A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

  She was engaged. Promised to a man she would marry once she completed grad school. He was not surprised. The paths their lives would take had been set in motion long before this blow was delivered to him.

  “I wanted you to hear it from me,” she said. “I wanted the chance to see how you were doing once more if I could, and tell you myself.”

  “Arranged?” he asked.

  “Initially,” she said.

  It stung. So she loved him.

  If there were other loves awaiting Amar, he knew they would be little loves, not: my whole life has led up to this moment with you. Every memory with you is electric. If you are there, it is you on the fence post with legs swinging, or you sipping from the striped straw, everyone else is out of focus or not there at all.

  “Are you happy?” he asked.

  “I am,” she said, and then she twisted again the row of bangles on her wrist. “I am content. My parents are happy.”

  He was a dentist, a few years older. What would Amar become then to Amira? Oh, she might tell someone one day, that was my brother’s friend. Or even less spoken: she would keep it a secret. One day she might push her son in the swing and look up to two kids sitting beneath a tree, too shy to scoot any closer, and she might remember herself at seventeen, defying everyone, risking everything, just to meet the boy from her community everyone warned her about.

  Before she left, they stood face-to-face. She returned the jacket he had draped over her shoulders.

  “I may not see you again and we may not speak again,” she said, “but whatever comes, I want you to know there is a part of me that will always be who I was when I wrote that note and left it on your pillow. I never regretted that. I will always hope that you are happy, and safe, and healthy. I will pray you keep your promise. And that wherever you are, you are at home there.”

  He thought if he were to speak his voice would break.

  “What’s it like?” she whispered, their old game, that first question she had written him, and she looked up at him with her big eyes. He had no answer. He allowed himself to hold her in his arms and she rested her head against his chest. They stayed like that. His whole body was alive. He cast a shadow over her face when she lifted her face to his. He moved her hair from her eyes and he looked at her for one long moment, then kissed her forehead.

  Now he crossed the street. The light in the liquor store window blinked OPEN, a bell sounded as he stepped in.

  * * *

  THE BOTTLE HE bought was the smallest one they carried, and he was proud of himself when it was the one he reached for. He knew his limits. It fit in the inside of his jacket pocket but was clunky. He needed to rest for just a minute before he could step back inside the main hall. He sat alone in the courtyard. He felt dizzy if he tried to stand. He should have eaten, he couldn’t remember the last thing he had eaten or when. People were lining up to take pictures with the bride and groom when he snuck past. Soon it would be his family’s turn. He would tell Mumma he was very sorry. They had been right about him. Eventually Amira would have realized it on her own too, so it did not matter how. It was inevitable. He was better off in L.A. He rested his head in his hands. And then a memory presented itself to him at so strange a time and so unvisited before, he wondered if it could even be true: he has thrown a tantrum at maybe eleven and has left his house to sit on the cement driveway beneath his basketball hoop. The sky draining of its color but not before filling first: with pink, orange, indigo, and violet clouds. When the door opens it is his father and not his sister or his mother that has come after him. And even though his father’s kurta-pajama is white and easily dirtied, he takes a seat beside him on the ground and Amar still thinks of him then as Baba. He moves his basketball from one hand to the other, its rough orange surface, and he is not speaking, and Baba looks at the street and the cars passing and maybe the people in the cars wondering what is wrong with them.

  “Amar,” his father is trying to talk to him, “why do you think like this, these foolish thoughts, that you don’t belong?”

  He holds the basketball close to him, rests his chin on its curved surface. Another car passes and the person inside not looking at them. When it becomes clear that Baba is waiting for an answer, that the sky will turn black before he is satisfied with the silence, Amar shrugs. If only he could remember now what the hurt was about. Maybe that he does not want to pray and maybe that he does not want to sit still when their mother makes them listen to the duas, and he gets in ear-twisting trouble for making it into a joke, for trying to make eye contact with Hadia or Huda until one of them starts to laugh. Maybe just that everyone is good except for him, everyone has a lock in them that they have found a key to, and he is all shut up and closed with no key so he looks to each of them when they are listening intently to the duas thinking either there is no key or that he was created without one. And maybe he does not really believe in angels but maybe the ones on his shoulders look at each other and they shake their heads and shrug, saying, well, we don’t know what to do with this one, even if God were to show him signs he would not listen because that is the way it is with some kids, when their hearts are just stained black.

  He must have said something because Baba pokes his shoulder and says, “Don’t you know—that’s the thing—everyone is not just good. Everyone is trying to be good. And everyone feels this way sometimes, that they are not good, and not good at trying either.”

  “That’s not true,” Amar remembers saying to his father. “You are good.”

  * * *

  HADIA AND TARIQ smiled and posed as family after family lined up for the photographs. She was ready for the night to end. When the Ali family approached, Hadia saw at once that Amira Ali’s face was flushed and her hair down and a little windswept. The photographer arranged each family member on the stage and Amira was directed to sit by Hadia. Amira congratulated her. Hadia thanked her and looked at her for a second longer than she might have—Amira Ali’s eyes were bright green, and Hadia could not decide if her face had that raw look of having just cried.

