An hour—less—and she would be married to Tariq. How odd the current of one decision, even one as small as taking a seat beside him in a lecture hall. Once this choice was made, every choice after became not easier to make, but inevitable, until he asked her to marry him and she could not imagine a life in which she said anything other than yes. The poetry had reached its pinnacle and she could feel the energy of the room rising, everyone in the hall swaying, clapping along.
“Are you sure?” her mother had asked her, after she had told them about Tariq, after Baba had been so upset he had gone to his study and slammed the door with the helpless frustration of a child who knows that even his displeasure will change nothing.
“I am telling you because I am sure.”
Mumma looked shocked and betrayed by the implication, but she recovered easily.
“But he is not Shia, Hadia. This decision will affect your entire life. It will determine the life of your children. And their children.”
She had thought about it. These were the differences that kept people separate from one another. Indian, Pakistani. Shia, Sunni. When Tariq drove three and a half hours to see her during their years in residency, when she watched from her window as his silver car pulled into her apartment complex, when she unlatched her door to him after having not seen him for a long time, the thought was not, what have I kept hidden, what rules have I broken? But rather, look at what I would do for you. I would keep from my parents your presence in my life until we were ready for the next step. I would risk isolating myself, however temporarily, from them. It was what she was willing to sacrifice, what she could overlook, that proved to her the love she felt. Her mother might be upset because of a difference in faith. But wasn’t the essence unchanging? Only the methods and metaphors varied. And what comforted Hadia was that she and Tariq had both held their fathers’ hands as children and stepped out at dusk, excited to learn how to sight the moon that marked Eid.
And maybe it was the least important reason, but it was the day-to-day aspect of her life with Tariq that truly mattered to her. How, with him, even trips to the grocery store felt like an event, tasks as mundane as lifting up apples and pinching avocados before placing them into their basket. It was care she evoked in Tariq. It was clear in their first months of friendship and it was clear now. What better quality to evoke in another, she thought, one more durable than desire, more sustainable than excitement, one that had the possibility of growing until a sweet and gentle life was formed.
But this Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan qawali was the only tape Baba put on for them when they drove a long drive. It was the only tune that made him tap his fingers on the steering wheel and even Mumma nodded her head in the front seat. The prayers were all in Arabic and the poetry was all in Urdu, so Mumma would translate for them, line by line: King of the brave, Ali. Lion of God, Ali. Guests in the hall were clapping now. The name that is true, the name that removes all sorrow. Her heart opened from hearing the verses, the chorus she loved as a girl and loved still: Ali, Ali, Ali, Ali.
As soon as the recitation stilled, someone shouted out naray hyderi, and everyone who knew the call knew how to return it: Ya Ali. It was a call carried by her ancestors going back hundreds of years. As Hadia returned the call, she turned to see that Tariq had not, did not know to. And she feared, for the first time, if a devotion sustained over generations would end with her.
* * *
THE MOMENT HE first heard the naray called out and maintained, one long note, he yearned to reply, and when the naray stilled and the crowd took a breath before answering in unison, he had responded as well, with as much gusto as all around him.
Had Huda heard him beside her? She must have. How could he make sense of how he felt hearing the recitation, how he stood through every turn and rising, as if on tiptoe. He looked around the hall. He did have something in common with them, and it was like a reflex. If there was so much he lacked in faith—the ability to fully believe and follow—why could he not also lack the desire for faith?
“Amar?” Huda asked. “Do you not want to meet Tariq?”
Her voice was cold.
“Not now, Huda,” he said.
He wanted a moment to himself. He began to turn away from her. She stood in front of him and whispered through her teeth, “If not now, when? You’ve been gone for years. You come home at the last minute. The wedding is halfway over and still you say ‘not now’?”
She was right. He could not even argue against her. But how could he explain what it was like to hear the qawali and remember again the dusty sunlight in their car, the black crayon marks on the plastic of his car seat, the swaying of his sister’s braids. It brought back what he hardly had to think about in the apartment he now shared with friends seven hours away, where he was more at ease than he’d ever been here. Of course he missed his family. But there, he did not feel that his lifestyle was worthless. He was funny in the world he found for himself. He was good at making money fast. He could charm strangers in an instant. He was up for anything and people wanted him around. If it was four A.M. and a friend’s car had been towed, he was the one they called. He went to readings at libraries and bookstores in his city and wrote his own poems in secret. He had a good rapport with the other chefs where he worked and when he got off work he could smoke a cigarette in the cool air without a worry. Meet his friends for a late drink no problem, stay at the bar until close no problem, wake up at noon no problem, sell a little weed on the side to some eager college kids and have enough to make rent. He was capable of doing it all by himself, with no one to say what a disappointment he was. He wanted to want that life and no other. He wanted to feel no loss when looking back.
Huda blinked at him and a line of worry formed between her eyebrows.
“Please, Huda. Just one minute alone.”
He stepped past her on his way to the parking lot where he could smoke a cigarette, but he looked once behind him to see that Huda had not followed and he turned a sharp corner, the sound of his footsteps absorbed by the corridor’s carpet.
