The Sweetness of Tears (2 page)

Mom always explained what each challenge meant on the first morning of camp—the sloughs, the valleys, the ropes. About the wall, she said, “You have to understand that doubt is poisonous to faith. It eats away at it. It has to be overcome, climbed over, and conquered in order to complete the journey of faith.”

After lunch, I snuck away to try to tackle the wall by myself. At the foot of it, I took hold of the rope and looked up, thinking about what Mom had said about doubt. I closed my eyes as if to avoid her words. The sound of footsteps crunching behind me made me turn, heart thumping, to see Chris, who stepped forward, offering advice I hadn’t asked for.

“Just take it one step at a time, Jo. You can do it. I know you can.”

I shut my eyes again, scrunching them tighter than before, trying to concentrate on the moment, to rise out of the haunting shadow of questions I had brushed aside. I saw a bright blanket of unidentifiable color, the sun, cresting over the top of the wall, which my eyelids weren’t thick enough to block out, and the mental association of those words—“eyes” and “color”—made me sink back into the shadow and let go of the rope.

“What’s wrong, Jo?” Chris was asking, his hand on my shoulder. I shook my head and shrugged him off.

“Nothing. I’m—I’m going for a walk.”

“You want me to come?”

“No.”

He was studying my face, but I couldn’t meet his eyes. He tipped my chin up with his finger and tucked a lock of hair that had slipped out of my ponytail behind my ear. “You’ll do it, Jo. You’ve got one more day.”

“Yeah. One more day.”

It’s funny now, to think of how earnest he was—he really thought I was upset about not climbing the wall. But it was the allegory of the wall that was bothering me—and its real-life translation.

I left the Progress Course and headed into a wooded area beside it. It was cooler there, under a canopy of leaves and branches that gently shushed and crackled in the breeze that livened them in sudden spurts. As I walked around in the woods, stalked by the insurmountable wall of the Progress Course behind me, I heard a strange noise—a clicking from above—and looked up into the branches around me to find its source. I saw a bird, small and ordinary, and was watching him when he repeated the clicking, followed by a whole repertoire of varying kinds of bird calls, along with what sounded like a car alarm, woven into the song. It was a mockingbird. I sat down on the ground—slowly, carefully trying not to scare him away—and watched him for a while. I wondered who the concert was aimed at and looked around to find another bird. There was none. Maybe he was just practicing.

Mockingbirds made me think of Finches, capital F—as in Atticus and Scout, because I’d just read Harper Lee’s classic in English class. Finches led me to Darwin—the different species he encountered in South America and the Galapagos Islands being one of the things that led him to consider the idea of variant species descending from one common ancestor. Until I was struck dumb by those darned Punnett squares, I’d spent much of the past year disputing Darwin with my biology teacher, Mr. Hicks, armed with all the arguments in Great-grandpa Pelton’s book.

But Darwin hadn’t been my problem in the end. Nothing Mr. Hicks said could shake my faith in the Genesis account of Creation. It was Mendel and his peas that I stumbled over—Mendel, the gardening monk, the man of God who believed in Genesis like I did. Specifically, dominant and recessive genes, phenotypes and genotypes. Detached earlobes. Blond hair. Hemophilia. And eye color. Mine are brown. My parents—they have blue eyes. Both of them do.

Here was the dilemma that had given birth to doubt. I had never heard anything against Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance—not from Mom, not from my pastor, and not from anything I could find in Great-grandpa Pelton’s book. No one disputed the fact that blue eyes are recessive, that two blue-eyed parents cannot produce a brown-eyed child. So I had to choose between not believing my own eyes and questioning everything I knew about myself.

The mockingbird, done with rehearsal, flew off in search, perhaps, of an audience more relevant than me. I stood up and tried to walk off the implications of Mendel’s conclusions.

Exceptions. There were always exceptions to rules. That’s what faith was all about. Miracles. They had no basis in science. The Bible was full of events that scientists dismissed as impossible because they went against the rules—the parting of the seas, the healing of the sick, resurrection, and the virgin birth. I was uneasy about lumping the color of my eyes into the august category of the Bible’s accounts of God’s work on Earth. But it was all I could manage on that walk in the woods.

