American Madrassa

Fiction by Aatif Rashid

The mosque in my California suburb doesn’t really look like a mosque — no minarets and shit — and instead is just a brown stucco building in a bland business park, as unremarkable as the chiropractor with which it shares a parking lot and the police station across the street. Except for a small sign that reads “San Ramon Valley Islamic Center” tacked onto a bulletin board on the sidewalk outside, one would be hard pressed to see the space as sacred, and it’s only in entering through the tinted glass doors that one finds the familiar signs of a mosque, the smell of feet, the cubbyholes by the entrance overflowing with varied shoes, the screaming of children whose parents are still in prayer and unable to effectively parent them, the stacks of flyers advertising weekly seminars and lectures and nearby Pakistani/Indian restaurants with their inexplicably arbitrary notions of capitalization (“All You Can EAT BUFFET, $10!!!!”), and of course the specific architectural elements that signify the place’s mosque-ness, the sloping arched entryway that leads to the prayer room, the mihrab carved out of a wall at the front facing the direction of Mecca, the white walls where a few framed pictures of Arabic calligraphy hang elegantly, the carpet patterned with images of more glamorous mosques from the Middle East.

Today, a Sunday afternoon in May, 2004 (about two and a half years after 9–11), the mosque is set up for Sunday classes, and the carpeted space of the main prayer room is partitioned (I should say divided, as “partitioned,” with all its evocations of 1947, is a loaded word to use in a Pakistani mosque) into several makeshift “classrooms” (really just circles of students that sit around a teacher) using those foldable dividers that went out of use in the ‘70s and do very little effectively except frequently clatter to the carpet. The “classroom” in the center of the room is larger than the others, and the students in the circle older than all the others (a mix of various high schoolers). This is the class that I, Muhammad (Mo), and Khatija (Kat) are a part of (we’re juniors in high school, both at the wonderfully pubescent age of 16), only today we aren’t there, but are instead in the men’s bathroom around the corner and down the tiled walkway, in one of the stalls, fucking. And it’s while we’re mid-sex-act, with Kat’s hand gripping the top of the particle-board wall of the stall, my pants around my ankles, and my hands gripping her waist and me trying hard to keep going and not drop her onto the tiled bathroom floor, that someone enters the bathroom.

We stop immediately, and Kat pulls her hand from the wall so her fingers aren’t visible. This causes her weight to shift, and my fingers almost slip. She gives me a look that dares me to drop her and see what would happen.

The figure is whistling some sort of Bollywood dance tune (I recognize the melody from Namaste America, a T.V. show my mom watches that features the latest Indian and Pakistani music videos) and gets into the stall next to us. I anticipate a long, arduous wait (Pakistani food rarely leads to quick bowel movements), but then I remember the lesson of the week, that peeing standing up is haram (I pressed my teacher for Quranic evidence, and she told me not to be smart with her), and I realize that this mysterious stranger is only sitting down to pee. I listen to the stream water-falling down into the toilet pool with a powerful and constant sound (he must be young and with good prostate health), and under the stall I see the person’s feet, white socks (Champion brand) slipped into black bathroom sandals (we weren’t allowed to bring shoes back this far, and so the mosque started providing these for each of the bathrooms after some complaints that the bathroom tiles were too dirty to track bare feet and socks into). My own feet are bare and in bathroom sandals too, and luckily Kat’s legs are up and pulled around me and so if peeing-man looked down, he’d see only one pair of feet visible under the stalls.

The man finishes, stands, and flushes, and then exits the stall and opens the tap. The man’s whistling continues, and I hear based on his movements that he’s doing the full ritual of wudu, the cleansing process each Muslim must go through after pissing, shitting, farting, or ejaculating. It’s a long process of carefully coordinated movements that might be spiritually cleansing but that in my mind is as a whole less effective than vigorously scrubbing the hands with soap. But the man outside must be a true believer, because he keeps the tap running and continues whistling for what feels like fucking forever, and all the while I have to hold up Kat with my arms, the sweaty flesh of her inner leg now chafing against my side, my arms burning and my legs quivering from trying to hold the position. Though we’re still mid-coitus, my previous sexual interest has deflated, so to speak, and now our genitals are just awkwardly pressed at one another, with the condom scrunched up between us, its pre-applied lube now smeared across her labia and my scrotum. I can smell the bathroom vividly, with its excessive amount of cleaning product, and I can smell Kat too, the shampoo of her currently disheveled dark hair, and the sweaty scent of her also-disheveled pubic hair, and I wonder if the man who is STILL doing his wudu can smell it to…

