by Nafisa Haji
“What do you mean?”
“Not in this case, as I said. Where both you and Angela were not committed to anyone else. But what about married men? Because these so-called laws you’re speaking of allow men to have more than one wife, married men get away with having affairs. All the while wrapping themselves in a mantle of piety. You know this very well. You’ve heard it all. What men do to women in the name of God. It is part of the same problem, the way your grandfather treated me, taking advantage of laws and traditions that don’t apply anymore—laws that were meant to give rights to women, and which are now used to take them away. I have thought about this a lot, over the years—it is the subject that I teach, after all. And it’s personal, too. When I think that anyone could have come up with the opinion that the just thing to do, in my case and yours, was to take you away from me—it makes me furious! In another time and place, in societies where women needed the protection of men in order to survive, this issue of custody was a way for a woman not to be burdened. For a man’s family not to abandon the widows of their sons. But to hearken back to the way things used to be as a weapon against women now, that is not God’s law. The only law that means anything—that can have anything to do with God—is one that is alive and that strives for justice given the circumstances of the present. Otherwise, the law is merely something dead, a weapon in the hands of those with power. Against those with none.”
“I’m not disagreeing with you. And I’m not advocating mut’a for married men. Or polygamy in any form, for that matter. Don’t lump me into the category of hypocrites. I was a boy. Playing a man’s game. In my own way, I was trying to take responsibility for my actions. And I would have. If Angela had let me. Jo is my daughter. I am not ashamed. I wouldn’t have been if Angela had told me back then. She’s mine. And I will treat her the way I would have treated any children I might have had later.”
“Might have had? You’re getting married, Sadiq. You’ll have children with Akeela. Inshallah.”
“No. She and I have discussed it. I’ve told her about Jo. She already has two children of her own. And I want no more.”
My mother sighed. “You told Akeela about Jo. You told your grandfather. It seems I am the only one you didn’t tell.”
“I—I’m sorry. This was not something I could say on the phone.”
“So? Who told you to say it on the phone? All these years, Sadiq, and you never even came to visit.”
“Neither did you.”
She didn’t say anything, and neither did I.
Then she broke the silence. “And? What about Akeela and her children? If Jo is to inherit all that you have?”
“She will have her meher. It will be more than generous. And I have opened accounts in her daughters’ names. They’ll all be taken care of. If I die.”
My mother shuddered. “God forbid! How did we get onto this morbid topic?”
“You were teasing me. About Jo.”
“Remind me never to tease you again. My God! What a somber man you have become, Sadee. And when are you getting married?”
“After the Muharram season is over.”
“Are the women’s majlises still held here? During the first ten days of Muharram?”
“Not this year. Not since Dadi passed away. Perhaps next year. When there is a woman in the house.”
My mother yawned. “Oh—I am tired, too, now. Suddenly.”
“Go and sleep.”
“Yes. I will.”
In the evening, Jaffer came to visit, from across the street, with his wife and children. Also with him were his parents. This was not unusual—they came often, just about every day, to see Dada. That day, I know they must have worked hard to contain themselves, to let the whole day go by without dropping in, curious to see my guests.
“Deena! It’s so good to see you! After soooo many years!” my aunt, Phupijan, declared.
“Asma. It has been a long time,” my mother replied, with a smile that could be described as mildly cautious.
“And this must be—”
“Jo. This is Jo,” I cut Jaffer off, wary at the slight smirk lurking behind the friendly smile he flashed at Jo.
“Ah. Yes. Jo. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.” Jaffer turned to me and said, in Urdu, “She’s pretty, Sadiq, this secret American daughter of yours. The girl who has turned your life upside down and made you into such lousy company.”
“That’s not a bad thing, Jaffer,” his wife, Haseena, said, also in Urdu. “I keep hoping that the new, reformed Sadiq will have some influence on you.” Turning to face Jo, my cousin’s wife said, “Come, children,” pushing her offspring forward, a boy and a girl, “come and meet your cousin.”
Before my relatives made total asses of themselves, I said, “Jaffer. Haseena. Jo knows Urdu.”
