American Dervish: A Novel (11 page)

“First base is kissing. Second’s up the shirt. Third’s down the pants. A home run’s all the way.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “All the way?” I asked.

“Sex? You know what sex is, right?”

I stared at Satya, not knowing what to say. All I knew was that I’d heard the word.

He smiled. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what sex is?”

In the window, Gina’s boyfriend had lifted her sweater to reveal her smooth, flat belly and a white bra above it.

“What’s going on in there?” Otto asked in a whining voice, peering up at us.

“Shut up,” Satya hissed. I watched him, his eyes wide with wonder over the napkin he still wore over his nose and mouth. I wondered if that’s what my eyes looked like when Mother caught me at the window.
Staring at prostitutes,
she’d called it.

Satya realized I was looking at him. “What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“I don’t know what you’re looking at me for. You’re missing the real action.”

“I don’t want the
real action.
”

“What’s wrong with you?”

I pulled the napkin from my face and started to climb back down the tree.

“Where are you going?”

“Home,” I said with disgust.

Back at the house, Mina and Nathan were still sitting on the patio. Even at twenty yards, I was struck by her. She looked different. Sharper. Even more magnetic than usual. Her face held my gaze, and I felt a stinging tug in my stomach, an urgency. She was separate from me, and I needed to close that gap, to seize her somehow, to make her my own.

I didn’t understand it.

I stepped up onto the patio, heading for the kitchen, but as I passed their chairs, Mina reached out, pulling me to her. I felt her legs close in and hold me in place. She lifted her lips to my cheek for a kiss. “He’s like my second son…,” she purred, radiant. Her
dupatta
scarf was draped loosely around her head, its translucent silk gleaming in the late afternoon sun. “And if I have my way he’ll end up a bibliophile just like the two of us.”

“Already on his way—aren’t you, Hayat?” Nathan asked with a lazy smile. He had a dazed, goofy look I found almost as unsettling as Mina’s newly arresting beauty. “With a little luck, you’ll keep the tradition going and end up as a thorn in your dad’s side,” Nathan added with a laugh. Mina laughed, too.

“Wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, would it?” Nathan continued. “If anyone can get him to read a book someday, it’ll be his own son. Don’t you think?”

“I doubt
that,
” Mina said, her eyes sparkling.

Something was happening, but I couldn’t tell what it was. There was a charge in the air, like a cloud of whirling gnats between them.

Mina went on: about how smart I was; how I’d begun to memorize the Quran; what a good surrogate brother I’d been for Imran. Not only was she talking about me, but I was standing locked between her legs, her arms about my waist…and yet she seemed more separate from me than ever. “I have to go to the bathroom, Auntie,” I finally said, pulling myself free.

“Okay,
kurban,
” she said.

I went through the patio door, making a point of slamming it shut behind me. But when I looked back through the window, neither of them seemed to notice.

They were already laughing about something else.

6

The Dervish

T
hat week, the phone rang every night about half an hour after dinner. Mother would come bounding into the kitchen to grab it. “Hi, Dr. Wolfsohn…,” she would coo, “sorry, I meant…
Nathan…
I’m fine,
Nathan.
How are you?…Of
course.
I’ll get her…” Then Mother would put her palm over the mouthpiece and yell out: “Meen! For you! Dr. Wolfsohn!” And soon enough, Mina would appear at her side, hovering on her tiptoes as she took the phone and chirped into the receiver: “Hi, Nathan.” But before the conversation went any further, she would turn to me—I was usually still doing the dishes—and inquire, always tenderly: “
Behta,
is it okay if I use the phone for a little while…alone?”

I would nod and head off to my room.

More than once that week, I emerged an hour or so later—after homework and some verses—hoping to bypass any unfinished dishes in the sink on my way down to the family room for some television. Invariably, I’d find Mother perched at the stairs, barring the way. And over her shoulder, down on the couch at the family room’s far end, I would see Mina curled up on the corner cushion, the phone cradled lovingly against her face.

“Don’t be nosy,” Mother would scold.

“I’m not.”

“Go finish the dishes.”

