American Dervish: A Novel (37 page)

He bought a gun, which—Mother suggested—had the advantage over pills that it got him the sort of frightened, all-consuming attention he sought without a trip to the emergency room. Now, all he had to do was brandish the pistol and put it to his head for Mina to get down on her knees and tell him—which she did, on more than one occasion—that he was her master.

Sunil started bringing the gun downstairs to dinner. He laid it by his plate, alongside the silverware. Having it there calmed him, he said. It kept her “fast mouth” in check. If he didn’t like something she said, all he had to do was raise the gun and point it at himself, or—increasingly—at her. This kept her quiet. But even with his wife’s silence at dinner ensured, Sunil would find new uses for his weapon. Too much turmeric in the ground beef curry was a reason to aim the revolver at her face. So was an empty pitcher of water that needed filling. Training the gun on his wife became the way Sunil prefaced whatever orders he had for what should be done at the table, or in the house. More than once, Imran himself closed his fist and extended his thumb and index finger to form a pistol with his hand, pointing it at his mother to make a demand or complaint.

When Mother told Father about Sunil’s shenanigans with the gun, he was outraged. He picked up the phone and called Ghaleb Chatha to tell him what was going on. For once, the two men were in agreement on something: Sunil had gone too far. Ghaleb promised Father to put pressure where it counted. He called his cousin and told him to get rid of the firearm. If he didn’t, Ghaleb said, the monthly checks that now composed a significant portion of Sunil’s modest income would stop coming. So Sunil had no choice. He sold the gun. But not before forbidding his wife from ever speaking to Mother again.

Mother did her best to circumvent the interdiction, but soon enough, there was another reason they stopped talking. They got into a series of arguments—Mother growing more and more strident about pushing Mina to leave Sunil; after all, now she was a legal resident, and there was no chance she was going to lose Imran anymore—and Mina retaliating by saying the sorts of nasty things only one’s best friend could.

One day, I found Mother at the kitchen table looking out at the smooth blanket of glowing snow covering our backyard. She wasn’t moving. It didn’t even seem like she was breathing. I asked her what was wrong.

“Your auntie and I got into a fight,” she said quietly.

“Again?”

“I told her to leave him. She doesn’t need the bloody man anymore. She has her permanent green card. But she doesn’t want to hear it. She’s had his child now, she says, and she’s not leaving…”

“
Ammi.
This isn’t new.”

Mother paused. “She said something else, too. She said I’ve been miserable most of my life.” She paused again. “And that I’ve made everyone around me miserable, too…Is it true?” Mother asked, weakly. She looked like she was going to cry.

“Mom. Of course it’s not true.”

“Maybe it is.”

“You made her happy, didn’t you? You helped her when she needed help, right?”

She nodded, unconvinced. “But what about you?” she asked. “Did I make you happy? You know what Freud says about—”

“I don’t care what Freud says,” I replied, interrupting.

“I make you happy?” she asked, her voice cracking.

A sudden knot was forming in my throat. “Of course you do,
Ammi.
Of course you do.”

“Oh, Hayat,” she keened, reaching out to me.

The next day Mina called to apologize. But almost immediately, the two of them got into yet another argument, and this just as Sunil was getting home from an uncharacteristically early day. When he realized Mina was on the phone with Mother, he flew into a rage and ripped the phone from the wall.

And so it was that Mina and Mother lost contact for three years…

Of all the stories that Mina told me as a young boy, the ones that stayed with me most were the ones about dervishes: the first, in which a dervish sitting by the side of a road has orange peels tossed on him by a couple of passersby and, in that moment of ill-usage, awakens to the fiction of the personal self that imagines it is any different from the peels or the passersby, or God Himself; and the tale that suggested being ground to dust was the way to our Lord.

Whether Mina, like one of her dervishes, found God, I can’t say, but in marrying Sunil I certainly believe she found someone to ill-use her, someone who would eventually grind her to dust.

