A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

  Next to him, Hadia became more aware of her choices, of what was important for her to keep and what had just been an inherited, unexamined habit. On and on she explored and was thrilled at the exploration. Fasting was important. Cursing did not matter. She deeply respected hijab but did not wear it for herself. Her faith became a highly personal affair: what did it matter what others believed? She had friends of other faiths or no faith at all. She could be in a room where people were drinking. She would sip water and make no fuss of it. She could hold in her heart a belief in Islam as well as the unwavering belief that every human had the right to choose who they loved, and how, and that belief was in exact accordance with her faith: that it is the individual’s right to choose, and the individual’s duty to empathize with one another. Didn’t the Quran itself contain the verse, We have created you from many tribes, so that you may know one another.

  Her family had impressed upon her a specific belief and in a specific way—and as a young woman she had not known, when she touched her forehead to the ground, if she was praying to God because Mumma had reminded her to, or if it was her own desire. Being with Tariq allowed her to stretch herself while also remaining fundamentally herself. It was not that they made the same choices so much as he understood hers, and she his. He might not accompany her to mosque during the first ten days of Moharram, but he did not turn the radio on when they drove together in those days either, and for her, on ashura, he wore black. Theirs was a love that acknowledged the individual as separate from the whole, from the family as a unit.

  Now Tariq’s sisters’ heels tapped against the stairs as they made their way up to the stage. His sisters hugged her first, then Tariq, and then sat on the couches beside them that were set up for the guests. The wedding would go on this way—the guests would come up in clusters, sit with them briefly, and then leave the stage. She leaned in to wipe lipstick from the chin of Isra, Tariq’s youngest sister. Hadia felt at ease with them. She wanted Tariq to feel it too, she wanted him to meet Amar and think, as she did now with Isra, that this family will be mine, that any brother of my wife is a brother of mine.

  * * *

  “ARE THE APPETIZERS no good?” Mumma asked Amar as he set the plate down to be cleared. She watched him intently and he remembered why he had sought out food in the first place: he had downed one whiskey and wanted to eat something to mask the smell. He turned his face from her before he answered.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Everything is all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sachi?” she asked in Urdu, truly? It was one word but it had the effect of implying that his first response had not been honest, and that he needed to be pressed for truth.

  “Truly.”

  Mumma smiled.

  “I would like to introduce you to some of my friends,” she said.

  “Friends?” he teased her. He had never known Mumma to have friends. She had women from the community who gathered by habit in the same mosque halls for the same events, who had formed something like a friendship after years of routine.

  She grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the main hall. “You think you’re the only one with friends?” she joked.

  Amar suddenly felt sorry for his mother, sorry that maybe the only thing she had in common with these women was that they had migrated to the same place, sought the same shelter.

  “Ami?” Mumma asked, her voice soft, “where should we say you have been?”

  His stomach tightened. He traced his teeth with his tongue for any taste of the drink. He had arrived at the last minute. Partially so he would not be able to change his mind, and partially so they would have less time to speak of it.

  “Your father and I—after—we began to tell people you had gone to India, to be with my sister.”

  He had made it difficult for them. They lied for him and were not asking him for an explanation.

  “I can tell them that.”

  She held on tight to his arm and then let go.

  “Only if they ask.”

  He nodded. He felt at the edge of discomfort, made worse by how desperately Mumma was trying to protect him from discomfort. He could lean into the feeling as it advanced toward him or he could deny it and remain present.

  “You have a choice, Amar,” Hadia had advised him years ago. “All of us are in this same boat, but you are the only one who chooses to thrash about, making unnecessary waves. You can be still. You can go with the flow. That way you’ll save energy to swim when you need to.”

  She was prone to using one metaphor after another and sometimes the connections between them did not make sense. It would have been more effective if Hadia had used only one, but he never told her this. He could be still. Go where the night took him.

  * * *

  LAYLA DID NOT like lying. If she were to be honest with herself, there was no point: nothing hidden remained so, time had a way of unearthing the truth. She would rather not speak than speak falsely. She imagined what others might say behind her back: poor Layla and Rafiq, what a test has befallen them—saying their son has been in India when everyone knows he ran away, became an unbeliever, gave them no account of his secret life.

  But he was her son. It did not matter what he had done or where he had been. Not when he was back now. A table of her friends had unwrapped the golden favor boxes and were unfolding the ayaat Huda had designed and printed about the love and mercy God placed between the hearts of couples.

  “What a beautiful wedding this is,” they said to her, and stood to greet her. The chairs had been draped with white cloth, tied together with a golden bow. She hugged them one after another, taking in the varied scents of their perfumes.

  She touched Amar’s arm and he stepped forward.

  “This is my son, Amar.”

  It had been years since she had spoken the words.

  “Mashallah he looks just like Rafiq,” one said.

