Excerpts

9780385545259|excerpt Masood / BAD MUSLIM DISCOUNT THE OPENING 1995-­2005 How you begin things is important. This is true in checkers and in life, because at the beginning of things you are freer than you will ever be again. Once the game starts, every move you make is influenced by what someone else has done. The longer the game goes, the messier the board becomes, the more that influence grows. But the opening, Anvar, belongs to you. --­Naani Jaan ANVAR I killed Mikey. It sounds worse than it actually was. You have to understand that I didn't kill Mikey because I wanted to do it. I killed him because God told me to do it. I don't suppose that sounds much better. It helps, I think, to know that Mikey was a goat. He had bored brown eyes with rectangular pupils that made him seem a little creepy. Loud and obnoxious, he shat tiny round pellets all over the cramped garage he shared with three of his brethren. He was probably the only one of them who had a name. I know my parents didn't name their goats, and my brother, Aamir, said that naming animals was stupid. Mikey was the only pet I ever had. He was mine for about a week. I fed him dry straw, brought him buckets of water and asked him if he really wanted to be slaughtered for the sake of Allah at the upcoming Eid because, quite frankly, that seemed like a poor career choice. He remained stoic in the face of his grim fate, at least so far as I could tell. Eid al-­Adha marks the end of the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca. The name of the celebration translates to "the Festival of Sacrifice." Yes, Islam has a marketing problem. The festival commemorates Prophet Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son, either Isaac or Ishmael depending on what you believe or disbelieve, to God. Muslims all over the world purchase and slaughter rams, goats, cows or camels in memory of the moment when God saved Abraham's son from God's own command. Mikey was my sacrifice to Allah. Since I was only ten, his purchase was financed by my parents. I remember that Eid well. I was forced to wake up a little after dawn and shower. My parents gave me a brand-­new, bright white shalwar kameez and a matching woven skullcap. Then they took me to a mosque to pray. When we got home, butchers my father had hired were waiting for us, carrying the sinister tools of their trade. Eventually, these men would skin the animals, gut them and chop their carcasses up into manageable bits to be cooked, frozen or given away as gifts or charity. Mikey was the first one they led out of the garage. He didn't resist. My father handed me a long, sharp knife and instructed me to be careful. He said that the butchers would hold the goat and expose its neck. All I had to do was slice open the carotid artery and Mikey's blood would flow out. One clean motion would be enough. He clapped a heavy hand on my shoulder. "Be brave," he said. I did not feel the need to be brave. I wasn't scared. I felt something else entirely. I didn't say anything to my father. I could've told him I didn't want to do this. I don't know what he would have said. Instead of speaking, however, I gripped the knife. I held on tight because the plastic handle felt slick and slippery in my hand. The men tripped Mikey to bring him to the ground. Now he resisted. He kicked, trying to struggle to his feet, but was restrained. I walked up to him. I think he saw me, recognized me, because he seemed to relax a little. I heard my brother say, "Allah hu Akbar." God is Great. Aamir told me later that he'd said those words, necessary for the ritual to be properly completed, out loud because he knew I would forget to say them. Aamir had almost forgotten them himself when he had done this for the first time a few years ago. What I haven't forgotten are Mikey's unattractive eyes full of unshed tears once the deed was done. I haven't forgotten his blood. It was everywhere. I didn't move away from him in time and his blood, it didn't seep out. It gushed out in a wild torrent, a flood, a fountain that soaked my hands and my clothes with all the force of a panicked, dying, still beating heart, and I stepped back and there was so much red and I was the cause of it. I ran. I showered. I wept. Once I'd changed, my father came to speak to me. "You know, Anvar, people don't understand these days," he told me, "the real sacrifice. They think their offering is the money they spend on the animal. Or they think it is the life of the animal. But it isn't. You are the sacrifice. What you are feeling now? That is your sacrifice. The lives of other creatures are not yours to take. Life is precious and to end one is final. Remember to never take more from the world than you can give back to it." Then he told me to come have breakfast. My mother had fried up Mikey's liver and it was, apparently, delicious. Unfortunately, Mikey's death may have been in vain. Four months after he died, I was informed that my soul was damned to eternal torment. My mother, a self-­proclaimed authority on all things religious, told me so. It was an appropriately hot day for such a revelation. Of course, we lived in Karachi then, so most days were hot days. Karachi, the city that spat me out into this world, is perpetually under siege by its own climate. The Indian Ocean does not sit placidly at the edge of the massive metropolitan port. It invades. It pours in through the air. It conspires with the dense smog of modern life and collective breath of fifteen million souls to oppress you. Under the gaze of an indifferent sun you sweat and the world sweats with you. It's probably not as hot as hell but it is definitely as bad as the sketchier neighborhoods of purgatory, the kinds of places you are just a little reluctant to wander after dark. When I was growing up, Karachi was a place caught between ages, grasping at modernity while still clutching at the fading relics of an inglorious past. It was a city of skyscrapers and small, squat shanties. It had modern highways but was still pockmarked with peddlers wheeling vegetables over narrow dirt lanes on wooden carts. Imported luxury cars, rumbling, shining and glimmering in marvelous mechanical glory, were not uncommon, though neither was the pitifully obnoxious braying of overladen donkeys hitched to rickety wagons. After a bad day at school, all I wanted was to go home. However, we were stuck in traffic and the air conditioner in our temperamental old Beetle was malfunctioning. Trouble started, as it often does, because my mother decided to speak. "When we get home, you are going to have to take a shower." I ignored her and rolled