Jaffer’s face was fun to watch, as he reviewed his own words to see if anything he’d said might have caused offense.
Phupijan was sitting next to my mother on the sofa, lifting the fabric of her former sister-in-law’s clothes, saying, “My dear Deena! We must take you shopping. You’re looking positively dowdy in these old-fashioned clothes. Long kameezes are totally out. Mini, mini, mini is what everyone is wearing. And your baggy old shalwar—no, no. See these.” She pointed to her own pants. “This is the trouser shalwar.”
“The what? But, Asma, they’re just regular pants!”
“Exactly!” said Phupijan. “Haseena,” she called her daughter-in-law over, imperiously. “We must take Deena shopping. As soon as possible. My daughter-in-law has impeccable taste, Deena. She designs clothes for all the best boutiques. Has done exhibitions, too.”
Her tongue in her cheek, my mother said, “But— it’s still Muharram season, Asma.”
Phupijan waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t be so old-fashioned, Deena. Besides, clothes are a necessity.”
My mother said, “What do you say, Jo? You want to go shopping? Tomorrow?”
“I’d love to go shopping,” said Jo.
Two days later—after several trips to boutiques and tailors with Phupijan and Haseena, my mother’s clothes now updated and Jo blending into the environment, as if in camouflage, with the new wardrobe my aunt had insisted on buying for her, saying, “It’s my gift, Jo. You’re my grandniece, after all! A daughter of this house!”—I was finally alone with Jo.
My mother was taking a walk around the garden. Jo sat on the armchair in the lounge, at an angle from where I was, on the sofa. Unlike the last time we were together alone, when she had been perched at the edge of her seat, ready to flee at the slightest provocation, she was relaxed, her back resting against the back of the chair, her hands and arms at ease, at her side, not clenched. “So— when did you learn Urdu?” I asked. “And how? And why?”
“When I started college, I was going to study African languages and be a missionary. Like my grandmother. But—right after I met you—because I met you, to be honest, I took Urdu instead. And Arabic.”
“Arabic, too? I’m impressed. Your Urdu is very good. My mother—she said—at the airport—that this is not your first time in Pakistan?”
“No.”
“You never tried to contact me.”
“I came for work. I had no time for personal stuff.”
“What kind of work? With the embassy?”
“No.”
She told me, then, what kind of work learning Urdu had led her into. She didn’t share all the details, but those she did were enough. I knew them already—knew, also, what she didn’t say—from a different perspective. I had to check myself, to keep from shrinking away from her words, especially when she told me the story of a man she called Fuzzy—a man cared for by someone named Sharif Muhammad, who he called his uncle. When she was done talking, I put all her words together and realized that if she hadn’t met me, her life would have been different. That whatever distaste I felt at what she had participated in, the fact of it could be traced back to learning Urdu, which, she’d said, she’d studied b
ecause of me.
I thought of what my mother had said. About the burden I carried and shared with those I met, with those I loved, and those who loved me. She had known this, what Jo was telling me, when she said it. Had known all of it—had seen the connection, had stepped away from the particulars of my story and Jo’s, and noted the matching color of the threads that ran through both.
It took me a while to recover myself enough to ask her what I had already asked my mother—twice. I asked her why she had come.
“I ran away from you last time. It was just so inconvenient. The whole thing. To find out that I—the story of my life—wasn’t what I thought it was. And I was too lazy to want to figure it all out. But running away didn’t help. Your story—who you are—came back into my life in the weirdest way, through this man, Fuzzy. I mean, even if it turns out—that he’s not—who it seems like he is, I had to come looking for you, to try and fix things that I’d broken. Inside of myself. And other people, too. I went to Deena because I couldn’t find you. And through her, I got to know you better—I got to understand what I couldn’t before.”
“So—you are ready, now? To accept it? What you found inconvenient before?”
“More ready than before. I—I just want to be clear. I already have a father. Nothing is going to change that. But—I—get it now. That I have to make room in my life. For things that are true. Even when they don’t fit easily into what I want to believe. Am I making sense? Probably not. Because I haven’t figured it all out.”
