Savor, p.30
Savor, page 30
I thought the next steps were going to be blackness. I’ve made so many mistakes in my life and I haven’t connected with God enough to deserve what’s happening now. I don’t know if it’s real. But I keep seeing my family. From my stepdad’s side, from my mom’s side, places I would not expect. I don’t want to lose it: the sense of not being abandoned. I’m scared to become a believer so fast. I’ve always believed in God, but I’ve never really done the things that He wanted us to do. I wanted to live my own life. But now, being in this place, where everything happens so fast, I have to choose. And I choose to accept the visions and Him completely.
Now I can see things others can’t.
“I’ve been trying to protect the little dog all day,” I tell them.
“You’re such a good kind person: You’ve been trying to protect the little dog,” my mother says patiently, full of love for me. Her voice has the quality of tears, though she’s not crying.
“Yes, but he’s coming with his attack dog for me, and I’m going to have to fight him off.” I want them to understand, but it’s so hard because they cannot see it.
“I’m going to be between you and the dog, Fatima,” my mother promises. “No one can hurt you.”
“He’s very powerful,” I warn her.
My friends remain with me through the visions, the hallucinations, the night terrors. Zainie and Binda are the last to leave.
“I’m sorry,” I tell them. Though the visions are real to me, I somehow also know that they are not for others. I can recount them, but they are mine alone. Sometimes I fear they’ll lose their potency if I try to explain them. “Today was tough, I know, and I’m sorry.”
“Don’t say sorry, Fati,” Zainie tells me.
“There’s so much love,” I tell her. “I’ve seen God and I know it for sure now. I always loved my life, believing in God but living like I wanted. I haven’t done enough for Him. But He loves us so much, Zainie, you have no idea. There’s so much love. I want you to hear me because I know you think about this a lot. It’s all about being a good person. Being good on the inside.”
Zainie kisses my forehead and I close my eyes, keeping them like that as she leaves the room so that I don’t see her go. While they are closed, in my private darkness, I pretend I’m a child, a teenager, dozing off beside her on a sleepover at her house. The reverie is pleasant and warm. I can do this now: intentional dreaming, navigating my memories like a librarian who knows just where to find each volume. I try to slip only into the comforting ones. Mostly I can still decide.
“I’m right in the middle,” I tell my sisters. “I’m right in the middle. Pehle jannat—heaven, then me in the middle. One foot in each place.”
chapter 43
HOT COALS ON SMALL LIPS
Fatima
I didn’t choose my religion. I was simply born into it. From a very young age, I understood, subliminally or otherwise, that without blind faith in a deity, one with attributes utterly overwhelming to an eight-year-old, my destiny was the seven layers of hell. Skin-peeling, hair-singeing, demonic-creature-filled hell. My religious education was split between school and my grandmother, who told my brother and me stories of the prophets when we were very young. My favorite one was about Musa. As an infant, he was tucked in a woven basket and sent floating down the river Nile into the waiting arms of one of the handmaidens of the Pharaoh’s wife—the very same Pharaoh who had ordered a decree throughout Egypt that all the baby boys be slaughtered because of a premonition from his soothsayer, who had seen a vision of a man able to perform miracles and rally the Egyptians in a way the Pharaoh never could. With this beautiful infant Musa in her arms, the Pharaoh’s wife beseeched her husband to allow her to adopt the baby, since they couldn’t have any children of their own. After seeking his fortune-teller’s advice, the Pharaoh devised a test for the infant: If the boy were to crawl toward the piles of shiny riches and jewels they had collected on one side of the room and ignored the furnace-hot coals on the other side of the room, he would be buried alive like so many of the baby boys in the kingdom.
A gurgling Musa was brought to sit in the middle of the hall, where all of Pharaoh’s court had convened to watch eagerly. The baby, oblivious that the next few minutes were crucial in determining his fate, began to crawl slowly toward the chest of gold. The onlookers murmured and whispered, convinced of the child’s demise. Halfway through his wriggling, however, he stopped in his tracks and changed trajectory. The baby now sat in front of the sparking embers of coal, and before the Pharaoh’s wife could gather him up, he had grasped a burning coal and tried to put it in his mouth. The trusted soothsayer proclaimed that no son who could overlook the riches of Egypt for a bite of excruciatingly painful embers could be a threat who would be able to defeat Pharaoh and his army, so Musa was raised in the palace like one of their own, thanks to Allah’s interventions, and continued his exceptional path toward prophethood.
I was fascinated by stories like these about Islam. Being a storyteller myself, I was drawn to the human sides of all the messengers. Their struggles and strife and victories and conquests, their families and relationships—that was what I expected when I began studying religion at school. However, at school there was instead a heavy emphasis on rote learning passages of the Quran and not much else. The dismissal of analyzing it as theory to use as guidance rather than dogmatic ideology confused me, and I found myself questioning my faith constantly. Needless to say, I grew up confused and frightened by God. On one hand His wrath is incomparable, smiting entire civilizations for their insubordinations, and on the other hand, love and magnanimity are His core. He is capable of love like a mother’s love for her child, amplified ten thousand times.
Did I believe it? I wasn’t sure…and what is true belief anyway?
