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“This is great stuff,” I said. “You don’t understand it?”

“Nope.”

“It’s called Ek nuqte vich gul muqdi e. ‘It is all in One contained.’” I plugged the iPod into Ziad’s laptop so that we could both hear and turned up the volume. “The lyrics are mocking the dogmatically religious,” I said, translating:

Mindless prayer is for the weak

Foolishly fasting is how the breadless save bread

Only the ill-intentioned make loud religious proclamations

Only those make pilgrimages to Mecca that want to avoid daily

chores

You can do ritual a billion times

But that is not the way to the Beloved

Until your heart is pure

Your prostrations are useless

Until you give up idolatry

You will be a stranger to the Beloved.

I continued translating through the thirteen-minute song.

As the song wound down, I muted the volume and unplugged the iPod. “I really like Bulleh Shah,” I said. “He was the most confrontational of the mystics. He had no time for the orthotoxics and the theocunts. If he were alive today, he’d definitely be a reformist.” I turned toward Ziad, expecting him to have gotten as much kick out of the lyrics as I did.

Instead, I saw that he had gotten out of bed and paced to the corner of the room, where he was running his fingers over his dresser. I thought I heard him sighing; sure enough, when I caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror there were tears running down his cheeks. He turned to me, his eyelashes wet and his lips quivering. He snatched the iPod from my hand, took a deep breath as if preparing to dive, and said simply, “Shut up with your reformist nonsense.”

Feeling like I’d been slapped, I backed out of the shimmering blue room.

10

The fight over Bulleh Shah increased the tension between Ziad and me. We started avoiding one another. I stayed up late at night so I wouldn’t have to see him in the morning, and he retired to his room almost as soon as he got home. If we walked past each other in the hall, we simply averted our eyes or walked in the other direction.

Things became so chilly that I called the airline to try to advance my ticket home.

It didn’t go well. Apparently if I wanted to change my itinerary, I’d have to forfeit my return ticket and buy a new one.

“At full price?” I asked, horrified.

“Yes,” said the attendant.

When I argued against the exorbitant pricing, the attendant told me to take it up with the airline’s field office and hung up.

I had no way of finding the office on my own. I could get a cab, I supposed, but Ziad had given me severe warnings about the taxi service in the area. Some were not trustworthy.

My only option, then, was to ask Ziad to take me. However, this I couldn’t bring myself to do; it would be unseemly and inexcusably rude, given the fragile state of our relationship.

My unwillingness to engage in further confrontation with Ziad over a ride to the airline, combined with the fact that I’d have to pay nearly a thousand dollars just to advance my ticket a few weeks, made me drop the idea of leaving early.

If I couldn’t leave, I could at least renew my effort to improve things. I decided to buy a gift for Ziad and try to patch things up.

The DVD seller down the block convinced me to buy from him a new Pakistani film called Khuda Kay Liye, or In the Name of God, saying that it was the “total best film ever!” He even threw in the soundtrack CD for free. I thought it would make a good gift.

I’d heard of the film. When it was released in Pakistan, it had received numerous fatwas from radical clerics and death threats from demagogues because it discussed difficult themes such as jihad, fundamentalism, forced marriage, and marital rape. Moviegoers had to pass through metal detectors in case they were planning on blowing up the theater, and they ran the risk of being killed by extremists merely for watching. Nevertheless, the film ended up being a hit inside the country and abroad.

I figured the film would intrigue Ziad enough to breach the