down my window, hoping to alleviate the heat in the car a little. It was a mistake. There was no breeze and, in the vain hope for one, I had let the city in. As usual, Karachi was screaming at its inhabitants and they were screaming right back. People were leaning on their horns, though the traffic light was red and there was nowhere to go. Hawkers carrying various goods yelled out a litany of prices in hoarse, worn voices. They sold information in newspapers and romance in strings of fresh jasmine. Divine protection, that is to say cheap pieces of plastic etched with verses of the Quran, could also be purchased for a modest price. My mother raised her voice over the din. "Did you hear me?" "Yes." I folded my slick, thin arms across my chest. "Why do I have to shower?" "Because you need one," she said, her tone sharp. She didn't like questions. After taking a deep breath, she went on in a more conciliatory manner. "Besides, showers are fun." "No, they aren't." "But you will feel nice and cool afterward." "I'll feel nice and cool when you get the AC fixed." My mother preferred morality to rationality because it put God on her side. When God was on her side, she won arguments against most right-­minded people. I'm not such a person but she didn't know that then and, truth be told, neither did I. So, she played what had long been her trump card, her divine ace. "Taking showers is good." "It's good?" "It is most certainly good. The Prophet, May Peace Be Upon Him, and his Companions used to take showers each and every day." I thought about that for a moment. "That's not true." "What?" "That can't be true. They were in the middle of a desert. They didn't have any water." My mother's lips disappeared. She was a gaunt woman, sort of like an exceptionally thin chapati. Her lips shared this quality. When she was angry and pressed them together, they vanished entirely from view. It was one of her more frequent expressions. "Anvar Faris! How dare you?" "I didn't--­" "Where did you get the courage from? How dare you say those great men were not clean?" "I didn't--­" "You will pray for forgiveness, Anvar. It was an insult to the Prophet." "It wasn't--­" "It was an insult to his Companions. They were the greatest of all men. And you dare. You dare? The first thing you will do when you get back home is get on your knees and beg Allah for forgiveness for having said such a vile thing. Or you will go to hell. Do you understand me? You will roast in hell for what you dare." "Dare," by the way, was her favorite word. She relished saying it. Whenever the opportunity to deploy it in conversation presented itself, she took it. She was careful to enunciate it fully, drawing it out, emphasizing it by using the most piercing voice she could manage. Hearing her speak about someone, an uninformed observer was likely to mistake the meekest of men for Prometheus. I was old enough to know that once sacrilege had been invoked, there was no way to win the argument. Any response other than silence would only intensify the wrath raining down upon me. So, I sat there, stewing in Karachi, until we got home. Once there, I went to my room, closed the door, kicked a few scattered action figures out of the way and laid out a prayer mat. I knelt but did not pray. That was the day the hold of the sacred upon me was broken forever. It was the day that made me who I am. The day I was first told I was damned was the day I felt I had been blessed. All deaths are inconvenient, in one way or another, but the death of a car can be uniquely so. When our little Beetle died, for example, it left me stranded in the middle of a brand-­new river. It was the heart of the monsoon season, and as usual it felt like an ocean was being poured onto the Earth through a sieve of pregnant clouds. It was the kind of ceaseless, relentless rain that was designed to make one believe the story of Noah. Karachi is one of those places that feels like it just happened. I'm sure it must have been planned out to some degree, like all the great cities in the world. However, either it was designed so artfully that the hand of the artist has become invisible, like the hand of God, or it was done so poorly that there might as well not have been a design at all. For example, though Karachi gets annual monsoons, it wasn't constructed to withstand them. So, every year, the city drowns a little. The streets, lacking proper drainage, flood. Cars float along roads like rudderless boats, carried off the ground by the irresistible force of the accumulating water. It was on this water that our Beetle choked one day as we were coming back from school. Our father went looking for help, and I was left to bob along in a makeshift river in the middle of the street, alone with my brother, Aamir, who was then, and remains to this day, a stinking little turd muncher. Before I go on, I should mention that I am the lone skeptic when it comes to Aamir Faris. He has gone through his life checking all the right boxes that a model desi boy should check. He maintained a perfect GPA throughout high school and college, never dating, never drinking or even so much as going to a party where everyone's parents weren't invited. He never snuck out of the house at night or got any detention and never, ever missed an extra-­credit assignment. Then he went to medical school and graduated near the top of his class. When he gets married, around nine months or so after his honeymoon, he will probably have an infant for everyone to coo over and a mortgage to pay off. Did I mention he was an easy baby, willing to eat anything, and that he never cried? Even labor was allegedly painless with him. Not like the eighteen-­hour ordeal I put my mother through, or so the story goes. Somehow he's always been popular too. Aamir is well liked at the mosque because he volunteers there. He organizes community events for young kids, all while praying five times a day and banking every optional prostration he can manage along the way. He does all this with a smile and it is a glorious smile. Five out of five dentists would recommend the toothpaste he uses. Aamir Faris, in short, uses dull crayons but he is relentlessly fastidious about coloring inside the lines. Anyway, there we were, I think I was twelve then, so he must have been fifteen, trapped together in the skeleton of a metallic bug. The radio was, of course, silent and there seemed to be nothing to say. The only noise in the car was the plastic rustling of the bag of chili chips Aamir was holding and the occasional forlorn rumble of my stomach. I waited patiently for him to open the bag and offer me