A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

the balcony on a hot day: any contact between the two of them could make the heat unbearable. She is comforted by the sounds of her street. The man who tries to sell pomegranates and mangoes. A boy who shouts at his friend with words forbidden to her. The honking of the cars and the clacking of a hoofed animal that walks by their house and into the bustle.

How much of the scene to set

The wind rises. It moves through the branches of the bougainvillea and all the leaves quiver like clapping hands, their rustle a round of applause. It is one of Layla’s favorite sounds in the whole world.

Rich imagery

God would be pleased with her if she pleased her parents, and she would be rewarded.

Her POV as fact

soft sadness. Raj

Using adjectives for concepts

“It’s your job as the big sister to take care of them,” he told Hadia. “You are like their mother when Mumma is not here.” Hadia held on to her arm and pinched her skin so tight she had no space to feel sad about what Baba was saying. “I know you will do a good job, Hadia. I am certain,” Baba said, then he leaned down to kiss her forehead.

When they’re going the descriptions also feel more juvenille cuz she’s in their heads

like only his body was with them.

SYing so much with such few verbs

She felt obligated to hug her mother. Once Amar climbed into her lap he did not leave it, and he refused to look at Hadia.

room even though he had become too old for that. Hadia ran upstairs and wished her mother had not come back, then felt so awful for thinking it that she began to cry, and she said to God, I am sorry, please forgive me. In

It’s such an easy flow of thr flashback to the present time and in this flashback only the feelings are important not the reason for the mom being away

Hadia does not say yes. Recently, Amar has begun sensing when Baba gets even a little irritated with her, or with Huda, and he acts out in a way that guarantees Baba will only get angry at him. If Huda complains about the dinner and Baba gives her a look, Amar will chime in, say he does not just dislike the dinner, he hates it, until Baba is only looking at Amar, willing only Amar to test his patience.

Abuse

come,” he says at last. She gives up. She wonders how long she will have to stay until Amar is calm, until he is ready to go back to class. She rubs the marks her nails made on her arm with her thumb. “Why do you always do that?” he asks her. She pulls down the sleeve of her sweater until it covers the marks. She feels as though he has uncovered one of her secrets. She watches the hand on the clock move.

of the body and the food it needs to eat to be healthy, and she studies it, thinking that if she memorizes at least one fact, her time will not be wasted.

You learn about the characters thru weird actions. Show don’t tell

the importance placed on maintaining a sense of decorum that feels stifling, false. Always

Headphones alone are enough to ignite his father’s anger, an anger that will fester during the party, escalate to a fight in the car, and become a disaster by the time they reach home.

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.

Bolder, he thinks, than he could ever be.

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. Amira with her laugh louder than the others beyond the partition, Amira running in a game of tag in the mosque parking lot, so fast that neither he nor the other children playing could ever catch her.

with such generosity of expression that it takes him by surprise, that someone could be capable of being moved, in that way, by something so small.

the realization that there could be nothing about her he would not want to know, he suddenly feels shy, a

Do you feel, then, like you are pretending, like you are the weakest link in the chain of worshipers? 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? Do you see a face, or Imam Ali’s name in Arabic? Does your father’s voice shake the walls? Would you run away if it weren’t for your siblings? Do you like to catch glimpses into strangers’ living room windows? Wonder what their life is like? Do streetlights make you sad too?

Cool way of doing dialogue Her writing is understated, simple and soft and poetic

pictures those cartoon cottages in shows her daughters watch, where a woman inside the cottage throws open the shutters and appears at the window singing. That is how it feels today to wake up and see his face, like a window in the room of her heart is being thrust open. Rafiq stirs. Layla shuts her eyes, not wanting him to see her looking at him. What is it about caring for another, feeling love, feeling affection, at times desire, that makes one shy? Even in front of her own husband she feels that hesitation of expression.

Poetic

Every time the dull blade of the butter knife reaches her palm, she pushes softly into her skin, feels its ridges. When they first

Some very specific imagery and detail but for what?

old enough to understand his game, young enough to be fooled by it.

Chiasmis

and Hadia giggled, and it was possible that Layla wished, for a moment, that he were leading her with as much care through their new home as he was Hadia. But this was silly—to give her daughter love was a way to give her love. When they reached the farthest end of the backyard

Some jealousy and young ness from the mom

The girls are not allowed to speak when he is reading the paper, they know this.

Sternness is being communicated. So much with so little

They listen to him without even being told.

