Children of Dust

by Ali Eteraz

  As we were driving back, the interior of the car full of sand, the taste of the desert in my mouth, cuts from the kite’s beak on my bare arms, the smell of sweat and leather and exhilaration in my nose, I wondered if perhaps the camels at Mandalay Bay hadn’t told me to come to the Middle East to carry out the silly scheme involving the shaykh and the sculptor and the princess. Perhaps I’d felt compelled to come here to befriend Ziad.

  “How long have you lived in Muslim countries?” I asked suddenly.

  “Two-thirds of my life.”

  “Yet you never became a reformist?”

  “No.”

  “And you never became a fundamentalist?”

  “Nope.”

  “And you never wanted to become an Islamic leader?”

  “Nope.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “I find that astonishing.”

  Ziad slowed the car and glanced over at me. He brushed his hand over his left eyebrow, dislodging little particles of dust onto his lap.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said.

  “What?”

  “How long have you lived in this world?”

  “Pardon?”

  “How long have you been alive?”

  “My whole life, I guess.”

  “When was the last time you flew a kite on a mountain?”

  “Never.

  “When was the last time you got on the ground and took high-res pictures of insects?”

  “Never.”

  “When was the last time you saved Bedouin boys in the desert?”

  “Never.”

  “Well, buddy, I find that astonishing.”

  I said nothing. I felt like I was buried shoulder-deep in sand and someone was aiming stones at my essence. Yet rather than shattering me, the stones revealed themselves to be globules of light. They went down my mouth and gathered in my stomach. They became a pool of brilliance that coalesced and began to bubble. Then a mammoth geyser of laughter shot out from my navel and the beam of light was visible all the way to Damascus.

  We laughed until we cried.

  12

  One day while Ziad was at work, I went walking through the neighborhoods looking for a barbershop. It didn’t take very long to find one. It was set in a narrow alley behind a massive high-rise, with aged leather couches on the front porch where men smoked hookas. Various types of people that I hadn’t seen at the malls—Indian carpenters, Egyptian shopkeepers, and errand boys from unidentifiable countries—came in and out of the shop, smoking cigarettes and sipping mint tea from stained glass cups with thick bottoms. There was a TV in the corner, one that no one watched, on which a soccer match between two anonymous teams was playing. The glass doors of the shop were flung wide open and the desert’s afternoon heat came in, encountered the shade, and moderated some of its anger.

  The barber who took care of my cut and shave was a middle-aged man named Arif—assigned to me because he was the only one who spoke English. Looking at one another we both raised our eyebrows in recognition. Then I cautiously inquired whether he was Pakistani.

  “Of course I am Pakistani!” he exclaimed, breaking into a smile. After shaking hands like old friends, we switched from English into Urdu and he told me about his family, the house he was getting built for them, and how he longed to go back and be reunited with his homeland. It seemed that homeless Pakistanis were everywhere in the world.

  During the course of the shave, when my neck was exposed to the ivory-handled blade and a trickle of foam ran down onto my chest, he stopped and looked at me in the mirror.

  “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “I’m going to a celebration. You should come.”

  I thought it over for a moment. For a second my stomach clenched as I thought of Ittefaq and the last time I’d been invited somewhere by a Pakistani. “What sort of people will be there?” I asked hesitantly.

  “Just average people,” he replied.

  That wasn’t much to go on. “What time does it start?”

  “After midnight,” he replied. As we exchanged glances in the mirror, I could see that he was confused about why I was being so reluctant. To a Pakistani, an invitation should be accepted out of consideration and kindness; it would be rude to refuse. When I stayed quiet, Arif shook his blade, wiped it, and then resumed scraping. Each time he wiped the little hairs onto the white napkin on the counter, he tried not to look at me.

  Arif’s silence and confusion weighed heavily on me, so I tried to make small talk. “What do you think about what’s happening in Pakistan?”

