I’m born of insecurity and need, of my mother Seema’s desire to fashion a family and home for and by herself.
Even so, it’s not until a few weeks after learning about my incipience that my mother comes to accept my inclusion in her life. During that time, the promise of me battles with the threat I pose: the disruption I presage, the additional responsibility for someone else’s happiness that I entail. She withholds from my father information of my conception when they meet to sign the summary dissolution, afraid Bill may convince her to keep the child, to raise the child together, or even to get back together, before she has time to decide for herself. But afterward, the task of delivering me, of raising me single-handed, is too formidable, too frightening to consider. You’ll never be ready for a child, Bill had said, and she believes him.
What changes her mind?
Is it to a happenstance, her sister’s visit to San Francisco, that I owe this life?
Consider: Receiving Tahera’s call out of the blue after her separation from Bill, Seema nearly discloses her pregnancy, conjuring up a future that definitely includes me, so she can better arouse Tahera’s sympathy and pity. Later, she feels guilty: she’d come close to trotting me out as an actor in her play for her sister’s compassion. Now she can’t compound the guilt by deciding to abort me. Her guilt makes me real. I’m born of guilt.
When Seema agrees to have dinner with Tahera’s family on that visit, it is to prove to herself that her sister doesn’t have anything she needs or desires. But despite her impulse toward disdain for the virtuous domesticity presented to her, she can’t help feeling envious of her sister’s life, echoing as it does the vibrance of her exiled past. “Wait till you’re a mother yourself,” Tahera says, as if that prize is out of Seema’s reach. I’m born of envy and rivalry.
Another way to look at the visit: Seema hasn’t decided yet to keep me. She spends the day with Tahera’s children. She sees my potential in them, and her mind becomes fixed to something more definite—perhaps these eyes, perhaps this voice, perhaps this way of holding the world both in an embrace and at a distance. I become real to her. By the end of the day, in some deep and unconscious stirrings of her mind, she has formed a resolution to give me a chance. I’m born of hope.
My to-be mother knows the risks associated with bearing me at her age. But she’d not been overly concerned until learning of Nafeesa’s condition. In the last two weeks, witnessing her mother’s decline heightens her awareness of how quickly the pillars of our lives—hers and mine—could collapse, how suddenly the ground could shift beneath us. We are, after all, in a land of earthquakes. She’s single, and she needs to assign a substitute parent for me.
But in asking Tahera to be my guardian, isn’t she motivated by another reason too? In addition to securing someone to take her place were something to happen, isn’t she also trying to find someone to take her mother’s place? The prospect of being set adrift again, unmoored, when Nafeesa’s gone, agitates her. Who else can she turn to but Tahera?
And so she comes up with this way of testing her sister, of checking how solid the walls separating them might be. Some ancient compulsions persist, she hopes, despite the barriers built up by history and time. That a dammed-up stream of love may yet find its way through and flow again, ending years of drought.
On that rain-cocooned afternoon when Tahera, breaking down, accepts provisional charge of me, Seema believes both prayers to be answered. Afterward, Tahera sits by Seema’s feet, watching the rain make patterns on the windowpanes, while Seema finishes braiding her hair. A peaceful silence has descended between them.
For what more can be said, with both sisters unwilling to imperil the fragile, dearly bought peace?
Presently, Tahera gets up for the asr namaz. Seema moves her chair so Tahera can use the corner for her prayers, but she continues observing: There’s a fierce grace to Tahera’s motions, a strength in their sureness, each gesture, each posture unfolding without hesitation, as though inevitable. As though ordained.
Sweet Grandmother! Sweet mother of my to-be mother and could-be mother! You do not know yet of the reconciliation between your daughters—however unspoken and tentative—when you hobble into the living room as day turns into evening. You are unrested from your nap. All afternoon you’d been worried that the pain, returned since the morning like a spring refilling a well, would overflow the confines of your body, once again no longer yours to conceal. It has receded to more manageable levels now.
But look—Tahera and Seema in twin plaits!
Your two daughters pose, showing off their hair. You immediately recognize each daughter’s handiwork: Seema’s shoulder-length hair much harder to braid, but precisely done, and you can picture Tahera’s fingers moving with the same sureness and concentration of years ago; Tahera’s hair longer, done looser, with escaping strands, especially toward the tip, showing definite signs of her sister losing patience. You can almost hear Seema complaining, as in the past, “But Tahera, your hair takes too much time, it’s so long, ask Ammi to do your hair today.”
The memory makes you momentarily forget your pain, and the hasty step you take toward your daughters causes you to wince. But what is a little pain today amid all this happiness! You’d gladly accept more of it if this evening’s flush were to last forever. How young your daughters look in their twin plaits, and how playful they are together, holding the tips of their braids crossed at their upper lips to form a twirled mustache and beard, as though they’ve assumed their childhood selves.
They insist on doing your hair too, and though you’re reluctant—your hair is so wispy now—you submit to their wheedling, and join in their glee, as they shape what remains into some semblance of plaits.
How does the evening go? There’s sweet chai and sitting by the window and watching the rain as it lets up. Then clouds begin to disperse, and fleeting golden rays of the setting sun pour through the window.
“Will there be a rainbow?” Tahera asks.
The eastern sky cannot be seen from the apartment, and Seema suggests Tahera check from the rooftop.
There’s no rainbow, Tahera finds. “But, Seema, your rooftop’s very pretty, with great views. And there’s a full moon tonight. Why don’t we have dinner up there, like we used to in Chennai?”
Tahera brushes aside every one of your objections: The cooking is simple, and won’t take her very long. She will bring the food up to the rooftop herself. There are tables and chairs already there. They can use shawls if the evening turns cold.
Her only concern is that the three flights of stairs may be too much for you, Grandmother, but you let yourself be carried away by her enthusiasm, and you claim you can handle them.
A whirlwind of activity follows. Tahera flies around the apartment, straightening objects and furniture, returning everything to its proper place, as though any excursion for pleasure must wait on tidiness. And then the maghrib namaz. This is the quickest you’ve seen Tahera pray, like in the black-and-white film clips from your youth—Gandhi and the freedom fighters at the salt march all scurrying like insects! Up she goes, down she goes, now she bends, now she rises, first she turns her head to one side, then to the other, and there—she’s done.
“That was very quick,” you say.
“That’s normal—I don’t have much time on weekdays.”
You and Seema are infected with Tahera’s energy and want to help. But she waves you away: “Go make sure Seema’s packed and ready for the hospital. I can cook faster by myself.”
The kitchen comes to life. Cabinets and containers open and close, pots and pans clang, the knife goes chop-chop, mustard seeds splutter, ladles scrape the sides of pans in a frenzy, water whooshes in the sink, papads sizzle. A parade of aromas tickles your nose—curry leaf, asafetida, turmeric, onion, frying oil, rice steam, cilantro.
Meanwhile, you and Seema have little to do because Seema has already packed her bag for the hospital. So you look into her closet and take out my belongings, newly purchased or gifted, and you show her how to correctly fold my little outfits, not in quarters, bunched up, but with sides folded in, as they were laid out in the store. Seema doesn’t complain but returns the stacks to the closet and brings you more things to fold, including some of hers.
“Everything’s ready,” Tahera calls out before you know it. “I just need to finish my isha namaz.”
The dining table is laid out with plates, silverware, napkins, covered dishes, moons of papad, glasses, water—just like you used to do, for your daughters to carry up to the rooftop. You’re impressed by Tahera’s speed, but saddened too: some things you’ve taught her, and some things life has.
She’s taken a shower, and is dressed again in her hijab and jilbab. Her twin plaits have disappeared, and with that her previous frenetic, animated self. Her isha namaz is back to its unhurried deliberation. She packs plastic bags with the picnic material as methodically.
Seema leads the way up, you follow, Tahera behind you with the bags. The stairs require grim determination—the pain intensifies with each flight, especially the last, and you proceed slowly, sustained by the sliver of the luminescent sky visible through the door.
San Francisco, lit by a thousand lamps, including a giant one in the sky, lies twinkling before your eyes: the sky a deep peacock blue, the moon saffron, the bay glistening with silver reflections, the city crisscrossed with garlands of light like strings of jasmine. Everything gleams—rooftops, railings, leaves, walls, roads—polished by the rain. And though this is not Chennai, it is a city under the moon, and cities under the moon everywhere have the same ethereal loveliness.
Tahera unpacks the bags while Seema points out the various landmarks: the Christmas-tree-shaped Transamerica building, the double necklace of the Bay Bridge, the blazing Market Street, and across the bay, as though on another continent, the faint shimmering lights of Oakland and Berkeley.
Having served the food, Tahera calls you to dinner. You recognize the mother she has become: she could be you from years earlier. You and Seema return to the table. You take your seats, and then wait, without touching your food.
“Bismillah,” she says. “Let’s eat.”
With that, Tahera transforms again, as though having taken care of everything, she can now shed the pretense of adulthood. She’s a daughter again, asking you anxiously how the food tastes—is everything cooked through and adequately spiced and salted?
Everything needs to be perfect tonight. You assure her: everything is as it should be.
Seema goes into raptures: “I forgot how great these simple dishes can be. The grated carrot and ginger in the curd rice. The peanuts in the lemon rice. The potatoes—spicy and blackened just the right amount. And the moonlight makes everything more delicious.”
How your daughters’ faces glow, their eyes shining! How they scrunch at their papads like they used to as girls, the papads initially round as their faces, and then slowly waning like the moon! How they laugh, how they call on each other to supply missing details to reminiscences!
A light breeze blows this way and that, playing with their voices, now bearing them away, now drawing them nearer, so you can’t quite hear everything your daughters say. They’re too quick for you, anyway, leapfrogging from one topic to another like they used to. You’re content to sit back and let their voices wash over you like the breeze and the moonlight. Everything is a balm on the pain throbbing through your body until it feels distant, like it belongs to someone else.
“Ammi’s become very quiet,” Seema remarks.
You’d taken advantage of a cloud curtaining the moon to close your eyes. When you open them again, everything seems dazzlingly bright—across the table, your daughters’ faces flare at you, and you can’t distinguish between them. Who’s sitting where? Who’s pregnant, who’s wearing a hijab? Your eyes take a moment to readjust.
“Are you in pain, Ammi?” Tahera asks. “Do you want to lie down?”
“No, I was just enjoying listening to you both. I was trying to remember the lines Tahera used to recite during our rooftop dinners at home. About the moon—do you still remember?”
“I was reading it just this morning, in the book Seema got me,” Tahera says. “What is there in thee, Moon! That thou shouldst move my heart so potently?”
When yet a child I oft have dried my tears when thou hast smiled.
Thou seem’dst my sister. Hand in hand we went from eve to morn across the firmament . . .
You haven’t heard Tahera recite in two decades. Her voice rings out, silvery and sparkling. Listening to Tahera reminds you of her father. How like him she sounds now. But you don’t want to be reminded of his absence tonight.
When Tahera finishes, she says, in her normal voice, but still addressing the sky, “Seema asked me to be Ishraaq’s legal guardian.” She glances at Seema briefly.
“In case something happens—” Seema fiddles with her plate. “And Tahera agreed.”
Both sisters look at you, waiting for you to say something. You recognize that your daughters are offering you this as a consolation. You’re moved, but also vexed: Why must the gesture of reconciliation include an allusion to calamity?
“Nothing will happen,” you manage to say gruffly, not knowing which emotion to give expression to. Your eyes fill up; you shiver. To cover your reaction you pull the shawl tightly around yourself, surreptitiously swiping it across your eyes.
“Are you feeling cold, Ammi?” Seema asks.
“Just a little breeze.” Seema suggests you drape your shawl around your head to cover your ears, and Tahera leans over to help you.
You don’t want to leave this place: the air rinsed clean by the rain, the city flickering solicitously, the luminous sky soft like a shawl, the benevolent moon presiding. And Tahera and Seema—in the telescoping moonlight, it’s as if you’re seeing all visions of them superimposed, not only as they are, but also as they were, and as they will be—daughters, sisters, mothers, grandmothers. Their hair black like the new-moon night, their hair silvered by the full moon; their faces unlined and smooth, their faces creased by shadows. You realize that the Tahera and Seema you want to continue seeing are not the Tahera and Seema of the past anymore but the ones before you now. You want more than the glimpses you’ve been afforded so far.
You want more. You want more! But what to do? The only way is through Time, and Time has already forsaken you.
How the moon smiles, Grandmother, so serenely, as though it were making you a promise or offering you a reprieve.
What is this tightness in my chest as I consider my three foremothers together on the rooftop? I have no words for it—I can’t even say that I must be out of breath, for I haven’t taken a single breath yet. I’m struggling with feelings I cannot describe; they seem to change and elude me even as I seek to comprehend them.
O dearth of human words! Roughness of mortal speech!
Even that lament isn’t mine, but courtesy of my could-be mother, from her favorite Endymion. I hear the words in her voice, passionate and declamatory, the way she’d recited to the moon other lines from the same poem.
Woe! Woe! Is grief contained in the very deeps of pleasure, my sole life?
The way my grandfather Naeemullah had taught her, the words saturating the mind and lungs till every nook and recess echoes with them, shocking the body into resonance before they break free of its confines.
I clutch at the words, trying to hold them inside me the same way, to suffuse my body with them so they can become my own. For I have lived but only vicariously until now, and I have nothing else to turn to.
Maybe there’s something to be grateful to my grandfather for, after all.
“Why poetry?” Naeemullah had argued one afternoon in the presence of his two daughters, and set their lives on the track that has led to this moment. “We may as well ask: Why life?”
I see him facing his reluctant audience of white blouses and blue pinafores, hemmed in by the line of white habits and gray wimples. He’s looking into the distance. To whom is he speaking? For surely most of what he says goes over the heads of anyone paying attention, including his daughters, the elder listening to him disinterestedly, concerned more with what his speech implies about her performance and whether she has executed well enough to win, the younger seeking clues to help gain her father’s favor. Sister Josephine is perhaps the only one following him, and she too wears a perplexed smile at times, paused in the act of running the beads of her rosary through her fingers.
Maybe he was really speaking to me all that time ago.
If life is a picture, then poetry is the faint flickering light that illuminates it, he says. If life is a lamp, then the stirring overlapping shadows it casts all around us are poems. We cannot apprehend the one without the other.
And the poet is life’s prophet.
Look around you: we are gathered here now in this bounded space, enclosed by these walls, but we are in reality in a city, in a country, on a continent, on a planet, in a solar system, in a galaxy, in a universe that is so vast we can scarcely imagine its limits. We can never comprehend the full extent of the world and the life that surrounds us, even with the most powerful telescopes and microscopes that science can invent.
Adding to the enormity of this task is an additional complication: even with the things that we can perceive readily, we have become so accustomed to them that we can no longer see them clearly. The best we can hope for is that someone lifts from our eyes—at least for a moment—the fog of familiarity that obscures from us the wonder of our being, to create anew for us the universe we have become indifferent to.
No, science is not the answer. The scientist looks at the rainbow and thinks: raindrops, electromagnetic radiation, refraction, reflection, dispersion. We need something different, something that will re-create for us the thrill we felt when we first witnessed a rainbow. And failing that, something that will point out to us what we are missing or have misplaced, and how, if possible, to recover it.
This is where poetry, and poets—prophets!—come in.
“My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky,” Wordsworth writes. “So was it when my life began, so is it now I’m a man.”
How important is it that he continues to experience the rainbow this way? He can’t imagine a life without it. So be it when I shall grow old, or let me die!
And what is it that allows Wordsworth to always feel such thrill on seeing a rainbow? The child is father of the man; and I could wish my days to be bound each to each by natural piety.
It is the purity of childhood that makes it possible. The thrill that children—you children—experience on first witnessing a rainbow is pure joy and wonder, simple, instinctual. In much the same way a bird sings to greet the sun each morning. We have to hold on to this purity of nature if we are to continue experiencing such joy, such wonder, in our lives.
So Wordsworth says, and I agree with him. But the poem enacts a larger, more complex truth as well. Wordsworth’s heart may leap up, for sure—but is the joy he feels now the same joy he felt the first time he saw the rainbow? Isn’t his current experience of the rainbow already different from his experience as a child, including as it does the memory of other times in his past when he has witnessed one, the hope that he will continue to experience a similar thrill in the future, the fear that he may not?
Wordsworth the man can only wish he is able to maintain that same simplicity and purity he possessed as a child. The very act of writing this poem proves to him—and us—that his wish cannot come true.
Wordsworth is a prophet. Like all prophets, he describes what should be, while at the same time admitting to what is, what cannot be, and what is beyond his understanding. Like all prophets, he has been blessed not with the whole truth but with that part of the truth he can grasp and convey. Like all prophets he is beset with self-doubt.
But even speaking half-truths, he points us toward the whole. The light he casts flickers, illuminating some part of the picture of life for one moment, only to cast it into shadows and doubt the next. But that flickering gives us a glimpse of the truths that mark our lives.
This is the best any human being can do in the face of the complexity of the universe, and most of us will do much worse.
So this is what it is, that feeling, almost akin to helplessness: my being so happy in my foremothers’ happinesses that my heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense. As though of hemlock I had drunk, or drained some opiate one minute past, and toward unconsciousness had sunk . . .
Keats again to the rescue, his ode to the diminutive nightingale that transfixed him one night—as if my could-be mother’s influence is growing in me, my future already decided.
Or am I merely dizzy, running out of the oxygen that has so far maintained my link to my mother? Am I to be forced to take a breath soon, to breathe in this world before I’m ready to enter it, before I’ve had my fill of this moment, my mothers together in momentary happiness?
As if Time is ready to forsake me too. I must press on, if I am to learn the full truth of my journey.
Tuesday morning, Seema wakes to an abdominal pain. But since her organs are squeezed to the back to accommodate me, the pulsing cramps feel more like her back is seizing up. She assumes her earlier backache has intensified.
Nafeesa blames herself: “I shouldn’t have let you climb all those stairs last night.”
Seema must stay in bed this morning—Nafeesa will not hear of anything else. Seema drinks her chai, brewed strong and milky and sweet, sitting in bed with the pillows piled up behind her. Breakfast, too, is served to her: toast and an omelet, despite protests that she’s not hungry.
Later Nafeesa and Tahera discuss the menu for dinner the next day, for Fiaz and Leigh. Seema lies back against the pillows, languid in the soft hum of their voices. They are planning an elaborate meal: mutton biryani, chicken curry, brinjals fried in oil, onion raita, a vegetable salad, perhaps kheer or halva for dessert—all contingent of course on finding halal meat and the other ingredients.
“What if I go into labor by then?” Seema objects but is brushed off. Her mother and sister have taken over her kitchen, and her house, and her life, as she’d feared. But they seem so taken with their plans—debating which recipes to use, recalling past feasts—that she admits to knowing a good Middle Eastern butcher in the Tenderloin, where Bill used to buy goat, and a Pakistani store near it that usually stocks the small round baby eggplants.
The next point of discussion is how to do the grocery shopping. Nafeesa and Tahera both agree that Seema should rest, even as she complains, “I can’t stay in bed all day.”
A decision is made: Tahera will do the shopping, taking a cab. But Seema, guessing how uneasy the sketchy Tenderloin would make her, suggests Fiaz accompany her.
“He won’t mind,” she assures Nafeesa, who balks at inviting someone to dinner only to set them to work. Fiaz is promptly requisitioned: he’ll come pick Tahera up in the afternoon.
Although Seema rebels against it all morning, lethargy slowly seeps into her body. As if now that the finish line is visible, her body has decided to slack off.
“Sleep as much as you can,” Nafeesa advises. “Once the baby’s born, he won’t let you rest.”
So Seema half closes her eyes and lets the house fall away to a gauzy haze. From the kitchen float Nafeesa’s and Tahera’s voices, engaged in making a shopping list, her mother specifying quantities. Sometimes they argue over the amounts, to Seema’s amusement. She can picture her mother gesticulating gracefully like a dancer, palm cupped, thumb traversing the length of the fingers to indicate various amounts, as she does in Chennai, giving instructions to their maid.
By the bed, Leigh’s lilies droop more than yesterday, the cream a shade duller. Seema idly wonders what Leigh is doing at that moment. It will be a while before they’re able to snatch some time alone again, after the delivery. But she doesn’t want to think about it now. The future will have to take care of itself.
Tahera’s period has arrived earlier than expected. She discovers the spotting while preparing for her morning shower. In the past, her cycle has always been very regular, always preceded by a slight discharge and a soreness of breasts, but here it is a few days early, unannounced.
Perhaps this explains the lassitude she’d woken up to. In the cold pale gray of the morning, the elation of the previous night’s moonlit escapade had seemed remote and improbable. And her call to Irvine tested her patience: Ismail agitated, unable to find the clothes Amina was adamant about wearing to school; Amina extra clingy and whiny; and even Arshad peevish, dissatisfied with the lunch Ismail had packed, his father having forgotten to thaw the food she’d left in the freezer. Life seemed to be unraveling without her, and she’d ended the call feeling guilty of deserting her family, and dejected.
