A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

They were told not to question the way God worked, not to think too much into it. That it was a mystery. And she was happy to think of it as such. She pictured a dark sky with the fog in front of it, how her mother had once explained it to her: we don’t have to see past the fog to know there are stars.

What is the use of all this living if we don’t stop once in a while to notice what is actually happening

A heavier silence ensued, both now painfully aware they still shared a language they should have long since forgotten.

Why do things always sound sadder in Urdu? Prettier too.

She likes that they speak to each other in Urdu, how even speaking it feels like access to their secret world, a world where they feel like different people, capable of feelings she could not experience let alone speak of in English.

She told them stories before they went to sleep. The one they liked about when the Prophet split the moon, or the one about the two children who get lost in the woods but find their way home by sticking together and by dropping breadcrumbs.

He attempts to appear as though he wishes he were anywhere but here. He knows it is a lie. This moment. That one glance. The color that rose to her cheeks, the way it suited her—it is the best thing that has happened to him this week.

And when she does speak, when she asks a question so simple—what are you listening to?—he realizes that though he may not have known it until that very moment, he has been waiting his whole life for her to walk through the crowd of whisperers and speak to him.

When you were little and you caught sight of the moon from the car window, did you feel like it was following you?

And what do you see when you stare at the moon?

Does your father’s voice shak...

The moonlight illuminates the white-painted wood that frames his window.

And if she is awake, on the other side of the city, he hopes she can sense that he is awake too.

What is it about caring for another, feeling love, feeling affection, at times desire, that makes one shy?

“Khudahafiz,” he says, which is good-bye, but literally it means in God’s protection I leave you. In His care I trust.

There is a gravity about her and he finds he is not the only one pulled into her orbit.

What was it about an apology that was so difficult? It always felt like it cost something personal and precious.

harder and darker. Until it is so heavy and black it cannot tell good from evil anymore. It cannot even tell that it wants to be good.”

And if not wearing a scarf was a speck, would a new one bloom every day she chose not to?

Will they know that she is the same Hadia, with or without her hair showing?

she feels a strengthening in her aloneness, a comfort in knowing she can rely on herself.

do you pray for yourself and God or do you pray because you’re told to? And before she dismisses the thought, she thinks now she could answer Amar with honesty: I pray for myself, and for God, who is my witness.

She repeats in her mind what she wishes she could utter out loud, but maybe it is the secret of it that gives it power: I hate being your daughter.

She opens her window wide and lets the cool air in. She will cry until she is tired. Until her face swells and her eyes become as red as her nose.

Bright, big moon. Sky dark with patches of lighter blue. And gray clouds, thin streaks of them. Innumerable tiny stars. How can she be upset when the world looks like this?

A plane passes in the sky. After a few minutes, another one. They hum as they move, a tiny red light blinks on one side, a white one on the other. The stars take turns brightening. Her calming voice inside rises to comfort her: It’s okay, it’s okay, you will be all right.

That she could learn something that would change the way she saw the whole world, and her place in it.

There is even the private hope that if she does work as hard as she absolutely can, there is a chance she will be able to sway the outcome of her life, and maybe one day a door will be presented to her, and an opportunity to walk through it.

By now he could not even note the way the hills greened in winter without wanting her there to note it with him.

That night the bright moon hung low in the sky. As a child, Amar’s belief that the moon followed him calmed him,

Slight pink smudge still on his thumb from wiping the rim of her glass but no other proof. But they were those two people in that mirror, they were the ones looking back at themselves, awed by their impossible reflections.

no, my father points out the stars in the sky to us if we haven’t looked up in a while, he teaches us how to look for the new moon to mark the new month, he reads books he underlines with a faint gray pencil.

From Him we are and to Him we return. A phrase recited in Arabic when hearing of someone’s death. Surely there is evidence for the line present in all aspects of life, not just in the face of death.

Our children are not our own as our lives are not our own. All are a loan from God, His temporary gift.

“Living is interesting enough. Don’t make the mistake of confusing a sad state with an interesting life.”

thinks of how odd it is to experience a secret loss. A loss without a name. The loss of a potential version of her life. Of what she never had, and now never will.

And she liked to think that there was a reason that one of the first things the Prophet ever did was forbid the people of Quraysh from burying their newborn daughters alive. But still, hundreds and hundreds of years had passed, and it was still the son they cherished, the son their pride depended on, the son who would carry their name into the next generation.

Where did they come from, her children? And how did they arrive already themselves, and unlike anyone else?

How unlucky that one person has the power to determine the shape of another’s life. He could laugh about it. Please, she is saying, say something, I don’t have much time. But there is nothing he can think to say, and it occurs to him that it is the one who loves less who has the privilege of being able to express their feelings easily and at all.

The magnolia flowers glow in the moonlight, white as bones.

When Hadia saw her mother cry as a little girl, she would begin to cry instantly. Even if it was a scene in a movie that had touched her mother—it did not matter.

It is as though to be loved at all you must be obedient. To be respected you must tame yourself.

The world trembles but only slightly.

The moon is so small he wonders why it ever awed him. Why he ever hoped his hunch was true: that it followed him home, every time he looked up and out the window of a moving car.

Those nights it looked like stars had fallen from the sky.

I might know a place for us.

Theirs was a love that acknowledged the individual as separate from the whole, from the family as a unit.

“All of us are in this same boat, but you are the only one who chooses to thrash about, making unnecessary waves. You can be still. You can go with the flow. That way you’ll save energy to swim when you need to.”

English. It was a specific kind of regret—not wishing he had acted differently, but a helpless sadness at the situation as it was, a sense that it could not have been another way.

loyal not to a spoken agreement but to a hope.