A Sister to Honor (8 page)

Shahid frowned. “Were you in hospital?”

“My comrades know how to heal such things.”

“What comrades? In the madrassa?”

Khalid's lip twisted. “We are an unsettled country,” he said. “Someone has to be ready.”

Shahid lifted his bag onto a charpoy next to Khalid's. He did not want to know what Khalid was ready for, or how he had been wounded. Khalid and his jihadi friends had not dictated the changes that had come to Nasirabad, but the parallels were unsettling. On the walls of the elementary school hung pictures of the faculty. When Baba had been a student there, his teachers had posed with uncovered heads, the men in suits and the women in knee-length skirts and chunky heels. By the time Afia graduated, the female faculty was reduced to three, all in shalwar kameez, wrapped in dupattas, even across their noses. Shahid remembered his mother driving the car, but now she went out only with Baba and in niqab, her warm eyes like bruises framed in black cloth. The madrassa where Khalid began his studies had been built by the Saudis while Shahid was in Peshawar. So the changes were a slow tide seeping across the province. They were going back, Shahid had heard, to how things used to be, before the Britishers came and began corrupting Pashtun ways. He didn't mind. But none of it seemed worth what Khalid and his friends were willing to do, the great fight they were gearing up to wage.

“Baba says he'll be talking to you about the farm,” Shahid said now.

“I respect my father,” Khalid said. “But I have greater work to do. We can't all be playing games while the drones rain down.”

Shahid pressed his lips together. No point in a retort. Khalid had started resenting him even before he'd been chosen for Peshawar, from the moment he came into the world. All because Shahid had a living mother. No, that wasn't all. There was Afia, too. All their growing up, they had been inseparable—picking mulberries together, raising lambs together, dreaming of America together—where Khalid had been older and alone. And then three years ago, Shahid had hatched his plan to bring Afia over to Smith College.

Had any of them stopped, Shahid wondered now, to think of Khalid, still living at home then? Had it been Shahid and Khalid in America, there might not be this awful tension, not to mention worry over a damning photo on the Smith website. But Khalid hated
Amreeka
. And Shahid had felt too frightened and guilty to reach out to his brother, to claim him.

These days his parents thought Shahid could go anywhere, do anything. But it was a relief to find himself among the men of his family. Here in the
hujra
you could relax; you could say what you thought. No blond women smirking at you or leaning forward to show the soft tops of their breasts. In the corner, the TV played last night's field hockey match, with Shahid's cousin Azlan shouting and shaking his fist at the center forward. “Two left feet! Why do they put him out there? He handles the stick like a club! Fool!” Tea was set up on the low center table, with plates of almonds and dates. Shahid's uncles pressed him to eat and asked about the journey. They lounged on their charpoys, their feet up and backs against the great bolstered pillows. This afternoon, after the Friday
jumah
prayer and a good fish lunch, they would return to work—Uncle Roshan to his dental practice, Uncle Saqib to the textile mill. For now Shahid had come home, enough reason to take the morning off.

“Your final year.” His father put a brown hand on Shahid's jeans. “And a shot at that American title, hey? Will they televise it?”

Shahid smiled. “No, Baba. Squash is not such a big sport in America. But there will be a video. I can send you the link.”

Baba held up a hand. “Don't talk to me about links. Links are for golf, which I do not play.”

“What comes after?” asked Roshan. He was Azlan's father and the most intellectual of Shahid's relations. Even now he balanced a book in his lap, his finger holding his place. “You'll come back to Peshawar, take over that club? Or is it on to the Olympics?”

“Squash still isn't an Olympic sport, Uncle,” said Shahid. “I'm trying for the MBA program at Harvard. They've asked me about an assistant coach job.”

“Harvard.” Tofan nodded, as if he had suspected exactly this. He turned to the others. “Do you hear the boy? The best school in America.”

“A school that takes its money,” said Khalid, sitting cross-legged on the rug, “from the Amreekan military. Who send their drones into our mountains.”

“Harvard is not attacking us.” There it was, the retort. Shahid had failed to hold it back. “America is a big place, Khalid lala,” he said.

“Maybe I should visit.”

