Children of Dust (31 page)

T
he burgers were so good they made me forget about the e-mails. Juice ran down my chin with each bite I took. I could feel the
shan masala
weaving through my stubble. As I chewed the tender flesh, I made muted moans of pleasure. By the time I took the next bite, one line of juice dried up and another trailed down the side of my mouth. The two lines, dry and wet, kept alternating with each bite.

“This is unlike anything I’ve ever had,” I said appreciatively.

Ziad looked at me and smiled, nodding in agreement.

In the background Abida Parveen’s voice crooned Bulleh Shah, but I was so intent on my burger that I wasn’t paying much attention to it. Looking up, I noticed Ziad staring closely at me.

“Whatcha lookin’ at?”

“I just thought about something I read,” he said.

“What?”

“I was reading up on your Sufi poets in Punjab the other day. Did you know that one of their favorite motifs was the idea of the
bela
?”

“What’s that?”

Ziad laughed. “And you call yourself a Punjabi! You know when a river changes its course? Well, the word
bela
refers to the basin it leaves behind. It’s supposed to be very fertile and lush.”

“Why are you thinking about that?”

“Because of the tributaries of grease on your face.” He reached forward and with his index finger traced the two lines down my chin.

I dabbed with a napkin. “So what’s your point?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I just think it’s cool that rivers change course. You wouldn’t think they would. They seem so permanent. It’s like they wake up one morning and go and lie down somewhere else. That’s all.” He shrugged and sipped his lemonade.

Ziad’s reference, now lodged firmly in my head, made me listen closely to the lyrics coming from inside. I wondered if I had missed a reference to a
bela
when I’d translated the song earlier.

Suddenly I remembered the fight we’d had the last time we listened to this song together. I recalled the comment Ziad had made then—“Shut up with your reformist nonsense”—and I realized that that had been the only time he’d ever been rude to me. I decided to bring it up. “I want you to be straight with me,” I said. “Fake it if you have to. Why did you get so pissed the other day when I said Bulleh Shah would be a reformist?”

“Doesn’t matter. Eat your camel.”

“Just tell me.”

“You want answers?” he said, arching his eyebrows like Jack Nicholson in his confrontation with Tom Cruise in the film
A Few Good Men
.

“I want the truth—Colonel Jessup.”

“Well, I was mad because you turned Bulleh Shah’s wisdom into a weapon. I didn’t like that.”

“You heard the translation I did. Wasn’t he clearly attacking Islamic orthodoxy and everyone else who turns religion into a series of rituals?”

“No.”

“Really?” I asked, genuinely surprised. “He says, ‘Prayer is for the weak.’ How about that? What about, ‘Only those make pilgrimages to Mecca that want to avoid daily chores.’ You don’t think that’s a direct critique of half the Wahhabis around you?”

“Don’t you think that’s a direct critique of
you
?” Ziad shot back.

I was stunned. “Me?”

“I’m just saying—you have the same relationship to religion as the Wahhabis. It’s all about appearance. Many of those verses apply to you: ‘Until you give up idolatry you will be a stranger to the Beloved.’ That’s just one example.”

“How does that apply to me?”

He pushed back from the little table with both hands, as if to put some distance between us. “Because you’re an idolater!”

I spat out the food I was chewing and stood up in a sudden burst of anger. Now it felt like the confrontation between Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson for real. “
What
did you say?” I demanded through gritted teeth.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Let’s just drop this.”

“Fuck that,” I shouted. “You can’t call me an idolater and not back it up. I didn’t realize you were a closet fanatic. Do you support theocrats and terrorists too?”

“Forget it, Ali, Amir, whatever you are.”

“No.” I flung my paper plate with its remnants of food off the balcony and it spun down. “You just declared me an idolater, which is like calling me an apostate. If the Wahhabis heard you, they’d throw me in jail and execute me. I’m going to defend myself, all right? That’s what
I
do. I defend Islam from people like you. People who judge other Muslims. Tell me, what’s my idol? Say it. Say it to my face.”

Ziad grew meek under my assault, cowering as if I’d hit him. His eyes filled with tears.

“Shit,” I said, suddenly regretting my harshness. “I’m sorry!”

I moved to touch him, but he shook his head and waved me aside. He rose and stepped away from the table, standing close to the wall. He wiped his eyes with his fingers and flung the tears to the floor like he was ashamed of them. After a while he mumbled something.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“You said something,” I repeated softly. “You can tell me.”

“Islam.”

“Islam what?”

“You wanted me to identify your idol, right? You worship Islam. There’s a statue in your soul to which you kneel. You call it Islam.”

I furrowed my brow. I figured that Ziad was just trying to get even with me since I’d made him cry. He was just trying to say something that would hurt me. I shrugged it off, figuring that nonchalance would be more irritating to him than anger.

“You were right about one thing,” I said placatingly. “Let’s just drop this. You’re obviously off your rocker with the idolatry stuff, though. Even when I first told you about the
mannat
at the Ka’ba you made fun of it. But it’s no use trying to convince you because for a large part of my life
I
didn’t buy it. I don’t expect you to understand my covenant, but you could at least—”

“Screw that. I think your covenant is invalid,” Ziad declared.

“Excuse me? I told you that my parents prayed in Mecca. You
do
know about Mecca, don’t you? It’s not that far from here. The House of God is in Mecca.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“You’re making a mockery of yourself,” I scoffed. “My covenant is ‘invalid’?”

