A Place for Us Read online

  Your brother, he said. Your.

  He announces to the few other boys that remain in the hallway that Amar will be on his team from now on. He pulls Amar closer to him for a moment before letting go. And it is that subtle display of affection for her younger brother that makes Hadia look at him in another way, aware of not only his eyes and how startling they are, or how he makes everyone in their Sunday school classes laugh, but also of how kind he is, how good.

  Amar has a stunned look he tries to conceal; he busies himself by kicking his shoes into a cubby, smiling the whole time to himself. The eldest Ali boy walks into the corridor and heads to the Quran class that Hadia will soon be late to. Lately, Amar has had a rough time at school and difficulty keeping friends. Toward the end of last year, his grades had plummeted like never before, he had lost what little motivation he might have possessed, and his third grade teacher decided it would be best for him to repeat the year, considering he had done terribly on almost every single test. He has just begun third grade again. Amar looks at her and his smile widens before he rushes to his own class. She stands in the empty lobby, taking in the silence and the scattered shoes.

  When she enters the classroom she spots the only empty seat, in the front row of the girls’ section, just behind the four rows of boys’ desks. The boys have the first few rows reserved, so that the order of the classroom may be maintained, so they cannot look at the backs of the girls at their desks and get distracted. Girls are not like boys, they are told, girls have control over their desires. It is up to the girls to do what they can to protect the boys from sin.

  Sister Mehvish, their Arabic teacher, is the strictest of them all. She has a thick Arabic accent and a mole the size of a little grape on her upper lip.

  “So gracious of you to join us, Sister Hadia,” Sister Mehvish says. “Why don’t you begin our class by reciting the surah you had to memorize.”

  Everyone turns to look at her. Her face burns when she sees that the eldest Ali boy is looking too. Hadia confesses she was unable to finish memorizing the surah, a lie she tells to save herself from the greater embarrassment of having to recite it aloud, drawing even more attention to herself, risking the possibility of fumbling the correct pronunciation, and the look she knows she will get from the other students who, as usual, have not bothered to memorize it at all.

  “Of course you didn’t,” Sister Mehvish says, and some of the students snicker.

  The only empty seat is directly behind the eldest Ali boy’s. He leans back in his chair, turns to face her when she sits, and she catches some sympathy in his eyes—but by the time she has settled and he has turned to face the teacher, she realizes it could easily have been pity. He rocks in his chair throughout the lesson, taps his pen against his blank binder paper, and she finds it hard to concentrate on the Arabic words Sister Mehvish is writing on the chalkboard. She remembers his arm around Amar, the points he scored, the moment he looked to her from the court, the vein in his neck, the skin revealed when he lifted his shirt—she feels instantly and intensely guilty for storing away that brief glimpse of his skin, especially ashamed that it has come back to her in a class for learning the holy language, holy texts. She does not recognize herself, and tugging on her loose sleeve so it covers her hand, she does not know if she likes herself. But he has a small speck of a birthmark where his hair meets his neck in the shape of a strawberry, and every so often he runs his hand through his hair, then lets his hand rest at the back of his head, so close that she would hardly have to stretch to touch him if she dared. Twice, she thinks he will turn to look at her, but he does not.

  When the class is over everyone stands, no one faster than Hadia. The eldest Ali boy turns to her, nods toward Sister Mehvish, and rolls his eyes. That drum in her body again. Sister Mehvish has her back turned to the class and is erasing the words that look like scribbles from the board, creating a cloud of white dust. Hadia looks back at him. He has not looked away from her. He pulls an almost empty packet of gum out from his pocket and removes the last piece, a stick wrapped in silver foil, and extends it to her, his palm open, his eyebrows raised. Hadia reaches for it, her fingers lightly graze the surface of his palm. She wants to say thank you but does not, she can feel her face getting warmer, she fears he will notice a change in color, so she offers a small, quick smile and walks away. Her classmates have not noticed and Hadia looks up to where she imagines God is, sometimes a spot on the ceiling, other times a patch of brilliant blue in the sky, to thank Him for the moment passed unseen. She doesn’t want to be the subject of the next story they share in the bathroom: Did you see how he offered Hadia a stick of gum?

