American Dervish: A Novel (27 page)

Mother wasn’t looking at me. If she had been, she would have noticed that I was starting to feel very uncomfortable.

“Where is Mina-Auntie now?” I asked after a long pause.

“Your father took her to see a lawyer this morning. She was in hysterics…you can understand. That bloody man threatened to take her son!” Mother shook her head again, still dumbstruck. “Sonny Buledi…What was he thinking?”

Mother went to the stove to start breakfast. As she cooked eggs, she repeated the same few details of the story, her telling inflected now with self-recrimination, now with anger, and now with her incredulity that any of these things could have come to pass. As I heard it again and again—that Mina might lose Imran, that her father was going to break her bones—it made me dizzy.

What had I done?

Mother tossed a plate of eggs and toast before me but I couldn’t eat. She wasn’t having any of it. “Things are bad enough right now. Don’t make them more difficult for me, Hayat.”

I ate a few bites. I popped the yolk on my eggs. I moved the food around and made a mess on my plate. She finally let me go.

Upstairs in my room, I got down on my knees.

“Please don’t let anyone take Imran from her, Allahmia. Please. I’ll do anything for you. Anything at all. I’ll learn the Quran faster. I’ll become a
maulvi.
Whatever you want. Whatever it is. Anything. Anything at all. Just please don’t let her lose Imran. Please don’t have her father break all her bones. Please, please, please…”

As I prayed, I saw pictures in my mind’s eye of the man with the stain across his face, chewing, and the office itself, its floor littered with torn and crumpled forms. I relived again and again the moment I held on to the form, imagining now that I hadn’t let it go. What I would have given for it to have been torn into two!

Finally, exhausted from my desperate pleas, I went to my bed. But not to sleep. I took the Quran with me. It was the only thing I thought Allah would want: For me to pick up where I’d left off.

As Mother predicted, the lawyer Mina saw that morning told her she had nothing to worry about. At least as long as she was in this country. Mother promised her that she could stay with us as long as she wanted or needed.

I didn’t see Mina until that evening. And when I did, I could barely bring myself to look at her. I wanted to tell her what I’d done, but she seemed so unapproachable. There was something forbidding and fierce about her I’d never seen before. Her full, almond-shaped eyes had tapered to slim chinks, and the lines on her forehead—and along the sides of her nose and at the corners of her eyes—were deep and dark. She was even moving differently, with briskness and efficiency, not the sort of shuffling about that had accompanied her earlier discouragements. There was none of the dreaminess in her gaze that often made it seem her mind had drifted off to some other, infinitely better place. With me, she was cold. And she would be for days to come. At first, I thought she knew. And then I realized she was acting like that with everyone. Something inside her had changed.

I dreamt every night that week of the Western Union office and the man with the stain across his face. The thought of what I’d done—the pain of it—was never out of my mind for long. I was so worried about what would happen to Mina and Imran. I felt helpless. And the fact that my helplessness was my own doing bred a new form of shame. Now, I saw clearly how I had kept myself from Imran. I didn’t understand why. I should have been grateful to have him, I thought. So I took to calling him my brother, as he had long done with me. We played more than ever. I deferred to his humors. I gave him my things. But even as I embraced every opportunity to repair the damage I thought I’d done him,  I just couldn’t forget the telegram. It was like plaque on my teeth that no toothbrush could scrub away.

At week’s end, on Friday, Mother and Mina put on their traditional Pakistani garb for a function at the Chathas’ to which we’d all been invited. Father was convinced the invitation couldn’t be taken as anything other than a provocation, considering the events at the Islamic Center. He even suspected worse: After speaking to Sonny Buledi—who vigorously denied having anything to do with the matter—Father had concluded the telegram could only have been sent by someone from that “crowd of wolves in sheep’s clothing,” as he now called them. He couldn’t understand how Mother would even think of going to the event.

“We need to get out,” she said. “
She
needs to get out. We need to be with people of our own kind. And you should be coming with us.”

“Absolutely not,” Father said.

“Fine,” Mother replied, coldly. “We’ll go without you.”

