The Laughter

by Sonora Jha

No matter how many times you went to the Provost’s home, the sharply uniformed help would hand guests an ivory-colored brochure with a map to the many pieces of art in that house. In the past few years, I had started to collect these and anonymously mail them out to the local media, especially the journalists who covered the rise of socialism in this town. That we never saw a story on the ostentatiousness of this home was a tribute to how good the Provost’s wife was at her job.

study them now, closely, these desperate seekers, these self-declared progressives who will be-the-change-they-want-to-see until they are maimed from the brutality of change and blind from seeing. Intellectual discourse, debate, disagreement, and certainly academic freedom, were dying swiftly in this terrible fire, this pretense of progressivism.

She looked at me and chuckled. “I have a view of the Cascade Mountains from my bedroom window.” I took my eyes off the treacherous road and glanced at her for signs of seduction. Women don’t mention their bedrooms without intent.

“There you go,” I said. “Self-flagellation goes down well in your community.” “My Muslim community?” she asked, frowning. “No,” I responded quickly. “Your Untenured Faculty community.”

It could be a gleaming blade of honor meant to knight you into an ivory tower of fools. Or it could be a blunt weapon of rust and resentment, tipping you with the tiniest shove into a sea of humans with ordinary wisdom. Which one would it be for me? Oh, the delicious agony.

He didn’t seem to mind. He was silent for a while, in the manner of a human who had turned wind to rhapsody and was now spent.

My little study may sound tawdry, but in the end, things do come down to skin and nail and flesh.

We watched as Sindy’s face fell and she hung up. Looking at the floor, she said, “The woman says to give you all her regrets.”

The mob had listened to him more out of the ecstasy of witnessing a train wreck.

These choices, these solutions of modern life, crowd out the purple hazes of rage and turn us into white sheep.

Nothing was boring in Ruhaba’s world. Nothing was irrelevant. I possessed a weary knowledge of established narrative and literature. Ruhaba possessed the currency of a story taking shape.

She was loved by her students and feared by America, and she walked in the knowing of this. She was othered, tokenized, pathologized, yes, but never gripped in anything resembling my own ocean of ennui.

Emily and her fine group of friends who signed petitions for letting Syrian refugees into America or letting Black teens into pool parties in white homes in Texas used such imagery to hold up a mirror to men like me. Then, after their virtue-signaling shares on social media, they’d go back to summering in Martha’s Vineyard or “recovering from the toxic divisions in America” with rituals of self-care at yoga retreats in Mexico.

I was saddened by this way of yours, Ruhaba, of dancing on the edge of your sensuality and then standing at attention to your intellect. It would break my heart, your swift journey from wiles to wonder to question.

“We Pakistanis . . . we will suck on the seed of a fruit till its juices are dry and its veins stay hidden around our tongues to taste in secret for hours. You Americans want your apples sliced by a kitchen gadget made of steel. We want to pinch our lychees between our fingers until our lips hurt from longing. Seriously. I have never seen an American push his nose into the wettest part of a rose. Smell it where the scent can stop his heart.”

“Leave Rosie to the silly white feminists, sister,” Zoe said. Don’t just wear a white woman’s costume over your skin and take on their work.”

“People are especially safe here if they assimilate,” I said quietly. “We have room for everyone.”

had taken Adil shooting and then texted to tell her I was on my way to drop him off, was a thumbs-up sign. Impersonal. Not from the world of Faiz Ahmed Faiz nor from that of T. S. Eliot, but a brown thumbs-up from the world of a Syrian orphan by the name of Steve Jobs who had had the last laugh on Americans.