A Place for Us Read online

  “They are very ashamed. But it is too late.”

  “What’s ashamed?” Amar asked.

  Mumma looked up at the ceiling for a moment as if she were wondering how to answer.

  “When you do something you know you shouldn’t have. And you are afraid to show your face.”

  Amar looked down, as if considering Mumma’s explanation.

  “Why is it too late?” Huda asked.

  “Nothing can be done. Joseph is gone.”

  There is a knock on the bathroom door and Huda calls her name. Hadia tells her she is coming. She looks at her reflection, rubs where she imagines her heart to be, and wonders if there will be dark specks inside her heart if she does not wear a scarf after Wednesday. Last night was the first time she heard of the specks collecting like dust on the heart. And if not wearing a scarf was a speck, would a new one bloom every day she chose not to?

  She weaves through the guests, lifts her cupped hand to her forehead in adaab to the uncles seated on the couch, accepts the gifts or envelopes from the aunties with a polite thank-you. She watches Huda, standing near the sliding door with some girls her age, telling them about the goodie bags. Huda’s hair is cut short, like a boy’s. There is an M&M’s packet in each one, she hears her say. Huda has a whole year before she has to make any decision, and this feels unfair. She feels apart from all of them—the girls talking about M&M’s and the women wearing dupattas or scarves on their heads discussing what she does not care about, and she looks past them all to her plum tree, its pretty purple leaves rustling, its branches swaying slightly, and no one surrounding it or standing beneath its shade. How she likes to sit there and listen to the wind pass through its branches.

  Some children are playing tag and others are playing hopscotch on squares drawn with chalk on the cement. Their fingers are dusty, powdery blue and purple. The girls jumping are young, their hair is worn down and it lifts up and falls wildly as they hop from square to square. She wishes her mother had told her about the party, so she could have invited her friends, Danielle and Charlotte, but she dismisses that thought as soon as it comes, realizing she would be too embarrassed to wear this dress in front of them, too shy to explain that the dinner is biryani and that there are no games planned, just children released into the yard, and that the adults are all there because it was more a party for them to mingle and less to celebrate her turning nine. What will she have to tell Danielle and Charlotte about wearing a scarf? What are the reasons to wear it, other than that everyone she knows from mosque wears it? And a frightening thought: What if after Wednesday her friends treat her differently? Will they know that she is the same Hadia, with or without her hair showing?

  Hadia reaches the plum tree at the far end of the backyard. The only thing beyond it is its own roots and the wooden fence, and she picks at the bark that she loves, picks at it until a small piece breaks off, and she looks at it jagged in her palm, turns it around. There are many trees that she appreciates but only two in this world she loves, and the plum tree is one of them. She is lucky that the other is in their front yard, the magnolia tree, visible from her bedroom window. The plums are always too high for her and she remembers when she was little her father would let her climb onto his back to pluck one. Would he speak to her after Wednesday if she chose not to wear hijab?

  “Happy birthday, Hadia.”

  It is Abbas Ali, the eldest Ali boy. Hadia wraps her hand around the piece of bark. Its rough edges bite.

  “You too,” she says.

  Abbas laughs a little and she feels silly, realizing her mistake. Hadia looks down at her dress. If it were a yellow crayon in a crayon box it would be the one that was never used. It would stay sharp and unbroken. That and the gray one. Even the brown would be used before this kind of yellow. Abbas walks up to the plum tree and touches it with his hand also. He is the only other person here her age. She thinks that maybe she should tell him this, and that they can be friends for the duration of the party. Abbas’s hair is a little long for a boy’s, it falls in his face and covers the tops of his ears. If she started to wear a scarf he would never see her hair again. Danielle and Charlotte might still, when they were in the bathroom at school or if they came to her house, but Abbas is a boy who is not related to her and so he would never.

  “This is my favorite tree,” she tells him.

  Abbas looks up at it, and Hadia looks up too, past the branches and the leaves and the little plums straight to the bright sky. She squints.

