of glory. With his squash triumphs, Shahid had brought him that. At least, so Shahid wanted to believe. And Baba looked plenty pleased as they made their way up the hill to the orchard and their own slate-roofed compound. As the sheepdogs barked their welcome, Shahid’s family swarmed out from the house. Their little sisters and the servant girls enveloped Afia in a pinwheel of dupattas. Around Shahid gathered his uncles and cousins. Khalid emerged from the hujra. Cries of welcome and admonishment echoed. Shahid and Afia were both too thin, didn’t they eat anything in America, and so pale, how deep were the snows, how long was the flight, were they hungry? His uncle Saqib’s fleshy hand pressed against Shahid’s bicep; he smelled the familiar mustiness of Uncle Roshan’s wool coat. So many years, now, he had been coming home from somewhere—Peshawar, the squash tour, America.
Khalid jostled him as they made their way through the courtyard. The dogs pushed their wet noses against his wrists. The girls had spirited Afia away to the other side of the house, chattering like birds. “Snow,” Khalid said. “They all wonder how you live in the snow. Well, I know snow, now, brother. As well as you.”
Shahid set his bag down in the hujra. On the wall hung yellowing photos of the estate as it had once flourished, in the days before Partition, when the British had favored Shahid’s great-great-grandfather and the land had stretched as far as the Swat River. The name Satar was still honored in Nasirabad, though the place was much reduced now. Only twelve families worked the land, producing cotton the likes of which could not be found this side of Peshawar.
Scratching the dogs’ rough heads, Shahid looked at his stepbrother. Like him, Khalid had started a beard, but Khalid’s was longer; it hung thinly from his chin like moss on an oak tree. He was an inch taller than Shahid, but lean and jumpy. He picked at his cuticles as he spoke.
Of course it should have been Khalid who went to Peshawar, to train as a cricketer for the Peshawar Panthers. Khalid had been captain of his Nasirabad team and three years older than Shahid. Only his left foot dragged a bit, hardly noticeable, from a surgery done when he was a newborn. The coach Uncle Omar had brought with him to Nasirabad frowned and said physical limitations, he was sorry.
“Couldn’t Khalid come to Peshawar as well?” Shahid had asked Baba before Uncle Omar came to take him away. “He could study engineering.”
“Your uncle has already been generous,” Baba had replied—not mentioning that Omar was Farishta’s brother, not blood-related to Khalid.
Khalid quit cricket after Shahid left for Peshawar. When Shahid came home on holidays, Khalid would take him around the town, laying wagers on his brother’s ability to beat any of the boys not just at squash but at sprints, table tennis, handball. Eager not to disappoint his big brother, Shahid would steal time from squash to train at everything else in the weeks before he returned. At the thought of losing, he would break a cold sweat. But when they came home from these challenges, Khalid would berate him. Did he think he was better than everyone now, showing off like that? The next day, he would wake Shahid early, pull him from bed, tell him he had a hundred rupees on another challenge and Shahid had better not let him down.
“You live in the snow?” Shahid asked now.
Khalid jerked his chin north, toward the mountains. “Three meters thus far. We train in snow. I was grazed by shrapnel this fall.” Pulling up the sleeve of his kurta, he exposed a constellation of scars, like jagged flowers, trailing down his forearm.
Shahid frowned. “Were you in hospital?”
“My comrades know how to heal such things.”
“What comrades? In the madrassa?”
Khalid’s lip twisted. “We are an unsettled country,” he said. “Someone has to be ready.”
Shahid lifted his bag onto a charpoy next to Khalid’s. He did not want to know what Khalid was ready for, or how he had been wounded. Khalid and his jihadi friends had not dictated the changes that had come to Nasirabad, but the parallels were unsettling. On the walls of the elementary school hung pictures of the faculty. When Baba had been a student there, his teachers had posed with uncovered heads, the men in suits and the wom
en in knee-length skirts and chunky heels. By the time Afia graduated, the female faculty was reduced to three, all in shalwar kameez, wrapped in dupattas, even across their noses. Shahid remembered his mother driving the car, but now she went out only with Baba and in niqab, her warm eyes like bruises framed in black cloth. The madrassa where Khalid began his studies had been built by the Saudis while Shahid was in Peshawar. So the changes were a slow tide seeping across the province. They were going back, Shahid had heard, to how things used to be, before the Britishers came and began corrupting Pashtun ways. He didn’t mind. But none of it seemed worth what Khalid and his friends were willing to do, the great fight they were gearing up to wage.
“Baba says he’ll be talking to you about the farm,” Shahid said now.
“I respect my father,” Khalid said. “But I have greater work to do. We can’t all be playing games while the drones rain down.”
Shahid pressed his lips together. No point in a retort. Khalid had started resenting him even before he’d been chosen for Peshawar, from the moment he came into the world. All because Shahid had a living mother. No, that wasn’t all. There was Afia, too. All their growing up, they had been inseparable—picking mulberries together, raising lambs together, dreaming of America together—where Khalid had been older and alone. And then three years ago, Shahid had hatched his plan to bring Afia over to Smith College.
Had any of them stopped, Shahid wondered now, to think of Khalid, still living at home then? Had it been Shahid and Khalid in America, there might not be this awful tension, not to mention worry over a damning photo on the Smith website. But Khalid hated Amreeka. And Shahid had felt too frightened and guilty to reach out to his brother, to claim him.
These days his parents thought Shahid could go anywhere, do anything. But it was a relief to find himself among the men of his family. Here in the hujra you could relax; you could say what you thought. No blond women smirking at you or leaning forward to show the soft tops of their breasts. In the corner, the TV played last night’s field hockey match, with Shahid’s cousin Azlan shouting and shaking his fist at the center forward. “Two left feet! Why do they put him out there? He handles the stick like a club! Fool!” Tea was set up on the low center table, with plates of almonds and dates. Shahid’s uncles pressed him to eat and asked about the journey. They lounged on their charpoys, their feet up and backs against the great bolstered pillows. This afternoon, after the Friday jumah prayer and a good fish lunch, they would return to work—Uncle Roshan to his dental practice, Uncle Saqib to the textile mill. For now Shahid had come home, enough reason to take the morning off.