Finally, he finishes and shuts off the tap, and the door swishes open and shut. Kat lets out a long sigh, right in my face. I laugh and lower her down, wincing, and then awkwardly pull off the sticky condom and dab at my nether regions with a bit of toilet paper. I toss this toiler paper down the toilet but, having learned somewhere that it’s bad to flush condoms down a toilet, I decide to fold the condom between several sheets of toilet paper to toss in the trashcan. In case anyone decides to sift through the mosque’s bathroom trash, they won’t happen upon the evidence of our indiscretions unless they take the time to unfold each folded-up ply.

I pull up my pants and zip up, and Kat adjusts her hair, and then peeks out from the stall to verify that the bathroom is empty. Satisfied, she moves to open the stall, but before I do I catch her and look her in the eyes and give her a wry smile. She smiles back and leans towards me and kisses me on the lips, a long, wet kiss.

“I love you,” she says, under her breath.

“I love you too.”

#

“If a man and a woman are alone in a room, then the devil is the third party present!”

This is what Amina Auntie, in her thick, guttural, Pakistani accent, is saying as Kat and I return to our seats in the circle. For a moment it seems as if she looks straight us, but she continues scanning the circle with her dark eye and pulls her hijab tighter around her head.

“Well, we weren’t alone,” Kat mutters to me.

“Unless that guy was the devil,” I say.

“… and so, because you are all reaching that age when it becomes more likely that you’ll be tempted by this gravest of sins, zina, or as they say in English, fornication — ” Amina Auntie articulates the word slowly, almost with relish, “ — we have decided to partition, or rather, divide, the boys and the girls into separate classes.”

This declaration sends a murmur through the circle, and the varied teenage heads teetering on the verge of sleep (the usual response to Amina Auntie’s lectures on the theoretical principles of Islamic law, as interpreted by this one particular suburban Pakistani-American housewife) suddenly snap up. Amina Auntie looks around at each of us in turn, with a surprising sadness.

“I’ve taught many of you for three years now,” she says, “and known many of you since you were children — ” she looks at me specifically (our parents are close family friends, and according to my mom, she was there at my birth), “ — and so while I will miss all you young men, it is better you have someone who knows your way of growing up to teach you on Sundays. And so, may I present, the San Ramon Valley Islamic Center’s newest instructor, Saad!”

She gestures to a man who has been seated against the nearby wall, listening in, and who now stands and approaches us and kneels next to Amina Auntie. He has a small off-white topi on his head and wears a long, flowing white thawb that falls down to just above his ankles. On his feet, I recognize the familiar white, Champion brand socks. His short, buzz-cut hair still glistens from his earlier wudu.

“Saad used to come to this very center, when he was just your age. He’s just recently graduated from Berkeley and works now in San Francisco, and he has graciously volunteered his time to us. And, I should add, he is my son. So be nice to him.”

I knew Amina Auntie had a son, but this is the first time anyone of us have met him, and her revelation (despite its anticlimactic delivery) sends more murmurs through the circle. Based on the resume Amina Auntie has just recited, I assume Saad must be at least in his mid-twenties — but his clean-shaven, cherubic face and wide innocent eyes make him seem only about 10 minutes older than the rest of us. And yet the way he gazes at us, calmly, with what seems like a cultivated idealism and confidence, gives him an air of transcendent authority, as if he’s channeling through him the presence of God Himself.

“A pleasure to meet all you,” he says, in a clean, Californian accent.

As Saad leads the boys from the circle and over to a separate, windowless room, I look wistfully back at Kat. Our eyes meet, and she shrugs, as if to say that all is in God’s hands now.

#

Saad’s class is very different from Amina Auntie’s. There are no lists of Arabic caliphs to memorize, no listening to bland recitations of Quranic passages, no long lectures on varied sins ranging from fornication to pork products. Instead, on that first day, Saad has us stand in a circle on the carpeted floor, with our hands out at waist level, palms facing the floor. The room’s white walls seem to press in, and the air is a microcosm of all the smells of the mosque, the feet and the sweat and the curry-breath.