some. When he didn't, I resorted to telling him that I hoped we would get home soon because I needed to eat lunch. When that did not work either, I clutched my stomach and groaned dramatically, muttering about how hungry I felt. Still nothing. Finally, I just flat-­out asked him for the chips. He looked at me in that imperious way of his and said, "Not yet." "I'm hungry," I protested. "Wait for Dad to get back." "Why?" "Because otherwise no one will know that I shared my chips with you." "So what? I'll know." "But you won't tell anyone. You never tell anyone when I do nice things. What is the point of being good if no one knows about it?" I stared at him. His wide, bullish face was set with that rigid, stony determination I knew so well. It made him look a little older than his age. "That's why we're going to starve?" "He'll be back in a second." I considered trying to snatch away the chips, but he was thick and heavy, while I, taking after my mother, have always been wiry and lean. I didn't think I could manage it. So, instead, trying to keep a straight face, I said, "Allah is here. He'll know what you did. Isn't that what's important?" Aamir opened his mouth to argue but then closed it again. He had been raised by the same woman who had raised me. He knew he was trapped. With a scowl, he handed me the spicy spoils of my victory, which I proceeded to devour. Back then there was only one person in the world who I knew preferred me to Aamir, and I know that because she told me so. I'm pretty sure Naani Jaan, our mother's mother, told Aamir so too. She didn't give a damn about anyone's feelings. As far as she was concerned, if someone was a pedantic little son of an owl--­the insult loses something in translation--­they ought to be informed of that fact. After all, if you didn't do people the service of pointing out their flaws, how could you reasonably expect them to improve themselves? Naani Jaan was a severe-­looking woman who rarely smiled and almost never laughed. With narrow, serious eyes she surveyed the world as she found it and, generally speaking, found it wanting. I loved her because she loved me, of course, but also because she never changed, and it is comforting to have constants in your life. Her gray hair was always pulled up in a tight, painful-­looking bun, and she only wore a plain white saris, which she said was the appropriate dress for a widow. My mother, appalled by Naani's adherence to what she considered a non-­Islamic custom, lavished Naani with saris of every color imaginable, but the old woman wouldn't even try them on. When she died, Naani left behind a rainbow of never-­worn, out-­of-­fashion clothes in her cupboard. When you are young everything seems eternal, even if you've killed more than your fair share of goats. I thought the days of sitting by Naani Jaan's window watching the rain come down and playing checkers while spearing sweet slices of Chaunsa mango with her dull silver forks would never end. I was twelve when I got good at checkers, but I never got good enough to beat Naani Jaan, who refused to teach me all her tricks because that was her way. "I'm like a cat," she said. "And you're a young lion." "What?" "I'll teach you everything I know," Naani said, "except how to climb a tree. That way, I can always get away when I need to." I shook my head. "I'm pretty sure lions can climb trees, Naani Jaan." "But how high can they go?" she asked, a rare, broad smile on her frown-­lined face as she plucked my final piece off the board and left me, once again, at a loss in her favorite game. I groaned. "Another one?" Naani asked. "What's the point? I always lose." "Losing is good for the soul." "What about your soul?" Another smile. "My soul is not your concern. Set up the board." I started placing the red and black pieces on the board, which I'd been told was a task beneath the dignity of a winner. "I wish I was better." "I wish you were better too." I grumbled under my breath but didn't dare complain further. Naani was the only person I couldn't beat at checkers. She really had taught me well. Aamir wouldn't even play me anymore, and none of my friends were any threat. I didn't want to offend Naani Jaan and lose the only worthy opponent the game still had left to offer me. "At least I'm getting better," I said, mostly to console myself, as I put the last piece in place, the board ready for another round. "You aren't." I looked up at her. "I'm not?" "Not really." "But Ma says that practice makes perfect." "Don't listen to your mother. She doesn't know anything." After a moment, Naani added, "Don't tell her I said that." "Tell me why I'm not getting better and I won't." "Cheeky and irreverent." She didn't sound upset about it. "Yes, Naani. The game?" The old woman scratched at her left eyebrow with her pinkie finger, which I knew was something she did when she was thinking. Just now she was probably trying to decide if the secret of my weakness was something she wanted to share with me or if it was an advantage worth keeping. Finally, she plucked a round, red disk from the board and held it up for me. "Checkers is the game of life," she said. "Idiots will tell you that chess is, but it isn't. That's a game of war. Real life is like checkers. You try to make your way to where you need to go and to do it you've got to jump over people while they're trying to jump over you and everyone is in each other's way." "Okay, I guess. But--­" "I'm getting to it, boy," Naani Jaan snapped, and I ducked my head to show that I'd been suitably chastised. "Now, as I was saying, just like in life, right when you think you've got victory in your grasp, people screw with you by stalling the end as long as possible and generally making a nuisance of themselves." "Not helpful, Naani Jaan." "Life," she went on, as if I hadn't spoken, "requires risk. It requires that you sacrifice safety. You have to have courage, Anvar, to get what you want. You have to be bold. You have to, not to sound like your know-­nothing mother, dare." "I'm not brave enough? In checkers?" She nodded. "You play like a wet cat." "I thought I was a lion . . ." Naani sounded weary. "Just play like you've still got your dangly bits. Stop being defensive. You never move the last row until you have no choice. It's too late. You think that makes you safe. It doesn't. It just makes you weak." I eyed my rear guard, the wall they formed my only defense against Naani's men transforming into kings, and tried to figure out if my grandmother was just making all this up, to ensure easier, faster victories. Her advice could be a ploy. She was not at all a trustworthy person