“Not now, Huda,” he said.
He wanted a moment to himself. He began to turn away from her. She stood in front of him and whispered through her teeth, “If not now, when? You’ve been gone for years. You come home at the last minute. The wedding is halfway over and still you say ‘not now’?”
She was right. He could not even argue against her. But how could he explain what it was like to hear the qawali and remember again the dusty sunlight in their car, the black crayon marks on the plastic of his car seat, the swaying of his sister’s braids. It brought back what he hardly had to think about in the apartment he now shared with friends seven hours away, where he was more at ease than he’d ever been here. Of course he missed his family. But there, he did not feel that his lifestyle was worthless. He was funny in the world he found for himself. He was good at making money fast. He could charm strangers in an instant. He was up for anything and people wanted him around. If it was four A.M. and a friend’s car had been towed, he was the one they called. He went to readings at libraries and bookstores in his city and wrote his own poems in secret. He had a good rapport with the other chefs where he worked and when he got off work he could smoke a cigarette in the cool air without a worry. Meet his friends for a late drink no problem, stay at the bar until close no problem, wake up at noon no problem, sell a little weed on the side to some eager college kids and have enough to make rent. He was capable of doing it all by himself, with no one to say what a disappointment he was. He wanted to want that life and no other. He wanted to feel no loss when looking back.
Huda blinked at him and a line of worry formed between her eyebrows.
“Please, Huda. Just one minute alone.”
He stepped past her on his way to the parking lot where he could smoke a cigarette, but he looked once behind him to see that Huda had not followed and he turned a sharp corner, the sound of his footsteps absorbed by the corridor’s carpet.
“Welcome back,” the bartender said. “Must not be a very fun wedding.”
Amar tried to smile.
“The same?”
He put a twenty down.
“Double.”
The bartender whistled. “That boring, eh?”
Someone at the bar made a joke about dry weddings, how they were no celebration at all, so why bother even having one, and Amar felt a dull queasiness, the kind he felt in middle school when he heard someone say something he was not meant to overhear. He reached for a napkin and tore it straight in half, and then again, until the drink appeared.
“Another?”
He had to pace himself. He lifted his palm and the bartender returned to a conversation he was having at the other end of the bar. On the TV the Warriors were playing and he imagined the living rooms across the country where the basketball game was on and a family gathered to watch and a dad opened up a beer and offered it to his son, who was twenty-one, no sneaking or shame necessary. This is how he imagined it might be for the rest of the world—simple and easy.
He had wanted to say Ya Ali. By the end of the recitation he had even teared up thinking of how like home it sounded, how the very name was like a beat in him and he thought: maybe it is in my blood. When he was a young boy, Nana told him about the Muhammad Ali fights that would be broadcast on TV that Nana watched even in India, how the crowd would chant Ali, Ali, and his grandfather poked Amar on his chest and said, “See that—even on the moon and anywhere on Earth, in any village, this is the name that will ring and ring.”
Tonight he wondered if he had turned his back on something far more meaningful than he realized the night he packed his bags in a hurry, thinking only of how angry he was, how harsh and unloving his father was about what Amar had no control over: who he was.
“This is haram,” his father had yelled the night he ran away.
They had been arguing in the hallway near the stairs. What use was a life lived out of fear of hellfire and nothing else? He thought: if the fires exist and I am to burn, let me burn for my own actions rather than force me to behave another way and be saved by a lie. He did not know what, exactly, his father had found: that was the year Amar spiraled from one extreme to another unthinking, proving to himself only that he could, and when he was confronted by his father he realized how tired he was of hiding. They had been arguing cruelly the way they always did, but when his father raised his hand to slice through the air for emphasis, Amar flinched.
And here is the moment that nobody knows. The nightmare he wakes from sweating in his apartment even now. His father’s back had hit against the frame in the hall and Amar realized from the throbbing in his own hand that he had hit him. Amar had struck his father on the jaw, and then shoved him again, the glass of the frame crunching behind his father and then falling to the floor when he stepped away, and it was that sound, or maybe how little his father reacted, that snapped Amar from the moment, and he stepped back.
They looked at one another as though they did not recognize each other. They were silent even when his mother approached the top of the staircase, and Mumma looked at both of them but narrowed her eyes and shook her head at his father. Mumma knelt, cupped her palm and placed jagged pieces of glass into its center.
“Enough of this now,” Mumma said, and her voice was shaking as each piece clinked into her palm, and she said to his father, “I’ve had enough.”
And in that moment he knew his father would not correct her. He would not even raise his hand up to touch his jaw.
That night he packed his bags. Called Simon and said, I’ve got to stay with you for a few days and then I’ve got to get out of this town. Hadia had stood in his doorway and tried to change his mind, do you have to go? This can be made all right again. These things pass. He told her he could not stay. And it was not because he wanted a life where he was free to do as he pleased, and it was not because Amira did not love him and he could no longer try to be the kind of man she would ever love, and it was not because of the argument between him and his father, because after the sting of the words subsided he could see a future in which he forgave his father and maybe his father forgave him. They had been reckless with their words before. Like water they could return to any shape asked of them.
Amar had to make sure he left and did not return, and it was because he could not look his father in the eye after he used all his force against him. Because when the glass cracked, his father did not even raise an arm to resist him. His father who was already becoming an old man, who already worried Amar when he spotted him on his walks outside, his hair turning a stark white, walking slowly and sitting down slowly as if it hurt his knees. The last time they looked at each other, while Mumma knelt on the carpet, Amar caught a look in his father’s eyes that he could only interpret as a look of loyalty, a look that tried to convey: I am with you, I am on your side, I will keep your secret.
If his father had just hit him back, cursed at him, said to Mumma, look how despicable our son is, how batamiz, anything—then maybe he could have gone home again. A punishment was a mercy. It marked the end of a sentence. Without one, he could not imagine recovering from his shame. Nor could he forgive himself for giving action to the hatred he had felt for his father, wanting to hurt him the way he had been hurt by him. Now he blinked around him at the people seated at the bar, tilted the glass so the last drops slid toward him, closed his eyes and heard Mumma’s voice from long ago, so hazy and fragmented it was like a dream.
What does shame mean?