I did not want to say it. I found I could not. My mouth became dry. You shook your head as if I had insulted you and you jumped from the bed.
“You went through my stuff,” you said, and screamed cuss words.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, holding my hand out to you, “I’m not angry. I want to help you.”
You kicked your desk chair and it fell over and crashed against the wall. You had begun yelling.
“Amar, I’m not angry with you,” I said it again.
You walked out into the hallway. I followed you. I stuffed my paper in my pocket. I stepped ahead, and stood in front of you, to block you from going downstairs. I reached out and put my hand on your shoulder.
“You can’t control me,” you shouted.
“Amar, you can’t do this. It is bad for your body, for your soul. It is haram.”
“I don’t care about haram or halal.”
You had acted that way but you had never said that before. I did not understand. One could be a bad Muslim, but one could not disregard, so totally, what was right and what was wrong.
“How can you say that? You do not care if you go to hell?”
I was yelling. I knew I was.
“I don’t believe in heaven or hell. I’m not a Muslim.”
There it was. Of all the things I thought might be possible when I stood in the hallway of the hospital and watched you, wrapped in a blanket, of all you might do or become, this had not even occurred to me. It was the farthest outcome from my mind. The most chilling of verses—We will send them signs and they will still deny—had become my own son. Amar, I know what I said next. You know what I said, and we both know what followed.
You stood there as in shock as I was. Your eyes were wide. You looked so afraid. It’s okay, I had the impulse to reach out and tell you then, it’s okay. It will be okay, I promise you. These things happen. You went to your room. I went to mine. Hadia looked at me like she despised me and Layla did not speak to me. It would be another forty days before she spoke to me again and even longer before she could look me in the eye. She fell asleep at the farthest edge of the bed and I lay awake blinking at the dark ceiling. I had done a terrible thing. I had disowned my child. I had been shocked by your words and out of cruelty I threw back my own, the worst I could muster. I never asked you to leave. I know that now. I remember that much.
I lay awake wondering if I should go to you. You were not Muslim. The thought pained me greatly then, and for years after, and even sometimes now, but there was no compulsion in Islam. I took comfort in the verses that expressed it. Everyone has free will. In time, I knew, we could work our way around it, I could become accustomed, even on that night I told myself there was nothing the human heart could not grow to endure, that the miracle of the human heart is that it expands in its capacity to accept, to love.
I used the wrong words, Amar. Or, I should never have spoken them at all. But I have only ever thought of you as my son, my only. I decided that in the morning, when things had cooled, I would go to you again, I would try again not to be angry. I would say to you, if you are not Muslim, fine, I accept, but I am still your father, you cannot get rid of me, you might not care if you sin and that is fine too, but I am concerned for your body. But by morning you were gone, Hadia fast asleep in your place.
* * *
HADIA HAS COME to our home to ask if we will watch the kids for her and Tariq next week. It is their nine-year anniversary. Of course, we say. As soon as we have answered, I make an excuse to leave the house, to go and check the mail. Outside, alone in the driveway, I think of how long it has been since we last saw you. The door opens and Hadia steps out. The magnolia tree is in full bloom and Hadia admires the petals, wide open as they are. I wonder what she is thinking when she says, “Mumma says you’re having a hard time.”
I am fine so I say nothing. I pretend to study the envelopes in my hand. Hadia takes a seat at the edge of the driveway and then looks up at me and says, “I know you hate when I do this. But join me.”
She is right. It always bothered me. It would make the neighbors wonder why we were acting strange. Still, I take a seat.
“When I was younger and mad at you, I would sit out here and wish for a life where I could just step out.”
“Did your wish come true?”
“Everything I ever wanted has become mine.”
It is a blessed sentence but she has spoken it sadly, picks up a pebble and pinches it between her fingers.
“And are you still mad at me?” I ask her.
I look at my hands and clasp them together. Hadia does not say no but from the corner of my eye I see her shake her head. In the months since the surgery I have repaid all debts I owed. I have drafted a will and dated it.
“I remember asking you about Amar,” I tell her.
She sighs.