  In the corridor light, the silver wrapping of the gum gleams. She tucks it into her pocket like a secret.

  * * *

  THAT EVENING, SHE sits in the living room armchair and runs her finger over half of the silver gum wrapper in her hand. The other half is taped to the ceiling above her bed, the interior inside out, so the white blends with the ceiling paint, unnoticed. On it, she had drawn a small strawberry. Most days even she would not notice it there, but there it would be.

  Her mother is setting the table for dinner. The smell of kheema and fried tomatoes sizzling fills the room. Amar is bothering Baba while Baba is trying to read the newspaper.

  “Why don’t you wear it every day?” Amar asks Baba, pointing to the watch on his wrist.

  It had belonged to Baba’s father, their dada. They asked to be shown it some nights because it was the only piece of Baba that had been there since before them, and because Baba was proud when he lifted it from the box to polish it. Dada was a mystery to them, just a photograph in Baba’s office, or the few anecdotes Baba would share, and so the watch itself felt like a mystery, kept in its box unless Baba wore it.

  “It still feels like my father’s,” Baba says to Amar. “I just inherited it, when my Baba passed away. It had been a gift to my father from his father.”

  “Does it always go to fathers?” Amar asks.

  “You mean sons,” Baba says.

  Hadia knows the story. The watch had been gifted to her grandfather when he went to Cambridge to study law. Her great-grandfather had wanted his son to have a Swiss watch, like the men with whom he imagined his son would be studying.

  “Hardly anyone studied in England then,” Baba tells him. “He returned home a lawyer.”

  Baba flips the page of the newspaper, and then extends his arm to Amar so he can get a closer look. Baba says to him, “This watch will work forever. It will never stop.”

  Hadia smiles from her couch. She likes thinking of her ancestors as people who had done something with their lives, that her grandfather had been brave to study in England and that her father had been brave to move here, each of them doing what they could so that she and her siblings could now be brave in their lives.

  “Where are you lost?” Mumma snaps at her in Urdu. “Put water on the table.”

  Hadia stands reluctantly to help her mother. Huda is setting the table slowly. Huda was lazy with her tasks; it was always apparent when she did not care about what she was doing. Hadia’s efforts never changed; she was determined to do everything well, even the tasks she hated. Amar refused to approach what he did not care for at all. But when he did care, he put more of himself into the task than Hadia ever could. Amar begins to throw pillows into the air before catching them. Baba continues reading. He has an angry look on his face and he is moving his hand up and down his eyebrow, and she wonders what is happening in the world that is worrying him. Hadia brings down the jug and fills it with ice and then water, listens to the way the cubes begin to crackle, which is her favorite part of this task. Amar is excited in a way that he is usually not, and she wonders if it is because he was included with the older boys today.

  Sometimes, Amar acts so despondent that Hadia wants to hold on to his shoulders and tell him to stop. He never seems to enjoy bei
ng at home, but complains whenever he is dragged to school, to Sunday school, to mosque on weeknights. He complains until something in their father snaps and he strikes at Amar—with a look, a sharp shout, sometimes a hand—a reaction that silences his protests but alters nothing in his attitude. She is beginning to wonder if Amar acts this way on purpose, just to see how angry he can make Baba. Mumma and Baba have gone to countless appointments with his teachers, but little has changed and Hadia often overhears them talking about him on the other side of their bedroom door.

  But tonight, Amar offers to help their mother. Mumma looks to him and smiles.

  “You don’t have to today,” Mumma says, “because you were so good to ask.”

