The Sweetness of Tears (7 page)

One day, I drove home from a party in the early hours of the morning, in a thoroughly inebriated state. I was veering and swerving my way home, missing turns and running stoplights. I turned fast onto one street, too fast and too late to stop when I saw them. A woman and a small child.

I remember the sound of the screech of the brakes. I remember her face, caught in the headlights, her scream, the sickening thud of steel hitting vulnerable flesh, her body flying and then disappearing off to my side. The car was stopped. I pushed open the door and stood to see what—who—I’d hit. The woman was crumpled on the ground, the child kneeling beside her, howling. Men started to spill out from a mosque up the street, where the dawn prayer had just ended. I heard shouting. Someone stopped to check on my victim. The rest of the men gathered menacingly into a clump, heading in my direction. I didn’t think. I jumped into the car, turned the engine, and fled, remembering nothing of the rest of the way home.

When I got there, I honked for the
chowkidar
—the gatekeeper—to let me in at the gate. Bleary-eyed and resigned—he was used to my odd-hour homecomings, along with the regular payments I made him to lie to my grandfather about them—he opened the gate. I drove in and parked on the driveway, noticing, for the first time, the race going on in my chest, between heartbeats and ragged breaths. Sharif Muhammad came in from his prayers just behind me, walking into the compound by the pedestrian gate. He saw me sitting in the car, my head pressed against the steering wheel.

“Sadiq Baba? Are you all right?” he asked loudly, knocking at my window.

I raised my head and looked at him. I must have looked wild-eyed. I didn’t answer him. He reached to open my door, which was unlocked, not even properly closed.

“What’s wrong, Sadiq Baba? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I sat there, unable to move.

He sighed, a long, hard sigh of disapproval. The
chowkidar
had not felt obligated to keep my secrets from Sharif Muhammad, who lectured me regularly about my drinking, words I ignored, words I laughed at, in his face. Sharif Muhammad reached into the car and helped me get out, mistaking the reason for my shaky state, understandably—the smell of my breath must have been all the evidence he needed. He was walking me toward the door of the house, trying to get me to speak all the while, when he stopped, suddenly, at the front of the car.

“What’s this, Sadiq Baba?” he asked sharply.

I looked down at where he was pointing—at the front bumper of the car, bashed and bloody. I heard myself moan and realized that I had been moaning all along.

“That’s blood! Whose blood, Sadiq Baba?” He squeezed the arm of mine that he held, hard enough to hurt. “What did you do?”

I started crying, unable to answer. I closed my eyes and saw them again. The woman on the pavement. The child kneeling beside her.

Sharif Muhammad shook me and asked again, “Whose blood? Who did you hit? Where did it happen?”

I mumbled an answer, suddenly remembering the street I’d been on. In Karachi, directions are given by landmark, because most of the streets have no name. So, I gave him directions that way—naming an ice cream shop, a newsstand, a bakery as signposts for him to follow.

“Did you run away, Sadiq Baba?”

His question was a formality. Later, I would be ashamed at the presumption in his words. He knew damned well I had run, without having to ask. And it didn’t surprise him that I had.

He left me at the front door of the house, shoving me inside.

“I will go. I will see what happened.” His voice was harsh and gentle at the same time, waylaying the objections he thought I might offer.

This time, at least, I didn’t lower myself to his expectations. I nodded gratefully, still shaking. This was a line that he offered, I knew, to keep me from drowning. “Yes. Yes, go see, Sharif Muhammad. See if they need anything.” As soon as I said the words, I moaned again, out loud. The tone of my voice sickened me. The privilege in it. The patronage.

I made my way to bed and fell asleep in my air-conditioned room, oblivious to the heat of the rising sun, oblivious to the life or death of the woman I’d hit, to the grief of the child I may have orphaned.

I woke up from my dreamless, pampered sleep and made my way out into the lounge. Both of their backs toward me, I came upon Sharif Muhammad, returned from his errand, filling my grandfather in on the consequences of what I’d done.

“She’s dead. Leaving behind a little boy.”

“How old is the boy?” Dada asked.

