A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

  * * *

  HADIA WIPES AWAY all trace of eyeliner, gets dressed in all black—it is the eighth of Moharram, and a break between rotations has allowed her to come home and attend the majlises. In the bathroom mirror, she regards her reflection. Since she removed her scarf she has only worn it when going to mosque, out of a deep respect for the place and its dress code, more important to her than her personal preference. Her hands and their memory—the square cloth folded until the edges were even, placed on her head just before her forehead, a safety pin poked through and clasped shut beneath her chin, and then one ear of the cloth thrown over her shoulder, her personal touch. When she looks at her reflection, tenderness for a younger Hadia overwhelms her. This was her face of years ago. It is as though she can take a pilgrimage to her younger self as easily as folding a cloth and clasping it to her neck again. There is a knock on the bathroom door and she opens it to Huda, dressed exactly like she is: all black, in a plain cotton shalwar kameez that they will put a black abaya over, the flowing uniform of Moharram, of mourning. Huda’s face softens when she sees her.

  “Mumma wants you to convince Amar to come,” Huda says.

  “He needs convincing?”

  Amar could offer an excuse on any other day, but these days of Moharram were for commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, and one would not even want to shirk attendance. Even Amar would not think to upset Mumma and Baba in such a way. Huda gives her the look she gives when both realize that Hadia has not lived with them since she was eighteen—almost six years ago now. It occurs to Hadia that unless she is specifically informed, she will not know what it has been like at home. But things are more or less always the same: only Amar fluctuates.

  “Try and talk to him. God knows he doesn’t listen to us.”

  She opens his door when he does not answer her knocking. He is still asleep. His room is an absolute mess. A strange stuffy smell. She shakes his shoulder, gently at first, then roughly until he opens his eyes to her.

  “Hadia. You’re home.”

  His eyes are groggy.

  “Get ready quick—we’re leaving.”

  “Where?”

  “What cave have you been living in? It’s eighth Moharram.”

  “I’m not coming.” He covers his head with the blanket.

  “But it’s your favorite day,” she tries.

  Each night leading up to the tenth of Moharram was dedicated to a family member or companion whose life was lost fighting alongside Imam Hussain in the Battle of Karbala. Eighth of Moharram was dedicated to Hazrat Abbas. His story was one of loyalty. Of the love between brothers.

  “Leave, Hadia—I won’t change my mind.”

  Mumma, Baba, and Huda are standing by the front door, each of them wearing the same look on their faces, the one that tells her that they have been waiting for her for days, hoping that she would be the one to reach him. She shakes her head to answer the question no one manages to ask.

  * * *

  THE LAST TIME she had properly spoken to Amar was months ago, near the end of summer. He had come home early from his summer class and suggested they go out, just the two of them. They drove with the music blasting, windows down, singing loudly, until they pulled into a café with patio seating. The sun shone bright in the bluest sky the way it does some California days and one marvels at the luck of living in such a place.

  It was not often the two of them were alone outside of home. Here, beneath the sky, they were like old friends who had not seen each other for a long time. Hadia bought the drinks, Amar waited for them at the counter and carried them out. She smiled because Amar remembered she drank even her cold drinks with a sleeve. She was squinting, and Amar asked if she wanted to switch seats, but she liked the rays warming her cheeks and liked the way, when she did look at Amar, he was backlit, just a moving outline.

  “Mumma and Baba love you a lot. You should be kinder to them,” she said.

  He looked to the cars that passed. The people waiting at the corner for the light to change.

  “I know Mumma does.”

  She shook her head. “Baba loves you more than any of us, even more than Mumma.”

  “All he does is yell.”

  “If he didn’t love you, you wouldn’t be able to upset him so easily.”

  They were silent then. He leaned forward and she could see all the features of his face and she felt strange for speaking so candidly.

  “But you have calmed yourself recently,” she offered in Urdu, and in Urdu it sounded like a light joke, one made with good intention.

  He raised an eyebrow as if to say you’ve noticed.

  “You have. You fight with them less. You smell a bit better.”

  She smiled then and he did too. Hadia would comment on how terrible he smelled when it was clear he had been smoking. It was the closest she came to addressing it. For a moment she wondered if he was in love. He was smiling the way people did when a change in them was noticed, satisfied that what was felt internally could be witnessed by the world.

  “I know what I want to do now,” he said to her. “Transfer quick, premed, medical track.”

  Hadia shifted her watch a bit. It was loose and moving it around comforted her.

  “But you hate the sciences.”

  “You don’t think I can do it.”

  “I’m only saying that you like writing, that’s what you’ve liked for years now.”

  “It wouldn’t be as respectable.”

  She laughed. He looked hurt, having misunderstood her laughter.

  “And when did that start mattering to you?” Again she spoke in Urdu, her tone intending lightness.

  “So you get to be the golden child, the studious one, and I should be the one who does what I care about.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Why are you trying to dissuade me?”

  “I’m not,” she said quietly, stirring her straw. “I think you can do it.”

