A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

“No one can help me.” A break in his tone. She thinks of how they are told that God wants to help His creations, how He says: take one step toward me and I will take ten steps toward you. She is only human, but still, if her brother would only speak to her, be honest with her, she would step a hundred times toward him. He studies her for a long time. “You think it’s okay,” he says, looking at her the way he would look at a friend, “but they don’t.”

“I never said I think it is okay. It doesn’t change how I think of you. But I can’t say the same for them.” It was still the two of them against their parents. It would always be.

She resents her parents but still seeks approval from her dad

“I’m not saying don’t do this. I am only saying don’t go so far that you don’t know how to come back home again.” She has reached him. She can see it from the way his eyebrows knit together before his face opens, unguarded, to her. She only needs him to nod or offer any reply that suggests he understands. “Hadia,” he says softly, in a tone that says she is the one who is failing to understand. “I have never felt at home here.”

Even with his mother’s coddling he never felt at home

“I married when my parents said it was time to marry. I prayed almost every single prayer. Even the ones I missed I made sure to make up later. I never said no to my parents. Not once, not even ‘uff.’ They said he lives in America. I said, whatever is your wish, whatever you say is best.

She stops speaking and Hadia is so still she can’t exhale for fear an answer will be asked of her. Then Mumma says, in Urdu this time, “Everything. Everything we could think of doing that was good, we tried to do.” And Hadia relaxes to hear it in Urdu: it doesn’t change the words but it does change their effect, and Mumma covers her eyes with her hand again and whispers, “He hasn’t woken up all day. When I go into his room and shake him, when he opens his eyes to mine—it’s like he’s not even there. It is like there is no one behind his eyes.” Mumma is not crying. So why is Hadia? After she leaves Mumma, she steps straight into Amar’s bedroom. He is asleep, his curtains drawn shut. She is smarter than this. She did not study so seriously just to miss a symptom in her own brother. “Amar,” she whispers. No response. He was gone all night again, so it is not so alarming for him to still be sleeping. She tries to remember what he was wearing last night, but it had been dark. A jacket dropped by his bed. She lifts it, goes through the pockets, nothing. Sets it down again. She sits at the edge of his bed. He sleeps on his side, with his hand curled under his face like a boy. She lifts his jacket again, turns it inside out, uses her hand as sight and there, by the breast pocket, she catches a clean rip. Inside, her fingers brush against a plastic bag, and she knows that this is what she has been looking for. Four identical pills, round and white. In the hallway light she examines ...

with them at all. He moves the food around his plate. Hadia can come and go as she pleases and she is supported. Welcomed home and bade farewell extravagantly: the Quran held above her as she passes beneath it, the bag of frozen food packed for her to defrost later, long hugs and will you please call us more often? It should be a joke, he thinks, but it isn’t—how different it is for you if you stay in line, keep your head down, do as you’re told. It is as though to be loved at all you must be obedient. To be respected you must tame yourself. Usually, the night before Hadia left, he felt the same anxiety one felt as a child during the last hours of Sunday, but tonight he feels nothing.

He resents Hadia as she resents him

“Now your watch is missing too?” his father says.

Amar sold his own watch first. Cheating, lying, stealing...

No one moves. Amar experiences the moment as if from a distance, he notes how strange his father’s voice is, how the hurt in it sounds coarse. Amar does not have to sit through this. He owes them nothing. He stands with his plate. Behind him, he can hear his father’s chair scoot back and he begins to yell at Amar. “You have no respect for anything, not even yourself. You will lose yourself and be forever blind to what you have lost.”

“AND WHAT HAPPENS when you sin?” “You get a speck on your heart, a dark, small speck.”

An ink-dark heart. He’s

His head is throbbing. He rubs his chest. He sins and sins and does not hesitate before sinning again. His ink so permanent. There is a presence behind him and then it is Hadia. It is Hadia taking a seat. She leans her head against his arm and he tries to steady himself. He breathes through his nose in case she can smell it on his breath.

that he had lost Amira, lost Abbas, and any day now would lose his father’s and mother’s love for him, each loss reaching back to the one before. He had told himself it was just one night he needed help getting through.

Now the pendulum swung in extremes. The glow from the pill so warm, even his insides were coated in warmth. And Amira’s face far away. Baba’s disgust and disappointment in him far away. Mumma saying, but, Ami, if you love us why can’t you listen, far away. Then he was returned to his body and in terror, thinking only of how badly he wanted that warmth again.

“Precaution,” his father says. “For safety.” Mumma does not ask safety from whom. He feels it in his stomach: the humiliation. He can’t stay here. Not tonight. He is grateful Hadia is not home to see it. He moves to the staircase. A rectangle of light shines from his parents’ bedroom. At the top of the stairs he looks back at his mother’s pale face. She is watching his father, seated on the floor, setting up the safe, the instruction manual laid out exactly as Amar pictured. His father has lowered his voice and Amar can only make sense of snippets of his sentences. “Enough,” he catches him saying, and then, “your wallet in here at night.” Mumma’s eyes darken. “No,” she says. “No, no.” She is like a child in her defiance. His father stands and steps toward her. “Layla, we cannot pretend anymore.”

