Children of Dust

by Ali Eteraz

  Sarmad, meanwhile, begins following a fanatical mullah. He stops playing music and accuses his own family of being apostates and infidels. One day Sarmad’s uncle from England arrives with his young daughter Maryam. The uncle is upset that she’s planning on marrying a non-Muslim from London and convinces Sarmad to marry her. At first Sarmad is reluctant, but when he asks his mullah for advice he’s given the go-ahead. Sarmad embraces the conspiracy and, after forcibly marrying Maryam, moves with her to a tribal area of Pakistan, where no one will find them. He eventually rapes her.

  Once Maryam is able to escape to Lahore, she files a motion to annul the marriage. A dramatic trial ensues. Sarmad calls in his sinister mullah to have him testify that Sarmad was simply following Islam and therefore did nothing wrong. Maryam, meanwhile, desperate for help, goes in search of a reclusive reformist shaykh and begs him to testify on her behalf. The shaykh, played by the Indian actor Naseeruddin Shah, stands up in court, demonstrating with both eloquence and scripture that Sarmad’s mullah’s testimony was utterly fraudulent and bankrupt. Beyond simply affirming the rights of women, the shaykh decries the mullah’s disregard for music, maligns him for the militancy he promotes, and attacks him for misleading impressionable Muslim youth. His testimony is so potent that it leads to a verdict in Maryam’s favor—and leads Sarmad to dump his mullah and his extremist teachings. At the end of the film Sarmad is found using his musical skills to perform an azan. It was a perfect reformist resolution. Good Islam beating bad Islam.

  By the time the twists and turns of the film were over and done with, the atmosphere in the room had changed. Ziad and I began talking in familiar ways again.

  “Wow. That was intense,” Ziad said, watching the final credits. “I feel like we should hug or something.”

  “Why don’t you make some of that mint tea and we can say that we hugged.”

  “Only if you make a hooka,” he countered.

  It was late at night and cool outside, so I pulled two chairs onto the balcony and lit up the tobacco as I once did with my grandfather. Ziad brought out the steaming cups and we clinked them. Then we slurped noisily as we commented on the progress the laborers had made on the nearby building. We passed the hooka back and forth and made rings with the smoke. The O’s rippled out of our mouths, hung in the air, and for a moment became necklaces for the stars.

  I interrupted the reverie to talk about the film. “Didn’t that movie really just cut to the heart of the civil war in Islam?” I said. “On one hand, you’ve got impressionable young men, who represent the strong, handing over the reins of their power to scheming mullahs. On the other hand, you’ve got smart women, who represent the weak, subjugated in the name of religion, looking for help from those who know the humane side of Islam.”

  “There seems to be something common to both sides,” Ziad observed.

  “Impossible. They’re as different as night and day.”

  “No. They’re alike. They both seem to believe that Islam is the solution. They’re just arguing over whose Islam should be dominant.”

  “Authoritarian Islam and tolerant Islam aren’t the same thing. The former is not Islam. They’re two different things. Which side are you on?”

  “What if I said neither?”

  “There is no neither. You’re either with us or against us.”

  “All things boil down to dominance to you, don’t they?”

  “Yes, they do,” I admitted, raising my voice. “Dominance matters to the other side and it matters to us. The only difference is that when we win we won’t kill everyone. I think that’s an important distinction. Don’t you?”

  Ziad swished his tea around in his mouth and took big puffs on the hooka. “Why do you do this?” he asked, looking at me intently.

  “What?”

  “This Islamic reform stuff.”

  “I already told you. I’m trying to get a think tank going. I want to create a legislation monitoring program that allows us to track the modernization of Islamic law in various Muslim-majority countries. I want to challenge theocracy and terrorism from an Islamic perspective. I want to create a liberal fatwa factory. I want to promote the creation of images so that Islam has an artistic renaissance like that of the Europeans.”

  “I’m not asking you your plans. I want to know what your motivation is.”

  “My motivation is Islamic reform,” I replied, speaking with exaggerated clarity.