My mother didn’t emphasize a show of our faith as a presentation of our virtue for others. Yes, she prayed—but not five times a day as is prescribed—and she encouraged us to pray as well, but she never forced us to. The same philosophy carried over to the other commandments: fasting for the whole month of Ramadan was not obligatory like it was for many of my friends. I think my mother had the wisdom to know her teenage children would only stubbornly shun ideologies they couldn’t fathom. I always thought it was bizarre that my classmates would compare the number of fasts they had kept and compete to see who received the most eidi (the pocket money all the adults hand out to children during the celebratory finale and probably the best thing about Ramadan, apart from the lavish feast for Eid). It was always critical that you went to the right relatives’ houses to celebrate the new moon of the lunar calendar because of the menu they would curate. I distinctly remember the decadent spread at my father’s khala’s house and that gut-panging feeling of greedy eagerness as we arrived, enduring the next hour of heavily perfumed aunties giving us wet kisses on the cheek as they cooed over how big we’d gotten. Once that khala passed away and took the many phenomenal family recipes with her, Eid never felt quite the same.
As I aged and religious study was no longer a part of our syllabus, I found myself moving further away from God. Conveniently, since I had never bothered to read much of the English translation of the Quran to make my own judgments, the information I had about my own belief system was from interpretations by others. After moving to the United States for college in 2008, I was exposed to vastly different cultures and people and all the judgment that comes along with that. In Pakistan, I was simply in a homogenous Islamic Republic, where notions like alcohol prohibition and martial law were commonplace, but in a secular society, concepts like lynching previous government rulers was too foreign and barbaric a notion to grasp.
Any time there was news of a terrorist bombing, I would squeeze my eyes shut and chant feverishly in my head: Please don’t let it be a brown person…please don’t let him be Muslim.
With each passing incident, my own self-worth began to chip away. I carried nagging guilt around with me as if I was somehow connected to those heinous monsters committing crimes against the innocent. I know I didn’t know very much then, but I was certain that hate and murder were not what my religion was about.
If my God had chosen some of these prophets as exemplary role models to represent Him—generous beyond their means, patient and noble, benevolent even, in the grips of cruel torture…these were the prophets I knew, and if they were made in His image, surely that was His true reflection. I was adamant about that theory, adamant that the Quran was a guide and not a dogmatic decree with mandatory rote regurgitation. I wanted to be able to take all the inspiring theories about my religion and discard the ones I could not grapple with like a stack of cards during a game. I wanted it—no, I needed it—to match up to my contemporary living. And now as I’ve read that “no soul does Allah place under a greater pressure than it can bear” (Baqarah 2:286), I long to believe it. It’s been fourteen months of getting my ass handed to me by cancer. Game after game, the cards are stacked and the house keeps winning and here I am underneath the table with not a chip left, knowing I should have stuck to go fish.
Now, knowing the end is near, I feel bathed in His presence. I feel complete conviction that I can bear what is coming and that I am not alone. When fear makes my chest shake and my vision blurs with tears, I ask my mother or brother to read me certain passages from the Quran, and my panic subsides. My fear of the nothingness abates and I feel certainty that what awaits me through the punctuated black paper of the night sky is not nothingness after all, that it’s nothingness’s opposite.
chapter 44
A FLOCK OF WILD PEACOCKS
Farezeh
We took her home from the hospital, with assurances that when it was time, she’d be relieved of her suffering so she could go peacefully. As we prepared to leave, she made me promise to give gifts to every single person, every resident, every doctor, every nurse’s aide, who had helped her over her months in this ward.
“Thank you,” Fatima said to every nurse, ambulance driver, and assistant that we passed. “Thank you so much for taking care of me.”
Some of her best friends flew in from all over the world to be by her side, took leave from their jobs across oceans to say goodbye to her forever. They saw themselves in one another’s grief, and were all united by their love for Fatima. They helped her make thank-you cards for everyone in her hospital ward. The head chef was still in control, ordering her sous chefs around, directing their moves to make sure she got what she needed to get done. They took turns sitting with her and did their best to help in whatever way they could, but they, like all of us, were powerless to prevent the inevitable. They held themselves together with bright and positive energy, their presence filled the rooms they were in with lightness and warmth, laughter, but behind all of it they, too, were breaking. When they were alone, or away from Fatima, they let themselves cry. The moment when three of them realized that they would never see their friend again as they said goodbye to her and left the hospital for the airport will stay with me. The shock of the inevitable.
They will ultimately all remain close to me. I will continue to see my daughter in them, and they will see their best friend in me—a physical tether to hold on to, to see with their eyes, to touch, feel, and hear.
When we arrived at the house and they pulled her from the ambulance on the folding gurney, she lightly touched the hand of the paramedic who was unloading her and asked him to wait a moment. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply.
“The air here. I love the air,” she said as if she was standing on a Provençal hillside planted with lavender or a freshly mown hay field in England or a Tuscan vineyard, all places that she’d never been. The fresh air of San Marino under the sky was enough for her.