  “Because the leaves are kind of purple?”

  “No. Just because.”

  Abbas nods. They stand side by side. They watch children playing freeze tag, standing still, shocked expressions on their faces, arms stretched out and waiting for someone to tap their fingers. Maybe if she started wearing a scarf she would grow up right away. Maybe she would not be able to run at a party like this one. No boy would be able to touch her to unfreeze her or tag her. And she thinks of how, sometimes, when they go to Seema Aunty’s house, they all play soccer in the backyard because the Ali family has two soccer goalposts, and Abbas always invites her to play, and she does play even though she is not very good. But at least she is getting better, according to him. The last time they played was at his brother Saif’s birthday, and there was a jumpy castle too, and a popcorn machine. And it is when she is looking at Abbas in his green T-shirt that she thinks, I will not be able to play soccer anymore. Not with him, anyway. And I won’t get any better than scoring one goal in the last five minutes of our last game.

  “Why aren’t you happy if it’s your party?”

  Of course he is her friend. The wind blows and the branches move and make their wind and leaves sounds, and Hadia’s dirty-yellow dress fills up with air and she holds it down with her hands. Even her lace collar flares up. Someone opens the door and it is one of the uncles, holding a folded white cloth, which means the men are going to gather on the lawn and pray soon.

  “I didn’t know I was going to have one,” she confesses, and once she does, it is easy to say, “I don’t know if I will like being nine. And I don’t like this dress.”

  Abbas is quiet. He stretches for a plum, but he is too short. His fingers are inches away from the nearest branch, the plum hanging. Hadia is grateful he does not try jumping up and down to reach it, drawing attention to them and kicking up dirt. She wants to suggest climbing onto his back and reaching up. But that is forbidden. She knows that. She wonders what the size of the black mark on her heart would be if she did, and if it is worse than jealousy, worse than telling a lie. The uncle is trying to put the white sheet down but it keeps lifting in the wind.

  “Why not? You look like the sun.”

  She smiles for the first time that day. Baba barks her name in his angry voice, then says nothing after. He begins walking across the lawn to them. She looks at Abbas and remembers why they are not friends, not really. Maybe they are “acquaintances”—the word Baba uses when he tells her, remember, boys are not your friends, they are acquaintances when you are in the classroom, and you have to keep your distance. Abbas walks away without saying anything, becomes one of the children running, lifts his baby sister in his arms. His shirt is the kind of green that would get used a lot.

  “Gee, Baba?” She uses her almost childlike voice. The little piece of bark cuts into her palm. She drops it into the dirt when he looks like he is a little bit mad at her, she rubs her reddened palm with her thumb.

  “Why aren’t you playing with the other girls?” he asks.

  “They aren’t my friends.”

  The uncle silences the children, points to the house, and they begin to march inside. The older boys linger, knowing it is time to pray soon. Baba puts his hand on her head, and his hand has a weight to it, and Hadia tiptoes up to him a little to feel the pressure. She wants to say to him, remember when I climbed on your back and plucked the plums? But before she can,
he reaches up, wraps his hand around one and tugs, the whole branch bending a bit before his hand returns with a small, deep-purple plum. He hands it to her.

  “Thank you, Baba,” she mumbles, “and for the party too.”

  He nods. They both turn to the men who have spread out the white cloth. Men are gathering in a row on the grass. She knows Baba will leave soon, walk up to take his place in the prayer line. As if he can hear her thoughts, he says to her, “Now you have to start praying too.”

  Hadia looks up at him. She senses that he is proud. When she is standing next to Baba she thinks that she is ready for it all. He places his hand back on her head and she moves the plum from hand to hand, feeling its weight.

  “Baba?”

  “Hm.”

  “Do you think I should start wearing a scarf?”

