American Dervish: A Novel (3 page)

Then the lawyer turned and walked out.

Mina cried for days and nights and weeks to follow. Yet, devastated as she was by Hamed’s brutality—and terrified by his menacing promise to take her son away someday—when she stared down into her infant’s eyes, she nevertheless cooed to him with the name that her now-ex-husband had chosen without her:

She called the boy Imran.

I first heard that Mother wanted to bring Mina to America in the winter of 1981. I was ten. The hostages in Iran had just come home, and American flags were burning on the nightly news. It was a Saturday afternoon, teatime, and my parents were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table, silently sipping from their cups. I was sitting at the other end, my back to the glass of milk Mother had set before me. I was watching a half dozen flies butting at the window overlooking the backyard.

“You know,
kurban,
your Mina-auntie might be coming to stay with us,” Mother finally said. “
Kurban?
”

I turned to her. “When?” I asked.

“The sooner, the better. Her family is driving her
crazy
back home. And that boy needs to get out of the country…or his father will take him. The truth is, they
both
need to get out.”

Mother paused, glancing over at Father. He was thumbing through a fishing magazine, oblivious.

I looked back at the flies, buzzing blackly along the cold glass.

“All these flies! Where are they coming from?!” Mother suddenly shouted out. “And there’s so many of them up in the attic! God only knows how they got up there!”

Father looked up from his magazine, annoyed. “You say that like we haven’t heard it, like it’s the first time you’re saying it. It’s not the first time. I’m dealing with it.”

“I wasn’t talking to you, Naveed.”

“Then who are you talking to?” Father asked, sharply. “Because the only other person here is the boy, and I don’t know what he has to do with it.”

Mother stared at him, her face blank. Father’s hazel-green eyes glared coldly back at her. Then he buried himself again in his fishing magazine.

Mother got up from the table and went to the fridge. “It’s not going to be easy,
kurban.
Even if we could arrange it, who knows if her parents will let her come. Sometimes I wonder if they just want to keep her around so they have someone to torture. You know what her father did? He sold her books! Can you imagine? Mina without her books!”

Mother glanced at Father, then looked at me, expectant. I knew she wanted me to say something, but I didn’t know what to say.

“Why did he sell her books?” I finally asked.

“Because he thinks
books
are the reason for the divorce. Books encouraged her
fast mouth…
that’s what he always said about her intelligence.
‘All it does is give her a fast mouth …’
” Mother sneaked another glance at Father.

He just shifted in place, turning a page in his magazine.

Mother grunted as she pulled a pitcher from the fridge. “Hayat, her intelligence has been the curse of her life. When a Muslim woman is too smart, she pays the price for it. And she pays the price not in money,
behta,
but in
abuse.
” Mother paused, waiting for Father to react. He didn’t. “You know what Freud said,
behta?
That brilliant man?”

I didn’t know much more about Freud than that Mother liked to tell me what he said from time to time. “He said silence
kills.
If you don’t talk about things…you get all
screwed up
inside.” She stole another look at Father.

Now he looked up, but not because of anything she’d said. He threw back his head and emptied the rest of his tea into his mouth. Mother slammed the fridge door shut behind him. Father set down the teacup and turned another page.

“I’m telling you these things because today you are my
behta,
my child…but one day you’ll be a man. And these are things you should know…”

I looked back at the window, behind which a scarlet sun was setting beneath tufts of purple-pink clouds hanging about the horizon like clumps of cotton candy. The flies were still stabbing at the glass.

“They are
so
annoying. Where are they coming from?” Mother complained again as she poured.

Again, silence. Until I finally heard Father’s voice behind me: “Here.”

I turned to find him holding out the rolled-up magazine toward me. “Kill them and get it over with.”

“Don’t make him do that,” Mother said in an odd, pleading tone. “You do it, Naveed.”

Father didn’t budge, still pointing the magazine at me.

