Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [62]
I didn’t want to tell them that the name made me feel more American.
“So this would be your nickname?” Pops asked.
“No. I want to change it legally,” I said. “So it gets changed on the school transcripts and for roll call at school and in all my records.”
Pops thought over it for a while and then patted my back. “You’ll need a new Social Security card, I guess, and you’ll have to go to Probate Court. I think you fill out a form there and explain your position to a judge. If he says fine, then I’m fine.”
I was shocked by how easy it had been, all things considered. I pumped my fist and smiled in relief. Only then did I turn to see Ammi’s reaction.
She had moved to the couch and was sitting with her arms folded, pouting.
“I’m not happy about this,” she said ominously. “Your name was Abir ul Islam, and now you’ll be just…Amir? Don’t you care that I rubbed your chest against the walls of the Ka’ba? What about our mannat, our covenant with Allah?”
“Pops said I could do this.”
“Your Pops is wrong this time. You got that name, Abir ul Islam, Perfume of Islam, because you were promised to Islam in Mecca. You were supposed to spread Islam as if it were a fragrance. I rubbed your chest on the Ka’ba,” she repeated.
“Tall tales.”
“No. Do you know that you didn’t start walking until you got to Mecca? What about the fact that during hajj, in the middle of the night, you just got up and went into the desert? What eleven-month-old does that? You were drawn to the places where the Prophet Muhammad walked. Islam—it’s in your blood. You are Abir ul Islam.”
“Don’t Islam-shislam me,” I said. “It’s just Amir.”
7
Amir had a multi-year plan for independence. He was going to apply for college far away from home. He was going to become a player. By the age of twenty-seven he would move to Amsterdam, work for equality at the Human Rights court, and keep a harem.
I applied to schools in New York, Chicago, and California. I used the Internet to befriend girls in those regions, hoping one day to meet them in person. At the same time, I distanced myself from all the backward people in Alabama—all the people I’d been calling my friends.
Then one day I met Una—blue-eyed, blond-haired Una. When she entered my life, I felt as if my plan was finally going someplace.
I met her at an academic achievement banquet held out of town. Her eyes were lively, and there was something of the Wild West in her presence that suggested a rowdy spirit. Her pale face had small freckles equidistant from one another except on one side of her forehead, where they congregated like a constellation. She did all the things I associated with all-American girls: she rode horses, played the piano, was on the school’s swim team (which meant she wore bikinis), and liked to read infamous freethinkers such as Marqui de Sade and Voltaire. We kissed the first night we met.
After the banquet, we kept in touch via phone and e-mail. I started opening up to her and explained my family’s fundamentalism. I expected her to back away, both hands up, but she seemed to become even more interested in me. Knowing that she liked me made me want to tell her that I’d be willing to challenge my family’s religious dictates for her.
That was when Una sent me sonnets.
The poems, set in medieval times, dripped with the encounter of East and West. They were about ramparts and towers. Minarets and domes. She was Vienna and I was Ottoman. She was Andalucia and I was Almoravid. She was Desdemona and I was the Moor. She was a blond princess batting her eyelashes into the sun and I was a dark rider eclipsing the moon.
At first the poems seemed to suggest that even if I was willing to shun Islam, others wouldn’t see me as anything but a Muslim. I took the poems as a sign that I couldn’t escape my servitude.
But then I realized that the poems were special. They were liberating. In them Islam was understood not as a series of rules and regulations, but as geography, as aesthetics, as decoration. The poems allowed me to identify myself as a Muslim