  Wonderful, the photographer said. Hadia did not look into the lens. She swept the hall for Amar and could not find him. Mumma sat alone at a far table, watching the hall empty of guests. From this distance she could not see Mumma’s expression. Huda was near the stage, talking to Dani, but Hadia sensed right away that Huda was anxious, she crossed her hands in front of her as if she were guarding herself.

  Hadia sometimes still returned to that conversation with Amira in the mosque parking lot years ago. It was just months before Amar was to run away, but of course Hadia had not known that at the time. She remembered being surprised when Amira had asked to speak with her. She remembered how Amira nervously looked around the ladies’ hall filled with women mingling and whispered, “Privately please, ten minutes, near the basketball hoop.”

  By then Hadia had glimpsed the contents of her brother’s box. She had not told her parents, but she had told Huda: no details, just that they had formed some sort of relationship.

  “I know this is strange,” Amira said when they were alone, “but I needed to speak to you. I don’t know if Amar told you about us—”

  Hadia shook her head no, then said, “But I had guessed.”

  Amira sighed. “We were so foolish.”

  Hadia remembered thinking that Amira was too young to look that sad, only eighteen.

  “My mother found out about us,” Amira said, “just three weeks ago. Amar and I have not really spoken since.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hadia had said, and she meant it. She found, in that moment, that she felt great affection for the girl, and oddly protective of her.

  “Mumma and Baba forbid it. I wake up every morning just wanting to fall asleep. There is a part of me that knows all I want is this. All I want is to fight my parents for him.”

  Later, Hadia would look back on that night and t
ell herself that Amira Ali had sought her out on purpose, to be someone who could listen to her as a sister, but could also hold in her heart love for Amar, and look beyond the limits of propriety that their parents could not. Hadia had hugged Amira, and Amira had leaned into the hug, let herself be consoled. It occurred to Hadia that in another life, in a life where her girlhood dream or her brother’s dream came true, the two of them would have become sisters.

  “They say he drinks, they say he is no good, that I am better off.”

  She was speaking into Hadia’s shoulder, her voice muffled. There was truth to what her brother was being accused of. Little by little, year after year, Hadia had given up any expectations of Amar, had tried to encounter him only as he was.

  “What is it you want, Amira?” she had asked her.

  They were both dressed entirely in black, flowing abayas, so her face looked even more pale and vulnerable. Amira did not answer right away. She bit her lip and looked to the mosque entrance, where people had begun to exit and head to their cars.

  “I know Amar is good. I know Amar wants to be good. But I want to be with someone who is a harmonious fit. Do you think his heart is open to the life we have?”

  “If that is what you want, my brother cannot be that for you. He cannot be that for any of us.”

  For years afterward that would be the line she returned to, asking herself why she had replied the way she had. But in that moment she had not wanted to deceive Amira, had not wanted to draw her any closer to the same chaos they were all suffering from.

  “Thank you,” Amira said at last. “I’ve been so conflicted. I think this will make it easier.”

  Again she held Amira and Amira let herself cry. Before Hadia turned to leave, Amira stopped her, and hesitated before saying, “I really do love him. If he wanted this life, even if it was a struggle for him to live it—I would stand by him.”

  Hadia did not know what to say. She told her so.

  “I just wanted someone to know that. I just needed to say it to someone out loud.”

  * * *

  HE WAS WAITING for the seasickness to pass. Then he would return to the wedding, be again the brother of the bride. He had missed more than he had attended and if he did not go back now Hadia would notice. They had to stand together for the family photograph. They had to say good-bye to Hadia. And he did want to speak to his father. Hours earlier, when he watched his father stand in the blue light of the backyard, Amar told himself he was still angry, but in his heart he knew he was like a child who refused to allow himself the one thing he wanted: to drop the fuss and go to him. Amira had once told him he would feel something other than anger and he had not believed her. He thought his anger would never be extinguished. Now he had exhausted his anger, exhausted himself, and found that what was left—what was inexhaustible—was longing and regret, each feeling fueling the other.

  Sometimes, Amar thought he could blame the distance between himself and his father on his own lack of steadfast belief in God. He could not claim to know God existed with any certainty. But there was love in his heart for the men and the women from the stories, the people of the holy book, love for the man whose name Mumma traced on his forehead, or pointed out on the moon, whose name was evoked in the naray; and even if Amar said to himself he did not believe, still his mouth opened to respond to the call.

  What was this love, he wondered, as he twisted open and closed the cap of the bottle, and why was it still such a part of him, when all that could go had gone? First the rituals went and were replaced by guilt, and then the guilt went, and soon his belief faltered before vanishing almost entirely too—belief in hellfire and the narrow bridge one had to cross to reach heaven, as thin as a hair, as sharp as the blade of a knife. But the love for them remained, the Prophets and the Imams, the characters from the stories he heard as a child, balanced on Mumma’s knee, curling her hair around his finger, and it was a love untarnished by the resentment of his father that had so afflicted everything else.

