one does not simply marry a saudi oil field and then self-report its mysterious death in Valentino Garavani pumps the next morning.

by Zoha Arif

cover art by Namooda Saher

“This is an internal self portrait. It focuses on my cultural identity as a Pakistani American Muslim.” - Namooda Saher

The choli that I wore for yesterday’s sacrificial goat Eid was the type of hollywood met gala contraption you wear to the funeral procession of your rich, old chap of a husband who was mysteriously murdered in his sleep. It was birthed out of vicuna wool, mulberry silk and koigu, kersti cashmere, shimmered like the Templar’s loot discovered by the Ottomans in Jerusalem, layered like Persian cavalry armor, stretched its hand like Yazid’s dynasty in Karbala, and sewn by my ammi jaan for two months in between a newborn 

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with jaundice defecating all over himself, in between fried spring roll samosas and roti from Subzi Mundai like strawboard, in between chipped fingernails and a mother-in-law who’s fallen dead from malaria. I drowned the choli in coco mademoiselle before I went to bed for chaand rat, and, the next morning, when 

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I pulled the skirt and dupatta over my body, quick like the scissors that cut my jaundice brother from my 

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mother’s moist body, I felt as though any Musliman sultan would ask to be my husband in that second. I smelled like lavender, thyme, lemonade and walked around Bebe’s house past sweaty cousins splitting pimples and uncles who fought with their wives last night over spilled breast milk. I was Cleopatra of West Hollywood, Sharifa bint Saqr, Taylor Swift, and Gigi Hadid in one spirit yesterday. 

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We went to collect the baqara from the butcher in Edison after Salat al-Eid. Other women and girls in cholis, lehenga saris, and laachas stood like iced Omani pilgrims with their brothers and husbands outside Shahnawaz Halal Meat & Groceries. They cradled green tickets bearing the number of their baqara and the time of its euphoric sacrifice. Shahnawaz, with his eye-beds sewn in watery veins like 

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candied pickle rivers, and his son, Avish, with his big hands like salak, paraded around the perimeter of the shop, hollering the ticket numbers of the sacrifices that were complete and packaged in mustard yellow plastic bags on the counter. 

I remember Shahnawaz from times when my hair was still cut across my forehead, from when I collected white cabbage roses from the round shrubs of the Bombay Talk grill next door because I thought that all foliage and flowers, and especially roses, perfumed the saccharine scent of watermelon, chives, and dill because I did not know of photosynthesis and cellular respiration and the natural tendency of organisms in the plant kingdom to eat carbon dioxide. In those days, Shahnawaz was brown like mushroom soil with a fantastic flop of hockey cut gray hair with fenders. He told my Baba one Tuesday that he’d met my fat Dada in a pathan platoon in Kolkata in 1954 to dissolve the Muslim rioters who had not left for Pakistan yet and who had birthed new conservative slogans that swore their deaths as holy martyrdom on the soil of their Mughal forefathers. The next Tuesday, when we came for ghosh and baqara brain for Bebe’s 

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tribal soup, Shahnawaz brought a polaroid of my fat Dada and him in an army hemtt in Kashmir, and the image had roused some strange emotion in Baba that impelled him to haul the polaroid home and incarcerate himself in the garage with my ammi jaan where they hushed a talk in a Khariboli Urdu dialect foreign to my English ears. Baba had then hauled the polaroid back to Shahnawaz the next Tuesday and said, “one ummah, one body, and one unity. I cannot say anything else, brother.” 

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I’d met Avish, the big, brown, slim son of Shahnawaz who was five months older than me, in a time when my hair was no longer cut across my forehead but sailed in parted side-swept bangs. He’d caught a pigeon one Sunday afternoon before Muharram, when he’d been chucking burnt tandoori roti outside the 

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meat shop. By the allure of garam-masala spiced rotis and the tenacity of hunger, he had managed to 

1“Ammi jaan” is one of the many terms for “mother” in Urdu. It directly translates to “Mother love” or “dear Mother.” 

2“Chaand rat” refers to the celebrate night before Eid. It literally translates to “Moon night.” 3 A “dupatta” is a shawl-like scarf that South Asian women wear traditionally. 

4“Baqara” is the Urdu term for “goat.” 

5“Ghosh” is the Urdu term for “cow meat,” although it can also be used to refer to any meat in general. 6“Ummah” is the Urdu and Arabic term for supra-national community. 