when it came to important things like games. Then I shrugged, and began to play, for the first time in my life using all the pieces at my disposal. I still lost. "What was that?" "What?" Naani asked, the very heart of innocence itself. "You still beat me." "Of course. I've been playing the game properly for a lot longer than you have. You just started. You know, someone really wise once said, practice makes perfect . . ." While we played the game of life, the games of death went on around us. Karachi became a casualty of the Kalashnikov effect, a geopolitical twist on chaos theory principles through which an automatic rifle fired in Afghanistan during a Soviet invasion can dramatically alter the character and destiny of the largest city in Pakistan, thousands of kilometers away. The Kalashnikov effect created the Taliban. It brought down the Twin Towers. It maimed Iraq, and Syria and Yemen, and unleashed a wave of terror on the world it was unprepared to deal with. Let's not blame butterflies is what I'm saying. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan created a new front in the Cold War. In response, American money and arms flooded into Pakistan, and from there were smuggled north, across the border, to supply the resistance. Money and arms alone, however, have never won a fight for freedom. A resistance requires fighters. To boost recruitment, campaigning against the Soviets was advertised as a jihad, a holy struggle. It was billed not as a simple annexation of one country by another, but rather as an invasion of Muslim lands by foreign nonbelievers. Taxpayer dollars, along with Saudi oil money, were used to push this narrative. Madrassas were built to create warriors willing to take up arms for what was declared a holy struggle. Islam was weaponized for the Cold War. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. The hard-­line version of Islam taught by these madrassas, largely foreign to the subcontinent, metastasized. It fed on anxiety and fear created by the Muslim world's modern decline. It argued that this decline was a direct result of moral decay in society, Allah's punishment for deviation from the true path. In order to improve their fortunes, Muslims needed to regain God's favor, and they could do that only by practicing the faith as it had been practiced by the Prophet and his Companions in medieval times. A return to the way things were done before would surely bring a return to the glory that had come before. It was how, preachers claimed, Muslims could make Islam great again. Hijabs started appearing in middle-­class social circles more often than before. Preachers became icons. I started hearing arguments that music was a forbidden thing. It was even said that miswak, a twig from an arak tree, was better for dental hygiene than toothpaste. After all, miswak was what the Prophet had used. What chemical formula could compete with such a divine endorsement? When my mother tried to get us to use miswak sticks, my father asked her if she wanted to sell our car and buy a camel instead. After all, he said, a camel was what the Prophet had used to get around. Simply put, sexy was not back. Islam was back. It was rejuvenated. Tossing out fourteen hundred years of history and progress will do that to a religion, I guess. Through the early part of the nineties, violence and unrest became common in Karachi, as weapons and returning jihadists flooded in, taking over industries, and bringing with them a gun culture that shifted the tectonic plates of sectarianism the city was built on. The sounds of distant Kalashnikovs being fired became the lullabies I fell asleep to at night. My mother had always been religiously inclined, but usually reasonable. Unfortunately, as parties where society women would get together to listen to preachers became common, she discovered that what she'd thought was Islam was not Islam at all. She became reeducated and recommitted. It was around this time that she became convinced that wearing a head scarf was an obligation, not an option, after a peddler of piety told her that angels would drag women who did not cover their hair into hellfire by their exposed locks on the Day of Judgment. My father was different, immune somehow to religiosity and chaos. I always felt safe, despite the growing lawlessness around us, because I knew he was there. He was not physically strong, but he was ideologically sound. The spirit of the age would never possess him. His appearance was reassuring as well. Imtiaz Faris looked and sounded like a brown Santa Claus, with a deep voice and a big laugh. His presence served as a reminder that there were still solid, pleasant things in the world. My earliest memories of my father are tied to music. He loved old, classical ghazals--­short, poignant poems, usually about love and loss, set to music and sung in crooning, mournful voices. He would sit listening to them on his creaking, discolored teak rocking chair, parked next to an old gramophone, eyes closed, a wistful smile on his face. Sometimes I would sit by his feet. We would not speak but every once in a while he would ruffle my hair with an affectionate hand. He had a few English records as well, but broke those out only on special occasions, like a birthday or an anniversary. Then, with Dean Martin or Elvis singing in the background, he would rouse his heavy, pudgy body into a sort of comic jig, shaking his wide hips and wagging his eyebrows up and down, skipping and hopping, occasionally tipping an imaginary top hat to my mother, who often sat by, rolling her eyes but also, I think, trying not to laugh. I last saw him dance in Pakistan while celebrating New Year's Eve and the coming dawn of 'ninety-­six. It was almost midnight. