All My Rage

by Sabaa Tahir

The chaiwallah brought sabz chai, Kashmiri-style. It was pink and milky, sprinkled with cardamom and brimming with crushed pistachios and almonds. A romantic tea, I always thought. Perhaps because I mostly enjoyed it at weddings.

ullu da patha—son of an owl—

“Ben aur Jerry tay ter-reh chang-ay tay pehreh vakth tay prah vah,” she’d say. Ben and Jerry are your brothers, in good times and bad.

I look up at him. Salahudin has brown eyes, along with four billion other people on the planet. You’d think songs about brown eyes would be common. But no. We’ve got “Hey Blue Eyes” and “Pale Blue Eyes,” and “Green Eyes” and “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” We’ve got a thousand fantasy books with gray-eyed heroes. (Which is BS, because who actually has gray eyes, and is also handsome and can also swing a sword? No one.)

Ama taught me that saying thank you to your own parents is unnecessary. Akin to thanking your lungs for breathing. The times I tried, she looked at me like I’d rejected Saturday-morning paratha.

“A boy. A girl. And a third that is not she, nor he, nor of the third gender.” The boy was Salahudin. The “third,” the motel. And this was the girl. My last child.

All of them are Muslim, because the one thing movies get right about jail is that people stick with their own.