  He clicked his tongue and shook his head disapprovingly. “What is there to think? These people are giving a bad name to Islam.”

  “Which people?” I asked, suddenly alert.

  “These people who blow people up. That’s not Islam. Don’t they understand that Islam is about moderation? They are giving every Muslim a bad name. In the West people think badly about us.”

  “Yes,” I said, encouraging him. “These people are responsible for many deaths, including those of Muslims, and of heightening tensions between Westerners and the Muslim world.”

  “What can you do?” he said, sighing. “They’re out of control.”

  I became quiet again. I wanted to tell Arif that if he joined me he world learn that the militants could, in fact, be controlled. I was envisioning him as the working-class hero of my movement to reform the religion, but I couldn’t form the words. Instead, I told him that I’d join him at his celebration.

  Around midnight Arif and I met at the barbershop to go together in his car and arrived at an empty field serving as a makeshift parking lot. We were far removed from the part of town where the glamorous shops and restaurants were located, though we could see the skyline in the distance.

  Leaving the car, we walked toward a small, squarish structure at the end of the lot. Gathered outside it numerous people—all men—were shaking hands, embracing, and kissing cheeks. Arif patted me on the back with a pleased look on his face before introducing me to a number of people, most of them wearing traditional clothes. I quickly realized that all of them were Pakistanis. Urdu, Punjabi, and a little bit of Pashto flowed among the congregants. There was a lot of laughter, which puzzled me greatly, because I was expecting to be tricked, to be led into something somber and serious, something angry and political.

  I could see that these men were all from working-class backgrounds. When I commented about that, Arif said, “Some of them come from the labor communities far outside the city—places where they sleep ten to a room.” I nodded and looked around at the dusty feet in torn sandals, the clothes that smelled of dust and desert, the turbans of aged fabric. Yet all the faces seemed serene. Each time my hand was shaken by a smiling man, my brand-name shirt—the same shirt I’d worn for the interview with Rashad in Vienna—rubbed against a man who spent most of his life sweeping dust from the streets, or clambering up and down the ladders of a building in progress, or slaving inside a boiling shop. I wanted to fling my shirt off my skin: maybe it was the expensive monogram on my chest that was keeping me from the warmth and serenity that Arif and his dusty friends seemed to share.

  “Let’s go inside,” Arif suggested, leading me into a throng of men taking off their shoes. We stepped into an open room that resembled a mosque but was decorated with banners, streamers, and numerous lights. Some of the banners had a picture of the Ka’ba upon them. Crisscrossing the room just above head level was a patterned decoration made from gauzy paper that rustled softly in the occasional breeze. Arif and I went and sat on the floor near the center of the room. From there I could see a group of old men seated in front, facing the crowd, their heads bowed and their lips murmuring.

  Soon a younger man rose and walked forward to a podium, where he introduced a fresh-faced singer in a blue T-shirt and dirty jeans. “This guy’s got an amazing voice,” Arif whispered.

  By now the room was full. People that weren’t crushed together on t
he floor were standing along the edges. Others, Arif told me, had gone up to the roof to sit. As the crowd thickened and congealed, various people pressed into me from the back, the front, and the sides. Feeling a bit anxious, I tried to keep space for myself by extending my elbows and jutting out my knees, but to no avail. I noticed that Arif, rather than fighting the crowd, welcomed it: he leaned back against the man behind him, hugged another man in front of him, and gave smiles to the man to his right.

  Finally the performer cleared his throat and began singing.

  It was a hamd, a devotional song about God. This particular one was a mixture of many ethnic languages from Pakistan. As the young man sang, the crowd swayed, sang along, and raised their hands in jubilation. When the singer hit a particularly compelling verse, Arif or one of the other men near me would put his fist in the air and shout, Haqq!

  The word meant truth.

