A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

“Mr. Hansen?” and felt the questions she had prepared during the drive over leave her. He was so very young. Why had she come without Rafiq, who always knew what to say?

“Please, call me Oliver,” he said, and he stood with his hand resting at the center of his tie. It was red with three navy blue stripes at the bottom. He didn’t offer a hand to shake and she was grateful. He gestured at the open seat across from him and waited to sit until she took her place.

“Certain kids you have to learn how to teach. Amar is like that. You have to know how to approach him. What to say that will ignite his curiosity, his wonderment. He doesn’t really respond to criticism. And he doesn’t try at all if he doesn’t want to. But if he thinks he can do something well, or if he wants to, he does. You just have to be patient, a little delicate.”

To be patient with him, to be delicate, to know how to approach him. To be patient, to know how to make him curious, to criticize less, to be delicate.

She was suddenly embarrassed he had seen her without her scarf, or a younger version of herself, and then wondered if the woman who entered his classroom with her face aged and hair covered disappointed him somehow.

She stopped reading, holding back tears and unable to continue without having to bite her knuckle—was it because of his words or because of this stranger, this young man, who was kind enough to look closely at her son, and see what she had seen?

She holds on to her wrist so tightly and pictures the marks her nails will leave when she lets go.

All she asked for was permission to go to her best friend’s home on Saturday night. When Baba pressed her for a reason she was careful to say it was to celebrate her birthday. She did not even use the word party. She had not divulged the detail about Dani’s mom leaving the house, or Dani’s older sister “supervising,” or the other attendees.

She should not have spoken: the girlish sound of her own voice makes her cry. She has made herself weak in front of him. She has lost. She turns from him and runs past Mumma, who she knows will never take her side, will only harp on the fact that she has been batamiz on a holy night. That she has caused him stress and pain. She runs past Huda and Amar

She only wanted to go to the party to be there for Dani, but now she will meet all the boys in the world just to spite Baba, she will shave half her head and dye the rest electric blue—but even that will not be enough because she will never escape this place unless she runs from

She takes out the strand of her hair tucked behind the rest that really has been dyed an electric blue, and curls it around her finger. She dyed it with Dani last week, when Dani decided she would no longer go by Danielle and chopped off her hair so it was short like a boy’s, bleached it and then dyed her bangs blue with Hadia’s help in the bathroom after school. Baba had been away on a business trip, and it had been easy to convince Mumma that she had to work on a group project. She could not even enjoy her time in the bathroom with Dani. Her mind had wandered, wondering what the group project could be, what she would say they had accomplished by the end of their time together.

But there, behind her left ear, visible only if pulled out or if her hair was lifted up, was her secret strand of electric blue. She showed only Huda.

How furious Baba would be if he looked out a window and saw her. What would the neighborhood think of him, for having a daughter who did something like that? She smiles a little. But he won’t come for her. Not after they have fought. He won’t try to appease her. He will wait for the apology that is his right, simply because he is older, because he is her father, and a father is deserving of respect regardless of how she feels about his rules and the logic he uses to arrive at them. But tomorrow, after she has apologized, she knows Baba will come straight to her room after work and he will close the door behind him. He will present to her a blended ice drink he knows she loves that costs almost five dollars each, or a book she has not yet read, or a porcelain figurine of some kind that has less to do with her and more to do with what a girl might expect to want—a girl holding her puppy, two children sitting back-to-back reading with their knees up on a bed of grass. The figurines are not inexpensive, but they are also not necessary. What good does it do to give me a gift now, she will think, when all I wanted was just for things to be another way yesterday. Still, there was always a reluctant delight in rising from her desk to claim her frozen drink or little figurine. In part, her delight came from knowing that Huda was not getting one and Amar was not getting one, nor would he. Baba loved him in ways Amar was blind to.