“I wish I had some information I could give you,” she says.
“You don’t know where he is, then?”
She shakes her head.
“Do you think it’s my fault he ran away?” I ask.
The sky is so vast and clear. I look up to no sun and still squint.
“There is no way for us to know that. I’ve thought about it for years and every time I do, there is a new cause to consider. Do you think it was your fault?”
I nod.
“I told him he wasn’t my son.”
“Baba. We said all kinds of things. Even he did. I think Amar convinced himself he did not belong, and he was waiting for any reason to go.”
“I talked to him at your wedding. I was the last one who did.”
She looks at me then with a look that says, please do not tell me if it will change things between us.
“I haven’t even told your mother that.”
“What did you say?” Hadia whispers.
“Every single day I have tried to remember that conversation. There was so much happening that night, and so little stayed here.” I point to my head. “He was upset. He had been drinking heavily. I could smell it. His words were slippery.”
Hadia’s eyes fill. I place a hand on her shoulder. She leans into me and rests her head against my arm.
“I told him that Inshallah, it would be all right one day. I didn’t say to him: never come home again. I didn’t say that.”
“I believe you.”
Behind us, the leaves of the magnolia tree rustle.
“I lied,” she says.
I hold my breath at once. I have known there was more. My heart leaps. I am so afraid she will speak and it will not be enough.
“A few years ago, when Abbas was about five, I came downstairs after putting Tahira down for a nap, and Abbas was on the phone. Just talking and talking. I took the phone from him. The person hung up as soon as I spoke. Who was that? I asked Abbas.
“He wouldn’t tell me. No one, he said. Okay, I asked him, what did you talk to him about? Abbas didn’t correct me, didn’t say it was a she. About me, he said. And about Tahira.
“I knew it was Amar. How could it have been anyone else? He just asked questions, Abbas said. What kind of questions, I asked, can you try to remember for Mumma? How old Tahira is, he said, what you are like with us, what you do with us, if you are a good mummy. What did you say? I asked. He said yes, I was a nice mummy, that sometimes I took them to the park.
“He could tell I was trying not to cry. Please tell me, I said to him, you’re not in trouble, I promise, just try to remember everything you can for Mumma. He eased a little. He asked a lot about Nana and Nani, he said, he wanted me to talk about them. Anything specific? I asked. No, he said, I told him what food they make and about Nana’s gift drawer, what Nani likes to do and Nani’s flowers. What did he say, I asked, when you told him all of this? He said, ‘Keep going.’ ”
I do not know what to say. I tur
n my face away from Hadia, unable to look at her.
Hadia sits up straight and continues. “There are times, every year or so, when the phone rings from a blocked number and I answer and say hello. Hello? Salaam? Then I say, is it you? And the caller hangs up. After that first time, I noticed Abbas would perk up when the phone rang, and he would look at me when it did. Just a few months ago, Tariq also came upon Abbas on the phone while I was at work. When Abbas saw Tariq, he hung up immediately. Tariq asked, who was that, Abbas? And Abbas just gave Tariq that look of his when he lies and said, I don’t know.”
* * *
FOR YOUR SIXTH birthday your mother baked a cake and tried to make blue frosting but it turned out teal, and you said to her, I like it, it’s like the ocean. I charged the video camera upstairs, and downstairs I could hear the hum of you all. We had invited a few family friends over. Blue and white balloons. Clear goodie bags filled with tiny packets of M&M’s and dollar-store bracelets and tiny notebooks and pencils and those little aliens that you kids liked to throw at the ceilings, the ones that left an oily trace when pulled from the wall. Your mother made trays of biryani. Your sisters wore matching frilly dresses. Your mother’s parents were visiting us from India at the time, and maybe because of this, I was thinking of my own parents, who would never see you. Who had gone before I could show them what I had made of my life, how I had succeeded in a way, a job and a house in California, three gorgeous children, a wife who made biryani and teal-frosted cake and pinned streamers and balloons to the walls.
“Baba,” Huda said, standing in the doorway, “Mumma wants to light the candles now.”
