American Dervish: A Novel (19 page)

“So why is she cooking them?”

“What do you mean,
behta?
”

“If they’re Dad’s favorite, why is she cooking them?”

“She wanted to do something nice for your father.”

“Why?” I asked, sharply.

“Why?” Mina looked surprised at my question.

“Forget about it,” I said, crawling out of the tent.

If Mother’s intention had been to please her husband, she succeeded. He sighed with pleasure, shoveling kidneys and
chapatti
into his mouth, looking over at his wife between bites. “Just like in Lahore, Muneer. Just like back home.” She was glowing. He took another bite, shaking his head. “Magic…just magic.”

“I’m glad you like them, Naveed,” Mother said.

Father swallowed the morsel in his mouth. “What would I do without you?”

Mother shrugged, seeming both eager and embarrassed by the directness of the question. Father was relishing the moment.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, brightly. “I would lose myself. That’s what would happen.” Father turned to Mina. “This woman keeps me honest.”

“That’s a good thing,” Mina said.

“And not only that… ,” he said, mischief in his eye as he reached out and touched Mother’s arm.

She blushed, looking down with a schoolgirl giggle.

Was I dreaming? That morning, she’d sobbed in my arms over Father and his mouth—a conundrum that still eluded me—yet here she was now, blushing and grinning and giggling as if nothing had ever happened.

Father looked over at me, chewing. “How do you like them?”

“They smell like rubber. And they taste like it, too.”

“All the better for me. I’ll have them for breakfast tomorrow,” he said in a strange high-pitched voice, as if playing some comic character. He just sounded silly to me.

“Take them,” I said, pushing the plate away.

Mother reached for the bread basket to take a
chapatti.
“Here,” she said. “Finish this with your yogurt and then you can go.”

“I don’t like kidneys either,” Imran added.

For once, Mina wasn’t accommodating. “You finish your food, Imran. Everything on your plate. No discussion.” Her tone was firm.

Imran stared at her, and then looked over at Father, who leaned in over his plate and started to coo. “Mmm, so good,” Father hummed, licking his lips. Imran started to laugh as he watched Father push another morsel into his mouth and begin to chew with exaggerated zeal. “Mmm,” he continued, pointing at everyone’s plate, “I’m going to finish
these
and finish
those…
and I’ll have those, too. I’ll have them
all!
” he growled with a gravelly faux-monster grumble. And as he reached out for Imran’s plate, the boy leaned forward and tossed a bite into his own mouth, chewing through a wide smile.

Mother giggled some more. Mina laughed, too.

I wanted to pinch myself.

As we wrapped up dinner, Mina told my parents she was going to take care of the dishes. So Mother and Father got up and did something else they never did:

They went for a walk together.

After loading the dishwasher and wiping down the table, Mina whisked me up to her room, where she lavished on Imran and me the tale of the Prophet’s night journey to Paradise. She recounted the trip made on the back of a magical horse called the Burak, a creature with an eagle’s wings and a lion’s head who, with a single bound, flew the Prophet from Arabia to Sinai to see where Moses spoke to God, and with another bound landed at the spot in Bethlehem where Jesus was born, and finally to Jerusalem, where a gleaming ladder descended from the heavens.

The Burak—with the Prophet on its back—climbed its hundred rungs, ascending into Paradise.

Through gates of emerald and pearl, the Prophet rode the Burak through heaven, beholding every splendor it had to offer, the palaces of gold set into the clouds, the fountains and rivers of milk and honey and wine that inspired without intoxicating, the hordes of virgins and praising angels and each and every one of the Almighty’s human prophets. Muhammad greeted them all, and they prayed together in a diamond mosque. Then he climbed again on the Burak and they flew farther and farther upward, through veils of light upon light, to the limit of creation itself. Finally, they came to the place where the Burak would go no farther.

Here the Prophet looked up and saw a tree as large as the universe. This was Sidrat al-Muntaha, the farthest tree of the farthest boundary. Now the Burak left him. No one, not even Gabriel, had ever ventured so far. This was where Allah lived.

Our Prophet stepped forward and entered the Lord’s presence.

“Almighty God,” Muhammad said, “let me see You.”