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald were belting out "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off." I was singing along. My mother was knitting something and Aamir was shaking his head as my father twirled around the room with a goofy grin on his face. Shouting erupted nearby. It took me a moment to realize that it was directed at our house. I looked out from a nearby window and . . . well, I don't know how many people constitute a mob, but there were ten, maybe fifteen men outside our house. They were young, probably in their twenties, and they were loud. A few of them were carrying field hockey sticks with ill-­disguised ill intent, and chanting, as if at a rally, demanding that we turn off the music. My father came to stand beside me, the smile struck off his face. "What's their problem?" I asked. My mother answered. "New Year's is a holiday made up by infidels. We are forbidden to celebrate it. Also, music is the instrument of Shaitan. Those are pious young men." Aamir hurried over to the gramophone and turned it off. My father stood by the window until the mob, satisfied with the silence they had forced upon our home, moved on to shepherd other straying believers back into the fold they were creating. Once the last of them disappeared from view, he whispered, maybe to me, maybe to himself, "I can't breathe here anymore." Almost no one took my father seriously when he said he wanted to leave Pakistan. For one thing, Imtiaz Faris was simply not the kind of man whose resolutions people believed. For another, leaving the country of one's birth isn't an easy thing. Not only do you have to leave everything you've ever known--­family, friends, streets littered with memories of your childhood and homes that had walls imbued with memories of generations--­behind, you also have to find a place willing to take you. It is a difficult business, uprooting yourself from the soil in which you've been planted. Few trees try it and more than a few never bloom again when they do. Everyone, especially my mother, knew that Imtiaz Faris was likely to wither in the face of such emotional, financial and filial trauma. So, she only nodded complacently as he explained that he had a school friend in California, a man he called Shah, who had his own business and who might be interested in hiring my father on a work visa. "Do whatever you think is best," she said for perhaps the last time in her life. When the process of immigration first began, with nothing more alarming than new passport-­size photographs, the only person taking it seriously aside from my father was Aamir. I didn't realize he was actually worried about the prospect of moving until he brought it up while we were waiting our turn to bat in an impromptu cricket match boys in the neighborhood had put together at Kokan Park. Kokan Park wasn't much of a park at all. In fact, we called it Kokan Ground, which was a much more accurate description of the barren, grassless piece of empty land surrounded by a wall a few feet high. There was a concrete patch in the middle of the property, which served as a cricket pitch, but the rough, sand-­covered lot had little else to recommend it as a playing surface. Of course, since our only other choice was to play on the street and stop the game every few minutes to allow cars to pass, we were happy to claim it for our own when older kids weren't monopolizing it. Just then, we were definitely not supposed to be there. A paiyya jam had been called by the opposition party, probably because of some outrage or slight committed by the government. It was, essentially, a cross between a traffic jam and a general strike. No tires were allowed to roll--­they were jammed, hence the name--­which meant that the powers calling for these demonstrations didn't want anyone on the roads. Obedience to these calls for civil disobedience was secured, at times, in the most uncivil of ways, that is to say, with violence. These strikes had become ridiculously common over the last few years. We missed a lot of school because our parents didn't want to risk sending us out into the world when a hartal was in effect. They wanted to keep us safe, but we still snuck out to play cricket because being safe was boring. I was next up to bat, so I was paying pretty close attention to the game when my brother started talking. "Aren't you going to miss cricket?" Aamir asked. I looked back at him. He was leaning against the rusted gate that let visitors onto the ground. It had probably never ever had occasion to actually be locked. "What?" "They don't have cricket in America, do they? They've got baseball." He made a grimace. "That's like cricket, I guess, for people who don't know what cricket is." "What are you talking about?" "California, Anvar. What do you think I'm talking about?" I shrugged. "I never know. Anyway, don't worry about it." "Why not?" "Because it is like the time Dad wanted to start changing the oil in his own car, or when he decided to learn how to make proper Hyderabadi biryani. It isn't going to happen. Remember when he thought carrying a cane made him look like Charlie Chaplin?" "Like Fred Astaire, I think," Aamir said. "Doesn't matter. My point is that he'll be tired of it in a month. In two months he'll forget all about it." "It's been six months now." "Fine. Worry if you want." I picked up one of the spare balls that was lying next to me. It wasn't made for cricket. It was a tennis ball covered with white electrical tape. The tape was meant to dull the bounce of the ball on a concrete pitch, letting it mimic how a proper cork ball acted on grass. It was almost as good as the real thing, except it didn't sound right when you played your shots and the weight was wrong, so you always knew that you weren't playing with the genuine article. I rotated the ball in my hands, looking for flaws in the way it had been wrapped, or for cracks in the tape, which often broke down after the ball was thrashed around the park by a good batsman. This one looked pristine. I dropped it back to the ground. "But I think everything will be fine. Then again, I'm a total optimist." Aamir snorted. "You are not. You just don't care about anything." "Whatever. Stop worrying so much about Dad. Even if he's serious and we really leave, we get to go to California. Do you know what they have in California that they don't have here?" Aamir shook his head. "Blondes. There are a lot more blondes in California than there are in Karachi." "Astaghfirullah. You've got such base thoughts." I rolled my eyes. "Sure. Because I'm the one who watches Baywatch when Ma and Dad aren't home." "That was one time," Aamir said. "I thought it was a show about exploding boats." "Uh-­huh." Aamir glowered at my disbelief. Then, displaying that widely praised maturity of his, he changed the subject. "You can pretend it doesn't bother you, but there are things you'd miss if we left Karachi." "Like what?" He gave the triumphant smile of someone who is about to win an argument. "Like Naani Jaan." "True," I said. "I'd get over it though. Because blondes." "I'm telling Naani Jaan you said that." "Of course you are, you--­" A cry of "how's that?" went up in the field before I could make things worse for myself. The batsman playing had been given out, and I was called to take my place at the center of the field. Aamir had a bad habit of doing what he said. The next time we visited Naani Jaan, he told on me. He was good at telling. It was the one thing that was true