American Dervish: A Novel (28 page)

“Fine,” I said.

She took my reticence as a provocation. “I know how much you love it,” she began, annoyed. “But sometimes things just are the way they are. When there’s someone who pays the bills, others have to go along. It’s the way of the world. When you grow up,
inshallah,
it will be different for you. But for now, our hands are tied. So just keep that Quran safely tucked away in your closet when he’s around. Hmm?”

Of course, she didn’t know there was no Quran to keep safely tucked away. And after Father’s threat to break my other arm, I wasn’t about to tell her.

“Okay,” I said.

“Good boy,” she said. “And one more thing: No discussion of Nathan. Don’t bring him up. Don’t mention his name. For
any
reason…okay?”

Only a few weeks earlier, I would have been overjoyed to hear her ask this of me. Now, I only felt my shame and regret.

“Okay, Hayat?” Mother insisted.

“Okay,” I said.

Mina found me in her room that afternoon, standing at her bookshelf, perusing her Quran. “What are you doing,
behta?
” she asked.

“Checking your Quran, Auntie.”

“But you have one, too.”

I hesitated. “I wanted to see yours.”

“But you have the same one, sweetie.”

I was quiet. I wanted to tell her what had happened. It felt like a way to close the awful distance I felt between us.

“Dad burned it.”

“He what?”

“He told me he didn’t want me to read it. Then he caught me. And he burned it.”

Mina’s hand went to her mouth. “My God… ,” she muttered. She looked away. I had expected her to be outraged. But she just looked worried. “Come here, Hayat,” she said, sitting on the bed and patting at the place beside her.

I sat next to her.

“
Behta,
” she began. “Your father asked me not to participate in your religious study anymore. He made me promise and…I have to honor his promise. I am his guest, after all.”

I was silent. I looked down at the Quran in my hands, remembering my first Quranic lesson—here in this room—the night my body had come alive in her presence and in the presence of the holy words she taught me to understand. That was the night Mina first told me about the
hafiz,
the night I’d gone to sleep brimming with hope and well-being, a night I now recalled with sadness. How long ago it seemed. Everything had changed. Mina didn’t love me the way she did back then. And I knew it was all my own doing.

“I don’t want you to think that I agree with him, sweetie,” Mina continued as she wiped my tears away with her fingers. “I have to honor his will. It’s his house. You understand, don’t you?
Behta?
Hmm?”

I didn’t know what I understood, but I nodded.

Father was increasingly in a bad way. Sometime in mid-September—once it was clear things were really over with Mina—Nathan took a leave of absence and went back to Boston to be with his parents. Two weeks later, he still hadn’t returned. And then, without a call or any other warning, Father got a letter from him. Nathan had been offered a position at Mass. General and was taking it. He wanted to stay out east.

Father was desperate. As he saw it, he wasn’t only losing his best friend, but also the partnership that had made them both successful. Father wasn’t certain he could go on with the work without Nathan. He did all he could to get his colleague to reconsider. He even floated the idea of moving us all to Boston so they could continue their research together. But Nathan wasn’t interested. The whole reason for the move, he told Father, was to cut his ties. He’d never been so heartbroken in his life—indeed, he’d never truly understood before what it meant for one’s heart to
break—
and he needed to move on. Father pined and despaired. I started to notice he was disappearing into the garage after dinner each night. When he returned, he smelled of whiskey. His mood, usually already foul, would worsen. He erupted without warning. My parents now fought as they never had. They cursed and slammed doors and threatened to leave each other. More than once, Father walked out, car keys in hand, and didn’t come back until the next day. Or even later.

One night after dinner Mother and Mina were talking over tea. I was sitting at the end of the table. Father had been gone an entire day and night, and Mother was complaining. After listening for a while, Mina stopped her. “I’m the problem,
bhaj.
I have to leave.”

Mother was quiet.

I looked at Mother, surprised she wasn’t saying anything.

“But you can’t go, Auntie,” I finally blurted out.

Mina turned to me. “
Behta,
your auntie has to live her own life now.” She said it drily; her tone left no room for debate.

