A Sister to Honor (2 page)

“The men will eat alone,” said Khalid.

“We will eat where I say we will eat,” snapped his father. Bending to retrieve the mail, he slit open another envelope. Farishta hovered. “Afia writes,” he said, replacing his reading glasses on his nose, “that she is taking four science classes this fall, and she studies so hard her head hurts. What she wouldn't give right now, she writes, for a good tikka dinner and her own bed. This does not sound like a girl who is being shown off.”

Khalid grunted. “That's because you have not seen the photograph.”

“What photograph?”

“On a certain website. You would find it interesting, Baba.”

“Is it”—Farishta heard the hesitation in her husband's voice—“objectionable?”

“Judge for yourself. Come with me to Ali Bhai's.”

Farishta could not constrain herself. “Afia is a modest girl,” she said. “Shahid sees to her safety.”

“I'm sure he does.” This was Saqib, leaving the television to scoop some nuts out of the bowl. “Only they are gone so long, it is easy to be fearful. Why not bring them home, Tofan? For Maryam's wedding.”

Tofan frowned. “Bring them home? But the expense—”

“Nonsense. The price of your cotton soared this fall.”

“Yes, Baba,” Khalid put in. “Why not celebrate? I would love to see my brilliant stepbrother.”

Farishta caught the note of sarcasm. At the same time she thought of Sobia, wanting her sister home to whisper with her about blooming into a young woman. “I don't know,” she said hesitantly, “if they can spare the time from their studies.”

Thoughtfully Tofan folded his reading glasses and tucked Afia's letter into his breast pocket. “They may have a break,” he said as if to himself, “in December.”

“You bring her home,” Khalid said, rising, “and I'll ask her about that photo.”

Roshan had disengaged from the television and come to pour himself a glass of water from the pitcher by the door. “You bring your daughter home,” he echoed in his sonorous voice, “mothers of many sons in Nasirabad will think you are prepared to entertain proposals.”

“Hardly prepared,” said Farishta quickly. “She has three more years of school.”

“Nothing wrong with proposals,” said her husband. “Khalid, where are you going?”

“I told you. To Ali Bhai's, the Internet café. I'll be back for dinner.”

“Mind you are. This is not a hotel.”

“And shall I serve out here?” Farishta asked again as her stepson shut the door to the
hujra
behind him. “Or will you join—”

Tofan gazed after his firstborn. He sighed and pulled at his mustache. Then he turned back to her. “Bring the food out here,” he said, his voice suddenly wistful. “Tell my daughters I will come see them when they have finished their homework. How is Sobia . . . how is she feeling?”

“She will be fasting at Ramadan.”

“Ah.” He cast a look at the door to the kitchen, as if his daughter had left through it and would not return.

“And will Shahid and Afia—”

Tofan's eyebrows still drew together. “We should embrace our children while we can,” he said. “And show the doubters how wrong they are.”

A
t the start of every season, Lissy Hayes gave both her varsity squash teams the honor talk. It was corny as hell, made worse by how much she believed it. But she couldn't stop. Even though she was athletic director, wrapped in the power of her office, she never gave lectures other than this one. Bringing the women and men together in the big conference room next to her office, she used the whiteboard just like a professor.

“Honor,” she began, “is one of the oldest concepts we have. It comes before love. It comes before victory. It comes from the same Latin-French root as honesty, and honesty is one of its chief components.” She wrote
honesty
on the whiteboard. “In our sport, that means you don't call a let when you couldn't make it to the ball. You call yourself on obstruction when you obstruct. When you're judging, you call the fouls on your teammate the same as on his opponent. And no, it doesn't matter what the other guy is doing. Dishonesty needs its tubes tied, it shouldn't breed.

“What else makes for honor?” she went on. Tall, her blond hair spiky, formidable in sea-blue Enright University warm-ups, she paced the conference room. Enright's athletes were the Rockwells, from Norman Rockwell, who made his name in the Berkshires; their logo was a jutting promontory of rock from the hill overlooking the campus. “Does winning make for honor?” The new recruits started to shake their heads. They knew they weren't supposed to admit how much they wanted to win. “Well, sure,” Lissy surprised them by saying. “If you win by playing your best game, you demonstrate your respect for your opponent, who wants nothing less—nothing less—than your best.”
Respect
, she wrote on the board. “Pandering to an opponent, throwing him or her a few points, that's dishonorable. Giving up on a squash match when you're down two games and nine points, that's dishonorable. The point of a competitive game is to compete, and to compete with everything you've got is to act with honor, and don't let anyone tell you different.