“
All
covenants are invalid. Save one.”

“Oh really? Which one is that exactly?”

“It’s in the Quran. Chapter 7, verse 172. ‘Am I not your Lord?’ God asks humanity. ‘Yes!’ reply the children of Adam. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“No.”

Ziad dried his eyes with his arm. His black pupils were bright and shiny. He drew closer to me and spoke softly but with feeling.

“That verse refers to the Covenant of Alast. The primordial agreement. The one that established the idea of a human ‘We.’ God gathered us—all of us: you, me, your ancestors, your progeny, past, present, and future—and asked us a very simple question, and we all—together, in unison with one another, as the human race—made an affirmation. He said, Am I? We said, Yes you are. We affirmed God. We gave our con
sent, establishing that god was God. That affirmation also established that we were We.”

Ziad sat back down before continuing. “It took all of us becoming One for God to be affirmed,” he said. “
Ek nuqte vich gul muqdi e
. ‘It is all in One contained.’ We are the one that is God. That’s what Bulleh Shah was talking about. That’s why I cried that night when you translated the poem—because I’d never heard it so perfectly captured. In the literature of the mystics, the affirmation of the Covenant of Alast is called the First Witness. It’s primeval. It’s original. There’s a Second Witness too, but it occurs way later. That’s when each one of us, in our own individual lives, affirms our disparate religions or ideologies or philosophies. You, my friend, place the Second Witness over and above the First. That’s wrong. It’s wrong because the real covenant that guides your life, the one that you
should
be obsessed with, is in the service of all humanity. It’s for the ‘We.’ It’s for God. Yet you march around the world with your covenant—that false covenant—which is in the service of Muslims only, thinking yourself to be engaged in God’s work. You associate partners with God. Islam is your idol.”

I stood dumbstruck, then collapsed into the chair opposite him. I had read a thousand books and debated hundreds of believers and spent my whole life in Muslim households, yet I had never encountered such thoughts. “I don’t know what to say,” I admitted.

“I told you before that my orientation was too simple for a great intellectual like yourself,” Ziad replied.

Then, as he reached across the table and touched my hand reassuringly, Ziad started crying again. This time they were tears of reverence. I said nothing; I just looked at his dark brown face. The places where tears had run earlier had dried. New rivulets ran down his cheeks.

Bela
, I thought to myself.

I
’m sitting on a bench in Monterey, California, waiting for a bus I don’t intend to take. Route 3, Glenwood Circle West, means nothing to me except that it’s the location of an apartment complex where Ammi lives.

Set below me, in an artificially carved armpit of the hill, is the maroon and white track of Monterey Peninsula College. Sloping above it is the interior of the gray dome that is the sky. Here and there upon its surface, light blue streaks have been sponged. In some places an angel passing by has dragged his wings and smudged together the disparate shades of gray. There’s a big tree nearby around which a million moths are dancing, bursting out of the spherical clumps of leaves like laughter from little boys.

God, meanwhile, is seated beside me on the bench, today adopting the form of a lone bird, eyes cast downward. Stubborn little guy, He didn’t scoot an inch when I approached to sit down. No matter. I suppose this must be because He knows that, since He is everywhere, every time I sit, I sit upon Him. I guess He realizes the Problem of Omnipresence: you can never be alone.

Oh no
, I think,
I said too much
—because with a soft whir of His wings, God flies away. Haha, but here He returns, the Ubiquitous One. Now He has lodged Himself between the teeth of the gritting bike rider
rolling quickly down the hill. Look at God! Look at Him hold onto an incisor for all His life. Too funny. I bet He now regrets having made this hill so steep.

The bus comes. The driver looks at me and I shrug. Then I get up and walk back to the apartment.

Ammi is in her bedroom, sitting at her desk, watching YouTube videos. I don’t say anything; I just get into her bed and watch her from a distance. She’s listening to old Punjabi love songs. The kind that lovers say are about lovers and the pious say are about God. The folk singer Reshma, with her purple lips and sorrowful eyes, is singing to an old Punjabi beat.

Oblivious to my presence, Ammi sways for a while and sings along. The song ends and she puts on the next video. It is Noor Jahan, the graceful crooner with a flower in her hair, adorned in a supple
sari;
the same Noor Jahan that my grandfather used to listen to in the bungalow in Lahore.

After listening to a few more songs Ammi wraps a gauzy scarf around her hair and goes to a prayer rug in the corner, where she performs two
rakat
s, two cycles of prayer. She finally sees me when she turns her head to give the peace offerings. She laughs out loud.

“First song, then prayer,” she says in a guilty voice. “I’m such a contradiction, aren’t I?”

I smile. “There’s nothing inconsistent there.”

“You should get up and pray,” she says.

“Will you tell me about the
parri
s afterwards?” I ask.

“You remember them?” she asks.

“They’re
all
I remember,” I reply.

“My little Abir. You grew up all these years,” she says, touching her hands to my hair. “Just to become innocent again.”

I want to recognize my agent, Andrew Stuart, for believing in me and I want to thank my editor, Eric Brandt, for being patient, precise, and generous. I didn’t expect to gain friends while writing this book.

I also want to thank all the hard-working editors, managers, and assistants at HarperCollins Publishers, especially Lisa Zuniga and Kathy Reigstad.

Finally, I must acknowledge the joy that the philosopher-alchemist gives me as well as the kindness and support that comes from the casuistically berserk bear.