The malaise intensifies without the solace of namaz or the Quran; she cannot bring herself to pray, or even read the Quran, during her period, even though she knows that the injunction to refrain from doing so during menstruation is disputed by some scholars.
Forgoing namaz for any reason leaves her feeling lost and rootless. But it’s perhaps because she’s aware of her attachment to the act of praying that she’s willing to give it up on the days of her period—giving up namaz resembles fasting during Ramadan, and the pangs of loss she feels are almost like the pangs of hunger. Her streak of austerity welcomes these deprivations. But at least in Irvine, she can draw strength from the frenzied structure of her days, both at the clinic and at home, a sufficient distraction from the unsettling void that the absence of namaz opens up in her.
The planning for the feast gives her something to focus on. She enters into it with a determined enthusiasm. This is the most animated she’s seen her mother so far, and Tahera finds comfort in that, submitting tolerantly to Nafeesa’s varied and often conflicting suggestions. A marked change from Ammi’s state during yesterday’s trip for Seema’s checkup, Alhamdullilah, a small miracle. Almost as if her mother has somehow been restored in spirit, revived perhaps by the rooftop celebration. She is happy to indulge her mother so that the effect endures, accepting with only slight misgiving all the extra work to cater to her sister’s friends.
Her equanimity restored, despite going without the zuhr namaz, she checks in with her clinic, to discuss with Khadija the patients left in her partner’s care. She dips into the book of Keats’s poems as she waits for Ismail’s call after he’s brought the children home from school, hoping to rectify her disaffection from the morning.
It’s a subdued Amina who lets slip the news to her, in a roundabout way: They were not allowed out during play period that morning. The playground was closed for the day. She’s sad because her favorite swing is burned. Then, clearly prompted by Ismail, she tells her mother not to worry, she’s not going to cry, she’s going to be brave.
“But how did the swing burn?” Tahera presses Ismail.
“I told Amina not to tell you, afraid you’ll be worried.” There had been a small fire in the children’s play area the night before.
“Do they know how it started?”
“Nothing for sure yet.” He’s deliberately vague. Only when she persists does he admit that the police may be investigating it as a case of suspected arson, and a possible hate crime—it is an Islamic school, after all.
Seema is roused from her listless post-lunch nap by a call from the campaign office.
The campaign has just obtained reliable intel that supporters of Kamala Harris’s Republican opponent are planning a blitz of ads the week leading into the election: a huge buy, upward of $10 million, flowing in from outside the state. They want to revive Prop 8 as a campaign issue in a bid to energize the demographic that voted to ban same-sex marriage. The same groups that worked to pass Prop 8—including the Mormon Church—were apparently getting involved in the attorney general’s race.
Can Seema come in for an emergency meeting?
Seema’s backache hasn’t improved. Ammi will make a fuss about her going, but she can’t say no. Only one concern gives her pause: “Is Divya there?”
Divya will be at the meeting, but she can’t hide from her forever. Seema consents and gets ready.
Thankfully, her mother is too caught up in dinner preparations to do more than cluck her tongue and suggest, “Why don’t you tell them you’re not feeling well?”
“This is important, Ammi,” Seema says, hunting around the apartment for her laptop accessories. “There’s a lot at stake.”
She hopes that either her mother or sister will inquire into what exactly is at stake—this would be a good opportunity to introduce the topic of same-sex marriage without exposing herself directly—but neither is paying attention to her.
Seema had not taken part in any of the protests and candlelight vigils held in San Francisco after the same-sex marriage ban was added to the California constitution. She’d been too preoccupied with her own grief, and guilt. Obama had won, but he’d thrown the gay community under the bus to secure his victory. Issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples was stopped that very day.
Seema also had to deal with the repercussions of her feckless night with Divya.
She’s not proud of her cowardly evasions during the year that followed, keeping both Bill and Divya dangling, until she’d felt able to take control of her life again. She’d not confessed to Divya that election night was a mistake of judgment but instead had simply insisted that nothing further could happen between them while she was still married to Bill.
One consolation: Obama is certainly as craven as she is. Two years after his election, he still hasn’t come out in support of same-sex marriage. He still supports only civil unions for gay and lesbian couples, even after a federal court ruled Prop 8 unconstitutional, two months ago. He’s worried now about his reelection prospects, perhaps waiting for the political winds to turn more favorable—only four states have legalized same-sex marriage, and opinion polls have yet to show a majority of the nation in support, despite rapidly changing attitudes of the younger generations. Meanwhile, he has left himself open to his views “evolving.”
As she climbs down the stairs, the exacerbated pain makes her wince and groan, a clenching that I respond to by kicking. But she’s been given a chance to make up for her previous nonparticipation in the marriage war, and surely that is worth some minor suffering.
Grandmother, you’d like an early start on the preparations for the feast tomorrow, but without the groceries there’s not much you can do. You go through Seema’s cabinets and cull what you can. You earmark which of her pots and pans, spoons and ladles, to use for which dish—you need an extra-large pot for the biryani, for example, one that can be sealed to hold the steam in. Thankfully Seema has an old pressure cooker that will do. You rinse Seema’s dining china and glasses, even though Tahera has said she’ll take care of them, warning you not to overexert yourself.
But Tahera has been unavailable for much of the afternoon, on the phone with Irvine. At first with her clinic, and you don’t want to disturb her. You are proud of what she has managed to create—you know the struggle it has been, the initial scarce years at her clinic with barely any patients, and how she slowly built up her practice by making house calls to the Muslim women in her community. You listen to the authority and assurance in her voice with pleasure.
But later with her family, you know something is wrong—she lowers her voice whenever you enter the living room, but there’s no mistaking the tension and urgency. Whatever is being discussed between husband and wife is surely causing the strain on her face.
Are they quarreling? You blame your son-in-law: Why did he have to spoil what was turning out to be a sweeter time than you’d imagined? You’re worried, too, about the time—doesn’t Tahera need to finish her asr namaz before Fiaz arrives?
When Fiaz buzzes, Tahera is still on the phone, almost scrunched over it in her seat by the window, keyed up like a spring-wound toy. You hover around her in a fret of indecision.
“What?” She looks up, exasperated.
“Fiaz is here, he’s waiting downstairs.”
She gazes blankly as if she doesn’t remember her commitment. But then she takes a deep breath and signals you to hold a minute.
You back away to give her some space. She concludes the call in a whispered consultation and snaps her phone shut. She dresses as you watch, hurriedly pulling on her jilbab and fixing her hijab. You hand her the list, relieved.
“Everything okay?” you ask, though you don’t want to bring up anything that might cause her to change her mind.
Just some matter with the children’s school, she says, giving you a forced smile before heading down.
With both your daughters gone, you can finally admit it to yourself: the afternoon’s activities have exhausted you. You try napping, but you’re too wired—perhaps the excitement of planning, perhaps that extra cup of chai. You sit down and wait for your daughters in the quiet of the living room.
You feel bad that you’ve paid so little attention lately to Tahera’s life. Surely whatever’s the matter with the children’s school can’t be too concerning? Perhaps Tahera’s right—you’ve been so caught up in Seema’s pregnancy that you have ignored Tahera and her family. You’ve barely spoken to your grandchildren and Ismail since you arrived. But what can you do? You have only so much energy, and time, left.
You’ve been pondering Bill’s request at odd times of the day since his visit. But with Tahera around, you’ve been unable to catch Seema alone. Or perhaps you’ve been using Tahera’s presence as an excuse to put the conversation off.
Last night on the rooftop, when your daughters told you of their guardianship plans, you could have seized the opening. But their offering had meant so much to you, so much to them, how could you have spoiled the moment and told them then what you’ve come to think:
No matter how good Seema is going to be as a mother, you cannot approve of keeping a willing father away from his child. Perhaps Seema is letting her feelings toward her own father blind her to her child’s needs. If the baby is Black—and seeing Bill the other day has reminded you that I’m not just Seema’s child but his as well—then he needs his father to help him navigate what you know of America’s tortured path to the present. Yes, America has finally elected a Black president, but if Seema is to be believed, half of America cannot tolerate being governed by him. And Seema speaks of protests in Oakland, even at this moment, against the shooting of that poor Black boy by White police officers in a train station. Also, if Tahera and Ismail were to become the child’s guardians—heaven forbid anything happen to Seema—no matter how hard they try, they will still not be able to offer him the same kind of love and guidance his father can.
But, perhaps, you can still do something about it.
You call Seema and ask when she’ll be back. In about half an hour, she says. You give Bill a call next, extracting his number from where you’d squirreled it away. Without allowing time to second-guess yourself, you ask Bill if he can come over to Seema’s apartment within the next half hour, as quickly as he can—you’ll explain when he gets here.
Yes, he says, a little surprised, and promises to leave immediately.
You want him here before Seema arrives, so she can’t deny him entry. And afterward—
Seema will no doubt be very angry. But she’ll have to forgive you, won’t she? And you’d have at least made an effort—and not kept putting it off for later. For who knows what tomorrow holds?
Picture Bill in the chair by the window, Nafeesa in the futon opposite, both looking to the door as the key turns in the lock. The hardwood floor is ablaze in golden bands, light slashing in through the slats in the drawn blinds, but the room itself is shrouded in the gloom of twilight, with the occasionally dazzling mote of dust. It’s nearly dusk, and Nafeesa has not yet turned on the lights.
As the door opens, Bill makes to rise, but Nafeesa gestures—wait—and he remains seated. Seema lumbers in, hands bracing her back, as if to counterbalance the massive globe containing his son. He hasn’t seen her up close recently, and the size of her comes as a shock.
She heads straight to the futon, sighing and grimacing, exclaiming, “Ammi, I’m so tired. And my back feels like a thousand knives.”
It’s a voice he hasn’t heard her use before, a child’s voice pleading for things to be made better, and watching her labor across the room he feels a spurt of regret and shame at his absence from her side. He swallows and keeps still, as if that would allow him to disappear into the shadows.
“I told you not to go,” Nafeesa scolds.
Seema hasn’t noticed him yet. She sinks down to the futon and Nafeesa wipes Seema’s face with the edge of her saree—like the way Mame would clean his face with a wet rag when he’d come in from playing outside, though Nafeesa is far more gentle.
“That feels so nice, sweet Ammi.” Seema leans back with closed eyes, and Nafeesa gets up to massage her face and brow, then her shoulders, bending over her.
Bill has seen Nafeesa and Seema together just once, at the dinner at the aunt’s house in Chennai. Nafeesa hadn’t been overly demonstrative then: apart from the long initial embrace, she’d seemed guarded, almost reluctant to show affection. The aunt had to coerce Nafeesa to allow Bill and Seema to touch her feet—a ritual explained to him as asking for Nafeesa’s blessing—and even when she’d agreed, she’d sounded flustered as she uttered the words—Jeete raho: live long and prosper—that accompanied the ritual.
And this evening, waiting for Seema, Nafeesa had sat up straight the entire half hour, rigid and unbending, reminding him so much of Mame that he’s surprised now at this other side to Nafeesa, her maternal ministering.
It’s hard to reimagine Seema as being close to her family, as even having a family, so little had she spoken about any of them in all their years together. It had only been the two of them. Seeing her now with Nafeesa, allowing herself to be tended to, a sudden pang: for what they could have been, for what they never were.
He’s anxious now to make his presence known, afraid that if he were to wait any longer, he’d become privy to some further intimacy that would blunt his ability to face Seema. He clears his throat.
Seema looks around the room and sits up with a jerk. In the half light, her eyes flare, larger every moment as if taking over her face, and he’s transfixed by them. He stands up and takes a few uncertain steps toward her, stopping in a vague panic when the room darkens further, the shadow of some intruder cast on it. Except he’s the intruder, blocking the light through the window.
“Seema, I asked him here.” Nafeesa cuts in, imploring. “Don’t be upset.”
In response, Seema pushes herself up and trudges past him to the apartment door. Does she mean to leave or to insist he does? Nafeesa scurries after her.
Bill finds his voice: “Seema, wait, please listen to me just this once. I promise I won’t bother you again.”
As if she hasn’t heard him—“Why were you sitting in the dark, Ammi?”—Seema flicks on the switch by the door.
The room flashes, the walls spring forward, then steady themselves. Bill blinks. Seema’s apartment feels less menacing now, but he is in the spotlight. Seema stands by the door, one hand on the doorknob, ready.
“Seema, come sit down.” Nafeesa takes her by the elbow.
Seema shakes her off. “I can listen from here. What does he have to say, Ammi?”
She’s looking at Nafeesa, not him. He looks to Nafeesa too, who opens her palms in a sudden gesture of resignation: it’s up to him now.
He paces once around the room. Everything he’d tried to rehearse still feels inchoate, incoherent. What can he say that he hasn’t said to her in so many emails and messages before?
He realizes he must appeal to her mother, get her to continue playing a part. She’d gotten Seema to at least accept his presence.
“Mrs. Hussein, I want you to know how sorry I am for behaving so badly toward your daughter. Seema deserves better. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me, and I let her down. You can’t imagine how many nights I’ve laid awake wishing I could roll back the past year. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to go back to where we were. And there’s nothing I want more than to be a good father to my child.
“Mrs. Hussein, I know the part elders play in your culture. They do in mine too. You are honored and respected for how much you sacrifice for your children, for how you love and guide them throughout their lives. You’re the only elder Seema and I have left now. I promise in your presence that if Seema were to forgive me, I will never give her any reason to regret it. I promise—”
And most naturally, as if he’s done this all his life, he bends down to touch Nafeesa’s feet. He doesn’t know how he came to do it, but it feels right. “Please forgive me.”
Nafeesa pats his shoulders unsteadily, urging him up.
He can’t meet her eyes now, or Seema’s, for he’s afraid he’ll tear up. He steps back and picks up his jacket from his chair.
“Seema!” Nafeesa’s voice is a sharp command. “You must listen to what he has to say. I don’t know what happened between you two. Things always happen between husbands and wives. I know you pride yourself in making your own choices, but this one time I want you to consider carefully what Bill says. For your son’s sake, if not for your own.”
Bill glances at Seema’s face. At first he thinks she wears the same intransigent expression he knows so well, but now there’s something else there too—a crumbling: doubt, and weariness. The authority in Nafeesa’s voice had startled him too.
“I’m exhausted, Ammi.” Seema shuffles away from the door. “Can we do this some other time?”
Nafeesa hesitates, throwing him a questioning look as she helps Seema back to the futon. He’s sure Nafeesa understands there won’t be a better time. “I can come back later, Mrs. Hussein.”
“Please sit,” she says, slipping a cushion behind Seema. “Tahera may be back soon. Seema, would you like something to eat? That will make you feel better. Bill, you’ll have something too.”
She hurries out before he can demur.
He pulls his chair to the middle of the room, closer to Seema. There’s an air of the reprimanded child about her, a shrinking, a sulking—she is the one now who refuses to meet his gaze.
They haven’t been alone in a room together for more than half a year.
He squeezes his hands together and begins in an undertone: “Your mother tells me you’re volunteering for the Harris campaign. How’s it going?”
It’s the right opening: she lets out a sigh, as if she’s been holding her breath, and turns to face him. They’d always started this way, he recollects, discussing political matters before venturing into the personal, even the evening they’d decided to separate. At least that has survived between them.
She matches his quiet tone. “The race is tight, it’ll be down to the wire. What do you lawyers think of her candidacy?”
“Her ‘Smart on Crime’ slogan is good.” He smiles at Seema. “She could be the next Obama.”
“Let’s not talk about Obama. He’s managed to keep one promise. He’s united the country as he said he would—only it’s against himself.”
“You’re still disappointed.”
“I had high hopes. And you’d think I’d have learned a lesson from that, but no.” A quick smile and a shrug. “But Kamala is half-Indian, and a woman.”
“You’ve only given up on men then?” He hadn’t meant to raise this, but his recent nights have been tormented by sightings of Seema with the girl in the hat. There’s no mistaking the nature of their relationship.
Seema stiffens, scanning his face. He can’t hide from her that he knows. She casts an anxious glance toward the kitchen, as if worried her mother may overhear. But doesn’t Nafeesa know?
“Why are we wasting time like this?” she hisses. “What did you want to say to me?”
He fears he’s lost her with his misstep. He stammers: “You never replied to my emails and messages.”
“I’ve been busy.” She points to her belly. “I’ve been having a child, as you can see.”
“Seema, I understand why you’re angry. What I did was wrong.” He’d like to pull his chair closer, but even leaning forward makes her retreat. “There’s no excuse for what I put you through. Punish me if you want. But don’t punish my child.”
“What do you mean punish your child? My son is no longer your child, remember?”
“I just meant—he needs a father. It’s not going to be easy.”
“Are you implying I won’t be able to take care of him? That I won’t be a fit parent?”
“Seema, don’t twist everything I say.” He wishes he could start over again. “I know you’ll be a great mother. But not even two mothers can protect him as I will. Even if you don’t want me back, let me—”
“Is that what’s bothering you—two women bringing up a child together?” She struggles to her feet, crying out: “Ammi, what were you thinking? How could you do this to me?”
She’s assumed that childlike voice again, now childishly shrill.
“Seema, what I meant was—”
He’s thankful when Nafeesa hurries into the room. She’s carrying two bowls of cut fruit in her hands.
Seema turns to her mother. “Do you want to know what happened between us? Do you know what he wanted me to do? He wanted me to have an abortion. He wanted me to kill my baby.”
“Seema, you know that was a misunderstanding.” He rises, taking a step toward Seema, wondering how to calm her down. She waves a hand as if to ward him off.
He appeals to Nafeesa. “Mrs. Hussein, please—”
But in Nafeesa’s face he sees fear now. There’s no missing it: those widened eyes, the frozen lips. Her hands begin trembling, he’s afraid she’s going to drop the glass bowls.
It takes him many seconds to realize how he must appear, towering over them both.
“Mrs. Hussein, I—” he says, stepping back, stumbling against the chair, his hands up to show he’s backing away. “I’ve never hurt Seema. I could never hurt her. Tell her, Seema.”
But even as he speaks, Nafeesa moves to interpose herself between him and her daughter.
And Seema says nothing.
He looks at Nafeesa and Seema, one protecting, the other almost cowering behind—as if he were a monster. He is not a terrible person, not a man to be afraid of—
A strange bitter taste fills his mouth, like the cod liver oil Mame forced him to take every morning.
He can perhaps understand Nafeesa’s reaction, but how could Seema do this to him? She remains still, not saying anything.
“You know, Seema—” He wags a finger, keeping his voice as level as he can manage. “I can have the consent form revoked. Any court would void it if it’s not in the child’s best interests.”
He grabs his jacket, resists the urge to kick the chair aside, and strides out of the apartment.
The Tenderloin reminds Tahera of Chennai: Fiaz’s car lurches through its jammed streets amid the sound of grating brakes and revving engines, cabs honk, pedestrians surge forward ignoring traffic lights, potholes pockmark the road, dust rises from everything and is everywhere. Pavements are littered with paper, plastic, discarded clothes. The buildings look grimy, their walls rain-stained, their paint peeling.
Fiaz finds the store Seema had indicated, but there’s little parking. “Shall I drop you off here? I can keep circling the block and pick you up.”
But Tahera can’t keep discomfort off her face: A group of men in hoodies pulled over their matted hair, clutching garbage bags of possessions to their chest, loiter in front of the store. And the store itself is intimidating—the legend halal meat barely visible on its run-down facade, its dingy storefront crisscrossed with brown tape to hold the glass in place. Why had she agreed to this ill-considered errand?
Fiaz, after a quick glance at her, announces that he’ll park in a garage a few blocks over and accompany her.
On the walk from the garage, Tahera feels an urge to edge closer to Fiaz as they approach the men outside the store. She’s thankful for the hijab and jilbab but at the same time rues the attention her attire provokes. She’s used to stares and undisguised curiosity by now, but today the news from home has made her particularly self-conscious.
The pictures of the desecration of the mosque hadn’t affected her as much. On her phone’s small screen, the busy and hard-to-decipher graffiti seemed almost toothless, the work of some angry attention-seeking malcontent. Though she knew it was their mosque, it might as well have belonged to some other town lately in the news. And it was easily painted over. But this arson at the school—even if unconfirmed—how could she not take it as anything but a direct threat to her children? And who were these people who could set fire to a children’s playground, and what if they were capable of more?
As she crosses the staring men, she braces herself for some kind of attack, either verbal or physical. The store’s seedy interior, with its chipped white-tiled floor, faded blue walls, and fluorescent lighting, is a relief.