I took it and turned to the window. Aiming, I swatted. The glass shook. One fly fell; the others sputtered frantically. It took me a dozen more blows to get them all. When I was finished, I looked down, where the flies lay dead on the kitchen linoleum.

“Good job,” Father said, taking the magazine back. Standing, he tore the cover off and crumpled it, sticking the ball into his empty cup of tea. Then he walked out.

Mother dumped her unfinished glass of water in the sink. “Next time, you don’t do what he says,” she hissed at me. “You do what I say.”

My parents’ marriage was difficult almost from the start. They’d met and fallen in love in Lahore, while they were both in college, Mother studying psychology, Father completing medical school. They married, and Father—who topped his medical class—was offered a spot in a program that brought him to Wisconsin to train as a neurologist. Mother left school to join him—it was always her great regret that she didn’t wait to finish her degree—ending up far from home, in Milwaukee’s rural westerly suburbs, a stone’s throw from dairy country, where the landscape was flat as a table and covered for months with snow. It was a place she didn’t understand. And she was with a man who started cheating on her almost as soon as they arrived in America. In short, by the time I was ten, she’d been miserable for years.

A week or so after the episode with the flies, I awoke in my bed in the middle of the night, not sure if I was dreaming. My room glowed and pulsed with a flickering orange light. Outside, people were shouting. The roar of an engine seemed to shake the air. I got up from bed and went to the window. Through a veil of swirling flakes, I made out a chaotic sight: a car in flames, and beyond it, two bright beams of light through which figures in black came and went. It took me a moment to realize it was a fire truck. The firemen were scattered about the flames, pulling at a white hose. All at once, there was a loud hissing sound, and the white hose stiffened along uneven joints, spewing an unruly, milky foam.

I still wasn’t sure if I was dreaming.

“Get back in bed,” I heard behind me. I turned to see Mother in the doorway, her eyes—like the car outside—ablaze. “One of your father’s white bitches set fire to his Mercedes.” She approached, coming to stand alongside me. Together, we watched the firefighters douse the flames. It didn’t take long. Almost at once, the fire was out, and the car’s wet, windowless carcass was giving off weak smoke.

Mother turned to me, her eyes still gleaming, though the room was now dark. “That’s why I always tell you,
behta…
Don’t end up with a white woman.”

She led me back to bed and tucked me in with a kiss. When she was gone, I got up and went back to the window. I spied Father’s tall, hulking form marching through the falling snow. He led the firefighters into the house. I crawled back into bed and fell asleep to the murmur of men’s voices drifting up the stairs.

All night, I dreamt of fire.

The next morning, when I came down for breakfast, Father wasn’t there.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked.

“Work,” Mother replied. “Had to take my car,” she added with a satisfied grin as she brought two plates of
paratha
s and eggs to the table.

“
Paratha
s?” I asked. She usually only made
paratha
s on the weekends.

“Eat, sweetie. I know it’s your favorite.”

Mother sat down across from me, tearing a piece of the ghee-soaked fried bread I so loved, and used it to poke at her egg and release the yolk. “Another of his white
prostitutes
decided she was
sick
of his promises,” Mother began. “God only knows what he promised
this
one. He gets drunk and runs his mouth, and probably doesn’t remember a thing he says.” Using the piece of
paratha,
she took a scoopful of the running yolk into her mouth and started to chew.  “
That’s
why we don’t drink,
kurban,
because it
impairs
you. It makes you
foolish.
” Drops of viscous yellow-orange dotted the edges of her lips as she chewed and spoke. “Give a Muslim man a drink and watch him run after white women like a crazed fool!”

I’d been hearing about Father’s mistresses since the night Mother dragged me through the streets of Milwaukee as a five-year-old, searching for Father, who we eventually found at the apartment of a woman he worked with at the hospital; I waited in the stairwell as she and Father shouted at each other on the upstairs landing. Throughout my childhood, Mother spared me little detail about her troubles with Father. And at ten, I already knew myself well enough to know that if I listened too closely to what she said, my blood would start to boil.