Instinctively, I said, “There’s more. There’s more you have to tell me.”
She shook her head. “No. Yes. There is. But—I—let’s just get this question answered first. This question about Fuzzy.”
“Yes. Fuzzy. You—you want to meet Sharif Muhammad Chacha?”
“Yes. Deena told me that he lives with his sister now.”
“Yes. They live together. I—I have been to visit them. And they come to visit me, from time to time.” I didn’t reveal what else I knew, for a moment. She’d assumed that my part in the life of the man she spoke of—the boy whose mother I had killed—remained what it had been when she’d come to see me in Chicago. “I’ll take you to see him. You can ask him about all the missing years between my story and his. Those, I know little about. But the main question you’ve come to ask, I can shed light on that. That this man you call Fuzzy—whose name is Fazl—he is the same boy from my story.”
“He—? How do you know?”
“Because I’ve met him. Since we last met, the story has progressed, Jo. I have changed. I see things, am able to see things, in a way I couldn’t before. You said that you studied Urdu because you met me. As you spoke, I thought of all the negative consequences of that choice of yours—of how adversely I affected the direction of your life. But the same is not true for me, Jo. It’s the opposite.”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you know that I was engaged to be married when you came to visit?”
“Your mom told me.”
“I was on my way back here, to Pakistan, for the wedding. It was arranged, the girl handpicked by my grandfather. She was young and pretty. Too young for me. I didn’t realize that until I met you. That was a bit of a shock—you were like a midlife crisis come alive, knocking at my door, making me realize that, if I was lucky, nearly half my life was already over. And what had I done with it? Not the surface things. Going to college. Going into business. Making some lucky investments, with money given to me by my grandfather. Tech stuff, in Silicon Valley. And I was fortunate enough to have gotten out before the downturn there. I enjoyed the fruits of my success. I traveled. I met beautiful women. Living the good life, something I could afford because of who my grandfather was. Even my business success could be attributed to his wealth. What had I done? What had I done?
“There were two things I could think of to answer that question. One was the car accident. An accident that involved death. The other was you. Also an accident. Involving birth. That was what the effect of my life amounted to, in real terms, on others. A death I had never emotionally absorbed or atoned for—I’d never even spoken about it, the woman and the boy in my path that night, not until I told you. And a birth I’d had no idea about.
“I came back to Pakistan and broke off my engagement. I felt lost. Muharram came. Again, I remembered my meeting with you—all the childhood memories I’d shared out loud, for the first time. Going to majlises with my mother, the sights, sounds, smells of a world I’d been shut out of when I joined this household, a world that was feminine and intimate. Suddenly, the stories of Karbala mattered, the way they had when I was a child—not as a sign of my identity, which is how I’d viewed religion for many years, as a way of defining myself, separating myself from others, from my mother, in particular, and from her husband—but as an experience in itself.
“Two years later, my grandparents went on pilgrimage, ziarat, to Karbala and Najaf, in Iraq. That was before the war. I went with them. It was—it was a life-changing experience. To be there. In places whose names were mythic in my mind. For years, grief and sadness were things I’d refused to acknowledge. The grief of Karbala helped me get in touch with other sources of sorrow that I’d never allowed myself to mourn. Losing my mother. What I’d done to another mother and her son at fajr time—at dawn—when I was a boy of fifteen. It was like a door opening.
“When we came back from Iraq, I asked my grandfather where I could find Sharif Muhammad Chacha, who had already retired. Dada was drinking tea, I remember. He seemed to know why I was asking. Without looking at me, his eyes on his newspaper, Dada said, ‘Let it go, Sadiq. Let the past rest.’ He refused to tell me what I asked. I had to find out where Sharif Muhammad Chacha lived from one of the other servants.
“One morning, I went to the address I’d been given—an extremely modest, cinder block dwelling in a part of town I had never before had reason to visit—and knocked on Sharif Muhammad Chacha’s door.
