Salaam, Love Read online

  And then I saw her on campus by a dandelion-shaped fountain. She was with some girls I knew. But Ruhi was different. Blue eye shadow, blue jeans, flip-flops. A little shorter than the rest and way more casual—a blend between a laid-back surfer and Aishwarya Rai.

  “Hey, Sam,” a girl with a gold nose ring shouted. “This is my friend, Ruhi.”

  Ruhi looked up. Our eyes met. I first noticed the perfect heart-shaped dip in the center of her upper lip, right below her nose, or was it her eyes? Honey-colored, almond-shaped. She smiled. I read deeply into that smile. While some have seen their whole lives flash before their eyes, I could see her life flashing before my eyes. I saw kindness and generosity. I saw adversity and strength. I saw a pair of lips prone to giggling, and I knew I could make her laugh. I saw, above all else, familiarity. If a face could be described as nonjudgmental, this was it—beautiful and bright with love and acceptance. I wanted her all to myself.

  I finally found my voice.

  “Oh, you’re Ruhi?”

  Her: “Yeah?”

  Me: “We need to talk.”

  Her: “We do?”

  Me: “Yes, we definitely do.”

  I didn’t know what I needed to talk to her about, but I knew immediately that I needed to spend time with her. She was the one. It was that simple. Attractive. Muslim. A little shorter than I was, which was rare. Perfect. Now all I needed was to talk to her to work out the details of our wedding. I was in a hurry. My “private parts” would not be safe for very much longer.

  Courting Ruhi was not unlike most young Muslim courtships in America. You tell your mother that you’re going to school to study, and then you meet your boyfriend or girlfriend at a coffee shop or at the movies or at a bookstore. On our first date, we tried to keep it halal. We knew the Prophet had said, “Whenever a man is alone with a woman, the devil makes a third,” so we brought along a skinny business major named Rashid. He was technically not a wali, but he was like a brother to us both, so that had to count for something.

  We went to BJ’s restaurant in downtown Long Beach and ate deep-dish pizza. Rashid and I sat on one side of the booth while Ruhi sat in the center of the other. She was dressed modestly in a purple sweater, thin and V-necked, with a white top underneath—silver hoops swinging from her earlobes. Her eye shadow was dusted with specks of silver glitter, or maybe I’m remembering incorrectly. Maybe she was sparkling.

  The steaming pan of pizza rested atop our table. Everyone stared at the last thick slice, but no one wanted to appear greedy. Eventually Rashid, with his blessed metabolism, ate it, and through greasy bites—cheese dangling from his lips—broke the awkward silence that had settled over our table.

  “So are you guys gonna get married or what?”

  In the minds of most Muslims, it is that easy. Find a Muslim girl. Get married. Simple. No personality tests, common tastes in music, complicated feelings, long talks about future goals. “Love” is a manufactured emotion designed by the West to fall in and out of rather than a simple choice. Do it or don’t. Period.

  “Your kid’s skin will look like coffee with too much cream,” Rashid teased. In his mind, the wedding was over and we had become parents before the Pizookie had been served for dessert.

  Rashid became a fixture in our dating lives, the tagalong kid we couldn’t get rid of. For weeks we dated (all three of us) and saw one another on campus, but Ruhi and I needed to be alone. We had heard of a place called The Next Level, and we both decided it was time to take our relationship there without an audience.

  Less than a month after Ruhi and I met, her parents left for Tanzania, where they were born and raised. They would be there for three weeks. At nineteen, Ruhi was old enough to be left behind to finish her semester of college without disruption, despite her mother pleading otherwise: “A Muslim girl should not be alone in the house. It is not safe.”

  Her father reminded her mother that Ruhi was a big girl. There was money in an envelope, gas in the car, relatives nearby. She would be fine. After all, this was not the African savannah. No lion was lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce.