Will he pause to embrace her, will he look back from the doorway, lift his hat or nod his head before leaving? Layla hugs the girls before she remembers the

“Mommy?” Layla says. She is startled to be called that. “Mummy,” Hadia corrects herself, embarrassed.

Shows Americanization clash

He pulls an almost empty packet of gum out from his pocket and removes the last piece, a stick wrapped in silver foil, and extends it to her, his palm open, his eyebrows raised. Hadia reaches for it, her fingers lightly graze the surface of his palm. She

So much detail

Her classmates have not noticed and 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.

“You don’t have to today,” Mumma says, “because you were so good to ask.” It is a line she has never heard from her mother.

Conveys gender issues without even conveying it

them. For this reason, Hadia was only as nice to her as she would be to any other girl, extending no special treatment. The

be kind to a sister, of course someone like that

would be safe to love.

He is smiling to himself in a way Hadia has not seen before, gentle and grateful even, for the newfound height of his son.

what he now knows: she loves mornings, she stares out of her window at a single streetlight when she cannot sleep, she is brave, and because of this, beautiful.

plan a jashan

Usually, he hated when his mother threw a party. How

Amar nods and walks away as calmly as he can, raises his fist in the air as soon as he is out of her sight.

It confuses him, the knobs and the different settings. He

Home is home when Hadia is in it. Amar

Whenever Hadia visits, Huda and Amar remember that they are friends too, and the three of them gather in her bedroom, stay up late talking, or they take their homework to a café, just to be near her.

straight into the garden with a lowered gaze.

A breeze lifts her hair then lets it go. A cloud moves over the sun and the entire world is shifted. Why

Despite the disappointment, he cannot deny how his garden is changed just by her being there. The air, changed. The charge of his body moving through it, changed. There is even delight in knowing that Huda and Abbas noted that change within him. So she does not speak to him, she does not even lift her eyes to his, so she does not smile, it is still a pleasure, feeling this way, inhabiting this space he has lived in for years without a modicum of enchantment. For once, he does not wish that everyone would leave as soon as possible. But as the sun begins to set they gather their coats and adjust their scarves and approach his mother to thank her for a wonderful afternoon, and one by one they go. The last moments of the day always make him uneasy, the changing color of the sky, the empty feeling of knowing another day is about to be swallowed by the dark. Even in this, he is so separate from his father, who waits for dusk to step out for his walk, either around the backyard or to the horse pasture streets away, looking up at the world as though its wonders were made to be beheld by him alone. Her family leaves and she leaves with them. The garden is just a garden. The living room just a living room. The long haul up the staircase. The sound of the door shutting behind him. Alone again in his bedroom that is just a bedroom.

There was a rule in their house that Baba only let them bend on rare occasions: they were not allowed to go over to their friends’ houses, they could only see them at school. Baba told them, “There is no such thing as friends, only family, and only family will never desert you.”

Hadia disliked it when Baba said this, it was untrue and unfair, especially because Baba had friends from work and friends from mosque, who he was closer to than Mumma was to her few friends. And besides, Hadia thought, she had Danielle, who had been her friend since the first grade, and even now that they were in seventh grade and only saw each other during lunch or in PE, Danielle slowed her pace while running the mile to jog alongside Hadia, and if their classmates pointed to Hadia’s head and asked her, “But aren’t you dying under that thing?” it was Danielle who stood up to defend her, Danielle who shouted back at them, “Does anyone ever ask you if you’re dying in your clothes?”

Instead, Hadia and Danielle shared a slam book that they decorated and filled with quizzes and journal entries written like letters to each other, and on weekends, Danielle called the house phone and Hadia would take the phone into her closet and pray to God that no one would pick up and listen in, and if Amar did, they had code names for everyone and their own version of pig latin.

Baba’s words made her think of her home like a fortress they could only leave to go to school or mosque or to the home of a family friend who spoke their language, and in this fortress she and her siblings were lucky, at least, to have each other.

They knew Baba. Knew which of Baba’s faces to not push further, knew that his reaction depended on how stressful his day had been. But Amar never knew when to stop. Hadia

“Do not ask me again,” Baba yelled at him, his voice the rough and loud one, the one that made Hadia jump no matter how many times she had heard it, even when she expected it, even when it was not directed at her. In these moments she hated her father. How the fury he was capable of contorted his features and made his skin flush red. The little gems that dangled from the chandelier trembled.