Saad pulls something green and metallic from beneath his white thawb and it takes me a moment to realize it’s a trigger lighter.

“How many of you think you know what the hellfire feels like?”

He glances across us with a strange, alluring look. I see my fellow classmates perk up. We remain silent and wait for him to continue. Without warning, Saad steps up to me and grasps my hand. I recoil, but his grip is strong, and before I can react, he has the lighter fired up and pressed against my skin. I yank my hand back in pain.

“What the fuck?!”

The other students laugh, but Saad glares at them, and they go silent. I massage my hand, and Saad looks sternly back at me. I wait for him to reprimand me for my language, but he doesn’t.

“If you can’t handle the pain of a simple lighter, then what do you think you’ll do if you have to face jahanam?”

“Jahannam” is the Arabic word for hell, and the way Saad says it sends a shiver down even my spine. The other students seem stunned, and a few glance at me and at my hand. One of the students, Ali (always the teacher’s pet) raises his own.

“Can I try?”

Saad smiles and steps towards him, holding out the lighter.

The rest of the first class proceeds like that, with Saad testing each of us with a dose of the fire. No one yelps like I did, though in fairness, they had more warning. Towards the end of class we do trust falls, an exercise Saad insists builds our sense of brotherhood.

“The Prophet’s companions, the sahabah, they would have died for each other! That is the zeal we must display!”

Everyone in the class does a trust fall. Ali does so with the greatest sense of calm, closing his eyes, not laughing nervously, arms crossed over his chest, a smile across his face, no doubt the spitting image of one of the sahabah. But I refuse. Saad insists, but I continually shake my head.

“Maybe later,” I say.

#

The burning of hands is just a warm up. In future weeks, Saad brings in guest lecturers, friends of his who’ve been on Hajj and tell of their experience with a vivid, frightening passion. He also has us memorize portions of songs that Sufi mystics used to sing back in the day and recite them from memory, including getting the notes right. None of us are exactly choir performers and so these individual American Idol style auditions are cringeworthy at best (except of course for Ali, who somehow sings perfectly in tune) but when Saad has us put it all together, the sound is beautiful and haunting. I find myself humming the tune days later, in class in my actual school, or when I’m walking home with Kat, when Islamic School is the farthest thing from my mind.

About a month into our class, Saad takes us on a field trip to a nearby Muslim cemetery for an as-of-yet unspecified activity. The cemetery is a broad expanse of manicured green grass, with flat stones marking each grave and a concrete path leading between the fields. Saad lectures us briefly on Muslim burial practices.

“At the burial, each mourner will throw handfuls of soil into the grave and recite from Surat Ta’ha: ‘Minhaa khalaqnaa kum, wa feehaa Nu’eedu kum, wa minhaa nukhrijukum taaratan ‘ukhraa.’ — ‘From the Earth did We create you, and into it We shall return you, and from it shall We bring you out once again.”

Afterwards, he has us lie in the cemetery itself, between the gravestones, and close our eyes.

“Do you know what happens immediately after the burial? In the grave, while the soul is still in the body? Two angels, Munkar and Nakir, appear and ask three questions: Who is your lord? Who is your prophet? What is your religion? If you answer correctly, your soul will rest in peace until the Day of Judgement. If not…”

Saad’s resonant voice grows suddenly quiet.

“Let’s see if each of you is ready.”

And so, as we lie between the graves with our eyes closed, Saad kneels by our side and quietly asks the three questions. I hear him murmur beside Ali, two graves away from me. Ali responds to each question in a booming, powerful voice.

“Allah! Muhammad! Islam!”

After a moment, I feel the ground beside me shift and the wind stop as a shape kneels to my left. I keep my eyes closed and tilt my head towards the new presence.

“Who is your lord?” Saad’s voice asks quietly.

“God,” I reply quickly. “I mean, Allah.”

“God” is just the English name for the Arabic “Allah,” and while I’m sure Munkar and Nakir will accept either, something tells me Saad may feel differently. I can almost feel him frown beside me.