  Each shout sent a wave of euphoria through the crowd. It was apparent to me that all these hard-working men could understand haqq—not the word but the concept—but I couldn’t. I began to feel like an outsider, someone who had been accidentally dropped into a group of people to whom he couldn’t belong. My mind started wandering. What if a militant came and blew up the congregation? What if some hard-line Wahhabi came by and arrested all of us?

  Suddenly the young man at the podium began singing Allah hoo Allah hoo, the legendary hamd. Arif let out a haqq that was echoed by others. As the beautiful notes of the song coursed through me, all concerns were erased from my mind. I felt as if someone had cut open my head and was blowing into the tube that was my body. The feeling softened me somehow. It melted away my skin and sinew and made me a part of the men around me. These men who were raised from dust, lived in dust, and would eventually rest in dust. I felt one with them. I was not alone. We were many. We were all children of dust. I swayed in time to the music and when a sweaty man put his head on my back to rest for a moment, all I could do was smile.

  The song accompanied us as we exited and even as we picked up our free tray of food from an attendant waiting outside. Even as we drove away, it kept pulsing in my veins.

  When Arif dropped me off at the apartment in the wee hours, I wanted to tell Ziad all about the event, and about the sense of belonging I’d felt with the Pakistani laborers, but I found him asleep. I went out to the balcony and sat up awhile longer humming the tune to myself and smiling.

  13

  Over the next few days I didn’t spend any time on Islamic reform.

  Ziad and I played tennis, argued through long games of Scrabble, and hung out with migrant Kenyans who taught us how to play Uno with regular playing cards. We went to look at calligraphy at a museum, drove out to a marina to attend a yacht party on the sea, and watched kids flirting at the mall. Then we went and bought a long hose at the hardware store and used it to wash the sticky desert sand from his car.

  While I was spraying the vehicle, a man in a robe stopped in his Benz and, thinking me to be a laborer, gestured at me to wash his windshield. I agreed to do it as long as he let me fuck his mother. He cursed and drove off.

  Ziad was impressed. “You came here as a beggar to the rich, and now you’re giving them a piece of your mind.”

  After the car was washed we drove to the meat market and bought an assortment of different meats: chicken, New Zealand beef, baby lamb, and Ziad’s favorite: camel. We decided to have a barbecue.

  While the chicken was marinating and I was waiting for Ziad to finish making lemonade, I went to the computer and, for the first time in many days, checked my e-mail. I found a series of startling messages.

  The first was from one of the shaykh’s acolytes, saying that he was ready to meet. She told me to send her the questions in advance so that she could point out—and I could toss—the ones the shaykh wouldn’t answer.

  The next was an e-mail from the sculptor. He advised me as to his availability and said that he looked forward to hearing from me.

  The last one was the most surprising. Rashad had gotten hold of one of the shaykh’s silent benefactors—an older noblewoman with a reformist slant to her philanthropy—who might be receptive to ideas about expanding the shaykh’s regional and international reach. She was a professional philanthropist—the sort of person who looked forward to seeing a PowerPoint presentation. I excitedly printed out the e-mails.

  As I was standing in front of the printer, I took a look out the window at Ziad, who was on the balcony grilling camel burgers. I could smell every spice he’d used in the seasoning. I also picked up the scent of basted chicken thighs crisping on the grill. I could hear the sound of clinking ice cubes when he took a drink of lemonade. I saw him wipe his mouth with his bare arm. The perfect picture of a life savored.

  I wanted to go out and show him the e-mails. I wanted to tell him that my scheme had not been insane, that my plans had not only come through as I’d hoped, but had the potential of being so much more.

  Yet a part of me felt reluctant. I remembered the gulf between us when I’d been caught up in my work. I didn’t want a repeat of that. I was drawn to the voracious way of living that Ziad had shown me. If I threw myself back into my schemes, Ziad’s way of living—living with abandon—would be lost. I’d be back into the fiber optic cables and press releases, back into the suffering that came with saving sufferers, back into the violence that was involved in vanquishing extremists.

