American Dervish

by Ayad Akhtar

Genres: Coming of Age; Cultural Heritage; Family Life

Synopsis

Hayat Shah is a young American in love for the first time. His normal life of school, baseball, and video games had previously been distinguished only by his Pakistani heritage and by the frequent chill between his parents, who fight over things he is too young to understand. Then Mina arrives, and everything changes.

Mina is Hayat's mother's oldest friend from Pakistan. She is independent, beautiful and intelligent, and arrives on the Shah's doorstep when her disastrous marriage in Pakistan disintegrates. Even Hayat's skeptical father can't deny the liveliness and happiness that accompanies Mina into their home. Her deep spirituality brings the family's Muslim faith to life in a way that resonates with Hayat as nothing has before. Studying the Quran by Mina's side and basking in the glow of her attention, he feels an entirely new purpose mingled with a growing infatuation for his teacher.

When Mina meets and begins dating a man, Hayat is confused by his feelings of betrayal. His growing passions, both spiritual and romantic, force him to question all that he has come to believe is true. Just as Mina finds happiness, Hayat is compelled to act -- with devastating consequences for all those he loves most.

American Dervish is a brilliantly written, nuanced, and emotionally forceful look inside the interplay of religion and modern life. Ayad Akhtar was raised in the Midwest himself, and through Hayat Shah he shows readers vividly the powerful forces at work on young men and women growing up Muslim in America. This is an intimate, personal first novel that will stay with listeners long after they finish.

Release date: September 4, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 384

Sample

I remember it all with a vividness that marks the moment as the watershed it would be:

The court was glowing, its wooden surface honey-brown beneath the overhead lights. Along the edges, players huddled with their coaches, and beyond, we were gathered, the clamoring rows upon rows of us, eager for the timeout to end.

Below, I spied the vendor approaching: a burly man, thick around the waist, with a crimson-brown ponytail dropping from beneath the back of his black-and-orange cap, our school colors. “Brats and wieners!” he cried. “Brats and wieners!”

I nodded, raising my hand. He nodded back, stopping three rows down to serve another customer first. I turned to my friends and asked them if they wanted anything.

Beer and bratwurst, each of them said.

“I don’t think he’s got beer, guys,” I replied.

Out on the court, the players were returning to their positions for the last minute of the half. The crowd was getting to its feet.

Below, the vendor made change, then lifted the metal box to his waist and mounted the steps to settle at the edge of our row.

“You have beer?” one of my friends asked.

“Just brats and wieners.”

“So two bratwurst and a beef dog,” I said.

With a clipped nod, he tossed open the cover of his box and reached inside. I waved away my friends’ bills, pulling out my wallet. The vendor handed me three shiny packets, soft and warm to the touch.

“Beef wiener’s on top. That’s nine altogether.”

I handed off the brats, and paid.

Cheers erupted as our side raced down the court, driving to the basket. I unwrapped my packet only to find I wasn’t holding a beef frank, but a marbled, brown-and-white pork bratwurst.

“Guys? Anyone have the beef dog?” I shouted over the crowd’s noise at my friends.

Both shook their heads. They were holding bratwurst as well.

I turned back to the aisle to call out to the vendor when I stopped. What reason did I have anymore not to eat it?

None at all, I thought.

We drove to the basket again, where we were fouled. When the whistle shrieked, the roar was deafening.

I lifted the sausage to my mouth, closed my eyes, and took a bite. My heart raced as I chewed, my mouth filling with a sweet and smoky, lightly pungent taste that seemed utterly remarkable—perhaps all the more so for having been so long forbidden. I felt at once brave and ridiculous. And as I swallowed, an eerie stillness came over me.

I looked up at the ceiling.

It was still there. Not an inch closer to falling in.

After the game, I walked along the campus quad alone, the walkway’s lamps glowing in the mist, white blossoms on a balmy November night. The wet air swirled and blew. I felt alive as I moved. Free along my limbs. Even giddy.

Back at the dorm, I stood before the bathroom mirror. My shoulders looked different. Not huddled, but open. Unburdened. My eyes drew my gaze, and there I saw what I was feeling: something quiet, strong, still.

I felt like I was complete.

