A Sister to Honor

by Lucy Ferriss

  “Your final year.” His father put a brown hand on Shahid’s jeans. “And a shot at that American title, hey? Will they televise it?”

  Shahid smiled. “No, Baba. Squash is not such a big sport in America. But there will be a video. I can send you the link.”

  Baba held up a hand. “Don’t talk to me about links. Links are for golf, which I do not play.”

  “What comes after?” asked Roshan. He was Azlan’s father and the most intellectual of Shahid’s relations. Even now he balanced a book in his lap, his finger holding his place. “You’ll come back to Peshawar, take over that club? Or is it on to the Olympics?”

  “Squash still isn’t an Olympic sport, Uncle,” said Shahid. “I’m trying for the MBA program at Harvard. They’ve asked me about an assistant coach job.”

  “Harvard.” Tofan nodded, as if he had suspected exactly this. He turned to the others. “Do you hear the boy? The best school in America.”

  “A school that takes its money,” said Khalid, sitting cross-legged on the rug, “from the Amreekan military. Who send their drones into our mountains.”

  “Harvard is not attacking us.” There it was, the retort. Shahid had failed to hold it back. “America is a big place, Khalid lala,” he said.

  “Maybe I should visit.”

  “It would be my honor.”

  “It is good to know your enemy in their own country.”

  “Stop sniping at each other.” Baba held up a hand, but his eyes darted only to Shahid.

  “Look!” cried Azlan. “Did you see that? Offsides! Did you see it? Where is the official? He’s a Sikh, isn’t he? See? Look there!”

  Shahid’s uncle Saqib was fat and slow. The youngest, he had always been gentle with Shahid, more like a plump aunty than an uncle. He leaned in toward the TV. “Looks like a fight brewing,” he said.

  Khalid poured himself a cup of tea and brought a plate of raisins over to Shahid’s charpoy. He leaned close. “If I visit, as you call it,” he said in a low voice, “it will be to rectify the situation there.”

  Shahid chuckled to conceal his nerves. “What situation, Khalid lala?”

  “You know.” Khalid lowered his head. He had a longer face than Shahid’s, fine cheekbones, ears that curled out a bit from his head, like their father’s. He spoke into his beard. “Our sister,” he said, “has been dishonored.”

  “Really.” Shahid fought to keep his breathing even. “Where and by whom?”

  “I’ve seen the photo,” Khalid muttered. “Her with her paw in that monkey’s paw. I’ve told Baba about it.”

  Shahid stiffened. “Did you show it to him?”

  “I was waiting,” Khalid said with satisfaction, “for you.”

  On the screen, the officials were pushing their way into the scuffle. Azlan yelled at the set. Baba and his brothers kept their eyes on the game but had started talking about the farm. “It’s only an advertisement,” Shahid said, “for a college.”

  “It is your sister holding a man. Who is this man?”

  “She is not holding him. And I don’t care.” A lie: Shahid had pored over the photo, the boy’s arm bare up to the elbow. “We don’t notice stuff like that in the States,” he said. He sounded, he thought, like a Western tool.

  “They will notice it here.” Khalid jerked his head toward their relatives. “And there is no nanawate for tora.”

  Shahid stared in both mock and real horror. No sanctuary, Khalid had said, actually said, for fornication. Those were the words of pashtunwali, of the Pashtun code, and they were fighting words. The same fear he had felt when he first saw the Smith homepage crept back over him. “They’ll notice it,” he whispered, “only if you show it to them. And shame casts a wide net.”

  “You need to control her.”

  “I do.”