  I was no predator, but this was a chance I wasn’t willing to pass up. It was 7:45 p.m., Saturday night, when I began my drive down the 405 freeway to Redondo Beach for my first Rashid-less date with the girl I was beginning to love. Until now, our only time alone had been phone conversations lasting deep into the night. We traded books and poems, shared stories about growing up. Neither of us had had it easy, but we both had each other to look forward to now. My stomach boomed with anxiety. I played Metallica loudly in the car and yelled along with James Hetfield the whole way there.

  My index finger shook above the doorbell to her house. Then she emerged, framed in the doorway, backlit by lamps with severed gazelle hooves for bases. She invited me inside. I was in a different world. On the shelves, Qur’ans everywhere, a tapestry of Mecca near the door, a million white dots swirling around the Kaaba. On the opposite wall, a zebra skin splayed out like it had just been skinned. One false move, I thought, and that might be my skin up there if her dad ever caught me in his house . . . with his daughter . . . alone.

  “Want some chai?” Ruhi asked.

  She’d already made some, a pot of black tea and milk brewed thick with cardamom and cloves. She added sugar and served it to me with a cookie on the side—a spongy orange golf ball that she called laddu.

  I stirred my chai, blowing into the cup to cool it down.

  “Do you think our kids will have skin this color?” I asked.

  She didn’t look pleased. Too soon, I thought, too soon. Suddenly, there was a knock at the front door. I leapt off my stool, her eyes wide as dinner plates. And then a louder knock. With a family of a thousand cousins and a hundred aunts, many of whom lived in the area, the chances were pretty good that a relative was at the door.

  “Hide in my room! Hurry!” Ruhi yanked me into her bedroom, pushed me into the closet, then pulled me out just as fast.

  “Outside! Go out the French doors. Hide in the backyard!”

  I hurdled over her bed, burst through the double doors into her backyard, and pinned myself against a tree and the stucco wall behind her house. I was shaking. My belly was full of bullet holes and scalding hot chai was leaking out. I wasn’t afraid of God. I was afraid of whoever was at the door.

  “Hey girl, what are you all dressed up for? Going out?”

  It was her cousin, an NBA-tall, slightly gangster-looking guy named, I would later learn, Maqbul. He was sent by an auntie. “Trustworthy” is not a word often associated with a young, single, beautiful, Muslim girl in the U.S. At least not in Urdu. So a family henchman had been sent over to check on Ruhi.

  “I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying home.”

  Through the gap in the drapes, I could see Ruhi and the lanky shadow of Maqbul. It was clear that she was trying to keep him at the front door, out of view of our two cups of half-drunk chai in the kitchen like spilled blood at a crime scene. She had one hand pressed against his chest, her triceps flexing as she pushed him away.

  “Get out of here, Maq. I need to take a shower and go to bed.”

  Good excuse, I thought. He persisted, but Ruhi was strong. He never crossed the threshold. She closed the door behind him, locked it, and came to fetch me from the yard.

  “He’s gone. You can come in.”

  “I think I better get going. That was too close,” I said, still shaking like an old man with Parkinson’s.

  That was the end of our first and only date. We were too scared to go out in public. We’d be seen. We’d be caught. We’d be judged. I had to do this the right way or not at all.

  Two months went by. Two months of long letters, coffee on campus, and poetry readings. Ruhi’s friends would drag her to my events to hear me read poems, and she would stand in the back blushing when a line about love was clearly aimed at her. She was my muse, and I wanted to hold on to her forever.

  It was Sunday, blissfully warm near her home
in Redondo Beach. That’s where I met her parents in person. I brought my mother and brother along. We sat in the parlor beneath the splayed zebra skin. It was awkward to be there again—even though I was invited this time.

  I proposed. Officially. Halal style. I told her parents how much I loved their daughter, how I would care for her better than I cared for myself, how nothing in this world meant more to me than she did. Everyone was in tears. Mostly me and Ruhi, though. We were softies. We had found each other in a peculiar world, and we had nothing left to hide.