 

I slept soundly that night, held in restful sleep like a baby in a mother’s loving arms. When I finally heard my alarm, it was a quarter of nine. The room was awash in sunlight. It was Thursday, which meant I had Professor Edelstein’s Survey of Islamic History in fifteen minutes. As I slipped into my jeans, I was startled by the bright prickle of new denim against my skin. The previous night’s wonders were apparently still unfolding.

Outside, it was another unseasonably warm and windy day. After hurrying over to the Student Union for a cup of tea, I rushed to Schirmer Hall, Quran tucked under my arm, spilling hot water as I ran. I didn’t like being late for Edelstein’s class. I needed to be certain I would find a place near the back—close to the window he kept cracked open—where I would have the space quietly to reel and contemplate as the diminutive, magnetic Edelstein continued to take his weekly sledgehammer to what still remained of my childhood faith. And there was something else that kept me in the back of the room:

It was where Rachel sat.

Professor Edelstein looked fresh and formal in a variation on his usual pastel medley: an impeccably pressed mauve oxford, topped and tightened at the neck by a rose-pink bow tie, and suspenders matching the auburn shade of newly polished penny loafers.

He greeted me with a warm smile as I entered. “Hey, Hayat.”

“Hi, Professor.”

I wove my way through the desks to the corner where I usually sat, and where lovely Rachel was munching on a cookie.

“Hey.”

“Hey there.”

“How was the game?”

“Good.”

She nodded, the corners of her lips curling coyly upward as she held my gaze. It was looks like this—her bright blue eyes sparkling—that had made me hazard the invitation to the game the night prior. I’d been wanting to ask her out on a date all semester. But when I’d finally gotten up the courage, she’d told me she had to study.

“You want some?” she asked. “It’s oatmeal raisin.”

“Sure.”

She broke off a piece and handed it to me. “You do the reading for today?” she asked.

“Didn’t need to.”

“Why not?”

“I already know the chapters he wanted us to read…by heart.”

“You do?” Rachel’s eyes widened with surprise.

“I grew up memorizing that stuff,” I explained. “It’s a whole production some Muslim kids go through. You memorize the Quran…They call it being a hafiz.”

“Really?” She was impressed.

I shrugged. “Not that I remember much of it anymore. But I happen to remember the chapters he assigned for today…”

At the front of the class, Edelstein started to speak. “I trust you’ve all done your reading,” he began. “It’s not ground we’re going to cover today, but it’s obviously important material. I’d like you guys to keep moving. The Quran can be slow going, and the more of it we get through this semester, the better.” He paused and arranged the papers gathered before him. Rachel offered me the rest of her oatmeal cookie with a whisper: “Wanna finish?”

“Absolutely,” I said, taking it.

“Today, I’d like to share some of the recent work a couple of my colleagues in Germany are doing. I wasn’t able to offer you any readings on their work, because it’s very much happening right now. It’s at the very forefront of Islamic scholarship…” Edelstein paused again, now making eye contact with the Muslim-born students in the class—there were three of us—and added cautiously, “And what I have to share may come as a shock to some of you.”

So began his lecture on the Sanaa manuscripts.

In 1972, while restoring an ancient mosque in Sanaa, Yemen, a group of workers busy overhauling the original roof found a stash of parchments and damaged books buried in the rafters. It was a grave of sorts, the kind that Muslims—forbidden from burning the Quran—use to respectfully discard damaged or worn-out copies of the holy book. The workers packed the manuscripts into potato sacks, and they were locked away until one of Edelstein’s close friends—a colleague—was approached some seven years later to take a look at the documents. What he discovered was unprecedented: The parchment pages dated back to Islam’s first two centuries, fragments of the oldest Qurans in existence. What was shocking, Edelstein told us, was that there were aberrations and deviations from the standard Quran that Muslims had been using for more than a thousand years. In short, Edelstein claimed, his German colleague was about to show the world that the bedrock Muslim belief in the Quran as the direct, unchanged, eternal word of God was a fiction. Muslims weren’t going to be spared the fate of Christians and Jews over the past three centuries of scholarship: the Quran, like the Bible, would prove to be the historical document common sense dictated it had to be.

Up in the front row, one of the students—Ahmad, a Muslim—interrupted Edelstein’s lecture, raising his hand angrily.

