A Place for Us

HADIA TAKES A break from packing to peek through her window: Amar, the Ali brothers, and some others. The boys have just finished playing basketball. For hours, Hadia listened to the hollow bounce of the basketball on concrete, the ring of metal, the swish of net, while she regarded her shirts, her sweaters, held them up one by one before tossing them or folding them neatly. She itched to join them, to be able to move a basketball from one hand to another, to know how to step around players and when to shoot for the basket. But that was the impulse of another life. She folded her sweater, a pale pink, and packed it into her suitcase.

She has often felt barred from hundreds of experiences—she has never strummed her fingers on the strings of a guitar, stretched her legs in dance, played a sport outside of PE class requirements, pedaled her feet fast on a bike without training wheels, on an actual street, next to moving cars—but recently the scope of her life has seemed to gasp open just a bit, and she wonders now what she will remain barred from, and what she can pry away for herself. It is quiet now except for the boys’ conversation that drifts up. When she peers down, the boys are lined against the garage door, directly beneath her window. She cannot make out their full sentences, but can tell their voices apart. Abbas Ali’s distinct timbre. His laugh. It is nearly the end of summer. Sun in the sky and sun caught in their stray strands of hair, Abbas Ali’s dark hair transformed into an almost golden-brown crown. Amar has scraped his knee. A streak of skin on his kneecap shines a bright crimson.

Could she really leave? Earlier this morning, she had begun the task of determining how much to pack, wondering how often she would return. After years of the same meals with her family, the same boys gathering in her front yard, the same community parties and events to attend at their mosque, Amar on the other side of her bedroom wall and Huda across the hall—her window will finally look out at another view, and she will discover what life elsewhere is like, and who she is there.

When the call from the school’s administration came, she walked out in a daze into the spring sunlight, until she was standing in the street, shaking a little from fear or excitement. All her life she assumed she could only leave the way others had: by marriage. As if marriage were the ticket, not to freedom exactly, but something close to it. Even Baba doubted her ability to make decisions for herself by stating: you are our responsibility until you are your husband’s. Or: no, you cannot do so unless you are married, and then it is up to your husband to decide with you. Which she knew meant for you. Even if all she wanted was something as simple and small as cutting her hair short, standing in line with her friends at the movie theater for the midnight screenings. Then it was fall of senior year and her classmates were in a flurry to apply to colleges, and she watched the green leaves turn red and waver and thought: why not me? I can at least try. She applied to nearby schools but also one program five hours away—a special, six-year program that was both an undergraduate degree and a medical one—a long shot, near impossible to get into, but Baba had always wanted her to be a doctor, always told her she could move away only if she got married or got into medical school.

Thank you, she had said to the woman on the phone, thank you, and because the rush of emotions made her face fuzzy she gushed to her: you have changed my life. Well, the woman said, I don’t think I had much to do with it, and she might have laughed. How could the woman have known that she was not just conveying the news of acceptance, but also presenting Hadia with the promise of a formerly unfathomable life? One Hadia had worked for and longed for, but never allowed herself to fully picture, never allowed herself to honestly believe that a life where she abided by her rules and hers alone, picked up a guitar if she wanted to, learned a chord to play, could be hers. She would become a somebody—a doctor. She would live a five-hour car journey away from this very street, this little leaf that blew right by her, the sight of the sun setting behind the tips of houses across her street.

Now the drive she and Baba will make to move her into her dorm is a week away and all she can think of is how nice the sound of a basketball thudding against concrete is, how nice that she can walk downstairs and out the front door to see the boys she has grown with since childhood, sweaty and tired and smiling with surprise at the sight of her waving at them and asking them if they want some mango lassi.

“I’m making some for myself,” she explains, which is true, but Hadia knows that Abbas Ali loves mango lassi, and the boys raise their hands up so she can count cups, and Abbas Ali hollers a yes and thank you, Hadia, calling her by her name.



* * *





SHE HAD COME back inside after the call. Mumma and Baba were in the living room and she began to stutter. What has happened to you? Baba asked as she tried to tell him what the administration had said. They thought she was a good fit. Her application had impressed them. She could be a doctor, begin residency in six to seven years if all went well, Inshallah, it would go well. And before they registered the news, their expressions were confused and there was her fear: that it had been a lie, Baba saying she could study anywhere if she became a doctor, and now it was almost possible and he would say no to this too.

Instead he stood and wrapped his arms around her and spoke into her hair that he was proud of her. She felt her body was humming from the impact of the news and realized she had begun crying. She couldn’t believe it. So she said so.

“Can’t you?” Baba replied. “I did not doubt it.”

Her mother too hugged her, albeit coldly, asking only how far away the program was, and Huda and Amar entered while Hadia’s face was pressed into the coarse fabric of her mother’s shalwar kameez. As if she were overhearing a conversation that was meant to be private, she heard Baba tell Huda and Amar the news, his voice animated, excited even. Huda shrieked and Amar lifted her up and over his shoulder and spun her around, and she kept saying put me down, put me down, but it was the best, the dizzying feeling, the world spinning and spinning.

The very next day, when she was called down for dinner, she saw that her family was standing in the hallway dressed in slightly nicer clothes—Mumma had put on lipstick, a very sober pink, Baba had worn his shiny shoes, Amar a button-up shirt—and they explained nothing to her as they got into the car. Huda had started wearing a scarf again and that day she had chosen an extravagant cream silk, wrapped tightly like a work of art around her face, but Hadia had not put it on again, so her hair was piled on top of her head in a messy bun, her sweater an old one for home. She would have to tell Baba that she could not see herself wearing a scarf again, and she imagined Baba would ask her, “Is it because you don’t feel safe?” To which she would respond, with the sharpest honesty she had only recently found the courage for, “It is because I don’t want to.”

A decision that would somehow be easier to reveal because the path of her life had begun to announce and distinguish itself as separate, as having worth that her parents could understand, respect, and therefore be able to acquiesce to. That afternoon no one replied when Hadia asked where they were heading, and soon the route was familiar to her—the one they took to her favorite Thai restaurant. When they got out of the car she waited behind to walk in with Baba, and half hugged him as she thanked him.

“It was Mumma’s idea,” he said, nodding to Mumma, who was holding the door open and waiting for them to enter.

Huda and Baba had asked her questions about the program, the accommodation the school would provide, the breaks she would be given, Baba wondering if she knew what she wanted to specialize in yet, Amar only speaking to say that he would miss her, or asking if he could steal her room despite his being the same size as hers. But Mumma had remained thin-lipped throughout it all, and Hadia was unsure what her mother wanted from her, or if she was even happy for Hadia.

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