Baba always looked relieved when she complimented the figurine or took a sip of the drink. He would ask, “Is it the flavor you like?” 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. “Drink it secretly,” he’d remind her. “Don’t tell Mumma I am ruining your appetite, or giving you caffeine at night.”

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...

She catches herself wondering what the point is—a question that has never occurred to her before. All anyone talked about was where they dreamed of going to college. Her friends had a reason to work hard. She would always stop before the indent in the pavement. The map of her life would never extend beyond the few places her parents dragged her to. She was fifteen already, soon she would be eighteen, she might attend a local university or community college, but either way, a proposal would come, and she would pack her bags and abandon her credits, live with her husband wherever he was, have her own children to drag from family friend’s house to mosque to home again.

And nothing compares to the promise of stepping into a classroom knowing she will step out a different person. 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.

Behind her there is the creak of the front door opening. She hopes it is Baba. That Baba will sit next to her without getting angry at her for lying barefoot on the pavement. She does not want it to be Mumma. She has begun to expect nothing of Mumma, who would only make her apologize to Baba. But the footsteps are quick and uneven and soon Amar is standing over her, blocking the moon from sight with his upside-down face.

She does not respect her mom at all because her mom seems to her as weak and without her own identity. She doesn’t like her fathers actions but she at least respects his ability to be his own person

“Do you think we can?” she asks. She is not facing him. She takes another sip. Her bangles clink. Every letter exchanged since that first scrap of paper left on his pillow seems to have been leading up to this moment. In his last e-mail he mentioned that maybe there was a floor in the hotel where they could meet, where no one would have any reason to go. She had not replied, and he had deleted it from his sent mail. Now he speaks. “Ten minutes, seventeenth floor.” “You’ve lost your mind.” But she laughs. He looks to see if anyone has heard her. She lowers her finished glass onto the table, a pink stain of lipstick on its rim. “You first. Fifteen minutes,” she says, and he watches her walk into the ladies’ hall.

He extends his hand to trace his fingers against the textured wall, the door frame, the smooth length of the door, the door frame again—because he can’t touch her.

Why can’t I, if you can, she had said to Abbas, are our lungs so different, that different standards apply? Abbas turned to Amar as if to say, see what I have to deal with? And then he shrugged and passed her the cigarette, and said to her, I won’t even mention you tried to Mumma or Baba, but only because I would rather you try with me than alone, and only if you drop it with the equality stuff for at least a week. At least a week, Amira. And she saluted him, which endeared her to Amar, and held the cigarette between her index finger and thumb, sniffed it and scrunched up her nose before taking it to her lips and smoking it, giving it back after she started coughing on her third drag. You boys are dumb, she said when she returned the cigarette to Abbas, and if it hadn’t been for the

that his sisters never experience the doubts he was feeling, that they never shake in their certainty of being Muslim, never think that maybe there was no hell and no heaven and therefore no point. Never wonder if everyone had gotten it wrong or maybe they had all gotten it right in their own way, which meant that no way was superior to any other. That his sisters never stray from the path outlined for them, and that if there was a heaven, they would be in line waiting to enter.

She is as beautiful in the mirror as she is in real life.

“Is your dad a terrorist?” Brandon asks. Amar feels silent. And sick to his stomach, like his insides have twisted into a tiny fist, and when he looks up from the gray cement floor, the gray grout, the dark gum stain, it is to look at Mark, who is avoiding looking back at him. This is not anger. This is not fear. This is not an exchange he has been in before. He feels too ashamed to even have to say, no, he is not. “Mark, you know his dad too?” “Yeah, man.” Once when they were ten, maybe eleven, Baba took all of them bowling. Mark’s finger had been between the bowling balls when another one rolled out, and it jammed his finger enough for him to not want to bowl. Mumma wrapped ice from the soda machines in a tissue, Baba gave them a ton of quarters to go into the arcade to play games that were manageable with one throbbing hand, while Hadia and Huda took over their turns. They brought home ten sticky aliens and one glow stick. “Is he a terrorist?” Grant asks. “Shut the fuck up, man,” Amar says. Good. That was better. That sounded tougher. Mark is the only one of these idiots who has been to his home, has eaten dinner with them, and if there is anyone who will tell them that his father is not a terrorist, but just someone who wears white shirts to work, packs brown paper lunch bags, it is Mark. His father with his beard and his skin a little darker than Amar’s. His father did have a temper, one that was undetectable until it erupted, but his anger was hardly ever directed an...