7 Muharram is the first month of the lunar Islamic calendar.

coax a single adult feral pigeon close enough to squish by the upper remiges, tibia, and wing bar. I’d been inside with Baba that Sunday, where the two of us were on some frenzied covert operation to buy a few chhole samosas and pounds of kheema for my ammi jaan who wanted to whip some papri chaat and kheema aloo and mutton kheema and dhabewala kheema for cousins visiting from Dallas. Cupping the fat pigeon with two muscled hands, Avish had rushed inside the meat shop, and, in light of the trench mud eyes and balding gray bowl cut of Shahnawaz, said to me, “I caught this for you so that we can talk like the big armies did in the old days.” 

The white oscillating ceiling fan and, with it, the chinking of the row of army medals behind the counter, was suddenly lulled, like a playback chamber orchestra reaching its climax in an Iranian comedy film. 

“I’m sorry I don’t know you,” I said, “and, that’s just not how that works.” 

I’d left the meat shop that Sunday with my Baba, a cardboard box of mango drink, and the image of Avish in front of the cabbage roses and the yellow-tinted solar street lamp of Bombay Talk patting the pigeon once on its convex head before releasing it in savage, beating flutters. 

That pigeon flit into a drunk mirage of mid-teenagehood crisis years in which I metamorphosed into some woman-girl mutant with small breasts and small hands but thick, strawberry-skinned calves and arched eyebrows like minarets and Avish into the heir and co-owner of Shahnawaz Halal Meat & Groceries which, by some contraption of Israfil, cascaded into yesterday’s baqara Eid when my painted nails poked the virgin nails of Avish’s big hands as I handed him the green ticket. For a moment, he peered at me in my choli of vicuna wool, mulberry silk, koigu kersti cashmere, and petco patterned bells and might have remembered me as the pigeon granddaughter of the fat man who was the chain smoking, pepsi-addict comrade of his colonel baba in an Indian Army platoon once a thousand Muharramans ago. 

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Our slaughtered baqara was plopped into six mustard yellow bags marked, in black marker, by body part. I was handed the smallest plastic bag tagged “head” and “kidneys,” but I couldn’t lug the bag the whole path back to the van because of its considerable mass and because I didn’t want any of the dribbling blood to stain my choli. So my brother plucked it from me and bore the bag as if it was pumped with helium. I didn’t feel particularly holy for having my poor sibling lug an extra bag, sure, but, I was more so feeling like a saint and the angel Jibril because, that morning, I’d donated my eidee to the county mosque 

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instead of purchasing castor and lemongrass oil for my eyelashes and hair. What a holy bachcha, mashallah, my ammi jaan had said, more than just a physical beauty, my gul. 

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My brother and Baba loaded the baqara meat into the trunk of our Honda pilot. The whole drive home, the sickeningly sweet smell of Satan’s rotten fish and durian fanned from the trunk and arrested every isolated fissure of the van like the British raj. Baba opened a window on the Garden State Parkway, but, even after the perfume of white oak and pitch pine and chlorine fizzed into the van, no one could forget the shatani11 odor of the baqara in the mustard yellow plastic bags. My brother and I evacuated the van as soon as we pulled into the driveway, leaving Baba to manhandle the sacrifice himself. 

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Four days before, I had seen the baqara breathing in the organic grazing fields of a hafiz who, after 

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hearing my name caterwauled by my brother who wanted me to turn and watch him feed a cow plain 

8In Arabic and Urdu, the angel Gabriel is named “Jibril.” 

9 Urdu-English translation: “What a holy child that God has willed." 

10 Urdu-English translation: “...more than just a physical beauty, my flower.” 

11“Shatani” is the Urdu term for “devilish” or “of the devil.” 

12 In Arabic, a hafiz is a Muslim who has memorized the Quran.

pumpernickel bagels, began reciting surah Doha with all its testaments to the morning brightness and 

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the night when it covers with darkness and the Lord who has not taken leave of any homosapiens or detested his prophets. 

“It means, by the hadiths and scrolls of Abu Hanifa and Malik bin Anas, that your God never takes leave of you,” the hafiz had said, “Also, the capital of Qatar is Doha. It’s a very modern name.” 

Baba had then pointed to a Tennessee baqara with hollow horns arched forward like balconies and tousled, satiny white hair like Afghan soy noodles. 

“I want that one,” he said, “it’s fat and looks like the man.” 

As the baqara masticated cubes of juicy watermelon, the hafiz and his two portly sons rolled into the fenced grazing fields and cornered the baqara between a jaffa orange tree and hookover trough, like Albuquerque’s Portugese fleet did to the Muscat Omanis and their pearl fisheries on the Persian Gulf. The hafiz then stapled the baqara’s ear with a green tag marred with umber blood stains and Baba offered them forty dollars for their saline teardrops and baqara. 

“I will slaughter him for you in the name of our God in Edison, brother,” the hafiz said, “don’t worry about it.” 

