A Sister to Honor (12 page)

T
he first few nights back in the dorm, Afia couldn't sleep. Missing were the hoots of the owls, the murmur of turtle doves, and the hourly whistle of Baz, the night watchman who bicycled through Nasirabad followed by stray dogs. Slight though she was, her bed felt too narrow and sagged in the center, not like the firm harbor Baba had built from that old chest. And when she woke, what did she have? Breakfast of cold toast in a hall full of chattering girls with piercings on their bits of loose flesh and hair chopped as if they'd suffered lice.

Patty, her roommate, tried to help. “Of
course
you belong here, Afia,” she said the third morning after classes had started. They were in the dining hall with Taylor. Taylor was making plans to transfer from Smith because there were too many lesbians. Afia thought maybe Patty was a lesbian, but she wasn't about to remark on it; she still didn't understand that part of things. “Don't you think we all feel out of place sometimes?” Patty went on, touching Afia's wrist. “Look at me. I'm from the deep South. I'm fat. I'm Baptist. People here think I talk as funny as you.”

Afia was back in her jeans, her turtleneck, the clothes she had been so excited to wear when she first bought them. “I don't think it is the same.”

“Nothing's the same, honey. That's America.”

“Diversity, diversity,” Taylor chimed in. “Just look at the Smith website. You're on it, Afia.”

“Not anymore,” said Patty.

“I told them no picture,” Afia said when Taylor frowned at her.

“What, is that your religion?” Taylor said. “Like it's stealing your soul?”

“She means no pictures with boys in them,” Patty explained.

Taylor laughed. “Please,” Afia said to both of them. “You are my friends. This is serious. In my country, to hold a boy's hand—”

“You mean Gus's hand.”

“Any hand, if he is not of my family. It could make trouble.”

“Afia, I'm just messing with you.” Taylor picked up her hand and kissed the knuckles. “We all love you to death.”

Wrapping her head scarf tight, Afia set off across campus to her classes. Molecular Bio was her favorite. It was taught by Sue Glasgow, for one, with her print blouses and unfashionable wool pants and her standard response to questions: “Isn't it
amazing
?” It
was
amazing, Afia thought—the shiny textbooks and the small, gleaming lab, and the way Professor Glasgow helped her apply the stain to the gel after separating molecules, so she could see the proteins glow under ultraviolet light. Each day on her way to Molecular Bio, her brain growled its cravings the way her stomach growled when she hadn't eaten all day.

In that way she was excited to be back. Excited, too, to hear a lecturer from Burma on Aung San Suu Ki, and to go with Patty to a strange, slow Bergman movie about a family with a crazy daughter, the scenes full of silence and menace, and she didn't really understand the plot but afterward Patty and Taylor argued in the wee hours about the meaning of it all.

But then she went to her job at the Price Chopper. And the aunties greeted her, “Back from the dark side! Seen your fella yet?” And she felt it then, felt how she couldn't just go back to this world she had inhabited before, the world in which she was a bag girl, and she had a fella, and his name was Gus. That other world, the world of henna and
rukhsati
, of
namus
and
ghairat
, had reached its tentacles across oceans and continents.

Away from the Price Chopper and bio lab, she hung in a place in between, like between sleep and waking. In the dream that kept tugging at her feet, she had bought this life—these classes, this too-narrow bed—with a promise to marry Zardad. Zardad, who was Zardad? She must have seen him, as many as a half dozen times at one gathering or another, but she drew no memories of him. An engineer, nine years older than she. In Nasirabad, after the families had come to terms, she might have asked for a photo of him, but she did not want to think about photos. Instead she had lain awake in her big firm bed. She'd made a collage from his mother's face—she had served tea to his mother and his aunt—and what she had seen of his father's face from the crack in the door between the kitchen and the
hujra
, the day his father came to set the terms with Baba. His father's big forehead, his mother's soft chin and narrow shoulders, his father's way of thrusting his chest forward when he spoke.
We hear your daughter is ambitious.
And Baba denying it, no, no, she wants only to help people, she will be a wonderful mother, so caring.

After the tears, she had said yes. Of course she had. She saw no point protesting. It was a good match, an engineer still in his twenties and from her
khel
, and they would let her go back to Smith, to finish her degree. No promises on medical school, but a married woman could do many things before she had children. In the dream haunting her sleep now, she was anchored to the name
Zardad
. She was anchored to her
namus
, or the story of her
namus
, and must behave as if it were intact. Already a letter had come from Moray, asking all the usual questions—was the flight smooth, did she have enough warm clothing—and giving in passing a possible date for the marriage, two years from this coming May, a week after Afia would graduate from Smith.

It was when she stared at the date that she felt the pinpricks of awakening—awakening from the dream into the bags she snapped open at the Price Chopper checkout and the soft pressure of Sue Glasgow's thumb on her wrist as she directed her tweezers under the microscope. And then his voice on the phone. Not the messages, which he started leaving before she left Peshawar, his words tiny and distant, but his voice when she lifted the receiver from the ringing wall phone. “M'Afia.”

She was awake. This was her dorm suite. Her Qur'an on top of the bureau. Patty's stuffed animals piled on her pink comforter. The cold sun outside the window, the bright snow like English cake frosting on the archways and roofs. Her own breath, stuttering. “Gus.”

“I was about to ask Shahid if you'd stayed in Pakistan.”

She sat up in her desk chair. Her skin gave off sparks. “But you didn't.”

“Down, tiger. I obey orders.”

She reached for the dream, tried to pull it into the world that was real again. “Gus, I am so sorry.”