  “Exact,” another agreed, pinching her fingers together for emphasis.

  Amar lowered his head and lifted his cupped hand to meet it. It was a small gesture, adaab, but Layla was instantly moved by how he had thought to do so without her reminding him. Her friends reached out to touch his head and they all said gee te raho, keep living, keep living.

  “Layla, you look too young to be the mother of a young man,” Khadija said.

  Amar smiled at that. Layla told Amar about Khadija, who had just recently moved from Hyderabad to live with her son and daughter-in-law.

  “Do you like it here?” Amar asked in Urdu, and Layla was again touched. He had used the respectful aap. Why had she assumed he had forgotten?

  The two of them talked, Khadija telling Amar how she had adjusted to California, the pleasant air and hills, an ocean nearby, and Amar asking her questions in a broken Urdu that was making them laugh.

  “That’s one thing that’s a shame,” Khadija said, turning then to Layla, “that the children here have forgotten their language. I fear for my grandchildren.”

  Layla gripped the loose fabric of her sari tight, the little beads bit into her skin. She did not want to nod and agree with Khadija, not in front of Amar and not at all.

  “Nice to meet you,” Amar said to her in English after a while. He stepped back into the crowd. Layla excused herself too and walked off as though called by an errand.

  Khadija had raised her children in India. Her son had moved here alone. He was what her children would teasingly call “a fob”—fresh off the boat, what she liked to remind them that their own parents were once. Layla was twenty when the proposal from Rafiq came. She looked at Hadia now, twenty-seven and seated on the stage surrounded by Tariq’s sisters. But she still seemed so young to Layla.

  On the eve of her own wedding night, while the mehndi lady covered her hands with henna and drew in Rafiq’s initials, the life that awaited her was a blur. She c
ould picture just the corner of the apartment they would live in, the outline of the hills. At that point she had seen Rafiq in person twice, had received from him five letters her mother read before giving them to her, had written him back four that her mother had checked and made her rewrite before allowing the envelope to be sealed and stamped. Rafiq had sent photographs with each letter. The hills green and empty of houses. The wide gray roads and the street lamps curved at the top like drooping flowers. The promise he would purchase plane tickets for her parents to visit them. Her father would turn to her flapping the photographs around like a fan saying, “Layla jaani, Layla raani—look, it is exactly like my paintings, and how entirely appropriate that a place like a painting is where my daughter’s destiny lies.”

  Almost thirty years ago, Layla had herself been a bride, walking to the stage where Rafiq waited, her sight obscured by rows of thick flowers she was not allowed to peek through. How was she to know then what it would be like to raise her children in an unfamiliar land, a land that held no history for her but the one they were making together. Bismillah, she repeated, as her sister held her to guide her to Rafiq, I begin in the name of God. She had never traveled out of Hyderabad before. She was like the women in the novels or the movies, the ones who stepped onto a plane or boat and watched their world shrink behind them. The Compassionate, the Merciful. The scent of jasmine and roses. Wondering only if her husband would be a kind man or a stern one.

  * * *

  TARIQ ASKED HER how much longer the smiling and greeting would continue. He gestured at his jaw. Hers ached too. Never had she sustained a smile for so long—during conversations and the moments between, when the photographer asked them to look up. She scanned the wedding hall: the rows of chandeliers twinkling, casting golden light on the tables beneath them. People she had seen all her life seated at the tables, leaning into one another, laughing and talking. The guest list reflected more her parents’ and Tariq’s parents’ circles than theirs, but neither she nor Tariq wanted to take that from them. The women had gathered on the right side of the hall and the men on the left. No partition, so everyone could move freely, especially the teenagers who wandered in hope of stealing a glance or bumping into a particular boy or girl. Hadia smiled to remember what that had been like. One by one the guests came to greet them and Amar had not come. Had still not met Tariq. Had the thought even occurred to him?

  She spotted Huda and waved her over. She had not intended to lower her voice and speak quickly in Urdu, but when Huda’s face was close to hers, she did. Tariq’s parents spoke Urdu but he and his siblings had not learned it. Hadia had not realized how important it would be for her until she found she kept wanting to speak to him in the language she used with Mumma and Baba, the language she slipped into when afraid or when she stubbed her toe against the desk. She had begun to sense that there was a barrier between them, unnoticed on most days but still obstructing a complete intimacy, the intimacy of home, and sometimes she felt unreasonably that until she called for him in her first language and he returned her call, they would not be truly, completely, a family.

  She did not want Tariq to know that her own brother had to be urged to meet him. She wanted Amar to walk up of his own volition, but if he did not come soon it would be time for the speeches. Huda gave her a look—not of sympathy or pity, but something in between—one that said that Hadia should know better than to care, than to have any expectation from Amar at all.