wishes Mumma were home and that she could pick him up instead. Mumma would know what to say and would not get mad at him. But she is so far away and already so worried about them he can’t even tell her what happened. What face will he greet her with when she returns? His eyebrow is split open. His forehead has a bruise so large it pains him to even touch it. His mouth tastes like blood. Mrs. Rose had said, you might be needing stitches, honey. He liked her voice; it was warm and she sweetened her sentences by calling him honey or sugar.

repeated the same lines: Something devastating has happened. Baba took a seat on the floor. The towers

terrorism. Oh God, Hadia said next to him. She pressed her fingers into her wrist the way he hated, dug her nails like she wanted to hurt herself. Please don’t let them be Muslims, Hadia said.

That night Baba told them that they had to go to school the next day, but that Hadia and Huda could not wear their hijabs. “We don’t know how people will react,” he said. “We don’t know where they will direct their anger if they are afraid.” Huda started to cry. Huda never cried. Hadia put her hand on Huda’s shoulder. “I refuse,” Hadia said. “What have we done?” “Please,” Baba asked her. “Please. Listen to me.” He had never said please before. His voice, the expression on his face—he was unrecognizable. None of them spoke. Hadia and Huda went into a bedroom, closed the door. I hate them, Amar thought, picturing the terrorists they showed on TV, I hate them more than I’ve ever hated anyone. The next morning Baba drove them to school. They were all quiet. Huda wore one of Baba’s old, faded baseball caps from a work retreat. Hadia wore her hair in a bun, clipped back so none of it fell into her face. Their eyes had the red and swollen look of having cried the night before. They looked out the window, Huda biting her bottom lip the whole drive.

The kind of look he has always been bothered by, the look of their secret language, but right now it does not annoy him and when they turn to him again they both look a little like their mother. Hadia asks what happened. He thinks of the gray light. Of Grant’s smile with his head tilted back. And how he could not break free of Brandon’s grip on him. How there was a moment, after kicking and kicking, when he relaxed, let it happen, how it was easier after that exhaling, after telling himself to allow anything. Grant’s bruised fists and Mark’s bloody mouth. And how Amar threw up after they dropped him, and kicked him, and walked out, how he was shaking as though a violent wind had passed through the room, how he kept spitting blood, tiny bubbly pools on the cement floor. How he thought he was going to cry. But he did not cry, not until Mrs. Rose pointed a finger at his chest, where it did not hurt, and said, you are a brave young man.

describing the disorder that ensued when she said no. When they first began meeting regularly, deepening the way they felt about each other, Amar promised her he would come to her doorstep when he had made himself into the kind of man her father would seek for her. “I will do it the right way,” he told her. “It will be right for you, for us, and they won’t suspect we have loved each other.”

don’t know how others do it,” she was saying now. “I would never want to get married like that. To someone who just saw a picture of me and sent a proposal—who has already made his decision and it doesn’t matter what I do or don’t do, what I say or don’t say, he’s just going to accept it. I want it to be me because of me. Me because of what I have said and done and thought. I want it to be him not because of his job or good family but because of how he thinks about the world, how he moves through it. And how we feel about each other.” Amira because of how she thought. Amira because she was capable of being wildly goofy one moment and poised the next, and he could never figure out how she moved from one self to the other so effortlessly. Amira because no room was lit until she entered it. Amira because if it would not be Amira, it would be no one. She had the aura and confidence of someone who was so beloved by all who knew her that it emanated from her even when she was alone, and any stranger who came across her could not help falling under a spell she had no awareness of casting.

