Indigo X

I used to go to the masjid before I used to go to high school. I think because it was easier then, back before things could not be categorized, dramatized or analyzed, before the hallways and cliques, people dressing one way or the other but never anywhere in between. The clash of civilizations between third and fourth period. When I made it to high school, I met other people and I found out that other people were just like me. And they had to like me. “Had” like a Hanafi would call wajib.

Before then, I used to go to the masjid, shalwar and kameez 1-2 punch, dressed for God or only to impress? Maybe it was because my father used to dress that way, with his pants above his ankles, and I copied him, just like a Wahhabi would. Anyone, in any masjid, can be a Wahhabi – until high school.

I remember sitting in the masjid and staring at the marble tiles inscribed with Qur’an, twice as high as I could reach, as if they were dangling off the lower reaches of heaven. I tried to read but this would only make the Arab kids (mostly Lebanese and Syrian) make fun of me, as my tongue only knew the Pakistani Urdu-based misinterpretations. Since Wahhabis certainly couldn’t sound out Semitic in any Indo-Aryan fashion, I drop that and seek something else to label me. Perhaps I was a Tablighi Jama’at Boy Scout.

I used to cry at the masjid.
That until high school.

* * * *

I went to college after high school, as all normal, good, obedient citizens are supposed to. That’s really the essence of secular modernity: obedience to fallibility. The organization of our lives to such an extreme that we lost the forest for the trees. Or the skyscrapers for the city. Do something, take a step, next routine, take a step, next routine, take a step – oh, he fell into the sea. Didn’t he stop to see? No, no time – he was going to be late for a meeting that would have caused him to go to bed that night after his kids were already asleep. It’s okay, really. He wasn’t really a man. He was closer to a lemming. Except lemmings don’t pay taxes.

The university struck me as Britain struck all the poor brown masses. God-forbid I’d be seen in any clothing that identified me as stupid enough to be proud of my Pakistani heritage. No more shalwar, no more kameez.
But I couldn’t let go completely, so I found some mixture between Communist rhetoric, Islam and American angst. Just like a Hizb al-Tahreer extremist, you know, not old enough to shave and spouting this and that about Hegelian dialectic, though he has no idea where Germany is and can’t tell you what a Bundesrepublik actually is. German Enlightenment? Not in their academies. Faith? No, thank you. I never again let my pants rise above my ankles, and I said it with all the conviction of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel combined. Never again!

That year I met her and called her God’s blessing to me, more so because she was Muslim, too. Enough to make me proud of being Muslim, but not enough to make me want to pray. After all, as I’d stopped asking, God had stopped responding. It was okay, anyway. I laid my plans for establishing a Fortress Islam, big enough for all the Muslims, with the non-Muslims conveniently on the sidelines.

All Muslims who actually bothered with Islam would have to be placed on plantations, maybe like Mostapha Mond, out in the middle of nowhere. God was a faith-based nationality, restricted to those who’d had the good sense to convert just in time. This would allow me to sleep with her, her Irish red hair and her body – which, though good, was not good enough to die for. I wasn’t about to die for anything.

She said no to me in a rather emphatic way, leaving me all alone outside a shiny neon-speckled Mexican restaurant. I’d forgotten all my Spanish. I think after she left – with another guy, Heineken in his hand (I preferred Coors) – I ran in the opposite direction, while calling my friend and panting into my cell phone. He told me that I would find someone else. It was the first and only time I heard a shrug over a Nokia.

There was nowhere to go then but the masjid. But I went anyway. Inside dark and quiet, if it wasn’t for the rain that had begun to sprinkle itself off the windows. The verses of the Qur’an were at my height after all these years, right within arm’s reach, but I didn’t want to reach for them anymore. There was an old man across me, with a nicely wound green turban, long, luxurious beard and a gray shalwar-kameez. I thought he looked like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. But then he looked up, offered me his hand and I acted as if I hadn’t seen him and walked past, to the bookshelves. Better than facing Makkah. My Mavi jeans (Turkish – did that count?), my tight black shirt, which displayed my gym membership, my participation in the most arrogant and disrespectful generation produced by humanity in quite some time.

Why was I even here?

Somehow, my hands found a Qur’an, or maybe the Qur’an flew up off the metal bookshelf and onto my hands. It was opened, in the third-person passive, and my ignorance remains just that, to this day. I don’t remember flipping past more than a few pages, when the words caught my eye.

And when the anger of Moses
Had calmed, he took up the tablets –
And in writing there was guidance
And mercy for those in awe of their Lord.

The verse number, chapter number, all those obscured, me only recalling that my tears caused the words to smudge and the ink to run. Please don’t run, I begged, she just ran away from me. Now I’m all alone, all alone. Just an old man in a room with me, whose hand I should have clasped. Then I wanted to run to him, hug him and wash his beard with my tears. He must have had a thousand things to cry for, great regrets and embarrassing retreats only whispered between him and his Lord. Wasn’t that why he was here? Just like me? So why… two more tears slipped out, both from my right eye and nothing from my left eye… then two words. Maybe to the old man, maybe to God, maybe to her, or maybe to me, for all the times I failed myself.

I’m sorry.