  The whiskey burned when swallowed. He sank his face into his hands and hoped to feel steady soon. Every minute he remained outside was a minute that sped toward the end of his sister’s wedding. He took a deep breath. Tonight had threatened all the work he had done—telling himself he did not believe and therefore did not belong. That his belonging depended on belief. If only he could tell his father: Look. I have kept this. I have held on to it. I open my mouth to criticize someone but then I close it, thinking of how the Prophet did not even tell the little girl to eat fewer dates when her mother asked him to, knowing he too shared her habit. My heart clenches at the thought of twelve brothers leading their youngest to a ditch, snatching from him his father’s gift, that colorful coat. And I think and think again of that child, climbing onto his grandfather’s back while he knelt in prayer, oblivious to everyone who was watching and waiting for his grandfather to set the standard for them all.

  3.

  VASES OF ORCHIDS HAD BEEN GATHERED ONTO ONE TABLE. The staff was busy clearing clutter from the others. Final families waited to be photographed, close family friends waited for the ruksati. Layla sat alone at a far table and watched the hall blur before her—either exhaustion or tears—the lights of the chandelier becoming geometric shapes that twinkled.

  “Mumma?” Huda said, snapping the hall back into focus. Huda took a seat by her and leaned in to look at Layla’s face.

  “Ma,” Huda said again, her voice more loving.

  “What have I done?”

  Huda sighed. Huda, the daughter she counted on to speak her mind and take a balanced stance, neither comforted Layla nor criticized her.

  “Was he all right?”

  “Amar will always be Amar, Ma. There is nothing we can do for him.”

  She had tried, hadn’t she? She had tried her best. Her intentions were good, were they not? It was hardly a comfort now. Intentions shrank next to actions. Actions took on their own momentum. Amar had not come back into the hall after his outburst. She had underestimated his care for Amira Ali, then and now. She had put too much faith in the passage of time.

  When Amar was little she stayed up late after putting him to bed, secretly read books for an answer on how to parent him. She sat through every parent-teacher meeting mortified at how his teacher spoke slowly, assuming Layla could not understand. She tried to become the mother he needed. Preparing herself, enlarging herself, educating herself, only to have let him down the way she had. Does she love him? she remembered Rafiq asking, as though he believed Amira’s love could change the outcome for their son. Layla had not believed—not in the girl’s love, nor in her son’s ability to win over Amira’s family. She could say nothing when Amar accused her tonight, could do nothing but sit and wonder just how the limits to her belief in her son had so dangerously destroyed his possibilities.

  Now she deserved any outcome. No longer could she say this was a test from God to prove her faith—it was that, but it was also her own actions returning to haunt her. Rafiq walked over to her. He had been managing last-minute jobs. Huda left them as soon as he approached.

  “Time for our photograph soon,” he told her.

  Dani was on the stage now, smiling brightly, Hadia’s oldest friend who Layla loved cooking for, who still came over anytime the two of them were back home for a visit.

  “What’s happened, Layla?” he asked, alarmed.

  Again the lights became a blur of moving shapes. She blinked until it returned to normal. Rafiq took a seat by her.

  “Will you find Amar?” she asked. “Will you call him back for the photo? He won’t come if I go.”

  Rafiq sighed. There was no time for him to ask why. She had been foolish. She had asked Rafiq to not speak to Amar all night, thinking Rafiq was to blame for their troubles with Amar. Now she knew better. A saying her father had taught her when she was very young came back to her as Rafiq stood to go and bring bac
k their son.

  “Be careful who you point your blame at, Layla. And remember that anytime you point your finger to accuse someone, there are three fingers beneath it, curled to point right back at you.”

  * * *

  THERE WAS A tap on his shoulder and he looked up to see it was his father. Amar was still in the courtyard, sitting on the lone bench. His first thought was that he could get away with it, trick his father into thinking he was composed, that the edges of the world had not begun to spin. He opened his mouth to say something and then closed it. His father took a seat. The night was cold. The gray clouds that had raced across the sky when he sat by Amira were gone. His father handed him a glass of water and Amar gulped it down. He thanked him. He had not realized he had been so thirsty.

  “Baba,” he said, just to break the long silence. But he sounded like a child pleading—a break between the two syllables. He had not called him Baba in years. There was a day when he decided this was how he would punish his father, that he would not only withhold affection and respect, but he would also keep from calling him father. The light of the lamp at the far end of the courtyard doubled and swayed.

  His father placed a hand on his shoulder and left it there. His hand was warm and Amar could feel it through the fabric of his shirt. He did not move just in case his father’s hand slipped. How did Amar get here and was this really happening? How long ago had Amira been sitting in the courtyard across from him? She wore a delicate gold necklace. She had beautiful lips. She laughed the same way she had always laughed. Some things never changed, and those things were a comfort, and a way to mark all the rest that had.