  * * *

  HE WANDERED FROM the hall out into the lobby and then back into the hall again. Where he really wanted to go was the bar but he could not go back there. But what was the difference between one drink and one more? There was none. Only after a few was there an effect. One drink was like none at all, like a sip of water. He had two things on his mind and they took turns occupying his thoughts; to be free momentarily of one was to soon be assailed by the other. The first was that in an hour, maybe less, he would walk out to the courtyard to meet Amira. The second was that his father had still not spoken to him properly. When Amar looked out across the hall his father was on the other side, as though they were following separate orbits.

  Just before they had left for the wedding, Amar had looked out the sliding door at his father walking in the backyard. The mist that time of day, the bluing light, his father’s green sweater and white kurta rippling. It had been three years and Amar wondered, what do I feel now? He was still angry. It was an anger that had been useful to him: to step out from his home and never return to their street, not even to drive by at the darkest hour of the night. An anger he touched like a totem to gain strength: they do not understand me and make no attempt to. I can’t be like them. On and on it went, each thought taking him farther to a place he could not return from.

  But hours earlier, when he watched his father in the garden, he realized that the anger had dimmed, and he was surprised to find that after anger, or alongside it, was not a bitterness or resentment, but regret. Afsoos was the word in Urdu. There was no equivalent in English. It was a specific kind of regret—not wishing he had acted differently, but a helpless sadness at the situation as it was, a sense that it could not have been another way. He could not call his father Baba, nor could he think of him as Baba. Other women he did not know saw his father’s face in his, but his own father could not see it.

  Someone called his name. He turned to see it was Huda. She had come to the men’s side of the hall to see him. He smiled at her.

  “You look like you’re enjoying your night.”

  She was joking. So he laughed. They walked together toward the center of the hall where there were more women. Who are you now? he wanted to ask her, but maybe she was who she always had been, and he was who he had always been, and it was foolish to think that the years had changed anything. Across the hall their father had spotted them together and he looked away as Amar looked back.

  For some reason unclear to Amar now, he had decided that Huda was not kind to him as a child and that he preferred Hadia, and maybe following that decision he had been kinder to Hadia. As he walked with Huda now it did not feel like she was watching him, the way Mumma did; it just felt as though, for the moment, he had company for the night.

  “You didn’t meet Tariq yet.”

  “Whenever I look up someone is on the stage.”

  It seemed like a boring and exhausting structure for a wedding. But it gave him an excuse to not approach them. He was embarrassed that a stranger had taken a place in his family, that a stranger knew more about him than he knew about the stranger.

  “And none of them has been her brother.”

  She looked up at him from the corner of her eye. He put his hand in his pocket and felt the roll of cash. Everyone was so careful with him it was both a relief and a reminder that Huda would be blunt.

  The emcee tapped on the mic and introduced poets who would recite the jashan. The reciters took their place and Amar saw that the Ali boys were among them. They had been his friends. They looked older now and still respectable. Kumail and Saif—to see them was to feel again the loss of Abbas. They shuffled on the stage and unfolded the paper they would read from.

  “Hadia’s hurt you haven’t met Tariq yet.”

  Her voice was low so that no one passing would overhear; she had her arms crossed and leaned in to tell Amar without turning her face to him.

  “She said that?”

  “No one should have to voice something so obvious.”

  The reciters began an old poem he knew by heart as soon as he heard the first line. He could not deny how happy hearing it again made him. He thought Huda would walk away, having said what she needed to, but when he turned he saw she had stayed beside him.

  * * *

  THE ENTIRE HALL faced the stage and she knew she should look down at her hands, but she could not help but look at them, the Ali boys. They were among five men from the community reciting lines of poetry Hadia
had specifically requested—a qawali she had loved as a child and wanted to hear a portion of today. The Ali boys had grown into the faces they would wear for their life. Gone was that awkward way about them, Kumail now with a full beard and Saif no longer so skinny. Their features were handsome but failed to come together in a striking way, as they had in their eldest brother and younger sister. Hadia wondered if Amira was here, and if Amar had seen her. The thought made her nervous. She watched the Ali boys raise their voices to join the chorus, and Hadia realized they had surpassed the age of their eldest brother and had now begun to experience what Abbas never would.

  She looked at Tariq, intently listening to the recitation. Once she had wished it would be Abbas Ali in his place. Once she had been so naïve as to think that a girlish dream could become her life. Abbas Ali scanning the mosque kids lined up in the parking lot after Sunday school, and pointing to her, the first girl picked, and his third choice, to be on his team. Abbas Ali standing from the couch if Hadia walked into the living room and telling his brothers to get up too, so that she could sit if she wanted and no one could accuse her of sitting next to a namehram. Only after he passed away did she look to anyone else—think of anyone else—so loyal was she, throughout elementary school, high school, college—loyal not to a spoken agreement but to a hope.