Acts of Faith

by Eboo Patel

  My mother was a teacher, first by personality and then by profession. A trip with her to the grocery store entailed the endless repetition of multiplication tables and Ismaili prayers. She had graduated from a well-known business school in Bombay and soon discovered that the life of an immigrant housewife in America was less than fulfilling. She began studying for her CPA when I was in first grade, dragging me along to the community colleges where her classes were held. She would plop me down in the vending machine area with a plastic bag full of Triscuits and several hours’ worth of math problems.

  I was riding bikes with a friend on the day her CPA exam results came in. “What’s that noise?” he said. “It sounds like someone screaming your name.”

  I stopped my bike and listened. “Uh, I gotta go,” I told him.

  I pedaled furiously on my Schwinn and returned home to find a small group of curious neighbors staring at my mother, who was standing on the steps of our apartment building in her yellow nightgown waving a sheet of paper and shouting, “Eboo, I passed! I passed!”

  My mother tried her hand in the corporate world, first at Arthur Andersen and then at the McDonald’s Corporation, but she did not fit well into the cubicle life. Her prayers were answered when the College of DuPage announced that it was looking for an accounting professor. She has been in the classroom ever since.

  My parents followed the path of successful immigrants, moving out of the city and into an apartment in an inner-ring suburb and then into a large house in Glen Ellyn, a suburb that shouted upward mobility. Our jamatkhana was forty minutes away. My father’s new responsibilities as a vice president at Leo Burnett meant that he was often away on business. The crush of preparing for class, mentoring students, and serving on committees kept my mother overly occupied. Religious ritual got caught in the squeeze.

  That was fine with me. My energy was focused on trying to fit in as a brown kid in a white world. I would strategize in bed before going to sleep, asking myself questions such as “What can I do to make the popular white kids at school accept me, or at least not harass me?” On the handful of important religious holidays when my parents dragged my brother and me to jamatkhana, I would look at the sea of brown people dressed in kurtas and salwar-kameezes (Indian tunics), mouthing Arabic prayers with their eyes closed and their bodies swaying, comically wagging their hands while telling stories in Gujarati, and I would feel as if they were an inferior breed. I was no longer only wondering what the white kids at school would say about these people. I had adopted their sneer.

  For many years, my closest connection to Islam was my mother’s insistence that I not eat pork. When the fifth grade of Park View Elementary School went on a camping trip, the choice for Friday night dinner was sausage or pepperoni pizza. My mother complained, insisting that a slice with just cheese be provided for me. When we gathered excitedly to eat, the principal called my name first. “Eboo,” he said, “come get your special piece of pizza.” I hung my head and slunk to the front while the other kids snickered.

  When I was invited to a birthday party, my mother would call the host and make sure that the food being served did not have pork. If hot dogs were the order of the day, she would hand me a plastic bag with two beef frankfurters and tell me to remind whoever was cooking to use a separate pan. “But why, Mom?” I would ask plaintively. “What’s the big deal?” I could do nothing about the fact that my skin color marked me as different, but certainly I could try to be like the white kids in every other way.

  My mother would flare up in anger. “Because we are Muslims. We do not eat pork,” she would yell. And then louder: “WE DO NOT EAT PORK.” As I did my best to eliminate the last vestiges of tradition, she was desperately trying to hold on to them.

  In high school, I had stretches where an inner desire to connect with God gripped me. Some Sundays, my mother would wake up at 3:30 a.m. to go to morning prayers at the jamatkhana, and I started accompanying her. I tested myself by playing basketball while fasting and took pride in refraining from the water and food my friends indulged in afterward. In my mind, this had little to do with Islam. It was more about a deep longing that I could not describe but needed somehow to satisfy. I remember telling my mother stories about a kid in my school I admired, a star athlete and honors student who generally managed to be a nice guy, too. “But he said he doesn’t believe in God,” I told her. “It makes me think he’s missing something.”

  My mother gave me a look of shock, as if to say, “Somehow, something I’ve done regarding religion has sunk in.” Wisely, she didn’t say anything out loud.

  “Your great-grandfather moved from a village in Gujarat to the city of Bombay carrying nothing but a can of ghee [clarified butter] and a wristwatch. He sold vegetables off a pushcart for a living, making two paise per item. He baked in the sun and slept by the side of the road.”

  Sometimes my father would draw the story out even longer. Sometimes my great-grandfather almost starved to death, but pulled through when he thought of the foundation he was laying for his family. Other times all of his wares were washed away in the monsoon, and he had to rebuild his business, vegetable by vegetable. After my father was satisfied that he had made my great-grandfather sound sufficiently heroic and intimidating, he would raise his voice and wave his arms to make his point: “He worked his ass off to get us here. So you have no right to be such a lazy pug.”

  I heard this lecture on a weekly basis when I was in junior high. My parents had done their best to impress on me that they had sacrificed mightily to settle in Glen Ellyn so my brother and I could attend the best schools. We were unmoved, more focused on being goofballs than getting good grades. My father felt as if he needed to call the ancestors in for reinforcement. I knew that if my dad caught me rolling my eyes at this story, he would be furious. So I cast them downward whenever I saw him wind up to deliver it, and I bit my lip almost until it bled to keep myself from smirking.

