The Sweetness of Tears (29 page)

“There were two things I could think of to answer that question. One was the car accident. An accident that involved death. The other was you. Also an accident. Involving birth. That was what the effect of my life amounted to, in real terms, on others. A death I had never emotionally absorbed or atoned for—I’d never even spoken about it, the woman and the boy in my path that night, not until I told you. And a birth I’d had no idea about.

“I came back to Pakistan and broke off my engagement. I felt lost. Muharram came. Again, I remembered my meeting with you—all the childhood memories I’d shared out loud, for the first time. Going to
majlis
es with my mother, the sights, sounds, smells of a world I’d been shut out of when I joined this household, a world that was feminine and intimate. Suddenly, the stories of Karbala mattered, the way they had when I was a child—not as a sign of my identity, which is how I’d viewed religion for many years, as a way of defining myself, separating myself from others, from my mother, in particular, and from her husband—but as an experience in itself.

“Two years later, my grandparents went on pilgrimage,
ziarat,
to Karbala and Najaf, in Iraq. That was before the war. I went with them. It was—it was a life-changing experience. To be there. In places whose names were mythic in my mind. For years, grief and sadness were things I’d refused to acknowledge. The grief of Karbala helped me get in touch with other sources of sorrow that I’d never allowed myself to mourn. Losing my mother. What I’d done to another mother and her son at
fajr
time—at dawn—when I was a boy of fifteen. It was like a door opening.

“When we came back from Iraq, I asked my grandfather where I could find Sharif Muhammad Chacha, who had already retired. Dada was drinking tea, I remember. He seemed to know why I was asking. Without looking at me, his eyes on his newspaper, Dada said, ‘Let it go, Sadiq. Let the past rest.’ He refused to tell me what I asked. I had to find out where Sharif Muhammad Chacha lived from one of the other servants.

“One morning, I went to the address I’d been given—an extremely modest, cinder block dwelling in a part of town I had never before had reason to visit—and knocked on Sharif Muhammad Chacha’s door.

“Macee opened it. She was shrunken in height, reaching up to embrace me with a shriek the moment she saw me. She spoke of my mother. ‘Do you know, Sadiq Baba, that your mother has never forgotten me, since she went away to
Amreeka
? Her old Macee? She sends me money and writes me letters, which I ask the schoolmaster up the street to read for me, every month. Here, let me show you. The pictures. See? Here she is, my Deena Bibi. And her husband. And her daughter. My Deena Bibi has not forgotten me. And I? I will never forget her either. Or you, Sadiq Baba. How are you,
Beta
? And how is your dear mother?’

“ ‘She is well,’ I told her. ‘I spoke to her last month.’

“ ‘Oh, it is so good to see you, Sadiq Baba! Wait here, I will go and call Sharif Muhammad. He has gone to the neighbor’s. I will just go and get him. Just a moment.’

“After only a minute or two, Sharif Muhammad Chacha came. His gray beard had turned white, his face more sharply scored by the lines that his hours in the sun had long ago defined. Neither one of us said anything. He stared at me, as if he was trying to read what he found on my face. Then he said, ‘Come, Sadiq Baba. Come and sit. I have been waiting for you. For all these years. I knew that you would come, one day, to see me. To ask after the boy. That is why you are here, is it not?’

“I said, ‘Yes,’ and started to cry. Not the way I had cried before, when Sharif Muhammad Chacha had found me in my car, shaking with fear at what I had done. This time, I was not crying for myself. I cried, quietly, during the whole time that Sharif Muhammad Chacha took to tell me Fazl’s story.

“ ‘I’ve taken care of the boy, Sadiq Baba, from a distance, as best I could. His name is Fazl. Your grandfather gave me the money, a small sum, every month—more when I asked for it. But he never asked me any questions. Never wanted to know any of the details. Of how much the child cried for his mother. Of how I found a school for him that would give him lodging. He was not a good student. And the masters there were harsh with him, so that I pulled him out and put him elsewhere. But the world was a hard place for Fazl, everywhere he went. We were never able to find out anything about who he was, about where he and his mother came from. Most likely from some village. He talked about fields and farms, in the beginning. He talked of his mother crying. Perhaps she was a widow. Perhaps a victim of some terrible injustice—how commonplace they are, these victims—that made her run away from the place she called home. Who knows?