“It would be my honor.”

“It is good to know your enemy in their own country.”

“Stop sniping at each other.” Baba held up a hand, but his eyes darted only to Shahid.

“Look!” cried Azlan. “Did you see that? Offsides! Did you see it? Where is the official? He's a Sikh, isn't he? See? Look there!”

Shahid's uncle Saqib was fat and slow. The youngest, he had always been gentle with Shahid, more like a plump aunty than an uncle. He leaned in toward the TV. “Looks like a fight brewing,” he said.

Khalid poured himself a cup of tea and brought a plate of raisins over to Shahid's charpoy. He leaned close. “If I visit, as you call it,” he said in a low voice, “it will be to rectify the situation there.”

Shahid chuckled to conceal his nerves. “What situation, Khalid lala?”

“You know.” Khalid lowered his head. He had a longer face than Shahid's, fine cheekbones, ears that curled out a bit from his head, like their father's. He spoke into his beard. “Our sister,” he said, “has been dishonored.”

“Really.” Shahid fought to keep his breathing even. “Where and by whom?”

“I've seen the photo,” Khalid muttered. “Her with her paw in that monkey's paw. I've told Baba about it.”

Shahid stiffened. “Did you show it to him?”

“I was waiting,” Khalid said with satisfaction, “for you.”

On the screen, the officials were pushing their way into the scuffle. Azlan yelled at the set. Baba and his brothers kept their eyes on the game but had started talking about the farm. “It's only an advertisement,” Shahid said, “for a college.”

“It is your sister holding a man. Who is this man?”

“She is not
holding
him. And I don't care.” A lie: Shahid had pored over the photo, the boy's arm bare up to the elbow. “We don't notice stuff like that in the States,” he said. He sounded, he thought, like a Western tool.

“They will notice it here.” Khalid jerked his head toward their relatives. “And there is no
nanawate
for
tora
.”

Shahid stared in both mock and real horror. No sanctuary, Khalid had said, actually said, for fornication. Those were the words of
pashtunwali
, of the Pashtun code, and they were fighting words. The same fear he had felt when he first saw the Smith homepage crept back over him. “They'll notice it,” he whispered, “only if you show it to them. And shame casts a wide net.”

“You need to control her.”

“I do.”

Deliberately Shahid rose, stretched. He always got off on the wrong foot with Khalid, especially when jet lag made him foggy. He had left New York just before midnight on Wednesday; now it was midmorning two days later, midnight for him. Tomorrow the men would go to the groom's home, over the hills in Mardan. Afia and the women would hold the
mehndi
, to henna the bride's hands. He would see little of his sister until the third wedding day. Maryam was marrying a government doctor, but a doctor nonetheless, and her family was relieved. Unlike Afia, Maryam wasn't so desirable—her skin was too dark, her hairline too low on her forehead, and her father ran a restaurant. The bride price for Afia, with her blue eyes and fair skin, and her father's newly rebuilt farm, would be much more substantial. “Baba,” he said, to turn the conversation away from Khalid, “who are Maryam's new people? How are we related to them? Are they of our
khel
?”

Baba rolled his eyes. “If you stayed home instead of roaming the world with your racquet,” he said in mock derision, “you would know about your own clan.”

“This is your grandfather's sister's husband's family,” said Roshan evenly. Keeping his eyes on the TV screen, he nodded for emphasis. “Our
khel
, yes, an honorable family.”

“Maybe one of them will spot our Afia,” Khalid said from his corner, “during the dancing.”

“Now, now,” said fat Saqib. “No men allowed at the rukhsati
.
”

“And yet you found my mother there. Didn't you, Baba?” Khalid said.

A look of pain crossed Baba's face. Why did Khalid take every chance to do this, to bring up his mother who had been dead now for two decades? “She was a lovely girl, an innocent girl,” Baba said. “She stood out.”

“And the same for your stepdaughter!” Roshan said. He punched his brother lightly on the shoulder. “What is Afia now, nineteen?”

“Twenty in January,” Shahid said. “But she's got two more years after this—”

“High time,” said Khalid. “While she still looks—what did you say, Baba?—innocent.”