Edelstein paused. “Yes, Ahmad?”

“Why has your friend not published his findings yet?” Ahmad barked.

Edelstein held Ahmad’s gaze for a moment before replying. And when he did, his tone was conciliatory. “My colleague is concerned about continued access to the texts if they were to make these findings known to the Yemeni authorities. They’re preparing a series of articles, but are ensuring that they’ve had enough time to go through all fourteen thousand pages carefully, just in case they never get to see the documents again.”

Now Ahmad’s voice bellowed, red and bitter: “And why exactly would they be barred from seeing them again?”

There was silence. The classroom was thick with tension.

“There’s no need to get upset, Ahmad. We can talk about this like scholars…”

“Scholars! What scholars make claims without documented findings? Huh?!”

“I understand this is some controversial stuff…but there’s no need—”

Ahmad cut him off. “It’s not controversial, Pro-fess-or,” he said, spitting the middle syllable back at Edelstein with disgust. “It’s incendiary.” Ahmad bolted up from his desk, books in hand. “In-sult-ing and in-cen-diary!” he shouted. After a look at Sahar—​the usually reticent Malaysian girl sitting to his left, her head lowered as she scratched nervously on her pad—and then another look, back at me, Ahmad stormed out of the room.

“Anyone else want to leave?” Edelstein asked, clearly affected. After a short pause, Sahar quietly gathered her things, got up, and walked out.

“That leaves you, Hayat.”

“Nothing to worry about, Professor. I’m a true and tried Mutazalite.”

Edelstein’s face brightened with a smile. “Bless your heart.”

 

After class, I stood and stretched, surprised again at how nimble and awake I felt.

“Where you headed?” Rachel asked.

“To the Union.”

“Wanna walk? I’m going to the library.”

“Sure,” I said.

Outside, as we strolled beneath the shedding ash trees that lined the path to the library, Rachel remarked how surprised she was at Ahmad and Sahar walking out.

“Don’t be,” I said. “Saying less than that could get you killed in some circles.” She looked skeptical. “Look at Rushdie,” I said. The fatwa was only a year old, an event still fresh in everyone’s mind.

Rachel shook her head. “I don’t understand these things…So what did you mean by what you said to Edelstein?”

“About being a Mutazalite?”

“Yeah.”

“A school of Muslims that don’t believe in the Quran as the eternal word of God. But I was joking. I’m not a Mutazalite. They died off a thousand years ago.”

She nodded. We walked a few paces. “How did you feel about the lecture?” she asked.

“What’s to feel? The truth is the truth. Better to know it than not to.”

“Absolutely,” she said, studying me, “but it doesn’t mean you can’t have feelings about it, right?” Her question was softly put. There was tenderness in it.

“Honestly? It makes me feel free.”

She nodded. And we walked awhile in silence.

“Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?” I finally asked.

“That depends.”

“On?”

“What you want to know.”

“Did you really have to study last night, or were you just saying that?”

Rachel laughed, her lips parting to reveal her small square teeth. She really was lovely. “I have an organic chemistry exam tomorrow, I told you that. That’s why I’m going to the library now.” She stopped and put her hand on my arm. “But I promise I’ll go with you to the next game…Okay?”

My heart surged with sudden joy. “Okay,” I said with a cough.

When we got to the library’s steps, I had the urge to tell her what had happened to me the night before. “Can I ask you another personal question?”

“Shoot.”

“Do you believe in God?”

For a moment, Rachel looked startled. And then she shrugged. “No. At least not the guy-in-the-sky type thing.”

“Since when?”

“Since ever, I guess. My mom was an atheist, so I don’t think I ever took it that seriously. I mean, my dad made us go to temple sometimes—Rosh Hashanah and stuff—but even then, my mom would spend the whole way there and back complaining.”

“So you don’t know what it’s like to lose your faith.”

“Not really.”

I nodded. “It’s freeing. So freeing. It’s the most freeing thing that’s ever happened to me… You asked me how I feel about the lecture? Hearing Edelstein talk about the Quran as just a book, a book like any other, makes me feel like going out to celebrate.”