“Four or five. Younger than Sadiq Baba was when he came to live with you.”

Dada stopped short his pacing, his hands behind his back. He frowned at Sharif Muhammad’s words.

Sharif Muhammad didn’t flinch. He said, “I left the boy, still crying, in the care of the old imam of the
masjid
. The
masjid
on the street where his mother was killed. They will try to find out who she is—was. Who her people are.”

“Hmm. Yes, the boy must be restored to those he belongs to. We’ll do what we can for him.” Dada resumed his pacing, already moving on from the matter of the boy.

Sharif Muhammad, too, switched gears. “And what about Sadiq Baba?”

My grandfather frowned again, unhappy with his servant’s tone of voice—a tone I had never heard him use before with his employer. Defiant. Interrogative. Peremptory.

“It seems you have an opinion you wish to express, Sharif Muhammad.”

Sharif Muhammad took a step forward. He took his skull cap off his head and crumpled it in his hands. “Yes, Mubarak Sayt. I have something more to say.” He stopped, as if to line up words he had amassed in an arsenal he had long waited to deploy.

“Then say it, Sharif Muhammad. Say what you will.” Dada’s voice was menacingly stern, belying the invitation he offered.

“It is time, Sayt. To reckon with the dirty deed you sent me to do for you more than nine years ago. This is something I should have said then, but I didn’t. You have been a good master. Fair and just. I have not forgotten any of your generosities over the years. I carry them with me, always, in a heart that is grateful. You took care of my sister, found her employment when Deena Bibi left for
Amreeka
. But what you made me a party to, when you took Sadiq Baba away from his mother, was not right.”

“Sharif Muhammad. The matter is none of your concern.” Dada’s voice was final. I thought he would stop there. Sharif Muhammad didn’t budge. He stood, silently, forcing Dada to utter more. “I was in my rights. The boy belonged here. You are a religious man. You know that what I say is true. Ask any mullah. Your Sunni ones will tell you the same, I am sure.”

“I don’t care what any mullah says,” Sharif Muhammad said. “I have a mind. And I know how piety and religion can mask the truth of what justice calls for. You took that boy away from his mother. That was wrong. You caused his mother grief—a good woman, who did nothing to deserve what life handed her. And now
kismat
has played out its retribution. Your grandson is the reason another boy’s mother has been taken from him.”

“These are matters you don’t understand, Sharif Muhammad. The law was on my side. The law of the nation and the law of God.”

“The law of the nation? What is that? Nothing but a plaything of big people. The law of God? When law is separated from justice, Sayt, that is not the law of any god I worship. That is when the true test of faith and wisdom comes—that is our opportunity to shine the light of humanity and compassion on the misfortunes we inflict on one another. There are no laws you can quote me that will change the way I see it. And what have you done with the boy? By separating him from the love of his mother? If heaven, for him, lies under her feet—as the Prophet, peace be upon him, said—then you have kept him far away from heaven, casting him on the path to hell. Send him to her, Sayt. He is out of control. Even Asma Bibi, your own daughter, will not let her son spend time with him anymore. The tragedy he has caused today is only the beginning—this, I promise. The boy needs his mother. Has needed her all these years. Send him back to her, I beg you. It may be too late already to undo the damage. But give him a chance at least. All your wealth and possessions
have
done and
will
do nothing for him. He is a coward. He ran over a mother and ran away from what he did. He will always run away.”

“Enough, Sharif Muhammad! You are a good man. You have always served me well. For this, I will forgive you today’s impudence. Leave me now!” Dada roared.

But what Sharif Muhammad said must have had an effect. Two weeks later, Dada put me on a plane to America. At the airport in Los Angeles, I saw my mother for the first time in six years. She was with her husband, the crocodile, and her daughter, Sabah. When she hugged me—her stiff-backed stranger of a son—her face was wet with tears. She took my hand and put it on her face, smiling through them. “See? These are sweet tears, Sadiq. So very, very sweet.” I stepped back from her, because she was so unfamiliar. Even the smell of her was foreign. But she welcomed me into her home. She and Sabah and Umar, the crocodile. But it was
their
home. Not mine.

