People were leaning on their horns, though the traffic light was red and there was nowhere to go. Hawkers carrying various goods yelled out a litany of prices in hoarse, worn voices. They sold information in newspapers and romance in strings of fresh jasmine. Divine protection, that is to say cheap pieces of plastic etched with verses of the Quran, could also be purchased for a modest price.
My mother raised her voice over the din. “Did you hear me?”
“Yes.” I folded my slick, thin arms across my chest. “Why do I have to shower?”
“Because you need one,” she said, her tone sharp. She didn’t like questions. After taking a deep breath, she went on in a more conciliatory manner. “Besides, showers are fun.”
“No, they aren’t.”
“But you will feel nice and cool afterward.”
“I’ll feel nice and cool when you get the AC fixed.”
My mother preferred morality to rationality because it put God on her side. When God was on her side, she won arguments against most right-minded people. I’m not such a person but she didn’t know that then and, truth be told, neither did I. So, she played what had long been her trump card, her divine ace. “Taking showers is good.”
“It’s good?”
“It is most certainly good. The Prophet, May Peace Be Upon Him, and his Companions used to take showers each and every day.”
I thought about that for a moment. “That’s not true.”
“What?”
“That can’t be true. They were in the middle of a desert. They didn’t have any water.”
My mother’s lips disappeared. She was a gaunt woman, sort of like an exceptionally thin chapati. Her lips shared this quality. When she was angry and pressed them together, they vanished entirely from view. It was one of her more frequent expressions.
“Anvar Faris! How dare you?”
“I didn’t—”
“Where did you get the courage from? How dare you say those great men were not clean?”
“I didn’t—”
“You will pray for forgiveness, Anvar. It was an insult to the Prophet.”
“It wasn’t—”
“It was an insult to his Companions. They were the greatest of all men. And you dare. You dare? The first thing you will do when you go back home is get on your knees and beg Allah for forgiveness for having said such a vile thing. Or you will go to hell. Do you understand me? You will roast in hell for what you dare.”
“Dare,” by the way, was her favorite word. She relished saying it. Whenever the opportunity to deploy it in conversation presented itself, she took it. She was careful to enunciate it fully, drawing it out, emphasizing it by using the most piercing voice she could manage. Hearing her speak about someone, an uninformed observer was likely to mistake the meekest of men for Prometheus.
I was old enough to know that once sacrilege had been invoked, there was no way to win the argument. Any response other than silence would only intensify the wrath raining down upon me. So, I sat there, stewing in Karachi, until we got home. Once there, I went to my room, closed the door, kicked a few scattered action figures out of the way and laid out a prayer mat.
I knelt but did not pray.
That was the day the hold of the sacred upon me was broken forever.
It was the day that made me who I am.
The day I was first told I was damned was the day I felt I had been blessed.
—
All deaths are inconvenient, in one way or another, but the death of a car can be uniquely so. When our little Beetle died, for example, it left me stranded in the middle of a brand-new river.
It was the heart of the monsoon season, and as usual it felt like an ocean was being poured onto the Earth through a sieve of pregnant clouds. It was the kind of ceaseless, relentless rain that was designed to make one believe the story of Noah.
Karachi is one of those places that feels like it just happened. I’m sure it must have been planned out to some degree, like all the great cities in the world. However, either it was designed so artfully that the hand of the artist has become invisible, like the hand of God, or it was done so poorly that there might as well not have been a design at all.
For example, though Karachi gets annual monsoons, it wasn’t constructed to withstand them. So, every year, the city drowns a little. The streets, lacking proper drainage, flood. Cars float along roads like rudderless boats, carried off the ground by the irresistible force of the accumulating water.
It was on this water that our Beetle choked one day as we were coming back from school. Our father went looking for help, and I was left to bob along in a makeshift river in the middle of the street, alone with my brother, Aamir, who was then, and remains to this day, a stinking little turd muncher.
Before I go on, I should mention that I am the lone skeptic when it comes to Aamir Faris. He has gone through his life checking all the right boxes that a model desi boy should check. He maintained a perfect GPA throughout high school and college, never dating, never drinking or even so much as going to a party where everyone’s parents weren’t invited. He never snuck out of the house at night or got any detention and never, ever missed an extra-credit assignment. Then he went to medical school and graduated near the top of his class. When he gets married, around nine months or so after his honeymoon, he will probably have an infant for everyone to coo over and a mortgage to pay off.
Did I mention he was an easy baby, willing to eat anything, and that he never cried? Even labor was allegedly painless with him. Not like the eighteen-hour ordeal I put my mother through, or so the story goes.
Somehow he’s always been popular too. Aamir is well liked at the mosque because he volunteers there. He organizes community events for young kids, all while praying five times a day and banking every optional prostration he can manage along the way. He does all this with a smile and it is a glorious smile. Five out of five dentists would recommend the toothpaste he uses.
Aamir Faris, in short, uses dull crayons but he is relentlessly fastidious about coloring inside the lines.
Anyway, there we were, I think I was twelve then, so he must have been fifteen, trapped together in the skeleton of a metallic bug. The radio was, of course, silent and there seemed to be nothing to say. The only noise in the car was the plastic rustling of the bag of chili chips Aamir was holding and the occasional forlorn rumble of my stomach. I waited patiently for him to open the bag and offer me some. When he didn’t, I resorted to telling him that I hoped we would get home soon because I needed to eat lunch. When that did not work either, I clutched my stomach and groaned dramatically, muttering about how hungry I felt. Still nothing. Finally, I just flat-out asked him for the chips.