  Six months later, we married and moved from Southern California to Modesto, where I landed a full-time, tenure-track teaching position at Modesto Junior College. Once there, we began to create our own world where, for the past twelve years, we have lived and laughed and cried a whole lot more—like when our first son was born and had to spend a week in the NICU; or when our daughter was born after Ruhi had so desperately wanted a girl; or when our littlest came out, fired up and pumping his tiny fists. All with skin like coffee with too much cream. All beautiful, alhamdulillah.

  Looking back, I regret never having that first “real” date. So some nights, Ruhi and I turn our suburban kitchen into a dance floor. Instead of a strobe light, our oldest son stands on a chair and flicks the light switch on and off. Our daughter picks songs on an iPad as our little guy hops around like a bunny rabbit. But at least admission is free, and our club never closes, and our song never stops playing.

  Mother’s Curse

  By Arsalan Ahmed

  My mother was strangely calm as I announced my intention to marry Anne.

  It should not have come as a surprise. She had met Anne several times since we’d graduated from university in Massachusetts three years ago. On my most recent visit to see my family in Karachi, Anne had sent a hand-knitted scarf for her. “You do realize it’s never cold enough there for a scarf?” I said affectionately, only to be shushed.

  It was a Saturday, in the summer of 2002. We were having a garage sale at our Boston condo before moving to Geneva, where Anne was to start a new job working on refugee issues at the United Nations. I was on the phone with my mother as Anne battled the early birds.

  “I can’t talk right now,” Ammi said. “Here is your father.”

  “No, sir, the Jetta is not for sale,” I heard through the window.

  Although Abu appeared to have surmised what was going on, he listened politely as I repeated my speech. “Are you sure?” he asked. I could hear Ammi wailing in the background.

  “Yes,” I said, but he was gone. Ammi was back on the phone.

  “Do whatever you want,” she shrieked. “But know one thing: you will never be happy.”

  “What?” I asked, confused.

  “You will never be happy. Never. Not after giving someone so much pain.”

  She hung up.

  Later, outside the garage, a family of ducks pecked at our feet. I gave a young Pakistani couple a tape recording of Zia Mohyeddin reading classic works of Urdu literature. They were thrilled. After they left, I cried a little. The ducks squawked while Anne patted my back.

  That night, Ammi tried, determinedly but inexpertly, to kill herself.

  Two days later, I was on a flight to Karachi. The drive from the airport was grim, the mood at my parents’ house funereal. Indeed, I have been to more cheerful funerals. From Ammi’s chilling silences to her searing rage, I numbly plodded through what were, until that point, the most difficult days of my life.

  Quite quickly, I discovered the three deficiencies that doomed Anne.

  Religion. How will a Christian adapt to a pious Muslim household?

  Anne had lost faith years ago, around the same time that the sons of the pious Muslim household last saw the inside of a mosque.

  Race. How will a blonde and freckled girl live in this racially pure city, purer since 9/11, when the last tourists left in a hurry?

  I had grown up in Karachi. But Anne and I had no plans to live there, although this was a point best left for future discussion.

  Culture. How will a child of divorced parents from a morally bankrupt society fit into a traditional, extended family? What will people say?

  Years later, when Ammi had two divorced sons and a Pakistani daughter-in-law from hell, I would be better equipped to respond. Then, I merely blinked.

  My brother, Bhayeea, was nonchalant. “Come, bull, kill me,” he said bemusedly. “You couldn’t just have continued quietly living with her?”

  He had a point. Anne and I had been living together for almost three years. If Ammi knew, she never said so. On Anne’s last birthday, when I proposed with a sapphire ring, we had been giddily happy. I had only worked up the courage to give Ammi the news a week later.

  Now it was done. Lines had been drawn, intercontinental curses cast, pills swallowed, scarves knitted. I waded through the aftermath the best I could.

  A week later I flew back to Boston, marital discussions placed in a deep freezer, in my father’s words, until Ammi was well enough to resume battle.

  “Her condition is such that any adverse action on your part could have dire consequences,” Abu warned.

  “Dire,” he repeated, furrowing his brow meaningfully. I nodded, as if I understood.

