We drove down the street I loved and it was autumn so the leaves were reds and yellows and slowly fluttering to the ground. What was it you wanted from me? I wondered. Did you want me to ask why it had happened? You were the kind of quiet that one has to make a decision to uphold. We had not spoken since the incident with your duffel bag. I had made a mistake. Why could I not be like your mother, who could reach over and touch your arm, why was it that before I was about to interact with you I felt a grand, growing desire to approach you in one way, generously, affectionately, but the moment I encountered you in your body I paused, stopped, my own uncertainty, my own stubbornness making it impossible for me to approach you the way that I wanted to. I turned on the radio again and tuned it to a news station and let another voice fill the air and you groaned and crumpled in your seat a little lower, as if that had been the wrong gesture and I had again disappointed you.
“You haven’t left your bag in the foyer for days,” I said, almost cheerfully and softly, when the car slowed to a stop at a red light, thinking of the first thing that came to me that was not connected to the swelling of your face. I wanted to acknowledge that I appreciated you remembering to put the bag away. I wanted to normalize the situation. I wanted to say something mundane so as to tell you: look, we can carry on, I am not mad, this and everything else is behind us. And you looked at me then, the stoniest look I had ever seen, and you held my gaze until I felt chills, and you said, “I really hate you.”
Not in the way you usually said it, in a moment of anger and frustration and therefore easily dismissed, but calmly and evenly, and then the light turned green, and the car behind me honked, and I turned back to the road and continued driving.
* * *
WEEKS AFTER THE fight between you and the other boys, you ran after me as I approached the edge of the street. I was taking a long walk before driving an hour to pick up Layla from the airport. She was finally coming home. I was nervous. I did not know if they would bother her in arrivals, if she would be able to manage the questions without me, if they would treat her roughly. In the sunlight I studied your face as you walked beside me: your lip had healed well but there would be a scar. The swelling around your eye had gone away but there would also be a scar there that flicked through your eyebrow.
“I want to ask you something,” you said.
I stopped to listen, but you kept walking, so I followed. You took a right at the road that would take us to the horses. You were taking a long time to ask me.
“Can you shave your beard?” you said. You were looking at your shoes, then at me for just a moment, then at your shoes again, as your feet picked up the pace.
“Why?” I asked. Though I was afraid I knew.
“You made Hadia and Huda take off their scarves.”
My daughters had not pointed out the hypocrisy of my act, of wanting to follow my faith but wanting them to be safe more, but of course you had.
“Why can’t you change for us? You make them change for you.”
“Watch your tone,” I said, because I could not come up with anything else to say. You kicked a pinecone and it skittered down the street. You were on a mission, you would not retreat, you wanted a persuasive answer from me.
“Baba,” you said, and I was crushed. Even then, you had stopped calling me Baba. You somersaulted through your sentences to avoid calling me Baba and thought I was dumb enough to not realize.
“If you shave, you won’t look like—” You paused, considered your words, then said quietly, “the bad guys.”
It pained me. It was such childish wording, but you could not allow yourself to say anything else. I did not know then, as Hadia knows now, how to be a parent in the face of all this. How to turn the TV off. How to speak to Abbas and Tahira about what they did not deserve to think or hear from the kids in school, even if we could not protect them from hearing it. She reminds them again and again that what might happen in the world, and what they might overhear, cannot reach or alter what is within them, their hearts, their future. We did none of this. It is not that we thought our way was better. It was that we did not know another way.
“But I am not the bad guys,” I said. We had reached the horses. You perked up a bit to see them.
“I know that,” you said in your matter-of-fact voice, “but they don’t.”
One horse trotted to approach us. You stretched out your hand. I did not ask who “they” were.
“Amar. Those boys you fought, did they say anything about the bad guys?”
“No.”
You pushed your tongue against your cheek. You were lying. We turned to go back. My hands were in my pockets and your hands were in your pockets.
“So will you?” you asked me.
“I can trim it,” I said.
That was one of the first times I thought about it in that way—that there was a “they,” people who assumed something about me, my family. There were enough troubling interactions in the years to come to know that they were there, but back then I thought of it as isolated incident after isolated incident, and not a force that tied each one, brewing with each year that passed. They stared at my wife a little too long in the park and I could not help but wonder if it was because of her hijab, or if there was a darker reason, and so I locked eyes right back, and I nodded, and I did my best to smile, hello I might say to anyone we came across in passing—just in case they felt it—fear, or anger, each emotion feeding the other like a loop. I wanted to dispel even a tiny bit of it. I wanted to say, before the thought even formed: Peace be upon you. I am here. You are here. We are only passing one another in the street. Sometimes, my daughters would look down on me, if, after an upsetting interaction, they insisted we had been wronged, and they would turn on me instead, tell me that I had given in, I had been weak, I had not fought to be respected. But I did fight. I tried to leave every human I have interacted with better than or the same as when I encountered them. I have gone out of my way to apologize to a stranger I might brush against in passing, or have held the door open for a family entering the restaurant after mine. These are small things, I know. Sometimes, even I frustrated myself—why should I always have to put forth this demeanor, why could I not be bumped by the man in the café and not be the one who apologized first and always? Sometimes men bumped me and they said nothing, even as I turned my head to call after them. But on most days it was not like this. It was the way I wanted to move through the world. I had a beard, a modest one. I had my face. I had my name with the hard ending. That was my fight: to continue to do little things for people around me, so no one would find fault in my demeanor and misattribute it to my religion.