“Sounds like fun,” she said, smiling. “If you wait ’til tomorrow, we can celebrate together…”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Rachel lingered on the step above me just long enough for the thought to occur. And when it did, I didn’t question it. I leaned in and touched my lips to hers.

Her mouth pressed against mine. I felt her hand against the back of my head, the tip of her tongue gently grazing the tip of my own.

All at once, she pulled away. She turned and hopped up the steps, then stopped at the door and shot me a quick look. “Wish me luck on my exam,” she said.

“Good luck,” I said.

When she was gone, I lingered, in a daze, barely able to believe my good fortune.

 

That night, after a day of classes and an evening of Ping-Pong at the Union, I was sitting in bed, trying to study, but thinking only of Rachel…when the phone rang. It was Mother.

“She’s gone, behta.”

I was quiet. I knew, of course, who she was talking about. A month earlier she and I had gone to Kansas City to visit Mina—not only my mother’s lifelong best friend, but the person who’d had, perhaps, the greatest influence on my life—as she lay in a hospital bed, her insides ravaged with cancer.

“Did you hear me, Hayat?” Mother said.

“It’s probably better, isn’t it, Mom? I mean, she’s not in pain anymore.”

“But she’s gone, Hayat,” Mother moaned. “She’s gone…”

I listened quietly as she cried. And then I consoled her.

Mother didn’t ask me that night how I felt about Mina’s passing, which was just as well. I probably wouldn’t have told her what I was really feeling. Even the confession I had made to Mina while she lay on what turned out to be her deathbed, even that hadn’t been enough to assuage the guilt I’d been carrying since I was twelve. If I was reluctant to share how aggrieved I was with my mother, it was because my grief was not only for Mina, but for myself as well.

Now that she was gone, how could I ever repair the harm I’d done?

 

The following evening, Rachel and I sat side by side at a pizzeria counter, our dinner before a movie. I didn’t tell her about Mina, but somehow, she sensed something was wrong. She asked me if I was all right. I told her I was. She insisted. “You sure, Hayat?” she asked. She was looking at me with a tenderness I couldn’t fathom. “Thought you wanted to celebrate,” she said with a smile.

“Well…after I left you yesterday, I got some bad news.”

“What?”

“My aunt died. She was like…a second mother to me.”

“Oh God. I’m so sorry.”

All at once, my throat was searing. I was on the verge of tears.

“Sorry,” I said, looking away.

Feeling her hand on my arm, I heard her voice: “You don’t have to talk about it…”

I looked back and nodded.

 

The movie was a comedy. It distracted me. Toward the end, Rachel pushed herself up against my side, and we held hands for a while. Afterwards, she invited me back to her room, where she lit candles and played me a song on the guitar that she’d written. It was something longing and plaintive about lost love. Only three days ago, I couldn’t have imagined myself being so lucky. And yet I couldn’t push away thoughts of Mina.

When Rachel finished her song, I told her it was wonderful.

She could tell my mind was elsewhere.

“Still thinking about your aunt, aren’t you?”

“Is it that obvious?”

She shrugged and smiled. “It’s okay,” she said, setting her guitar aside. “My grandma was really important to me like that. I went through a lot when she died.”

“But the thing is, it’s not just that she died…it’s that I had something to do with it.” I didn’t even realize I’d said it until I was almost finished with the sentence.

Rachel looked at me, puzzled, folds appearing along her forehead.

“What happened?” she asked.

“You don’t know me very well…I mean, of course you don’t. It’s just…I don’t think you realize how I grew up.”

“I’m not following you, Hayat.”

“You’re Jewish, right?”

“Yeah? So?”

“You may not like me very much if I tell you what happened…”

She shifted in her place, her back straightening. She looked away.

You barely know her, I thought. What are you trying to prove?

“Maybe I should leave,” I said.

She didn’t reply.

I didn’t move. The fact was, I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay. I wanted to tell her.

We sat in silence for a long moment, and then Rachel reached out to touch my hand.

“Tell me,” she said.

1

Long before I knew Mina, I knew her story.