about him. He was obedient because he was taught to be obedient, and he studied hard because he was supposed to. Yes, he prayed a bunch and liked to spend time at the mosque, but if he'd been born in another part of the world, or even in a different family here, he'd have gone to temple or to a gurdwara or anywhere else he was supposed to go. Everything Aamir did, he did because people wanted him to do it. Except being a tattletale. That he did all by himself, despite having been told that it was a bad habit. It was just who he was. It was almost hard to be angry with him when he told on you, if you knew him, because he couldn't help himself. You don't get angry at the desert for making you thirsty. That's just its nature. Naani Jaan stared at Aamir in silence with unblinking, sharp eyes after he was done complaining. It was as if she was expecting him to go on. Aamir, with nothing more to say, stammered out a closing argument. "He really said that. That he wouldn't miss you because there'd be blond girls around. That . . . I mean, he'd forget you for something like that." Still Naani said nothing. "I . . . I thought you should know." Finally, the old woman took a deep breath, held it for a long time, and let it out in a barely audible whistle. "How wonderfully religious you are." That was precisely the right thing to say to cut Aamir. He looked down. "How does the flesh of your brother taste?" According to Naani Jaan, in the Muslim version of hell, that was the punishment backbiters got--­they had to eat their own brothers for eternity. That didn't make sense to me. It sounded a lot worse for the brother being eaten than the brother doing the actual backbiting. Aamir bought it though. He never had the luxury of doubt. He didn't even bother pointing out that, technically, he wasn't backbiting at all, because I was right there. "I'm pretty sure I'd be delicious," I said, just to help out. When Naani's baleful attention turned on me, I held up my hands in surrender. "Sorry." "Tell me, Aamir," she said, deciding to ignore me. "What would make you forget me?" "Nothing," he said quickly. "You would forget me for nothing?" Naani asked. Aamir stumbled around for an answer long enough for me to take pity on him. "I didn't really mean it," I said. "I was just trying to make Aamir feel better." "And why did you need to make him feel better?" "He's worried that we might move to America." Naani tilted her head a little, regarding Aamir more closely, as if she'd just noticed something interesting about him for the first time. Then she sat down on her favorite plush chair and reached for her dainty silver purse, which usually carried precisely one thousand and one rupees, three lighters and one pack of cigarettes. She'd taken up smoking when she'd given up colors. "I thought you'd want to leave." She lit up and took a long draw. "You like religion. You follow the prophets and messengers, don't you? None of them stayed where they were from. Even Adam and Eve were immigrants. The first man and woman, the first ones to leave the place they were born." "Hazrat Adam, May Peace Be Upon Him, wasn't an immigrant," Aamir said. "He was an exile." "It's the same thing." Aamir opened his mouth to argue, but our grandmother gestured for him to be silent. "My point," she said, "is that all your heroes were wanderers upon this earth. Moses, Jesus, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Ishmael, Muhammad . . . The history of the world is the history of people who went places. People who walked to the horizon. If you get the chance, you should be glad to be one of them." "Not that we're going anywhere," I said. Our grandmother chuckled, looking past us, through the open window behind me, and through time perhaps at a land she had left fifty years ago, when she'd been young, probably around my age, to make her home in a new country. "You'll be surprised," she told me, "at how many people have said that to me in my life. My children, how wrong they've all been . . ." The first time anyone ever touched my balls, so far as I can remember, was at the behest of the United States government. It turns out that one doesn't simply get on an airplane and start a new life in America. It's much more complicated than that. You have to go to a doctor, who makes you take off your pants, cups your testicles in a cold, clinical hand and asks you to cough. Then you get to go on a plane and start a new life in America. The moment I was asked to take my pants off was the moment I realized that we were actually going to move to the States. This was in part because that directive--­to take off your pants--­is always a prologue to whatever is about to come next. It brings with it the certainty that something is about to happen. More important, I was convinced that my father wouldn't have subjected me or Aamir or himself, for that matter, to such a rude medical exam if he wasn't absolutely committed to fulfilling all the onerous requirements of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service. I think Aamir knew that as well. Neither one of us spoke much on the drive back from the doctor's office, each looking out our window, looking at Karachi with eyes that suddenly had goodbyes in them. I don't really know much about the paperwork my father had to complete to get us out of Karachi. My involvement was limited to being fondled, fingerprinted and photographed. I saw his late nights sitting at the dinner table, filling in forms. I overheard him speaking long-­distance to his friend Mr. Shah about a job and a visa. He took me once to an attorney's office in Saddar, where I had nothing to do but wait in an empty room full of the sound of typewriters. It was strange. We were home and yet about to head home at the same time. -- They say that the wife is always the last to know. To be fair to my father, he'd told his wife precisely what he was about to do before he went chasing after a new country. She simply hadn't believed him. The one thing Bariah Faris knew was that Bariah Faris knew everything, and she certainly knew the capabilities of her husband, who I think she'd always assumed to be a man of rather limited ambitions. When you're young, you don't often think about the relationship between your parents. You see them existing together but never touching, not even talking to each other that much, and you assume that is the natural order of things. Now I recognize that maybe my parents should've never been paired off with each other, that their marriage should never have been arranged, because they were so different. Yet, even though I doubt there was much passion or