  Deliberately Shahid rose, stretched. He always got off on the wrong foot with Khalid, especially when jet lag made him foggy. He had left New York just before midnight on Wednesday; now it was midmorning two days later, midnight for him. Tomorrow the men would go to the groom’s home, over the hills in Mardan. Afia and the women would hold the mehndi, to henna the bride’s hands. He would see little of his sister until the third wedding day. Maryam was marrying a government doctor, but a doctor nonetheless, and her family was relieved. Unlike Afia, Maryam wasn’t so desirable—her skin was too dark, her hairline too low on her forehead, and her father ran a restaurant. The bride price for Afia, with her blue eyes and fair skin, and her father’s newly rebuilt farm, would be much more substantial. “Baba,” he said, to turn the conversation away from Khalid, “who are Maryam’s new people? How are we related to them? Are they of our khel?”

  Baba rolled his eyes. “If you stayed home instead of roaming the world with your racquet,” he said in mock derision, “you would know about your own clan.”

  “This is your grandfather’s sister’s husband’s family,” said Roshan evenly. Keeping his eyes on the TV screen, he nodded for emphasis. “Our khel, yes, an honorable family.”

  “Maybe one of them will spot our Afia,” Khalid said from his corner, “during the dancing.”

  “Now, now,” said fat Saqib. “No men allowed at the rukhsati.”

  “And yet you found my mother there. Didn’t you, Baba?” Khalid said.

  A look of pain crossed Baba’s face. Why did Khalid take every chance to do this, to bring up his mother who had been dead now for two decades? “She was a lovely girl, an innocent girl,” Baba said. “She stood out.”

  “And the same for your stepdaughter!” Roshan said. He punched his brother lightly on the shoulder. “What is Afia now, nineteen?”

  “Twenty in January,” Shahid said. “But she’s got two more years after this—”

  “High time,” said Khalid. “While she still looks—what did you say, Baba?—innocent.”

  Shahid felt the sting and the poison behind it. He looked at his brother sharply. But Khalid was gazing into the middle distance, out the open gate of the hujra into the orchard. Did Khalid care about their ghairat? Or did he care more about cutting Shahid down, and if Afia now provided the knife to do it, he would use her and honor be damned? It’s not been what you think over there, he wanted to say to Khalid. It’s been hard, it’s been lonely. We need each other.

  Rising to pour tea, Baba called through the door, and Tayyab emerged. Setting down a fresh tea tray, he bobbed his skullcap at Shahid.

  “Asalaam aleikum, Tayyab,” Shahid said.

  “Wa aleikum salaam, Shahid sahib,” said the old man.

  “How goes it with your girls? Have they—”

  His father put a hand on his arm. “Thank you, Tayyab,” he said. His face a map of wrinkles, the old man bobbed again as he removed the old tray. “Died,” Baba said when Shahid frowned at him.

  “Childbirth, one of the two who married,” Roshan added. He adjusted his glasses, a quirky grin on his face. “And the other got a kick, didn’t she, Tofan?”

  “In her big belly, from her father-in-law,” Baba confirmed. He shook his head and sighed. “Never forget seeing Tayyab banging his head against the wall like that. Moaning about his fate.”

  “And his third daughter? Panra?” Shahid asked. Panra was just Afia’s age; he remembered playing with her when they were children, her auburn hair the color and texture of cornsilk.

  “Still in your uncle Omar’s household,” his father said. “They’ll be lucky to marry her off, pocked like she is.”

  Shahid didn’t want to respond to this. “He’s got the one son,” he said instead.

  “Soft in the head,” said Saqib from his charpoy.

  “Worst of it is, Tayyab’s going blind,” said Baba. “Diabetes, your mother says. She’s tried to hire him an assistant, but he scares them away. Scared we’ll replace him. Meanwhile we get cumin instead of cardamom, and the rice overcooked.”


  “Kismet,” said Saqib, and they all chuckled. Shahid felt his judgment readjusting, like a shoulder dislocated and popped back into place, the sharp, brief pain of it. This was Nasirabad, not Devon.

  Baba poured tea. He was a big man, almost as tall as Shahid, and heavy in the gut these days. He smiled rarely, but when he did it was a soft curl of the lips under his mustache, as if he had waited for just that moment of happiness. His hair was thinning away from his forehead, the skin there tanned from the sun. “Your mother should take some photos of Afia,” he said thoughtfully, “while she is here.”