  My parents had lobbied hard for me to be included in Challenge classes, meant for the cream of the crop at Glen Crest Junior High. My prior academic and behavioral record had been spotty, but my parents badgered the administration until they relented and let me into the program. I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain. Even after my phase with the boys who rode dirt bikes had passed, I was still only a so-so student. Class time, in my mind, was best used to try to figure out how to jam an entire pack of Fruit Stripe gum into my mouth. Who needed to learn how to diagram sentences or solve algebra problems?

  An offhand comment made by my science teacher, Mr. Schrage, catalyzed a profound change in my life. Schrage ran a special seminar for seventh- and eighth-grade Challenge science students designed to teach us how to do original research. He also happened to be my sixth-grade Challenge science teacher. I believe it was in his class that I finally succeeded in placing all twenty-four sticks of Fruit Stripe gum in my mouth. I raised both hands in a sign of triumph, but I couldn’t say much because my mouth was full and turning various shades of blue thanks to the artificial colors in the gum. Perhaps because it was close to the end of the school year, Schrage didn’t take the trouble to have me formally removed from the Challenge science program, believing that I would make both of our lives easier and drop down to a regular science course for the rest of my junior high career.

  I didn’t get the hint. I walked into his class on the first day of seventh grade and made for my typical seat in the back. But before I got there, I heard Schrage say, in utter seriousness, “Didn’t we get rid of you last year?”

  He said it loud enough for some other students—the type who spent their class time taking notes on Schrage’s lectures—to hear. I could feel them snickering. My neck got hot. I felt tears coming. Schrage, usually a lighthearted jokester, wasn’t laughing. He was staring me down. He meant to win this. I had been a thorn in his side the previous year, and he was not about to have me disrupt his class again. All of these things went through my mind at once. I opened my mouth to say something and then closed i
t. There was nothing to say. Schrage was right.

  And then I had another thought: “Does this guy think that I’m not smart enough to write a Challenge science research paper?” Suddenly, I got mad. I prepared to hurl a stream of defiance at him.

  But my anger was interrupted by a scarier thought:. “Am I smart enough?” I had never really applied myself to anything. What if I tried this Challenge science research project thing and failed? Schrage would be right. All the other kids in the Challenge program who treated me as if I didn’t belong with them would be right. Up until then, I had pretended that I was too cool to do homework or study for exams. So what if my grades weren’t as high as everybody else’s? My goal was to create the aura that I could do well if I wanted to. I realized that I was the only person in the room who bought that story. And at that moment, I wasn’t so sure that I believed myself anymore.

  I sat quietly at my desk for that first day of class, keeping my Fruit Stripe gum in my pocket. I didn’t cry; that was a victory. But I wanted to, and that was something, too. By virtue of his insult, Schrage helped me discover an identity that was so deeply buried I didn’t even know it existed. I wanted to be a good student—no, an exceptional student. I wanted to be the kind of student whom other people whispered about when I walked down the hall: “There goes Eboo. That kid is smart.” I wanted teachers to say, “This was outstanding,” when they handed my paper back. I wanted to be asked to read my essay out loud in front of the class.

  I returned to Schrage’s classroom after the last bell of the day. “I want to be in Challenge science,” I told him. “I want to write the best research paper you have ever seen.”

  Schrage could have told me that the decision to place me in regular science class had already been made by the department head. Sorry. He could have said that I wasn’t prepared to write the paper—even if I had an attitude change, I just didn’t have the writing or research skills. He could have been brutally honest and said that none of the teachers at Glen Crest had any faith that I would amount to anything, and they didn’t like me much anyway. For all they cared, I could sit in the back of the classroom and stick my fingers in my mouth, as long as I didn’t bother anybody.

  Instead, he took a risk. “Find a topic by next week,” he said. I left with a mission.

  I chose to write on the topic of chiropractic medicine. There was no good reason why, I just liked the word “chiropractic.” I spent nights and weekends buried in the subject. I checked out every book on the topic from the library at the College of DuPage, where my mother taught. I discovered that the National College of Chiropractic was based in the western suburbs of Chicago, and I spent weekends in its library. I learned the different regions of the back, studied the various types of scoliosis, and interviewed local chiropractors about the details of their practice. More important, I learned that I liked this research thing. I enjoyed reading several perspectives on a subject and having to juice them into something that was coherent and distinctly my own. I liked tapping my forehead with my pencil trying to get a sentence just right. I liked feeling smart.

  My father helped me type the paper the week before it was due. It came in at seventy-two pages. “This might be the longest paper any seventh grader has ever written,” he told me, tousling my hair. He was proud of me. I hadn’t heard the story about my great-grandfather in weeks. Maybe my father thought that I had absorbed some of the old man’s work ethic.