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Sometimes, even after you witness the shahada of there is no God but God in front of the mullah of a 

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basement mosque, under the bubbled, sore tentacles of your God, under the ballooned body of Ivy Hill Park Apartments, under the rogue elephant mass of brick high-rise complexes that suckle immigrants and refugees and pockets of diaspora, Pakistani and Lebanese and Omanis and Palestinians and Yemeni and Syrian, it does not stop you from going bald. At seventeen, in feathered braids, I wanted to be punk rock cool like Guy Ferrari. As my ammi jaan was sewing the choli for weeks with pink hands, I kept yelling at her that I wanted Paul Mitchell bleached locks, and a namaste Botticelli Birth of Venus tattoo, and Hawaiian bloom vacation shirts, and I wanted to learn how to air fry something other than ratte potatoes and cauliflower, something exotic like ice cream or cola or caramel corn jelly beans. My ammi jaan once slapped me for drawing hybrid bicycles and auxiliary views of community swimming pools and waxing crescent moons on the wall in yellow chalk. This is your rebellion, she said, enough. Ammi used to oil my brittle , pimpled scalp every noon with ghani mustard oil from Subzi Mundai because apparently my hair follicles weren’t black enough, and apparently my hair shaft was searing into a veil of meshed frizz like boiled spaghetti. She kept reminding me that I was born bald, buttery, like a fat bee, with fingers and toes paltry, cluck, and ginger-root-shaped like an orangutan’s. I hated the gummed, soupy texture of the mustard oil spilling like canals down my neck, so, one day, I rolled away at noon to courtyards of peeled mangoes, raccoon footprints, and scallop shells, and it became some addiction. In middle school bathrooms, peeking into lacerated mirrors, I knew that I only tolerated a hijab and succumbed to life as a cabbage-head because I wanted someone punk rock cool like Guy Ferrari to shred the fabric from my cranium and see that I have thick black-brown Peruvian hair. Guy Ferrari never happened, but I still ran whenever ammi lured the mustard oil out of the cereal cubert. Every time, I could feel my fat Dada and phuppos with mustard oil scalps pucker in their coffins with whoops of bismillah and ay, ay. 

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13 The Arabic phrase “Surah Doha” translates to “Chapter about the morning hours” or “Chapter to the first light of the morning.” Surah Doha is a chapter in the Quran that is believed by Muslims to have been revealed to the Prophet Muhammad when he thought that God was displeased with him because he had not received a revelation from God or the Angel Gabriel for several years. 

14 In Arabic, a mullah is a statesman who has an extensive religious education. A mullah often helps and supports the imam of a mosque in his duties. 

15“Bismillah” is an Urdu and Arabic expression meaning “in the name of Allah.”

I am remembering that, at eight years old, Baba pulled us to so many Kentucky Fried Chickens for jummah suppers. We feasted on the haram, genetically modified, seduced chicken drumsticks in laminate booths the color of pomegranates, in the aura of soybean and canola oil, in the oxygen of broiled, crusted fryers, beating industrial microwave timers, and potato wedges. One jummah, Bebe called to tell us that, today, suited surgeons piped polar tubes in her raw spinal cord, and we nodded along to her emergency room saga while we plumped ourselves with the haram chicken fillets and rolled chicken biscuits. Baba said to my ammi jaan you eat too fast. Baba also said with mousseux eyes that he once slapped barbecue-style pulled pork out of a co-worker’s hand and was able to state the detriments of eating swine without a single stutter. I didn’t congratulate him on his infinite holy victories, unfortunately. 

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Unfortunate that I keep thinking of Shahnawaz Halal Meat & Groceries and the fresh paper sign on their deli display case: “We sell fried chicken now.” 

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I am also remembering when I sliced my hair with an orange sewing scissor just as my broccoli curd was mushrooming into a pixie cut. The next day, when the feral pigeons roosted on noodly black power lines waiting for some favorable sailing wind, my ammi jaan pushed me into our 2006 Toyota Corolla after school, plucked her spool of burlap ribbons and a case of sewing bobbins from Bebe’s apartment, and steered me to a white split-level cottage in some neighboring county with good public schools. I left my sun-dried brick Ivy Hill Park Apartments school with sash barred windows and never saw the Aishas and Fatimas and Asmas and Hussains and Irfans from that foreign, overseas banana republic land again. For some weeks, I couldn’t stop pondering about them and their daily lives out of some scandalous childhood nostalgia, but I never felt sore for the aunties and uncles of those Aishas and Hussains and Zainabs who were distant fourth-cousins or godmothers or dated co-workers of Ammi and Baba. No quota of cocoa petroleum jelly flooding my nasal cavities after anterior nosebleeds allowed me to forget the scent of uranus that they bombed and barraged us with when they came to our one-bedroom, one bathroom ventless apartment where my ammi jaan and I slept plopped on the floor like coastal berbers and moor tribesmen in the First Punic War. They vomited their pink lungs for daughters and sons who they prayed will mutate into doctors or engineers or humanitarian social workers for the United Nations and Peace Corps and somehow never pined for pure oxygen as if they were Siamese fighting fish. They came to us on chaand raats with hobo bags of Americana and Jovan Musk perfume to report that their son is at Chapel Hill studying database administration and information systems. He wants to be either a Systems analyst or Network architect. What about you? What do you want to be? They, you, sire, must come to realize that you are either too Muslim or too Woman or too Man or too Brown or too White or too Communist or too West to clog the livers and pancreata of the homosapiens. As for me, I am eating some computer science. 