* * *
ONE EVENING I returned home from another business trip and parked my car in the driveway. My house, the magnolia tree, the patch of grass and the basketball hoop above the garage door—all of it was familiar to me and yet I felt like a stranger. The key to the front door was in my hand, but I hesitated before announcing my arrival. I had gone away for work trips for so long and so often that I feared my absence was as unnoticed as my presence, or worse. All this work done to provide for a family that could go on effortlessly without me. I walked to the wooden gate at the side of the house. If I stood on tiptoe and felt around the other side, I could unlock the hook and allow myself into the backyard. The green hose was curled in one corner and looked blue in the dark. There were fresh footsteps, and a cigarette butt in the dirt beside it. You had not thought to press it down, or flick it over the fence. By then, you were sixteen, and there was little you cared to do for our sake.
My next trip would not be for months but I wondered if I should request another sooner. I imagined that you were relieved whenever I left, because there would be no one to reprimand you or interrogate you about how your studies were going or to ask the reason for your departure. Whose home are you going to? What for? The wind blew. I shivered. It had raine
d hours before. The air was still misty. Little drops gathered on the waxy surface of dark leaves, reflecting light. I walked until I reached our plum tree and leaned against it. My home was framed in my view. On the second floor, the light of my bedroom was off, but Huda’s adjacent to it was on, her curtains were partly drawn—lace, she wanted then, a cream lace and pale mint walls, and I had gone to the store wondering how I could have one child that wanted curtains with lace accents, and another child who had punched holes into our walls and tried to cover them with posters, had kicked his lamp so that it was permanently bent and imbalanced, had begun to smoke and did not even have the decency to step away from our premises to do so.
Your mother’s face appeared in the kitchen window, she turned on the tap and began to wash something in the sink. Surely she could not see me. The window she looked out from would only show her own face, the glass a sheet of black. She turned around and then back to the window, a slight smile on her lips. She began talking, her face moving from expression to expression, and I saw it was you behind her. You were wearing that hat of yours I despised, worn backward and askew in a way that frustrated me, how even your dressing evoked attitude and arrogance. You began washing whatever it was that had been in her hands. You were good in that way. You always offered to help her. Even I did not do that then. Layla disappeared and then reappeared in the dining room area, her whole body visible through the sliding glass door, and she walked almost on tiptoe, the base of her ankle a fraction above the tile, and she turned the light above the table as bright as it could go, so that it splayed onto the concrete just outside. I am still in darkness, I thought. So far back that she would have to really be looking, would have to press her face against the glass and block out the world around her with her palms. And even then, she might miss me.
Something shifted in my sight. I glanced up to the second floor and saw Huda’s light had been turned off. So the whole of upstairs was dark and I thought, well, good, they turn the lights off when I am not home, as I tell them to.
You must have said something to your mother because she leaned against the table and laughed. She looked so at ease. She lifted her hand up to cup her mouth, the way our daughters laughed timidly and yet loudly. You were good in that way too, making anyone around you laugh. I could never quite figure out how you did it. You splashed the drops of water into the sink, wiped your hands on your clean shirt. You disappeared. You reappeared. You and your mother placed plates and bowls of steaming food onto the table. All the while your lips moved, your expressions changed, whatever you spoke about engaged you both. And I thought of how I know only silence. Huda appeared and took a seat at the dinner table, her head bent over the phone in her hand. And I saw you try to read over her shoulder, the exaggerated expression on your face so I knew you only wanted to tease her with the illusion of interest, or you wanted to make Layla smile. Huda swatted you away, her hair flipping around her when she twisted her neck to glare at you after she caught you. Up close, these things bothered me, but from out here, it wasn’t so bad, it was all done in play. Huda must have complained to Layla then, because Layla shrugged, that smile still on her face that I feared would fall if I entered.
My family seemed complete, save for Hadia, who was in undergrad by then and would not be back until the following weekend. The wind rustled the leaves in the trees and the neighbor’s dog, a few houses down, barked. I had never thought of leaving your mother. The thought of divorce never once crossed my mind. But that night, you sat in the seat that was my seat. This is how my home must be without me in it, I thought, and it looked just fine. Warm and bright, the three of you there, talking animatedly together. Huda had put her phone away, she tied her hair up, and sat with one leg tucked beneath her. You helped spoon food onto her plate. Layla was still smiling a little. You took your hat off and hooked it on your knee. And that was when the thought first occurred to me, that I could go, I could leave, I could walk alongside the little tomatoes and mint leaves and step through the gate back into the driveway, the metal lock clicking shut behind me. Say I left that night. Would you have been able to stay, then?