  “No. You aren’t following. Why do you throw yourself into Islamic reform? Why do you care about that in particular?”

  “I like helping people,” I said. “Look, are you trying to evaluate me? Maybe deconstruct me? How about this: I help people because I’m not happy inside. I’m insanely lonely, and all this is a way for me to make myself feel better. Is that what you wanted to hear, Oprah? Should I shed some tears?”

  “Now you’re just mocking me,” Ziad said. “Here’s my issue. If you just want to help people, why not become a lifeguard? Why not work with the homeless in…I don’t know…Philadelphia? Why are you chasing around shaykhs and princesses in the Middle East? Why are you putting up—”

  “Islam!” I shouted, fed up with his obstinacy. “It has to do with Islam! I’m doing it for Islam! Isn’t it obvious?”

  I thought this would shut Ziad up, but it didn’t. “Ali Eteraz, there are a lot of people in this world who know Islam better than you,” he said. “Why not leave it all to them? Why not give your ideas and suggestions to them? Hell, why not go back to practicing law and raising the money yourself and becoming wealthy enough to buy your own think tank?”

  I yanked the hooka nozzle back from him. “I want to get my hands dirty.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you know the story of the Black Stone?” I asked.

  “The one in Mecca? Yeah. It came down from Paradise, and the Prophet Ibrahim made it the cornerstone of the Ka’ba. You kiss it and it cleanses your sins.”

  “Yes. Did you know that it used to be white?”

  “It did?”

  “Yes. And now it’s black.”

  “Your point?”

  “It’s black because billions of hands have touched it and made it dirty. Do you know what I want to do about it?”

  “What?”

  “I want to take a rag and clean it. Ever since I was little, that’s been my dream.”

  Ziad laughed. “You’re an odd one.”

  “Don’t laugh: this is very serious.”

  “So you’re on a quest, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hate to repeat myself, but…why?”

  “There are things that define a person’s life. In my case it’s a covenant that was made at the Ka’ba before I was born.”

  “A covenant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you making this up? People don’t do that kind of thing in today’s world.”

  “Yes, they do. I’m living proof!”

  “So what does your covenant involve?”

  “Simple. In exchange for my being born a male, I would become a great servant of Islam. That’s the deal my parents made. At birth I was given the name Abir ul Islam. It means Perfume of Islam. I was supposed to spread Islam like a fragrance. When I was still an infant, my parents rubbed my chest against the Holy Ka’ba. I took my first steps in the sacred city of Mecca. My draw to Mecca was so strong that when I was on hajj with my parents—I was less than a year old then—I crawled away from them and went off into the desert. Must have been following Muhammad’s path, my parents assumed, once they got over worrying that I was lost. I grew up my entire childhood listening to this…this legend of what I was supposed to be.”

  “Some sort of Islamic hero,” said Ziad.

  “Yeah. For a while I even thought I was from a caliphal bloodline. Talk about the stuff of legend!”

  “What happened with that?”

  “Long story.”

  Ziad didn’t say anything for several minutes. Mulling over what I’d said, he bit his
lip the way he had in the car the first night I’d arrived. He fiddled with his cup and dipped his finger into the little remaining bit of tea. He licked his finger and made a sucking sound.

  Finally he spoke again. “If you changed your gender,” he asked, “would the covenant lapse?”

  “First of all: I like my penis. Second of all: I don’t appreciate you making light of this.”

  “I’m just trying to understand,” Ziad said. “Really.”

  “I don’t think you can,” I replied.

  “Fine,” Ziad said, putting up his hands in surrender. “I’m going to sleep. Let’s go off-roading in the morning. There’s a place I’d like to show you. I’ll wake you up early.”

  “I don’t want to go,” I said, sounding as petulant as I felt.

  “I’m not hearing you,” he singsonged.