It worked, I suppose. The last morning of camp, I made it over the wall, fueled by will—mostly Chris’s. He yelled me all the way up—like Richard Gere in
An Officer and a Gentleman,
when he helps the girl recruit climb over the wall and graduate as an officer.

Getting over the wall seemed to clinch it. I’d conquered my doubts, climbed over them—with help from Chris. Left them behind. That’s what I told myself.

Except, two years later, just as I was leaving home for college in Chicago, the doubts surfaced again, bursting their way out of my mouth, asking Mom for the truth as she helped me pack my suitcases. Then I knew I had been right to be afraid. The story she told me made my mother seem like a stranger. It made me a stranger to myself.

“Does Dad know?” was the only thing I could think of to ask when she was done.

“Of course he does. I didn’t lie to him, Jo!”

But you lied to me,
I wanted to say.
And you’re asking me to lie, too.

That had been two weeks ago. Now I was in Chicago, getting ready for classes to start the next day, trying not to think about what Mom had said, thinking I’d just plow over the whole story and pretend not to know. Instead, I found myself standing, staring at a stranger’s building from across the street. The numbers on the glass door, etched in gold, were clear, matching the address I had found in the phone book that morning, next to the name I hadn’t meant to look up, my fingers doing the walking that my mind didn’t want to do.

I looked left, right, left. There were no cars to stop me from crossing over. But after a moment spent on the brink of the curb, I stepped back, staying on my side of the street, pacing up and down the sidewalk, my eyes on the windows of his building, wondering if he was home, if he was even the same person as the man—the boy—from my mother’s story.

I sank my hands into the pockets of my jeans and, this time, didn’t double back when the sidewalk ended, walking two blocks up and then two blocks over, circling the perimeter around where he lived in a two-by-two grid, like the Punnett squares that were the reason I was here.

I guess my feet were telling me that what I felt now was the same as what I’d felt back in Mr. Hicks’s class, when who I thought I was ran up against Mendel. No matter how many times I had tried, filling out the worksheet that Mr. Hicks had passed out in class, erasing those letters and filling them back in, over and over again—capital and lowercase, dominant and recessive—I couldn’t fit myself into those Punnett squares. Finally, I’d had to lie my way through the assignment, rearranging the letters, forcing them to make sense, pretending my dad had brown eyes instead of blue, faking a place for myself where there was none. But two years of lying to myself hadn’t worked.

I completed my way around those blocks, was back in front of his building. This time, after looking both ways, I crossed the street and found his name on the intercom system outside the building.

Mubarak, S. A.

Finding his name in the phone book—the name my mother had so reluctantly shared two weeks before—had been too big a coincidence. If he was the same person, his being in Chicago was another whopper, one of those twists in a story that’s too hard to swallow. But I didn’t believe in coincidences. You can’t if you have faith.

Still, I hesitated, reluctant to raise my finger to the buzzer. Then I saw a woman come out of the elevator in his building, pushing a stroller. She struggled with the door, until I caught and held it for her. I watched her mouth make thank-you sounds, saw her turn and croon to the baby in the stroller, who clapped its hands at whatever it was she said, watched her make her way up the street, probably to the park I’d passed only moments before, my own attention focused on the door my hand still held open. In a flash of surrender, I walked inside, through the lobby, into the elevator and up to his floor. I went down the hall in search of the apartment number listed in the white pages. Finding it, I stared at the peephole, wishing it worked both ways. Faintly, through the door, I heard music—a high, woman’s voice, singing in a foreign language. I lifted my hand and knocked hard, the sound drowned out by the beat of my heart.

Before he opened the door, the volume of the music went down. And then there he was. “Yes?”

“Uh—I—hello,” I said, my eyes registering the dark, smooth chocolate color of his.

“Can I help you?”

Over his shoulder, I saw boxes. Lots of them. He was packing. Moving someplace, it seemed.

“I—uh—are you Sadiq Mubarak?”

“Yes?”

“I—is—is your mother’s name Deena?” It was the only question I could think of to ask to make sure he was the right guy before getting to the point.