“Welcome back,” the bartender said. “Must not be a very fun wedding.”
Amar tried to smile.
“The same?”
He put a twenty down.
“Double.”
The bartender whistled. “That boring, eh?”
Someone at the bar made a joke about dry weddings, how they were no celebration at all, so why bother even having one, and Amar felt a dull queasiness, the kind he felt in middle school when he heard someone say something he was not meant to overhear. He reached for a napkin and tore it straight in half, and then again, until the drink appeared.
“Another?”
He had to pace himself. He lifted his palm and the bartender returned to a conversation he was having at the other end of the bar. On the TV the Warriors were playing and he imagined the living rooms across the country where the basketball game was on and a family gathered to watch and a dad opened up a beer and offered it to his son, who was twenty-one, no sneaking or shame necessary. This is how he imagined it might be for the rest of the world—simple and easy.
He had wanted to say Ya Ali. By the end of the recitation he had even teared up thinking of how like home it sounded, how the very name was like a beat in him and he thought: maybe it is in my blood. When he was a young boy, Nana told him about the Muhammad Ali fights that would be broadcast on TV that Nana watched even in India, how the crowd would chant Ali, Ali, and his grandfather poked Amar on his chest and said, “See that—even on the moon and anywhere on Earth, in any village, this is the name that will ring and ring.”
Tonight he wondered if he had turned his back on something far more meaningful than he realized the night he packed his bags in a hurry, thinking only of how angry he was, how harsh and unloving his father was about what Amar had no control over: who he was.
“This is haram,” his father had
yelled the night he ran away.
They had been arguing in the hallway near the stairs. What use was a life lived out of fear of hellfire and nothing else? He thought: if the fires exist and I am to burn, let me burn for my own actions rather than force me to behave another way and be saved by a lie. He did not know what, exactly, his father had found: that was the year Amar spiraled from one extreme to another unthinking, proving to himself only that he could, and when he was confronted by his father he realized how tired he was of hiding. They had been arguing cruelly the way they always did, but when his father raised his hand to slice through the air for emphasis, Amar flinched.
And here is the moment that nobody knows. The nightmare he wakes from sweating in his apartment even now. His father’s back had hit against the frame in the hall and Amar realized from the throbbing in his own hand that he had hit him. Amar had struck his father on the jaw, and then shoved him again, the glass of the frame crunching behind his father and then falling to the floor when he stepped away, and it was that sound, or maybe how little his father reacted, that snapped Amar from the moment, and he stepped back.
They looked at one another as though they did not recognize each other. They were silent even when his mother approached the top of the staircase, and Mumma looked at both of them but narrowed her eyes and shook her head at his father. Mumma knelt, cupped her palm and placed jagged pieces of glass into its center.
“Enough of this now,” Mumma said, and her voice was shaking as each piece clinked into her palm, and she said to his father, “I’ve had enough.”
And in that moment he knew his father would not correct her. He would not even raise his hand up to touch his jaw.
That night he packed his bags. Called Simon and said, I’ve got to stay with you for a few days and then I’ve got to get out of this town. Hadia had stood in his doorway and tried to change his mind, do you have to go? This can be made all right again. These things pass. He told her he could not stay. And it was not because he wanted a life where he was free to do as he pleased, and it was not because Amira did not love him and he could no longer try to be the kind of man she would ever love, and it was not because of the argument between him and his father, because after the sting of the words subsided he could see a future in which he forgave his father and maybe his father forgave him. They had been reckless with their words before. Like water they could return to any shape asked of them.
Amar had to make sure he left and did not return, and it was because he could not look his father in the eye after he used all his force against him. Because when the glass cracked, his father did not even raise an arm to resist him. His father who was already becoming an old man, who already worried Amar when he spotted him on his walks outside, his hair turning a stark white, walking slowly and sitting down slowly as if it hurt his knees. The last time they looked at each other, while Mumma knelt on the carpet, Amar caught a look in his father’s eyes that he could only interpret as a look of loyalty, a look that tried to convey: I am with you, I am on your side, I will keep your secret.
If his father had just hit him back, cursed at him, said to Mumma, look how despicable our son is, how batamiz, anything—then maybe he could have gone home again. A punishment was a mercy. It marked the end of a sentence. Without one, he could not imagine recovering from his shame. Nor could he forgive himself for giving action to the hatred he had felt for his father, wanting to hurt him the way he had been hurt by him. Now he blinked around him at the people seated at the bar, tilted the glass so the last drops slid toward him, closed his eyes and heard Mumma’s voice from long ago, so hazy and fragmented it was like a dream.
What does shame mean?
To be unable to show your face. To be afraid to.