“Then there's courage,” she said, adding it to the list. “Now, this ain't war. You're not getting shot at. But you are trying a back-wall boast when you're down ten-three, or you're pounding the rail until you grab your moment. You're not playing wild, but you're not playing safe. You're playing with heart, which is the only honorable way to do anything in this life.”

To her left sat Shahid Satar, her first starter on the men's team. Squash was the only sport Lissy coached, though she could have taken on tennis, soccer, field hockey in a pinch. Everyone in athletics called her Coach Hayes, which was more than fine by her. She knew all the players on both men's and women's squads—knew them intimately, their loves and hates, their daily habits, their family backgrounds, what foods they refused and what jealousies they harbored, what drew forth their greatest effort. In the three years since he came from a remote town in Pakistan to this small town in the Berkshires, Shahid had done more than his best for Enright. He had given Lissy back her sense of magic. With Shahid, she'd come to feel, any given moment held the possibility of perfection, of the opening to a new world. She hadn't felt this way since she tore her Achilles in the midst of a streak at the Cleveland Classic, twelve years ago, and walked away from the lights of her own squash career. So she glanced at Shahid as she continued, and in return received his slow, enigmatic smile.

“Integrity”—she added the word to the board—“refers to wholeness. If you compromise one part of your life to serve another, you have no integrity, and you are playing without honor. This means the athlete who cheats on her exams is a dishonorable athlete, even if nothing about the exams shows up on the squash court. It means the athlete who stays up all night with a friend at the hospital has to weigh the cost of coming onto the court. Got to be honest—remember that part, about honesty?—about his ability to do his best. Bowing out may be the most honorable thing. On the other hand, staying up all night with a friend who's drinking herself into a stupor because her boyfriend broke up with her? Then calling at noon to say you're not a hundred percent for the match? That's a lack of integrity. So to play with honor you have to know yourself, every bit. You've got to keep that self whole.

“And the team.” She was tiring now, her voice going husky, keeping the speech rolling because it all had to be said, though voicing this many words at once seemed to knock the stuffing out of her. Writing
Loyalty
on the board, she went on. “Keeping the team whole. Loyalty and honor, you know, they're like fraternal twins. They don't share quite the same DNA. The player who showboats, the player who sneers at his teammate who just muffed the match, the player who entertains her sorority sisters with tales out of her squash squad—she is disloyal. She's a blight on the team. How do we treat her? With honor. We do everything we can to get the glue working again, and if we have to let her go we do so with a lot of pain. The opposite is the player who does something magical and invisible for one of his teammates, who gets no credit for it but does it out of pure loyalty, and we all feel his honor, it's like a warm breeze.”

She squared her shoulders. She glanced at Shahid, and at Margot, the lead on the women's squad, a chunky fighter from Minnesota. These were her kids. “Loyalty can be dangerous, too. Confirming a let when there was no let, because your teammate needs it so bad? Dishonorable. Informing the coach that your teammate plagiarized, or hawked cocaine, or left the scene of an accident? Honorable. Yeah, I know,” she said, when Yanik and Gus, her up-and-coming starters, shook their heads. “There's a code. You deal with your friends first, sure. Do everything to get them to come forward. Only if they don't, then you're being loyal to something that's rotten, and it'll rot your loyalty too. If you feel different about this,” she said, targeting one after the other with her eyes, “you should find a different squad.”

“But you're the A.D.,” a first-year put in, feeling the speech wind down.

“Find another college then,” she said. “There are plenty of sports teams that don't bother with honor. But this is Enright, and we do.”

•   •   •

O
ccasionally an athlete dropped off the squad after the honor speech. Two years ago, she lost her top male recruit, a tall Argentinean who went out for soccer and told those players that the A.D. was a Class A bitch. Six months later, brought up on sexual assault charges after a frat party, he was suspended. So the speech did serve to weed out some bad apples, but it also put a shine on the good ones. Without it, getting them to cohere—a band of brothers, a circle of sisters—felt like herding cats.

•   •   •

T
he first team match of the season, an exhibition against Dartmouth, fell a week after Halloween. Standing in the middle of Court Four, Lissy and the Dartmouth coach, Brad, a sharp-faced pro with a dense tire at his waist and a chip on his shoulder, introduced their teams. The players shook the hands of each player on the opposition and of the coaches, then launched routines of high-fiving, chest-punching, and back-slapping before they broke into paired matches.

“What've you got this season, two Americans?” Brad asked as the guys started warming up.

“Four, counting Tom. He sprained his ankle skateboarding.” Lissy nodded toward a player on the bleachers, among the couple dozen spectators who'd come out. If her kids did well over the season, the numbers would grow.

“You're joking.” Brad moved his finger down the list of Lissy's players on his clipboard.