  It is a line she has never heard from her mother. That everyone in her family is occupying the same space and that none of them knows about the silver gum wrapper in Hadia’s pocket, or where her mind goes, is intensely pleasing to her. She thinks of Abbas Ali. Of the color of his eyes, hazel, striking against his lightly tanned skin, a rarity in their community. Everyone is fascinated by the Ali family, their wealth and their stature, how they came from a line of esteemed scholars and politicians, their latest and loveliest fashions. But Hadia has noticed with sad curiosity how often positive things about them were discussed in a negative tone. When she first began to understand jealousy, it was the comments she had heard Mumma say to Baba about Seema Aunty that came to mind: Did you see the purse she was holding, it is haram, that kind of excessiveness. Did you notice how highly she spoke of her children’s independence, without once mentioning it is only because she is always at work? If she doesn’t wear hijab, how will she ever expect her daughter to? Always a different lipstick shade, sunglasses atop her head, blue jeans. Beauty is meant to be concealed, not indulged in.

  And yet not one community member ever turned down an invitation to the Alis’ home, nor did anyone deny themselves the pleasure of their presence at their own parties, a presence that made them feel both big and small at the same time. She wasn’t sure what the parents did exactly, how they had so much money—the father was a doctor of a special kind, the mother designed clothes in India before moving to California, and she had continued doing so in the garage of their home until the business flourished. She owned stores across the States. She was one of the few mothers who was successful at work. Most mothers stayed at home. Almost all of Hadia’s and Huda’s Indian clothes had been bought from her boutiques. Overpriced, her mother would say, before purchasing it anyway, because their family, and many others in the community, always received a discount. Seema Aunty was never in the store, which made Hadia wonder exactly what it was that she did. There were four children in the family—three sons and one daughter, Amira Ali, a pretty and charming seven-year-old girl, with dark hair and rounded eyes, hazel, the exact hue of her brother’s. Many of the older community girls were kind to her, and the adults too, because she spoke fluent Urdu and was not afraid to be witty, to joke with them as if she were their age, and she had not yet reached the age when that would be considered rude, when they would begin to discourage that kind of banter. She was not told to shush like other girls were. Hadia wondered if the girls her age were kind to her in the hope that her older brother would one day notice them. For this reason, Hadia was only as nice to her as she would be to any other girl, extending no special treatment. The other boys of the family—Kumail and Saif—were fine enough, but they were shadows of their eldest brother, Abbas. They often walked on either side of him. And all three of them banded together to protect Amira, which was another reason why no one dared to treat her unkindly. Once a boy had been throwing things in the corridors of the mosque and something hit her. A small gash appeared at the edge of her eyebrow. Everyone still exaggerated the blood, Amira’s cries, and the reaction of the eldest Ali boy who, rumor had it, pushed the boy against the wall and threatened to knock his teeth out if he ever threw anything in the hallways again. But Hadia did not like to think of him in that way—as someone with a temper. She liked to think of him walking with his little sister on his shoulders, as she sometimes saw them do, and how Amira would hold on to his neck, and how this too had endeared him to Hadia, how of course she could care for a boy who knew how to be kind to a sister, of course someone like that would be safe to love.

  Amar walks up to her on tiptoe and announces, “I’m taller than you now.”

  He sticks his chest out and holds his hand to his forehead as if to salute her. Hadia pushes him a little so he falls back on both feet.

  “No, you’re not,” she says. The day her younger brother would grow taller than her loomed. She knew it would be a strange, embarrassing transition and she feared it would also transform the way they thought of one another, related to one another.

  “Am too,” he says.

  Mumma notices their quibble. She stops pouring the tomato dish into a clear bowl and wipes her hand on a towel. All right then, she says, and she forces them to stand back-to-back. Amar complies eagerly, his new confidence already beginning to annoy her. Huda stops putting the plates on the table to watch. The crinkle of a turning newspaper page cuts the air. Hadia looks to the ceiling and sends a quick, short prayer to God, Please, do not let him grow taller than me just yet. After placing her hand on both of their heads and shoulders, stepping close to them and then farther away, Mumma declares, “Hadia is still taller. But not for very long.”

  Mumma winks at Amar and he leaps into the air. Mumma catches him in her arms and tousles his hair before walking back into the kitchen. Hadia rolls her eyes and turns to busy herself with the task of filling glasses with water, but not before noticing Baba, still staring at the newspaper spread out before him on the coffee table. He is smiling to himself in a way Hadia has not seen before, gentle and grateful even, for the newfound height of his son.