“He hasn’t called yet, has he?” Mother asked after another long pause.

Mina shook her head. “But they’ve been asking.”

I suddenly worried they were talking about Hamed. “Who?” I asked.

Mother turned to me, sharply. “Mind your own business, Hayat…Take your milk and go somewhere else.”

Two days later, the phone rang. I picked it up. But before I could speak, I heard Mother’s voice on the line. (She’d gotten it upstairs.) It was Ghaleb Chatha calling. I stayed on and listened. After chilly greetings, Chatha got to his point: He wanted permission for Sunil to contact Mina. The intent would of course be matrimonial, he explained.

Mother told him curtly it was fine.

Chatha’s response to her was just as curt. “Muneer. I appreciate the fact that you approve. But I really should speak with the man of the house.”

There was a pause.

“He has no say on the matter. I’m the one you need to speak with.” Mother’s tone was acerbic.

“All the same…Is Dr. Naveed-
sahib
there?”

“He’s not.”

“Would you have him call me, please?”

“Not likely, Ghaleb,” Mother replied. “There’s no love lost for you as far as Naveed goes.”

“Then I should speak with her parents directly.”

“Suit yourself.”

There was another pause.

“Do you have the number, Muneer?”

“You’ll have to speak to Mina about that.”

“Well, I would prefer not to. If you could get the number and call Najat with it…”

“Fine,” Mother said. There was a click. She’d hung up the phone.

Mother had no intention of following through with Chatha’s request—“I won’t be bossed around by that beard on a stick,” she complained that night—but Mina would force her to.

Two days later, sometime before sunrise, our phone’s tinny toll shattered the sleeping quiet, ringing and ringing. Someone finally picked up. After a brief silence, Mother’s bedroom door flew open and she scurried down the hall to Mina’s room.

“Call from Pakistan!” Mother hissed. “Your parents!”

“Is everything okay?” Mina asked, alarmed.

“I think Chatha called,” Mother said through the door.

Mother was right. Chatha had called her parents in Pakistan and secured the permission he wanted, by way of a proposition: He would not only waive the dowry but he would also foot the bill for the entire wedding, including the Alis’ airfare to America to attend it. Rafiq, Mina’s father, was overjoyed. And he was calling the house now to persuade his daughter not to squander this second chance at a “normal life.” He must have been pleasantly surprised to find his daughter wouldn’t need persuading.

My first interaction with Sunil was over the phone. He and Mina had been speaking regularly for about a week when I picked up the phone one afternoon. From the other end came a peculiar, high-pitched drawl:

“Hulloo?”

“Hello?”

“This is Sunil? I’m loooking for Mina Alee?”

“Who?”

“Minaa?

“Mina?”

“Yesss?”

The voice was strange. It spoke with the same unvarying lilt, elongating sounds for no apparent reason, making every phrase sound like it was a question, even when it wasn’t.

“Who’s calling?”

“Sunil?” He paused. “Is this Haayat?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“I’ve heard about yoouu? I’m looking forward to meeting you?”

I couldn’t understand why he was speaking like this.

“I would like to taaalk to your auntie Mina?”

“Okay. I’ll get her.”

“Thaank you,
behta?
”

I looked down into the family room, where Mina was sitting on the couch, her hand already on the receiver.

“It’s for you, Auntie.”

“Sunil?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, sweetie,” she said.

I was grateful to Allah that things looked to be turning out right. Mother explained that if Sunil and Mina married, then Mina would have no difficulty staying here in America, and Imran would be safe. And so it was with gratitude and renewed devotion that I now began to pray regularly, certain not to miss even a single one of the five daily prayers. But since I wasn’t able to be seen praying at home, I concocted a new way to worship. Taking my lead from Mina’s insistence on intention, I shed the traditional verses and movements of our
namaaz.
Instead, I would sit quietly at the appointed prayer times, my eyes closed, imagining I was in the presence of Allah Himself. Sometimes I thought of Him as a cloud in the sky; sometimes as the golden throne on which I imagined He sat; sometimes as simply an enormous white light. Whatever the image, I would imagine Him close to me. And then I would wait, listening to my breath, until the silence came. And I would mutter:

“I give myself to You.”