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We ate plain cheese pizza from the local Papa Murphy’s franchise for the first time on the vinyl laminate floors of that white split-level cottage in the neighboring county with good public schools. After years of urad dhaal and lassi and sajji and chicken karahi and paya, the plain cheese pizza was something exotic. 

Afterwards, we pinched our cheek hollows against the Bermuda windows of the split-level cottage and tried to guess the uniform colors of our new public school from the schoolchildren trekking home because, in Newark, in Ivy Hill Park Apartments, every public school had a mandatory uniform of pleated scooter skirts and short sleeve pique polo shirts. The first, second, and fourth school girl who strut by our white cottage wore pink and purple chiffon wraps and banana clips, and I was so gobsmacked at the prospect of attending a public school whose uniform was pink and purple. On our first day in the new public school, a counselor said to my ammi jaan, “Oh, we don’t have uniforms here. Wear whatever you want, but make sure it’s school appropriate” and my brothers immediately scraped the pink bow ties from their collars. 

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I want to poke the lapping, pickled valleys and deltas of Kashmir someday, and Mardan, Peshawar, where Bebe was arrested by honor codes claused with uniform dress codes, where she and her half-sisters became child brides and married oiled pashtun tribesmen decades older than them in the radical ethos of sacrifice, where they witnessed the islands of village life behind the baby, pastel vintage tints of their nylon and silk and gauze dupattas, behind the cracked countenances of iron awnings and fettered patio doors, behind the big hands of hairy, carnivorous sons with mutton chops and balbos like their babas, where they bore veteran wounds from beatings with Pepsi pop-tops and jharus and tin packages from the fish mafia of the Bengal Bay. They rolled in a holy land with no contraception because God won’t allow that, no way, are you bat crazy, dude(?), where some culture, I cannot say, juiced its black pepper and saffron with the perfection of God’s word to birth some new contraption designed to choke the women who, in cholis of vicuna wool, mulberry silk, koigu kersti cashmere, and petco patterned bells, romp around their rooms piping the radical liberal-conservative slogans of Atif Aslam and Imran Khan and Shah Nawaz Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto. That’s why I cannot really accuse my mother of child abuse and violation of the right to prove myself when she says that she doesn’t like that my high school has so many Princeton-looking frat boys, that she suspects that I would much rather ship myself to some glorified elephant safari park in India with a Princeton frat boy than feign soltitude and domestic abuse like Bebe and her half-sisters behind chastity dupattas. But it’s all easy for me to say, anyway, in the sovereignty of the constitutional amendments and the United States of America and bottle rocket fireworks and white cabbage roses and brown boys like Avish who don’t really care about Imran Khan and Ram Nath Kovind and Narendra Modi because they have a Shahnawaz Halal Meat & Groceries to operate. I lay in pools of wet crabgrass and chickweed and common nettles and imagine that I am flossing the air-conditioned prison cubicle of Nawaz Sharif with the jharu that my Dada used to melt Bebe’s rebellion of non-conformity and non-compliance. I still remember our trip to Karachi kachra spring break of junior high. I peered at the flat waters of the Arabian Sea with feet in polluted white sand of paper towels and aluminum choran chatni wrappers and thought of the plump roundness of the globe like a peeled orange in my palm. Barefoot with soles jabbed and poked with needles, I tried to thread across the Arabian sea through Shia and Sunni valleys and crescent turrets in Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran and Yemen and Lebanon and the Ionian Sea of the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic to Newark, to Union, New Jersey with the good public schools, but I was no prophet on miraj. After Kaveh Akbar: there are no good kings, 

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only beautiful palaces. 