And there behind the counter—her heart leaps up: a Muslim! Gray-haired and bearded, clearly Middle Eastern, in a fraying prayer cap. Behind him a sticker with an ayat from the Quran, and beside the cash register a photo of the Ka’ba. She’d forgone namaz, had been unable to even touch the Quran today, and must have been craving these visible signs of practiced faith, totally absent from Seema’s apartment.
“Assalamu Alaikum!” She flashes a wide grateful smile. She wishes she knew more Arabic.
His acknowledgment is reserved. “Salaam. What can I do for you, sister?”
It’s an odd transaction—she is effervescent, he formal: Sure, he has goat meat. What would she like? Big pieces, not too much fat. Is the meat fresh, tender? Yes, it comes from Sacramento every week. How much does she want? Three pounds, not too many bones. Her mother’s going to cook goat biryani. She’s not had her mother’s biryani in so many years!
He reaches into the refrigerated glass case stacked with meat, picks up a pink-red, fat-marbled slab. Does she want it cut up? He feeds the slab through an industrial-strength electric meat saw and gathers the cubes in a plastic bag. He shows her the reading on the scale, slaps tape around the bag, and hands it over. The meat looks very good, shukran! Does he have chicken thighs too? Bone-in is fine, it adds rich flavor to curries!
The chicken is packaged as well, and he calculates the total.
Fiaz reaches for his wallet.
“No, you’re our guest.” She taps Fiaz’s hand away. “Seema warned me you’d try to pay.”
She’s more relaxed on the way back to the garage. Allah keep you safe, the storekeeper said as she left, and though the phrase is customary, she needed to hear it. Somehow it’s easier to ignore the men outside—she barely even notices them.
Conversing with Fiaz is easier too. She describes the biryani at family weddings in Chennai. But her mother’s biryani, she asserts loyally, would rival any she’d eaten at any wedding.
“I’m glad we found the meat, then,” Fiaz says. “I can’t wait to taste it.”
Tahera hesitates: Should she tell him the real reason for her state of anxiety? Fiaz is a Muslim, but he’s a friend of Seema’s, and like Seema, he has probably lapsed in his faith. But, he’d mentioned a mother who prayed at the mosque he took Tahera to on Saturday, and brought up in the United States, he may understand better than Seema and her mother.
“I’m tense about what’s happening in Irvine—” She gives him a brief account of the events: the fundraising for the community center, the desecration of the mosque, the suspected arson at the schoolyard.
The vigor of Fiaz’s anger is both surprising and satisfying. A mosque anywhere has a right to exist, and Muslims everywhere have a right to their faith.
Tahera asks: Does he pray namaz regularly?
No, but he accompanies his mother to the mosque during her visits.
She shouldn’t have expected more from a friend of Seema’s, so she drops the matter, asking instead about his mother. It turns out she is a retired nurse, living by herself in Sacramento after his father’s death. She visits him frequently but refuses to move. At some point, when she needs more care, he’ll have to persuade her more forcefully to move in with him.
“It’s nice to have your mother close by,” Tahera says. A flash of guilt: for a panic-stricken spell that afternoon she’d argued with Ismail about catching a flight to Irvine that very night. Ismail reminded her why she was in San Francisco in the first place, dismissing her return as unnecessary, her fears as overblown. “I wish I could care for my mother better.”
“I’m sorry to hear about her illness. Seema told me,” Fiaz says. “This is a tough time—I hope Allah gives you all strength.”
Their next stop is the Pakistani grocery store. The store is quite small—two aisles, dimly lit, with a musty, unaired smell, stacked high with spices and grains—compared to the ones she’s used to in Irvine. But the store does have the baby eggplants and the green chilies in its refrigerated section, as well as the aged basmati rice and all the nuts and spices on her list. She needs Fiaz’s help to reach some of the upper shelves.
At the checkout, Fiaz browses through the compact discs on the counter. “Cheap—five bucks each. And they have Urdu ghazals. Do you remember which singers your mother likes?”
Some names seem familiar. Tahera points to Begum Akhtar and Noor Jehan, faded women on faded disc jackets, from the 1940s and ’50s. She remembers tapes playing softly some afternoons when she and Seema returned from school to find Ammi in bed, eyes closed, listening to songs they’d make fun of as nasal and old-fashioned—Ammi would shut the music off to prepare the girls’ tiffin. And Ghulam Ali, from Tahera’s youth, whom she also liked.
Fiaz says he’ll buy all three, and Tahera is touched. She hadn’t gotten her mother anything from Irvine. Why hadn’t the thought occurred to her?
One last stop is required, for mint, cilantro, yogurt, lemon, onions, tomatoes, milk, cream, oil. Fiaz says he’ll take her to the Safeway on their way back. It’s dark already, everything taking longer than she’d expected because of the traffic and parking. There’s no maghrib namaz—because of her period—but she’d like to talk to her children before they go to bed.
Compared to the previous stores, the Safeway is large and brightly lit, aglow against the hills of San Francisco. They’re back in the America she knows. The bulb-ringed marquee perched atop a tall column, like a torch, overpowers the lusterless orange moon in the city-lit sky, though the moon is almost as full as it was the night before, only a tiny sliver missing. Glimmering shopping carts and shiny cars litter the busy parking lot.
Inside, Tahera is back among the labeled aisles and preoccupied customers pushing overloaded carts, familiar to her from every other chain store she’s visited. This is America going about its business.
Her earlier uneasiness floods back. She is small in this huge hall, hemmed in by strangers—mostly White, no Muslims—crowding the aisles. She is a black blot, in her jilbab and hijab, against the cheerful color of the rows of merchandise. Alert once again to glances cast her way, she suspects shoppers of avoiding her, or plowing ahead, ignoring her, as though to claim the space for themselves.
She’s ashamed of her earlier reaction to the men outside the halal market—it’s not those harmless men but “decent” people like the ones here she needs to beware. It’s decent Americans like these behind the warnings and threats, the profanities and blasphemies: Go back to your savage lands, with your bombs and your burqas, your sharia and your polygamy. You’re not wanted in America. She’d only read about it on the news and on blogs before, but now it’s here at her doorstep.
Arshad’s question echoes in her mind: Why do they hate us so much?
At times, she finds herself instinctively scuttling out of the way when a White shopper approaches. And then, in retaliation, she lingers over her selection, to hamper an overeager shopper, taking her time to make her choice, determined not to be cowed. What were they thinking? If only they said it out aloud, so she could challenge them.
An image of the burning playground persists. She imagines Amina caught in the flames, on her favorite swing, shouting to her mother to save her. The thought of being unable to reach her daughter in time sets her heart racing, her feet tripping in panic. The anonymous voices around her blend into an ominous soundtrack to the flickering flames. She wishes Ismail were here; she needs his comforting presence.
Fiaz’s playful patter helps take her mind off of Irvine. He has lively opinions about everything, including which brand of vegetable oil to use. She searches for the one he suggests, but when she turns around to place it in the cart he’s pushing behind her, he isn’t there anymore.
For one long moment she freezes: she’s been abandoned here. Then, still clutching the bottle in her hand, she rushes to the end of the aisle, scanning the store for him.
A relief: he’s standing by an adjacent checkout counter. She’s about to call out, when she observes that he’s conversing with two men: one White, one Black, both in very tight V-neck T-shirts and indecently short shorts, their limbs and chests muscular, smooth and hairless. The three men are laughing and talking, completely at ease with each other. The clerk rings the men up and they collect their bags and take leave of Fiaz, who kisses them both on the lips.
Tahera knows the men are a homosexual couple, one of the many San Francisco is notorious for. And the fleeting look—guilt? shame?—on Fiaz’s face as he turns around and catches sight of her is enough to confirm another suspicion: Fiaz is gay too.
It’s obvious now—how could she have been so blind? How Seema and Fiaz must have laughed at her naiveté, scorned her “narrow-mindedness.” A deep flush reddens Tahera’s cheeks.
“Were you looking for me?” Fiaz has regained his composure. He takes the oil from her and heads back to the cart. “Do you know why the frying pan liked the oil? Because it was so refined!”
But now that she’s wise to him, she is no longer susceptible to his banter. She maintains a studied silence for the rest of the trip.
Tuesday night is soccer night at the mosque. Imam Zia had wanted to cancel the session, but the boys wouldn’t have it, and he has roped in Ismail to better control them—many have only learned of the recent incidents at tonight’s isha namaz. Ismail has brought Arshad and Amina along, giving in to Arshad’s wheedling.
This is Arshad’s first time here, since only those in high school and older are allowed to participate. Imam Zia says Arshad can take part in the training at least, like his friend Jemaal, who usually accompanies his much older brother to isha namaz on soccer nights. Amina is content with her coloring book, but Arshad is glad to be among the men, on the alert for anything more he can learn about the fire in the schoolyard.
Little had been shared at school, and Arshad and Jemaal have already discussed their meager store of information to exhaustion. Only the swing and the slide had been affected, their charred frames standing out starkly in the cordoned-off play area. The police had made a brief visit that morning.
Before starting, Imam Zia warns: No more discussions and speculations, no venting their anger in aggression on the field. He has heard outbursts, cuss words, proposals of retaliation. Any such displays, either in word or action, and he’ll end the practice immediately.
Even so, furious whispers buzz around Arshad as they warm up, first jogging laps, then stretching. His ears are on fire: he hears gasoline, fire bombs.
Their anger seeps through the dribbling and passing exercises, bubbling open as they practice shooting goals. Jemaal’s brother Emir comes closest to defying Imam Zia. “Burn in hell,” he muffles his scream as he sails the ball into the net. The twins, Rizwan and Sohail, are quiet, as usual, but even they appear on edge, with a grim determination that Arshad can copy without arousing his father’s ire.
His father had insisted it was nothing, a small fire, probably started accidentally, maybe by a discarded cigarette. An accident! Imam Zia, too, would do nothing, other than once again admonish his jamaat to have patience while the police investigated, like after the defiling of the mosque and the besmirching of the Prophet. As if the police cared enough to catch the cowards who had set fire to his little sister’s swing just because they couldn’t accept the supremacy of Islam over their supplanted religions.
The scrimmage is to be seven a side, with Arshad and Jemaal sitting it out. Imam Zia whispers to Arshad’s father: Better that they have the troublemaker Emir on Imam Zia’s team to keep him under control. Ismail can take the twins, who usually respond well to him.
Amina has put aside her coloring to come cheer for their father. Arshad is torn between loyalty and blossoming admiration: Emir is small but quick and ferocious, and he’s everywhere on the field in the wink of an eye, fearless in tackling larger opponents, unconcerned with hurting himself. He slides to kick the ball away, misses, goes slithering down the synthetic turf, but bounds up again instantly to limp back into play, rolling up the ripped hems of his tracksuit.
Imam Zia admonishes Emir twice. When it happens a third time, Imam Zia sends him to the back of the field, to the relative passivity of goalkeeping.
Imam Zia then takes charge of the game. A sorcerer with the ball, he now feints, now swerves, now chops and cuts, steps over and turns, the ball magically tethered to his feet throughout. Stumped at first, unable to even get close to the ball, the other team regroups, energized to wrest it from him amid roars of appreciation and competition. Jemaal runs up and down the side of the field as if drawn along by the ball, hoarse with breathless commentary.
Arshad watches with mixed feelings his displaced hero’s artistry on the field, while Emir languishes by the goalposts. But when Emir is finally allowed to return to his former position, now chastised and deferential, he joins his teammates urging to be passed the ball when Imam Zia is surrounded and immobilized by determined opponents. Obeying Imam Zia’s instructions, he and the team then press the ball forward toward the goal in well-placed passes.
They should have dominated the game, scoring goal after goal, were it not for Sohail and Rizwan—Arshad has switched his support back to his father’s team, after the surrender of his latest hero—two pairs of eyes on the ball, two trunks and four pairs of limbs reacting like some coordinated whole, an equally magical defense that even Imam Zia can break through only rarely. But Imam Zia manages to get the ball past them, scooping it over to Emir, who springs into a header. The ball soars past his father’s inadequate arms into the net, while Emir runs screaming back to Imam Zia for a high five.
“Jemaal, we must do something, you and me,” Arshad cries out in sudden anguish. “Nobody else will do anything.”
“Tahera knows about me,” Fiaz announces in a stage whisper. Having helped carry the groceries in, he has stopped by Seema’s room, knocking conspiratorially on her door. “She saw me with Ben and Percy at the Safeway. Not very difficult with those two.”
My mother is in bed, working with her laptop on her belly, the extra warmth spread like a cozy comforter over me. She gestures to Fiaz to pull the door shut behind him. She’s half-relieved, half-aggrieved: one less deception, one more complication to deal with. Should she have, as Leigh has held, been completely open with her mother and Tahera from the start? But it hadn’t seemed possible before their arrival: Would her mother have come, would her father have let her mother come if he too found out? “How did Tahera react?”
“She has barely spoken to me since.” Fiaz smiles ruefully. “We were getting along very well before that.”
Seema sighs, puts the laptop away. She’s not ready yet to give up the lurking hope that Tahera has moderated since sending her that letter twelve years ago, just as America itself had, to at least tight-lipped tolerance. “I was going to tell you, I’ve asked Tahera to be my son’s guardian.”
He raises both eyebrows. “Tahera, really, why?”
“Who else? You’ve already said you can’t, and I’m assuming you haven’t changed your mind.” The shamed look on his face is confirmation. “And it’s too early with Leigh. There’s no one else.”
“Why not Bill? He’s the father, after all.”
“You know why not Bill,” she snaps. “Everyone keeps pushing Bill on me. Has he gotten to you too?”
“Ouch. What’s going on, Seema?”
“I’m sorry, I’m dealing with a lot.” She pats the space beside her. “Come sit by me for a minute? Bill was here. My mother had some crazy idea of bringing us together. They just ambushed me.”
“That sounds horrible.” Fiaz sits down, massages her shoulders. “How did it go?”
Two memories arise: when she’d first set eyes on Bill that evening, and when she’d hid behind her mother. She’s ashamed of her reactions to both moments: the instinctive desire to welcome his reassuring presence into her life again; the despicable cruelty with which she’d repulsed him, afraid he’d betray her to her mother.
“He left threatening to void the consent form,” she says. “He could fight for custody.”
“Don’t worry about it now. We can deal with it if it happens.”
“One silver lining: my mother stood up for me in the end. I was so relieved, I couldn’t even be angry with her for setting it up. But I need to have something signed about guardianship before I go into delivery, just in case. Isn’t it sad that after all these years living here my only two options are an ex who wanted me to get rid of my baby and a sister who still probably doesn’t approve of my lifestyle?”
“You do know, Seema, that if I didn’t have Pierre—?”
“Do I know?” Her smile is inquiring, a little bitter. “But you do have Pierre. At least Tahera agreed. I can always change it later, depending on what happens with Leigh.”
Fiaz stretches himself on the bed alongside her and drapes his arm over me, as he’s done before. “I’m ready to sign up for diaper duty whenever Ishraaq needs me.”
“Guess what? My mother thinks you and I are together. After Bill left, she asked if there was anything between us. I suppose after her plan with Bill misfired, she decided to settle me on you. I said we’re just friends, but I don’t think she believed me. And she won’t, if she sees us like this.”
“Uh-oh, dinner’s going to be awkward tomorrow.”
“I’ll think of some way to disabuse her by then,” Seema says. “And don’t worry, silly—I won’t tell her all your secrets.”
Fiaz laughs uneasily. “I got these CDs for her. Hopefully that’ll be enough to keep me in her good books.”
Grandmother, you’re inspecting the mutton when Fiaz offers you the CDs. Preoccupied with the meat—the butcher should have made the pieces larger, so they won’t fall apart in the biryani—you thank him cursorily. Only after he leaves, and you and your daughters are done with your simple dinner of rice and rasam, do you examine them.
“Arre, where did he find these?” You flip through them, excited. You’ve been searching for these discs for many years, the cassettes you owned not playing anymore. You try to remove the cover of the Noor Jehan CD, but your hands shake too much. The collection has the very best of Noor Jehan’s songs and ghazals.
Tahera takes it from you and turns on Seema’s music system, lying dusty on the lower shelf of the bookcase in the living room. Seema has returned to her bedroom, claiming she’s working on something for the campaign, though you suspect she’s avoiding you for having forced Bill upon her.
The lilt and melody of the opening song transports you immediately to your childhood home in Coimbatore, to the hiss and crackle of the LPs playing on your father’s—my great-grandfather’s—gramophone, and to the jasmine-scented, song-silenced evenings in your parents’ bedroom, your father in the rocking chair by the window, your mother cross-legged on the floor, stringing buds plucked from the garden. And you, on your father’s lap, rocking with him, or sprawled on the bed doing your homework with your sister when you were older.
You are aware of the years that have intervened since that past. You clasp the empty plastic case to your chest to steady yourself. What a precious gift from someone you’ve scarcely known for a week. Only a friend, Seema insisted. “So thoughtful of Fiaz, and I didn’t even thank him properly,” you say. “Come, sit and listen with me, Tahera.”
Tahera says she’ll clean up in the kitchen and then join you. Unfortunately, your daughters were never admirers of these old classics. You rest your head against the futon, close your eyes, and let Noor Jehan’s voice steal its way back into your dying body. It’s an unexpected pleasure, something you hadn’t imagined finding here on this trip or, for that matter, ever again.
Now here’s Noor Jehan singing, “Mujhse pehli si muhabbat mere mehboob na maang.” You’ve been both waiting for and dreading this song, for all the memories it holds for you. You had recited that Faiz Ahmed Faiz poem, one of your favorites, at a jubilee celebration at your college. How different your life would have been if your husband hadn’t come to that event with his friends. He said he’d fallen so in love with you that evening, he’d moved heaven and earth to find out who you were and forced his parents to approach yours for an alliance. And you were so charmed, you allowed yourself to be swept off your feet and forget everything, including the warning in the last lines you had recited: There are other satisfactions than the satisfactions of love.
You’d wanted to teach Urdu and write your own nazms and ghazals, perhaps even sing them. You locked away all your dreams, along with your bridal finery, in a chest you’ve rarely opened since.
You murmur along with the closing refrain through trembling lips.
You’re aware Tahera has entered the room. You’re glad for the interruption, otherwise the song might have set off your tears. You sense Tahera watching you: some part of the story of this song is cherished family lore. You’re grateful for the moment she gives you to compose yourself before she sits beside you.
She squeezes your hand. “You never told us you wanted to sing too, Ammi.”
“I never trained. I never even asked. Your Nana wouldn’t have let me. It wasn’t something we did.” The truth is, it had never seemed important to you what anyone wanted. You could want so many things, you believed then, but the world would only give you what it’s willing to give, what has been set aside as your portion. You didn’t believe you could bargain with the world. “You never told me Amina sings so well. Perhaps my granddaughter—”
“If Allah wishes.” She sounds despondent, not the blossoming you’ve come to expect whenever she talks about her daughter.
“What is it, Tahera? You’ve been acting differently all day. You even skipped your namaz.”
“It’s just my period.”
You wait, knowing there is more: you can see in her eyes that the commiseration in your face is welcome today. Usually she withdraws at any sign of pity or compassion.
She opens up hesitantly. There’s all this anger in America against Muslims like her. And it’s not just name-calling and abuse. Their mosque in Irvine has been vandalized, the children’s playground has been burned.
You’re shocked and saddened. You know so little of Tahera’s life here. You don’t know what to say. You’ve never understood why both your daughters, given a choice, always seemed to choose the path that required more hardships. You’d get upset, thinking they were being thoughtless and obstinate, not considering you at all. If they cared for you, they wouldn’t act that way.
Perhaps the Faiz poem is written in their voice, addressed to you: Don’t ask of me that earlier simpler love. The world holds other sufferings than mere love.
You’d given up what you wanted without even trying. You’d convinced yourself that all you ever wanted was that your daughters lead happy lives. But you never asked them what would bring them happiness. The least, and the most, you can do now is listen. You don’t yet know the full sum of their struggles and sorrows.
Tahera’s eyes are downcast. You lift her chin up, as you would when she was a child to force a smile, and she complies, and you let your own eyes rest on her face, as if to take in all her pain and add it to yours.
Seema is in bed in San Francisco, waiting for her mother to come to her. Seema is in bed in Chennai, waiting for her father to come to her.
In San Francisco, Seema listens to the faint buzz of conversation between Tahera and Nafeesa in the living room. During the lulls, she can make out—barely, because the volume is turned down low—the songs her mother has been playing all evening.
In Chennai, Seema listens for the determined rhythm of her father’s steps up the stairs. He hadn’t come to the airport to receive her—he usually does when she arrives before dawn, but due to a snowstorm in London she’d been delayed till the evening. He wasn’t home for dinner either, and she’s waiting for her father to look in on her, as he does on the nights of her homecoming.
In both places—San Francisco and Chennai—Seema is sick with anticipation and apprehension. Except that in San Francisco, she is additionally burdened by the ghost of that long-ago night in Chennai, revived and clamoring.