“ ‘He called me Uncle. I did what I could. But it was never enough. When he was grown, he found a job. And then another. I helped him with references, sometimes. But he was too simple. He was fleeced of any money I gave him, again and again. What I wanted to do was to bring him home with me. I asked your grandfather’s permission. But he refused.’

“I asked, ‘Where is he now?’

“ ‘He is working again. As a servant. In a big house. I got him the job, knew the driver in that household, which was the home of very big people, like your grandfather. They are friends of his. Your grandfather has seen Fazl, many times, but he doesn’t realize who he is. Do you want to meet him, Sadiq Baba?’

“I hesitated for a second. Then I said, ‘Yes. I do. I want to meet him. To tell him who I am. To beg his forgiveness.’

“ ‘I will arrange it,’ Sharif Muhammad Chacha said. I left him, planning to go back the next day so that I could go with Sharif Muhammad Chacha and meet the boy. Fazl.

“When I came back, Sharif Muhammad Chacha was in some distress. ‘He is gone, Sadiq Baba. I don’t know where. He left that house a month ago. He was fired. The driver told me that he had found him another job, through the cook there. But when I went to the new place, where the cook said Fazl was now working, he wasn’t there, either. I’ve lost him. I hope he gets in touch with me. He has always counted on me in the past. Has come here when he needed me. We’ll have to wait for him.’

“That’s what we did. For many, many months. Finally, one day, Sharif Muhammad Chacha came to see me. ‘I am afraid, Sadiq Baba. I was able to trace the boy through someone from the school that he attended. One of the teachers there, a mullah, found him a job. As a gatekeeper. When I went to inquire there, the house was empty. The neighbors told me that the police had been to the house some weeks before. That some very bad men lived there. Terrorists. The house had been raided, all its occupants arrested. I cannot do anything, now, Sadiq Baba. I am a poor man. With no power. You will have to take up the search. To find out what happened. To find out where Fazl has been taken. I am afraid for him. He has no one in this world to ask after him.’

“That, I knew very well, was my fault. I spent the next few weeks paying bribes to police officers, trying to find out what had happened to Fazl. I came to know that he’d been working for some big-shot Al-Qaeda people, wanted by the Americans. I think you found him, Jo, before I was able to. And you know what happened to him. Better than I. He was a simple man. An innocent one. They—you—shouldn’t have taken him.”

“I know,” Jo said softly.

“In the process of searching for Fazl, I made many new friends. Human rights lawyers. Among them, Akeela, the woman who is to be my wife. She specializes in women’s rights, but she was very helpful, hooking me up with people who were happy to assist. It was a long while before I found out. That he’d been taken to Guantánamo. I went to the States. I hired a lawyer for him there. But the case didn’t seem to be going anywhere. They—the lawyers—hadn’t even been allowed to see him. And then, suddenly, we heard that he had been released. Into Pakistani custody. Kept in prison here and treated badly. I paid more bribes. And finally got him out. He was so happy to see Sharif Muhammad Chacha, when we got him out of jail, that he paid little attention to who I was and the role I had played in his life. I tried to make him understand. But he is a simple man—a boy, really, incapable of holding anything against me. That doesn’t make me feel any better. The opposite, in fact. But he is all right now. Safe. Living with Sharif Muhammad Chacha.”

“Will you take me to see him?” Jo asked.

“Of course.”

Two hours later, my mother and Jo and I were in Sharif Muhammad Chacha’s humble home. I had explained to him—conscious of how incredibly unlikely it all was when I told him. Who Jo was. Who she was to me and who she had been to Fazl.

Fazl’s eyes lit up when he saw my daughter. Clearly, he remembered her. But his eyes were gentle, smiling. “I told you,” he said to her triumphantly. “I told you that Sharif Muhammad Chacha would save me. See? This is my uncle. Who is not really my uncle. And his sister, my aunt, who is not really my aunt. They take care of me now. I told you that he would save me.”

Jo was crying.

“What did I say?” Fazl demanded of Sharif Muhammad Chacha. “I have made her cry. The American woman who speaks Urdu.”

