I haven’t asked. I wouldn’t dare. Back then all I knew was that my mother didn’t want to move. I never actually saw her weep, but I could tell, from her puffy, red eyes, that she did and did so often.
Some nights, I could hear her screaming at my father, even though their room was clear down the hall from mine. It was a sin, she claimed, to move from a Muslim land to a country of infidels. She worried that Aamir and I would go astray, start drinking, dancing and doing drugs before marrying white girls, forever and irrevocably ruining the family tree.
She wanted to be buried next to her parents, where she already had a piece of land waiting for her shrouded body, not in a wooden box that would rot, and not next to strangers.
On and on her concerns went, like a monsoon of rage and fear and anxiety but, uncharacteristically, my father remained unmoved by all that rained down upon him.
I was there when her crusade ended, as most crusades in the history of the world have ended, in failure. That morning, we sat at the breakfast table. A kettle whistled on the gas stove, signaling that the water for my parents’ tea was ready. I was struggling to finish a greasy, overcooked omelet Ma had made for me. It smelled eggier than normal, as if it had stayed inside the chicken longer than actually necessary. I felt a little queasy. My mother stood up to fetch the kettle and some tea bags and, out of the blue, said, “You know, Anvar, you’ll always be a second-class citizen in America. They will always think of you as different from themselves. Inferior.”
My father set down the newspaper he was reading and looked in her direction. She wasn’t meeting his gaze, focusing her complete attention on the tea she was preparing. In a quiet voice, he said, “You’re bringing the children into this now? That’s it. The water is now over my head. I can’t take any more. So that’s enough.”
And just like that, somehow, it was enough. I don’t understand why but, after that moment, my mother didn’t complain or try to argue against our pending immigration. She remained unhappy, but she remained unhappy in silence.
To me, my father said, “All men are equal.”
“What?”
He picked up a piece of toast and began to butter it. “The Americans. They say that. All men are created equal. You won’t be bloody second-class.”
I thought about that. “Everyone was made equal,” I agreed. “Except for Aamir. He was made special. With a stick up his butt.”
My mother pursed her lips in stern disapproval, but Imtiaz Faris laughed that huge laugh of his and went back to the news of the day.
About a week later, from somewhere, my father brought me the only book I actually owned while I was in Pakistan. It was a thin, unmarked text, bound in worn blue leather. I opened the first page and saw from the title that it was The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.
—
In our house, there was never music that wasn’t mine unless, of course, my father was home. Except for one day, when I heard the soft, mournful words of a poem I’d heard often, but never managed to remember, coming from my parents’ room. I was going somewhere, doing something, but I stopped. It was singing. My mother was singing.
I tiptoed to the master bedroom’s door like I was approaching a wisp that might flit away at the sound of my steps, and I listened.
Bariah Faris could sing.
I don’t remember the words. I don’t think it was Urdu at all. It was Punjabi, maybe, or perhaps Sindhi. Whatever the language, I knew instinctively that the song was very old, and it echoed around the almost barren room like a ghost seeking something it could not find.
My mother’s voice was gentle and melodic, like I’d never heard it. She’d always recited nursery rhymes in a monotone, like she was reading out of a cookbook, and had never indulged us with lullabies. Until that moment, I hadn’t considered it possible that the woman would even be able to carry a tune.
Yet now she was doing justice to a song that seemed to reach back centuries, into the heart of the place she was about to leave.
I didn’t want her to stop singing, but I knew that she would if she found me here. So, I tried to step away, and in doing so I must have made some noise, because as unexpectedly as I’d found the song, I found it gone, leaving behind a silence that seemed to remember it.
My mother wiped at her eyes, though I saw no tears there, and cleared her throat. “Music,” she said, her manner as stern as ever, “is different from poetry.”
“Okay,” I said.
“The Prophet liked poetry. The human voice, you know, it is used in the—”
“Do you really not want to go?” I asked, and not just because I wanted an answer, but because I wanted to cut off the lecture I could sense coming for something that I hadn’t even been doing.
She smiled a little. “Life is not about what we want.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you do what you want—if you get what you want—then there is no one to blame if things go wrong. Your world, if you make it what you want it to be, becomes your responsibility.”
I shook my head, not because I disagreed, but because I had no idea what she was talking about.
“You’re too young to understand,” my mother said. “Think what would happen if I got your father to stay here.”
“Well . . . we’d keep living here.”
“And with everything that is going on in this city, in this country, what if one day something happens to Aamir? Every house on this block has had burglars break in, hold the families at gunpoint. The Grace of Allah has kept us safe, but what if it happens to you? Who would your father blame? Who would I blame?”
“Well,” I said, perhaps not entirely helpfully, “there is always God.”
“Always you have to talk nonsense,” she snapped. “Who would dare blame God?”
It seemed perfectly reasonable that if you were going to thank God when good things happened, you could blame Him if bad things did, but I knew better than to say that out loud.
“We have to be careful in this world, Anvar. The things we do—and the things we don’t do—we pay for them all.”
“Like checkers,” I said.
“Uff. Yes. Fine. Like checkers. You spend too much time with your grandmother. I worry that she will fill your head with too much nonsense.”
“You shouldn’t talk about your mother like that,” I said.
Bariah Faris glared at me, though her shoulders shook a little, with suppressed laughter, perhaps. “You want to get out of my sight now, unless you want me to show you what I mean when I say that actions have consequences you can regret.”