Our swollen home awaited her, full of people and grief. Fatima’s friends from all over the world had come to see her, silently waiting for their moment with her. There were mattresses all over the lounge, suitcases everywhere. I glanced around at the fullness and emptiness of that house. It could have been Fatima’s wedding. On what other occasion would the best friends of a twenty-nine-year-old girl flock to the same city on the other side of the world? And yet, somehow, life had led us all there—a beautiful house bracing for unbearable sadness.
Fatima worried about everyone’s comfort and was afraid that her various friends from different chapters of her life would clash. “Mom, what if they don’t get along? I don’t want people to have a bad time.”
I shook my head at her. I wish she worried more about herself. I know she would be happy to know that all the friends she feared wouldn’t get along are all incredibly close now. They tell me all the time that Fatima brought them together. Perhaps Fatima knew that they’d all need each other after she was gone. She was leaving instructions and cushioning the inevitable falls that were to come.
She would have tried to leave instructions for me too, but for us, her family, she did not have answers. Moms are supposed to be the ones with answers. But I only had questions: How will I face each day knowing she’s not with us? How will we live our lives knowing she won’t share any more moments together? What even is the point of living without her?
* * *
~
My daughter is dying. The slow, drawn-out agonizing process of watching her die has left me in ruins, and yet, rudderless as I am, I feel my journey has just begun. I have my whole life ahead of me. I wake up and go to sleep with this every day: the fact that she won’t be here with me. I can still touch her now, but never being able to hold her hand, to feel her, to hug her…I don’t know how to make sense of it.
Why hadn’t I gotten her the help she needed to heal from her molestation? I’ve begun to ask myself the nagging questions that will stay with me always, in her absence. I’d wanted to turn the page: I hadn’t wanted her to relive the trauma by retelling it. I’d meant well, but I’d been selfish. It was I who was afraid of the retelling, of the power those words might have on my new, fragile marriage. I was afraid that shining a light on her wounds would also reveal my shortcomings as a mother, as a wife. The impossible standards of a society that rules with shame and secrecy rather than acknowledgment, acceptance, and tenderness.
She told me one morning, “Mom, I am going to write something—I think it can become a movie! It will be about the sister-in-law I will never know. She can read it one day and know me.” Because she’s so close to Mohammad, she feels that by dying, she’ll miss out—so many things she was excited about. But it’s we who will miss out after she goes: her company, the love she radiated, her presence.
In theory, Yasmin is in charge of food and the kitchen, but with Chef Fatima in the house, of course she must share that space. Fatima asks for a boiled egg, and when Yasmin brings her one, Fatima’s humor kicks in.
“Yasmin Khala, I’m going to teach you how to boil an egg.”
And of course, Yasmin patiently listens and prepares it just as Fatima tells her to. And of course, Fatima’s technique was right: It was a perfect egg.
* * *
~
I know that I must seek out support, a community to help me through this, that others have lost their children too, that technically I am not alone in this. But I feel utterly alone. There’s a vacuum inside me; I already feel hollow. Something’s missing. I feel lost. Even though I wake up and go through the same motions every day, I watch her, I help her, I talk to the doctors—eat, sleep, whatever…
When they were young, I used to say to them, It’s all right, it’ll be okay. And I don’t know why, but I keep repeating this sentence. And I look at Fatima and I keep saying it in my head: It’s all right, it’ll be okay, even though it’s not all right, and it’s not okay. Why do I say this then? Is it to comfort myself?
As she feels herself getting closer to death, Fatima wants to know what awaits her. She asks me for the green Quran that’s become an extension of my body throughout her illness. She reads it robustly. Sometimes she smiles, as if she found an answer. Other times she furrows her brow. Then quietly says, “How beautiful” and stares at that page for hours. In and out. There and yet not there.
I seek her out constantly. I want to pull out my veins and knot them into hers so I can keep her, just a little longer. I sing off-key to her:
You are my sunshine,
My only sunshine,
You make me happy
When times are blue.
“Mom, it’s when skies are gray,” she giggles.
I know the right lyrics, but I knew it would make her laugh, momentary comic relief at my expense—a mistake I make again and again for my only sunshine.
It will be days now, not weeks, until she’s fully on the other side.
* * *
~
This morning, I woke up to a text from Yasmin. It’s a photograph: There is a peacock on our roof. A peacock.
I looked out the window and there was a peacock in the backyard. I thought I was dreaming, but when I rubbed my eyes and looked again, it was still there. I got out of bed and washed my face and looked out the window again and there was another. One by one, peacock after peacock landed in our yard until there were eleven of them parading around our yard and our roof like royals at a lawn party. Fatima’s cat was beside himself.
Peacocks are Fatima’s spirit animal. She loves their unapologetic majesty, their beauty and grandeur. And they had come—as her angels, guides promised by the Quran—to welcome her to the next world.
At dusk, they left, one by one, as inexplicably as they’d arrived. I don’t need outward signs to know that something unusual is happening, that my daughter’s passage is extraordinary, but they are there to remind me. Then a halo around the full moon, directly over our house. I can’t make sense of these last days of her life and I won’t try to. I accept their painful chaos and their strange, purposeful mystery. The gory intensity of her death is a distorted mirror to her tenacious, complicated birth. I thank God that I could hold her in both.