* * *
AFTER ABBAS ALI passed away, I grew deeply worried for you. I had really liked that boy. He cared for you and he looked out for you and I trusted him. I was at peace anytime the two of you were together. After his death, I began to fear that the little that connected you to our faith would be severed and eventually I organized a trip for our family to do ziyarat in Iraq. I wanted there to be nothing I did not introduce you to that could be a tool for you and your spirituality.
When I first brought the trip up with you, you asked if you could stay back at home, but when you saw the look on my face, you quickly said you did not mean it, you would come. I could see how one might deny a night at mosque but could not fathom turning down an invitation to go to the holiest of places. Once in Iraq, my girls wore black abayas over their clothes. They looked luminous and almost unrecognizable. Even you, who respected nothing, seemed in awe. That first day in Najaf you walked wide-eyed through the streets. Men sold tea in the street from giant steaming vats, piles of sugar heaped in bowls where flies buzzed. Wheelbarrows heaped with fruit. We were patted down at checkpoints every few miles. Children ran barefoot and asked us for sticks of gum and spare change and you never mastered the art of saying no, you reached into your pocket for a bill and by the time you had pulled it out you were swarmed by other children. The markets and the hot sun and the dust and the fluttering ends of the black abayas, and soon we looked up and could see the golden dome of Imam Ali’s shrine, which stood brilliantly against the blue sky.
Peace be upon you, Amir-ul-Momineen, leader of the Faithful, I whispered, and I looked to my right and to my surprise, your lips were also moving. Once inside, the ladies had to go to one side and men another. There was nothing to do there but pray, in organized groups or alone, by reading prayer books or just by speaking openly from one’s heart. You were in the notebook phase that I hoped every year would leave you. I did not like it. I did not hide my dislike. I did not want you, an already sensitive man, to dwell even more in your sensitivity and become further removed from pursuing a respectable, well-paying career. But there, I did not mind it. I read from my prayer books outside while around me birds hopped from prayer mat to prayer mat, and next to me you scribbled away. In a country where we knew neither the language nor the customs and could not spend the day with Layla and the girls, you and I had no choice but to be at ease with one another, even if it was in silence.
When the rush surrounding the zari of Imam Ali dulled, we could easily approach his shrine. It stood proud beneath a chandelier that threw lights on the decorated mirrors of the walls, and we could hold the rounded metal of the gate, close our eyes, and pray. I rested my forehead against the metal. It was cool. I prayed for the things I always pray for, but there, in that place, so close to my Imam, whom I had spent my whole life hearing stories of and hoping to be like even in the smallest of ways, I felt even more strongly the possibility of being heard. I opened my eyes. You were still holding on to the zari. I had never seen you afford that attention, your eyes closed and eyebrows knit together.
“What did you pray for?” I asked later, when you took a seat beside me outside.
You sat holding on to your knees. You were eighteen then. You looked so handsome that day and so much like my father, the tips of your hair beginning to curl slightly.
“That God will forgive Abbas’s sins,” you said.
I nodded.
“He will,” I said.
You looked at me. Your face was sincere and full of concern, as if you were asking me how did I know.
“God is merciful. We must not forget it. Abbas was a wonderful person.”
My answer did not comfort you. You watched a bird that had landed by our feet. You reached your hand into your pocket and I predicted you would pull out a piece of that very thin bread we ate wh
ile there.
“But he sinned,” you said.
You did pull the bread from your pocket. The bird cocked its head to one side and then hopped closer. You tore the bread into tiny pieces and tossed them one at a time. Like Layla, chopping up the apples for the horses. If we, just humans and entirely limited in our thinking, could think to break resources into smaller pieces so our children could feel the joy of scattering slices a little longer, then what generosity was our creator not capable of?
“Amar, God is so merciful that on Judgment Day He will forgive so many souls that even shaitaan will have hope for his own salvation.”
“That’s sweet,” you said. You gestured “all done” to the bird but the bird did not go.
I lightly hit my own cheek to say tauba.
“Only you would find the devil sweet.”
You smiled and glanced at me from the corner of your eye. I chuckled. We were getting along. Perhaps in wanting to impart fear of God and therefore adherence to His laws, I had not done enough to show you the side of God who was, above all, merciful.
“Did you have a nice time?” Layla asked when we found her at the appointed meeting spot.
“We did,” you answered before I could.
You turned to watch boys in the street playing soccer. They were barefoot and most of them were children. Layla and Hadia wanted to search the markets for akhiq rings and Huda wanted an akhiq necklace.
“Can I join them instead?” you asked me, and gestured to the group.
They had made goalposts out of piles of bricks. One boy jumped to knock the soccer ball with his head into the goal and they cheered. You had asked me. You had cared about how your actions would affect me.
A Place for Us Page 37