The Seema in Chennai has made up her mind. The questions her father has asked her over the phone about “her friend Chloe” have convinced her he suspects, informed by one of his friends at Oxford, most likely Uncle Rajasekharan, who has seen her with Chloe on a few occasions. Her father has also started to talk about her marriage. How much does he know? And what does he have in mind? She will be firm about refusing marriage. She has rehearsed what she will say.
She is eager to get the confession—the confrontation?—over with as soon as possible. If only Chloe were here to blunt her anxiety. Any noise suggesting her father’s approach makes her sit up and clutch her damp bedsheet, twitching as though her organs are pulsing alongside her heart. Her palms are bathed in sweat despite the grumbling fan and the chill December night.
But still she’s optimistic: Abba loves her, he’s proud of her. Her mother has said nothing so far, and she takes this as a good sign. If anything, she expects her mother would be more upset, being more traditional, less doting. Abba had supported her decision to study in England over Ammi’s strenuous objections, persisting until Ammi had come around.
The Seema in San Francisco is no longer afflicted by the daring optimism of youth. She finds it absurd that the Seema in Chennai expected her father would support her, commending her on the courage to agitate for what she wanted, as he’d done many times before. How naive that younger Seema must have been for failing to recognize the difference between a transgression that challenged her father and her past harmless exploits.
She’s been holding everyone—her mother, her sister, even her lover—at bay for the last few months, bracing herself for a repeat of that earlier abandonment. But the last few days have softened her defenses: having experienced once again the comfort of their love, the prospect of losing them for the second time wrenches at her.
She owes it to Fiaz to correct her mother’s misconception about their relationship, and to Leigh for standing by her patiently. But mostly she owes it to herself, so she never reacts again with the kind of fear that the threat of Bill’s disclosure had aroused that evening. She will speak to Ammi tonight, as she should have done earlier. She owes it to Ammi, too, to give her a chance to come through. Perhaps her mother’s desire to see her partnered will yield a different outcome this time, this second coming out.
In Chennai: footsteps first, then a soft knock, then her father’s voice, muffled.
She gets up and opens the door.
He’s come directly to her, not having changed his clothes. He holds her by her nightgowned shoulders, kisses her on her forehead. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be at the airport. Was the delay too taxing? Did you eat?”
She’s relieved to still hear tenderness and concern in his voice. She reaches for the switch to turn the light on.
“No, you should go to sleep,” Naeemullah says. “You must be tired. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“I’m jet-lagged—I won’t be able to sleep anytime soon.”
They compromise: she gets into bed, Naeemullah pulls a chair to her bedside.
The room is lit only by a night lamp. He is a dark shape sitting beside her, stroking her hair. They converse in whispers, even though Tahera has her own room now, next door. They talk about Oxford, which he has fond memories of. She talks about college, and the courses she’s taking. She has one semester left.
And then what?
She hesitates: she’s thinking of a doctorate.
“Wonderful! Both my daughters will be doctors.” Tahera has surprised everybody by opting for medicine after her schooling. “But don’t you think,” he continues, pressing her hand, “it’s time to get married? Your mother already had you at your age.”
In the shadows, she can’t quite make out the expression on his face. Is that what gives her the courage?
“Abba—” She hopes he’s smiling. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you—”
In San Francisco: her mother gets ready for bed, as unobtrusively as possible—the lamp remains off, she barely opens the closet door to retrieve her nightclothes, her footsteps are as soft as the moonlight streaming through the window. And then she arranges herself rigid and narrow, toward the edge of the bed, as if to minimize her presence.
“If you scoot any closer to the edge, you’ll fall off,” Seema says, her eyes still closed.
Nafeesa sits up, surprised: “I thought you were sleeping.”
“I was waiting for you.”
“Why did you wait up for me? As if I need help to come to bed. You need your rest.” Tsk-tsking, Nafeesa lies back again. “It’s late. Let’s go to sleep.”
But instead of abiding by her own proclamation, Nafeesa continues, “I was listening to the songs Fiaz brought me.” And, after a pause, “I never thought I’d hear them again before I—”
The hush in the bedroom is then punctuated by quick sharp intakes of breath, Nafeesa’s desperate attempts to stifle her sobs. As with Tahera the previous day, Seema doesn’t know how to react. This is the first time her mother has alluded to her impending death, displaying open grief at the prospect. She reaches a tentative hand toward her mother, but Nafeesa brushes it away.
In the darkness, an immense abyss opens up between mother and daughter, in the space between their bodies in bed. It is Seema who lies rigid now, not breathing, as if even that could pierce the distance separating them. Her world turns soundless, complying with her mother’s wish that the moment simply pass by unacknowledged. Nafeesa’s sobs are someplace else, in a different room, a different continent. Only unmoving shadows remain, the dark curve of the calla lilies arcing over Seema in the ghostly moonlight streaking through the window.
Gradually, as Nafeesa regains control over herself, sound returns. She hears her mother say: “Seema, I want to say something—”
In Chennai, Seema’s rehearsed speech starts off well. The darkness is liberating: she won’t be distracted by her father’s reactions. She is the performer, her father the audience. She has prepared an impassioned argument, incorporating much that he has taught her, much that he should recognize as his own values. He will be proud of her—she will make him proud of her, not for nothing is she his daughter.
When does she realize her performance is coming up short? When Naeemullah listens but his grip on her hand tightens, his face looming large and featureless? His impassivity makes her falter. Her prepared words sound trite and unconvincing. She panics, losing the thread of her oration, digressing into explanations and justifications she hadn’t intended. Still he’s silent. She clings to the belief that she can salvage this. She only needs to find the right words, the right way to declaim them, and her father will respond with his usual applause and approbation.
She repeats sentences, phrases, rehashing herself in increasingly desperate constructions and combinations until she finally stops with a strangled gulp of air, her father’s grip painful around her wrist.
“You’re hurting me, Abba,” she sobs, trying to reclaim her wrist from the vise of his hand.
In San Francisco, Seema turns toward her mother, ashamed at having allowed her to cry alone. She takes her mother’s hand, lifts the bony knuckles to her lips for a kiss—dry lips to dying skin—as her mother had done earlier that evening, consoling her.
Mother and daughter curl toward each other in the dark of the room, their bodies adjusting to the space occupied by me, their faces almost touching.
“What is it, Ammi?” Seema asks, the words whispered to Nafeesa’s clammy forehead.
“Forgive me, Seema,” Nafeesa says, her fingers tracing—awkwardly given the constraint of closeness—Seema’s face, the bridge of her nose, the springy curl of her eyelashes, as though she needs to make sure that Seema is here.
Forgive her for what?
For everything, for all that she should have done but didn’t, for all that she did but shouldn’t have.
For not having understood, for still not understanding fully—
Nafeesa is both coherent and disjointed, forthcoming and hesitant, precipitate and pensive, the bridge of her words sometimes stretching across silences, sometimes hanging midair unfinished.
Seema responds with caresses and kisses, with noises of encouragement, not wanting to say anything for fear of upending the moment and bringing it to an end. A trembling half joy, a shimmering sweet sorrow fills her. She has never felt this close to her mother before, never before seen her as an equal in regret and pain and heartache. That long-ago night with her father in Chennai is forgotten. Any lingering resentment toward her mother dissipates.
Tomorrow, she promises herself, with Fiaz and Leigh there, she will tell Ammi everything. Her apprehensions for the future fade away, as a glimmering optimism takes hold, even as she recognizes how little time together she and Ammi really have.
I take it all in, hungrily, greedily: Nafeesa’s remorse, Tahera’s fears, Bill’s disillusionment. Arshad’s anguish, Seema’s optimism. America’s turmoil. As if I need to inhale this world into the very cells of my body, every element of it simultaneously, before I can bring myself to take a single breath of its air.
I taste most sharply my could-be brother’s anger and despair. For isn’t Arshad someone in whom my to-be mother had seen a possible model for me, convincing her of my viability? A child who seemed so sure of himself and his place in the world that she could picture him rising to meet the world hand to hand, eye to eye, the kind of child she could picture herself raising.
The kind of person she’d believed herself to be before that fateful evening in Chennai, when her performance had failed her. And ever since, she’s been convinced she’s merely going through the motions, performing a pale simulacrum of herself.
If I could give her that moment of radiance. How differently the world would have unfurled for her. I reimagine that evening, seeing it as she imagined it would play out. I become the audience she desired, willing to be captivated by the power of her performance, waiting to be converted by the persuasiveness of her words:
Abba, you taught us to look beyond subsistence, beyond what is needed to keep mind and body together. You taught us to probe the universe for hidden truth and beauty, to seek sustenance only in the true and the truly beautiful. You taught us to question everything else—rituals, tradition, faith, ties. You taught us to embrace everything that life challenges us with: we are to always strive beyond what we are capable of, beyond what we cling to for comfort.
You taught us to love: to love those discoveries that bring unexpected joy, to love those moments that press us to the brink of new discoveries, to love those beings who make each moment burn and crackle with the promise of illumination. You said that it’s precisely there, in these moments, that true poetry resides.
I love someone like that—beautiful, wise, brave, strong. In their presence the universe reveals its hidden beauty, in their presence the universe shines with a new light—
Isn’t someone like that worthy of love? Isn’t love like that worthy of our deepest gratitude?
The city sinks into the night.
Blessed Sleep, quiet defender of the still midnight: Close, with your careful fingers, our gloom-beleaguered eyes. Protect us with your watchful attentions, lest the fugitive day slip in and even at our pillows inflict many wounds. Save us from ravaging consciousness that roams ready, with sabers drawn.
Seal us in. Root out treachery. Expel from us our treasonous minds.
Imam Zia speaks: How magnificent the universe is, my brothers and sisters. So vast that no human being can take full measure of its vastness, so beautiful that no human eye can perceive its every beauty, so mysterious that no human mind can comprehend all its mysteries.
Yet every part of the universe—from a massive galaxy to a minute neutrino—follows every law that has been prescribed for it by the creator, Allah, the Exalted in Might, the All-Knowing. Every part of the universe submits to the will of Allah, which is the essence of Islam, and thus every part of the universe is Muslim.
The stars are Muslim, the sun is Muslim, the moon is Muslim. Does not the Quran say, “The sun runs his course for a period determined for him: that is Our decree. And the moon—We have measured for it mansions to traverse till it returns to its withered state, like a stalk of date. It is not permitted for the sun to catch up to the moon: each swims along in its own orbit according to Our law”?
And here on earth, every mountain is Muslim, every ocean is Muslim, every river is Muslim: they all follow the natural laws that have been laid down for them. Every animal is Muslim, every tree is Muslim, every bird is Muslim: from birth to death every organ, every tissue, every cell in their bodies follows the laws that have been designed uniquely for them. Can the nightingale sing any other song than has been ordained for it? Every note that it sings has been written for it. It can no more change its song than it can shed its wings.
But what of man? On the one hand, every man is born Muslim, because every part of his body, from the nails on his toes to the hair on his head, is regulated by Allah’s laws. His heart is Muslim, his brain is Muslim, his tongue is Muslim: his body is bound to follow every law that Allah has decreed.
On the other hand, Allah has bestowed on man a mind: a mind that can think and judge and choose. And with this mind, man has been endowed with a free will: he has the freedom to embrace or deny any faith, the freedom to live by any code of conduct, the freedom to react in any way to the conditions of his life. With this mind, he can choose whether or not to be a Muslim.
How can man’s mind and body be brought in harmony with each other?
Only if his mind consciously submits to Him whom his body already submits to intuitively. Man completes his Islam by surrendering back to Allah the freedom he has been given, by consciously deciding to obey the slightest of Allah’s injunctions.
Now his feelings are in harmony with his heart, his thoughts are in harmony with his brain, his words are in harmony with his tongue. Now his actions are in harmony with his body, and he is in harmony with the universe: he obeys with both his mind and body Him whom the whole universe obeys.
He has finally become a Muslim, in this brief life. And for that he will be rewarded for eternity in the afterlife, with everything his heart desires, with all the joys of Paradise.
John Keats speaks: Forgive me that I cannot speak to you definitively on these mighty things.
Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? No voice will tell: no God—no demon—deigns to reply, from heaven, or from hell.
You perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly happiness to be arrived at. I scarcely remember counting upon any. I looked not for it if it not be in the present hour—nothing startled me beyond the moment. If a sparrow came before my window I took part in its existence and picked about the gravel.
Man is a poor forked creature subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude. If he improves by degrees his bodily accommodations and comforts, at each stage there are waiting for him a fresh set of annoyances. The whole troubles of life are frittered away in a series of years, and what must it end in but Death?
The most interesting question is: How far, by the persevering endeavors of a seldom appearing prophet or philosopher, may mankind be made happy? Can I imagine mankind’s happiness carried to the extreme?
In truth, I do not believe in this sort of perfectibility. The nature of the world will not admit of it.
This is human life: the war, the deeds, the disappointment, the anxiety; the weariness, the fever, and the fret. All human, bearing in themselves this good: they are still the air, the subtle food, to make us feel existence, and to show us how quiet Death is.
Do you not see how necessary this world is to spirit-creation, to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
Intelligence there may be in the millions: atoms of perception—they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God—but they are not souls till they acquire identity, till each one is personally itself, to possess a bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence.
How are souls to be made then? How but by the medium of a world like this, effected by three grand materials—the mind, the human heart, and the world—acting the one upon the other for years?
The world is a place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways, for the heart is the mind’s experience, the teat from which the mind or intelligence sucks its identity: as various as the lives of men are so various then become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings from the spark of his own essence.
I’m certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections—they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential beauty.
The city sleeps.
Magic sleep, comforting bird: you brood over the troubled sea of the mind until it’s hushed and soothed. Night of silvery enchantment, full of tumbling waves and moonlight: we welcome your merciful renovations.
But: Dazzling sun, enduring lamp of the skies, that lures us back into the labyrinthine world—why must we show gratitude for your daily resurrection, our imprisoned liberty? What doesn’t unfurl beneath your burning light for many a day but withers and dies?
My mother’s last day on earth is here, and the sun will too soon rise over the hills of the East Bay to preside over it.
In some parts of the world, the sun has already breached in preparation for the new day. How effortlessly the sky appears to give birth to the sun, how willingly it allows itself to be transformed in return, from a speckled nighttime indigo through a burning daybreak orange to a jubilant sunlit blue, and how confidently the sun traces its arc through the sky, blazing its fiery path around the earth—the result no doubt of all that repetition and practice, the eons of strict observance of every natural law there is.
But my mother’s pregnancy has taken a turn that few other pregnancies do. The abdominal pain she’s been suffering from since yesterday is only the beginning. The medical term is placenta abruptio. The placenta that has kept me nourished and thriving, and is only to be expelled from my mother’s body in an act of afterbirth, has begun to separate from the uterine wall, even before I am delivered to the world outside. As if it’s in a rush to sever our connection.
I’m the first to sense this, a vague discomfort, as though there’s something in the fluid enveloping me that makes me screw my face up so, eyes squeezed shut, brow furrowed. My thumb—my left thumb, for I must be left-handed—has acquired a taste that I can’t find satisfying, no matter how much I continue to suck on it.
Wednesday morning: Arshad struggles through fajr namaz, unable to concentrate. Even after being up most of the night, he still can’t settle on which symptoms to fake to persuade his father that he must stay home.
Arshad has no experience faking illness. If his mother were home, he’d never have agreed to Jemaal’s plan—he has too much respect for her professional acumen. Fortunately, Arshad needs to convince only his father, who is usually preoccupied these mornings getting Amina ready for school.
Arshad can’t decide between a stomachache and a fever—but what is he to do if Abba insists on checking his temperature? Also, he can’t overdo the symptoms: Abba may then decide to have him examined by Khadija Aunty or may choose to remain home to take care of him. This first hurdle must be surmounted if the day is to succeed according to plan.
“You’re daydreaming, or what?” Ismail taps Arshad lightly on the back of the head.
Arshad is still on his knees wondering which dua to pray for help with the day’s enterprise. Startled, he hurries through the rest of the tasleem, staggering to his feet afterward.
“You don’t look well,” Ismail says. “Go sleep some more, you can read the Quran in the evening.”
Fajr has brought some respite after all. Arshad returns to bed, heartened, after a glance in the mirror: he does look peaked and fatigued from the sleepless night. He may be able to get away with a low-grade stomachache, with generalized weakness thrown in for good measure. As though in answer to his dua, by the time he needs to get out of bed again, his body appears to have fallen in with his designs, sick with anxiety. He shuffles through his morning preparations, his sighs and groans are only slightly exaggerated, and when he doubles up clutching his stomach, the pain feels real.
Amina, his only audience, is easily convinced. “Abba, Bhaiya’s sick,” she runs downstairs crying, lending him credence.
His mother’s call, coming then, also ends up working in his favor: she’s not worried since he doesn’t have a temperature, she announces, and he’ll be fine if he stays home and rests.
Abba leaves him with solicitous instructions; Amina’s eyes brim with sympathy and concern. He’s reenergized when they depart, the feverishness his body had assumed fading even as his father’s car turns into the street. The ease with which the first hurdle was overcome seems auspicious.
While waiting for Jemaal, he makes a list of possible targets, looking them up on his father’s computer. When Jemaal arrives, Arshad feels once again the rush of blood through his body, making him light-headed with excitement and apprehension.
“Have you seen this?” Jemaal pulls up a video on a website. It features a boy about their age, speaking directly to the camera: “In recent weeks people may have been telling you what to think of us Muslims. They say that you should fear me. But I’m no different from other American teenagers—”
“What is this? We have to beg them to leave us alone?” It’s similar to a video his father has shown Arshad, My Faith, My Voice. “While they can do whatever they want to us? Are you chickening out?”
“Nah! I was just showing you what Sajjad and Bilal want to do. They’re all bull, no balls.”
“Let’s not waste time then. You were late.” Arshad shows Jemaal the list he’s made.
They argue about the criteria: the churches should be within bikeable distance, of course. But not too close to each other—this is Jemaal’s condition—to create a sense that their crusade is far-reaching.
Arshad proposes, as a symbolic gesture, the Episcopalian church opposite their mosque, though he worries that it might direct suspicion toward their congregation.
“Let them suspect,” Jemaal says, “they won’t be able to prove anything.”
They settle on it as their first stop. Jemaal picks the next one—a megachurch near the freeway that dwarfs the Islamic center being built. This is some distance away, so they decide to pick two more churches along the way, completing a circuit.
They look at photographs. A tall glass facade clinches one choice. For the final target, Jemaal says they need to include a Baptist church—he’s heard that Baptists hate Muslims the most. After poking around the internet, they settle on one that looks enticing with its row of blue stained-glass windows. It has the added bonus of being the oldest Baptist church in the city.
There’s one last decision to be made: What should they call themselves?
Jemaal suggests “The Avengers”—he’s a fan of Marvel comics. It’s Arshad’s idea to look to the Quran, and happily they soon alight on one they can both agree on: Ar-Ra’d. The Thunder. The name seems appropriate: it’s the title of the surah that speaks of unbelievers demanding of Allah signs of His omnipotence.
“The Thundering Avengers has a nice ring!” Jemaal says, but Arshad prefers the simple Arabic name.
Jemaal goes downstairs to pick rocks, while Arshad designs their “calling card.” They’ll make copies on sheets of paper that they’ll fasten around the rocks. Arshad has given up on including the surah—it seems blasphemous to allow parts of the Quran to be crushed, or trampled underfoot—so the sheets will simply contain the takbir, Allahu Akbar, and their group’s name.
Jemaal returns with his backpack loaded, he has chosen the rocks wisely: they fit easily in the palm, they’re neither too heavy nor too light, and they appear hard enough, unlikely to crumble. They wrap a sheet around each rock, two rubber bands per rock, and split the rocks between their two backpacks. They lock the house and leave on their bikes.
They arrive at their first target, stopping by their mosque, square and squat in the tarmacked parking lot, its green dome dazzling in the midmorning sun. Diagonally across from it, at the far end of the block, is the church, hunched in the shadow of oak trees on its small rectangle of a lawn, only its steeple rising above the foliage.
The two boys dismount from their bikes. No glass is visible from where they stand.
“Let’s go around,” Jemaal says.
They cross the road, get on their bikes again, and cycle slowly up the block and around the church. There are small windows on the side, but the prospect is disappointing and anticlimactic.
Ah! There, in the back—a large wheel window with amber glass set high up on the wall, probably directly overlooking the altar. But, they won’t be able to take a good shot at it from the road—they will have to aim from the lawn, directly beneath the window.
“I’ll keep watch,” Jemaal says.