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I visited my Dallas cousins in their traditional balinese villa in February. They greeted us with salaams and clam chowder and salted caramel apple pie and burgers and Joe Biden nodders and gluten-free cheddar jalapeño corn dogs [all halal]. They let us parade around the villa in shearling boots and Timberlands from the airport and said that the Astros game in Houston last Tuesday was fist-pump material. Somewhere, in Dallas and other vast panhandles, there are people forgetting about their forefathers, the bedouins. Some days, even I don’t care about my Dada and Bebe who fled Bhopal in trains festooned and ornamented with the mud bodies of Muslims and who bathed in riverbeds furbished with skinned Islamic skulls. Somewhere in between celestial dust and guava and giant Burj Khalifas and liberal desert nomads and British Indian sepoys licking pork and cow lard off their cartridges, someone will always be in the meat sack of Kashmir marrying a Hindu man she does want and some Dubai princess, your highness, is escaping her palace to Goa after centuries of human right denial while her sheik prince brother rises to Instagram fame. Someone is being slapped northward in Saudi oil fields, Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, fat-shamed like a Bethenny Frankel reality show personality and hated like Sultan Ibrahim for hunting bactrian camels and kangaroo rats every Sunday. Someone is bombing those oil fields, the Americans, the West, Iran, Saudi protesters themselves upset with the American militias trotting in the north, either way, someone is always like me, a hyper-feminine brown girl with virgin, ferocious hormones shaving in airplane lavatories, afraid that she is growing a mustache. I wanted to be an actress at six years old. I wanted skin like seasoned apricots and lemonade hair like Cindy Brady. I wanted to be a sensei of shotokan karate and a pirate, Jack Sparrow, with chunky, buttery, beaded braids, crocodile coal skin, and 

16“Miraj” is an Arabic-Islamic term that refers to the holy one-night journey of the prophet Muhammad through the seven heavens and the spirit of God.

a brigantine on the Bengal Sea. I wanted to be a bluefin tuna desert nomad who looks like Olivia Hot and who sells camel woodworks on the Mauritanian cross-Sahara railway. But I had peruvian black-brown hair, my tan skin was like bitter melon and photosensitive, I had the wide endomorph body structure of a pashtun, and I did not drool over drama. 

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My God, I am not iron, or even aluminum-copper alloy. 

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Sometimes, I am Atif Aslam, croning mere watan, tere jannat and tajdar-e-haram, this jannat to the 

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pillowed Italian ice trollies of Kashmiri aunties in a seasoned Battle of the Bands because I miss the yawning chalk countenances of the tanned people I do not know yet. I am thinking of the Bombay Talk grill plopped besides Shahnawaz Halal Meat & Groceries and how Bombay, the nutritious womb of Mumbai, was once the seven islanded city of the Gujarat Sultanate and its white marble palaces. I am thinking about the Pakistani vloggers, the daughters, and sons of People’s Party politicians and morning show hosts, who birth scandals with ricksha drivers and viper snake milkers in Lahore, and I am wondering if they ever wince at the polaroids of the red homosapien paint that dribbled off the piston rods and axle boxes of the trains from Amritsar. Somewhere in Amritsar in the same decade, a train from Cherat rolled into the platform with painted cabbage roses of Hindu and Sikh blood. I still peer at myself in lacerated bathroom mirrors at questionable hours of the night with my shell and washer method journal left in smoked pencil lead smock and eraser organs, with my One-Hundred Years of Solitude essay penned to one paragraph, with my constant acceleration graphs having no complimentary constant velocity and linear position graphs to them. I think that I am some awful closeted racist for sometimes hating the people who do not remember the bathtub of sandalwood and oatmeal milk honey soap shavings, who cannot muster disappointment for leaving a bathtub clean from brown skin scales, who do not understand how many feral pigeons and Avishes and baqaras I have had to sacrifice in my dreams of drowning blue tangs to finally be titled some malleable metal. 

You think too much, my ammi jaan said when I asked her why Bebe has been mapping murder plots against my deceased Dada these Arabian nights, what was our struggle is not your struggle. Go to sleep and think about your college. 

But ammi jaan does not understand that bankrupt humanity has ached with eternal dementia since its birth, as every child marriage wife will say. 

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You could see the Hudson River oil barges and, every United States birthday, the pop of parachuting fireworks, from our ceiling flat in Ivy Hill Park Apartments. When I left our Toyota Corolla that Tuesday so many years ago and felt the vinyl body of our white split-level cottage for the first time, I was like the orphaned children of Esma Sultan who suddenly found themselves draped in Thai ruby gemstones. I remember pandaring into my white cottage bedroom for the first time and being arrested by nothing but the memories of the many midnights in Ivy Hill when I woke up to speckled cockroaches and house mice hollering on glue boards and scrutinizing my toe nails as if they were Parthian standing men. My first night in my own pink room, I wondered why the entire cottage shook like a bolted washing machine whenever a semi-truck and Chevrolet suburban passed by. I woke up at two one weekend night and heard the Saudi neighbor mowing the lawn while on the phone yelling at least I don’t look like Gaddafi(!). I woke up another night and listened to the patter of Memorial Day fireworks in the Union High School fairway, relieved that the pops and pitters belonged to potassium nitrate and sulfuric and not pistol bullets. I woke up another night to the Cuban neighbors parading about our flagstone clay patio with supermarket carnations claiming that the fence lining the perimeter of our property is burning in fantastic orange 