“Who is your prophet?”

“Muhammad,” I say, and then add, “peace be upon him,” reflexively, as we’ve been taught to do each time we invoke his name.

“And what is your religion?”

“Islam.”

The word hangs in the still air of the cemetery. Beside me, I hear Saad slowly stand and move on to the next grave. The wind returns to brush against my face, but my thoughts are elsewhere, contemplating the souls of each of the deceased lying in the graves beside me, wondering whether they heard me speak and whether they detected any tremors in my voice.

#

After we’re finished, we arrange carpools back home. Ali and some of the others want to go play basketball at one of the nearby courts. I myself am no sportsman, and so I decline. I note the way Ali frowns, as if rejecting an invitation to basketball is tantamount to answering the questions incorrectly.

Saad agrees to give me a ride back to San Ramon. His car is old, a Honda from the early ‘90s, and it rattles as we pull out of the cemetery and leave through the green metal gate. The inside smells vaguely of Indian food and a metal charm with an Arabic inscription hangs from the rear-view mirror and jingles as the car picks up speed.

“Can I ask you something, Muhammad?” Saad says, after we’ve sat in silence for some time.

I’ve told him several times by now that I go by Mo, but to no avail.

“Sure,” I say.

“What do you think is the hardest temptation to avoid for people like us?”

I’m surprised that he’s lumping the two of us together.

“People like us?”

“Muslim-Americans,” he explains. “Those of us who are devout Muslims but who live in an American culture.”

I remember then that Saad grew up in San Ramon too.

“I don’t know,” I say, trying to avoid his gaze.

“Just name one thing,” Saad presses. “Whatever you think is the biggest temptation.”

I can tell he’s thinking of very specific temptations, and I wonder suddenly if Ali and the other kids have told him about Kat and me. It’s not exactly a secret in our high school, but I prefer to keep that knowledge away from the prying ears of adults, and even from nebulous half-adults like Saad.

“Drugs?” I finally say.

I am entirely unconvincing, and I can tell Saad knows it. I’ve never actually done drugs in my life and wouldn’t know the first thing about the difference between grass and pot and weed and which end of a blunt to smoke, or what a blunt even is. I know suburban kids are supposedly supposed to be doing ecstasy and going to raves and shit but I must have missed the memo — or maybe the white kids who sell ecstasy and throw raves don’t bother to invite me.

“You know what it was for me, when I was your age?” Saad says.

He pauses dramatically.

“What?” I ask.

“Girls.”

He stares at me, for what seems like an excruciatingly long moment.

“Really?” I ask, trying to act surprised.

“Really,” Saad nods, smirking. “The drugs, the alcohol, the pepperoni pizza. I could say no to all that easily. But girls… it’s a sin, Muhammad. Don’t ever forget that. The angels may not ask you in the grave, but Allah knows.”

#

With that ominous pronouncement hanging over my head, I continue through my junior year and through Saad’s Sunday classes, though with a greater sense of unease than before. Kat and I have sex only once more in the mosque during this time, and unlike all the times before, this one is hurried and uncertain, and about half-way through I realize I’m no longer up for it, so to speak.

“What’s wrong?” Kat asks, frowning.

“Nothing,” I say, though I imagine Saad’s eyes gazing at me through the stall’s particle-board partitions.

Towards the middle of the year, Junior Prom season begins. As with all school dances, Kat and I make plans to go, though my parents, of course, have no idea what prom is or that I’m going at all. Like all Pakistani parents, they think school dances are hangouts for the devil, “Dens of sex, drugs, and fornication!” as Amina Auntie redundantly puts it, and so I lie to them and say the tux I rented is for a night at the San Francisco Opera with my English class to see the new and critically acclaimed adaptation of Gogol’s The Overcoat (a convenient lie since Kat and I went to see that very opera a few weeks before). Because Kat is second generation, her parents are more lax and, having grown up in the United States in the ‘70s, understand American culture a little bit better than my own, though even she has to assure them she’s not going to prom with anyone in particular (and certainly not the boyfriend she regularly fucks in the bathroom of the mosque where they pray). Our white friends don’t quite understand all this lying, and when I see the way they talk so easily with their parents about who they’re dating and how a few of them even get their parents to get them condoms or birth control pills, I feel envious that I wasn’t born into a religion more relaxed and more in tune with contemporary culture.

