Tripping on Tears (18 page)

It was while browsing that I noticed Kareena. I guess she was doing the same. I was the first to see her, and considered turning and walking away. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time, and really, what did we have to say to one another; I really wasn’t up to a gab session talking about Safia. Safia was our shared experience, and also our shared pain. I considered fading away and exiting the bookstore, but then changed my mind, so I said “Hello.”

Kareena was upset; I could see she was not happy to see me, although I didn’t understand why. Was she still upset I never gave her Safia’s belongings? She almost seemed dismissive of me, and for some reason, that bothered me. What was it with these South Asians that I was so easily ignored?

“Are you angry with me?” I asked her.

I should have just walked away and chalked it up to Kareena being Kareena; I really should have; I should have known nothing good was going to come from an exchange between the two of us.

Kareena just looked at me, the anger in her eyes. I’d had enough; I’d never thought she was playing with a full deck.

“Whatever,” I said, as I turned to walk away.

“You killed Safia,” I heard her say as I started to walk away. Those words stopped me in my tracks.

“You killed her,” she said.

I turned to face Kareena. I wanted to tell her to go to hell, but I also wanted to know what the hell she was going on about.

“Are you out of your mind?” I said, approaching her. “Have you gone crazy? I loved Safia, still do.”

“You haven’t heard?” she asked.

“Heard what?”

“I guess you haven’t; why would you? You’re back in your cozy little world.”

“What the hell are you going on about?” I asked.

“The rumors,” she said.

I just looked at her with a blank expression on my face. I had no idea what she was talking about.

“About Safia.”

“I have absolutely no connection to Safia’s world anymore now that she’s gone; how would I know anything? What are these rumors?”

I could see Kareena didn’t know whether or not she should tell me; she did.

“It wasn’t a robbery the night Safia was killed. It was her family,” she said.

I didn’t know what I was hearing.
Her family?

“The police haven’t been able to prove anything; there have never been any cameras in the store, but within the community it’s been rumored that Safia’s brother, Saif, killed her at his parent’s request. An honor killing.”

“Jesus Christ,”
I thought. An honor killing; I’d heard of those; there had been some high profile cases regarding honor killings in the news over the years, but Safia? Her brother stabbing her to death?

“She brought dishonor to her family by seeing you and moving in with you. She’d disgraced them in the eyes of their community. The only way for them to bring honor back to the family was to take care of Safia; punish her for her sins.”

“This can’t be true,” I said in disbelief. “This is insane.”

Kareena just looked at me, intensely.

“This is what’s being said privately; amongst her parent’s community,” she said. “I believe the police questioned the family, but they’re all providing alibis for one another, and there’s no proof who killed her, but, this is what’s being said. Safia died because of you; if she’d never met you, she’d be alive today. I’d still have my best friend. You killed her.”

Kareena didn’t wait for my reaction; she turned and walked away, quickly. I just stood there like an idiot, Kareena’s words echoing in my head. I was numb – dazed. Had my love killed the woman I loved?

CHAPTER
Sixteen

“WHAT
The
fuck is an honor killing?”

I’d been asking myself the same damned question.

“Do you believe it?”

I didn’t know what to tell Duncan. Did I believe it?

“This friend of hers, she could be messing with you.”

“But to what end?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Women,” he simply said.

Duncan and I had been turning it over and over in our minds for most of the evening. After Kareena had walked away, I didn’t know what to do with myself. If what she had told me was true...well, if what she had told me was true, I didn’t know what to do about it – assuming there was anything I could do.

An honor killing?
I’d heard the concept discussed on the radio; there was one case in which a man and his son were convicted for drowning his three daughters, the son’s sisters, in a car, simply because the father felt the daughters were becoming too Westernized. Killed because they no longer favored some backwoods idealism and thinking, and had brought themselves up to speed with the modern world, and tried to find their place within it? The father and son had tried to make it look like a car accident, the three girls drowned in a car that had slid off the road into a lake, but something went wrong, the police became suspicious, and the facts played out such that the father and son were found guilty of the three homicides - guilt of committing an honor killing.

An honor killing?

I guess if you put the word ‘honor’ in front of murder it’s supposed to make it all right. I remember listening to a discussion about the same on the radio and feeling a little pissed off that they used the word ‘honor’ to distinguish the actions of these killers, as while there’s never any honor in taking another’s life, there was an attempt to distinguish it as different from any other murder – almost as if trying to justify it. There have been a million different reasons over the centuries and decades as to why one person has taken another person’s life. There have been a million different attempts at the justification for taking another person’s life. When you get right down to it, killing is killing; whatever reason you have, it’s still a crime and you’re still committing the act of murder. You can try and gussy it up however you want, but it all comes down to the same thing – you’re guilty of murder.

