Homeland Elegies(59)



One of the reasons Asha could go on without so much as a hesitating pause had—I suspect—something to do with what she was reading on my face as she spoke: interest, encouragement, assent. I, too, had long harbored a secret penchant for this sort of thing. Though never tempted by psychics or tea leaves or tarot cards, I had always gone about my days with the assumption of some unseen but dimly legible order beneath the bright clatter of Creation. In leaving the theism of my Muslim childhood behind, I never did entirely abandon its deepest underlying logic. I didn’t know if there was anything like a God. I didn’t care. But it was mostly clear to me we were not just castaways in some tohubohu bearing an ensign of meaning only for those desperate enough to concoct one: I felt mostly certain more was going on than met the eye—despite not having a real clue just what that “more” might entail. My assuredness on these matters owed less to faith than it did to experience, for I’d been hearing echoes of the uncanny since early childhood. Indeed, coeval with the birth of memory itself is the steady, reassuring recollection of my dead older brother, Imtiaz, already deceased when I was born; a recollection not as a figment of family lore—my parents rarely spoke of him; had no pictures of him up on our walls or shelves—or as chimeric companion; rather, as a presence: soothing, inquiring, somehow noble. I knew he was mine before I ever thought he might be my brother. I called him Joe. My parents called him my imaginary friend. When I was four, I asked my mother if we could have the fish tank back. She looked at me, horrified. Joe said we had orange fish in the room, I said, and he wants to watch them again. She asked me to repeat it. I did. Then she slapped me and started to cry. Apparently, before I was born, there actually had been an aquarium in the room beside the bed in which I slept, and Imtiaz would gaze into it endlessly. Father and he would go to the fish store to pick goldfish for that tank, and when Imtiaz died, it bubbled softly away in that now empty room, too painful a reminder for both of them. Father released all the fish into a local pond and hid the tank in the garage.

I’d never known any of this.

When I say I felt him as a presence, I don’t mean to imply that I ever spied his form or heard him speak in any other voice than my own. Even so, his tenor and texture were not of me. To become aware he was present felt like a kind of play initiated by something only different from myself because it felt like him. He’s with me still, an aegis, a daemon, a mood of particular calm, a name I give to the great-hearted goad—not heeded often enough—to hold my tongue, to wait my turn, to stop and inquire. As I grew older, I would learn more about my brother from my mother’s sisters, from my father—and, once my mother died, from her journal. I was told he was thoughtful, affectionate, graceful beyond his years, that he loved to draw and would spend hours a day absorbed in the pictures he incessantly made—mostly of fish. No doubt there was much idealization in all their recollections of him, bereaved as they were by his death at the shocking age of five, but notwithstanding, so much of what they said to me I felt I somehow already knew. As an adult, I would wonder if I’d picked up on some still palpable emotional residue, still carried, still felt by my parents—the raw data of their grief, if you will—that I made my own. This vaguely conceived notion was certainly infinitely less objectionable than the entirely indefensible conclusion that I might be actually communing with the gracious spirit of my fish-adoring dead brother.

When I was eight:

I dreamed that my mother’s mother’s mother was being chased by God. In the dream, God was a large, angry cloud, so large, in fact, I couldn’t see Him. I saw her running and saw that everywhere she ran, she couldn’t escape Him. The next morning, I came into the kitchen to find my father consoling my mother. Her sister, my aunt Nazneen, had just called from Rawalpindi. Their grandmother—my great-grandmother—had died that night.

There’s more:

The following winter we were in Pakistan for Christmas break and staying in my father’s northern Punjabi village. I remember a meal in the courtyard with the village imam. He was a slight middle-aged man with a long bister face framed by a henna-red beard. His teeth were square and orderly and flashed in his mouth as he spoke. I wondered if they were real. At some point during dinner, my legs got sore. And then the soreness spread through my body. That night I came down with a fever that lasted two days. On the second night, my temperature spiked to 104. As I lay sweating in a wicker bed in my grandmother’s room, I started to hallucinate that the sky was coming apart into chunks of bread and bone. I was scared one of these would crush me. My father climbed in beside me, caressed my forehead, sang quietly into my ear to calm me. I fell asleep and dreamed of the same village imam with the curtain beard and square teeth, accompanied by a throng of elders—men and women—in shawls and beards. They had all come to see me, forming a line so long it led out of the bedroom, through the courtyard, and into the village square. They were all holding water from Zamzam3 in their cupped palms, and one by one, they dripped the holy water on my forehead. Finally, my bed was taken out into the courtyard, where they all gathered in a circle that turned quietly around me.

For months after that illness, I would dream of grandparents and grandparents of grandparents coming to visit; I dreamed of a desert vista filled with my ancestors praying in unison; I dreamed of the dejected Prophet wandering through the empty streets of my suburban subdivision at night. He had a green scarf on his head and looked like Tafi—the man I’d seen at the well as a child—but I knew in the dream it was Muhammad. This dream I relayed to my mother the following morning as she cracked eggs into a skillet for my breakfast before school. As she cooked, she asked me to repeat the dream again, and I wouldn’t understand the intent, furrowed look on her face as she listened until I heard her repeat on the phone—to what must have been a dozen friends and family over the next few days—almost word for word what I said. She was bragging: seeing the Prophet in a dream was a badge of honor in our Muslim faith, and especially so in her family. The most outwardly religious of my mother’s sisters, Khadija, had famously had her own dream about him and had this to say about mine: it was well known that the Prophet slept and rose early; for him to be wandering at night signaled turmoil; he was dejected, she believed, by the plight of Muslims in America; that I had seen him on our local streets meant that I would become a great American imam someday, perhaps great enough finally to make this nation of unbelievers see the truth. Of course, Father thought it was all nonsense, and not just of the usual unthinking Muslim grade; this “great imam” stuff was a particularly noxious form of nonsense he didn’t want repeated—he told Mother—as it threatened to “swell up” my head. She didn’t abide the warning, though I think my father was probably onto something.

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