“Yes?”

“I’m Jo. Josephine March. I’m Angela’s daughter.”

“Angela?” I saw the flicker of something on his face. He remembered her.

Sadiq

It is the wisdom of the crocodiles,

that shed tears when they would devour.

Francis Bacon

M
y daughter, who is newborn to me and eighteen years old, knocked at my door last month. She identified herself. First name and last. Jo—Josephine—March.

She said, “I’m Angela’s daughter,” slowly, and then paused, her eyes seeming to measure the length of the space between my eyes, searching from one to the other of them.

I frowned at her. “Angela?” The way her face shifted, I gathered she was afraid that I had forgotten who Angela was. How could I have? Angela. My first American friend. A beautiful, blue-eyed girl—tall and slim—who I once thought I was in love with. The first girl I ever felt that way about, though certainly not the last. A mixed-up, miserable girl who I knew back when I was a pretty mixed-up, miserable child myself—also angry, resentful, sullen. No, I had not forgotten Angela.

Jo released the breath of air she’d been holding. And then told me who she was—in relation to me. After withstanding the long moments of shock that washed over me as we stood on either side of the threshold to my home, my hand gripping the door, my eyes blinded by the implications of what she said, I must have invited her in. That’s where I found her, inside, standing among the boxes in my living room. I looked at her face, searching for traces of me. What I saw, instead, was something there that reminded me of my mother. Was it in her brown, wide-open eyes? In her lips, slightly parted and uncertain? Or in the symmetrical arrangement of the features on her face? A face as beautiful as my mother’s.

Maybe the sense of familiarity had nothing to do with any resemblance she may have borne to my mother, nothing to do with
her
eyes and everything to do with mine. This was something I had experienced before—staring at a stranger who should not be one. I saw that she was staring back at me, looking for herself in a man she had just met, seeing a face browner than hers, more thickly browed, a nose a little too long, and black hair. Then, when her eyes were done staring, before I had a chance to process what I felt, if I yet felt anything at all, she said she wanted to know who I am.

How to even begin to respond to such a question—from such a source? Her very existence casts doubt on any answer I may have thought I knew. My name, Sadiq Ali Mubarak, she knew already. My address, too, or else she would not have been there, confronting me with what was worse than impossible—because it was possible and had been overlooked, concealed, and completely unexpected—leaving me breathless with the likelihood of other truths that I should own but which I knew nothing about.

Other pertinent information that I might offer—driver’s license and Social Security numbers, marital status, educational credentials, names of businesses I owned, and references, fill-in-the-blank facts that I have written thoughtlessly a hundred times on forms and applications: for the government, for banks, and car-loan applications, bureaucratic questions of identity that helped me claim what was mine, officially, in two countries, and to discard what was not—was irrelevant to the deeper question she seemed to be asking. I invited her to sit down on the chair where I had been sitting before I stood to answer the door, and cleared a space for myself on the couch piled high with possessions still to be packed. On the coffee table in front of us was my passport, ready, alongside the airline ticket I had bought weeks before she knocked—the beginning of a journey I have taken, in body, many times, to and fro, unable to find my place in this world or that one.

Now, I hesitated before beginning that same journey back in a different way, one paved with words. I hesitated because I knew that no matter how hard I tried, I would fail to paint her a complete picture of the scenes that suddenly, incomprehensibly, stood out in my memory. Childhood scenes from before life changed forever—pictures of and senses from a world of stories and rituals that the young American girl who claimed to be my daughter could never really understand. How could she? There was too much to translate, too much grounded in a context that no one in this world, the one I am running away from again, has ever seen.

But I tried. I owed her that, at least.

T
he orbit of my childhood world was small and safe. It was a woman’s world, my mother’s, located in the house where she had spent her childhood—an old-fashioned, pre-Partition home with a rickety, double-front door whose paint had long ago chipped and peeled. A home from which another family, Hindu, had fled to newly independent India before my mother’s came to live in it, in newly formed Pakistan, having left their own home behind in Bombay. The front windows were shuttered and screened so that there were no views to the narrow residential street in front. But there was no shortage of light in the house, because of the open courtyard in the middle of the once-stately structure, the floor laid with faded mosaic exposed to the elements—the brilliant heat and light of the Karachi sun, the heavy wetness of the morning dew, the sudden, soaking downpour of infrequent rains.