Arshad crouches behind the trunk of an oak tree, ready to sprint, a rock in each hand, looking back occasionally at Jemaal standing by the street corner to get a better view of the roads, which have a constant trickle of cars speeding by. Arshad’s bike is leaning against the tree, but he still has his backpack on—he’s worried removing it may delay the getaway.
Twice Jemaal says, “Now!” But both times Arshad’s feet refuse to cooperate.
“You have to do it as soon as I give the signal,” Jemaal says.
He offers to take Arshad’s place, but no—Arshad steels himself—he will see this through.
“Now!”
He’s running, the rocks heavy in his clenched hands, the straps of his backpack pulling down on his shoulders. He’s out of the shadows of the oak trees, cutting diagonally across the lawn.
The green of the lawn is a blur, the white of the walls flash past in his peripheral vision, the amber disk of the window hangs suspended like a full orange moon. He’s aware of little else—not his pounding heart, nor his pounding steps, nor his dark little shadow scurrying just half a step ahead of him. His right arm is already swinging, but he knows his physics: he’ll impart a velocity in an unwanted direction if he doesn’t come to a complete halt before he takes a shot.
He digs his heels in, pivots toward the window, winds his torso, and releases. The rock leaves his hand and sings through the air. He doesn’t wait to see if it has found its mark, he’s immediately preparing the other projectile: wind and release again.
Alas! He’s not ambidextrous. Even as the second rock leaves his left hand, he knows it’s going to fall short—the thrust is simply insufficient. But he’s already running back now, with hardly a sideways glance. He knows by the crack and clatter of falling glass that at least his first missile has been successful. He fumbles with his bike and leaps onto it.
Whir go the wheels, whir goes the gray of the road beneath him—relief, then exhilaration, surging through him. Swoosh goes the exhilarating air. He’s vaguely aware of Jemaal’s bike nosing his, the splotches of sunlight dancing over him, the blazing disk of the sun as he emerges momentarily between trees.
He races his bicycle down the block away from the scene of his triumph, zigzagging now as a delirious jubilant laughter bubbles through him. He wants to whoop, to let go of the handlebar and pummel the sky. He turns back to Jemaal who’s also huffing with laughter, even as he’s calling out to Arshad to stop.
Arshad has only one regret: that he didn’t think to call out the takbir—Allahu Akbar!—as the rocks soared from his hands. The next time, he promises himself, the next time!
In San Francisco, Tahera wakes looking forward to a day spent with her mother. She now claims the dinner for Fiaz and Leigh as a gift Allah has bestowed on her, one of her last opportunities to cook a feast with Ammi.
She’s grateful for it. She won’t let her knowledge about Fiaz distract her; his conduct is a matter between him and his Maker. Who is she to judge, besides, whose is the graver lapse? She’s ashamed now of the jealousy that had consumed her when she’d thought that he and Seema were a couple, destined for an open-armed welcome from their parents. Fiaz has been a support to Seema—she must have met him during her wayward days, which she must have renounced before her marriage to Bill—and Fiaz has brought joy to Ammi. What more can Tahera ask from a relative stranger? Judgment is up to Allah.
Last night’s conversation with Ammi had been different from all the others since her arrival. Perhaps the music allowed Ammi to return to some earlier, less burdened time. Ammi didn’t try to bring the conversation around to Seema, like in the recent past, but instead persisted gently in learning what was bothering Tahera. She could finally let her guard down, about the events back home and her concerns for her children’s safety.
Ammi listened, without the derision Abba and Seema might show for what Abba has often labeled the results of her “Allah business.” Her mother gave a look of understanding that Tahera had recognized and reciprocated: Look at what we’ve been forced to accept, what changes the world has wrought in us.
Tahera holds on to that look, for the hope it brings her: to give and seek solace from each other, as many times as is still possible. The efforts of the day, and the trip, will be worth that reward.
The day has already brought a few annoyances, but she’s determined not to let them bother her. Her period has been heavier than usual, and she’s had to change pads a couple of times already. Also, on her call with Irvine, Arshad seems sick, but hopefully not enough to be worried about.
She’d like to start on the cooking, but her mother first insists she check on Seema.
Seema has been experiencing a few contractions. The two sisters sit side by side on the bed, knees up, backs against the headboard. Tahera is glad for this moment of respite, before embarking on the long session that dinner will entail, for her heavier bleeding portends increasing nausea and headache throughout the day.
Seema grimaces every time one convulses her, biting her lips to contain her cry, clamping her hands tightly around Tahera’s. This is the second one in the last half hour, and in between, the sisters have maintained a drowsy companionable silence to the sounds of Seema pecking away at her laptop. Tahera finds the pressure on her forearm, where Seema’s nails dig in, strangely soothing—it makes her forget her own discomfort.
“And this is just the beginning?” Seema asks, after a particularly intense contraction.
“These are just Braxton Hicks. True labor contractions will grow progressively closer and become more intense, lasting up to a minute.”
“I can’t imagine how painful those will be.”
Seema sounds scared. Tahera is reassured: here’s the Seema she’d grown up with, the Seema who’d turn to her in moments of pain.
“You’ll be okay.” Tahera realizes, with some shame, that she’d looked forward to her sister’s vulnerability, the only moments she’d felt needed, and appreciated. “You can always take epidurals if the pain becomes too much. And we’ll be there as well.”
A momentary bitterness: Who had been there for her, during her pregnancies? Her mother had wanted to come for her first pregnancy, but she’d refused her, aware of her parents’ disapproval of the life in Islam that she and Ismail were creating for themselves. And she’d been glad for it: going through the process with only Ismail and Islam for support had brought her closer to both. She had fallen in love with Ismail then, the way he and his faith steadied her, finding a peace in the rituals of their life together. And doing namaz together till the last moment had allowed her to get through the delivery without needing an epidural herself.
But those times seem almost idyllic now, compared to what is currently happening at home. There are too many issues to reconsider. Perhaps the expansion of the Islamic center is misguided, and perhaps Ismail should rethink his involvement with it. And how to protect Amina and Arshad if the situation escalates? Maybe it wasn’t the wisest decision to send them to an Islamic school. Maybe they should dress less differently, less conspicuously in the future—
But pondering these issues serves no purpose other than to aggravate her headache, sapping the energy she wishes to reserve for the day.
“I have to go help Ammi with the dinner,” she says, pushing herself off the bed.
“Tahera, wait.” Seema restrains her. “I need you to witness this.”
Seema reaches over, awkward in her bulk, to pull a folder from the bedside table. She takes a printed sheet from the folder and fumbles in the drawer for a pen.
“It’s my will—it names you as Ishraaq’s guardian.”
Tahera holds out her hand, and Seema hesitates but gives her the sheet. Tahera scans it without really taking it in, except for the line where her name appears: printed like the rest of the sheet. “You already made this?”
“I like to be prepared. You’re still willing?”
“Am I allowed to sign this? My name appears in the will.”
“I’d like something signed before I go into labor. I’ll ask Fiaz later.”
But Tahera hasn’t spoken to Ismail yet. She hadn’t expected to be confronted by anything official so soon. Also, she’d meant to clarify with Seema the matter of her child’s upbringing in Islam. Tahera cannot agree to anything else, of course. But given the events in Irvine, she’s not prepared to have that discussion now, when she herself is conflicted about the wisdom, though not the rightness, of some of the choices she’s made for her children.
Meanwhile, not waiting for her answer, Seema has uncapped the pen and sprawled her signature across the bottom of the page. Then, while extending them to Tahera, Seema calls out to their mother, “Ammi, can you come in here for a minute?”
Perhaps Ammi would object to the making of a will today, deeming it inauspicious, affording Tahera a delay. But Nafeesa merely dries her hands on her saree and, taking the pen and paper from Seema, signs and dates the form as a witness.
Tahera cannot refuse now: she cannot appear to be backing away from her promise in the presence of her mother. It has brought her mother some happiness in her last days, and she can’t take it away. She also cannot bear to introduce discord into today. She signs and dates beneath Nafeesa’s signature, trying to recapture the moment that had led her to accept Seema’s request: her face in Seema’s lap, her arms around Seema, with both Seema and the baby comforting her, each in their own ways. It had truly felt like Allah’s answer to her istikhara, that the guardianship and the renewed intimacy with her sister were right and good, for both Tahera and her faith.
And with this signature I formally gain a could-be mother.
Grandmother, you’re glad to get the day’s preparations started. There’s a mound of red onions and tomatoes to be sliced, bunches of mint and coriander to be picked, almonds to be blanched and slivered, garlic and ginger to be peeled and ground to paste, meat to be cleaned and trimmed. And of course Tahera is doing most of it. She keeps an eye on you to make sure that you don’t take on anything too taxing, and you keep an eye on her to make sure everything’s done right—she tends to slice the onions too thickly, for example, which won’t meld into the biryani as they should, but she blames it on how unusually pungent they are, making her eyes water so. Seema has closeted herself in her bedroom to avoid the fumes.
It’s tedious work, and both of you labor quietly through the morning, you making light of your aches and pains and she of her period-related discomforts, so you can embark on the actual cooking in the afternoon. She has mentioned a few times already that she’s lucky to be able to learn from a master, and you hope you haven’t lost your touch.
You begin with trepidation.
But how redolent Seema’s apartment soon becomes, Grandmother! First the toasted aroma of oil being heated, then the roasted sweetness of frying cardamom, cinnamon, cloves. Then onions fried till they’re translucent, then the meaty ginger and garlic, then green chilies and fragrant coriander and mint. How the odors harmonize, how they swell and fill the apartment.
Seema says, coming out of her bedroom, “We’ll never be able to get rid of this smell now.”
But she’s not complaining—her eyes are closed, a beatific smile plays on her lips. She decides to work at the kitchen table too, finishing her edits on the matter for the campaign. There’s the spitting and sizzling from the pots, the occasional splutter of some whole spice exploding, and overlaid on these, the sounds of mothers and daughters working: chopping, stirring, typing, murmuring questions and directions.
By unhurried stages the distinct aroma of biryani assembles itself, at first fugitive and evanescent, but then lingering longer and longer, as though being coaxed out like a shy child.
Seema is overwhelmed. “This is too much. I’ll be so sated by the smell that I’ll hardly be able to eat any of it.”
You know what she means, how filling just the aroma can be—you and Tahera will be content with just a taste of the biryani when you’re done. Gratified by her response, you shoo her back to her bedroom. You taste for salt the simmering sauce of the yakhni that Tahera spoons out to you, you check its meat for tenderness and give your approval.
You are relieved, though you still cannot be perfectly at ease until the very end—when the seal to keep the steam in is broken, and the basmati rice, added to the yakhni while still a little short of fully cooked, budded at the core, has absorbed the spices and liquids and blossomed to a perfect tenderness, releasing to the biryani its own distinctive fragrance. And this you will not know for an hour or more.
Even Tahera relaxes. She’s been an efficient assistant all day, quick in executing your directions. But she’s also been dogged in her efforts, as though she cannot afford to smile until the success of the biryani is assured. She smiles now. She insists you rest, while she takes care of the remaining dishes. But you want your hand in every dish today. As a compromise, you suggest some music to lighten the afternoon, and she agrees, even to ghazals.
So while Tahera gets the ingredients ready for the chicken, the crackling of Begum Akhtar’s inimitable voice, the breathy harmonium and the bright sitar, the comforting percussion of the tabla, infuse themselves into the kitchen as well. It’s your favorite ghazal: “Woh jo hum mein tum mein qaraar tha.” The understanding that we had between us, you might remember or not: that promise of steadfastness.
It’s a song for lovers, but it seems appropriate to you this afternoon, so reminiscent of those long-ago festival days in Chennai with the house buzzing this same way. The magic of Begum Akhtar’s voice possesses you to exclaim that you wish your granddaughter would one day be able to sing this very song.
Once again Tahera hedges, like last night, and you have to draw it out of her: Masha’Allah, Amina has been bestowed a supreme talent, the way she picks up songs after listening to them a few times, reproducing long melodies with a nimbleness of voice, even if she has to substitute words she doesn’t know with made-up lyrics. Yet the question of how—even whether—such talent should be nurtured is not easy to answer. It could be in violation of the Prophet’s teachings if it serves merely to distract and arouse—so the Hadiths say. Ismail himself considers it to be something best enjoyed as a gift, a source of private and personal happiness.
You listen, old sorrows and frustrations resurfacing. You remember the first time you saw Tahera in a hijab, when she and Ismail had come to receive you and her father at the Dallas airport, your first visit after she’d followed Ismail to the United States. You were meeting Arshad for the first time—your first grandchild, two months old then—and though Tahera was holding the baby up, it was her face you couldn’t drag your eyes off, a face small and scrunched in the hijab’s clutch.
Tahera has maintained that it was her decision to don the hijab. The decision to later robe her body in loose-fitting jilbabs was hers too, she’d claimed, for the freedom of movement it gave her, as well as freeing her from wasting time worrying about her personal appearance, time she could little spare after Amina was born. She has defended Ismail: Ismail held that he could advise her on the teachings of the Quran and the Hadiths, the various fatwas by learned Islamic scholars, but she must make the judgment call and decide for herself what is required by Allah, as must every Muslim, for Islam was revealed as a forward-thinking religion, meant for all ages.
How different her life would have been if she hadn’t insisted on marrying Ismail. Even from America, as her father wanted, there were other proposals. But she picked Ismail. “What’s wrong with being a practicing Muslim?” she’d argued. At least she wouldn’t be led astray on sinful paths, like Seema. She’d forced you and her father to give in.
“Why do this to yourself, Tahera?” you say. Meaning: Why burden herself with additional considerations, like whether the singing that gives one so much joy is a violation, or even namaz during one’s period if it gives comfort, as if life isn’t difficult enough already?
“Sometimes I wonder too,” she says, a little shamefacedly. “I worry I’m failing my children, especially with what’s happening in Irvine.”
In the warmth of an afternoon spent in the kitchen, when everything—the smells, the sounds, the company—reminds you of an earlier time, a time when you were presiding, when your daughters would poke their excited faces into the kitchen to inhale the aroma and then pinch their noses shut “to trap heaven inside their heads,” ready to acquiesce to anything you wanted from mere anticipation of the treat in store, in that heady fog of nostalgia and relived memory, you are compelled to speak:
Living in America is like living in an in-law’s house, you say. When one marries into another family, one needs to learn their rituals. One needs to adjust and accommodate, one needs to continue charming and beguiling well-wishers, one needs to win over naysayers and adversaries by surrendering a little, by learning how to become indispensable to their well-being. One cannot survive by segregating oneself, by giving others reason to treat one as an outsider. One survives by learning how to fit in.
By the rigidity of her faith and practices, isn’t Tahera opening her family to charges of fundamentalism, especially at a time when America has good reason to be suspicious of fundamentalists? Isn’t Tahera making it harder for her children to succeed in America by not teaching them the skills they will need to flourish in its culture? If not for herself, she should at least think of her children. This is the lesson to take from the events in Irvine.
While you speak, Tahera continues cooking—she chops, she stirs, she holds out the ladle to you to taste, she inquires about next steps. She doesn’t flare up, and you grow bolder and bolder in your pronouncements, heartened: maybe you are finally getting through to her.
Too late you notice that her eyes have hardened. You’ve said more than you intended, led astray by some miscalculation about her receptiveness and a trick of time that made you forget where you are. An unease settles in the kitchen, like from the first day.
“Say something, Tahera.”
She remarks, in an offhand manner, “Did you know Fiaz is a homosexual? Is that the sort of American culture you want your grandchildren to be exposed to?”
She doesn’t wait for your reply but turns back to the stove as if she’d simply made an insignificant observation, unrelated to anything.
You don’t have an answer to Tahera’s question. It’s not that you’re dumbfounded by the idea. Various details click immediately into place: Fiaz’s almost effeminate good looks and sense of style, his implied bachelorhood and reticence about his home life, his easy relations with Seema, his love of fine things.
Dully, you begin pondering the implications of Tahera’s revelation. Is Tahera mocking your intentions for Fiaz and Seema? Is that why she brings him up now, to demonstrate how little you know about life in America?
You feel small: how presumptuous, how foolish your advice to her, thinking her incapable of considering her own situation carefully. You will have to ask her forgiveness, as you’d asked Seema’s last night. You had promised yourself that you’d listen, not try to fix what you don’t understand.
“Shall we check on the biryani?” she asks.
A welcome distraction: you brighten with gratitude at this conciliatory gesture on her part. She lifts the lid and pries away the sheets of paper towels covering the mouth of the pressure cooker to absorb the steam.
Ah, there it is! That final elusive note of the aroma! One sniff, one glance at the rice—the grains fuzzy yet distinct—and you know the biryani will be perfect, you don’t even need to taste it.
Tahera gives the pot a final mix, and then samples the biryani straight from the ladle. “One can’t ask more of even Jannat than biryani like this. Seema’s friends are lucky.” There’s an edge to her voice, but at least she’s smiling.
“It’s not only for Seema’s friends,” you say. “It’s for you too.”
The last couplet of the ghazal resonates—Whom you once counted a friend, whom you once considered loyal, I’m still that same smitten one, whether you remember or not—and you wish you could take Tahera in your arms again to remind her of those times. But she’s returned to the chicken, skinning it with a matter-of-fact ferocity, and you fear you’ve squandered some opportunity that’d been granted you this afternoon.
Amina is waiting after school for Ismail to pick her up. In Arshad’s absence, she stands by herself, by the main entrance just inside the lobby, which is emptying slowly of its inhabitants. Her friends have all left with their parents.
She wonders what her brother is doing at home. Is he feeling better? She’d remembered to say a dua for him at lunchtime, her hands joined in prayer, right after saying her Bismillah.
But her father is late. She’s not concerned yet, comforting herself instead with an alternate vision: perhaps her mother will pick her up today!
Ammi will arrive and wrap her jilbab around her and drop a kiss on her head. And then they’ll drive home, and Bhaiya will be there, and her Asma doll, and Ammi will give her a cupcake to eat—with frosting and sprinkles!—and chocolate milk to drink.
This catalog of pleasures keeps Amina occupied. She swings her lunch bag, she skips from one end of the doorway to the other, stopping in the middle to peer at the parking lot.
Her backpack begins to feel heavy. She takes it off and presses her face against the glass doors to peer around the corner, farther up the driveway. She’s supposed to stay inside—Abba warned her specifically while dropping her off that morning—but Bhaiya, when he’s with her, usually disregards this injunction and leads her to the playground at the end of the parking lot, claiming they can keep a better watch for their parents from the platform above the slide.
Except, of course, the playground has been spoiled—her face falls at the memory of the burned swing and slide. Nobody was allowed to go near the playground during recess or lunchtime today either.
But where is Abba? As minutes pass, the fear that she’s been forgotten mounts. The teacher on watch is engrossed in her cell phone—Amina pushes open the door quietly and trudges to the end of the front porch, toward the parking lot, dragging her backpack behind her. Here she waits some more, dangerously close to tears, chewing at the corners of her hijab even though she knows she’s not supposed to. But it feels as though everyone has forgotten her—including the teacher on watch—and with a stifled sob, she slips under the yellow tape into the enclosure of the playground.
It’s a desolate and strange new country. In the center of the playground the charred structures tower over her like skeletons of dinosaurs. Huge blobs of deformed plastic are scattered beneath them, blackened animals in various attitudes of agony. The colors she admired—bright reds, greens, blues, yellows—are sooted. The soft white sand she liked to scuff is streaked through with gray ashes and debris. The odor of burning—Amina scrunches her nose—still lingers over everything.
And her favorite slide is no more. Only a tongue remains at the very top, twisted and fierce. Underneath it is a shapeless lump of plastic, which the tongue reaches toward as though it wants to lap it back up. Her stomach knots, like whenever she imagines something happening to Asma doll.
She whimpers: Who would do something like this to her slide?
“Bad men,” Farah Miss had said in class that morning.
Farah Miss is Amina’s favorite teacher. Farah Miss is young, tall, wise, kind, and always pretty in her light-colored hijabs and jilbabs—cream, lavender, rose. Allah will punish the bad men, Farah Miss explained. There are two angels writing down everything a person does, one sitting on the right shoulder, Raqeeb, who writes down all good deeds, and one sitting on the left shoulder, Atheed, who writes down all bad deeds. And one day when everyone is standing in front of Allah, Allah will consult with Raqeeb and Atheed and decide whether to reward or punish. On that day the bad men who had burned the playground will be thrown into the fires of Jahannam.
Farah Miss made the children recite their kalimas, Allah being the only one powerful enough to protect them from the evil work of the Shaitan and his helpers. Farah Miss then made them blow into their palms and down their chests to create an armor around themselves, so the evil Shaitan couldn’t harm them. And Farah Miss went around the room, blowing on the forehead of each child, before starting the day’s lessons.
The prayers work their magic again: standing with her eyes closed in the playground, Amina recites the kalimas—the first few fully, the last couple mumbled where she’s forgotten some words—opening her eyes only after she’s done blowing down her chest. Now all that remains is to walk around and blow over every object here, both fallen and standing.
