A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

His father said to his sisters, “I expected better from you two.” Amar had sulked to his bedroom, closed his open window, sunk onto his cold sheets. Nothing was expected of him.

The photographer lifted his camera. Her mother touched Hadia’s forehead with her index finger and traced Ya Ali in Arabic, the gesture done for her protection and luck before every first day of school, every big exam, any flight she had to catch.

we don’t have to see past the fog to know there are stars.

that God had created the blue sky, and the changing landscapes, the bright moon and the burning sun, the rotating planets and flowing seas and the ships on them sailing—all out of love for the five beneath the blanket, the Prophet, his son-in-law Imam Ali, his daughter Bibi Fatima, and his grandsons, Hassan and Hussain.

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 daughter on-stage, our son safe, and all our friends and family, who have traveled miles to gather in this hall, just to celebrate with us?

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

If Amar watched TV, he looked at Hadia every few minutes, as if he were afraid she too would disappear if he looked away for too long.

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.

He announces to the few other boys that remain in the hallway that Amar will be on his team from now on. He pulls Amar closer to him for a moment before letting go. And it is that subtle display of affection for her younger brother that makes Hadia look at him in another way, aware of not only his eyes and how startling they are, or how he makes everyone in their Sunday school classes laugh, but also of how kind he is, how good.

distracted. Girls are not like boys, they are told, girls have control over their desires. It is up to the girls to do what they can to protect the boys from sin.

Hadia looks up to where she imagines God is, sometimes a spot on the ceiling, other times a patch of brilliant blue in the sky, to thank Him for the moment passed unseen.

Hadia smiles from her couch. She likes thinking of her ancestors as people who had done something with their lives, that her grandfather had been brave to study in England and that her father had been brave to move here, each of them doing what they could so that she and her siblings could now be brave in their lives.

Even Mumma calls Sara Khala on the phone and brags and brags—but they never tell Hadia. Only say to her, good, that is good, finish soon and come home again.

And then Amar asked for the shoes, and because her home was given to arguments, in the way she imagined other homes might be given to laughter, Amar continued to ask even after Baba refused him, his pleas growing more desperate as Baba’s request to not be tested turned into a firm command.

And Hadia decided in that moment that she too hated them all—her brother, who made everything difficult for himself. Her mother, who turned against her own children just to stand by her husband. Huda with the smug look on her face, and how provoking Amar’s anger was like a game to her. They were all cruel to each other. They could not even get through one dinner. She stared at the food on her plate and made a silent pact with herself: she would work hard, she would study, and she would find herself a new family. A new house that never got angry, a home where weeks would pass without a voice raised.

She regards him as younger at ten than her daughters seemed at nine, when they began wearing hijab and praying and fasting during Ramadan. Were you two also that little then? she wonders when she sees her daughters, now thirteen and fourteen.

They didn’t care how she was affected. Maybe children could never imagine their mother as being anyone other than their mother.

What was it about an apology that was so difficult? It always felt like it cost something personal and precious. Only now that she was a mother was she so aware of this: the stubbornness and pride that came with being human, the desire to be loyal and generous that came too, each impulse at odds with the other.

Her voice is so sad it makes him want to touch her, it seems wholly unbelievable that they are not allowed to touch one another, that he cannot even offer an embrace to comfort her. How could something so simple, for the sake of solace in a time like this, be a sin?

And Layla swelled with love for him, her love born from gratitude.

That was the year his camera was always pointed at her if he brought it down from the high shelf where he kept it, a year before Hadia was born and the only photographs of her became ones where she was holding their children.

Even if it wasn’t she would nod and thank him. She wanted to be firmer, or stay angry like Amar, without letting it so easily dissolve into guilt. But when she pictured her father stopping off at the store on his way home from work, wandering the aisles searching for something that he thought she might like, feeling bad for what had passed between them, though he would never be able to tell her so—she could not do anything but accept the gift, despite knowing her place in the transaction, knowing what fight she was giving up on completely.

How much more fun it was to throw Urdu terms at one another in jest; how different it felt when the same words were spat from their parents’ mouths.

There is something about the boys from their community that disappoints her: they do not work as hard as they could, there is a listlessness about them, a lack of longing for another kind of life. They could be anything, go anywhere. With no one to deny them. Any word that is said against them is only to ask: where have you been, and why did you go? How lucky to have a question like that directed toward you. They are the young men of their families. They carry the family name. Everything is designed to cater to them, to their needs, to bend to their wishes. But they just gather in each other’s front yards and reenact the same summer afternoons.

Abbas Ali, the eldest Ali boy, the one face she has always sought out in a crowd, looks up at her with his face lowered, so that his eyebrows are raised, so that his eyes look bigger, his expression earnest, and when she looks at him, when she lifts the cup to her lips, when she nods that she will stay, he smiles to himself and looks away, past her, maybe to the magnolia tree, maybe to the street, maybe directly to the setting sun.

The sky glimpsed through the branches so blue. How can he not notice as they pass beneath them? When God first began to brainstorm the world did He think to make branches a dark brown and flowers either white or soft pink, and only like that in the spring, so that you are always startled by their bloom? Or were God’s decisions scattered and sudden, beautiful by chance?

“I prefer the stories to the rules about the proper way to shower when fasting,” Amar said and rolled his eyes.

He has been rude to them lately, to everyone, angry all the time without really knowing why. He should try harder. He loves them. He knows that. It is easier to feel it here, after this walk, drinking soda in the sun, than it is when they are home.