“Those tears are good tears, Fazl,
Beta,
” Sharif Muhammad Chacha said, looking at my mother. “A wise woman that I know once said that the tears we cry for others are tears of sweetness—to be appreciated as a sign of God’s love, and sorrow, for all of the injustice that we lowly creatures, human beings who have not yet learned to be human, all of us, inflict on one another. It is a good thing, when we cry those sweet tears, she said. It is a good thing.”

Jo

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,

yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. . . .

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song. . . . How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

Psalm 137, v. 1–4

T
he tears I shed, in front of strangers, during that afternoon when I met Fazl, were the keys to an opening. Walking back to the main street with Deena and Sadiq, where Usama was waiting with Sadiq’s car, through the narrow lanes of the area where Sharif Muhammad Chacha and Macee lived—a neighborhood only slightly better than the slum I’d visited outside of Nairobi so many years before—I could almost hear the squeak of the rusty hinges giving way, almost feel the stretch of it happening, the opening that came with a sense of relief all the more acute because I hadn’t realized that anything had been closed to begin with.

Later in the evening, Deena and Sadiq and I went out for dinner—to a small, dark Chinese restaurant on Tariq Road that Deena remembered from her days in Pakistan. “You must try Pakistani-Chinese food, Jo,” she said. “It’s very different—much tastier—than American-Chinese. The family that runs this place, Chinese, has been here, in Karachi, since before Partition.”

At the restaurant, I could hear how different the sound of my own voice was, unleashed like it hadn’t been for years. I talked and talked. The way I used to when I was little, without reserve.

Sadiq took advantage, asking the ton of questions he must have been holding in until the opening showed itself in my eyes and in the way I felt my mouth relax—about my childhood, my mom, my dad. And Chris. Even the questions about Chris I didn’t hesitate to answer, describing my brother in detail in all the stories I told Sadiq and Deena about my childhood. I told them about PPSYC, making them laugh at some of my best camp memories. I told them about Grandma Faith—Wàipó-Lola-Bibi-Abuela-Faith. About the trip we took with her to Africa, about washing the feet of the kids who lived in the slum, and about how she was always riling up her own children—Mom and Uncle Ron—with her peculiar notions about faith and religion.

Once we’d ordered our food, the whole time I spoke—through dinner arriving, filling our plates, passing and eating—Deena kept mostly silent, letting Sadiq ask all the questions, watching and listening with those wise eyes and ears that seemed able to see and hear beyond the surface, straight through to what lay underneath.

“Tell us more about your brother,” was the only thing she’d said to prompt me, right at the end of my monologue.

“He lights up a room. That’s the only way to describe him. Without saying a word. When we were little, he hardly talked. Because I talked too much. But he didn’t need to. His face said everything. Kids and animals and strangers tend to fall in love with him at first sight. He’s the lead singer in a band that he started with his buddies in high school and has a beautiful voice.” I lifted my chin up and said, “It’s a Christian rock band.”

Then Deena said the only other thing she said that night over dinner: “You love your brother very much,” making the words a statement.

“Yes. Very much.” I found myself blinking back more tears, when I thought I’d already cried myself dry, earlier, in front of Fazl. Deena put her hand on mine and squeezed.

We moved on, then, to talk about religion and politics and war. The only things I didn’t talk about were Chris’s accident and the tour in Iraq that led up to it. And the only time I was less than honest was when Sadiq asked me if I had a picture of my family. I did, but said I didn’t, not yet wanting him and Deena to see the color of Chris’s eyes. It was something that I knew I would have to share eventually. But I wasn’t ready yet.

From that day forward, I started to enjoy myself, to really see, hear, taste, and touch the city of Karachi—with eyes wide open, breathing through my mouth, the way Grandma Faith had once said she liked to be when she traveled. But I was one up on her. I understood and spoke the language already. Still, I followed the spirit of how Grandma Faith had described herself on her journeys, letting the feeling of
I don’t know
and
I don’t understand
flow through me, so that I could let go and just take it all in, open, from one moment to the next.

I met Fazl a few more times, going back again and again just to listen, to hear the story of what happened to him after our paths crossed, to hear the story of others he had met at Gitmo, where, one day, I hoped to go. It would have been faster if I’d guided him with questions, but I tried hard to keep myself out of it, to only use my ears, like my dad had done with me when I was a child, letting him talk at his own pace, not wanting anything that passed between us now to feel like the interrogations he’d already suffered at my hands and others’.