  * * *

  AMAR CANNOT STOP thinking of Amira and their unfinished conversation. He wonders if he is the only one who has returned to their exchange and if they will have another like it. He wants to call Abbas, just so he can go over to their house, glimpse her walking across the landing—but he decides against it. He cares too sincerely for Abbas to seek him out for a false reason. Instead, he shoots hoops in his front yard, returns to their questions and answers and catalogs what he now knows: she loves mornings, she stares out of her window at a single streetlight when she cannot sleep, she is brave, and because of this, beautiful.

  Days pass and his mother begins to plan a jashan for Hadia, who will soon be on break from college. Three years ago, Hadia was accepted into a combined undergraduate and premed program, with the possibility of continuing on to med school under the condition that she work hard and distinguish herself. Recently, she had called home with the news that she had gotten the grades and test scores and faculty recommendations necessary to continue. His parents are so proud of her. He overhears his father talk about her any chance he gets to family friends who visit or to the grocery store clerk who asks a simple question out of courtesy. Even Mumma calls Sara Khala on the phone and brags and brags—but they never tell Hadia. Only say to her, good, that is good, finish soon and come home again. Amar never shows his parents his report cards. He only hopes to do well enough to graduate. Thinking of his future sometimes felt like looking down a long tunnel, and even if he squinted he could hardly picture what his life would be like when he stepped out at the other end.

  Usually, he hated when his mother threw a party. How she fretted over their house, how she made them clean their rooms. He protested that no one ever ventured inside their bedrooms, but to no avail. He especially detested how it fell on him to entertain the guests, when all he wanted to do was stay in his bedroom until everyone left, or sneak off with Abbas and Kumail and take just one drag. But this time the news of the party piques his interest. Twice, he asks his mother to clarify the date. First, to mark it on his calendar, a little red x. The second time to make absolutely sure he got the day right. Fourteen
days until the party. On day eleven, he gets his hair cut, knowing how terrible he looks the first few days after a new one. The last ten days take the longest to pass. When only three days remain, he gathers the courage he needs to find his mother in the kitchen.

  “Which families are invited?” he asks, gripping the edge of the counter, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible, knowing how unlike him it is to do anything other than complain.

  His mother is kneading dough for roti in a large silver bowl. Her cheeks are dusty with flour, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. He had assumed Amira’s family would be invited. But earlier today he panicked and now he has to confirm, just to make sure his haircutting and hoping have not been a waste. Mumma takes her time answering, moves strands of her hair from her face with the back of her hand, leaving behind another streak of flour, graying her eyebrow. His pulse quickens, he is surprised at the insistence of his own heartbeat, he twists his mouth to hide his nervousness.

  “Why do you ask?” She glances up at him.

  He shrugs one shoulder. Mumma smiles. She resumes kneading the dough. He regrets asking immediately. She must know. She always knows everything. She begins to list the families invited, raising a dusty finger each time, but none of the last names are Amira’s. She stops speaking and sprinkles more flour into the bowl, a trick for when the dough is too sticky. He turns to walk away, and fills with a disappointment or deflation he cannot precisely define.

  “Oh,” his mother calls after him, “I forgot one.”

  He turns around and she is smiling at him in her knowing way. She says the Ali family. Amar nods and walks away as calmly as he can, raises his fist in the air as soon as he is out of her sight.

  On the day itself he irons his clothes for the first time in his life. It confuses him, the knobs and the different settings. He rushes to finish before his mother is done showering. He cannot risk any more of her knowing glances, her embarrassing smile. He is ready an hour before the function begins. Another first. He asks his mother if she needs any help, just to have something to occupy his hands. She beams at him. For her, he pours cold mango lassi into plastic cups and arranges them on trays. He lounges in the living room near the entrance, though the party is outside, the men on one side of the garden, the women on the other side or in the family room. Every time the doorbell rings he looks to the door. Every time it is anyone but her family, he feels pathetic.