He was walking across the car park, attaching the mic and its homemade windscreen to his phone, paying no attention to the lone car until its doors opened and three boys he knew from football games on this ground stepped out. Designer sneakers, pristine white robes, ecosystem beards (Aneeka had named them: large enough to support an ecosystem, she’d said). They hung around the neighborhood trying to look troublesome, not understanding they’d done themselves no favors with the name they’d chosen: Us Thugz. A shortened form of the Arabic astaghfirullah. What exactly are you seeking Allah’s forgiveness for, Isma had asked them when they accosted her in the street one day and told her that sisters should cover up more. Their response made it clear they had no idea what astaghfirullah meant.
“Give it,” one of them said, holding out an upturned palm for Parvaiz’s phone and mic.
“I’ll tell your mother,” Parvaiz said.
The boy—Abdul, his childhood friend—lowered his hand and mumbled something about Parvaiz’s phone being too old anyway, but the older boy standing next to him, who wasn’t from the neighborhood, stepped forward, kneed Parvaiz in the groin, and, when he doubled over in pain, took the phone from his hand, tossing aside the expensive mic as if to prove his own stupidity.
Parvaiz lay on the ground of the car park, waiting for the pain to pass, as the boys’ car screeched past him. The sound envelope: slow attack, short sustain, long decay. Nothing to hear that he hadn’t heard before. How he hated his life, this neighborhood, the inevitability of everything.
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Farooq found him the next morning, standing among empty crates around the back of the greengrocer’s, trying to remove a splinter from his palm.
“Asalaamu Alaikum,” said an unfamiliar voice in the faux-Arabicized accent of a non-Arab Muslim who is trying too hard, and Parvaiz looked up to see a compact but powerfully built man, muscles distorting the shape of his tightly fitting bomber jacket. Somewhere around thirty years old, with hair that fell in ringlets to his shoulders offsetting a beard neither hipster nor ecosystem but simply masculine. An instant glamor to him that excused all accents. He was holding out the tweezer component of his Swiss Army Knife, a surprising delicacy in the gesture. Parvaiz took it and tried to capture the splinter, but his left hand felt clumsy, and he kept pinching his skin instead. Without saying anything, the man took the tweezers from him, rested his hand beneath Parvaiz’s to steady it, and plucked out the splinter with a flourish and a wink. Then he pressed his thumb against the drop of blood that appeared, stanching the inconsequential wound.
“My kutta cousin took something of yours. I apologize. He didn’t realize who you were.” He reached into a pocket of his combat trousers and handed back the stolen phone. Who am I? Parvaiz wanted to ask, but he knew the answer already. He was Aneeka’s brother. When older boys, the kind you would die to be friends with, paid attention to him, it was always because he was Aneeka’s brother. Aneeka never liked the ones Parvaiz tried to nudge her toward, though; she preferred the quieter boys she could boss around.
“You know my sister?”
The man looked displeased. “What are sisters to do with me? I know of Abu Parvaiz.”
“I’m Parvaiz. I don’t know any Abu Parvaiz.”
“Don’t you know your own father’s name?”
Parvaiz assembled his features into neutrality with a tinge of bewilderment. Who was this man—MI5? Special Branch? They too had seemed so friendly that time they’d come to the house in his childhood. One of them had entered his room and played racing cars with him on the track that took up all the space between his bed and Aneeka’s—then he’d picked up the photograph album that Parvaiz’s father had sent him and walked out with it. They’d returned most of the items they took, but not the pictures of Adil Pasha climbing a mountain, sitting beside a campfire, wading across a stream—sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of other men, always smiling, always with a gun slung over his shoulder or cradled in his lap. When you’re old enough, my son, his father had inscribed inside it, which made Parvaiz’s mother furious for reasons he didn’t then understand. Although his grandmother had intervened to prevent her daughter-in-law from taking the album away from him when it had first arrived, he’d always suspected his mother had told the friendly man about it so he would remove those images of Adil Pasha from his son’s life. It was discomforting to remember that and, with it, how early on he’d started to look at his always harried mother and think, No wonder he left.
“I never knew my father.” This was what he’d been taught to say, over and over, by his mother and grandmother. There were whispers in the neighborhood about Adil Pasha, he knew, and one day in the school playground a group of boys had accosted him to ask if it was true his father was a jihadi who’d been killed in Guantánamo. I never knew my father, he had replied weakly. The boys walked over to Aneeka and asked the same question. She shrugged and turned away, disdain already perfected at the age of nine, but later she whispered to the most loose-lipped of her friends, It makes him sound like someone in a movie, doesn’t it? More interesting than a father who died of malaria in Karachi.
“He regretted that,” the stranger said. “That you never knew him. He fought with my father; I heard all the stories of the great warrior Abu Parvaiz.”
“That wasn’t my father’s name. It was Adil Pasha.”
“It was his—” the man said something that sounded like numb digger. “That’s French for ‘jihadi name.’ Superhero name is how I think of it, though some of the brothers don’t like that. But, yeah. Your dad. When he entered the fight for justice he called himself Father of Parvaiz. That was his way of keeping you close. So anytime someone said his name—his enemies, with fear; his brothers, with love; his comrades, with honor—they were saying your name too.”
Horribly, Parvaiz felt tears come to his eyes in the company of a man who probably wouldn’t cry if you drove a tank over his legs. But the man didn’t seem to think any less of him for it. Instead he drew Parvaiz close, in a cologne-scented embrace, and said, “I’m glad I’ve found you, brother.”
Parvaiz went home that evening with the incandescence of a beautiful secret in his heart. He did all the cooking, didn’t take his plate off to the TV room while his sisters ate at the kitchen table, teased Isma about the American accent she would acquire in Massachusetts.
“What’s happened to you?” Aneeka asked, and he had the satisfaction of having a hidden corner of his life that his sisters didn’t know about.
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Late that night, Farooq called.