She was joking. So he laughed. They walked together toward the center of the hall where there were more women. Who are you now? he wanted to ask her, but maybe she was who she always had been, and he was who he had always been, and it was foolish to think that the years had changed anything. Across the hall their father had spotted them together and he looked away as Amar looked back.
For some reason unclear to Amar now, he had decided that Huda was not kind to him as a child and that he preferred Hadia, and maybe following that decision he had been kinder to Hadia. As he walked with Huda now it did not feel like she was watching him, the way Mumma did; it just felt as though, for the moment, he had company for the night.
“You didn’t meet Tariq yet.”
“Whenever I look up someone is on the stage.”
It seemed like a boring and exhausting structure for a wedding. But it gave him an excuse to not approach them. He was embarrassed that a stranger had taken a place in his family, that a stranger knew more about him than he knew about the stranger.
“And none of them has been her brother.”
She looked up at him from the corner of her eye. He put his hand in his pocket and felt the roll of cash. Everyone was so careful with him it was both a relief and a reminder that Huda would be blunt.
The emcee tapped on the mic and introduced poets who would recite the jashan. The reciters took their place and Amar saw that the Ali boys were among them. They had been his friends. They looked older now and still respectable. Kumail and Saif—to see them was to feel again the loss of Abbas. They shuffled on the stage and unfolded the paper they would read from.
“Hadia’s hurt you haven’t met Tariq yet.”
Her voice was low so that no one passing would overhear; she had her arms crossed and leaned in to tell Amar without turning her face to him.
“She said that?”
“No one should have to voice something so obvious.”
The reciters began an old poem he knew by heart as soon as he heard the first line. He could not deny how happy hearing it again made him. He thought Huda would walk away, having said what she needed to, but when he turned he saw she had stayed beside him.
* * *
THE ENTIRE HALL faced the stage and she knew she should look down at her hands, but she could not help but look at them, the Ali boys. They were among five men from the community reciting lines of poetry Hadia had specifically requested—a qawali she had loved as a child and wanted to hear a portion of today. The Ali boys had grown into the faces they would wear for their life. Gone was that awkward way about them, Kumail now with a full beard and Saif no longer so skinny. Their features were handsome but failed to come together in a striking way, as they had in their eldest brother and younger sister. Hadia wondered if Amira was here, and if Amar had seen her. The thought made her nervous. She watched the Ali boys raise their voices to join the chorus, and Hadia realized they had surpassed the age of their eldest brother and had now begun to experience what Abbas never would.
She looked at Tariq, intently listening to the recitation. Once she had wished it would be Abbas Ali in his place. Once she had been so na?ve as to think that a girlish dream could become her life. Abbas Ali scanning the mosque kids lined up in the parking lot after Sunday school, and pointing to her, the first girl picked, and his third choice, to be on his team. Abbas Ali standing from the couch if Hadia walked into the living room and telling his brothers to get up too, so that she could sit if she wanted and no one could accuse her of sitting next to a namehram. Only after he passed away did she look to anyone else—think of anyone else—so loyal was she, throughout elementary school, high school, college—loyal not to a spoken agreement but to a hope.
An hour—less—and she would be married to Tariq. How odd the current of one decision, even one as small as taking a seat beside him in a lecture hall. Once this choice was made, every choice after became not easier to make, but inevitable, until he asked her to marry him and she could not imagine a life in which she said anything other than yes. The poetry had reached its pinnacle and she could feel the energy of the room rising, everyone in the hall swaying, clapping along.
“Are you sure?” her mother had asked her, after she had told them about Tariq, after Baba had been so upset he had gone to his study and slammed the door with the helpless frustration of a child who knows that even his displeasure will change nothing.
“I am telling you because I am sure.”
Mumma looked shocked and betrayed by the implication, but she recovered easily.
“But he is not Shia, Hadia. This decision will affect your entire life. It will determine the life of your children. And their children.”
She had thought about it. These were the differences that kept people separate from one another. Indian, Pakistani. Shia, Sunni. When Tariq drove three and a half hours to see her during their years in residency, when she watched from her window as his silver car pulled into her apartment complex, when she unlatched her door to him after having not seen him for a long time, the thought was not, what have I kept hidden, what rules have I broken? But rather, look at what I would do for you. I would keep from my parents your presence in my life until we were ready for the next step. I would risk isolating myself, however temporarily, from them. It was what she was willing to sacrifice, what she could overlook, that proved to her the love she felt. Her mother might be upset because of a difference in faith. But wasn’t the essence unchanging? Only the methods and metaphors varied. And what comforted Hadia was that she and Tariq had both held their fathers’ hands as children and stepped out at dusk, excited to learn how to sight the moon that marked Eid.
And maybe it was the least important reason, but it was the day-to-day aspect of her life with Tariq that truly mattered to her. How, with him, even trips to the grocery store felt like an event, tasks as mundane as lifting up apples and pinching avocados before placing them into their basket. It was care she evoked in Tariq. It was clear in their first months of friendship and it was clear now. What better quality to evoke in another, she thought, one more durable than desire, more sustainable than excitement, one that had the possibility of growing until a sweet and gentle life was formed.
But this Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan qawali was the only tape Baba put on for them when they drove a long drive. It was the only tune that made him tap his fingers on the steering wheel and even Mumma nodded her head in the front seat. The prayers were all in Arabic and the poetry was all in Urdu, so Mumma would translate for them, line by line: King of the brave, Ali. Lion of God, Ali. Guests in the hall were clapping now. The name that is true, the name that removes all sorrow. Her heart opened from hearing the verses, the chorus she loved as a girl and loved still: Ali, Ali, Ali, Ali.
As soon as the recitation stilled, someone shouted out naray hyderi, and everyone who knew the call knew how to return it: Ya Ali. It was a call carried by her ancestors going back hundreds of years. As Hadia returned the call, she turned to see that Tariq had not, did not know to. And she feared, for the first time, if a devotion sustained over generations would end with her.
* * *
THE MOMENT HE first heard the naray called out and maintained, one long note, he yearned to reply, and when the naray stilled and the crowd took a breath before answering in unison, he had responded as well, with as much gusto as all around him.
Had Huda heard him beside her? She must have. How could he make sense of how he felt hearing the recitation, how he stood through every turn and rising, as if on tiptoe. He looked around the hall. He did have something in common with them, and it was like a reflex. If there was so much he lacked in faith—the ability to fully believe and follow—why could he not also lack the desire for faith?
“Amar?” Huda asked. “Do you not want to meet Tariq?”
Her voice was cold.