THE FAMILIAR SIGHT AT LAST IS NOT THE SILVER OF HIS MOTHER’S car, but his sisters walking up to where he leans against the chain-link fence of his middle school. He recognizes them instantly, even though they are still blurred figures approaching. His sisters look like twins, similar strides and same height, except Hadia’s dark hair sways, and Huda’s black scarf frames her face.
“What’s wrong?” he asks when they are close enough to hear. He stands straight and the fence rattles.
“Mumma can’t pick us up today. Malik Uncle is coming to this spot as soon as he’s off of work.” Hadia points to the ground.
“Why?”
“He didn’t say.”
Amar groans.
“But I have an idea,” Hadia says.
It has been a while since Hadia has had an idea.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
“We’ll get into trouble,” he says.
“And you’re going to be the one to tell them?” she says in Urdu.
She raises an eyebrow. She smiles mischievously. He cannot help but smile too. Without their parents there, they can go anywhere, do almost anything.
“Where?” he asks.
“You’ll see.”
He grabs his backpack and follows them down the slope. Hadia asks him to keep an eye on their route. He has a knack for directions, according to his father, and Amar prides himself in it. In a few months, Hadia will graduate and move away to college. He does not like imagining their house without her. His sisters appear excited and they laugh loudly at each other’s jokes. They’re speaking in their code and he feels not resentment but love for them. That they thought to include him in this afternoon, when they could have left him to wait behind his school fence. Hadia walks with her back straight. She looks both fierce and friendly. He trusts her to take them anywhere.
The trees above them are blossoming with white flowers. The sky glimpsed through the branches so blue. How can he not notice as they pass beneath them? When God first began to brainstorm the world did He think to make branches a dark brown and flowers either white or soft pink, and only like that in the spring, so that you are always startled by their bloom? Or were God’s decisions scattered and sudden, beautiful by chance? He considers asking his sisters, wanting it to be as easy for him to speak with them as it is for them to speak to each other, but he stops himself, in case it is rude to imagine God in this way. Perhaps this is what Mumma means when she says not to think about God too much. Perhaps these are the kinds of questions that the moulana calls shirk, blasphemy, among the greatest of sins. He jumps up and tries to tug at a blossom but the branch is out of reach.
Recently, Amar has begun to feel as though he had been born into a world not made for him. What did it matter that his birth certificate was from a hospital in this very city, that the only house he had ever lived in was here. Where are you from? the kinder question would be. As though he could not possibly be from here. As though it were he and not they who had misunderstood. He had given up trying to explain. India, he would mumble. Even though he had not even been there for more than two weeks total, and that by now both his parents had lived here longer than they had ever lived elsewhere. Sometimes this answer would satisfy them and sometimes he could see their faces twist in confusion, and they might even say, but don’t people from India have darker skin?
Even at mosque, when listening to the speaker lecturing from the pulpit, he pulled little threads from the carpet and felt that none of this moved him, or was made to include him. There were moments. A feeling he got after praying, but never during, when the men turned to each other to shake hands, and when they settled into holding hands to recite aloud together the dua of brotherhood and sisterhood. Or when some of the boys said they were walking to a gas station nearby and they asked him to come. But then the moment passed. He pulled another thread. Outside, people could not pronounce his name and often asked if he had a nickname they could use, and in the mosque everyone nodded in agreement to speeches that just bored him. But if not here—where? Amar would slip away and wander the empty hallways, stop to drink from the water fountain, thinking to himself, nowhere, nowhere, nowhere.
Through the glass door one particular evening he saw the eldest Ali boy, Abbas, sitting on the front steps facing the parking lot. He went to him.
“Why are you not inside?” Amar asked.
“Pick a reason: Thought it was a nice night to enjoy the outside air. I didn’t like the speaker’s tone.”
He was surprised to hear someone speak against the moulana.
“I prefer the stories to the rules about the proper way to shower when fasting,” Amar said and rolled his eyes.
Abbas laughed a little. It was true. Amar loved the stories. If it were up to him that’s all a mosque trip would be. No praying, no listening to Arabic recitations he didn’t understand, no man telling them what the rules were and how they had already broken them.
“Won’t you get in trouble?” Abbas asked him when Amar took a seat.
“I’m in trouble whether or not I sit out here.”
Abbas laughed again.
“To ask for forgiveness and never permission, rule number one,” Abbas said, and he lifted a finger up in emphasis.
Amar nodded, sort of understanding.
“What if you don’t ask for either?” he asked.
“To never push your luck too much—that’s probably a rule too.”
Abbas Ali smelled faintly of cigarettes. Amar did not want to ask him why.
“You said you preferred the stories,” Abbas said.
Amar nodded.
“Which ones? We might as well get something from tonight’s mosque trip. In case anyone asks us what we were doing, why we were wasting time, we could say we were learning and participating in our own way. That could be another rule.” Abbas winked at him.
It was a specific thrill, someone winking, like a secret handshake or an inside joke, but better. And not just anyone, but Abbas Ali.
Amar told him the story about the Prophet leading hundreds in jummah prayer. How one day when the Prophet knelt to touch his forehead to the ground in sijda, everyone behind him did the same, and at that moment, Hussain, the Prophet’s grandson, climbed onto his grandfather’s back. Instead of shaking his grandson off, the Prophet stayed kneeling. Amar imagined the sun shifting a fraction in the sky. All the men who were waiting for the cue to rise, confused about why it was taking so long. Mumma said the more hopeful believers wondered if a revelation was a cause for the delay, and the more cynical smiled to themselves, thinking they had finally caught the Prophet making a mistake, and one so public. What kind of believer was he, Amar wondered, if he liked the story so much because while everyone waited, the Prophet remained patient, forehead to the ground, and bent the rules just so his grandson could play a little longer.
“He waited until Imam Hussain decided he was ready to climb down, and as if it had never been stopped, the prayer resumed,” Amar said to Abbas, copying exactly how Mumma had told them.
Mumma tried to make the stories about morals but to Amar they were just about what people were willing to do for one another.
“You’re my protégé,” Abbas said to him after a long silence.
“What’s a protégé?”
“Someone who is going to be trained to keep things relaxed around here, so boys like you and me can leave for a bit and feel fine doing it.”
“Where are you going?”
“Anywhere.”
“What should I learn?”
“Loopholes.”
Abbas Ali winked at him again, and Amar nodded and sat up a bit straighter, so Abbas would know he was ready for the lessons.
* * *