  When I got to my room I felt so annoyed that I figured I’d have trouble going to sleep. Lying in bed and thinking back on the confession I’d made to Ziad, I began to feel light and supple. I no longer felt angry. Relief overtook me. It was as if my mind was a walnut that had been cracked open by Ziad’s incessant curiosity. I wasn’t sure where I’d read it, but it was said that sometimes water actually spouted out naturally from stone. I felt now as if a hole had been opened in my ossified conscience. Soon I was drenched in myself.

  I slept soundly and dreamlessly. I woke as refreshed as if I had just stepped out of a cool lake. In the morning I wasn’t sure whether I felt so good because the night had spun silvery threads of joy into my heart, or because the forthcoming day held the promise of bounty.

  11

  After mating with the desert, the city lay on her stomach snoring. There had been a sandstorm during the night, and a smooth, pristine-looking dusting covered everything. It wasn’t yet dawn, and the moon was erotic gold.

  When Ziad and I headed outside on our off-roading adventure, we found the black SUV coated in sand—a soft, fine-grained sand that felt like velvet. We used the edges of our hands to clean the windshield and the mirrors and then headed onto the highway.

  There were no cars on the streets at that hour, though every now and again we passed a little mosque. The homes became larger the further we got out of the city until suddenly there were no more mosques or houses. We passed a few warehouses and some junkyards; then those disappeared as well.

  The landscape resembled a good ghazal. Like that traditional form of love poetry, the desert was repetitious without being tedious. It had a melancholy tinge that was expressed with simple economy. It wasn’t raw or forceful, yet it still felt imposing and impregnable. There was formality in its wickedness. It was ageless without being aged. Very rarely there was a singular man or a lone bird that inevitably disappeared in the sighing sand as the author of a ghazal disappears into his final couplet.

  Ziad cut into a marked area and began to follow tire marks from earlier off-roaders. “The sandstorm would have wiped yesterday’s tracks out,” he said, “so someone must have stopped by recently.” The knowledge that there were others in our proximity bothered me. I wanted to be alone with the world.

  Ziad pressed the gas pedal down as we approached a looming bank. As he dropped into 4x4 mode, the Jeep roared, leaping into the air and then landing nose-first. He swung the steering wheel from side to side as we lurched down the backslope. The vehicle skidded calmly to the bottom, like a ship getting carried onto shore by a powerful wave.

  After we took turns practicing downshifting and drifting, we parked the vehicle, took Ziad’s bike out of the back, and hiked up a meager trail that led through clumps of rocks to a distant tabletop plateau. Ziad, with a camera around his neck, and carrying his bike over one shoulder, rushed ahead of me. He looked back from time to time, and I could see in his eyes a zealotry I’d never been before. His desperation to beat the sun to the plateau made him seem like an ancient Zoroastrian priest chasing after Ahura Mazda. I looked up at the sky and saw that the craggy moon was still visible, though in anticipation of the inevitable invasion by the sun it had fortified its light within its craters.

  I couldn’t understand Ziad’s maddening pace. I wanted to shout out to him and say, “It’s just the sun! It looks the same every day! It’s just an ancient star that was destroyed billions of years ago!” Instead, I sighed and held my tongue. With one hand on each thigh, I pressed forward. By the time I got to the top, Ziad was contorting his body in myriad ways to capture the sun with his camera. I watched his acrobatic art for a little and then I started riding the bike around the rocks.

  When I reached the far end of the tabletop, I stood with my back to the sun, looking across a vast desert. It struck me that just a few hours in that direction sat the city of Mecca, where the Ka’ba, the crown jewel of Allah, sat in the center of a thousand marble minarets, leaking the aab-e-zamzam into the desert to nourish its pilgrims, with the Black Stone, its singular eye, giving God a way to gaze upon the profane world. If I just kept riding this bike, and it turned into a camel, and if I rode and rode, I would be at the place where my existence had started.

  I spent the rest of the morning following Ziad around the plateau. It was hard to keep up with him. Sometimes he climbed on the bike and took a suicidal ride partway down at a steep angle, sometimes he stopped suddenly and lay down on his belly to focus his camera on a tiny insect—he took hundreds of pictures—and sometimes he had me stand between him and the sun and he captured my shadows. From time to time he would conceive in his head a scene that pleased him, and then he would hand me the camera and run to the spot—sometimes two or three hundred yards away—and strike a pose and tell me to take a picture. Then he’d come rushing back and look at the job I’d done, usually nodding in approval.