Father ordered cheese pizzas and mozzarella sticks from a local pizzeria for me and Imran. Father kept getting up and leaving the room and coming back as Imran and I ate, sitting through reruns of
Three’s Company.

After the show, Imran fell asleep on the couch. Father seemed to have disappeared.

I went up to my room. I opened my desk drawer. Buried under some paper was Mina’s picture. I pulled it out. Her face was perfect, the very shape of a nameless feeling inside me that seemed to define all I wanted, a feeling that was now tinged with a roiling regret.

I put the picture back and picked up my Quran. But I couldn’t keep my mind on the verses.

I closed my eyes and prayed.

“Please, dear Allahmia. Save Imran from that man. Save Mina from her father. I will do whatever you want me to do. I will give up whatever you want me to give up…”

I heard something. I looked over to find the door to my room yawning open. There was Father.

His hulking form appeared against the black hall, his face barely brushed by the light coming from my desk lamp, the only visible illumination. But despite the darkness, I could see his eyes. They were smoldering.

“What are you doing?” he asked. His voice was strained. His words were slurred.

“Reading Quran,” I replied.

“Did you forget what I told you in the hospital?”

It was only then that I realized the book he’d mentioned in the hospital room was the Quran.

“Give it to me,” he said, approaching.

I pulled back, drawing it closer. My heart was racing.

“I said give it to me!” he commanded. He was standing above me now, his hand open before me.

“Why?” I finally blurted. My voice—loud, defiant—surprised me.

He stared down at me, his jaw tightening. All at once, his closed fist was coming down at my face. I ducked. He hit the back of my neck. And then he hit me again. I tumbled from the chair.

Father had my Quran in his grip now, his right hand around its cover, his fist closed around a clump of its pages. “This goddamn thing… ,” he said through his teeth, his arms and shoulders tensing as he pulled and pulled. Finally, he rent the pages from the binding.

He growled as he tossed the cover down and set about ripping the pages free. He pulled and tore, pages and pieces of pages falling to his feet. He tore and tore and before long the carpet was covered with paper. And now Father danced and ground the pages underfoot. He had a wild look in his eye as he stepped madly on the pieces of our holy book. He turned to me, still dancing. “You want your Quran?!” he yelled. “That’s your
fucking
Quran!” I’d never heard him use that word. It sounded awkward in his mouth, like something he didn’t know how to say. “What you do when you are eighteen is your choice! Until then—if I ever see you with a Quran, I will do exactly what this
fucking
book says about thieves! I will
cut off
your
fucking
hands! Both of them!” He was pointing at me, scowling. “Do you understand?”

I was crying now. My breath was not my own. It kept getting caught in my throat, my chest and neck seizing with contractions I couldn’t control.

“Do you understand?!” he screamed.

I tried to nod, but my involuntary wheezing made it difficult to do even that.

“I SAID DO YOU UNDERSTAND?!”

“Ye…e…es…,”
I cried, finally forcing the sounds out.

“Good,” he said, his chest heaving. I looked over at the doorway. Imran was standing there, staring at me.

“We’re not finished yet,” Father said, headed for my bed. He tore the covers off, then snatched free the fitted sheet underneath. He dropped it to the floor and started kicking the paper onto it. Imran watched, fascinated, as Father worked himself back into a fury, throwing one foot out and now the next, teetering, a look of ever-new surprise on his face, as if he couldn’t bring himself to believe it was just paper he was kicking.

The torn pages finally all gathered on the sheet, he pulled the sheet’s corners together into his fist and threw the drooping bundle over his shoulder. He turned to me. “Let’s go, Hayat!” he shouted. “Now!”

I got to my feet. I still couldn’t control my breathing.

“Whe…where…are…we…go…ing?”
I asked with difficulty.

“Just go!”

Imran followed as Father marched me down the stairs and into the kitchen. He pulled at the drawer by the telephone and grabbed a lighter lying in there. He pointed at the patio door.  “Outside, Hayat! Now!”