Today he will be buried. And in two days, she will have to get back in her car and drive the long five hours, keeping her grip steady on the wheel, to return to school, where she will somehow begin another semester. Life will go on normally, and this seems like the most impossible fact of all.

She turns away from the fan, convinced it is making her nauseous, and there it is: that small piece of gum wrapper still taped to her ceiling from when she had stood on her bed on tiptoe as a young girl and stuck it there. She had drawn a small strawberry on the gum wrapper. Almost a decade ago. She had forgotten about it—saw it from time to time over the years and it had always struck her as silly and embarrassing, as if she were no better than the girls who wrote Mrs. next to the last names of their crushes. Still, she had never had the heart to take it down. The events surrounding the silver wrapper are blurred. He had given it to her, she remembers that much, as well as the soft scrape of her fingertips against his palm.

“I told you that I knew you’d make us proud,” he said. “You’ve always been the best of us.” “You never said that,” she said, shaking her head and allowing a smile to escape her. “Didn’t I? Well, I meant to.” He was smiling wide. She was too. They stood like that for a long moment and she had the sense that they were both aware of some secret. The thought she had pushed aside since she was a young girl rose up one last time—that hope or intuition that he was, in his own way, in the only way he could, courting her by being kind to her brother. Then she blinked and the moment was lost. Not knowing how to offer a response that hummed the way his did, she asked how things had been at home since her last visit.

She does not cry. But she does think of how Mumma only knocked on Amar’s door after the news came. How it did not even occur to her to check on her daughters. What she wanted was for someone to know. For her sadness to not go unnoticed anymore. She wanted, more than anything, to lay her head in her mother’s lap the way Amar often did, and tell her she had lost the first boy she had ever loved.

Her reflection. Her tired face. She touches her dry bottom lip and 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. The realization that, in her own small and sustained way, she had loved someone for years that she had only looked at in glimpses, only spoken to in passing, only thought of in secret, only ever touched when they passed a cup of lassi or a stick of gum between them.

Hadia and Huda were a two-for-one deal: if there was a framed picture of them, they were likely together.

His favorite ice cream flavor was always stocked in the fridge; if Hadia helped unload the groceries and saw a pistachio and almond carton, she reminded Baba that Amar was the only one of them who ate that flavor. “You don’t love it too?” Baba would ask her distractedly, every time. “No,” she’d say quietly, thinking there was no point in correcting him at all.

“You think about him more. What he needs and what he wants.” Hadia had turned to run back into her room. “We worry about him more,” her mother had called after her, so gently that Hadia had wanted to believe her. “We don’t have to worry about you.”

They loved Hadia because she did well. Her grades were good and her teachers said kind things about her. She was not sure if Baba would even notice her at all, if she did not work hard to distinguish herself academically. The only compliment Mumma ever gave her was that when Hadia cleaned the stove, it always sparkled.

Amar was their son. Even the word son felt like something shiny and golden to her, like the actual sun that reigned over their days.

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.

Baba is wearing his father’s watch. It is old but so nice and it makes Baba’s wrist look important. The watch has passed from father to son and one day it will be Amar’s. He does not even have to do anything to earn it. All he has to do is exist.

And Hadia thinks of Mumma leaning in to kiss Amar. How Mumma always says to Amar, mera beta, my son, but never says meri beti, to Hadia or Huda, as though daughters are unworthy of being called mine.

What is surprising to Layla is that it is Hadia who picks them out for Amar. Hadia who has grand ideas of how he should move through the world. So important to her, that he reads the books that were her favorite at that age, that made her love reading. Amar should watch animal documentaries about tigers and lions and sharks. They should go as a family to the museums her school took her to. That these activities are good for Huda’s and Amar’s imaginations. These are Hadia’s words. Her decision too that Amar not watch violent shows or movies. Amar not spend too many hours playing video games.

She was only afraid that when time passed, it would not be these trips to the library he would remember, or his eagerness to learn how she made roti in the kitchen with him as her helper, but how upset he would become when Rafiq scolded him.

How many times has she stood, as she is standing now, and looked at her children as she is watching them now? A way of seeing that magnifies her attention, deepens her love at the sight of them, and she notices them in a way she otherwise might not, the way the sunlight goldens the profile of their faces, the way Hadia scratches at her nose, adjusts her scarf that always looks a little big on her. Perhaps a hundred times, just in a single week. Huda

A hundred times. If not more. She was stunned and stunned again by them, and her love for them. How much had been lost? Never made it into her memory, never been captured in a photograph?

You’re lucky, you know. Mumma is so upset with me, she has not looked at me in days. Everyone can find out about us and you will walk away unscathed. But it will be my parents who can no longer walk with their faces raised. For having a daughter like me.”

When he had been in danger of dropping out of high school, she had tried to convince Baba that there were other kinds of intelligence. Did I come this far, he said, did I work this hard, for you to all waste your lives? Make nothing of yourselves. She did not say to her father: but I am making something of myself, and only for you. She did not tell him that since beginning med school it had become clear to her that she had no personal interest in the subject, that she was only pursuing it for him, pushing and pushing herself and resenting how one decision made at eighteen would now determine the shape of her life.

It is not the drink but the impulse to seek it out that is the problem.

She knows her father. His pride, his values, his adherence to the religious rules. They are more important than love. More important than loyalty to one’s child. She always sensed conditions to their parents’ love and so she did nothing to threaten it. Amar sensed the same and only thought to test its limits. See how far he could push them before they left him.

“I don’t understand how he could sin so severely,” Baba had whispered, shaking his head. “Baba, sinning does not even matter anymore, not in the face of this.”