Along one side of the courtyard, a hallway led to bedrooms, one opening into another, mine and my mother’s the second in a line of three. Another side opened to the living and dining rooms, all with the same rust-red mosaic as the courtyard, large square shapes inlaid with sun-colored flowers, sharp and angled in a geometric pattern that became roads for the dinky cars I played with, battlefields for the tin soldiers I lined up, making motor sounds and crashing noises for all the collisions and clashes that little boys delight in orchestrating. On the other side of the courtyard was the kitchen, a dark hole of a room furnished with cement blocks that had a countertop gas stove and a floor-level sink in the corner, where Macee, the aged kitchen servant who had been a part of the family since before I was born, would squat to scrub and wash the pots and utensils that emerged as the kitchen alchemy over which my mother presided produced delicious sounds of onions sizzling and throat-scraping vapors from dry spices roasting, which drove me just outside to the courtyard, where I would hop from one mosaic square to another, within sight of my mother, within hearing of the laughter and chatter that she and Macee exchanged.

The refrigerator, which was far from the kitchen, in the dining room on the other side of the courtyard—a vicious old clunker known as the “Machine”—had a pull-down handle that gave out a sharp electrical shock to anyone hapless enough to try opening the door without first wrapping a hand with a dishcloth. There was an L-shaped terrace above the house, spanning the length and breadth of two sides of the courtyard, built atop of the living room, dining room, and bedrooms. There, a table and low chairs were arranged, affording the view to the street lacking inside of the house. The walls around the terrace were low, something my mother constantly warned me to be cautious of, calling sharply if I ventured too near to them. When the heat of the day abated, I would climb the wobbly, wooden staircase, my hand firmly grasped in my mother’s, and we would sit and watch the quiet life of the street go by, my mother sipping the tea that Macee would bring her, reading the newspaper, telling me stories.

“Tell me the one about the monkey and the crocodile again.”

My mother would smile. “
Oh-ho?
Again? That one is your favorite,
nah
?”

I would nod.

She would close her eyes, as if to conjure up the presence of the characters I loved, and begin, “Once upon a time, there was a monkey who lived alone in a
jamun
tree.”

“Why did she live alone, Amee?”

“She was a naughty monkey—strange and different from the others. They didn’t like her. So she lived by herself in a big, leafy, green
jamun
tree, which gave fruit all the year round.”

“A tree like that one?” I would say, pointing at the tree that shaded one corner of the terrace, a tall tree that grew up from the neighbor’s garden, showering us with fruit, but only in season.

“Yes. A tree just like that one. Except the monkey’s tree grew at the bank of a river and gave fruit all the time. She was never hungry, and the tangy, sweet
jamun
s were all she needed to live. But she was lonely.”

“Until she met the crocodile?”

“Yes. One day, a crocodile swam out of the river and onto the bank to take shade from her tree. The monkey watched the crocodile for a while, having never seen one from so close before.

“Then she called, ‘Hello there, Crocodile!’

“And the crocodile replied, ‘Hello.’

“ ‘Where have you come from?’ asked the curious monkey.

“ ‘Oh, from the other side of the river,’ answered the crocodile.

“ ‘Are you hungry?’ asked the monkey.

“ ‘I am a crocodile,’ he said. ‘It is my nature to always be hungry.’

“ ‘Here, have some
jamun,
’ called the monkey, and threw a large number of the fruit down to the crocodile, happy to share.

“The crocodile ate the fruit and found it scrumptious. Sweet and crunchy and soft, all at the same time. ‘Thank you,’ he told the monkey. ‘Those were delicious.’

“ ‘Any time,’ said the monkey. ‘Come again tomorrow and I shall give you more.’