summer. But it wasn’t a lie—or at least not a malicious one. And it did not count as a lie if he simply withheld information. Like the nights he still snuck out to go to parties at his friends’ houses. She would be hurt if she knew. She never judged him or admonished him but she did express wanting a future in which he wouldn’t, and she had begun to assume, and he allowed her to continue to believe, that since they had become more serious he did not really drink and did not smoke anymore either. In some ways that was true. In the months after Abbas died, before he and Amira acknowledged what was happening between them, he would leave the house in the middle of the night with only the intention of altering his state as quickly as he could, any way that he could, anger driving him there, God knows what pulling him back. Now, he seldom drank and weed was just a way to feel how his mind zipped through a moment or slowed to focus in on it.

The repercussions are always worse for a woman. He decided long ago that he did not care who he disappointed, how tarnished his reputation was, or even how it would reflect on his family. If it was between his reputation and another afternoon by her side, he would choose the afternoon. But he waited in fear of the moment it would occur to Amira that for her the stakes were different, that the community gaze would not be as forgiving.

Loving Amira was not just loving a young woman. It was loving a whole world. She was of the same world he had been born into but had only ever felt himself outside of, and sitting by her was the closest he came to feeling harmony with his own home.

And if they do touch it is accidental, or it’s a hug to comfort her or say good-bye or move the hair from her eyes—he never dares ask for more. Once it occurred to him that she was not ready, that she was not used to thinking of her body as hers, he made a point to not extend even the slightest touch that might cause her sadness or guilt later. She had had years of being told that there would be nothing more shameful than to follow the desires of the body, that any impulse was the devil’s temptation. She would have to decide what she believed for herself, what she wanted for herself. He would never ask her to think about it for him, never even try to reach over and kiss her. He would wait, follow her cue.

“My mother and me. I asked her to join me in the river, and she did. I remember she did.”

She itched to join them, to be able to move a basketball from one hand to another, to know how to step around players and when to shoot for the basket. But that was the impulse of another life. She

She has often felt barred from hundreds of experiences—she has never strummed her fingers on the strings of a guitar, stretched her legs in dance, played a sport outside of PE class requirements, pedaled her feet fast on a bike without training wheels, on an actual street, next to moving cars—but recently the scope of her life has seemed to gasp open just a bit, and she wonders now what she will remain barred from, and what she can pry away for herself. It is quiet now except for the boys’ conversation that drifts up. When she peers down, the boys are lined against the garage door, directly beneath her window. She cannot make out their full sentences, but can tell their voices apart. Abbas Ali’s distinct timbre. His laugh. It is nearly the end of summer. Sun in the sky and sun caught in their stray strands of hair, Abbas Ali’s dark hair transformed into an almost golden-brown crown. Amar has scraped his knee. A streak of skin on his kneecap shines a bright crimson.

Even Baba doubted her ability to make decisions for herself by stating: you are our responsibility until you are your husband’s. Or: no, you cannot do so unless you are married, and then it is up to your husband to decide with you. Which she knew meant for you. Even if all she wanted was something as simple and small as cutting her hair short, standing in line with her friends at the movie theater for the midnight screenings.

but Baba had always wanted her to be a doctor, always told her she could move away only if she got married or got into medical school.

Thank you, she had said to the woman on the phone, thank you, and because the rush of emotions made her face fuzzy she gushed to her: you have changed my life. Well, the woman said, I don’t think I had much to do with it, and she might have laughed. How could the woman have known that she was not just conveying the news of acceptance, but also presenting Hadia with the promise of a formerly unfathomable life? One Hadia had worked for and longed for, but never allowed herself to fully picture, never allowed herself to honestly believe that a life where she abided by her rules and hers alone, picked up a guitar if she wanted to, learned a chord to play, could be hers. She would become a somebody—a doctor. She would live a five-hour car journey away from this very street, this little leaf that blew right by her, the sight of the sun setting behind the tips of houses across her street.