17 Urdu-English translation: “croning my nation, your heaven and hey king of the holy sanctuary, this heaven…”

flames because someone chucked a lighted menthol cigarette into the pampas grass. I woke up another night and heard light footsteps like doves and dramatic, sullen laughter on the staircase and was convinced that there was a china robber in the house. I pounced into my cabinet, bolted it from the inside with baskets of colored laundry, sat with 911 on dial, and lusted for morning to erupt in intense yellows and blues. I woke up another night and felt the teardrops of gray water vapor steaming below the ceiling of my bed like a fat, squishy cloud. I offered my thumb thinking that it was the angel Jibril come to tell me what I already know of myself and this dunya of single baseless gunpowder: no truly honest man is left in this world. I woke up another night and thought that I heard Israfil blowing his trumpet for al-qiyamah,18 but then I remembered that the Messiah, and Gog and Magog, and Mahdi, and the Dajjal have not oozed 

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out of their respective tiers of jahannam yet. I slept on the floor of my brothers’ bedroom seeking some 

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solace in the aura of two other breathing, beating, resting bodies, but the floor pressured my tailbone joints and awarded me with lower back and spinal sores, so, after a week, I rolled back to my own bedroom and listened to the Saudi neighbor, the Memorial Day fireworks, the Cuban cigarettes stubbed into pea gravel, the water vapor of the angel Jibril, the invisible china robber, and the paired yellow butterflies eating Pekmez molasses in my perfume cubert. 

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I want to be an obstetrician in the canyons of pathan child brides and muted genocides and Hazara Afghan refugee camps. One day, I am going to be a satirist. Pen name: I don’t know right now, but something generic like Jane Doe, Ryan John Wilson, or Billy Bob Joe will do. I just don’t want to live the drama of my friend’s Baba, the son of a major shareholder in Saudi oil fields who’s been rolling tapes and interviews with Stephen Sackur on BBC for the past year to tousle and broil the world’s most respected climate activists. 

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Baba said that, when my Dada slaughtered an adult lion for the Nawab of Bhopal with naked, bearded hands, he perished six days later from split organs, blunt force trauma, and exsanguination. When he became a void meat sack, the papery foliage on the ground from the chinaberry trees churned out fictional, spirited colors of plum purple and oxford blue so that the streets beyond the medic surge tent looked as if they were strewn with confetti. I coveted the heritage of my Dada and slapped it in chaos across ordinary pomegranate seeds until I learned that the Yousafzai Pashtun tribes and Tajik Afghans have their own legends of Dadas who slaughter black bears and other mythical, fictional beasties with their bigs hands and macho, muscled thighs. A neighbor of mine once killed a cat, cornered it between the front-load dumpster and light pole and ripped out its intestines with a bread knife and slotted spoon. He didn’t realize the cat’s collar—webbed nylon with the name “Beans” slapped across it in Times New Roman— until after the thing was a mush of intestinal confetti. 

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My ammi jaan talks of a Balochi first-generation American wife who married a French colonel decorated with the Order of Maritime Merit, Order of Academic Palms, and War Cross for Foreign Operational Theaters. He suggested that he was a god-fearing Musliman, but then bought a balsam fir Christmas tree with ceramic ornaments and bestowed their Scorpio daughter with the name Santa Sophia. She says that the Balochi wife melted her culture for a white boy again. All I can do in these times is state my precise age: seventeen years and nine months and a thousand fruitless hours spent in hard stoichiometry calculations and derivations of the exact photosynthesis of the perpendicular of the cubed hypotenuse of the prism light of God. 

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18“Al-qiyamah” is the Urdu and Arabic term for “Judgement Day.” 

19 In Islam, the Messiah, and Gog and Magog, and Mahdi, and the Dajjal are all beings that God has promised will appear shortly before the end of the world. 

20“Jahannam” is the Urdu and Arabic term for hell.

I keep dreaming of anonymous arranged marriage husbands in shalwar kameezes who fold ta'wizes 

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with truncated Bohemian glass beads around their thumbs. They, the starboys, are always mocha brown. They are always broad, rambling like coral sand beneath convergent tectonic plates, and crinite furballs like Avish. They arrest feral pigeons in gourmet, dry ice cubes and aluminum Colgate toothpaste tubes. We are always married old men and women when we totter with modular origami and golden venture folding and kirigami. We are always married old men and women when we wheel our kismets to Mardan, 

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Peshawar and the lapping, pickled valleys and deltas of Kashmir to savor the Hazari Afghan refugees after the Soviets cremated Kabul, to radio Muhammad Ali Jinnah, to cease the massacres and genocide of the Shia and Kaelish people. They chew the pink tongues of my ammi jaan and baba, or at least they are literate with the Arabic script, or at least we eat hanfi symbols of ba’s and alifs together. 