I’d already been shopping with Sadiq’s aunt and his cousin’s wife, along with Deena, and had to resist their urgings to go again. With my new Pakistani wardrobe, they told me, I blended in.

“No one would even guess. That you’re not Pakistani,” said Jaffer and Haseena’s daughter, Batool.

“A very fair, very beautiful Pakistani!” declared Asma, her grandmother. My great-aunt. She’s the one who started the whole what-I-should-call-everyone thing.

“But—my dear! You cannot just call us all by our first names!” She was horrified when she heard me talking to Deena. “She’s your
dadi,
after all! You can’t just call her Deena!”

After that, I started calling everyone “auntie” and “uncle.” Except for Deena. I asked her—if she didn’t mind—whether I could call her Deena Dadi.

“Oh, Jo! I would love that! I must confess, it bothered me a little that you called Abbas Uncle
dada
without even thinking.”

“Well. He’s old. I kind of had to, didn’t I?” It
had
been instinctive. I knew enough of the culture, from watching those old television dramas, to know that calling Abbas Ali Mubarak
dada,
the word for paternal grandfather—which could also be used for great-grandfather—wasn’t about what he was to me. That older people were always given some kind of title of respect, something that implied a family relationship. In some ways, age trumped class.

That’s why Macee was called
macee,
Deena had told me. “In some dialects, it means mother’s sister. Your maternal aunt. Even servants, who are often unjustly treated as lesser humans, are still given respectful titles.
Macee
.
Amma,
which, you know, means ‘mother.’ You can’t just walk up to someone older here and start using their first name. Age deserves respect. Or the show of it, at least.”

So, everyone older became uncle and auntie. Everyone except Sadiq. Who stayed Sadiq. It was just too complicated to think of anything else to call him.

I called home, in Garden Hill, every other day.

When I did, Dad would say he loved me, in a hurry, before Mom grabbed the phone away from him.

I tried to reassure her, when she said she was worried sick. Every phone call, she complained, “As if I don’t have enough to deal with, Jo. Right here. You being there—you’re just adding to it all. I wish you would see that. I wish you would come home.”

Whatever else she wanted to say or ask, she kept to herself. Chris was there, within earshot, waiting to speak to me, too. Always reluctantly, she would pass him the phone when he or I asked her to.

“Hi, Chris.”

“Hey. So. Pakistan, huh?” he said, the first time I called.

“Yup.”

“What are you doing there, Jo? Some kind of missionary work?”

I hesitated. “In a way.” I didn’t want to lie. I told myself that it was a good description. Only I wasn’t here to save other people. I was here seeking my own salvation—the only kind of missionary work I still believed in. I was even more radical than Grandma Faith in the firmness of this conviction.

“Is it—is it safe there? I—I mean, is it a dangerous place?”

“Uh—”

“Isn’t there a war going on there? Or—somewhere?”

I heard the confusion in his voice.

“No. No war. Not here. Where I am.”

“Man, I’m ignorant! I’ve got to start reading some newspapers. I’ve been so wrapped up in getting better that I feel like the whole world has just been going on without me. I feel kind of left out, you know? Like I should get a job. Make a contribution to the world. Like you are.”

“There’s plenty of time for that, Chris. Just concentrate on getting better.”

“I
am
better, Jo.”

“I know, Chris. But—you’ve still got a ways to go. Just take it slow and simple.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“I know, Chris. Look, I’ve got to go.”

“Oh, yeah. Must be an expensive call.”

“Take it easy, Chris. Don’t worry. You’ve got plenty of time to—catch up with the world.”

He did, but I didn’t. When I hung up, I remembered the conversation I’d had with Chris the day before I left him.

“Jo?”

“Hmm?”

“I—sometimes, I feel like—like Mom doesn’t want me to remember. It kind of— freaks me out. Like there’s something about the time I’ve forgotten that’s bad. I’m—I—didn’t do anything horrible, did I, Jo?” he asked with a laugh. “I mean, I didn’t kill anyone, did I?”

My laughter, even more nervous than his, was my only answer.

I was running out of time.

Sadiq introduced me and Deena to his fiancée, Akeela, and her two daughters, Samira and Tasneem. Akeela was the women’s rights lawyer. She was very dignified, a little reserved, but friendly.

