Chapter 1 Salma #3
The painting is not particularly interesting, a dark and gloomy war scene with horses and people dying in the midst of a battle.
But as I sit there, something happens. Slowly, I see things I hadn’t noticed in the beginning.
A soldier’s face holds an expression of joy.
A raised sword catches a ray of sun. An impossibly ornate tassel on a horse stands out.
Little dramas on the edges reveal themselves—a woman giving a soldier a ladle of water, a lone man on horseback looking down on the fighting in the distance, a presence or force behind the clouds.
I am struck that the image has not changed, merely my ability to see. Maybe because of the scale of the work or the cacophonic scene or the darkness of the painting, it didn’t exist to me until I made myself sit still and observe in solitude and silence.
What else is like this? In my history but not seen by me? Maybe the secret to being released from my grief is to go back to the beginning and look more closely rather than avoid?
After our first few months in the city, we moved into a house in Rosebud that my parents bought with Mamoo’s help.
Our house was simple, and even though it was largely a sea of empty space, it felt like a mansion to us.
We loved it, one of those things on which we could all agree.
The front door opened to a landing, with a half-flight set of stairs leading up and another half-flight set of stairs leading down.
Ami and Abu’s bedroom was upstairs, which, in the beginning, contained only a hand-me-down bed and dresser set from Mamoo and Aunty.
The shared dining area and living room had a sliding-glass door which led to a patio and looked out over the large lawn, which backed up to the Kohlmanns’.
There was an old kitchen table with legs that could fold away underneath, four mismatched chairs, and a love seat left behind by the previous owners.
Downstairs had a large living space, which became our TV room and play area, and our bedrooms. Even though we each had our own room, connected by a dark and musty Jack-and-Jill closet, in the beginning, Asma and I shared a single mattress in her room.
Our first week, Ami moved our few belongings from cabinet to cabinet, closet to closet, part reveling in the sheer volume of space that was now her dominion and part repetition born of anxiety.
One day, while Asma and I were helping Ami move our one love seat around the room, there was a knock on the door.
We were home alone; Ami was in charge while Abu was gone long days driving taxis in the city.
Wild-eyed, her gaze flitted between Asma and me.
We stood there frozen with the sofa aloft until Asma placed her end down decisively.
Back then, it felt like Ami was a teenager who was taking care of us while waiting for the real adult to show up.
Asma strode to the door and threw it open.
On the other side of the screen stood an elderly couple, our new neighbors, Marianne and Cleo Kohlmann.
The Kohlmanns became our entry point into the wider community, teaching us about all kinds of American things, such as how, when Americans asked for tea, they were referring to tea with ice in it.
In summer, they made Asma and me grilled cheese sandwiches with a slice of orange tomato warm from the sun.
But that first day, they brought us cinnamon rolls as a housewarming gift and told us about a flea market in the next town where we could pick up things to help fill our life.
Every Saturday, the one day Abu didn’t work, we started going to the bug market, which was how my parents referred to the flea market, no matter how many times we corrected them.
The bug market was halfway between Rosebud and the next town and was held in an old corrugated-metal barn, open on one side.
The first time, we pulled our car into the makeshift parking lot at the bottom of the hill and parked like everybody else, in neat, self-imposed order.
Townspeople, in jeans and worn shirts, trudged up the small hill to the barn chatting with farmers in overalls and muddy boots.
Ami in her salvar kameez, Abu in trousers and a button-down shirt, and Asma and I, in a combination of things too big and too small, all huddled together and followed suit.
The barn smelled sweet and dry and was filled with three rows of tables.
Two rows lined the sides of the barn, and one row ran down the middle.
If people had noticed us outside, it wasn’t apparent as we all marched toward a common destination.
But inside, as if on cue, all heads turned to look at us.
Some people looked like they were trying to turn their heads away out of politeness, but others didn’t bother.
We walked down the aisles, aware of people pausing their conversations as we approached.
Ami and Abu just imitated what everyone else did, wandering by the tables slowly, giving each its personal space unless there was an item that caught their interest and warranted an approach.
Abu recoiled from picking through the souvenirs of a remnant life, hands pushed into pockets, refusing to touch.
Over time, the bug market became a family ritual.
People stopped staring at us and smiled like they did at each other.
Our first stop was always to look at a matching pair of wagon wheel headboards, which leaned against the barn wall.
Inevitably, Asma would disappear to go look at kittens in a box or play outside with random children.
Abu would wander away to look at the equipment outside—riding mowers, Weedwackers, tractors.
Ami, who never lost her delight at the detritus of other lives, pulled me close and wandered about, lifting items and peering at their underneaths for a price.
By then, we had already established the pattern of Asma or me speaking on her behalf.
At the market, I asked the seller about the item to test if the price was firm.
If Aunty Marianne and Uncle Cleo were with us, my parents asked questions about the purpose of certain items new to them, like a deviled-egg dish with its half shells.
We purchased things like old Nancy Drew books, serving dishes, or a set of glasses.
Often, we left empty-handed. If Abu had a good week, we each got a dime to buy a soda, cold with condensation, from the steel vending machine.
But on that first trip, we left the market with a large pot and a small end table with drawers for me and Asma. Driving home with the windows down, our new items in the trunk, Abu tapped the steering wheel and sat a little taller while Ami tried to hide her smile in the side mirror.
Sometimes I wonder what might have been if Asma and I had gone to an elementary school like Sunnyside.
What if we’d had peers who were also straddling cultures, norms, and families?
What if my mother had been surrounded by the kind of community evident all around me?
Where people of different colors, socioeconomic statuses, cultures, and religions mix and befriend one another, bound by a shared commitment to education and the beauties of plurality?
How might our lives have turned out differently?
While there are social stratifications in this neighborhood, there is also an anti-otherness mentality.
The parents at Sunnyside have little hardship and take the home visits and parenting support all around them for granted, where two miles away, there live parents working two jobs who get no support.
The unfairness of it all can be galling.
If we had grown up like my students, would my parents have been able to accept us as we were?
In America, children are given a long time to settle into their adult forms. In our family, we were expected to know who we were from a young age and to behave consistently as that person.
The idea of growing up somehow didn’t mean to actually grow; it meant to be.
To be the person our parents wanted us to be.
To be the person they expected us to be.
A white canvas on which they could project the vision—the least threatening version of us—that was the most palatable.
We were kids who made sure to be studying the Quoran when Abu walked in from work, going through the motions of writing Arabic characters—right to left on the tissue-thin, dotted, and solid-lined paper in the Quoran primers, treasured and brought from Pakistan.
In the way that children know every inflection of their mother’s voice and understand what every look means, we knew we were diligently practicing, not because it was important to Ami, but because she wanted to give the right impression to Abu.
And it worked. It usually got us a “good girl” or a pat on the head as he went out for a walk after a long shift.
We were also the kids who were sent to Bible camp at the local Lutheran church for one week so that Ami could get a break from us over the long summer.
After-school specials told the stories of kids spending their summers running lemonade stands, going to sleepaway camps, and having parties at the beach.
Not in Rosebud. Our summers were much like the rest of the year but with less structure.
The 4-H Club didn’t offer programming because children of farmers were needed on the farm.
The Junior National Rifle Association held a shooting camp in the local elementary school the week before it started where they handed us rifles and told us to shoot at targets across the gym.
Other than that, there was only Bible camp.
Once, a girl named Amy asked us whether we’d been baptized.
“No,” Asma had said.
“You know you’re going to hell, right?”
“We’re not Christian, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to hell,” Asma said, pulling me close.