Instead he stood and wrapped his arms around her and spoke into her hair that he was proud of her. She felt her body was humming from the impact of the news and realized she had begun crying. She couldn’t believe it. So she said so. “Can’t you?” Baba replied. “I did not doubt it.” Her mother too hugged her, albeit coldly, asking only how far away the program was, and Huda and Amar entered while Hadia’s face was pressed into the coarse fabric of her mother’s shalwar kameez.

Huda shrieked and Amar lifted her up and over his shoulder and spun her around, and she kept saying put me down, put me down, but it was the best, the dizzying feeling, the world spinning and spinning.

Huda had started wearing a scarf again and that day she had chosen an extravagant cream silk, wrapped tightly like a work of art around her face, but Hadia had not put it on again, so her hair was piled on top of her head in a messy bun, her sweater an old one for home. She would have to tell Baba that she could not see herself wearing a scarf again, and she imagined Baba would ask her, “Is it because you don’t feel safe?” To which she would respond, with the sharpest honesty she had only recently found the courage for, “It is because I don’t want to.”

A decision that would somehow be easier to reveal because the path of her life had begun to announce and distinguish itself as separate, as having worth that her parents could understand, respect, and therefore be able to acquiesce to. That afternoon no one replied when Hadia asked where they were heading, and soon the route was familiar to her—the one they took to her favorite Thai restaurant. When they got out of the car she waited behind to walk in with Baba, and half hugged him as she thanked him. “It was Mumma’s idea,” he said, nodding to Mumma, who was holding the door open and waiting for them to enter.

her room despite his being the same size as hers. But Mumma had remained thin-lipped throughout it all, and Hadia was unsure what her mother wanted from her, or if she was even happy for Hadia.

She looked at each face—all four of them eager and excited, even Mumma’s wide smile, how Mumma dipped her head to encourage her. Hadia spoke to herself then: It does not matter what is in this box. Be so happy, so visibly grateful when you open it. She did not tear the wrapping but tugged gently until the tape came free and folded the paper to save it. Opened the box and there, elevated on a small stand, was a watch—the watch—Baba’s, her Dada’s. Now, hers. She looked up. Baba was waiting for her reaction. Of course she had seen it before—Baba wore it on special occasions, he had let her hold it when she was a child, and she might have even slipped it over her wrist. The delicate gold rim, the perfect circle, its black hands with tiny tear-dropped ends, its most gentle tick. She had never been gifted something so simple but also ornate, so obviously valuable at first glance, unnecessary and undreamed of until the moment that it was given to her, and she knew then that she would wear it the same way she carried her last name, with pride.

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.

she follows, of course she follows.

Recently, Amar has begun to feel as though he had been born into a world not made for him. What did it matter that his birth certificate was from a hospital in this very city, that the only house he had ever lived in was here. Where are you from? the kinder question would be. As though he could not possibly be from here. As though it were he and not they who had misunderstood. He had given up trying to explain. India, he would mumble. Even though he had not even been there for more than two weeks total, and that by now both his parents had lived here longer than they had ever lived elsewhere. Sometimes this answer would satisfy them and sometimes he could see their faces twist in confusion, and they might even say, but don’t people from India have darker skin? Even at mosque, when listening to the speaker lecturing from the pulpit, he pulled little threads from the carpet and felt that none of this moved him, or was made to include him. There were moments. A feeling he got after praying, but never during, when the men turned to each other to shake hands, and when they settled into holding hands to recite aloud together the dua of brotherhood and sisterhood. Or when some of the boys said they were walking to a gas station nearby and they asked him to come. But then the moment passed. He pulled another thread. Outside, people could not pronounce his name and often asked if he had a nickname they could use, and in the mosque everyone nodded in agreement to speeches that just ...