I went to church, something I’d never expected to do in Pakistan. Sadiq told me that his grandfather’s nurse, Susan, was Christian. Presbyterian. My second Sunday in Karachi, I went to services with her. I was glad of the clothes that Haseena Auntie had helped me shop for, because all the women in church covered their heads, just like Muslim women, with their
dupatta
s. The whole sermon and service, a traditional liturgy—the prayers, quotations from the Bible, even the hymns—all of it was in Urdu. Deena came with me. She’d been to Mass once, she told me. When she was in school. But this was her first time in a Protestant church.

There was no choir and no organ. Instead, there was a little band, off to the side of the altar, made up of a keyboard, a couple of guitars, and a lead singer, who led the congregation when they rose to sing the hymns, the words for which were written in Urdu in hymnals called
Geet-e-Ibadat
—songs of worship, the same word for worship that Muslims use. They were all young, the musicians in this group. They reminded me of Chris and his band. At the end of services, I met the pastor, who shook the hands of all the men in the congregation and put his hand on the heads of the women. I wondered how many degrees of separation lay between me and the families that made up his parish, all of whom were originally from North India, where Great-grandpa Pelton had once visited during his missionary days.

I had been in Karachi for almost two weeks before I understood where I was being led next. I still thought of my life in those terms, in terms of providence and God’s plan and how I must follow it, in spite of everything that had happened, in spite of all the evidence that might lead me to believe that what I’d thought of as God’s plan before—back when I’d first met Sadiq—was really just a ghastly mistake, a long journey down the wrong path. Back then, God’s plan was something I
thought
about, something I had to figure out. Like a puzzle. It was my hand that jammed the pieces into place. Now, it was something I waited for, without thinking at all. It just happened. I could fight it. Or, as Deena had talked about when she told me her story, I could surrender. Either way, it didn’t require any effort on my part, no beliefs or judgments that I had to assume, defend, and rationalize.

It was a casual conversation, among all of the strangers who were my new relatives, in the car outside a sweets shop, that made the next step I had to take very clear.

Deena and I had woken up early to attend a women’s
majlis
at Asma Auntie’s house.

“You must come, Deena,” Asma Auntie had urged Deena. “You will meet all kinds of women there that you haven’t seen for years. The
zakira
—that’s the woman who will preach, Jo—is Masooma, who is very progressive. Not like that Tayiba Khursheed, the fanatic who is so in fashion,” Asma Auntie pursed her lips, “teaching all kinds of nonsense—that wives should give their blessings if their husbands wish to take a second wife, that women cannot leave their homes without their husband’s permission, bullying everyone to wear the
hijab
. I don’t know how anyone can stand her, but many flock to hear her. Incomprehensible!”

Deena was reluctant, at first. I understood. There’d been a lot for her to cope with on this trip. Staying in Sadiq’s house, for one thing. He hadn’t realized that the room he’d given her was hers and Akram’s when they were first married. That she’d spent a lot of time there alone, when his dad wasn’t well. When she asked me to share it with her, to keep the old ghosts at bay, I’d said yes, feeling even closer to her than I had become on the way to Pakistan, telling her things I hadn’t before—about studying Urdu and Arabic and what I’d done with those skills. So that she knew those things already, before I told Sadiq. I hadn’t talked about Chris, though. Not yet. It was a hard subject to broach. The more time passed, the harder it got.

When Deena saw how eager I was to attend the
majlis,
she agreed to go. It was like déjà vu, so accurate had Sadiq’s imagery been. I thought of Chris. Is this the way memories would make their way back to the surface of his mind? Like old stories, someone else’s, coming to life?

The sermon, in Urdu, was very different from what I was used to. Maybe because of the purely female congregation. The preacher talked about the power of the feminine, saying, “Women have gotten into the habit of underestimating their own power. Real change in the world, real justice, cannot happen without the participation of women. Paradise is under our feet. So we must be careful and deliberate with the steps we take. We must remember that without the sister of Moses, who watched over him from afar, and the woman of Pharaoh’s house, who took him as her own, there would have been no Moses. Without Mary’s womb, there would have been no Jesus. Without Fatima, there would have been no Husain. And without Zainab, no story of Karbala for us to remember.” That was how she transitioned to the end of the
majlis,
the part I had been curiously waiting for—a distressing recitation of grief that the women around me responded to with tears and sobs, powerfully primal and impossible to resist.