A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

What had she done to her brother, so that she could survive, so that she could be the one who thrived?

There is no time for him to walk out beneath the Quran. And she does not know if he would even care to. But still, she steps forward, raises her finger a little and asks, “May I?” He nods. He ducks a little so she can reach and then closes his eyes. She traces it slowly, tries to get the Arabic exactly right, wishes she knew the prayer her mother would whisper to accompany the gesture. He does not flinch. He looks peaceful, even. Please God, she begins her own prayer.

Amar is alarmed by the sudden presence of a thought: I’ll try anything just to not feel this way anymore.

About how important it was for one to choose the right friends, that it was one’s friends who were the truest reflection of the self.

Amar can’t expect Kyle to understand because he can’t quite understand it either. All he knows is that if he were with her, he could be Muslim. He could try his best to practice, if practicing meant trying, failing, and then resolving to try again. Sometimes he suspected that it was not her he was fighting for so much as what life with her would represent and promise him: a respectable life.

He felt like a dam waiting to break open and he wanted her, unfairly maybe, to keep him contained.

What was a believer meant to be like when all their rituals and practices were stripped away? Amar was kind. If

Besharam. The word is like a slap. Modesty—the highest value a woman can embody, and the most crucial. Without it, a woman is nothing. They have drilled the importance of it into their daughters since they were little girls, as it was once emphasized to them. Guarded themselves from the gaze and touch of men until their wedding night, and warned their daughters to remain guarded. Nothing was worse for a mother than to realize her daughters had grown and abandoned regard for what she had most desperately wanted to instill.

Hadia and Huda were their father’s daughters. It was their father they tried to impress, his approval they sought. If he made a joke or even gestured toward a joke they would laugh. She had known this when they were little girls at dinnertime glancing at him to see if it was safe to speak, had known it from the way their eyes delighted when he let them climb onto his back. He could switch seamlessly from playmate to parent, whereas Layla was stuck in the one role, and was not given much authority even within the one.

“What difference, what do children know about love, when they have sacrificed nothing.”

It feels impossible that there could be days when it was not like this for them, her children’s fingers sticky with tangerine juice, her husband so calm, his face so relaxed, that when he lies on their picnic sheet she wonders if he has fallen asleep. Amar cups the water in his hands and throws it up and laughs and it feels as if nothing could interrupt the bliss of the moment, bliss as bright as the sun that glimmers on the water, as light as her daughters’ girlish laughter, as light.

and I thought, these are my children, mine, laughing together, and that is when I met Rafiq’s gaze and he looked like I must have, swelling with so much pride it was apparent on his face, on mine, so apparent that we both had to look away, made shy from the force and depth of a feeling we did not expect.

Next to him, Hadia became more aware of her choices, of what was important for her to keep and what had just been an inherited, unexamined habit.

She could hold in her heart a belief in Islam as well as the unwavering belief that every human had the right to choose who they loved, and how, and that belief was in exact accordance with her faith: that it is the individual’s right to choose, and the individual’s duty to empathize with one another. Didn’t the Quran itself contain the verse, We have created you from many tribes, so that you may know one another.

It was not that they made the same choices so much as he understood hers, and she his. He might not accompany her to mosque during the first ten days of Moharram, but he did not turn the radio on when they drove together in those days either, and for her, on ashura, he wore black. Theirs was a love that acknowledged the individual as separate from the whole, from the family as a unit.

“You have a choice, Amar,” Hadia had advised him years ago. “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.”

Hadia had not realized how important it would be for her until she found she kept wanting to speak to him in the language she used with Mumma and Baba, the language she slipped into when afraid or when she stubbed her toe against the desk. She had begun to sense that there was a barrier between them, unnoticed on most days but still obstructing a complete intimacy, the intimacy of home, and sometimes she felt unreasonably that until she called for him in her first language and he returned her call, they would not be truly, completely, a family.

Other women he did not know saw his father’s face in his, but his own father could not see it.

Her mother might be upset because of a difference in faith. But wasn’t the essence unchanging? Only the methods and metaphors varied.

As soon as the recitation stilled, someone shouted out naray hyderi, and everyone who knew the call knew how to return it: Ya Ali. It was a call carried by her ancestors going back hundreds of years. As Hadia returned the call, she turned to see that Tariq had not, did not know to. And she feared, for the first time, if a devotion sustained over generations would end with her.

He had wanted to say Ya Ali. By the end of the recitation he had even teared up thinking of how like home it sounded, how the very name was like a beat in him and he thought: maybe it is in my blood.

Please God, she prayed, let ours be a successful and happy marriage. Let us maintain what we have. Let us create a loving family. And let me always feel that this life is mine, experience it proudly, fully, and ever alive.

Listening to this man praise his father, Amar felt as if a balloon were growing in his chest and he was afraid if it popped he would cry. He had been cheated out of knowing the best of his father; his father had reserved his kindness for others.