It was a dry night. The faintest hint of autumn’s coming chill was in the air. At the end of the sloping lawn, above the cover of trees whose silhouette was barely sketched against a black sky, the paper-thin wisp of a crescent moon dangled over the horizon. Father pushed me along. I was still wheezing. I turned and looked back at the house. Imran was watching at the patio door window.

Father made his way to the back of the yard, behind the vegetable garden. He tossed the bundle onto a clearing in the grass covered with ash, where he burned brush in spring and summer, and leaves in the fall.
“Noo….ooo!”
I cried out, realizing what he was going to do.

Father pulled the lighter from his pocket, leaned down, and took up a handful of the torn pages of the Quran into his fist. His thumb snapped at the lighter’s switch, producing a thin, long flame. He flashed me a treacherous smile as he held the flame to the pages and waited. It wasn’t until the paper actually caught fire that I realized I was surprised. I had expected the pages not to burn.

“Just paper,” Father said, as if reading my thoughts. “Couldn’t save my sister. And it can’t save itself.” He dropped the burning pages onto the pile.

The fire slowly took, the flames growing. Tears poured up through me, thick and hot. The fire danced and swam against my wet gaze.

Father was quiet.

“
You…are…go…ing…to…go…to…hell…,
” I said through my tears.

“Good,” he said.

“Go…goo…good?”

He didn’t answer.

The torn pages wrinkled and turned black in the fire. The black pieces broke apart and lifted on the rising heat. Like flakes of dark snow going the wrong way, they disappeared against the night sky. “If you say anything about this to your mother,” Father warned, “I swear to you I will break your
other
arm.”

I watched the pages burn.
You didn’t stop him,
I thought. And then I remembered what Mina said about intention. That it was all that counted.

I looked away from the fire. I hadn’t stopped him. But I didn’t have to watch.

Book Four

Mina the Dervish

14

Sunil the Absurd

T
he night Father burned my Quran was the night Mina first met Chatha’s cousin Sunil. He was in a corner of the room where the men were sitting when Mina noticed him: small, dark, not particularly handsome, but she could tell he was in pain. And it was the way he held himself in that pain—with dignity, nobility, even (or so she would say)—that impressed her.

Sunil had reason to be in pain. His wife had left him for a white American, taking their only son and moving halfway across the country to Florida. (Sunil lived in Kansas City.) He’d since succumbed to paralyzing depression; his ophthalmology practice suffered; he’d been forced to sell it. And now, here he was, midway through his life, sleeping in his first cousin’s guest room.

Mina noticed him on her own, but it wasn’t until he came up in the dinner conversation among the women that her interest was really piqued. Chatha’s wife, Najat, mentioned Sunil’s divorce and his difficulties, but by way of complaint: He’d been living with them for months and maybe it was time, she said, for him to take his life into his own hands. Mina weighed in, surprised at Najat’s harshness. Divorce, she said, was something you could never understand if you hadn’t experienced it. But as no one at the table expected to experience divorce, they weren’t interested in discussing it. Abruptly, Najat changed the subject. And all at once, Mina found herself stewing at the end of the table, her passions inflamed, her heart softened toward the man whose very visible suffering she believed she understood only too well.

Later that night, Mina struck up a conversation with him. She saw him step out onto the front veranda for a cigarette, and she slipped away from the ladies to join him. They spoke for almost half an hour about their divorces. When Mina returned to the kitchen, she did something she had to have known would set things in motion. Najat was preparing the desserts. Mina took a bowl and scooped a hefty portion of
kheer
into it. Then, she walked right into the living room, where the men were gathered, and handed the bowl to Sunil.

In front of everyone.

Sunil sat up, awkwardly taking the bowl and the teaspoon from her. “Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” Mina replied with a smile.

“Your father’s not too happy about your Islamiat,” Mother said to me a full five days after Father’s Friday-night explosion. “So tone it down for now…just a little.”

I stared at her, blank. I knew Father had said something to her that weekend. I’d heard them arguing on Saturday in the bedroom, and heard Father shout my name. And here she was—on Wednesday—talking about me
toning it down
with a scrunch of her face and a tamping gesture with her right hand as if she were asking me to lower the volume on the stereo. “I mean, no one’s telling you to stop. But
go easy…
”