  I arrived at school early the day the paper was due and went straight to Schrage’s classroom. A part of me wanted to be defiant when I handed it to him and say, “Here—stick this, you jerk. You didn’t think I could do it.” But this process was about more than the chip on my shoulder. Since signaling my second chance, Schrage had been a full partner in this endeavor, meeting with me every other week to check on my progress. Standing in front of him, my dominant emotion was deep gratitude. “We did it,” I told him, and handed him the black binder with my paper inside. He whistled softly, warmly, as he flipped through it, checking the table of contents, scanning the index. “Kid, you are something,” he finally said.

  He put the binder on his desk. The other binders, the projects done by other students in the Challenge program, were piled near the back of the room. “Why aren’t you putting my paper over there?” I asked.

  “Because I’m using your paper as the example this year. I’m going to show it to all my other classes and my colleagues in the science department as an illustration of what seventh graders can achieve.”

  “They’re not going to believe that it was really me who wrote it,” I said.

  Adolescent identities can shift in an instant. I went from being a bad boy to a goofball to a Class A nerd. By the time I was in high school, my life was dominated by suburban fantasies of the future comforts of a fat paycheck. My small group of friends and I were convinced that high school achievement was a perfect indicator of the amount of fame and fortune we would enjoy later. We were obsessed with grades, scores on standardized tests, and academic awards. On Saturday nights, we gathered at the local Taco Bell, imagining our careers, arguing over which one of us was going to get the biggest house, the coolest car, the most chicks. Ariel was going to be on the U.S. Supreme Court. Karthik would be head surgeon at a major hospital. Chris would be a scientist at the National Institutes of Health. I would be a high-flying California lawyer, driving statuesque blondes to Lakers games in my red Mercedes, just like the characters I watched on the television show L.A. Law.

  Most of our fun came in assaulting one another’s dreams. “You got a B on the history test,” I would needle Karthik. “You’ll never get into Harvard Medical School.”

  “Screw you,” he would reply, embarrassed at being called out in front of everyone. “You can’t even do basic geometry.”

  These discussions quickly degenerated into mom jokes and, finally, pathetic nerd brawls, skinny arms flailing wildly about.

  The more meaningless the matter, the more intensely we competed. When school let out at 2:50 p.m., we would race home to watch Jeopardy! Whoever got the most right answers would win, with the losers inevitably ganging up to pummel the winner.

  We were, in short, nauseating.

  I told my parents I wanted to drop out of the YMCA Leaders Club and stop volunteering so I could spend more time focusing on schoolwork. I couldn’t stand to think that my friends were getting better grades than I was. And I couldn’t believe it when my parents said no. What about my great-grandfather and all the work he had done to lay a foundation so that I had the opportunity to get a great education?

  My father was nonplused about having his example shoved back in his face, particularly when he felt as if I was skewing the story for dubious reasons. “Your great-grandfather always found time to serve others. He was a deeply devoted Ismaili who was constantly doing volunteer service, even when he barely had enough for himself. This is part of our faith, Eboo.”

  What? My father had always seemed lukewarm about religion. He had been slow to come to prayers even during the years when we had prayed together as a family, and he seemed positively gleeful to flee jamatkhana whenever we went. Now he was citing faith as a reason for me to stick with my volunteer activities. I asked my mother about it.

  “Your father’s faith is very strong,” she explained. “For him, faith is about service, not rituals. His family in India has been involved in service at every level imaginable. One day you will hear the stories. They will make you proud. Your father is doing his best to carry on that tradition here. He has helped dozens of recent immigrants get their start in this country. Green cards, driver’s licenses, loans for new businesses—your father helps them with all of those things. Do you ever wonder about those phone calls we get from people who speak only Urdu or Gujarati? Those are the people we are helping.”

  And so I spent my Saturday mornings teaching swimming lessons to handicapped people at the YMCA. I spent every afternoon at the Y during the weeks before Halloween and Easter helping to set
up the haunted house and the Easter egg hunt. I learned something about the lives of people unlike me. I learned to cheer for somebody other than myself.

  Watching my friends and I joust over grades and Jeopardy scores, my father became worried that I was beginning to view learning in purely functional terms. He had been an actor and a filmmaker in India, and learning for him was far more than a path to good grades and a fancy job. One day he marched into my room with an armful of books and said, “It’s time to start reading real literature.” His plan worked. I put aside the Hardy Boys and Great Brain series and inhaled the stack he left on my bedside table. I read Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and devised a hundred ways R. P. McMurphy and I could outmaneuver Nurse Ratched. I joined Mack and the boys from John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row in their schemes to score bottles of “Old Tennis Shoe” and fix up the Palace Flophouse. I left the princely quarters and wandered out into the world with Siddhartha, wondering how my life would change after I encountered old age, sickness, and death.

  In school I joined my classmates in complaining about the books we were assigned in English class, pretending to substitute Cliffs Notes for the real thing. But I secretly loved each one. I remember shutting myself in my room for the entire four days of my Thanksgiving vacation during junior year, immersed in Thoreau’s Walden. Summers, when I wasn’t playing basketball or working at my parent’s Subway sandwich shop, were spent rereading my favorite books from the school year—Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.