A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

He looked content. She would go to him once the recitation was complete. She would say: We did this. We created this. These children who are adults now. What is the use of all this living if we don’t stop once in a while to notice what is actually happening—our

It is time the stone made an effort to flower. Celan’s lines and Rilke’s on his mind—how foolish he would appear if he admitted that, how she would roll her eyes and think he was trying too hard, or that he was not as cool as he seemed. But there is a part of him that does not care, that wants to take the hair that has fallen into her face and tuck it behind her ear, gently brush against the skin of her cheek, and say the line he recalls—how everything exists to conceal us.

Amar wants to tell them: 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.

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

the role of the daughter is to go off, to make her own home, to take her husband’s name—daughters are never really ours,” Baba would tell her. But I want to be yours, she’d want to say. I want to be yours or just my own.

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.

How were they to know the moments that would define them? It will affect his personality for his whole life, someone is saying to her, and whose fault will it be then? Mine, a voice replies, and the voice is hers.

How was she to know then what it would be like to raise her children in an unfamiliar land, a land that held no history for her but the one they were making together. Bismillah, she repeated, as her sister held her to guide her to Rafiq, I begin in the name of God.

Afsoos was the word in Urdu. There was no equivalent in 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.

even if I were to walk outside, if I were to approach him, stand by him, shoulder to shoulder, same height as we are now, we would never be near, never be close. To stand side by side in that way, to stumble through my thoughts until I had something to say, would only emphasize it—the impossibility of us.

“What had we been thinking?” she said quietly, leaning her head back and speaking to the sky, her neck stretched in the moonlight. “Approaching one another so openly, just asking to be seen.

He must have said something because Baba pokes his shoulder and says, “Don’t you know—that’s the thing—everyone is not just good. Everyone is trying to be good. And everyone feels this way sometimes, that they are not good, and not good at trying either.”

She could say nothing when Amar accused her tonight, could do nothing but sit and wonder just how the limits to her belief in her son had so dangerously destroyed his possibilities.

“We will wait until you are allowed in,” Baba said, as if to himself. “I will wait.” Baba pointed at the sky, and Amar looked, past the stars and past the lighter patch of the Milky Way, past the moon, and maybe God was there and maybe God wasn’t, but when Baba said to him, “I don’t think He created us just to leave some of us behind,” Amar believed him.

The Prophet was the leader of the entire ummah, his every action an example, but when his grandson climbed his back, he had bent the rules, and what if it had been because it was more important to protect a child from pain than to be unwavering in principle?

Maybe it was the exceptions we made for one another that brought God more pride than when we stood firm, maybe His heart opened when His creations opened their hearts to one another, and maybe that is why the boy was switched with the ram: so a father would not have to choose between his boy and his belief.

They had their whole lives ahead of them: they moved through a world where anything was possible and did not even know it to be grateful for it.

Back then, Layla remembered thinking that humiliation was a deeper wound than heartache. She had wanted to protect them all from it. Now, as they stood beneath the spotlight on the stage, before the remaining guests who surely must be whispering to one another—where is their son, does he not care for them enough to stay for the family photograph?—she knew better. Knew that it did not matter what anyone thought if her own heart were not at peace.

I have no duty toward them except loving them, and because of this I am only loved in return.

And it is in these moments that the fabric of my life reveals itself to be an illusion: thinking that I am fine, we all are, that we could grow around your loss like a tree that bends around a barrier or wound. That I do not need to see you again. That the reality of our life as it is now is the best that we could have done and the best we could have hoped for.

I wonder now what we could have been had I had the courage to lift you into my arms as I wanted to then, tell you that tomorrow you would see your mother but that today I was here for you, that you had lost a brother and I a son, but I had you, and you would never lose me.

Amar, I had thought that denying you would build character. I thought the not-having would teach you something valuable. You were always so sensitive. And your mother, out of love for you or seeking to protect you, would give you anything you wanted. I was afraid you would grow up spoiled. I especially didn’t want it to be material goods that we spoiled you with.

I’ve looked closer, Amar, I have looked, and I have looked again, and I have exhausted myself looking. For his beloved grandson, out of his love for him, even the Prophet of Islam could pause the single most important requirement of faith, regardless of how many watched. What were we meant to learn from this that we had failed to?

You held on to my sleeve and said things I did not understand. And then all at once I did understand: you were saying good-bye. Not only in this life, but in the next, warning me that you would not make it to heaven, that our souls would not reunite there. Of all my mistakes the greatest, the most dangerous, was not emphasizing the mercy of God.

Amar, here is what I tried to tell you, and if you ever come back, I will tell you again: what happens in this life is not final. There is another. And maybe there, we will get another chance. Maybe there we will get it right.