She blows over the melted slide, the seesaws, the merry-go-round; she blows through the chain links of the melted swing. She blows into the air toward the sky, she blows onto the sand as she slowly spins around, so that her breath can reach every part of the playground.
A glitter in the sand catches her attention: it’s one of two plastic figurines that were attached to a rotating drum mounted on a climbing structure. This figurine is the princess, with yellow hair and rosy cheeks and dressed in a sparkling white gown with a gold tiara on her head. Amina has asked Ammi many times for something similar to the tiara for Asma doll, but Ammi has always refused—tiaras are not for Muslim dolls. Amina picks the figurine up, brushing the sand off it.
The princess is unharmed except for a small fused section of the tiara. The prince is missing—Amina searches futilely in the sand—he must have melted in the fire with the drum. She cradles the princess close to her chest, singing to the princess the song her mother sings to console Amina when she’s hurting.
At first Amina sings softly, whispering the song into the ears of the figurine. But she’s alone here, with nothing around her but the ruins of a place she has spent happy hours in. She begins singing a little louder, as though she wants what’s left of the playground to hear her. And then louder still: to the sand, to the air, to the skies.
Her voice is clear and ringing even to her own ears, and she revels in the sensation the song produces in her throat, in her chest, in the upper reaches of her nasal cavities as she strains for the high notes. She’d started the song plaintively, but as it works its way into her body, it transforms into something subtly joyous, the notes a little brighter, the tempo a little quicker, the cadences lilted toward the sky.
In the new universe she’s singing into existence, the princess figurine has been restored to its original condition and united with the prince, the playground has been re-created, her mother has returned, her brother is well again, and she is safe at home, surrounded by everything familiar and dear to her.
When her father calls, she spins around startled, dropping the princess. Her father beckons from the car parked close. She fumbles to pick up the figurine, then sights her backpack, shrugs it on, and races toward the car, almost forgetting to duck under the yellow tape. Beside her father sits Arshad. No mother, but her disappointment lasts only a few seconds. Her brother must be feeling better; she’s pleased he has accompanied their father to collect her.
But why does Bhaiya not get out of the car and help her into her booster seat as he usually does? Is he still sick? It’s Abba who helps her, strangely stern and silent. Bhaiya doesn’t even turn around to look at her.
“Look, Bhaiya, what I found—” She holds out the princess, remembering only belatedly that her father may not approve, but thankfully he’s busy pulling out of the parking lot. Her brother, too, ignores her offering, giving no indication that he’s even heard her.
“Are you still not well, Bhaiya?” Her fears for him, from the morning, return.
“No, he’s not well.” It’s her father who replies. “He will go straight to his room when we get home.”
On his face is a forbidding expression she’s never seen before. There’s none of the concern he’d run up the stairs with, when she’d called him to her brother’s side that morning.
Something has changed, she senses. It’s not a foreboding she can give words to, it’s more an impression that some fire has passed through the world she knows, and everything—the playground, Abba, Bhaiya, perhaps even herself—has been melted and transformed into something dark and strange. She hides away the princess doll under her books in her backpack.
Leigh arrives at four o’clock, hours earlier than expected.
Tahera buzzes her up, looking in on Seema to announce her untimely arrival. Tahera appears frazzled, her face shiny with sweat from the heat and steam in the kitchen, her hair plastered to her head. She then retreats to the kitchen, picking up her hijab on the way.
Seema is herself surprised. What could Leigh want? Seema pictures a scene where Leigh races up the stairs and sweeps her into her arms to kiss her, while her mother and sister watch openmouthed. The prospect is both unnerving and exhilarating.
In the early days of their relationship, Leigh often acted in impulsive, unpredictable ways: turning up at Seema’s office with takeout from their favorite Burmese restaurant, slipping into Seema’s apartment to light candles for when they later returned, kidnapping Seema for a day trip to a spa. But lately there have been few such incidents, which Seema is thankful for—Leigh’s spontaneity can be exhausting, and the stunt with the candles was dangerous—though Seema also misses the excitement.
Today Leigh arrives empty-handed. “Don’t mind me,” she tells Nafeesa who has hurriedly washed her hands and come out of the kitchen to greet her. “I knew you’d be busy, I thought I’d take Seema off your hands, perhaps go for a walk?”
Nafeesa hesitates, looking back to Tahera in the kitchen for guidance.
“Ammi, I’m not in labor, don’t worry,” Seema says. “I’m not going to have a baby in the next hour—even the contractions from the morning have stopped. I could use some fresh air, and Leigh will be with me if I need help.”
“What about your backache?”
“I took something for it. It seems to be working.”
Nafeesa gives in. Will they drink tea before they leave? It will be ready by the time Seema has changed.
Leigh follows Seema into the bedroom, ignoring the warning shake of her head, and launches into a rapid patter about upcoming articles and interviews, Raj Goyle, the Indian American running for Congress in Kansas, and Jeremy Lin, the first Chinese American NBA player, clearly intended for Nafeesa’s and Tahera’s ears. As she helps Seema into something more suited to a walk outside, she stoops to cover Seema’s shoulders and belly with swift giggling kisses, which Seema decides, keeping an eye on the open bedroom door, is wiser to yield to than protest.
Back in the living room, cups of chai in their hands, they sit conversing as though they hadn’t just given in to teenage giddiness a few short moments ago, until Leigh puts her cup down and says, with an air of innocence, “Ready?”
They wait till they round the corner to hold hands. And then at the next corner Leigh leads Seema into a cul-de-sac, where they kiss, feverish and long, standing in the entrance of a recessed garage.
Afterward, Leigh sighs: “I needed that.”
“I know, I missed you too.” Seema chooses her words carefully.
At least San Francisco has conspired to give them a perfect October day for walking, for making up. The late afternoon sun is perched high above the hills to the west, skimming the hovering clouds, flooding the Mission with a light that clings to everything with a honeyed sheen—skin, hair, clothes, houses, streets. Above, the sky has yet to lose its limpid blue, and around, the air is humming with a warmed-over buzz, the city everywhere stretching languorously.
Seema tells Leigh about the ad against Prop 8 she’d written for the Harris campaign. They’ve rarely discussed the topic of marriage, both wary of broaching the subject, but this seems a safe step in that direction. Besides, Seema is proud of her work.
“That’s awesome,” Leigh says, with a kiss. “I must treat you to ice cream.”
There’s a line outside their favorite shop. They join it, still holding hands.
“When’s the baby due?” the woman behind the counter asks, as she hands them samples.
“Any time now,” Leigh answers for Seema.
The woman says, “Good luck, enjoy your baby! Is this your first?”
The woman’s glance includes both of them. Leigh looks to Seema as if for confirmation, a hint of expectation in her eyes.
“Yes,” Seema says, “my first.” She adds a smile to involve Leigh in complicity, hoping that would suffice, but Leigh’s shoulders drop. But what else could she have said? They’re not there yet, however much Leigh (or even she) might wish otherwise.
At the bottom of the path, they pause so Seema can rest a little before the climb up. They watch the couples in the tennis courts swinging their rackets and missing their serves with easy laughter. Beyond the tennis court, men battle on an uneven soccer field with animated shouts and grunts. And beyond them, on the slopes of the hill, are the afternoon sunbathers.
Where do they come from—Seema wonders, as she’s done before—the sunbathers and the tennis and soccer players, the people lining up for ice cream, partaking of the afternoon’s store of pleasures with such familiarity? They made happiness seem easy, as though they could sense the universe’s pulse and knew exactly where and when it was ready to offer up its coffers. A customary bitterness: she’s not one of them. Happiness has never come easy to her.
A memory: A Sunday morning in bed, Leigh spooning Seema. They’d fucked already, but Leigh’s hands start moving once again, in spirals, across the swell of her belly, down to the cleft of her thighs. Leigh stops herself. “I wonder what the baby makes of all this.”
“The baby’s happy if the mother’s happy.”
“Is the mother happy?” Leigh’s lips on Seema’s nape.
“Very happy.” Drowsy and content.
They’d eventually gotten out of bed, and then this same walk to Dolores Park. The day had seemed cozy, like the bedroom they’d left: made to hold just the two of them. But later that same evening came the call from her mother about the diagnosis.
“Leigh,” she says now, “last night I almost told my mother about us.”
“But you didn’t.” Not an accusation, merely a statement, but resigned.
“It wasn’t the right time.” Seema is defensive. Leigh hasn’t had to worry about her parents’ acceptance. “My mother was crying, and I couldn’t comfort her. I felt so bad. I’ll tell her tonight after dinner.”
They climb up the hill in silence to their spot at the top of the park, Seema holding on to Leigh’s hand for support.
But how unlike that other day, when holding hands wasn’t enough and they stopped periodically to touch each other: face, hair, the small of the back. At the Dolores Cafe, while waiting for their coffee, Leigh held her, hands resting on her belly, and they swayed to the sounds of the café and the street, oblivious to the crowd. They raised cups in a toast to perfect Sundays. They ambled up the hill, washed a vivid green by the September sun. Their bench was free, lit by a dazzling beam of sunlight. They took bites of each other’s cupcakes; they fed each other spoons of yogurt.
And sitting there, they’d talked about everything and nothing: Leigh’s dreams of going to grad school for journalism, the upcoming elections, Seema’s work for the Harris campaign, the baby.
“Have you decided on a name yet?”
“I don’t know how to pick. Nothing seems to call out to me.”
“Maybe I can help.” Leigh’s hand on her belly, stroking it.
Raising Leigh’s hand to her lips. “Yes, I’d like that.”
“What are you thinking about?” Leigh asks now. They’re sitting side by side on their bench, the city spread at their feet.
What Seema would like to say: I want to know what you see in me. Why do you want to be with me?
She senses the futility of the question, for no one could answer it fully, truthfully. At best an answer would contain truths, half-truths, and fictions one wanted to believe. Leigh has answered before: because Seema is beautiful, Seema is resilient, Seema doesn’t let the world push her around.
But her resilience has come at the expense of keeping everyone at bay. She recalls her family, her friends, her lovers, her homes, the many she’s left behind or escaped from, so easily, so cavalierly, over the years. Only to foolishly grasp at the next whoever or whatever offers passing succor. Like Divya, and perhaps even Bill. At least she has resolved the matter with Divya: yesterday, after the meeting at the campaign office, she’d told Divya she shouldn’t have led her on, that she has no current intention of leaving Leigh.
If Leigh asked her the same question, Seema might reply: because Leigh is at ease with the world, Leigh makes life look easy, Leigh makes her happy.
She only knows how to fight the universe, as if there were no other way to access its secret store of happiness. Leigh is one of these afternoon revelers, who know what they want and are willing to accept it when offered.
If Seema were forced to be more truthful, she’d have to add: because Leigh also reminds her of her first and truest love, because she also fears having to bring up a child alone.
Perhaps it’s better to accept without scrutinizing the reasons too deeply, to not try to separate them into truths and fictions but value them as a whole. Much like religions do—she’s thinking now of Tahera—like faith does: For isn’t love just like religion, this faith in someone other than oneself to help steer through the flow and ebb of life, to give meaning to life?
“I’m thinking about you,” Seema says.
“What about me?” Leigh says.
“I’m thinking I can’t go through the delivery without you by my side.”
This at least is the truth. She is not promising anything beyond it—she cannot. She will speak to her mother—and if needed, her sister—about this. “I’m so happy,” Leigh says, but quietly, resting her head on Seema’s shoulder.
It must count for something that she, in some way, contributes to Leigh’s happiness. She takes Leigh’s palm and presses it to her belly. “Feel how strongly he kicks. He’s ready to meet us.”
It’s a signal of my growing distress, but they don’t know that. The sun is setting behind them, the city is flaring in front of them. She holds Leigh’s palm there, as they sit in their favorite spot—steeped in light that’s growing thick and darkly honeyed now, under a sky that sings in reds and oranges, then in pinks and purples. My two could-have-been mothers watch as the city first bursts into flames, then dies to ash-blue embers.
Tahera is on the terrace, the dinner ready, the kitchen cleaned up, seeking a moment to herself before Seema’s friends arrive. But she must call and check on her children, and she’s stressed, too, by how to tell Ismail about Seema’s will. The usually restoring namaz is not a possibility today, and her body is leaden with exhaustion, having plowed through the day’s exertions while battling her period.
Over the phone, Ismail announces that Amina has been crying all evening, and he can no longer soothe her. “She’s not listening to anything I say. She wants you.”
Tahera hears Amina in the background: thin whimpering cries, different from the gusty sobs when she misses her mother. Drained of the energy to determine the cause of her daughter’s distress, she suggests that perhaps Arshad can calm her down. He’s so good with Amina.
“I’ve asked Arshad to stay in bed,” Ismail says.
“Does he have a fever? Why didn’t you call me earlier?” she asks, moved to guilty concern for having forgotten about Arshad’s illness until now.
“I can take care of Arshad,” Ismail says. “Just calm your daughter, please.”
She recognizes in the way he’d inflected his words—your daughter!—that he, too, is close to a breaking point. She braces herself to face Amina’s querulousness.
How is mother’s sweetheart doing? Why is she crying?
A jumble of sounds answers her: sobs, swallowed words, panic-stricken wails. Tahera can’t get a word in edgewise. Amina isn’t listening: she has created a wall of sound around herself to keep her mother out. This is no time for words or reason, the ways Ismail must have attempted to quiet her. She knows what her daughter needs at this moment, and the knowledge helps her overcome her weariness.
Tahera begins by hushing her daughter, patiently repeating the shushing sound over and over again, a little louder each time, like a rising tide. Next she croons a lullaby, from her own childhood days, the song she sings whenever Amina wakes up frightened by nightmares.
Slowly Amina responds, her wails giving way to sobs, then to sniffles, then to silence.
So Tahera asks, “What is it, Munni? Why are you so upset?”
“Bhaiya said I’ll burn in Jahannam for playing with the princess doll,” Amina says. Bhaiya snatched the doll with the tiara and threw it away. Bhaiya threatened to never play with her again.
Amina’s voice breaks, and Tahera is once more forced to pacify her. “Your Bhaiya would never do anything to hurt you, Munni. Did you bother him? You know he’s not feeling well today.”
To distract Amina, Tahera explains what happens when someone becomes ill: how germs invade a body, how the body grows feverish and the mind grows tired and irritable as white corpuscles in the blood fight the invading germs. Eventually her Bhaiya will return to his normal loving self.
“Please come home, Ammi, make Bhaiya better. Abba is upset with Bhaiya. He won’t even speak to him.”
Here Ismail interrupts, taking the phone away from Amina. In response to Tahera’s queries, he denies Amina’s report: Nothing’s going on with Arshad, the boy has perhaps been acting up a little, from not feeling well. When Tahera insists on speaking to her son—she must learn how he’s really doing, and besides, it’s so unlike him to frighten Amina—Ismail becomes evasive. She has enough to worry about with her mother and sister. Isn’t Seema’s delivery approaching? He’s taking care of this. What can Tahera do from there anyway? He’ll tell her when she returns.
Panic-stricken, like her daughter had been a little while ago, Tahera sputters: What is wrong with Arshad? How can she wait till she returns, worried as she is about her son? She has every right to know now.
Ismail finally tells her: Arshad was only pretending to be sick. Jemaal’s uncle Selim was driving to his construction site when he happened to see Jemaal and Arshad on their bikes during school hours. They wouldn’t stop when he called out to them, and he had to follow in his car to catch up to them. They gave every kind of excuse for being outside, and when he inspected their backpacks to see what they were hiding, he found rocks in them. They were planning to stone many churches in town. Unfortunately, by then they’d already inflicted damage on the church next to the mosque.
At first Tahera is too relieved to comprehend the extent of Arshad’s transgression: a broken window is surely a small forgivable offense. “Should we offer to pay for the window?”
“Do you want to call attention to your son?” Ismail chides. “The fools left a trail. They wrapped paper around the rocks, signing themselves Ar-Ra’d or some such nonsense. The police are investigating. One window, and the boys will be labeled jihadis for life, with the FBI after them.”
She hadn’t considered this. She blanches: What will happen if Arshad gets caught?
“We can only pray that nobody saw them,” Ismail says. He talks vaguely of keeping Arshad out of sight for some time. If Tahera were there to take care of Amina, he could take Arshad out of town. Perhaps he can coordinate with Jemaal’s father.
But what about Arshad? What do they tell him? Surely they can’t ignore what he did. What if it leads him down some terrible path?
“First, let’s get the situation under control, then we’ll worry about that,” Ismail says.
“Let me talk to Arshad,” Tahera begs.
No, Ismail says, not now. “I’ve already spoken to him, but everything I say only seems to make him more willful, more defiant. We’ll have to be careful how we treat this. I’ll talk to Imam Zia. Arshad won’t listen to anything you say anyway.”
Ismail hangs up before she can protest. His matter-of-fact assertion that she can do nothing to help her son stuns her with its authority, its truth. She’s tempted to let his father and Imam Zia handle him their way.
But there’s this: the anguish in Arshad’s voice when he’d asked her, barely three days ago, “Why do they hate us so much, Ammi?” And she’d forsaken him, convincing herself his father was the right person to counsel him.
And also this: Amina’s voice on the phone, trembling at the mention of the brother she loved, her desperate plea: Come home, Ammi, make Bhaiya better. As if Amina sensed—but how? by what sisterly connection?—some fever waiting to carry her brother away, some tragedy poised to change their lives.
But what can she do?
What has she ever offered Arshad, anyway? A son to whom she has never felt the way she should feel toward a son and who, perhaps in retaliation, treats her with the same remote and ambivalent affection. A son who slipped away from her even as he slipped out of her, and now may be slipping away even further.
She’d been pregnant with Arshad during her residency in family medicine and felt resentful at the disruption to the career she needed in order to rebuild some semblance of the life she’d left behind in India. Following the delivery she’d left Arshad in Ismail’s care, to return almost immediately to her rotations. Had Arshad sensed her resentment? After her daughter was born, she’d smothered him with the same affection and endearments she lavished on Amina, but perhaps by then it was too late. She had to be content with his forbearance, his quiet eyes always watching her as though he could see through her.
She has failed not only her son but also her daughter, who loves him, whose happiness depends on him. Just like Tahera’s happiness once depended on her sister.
She recalls her mother’s words from the afternoon: Why do this to yourself, Tahera? You must learn to fit in. If not for yourself, at least think of your children.
Meaning: there is no one to blame but herself.
She feels it in her body, a sharp and searing pain: a grief deeper than she has ever known. For she’s not just grieving the past but also some cherished future for her family, which seems on the brink of collapse. It includes the losses of the past—a sister, a father—and the losses yet to come—a mother, a son, perhaps even a daughter. The grief comes upon her so suddenly that she has to grip the terrace wall to hold herself up, as though the bones in her legs have melted.
But no! The floor under her has vaporized. She’s hovering over the city of San Francisco, whose trees and houses and streets and hills are shimmering under her, awash in a fiery light she hadn’t noticed until now, as though the city were burning and its flaming tongues were leaping toward her, threatening to swallow her up. The scorching flames of the guilt and remorse of mothers, daughters, sisters, unable to love or incapable of protecting those they hold dear.
This is Jahannam, she thinks, this is how it feels to burn in hell. Jahannam is the fire of grief, Jahannam is the fire of guilt and remorse. And above her the sky blares its reds and oranges. The sky is a warning screamed at her.
How long does she stand there looking at—but not seeing—the city as it slowly turns to cinders? Here’s what she sees when the fire has finally burned itself out:
Up the street, two figures, hand in hand. The way one of them waddles instantly identifies her, even from this distance. At the apartment entrance, precisely below her, they turn toward each other and kiss. It’s a long lingering kiss, meant to satiate some deep hunger. Then they part and, amid laughter, disappear into the building.
Evening’s here, so come home please. I know no peace, there are no words for my heart’s longing.
Noor Jehan sings, and you, Grandmother, are struck yet again by the pathos she wrings from the words. You’ve listened to the song a few times since yesterday, but twilight is the perfect time for it—as the sky darkens against the windowpanes and the universe shrinks to the room you’re in, while promising to expand to the moon and stars.
“The resurfacing moon and stars revive your memory, pledges of your love,” Fiaz translates from the song with a sigh. “But that’s beautiful. Thank you.”
Eyes half-closed, you both listen to the song. It seems to you, Grandmother, that Fiaz too is no stranger to this long wait at dusk.
“Why do you thank me?” you say. “It’s I who am in your debt.”
“For introducing me to Noor Jehan,” Fiaz says. “I may never have listened to her otherwise.”