“Fine,” I would say.

There was no need to be nosy. Mina’s peals of joyous laughter—easy to hear, even over the sound of running water as I finished up at the sink—and her dreamy gait as she came up the stairs after her calls were over left no doubt about what was happening:

She was smitten.

On Thursday night, as I sat at my desk, I heard Mina screaming at someone downstairs. I came to my doorway and saw her crying as she stormed into her room and slammed the door shut. Mother would later tell me Mina’s parents had called. They’d learned of a divorced Pakistani, a dentist in South Carolina, who was looking for a wife. Without mentioning it to their daughter, the Alis had sent the man Mina’s picture. Now he wanted to meet her.

Mina lost it. She told her parents that not only was she not interested, but there was no chance she would ever even consider another arranged marriage after what had happened with Hamed.

Her father started screaming. She screamed back. And then he hung up on her.

The next morning, as I readied for school, Mina was still in bed. This was odd. She was usually up early, helping Mother with breakfast, getting Imran ready for nursery school. When I left for the bus that morning, her bedroom door was shut, and when I got home that afternoon, Mother complained that Mina hadn’t come out all day. At teatime she finally emerged, shuffling along the hall and down into the kitchen, where Mother was pouring tea. Mina looked drawn, downcast, her eyes wide and sunken into darkened, cavelike sockets.

“Hi, Auntie,” I said, trying to be cheery.

“Hi,
behta,
” she mumbled.

“Can I come see you tonight?” Since the weekend—and the subsequent nightly calls from Nathan—we’d had no time together with the Quran.

“Don’t make your auntie’s life difficult, Hayat,” Mother said abruptly.

“It’s fine,
bhaj,
” Mina said with a faint smile.

“Let’s go,” Mother said to her friend brusquely, as she handed Mina her tea and took her by the hand.

Mina smiled at me again. “Come and see me later,
behta,
” she said as Mother led her out.

At bedtime, I went to see her, Quran in hand.

“Is it okay if we do a story tonight instead of
diniyaat?
” she asked with a whisper. She pointed: Imran was lying on his bed, sleeping.

“Sure, Auntie,” I whispered back.

Mina threw open the covers, inviting me inside. She asked me what story I wanted to hear. Something new, I said. She took a moment to think, and then her eyes lit up.

“I’m going to tell you about a dervish. That’s someone who gives up everything for Allah.”

“Gurvish?”

“Dervish. With a
d,
not a
g.
”

“Dervish,” I repeated, nodding. But an image had already been born from the word incorrectly heard: Mr. Gurvitz, the old janitor at my elementary school, a bald, skinny man who doddered, hunched, along the halls trailing a trash can on wheels.

“So I want to tell you about a dervish who was wandering the world by foot. He wandered and wandered, thinking only of Allah all day long. He’d given everything up in search of God,
behta,
to the point that he was depending completely on the kindness of strangers for his meals, sleeping at night on the open road, under the open sky—”

“He’s a homeless guy,” I said.

“Not just homeless, Hayat. I’m talking about a Sufi. A Sufi dervish. Whose whole life is devoted to Allah. It was his choice to give everything up.”

What she was saying made no sense to me. “Auntie, why would anybody
choose
to be homeless?”

“Because by giving everything up, his home, his family, his job, nothing is in the way anymore. Nothing between himself and God.”

Mina could tell I wasn’t following.

“What is special for you,
behta?
Is there something you would never want to lose?”

“You, Auntie.”

She smiled. “That’s so sweet, Hayat.” She ran her fingers along my forehead. “You love being with me…in this moment…”

“So much, Auntie. So much.”

“You don’t want it to end, right?”

“Never.”

“It’s the same with our dervish
.
He feels this kind of love with Allah. He doesn’t
ever
want it to end. Just like you and me right now. Everything else, television, school, chores… those would take you away from me right now, right?”

I nodded.

“So that’s what the dervish does, gets rid of his television and his school and his chores. Everything that takes him away from Allah’s love.”

“I understand, Auntie.”