“Do you honestly believe that Safia’s parents could really resort to killing her, because she wasn’t doing what they wanted her to do?” asked Duncan.

“I really don’t know what they’re capable of,” I answered. It was true, I’d never been allowed to get to know them, so I had no idea what they were really like. Based on how they had treated their daughter, however, I had formed my own opinion as to their character. “If they disowned her, maybe they could be guilty of this.”

“They murdered their own daughter because they disapproved of you; the man she was dating?” he said, trying to understand the concept.

“From what I understand,” I said.

“Jesus, if that were the case, I could be classified a serial killer. Do you know how many fathers couldn’t stand the sight of me when I showed up to take their daughters out on dates during high school and after? I’d have been a walking death trap.”

I really didn’t know what to think. I couldn’t imagine for the life of me anything I could do that would have prompted my parents to murder me; okay, sure, during my more rebellious teenage years, if I think back on them carefully, I could probably recall seeing a hint of murder in both my parent’s eyes as they tried to deal with me, and I’m sure many times they’d wanted to whack me for being such an arrogant teenage asshole, but they didn’t; hell, they didn’t even turn to drinking, which would have been understandable. No, they just dealt with me the best they could – which I imagine entailed summoning up a great deal of patience. Whether they remembered their own teenage years, when they thought they knew it all, or they just knew I was going through a phase and would eventually outgrow it, I don’t know, but in all that time, despite a few arguments and threats of groundings, they never even laid a hand on me. My parents let me embrace my arrogance, and while in some cases they attempted to warn me, they let me go out there and make my own mistakes; and when I did make mistakes, if I needed them, they were there for me, ready to help clean up the mess, confident that finally I might have learned something. Maybe that’s the secret to parenting. You do your best to steer your kids in the right direction, but at the same time, you also have to be ready to let them make mistakes; praise them when they do well and be there to help them when they fail. You just have to hope those moments of failure aren’t bad enough that they’ve ruined their future or something of that magnitude.

As I think back on it now, without even knowing it, my parents instilled in me common sense. They didn’t beat me over the head with it, but growing up and observing the way they handled themselves and situations, I learnt something. The same was true for many of my friends. We ran a little wild as teenagers, while in high school, and even college, but we knew when we were pushing it too far. We took stupid chances from time to time, but not as many as we’d like to glorify in our minds as we recall our wild and crazy youth. We had an understanding of right and wrong, and we also had a desire not to disappoint or let our parents down. I guess the only truly stupid thing I did, and when I did it I knew it was wrong, was having unprotected sex the first time I ever had sex with a girl. That’s the kind of mistake one can make that could ruin their future
– at least alter it dramatically. At that point I hadn’t been thinking clearly, but had gotten caught up in the moment – that and having a naked girl with me who was going to let me do something like that with her – it was all too heady for a teenage boy to deal with – and think straight.

My parents instilled in me the knowledge of right and wrong; their actions, and how they raised my siblings and I, also helped develop and determine our character. Why couldn’t Safia’s parents see that? You can’t keep a tight rein on your children forever; eventually you have to let them go out in the world and cope on their own; if you’ve raised them right, they’ll be fine. Why couldn’t her parents trust they had raised her right; instilled in her those core values they cherish. Safia wasn’t a wild girl, and she wasn’t someone who slept around – as you recall, we waited ourselves. She actually had a very good head on her shoulders. Knowing that, why couldn’t they allow that although they didn’t understand why she was dating someone outside their faith, and it wasn’t what they wished, that Safia, in doing so, would not have been dating someone whom she hadn’t determined was worthy of dating and giving her heart to? If she saw something in me; she saw something good, otherwise she never would have given her complete self to me. Safia’s parents knew how they raised her, and if she said I was all right, shouldn’t they have accepted her evaluation, after all, her decision was based on their years of nurturing and raising her and influencing who she would become?

Whether Safia’s parents knew it or not, she was who she was because of them; so could they actually have murdered their own daughter, just because she had gone against their wishes and dated a man outside their faith; could her defiance in seeing me be so horrible that it signed her death warrant?

I just couldn’t see it.

“She said Safia dishonored them by seeing you? Dishonored? What the hell does that mean?” asked Duncan.

I could see that as much trouble as I was having wrapping my head around the issue, so was Duncan.

“Aren’t these all backward notions?” he asked. “I mean, isn’t this like something from the olden days; the 19
th
Century or earlier, when people were a lot more simplistic in their thinking?”