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During tropical storms and global pandemics, as the men and adult-toothed news anchors on television declare that an apocalypse is brewing as they lunge at the television, eating their scripts and roundhouse kicking their directors, shouting at us civilians to stock up on Campbell's Spaghetti Canned Pasta, juicy, ripe potatoes, and fresh baby corn before the Second Coming, I slap crates of dyed purple plums from the microscopic gypsies and think that mayhaps our sidewalks in time are parallel, or mayhaps they have reciprocal, negative slopes and we’ve converged in gardens of double Ferris wheels and Costco raspberry crumble cookies, or mayhaps we hate each other right now over seaweed chips plastered to teeth, or mayhaps He is on the western sphere of the planet in lands canoodling the Red Sea, disturbed about other things, like I should be disturbed about the Common Application, or mayhaps He is a complex mirage, and my kismet is to be virgin, independent feline lady and exotic, spicy auntie to the babies of my brothers. Yet the paired yellow butterflies, perfumed in coco mademoiselle, that oscillate and beat around the hardcover binders of my Modern American Literature teachers, the black hair noodles on oatmeal milk soap bars in the shower, the standard nylon floss of my ammi jaan, the nectarine peaches my brother ingests every morning, the gumboots of my friends, the bass voice of my calculus teacher telling me that I didn’t do the derivative right because I didn’t use the limit definition, they spook me into fantastic fantasies. 

The Italians and French and British English in my class say that they are fascinated by the cartoonish, geometric, Persian textiles and the convoluted, serpentine seed beads detailing the cholis I wear for Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. They solicit wonder in the Pashtun rhythm of my ammi jaan when she fetches me from school early after menstruation cramps mar me and asks who is that boy who waved at you? Why are you smiling at him? Gul, do you have boy friends? And my response: ammi jaan, no, we just did a project together and he just sits next to me in Spanish and physics...the teacher chose our seats, I didn’t decide or else I would sit next to Josephine, the Chinese girl you like me to be around. And then Jibril materializes as gray water vapor at twilight as I turn my face from Mecca: there is no truly honest man left in this world. Because I do have boy friends who talk to me about the photosynthesis of the perpendicular and york peppermint patties and the biological fact that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell and Jack Black and Grand Theft Auto and the feasibility of socialism. 

My ammi jaan does not know that, seven months ago, a Japanese-Korean Buddhist who was not gorgeous, but still felt like the light of God, who was not a canny intellectual, but still toiled and sacked higher grades than me, who was not a resin Middle Eastern liberty statue, but still stood like iron outside lined yellow cheese buses after school in tropical storms, began one day by saying “ma'am, ever since we met, I knew that I wanted you to be the other part of me,” and I said no, because, even though we can alchemize into holy supreme leaders of godless lands, even though it is entirely possible for my ammi jaan to never learn of my arranged hours for eloping at the Magic Fountain or Huck Finn Diner in Union, sire, I have no physical, secular excuse other then my God won’t approve, other than that you do not possess the same gravity as the macha arranged marriage husbands who roll to me in blue tang 

21 The shalwar kameez is the national, traditional dress of Pakistan. 

22 A ta’wiz is an amulet that is worn, generally, by South Asian boys for good luck. 23“Kismet” is the Urdu term for “destiny” or “faith.” 

24“Ba” and “Alif” are letters in the hanfi Arabic alphabet.

daydreams, who marry me in my red choli dupatta of vicuna wool, mulberry silk, koigu kersti cashmere, and petco patterned bells, who have practiced hands with platinum mehndi cones, who prop one palm on the holy Quran and pronounce surah Doha with all its testaments to the morning brightness and the night when it covers with darkness and the Lord who has not taken leave of any homosapiens or detested his prophets, who love that my name means the first light of the morning, who can and will trek to the pickled valleys and deltas of Kashmir and Mardan, Peshawar and understand why I see every land as Karbala and every day as Ashura and why I would martyr myself at the direct command of Imran Khan and Shah Nawaz Bhutto and Quiad-e-Azam and Gandhi and why I prostrate to a clothed black limestone box in the Nafud desert five-times a day and why a hijab prevents any school boy from knowing that I have thick black-brown peruvian hair and why my God is Allah and why my God also wears a hijab of noor and why 

