Exit West(37)

The preacher was a widower, and his wife had come from the same country as Saeed, and so the preacher knew some of Saeed’s language, and his approach to religion was partly familiar to Saeed, while at the same time partly novel, too. The preacher did not solely preach. Mainly he worked to feed and shelter his congregants, and teach them English. He ran a small but efficient organization staffed with volunteers, young men and women, all Saeed’s color or darker, which Saeed too had soon joined, and among these young men and women that Saeed now labored alongside was one woman in particular, the preacher’s daughter, with curly hair she wore tied up high on her head with a cloth, this one woman the one woman in particular that Saeed avoided speaking to, because whenever he looked at her he felt his breath tighten within him, and he thought guiltily of Nadia, and he thought further that here, for him, lay something best not explored at all.

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NADIA PERCEIVED the presence of this woman not in the form of a distancing by Saeed, as might have been expected, but rather as a warming up and reaching out. Saeed seemed happier, and keen to smoke joints with Nadia at the end of the day, or at least share a couple of puffs, for they had adjusted their consumption in recognition of the local weed’s potency, and they began to speak of nothings once again, of travel and the stars and the clouds and the music they heard all around them from the other shanties. She felt bits of the old Saeed returning.

She wished, therefore, that she could be the old Nadia. But much as she enjoyed their chats and the improved mood between them, they rarely touched, and her desire to be touched by him, long subsided, did not flicker back into flame. It seemed to Nadia that something had gone quiet inside her. She spoke to him, but her words were muffled to her own ears. She lay beside Saeed, falling asleep, but not craving his hands or his mouth on her body—stifled, as if Saeed were becoming her brother, though never having had a brother she was unsure what that term meant.

It was not that her sensuality, her sense of the erotic, had died. She found herself aroused readily, by a beautiful man she passed as she walked down to work, by memories of the musician who had been her first lover, by thoughts of the girl from Mykonos. And sometimes when Saeed was out or asleep she pleasured herself, and when she pleasured herself she thought increasingly of that girl, the girl from Mykonos, and the strength of her response no longer surprised her.

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WHEN SAEED WAS a child he had first prayed out of curiosity. He had seen his mother and father praying, and the act held a certain mystery for him. His mother used to pray in her bedroom, perhaps once a day, unless it was a particularly holy time, or there had been a death in the family, or an illness, in which case she prayed more often. His father prayed mainly on Fridays, under normal circumstances, and only sporadically during the week. Saeed would see them preparing to pray, and see them praying, and see their faces after they had prayed, usually smiling, as though relieved, or released, or comforted, and he would wonder what happened when one prayed, and he was curious to experience it for himself, and so he asked to learn before his parents had yet thought of teaching him, and his mother provided the requisite instruction one particularly hot summer, and that is how, for him, it began. Until the end of his days, prayer sometimes reminded Saeed of his mother, and his parents’ bedroom with its slight smell of perfume, and the ceiling fan churning in the heat.

As he was entering his teens, Saeed’s father asked Saeed if he would like to accompany him to the weekly communal prayer. Saeed said yes, and thereafter every Friday, without fail, Saeed’s father would drive home and collect his son and Saeed would pray with his father and the men, and prayer for him became about being a man, being one of the men, a ritual that connected him to adulthood and to the notion of being a particular sort of man, a gentleman, a gentle man, a man who stood for community and faith and kindness and decency, a man, in other words, like his father. Young men pray for different things, of course, but some young men pray to honor the goodness of the men who raised them, and Saeed was very much a young man of this mold.

By the time he entered university, Saeed’s parents prayed more often than they had when he was younger, maybe because they had lost a great many loved ones by that age, or maybe because the transient natures of their own lives were gradually becoming less hidden from them, or maybe because they worried for their son in a country that seemed to worship money above all, no matter how much other forms of worship were given lip service, or maybe simply because their personal relationships with prayer had deepened and become more meaningful over the years. Saeed too prayed more often in this period, at the very least once a day, and he valued the discipline of it, the fact that it was a code, a promise he had made, and that he stood by.

Now, though, in Marin, Saeed prayed even more, several times a day, and he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity’s potential for building a better world, and so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope, but he felt that he could not express this to Nadia, that he did not know how to express this to Nadia, this mystery that prayer linked him to, and it was so important to express it, and somehow he was able to express it to the preacher’s daughter, the first time they had a proper conversation, at a small ceremony he happened upon after work, which turned out to be a remembrance for her mother, who had been from Saeed’s country, and was prayed for communally on each anniversary of her death, and her daughter, who was also the preacher’s daughter, said to Saeed, who was standing near her, so tell me about my mother’s country, and when Saeed spoke he did not mean to but he spoke of his own mother, and he spoke for a long time, and the preacher’s daughter spoke for a long time, and when they finished speaking it was already late at night.