  I sat back down and put my head in my hands. What was happening? Was I really contemplating abandoning all my plans just because they would create some distance between me and someone who didn’t agree with my aims? It was irrational! I didn’t have a legal career anymore. I’d lost my family. I had no money. Islamic reform was my salvation—my way of becoming respectable and stable again, my way of having a place in society, my way of gaining status among the community of believers. Only the utterly insane would fail to act responsibly here.

  And it was more than just material things. The think tank was to be the culmination of the covenant with Islam that had colored every manifestation of my being from childhood to adulthood. I had an inescapable duty to follow through on these plans. I owed it to myself; I owed it to Islam.

  All of a sudden Ziad’s voice through the window brought me out of my reflection.

  “Hey, desk jockey! Are you coming back out?”

  “You bet.”

  “The chicken is done. We’re just waiting on the camel.”

  “Coming!”

  “Bring my laptop while you’re at it, would you? I feel like hearing some of that Bulleh Shah again.”

  I went into Ziad’s room, the e-mails still in my hand, looking for his white MacBook. I didn’t see it at first. Then I noticed a corner of it sticking out from under a pile of papers on the bed. I sifted through them quickly as I pushed them aside. The computer printout of an article containing the picture of a white-bearded old man with a turban, a chador draped around his shoulders, caught my eye. At first I thought it was a picture of Bulleh Shah, perhaps because I’d just heard his name.

  It turned out to be part of an article entitled “A History of Spiritual Love,” written by Osman Mir for EGO, an online magazine. The man in the picture wasn’t Bulleh Shah but Jalal al-Din Rumi, one of the greatest poets and mystics in history. He was the author of the Masnavi—a work of such literary brilliance that it was called “the Persian Quran.” That was all I knew of him. Out of curiosity I picked up the article and began skimming.

  This particular piece focused on the relationship between Rumi and his teacher, Shams of Tabriz—its warmth, its intimacy, its ecstatic and celebratory subtlety. Their relationship began with a three-month period of seclusion, I read, during which the pair withdrew themselves from the rest of the world in Shams’s house. They worked together for some years, until Shams heard a voice outside of his door while he and Rumi were speaking. He followed it out and was never heard from again. At that point Rumi made Shams into his poetic signature, his alter ego, and integrated him
into his “I-ness.” Thus wrote Rumi: “Why should I seek? I am the same as he. His essence speaks through me. I have been searching for myself.”

  Suddenly Ziad’s voice came from the balcony. “The camel is cooked to perfection!”

  Startled, I dropped the essay and the e-mails, grabbed the laptop, and ran outside. “This camel is coming,” I called.

  “Hurry up,” Ziad shouted. “I’m hungry like a lion.”

  14

  The burgers were so good they made me forget about the e-mails. Juice ran down my chin with each bite I took. I could feel the shan masala weaving through my stubble. As I chewed the tender flesh, I made muted moans of pleasure. By the time I took the next bite, one line of juice dried up and another trailed down the side of my mouth. The two lines, dry and wet, kept alternating with each bite.

  “This is unlike anything I’ve ever had,” I said appreciatively.

  Ziad looked at me and smiled, nodding in agreement.

  In the background Abida Parveen’s voice crooned Bulleh Shah, but I was so intent on my burger that I wasn’t paying much attention to it. Looking up, I noticed Ziad staring closely at me.

  “Whatcha lookin’ at?”

  “I just thought about something I read,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I was reading up on your Sufi poets in Punjab the other day. Did you know that one of their favorite motifs was the idea of the bela?”

  “What’s that?”

  Ziad laughed. “And you call yourself a Punjabi! You know when a river changes its course? Well, the word bela refers to the basin it leaves behind. It’s supposed to be very fertile and lush.”

  “Why are you thinking about that?”

  “Because of the tributaries of grease on your face.” He reached forward and with his index finger traced the two lines down my chin.