You’ve been waiting to express your gratitude since he arrived half an hour ago. But the words have been difficult to pin down: so weighty, yet they flit like wary dragonflies. He arrived with flowers—brilliantly colored gerbera daisies. He followed you into the kitchen praising the aroma of the biryani, peering into the dishes for dinner, lavishing you with fulsome compliments in high Urdu, which made you laugh. He then busied himself arranging the flowers in a vase and later prowled around the living room on the lookout for Seema, until the song cast its spell, and you both fell quiet in its enchantment.
“You are such a good friend to Seema,” you say. “You take such good care of her.”
“She’s like the sister I never had,” he says.
“Then you’re like the son I’ve never had.” You hesitate, then continue, “You’ll make someone a very good life partner one day.”
You stumble on the phrase life partner—how cumbersome it is. But that’s the only phrase you know and the only way you’re comfortable talking about what you think of as his condition. You can’t look at him as you speak, so you gaze out the window. You wonder if he’ll acknowledge your clumsy attempt at declaring your acceptance.
“That’s the nicest compliment anyone has given me,” he says. “I have a partner. He knows how lucky he is to have me.”
There, it’s said. Now an uncomfortable silence settles as you both readjust to this new intimacy.
You cough. Fiaz clears his throat and wonders aloud: Why isn’t Seema back yet? And where is your other daughter?
You say Tahera is still on the rooftop. And Seema and Leigh should be back soon.
You peer out the window, as if expecting to see them from up here. And having taken one plunge, you’re primed for the next: “Are Seema and Leigh partners?” you ask.
The alarmed look on Fiaz’s face is sufficient confirmation. You feel guilty for putting him on the spot, but how much longer could you have held back, after your suspicions were aroused by the way Seema and Leigh sat primly sipping their chai, like the many times you’ve witnessed Seema and Tahera put on a show of innocence after having concocted some mischief? The air around them had crackled with some shared secret.
“Seema didn’t tell you,” Fiaz replies, half question, half statement.
You’re grateful again to Fiaz for not evading you. “I guessed.”
He comes and stands beside you. “What are you thinking, feeling?”
“I’m glad,” you say. But it’s only a half-truth. You’re sad, too. It explains what happened between Seema and Bill, but you don’t understand it any more than you did years ago. “If it makes her happy. And it’ll be better for the baby.”
How challenging your promise from last night is turning out to be: to try to understand Seema. “Please don’t say anything. I’ll talk to her later, when we’re alone.”
You wipe your eyes and turn away from Fiaz: “Are you hungry? Maybe I should start heating the food.”
Luckily, Seema and Leigh trip in, with apologies for being late: the sunset was so breathtaking they couldn’t drag themselves away. Both of them glow, as though they’ve bottled up the last rays of the sun and brought it in with them.
“You said you were going for a short walk,” you chide Seema.
You chide Leigh, too, for breaking her promise to bring Seema back early. She listens meekly, and you feel like a fretful mother-in-law.
After helping Seema to the futon, Leigh takes the chair opposite. They continue their pretense of being only friends, carefully monitoring their behavior for any slips.
You want to tell them: I know, so you don’t have to hide any longer.
You want to say: Leigh, you should sit next to Seema.
You want to see them together, so you can reassure yourself of the value of what they have together—love, if that’s what it is. But Grandmother, you don’t, because—
“Where’s Tahera?” Seema asks, looking around.
It’s a while before Tahera returns to the apartment.
Nafeesa says, “What were you doing on the rooftop for so long? I even sent Fiaz to call you. You look chilled, dressed so lightly.”
Tahera gives no answer. Yes, she’s almost numb, but the warmth of the apartment is more jarring than welcome. She’d been pacing in the cold pale reality of the rooftop with only the moon for company, like the many times as a girl in Chennai, but there was only so long she could avoid the gathering in her sister’s home.
Fiaz rises to greet her, Leigh waves. Tahera returns a perfunctory smile, a mere tightening of her lips, and fends off her mother hovering about her: “I have to pray my isha namaz.”
Ignoring everyone in the room, she rummages through her suitcase for a fresh set of clothes, a fresh pad, then heads for her shower. A wadu will not be sufficient today, she will need to do a full ghusl. Her period isn’t over yet, though the major flow has perhaps ended, but there is still some bleeding. But she can no longer go without her namaz. She needs its strength to face a world that feels even more hostile than it did just yesterday, with everything that has happened since the news of the arson. The room, with Ammi and Seema and her friends, feels almost like a battlefield she must steer through warily.
Tahera leaves an awkward silence behind her. Fiaz raises an eyebrow at Seema, but Seema is herself baffled. “I don’t know,” she mouths. Tahera has made no mention of Fiaz all day and had seemed happily engaged in the kitchen with Ammi when she’d left with Leigh. She looks to her mother for a clue.
Nafeesa murmurs, “Some things back home are upsetting her.” She wishes now that she’d not provoked Tahera that afternoon. Or that she’d asked forbearance from Tahera for tonight, but she’d been afraid she might only make things worse.
Fiaz asks, “Was there more trouble at the Islamic center?”
“What trouble?” Seema asks, and Fiaz explains, an eye out for Tahera’s return.
Nafeesa is surprised that Fiaz knows and Seema doesn’t. “Seema, you should pay more attention to your sister’s life.”
Seema runs through her various conversations with Tahera in the past few days—how is she to know if Tahera doesn’t talk about it? She has heard about the protests at Ground Zero in New York, of course, but hasn’t followed the news. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to connect it to Tahera and her family, anyway. She feels abashed at her ignorance. “Has it really gotten that bad?”
“I did a report on the protests at Yorba Linda and Temecula—people waving flags and chanting ‘God bless America’ in front of mosques,” Leigh answers. She recalls how taken aback she’d been by her first sight of Tahera in her hijab and jilbab, and is conscience-stricken learning about Tahera’s ordeals. “I’m not surprised worse is happening in Texas.”
They’re conversing in low voices. When Tahera comes out of the bathroom, the discussion halts. She’s had a shower and changed her clothes—a dark brown jilbab, a light gray hijab with large indigo flowers, which strikes Nafeesa as pretty and unlike anything she’s seen Tahera wear. Perhaps it’s intended for the guests? Nafeesa notes that Tahera hasn’t dried her hair properly—drops of water drip down her face—but before Nafeesa can say anything, Tahera walks straight through the room toward her belongings, as if there’s no one else in the room. She picks up and unfolds the janamaz with a flick and spreads it out in her usual spot.
“Tahera, you should pray in Seema’s room,” Nafeesa says, a little sharply. “We have guests.”
The walk across the room has required all of Tahera’s resolve. Like with the men in front of the meat shop in the Tenderloin and the shoppers in Safeway, she is the target of stares and whispers, judgment and contempt. She’s sure Seema and her friends, even Ammi, have been discussing her affairs, pretending concern, but in reality, judging her for her beliefs and practices, as Ammi had done that afternoon. Thankfully they don’t know about Arshad, but if they did—the shame burns brighter. They would judge her as negligent, condemn her son as hateful and out of control.
She trembles. She’d unfolded the janamaz out of agitation and habit, but the reprimand in her mother’s voice stings. What is so discomfiting about namaz that it needs to be out of sight, as if Seema’s guests can’t abide it? Perhaps because it reminds them of what they owe Allah. She feels compelled to continue where Seema and her gay friend and her lesbian lover can watch.
She starts her salat with the takbir, but in her haste has forgotten to mentally voice her niyyat—Allah, I intend to pray four rakaat as fard for isha namaz, facing Ka’ba—and must start over.
If she’d been concerned earlier that her namaz may not be accepted for praying while her period isn’t over, she has more reason now, riddled as her namaz is with makruh acts caused by her lack of concentration. For though she’s facing the corner walls, she’s unable to dismiss the presence of the others. She struggles on, feeling none of the peace of mind she’d sought in the namaz.
Fiaz does notice Tahera’s small mistakes: arms not clasped when they should be, an extra sajda instead of sitting up in jalsa. Tahera is clearly becoming frustrated, fumbling even more as she tries to recover.
“Let’s go to the kitchen,” he whispers to Seema, “and let your sister pray in peace.”
He leads the way, and they stand awkwardly around the dining table, until Nafeesa says they may as well set the table while they wait.
They set the place mats, the plates, and the cutlery. Seema is to sit down, since she’s experiencing some pain, as if contractions were resuming. The three work quietly so Tahera isn’t disturbed. And then the food is transferred to serving dishes, except for the biryani, which must wait until Tahera joins them so it doesn’t get cold.
Their muted actions are still too loud to Tahera’s ears. Even as she strives to focus on her namaz, she recalls the evening she arrived—was it less than a week ago?—when Seema and her mother were setting out dinner. She’d been right to be anxious then, for hadn’t Seema already wreaked havoc on her life once? She had come, anyway, to support her dying mother and offer what aid she can her sister, because that’s what her mother wanted. And this is what it has led to: while her own life in Irvine threatens to fall apart, she’s here participating in Seema’s licentious life.
There is no getting away from it: Seema and her community talk of tolerance, and the Quran warns about judging in Allah’s stead, but Allah could in no way have intended that she be accepting of what He has denied His creation. If she had known that Seema had returned to her former ways, she still may have come to San Francisco, for Ammi’s sake, but she would have known to hold her distance from Seema.
Maybe this day is a warning, that the permissive comforts from her past life, which she’d been slipping back into so easily, are really distractions to her faith she needs to guard against, whatever Ammi may say.
If she needs proof of how easy it is to forget the teachings of the Quran and the Prophet, then an account of her visit provides a list of temptations: the non-halal chicken the very first night, the book of poetry, the steadily impairing association with Seema’s friends, Seema’s request of guardianship, the music, and tonight’s dinner. She’s been led to this point, step by step. If the Shaitan needed a helper, he couldn’t have done better than use her sister. And she’d fallen for it: she’d been on the verge of letting Seema back into her life, even believing it to be the answer to her istikhara.
Why is she still here? She has better things to do: she has her own family to tend to, a daughter who needs her, and a son whom she’s failing. She is unable to even find the immersion she craves in namaz—each sound from the kitchen yanks her back into a depraved world.
Finally, the sounds stop. She’s done with her rakaat for isha but decides to pray a few more for the optional prayers. And also duas for forgiveness and mercy, if Allah is indeed unhappy with her lapses, and for Arshad’s safety and well-being. Perhaps his act was intended by Allah to remind her of her true life in Irvine, to return to it immediately. This must be what her vision of Jahannam on the rooftop means. She’d mistaken that, too, imagining in that moment of grief that the loss of sister and of son were alike. Until her eyes had been opened to Seema’s continued transgressions.
She raises the volume of her recitation, so the buzz of the surahs can fill the living room and infiltrate the rest of the apartment, cleansing it.
In the kitchen, Seema succumbs to irritability. Surely Tahera is keeping everybody waiting to call attention to how namaz is more important to her than the dinner she’d spent all day cooking for Seema’s friends. Like the martyr Tahera used to like playing as a girl.
“I’m hungry,” Seema frets. “At this rate, I’ll be in labor by the time she finishes.”
Nafeesa looks: Tahera is still moving through her prayers. It would be unseemly to start dinner without her—especially since the dinner owes its existence to her—but Nafeesa is nettled by Tahera’s disregard for their guests. She decides: “Why don’t you and your friends start? I’ll wait for Tahera. She won’t mind.”
Fiaz demurs, but she ignores him. The aroma of biryani fills the room as she transfers the fragrant rice and mutton to a serving dish.
Fiaz breathes in the aroma, his chest and frame expanding as though to suck in all the air in the room, a smile on his face. “How can I say no to this?”
Nafeesa is gratified. “Eat, eat,” she urges. “I hope it’s to your liking.”
She searches for bigger chunks of meat to serve him and Seema. And Leigh as well—at first hesitantly, unsure if Leigh likes Indian food, and then with growing assurance as Leigh praises the dishes.
Satisfied, she settles down to watch them eat. The way they pass the food around, the way their eyes exchange smiles—like a family, she thinks. Something intimate is being shared, without words, through the very harmony that permeates their eating together.
Tahera faces the quiet dark of the living room corner. Behind her is laughter, the sounds and smells of a celebration, from which she is excluded. She can picture the scene, as if she were observing by the kitchen door: Seema and her lover and her friend all focused on their plates until the first throes of hunger and desire are sated, while Ammi, having prepared the feast, would barely be eating, her eyes more on their faces than on her own plate, feeding off their pleasure. A new family coming together.
Whatever be the rewards in the afterlife, Tahera has no doubts now that she is to be punished here on earth, shunned by family and country alike, for never straying from the straight path, while Seema, who has only ever pursued her own desires, is to be feted, rewarded with this new family. And soon the pleasures of a son, while Tahera is to be left with the pain of failing hers, which too could be traced back to the day Seema walked out of their home. The evening fires from the rooftop may have diminished, but now they spark and flame again, only this time with anger.
Grandmother, you hear Tahera finally moving around in the living room and you call out, “Tahera, come to eat. We’re waiting for you.”
There’s no response, and you decide to check on your daughter.
“Tara,” you start, and then stop at the sight of the red suitcase lying open on the living room floor, her clothes and belongings stacked in piles around it. “What are you doing?”
“I’m packing,” Tahera says.
“Why do you have to do that now?”
“I’m leaving. I’m going back to Irvine tonight.”
You stand still, not knowing what to make of her statement. Tahera is down on her knees, stowing her clothes in the suitcase. “Why? What’s happened?”
“My son is ill,” Tahera says.
You bend over Tahera’s suitcase, not sure whether you mean to help her pack or unpack. What could an eleven-year-old be suffering from that suddenly required his mother’s presence? Tahera must be overreacting. “How can you leave now? Seema will be in labor soon. Is Arshad really that sick?”
“What does it matter? He’s my son. I have to go. I want to go.” She dumps the last of her belongings into the suitcase and slams its top shut. “I’m not needed here anyway. You all can manage very well without me. Go, enjoy the feast I cooked for Seema and her friends.”
You place a hand on your daughter’s shoulder to help her rise, worried now. You lower your voice: you don’t want anyone in the kitchen to hear you. “I didn’t want to keep our guests waiting. I’m sorry I asked them to start without you. I still haven’t eaten. Come, don’t behave like a child. You’ll spoil the evening—you put so much effort into it.”
Tahera, squatting on the floor, stares up at you—she seems to have shrunk to the willful child you once knew her to be, though never as wayward as Seema. She shrugs your hand away, and struggles to rise, lifting the suitcase at the same time.
“Yes, I’m the one spoiling the evening. It doesn’t matter that Seema already has. She gets to do whatever she wants, and you’ll still fly to her side, even feed her your biryani.”
“Tahera, please!” you say, gesturing her to calm down. Surely Seema and her friends must be listening—the sounds of eating have ceased. You glance back at the kitchen door—at least no one’s watching. You lower your voice even further: “What’s all this about?”
“Ask her what kind of relationship she has with her friend.” She resists your attempts to lead her to Seema’s room. “I thought she’d given up all those haram activities.”
You’re perturbed: How did she learn about Leigh? But more importantly, what do you tell her? Grandmother, how do you speak when you haven’t made peace yet with Seema’s choices yourself, even though just a few minutes ago you’d been grateful for the friendship and love surrounding her?
“Tahera, this is not the time to discuss this,” you say in Urdu, so Leigh won’t understand—you wish you hadn’t been speaking in English before. “They will hear. Please.”
“So you knew, already,” Tahera replies, still in English. “You knew and didn’t tell me. What you must think of me, that I wouldn’t help if I knew, even if my dying mother asked.”
You shrink at her anger—where does it stem from? You want to deny knowledge, you want to say: I learned of it only today, I learned of it from Fiaz. You know she’s seeking reassurance that she’s a good daughter, and you want to assure her you know of her love and thoughtfulness and kindness toward you. But you’re so focused on preventing further disruption to the evening, that instead you say, “Tahera, they are our guests. What will they think?”
“Let them think what they want. I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of.” She turns toward the kitchen. “I’m not the one violating Allah’s decrees. And for what? Just because Seema wants to draw attention to herself, she wants to think herself different—unique—so she can look down her nose on the rest of us, as though we’re mindless sheep for following the Quran and the Prophet.”
She makes a quick round of the room, as if searching for something. You follow a step behind her, trying to gather your courage to hold her by the arms and calm her down, if you still have the strength to.
You know your words from the afternoon rankled: she includes you when she talks about being looked down upon. You want to tell her: it wasn’t just frustration that drove you but sorrow too. You know as well as, if not more than, anyone else the effect of the constraints on one’s lives, real or assumed, imposed from the outside or by the self. For hadn’t you let yourself be ruled by your husband’s dictums all these years and paid the price for adhering to them, and for breaking them? The price in both cases was crippling.
But you can’t say this, because you know your comparison won’t be welcome. You can’t tell her, when she’s this angry, that you understand Allah can demand a heavy price from His creation. That you understand she believes she has no choice in the matter. Just like Seema does.
Tahera sees the Quran and rehal on the bookshelf, grabs them, and darts to open her suitcase to put them away.
“Tara—” You touch her arm, grieving for both your daughters. Why should they each struggle separately, when they have each other and could use each other’s support? “Don’t judge your sister so harshly. She doesn’t deserve it.”
“Always thinking only about Seema.” She spins around to strike your hand away. “I’m not doing any judging. But Allah will. She will burn in Jahannam if she doesn’t correct her ways.”
The upright suitcase, latches released, falls open. In Tahera’s haste to prevent its contents from tumbling out, she lets the Quran and rehal slip from her hands. The hardback suitcase halves crash to the floor anyway, followed by the thump of the Quran, and the clatter of the rehal.
You’d stepped back to avoid them landing on your feet, and you stumble. You’re afraid you too will fall, but someone catches you. It’s Fiaz, and behind him Seema and Leigh, pale as ghosts.
“Look what you made me do—” Tahera blazes, at you, at everyone behind you.
“Enough, Tahera, enough,” Fiaz says. “We respect your choice—to live according to your strict interpretations of the Quran. It’s not the only way to be a Muslim. You don’t have to insult us.”
Seema has never heard Fiaz this forceful before, or this stern. He stands between her and Tahera. She’s ashamed of hiding behind him, like she hid behind her mother with Bill yesterday. She hadn’t expected she would feel this sick to her stomach even after it was clear how Tahera would react.
A stranger stands before her, a stranger in her stark attire and implacable face, with the Quran in one hand, silhouetted against the light from the floor lamp. She’s unrecognizable as the sister of her youth, or even the sister from just days ago—not the girl in twin plaits who’d looked up to her, nor the woman who’d cried in her lap after braiding her hair. And not even the sister from just that morning, the one who’d reassured her that she’d be there with her for the delivery.
“Seema can speak for herself,” this stranger says to Fiaz. “What you do is no concern of mine.”
“What your sister does is no concern of yours either,” Fiaz says.
Their mother cringes at Fiaz’s tone. “Son, please—” Nafeesa restrains him with a hand on his arm. “Tahera, let it go.”
“Son!” the stranger sneers. “Your son and daughter are birds of the same feather. You must be proud of who they are.”
Even this Tahera, the one with the dark flint inside her, seems to have some power over Seema: Leigh squeezes Seema’s hand, but Seema instinctively withdraws it.
What does my mother continue to want from this sister?
Now that she is on the verge of being deprived of it, my mother can admit it to herself: she wants what that day spent with Tahera’s children promised.
“Will you come visit us?” Amina asked, and even as my mother sought a lie to let down the child, she grasped at the prospect of a permanent mooring, which has eluded her since her exile, where she could access again and again the unadulterated happiness of that day, reminiscent of her childhood where she didn’t have to fight the world for it. Even her happiness with Leigh doesn’t compare, accompanied as it is with the fear that it isn’t meant to last.
Did she conjure up, for herself and for me, the hope of visits between siblings and cousins, like in Chennai, so that it wouldn’t be just the two of us—mother and son—dependent only on each other for any sense of stability and continuity? And had she even contemplated paying the price she’d once rejected, the shameful silence that would enable it, if both parties agreed? With my grandmother’s prognosis, it had felt urgent. And only this morning, with Tahera signing the will, it had felt possible.
Tahera touches the Quran to each eye, then collects the rehal from the floor and makes protective space for them in the suitcase lying open at her feet. The rest of the strewn contents she stuffs haphazardly back in and closes the suitcase. She tightens the hijab around her head, picks up her handbag from beside the futon.
“Tahera, don’t go,” their mother pleads, in Urdu. “Seema, say something.”
“If she wants to go, let her go,” Seema rasps, in English. “I’m not going to stop her. You came to see Ammi. Well, now you have—”
“Are you saying I’m a bad daughter? As if you are perfect.”
“Seema, Tahera, stop—” Nafeesa wrings her hands, but both sisters ignore her.
“I know I’m not perfect,” Seema says. “But even I can see what Ammi needs now.”
“Yes, this is what Ammi needs now!” Tahera waves a contemptuous hand at Leigh. “So you and your lover are going to take care of Ammi? Seema, you’ve never taken care of anyone but yourself.”