  Khalid pounced. “There’s that photo I told you of, Baba.”

  Baba’s eyebrows lifted. “From America? Is it appropriate, Shahid?”

  “What?” Shahid’s mind had wandered. Jet lag, he thought. He was trying to remember the cook’s eldest daughters. How relieved the old man had been, when they were taken up by husbands. Dead now in childbirth, and of a kick to the belly. How casual it sounded here, a strange little story about the cook. “If you’re talking about showing Afia off to a suitor,” he said, avoiding his brother’s eyes, “I think we should take photos here. She’ll show to good advantage at the wedding.”

  Khalid opened his mouth, then shut it. Biding his time, Shahid thought.

  “Finally, a goal!” cried Azlan. A shout went up from the television. “That showed them, didn’t it, Baba?”

  “Just in time, too,” said Saqib. “Time for jumah prayer.”

  As they rose, Shahid looked at the familiar faces of the men of his family. They thought they knew him. They had traveled to Peshawar, to Lahore and Karachi, to watch him compete. They had mounted him on their shoulders when he brought home a winning plaque. But they had never heard him say how much he feared going to America, how he would never make it professionally, how much he found himself missing Nasirabad, how hard it was for him to sit still and study, how he could never think beyond the next tournament. Since they were little, Afia had been his sole confidante. She was smarter than he, and she knew how she could contribute to the world. He had only to protect her—from the men in America, yes, but also from these men, from men who chuckled over Tayyab’s dead daughters, from his family who could not comprehend what things were like, somewhere else.

  Passing through the courtyard to head for the mosque, he saw Tayyab’s youngest daughter scrubbing the steps. She looked up shyly at the men and went back to her work. How old was the girl now? Twelve, fourteen? How would she manage in the world without a brother to look after her?

  As they piled into the Suzuki, his father plucked him back. “This American photo,” he said. “It is not objectionable, is it?”

  “I . . . I don’t know what you mean, Baba. It’s not appropriate for an engagement, but—”

  “You protect her.”

  “I do, Baba.”

  “It is what makes a girl happy. To know she is safe. She is protected.”

  “But I worry, Baba. It’s different over there. And if a rumor started—”

  His father laid a heavy hand on Shahid’s shoulder. “We’ll get her engaged, before you go back,” he said. “I have been thinking about it. I’ll speak to your mother. You both need to finish your studies with a plan for the future. This is a good plan, and a good time for it. Now, we’ll talk no more of women. Tell me,” he said as the call to prayer rose above the village, “about this chance at Harvard.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Afia had dressed in her brightest shalwar kameez, with spring green flecking the deep turquoise silk, the bodice hand-embroidered and studded with freshwater pearls. The sleeves went only to her elbows but ended in handworked lace. She had washed her hair and doused it with the tea-scented rinse her mother always used. Brushing, she found her locks thicker, softer, brighter. She would bring a tube of this to Northampton. How far away Northampton seemed! Forty-eight hours she had been home, and already the whole world of Smith College seemed an invention.

  Yesterday, at the mehndi, she had still set herself a little apart. Maryam was the sixth of her cousins to be married, and the others giggled and gossiped about which girl would be next. As a government doctor, the groom would receive a house once he and Maryam started a family. His father ran a sugar mill in Mardan. The groom was rumored to be short, with a receding chin, but not too old and in good health. One sticky point was that his parents had come first to the home of another cousin, Tahira, but Tahira’s parents hadn’t taken him seriously. Tahira was tall, fair-skinned, and blue-eyed; over the summer she had married a cardiologist in Peshawar. So everyone knew that Maryam’s parents had accepted another’s leavings. But marriage was marriage; marriage was the point.