  Her words felt false then and she was sure he took them as so. Amar was turning twenty soon and was about to begin his second year of community college. As far as Hadia could tell he was far from being on track. He had gone through his entire education doing the bare minimum. His high school graduation had been a kind of miracle. When he had been in danger of dropping out of high school, she had tried to convince Baba that there were other kinds of intelligence. Did I come this far, he said, did I work this hard, for you to all waste your lives? Make nothing of yourselves. She did not say to her father: but I am making something of myself, and only for you. She did not tell him that since beginning med school it had become clear to her that she had no personal interest in the subject, that she was only pursuing it for him, pushing and pushing herself and resenting how one decision made at eighteen would now determine the shape of her life.

  After her conversation with Amar, she could not silence her suspicions about the sudden change in him, the way he’d pulled himself together. She had stepped into his closet looking for his keepsake box. It felt wrong, but she only wanted to know if her hunch was true. When Amar was much younger and they had first gifted him the box, he had only trusted Hadia to help him figure out how to set the combination. He had chosen his birth date and his jersey number from the jersey Abbas Ali had given him, a combination he did not realize Hadia caught the significance of, and likely thought she had forgotten. Over the years she very rarely indulged in a cruel curiosity, and allowed herself to peek in his box.

  In photographs held together by a plastic band she saw the face of Amira Ali. So he loved her. She had wondered when she had caught Amar looking in Amira’s direction at parties. She had once walked in on them risking a conversation in the mosque lobby. Amira had blushed immediately, offered up a flimsy excuse, and walked away, leaving Hadia free to tease Amar, but instead she gave him a grim look. Of all the girls? she wa
nted to say. He should be careful. But why wouldn’t he love Amira Ali? She was easy to love. Something about her stood apart from the other girls. Judging by the stack of letters addressed to him (To: A, From: A), perhaps she loved him too.

  What surprised her most that night, though, was not the photographs of Amira Ali, but one of her father, young and handsome and so serious. He looked exactly like Amar did now. She held it in her hand like a prize, considered knocking on her parents’ bedroom and saying: look—he saved this. But what would it prove? There was another photograph she had not seen before, at a park, their mother wearing a bright yellow shalwar kameez. Mumma looked radiant and astonishingly young. Baba was missing from the picture. Hadia tried to recall the day but could not. Tangerines in her hand and Huda’s. In the picture Amar was looking up at her. Then there was a photograph of Abbas Ali and she stopped, having not seen his face in years, and she realized she had almost forgotten its disarming effect on her. Her throat closed shut. It was taken at a camp their families had gone to years ago; Amar’s arm was around him. For years she had been too shy to say his name, but alone, under the yellow light of her brother’s closet, she spoke his name aloud.

  Amar loved Amira Ali. And she could not help but admire how he had done something about it: he had lifted a camera and focused it on her face, he had written her letters, sat by her in a sunny place. Hadia had loved Abbas Ali and had done nothing; the love story that existed between their families was not, as she had imagined as a girl, between her and Abbas Ali, but a story that now belonged to her brother. She had been alone with Abbas in the same kitchen and had barely spoken to him. She had kept her hands dumbly at her sides.

  * * *

  THE NIGHT OF the eighth Moharram majlis, Amar comes to Hadia’s bedroom. He shakes her a little to wake her.

  “I’m heading out,” he says to her. “I’ll be back before morning.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She sits up. Even in the moonlight, even through the fog of her sleep, she can sense that he moves strangely, unsteady on his feet.

  “It’s good to have you home,” he whispers. “I’m leaving my window open. Cover for me in case? Don’t tell, yeah?”

  He leaves. After he has walked away she catches a smell she cannot quite place. At least he still tells her before he goes. A horrible thought twists a knot in her stomach: what if something happens to him, what if her parents find out she had known and did nothing? The thought wakes her. She goes to her window and looks out. He is the figure jogging across the street and getting into a car. Navy blue, four-door, a license plate she can’t make out. Please God, let him come back before Mumma and Baba wake for fajr. The magnolia flowers glow in the moonlight, white as bones.