I kept my head down, hoping she would lose interest, but that was unlikely. She was buoyant that morning. Even her appearance—usually unkempt, her round face increasingly drawn and gaunt from bitterness, her thin brown hair often tousled well into the evening as if she’d just risen from bed—was different. She’d showered and dressed for the day as if she actually planned to leave the house. “But now he has a chance to do the
right thing,
” she said, breaking off another piece of
paratha.
“Now he’ll have the chance to help someone in need. Your Mina-auntie needs someone to help her and that boy…I just lose sleep every night thinking about what she’s going through. The boy is already four. They have to be thinking
now
about how to get out. Or it will be too late.” She took another bite and chewed, shaking her head. “You don’t humiliate your wife and child in front of the world without
consequence.
He’s not sure about this, he’s not sure about that. Now he doesn’t have a choice. She’s coming and he’s not going to stop it. After last night, he
owes
me.”

“Mom, I’m gonna miss my bus.”

She looked up at the clock. “You have time. Five minutes. Finish your breakfast.”

“I’m not hungry. I have to pack my bag. My homework.”

“Finish your juice.”

I got up from the table and gulped down the rest of my orange juice. Before I could leave, Mother reached out and drew me to her. “
Meri-jaan,
remember: The secret of a happy life is
respect.
Respect for yourself and respect for others. That’s what I learned from my father,
behta,
who you didn’t know…and he was a wise man. You could almost say he wasn’t really even a Muslim man. He was more like a Jew.”

“I have to get my bag ready, Mom,” I whined.

“Okay, okay,” she sighed. I kissed her on the cheek, then  ran off to my room to pack my things for school.

2

A Still, Small Voice

M
other was right. After the episode with Father’s car, she would have no trouble getting him to go along with her plan to bring Mina to Milwaukee. Now it was only Mina’s parents who needed convincing. Mother spent hours on the phone with Rafiq and Rabia Ali, assuring them that their daughter would be well looked after. She would have a place to stay as long as she needed to rebuild her life, and Mother promised to care for Imran, her son, like her own child. But it turned out the assurances Mina’s middle-class parents really wanted had more to do with their daughter’s honor than with her lodgings. For even Western-leaning Muslims like the Alis—Mina’s mother was a huge Elvis fan, and her father an avid consumer of Marlboros and Zane Grey—thought of America not primarily as a land of abundance and opportunity, but of sin, where souls went to be corrupted by the very liberty that so intoxicated the world’s imagination. For people like Mina’s parents, there was no more emblematic image of America’s spiritual corruption than that of the American woman, eager to shed her clothes in front of strangers, emboldened by freedom to cultivate her lust for pleasure and profit. That their daughter might become one of these was the only thing the Alis wished to avoid at all costs.

Or
almost
at all costs, as Father would put it at dinner one night.

“It’s a double standard,” Mother complained, as Father and I munched on chicken
karahi.
“Rafiq wants his sons to come here, but not his daughter. It doesn’t matter if
they
run around with white women, but God forbid
she’s
found looking at a white man.”

“The sons?” Father asked.

“It’s the only reason he’ll even consider it. If she comes, then she can sponsor her younger brothers.”

Father smiled wryly. “So Rafiq is trying to figure out if the cash his sons will make him when they get to America is worth the price of turning their daughter into a whore…”

I didn’t know what the word meant, but before I could ask, Mother leaped in. “Do you think you’re funny? Such a word in front of your own child?”

Father glanced over at me. “The sooner he knows the way the world really works, the better.”

Mother turned to me. “Cover your ears,” she said.

“What?”

“I said cover your ears.”

“Mom…”

“Do it, Hayat.”

Reluctantly, I wiped my curry-covered hands and did as I was told, but it didn’t stop me from hearing what she said to him next:

“Use language like that again in his presence, and I will have you thrown out of the house.
Thrown out,
do you hear me?”