even love in their relationship, there was a fondness and understanding that comes with time. So maybe my mother can be forgiven for thinking that, even if she didn't always admire the round, jolly man her knot had been tied to, she at least knew what he was. Then he surprised her. Was she truly devastated about leaving Pakistan or was she just angry that Imtiaz Faris could still manage to shock her, after she was so sure she'd figured him out? I haven't asked. I wouldn't dare. Back then all I knew was that my mother didn't want to move. I never actually saw her weep, but I could tell, from her puffy, red eyes, that she did and did so often. Some nights, I could hear her screaming at my father, even though their room was clear down the hall from mine. It was a sin, she claimed, to move from a Muslim land to a country of infidels. She worried that Aamir and I would go astray, start drinking, dancing and doing drugs before marrying white girls, forever and irrevocably ruining the family tree. She wanted to be buried next to her parents, where she already had a piece of land waiting for her shrouded body, not in a wooden box that would rot, and not next to strangers. On and on her concerns went, like a monsoon of rage and fear and anxiety, but, uncharacteristically, my father remained unmoved by all that rained down upon him. I was there when her crusade ended, as most crusades in the history of the world have ended, in failure. That morning, we sat at the breakfast table. A kettle whistled on the gas stove, signaling that the water for my parents' tea was ready. I was struggling to finish a greasy, overcooked omelet Ma had made for me. It smelled eggier than normal, as if it had stayed inside the chicken longer than actually necessary. I felt a little queasy. My mother stood up to fetch the kettle and some tea bags and, out of the blue, said, "You know, Anvar, you'll always be a second-­class citizen in America. They will always think of you as different from themselves. Inferior." My father set down the newspaper he was reading and looked in her direction. She wasn't meeting his gaze, focusing her complete attention on the tea she was preparing. In a quiet voice, he said, "You're bringing the children into this now? That's it. The water is over my head. I can't take any more. So that's enough." And just like that, somehow, it was enough. I don't understand why but, after that moment, my mother didn't complain or try to argue against our pending immigration. She remained unhappy, but she remained unhappy in silence. To me, my father said, "All men are equal." "What?" He picked up a piece of toast and began to butter it. "The Americans. They say that. All men are created equal. You won't be bloody second-­class." I thought about that. "Everyone was made equal," I agreed. "Except for Aamir. He was made special. With a stick up his butt." My mother pursed her lips in stern disapproval, but Imtiaz Faris laughed that huge laugh of his and went back to the news of the day. About a week later, from somewhere, my father brought me the only book I actually owned while I was in Pakistan. It was a thin, unmarked text, bound in worn blue leather. I opened the first page and saw from the title that it was The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America. -- In our house, there was never music that wasn't mine unless, of course, my father was home. Except for one day, when I heard the soft, mournful words of a poem I'd heard often, but never managed to remember, coming from my parents' room. I was going somewhere, doing something, but I stopped. It was singing. My mother was singing. I tiptoed to the master bedroom's door like I was approaching a wisp that might flit away at the sound of my steps, and I listened. Bariah Faris could sing. I don't remember the words. I don't think it was Urdu at all. It was Punjabi, maybe, or perhaps Sindhi. Whatever the language, I knew instinctively that the song was very old, and it echoed around the almost barren room like a ghost seeking something it could not find. My mother's voice was gentle and melodic, like I'd never heard it. She'd always recited nursery rhymes in a monotone, like she was reading out of a cookbook, and had never indulged us with lullabies. Until that moment, I hadn't considered it possible that the woman would even be able to carry a tune. Yet now she was doing justice to a song that seemed to reach back centuries, into the heart of the place she was about to leave. I didn't want her to stop, but I knew that she would if she found me here. So, I tried to step away, and in doing so I must have made some noise, because as unexpectedly as I'd found the song, I found it gone, leaving behind a silence that seemed to remember it. My mother wiped at her eyes, though I saw no tears there, and cleared her throat. "Music," she said, her manner as stern as ever, "is different from poetry." "Okay," I said. "The Prophet liked poetry. The human voice, you know, it is used in the--­" "Do you really not want to go?" I asked, and not just because I wanted an answer, but because I wanted to cut off the lecture I could sense coming for something that I hadn't even been doing. She smiled a little. "Life is not about what we want." "Why not?" "Because if you do what you want--­if you get what you want--­then there is no one to blame if things go wrong. Your world, if you make it what you want it to be, becomes your responsibility." I shook my head, not because I disagreed, but because I had no idea what she was talking about. "You're too young to understand," my mother said. "Think what would happen if I got your father to stay here." "Well . . . we'd keep living here." "And with everything that is going on in this city, in this country, what if one day something happens to Aamir? Every house on this block has had burglars break in, hold the families at gunpoint. The Grace of Allah has kept us safe, but what if it happens to you? Who would your father blame? Who would I blame?" "Well," I said, perhaps not entirely helpfully, "there is always God." "Always you have to talk nonsense," she snapped. "Who would dare blame God?" It seemed perfectly reasonable that if you were going to thank God when good things happened, you could blame Him if bad things did, but I knew better than to say that out loud. "We have to be careful in this world, Anvar. The things we do--­and the things we don't do--­we pay for them all." "Like checkers," I said. "Uff. Yes. Fine. Like checkers. You spend too much time with your grandmother. I worry that she will fill your head with too much nonsense." "You shouldn't talk