“But in this story, the dervish gave up everything, but he still felt sad and confused. He still felt he was holding on to something that took him away from God’s love.”

“What?”

“He didn’t know. And he was asking himself that question over and over. For years he wandered and searched and prayed for an answer. And he couldn’t figure out what it was…

“Then one day, the dervish lost hope. After looking for so long, he was so tired. He sat down on the side of the road. Exhausted. With no idea what to do anymore…”

I was still seeing Gurvitz in my mind’s eye. And I saw him now, in tattered clothes, defeated, sitting beside an empty road.

“Just as he was sitting there, two men came walking along, eating oranges. They came closer and saw the old dervish, and one of them said: ‘What a filthy old man.’ And the other said: ‘Look how he’s staring at our oranges. With greedy eyes!’ They laughed. And as they passed the dervish, they tossed the orange peels at him: ‘Here, old man, eat the peels if you’re so hungry!’

“Now,
behta.
If that happened to you or me, we would get angry. We would get up and say something, or throw the peels back at the men. But not this dervish. He didn’t get angry. Instead, he got up and took both of them into his arms.

“ ‘Thank you, brothers! Thank you for giving me the
answer!
’ The men were confused. ‘What answer?’ they asked. ‘The answer I’ve been waiting for my whole life!’ the dervish said.”

Mina paused.

“It’s a difficult story,
behta.
I know. But I think you can understand it…

“What the dervish found was true humility. He realized he was no better, no worse than the ground itself, the ground that takes the discarded orange peels of the world. In fact, he realized he was the same as that ground, the same as those peels, as those men, as everything else. He was the same as everything created by Allah’s hand.

“What was in his way before? He thought he was different. But now he saw he was
not
different. He and Allah, and everything Allah created, it was all One.”

I didn’t understand what she was saying at the time. But I would never forget it.

Saturday night, our doorbell rang an hour before dinner. Mother came hurrying out of the kitchen. “Get the door, Hayat,” she said, pulling her cooking apron from her waist as she headed for the stairs. I was in the living room with Imran playing chess, or at least trying to.

“Take your time and think about it,” I said to Imran as I stood up. “You’re close to checkmate.”

Imran stared at the board for a moment, then threw his arm across it, scattering all the pieces. “I win!” he cried out.

“You didn’t win,” I shot back. “You don’t know the rules, so you don’t even know what it means to win. And after what you just did, you won’t ever win, because I’ll never play with you again!”

Imran squealed now, tossing the board into the air. He threw himself onto his back and started to kick and scream.

The doorbell rang again.

“What’s going on down there?!” Mother shouted, peering out from the upstairs bathroom. Mina’s face appeared over her shoulder.

“What happened?” Mina shouted out to her son in Urdu.

“Nothing!” I shouted back.

“Stop making trouble, Hayat,” Mother said, sharply. “Go see who’s at the door!”

“Yeah, I wonder,” I muttered to myself. Mina and Mother had been in a frenzy all afternoon in anticipation of our dinner guest, Nathan. I opened the front door.

“Hey, Hayat!” Nathan said brightly. He was wearing a brown sport coat, a yellow buttondown oxford, and khakis. Everything was perfectly pressed, and he looked like he’d just come from a haircut. He was patting at his forehead with a handkerchief.

“Hi, Dr. Wolfsohn,” I mumbled back. Nathan reached down and picked up a box lying at his feet.

“How’s life treating you, Hayat?” he asked as he stepped inside.

“Fine.”

Behind us, Imran dashed past, racing up the steps. He was crying.

“Everything okay?” Nathan asked.

“Don’t ask me,” I answered with a shrug. “The kid’s always crying about something.”

Nathan nodded. “Well, can’t be easy for him to be in a new country…”

“It isn’t that new. He’s been here awhile.”

“I guess… so, um, Hayat, where’s your dad? He’s been pestering me all week for these.” Nathan indicated the box he was holding.

“Out back. In the garden.”

“Mind if I go ahead and set this down?” Nathan stepped into the living room, looking about. He turned to me, nodding at the armchair. “You think it’s okay if I put it over there?”

“Sure,” I said.