A few days before prom night, I’m at home, having dinner (samosas, biriyani, and kheer for desert) with my parents and brother, when there’s a knock on the door. Dad goes to answer it, and I keep eating, oblivious, and it’s only when I look up, having just stuffed a lamb samosa in my mouth, that I see Saad, with a dour expression.

“If you don’t mind, Muhammad, I’d like to talk to your parents alone.”

My brother and I leave, (taking some more samosas with us) and go upstairs. From railing, I try to listen in on what Saad and my parents are saying in the kitchen, the hushed voices, the low, murmuring, foreboding tone. My brother wants to play video games and keeps trying to press the N64 controller into my hand, but I shush him. Finally, Saad exits the kitchen and leaves from the front door, and I hear the rattling sound of his Honda. I watch through the curtain in the hallway window as it pulls out of the driveway and moves down the dark streets. Meanwhile, my parents call me into the other room. By the grave looks on their faces, I can tell something is wrong.

They tell me that Saad came to tell them that, according to the other boys in my class, I have a girlfriend, and that the two of us engage regularly in “improper relationships” (my mom’s words) in the mosque bathroom, and that Saad even went through the trashcan and found a used condom as proof (when they say this, I half-expect to see this article laid out on the table, Exhibit A, next to the lamb samosas, but the only thing atop the arabesque tablecloth are half-eaten plates of food). I am too dumbfounded to even deny it.

My parents ground me for the rest of the year. No hanging out with friends, no cell phone, and no computer.

“But what about internet for school projects?” I ask.

“The library has internet,” my dad says.

“And what about the play?” I ask, thinking of prom. “The school field trip — ”

“Absolutely not!” my mom says.

“But it’s for school!”

“Fuck your goddman school!” my mom says. “If your school teaches you that it’s OK to have sex wherever you want then I don’t care if you never go again!”

I’ve never heard her swear before, and it silences me instantly. I don’t look them in the eye and turn away, but I can feel their gazes, the judgement, the horror, and, worst of all, the disappointment. And as single-mindedly fixed on prom as my teenage brain is, I know then that the grounding will be the least of the repercussions of this revelation. My easy-going relationship with my parents and the careful dome of lies I’ve built to sustain it alongside my other life have fallen down around me, and no amount of penance will ever clear the rubble. In the eyes of my parents, even if I leave school then and move to a cave in the Arabian desert to memorize the Quran like the Sufis of old and devote the rest of my life to begging for God’s forgiveness, I’ll never make up for the shock of what they learned and the overwhelming sadness they feel now as they reflect on how after leaving the poverty of their homes in Pakistan to come here for a better life and struggling to preserve their culture and religion in the face of unceasing and, since 9–11, increasing prejudice and intolerance they find that their own son, the angel of their eyes, seemingly devout, is in fact no different than the immoral majority, as dismissive and insulting of their religion as their fear-mongering, Republican-voting, Islamophobic neighbors (actually, to be fair, about half the people in our neighborhood, despite being Islamophobic, are Democrats and voted proudly for Al Gore).

That night I call Kat (on my brother’s phone) and tell her what happened. She’s quiet on the other end, save for regular, steady breathing.

“You can sneak out, though, right?” she asks when I finish. “For prom?”

Something about the way she says it bothers me, as if it’s the only thing she’s been thinking about and as if she hasn’t been considering the larger issue, the sheer weight of what’s changed. I feel like yelling at her, like telling her it’s not just about whether we get to go to Junior fucking prom.

“I can’t sneak out,” I say instead.

“Why not?” she asks. “There’s that tree branch by your window.”

Her voice is steady, calm, serious. I feel speechless with frustration. How does she not understand? This isn’t just a matter of the mechanics of sneaking out. Everything’s changed. How can I go to prom, how can I enjoy myself, how can Kat and I ever have sex in the mosque bathroom again, when all I’ll be thinking about is the look on my parent’s face and the tone of my mom’s voice, that heart-wrenching mix of fury and devastation?

“I can’t go,” I say. “I just can’t.”

Kat is silent on the other end of the phone, but I can hear in that silence a profound lack of understanding.