While I was there, only a year—until I graduated, early, from high school and went away from them to college—I met Jo’s mother. Angela. I was still fifteen, new to America, living with my mother though I had already, long before, learned to live without her.

W
hen I was done telling Jo my story, on that day she was born to me, I looked up to catch an expression on her face that was plain and easy to understand, despite my having never learned to read her stranger’s features. She had come to ask who I was. And the answer I had given her was one that she did not understand. I realized, almost immediately, that what I had told her would drive her away and out of my reach.

Since then, I have tried and tried to call her. I keep thinking of more I should have said and also of what I shouldn’t. Her departure had been abrupt, as sudden as her arrival, coming before it was my turn to listen. That, too, keeps me awake at night—the questions I would have asked, which surely I had the right to ask, but which she gave me no opportunity to voice.

The boxes in my living room are all gone. I have delayed my trip twice already. Today, when I called her, she picked up. She was sorry, but there was nothing more she wanted from me. She was glad to have met me, she said, very graciously. But that was it.

Jo

Drop, drop, slow tears,

And bathe those beauteous feet,

Which brought from Heaven

The news and Prince of Peace.

Phineas Fletcher, “A Litany”

F
or a while, that day with Sadiq, I lost myself—dizzy in the spiral of his stories inside of stories. It took a lot to keep my face clear of all that I felt in response to what he told me—pity, disgust, revulsion. Until the end, when his eyes—dark brown and dominant—came back into the room and found mine, staking a claim I had no intention of granting. I left him as fast as I could, chased away by the questions I didn’t give him a chance to ask.

I knew what those questions would have been. About my mother. But I didn’t want to talk about her. I didn’t want to hear about her, either. Not from him. To see her through his eyes would have been too much—making her as alien to me as he was.

He might have asked about Dad, too. Scenes with him flashed through my mind. Going into his workshop when I was little, when I knew Mom was too tired to listen to me. He’d be sawing or hammering away. When he’d see me, he’d put down his tools, clear a space on the counter for me to sit on, lift me up to place me there. I’d start talking. He’d resume working and listen—his hands busy, his head nodding. His hands would pause as he looked at me, from time to time, smiling, laughing, or frowning to let me know he was still paying attention. He didn’t talk much himself. His favorite joke was that I never gave him a chance to. Eventually, the sight of those hands working would catch my attention so fully that I’d run out of words.

One day, when Dad and I were in the car on our way to the library, we stopped at a red light and saw a homeless guy standing at the corner. He was holding up a sign—homeless vet. Dad pulled the car over and took the guy with us into the coffee shop around the corner. My father bought him a meal, me sitting next to Dad, sipping on a milk shake, my eyes staring at the long-haired, bearded, scary-looking stranger across from us at the table. When we were done, we took the guy back to his corner and went on to the library as if nothing had happened.

Except, when he turned the key to start the car, Dad said, very softly, “That could have been me. It would have been. But for your mother. She saved me. Brought me to Christ. Gave me a reason to live. Two reasons. You and your brother.”

My brother. Sadiq would have asked if I had any brothers or sisters. And Chris was off-limits. Because of what I’d promised Mom.

The minute I got back to my dorm room from Sadiq’s place, while they were still fresh in my mind, I wrote down all the words I could remember, the foreign ones from his story, adding them to the lists of words in my special notebook, which I’d packed and brought with me from home, on a fresh page, under a new heading: Urdu—though I remembered he’d mentioned Arabic, too, and wasn’t sure which words were which.

Amee
    mother

Dadi
    grandmother

Dada
    grandfather

Zakira
    preacher?

Rickshaw
    motor tricycle

Majlis
    ?

Mushk
    water bag

Noha
    religious song—sad

Muharram
    month

Shia

Sunni

Jamun
    kind of fruit

Chacha
    uncle

Dupatta
    scarf?

I wrote down names, too, which was something I hadn’t done on any of the lists I’d made before. Sharif Muhammad. Deena. Jafar. Abbas. Husain. Sakina. I wrote them as a way to unpack the images Sadiq had loaded on me, not because I wanted to remember the people he’d talked about.