“Macee opened it. She was shrunken in height, reaching up to embrace me with a shriek the moment she saw me. She spoke of my mother. ‘Do you know, Sadiq Baba, that your mother has never forgotten me, since she went away to Amreeka? Her old Macee? She sends me money and writes me letters, which I ask the schoolmaster up the street to read for me, every month. Here, let me show you. The pictures. See? Here she is, my Deena Bibi. And her husband. And her daughter. My Deena Bibi has not forgotten me. And I? I will never forget her either. Or you, Sadiq Baba. How are you, Beta? And how is your dear mother?’
“ ‘She is well,’ I told her. ‘I spoke to her last month.’
“ ‘Oh, it is so good to see you, Sadiq Baba! Wait here, I will go and call Sharif Muhammad. He has gone to the neighbor’s. I will just go and get him. Just a moment.’
“After only a minute or two, Sharif Muhammad Chacha came. His gray beard had turned white, his face more sharply scored by the lines that his hours in the sun had long ago defined. Neither one of us said anything. He stared at me, as if he was trying to read what he found on my face. Then he said, ‘Come, Sadiq Baba. Come and sit. I have been waiting for you. For all these years. I knew that you would come, one day, to see me. To ask after the boy. That is why you are here, is it not?’
“I said, ‘Yes,’ and started to cry. Not the way I had cried before, when Sharif Muhammad Chacha had found me in my car, shaking with fear at what I had done. This time, I was not crying for myself. I cried, quietly, during the whole time that Sharif Muhammad Chacha took to tell me Fazl’s story.
“ ‘I’ve taken care of the boy, Sadiq Baba, from a distance, as best I could. His name is Fazl. Your grandfather gave me the money, a small sum, every month—more when I asked for it. But he never asked me any questions. Never wanted to know any of the details. Of how much the child cried for his mother. Of how I found a school for him that would give him lodging. He was not a good student. And the masters there were harsh with him, so that I pulled him out and put him elsewhere. But the world was a
hard place for Fazl, everywhere he went. We were never able to find out anything about who he was, about where he and his mother came from. Most likely from some village. He talked about fields and farms, in the beginning. He talked of his mother crying. Perhaps she was a widow. Perhaps a victim of some terrible injustice—how commonplace they are, these victims—that made her run away from the place she called home. Who knows?
“ ‘He called me Uncle. I did what I could. But it was never enough. When he was grown, he found a job. And then another. I helped him with references, sometimes. But he was too simple. He was fleeced of any money I gave him, again and again. What I wanted to do was to bring him home with me. I asked your grandfather’s permission. But he refused.’
“I asked, ‘Where is he now?’
“ ‘He is working again. As a servant. In a big house. I got him the job, knew the driver in that household, which was the home of very big people, like your grandfather. They are friends of his. Your grandfather has seen Fazl, many times, but he doesn’t realize who he is. Do you want to meet him, Sadiq Baba?’
“I hesitated for a second. Then I said, ‘Yes. I do. I want to meet him. To tell him who I am. To beg his forgiveness.’
“ ‘I will arrange it,’ Sharif Muhammad Chacha said. I left him, planning to go back the next day so that I could go with Sharif Muhammad Chacha and meet the boy. Fazl.
“When I came back, Sharif Muhammad Chacha was in some distress. ‘He is gone, Sadiq Baba. I don’t know where. He left that house a month ago. He was fired. The driver told me that he had found him another job, through the cook there. But when I went to the new place, where the cook said Fazl was now working, he wasn’t there, either. I’ve lost him. I hope he gets in touch with me. He has always counted on me in the past. Has come here when he needed me. We’ll have to wait for him.’
“That’s what we did. For many, many months. Finally, one day, Sharif Muhammad Chacha came to see me. ‘I am afraid, Sadiq Baba. I was able to trace the boy through someone from the school that he attended. One of the teachers there, a mullah, found him a job. As a gatekeeper. When I went to inquire there, the house was empty. The neighbors told me that the police had been to the house some weeks before. That some very bad men lived there. Terrorists. The house had been raided, all its occupants arrested. I cannot do anything, now, Sadiq Baba. I am a poor man. With no power. You will have to take up the search. To find out what happened. To find out where Fazl has been taken. I am afraid for him. He has no one in this world to ask after him.’