  She only became well enough two years later. Two years of an uneasy peace. Minor but punishing skirmishes aside, there were hardly any engagements to speak of. I am intrinsically nonconfrontational—cowardly, Anne said in exasperation—so I handled the conflict the only way I knew how: by avoiding it. Grimly, Ammi and I waged a cold war. Politeness was our weapon, Abu and Bhayeea our proxies. She had the strategic advantage of emotional blackmail, of course, but I had the self-righteousness of youth. That and Dylan. Your sons and your daughters/Are beyond your command, I would hum often, tunelessly but with great earnestness.

  Stubbornly, I refused to marry without Ammi’s consent, however grudging. Our conflict was one of ideas, not actions. Victory was not simply getting what one wanted, but doing so with the adversary’s blessing. She reciprocated, shunning the soap-operatic Pakistani mother’s classic move of disowning a son, never again speaking his name. Which was what an uncle of hers had done some forty years prior, when an errant son married a Canadian woman. “He never saw his son’s face again, not even from his deathbed,” Ammi said, darkly and not very subtly.

  My resolve and Anne’s patience lasted two years. Eventually, I announced that we were looking at venues in Boston, debating food options and guest lists. All of a sudden, the iron curtain lifted, amid much surprise and rejoicing. There was a surge of last-minute, but ultimately halfhearted, resistance. “So it has come to this,” Ammi sniffed. But the passion of the past was gone, as if Gorbachev had secretly embraced capitalist decadence in his home, but had to keep up appearances at the politburo.

  The bigger surprise came when Ammi proclaimed, to universal disbelief, that if a wedding were to take place, it had to be done properly: in Karachi, with many guests, a dholki, a gharara, a nikah, and a maulvi sahib. (We later negotiated the maulvi sahib down to an uncle.) “You can’t stop a speaker’s tongue,” she said on the phone as I scratched my head. “So why try? We will do your wedding with great fanfare.”

  A month later, on the night of the dholki, sipping chilled Bubble Up on my parents’ lawn under a puzzled April moon, I wondered what the fuss had been all about. Was it all an elaborate act, at best a grudging acceptance of what Ammi could not control? People never change, I had always believed. Or do they? She certainly appeared to have embraced Anne like the daughter she’d never had but had always wanted. She told her how lucky I was to have found her, taught her how to make masoor ki daal, gently corrected her for using her left hand while saying adaab to an elderly great-aunt, took her bangle shopping, and showered her with gifts and affection.

  “I never spoke ill of her,” Ammi explained later, hazily and not entirely truthfully, clarifying her position on her former nemesis, the child of a broken home from a morally bankrupt societ
y. “I opposed the idea of her, the foreign girl who wouldn’t understand our family and would break us apart.” By then Ammi was busy battling a new bane, my brother’s first, Pakistani wife, and her thoughts on cultural compatibility and the clash of civilizations had evolved considerably.

  I don’t think it was pretense, either. Months later, when Ammi came to visit us in Switzerland, she seemed genuinely happy, perhaps the happiest I have ever seen her. Walking by the lake in Montreux, up to the Chateau de Chillon, she held Anne’s hand, casually, as mothers and daughters do in my clichéd imagination. For our first wedding anniversary, she gave Anne a sari, and took us to the rooftop restaurant at the Pearl Continental, in Karachi. There was cake and laughter. Later, when Anne wanted to ride a camel on Sea View beach, it was Ammi who negotiated the price with the camel wallah. “This is my daughter, not some memsahib,” she declared, as he sputtered helplessly about his small, small children. I should have been concerned, but I was merely content.

  Retracting a curse is a hard business, harder perhaps than breaking it.

  A year later, when Anne spiraled inexorably into psychological despair, I thought about the curse a great deal. Curses, hexes, the evil eye. I clutched at anything that could explain my crumbling life. Nothing did. “It’s not you, it’s something I’m going through,” Anne said, between sobs, during what I told myself was a rare moment of sanity.