When I was done with the new list, I turned over the pages to look at the old ones—collections of words in Tagalog, Mandarin, Swahili, and Spanish. These were gifts from my grandmother—not the paper or the notebook I had written them in, but the words themselves.

Grandma Faith, whose husband left her when my mother was little, began traveling the world when her son—my uncle Ron—was away at college, and when her daughter—my mother—started high school. She left Mom behind in Great-grandpa and Great-grandma Peltons’ care.

Mom said that Grandma Faith was a gypsy at heart. “I suppose it’s in her blood.” She sighed. “She was born out there,” Mom said, waving her hand around vaguely, lumping all places beyond our borders together—all of them a little scary. Borders were something we were acutely aware of, living in the suburbs of San Diego. But only as something that should be sealed tighter than they were. We’d never been across to Mexico. Never gone out of the country at all, until the big trip Chris and I took that summer, before I started college.

Grandma Faith was an oddball in our family, exuding an exotic air that she must have absorbed from years of traveling. She didn’t like to be called Grandma. At least not in English. She gave herself a new title every year, teaching me and Chris the word for “grandmother” in whatever language she’d spent time learning on her most recent travels.

One year, she was Abuela Faith. She’d been in Central America that year. The next year, the year she spent some months in East Africa, she was Bibi Faith, which is how you say “grandmother” in Swahili. Another year, coming back from the Philippines, she was Lola Faith.

Every time Grandma Faith came home, she taught us the new word we were supposed to call her and listened to us repeat it, wincing a little at the way Chris mangled the words, nodding her approval at the sounds I made.

“You’ve got an ear for languages, Jo,” she’d tell me. “It’s a gift. Some people have got it and some don’t.” Then she’d quiz us on the words she’d taught before. The different words for “grandmother.” Numbers, one to ten. Colors. Hello and good-bye. I always remembered the words, making lists in my notebook from when I was ten, studying them before Abuela/Bibi/Lola Faith was due home for a visit. Chris never did. It was a game to him, the novelty wearing off quickly so that he’d forget and slip back into calling her Grandma after a day or two. Not me. I’d keep it up until she’d leave on another trip.

Last year, just home from Taiwan, she was Wàipó Faith.

“That’s maternal grandmother, mind you,” Grandma Faith had said. “There’s another word for your grandma on your dad’s side. A lot of languages are like that—you can tell exactly how someone’s related to you, on your mother’s side or your father’s, by blood or by marriage—by what you call them, all the relationships very specifically defined, the words themselves like a family tree. I guess that says something about the importance of family in some cultures. Something we could all stand to emulate. Instead of just talking, all the time, about
family values
—only thing I ever saw being valued when I’ve heard those two words getting thrown around is the act of not minding your own business.”

That comment, like a lot of what Grandma Faith said, set Mom’s eyes rolling in her brother’s direction. Once, I heard Uncle Ron say to my mother, “Mom just has a talent for going native, Angie. I suppose that’s a good thing, in her line of work. But I know how you feel. I worry sometimes. Just like you do. That she goes too far—approaching her work like some kind of evangelical version of Margaret Meade.” That was a reference that went over my head, until I looked it up later. Margaret Meade, the woman who made anthropology as much about learning
from
other cultures as learning
about
them, making all values relative, leaving no room for the absolute. “It also makes her a bit of a stranger to us, I suppose. I love her. But I don’t always understand where she’s coming from.” He chuckled. Mom just shook her head.

Grandma Faith was the reason I’d transferred from Christ Academy, where the foreign language program wasn’t that great, to the public high school, where it was. I’d taken four years of Spanish and French there and counted myself as pretty fluent in both. Grandma Faith was also the reason I had decided to go to college in Chicago, to a university famous for the wide choice of foreign languages it offered—ready to venture out of Europe, linguistically speaking, and into more exotic, less Romantic languages involving whole new sets of letters and sounds that I’d have to memorize and master.

I ran an eye down the list of words I’d collected in Swahili, one of the classes I was enrolled in, which was starting the next day, a long list because of a trip Chris and I had taken earlier in the summer.

