—
My father thought we should each choose one last place to visit in Karachi before we left—a quick little goodbye tour to the places that meant the most to us. Ma declined to make a pick. Aamir thought going to visit our deceased grandparents’ graves would be a fun time, I guess because that was the kind of thought that won him praise from grown-ups. I wanted to go to the beach.
The sea speaks to you when you’re born by the ocean. It sings to you. If you stand still, just out of reach of the water for long enough, you begin to sense a small echo of the infinite inside yourself, and in the violent crashing and breaking of waves you begin to feel at peace. It was something I would miss.
Aamir said that was silly because there were plenty of beaches in California, and this is true, but I’ve yet to find one like Clifton Beach, where you can buy a ride on a camel or horse and walk back over their hoofprints barefoot in the black, tarry sand.
Anyway, since my parents agreed with Aamir that the beaches in California were better, I said that I’d like to go to Naani’s house earlier than we had planned, so I could get in a few extra games of checkers. I was fairly certain that on this last day, of all days, my grandmother would let me win once.
She did not.
I did get close though, bringing Naani down to her final piece, a single solitary king, before she started counting. Then she moved that infuriating little monarch all over the familiar board with practiced ease, until she got to the magic number of twenty and the draw that came with it.
The look on my face when victory slipped away from me must have been something because my grandmother started to laugh. “I told you,” she said. “Checkers is like life. Just when you think you’ve got everything you wanted, it all slips from your fingers.”
We were sitting on her takht—a large, low wood bench covered with a bedsheet that was, in my opinion, only marginally more comfortable than the ground—and we were alone for the moment. The family had gone to look through the house again one last time. I stayed behind. I didn’t care about the house.
She looked at me with something sad in her eyes.
“What?” I asked.
“It would be better for you, my child, if you were more like your brother.”
I rolled my eyes. I’d heard that one before.
Naani chuckled. “I mean it. The world is difficult sometimes for restless minds and imaginative hearts. Things go easier for you if you do what you’re told, when you’re told, and never ask any questions.”
“Sounds boring.”
“There are worse things in life than being bored,” she told me.
“No. There aren’t.”
Naani laughed just as my mother led the rest of the family back in. Bariah Faris smiled at the scene and shook her head. “You laugh more with him than I’ve ever seen you laugh in my life.”
“She didn’t used to,” I said before I could think to stop myself, “until she started wearing white.”
That killed my mother’s smile, because nothing can kill a smile faster than the truth, and my father winced. Everyone started looking at anything except my grandmother, who just nodded, not at me, but at the checkers board.
“I know that your parents will want me to impart some wisdom to you, Anvar, before you leave, so . . . You’re going to meet all kinds of girls there in America, I think.” She leaned over and swatted my arm when I grinned widely at that. “Be careful. More than anything else, falling in love with the right person will bring you happiness. Failing to do that . . .” She took a deep breath. “Love is blind, beta, but be careful.”
I wanted to ask Naani what she meant, but my mother spoke instead.
“He wasn’t a bad man, Amma.”
“No,” Naani agreed. “He wasn’t a bad man.”
Aamir stepped forward, all eagerness. “What about me, Naani Jaan?”
“What about you?” Naani asked.
“Any advice for me?”
“Oh.” She seemed to think about it for a while and then shrugged. “No. You I don’t worry about.”
Aamir grinned. It was the nicest thing Naani had ever said to him.
—
As frustrating as delayed flights and security checks can be, it would be a better world if more of the human experience was like being at the airport. People move around looking for things—loved ones, bags, boarding gates—and generally find them. Those who are lost are easily guided, directed to where they are supposed to be by people who sit behind counters and peer over eyeglasses and usually know the answers to the most pressing questions presented to them.
Airports are places of certainty and purpose. Those things are difficult to find.
Of course, when you’re leaving behind the only country you’ve ever known, walking away from a caravan of first cousins and second cousins and close friends who have gathered to see you off, possibly forever, it is hard to appreciate that. I didn’t feel very certain of much that day at Jinnah International.
“We’ll meet again soon,” Naani Jaan promised, as I pulled away from her embrace. She smelled like stale perfume, smoke and time. “All separations are temporary.”
“I know,” I said.
“Then smile.”
I tried.
“When you’re walking away,” Naani said, “remember not to look back. If you look back, you turn to stone.”
She was talking about Lot’s wife, the woman who had looked back at the city she was leaving when she wasn’t supposed to, and who had been punished for her disobedience by being turned to stone.
I felt something like kinship with her then, that woman centuries removed from me, abandoning her city in distress, leaving her home to its perilous fate. How could she have been expected to resist a glance back, and why had her punishment, for so small a transgression, been so severe?
I glanced up to see my mother was standing by me, and I knew not to ask the question. It is one thing to relate to sinners. It is another thing to say that out loud. One must, after all, pretend virtue whenever possible.
I’ll admit that I shared in the weakness of Lot’s wife—Edith, they say her name was—because I couldn’t keep myself from glancing back either, at my extended family, at the sun-soaked city where I’d been born, at the frail old woman who always played to win. Was there a chance that looking back could have turned me to stone? I didn’t think it mattered. Anyone who didn’t look back, I realized then, was stone already.
AZZA
I didn’t kill Fahd.
It’s not my fault my brother’s dead.