Except being a tattletale. That he did all by himself, despite having been told that it was a bad habit. It was just who he was. It was almost hard to be angry with him when he told on you, if you knew him, because he couldn’t help himself. You don’t get angry at the desert for making you thirsty. That’s just its nature.
Naani Jaan stared at Aamir in silence with unblinking, sharp eyes after he was done complaining. It was as if she was expecting him to go on. Aamir, with nothing more to say, stammered out a closing argument. “He really said that. That he wouldn’t miss you because there’d be blond girls around. That . . . I mean, he’d forget you for something like that.”
Still Naani said nothing.
“I . . . I thought you should know.”
Finally, the old woman took a deep breath, held it for a long time, and let it out in a barely audible whistle. “How wonderfully religious you are.”
That was precisely the right thing to say to cut Aamir. He looked down.
“How does the flesh of your brother taste?”
According to Naani Jaan, in the Muslim version of hell, that was the punishment backbiters got—they had to eat their own brothers for eternity. That didn’t make sense to me. It sounded a lot worse for the brother being eaten than the brother doing the actual backbiting. Aamir bought it though. He never had the luxury of doubt. He didn’t even bother pointing out that, technically, he wasn’t backbiting at all, because I was right there.
“I’m pretty sure I’d be delicious,” I said, just to help out. When Naani’s baleful attention turned on me, I held up my hands in surrender. “Sorry.”
“Tell me, Aamir,” she said, deciding to ignore me. “What would make you forget me?”
“Nothing,” he said quickly.
“Nothing?” Naani asked. “Isn’t that worse?”
Aamir stumbled around for an answer long enough for me to take pity on him.
“I didn’t really mean it,” I said. “I was just trying to make Aamir feel better.”
“And why did you need to make him feel better?”
“He’s worried that we might move to America.”
Naani tilted her head a little, regarding Aamir more closely, as if she’d just noticed something interesting about him for the first time. Then she sat down on her favorite plush chair and reached for her dainty silver purse, which usually carried precisely one thousand and one rupees, three lighters and one pack of cigarettes. She’d taken up smoking when she’d given up colors.
“I thought you’d want to leave.” She lit up and took a long draw. “You like religion. You follow the prophets and messengers, don’t you? None of them stayed where they were from. Even Adam and Eve were immigrants. The first man and woman, the first ones to leave the place they were born.”
“Hazrat Adam, May Peace Be Upon Him, wasn’t an immigrant,” Aamir said. “He was an exile.”
“It’s the same thing.”
Aamir opened his mouth to argue, but our grandmother gestured for him to be silent.
“My point,” she said, “is that all your heroes were wanderers upon this earth. Moses, Jesus, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Ishmael, Muhammad . . . The history of the world is the history of people who went places. People who walked to the horizon. If you get the chance, you should be glad to be one of them.”
“Not that we’re going anywhere,” I said.
Our grandmother chuckled, looking past us, through the open window behind me, and through time perhaps at a land she had left fifty years ago, when she’d been young, probably around my age, to make her home in a new country. “You’ll be surprised,” she told me, “at how many people have said that to me in my life. My children, how wrong they’ve all been . . .”
The first time anyone ever touched my balls, so far as I can remember, was at the behest of the United States government. It turns out that one doesn’t simply get on an airplane and start a new life in America. It’s much more complicated than that. You have to go to a doctor, who makes you take off your pants, cups your testicles in a cold, clinical hand and asks you to cough. Then you get to go on a plane and start a new life in America.
The moment I was asked to take my pants off was the moment I realized that we were actually going to move to the States. This was in part because that directive—to take off your pants—is always a prologue to whatever is about to come next. It brings with it the certainty that something is about to happen.
More important, I was convinced that my father wouldn’t have subjected me or Aamir or himself, for that matter, to such a rude medical exam if he wasn’t absolutely committed to fulfilling all the onerous requirements of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service.
I think Aamir knew that as well. Neither one of us spoke much on the drive back from the doctor’s office, each looking out our window, looking at Karachi with eyes that suddenly had goodbyes in them.
I don’t really know much about the paperwork my father had to complete to get us out of Karachi. My involvement was limited to being fondled, fingerprinted and photographed. I saw his late nights sitting at the dinner table, filling in forms. I overheard him speaking long-distance to his friend Mr. Shah about a job and a visa. He took me once to an attorney’s office in Saddar, where I had nothing to do but wait in an empty room full of the sound of typewriters.
It was strange. We were home and yet about to head home at the same time.
—
They say that the wife is always the last to know.
To be fair to my father, he’d told his wife precisely what he was about to do before he went chasing after a new country. She simply hadn’t believed him. The one thing Bariah Faris knew was that Bariah Faris knew everything, and she certainly knew the capabilities of her husband, who I think she’d always assumed to be a man of rather limited ambitions.
When you’re young, you don’t often think about the relationship between your parents. You see them existing together but never touching, not even talking to each other that much, and you assume that is the natural order of things. Now I recognize that maybe my parents should’ve never been paired off with each other, that their marriage should never have been arranged, because they were so different.
Yet, even though I doubt there was much passion or even love in their relationship, there was a fondness and understanding that comes with time. So maybe my mother can be forgiven for thinking that, even if she didn’t always admire the round, jolly man her knot had been tied to, she at least knew what he was.
Then he surprised her.
Was she truly devastated about leaving Pakistan or was she just angry that Imtiaz Faris could still manage to shock her, after she was so sure she’d figured him out?