Right after high school graduation, before I’d asked Mom the truth about the color of my eyes, Chris and I had gone to Africa with a bunch of kids from church and camp, Uncle Ron in charge, to meet up with Grandma Faith and the missionary organization she’d been working with for the last few years. Grandma Faith coordinated the trip on the African end, to a slum town on the outskirts of Nairobi in Kenya. They spoke Swahili there, so, of course, Grandma Faith made us call her Bibi Faith. The mission had been simple. To give shoes to kids.

“It’s not that there’s anything wrong with going barefoot,” Grandma Faith had said. “I think there’s something true and honest about having your bare feet grounded on the earth. Huck Finn had it right when he resisted getting ‘civilized’ by the widow, kicking off his shoes every chance he got. Except, for some of these kids, here in this town, it’s a matter of life and death. This isn’t the banks of the Mississippi. Right near here, there’s a huge garbage pit, where a lot of trash from the city gets dumped. Some of the kids have to go through those garbage pits, looking for food and stuff to salvage and sell. And in those pits, there are needles—infected needles. These kids get stuck by one of those and they can get AIDS or all kinds of other diseases. So shoes are important for them. I know that foot-washing has become a fashionable thing to do on missions. But here, it’s not just about humbling yourself, or reenacting a scene from the Bible—though that’s definitely part of the experience. Here, you’re providing a necessary service, a real-life mission, not just something symbolic.”

Before we handed out the shoes, we washed and disinfected the feet of those little kids, the way Jesus washed the feet of the disciples at the Last Supper. It
was
humbling. Beautiful. Like something right out of the Bible. Some of the kids would laugh and laugh, because our hands on their feet tickled. And, at the end, the way those kids’ eyes lit up when we showed them how to tie their shoelaces!

I helped Bibi Faith—all the kids here called her that—with her work in the mobile clinic on wheels, parked in the slum. She saw patients and vaccinated kids, making even the most frightened ones, the little babies, laugh at the voices that she put into the mouths of the silly puppets she used to distract them. I knew this was what I wanted to do—not the nursing, because needles made me queasy. Just the interaction. The communication across languages. I understood why Grandma Faith had such a hard time staying home.

I didn’t want to go home, either, deciding not to leave with Chris and Uncle Ron and the other kids from church, as we’d planned to do at the end of two weeks in Kenya.

During the second week of our stay, I told Chris, “Bibi Faith is going up north, to Ethiopia. To some villages out in the Omo River Valley.”

“I know,” said Chris—red-faced, nose peeling from sunburn, the same way mine was. He was thinner, too, because he’d had a hard time with the food.

“I want to go with her.”

“What? PPSYC’s starting right after we get back. You’ve got to come home.”

“I’ll skip camp this year.”

“But— Mom and Dad need us at camp.”

Mom and Dad hadn’t come with us to Africa. Not that Mom had seemed interested anyway. She’d used camp as an excuse—all the preparations that needed to be done before it started, all the activities she was planning for the Progress Course this year. “They’ll do fine without us.”

“Us?”

“Stay back with me, Chris. I already talked to Bibi Faith and Uncle Ron. They’re okay with it.”

“But— I want to go home. I mean— it’s been a great experience. But I want to go home now.”

Chris had been more homesick than me. But he’d enjoyed himself with the kids—able to communicate with them without words. By the time I’d find the words in my phrase book to ask them their names, he’d already be cracking them up with his funny faces, kicking a ball around with them in the dirt.

“Come on, Chris. It’ll be awesome to stay back. They speak different languages out in the villages. We’ll get to learn new words.”

“You mean
you’ll
get to learn new words. I’m not the nerd with the notebook. No way, Jo. I’m going home. Just like we planned. Two weeks. That’s enough for me.”

In the end, I wasn’t the only one to stay back. Uncle Ron stayed, too—along with the team he’d unexpectedly brought with him. His camera crew, his makeup man, his production team—a whole media entourage that I hadn’t realized his television show had grown into. They were the reason the trip ended on a bit of a sour note.