Simon had come for him before dawn and as Amar stepped out from his home for the last time, he thought to himself, if I really hated this place, if I were really ready to leave, I would not look back. But he did look. For so long the sky might have lightened, the little magnolia leaves trembling like it were a normal day, the stars already dimmed, his stupid basketball hoop with its torn net and his stupid window. Looked and even thought, if Hadia’s face appears in my window, I will change my mind and I will stay. Looked until Simon touched his shoulder and said, are you sure? Amar nodded because he could not speak. He felt the terror of a boy being dropped off at school for the first time as the car began to pull away, and Simon drove slowly, watched him quietly, maybe thinking that Amar would ask him to turn around, to take him back, but Amar was brave. He had thought it was bravery then. Now he thought it might have been cowardice. But whatever it was, he had not seen his father again until just hours earlier, when he had watched him step out into the blue light of their backyard and Amar had thought, even if I were to walk outside, if I were to approach him, stand by him, shoulder to shoulder, same height as we are now, we would never be near, never be close. To stand side by side in that way, to stumble through my thoughts until I had something to say, would only emphasize it—the impossibility of us.
* * *
“WHAT DID YOU say to him?” Layla asked.
“Nothing.”
Huda was clearly frustrated. It always surprised Layla when Huda expressed her frustrations. She depended on Huda to be respectful and even-tempered.
“Then why did he rush out?”
There were murmurs in the hall, people mingling before the speech started.
“I just told him to meet Tariq.”
“Who asked you to interfere?”
Huda looked at her as if she despised her. Layla disliked the way she was speaking too, how easy it was to unleash her worry on Huda.
“Hadia asked me to.”
There was a sharpened edge to Huda’s voice. Layla was beginning to get a headache. Her neck hurt. She had not enjoyed the wedding since she first saw Amar speaking with Amira Ali, and could not even say why the sight had so unsettled her.
“We have to be very gentle with Amar. We have to be careful to not upset him.”
“Yes, God forbid we hurt Amar’s feelings. God forbid we say anything to him, or ask him to have even an ounce of consideration for any one of us.”
Huda held up her hand with her index finger against her thumb, showing how tiny. Layla pressed two fingers against her temple.
“Did he say where he was going?”
“He said he needed a moment alone.”
Layla wanted to find Amar and reassure him that he could meet Tariq at his own time, but Moulana Baqir took the stage, said his salaam, and the hall of people responded in unison. She had to stay and listen. He had been good to them—had spoken privately with Rafiq when Amar first began to trouble them and had respected their privacy after and not pried. He often praised them on Hadia’s successes. Tonight he would recite the nikkah on her behalf. Layla turned to Huda but she had gone. Alone, Layla suddenly felt drained. This was the night she had looked forward to for years. She had hoped Amar would come and was thrilled when he did. Now she was so tense she wanted nothing but the night to pass smoothly. Wanted the nausea of watching Amar and Amira Ali to have been for nothing—a fleeting encounter, a salaam out of courtesy, their brief story still sealed shut in the past. And she wanted Amar to enjoy the wedding, to feel welcome, so that by the end of the night he could stay, or leave with a plan to visit. Now that she had seen him again it was difficult to recall the three years that had just passed, a life in which she could not speak to her son or even know how he was, where he was, and even the possibility of returning to that separation felt unbearable.
Tariq was listening intently and nodding as Moulana Baqir spoke of marriage as a blessing, how people were created to look out for one another. Regardless of what she might have felt when she first learned her daughter had gone against their wishes for her, she could not help but love him now. He would be a good husband to her daughter. It was a weight lifted from her mind, that now t
here would be someone to care for her daughter and be responsible for her safety, someone to know if Hadia came home from work at night, someone to keep her company. These were small comforts that accumulated, and what she most wanted for her daughter was a comfortable life.
* * *
HADIA THANKED MOULANA Baqir for his speech. Tariq stepped away while the two of them spoke.
“You are the first generation of our community. I am honored,” Moulana Baqir said, placing a hand on his chest.
The nikkah was soon. Moulana Baqir left the stage and Hadia looked over at Tariq and saw he was speaking to Amar. What Amar was saying was making Tariq grin, as if they were already at ease. Maybe they would never be what she pictured and wanted for her family. But they could be something else. The two of them noticed Hadia alone and walked to her. Amar took the seat by her.
“I was just hearing about how bossy you were,” Tariq said, and he winked at Amar.
“Oh?” She smiled. “Did he give you any tips?”
“There are none,” Amar said, speaking directly to Tariq, in a voice that suggested he was joking.
The entire hall looked like a movie set. The stage had extravagant flower arrangements on both sides, the couch was placed atop a gorgeous Persian rug, and Hadia looked from her brother to her husband-to-be and felt that this was the beginning of the rest of her life.
“Amar was also telling me about being a chef,” Tariq said.
Hadia’s breath caught in her. She kept still the expression of her face, did not even look at Amar, and she nodded as if she had known it all along. She did not want Tariq to think her brother was a liar. It was like an animal instinct, to defend her pack in even the slightest of ways, despite Tariq being the man she was making into her family.
“It’s true,” Amar said, and he touched Hadia’s knee to get her to turn to him. “It’s a part-time thing, but I’m getting good.”
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