It was a ritual that had come about in the days when one never even saw the face of their spouse before they were wed. It had been how her grandparents on both sides had first seen one another. By the time her parents had gotten married, it was a formality; her father had visited her mother’s home twice. They had never spoken in private but had seen each other from across the room. Now that it was Hadia’s turn, it was no more than a performance—she had memorized Tariq’s freckle beneath his eyebrow, the spot on his beard that grew in a swirl. Each generation lost touch bit by bit. By the time it was her children’s turn, would there even be a point?

If there were other loves awaiting Amar, he knew they would be little loves, not: my whole life has led up to this moment with you. Every memory with you is electric. If you are there, it is you on the fence post with legs swinging, or you sipping from the striped straw, everyone else is out of focus or not there at all.

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.” “That’s not true,” Amar remembers saying to his father. “You are good.”

It occurred to Hadia that in another life, in a life where her girlhood dream or her brother’s dream came true, the two of them would have become sisters.

He could not claim to know God existed with any certainty. But there was love in his heart for the men and the women from the stories, the people of the holy book, love for the man whose name Mumma traced on his forehead, or pointed out on the moon, whose name was evoked in the naray; and even if Amar said to himself he did not believe, still his mouth opened to respond to the call.

I open my mouth to criticize someone but then I close it, thinking of how the Prophet did not even tell the little girl to eat fewer dates when her mother asked him to, knowing he too shared her habit. My heart clenches at the thought of twelve brothers leading their youngest to a ditch, snatching from him his father’s gift, that colorful coat. And I think and think again of that child, climbing onto his grandfather’s back while he knelt in prayer, oblivious to everyone who was watching and waiting for his grandfather to set the standard for them all.

“I don’t think I will make it,” Amar said. “I’m sorry.” “Of course you can’t come back inside, Amar—you can hardly sit up.” “No, I mean to the other place. The next place. I don’t think I’ll make it. I don’t think you’ll find me there.” He had left the path. His parents had given him a map, and directions, and he had abandoned it all. Now his heart was so ink-dark he could be lost and not know it, and not care, and never know how to find his way back.

“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. Amar wanted to.

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. There was another way. Amar was sure of it. He wanted them to find it together.

The overwhelming feeling now, as it was almost over, was that she wanted only to love them more, to love them better.

She had seen it somewhere before: Amar was laughing in that memory. When the chandelier shook, this had been her wish. Now everything she had ever wanted had become hers. And where was her brother, and was he close enough to look up and see the rocket firework that somehow she knew he liked? She tightened her hold on her husband’s hand. She loved him. She would start her own family with him. The last of the fireworks dissolved. The sky was all smoke. Had she reached out for Amar’s hand beneath the dining table that night? Had she done as much? She could not remember now.

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

Sometimes, even now, I wonder if you realized that the world loved you, softened at your presence.

“If she stays home, if she accepts any of these perfectly good proposals, I will know how to guide her,” Layla said to me as we lay wide awake in bed, unable to fall asleep. “If she begins her own way…I won’t know how.”

Abbas fell asleep easily with Layla and went to her when he was tired, or if he had hurt himself and begun to cry, but during his unhurt waking hours it was me he wanted, my arms he was always in. It was a mark of that age. I had slept through my children’s childhood. I would not allow that to happen with him. I would hold him anytime he asked, even during the months that Hadia and Tariq were trying to break his bad habit of being held. Everything he did, I told myself to cherish the act, knowing that the age would pass, and he would stop asking me to carry him everywhere, would stop ranking the ones he loved.

I lifted Abbas to my face, his ear was so delicate and red it reminded me of a tiny shell, and I whispered the adhaan, essentially saying: welcome to the world, my little one. Here, we believe in one God. Mohammed is His messenger, Ali is His friend. And I will do my best to tell you all about it.

“Watch your tone,” I said, because I could not come up with anything else to say.

Every ancestor of mine was buried oceans and continents away, and though I could not grasp it then, as I walked to work in the middle of the night, in making the decision to come here, I had drastically altered my destiny, and Layla’s, and my children’s and also my grandchildren’s. I brought them here and one day I will leave them here. And what will the world be like when my Abbas and my Tahira are parents of their own children? And will they be welcome in it?

Half of my life is here—my wife, my children, my grandchildren. Half has already made it to the other side—my parents, so long ago that for most of my life I did not think of death as a region to ward off, but as the place where they were waiting for me.

I recite the adhaan. I concentrate on looking ahead of me but I can sense his focus. He is listening. I had recited these very verses into his ear when he was a newborn. They were the first words he had ever heard. I wonder if his soul recognizes what his mind does not remember.

And if what we have been taught is true, I will not enter without you. I will wait by the gate until I see your face. I have waited a decade, haven’t I, in this limited life? Waiting in the endless one would be no sacrifice. And Inshallah one day, I know I will see you approaching. You will look just as you did at twenty, that year you first left us, and I will also be as I was in my youth. We will look like brothers on that day. We will walk together, as equals.