“When you say simplistic, do you mean stupid?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“I mean what’s dishonor?” repeated Duncan. “I’ve got a brother-in-law who’s a Dallas Cowboys fan. As far as I’m concerned that brings dishonor to our family. Fucking Cowboys.”

I smiled. Both Duncan and I were San Francisco Forty-Niners fans and for the life of us couldn’t understand why anyone would support any other team.

“Is there some sort of sliding scale on this honor shit?” he continued. “I mean, is it like your credit rating? ‘Oh dear, your daughter’s dating a white boy and he isn’t Muslim, we’re going to have to deduct points from your score for that. Sorry, you’re no longer a valued customer.’ Is it like when you lose points on your driver’s license, her parent’s just had to live with the dishonor for three years, and the points and status are returned to them? You lose honor because your daughter is dating a white guy, but you gain it back when you tell everyone that you’ve had her killed because of it? What kind of fucked up reasoning is that?”

I had no answers for him. I know he was being crazy, throwing out ridiculous scenarios, but the concept deserved it. Believing there was any honor in taking another person’s life was just insane – a ridiculous and warped concept that could only be viewed as insane.

Could Safia’s parents have actually had her killed?
Could they?

“This is crazy,” said Duncan. “So, what are you going to do about it? What can you do about it? What’s your next move?”

Good question.

I decided I had to go back to the source – Kareena.

After she had left so abruptly during our last meeting, I wasn’t sure she’d be interested in meeting with me. When it took several phone calls and messages before she even answered the phone, I figured there was even less likely a chance she’d want to get together. Could she really believe that Safia’s death was my fault? We had done nothing wrong; you don’t kill people for falling in love. It was irrational to blame me for what happened; if anything, I was trying to offer Safia a life – hopefully one full of happiness.

Eventually Kareena answered her phone; she must have figured out I was determined and wasn’t going to go away, so it was either answer the phone or get a new one. In that case, I’d just have to track her down.

Everything that had been said in the bookstore had been said so quickly; and in my case came out of the blue. I needed to sit down with Kareena to determine how serious she was regarding what she had said. How strong were the rumors? How believable, or was this just something that was out there, a rumor that had gained some notoriety, but generally was believed to be false? I needed to know a little bit more about it all and whether she liked it or not, she was my only source in the matter.

It took some encouraging, but I finally got Kareena to agree to meet with me. While she stated she had nothing more to say to me, I figured that wasn’t the case; while it took some goading to get her to meet, I’d gotten to know Kareena pretty well during my time with Safia and I just didn’t see her as the kind of woman who would do anything unless she really wanted to do it. We decided to meet at a coffee shop near my house.

“That was quite a bomb you dropped on me the last time I saw you,” I said after we’d ordered our drinks and sat down at the table. I’d considered some small talk; maybe easing into the subject matter, but in the long run, I figured we’d both appreciate the direct approach and pure candor in our responses.

“You took me by surprise. I didn’t think we’d ever run into one another again,” she said.

“Same here.”

We sat in silence for a couple of seconds; no doubt thoughts racing through both our heads.

“I always got the impression that maybe you didn’t like me much. That you tolerated me for Safia’s sake.”

“I did,” she answered simply.

“I didn’t go looking for Safia and she didn’t go looking for me. Things just happened. It was all out of our control.”

“I know,” she said. “Listen, it’s not that I didn’t necessarily like you, it was just that, you were bad for Safia. I was worried for her.”

I just looked questioningly at Kareena.

“You didn’t grow up with her and her family. You had to know her parents,” she continued. “My parents are strict, or at least they try to be, but they’re not even close to as strict as Safia’s parents are. I mean, her parents, well, they’re almost fanatical.”

Kareena laughed.

“They didn’t even want Safia hanging out with me,” she continued. “Thought I was a bad influence; that my parents were failing me, and somehow I would corrupt their daughter.”

“And did you?” I asked, a smile on my face.

Kareena smiled. “No, quite the opposite; Safia was a good influence on me; probably kept me from turning into a real hellion. What her parents didn’t know, and didn’t bother to notice, was they had a really good daughter. She loved them and cared about what they thought. Do you know how many times I told her she should just ignore her parents, they were being unreasonable, and she should just do what she wanted and to hell with them? Thousands. But every time, she took into account what they wanted and acted accordingly. She wasn’t the rebellious type.”

Kareena paused to take a sip of her herbal tea.

“At least not until she met you,” she said. “That’s how I know she must have really loved you. She’d have never defied her parents unless it really meant something to her. She just wasn’t that type.”

“I never wanted her to defy them. I just wanted them to accept the circumstances. They didn’t even have to accept me, just so long as they continued to love her. I would have been happy with that,” I explained.