His beard was itching again. He forced himself not to scratch it. He had abominably sensitive skin, easily inflamed, and he did not want to have to deal with that additional problem now. Ammi, who blamed the beard, was always asking him to shave it off. He smiled at the irony of that. For years Ammi had begged him to get more serious about his religion, weeping and praying over his bad behavior in high school-his drinking and fighting and getting suspended. But when he did change, his mother was too anxious to enjoy it, because America had changed, too: it was a time when certain people were eyed with suspicion in shopping malls and movie theaters; when officials showed up at workplaces or even homes to ask questions; when Ammi gave a rueful sigh of relief and told her friends when they came over for chai that perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing her son was so westernized.
The first sign of Tariq’s change was arguments with friends (at that time, most of them had been white) about what had led to the attacks on the Towers, about the retaliatory bombings in Afghanistan, about what Muslims really believed. To argue better, he started reading up on these things. He visited websites with strange names and seemingly baffling views and stayed up into the small hours of the night trying to decipher them. He started e-mail conversations with people who held strong opinions and presented him with facts to back them up. Mostly as an experiment, he quit drinking. One day he rescued from its wrappings a salwaar kameez outfit his mother had bought him from India -and which he had promptly tossed into the back of his closet-and wore it to the masjid. He liked the glances he got from the young women, especially a certain young woman, and did it again. Yes, he might as well admit it: women had as much to do with his transformation as his political beliefs.
When Ammi was advised by friends to stop wearing the hijab, he sat her down on the sofa and took her hands in his. He told her she must do what she believed in, not what made the people around her feel better. And most of all, she must not act out of fear. It did not work. She folded the head scarves and put them away in a drawer. Still, sometimes he would catch her watching him adjust his black cap in the mirror before he set off for Friday prayers. Pride would battle with astonishment in her face. At unexpected moments, he would be struck by a similar astonishment. What made him change? Was it 9/11, or was it Farah?
Farah. The thought of her pulled Tariq off the floor. He tried to stand tall, but pain shot through his neck, making him curse the African American. He put the anger away in a small, dark closet in his mind. This was not the time. He needed to purify his heart now, to praise Allah, to ask for help, to request blessings, particularly for Abba and Ammi, may the angels enfold them in their protective wings. He groped through the darkness until he found his briefcase, still standing upright where he had set it down beside his chair, though the chair was gone. A small miracle whose meaning he would have to ponder. He unrolled the rug, pulled on the tight cap. He tried to ascertain in which direction Mecca lay, but he was confused by darkness and fear. (Yes, stripped of pride in front of God, he admitted to the fear that ballooned in his chest every few minutes, making it hard to breathe.) Finally he chose to face the door he had been prevented from opening.
“Allahu Akbar,” he whispered. “Subhaaana ala humma wa bihamdika.” He tried to feel on his tongue the sweetness of the words that had traveled to him over centuries and continents. Against the reddish brown walls of his eyelids, he tried to picture the holy Kaaba, which one day, Inshallah, he hoped to visit. (Sometimes the image would come to him clearly, edged with silver like a storm cloud: a thousand people kneeling in brotherhood to touch their foreheads to the ground in front of the black stone, fellowship like he longed to know.) Today, all he could see was Farah’s face, alight with the ironic smile that, at one time, used to infuriate him.
Farah. She had entered Tariq’s life innocuously, the way a letter opener slides under the flap of an envelope, cutting through things that had been glued shut, spilling secret contents. Her name was like a yearning poet’s sigh, but even Tariq was forced to admit that it didn’t match the rest of her. Boyishly thin and too tall to be considered pretty by Indian standards, she was smart and secretive, with the disconcerting habit of fixing her keen, kohl-lined eyes on you in a manner that made you suspect that she didn’t quite believe what you said.
The daughter of Ammi’s best friend from childhood, Farah had come to America two years back on a prestigious study-abroad scholarship from her university in Delhi. (Tariq, whose own college career was filled with stutters, was a senior then, trying to finish up classes he had dropped in previous semesters.) In spite of her brilliance, though, Farah almost had not made it to America. Her widowed mother, blissfully ignorant of what occurred with some regularity on the campuses of her hometown, had been terrified that American dorm life, ruled as it was by the unholy trinity of alcohol, drugs, and sex, would ruin her daughter. Only after a protracted and tearful conversation with Ammi had Farah’s mother given Farah permission to come. These were the conditions: Farah would live with Ammi for her entire stay; she would visit the mosque twice a week; she would mingle only with other Indian Muslims; and she would be escorted everywhere she went by a member of the Husein family. Since Abba was busy with his janitorial business, which was growing so fast that he recently had to hire several new employees, and Ammi’s day was filled with mysterious female activities, this member most often turned out to be the reluctant Tariq.
From the beginning Farah got under his skin. Though she was polite, a disapproval seemed to emanate from her, making him wonder if his disheveled lifestyle wasn’t quite as cool as he’d thought. He couldn’t figure her out. Unlike other girls who had visited them from India, she wasn’t interested in the latest music, movies, or magazines. Brand-name clothing and makeup didn’t excite her. One day, feeling magnanimous, he had offered to take her to the mall-and even clubbing, later, if she could keep her mouth shut. She needed to see what made America America. But she had asked if they could go to the Museum of Modern Art. What a waste of an afternoon that had been. He had trailed behind her as she examined, with excruciating interest, canvases filled with incomprehensive slashes of color or people who were naked, and ugly besides.
On the way back, she had been more exuberant than he had ever seen her, going on and on about how innovative modern Indian art was, too, with Muslim artists like Raza and Husain in the forefront. She had made him feel stupid because he had never heard of these so-called artists, not even the one with the same last name as his. In retaliation, he had listed for her all the things he had hated about India from his duty visits there. She was angry; he could tell that from the way her nostrils flared quickly, once. She said, “It’s easy to see the problems India has. But do you even know what America ’s problems are?”
He was stung into that hackneyed retort: if America had so many problems, she was welcome to go back home. Right now. She had turned her face to the car window. After a few minutes, her hand had sneaked up to her face to wipe away tears. Her fingertips came away kohl-streaked. He hadn’t felt like such a jerk in a long time, though he said far worse things to the girls he went out with. Perhaps it was that Farah didn’t carry tissues, which he translated as meaning that she had not expected him to hurt her. He stopped the car and apologized. She didn’t reply, but she gave a stiff little nod. The thin, curved rod of her collarbone reminded him, illogically, of a fledgling bird. That was when he started to fall in love.