  Strange, how Afia felt the pull of this gossip. Her first instinct was to make the kind of speech she imagined in the voice of her roommate, Patty, about the superficiality of fair skin or a doctor’s wages, the value of the single life. But after they had gathered to watch the design spread over Maryam’s tiny hands onto her plump wrists, she found herself laughing at the mother-in-law jokes, eager to hear of other visits made by other bride-seeking families to other cousins, the bright hope of a good match. They had gathered in Maryam’s home, a small compound but immaculate, with a garden that would bloom brightly in the spring. All were women except for the guard at the gate, and what a relief, to be away from men! Maryam’s mother and aunt had spread a feast of kebabs and fried fish on the veranda’s long table. Filling her plate, Afia thought idly of the buffets at Smith, laden with vegetables and trays of meatless lasagna, with knives as well as forks, and napkins because you weren’t supposed to eat with your hands or lick your fingers. But your fingers tasted good! She bit off a chunk of juicy meat and then sucked the juice from her thumb.

  That was when Moray had touched her elbow and said calmly, as if she were talking of hiring a new cook, “When all this is over, my sparrow, Maryam’s people will be calling on us.”

  Afia felt a space open in her heart. “But, Moray, we’ll just have visited with them. Why—” Then she stopped, and flushed. Of course. Maryam had an older brother, another second cousin. Zarbat? Zardab? She had not seen him since she was small.

  “You’ll need to serve the tea,” her mother went on. “We’ll go shopping in a day or two, after the ceremony. Find you something in the latest fashion. See what your cousin Tahira is wearing?”

  Last night, Afia had lain awake in the bed she had longed for while at Smith—the wide frame constructed from an ancient wooden chest her grandfather had brought home from the Kashmir. The chest had split apart, but the panels were solid enough for Baba to refashion into a bed, which had been Afia’s as long as she could remember. All through the long flight, she had craved a good night’s sleep in it. Now sleep would not come. They wanted her married, Baba and Moray. Of course she had always expected to be married off. Being educated had been part of preparing for marriage; a more successful man, Moray had declared to Baba, wanted a wife with a university degree, even a wife who could practice medicine. Afia was short and wore glasses, but behind them her eyes were blue as sea glass, and when she let her hair go, it fell thick and soft over her shoulders. Marriage was never going to be a problem for her. Only since America had it become a problem. Only since Gus.

  She turned on her side and thought how neither of her parents had talked of engaging her before her studies were finished . . . until now. Would Shahid have—?

  No. Not possible. There would have been howls of shame, and the shame would have covered Shahid, too. People were starting to talk, that was all; starting to ask when Afia would be coming home, what Afia’s prospects were. No one knew about Gus, not even—especially not—Shahid. She could lie here and think about her beloved to her heart’s content, and bring dishonor to no one.

  But when she tried to dwell on Gus, the dark air seemed to swallow him. That she had lain naked next to him only a week before was now a thought too horrib
le to own. Even to imagine his half-shaven face, his hands with the wisps of dark hair on the backs of the knuckles—no. She couldn’t. If she lingered on his touch, or his breath against her ear, her stomach would rise within her. She would vomit the strangeness of it. What she had done was risky, in and of itself. But it had happened in that other world, where honor was topsy-turvy and rules frayed at their edges. To think about it was to do something here, in Nasirabad, something unforgivable.

  And so she stopped thinking about Gus. It happened like that, like the door of the freezer sucking closed. There was, after all, so much else to think about. Maryam’s wedding, of course, and the tremendous anticipation of how Maryam would look at the close of the rukhsati, how her new husband would regard her, how the men of the wedding party would slip into the back of the hall to watch the girls dancing. Whether Lema would be there—Lema, her best friend from school, who had gone on to secretarial college in Peshawar and come home over the summer to be married. She had written to Lema and tried to connect with her on Facebook, but no answer. She had to think, too, about Moray and about Sobia and Muska, who were fourteen and ten now and starting to cover their little chests with their dupattas. The village was already a more conservative place for them than it had been for Afia. Yesterday Sobia had talked about three girls from her class who had quit school and were staying home, in purdah like their mothers.