  A man begins reciting the adhaan. She sees that Abbas Ali has found a spot in the line. Even though he does not have to. He is nine too, but won’t have to start praying until he is fifteen. He will never have to wear a scarf. They are so lucky. She wonders if seeing him there makes his parents happy, and if God has an opposite of a dark spot on the heart if someone does something good, like a shimmer of gold. The wind makes small ripples in his green shirt. Baba is silent for the duration of the adhaan. Then the man is finished, and Hadia knows there is a small slot of time before the second call, which calls Baba to come, to pray. When Baba speaks he does so slowly, as if he is being very careful about every word.

  “I think that you should. It would be good if you did. And it is wajib on you now, you know. It would be a sin not to. But. It is your decision.”

  She looks up at him, dark from the sunlight behind him. She does not squint, does not blink, reaches up to tug at the little tail of her hair that is not woven tight in a braid, the soft clump like a paintbrush, bristly at its edges.

  * * *

  HE OPENS HIS door to his father’s face and knows immediately that something terrible has happened. Rain pounds the roof, wind rattles the windows—an unexpected storm that was light drizzle just an hour ago. Hadia is still home on her break from college and the three of them are staying up late reading together. He is afraid to ask what is wrong. His father’s face is pale, his expression unfamiliarly softened. He is fully dressed in a button-up shirt and pants, even though it is well past one in the morning, and he had retired hours earlier.

  “The Ali boy—” his father begins, but a break in his voice stops him from continuing.

  Everyone called the Ali boys the eldest Ali boy, the skinny Ali boy, the youngest Ali boy. To Amar, the Ali boys were just Abbas and Abbas’s younger brothers. And their sister, Amira Ali, who was perhaps the only child in their entire community known by her full name. No one needed any other marker to distinguish her. She was already herself, even as a child. He knew he was referred to as Rafiq’s boy, and when he was younger the community members would add, that naughty one.

  “Which one?”

  It is Hadia who asks. They both turn to look at her as if noticing her for the first time, and the look on her face makes Amar’s mouth suddenly dry.

  “The eldest one,” his father says. “A car accident.”

  “Abbas?” Amar asks, and Baba nods, and next to him Amar hears Hadia make a small animal sound.

  He leans against his doorframe. Then somehow he is sitting, somehow his hands are flat against the rough carpet. His father is saying, I am sorry. But he’s alive? Amar thinks he asks, but his father doesn’t reply and anyway, he already knows. His first absolutely stupid thought is to wonder who he will sit next to at mosque now. And just as the possibility of loss begins to open up beneath him, he thinks of Amira. Her note is hidden in the side pocket of his History notebook. He has hesitated from tucking it into his keepsake box because then his box would become not where he stored his own journals, but where he hid that one reminder of her. He has composed a dozen letters to her in the four days since receiving it, but has discarded them all. He feels a sudden urge to be beside her, and he is surprised by his thoughts—by the way they pull him in her direction.

  His father says he is going to the Ali house. His voice so thin it sounds nothing like him. When someone passed away in their community, people gathered in the house of the bereaved every day until the funeral. They brought food, sat in circles, read prayers and passages from holy texts, dedicated the merits to the deceased.

  “I’m coming too,” Hadia says.

  “Unnecessary,” his father says to her. “It is late and inappropriate.”

  “I’m coming,” she says, a determination in her voice that Amar had not expected her to ever use against their father. She looks up at the ceiling, holds tight on to her own arm.

  “I want to see Amira,” she insists, expressing the very thought that had become a beat in Amar’s mind. Their father, worn out by the news, does not have the energy to deny her.

  * * *

  OUTSIDE, RAINDROPS DARKEN their clothes. His father turns to Amar as if he is about to say something, but touches his shoulder instead, just for a moment, before retracting his hand to unlock the car door. Amar does not flinch at his touch.