It was a tale Mother told so many times: How her best friend, gifted and gorgeous—something of a genius, as Mother saw it—had been frustrated at every turn, her development derailed by the small-mindedness of her family, her robust will checked by a culture that made no place for a woman. I heard about the grades Mina skipped and the classes she topped, though always somewhat to the chagrin of parents more concerned with her eventual nuptials than her report card. I heard about all the boys who loved her, and how—when she was twelve—she, too, fell in love, only to have her nose broken by her father’s fist when he found a note from her sweetheart tucked into her math book. I heard about her nervous breakdowns and her troubles with food and, of course, about the trove of poems her mother set alight in the living room fireplace one night during an argument about whether or not Mina would be allowed to go to college to become a writer.

Perhaps it was that I heard it all so often without knowing the woman myself, but for the longest time, Mina Ali and her gifts and travails were like the persistent smell of curry in our halls and our rooms: an ever-presence in my life of which I made little note.

And then, one summer afternoon when I was eight, I saw a picture of her. As Mother unfolded Mina’s latest letter from Pakistan, a palm-sized color glossy tumbled out. “That’s your auntie Mina, kurban,” Mother said as I picked it up. “Look how beautiful she is.”

Beautiful, indeed.

The picture showed a striking woman sitting on a wicker chair before a background of green leaves and orange flowers. Most of her perfectly black hair was covered with a pale pink scarf, and both her hair and scarf framed an utterly arresting face: cheekbones highly drawn—gently accentuated with a touch of blush—oval eyes, and a small, pointed nose perched above a pair of ample lips. Her features defined a perfect harmony, promising something sheltering, something tender, but not only. For there was an intensity in her eyes that belied this intimation of maternal comfort, or at least complicated it: those eyes were black and filled with piercing light, as if her vision had long been sharpened against the grindstone of some nameless inner pain. And though she was smiling, her smile was more one concealed than offered and, like her eyes, hinted at something mysterious and elusive, something you wanted to know.

Mother posted the photo on our refrigerator door, pinned in place by the same rainbow-shaped finger magnets that also affixed my school lunch menu. (This was the menu Mother consulted each night before school to see if pork was being served the following day—and if, therefore, I’d be needing a bag lunch—and which I consulted each school morning hoping to find my favorite, beef lasagna, listed among the day’s offerings.) For two years, then, barely a day went by without at least a casual glance at that photograph of Mina. And there were more than a few occasions when, finishing my glass of morning milk, or munching on string cheese after school, I lingered over it, staring at her likeness as I sometimes did at the surface of the pond at Worth Park on summer afternoons: doing my best to catch a glimpse of what was hidden in the depths.

 

It was a remarkable photograph, and—as I was to discover from Mina herself a couple of years later—it had an equally remarkable history. Mina’s parents, counting on their daughter’s beauty to attract a lucrative match, brought in a fashion photographer to take pictures of her, and the photo in question was the one that would make its way—through a matchmaker—into the hands of Hamed Suhail, the only son of a wealthy Karachi family.

Hamed fell in love with Mina the moment he saw it.

The Suhails showed up at the Ali home a week and a half later, and by the end of their meeting, the fathers had shaken hands on their children’s betrothal. Mother always claimed that Mina didn’t dislike Hamed, and that Mina always said she could have found happiness with him. If not for Irshad, Hamed’s mother.

After the wedding, Mina moved south to Karachi to live with her in-laws, and the problems between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law began the first night Mina was there. Irshad came into her bedroom holding a string of plump, pomegranate-colored stones, a garnet necklace and family heirloom which—Irshad explained—had been handed down from mother to daughter for five generations. Herself daughterless, Irshad had always imagined she would bestow these, the only family jewels, on the wife of her only son someday.

“Try it on,” Irshad urged, warmly.

Mina did. And as they both stared into the mirror, Mina couldn’t help but notice the silvery thinning of Irshad’s eyes. She recognized the envy.

“You shouldn’t, Ammi,” Mina said, pulling the stones from her neck.

“I shouldn’t what?”

“I don’t know…I mean, it’s so beautiful…are you sure you want to give it to me?”

“I’m not giving it to you yet,” Irshad replied, abruptly. “I just wanted to see how it looked.”

Bruised by Irshad’s sudden shift, Mina handed the necklace back to her mother-in-law. Irshad took it and, without another word, walked out of the room.