Shahid felt the sting and the poison behind it. He looked at his brother sharply. But Khalid was gazing into the middle distance, out the open gate of the
hujra
into the orchard. Did Khalid care about their
ghairat
? Or did he care more about cutting Shahid down, and if Afia now provided the knife to do it, he would use her and honor be damned?
It's not been what you think over there
, he wanted to say to Khalid.
It's been hard, it's been lonely. We need each other.

Rising to pour tea, Baba called through the door, and Tayyab emerged. Setting down a fresh tea tray, he bobbed his skullcap at Shahid.

“Asalaam aleikum, Tayyab,” Shahid said.

“Wa aleikum salaam, Shahid sahib,” said the old man.

“How goes it with your girls? Have they—”

His father put a hand on his arm. “Thank you, Tayyab,” he said. His face a map of wrinkles, the old man bobbed again as he removed the old tray. “Died,” Baba said when Shahid frowned at him.

“Childbirth, one of the two who married,” Roshan added. He adjusted his glasses, a quirky grin on his face. “And the other got a kick, didn't she, Tofan?”

“In her big belly, from her father-in-law,” Baba confirmed. He shook his head and sighed. “Never forget seeing Tayyab banging his head against the wall like that. Moaning about his fate.”

“And his third daughter? Panra?” Shahid asked. Panra was just Afia's age; he remembered playing with her when they were children, her auburn hair the color and texture of cornsilk.

“Still in your uncle Omar's household,” his father said. “They'll be lucky to marry her off, pocked like she is.”

Shahid didn't want to respond to this. “He's got the one son,” he said instead.

“Soft in the head,” said Saqib from his charpoy.

“Worst of it is, Tayyab's going blind,” said Baba. “Diabetes, your mother says. She's tried to hire him an assistant, but he scares them away. Scared we'll replace him. Meanwhile we get cumin instead of cardamom, and the rice overcooked.”

“Kismet,” said Saqib, and they all chuckled. Shahid felt his judgment readjusting, like a shoulder dislocated and popped back into place, the sharp, brief pain of it. This was Nasirabad, not Devon.

Baba poured tea. He was a big man, almost as tall as Shahid, and heavy in the gut these days. He smiled rarely, but when he did it was a soft curl of the lips under his mustache, as if he had waited for just that moment of happiness. His hair was thinning away from his forehead, the skin there tanned from the sun. “Your mother should take some photos of Afia,” he said thoughtfully, “while she is here.”

Khalid pounced. “There's that photo I told you of, Baba.”

Baba's eyebrows lifted. “From America? Is it appropriate, Shahid?”

“What?” Shahid's mind had wandered. Jet lag, he thought. He was trying to remember the cook's eldest daughters. How relieved the old man had been, when they were taken up by husbands. Dead now in childbirth, and of a kick to the belly. How casual it sounded here, a strange little story about the cook. “If you're talking about showing Afia off to a suitor,” he said, avoiding his brother's eyes, “I think we should take photos here. She'll show to good advantage at the wedding.”

Khalid opened his mouth, then shut it. Biding his time, Shahid thought.

“Finally, a goal!” cried Azlan. A shout went up from the television. “That showed them, didn't it, Baba?”

“Just in time, too,” said Saqib. “Time for
jumah
prayer.”

As they rose, Shahid looked at the familiar faces of the men of his family. They thought they knew him. They had traveled to Peshawar, to Lahore and Karachi, to watch him compete. They had mounted him on their shoulders when he brought home a winning plaque. But they had never heard him say how much he feared going to America, how he would never make it professionally, how much he found himself missing Nasirabad, how hard it was for him to sit still and study, how he could never think beyond the next tournament. Since they were little, Afia had been his sole confidante. She was smarter than he, and she knew how she could contribute to the world. He had only to protect her—from the men in America, yes, but also from these men, from men who chuckled over Tayyab's dead daughters, from his family who could not comprehend what things were like, somewhere else.

Passing through the courtyard to head for the mosque, he saw Tayyab's youngest daughter scrubbing the steps. She looked up shyly at the men and went back to her work. How old was the girl now? Twelve, fourteen? How would she manage in the world without a brother to look after her?