  “You’re distracted,” Abbas had said to him, the last time he saw him alive, four days ago at the jashan Mumma had thrown for Hadia. They were standing in the food line together and it was true, Amar was distracted, and more reserved because of it. After years of not having anything to hide from Abbas, he was embarrassed to find that his first secret was about Abbas’s younger sister. When Amar gave him a flimsy excuse as to why he would not join him for a smoke walk, Abbas looked at him skeptically, a look that Amar recalls so vividly now it sickens him. But Abbas shrugged, talked more to make up for Amar’s silence, and instead of asking someone else to accompany him, he stayed by Amar’s side.

  Now there would never be another walk to the corner and back, a moment as simple as looking at him and then the sky. Abbas was young, Hadia’s age. Amar is afraid he will throw up, or worse, cry, so he tries not to think of the way Abbas gave him a reason to be excited about being a member of their community. Or that time when Amar, Abbas, and Abbas’s brothers, Saif and Kumail, passed a joint around for the first time, the windows open, fan on, candles and incense burning. Abbas made him feel that he had a brother, as though that bond was possible for him.

  At school Amar was valued for the very qualities that were looked down upon in his house. There he was not disrespectful but funny. There it was good that he was interested in English class, in the poems and stories his teachers assigned. As far as he was aware, none of his school friends knew what it was like to come home to a house that was quiet the way his was, where everything was forbidden to them—loud music or talking back, wearing shirts with band logos printed on them. A father who yelled, a mother who looked out the window or spent the day praying and tending her garden. A family that wanted him to change who he was, to become a respectable man who obeyed his father’s every word, and followed every command given by his father’s God. Or what it was like to live with the knowledge that his father would disown him if he found something as harmless as a packet of cigarettes under his mattress. To not have that kind of love. To not even believe in it.

  But Abbas knew these things. They would leave the mosque to walk in the parking lot, talking about what Amar could never voice to anyone else, the streetlights reflected in the murky puddles, and Amar confessing he did want to believe in God, in his father’s God, and he was afraid to lose that desire. Abbas touching his shoulder to stop him from stepping into a deep puddle, telling him, “You know, just because you don’t listen doesn’t mean you don’t believe.”

  Abbas knew when to stop fighting with his parents, and how to guard the secrets that would hurt them, and in turn cause him to be hurt by their rejection of him. He did not resent that this was the way it had to be. But Amar could not do that without feeling like a hypocrite. And now
Amar pulls the seat belt away from him because it feels too tight, he bites on his knuckle, afraid to think of who he has lost. The one person in front of whom he could sin under the watch of their fathers’ God without being cast aside.

  His father has forgotten to turn the wipers on, and neither Hadia nor Amar reminds him. Drops of water gather on the windshield when the car slows to stop at a red light, and each drop has caught within it the color red. He turns to Hadia in the backseat. She leans her head against the car door and looks out the window. When the car trembles, so does she. She refuses to meet his eyes even though she knows he is looking at her. He has always prided himself on being able to discern how Hadia is feeling by studying the look on her face, the way she carries herself, what she does not say. But tonight it is impossible to make sense of her.

  Abbas’s street is filled with parked cars. It seems news has reached every community member. This is a tragedy, he thinks as he steps out of the car and the door slams behind him. Tonight they have all lost a young man, barely twenty-one. This night, he knows, will be a mark that divides his life. They are soaked by the time they enter the house, which is warm from the people that will continue to visit in shifts. It is sickening to think of Abbas as a body to be buried. The first room—the family room—is full of women. Amira is not there. But Abbas’s mother, Seema Aunty, is surrounded by women who are speaking to her as if she were a child, hugging her to offer their condolences, and she collapses into their embraces, each one making her cry anew. He is hit with the strange sensation that Seema Aunty has comforted him before, that he has felt safe in this very room, and he is not sure if it is from a memory or a dream. He cannot look at her. Women sit in clusters reading from the Quran. Hadia takes a seat in the corner, by herself, without reaching for one of the books. The look on her face unsettles him, a vacancy to her expression that makes him want to shake her. He turns away and follows his father into the men’s section.