“Hey, you should be. I read the headlines, you know. Always violence over there. I get worried when you don't pick up.”

“I am engaged.”

A long silence. Then, “Don't be stupid, M'Afia. Nobody gets engaged anymore.”

“I do. I am. I cannot see you, Gus.”

“I'm coming up.”

She looked at the Hello Kitty clock that Patty kept on the bookshelf. “In an hour I must be in lab.”

“Yeah, but I'm downstairs.”

The dream was shattered, now, into splinters of panic. She cleared off the desk and closed the library copy of
Jane Eyre
onto which she'd stuck Post-its for her notes. Quickly she brushed her hair before the full-length mirror on the back of the door. She had loved this mirror when she first discovered it, just as she'd loved the view from the second story. She had never lived so high above things before. She loved the desk lamps the college supplied, with their flexible necks. Only late at night, when the high-pitched laughter of drunken girls reached her through the window or the smell of pot seeped through the walls, eerily reminiscent of fish roasted with tamarind, did she feel out of place. Now she tucked her hair under a sheer dupatta that she wore back from the crown of her head. Lifting her glasses, she ran a pinkie under each eye, as if she were applying kohl. She tried to move slowly, deliberately. But her body was too full of blood, and it had to move. Sliding into her clogs she yanked the door wide. She clattered down two flights of stairs. She opened the front door just enough to pull Gus—in his yellow fleece and Icelandic cap, his short freckled nose bright with cold—into the building.

“M'Afia,” he said. His hands on her cheeks were cold. “I missed you so much.”

Where was her shame? In her, all around her, but lost to her senses. Gus's cold nose buried itself in her hair. Before, with him, she had forgotten shame. Everything had been reversed. Her life in America, which had proceeded with the loopy logic of a dream, became real, and Nasirabad took on the slow undertow of dream. Even with Shahid going on about that photo, that stupid photo that the publications office had posted, the world of shame had stayed far away. Dream people couldn't hear what you said when you were awake; they couldn't see what you did.

But now she had been home, where the photo was a letter from another world, from the America that had turned, all at once, to dream, and in Nasirabad she had understood the exact terms of the life she was destined to conduct. Her task was plain—keep the rest of the dream under lock and key, accept the engagement to Zardad, marry Zardad if it came to that, and hope he never learned what she had so recklessly allowed to happen in her dream life.

Which now, again, was real. “I worried about you,” Gus said, his hand cupping the back of her neck. “We heard there was a suicide bomb in Peshawar—”

“Peshawar's a hundred kilometers away from Nasirabad!”

“I know. I Googled it. I Googled every day, like you might pop up from the map and wave at me. But I know you flew in and out of Peshawar. And you weren't writing, so I thought—”

“I couldn't write.”

“I know, it must be impossible to get Internet.”

“No, not for that. I just . . . Gus, if I am writing you, in Nasirabad, I am a bad daughter, I am rotted like bad fruit.”

“Hey, hey. It's okay. You didn't need to write me.” He took her face in his hands. He kissed her mouth. Her blood sang.

“But I did not. And I cannot.” With what strength she could muster she pushed away from him. “Gus, I am
engaged
.”

“Yeah, you said that.” He pushed unruly hair from his eyes. He was so eager, like a puppy. She envied him. All he'd needed to be set free from his shyness was to know that she loved him. No looking over his shoulder for the judgments of one world to be passed in the next. He would crow from the rooftops if he could. “Let's go upstairs, baby. Let's sit down. You look pale. What kind of mafia's putting the screws to M'Afia?”

She didn't know what he meant by
putting the screws
. Screwing was intercourse, she'd learned that much. Did he think—? Shame muffled the song in her blood. “No, no, Gus—”

“Okay. Okay, I withdraw the question. Come on. It took more than an hour to get here. It's snowing outside.”

By the time they entered her room, his good cheer had drained away. Sitting next to her on the narrow bed, he rested his elbows on his knees and picked at invisible dirt under his fingernails. In the last e-mail she'd received from him in Nasirabad, he was driving to Manhattan with a couple of guys from his high school, to watch the ball drop.
If you were here
, he'd written,
we'd stay at the Ritz tonight. Pancakes in bed tomorrow. Book it for next year?
“So,” he said now, flicking an invisible speck of dirt to the floor, “you've met someone. In Pakistan.”

“I have not met him. Maybe, when I was small. But it is promised now.”

“I don't get it.” Wounded, his pale eyes turned to her. “If you haven't met some other guy, who are you engaged
to
? What's promised?”

“To marry. His name is Zardad.” Slowly, sitting next to him while low light slanted through the dusty window, she explained the custom she had grown up with. The image that Khalid must have found on the website, the visit from Zardad's family. “I had to come back here,” she said, “so I say yes.”

“So they're forcing you,” he said. He stood up, bristling. She had never seen him angry before. “That's disgusting.”

“No, not forcing. This is what we expect. I expected, until . . .” She couldn't complete the sentence. She tried again. “I am the disgusting one, Gus. My family's honor—”

“No. No no no. You can't let them do this, Afia.” He stood by the window, arms akimbo. “You're in America now, you can see who you want, marry who you want. I thought . . . Jesus, I thought there was somebody else. This Zardad guy—he's not a problem. He's nothing to you. You can just, I don't know, not go back there.”

“No, Gus.” She shook her head. What she wanted to say was like telling him the dream. But you could never explain a dream once you were awake, even though it had made perfect sense in the other world. “It is not me. It is my family. I cannot hurt them. You cannot imagine, how it would hurt them.”

“Look, the photo's out there.
We
should be out there, if you ask me. But you can't call the picture back. So what do they want?”