“Fine,” she says. “I’ll go myself.”

#

I spend prom night sitting in my room, reading Wuthering Heights for class and thinking about my essay topic (“Analyze and discuss Heathcliff’s status as an outsider and how it influences his relationships with others.”). The next day, at the library, I look at pictures uploaded by Kat on Facebook. They’re mostly selfies, and so it’s hard to tell what the venue looks like, but Kat looks magnificent, in a dark blue dress, sharp eyeliner, and cascading hair that in one photo is a wild mess across her face. She’s laughing, clearly reeling from a romp on the dance floor. I see Darren, a white guy from our year at school, standing next to her in another picture, and in another, she’s in his arms, post-dance, laughing again and looking into his eyes.

As expected, Kat and I stop seeing each other, though there’s never any official breakup conversation. Occasionally I pass her in the halls at school, or see her in the circle in Amina Auntie’s class, and occasionally we exchange brief, tragic looks across the mosque’s prayer room. Eventually, she and Darren start dating, and I see their relationship status appear on Facebook, something Kat and I never did, out of fear that my mom might find out through my Aunt, who I once stupidly added as a friend when she decided to crate a profile and “see what all these crazy kids are up to.”

The next few months pass by with difficulty. Dinner with my parents becomes silent and awkward. My brother is too young to be told the details, but I can tell that after a while, even he understands something big has happened. School itself also becomes a chore, though my grades actually rise instead of drop since all I do now is stay in my room and study (parents take note, grounding actually does work). I continue going to Sunday classes at the mosque too, though as with school, I feel like I’m just going through the motions. I do my best to avoid Saad and the expression in his eyes, smug, knowing, self-righteously pleased with himself.

The end of the school year brings with it the Islamic Center’s annual “event” held in the auditorium of the nearby community center, which we’ve booked for that particular Sunday afternoon. There’s no actual name for this event. Some teachers call it a “symposium” but that feels too official, and so most of us just default to calling it the “thing.” What it is is a chance for the students from each of the classes to show off what they’ve learned throughout the year, up on stage, while adults and teachers and other students eat from a buffet catered by a local Pakistani/Indian restaurant (for most of us, the real highlight of the evening). The younger classes usually put on plays or sing songs, and this year is no exception. In between courses of biriyani and samosas and mango lassi we’re treated to a series of dioramas about the Five Pillars of Islam, an out of tune song that (tries) to list the 99 names of Allah (they get to about 30 with no problem, but from there to 60 it’s a gradual spiral out of control, and from 60 to the end it’s every boy and girl for him-or-herself), and a surprisingly well-produced and emotionally moving play about the life of the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him, as they say). Our class meanwhile has two separate contributions to the “thing.” First we sing an amalgamation of the various Sufi songs that we’ve been practicing, put together and curated by Saad. I usually find these lyrical, beautiful, but today I’m too distracted too appreciate them, though we do get a large applause from the gathered crowd, little kids and adults alike. After the song then comes the second half of our program, the speeches. Saad asked certain members of the class to volunteer and talk for roughly five minutes on what we’ve learned throughout the year and any wisdom we might impart upon the young and the old alike. Ali of course volunteered and to everyone’s surprise, so did I.

I wait now, stage right, while Ali stands behind the podium and gives a loud, bombastic, and largely empty speech filled with generic platitudes about faith and infused with a vaguely fascistic ideology (“Only though discipline can we conquer the wavering in our hearts and be steadfast in our commitment to Allah!”). In my hands are the index cards I’ll be using, cards that only I have seen. Saad asked Ali and I to turn in copies of our speeches to him, so he could vet them (“Just in case,” he says, looking directly at me). I gave him a speech, benign and filled with as many platitudes as Ali’s, but not the one I’m planning on giving today. If Saad wants to hear what I learned throughout the year, then he’ll hear the truth.

After Ali finishes and bows to inexplicably thunderous applause, I take the stage. The crowd goes silent. The only sounds are of chewing, as everyone continues eating their food, the spicy smell of which fills the room. The stage has a few yellow lights, unnecessary given that the curtains of the room are open and afternoon sunlight pours in through the large windows. Outside, I can see the grassy fields of Central Park and a few groups of white kids in baseball uniforms playing a little league game on the dirt diamond.