“And so, the crocodile came again. Every day. And every day, when the crocodile came, he and the monkey would talk—he would tell her of his journeys on the river, and she would listen and share her fruit. Before they even realized what had happened, the monkey and the crocodile became friends. That was a glorious moment. For it was unheard of, for monkeys and crocodiles to be friends. But
this
monkey and
this
crocodile rose above their natures, taking pleasure in each other’s company, the way that friends do.

“One day, they spoke of their families. The monkey told the crocodile of how she lived alone and separate from the other monkeys. And the crocodile told of his brothers and sisters and parents, who he lived with on the other side of the river.

“ ‘But why didn’t you tell me that you live with your family!’ exclaimed the monkey. ‘I would have sent extra fruit home with you for them.’ And that was what she did that day.

“ ‘This is so kind of you,’ said the crocodile, truly touched by the monkey’s generosity.

“ ‘Anything for my friend,’ said the monkey.

“That day, when the crocodile went home, he shared the gift of fruit that his friend the monkey had sent for his family. They all enjoyed the fruit and asked him where he’d found it. He told them of his friendship with the monkey, of how kind she was, and what pleasant company. They were all astonished to hear him speak this way about a monkey, who they had only ever thought of as food.

“Then one of his brothers, the eldest, began to laugh at him. ‘What kind of croc are you? That you would be friends with a monkey! Crocodiles eat monkeys, don’t you know?!’

“ ‘I know that,’ said the crocodile. ‘But this monkey is different from other monkeys. This monkey is my friend.’

“ ‘Your friend!’ they all guffawed, following the eldest brother’s lead. ‘That is unnatural,’ they told him.

“The poor crocodile was very hurt for his friend. He decided not to talk of her anymore. But it was too late. Every day, when he would return from his visits with his friend, they teased him.

“His older brother bragged to him of having eaten a monkey once. ‘Oh— their flesh is so tender and tasty— it makes my mouth water just to think of it! And your monkey, who spends all day eating that delicious fruit, must be especially tasty.’

“The crocodile would turn away from his brother and try not to hear. But his brother would not stop. ‘You know what the best part of the monkey is? The very tastiest part? It is the heart—mmm, oh, so delicious! And your monkey’s heart,’ the crocodile’s brother smacked his sharp teeth, ‘oh, yes, your monkey’s heart must be the most delicious in the world! But what does it matter? You are too cowardly to ever know that what I tell you is true. Only brave crocodiles can ever know the taste of monkey flesh. I wonder whether you are really a crocodile at all.’

“What his brother told him bothered the crocodile. His sense of honor was offended. He was torn. On the one hand, the monkey was his friend. Surely, all of her kindness to him required him to honor that friendship. But he was a crocodile after all. And every day, his brothers and sisters reminded him that crocodiles and monkeys cannot and should not be friends—that he was a cowardly kind of croc for not even trying to eat the monkey. In the end, what his brother told him was too much to bear. His mouth would water whenever he heard of the tastiness of monkey flesh, of the great delicacy of monkey heart. And his greed won out over his sense of honor as a friend.

“The next day, when he visited the monkey, he said, ‘My friend! My family has made me realize that while you have been a good friend to me, sharing your fruit and sending gifts home for them, I have not been such a good friend to you. They have asked me to invite you to the other side of the river in order that they might meet my friend who has been so generous.’

“The monkey was happy. ‘Oh, Crocodile! You and your family are too kind. But how can I visit them? I am a monkey. I live on the land.’

“ ‘Oh, that is no obstacle,’ said the crocodile. ‘Climb onto my back and I will take you to my family.’

“The lonely monkey was tempted out of her tree. ‘Why not?’ she said, and climbed down to mount the crocodile’s back.

“The crocodile could hardly contain himself. Now that the monkey was on his back, he thought of all that his brother had said. His mouth watered at the prospect of eating his friend’s heart. He swam out to the middle of the river and stopped.

“ ‘Why have you stopped here, my friend?’

“ ‘I have stopped, Monkey, because I am a crocodile. You are a monkey. And real crocodiles eat monkeys. I have been thinking about how especially tasty you will be—you, who eat delicious
jamun
s all the day long. I am very sorry, Monkey, but I have decided to eat your heart.’