So Irshad’s enmity began. First came the snide comments offered under her breath, or in passing: about how headstrong the “new girl” was; how she ate hunched over her plate like a servant; or how, as Irshad put it, Mina looked like a “mouse.” Soon to follow were changes to the household routine intended to make Mina’s life more difficult: servants sent up to clean Mina’s room when she was still asleep; the expunging from the family menu of the foods Mina most enjoyed; the continued flurry of mean-spirited remarks, though now no longer offered sotto voce. Mina did all she could to appease and placate her mother-in-law. But this only stoked Irshad’s suspicions. For as Mina tried to ply Irshad with submissiveness, the elder woman felt the change of tack, and read it as evidence of a cunning nature. Irshad now started rumors about her daughter-in-law’s “wandering eyes” and “thieving hands.” She warned her son to keep Mina away from the male staff, and warned her staff to keep their valuables under lock and key. (Neither Hamed nor his father—both terrified of Irshad—did anything to address the growing conflict.) And when the pleasure of verbal abuse wore thin, Irshad resorted to the physical. Now she slapped Mina, for leaving her dirty clothes strewn around her bedroom, or talking out of turn in front of guests. On one occasion, hearing an insult in a comment Mina made about dinner not being as spicy as usual, Irshad grabbed her daughter-in-law by the hair and dragged her from the dinner table to throw her out into the hallway.

Fourteen months into this growing nightmare, Mina conceived. To escape the abuse and bring her pregnancy to term in peace, she returned north to her family home, in the Punjab. There, three weeks early, unaccompanied by her husband—who would not join her for fear of suffering his mother’s wrath—Mina gave birth to a boy. And as she lay in the hospital bed exhausted from her daylong labor, a man in a long dark coat appeared at the doorway just moments after her mother left the room to fetch a cup of tea from the canteen. He stepped inside, inquiring if she was Amina Suhail née Ali.

“I am,” Mina replied.

The man approached her bedside, an envelope in hand. “Your husband has divorced you. Enclosed are the papers that make this divorce official. He has written in his own hand—you will recognize the writing—that he divorces you, he divorces you, and he divorces you. As you well know, Mrs. Suhail—I mean, Ms. Ali—this is what the law requires.” He laid the envelope across her belly, gently. “You have just given birth to Hamed Suhail’s son. He has chosen the name Imran for the boy. Imran will stay with you until the age of seven, at which point Mr. Hamed Suhail has the right to full, undisputed custody.” The lawyer took a step back, but he wasn’t finished. Mina squinted at him in disbelief. “All that I have shared with you is in accordance with the law as it stands, this date of June 15, 1976, in the land of Pakistan, and you are entitled to a custody trial by law, but I would advise you to understand, Mrs. Suhail—I mean, Ms. Ali—that any fight will be a useless one for you, and will simply cost your family resources it does not have.”

Then the lawyer turned and walked out.

Mina cried for days and nights and weeks to follow. Yet, devastated as she was by Hamed’s brutality—​and terrified by his menacing promise to take her son away someday—when she stared down into her infant’s eyes, she nevertheless cooed to him with the name that her now-ex-husband had chosen without her:

She called the boy Imran.

 

I first heard that Mother wanted to bring Mina to America in the winter of 1981. I was ten. The hostages in Iran had just come home, and American flags were burning on the nightly news. It was a Saturday afternoon, teatime, and my parents were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table, silently sipping from their cups. I was sitting at the other end, my back to the glass of milk Mother had set before me. I was watching a half dozen flies butting at the window overlooking the backyard.

“You know, kurban, your Mina-auntie might be coming to stay with us,” Mother finally said. “Kurban?”

I turned to her. “When?” I asked.

“The sooner, the better. Her family is driving her crazy back home. And that boy needs to get out of the country…or his father will take him. The truth is, they both need to get out.”

Mother paused, glancing over at Father. He was thumbing through a fishing magazine, oblivious.

I looked back at the flies, buzzing blackly along the cold glass.

“All these flies! Where are they coming from?!” Mother suddenly shouted out. “And there’s so many of them up in the attic! God only knows how they got up there!”

Father looked up from his magazine, annoyed. “You say that like we haven’t heard it, like it’s the first time you’re saying it. It’s not the first time. I’m dealing with it.”

“I wasn’t talking to you. . .