After eight years of marriage, the stress and strain would finally end when she was diagnosed with a terminal case of uterine cancer that had metastasized to the bone. Mina’s illness would make Sunil repent his ways. He called Mother to deliver the news himself. He confided that he felt he was responsible for her sickness. Mother agreed—she was to give Sunil a great deal of grief during Mina’s last months—but Mina herself didn’t. Though she appreciated Sunil’s change of heart—and probably didn’t mind him bearing the brunt of Mother’s outrage—to Mina, her own illness could only be Allah’s doing, another
station on the path,
as she called it.

During the last eight months of her life, Mina and I spoke on the phone at least a dozen times. And I saw her two months before she died.

Mother had already been to visit her once, and as she planned her second trip, I told her I wanted to go as well. At that point, there was little doubt Mina was dying, and I knew I had to see her.

Mother and I took a plane to Kansas City, where Sunil picked us up from the airport in the late afternoon. It had barely been eight years, but he seemed to have aged at least twenty. His small face was covered with wrinkles, and his head with white hair, and I’m not sure I would have thought it was the same person if he hadn’t taken my hands and pressed his fingers into my palms the way he had when we first met, speaking with the same distinctive, distracting drawl which, once heard, was difficult to forget: “Your Mina-auntie will be so haappy to see yoou,
behta.
She always looved you so much.”

We sped along the freeway to the hospital, Mother in front with Sunil, me in back watching the houses and businesses pass outside the window. Quranic tapes quietly played over the car speakers as Sunil spoke, mostly about Mina’s imminent passing. He seemed to be working himself up into a state, repeatedly saying that his wife was the only person he was one hundred percent certain was headed directly for Paradise. At one point—as we pulled into the hospital lot and parked—he broke down. Mother put her hand on his shoulder. “What I put her through,
bhaji,
” he repeated through his tears. “I don’t know how she can forgive what I put her through…”

Upstairs, on the eighth floor, at the end of the hall, was Mina’s room. She was awake, propped up on pillows, machines humming quietly around her. Her skin was ashen and she was thin, as thin as I’d ever seen her, even at her worst. But her eyes sparkled when she saw us. However sick she appeared, she looked no less alive. When she saw me, a wry smile came across her face. “My goodness, Hayat.”

“What?”

“A heartbreaker. I’ve seen pictures…But in person, you’re even better…”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “I don’t know if you remember…that’s the first thing you ever said to me.”

“And it might be the last,” she joked, wincing from the pain her laughter caused her.

“Stop it,” Mother said.

Mina ignored her. “Eyelashes like that?” she coughed, lifting the arm from which an IV drip snaked to point at me. “Wasted on a man! Just look at those!”

Mother sat down beside her, taking Mina’s other hand. “Man? I don’t know about that yet.”

“He’s a man,
bhaj.
He’s a man, all right.”

Mina looked over at Sunil, who was watching from the corner. To me, he looked sheepish, even cowed. Seeing the two of them together now—after all this time, after all the tales—was strange. It was difficult to imagine that the man had ever had any power over her.

Sunil left the three of us to be together. Mina was eager for details of my life at college: my classes, what I was reading, and then—when Mother got up to go to the bathroom—she wanted to know about girls.

“None yet,” I told her.

“Just as well. Because when you get started…” She laughed again, wincing. When Mother returned, Mina said she was getting tired and needed to sleep. Mother leaned in to kiss her. I got up and did the same. But as we were about to leave, Mina put out her hand to stop me. “Hayat. You can stay. If you want.
Bhaj,
if it’s okay, do you mind if he stays while I sleep? I don’t want him to go yet…”

“If he wants to, it’s fine with me,” Mother said.

“I’d love to,” I said.

I would end up spending the night, much of it watching her sleep from the armchair beside her bed, thinking about what I had come to say. (Mother had gone back to Sunil and Mina’s home for the night, and planned on returning in the morning with both Imran and Imran’s younger sister, Nasreen.) At daybreak, she roused and looked over, clearly in pain. “You’re still here?” she asked.

“I didn’t want to leave.”

She smiled through her pain.