I begin my speech, and at first, it’s innocuous enough. I talk about singing the Sufi song and how it moved me to imagine that a thousand years ago the same words were sung in deserts on the other side of the world. Saad is smug and beaming. Amina Auntie looks pleased. Kat, sitting at a table with some of the other girls from her class, listens but looks bored and frowns. My parents sit nearby, expressionless and still on edge, as if waiting for me to make a mistake and reveal myself for the heathen that I am. And a note-card in, their fears are validated as the tenor of my speech changes. I start to talk about the difficulties of being Muslim in America, the difficulties of being a part of one culture and being forced to obey the often arbitrary laws of another. I can see Saad’s smug smile fade away. Kat’s eyes, meanwhile, light up, and she shushes her whispering classmates.

“Going to prom, for example,” I say. “A tradition all American high schoolers take part in. And I, I want to fit in, I want to be a part of the high school social sphere, because I’m already dark-skinned, I’m already a Muslim, the white kids already make fun of me and call me ‘terrorist’ and all I want is to be able to go to prom with the person I love and enjoy being an American teenager for a night. Why is it that the people of this community, the immigrant Pakistani community, try to keep their sons and daughters from these aspects of American culture, of our culture? They of all people should understand the struggle to fit in.”

I can see Auntie Amina frowning and looking at Saad. My parents too are frowning, and my mom looks as if she’ll storm the stage at any moment. Kat, meanwhile, has tears in her eyes.

“I once thought I could have the best of both worlds,” I continue. “The rich tradition of Islam and the modern outlook of America. But my own culture, my own parents, my own mosque, have taught me that that’s impossible. That in truth, I belong to neither culture.”

Without waiting for a reaction from the crowd, I step away from the microphone, stage left, and head straight for the auditorium’s exit. Behind me, there is murmuring, but no applause. I imagine my parents and Amina Auntie sharing a grave look and Kat wiping tears from her eyes. My heart is pounding in my chest, a drumbeat for each step I take. I burst through the double doors and stride down the hallway, towards the building’s entrance. Behind me, I hear the patter of sandaled feet.

“Muhammad!”

It’s Saad’s voice. I turn quickly around.

“What?”

Even in that one word, my voice is shaky, uncertain. My heart continues to beat, and I can barely hear the external world over its rapid thumping. Saad looks at me with a strange expression, full of pain, sorrow, uncertainty. For the first time, there’s nothing smug about the way he looks.

“What?” I repeat, and this time, my voice is more confident, less shaky.

“I…”

He hesitates. I wait.

“I’m not mad,” he finally says.

“I don’t care if you are,” I say, staring back at him.

Saad’s eyes flicker to the ground, and his lips twitch before he speaks.

“You know, I’ve been where you’ve been. Faced those same struggles. And so, what you said — I completely understand.”

It’s a surprising sentiment coming from Saad, but I don’t feel like commiserating.

“I doubt it,” I say.

“Why? I went to the same high school as you. I went to the same Islamic classes. I wanted to go to prom when I was seventeen, and my mom told me not to.”

I imagine Auntie Amina yelling at him in her guttural voice the way my mom yelled at me. Maybe that’s why Saad is the way he is. Trauma from childhood, repressed feelings, all that Freudian shit dumped onto a new group of teenagers.

“I had sex with a girl in junior year too,” Saad continues.

I am surprised. I never imagined Saad actually had a penis. Something about that transcendent, divine quality of his always made me think he was a eunuch. He appears more earthly now, and I imagine him at seventeen, awkward, gangly-armed, sucking at some girl’s face and tit in the back of his Honda Civic. It makes me pity him, thinking of him in this way, a person not unlike me, and it ruins the rush of defiant confidence I had moments earlier while breezing out of the auditorium. I try to ignore these feelings and see Saad as that devil in the bathroom.

Saad reaches out and places his hand on my shoulder.

“Muhammad — ” he says.

I shove his hand away and try to avoid his sharp, suddenly human eyes.

“My name is Mo,” I say, with all the anger I can muster up.