I stood, walked downstairs, found you all surrounding the kitchen table, where the candles had been lit, little drops of blue and white wax staining the cake and becoming solid, and you were standing right before it, surrounded by children who were struggling to find a space, pushing past one another and standing on tiptoe to see the action that was hardly exciting, hardly new.
“Baba’s here!” you said, stomping on the ground, alternating one foot then the other, lifting them up a little so you looked like you were shaking from excitement.
I held the camera up, I put it to my eye and focused on you, and suddenly you were a tiny face in a tiny square bordered by darkness, and you said, “Baba’s here!” to the kids around you, and I hit record, the little red dot began to blink where your shirt was, and I missed it just by an instant, you saying that. Hadia looked up at me—she too fit in the frame—and she began to sing “Happy Birthday” and it spread until all the children joined in singing it, and you beamed, and I concentrated on keeping my camera steady and focused on your face, as you looked around at everyone, smiling wide. You were missing a tooth then. Your mother’s hand was on your shoulder. She was wearing the same ring she wears now. The Ali girl you would one day grow to love and be devastated by was standing in the frame too, her hand in her mouth, her big eyes turned up to the light fixture. You leaned forward when the song was done and a boy shouted, make a wish, and you paused, closed your eyes, your face in deep, sincere concentration, focused in a way it never was when we would ask you to pray with us, and you inhaled a giant breath and released it theatrically, so forcefully that spit flew from your mouth and onto the surface of the teal cake and I cringed, hoping none of the adults had caught that. And all the flames were spent. And a little smoke rose into the air, slow and meandering, and Hadia leaned forward and sniffed it, and Huda extended a finger and poked it into the cake, licked the frosting off her finger, and smiled. Your mother’s face appeared in the little square then, and she held on to your cheek and pulled your face up to hers and she kissed you, and your grandfather took a spoon and fed you from your cake and you wiped the teal frosting on your mouth with the back of your hand, and I pulled the camera away from you then, zoomed out, and scanned the room. The HAPPY BIRTHDAY sign we used for every birthday for years tacked on the wall, the children that had begun running from the kitchen into the living room, the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game taped up, a disarray of sticker tails all over the body and one on our wall, the adults talking again, and then I pulled the camera back to you, and you were still standing by your mother, still beaming, your lips and teeth now tinged blue.
Sometimes I come home and know your mother has been watching the videos. Sometimes she forgets them in the tape player. I turn the TV on to watch the news and there it is again—a moment from our life paused on the screen, how our backyard looked years ago, our children frozen in it. We don’t watch them together as a family anymore, as we used to when you kids were all still under the same roof and one of you would ask us to watch them. You would always insist we only put on one that you were in, a video from after you were born. As a child, it was hard for you to imagine us having a life without you in it. Hadia would say it wasn’t fair, that we never got to see videos of her as a baby, we only saw the ones with you as a kid, you as the center of attention. And that by the time you entered the videos she had already begun her ugly stage. And I would tell her not to be silly, when I should have told her she did not have an ugly stage, and I would put on a video from after you were born, and we watched your birthday, or all of us going to the zoo one day, or the three of you playing in the sprinklers outside one summer afternoon. Sometimes, I watch them again too. I press play and I think, This was the moment right after you said, Baba is here, that is why you were looking up, straight at the camera. When I watch the old tapes and look through the old photographs, it’s as if I wasn’t there at all. But they are mine, I remind myself, they are my memories, they are exactly how I stood and saw them.
* * *
I WAS THIRTEEN when my father died. I did not tell any of the boys in my class. I did not want anyone to pity me. I wore a black kurta-pajama to the funeral. The air smelled strongly of fresh dirt. My mother could not come to the graveyard. It was not allowed. I alone was the representative and I buried him. Every man my father had known was there and each of them placed a heavy hand on my forehead and let it rest for a moment. At first I was confused. It felt nice. How did everyone know to do the same? Then I remembered what the Prophet, peace be upon Him, had said about orphans: be kind to them, feed them, place a hand on their forehead. They were getting sawaab. And I was the one who had become an orphan.