And all at once, he saw nothing but the Lord. He looked to the right and saw nothing but the Lord, and to the left and saw nothing but the Lord, and to the front, and the back, and above…and everywhere he looked, he saw nothing but the Lord. What the Lord looked like Muhammad would never say, other than that His beauty was so great he would have preferred to stand there gazing at Him forever. But the Lord told him: “You are a Messenger, and if you stay here, you will not communicate My Message. Go back to the world. But when you want to see Me as you see Me now, make your prayers, and I will appear before you.”

“That’s why we pray,
behta,
” Mina explained. “To know Allah in the same way that Muhammad did when he took his night journey.”

I asked her what Muhammad himself looked like.

Mina took a long time to reply. “I never met him,
behta.
But I had a teacher in high school, a great man, Dr. Khan. He met the Prophet,
peace be upon him,
in a dream. He said he was a handsome man, with long eyelashes and thick black hair. He said he had a full beard and a beautiful smile that showed a gap between his two front teeth.”

“But how do you know if that’s how he looked? It was just a dream…”

“Dreams are very important,
behta.
In Islam, we believe they can show you things that are more real than what we see when we’re awake. And when the Prophet visits someone in a dream, it’s a very important sign.”

“Of what, Auntie?”

“Of great holiness. It means the Prophet is watching over you.”

Story hour had not calmed me. I left Mina’s room still agitated, wondering why it was God lived so impossibly far from us all. Instead of heading for my bedroom, I went downstairs to the kitchen, where Mother was fiddling with the trash. She looked up and saw me. “Here,” she said blankly, handing me the bag. “Take it out for pickup.”

I took it, lingering at the counter. She stood at the sink, washing her hands and humming to herself. I wanted her to look at me again. She finally did. “What is it, Hayat? I’m not in the mood for your humors this evening. Go, already!”

Outside, it was a heavy, hot July night. The lawn was awash with insects. Flickering fireflies, roaring crickets. Something was hurting inside. Something raw. I trudged along the front lawn, headed for the garbage cans at the end of the driveway.

What’s wrong with you?
I wondered.

As I got to the cans, I stopped. The pain inside was throbbing, insistent. It seemed there was something I had to do, but I didn’t know what.

I remembered what Mina had taught me. I closed my eyes and breathed.

In and out. In and out.

Beneath the crickets, beneath the wind in the trees, despite the stench of trash.

I listened for the silence. And then I heard something. It was a voice, firm, cold, convincing:

You can’t even take out the garbage. You’re useless.

I opened my eyes. At the end of the street, a pair of tiny lights was slowly growing. As a car’s black form began to show, the engine’s tinny wail deepened into a rough and noisy rumble. The car was moving with unusual speed, and as it approached, the sound it made was painful to hear. It was a sound to be heard and heeded.

I stepped out into the road, staring into the headlights.

The horn blasted. The trash fell from my grip. Behind the windshield, eyes flashed wide with alarm. The engine roared as the car careened, swerving away, missing me by barely a yard.

All at once, blood was exploding through my veins.

The car disappeared down the road, horn still blaring. My heart was pounding; my knees felt like they were going to fall out from under me. I picked up the trash and stumbled back to the cans. Opening a lid, I dumped the bag inside. Then I sat down on the pavement. I looked back at the house. The lights were on upstairs, behind Mina’s closed blinds.

Above me, the white oaks swayed, their branches groaning beneath the chatter of windswept leaves. I thought of Sidrat al-Muntaha, the tree that marked the place where God lived.

Why so far away?
I wondered.
Why?

I stared up at the trees, their twisting branches silhouetted against a turbid night. Far above, behind the murky cover of thick, low-hanging clouds, there was a bright spot: the hidden moon lighting its patch of sky, its glow strong enough to limn the forms of racing, roiling clouds beneath it.
Don’t waste your time,
I thought.
Go back and read your Quran.
I pushed myself to my feet and started up the driveway. But the truth was: I didn’t want to go back. Not to read Quran or for any other reason.

I didn’t want to go home.