I turn and head for the door, quickly, making sure not to look back. But I can see Saad’s reflection in the glass of the window before me, an anguished look in his youthful face, a face so young it seems like a reflection of my own. I try to ignore it as I push my way through the building’s exit.

#

That’s the last Islamic School event of the year. Classes will begin again after summer break, though I insist that I’ll never set foot in a mosque again. I don’t say this explicitly to my parents, but they seem to understand. Since the speech, something in our relationship has changed yet again, and they’re suddenly distant, almost afraid. I kind of like it. Because it’s summer I’m no longer grounded, and even though there’s no one I really hang out with anymore, I’m enjoying the freedom of my new, post-Islamic way of life.

But then, halfway through the summer, Amina Auntie dies.

The official cause of death is a heart attack, though my parents talk about it in more general terms, using phrases like “passed on” and “natural causes.” She was only in her early 60s, but wasn’t exactly living the healthiest of lifestyles (I remember after class she always needed two of us to help pull her to her feet). Still, it’s a shock when I hear the news. My mom tells me Saad found her lying on the kitchen floor when he came home one evening from work. I imagine him on his knees, grabbing at her dupatta in tears, the kitchen still smelling of the masala she was cooking. I wonder if he hated himself for any harsh words he ever said to her, for any anger or ill-will he still held towards her in his heart. I try to imagine what I would feel if I ever found my own mother like that.

We go to the mosque first, to pray the janazah prayer. It’s a complicated, unfamiliar prayer, with different verses and order to the movements, but I follow along as best I can, while the imam at the front of the room leads us with his graceful, powerful voice. Our collective chant of “Allahu Akbar” rings off the white walls, but the place still feels cold, devoid of that human presence that had once been among us, seated in the floor where we now prayed, in between flimsy partitions, lecturing us on Islamic history, valiantly keeping our traditions alive. I look for Saad amidst the congregation but can’t find him.

The funeral takes place in the cemetery Saad took us too. The sky is dark and cloudy. Many familiar faces are there, fellow teachers, parents, and all of Amina Auntie’s class, Kat and me and all the rest of them. We cluster together on the patch of grass, watching as her body, covered in a white shroud, is lowered gently into the earth. Saad stands by the body, crying fitfully, trying to stay composed as tradition dictates. But when the body enters the earth, he falls to his knees and lets out a long, punctuated wail and buries his head in the folds of his white thawb.

I want to walk up to him and put my hand on his shoulder and tell him it will all be OK, that, as he taught us, his mother will be visited by the angels, Munkar and Nakir, and that she will be asked the three questions, and that she will answer correctly and calmly, with the assurance of a lifetime of devotion, ensuring a peaceful slumber till the Day of Judgement. I want to tell him that he’ll see her again, in the afterlife, when the two of them will be in jannah together. I want to recite for him the Quranic verses about Paradise, the ones that Amina Auntie taught us to memorize and the translations he close-read with us in his class, the ones that tell of rivers and “gardens of perpetual bliss” and the everlasting happiness that awaits us all in the hereafter.

I feel Kat’s hand grip my own, and I see that she’s crying. I squeeze her hand, which is warm and comforting in the cold air.

Saad stands and watches as the body is fully lowered in the ground. We pause and wait and watch as he slowly takes a handful of dirt from a nearby pile and sprinkles it over the grave.

“Minhaa khalaqnaa kum, wa feehaa Nu’eedu kum, wa minhaa nukhrijukum taaratan ‘ukhraa,” he whispers.

Each of us then moves forward, one by one, and does the same. Kat goes before me, and I watch her pause and look down at the body. Her lips move, but the words are too faint for me to hear, and I’m too far away to tell what she’s thinking.

When it’s my turn, I take the dirt slowly, in two hands, so as not to spill any. It feels soft and cool, and I imagine how it will feel to Amina Auntie, the weight of all this earth upon her as she waits for Paradise. I step up to the grave and look down. It’s deeper than I imagined, and Auntie Amina looks so far away, a tiny white figure in the darkness.

I let the dirt fall from my hands down over the body, and whisper the words. They come naturally to me, as if they were in me all this time.

Aatif Rashid is a writer living in Los Angeles. He currently blogs for The Kenyon Review and his debut novel Portrait of Sebastian Khan is forthcoming March 18, 2019.