Chapter 2 Asma
Asma
The mosque didn’t look like a mosque at all.
It was just an old storefront in an outdated strip mall, sandwiched between the Lucky Dragon Chop Suey and Ray’s Donuts.
There were no turrets or domes or embellishments of gold.
Simply a deep-green sign announcing Movement of Islam in nondescript white lettering followed with Arabic script in barely decipherable letters.
The green, diffused through the late-September fog, looked like a traffic light signaling “go.”
Asma pulled into the largely empty parking lot and sighed.
She was early. She had come to tell her parents her news.
But now that she was here, all she felt was that old familiar sense of being out of place.
She turned up the cassette player, let Robert Smith’s melancholy voice lull her, and wondered what kind of music Ruby listened to. Finally, she exited the car.
The smell of fried food and caramelized sugar hung heavy in the air.
She passed who she assumed to be Ray standing sentinel in front of the parking spots reserved for his donut shop.
With arms the size of small tree trunks crossed over his chest, he patrolled for errant prayer-goers.
He glared at Asma. Asma met his glare and lazily sauntered past.
All of her prior, infrequent trips to the mosque had been via highway, traveling with her family from their home in Rosebud, more than an hour away.
Today was the first time Asma had driven there alone.
The ten-minute drive from her university had been harrowing.
It had been impossible to not notice graffitied plywood covering the windows of formerly stately, two-story brownstones, sidewalks erupting with weeds, and trash lying all around.
When an old man had materialized in the street pushing a shopping cart brimming with his life belongings, she had hit the brakes so hard that her tires screeched.
Her legs still felt weak from the adrenaline rush.
In a normal family, her news would register as a positive, a cause for celebration.
But in their upside-down family, it would mean something different, somehow more and less at the same time, with its own implications and baggage and signals, only some of which Asma understood.
Salma was better at charting a course through the unseen eddies of their parents’ expectations.
Their mother used to say that Asma and Salma were actually one person, born fourteen months apart, the only one the other needed.
Until Asma had started university, they had spent only one night apart.
“Salaam aleikum, sister.” A man with sparkly eyes and a wide smile with jumbled teeth walked toward her.
“Salaam, brother.” Despite her anxiety, Asma couldn’t help but feel welcomed by his friendliness.
Originally two storefronts, the mosque had maintained two distinct entrances, the easier to segregate the population by gender.
He walked into the men’s entrance, leaving Asma outside to stare at the door marked Women.
She wondered if the different entrances, dictating who could or could not enter, evoked dark memories for the friendly man or whether the sting of exclusion was felt only by the people being excluded.
The mosque had been founded twenty years ago by two Black families who had left the Nation of Islam because that type of Islam felt too political.
Eventually, as a handful of Pakistani families arrived and the congregation grew, they had rented and connected the adjacent storefront.
The families that made up this community had few similarities other than their shared belief in a holy book and a reform prophet.
One group was comprised of striving dreamers, educated and stupid, fearless enough to leave their homeland for a myth, and unprepared for the life that awaited them.
The other, a group of striving dreamers, still trying to find their place in a country that went to great lengths to not see them.
Inside the women’s entrance, it was the same as it ever was. A big, open room with a few framed pictures of Haj and flat white sheets that covered the carpet. Someone was cooking the meal for after prayers.
A few women were setting up. They greeted Asma warmly.
Coming to mosque always triggered a confusing mix of feelings.
She was known to everyone. She wanted to think it was because of her height but knew it was because she was Pakistani.
Like all converts, there was a real or perceived hierarchy between those who had adopted the religion and those who had not.
The Black families treated the Pakistani families like they were special, as though being born into the religion made them more Muslim or more devout.
Asma existed to prove otherwise. After a lifetime of not feeling Pakistani enough for Pakistanis or American enough for Americans, she felt simpatico with the Black congregants.
She, too, was just on the other side of belonging.
Asma asked a middle-aged woman buzzing about if she could do anything to help.
She needed to keep her hands busy. Otherwise she might falter and leave, her desire to see her sister grounding her only so much.
At the woman’s request, Asma went to the back of the room and took out folding metal chairs from the closet and started setting them up in a few clusters around the room.
Old women, heavy women, and pregnant women were excused the prostrations required by namaz and permitted to sit while they said their prayers.
Asma wondered who set up the chairs for the old and fat men on the men’s side.
Undoubtedly, it was the women—that’s why they came early. She smiled wryly.
There was nothing left to do, so she sat on the ledge and looked out the front window and waited for her family to arrive.
One by one, they started emerging from the slowly dissipating fog.
The women, in bright-pink salvar kameezes trimmed with metallic thread and deep-blue silks embroidered with small mirrors, dazzling as peacocks, each outfit matched with a sheer head scarf, a dupatta, one or two shades lighter.
Two women wore African-inspired fabrics, with children whose fabric matched their own.
It made Asma think of Rosebud, where each night the bells of the Lutheran church rang at 6:00, calling the faithful to prayer.
Growing up, Asma had felt a deep sense of well-being when she heard them ring.
In winter, the notes, sharpened by the cold, pierced the gloom of the early night, warming her insides.
In summer, mellowed by the day’s sultry heat, the bells drowned out the loudening crickets.
The predictability of that call to prayer gave her a sense of belonging and security.
As a child she had liked to think that everyone within hearing distance was bound to each other, even those that didn’t have a German last name or believed that Christ was God’s son.
The ritual playing out before her was really no different other than it took place on a Friday afternoon and almost everyone here was some shade of brown.
Except now she believed in the pomp playing out before her as much as she believed in the Lutheran church, which was to say, not at all. She had already come to understand that all religions existed primarily to keep women in their place and compliant with the desires of men.
The station wagon with the dented driver’s door pulled into one of the parking places in front of Ray’s, and Asma felt her ire rise.
Why could her parents not comply with the most basic rules?
Her father drove taxis for a living. He understood there were rules for parking.
Why didn’t they just read the signs? She slipped on her shoes while scanning the lot for Ray.
He did not seem to be a patient man, and she would need to help smooth things over.
As much as it infuriated Asma that her parents’ cluelessness inexplicably made all events about themselves, she wasn’t about to let some American intimidate them.
For as long as she could remember, it had been her and Salma’s role to protect them and intercede on their behalf.
Fog stubbornly clung on, making things visible one minute and appearing distant the next.
Her father swung his legs out of the driver’s seat and took a minute to hoist himself out of the car, slowly putting weight on his right hip before pivoting.
At home, when he got out of the car, he would immediately stretch his arms over his head and lean over to get a cross-body stretch.
But here, where others could see him, she could see he was holding back, afraid of looking foolish.
She hated how she knew his every habit. Her mother, diminutive and round, wore a dun-colored salvar kameez, always seeking the opposite of drawing attention to herself.
Her parents seemed to have aged in the short time she’d been away.
Either that, or she simply had new eyes.
And then there was Salma, only slightly taller than their mother, holding a paperback in one hand and clumsily trying to gather the slippery fabric of the dupatta as it slid off her wavy hair with the other.
She seemed so young. Salma wasn’t shy, but she preferred the edges of the room from where it was easier to observe.
Asma could only imagine what it was like for Salma living at home with no one to hide behind.
In a way, she felt as though she’d abandoned her.