Auntie Rima shakes her head.
I point out the henna artist near Mom and her friends to Sausun. “I’ll watch you guys dance while I get my henna done.”
“Let’s catch up later.” Sausun winks at me.
I nod and leave Auntie Rima.
Before I get to the henna station, though, I feel a hand on my back. It’s another of Sarah’s aunts, Auntie Razan, who’s older, maybe almost as old as Teta, my seventy-six-year-old maternal grandmother. She leans in to whisper to me. “Habibiti, don’t worry. You’ve brought so much joy. Don’t listen to Rima. She’s feeling things wrong. We’re so happy to be here together. There’s so much joy here.”
Then she strokes my hair and I feel like I’m with Teta and her warm love.
* * *
Mom comes to sit beside me while I’m getting hennaed.
“What happened over there with Auntie Rima?” she whispers. “I was going to come over when I saw your face, but then you left.”
“You don’t have to whisper, Mom,” I say, indicating the henna artist with my chin. “She’s got headphones on.”
“So what happened?”
I fill her in, and she shakes her head when I’m done.
“I’m sorry that happened.” Mom sighs. “But you know Sarah’s mom’s not like that, right?”
“Then why does she look so disapproving all the time?”
“That’s her personality. She’s like that with Sarah, too. She really loves Muhammad.”
“Mom, can I ask you something?” I draw my right hand, now complete, away from the henna artist and shift myself to lay my left one in her palm. She positions the henna cone in the middle of the back of my hand and starts the same beautiful design of paisleys swirling in and around a larger, slender paisley that extends from below my wrist to the tip of my ring finger. “Did your family treat Dad like that? Like how Auntie Rima is behaving?”
I want to know how this assumption about cultural superiority plays out in our family. Like, I know it’s there in the world; I’ve seen it with my own eyes—at school, at the mosque, the Muslim community—it’s out there, everywhere.
I’m not that naive.
But I want to know about its existence in my family.
Mom doesn’t say anything for a bit. Then she sighs again. “Most of my family didn’t want me marrying Dad. Except for Amu, who helped us get married. And Teta, who is Teta, always kind—you know how she is. But everyone else wasn’t very happy, especially Grandpa before he died. That’s why I’d only take you and Muhammad for visits. Why Dad wouldn’t come.”
“Why? Was it because Dad wasn’t religious? And your family is?”
“I thought that was why for the longest time. But then one of my cousins married a completely unreligious person, but he was Egyptian, too, and they welcomed him with open arms. And Dad saw that. And it was early on in our marriage.”
I shift again, uncomfortably this time. “What did you do?”
“I got angry. But I couldn’t change them. To them, it’s about the fear of losing something—culture, history, language—and not what the Qur’an says about why God created diversity.” Mom leans me against her gently. “So that we may come to know our differences and love each other for them. When you see the world as divided, when you’re prejudiced, it’s not about expanding hearts—it’s about shrinking your capacity to love. Which is really bad for our systems, physical and spiritual.”
Is that why Dad and Auntie Rima are like that? Their capacity to love has been restricted by the way they see the world? Even though Dad acts so generous, is so generous, in other ways?
How does it make sense that Dad, who has felt the effects of prejudice himself, is dishing it out now too? Is it because it’s the kind of prejudice, anti-Blackness, that’s been ingrained in our cultures, South Asian and Arab, the kind that’s so insidiously prevalent that Dad didn’t hesitate to blurt it out like it was nothing?
Chapter Twenty-Four
Tats and I slip out quietly with Mom when she leaves Dad’s after the party, just after one a.m., after Sarah’s family takes her back to Chicago, where they’ve all gathered. They’re going to make their big entrance for the nikah tomorrow as a family procession around the bride. It’s going to be quite dramatic according to what I’ve heard from Sarah. Having met more of her family tonight, I don’t doubt it.
To stay in Mom’s room at the hotel I packed an overnight bag, which, at Tats’s insistence, includes my burkini. She found out from Mom that the Orchard has a pool, and she claims we’re going to get up early in the morning to go swimming.
Dania and Lamya are in the car with us to go back to the Orchard.
With Tats in the back with them, acting like a talk show host (she’s actually going to junior college to study broadcasting), we’re getting a lot of information about their lives.
They even bring up Layth. How he’s their cousin on their mom’s side.
How he’s had a rough life.
And how they hope his going back to Ecuador will help him out. Because the summers he spent there were the best years of his life.
We even learn how his family fell apart after a car crash, when Layth’s only sibling, a younger brother, died.
Oh.
That’s why he said “used to” about siblings.
* * *
When we get out, Dania stops me as everyone else goes on ahead.
The matching scarf for her pink outfit is wrapped around her head turban style, allowing massive gold hoop earrings to glint in the light from the parking lot.
“Guess what?” Dania’s beaming. “Remember how you asked me to keep an eye on your mom and my dad?”
I nod, but tentatively. Her big smile is throwing me off.
“So the whole time, at the restaurant at lunch, they were reminiscing about college, right? And so Lamya and I kept asking questions, and we got a crucial piece of information that we wanted to share with you as well.” She’s practically laughing, the way her mouth’s turned up so wide while she’s talking. “We found out that Magda—Remember the famous Magda? Whose apartment everyone gathered at for Eid that fateful year long ago? She’d actually been trying to set our dad and your mom up! But then your dad showed up with our dad and bam! He swept your mom off her feet.”
I don’t know what to say.
“Isn’t that just wild? This fact and that they’re laughing about it over twenty years later at another Magda’s?”
Okay, that part is wild.
But the rest is just historical accuracy. Mom was clearly supposed to meet Dad. And then go on to have Muhammad and me.
I nod and say, “Yeah, wild,” but it’s in such a lackluster way that Dania’s face falls.
“Oh, wait,” she says. “Oh. You’re actually not okay with them together.”
I remain silent, highly aware of the myriad directions this situation could go.
“Oh,” she says again, turning around to walk toward the Orchard. I follow but not fast enough to walk alongside her. “Oh.”