  Once they have driven away, she steps into his bedroom on tiptoe. It might just be an invitation to a party he does not want to refuse, a young man acting like one, which would not be a problem in any other household, had their family not been their family, their faith not their faith, their father not their father. She closes Amar’s bedroom door behind her. Earlier that night, in the mosque parking lot, Amira Ali had pulled Hadia aside. Amira had had the audacity to ask after Amar, and had she not seemed so genuinely blue, Hadia might have bristled at her boldness. Whatever might have existed between Amira and Amar was over. She felt for her brother but was hardly surprised. Now she lifts up his sheets. Runs her hand beneath his mattress. Lifts his pillows and shakes them. A small green case falls out and bounces off the mattress and onto the floor. He is so reckless. Baba could easily follow the same trail. It is almost as though he wants to be caught. She unscrews the lid, sniffs it: just weed. She had guessed as much. She returns the canister to his pillow. As long as Mumma Baba didn’t find it and overreact, all would be well. Baba would be unable to tolerate or understand it. The longer she searches, the faster she moves: his laundry basket is heavy for just clothes and she rummages until she finds two water bottles, one clear and one honey colored. She twists the cap open and scrunches her nose from the strong scent. She considers tasting it but could never. Not on the eve of ninth Moharram, not on any other day. She is a little proud of herself: that, even in the dead of night, with no one to watch her, even while holding the alcohol in her hand, she still has no intention of acting on her curiosity. Maybe a better sister would have drained the contents into the bathroom sink but she knows it would be no solution. It is not the drink but the impulse to seek it out that is the problem. She sprays his room with freshener, wipes down the surfaces of his desk and drawers. Tired, she sits on his bed. The breeze from his open window gets caught in the curtain like a ghost’s dress. She thinks of the stacks of letters and photographs she found in Amar’s box months ago, and her conversation with Amira tonight, and feels deeply sad for her brother. He should have known better—there was no way her parents would think to marry her to Amar. Amar, who liked to stoke the disapproval of everyone in the community like a man fanning flames. Amar never tried to be anyone other than himself, but now she sees that perhaps, this past summer, when they were sitting on that patio squinting from the sunlight, he had been trying, for Amira Ali, to become the kind of man who could send a decent proposal. Before leaving his room she looks out the window at the empty street and trembling magnolia blossoms. The curtain fills with air before dragging back and she tries to push the uneasy thought from her mind: of how well she knows her brother, of what he is like when his desire escapes him.

  * * *

  ON NINTH MOHARRAM she removes all jewelry—Dada’s watch, her small earrings that are shaped like little strawberries, her akhiq ring—and she sets them down at the edge of her desk. No adornments on ashura. It is still early evening. Once the stars are out, she will pray before they leave for mosque. There is a knock on her door and it is her brother.

  “You’re awake,” she says. He has been asleep all day. She studies him as he approaches, he peers out the window, jumps onto her bed. He seems steadier on his feet.

  “You see—that’s exactly why I never want to become an early riser. They just look down on people who sleep in.”

  “It’s almost six.”

  “It was a joke, Hadia.”

  She considers making a joke in return, letting the moment pass easily and undisturbed; but instead she says, “Listen, I wanted to speak to you. You’re being reckless, Amar.”

  She knows her father. His pride, his values, his adherence to the religious rules. They are more important than love. More important than loyalty to one’s child. She always sensed conditions to their parents’ love and so she did nothing to threaten it. Amar sensed the same and only thought to test its limits. See how far he could push them before they left him.

  “If you don’t want to pray, don’t pray. If you don’t want to come to mosque, don’t come. But please. Have some respect. They will catch you and it will break their hearts.”

  “There is nothing to catch.”

  “I found the weed and the bottles. If something is wrong, I can help.”

  For a moment he looks as though he has registered nothing she has said, and then, as though it took a minute for her words to reach him, his face softens. She thought he would be angry at her for trespassing, but he does not appear to be.

  “No one can help me.”

  A break in his tone. She thinks of how they are told that God wants to help His creations, how He says: take one step toward me and I will take ten steps toward you. She is only human, but still, if her brother would only speak to her, be honest with her, she would step a hundred times toward him. He studies her for a long time.

  “You think it’s okay,” he says, looking at her the way he would look at a friend, “but they don’t.”

  He gives a venomous look to the closed door, where on the other side and across the hallway, their parents are setting out their rugs for maghrib prayer.

  “I never said I think it is okay. It doesn’t
change how I think of you. But I can’t say the same for them.”

  It was still the two of them against their parents. It would always be.

  “But who will tell them? Not me.”

  “If you don’t be more careful, no one will have to. Amar, is there something you’re not telling me?”

  “No.”

  He clasps his hands together. He narrows his gaze.

  “We can talk about her, Ami.”

  She uses the name Mumma had used for him when he was younger, and she would overhear it and wish that she too had a nickname.

  He stands abruptly. She steps back without meaning to.

  “Don’t ever,” he says, so sharply she is afraid he might push her out of his way. She is suddenly still. Outside, it is now dark. He does not finish his thought, not after seeing the look on her face, how she was, for a moment, afraid of him. Amar turns to head for the door. She could let her anger keep her quiet. She could be cold to him and not speak to him for the remainder of her visit.

  “Amar, wait.”

  He stops and turns to face her but he does not look up.

  “I’m not saying don’t do this. I am only saying don’t go so far that you don’t know how to come back home again.”

  She has reached him. She can see it from the way his eyebrows knit together before his face opens, unguarded, to her. She only needs him to nod or offer any reply that suggests he understands.

  “Hadia,” he says softly, in a tone that says she is the one who is failing to understand. “I have never felt at home here.”

  * * *

  AMAR IS STILL sleeping. It is the day after ashura, three in the afternoon, and in a few days she will leave to begin her new rotation. Huda is still at mosque, meeting with her Sunday school students and cleaning up after a play she organized for them. Hadia peeks from the doorway into her mother’s room and sees that she is napping.