25 

my prophet is Muhammad and Jesus and Moses and Abraham and Joseph and Lot and Jonah (peace be upon them) and why I listen to Atif Aslam and read Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Manto and Allama Iqbal and sob fat, plopping teardrops because I cannot hear their polyphony in Urdu and why peace has become the drumming, beating mantra of my life. I plopped in my bus seat with chinking, clacking bones that day and could not find the mellow heart for a siesta because how can I describe to your swollen, bloated emotion of cliché teenagehood the confidential convocations with the angel Jibril as gray water vapor and the patters of the invisible china robber and the scanadalous romance with arranged marriage husbands and the Saudi’s neighbor’s maniac obsession with Gaddafi and the son of the Saudi neighbor who said to me on a Labor Day barbecue picnic in Bier Temple Park that he likes researching dictators “like Moussillini and Trujillo and the statesman who perpetrated the Armenian genocide.” 

To the Japenese-Korean boy who no longer speaks to me: I cannot see my God in you, but rejoice that it was not you, but me, and my God, and my fantastic fantasies, and my fat Dada who slaughtered an adult lion for the Nawab of Bhopal with naked, bearded hands, and who was the chain smoking, pepsi-addict comrade in an Indian Army platoon once a thousand Muharramans ago. Find solstice in that I also bellow over the Italian and French and Korean and Japanese in my class who I know will never be anonymous arranged marriage husbands, but who still trek my mid-teenagehood crisis and boy-crazy fantasies. In other words, I suffer from unrequited love and the curse of the paired yellow butterflies and Mauricio Babilonia too. At least your Buddhist God and the universe’s celestial beings haven't spilled the pinto-cranberry beans on your future, and at least you were brave enough to try with me. You are moo juice, but I am lactose-sensitive sir. And I am just beryllium and tin, waiting for the macha man from the Red Sea with big hands to distill himself in crowds. 

* 

I’ve learned God’s mercy in Kentucky Fried Chickens, in ballooning, white split-level cottage houses, in yellow, sun-dried brick school halls with sash barred windows, in the commercial freezer basement of a halal deli in Edison, in the one bedroom, one bathroom ceiling apartment of Ivy Hill Park Apartments when, even after considering eloping with a Japense-Korean boy who was not gorgeous but still felt like the noor of God, even after plodding around my sweaty cousins splitting pimples in a choli of vicuna wool, mulberry silk, koigu kersti cashmere, and petco patterned bells, even after hollering about Leila Hatami Iranian comedy films and Guy Ferrari’s Botticelli Birth of Venus tattoo, even after pretending that I am some liberal escort in a godless municipal, I still breathe pure oxygen at a rate of sixteen breaths per minute. I did not learn this mercy and this rahman behind pastel chastity dupattas and Pepsi pop-tops 

26 

and Soviets in Kabul and Persian cavalry armor and plops of Taliban lead-antimony alloy in the mushy brains of Swat Valley school girls and a night in Masjid-e-Aqsa and pilgrimages to Medina under the title of hijra and trains in Lahore from Amritsar encumbered with disfigured, corrupted wives and their 

27 

castrated husbands and their slogans of Jinnah’s “You are free to go to your temples” and campaigns with Ottomans kneeling to the Templars with their burnt pregnant wives at the adult teeth of the Mongols and conspiracies with last Mughal prince, Bahadur Shah Zafar, paralyzed and choked by the British. 

25“Noor” is the Arabic term for “light.” 

26“Rahman” is the Arabic term for “graciousness.” 

27“Hijra” is an Arabic term that refers to the journey of the prophet Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina in the year 622.

mercenaries like the baqaras Shahnawaz and the hafiz with the organic grazing fields sacrifice for Eid al-Adha and dehydrated in brittle, parched Arab springs and dismembered by royal mercenaries in a Saudi consulate in Istanbul and in between Houthi believing youth phalanges and by the arrival of an acrobatic Portugese fleet who arrest sultanahs so that they can politely ask in please, dear customers and yes, ma'ams to concede the slaves’ East Indian trade. Somehow, by the mojza of God, even after seventeen 

28 

years since my birth one solstice morning, I still have the atoms, protons, electrons, and neutrons of three-hundred bones and thirty-two primary teeth and four wisdom teeth and I can still prostate five times a day to the Nafud desert, knowing that, with my virgin, un-pierced nose canals to the janamaz smelling 

29 

like hot honey ginger lemonade, this is the closest to God I will ever be in this life. 

* 

What can I say other than that I will not be among those on al-qiyamah who question God about his apparent detachment to the genocides of the tribal homelands and global pandemics. 

28“Mojza” is the Urdu term for miracle. 

29“Janamaz” is the Arabic term for prayer mat.