That was all. I don’t know where it came from, but it felt right. It felt like what I needed to say to God.

I did it everywhere: On the school bus. During recess or lunch. In class. In the backyard. In my room. At the mall. I would sit quietly with my eyes closed, and mutter to myself: “I give myself to You.” At times, I emerged from this prayer feeling something—a warmth, a light—I could tell others noticed in my eyes. I relished knowing that they hadn’t the slightest idea what it was, or how it got there. No one knew what I was doing.

As for my goal of becoming a
hafiz,
I not only persevered, I worked even harder than I had before, the dawning certainty of Mina’s eventual departure fueling a new kind of fervor in me, as I sought now in faith what I was losing in her. The school library had its own copy of the Quran, a small red tome translated by one Ronald McGhee. The edition had a preface that should have troubled me more than it did, outlining the necessity for an “unbiased version of the Bible of the Moslems” that would help Westerners to understand once and for all how “truly barbaric, even animal,” these “Moslems” were, and why “Christendom needed to prepare for a renewed crusade.” Perhaps I should have been bothered by this, but I wasn’t. As I saw it, beggars couldn’t be choosers, and McGhee’s renditions of verses I already knew were recognizable enough for me not to care about his opinions. I just needed the words. I checked it out and kept it in my desk at school, renewing it every three weeks on the due date stamped on the slip affixed to the inside of the back cover (which slip, incidentally, showed that the last time the book had been checked out before me was twenty years earlier). I spent many a recess sitting in a corner of the playground quietly working my way through new
surah
s. My classmates teased me at first, but after a few weeks—my Quranic half hour by then a mainstay—I ended up no more conspicuous to them than any of the new-planted maples in the school courtyard. Of course, there were times I didn’t feel like going on, times when I longed to join the midday games of kickball or football. But I knew what I was doing was more important than any game. If the Quran was clear on one thing it was that life on earth was passing, and that to pretend otherwise was the only lasting mistake one could truly make. This was how I started to think of it: Life was like watching a show you loved. You didn’t want it to end. But it
would
end, sooner or later; that’s just the way it was. And when the show was over, you had to get on with things. The sooner you started getting yourself ready for what was coming after, the better.

It was early one Sunday morning in mid-October. After waking at sunrise to sit at the edge of my bed and pray in my new way, I went downstairs to the family room with a bowl of cereal to watch TV. At some point, I heard Father grumble a greeting from the top of the steps, disappearing into the kitchen to make himself tea. There was a brief clanging of pots and pouring of liquids, and shortly, Mother joined him. Moments later, Father was shouting:

“I don’t care! I don’t want to be here for it! And I won’t! I have better things to do with my life! If she won’t listen to me about that fool, at least I don’t have to be a party to it!”

“Calm down, Naveed!”

There was a loud, metallic crash. I looked over at the stairs leading up to the kitchen. Father was standing at the cabinet where he and Mother kept their keys.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Mother asked in a pointed tone.

“Fishing. That’s where.”

Father glanced down into the family room and our eyes met. For a moment, I thought he was going to ask me to go fishing with him. But he didn’t.

I would gather what the argument had been about later that morning as I lingered in the kitchen while Mina and Mother took breakfast: Sunil was supposed to be coming over to visit. It wasn’t the first time Mina and Imran had seen him; they’d been to visit at the Chathas’ with Mother a few times in the past weeks. But this was the first time Sunil would be coming to our home. The real idea had been for Sunil to meet Father, but Father wasn’t having any of it. He was still upset over what had happened between Nathan and Mina, and he thought this new development with the “Chatha cousin”—as Father referred to Sunil—was laughable.

Mother didn’t care that he wouldn’t be around, but Mina was concerned.

“This is not good,
bhaj,
” Mina said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter,” Mina said, putting her piece of toast down and pushing her plate away.