The dirt was dark and very moist. It had rained. Nearby there was a sanctuary structure where dark birds crowded the roof. I saw my father, wrapped in the white cloth, lowered into the grave. His face was very waxy and that bothered me. I tried to communicate with him in my mind. I am here, Baba—you are not going alone to the other world. We are sending you off. The moulana had told me what to pray in Arabic but I forgot the verses. I spoke to my father in Urdu instead. My father, whom I had not known very well. He preferred gulab jamun to halwa. He insisted on paying a set price for rickshaws and if the rickshaw driver did not match it he walked on, looking for another. He was a man of principle. He was very punctual. He liked watches very much. He was proud of the one he wore every day, told me often why it had been given to him. He was studious and competitive. He had a temper. I had been terrified of him. Once, when I was a young boy, I had taken a magazine from the store. When he saw I had walked out holding it he struck me on my face so hard my ears began to ring. I did not remember if I had taken it on purpose or if I had forgotten I was holding it, but when I touched my hand against my burning face, I hoped I had taken it intentionally, so that I would be deserving of the punishment and saved from hurt that my father had assumed the worst in me.
I lifted the dark dirt. It fell between my fingers. I formed my hand into a fist and more dirt fell, but the dirt that remained clumped together into a ball. I dropped it into the grave. It landed with a thud. The dirt came apart against the white cloth my father was wrapped in. In America, years later, I volunteered for our mosque in different ways. I dropped off and picked up moulanas at the airport. We often sponsored iftaars during Ramadan. Another duty of
mine was performing ghusl on people who had passed away. The first time I did this I was thirteen. I had never seen my father’s body unclothed before. I was a child before he died but after, I was a man; I began to pray and keep my fasts, and on the day my father was to be buried the other men who did his ghusl had ushered me into the room and showed me the steps. In America, every time someone wanted a Muslim burial but did not have enough family members to perform the ghusl, I would go in and help with a handful of other men. Only men could wash men and women could wash women. Sometimes, before we stepped into the room, we would learn about the life of the body we were about to wash. Their occupation, how they died, who they had left behind. Other times, we knew them, they were members of the community, and I cataloged every memory I had with them and shared some aloud with the other men. But in the room, while we washed, when the body lay on the table before us, we were completely silent. We only spoke if it was absolutely necessary and if it related to the task at hand. The body was vulnerable and I felt for the person, who had not known, before death, it would be strangers who prepared him to rest finally in the earth. I concentrated on being very gentle as I washed the arms, the legs, each finger and each toe. Now I know I will be like those bodies that are washed without their sons present. Hadia and Huda and Layla will stay home on the day I am to be buried, or they will come to the cemetery and stand far enough away that they can only see my body lowered into the ground through the gaps of men present who surround the grave. And who will be the one to step forward first, grab a fistful of dirt, and before they have dropped it into my grave say to me, you are not going alone to the other world, we are here, I am here, sending you off.
* * *
THERE ARE SIGHTS in life I will never tire of seeing. Layla tying her hair up in a bun before beginning a task, that fluid motion of her wrist and fingers working to gather all her hair and contain it. Huda when she was three and learned how to whistle, how we asked her to entertain us and any guest who came to our home. My grandchildren calling me Nana. Tahira tugging at the edge of my kurta to get my attention. That moment I first step out and look up at the sky. Layla pointing out the leaves when the wind makes them all wave at once. Death, which awaits everyone, seems to be standing beyond a corner I can’t see but feel I will turn to face any moment. Half of my life is here—my wife, my children, my grandchildren. Half has already made it to the other side—my parents, so long ago that for most of my life I did not think of death as a region to ward off, but as the place where they were waiting for me. So I am not afraid. But when I think of these inexhaustible sights something pinches in me: To never see Layla twist her hair into a tight bun. To never look up and be made a child again by the wonder of the moon. To never hear the thud of the basketball against the pavement, the squeak of sneakers, and stop what I was doing, widen the space of the blinds just enough to see you lift your arm in the pause before flight, bend your knees, your face full of such concentration that I couldn’t help but wait until you shoot, score, smile to yourself wide and pure.
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