Homeland Elegies(27)
Zayd hopped out and pulled the door open for Father, muttering his bismillah. At the curtain’s edge, a woman’s small face appeared. Like Zayd, she was dark; her nose was pierced. As Father and I emerged from the car, she adjusted her dupatta to ensure her hair was fully covered. Zayd spoke to her in Gujarati and lifted himself up—there was no step—then reached back to help Father up as well. As they disappeared inside, I peered after them. The single room was spare, a faded red carpet covering much of the floor, shelves bolted into the walls, holding clothes and pans, a mattress barely large enough for two in one corner and, next to it, another much smaller one where their boy lay inert. Father’s fingers were already on the child’s neck, checking his pulse, prying open his sleeping eyes to inspect. There was a small box fan mounted on the right wall, and it kept the air inside the container surprisingly cool. Zayd saw me and approached. He kneeled at the opening and asked if I wanted tea.
“I’m fine,” I said in Punjabi. “But thank you.”
He pulled his cigarettes and held them out to me. I took one and let him light it.
In the alleyway, I smoked as I waited. It was cleaner here, the sickening odor of human waste easier to ignore. Across the way, an old man with a thick henna-red beard squatted against a plywood wall, a hookah to his lips. I nodded a greeting, which he didn’t acknowledge. Farther on, a trio of women leaned over a metal basin, washing clothes. From afar, I heard the children singing again, their motley chorus riding the breeze. Zayd appeared in the alleyway, lighting a cigarette as he joined me. His demeanor was different from the way it had been earlier—warm now, nervous, talky. He asked if what Naseem told him was true, that my father was a famous doctor in America.
I told him he was.
“Mashallah,”6 he said. “Are you a doctor, too?”
“Oh, no,” I said with a laugh that visibly perplexed him. “I’m a writer,” I said, which only seemed to confuse him more. My Punjabi was iffy at best, indulged and gently mocked by my extended family, most of whom had good English of their own. And though I’d been in Pakistan now for three weeks, it was only in speaking to Zayd that I truly realized just how bad my Punjabi was. “Yes. He’s a very famous heart doctor where we live in America. But he’s a good doctor for everything; very good with children who are sick. He loves children.”
“Mashallah,” Zayd said again. “Osama always has luck on his side.” Seeing my surprise, Zayd laughed. “My son, I mean. Not bin Laden Sahib.” I noticed him watching for my reaction as he took another drag. Exhaling, he brought his hand to his chest to indicate himself: “I’m Zayd. The Messenger of God, peace be upon him, had a Zayd, too.” He spoke now in a more formal, Urdu-inflected register, and his demeanor changed: “The Prophet’s Zayd had a son—and his name was Osama. Hazrat Ali was one lion of God. Osama is the other. A baby lion,” he said with a smile as he tapped away the ash at the end of his cigarette. Across from us, the old man was still squatting, lips affixed to his pipe as he watched us talk. The children’s melody sounded closer now, as if they were approaching from the alley’s other end. “It’s a beautiful story. Can I tell you?”
“Of course.”
“When Zayd’s Osama was ten years old, he started praying. One day he asked the Prophet, peace be upon him, if he could join the men in battle. ‘I am old enough to stand alongside you, the Prophet of God, in prayer, so why am I not old enough to join the war against the enemies of our Lord?’ Can you believe it? He loved our Messenger, peace be upon him, loved him so much that he wanted to be by his side even in the fight. Of course, he was too young. So the Prophet, peace be upon him, said no. But every year Osama would ask, and every year the answer was no—until he turned seventeen. And then our great Messenger, peace be upon him, said yes! And what a great fighter Osama became! So good that he became the youngest general in the army. Can you believe it?”
I offered a quiet mashallah of my own in response, not knowing what else to say.
Just then, the gaggle of children raced past us—no longer singing now—chased and chasing, slamming the Mercedes with their palms and sticks as they passed, screeching with unbridled glee. Zayd shouted at them as they disappeared down the alley. Across the way, the old man smoked, watching.
As Zayd inspected his car, I burned with a question, mentally framing it in my meager Punjabi, searching for the proper measure of deference in my word choice to be sure I didn’t give offense. By the time I’d settled on the form my question would take, he’d returned to his place alongside me, satisfied, it seemed, there were no new scratches. “Do you hope your Osama, too, becomes a great fighter one day?” I asked. My worry had been needless; he was visibly pleased. And I couldn’t have expected how uncomplicated his reply would be:
“If he can give his life to make the world a better place, inshallah, if he can live up to the name he has—what more blessing could a father ask for?”
Footnotes
1 Thus it is that armed prophets succeed where unarmed prophets fail.
2 When I was in college, Surah Al-Muzzammil would end up on my reading list for the Meccan unit of my Islamic Studies class in the history of the Quran. I recall sitting in the first-floor reading room of the university library, looking up from the pages of the translation we’d been assigned, catching hold of the image of my uncle turning in our guest-room bed mixed and mingling with the picture of the person who, since childhood, had always been the Prophet to me. That image was, itself, some version of a person I’d known who had no connection to the Prophet whatsoever. He was a man I’d seen as a very young boy in my father’s village whom my father seemed to love. We were by the village well; they were laughing; then they hugged. I remember the green scarf tied to this man’s head, a long black mustache above his lip, a booming laugh his joy released. I remember looking up to see a metal pail pouring water into an earthenware jar as large as I was. For some reason, this man I would remember being called Tafi, though my father recalls no such person. I can’t tell you why Tafi somehow became the Prophet in my mind, but he did. Whenever my mother—or her sisters, or her mother—would tell me tales of the Prophet, I saw Tafi in the role, which meant my every thought of the Prophet was dressed in some version of that green scarf and handlebar mustache, not to mention ringed with a liquid, unbridled joy.