“Yanik's from Virginia,” Lissy said without looking. “Gus Schneider is from right here in Devon, Jamil Brown's from Queens.”

“He's Jamaican!”

“His parents are. It's called the melting pot, Brad.”

“Well, yours make a spicy stew.”

“They're student athletes. Like yours.”

Brad was assistant A.D. at Dartmouth, which had a much higher profile than Enright. But if Lissy's teams beat a couple of Ivies, she'd be serious competition for the Brads of the world. She beamed at him and went to watch Court One.

Shahid looked fluid. Two weeks ago he'd placed first in the prelims, setting the individual rankings for the season and bolstering his confidence. Andros, the guy he was playing, was a thick-necked South African; Brad recruited abroad, like Lissy, but among the Anglo and Aryan sort. Two years ago, Andros had called Lissy's Kurdish player, Afran, a raghead. Afran had almost lost his cool, but Shahid had stepped in, made a joke of it. He helped the others keep a lid on epithets. They got plenty, both from opposing players and from the crowd. Worse, when they first started at Enright, they got it from each other. Since forming her team, Lissy had learned more hate terms than she knew existed. Desi, banana, camel jockey, chi-chi, cholo, kaffir, paki, malaun, slopehead—they'd razzed each other on and off the court until Lissy decided to begin the year with a shouting match: Every offensive name they could think of got tossed out, never to be heard again. When she witnessed Shahid, the paki, go hoarse with cheering for Chander, the malaun, she punched one hand into the palm of the other, flush with success.

“We don't just preach diversity,” went her standard line to the donors she was sent to woo. “We play it.” In the endless,
endless
meetings about the capital campaign, the
d
-word,
diversity
, always brought a marked stiffening from Don Shears, Enright's president. But since she had taken over as A.D., Enright's athletic gifting had almost doubled. Maybe the alums weren't such bigoted blockheads as the administration imagined.

“Keep it flowing,” she shouted to Shahid. She never looked at him without a certain softening, almost like a bruise, in her heart. It wasn't simply the assurance with which he played, or his birdlike qualities, the way he flew diagonally over the court to retrieve a drop shot or how his brows became a hawk's brow as he stretched for the volley. It was mostly the look of wonder he wore as the ball arced high in a cross-court lob coming down to the back wall, coming to him. As if physics itself astonished and seduced him.

She watched him finish the point with a nick that died off the right wall, then turned to the others. Afran, at number two, was down 0–4 to a big lug of a kid recruited from Andover. The other courts were trading points. She moved into the bleachers to shake hands with a few stalwarts from the faculty. On the fourth bleacher she spotted Shahid's sister, Afia, a shy girl who had come to the States last year to attend Smith. She was wearing a loose purple tunic over a black turtleneck, with loose black pants and flats. The only parts of her exposed were her face and hands. No wonder, Lissy thought, she couldn't recruit women from countries like Pakistan. “Hey there,” Lissy said, making her way over. Afia was flanked by a redheaded girl sporting a Dartmouth sweatshirt. “Early in the season, for fans.”

“I am helping Shahid to study tonight,” said Afia.

“Attagirl. He could use some focus. What's your excuse?” she said to the redheaded girl.

“This is my friend Taylor,” said Afia.

“Got a guy out there, Taylor?”

The redheaded girl grinned. “He's up against Afran.”

“Well, it's just the start.”

She turned back to Afia. Behind her reserve, Lissy had always detected a vibrancy, almost an exultation at the challenge of academics. Such a great thing Shahid had done, giving his sister this chance.

“Your family must be proud of you,” she said now. “And Shahid.” She perched briefly; she needed to get back to the courts.

“Oh, they are proud of Shahid,” the girl said. Her voice cracked a little.

“Come on, Chase!” Taylor jumped up and clapped. Lissy glanced at the scores. Shahid had taken his first game and was on a ninety-second break. But Afran was in trouble. By the time she'd excused herself and made her way back down, the first of his games was over: 11–7, Dartmouth.

Stumbling off the court, Afran collapsed on the bench. Shahid was already crouched by his side. “So,” Lissy said. “What's going on?”

“Just don't have it today, Coach.”

Normally she knew how to do this, to let a player talk his way through defeatism to the other side. “Let's hear it,” she said.

“He's crowding me, you know? So I try cross-courts to get him off the T, but he volleys, and then I'm just hitting straight again, playing defense.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“C'mon, Coach. Don't make me go through this.”

She sighed. This was her third season with Afran. He could be his own worst enemy. “You want me to tell you?”

“I can't do anything right today, okay?”

Shahid leaned in. “You can nick the ball,” he said. “You're rad at that. If he's geared up to cover a drive, he is not ready to dash up and cover the nick.”