Book Three

Portrait of an Anti-Semite as a Boy

10

The Mosque on Molaskey Hill

H
ow vivid was my melancholy as the summer progressed! Nothing gave me solace. Not spending time with Mina. Not reading the Quran. Gone were the days when I was moved to awe at the sight of the sky. God’s glory was nothing to me, and in its place was a new and growing torment: my recollection of Mina’s naked body. The image I thought I’d taught myself to forget would return, unbidden—her breasts; the thick, dark triangle at the top of her legs—and hours of confusion and unrest would ensue. I made fresh attempts to suppress the mental picture. To no avail. The more I resisted, the more persistent it proved. And now this image of Mina was making my short, soft penis grow long and hard. I had no idea what was going on. And I didn’t know who to talk to.

One afternoon early that August, I took that photograph of Mina down from the refrigerator. I don’t know why I had the thought I did, but it occurred to me that if, each time I found myself thinking of Mina’s naked body, I had the picture to look at instead, it would distract me. For a few days, it worked. But then something curious started to happen. When I looked at the photograph, I would feel the stir and tumult that my recollection of her nakedness brought about.

More than once, I had the urge to touch myself as I held and looked at that picture of her. I would lay my hands between my legs through my shorts or jeans, or through my pajamas. I never touched myself directly. But even so, the pleasure was intense. And it would fill me with a blazing fullness.

One night I lost myself. Mina’s picture before me, my hands between my legs, I disappeared into pleasure. Before I knew it, my loins shuddered and convulsed, releasing something thick and wet inside my underwear. Horrified, I unbuttoned and saw myself hard and straight, covered with gobs of milky substance. It had a strong, acrid smell, like bleach.

You knew it was something wrong,
a voice inside me spoke.

My sudden shame was sharp, overwhelming.
I’ll never do it again,
I thought.

The second week of August, Nathan took a trip home alone to discuss his conversion with his parents. His father had lost much of his family in the Holocaust and, though an atheist, still deeply identified with his Jewish culture. Nathan expected his father might be shocked, perhaps even violently so. Which is why he thought it best to head home and to tell his parents on his own, and to wait to introduce them to Mina on a separate visit.

He left midweek and was back on the weekend. Mina spent most of those few days on the phone with him. She was worried, though she would have little reason to be. Things with his parents would turn out just fine. Nathan’s father had no objection to his son’s plans, but he did have a warning:

No one will ever see you as anything other than a Jew,
he told his son.

“He’s wrong about that,” Mother said to me one morning, cheerfully in the thick of parsing all the details. “It’s what’s different about us—once you’re a Muslim,
that’s
who you are. And it doesn’t matter what you were or where you come from—it’s a
true
democracy. Where everyone gets to vote.”

“He’s not voting, Mom. There’s no election. He’s just becoming a Muslim.”

Mother’s expression flattened. “Don’t be a smart aleck, Hayat. You know what I mean.”

She was right. I did. I just wasn’t sure she really knew what she meant. For, if politics was—as in our yearly classroom election—about getting people to like you, then Nathan’s interest in Islam really was more like politics than religion after all. More than either Mina or Mother realized.

Mina doted on Imran even more than usual while Nathan was away. Her agenda was clear: She was trying to get her son to soften to the thought of Nathan as his father. Mother called the whole situation with Imran an “absurdity.” As she saw it, all Mina had to do was marry the man and force Imran to get used to it. “‘
He
doesn’t want a white father…,’ Mother mocked. “Who in God’s name cares what
he
wants? ‘
Why can’t I have a father like Naveed-Uncle?
’ The boy looks at your father and thinks that’s what a father should look like. What he doesn’t see… it’s not the color
outside
that matters, but
inside…
And we all know your father is black on the inside! Black as pitch!” Mother paused, gathering herself. The halcyon days occasioned by her meal of Lahori-style kidneys had apparently not lasted very long. “I keep telling her… he’s a
child.
Ignore him. But she doesn’t. And then she starts to think:
If that’s what he’s saying, what will her family say…
Who
cares?!
What did
they
ever give up to make her happy? Nothing! Beating her for reading books, for God’s sake. That’s what they did! For someone so advanced, so intelligent, your auntie worries
too
much about what others think…” Mother sighed, considering. A subtle smile crept across her face. “
Kurban,
if I get this to work out,
I’m
the one who should be given that Nobel, not Sadat…”