Sparks Like Stars

by Nadia Hashimi

According to my father, the Qur’an teaches us that heaven lies at the feet of mothers.

“Where is my little boy? Wherever might he be?” my mother sang out. But her voice was tinged with melancholy. Perhaps she was lamenting, as all parents do, the truth my brother had yet to learn—that closing his eyes would not make him invisible to those determined to find him.

But, Boba, I’m just a girl. What a thing to say! As if a girl is made of lesser materials. Have you forgotten the words of Rumi? You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.

Sometimes it’s when people are silent that you hear them most clearly,

Let people serve you information, he had said mischievously, but never let them serve you your opinion.

“It’s a messy business, having children. Parents are supposed to be wise and worthy and selfless, and really, it’s the other way around. Most of the time you can get away with the masquerade and it feels great. But then you walk off the stage and into the daylight, and suddenly the whole world can see it was all bad makeup and props,”

Be smart with your efforts,

You need no one to confirm you. You are everything you believe yourself to be.

Love and war are two ends of a single rope, Boba told me once. Poetry comes from the tangling of the two. Deep into the night, high in the hills, warriors would gather around fires, strumming lutes and singing songs about love as old as the mountains, with their swords tucked under one leg. Even in peacetime? Of course! For a warrior, peacetime is only the prelude to war.

The corruption of an entire nation begins with one lie,

The truths you will tell are far bigger and much more important than this one small change.

People are God’s cruelest creations. They’ll step on the smallest of backs to feel an inch taller.

Don’t expect him to bow at your feet because you saved him today. He’s saved himself every other day of his life.

“Al-jabr” means the reunion of broken parts, Boba had taught me. It was a term first used for broken bones, then later to describe a mathematical equation.

My world had swerved from beautiful to punishing and back again.

corruption doesn’t happen without cooperation.

People become experts at finding loopholes when they face losing someone they love.

I could have a lovely life with Adam. But we cannot have that life if I don’t come out of the shadows.

I started eavesdropping and realized that the books they read were just an excuse to talk about their own lives. Every character, every broken heart, every twist of fate inspired a story about an unruly mother-in-law, a philandering father, or the cousin who came out to his unforgiving parents. Sometimes it sounded more like a therapy session than a book discussion. I could never join a book club.

Now, courage without fear? That’s just bravado.”

We keep trying to make sense of it all. Let’s be real. History books are sanitized, abbreviated versions of the story. One guy assumes power, another guy loses it. But the soldiers and civilians are living this war and suffering the losses.

Turns out sexism doesn’t discriminate.

You miss them, she said. That’s grief, and grief is nothing but the far brink of love. Love is the sun, grief is the shadow it casts. Love is an opera, grief is its echo. You cannot have one without the other. But if you follow that grief, you’ll find your way back to love. You haven’t let yourself do that yet, and you need to—in your own way. So cry, scream, run, sleep, pray, or write love notes in the sand. But grieve, so you can get back to love, because love is a better place to be.

“What man can stop a river? This is God’s river. I am nothing. God is God.”

I’m not looking for revenge. I’ve not fallen for the myth of closure either. I don’t expect that whatever Shair admits to me will lessen my hurt. All I want is an accurate record of history. I want a truthful account of that night. I want something to mark the graves of my family so that the world can know for certain that they lived and died. Truth matters.

Music is miraculous in that way—songs wiggle their way into some black box in the corner of our hippocampi. Decades later, triggered by a word or an image or a few notes, they fly to the surface at warp speed.

If a tree falls in the forest, but no one posts about it on Facebook, is the tree even real?

One dollar comes in, two rubles come in. One builds a university, another builds a tunnel. One day I told the Americans that the Russians were planning an irrigation project for one of the provinces. The next day the Americans asked for a meeting with me to discuss building a highway across the country. They fight like siblings and we are the favorite toy.

What difference does it make?” Shair says quietly. His hands move to his belly and his eyes droop, forlorn. “The dead are dead. The dying will soon be dead. Only the living can stand and be counted.” “It makes all the difference in the world. It is the difference between heaven and hell,” I say. “Heaven and hell,” Shair scoffs. “As if those are two separate places. As if you and I have not already stood in both!”

From what I’ve seen, the CIA likes to be very secretive about the elections it rearranges, the dictators it seats or unseats, and the conflicts it fuels. But once a couple of decades have passed, they open their files, knowing there remains little energy for outrage or shock once that much time has gone by.

I’m an American now, but one who sees clearly what the CIA’s meddling has done across the globe. I am no less grateful that Antonia is my mom, and that here I can be the doctor my father dreamed I would become. Sure, I’ve been saved here. But maybe I wouldn’t have needed saving if people like Leo hadn’t been so anxious about the creep of communism.

Sometimes I regret that the faith I was raised in slipped away from me like a silk robe. I hold on only to the core, the belief that there exists a Creator and that heaven and hell are real. Necessity isn’t just the mother of invention. She’s the mother of faith too. The rest of it, the fasting, prayers, and holidays, mean nothing without my family or even a community.

The wound is where the light enters, my father used to say, quoting Rumi.

Sometimes Shiva is depicted with a neck tinged blue from holding in his throat a churning poison gas that threatened to destroy the world. He has powers of destruction, but re-creation as well, as one cannot happen without the other.

“How desperately we struggle for meaningless things—revolution, martyrdom, bricks of gold,” he says. “When the only thing worth fighting for is a glimpse of heaven in this life.”

“You’re not the only one drawn to the thing that keeps you up at night,”

“People are always complaining about moms pushing their buttons,”

To wrest a body—or a country—from the grips of demise is a bloody affair.

“But if they see it or not, everyone in Parliament knows what has happened here. You cannot hide the sun behind two fingers.”

Donkeys look like stallions from a distance,”

My soul is from elsewhere and I intend to end up there.

Sparks rain from my sighs like stars

Maybe walking through fire makes it hard to feel sparks.

“Diplomatic relations with Afghanistan were one tactic in the Cold War strategy,” Clay responds. “You’ve got the Russians and the Americans trying to be best buddies with the Afghan government. Two muscle-flexing superpowers playing tug-of-war, and they shredded this country to pieces.”

I remember my father once telling me that whether prayers were made on a gold-threaded rug or on a straw mat, they carried the same weight with God.

“Prayer is you talking to God. But meditation is God talking to you.”

I love this. Concise but true.

“You know, we’re so damned afraid that talking about the ones we’ve lost will hurt us as much as losing them did. So we just stop talking about them. But that’s when we truly lose them.”

I think it’s okay to mourn people out loud for more than a few days.

I have not allowed them to be part of me, failing to understand that their light can be my dawn—that a good day begins with a good mourning.

What if I forgive myself and nothing changes?