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.