“You don’t think we can?” Seema takes Leigh’s hand back in hers, aware that she and Leigh have never discussed this before. But Leigh doesn’t pull away.
“You people are selfish. You only think about yourselves. Did you even stop to think what effect this will have on Ammi’s health? Of course you didn’t—the same way you didn’t think about us when you ran away to pursue your selfish sinful desires.”
“Now you’re simply being hateful, Tahera,” Fiaz says.
Tahera turns on him. “At least I am trying to live honestly and quietly, and by my understanding of the Quran. I will be able to answer to our Maker, but will you and Seema?” She pauses as though expecting Seema to respond.
“Yes, you live very quietly!” Seema bites back with spite. “With your fatwas and your jihads and your suicide bombs. No wonder everyone is afraid of you, even in Irvine.”
Tahera pales, pulls her jilbab tighter. “If that’s what you believe, then why did you ask me to be your child’s guardian? Why didn’t you ask your lover? Or your best friend? Nobody who shared your liberal values was willing?”
Leigh’s hand in Seema’s goes slack. “You asked your sister to be Ishraaq’s guardian?”
“Oh, you didn’t know?” Tahera’s laugh is bitterly strident. “She had us witness her will just this morning. I wonder why she asked me and not you or her ex-husband. I don’t know how long your kind of relationships last. Maybe she doesn’t expect to stay with you very long. Knowing Seema, she may have already found somebody else. But who can say what Seema is really planning? It’s hard to guess—” Tahera’s face scrunches up. “Maybe she thought if she asked me, I would be happy to stay and do the cooking and cleaning and be the unpaid midwife as well. Be careful, she may only want you as a babysitter.”
No one attempts to stop her: there’s no stopping her, she flings her arms after each accusation as if to block any response from getting through to her, the flared sleeves of her jilbab her shields. “I’m sure that’s why she married Bill, too—so Abba would take her back. You’re a user, Seema. You use and throw people away, you don’t care who you hurt—”
Every shaft finds its target. But Seema has something new to worry about: Leigh has pulled away and grown still.
“Is she right, Seema?” Leigh says. Her lips seem to hardly move, but Seema feels the burn in her words. “Is that all you want from me? A babysitter for Ishraaq?”
It’s an assault from both sides: a thwarted sister, an anguished lover. Who is Seema to respond to first? And how to deny the half-truths on both sides?
You’re a user, Seema.
How to speak when the truth is not simple, when everything she says will need qualifications, and those qualifications will need further qualifications, and so on. How to explain in a moment what has taken a lifetime to accrue?
And here’s something else, working from inside my mother’s body, undermining her further: a rift is opening up between the placenta and her uterine walls. A trickle of blood—an embryonic spring—is welling into the uterus and pooling around my amniotic sac. She registers it as a discomfort in her abdomen—she shouldn’t have gorged on the biryani, or is this perhaps the beginning of labor? An invading languor, an apathy almost, renders her unequal to the task of facing her sister and her lover. I register the reduced supply of oxygen and glucose as an irregular heartbeat, a climbing chill, a fickle tipsy consciousness.
Can my mother sense my distress? Her mind is elsewhere, grappling with what to say to the two women confronting her. She finds nothing that can heal the rifts, has little energy for it now. The two women continue waiting.
Leigh gives up first. “I should leave.”
Nafeesa, harassed, depressed, says, “Look what you’ve done now, Tahera.”
She gestures to Seema to do something to stop Leigh, but what is Seema to do?
There’s not much time anyway: Leigh moves quickly, stooping to collect her jacket and bag. Without even pausing to put on her jacket, she gives a thin smile to Nafeesa, whose hand is extended out toward her, and letting herself out of the apartment, clatters down the stairs. The door to the building opens and shuts.
The silence is broken by Tahera: “I didn’t ask her to leave. I asked nobody to leave. I said I was leaving.”
“Then leave,” Seema says. “Everybody leave. I don’t need anyone’s help, I don’t need anyone. I didn’t ask you all to come here. Just go. Please go.”
She turns toward her bedroom, without a glance at her mother or sister. Fiaz makes a movement toward her, but she stalls him. “You too, Fiaz. I’m tired. I’ll call if I have use for you.”
She shuts the bedroom door and locks it. She doesn’t turn on the light. She climbs into her bed and pulls her comforter over herself. She ignores the knocks on the door, the rattle of the doorknob, Fiaz’s strained voice, and places a pillow, her mother’s pillow, on her face to block all light from her eyes, even though the room is already dark. The smell of the coconut oil her mother uses assails her nostrils, and she turns the pillow over to the faint scrubbed fragrance of detergent.
This dark is a blessing. This solitude is a blessing. She takes a few deep breaths, and her lungs fill with relief, as if she’d been holding her breath not just the last few minutes, not just this evening, or even this week, but all her life.
The pillowcase is cool against her eyelids, like leaves with the drip of summer rain after long dreary days of oppressive heat.
Her mind glides toward calming thoughts: flowers budding in gulmohar trees, mangos ripening in fragrant stillness, monsoon suns smiling through shiny eaves, sweet Reshmi’s cheeks, a smiling infant’s breath.
And all the while, blood continues to pool and swirl around me, in shifting fleeting patterns that neither of us can see.
Poor Tahera. Her sister has locked herself in her room. Her dying mother regards her with eyes that threaten tears at any moment. And though Fiaz stands by Seema’s bedroom door, he appears to be present everywhere she looks, judging and condemning her. What is she to do?
A part of her wants to apologize, to throw herself around her mother’s neck, to knock on Seema’s door and beg for forgiveness. But these actions would constitute an admission of guilt, which she cannot bring herself to do. For to do so would be to accept the enormity of her offense, not only against her sister but against her mother as well, and her own understanding of the teachings of the Prophet. So she tells herself: Allah as her witness, she has done nothing wrong. She stands irresolutely by her suitcase, clutching her handbag to herself.
“I’m going to catch a taxi to the airport,” she says, testing her power to leave.
Does she want Nafeesa or Fiaz to make another effort to persuade her to stay? And if they did, would she give in? But the option is not presented: Nafeesa is still bereft of speech, and Fiaz is ready to take Tahera at her word.
“I’ll drive you,” he says.
He makes his offer without any rancor that she can detect. Is he simply determined to get her out of Seema’s apartment? Does he mean to take her to task on the way? Or is he laying claims to being the nobler Muslim? Her indignation gives her the strength to leave: “There’s no need. I can manage by myself.”
She looks toward her mother for a last sign of protest, then picks up her suitcase and heads to the door. The suitcase is heavy; she cannot make a quick exit like Leigh did: she struggles to hold the door open while hauling her suitcase through. Fiaz appears behind her, and this time she accepts his help. He descends first with her suitcase, and she follows with her bag.
She is halfway down the stairs when she hears her mother cry, “Tahera, wait.”
Nafeesa’s footsteps sound behind her, but she continues down the stairs and out the building entrance—Fiaz holds the door open for her—into the cold San Francisco night.
“Thank you.” She takes her suitcase back from Fiaz. It’s a stroller; she pulls the handle out, then waits for her mother to join her.
Nafeesa shivers as soon as she steps out onto the street—she has on only her thin sweater.
“Go back, Ammi, it’s cold,” Tahera says, but her mother appears too dazed to respond.
The three stand by the entrance to Seema’s building, like actors who have forgotten their lines. Tahera nods to Fiaz—she wants him to leave, she knows her mother will say nothing in his presence. “I’ll be able to find a taxi myself, Allah Hafiz.”
“Good night.” He accepts his dismissal politely.
He extends his hand to Nafeesa, who returns a squeeze. “Aunty, tell Seema to call me.”
He turns and runs lightly down the street, leaving Tahera alone with her mother.
And still her mother says nothing. Even a reprimand would be welcome. Tahera is bitter: her mother has chosen Seema. The prodigal daughter has returned, and the long-dutiful one is to be turned out for misbehavior, without even a chance to explain herself. Seema has stolen her mother as well. She tells herself she cannot forgive her sister, even if it means she cannot ask for forgiveness herself.
There should be taxis around the corner, two blocks away, and she begins dragging her suitcase in that direction. But first she must, she will, say goodbye—this could be the last time she sees her mother alive. She will not let herself be cheated of this moment too.
She turns around, sees Nafeesa following her. Tahera waits till her mother catches up.
They walk to the sound of suitcase wheels rumbling over the uneven pavement and the slap of Nafeesa’s slippers against her feet. The street is dark except for dull light bleeding out of a few lit doorways and bright white halos under the occasional streetlamps. When will her mother say something? Under one of the halos, Tahera allows herself a quick glance. Nafeesa’s blank gaze is on the pavement, as though mesmerized by the patterns there. She’s accompanying Tahera mindlessly, stopping when she stops, stepping off the pavement to cross the street when Tahera does. Her mother has escaped to some other world, become lost there.
Now they’re near the bustle of the main street. Time is running out, and Tahera has only to reach that brightly lit corner for her world to be altered, perhaps irrevocably. Say something, Ammi, she wants to cry out. She prays for something to change the course she’s on—perhaps she won’t find a taxi, perhaps she’s too late for the last flight to Dallas, perhaps she’s left her purse behind and cannot buy a ticket or board the airplane—even as she realizes that it’s in her power to turn back. Yet how powerless she feels.
At the street corner, she rummages through her handbag: she does have her credit cards and license. Is there anything she’s left behind? The only thing that comes to mind is the book of poetry Seema had given her. She’d seen it lying forlorn beside the Quran but had not packed it. Forlorn! The very word is like a bell to toll her back to herself.
And here is an empty yellow taxi drawing up at the traffic light. Is it a vision or a waking dream? Automatically she raises her hand to flag it down.
“To the airport.” Her voice is surprisingly firm, yet appears to be spoken by someone else, not her. Is she awake or asleep?
She cannot bear to look at her mother. The driver—Middle Eastern, maybe even a Muslim, she thinks inconsequentially—springs open the trunk and swings her suitcase into its depths. Deprived of its weight she feels untethered, as if she could float up into the fog-hazed skies to join the fading moon, leaving the streets, the lights, the city’s inhabitants—her mother and sister—behind.
The driver thumbs open the passenger door for her and climbs back into the car. She turns, finally, toward her mother in a hungry embrace, almost throwing herself at Nafeesa, as if to not give her a chance to resist. She buries her face in her mother’s hair. She would like to press Ammi into her body, to inhale Ammi into her lungs, to kiss Ammi’s cheeks and eyes and forehead and hands, to memorize the feel of every inch of her skin.
What she still cannot bring herself to do is meet her mother’s eyes.
“I must go,” she mumbles into Nafeesa’s hair, fighting a sudden and terrible urge to justify her decision. She cannot maintain the embrace any longer without breaking down. She releases Nafeesa, then scampers into the taxi, pulling the door behind her with extra force, afraid her mother might follow her inside. The crash resounds in the cab, and the driver asks, “Were you trying to break the door?”
She doesn’t reply. She has her face pressed to the window, her eyes fixed on the figure at the street corner: small, crumpled, and diminishing, while the moon continues to stalk her.
Say: You who tread a different path! I do not revere what you revere. Nor do you revere what I revere. I shall never revere what you have revered. Nor will you want to revere what I revere—
To you your path, and to me mine—
Grandmother, where are you? What’s keeping you? Please return soon. There’s hope yet: there’s life in us still, and blood still trickles through your daughter’s veins.
Her hand, still warm and capable of grasping, would, if it were cold and in the grave, so haunt your days and chill your remaining nights that you would wish your own heart dry of blood, just so in her veins red life might stream again and your conscience be calmed.
See, here it is—she holds out her hand, she cries out to you.
My mother’s last conscious moments with me: She struggles up in the dark of her bedroom, unable to comprehend what has woken her. The liquid warmth of her blood is a shock, but so familiar from her childhood that she presumes herself in Chennai, waking up to a familiar if infrequent deluge.
“Abba,” she calls out, “Ammi—”
The blood has soaked through her clothes to the sheets, and she pulls her knees in to escape the wet patch, even though in the dark she can’t make out its extent. But her own body prevents her, a protrusion growing out of her, solid, globe-like, unexpected. It’s then she panics, awash in realization, one thought screaming through her mind: Ishraaq!
For one long paralyzed minute she wills Bill to be here, to help her out of this puddle of blood and carry her away, as he’d done once before. But, of course, Bill is no longer by her side, and neither is Leigh, and Tahera has left, and she’s sent Fiaz away and locked her mother out. Her father is oceans away. She’s all alone, like she’d always feared.
She fumbles for the switch of the bedside lamp. Her hand strikes a vase and sends it crashing down—first the splash of water, then the shattering, loud in the confines of the room. She forgoes the hunt for light and lurches out of bed, her only thought now to get out of the room toward help—for her baby, her baby!—for whom she would bear the pain of stepping on glass, though she tries to avoid where she expects the shards to be.
But it is the water that undoes her, slimy from the stems of calla lilies soaking in it for two days. The first hobbled step on the slippery hardwood floor, and her foot slides. She teeters for a moment, for the second time in a week, poised as if time itself has paused, and then her world pitches backward. Her hands flail, seeking a reprieve, something to intervene, but this time there is no sister to pull her to safety. Her head strikes the bedside table.
Her last gesture before she loses consciousness: one hand strokes feebly the dome of my world, offering and seeking comfort.
Oh, that each moment could be an age. Then we could live long in little space, and Time itself would be annihilated.
Grandmother, you’re sitting on the front steps of Seema’s building. When you return from seeing your younger daughter off, you find the door locked—it locked automatically behind you. There’s no response when you buzz Seema’s apartment, and you decide to sit down for a while, because it occurs to you that you don’t want to return immediately to Seema’s home. You will rue this lapse soon, Grandmother, you will beat yourself up over it.
The truth is, Grandmother, just as you couldn’t find it in you to be angry with your husband all those years ago, you can’t fault Tahera for her departure now. You don’t disagree with everything Tahera has said. Though you want to be, you’re not yet entirely comfortable with all the choices Seema has made. And you’re not unaware of Seema’s shortcomings—unlike your husband, you’ve mostly had a clear-eyed understanding of your elder daughter’s sometimes manipulative and self-serving nature. Some of Tahera’s accusations have insinuated new misgivings in your mind, which you don’t know what to make of yet.
In your defense, Grandmother, you’ve had only a few hours to digest the reality of what your elder daughter is asking of you for the second time.
“I’d rather have no daughter,” her father had proclaimed the first time, during one of their many rancorous fights on Seema’s last visit from England, “than one who makes me hang my head in shame.”
“I cannot lead a life of falsehood,” your daughter had declaimed in reply, “just to save your face.”
What life she wanted to lead, you didn’t ask then—because you couldn’t imagine that life as being anything other than impossible, unhappy, fruitless. Even the words to describe it—homosexual, lesbian—have sibilant, sinister overtones. You refused to use the words and dismissed the matter as another of Seema’s attempts to shock you. You reproached her for her willfulness, you begged her father for forgiveness on her behalf.
Even on the morning you found Seema gone—her room bare, her clothes and suitcase missing, pale rectangles on the wall where her favorite photos used to be—you didn’t take her seriously, thinking it a ploy to bring her father around. You thought she’d gone to your sister’s house, where she’d been spending a lot of time during that trip. Only when you learned she was not with Halima did you start panicking.
You’ve seen today—finally, at the dinner with Seema’s partner and friend—the contours of the life Seema could lead. But you’ve not been given time to grapple with the knowledge; you’ve once again been asked to pick sides, this time between the two daughters you’d hoped to bring together as your last act of motherly consideration. The rift you’d come to heal has ripped open wider than it had been before.
You want some time alone with your sorrow—your multiple failures as a mother—before you face your elder daughter again.
Presently you rouse yourself. You press the buzzer and speak into what looks like the intercom. Still no response. You’re more irritated than alarmed—Seema has locked herself in her room and perhaps can’t hear the buzzer. You know none of the neighbors; you gather your courage and buzz the floors below and above. A man responds to your second attempt. He grunts at your flurried explanation of being locked out and buzzes you in.
At least the apartment is open. The smell of biryani overwhelms you as soon as you enter. You look into the kitchen: dishes and plates as they were left, remains of an unfinished dinner. You cannot bear to see these signs of a ruined evening. You had such hopes.
You clear the table, scrape the food off the plates into the garbage. As for the dishes and the biryani—will anyone have the desire any longer to eat them? Still, you can’t throw them away. You make space for them in the fridge.
Only then do you knock on Seema’s bedroom door. First timidly, then peremptorily. You rattle the doorknob, you push against the door. It won’t budge, and there’s no reaction from inside.
Now you’re frantic: you call out her name, hysterically almost, a heavy hand squeezing your heart.
What are you to do? You are alone, thousands of miles from anything you’re familiar with, with no idea how the world works here, no knowledge of its rules and protocols. Whom to call?
Tahera may be at the airport already, and it would take her a while to get back, and—yes, Fiaz, but alas, you don’t have Fiaz’s number. You do have Bill’s number though.
Your hand trembles as you fumble for it. You pray that he will pick up, that he will listen to you, despite what happened yesterday. Was it only yesterday? The first ring, then the second, then the third cut short as Bill answers, and before you hear his voice—
“Son, son,” you sob in Urdu, because for what you have to say, and even for what you can’t find the words to say, it’s the only language that moves your tongue at this moment. But, of course, he doesn’t understand you. You panic that he may hang up, you force your tongue slowly around words that feel foreign to it now, you force yourself to give voice to your fears clearly and specifically.
Yes, Bill says, yes, he will be over, they should call 911, call an ambulance, he’ll call them, what’s the address again, is there anyone else in the building to help, he’ll be over, don’t worry, it will be all right, it will be all right, it will be all right.
You want to believe him.
How do the next minutes go? You must have run upstairs to the neighbor who let you in and somehow convinced him to help. Did he try to break the bedroom door down before the ambulance arrived? He must have tried, he must have given up. Did the ambulance come screaming down the street pulsing blue and white? You must have been watching out for it on the fire escape, you must have run down to meet the two paramedics stepping out of it. You must have shown them the way up. The three of them—the paramedics and the neighbor—must have forced the bedroom door open. Someone must have turned the bedroom lights on.
Seema is on the floor beside the bed, lying on her side. Her head is raised, propped up at an unnatural angle in the niche between the bed and the dresser, her eyes closed. One hand is thrust up, as if trying to hold on to the side of the bed. A dark red smear on the sheets trails off at the edge of the bed where her fingers curl. Under the curve of her belly, which looks enormous, as if she were pregnant with a lifetime’s worth of babies, a thick wide pool glistens red-black against the hardwood floors. Merging into the pool of blood is a colorless pool of water, with scattered flowers—the calla lilies—lying in it, among shards of glass.
You stagger back to the splintered door, unable to stand any closer, unable to take your eyes off her, unable to watch. The two paramedics bustle around her, setting her on a stretcher. They call out to each other instructions and observations that you can’t comprehend. They ask questions that you don’t realize are directed at you, because they’re looking at your daughter. The neighbor repeats them to you, nudging you out of your trance.
You must have tried to answer their questions. They tell you that your daughter’s pulse is present, though weak, since she’s lost much blood. They think they can still hear my heart beating. They won’t know for sure until they get to the ER. You clutch at the small glimmer of hope their words give you.
They must have carried the stretcher down. You must have remembered to grab Seema’s maternity bag before you followed them. You don’t remember locking the apartment but do remember noticing for the first time the color of the carpet that covers the stairs—crimson—and the dark mahogany-red stain of the handrails.
Bill must have arrived by then. You feel relieved: you’re no longer alone. At least there’s one other person to share the unbearable weight of this moment with you. You embrace him, grateful he’s here. Bill must have asked what he can do to help.
Call Tahera, you tell him. You must have been able to recall Tahera’s number. You wish you had Fiaz’s number, and Leigh’s, too. You wonder what your husband is doing right then.
One of the paramedics says you can ride with them. Someone must have helped you into the ambulance and handed you Seema’s bag. Bill says he will follow in his car, he must have found out where they were taking you.
The ambulance screams through San Francisco’s streets to the hospital. Yet how long the ride seems to last. The inside of the ambulance is lined with equipment of every kind but apparently none that can help your daughter. Was it only two nights ago, that dinner on the rooftop beneath that full promising moon, when you’d declared with so much certainty, “Nothing will happen”?
You imagine her calling out to you as her blood began to spill out of her body. You recall that day from long ago—the day your newly menstruating daughter bled uncontrollably—when you attempted to soothe her fears as she lay crying, her head in your lap. Both these daughters, the past and present Seema, lie on the stretcher beside you now, as do all your imagined versions of me, and you would give anything—your blood, and your life, too, for what use is what remains of your life anymore?—anything to keep us with the living.