Amar steps down a stair. Mumma refuses again, louder this time. If he had not been there to witness it he would never have believed his mother could raise her voice like this against his father. “How much has to go missing?” “I want that safe out of my house,” she says. “Nothing of mine is going in there. Not one necklace. Not one penny. Nothing.” He can sense that something has broken in her; her face is contorted in a strange expression, there is a shrillness to her voice.

She whispers it to him, and he feels so angry at himself, so angry that he could strike the wall the way he has before when fighting with his father. But he cannot move. Mumma crosses the space between them and wraps her arms around him. She is at the top of the stairs, and he is one below, so they are almost the same height. He does nothing. He does not lift his arms, does not even thank her. Nothing in his body feels a part of him. Behind her, his father comes to the door, sees the two of them at the stairs, and closes it. The rectangle of light narrows into a thin line.

Last line so powerful

library. It was never easy with men, not easy talking to them, not easy thinking she could love them. Any interest made her nervous, mistrustful even. But she and Tariq had been friends for months before Hadia decided it was in her hands to reach for more if she wanted it, to call him over for dinner, to make plans intentionally once their excuse of studying together was gone.

She has been trying to assert herself by setting the pattern of her own life, hoping her parents will grow to accept it.

is a five-hour drive and it is already eleven at night. Tariq’s concern appears genuine. He has been so open with her. Maybe she will allow herself to become closer to him than she has been to anyone. But how can she be certain he will not look unkindly at her family?

Thank you God, she thinks, maybe I have been selfish, but You have allowed me to return before it was too late. She feels strange after the thought: it is how her mother would think to thank God, and Hadia considers her relationship to God to be slightly more sophisticated than her mother’s. But if God is the one to thank, then she will thank Him, and she stands from the bed and kneels on the floor, touches her forehead to the carpet.

He looks up. His eyes are wide. He is still like a child. He has not cut his hair in months and it falls into his face. She only saw him recently and she is alarmed by how much weight he has lost. His cheeks are sunken and his cheekbones even more pronounced. Is she a fool to trust her brother because he is her brother? Against her own instincts, her own intuition, because she wants to believe him, because she has known him his whole life and cannot fathom a change so drastic he would be made unfamiliar to her. “I do.” “Don’t tell Baba?” he asks her. “Don’t you trust me?” “I do. I knew I could ask you.”

NEEDLE, BABA had said earlier that morning, when she first spoke to him alone in the hallway while everyone slept. Baba hugged her and she braced against his embrace, realized in that moment that she did not trust him when it came to Amar. He agreed, almost too eagerly, to let her speak to him first. He could not control his anger and Amar could not control his reaction to it, and they found themselves in unpredictable territory. “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.”

She was speaking with such little patience. Baba blinked at her. Hadia sensed a new space opening between them—a space in which he looked to her for answers—and realized she could say anything. Was it respect that allowed Baba to listen to her now, or desperation? Right and wrong, halal and haram—it was her father’s only way of experiencing the world. She should do what she could to bridge the distance between his understanding and Amar’s actions. “Baba, what he is gambling on is not just his standing before God. This is much graver. This is about him surviving this life, here.”

And she found herself not wanting to protect his weakness, as she might have hoped, but wanting to attack it, wanting him to blame himself the way she faulted him. “You cannot approach him now as you always have,” she said. “Tell me how.” “You cannot get angry. ...

“After that I noticed his pattern: he begins to try, only to feel, at some point, helplessly unable to continue, like he decides for himself there is no point in trying.” The curtain moves back and forth. The fabric of Huda’s trousers are wet from her tears. Mumma turns off the hose. “You’re going to make a good teacher,” Hadia says to her, and Huda mouths a thank-you, and wipes Hadia’s cheeks. 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. Now her brother was in danger of having nothing. And now she wanted nothing her brother could not have: not the exams her teachers handed back to her winking, not the accolades, not the watch that had been gifted to her—she was glad it had disappeared—not the career she was building or the space opening up between her and Baba that told her he finally respected her as an adult and would rely on her the way a father might a son. What had she done to her brother, so that she could survive, so that she could be the one who thrived?

Parents love wasn’t conditional. Only dispensebed How did Huda manage

She shuts the door gently behind her, intending to reach out and touch his shoulder, pick up the clothes from the floor, and return them to the drawers, but she stops herself. What surprises her is that this is a moment she recognizes. Not that she has seen this sight. But that maybe she has always feared that one day this is how he would react, that there would come a time when there were words exchanged and actions executed that neither he nor their father could recover from. And maybe there is a part of her, cruel and unforgiving, that has been waiting for Amar to realize what she has sensed all along: that there is no place for him in their home.

She resents amar for having the courage to rebel

“What are you waiting for? If you’re really going to go.” She speaks so sharply she surprises herself. And it has worked: she has hurt him. But there is something about the determined look in his eyes that hurts her more, something that tells her he is serious, that there will be no dissuading him. Once she glimpses her fear, she follows it to its worst conclusion, and now she wonders, What if this is the last time I see my brother? “We both know what it is you are doing,” she says, kindly this time. “Do you think leaving will help you? That if you leave you can have a healthier—” She stops. She had thought his face would harden. But he considers her words. “I don’t know,” he says honestly. “But if I stay, I’ll only continue to hurt them.” He watches her profile. Soon the dark outside will begin to blue. “You should go before they wake for fajr,” she whispers. Amar nods. He has been waiting for her to give him permission. Her words are enough for him to know she will do what he has asked of her. He stands and lifts his duffel bag.