  Even when we finally got back down from the plateau he didn’t stop taking pictures. He took pictures of the SUV going up and down the sandy banks, me at the wheel. He stood in the center of a clearing and told me to drive doughnuts around him so he could take pictures of the blowing sand. The jaws of his camera snapped open and shut like the mouth of a voracious lion. Ziad ate everything around him.

  Finally we got into the Jeep and, leaving the scant shade of the mountain, drove over to a raised clearing between two hills where the wind was more fierce. Ziad burrowed in the back of the Jeep and brought out a parachute kite, handing me the two-handed controls. Then he ran off and flung the kite into the air. With a powerful whoosh the kite caught an eastern gust and yanked on my arms. I felt as if I were trying to rope down a massive dragon with nothing but string. The gusts were so powerful that I was lifted in the air and even dragged forward a few yards now and then. To control the kite I had to dig my heels into the sand and get in a squat, my quads quivering from the force I exerted. Sometimes I didn’t give the line enough slack or pulled too suddenly and the kite took a nose dive and slammed into the ground. Whenever this happened, Ziad whooped and ran over to untangle the string; then he flung the kite in the air again.

  Once I figured out how to control the kite, I began enjoying myself. I sent the kite in threatening swoops over Ziad’s head, which sent him ducking and rolling and running down the clearing in a panic. After a while he became fed up with taking evasive maneuvers and came over to take control of the kite. Now it was my turn to run around the clearing while the kite veered down and pecked at my head or slammed into me from my blind spot and sent me sprawling.

  When in a hallagulla of laughter and sweat I fell down into the sand, I spread out my limbs and made sand angels. I left a line of sweat where the spine would be.

  We flew the kite until the day became hot and the breeze died down. Finally we made our slow way back to the SUV and had a drink. Our faces were flushed, our skin covered in dust. Sand had gotten into our shoes and socks and under our clothes. The few hours we’d been out had made us darker, and we compared tan lines. We looked back up at the clearing and saw our tracks—footprints, and furrows where the kite had dragged us, and indentations where the kite had lacerated the sand.
r />   After we cooled down, we got in the Jeep and made our way back toward the highway.

  Suddenly Ziad pointed at a spot upon the hills. “What’s that?” he asked, slowing down so that he could gaze into the distance.

  I put the binoculars to my eyes and stared. Three forms slowly came into focus. One was an SUV high up on a sandy embankment at the side of a stony ridge.

  “It’s a Jeep like yours,” I said. “I don’t think it’s moving.”

  “Do you think it’s stuck?”

  I adjusted my binoculars and confirmed. “I think so. I see two guys. They’re just standing around near the Jeep. Maybe they’re just hanging out.”

  “Unlikely. Let’s go check it out.”

  When we got close to the ridge, we realized it wouldn’t be safe for us to drive up where the other Jeep was. The sand was too deep and the incline too steep. We got out and approached the two men on foot.

  They weren’t men, as it turned out. They were a pair of Bedouin boys, no more than sixteen years old, who had brought their father’s Jeep for an early morning adventure. Lacking 4x4 capability, the vehicle had gotten stuck. They had spent the greater part of the morning spinning their wheels, and the rear left wheel was now more than halfway buried in the sand. We tried using a big plank that the boys had found as a lever, but it snapped when we put our weight into it. Then Ziad trudged down and back and brought a shovel from his car. The boys took turns digging energetically. Each time they displaced some sand, however, more sand shifted and replaced it. They tried to persuade us to bring our Jeep and give them a push, but Ziad adamantly refused because it would cause us to sink as well. In the end we drove the pair to the highway, from which point they said they could navigate the rest of the way back to their tribe. I was surprised by Ziad’s unwillingness to risk himself for the sake of others.