The nurses came in, and I stepped out. I went down to the canteen to get a cup of coffee. When I returned to the room, she was sitting up in bed, a small plastic cup of apple juice before her. She looked better, and she was eager to talk. We chatted more about books. She showed me a quote from what she was then reading, a collection of Fitzgerald’s letters:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

She seemed so pleased to share it with me, and so interested in what I thought of it. I remember not telling her what I was really thinking: that she herself was a paradox I couldn’t resolve, my opposing ideas of her—enlightened and devout; intrepid and passive—only ever colliding, and never sitting comfortably enough for me to hold them at all, let alone function.

At some point, she said she could tell I had something on my mind. I told her I did, and then I mentioned my regret over the things I had said about Nathan to Imran that night.

“How many times have we talked about this, Hayat? It’s okay. You did it. You learned from it. That’s life.”

I was quiet.

She went on: “I’ve told you. You’re not responsible for what happened to me. It was my own choice. And it was all for a reason,
behta.
You need to accept that.”

There was another silence. And then I said: “There’s something you don’t know, Auntie. Something I never told you.”

“What is that?”

“The telegram? To Hamed? That was me. I sent it.”

“What?” Her eyes widened with surprise. There was silence. The answer to her long-unresolved question was taking some time to make sense. “But how did you…”

I completed her thought. “You had a book. It had your address from when you were in Karachi. I went to the mall and sent it.”

“Enterprising,” she said after a brief moment.

“I don’t know about that.”

Again there was silence. Mina took a deep breath. “So that’s why you won’t let this thing go.”

“If I hadn’t sent it, you might still…”

She lifted her hand to stop me.

“It doesn’t change anything,
behta.
It was my choice. I made that choice. If I was going to make a different choice, I would have made it anyway.”

“But why?”

“Why what?”

“Why didn’t you make a different choice?”

“You could say it’s who I am, Hayat. What I experienced in my life, and that made me what I am. Or you could say it was Allah’s will for me.” She paused. “In the end, both ways of looking amount to the same thing…”

“They’re not the same thing,”  I began. I wanted to tell her that I had been giving up on Islam little by little for years, and that now there was barely anything left.

But somehow, it didn’t seem like this was what needed saying.

“You say Allah’s will. Fine. But why follow His will? So you can go to heaven or something like that? I mean, isn’t it all a little silly? Isn’t it more moral to be good and to do the right thing for its own sake? Isn’t that really the sign of the good?”

She smiled. I thought she almost looked proud of me. “Absolutely,” she said.

“Then I don’t understand.”

“Faith has never been about an afterlife for me, Hayat. It’s about finding God
now.
In the everyday. Here. With you. Whether I’m living in a prison or in a castle. Sick or healthy. It’s all the same. That’s what the Sufis teach. What comes our way, whatever it is,
that
is the vehicle. Every single life, no matter how big or small, how happy or how sad, it can be a path to Him.”

What are all these Sufi tales,
I thought,
but fictions she’s using to shed a redeeming glow on a life scored with pain, pain I caused her, pain Sunil caused her, and that she should have sought not simply to bear, but escape?

She could tell I didn’t agree. She wanted me to speak my mind.

So I did. I made my point with all the force I could muster. Humiliation, I told her, was not a vehicle to anything but senseless injury. And to say otherwise was to let a world filled with pain go its own way, unchecked, unredeemed.

As I spoke, I had the distinct feeling she was relishing every moment of what was happening, the discussion, my turmoil and passion, the apple juice she was slowly sipping.

I finally put the question to her as directly as I could:

What did the suffering she had gone through over the past eight years at her husband’s hands—and for that matter the suffering she was experiencing now, as she lay dying—what did any of this have to do with finding God?

I should have expected she would reply with another anecdote pulled from a dervish’s life.

“When Chishti was dying,” she began, “he was in pain all over his body. His followers didn’t understand how a man who Allah loved so much could be put through so much pain… Do you know what he told them when they asked him why Allah was making him suffer so?”