about your mother like that," I said. Bariah Faris glared at me, though her shoulders shook a little, with suppressed laughter, perhaps. "You want to get out of my sight now, unless you want me to show you what I mean when I say that actions have consequences you can regret." My father thought we should each choose one last place to visit in Karachi before we left--­a quick little goodbye tour to the places that meant the most to us. Ma declined to make a pick. Aamir thought going to visit our deceased grandparents' graves would be a fun time, I guess because that was the kind of thought that won him praise from grown-­ups. I wanted to go to the beach. The sea speaks to you when you're born by the ocean. It sings to you. If you stand still, just out of reach of the water for long enough, you begin to sense a small echo of the infinite inside yourself, and in the violent crashing and breaking of waves you begin to feel at peace. It was something I would miss. Aamir said that was silly because there were plenty of beaches in California, and this is true, but I've yet to find one like Clifton Beach, where you can buy a ride on a camel or horse and walk back over their hoofprints barefoot in the black, tarry sand. Anyway, since my parents agreed with Aamir that the beaches in California were better, I said that I'd like to go to Naani's house earlier than we had planned, so I could get in a few extra games of checkers. I was fairly certain that on this last day, of all days, my grandmother would let me win once. She did not. I did get close though, bringing Naani down to her final piece, a single solitary king, before she started counting. Then she moved that infuriating little monarch all over the familiar board with practiced ease, until she got to the magic number of twenty and the draw that came with it. The look on my face when victory slipped away from me must have been something because my grandmother started to laugh. "I told you," she said. "Checkers is like life. Just when you think you've got everything you wanted, it all slips from your fingers." We were sitting on her takht--­a large, low wood bench covered with a bedsheet that was, in my opinion, only marginally more comfortable than the ground--­and we were alone for the moment. The family had gone to look through the house again one last time. I stayed behind. I didn't care about the house. She looked at me with something sad in her eyes. "What?" I asked. "It would be better for you, my child, if you were more like your brother." I rolled my eyes. I'd heard that one before. Naani chuckled. "I mean it. The world is difficult sometimes for restless minds and imaginative hearts. Things go easier for you if you do what you're told, when you're told, and never ask any questions." "Sounds boring." "There are worse things in life than being bored," she told me. "No. There aren't." Naani laughed just as my mother led the rest of the family back in. Bariah Faris smiled at the scene and shook her head. "You laugh more with him than I've ever seen you laugh in my life." "She didn't used to," I said before I could think to stop myself, "until she started wearing white." That killed my mother's smile, because nothing can kill a smile faster than the truth, and my father winced. Everyone started looking at anything except my grandmother, who just nodded, not at me, but at the checkers board. "I know that your parents will want me to impart some wisdom to you, Anvar, before you leave, so . . . You're going to meet all kinds of girls there in America, I think." She leaned over and swatted my arm when I grinned widely at that. "Be careful. More than anything else, falling in love with the right person will bring you happiness. Failing to do that . . ." She took a deep breath. "Love is blind, beta, but be careful." I wanted to ask Naani what she meant, but my mother spoke instead. "He wasn't a bad man, Amma." "No," Naani agreed. "He wasn't a bad man." Aamir stepped forward, all eagerness. "What about me, Naani Jaan?" "What about you?" Naani asked. "Any advice for me?" "Oh." She seemed to think about it for a while and then shrugged. "No. You I don't worry about." Aamir grinned. It was the nicest thing Naani had ever said to him. As frustrating as delayed flights and security checks can be, it would be a better world if more of the human experience was like being at the airport. People move around looking for things--­loved ones, bags, boarding gates--­and generally find them. Those who are lost are easily guided, directed to where they are supposed to be by people who sit behind counters and peer over eyeglasses and usually know the answers to the most pressing questions presented to them. Airports are places of certainty and purpose. Those things are difficult to find. Of course, when you're leaving behind the only country you've ever known, walking away from a caravan of first cousins and second cousins and close friends who have gathered to see you off, possibly forever, it is hard to appreciate that. I didn't feel very certain of much that day at Jinnah International. "We'll meet again soon," Naani Jaan promised, as I pulled away from her embrace. She smelled like stale perfume, smoke and time. "All separations are temporary." "I know," I said. "Then smile." I tried. "When you're walking away," Naani said, "remember not to look back. If you look back, you turn to stone." She was talking about Lot's wife, the woman who had looked back at the city she was leaving when she wasn't supposed to, and who had been punished for her disobedience by being turned to stone. I felt something like kinship with her then, that woman centuries removed from me, abandoning her city in distress, leaving her home to its perilous fate. How could she have been expected to resist a glance back, and why had her punishment, for so small a transgression, been so severe? My mother was standing by me, so I knew not to give voice to the question. It is one thing to relate to sinners. It is another thing to say that out loud. One must, after all, pretend virtue whenever possible. I'll admit that I shared in the weakness of Lot's wife--­Edith, they say her name was--­because I couldn't keep myself from glancing back either, at my extended family, at the sun-­soaked city where I'd been born, at the frail old woman who always played to win. Was there a chance that looking back could have turned me to stone? I didn't think it mattered. Anyone who didn't look back, I realized then, was stone already. Excerpted from The Bad Muslim Discount: A Novel by Syed M. Masood All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.