An Awkward Proclamation
Ice rattling in glasses, sitting closer than the bar’s seat requires—a good first date, yes, but on the edge of something bigger and unspoken: our special-ism lingers heavily below the light and airy excitement of getting to know each other, having met just four days before, around the lake. Lost in the flying moments of when someone looks at you like that, the day-and-time strikes me and I take an almost involuntary look at my wristwatch: it is Friday, five till, and my hair is a mess.
I wonder who will mention it first.
I make a firm commitment not to—so as not to ruin the beautiful secularity of this budding romance—and she doesn’t bat an eye. I don’t think she even knows where jamat khana, much less Alameda, is. My heart buzzes at this possibility; then, on the bar, so does my iPhone: MA in big letters, visible to both of us.
“BABA, IT’S ALMOST DUA TIME! ARE YOU COMING?”
She always screams into cell phones. I turn down the volume in the earpiece and shoot a nervous smile toward Sofiya, who thinks either that this is cute, or that I am not the grown-ass man I purport to be. I hope for the former.
I let Ma down gently, all the while knowing that if she really knew what I was doing—exchanging loose looks with not-just-anychokri—missing Friday dua would be the kind of spiritual sacrificethat this particular Daughter of Abraham would offer up without a second thought. When I put the phone down, Sofiya’s eyes have that look of, So are you going to say it or am I?
And out it comes, in all its awkward glory:
“So . . . we are Isma’ili.”
“ . . . ”
“It was my mom, it’s dua time . . . I mean, you know.”
I decide that her silence says enough, that, yes, she does know, not just that it’s dua time, but that there are several parallel dimensions of time at work: it is overdue-shadi time; it is we’re-not-getting-any-younger-cultural-wish-fulfillment time; it’s jeez-it’s-nice-being-on-a-date-not-set-up-by-my-auntie time; it’s holy-shit-you’re-Isma’ili-and-I-like-you-I-wonder-if-my-parents-were-right time.
A few hours later, nose-to-nose, she tells me, in the dreamy almost of a whisper, that she can’t believe I’m Isma’ili. I take a page out of her book and keep my exclamations inside. I can’t believe that the only thing compelling this tender moment is volition, that I am choosing to be nasally close, that the –ism is absent, and the perfect storm of sister-and-Pops, brother, and Ma aren’t watching from somewhere, leaning in with their good-natured, poorly-executed yenta-ing.
Waiting for the Death of Everyone
“Baba, you will finish your master’s, then get a good job, and then you will meet a nice Isma’ili chokri. . . . I mean, Baba, you’re over . . .”
Due. Yeah, I know.
My mother’s zealous embrace of Old Chacha’s Mantra for Yours Truly is so unimaginatively textbook that I find the tired Ghosts of Every Pakistani Immigrant Past—the scenes in which a young brown boy has to explain, unintelligibly, why he neatly stacks pepperoni in the corner of his post-soccer-game paper plate; why root beer would cause some very understandable confusion; what a masjid, no less a jamat khana, is and why he keeps missing Friday-night school dances—are resurrected and renewed with each incantation of the O-word.
I thought, in the case of my family, as the Pakistani continues its steady, two-score drift toward the Pakistan American—cue Pops’s frustrating assimilatory rhetoric about “The Greatest Nation on Earth” and “Democracy and Freedom”—that these weary Ghosts would finally get some deserved rest. That maybe, in their place, we would build new, complex, and nuanced stories, alive and reflective of our changing conditions; that our stories would engender the myths, morals, and lore that shall trickle down and guide posterity.
I guess not.
Instead, I am now abruptly exposed to this redoubled effort for cultural continuity and core value, after hiding, for the past half decade, in the penumbra of my sister’s wedding. Zarah, true to traditional form, got married at twenty-five—not just to some man with subcontinental roots—but a bona fide, Allah-fearin’, Ali-lovin’ Shia Imami Isma’ili Muslim. She kept not only in the race but in the sect!
This choice deserves no reprehension—excuse me if I’ve made it sound so. I respect the values and honor the deep love hidden in my mother’s hackneyed proclamations. Moreover, I witness, almost daily, the ease, joy, and love in my sister’s marriage. This is the ease, the very same brand of it, that my parents have fought their up-hill, immigrant fights to secure for me. Shit, maybe I’m even a little envious about how things have worked out for my sister. What is this obscure desire for Freedom and Democracy in my love life? Is this—gasp—what assimilation feels like?
I used to joke with my cousins about how we just needed to wait until the entire parent generation dies before the work of neo- Isma’ilism can commence. Seems like I’m the only one who still remembers the joke.
The Deathblow
Paola sometimes does this thing where she mouths the words you’re saying while you’re talking to her, somewhere between repetition and prediction, so it kind of looks like she’s a mirror that’s trying to read your mind. This is especially the case after coming home from a date, when the action potential of a kiss-and-tell story takes her into full-steam predictive mode: she’ll even start dropping the occasional sentence finisher or two.
It’s Monday evening, I didn’t see Paola all weekend; the anticipation has reached a boil. So when I start telling her about the peculiar last few days re: Sofiya—a record of cosmic oddities and bad luck in the gauzy shadow of a phenomenal first date—her penchant for prediction ends up becoming the proverbial last straw:
“Many things, P. A few too many bad omens with this one. Weird shit. I mean she’s fantastic, but—”
“—she looks like your sister?”
“ . . . ”
The innocence of it and the honesty behind it soften the blow a bit, but goddamn it—this is never something anyone wants to hear.
Although unintentional, Paola’s unfortunate proclivity for sentence closers was the masterstroke at the end of a brief and ill-fated potential love-interest-type situation, a fitting capstone to a weekend of madness and misfortune. Suddenly, my special Friday night feelings couldn’t have seemed further away, and I was left in wonderment: how could it all fall to pieces in seventy-two hours?
