BODY Chapter 12

BODY Chapter 12

The prisons are full

Faiz himself sat

and watched the hours flow

away in rivers of blood,

his blood and the blood of others

who had voices but no names.

The prisons are full of empty heartshells

like the abandoned shells

of so many sea creatures

stranded in the sandstorms on a sea floor,

a civilization full of houses

without occupants

filling the prisons.

                                    S

Coriander is the old world name for cilantro, the name that has attachments to Ariadne and to the thread that pulled a hero from the tunnels and from the jaws of death. You can look it up. Noor studied the recipes of Mexico. She discovered that Cilantro was not from the new world but from the old world. It was brought by the conquerors. It became a signature that was on everything that the conquered ate since, like the signature on a death warrant or on a birth certificate. Some signatures we carry with us. Eventually, we do not even know who the names are meant to identify. They are the ancestors. But imagine an army of conquerors who invade a place and become the fathers because they are the rapists and the seducers and the masters who must be obeyed. They are the ones who create a new race who in their way think they are healing the wound when they are compounding the injuries. The sources and the fathers and mothers and at best the gods and at worst the devils who have expelled us as if we were their breaths their voices spitting us into the future. And we are here because of them and we don’t even know who they are. That is why we have to study. We have to know what sent us here and what our mission is.

Noor cooked Mexican and tried to speak in a reassuring way to Sameer. But he was inconsolable. It had been this way for a few weeks something had clicked in him. The world was intolerable. But she knew that he loved Mexican food. So she looked it up on line and treid to make the food that he liked. Of course when she made it  it was nothing like the food at Chipotles or at that other place he went to, the one with the bar. The food resembled food from Pakistan or Afghanistan by way of French Quebec. It was something the Mexican might not recognize. But she said only you see this is the way it was invented. Nor rattled on while she moved the beans and the rice onto the plates with a sandwich of bread folded around some thin slices of beef and yogurt dressing on the side. The Spanish brought this food and the spices to the new world then they were still dominated by Islam and still loved the food with its spices folded in pita bread and the Pastor, the Carnitas, it is the same kind of skewered beef in a kebab or that is sliced into the Giro. It is all the same and it was forgotten in Spain, in Spanish cooking or it was changed, but the food, the recipes were maybe adjusted but it was preserved, the connection to the Middle East was kept in the Mexican food. It is the same.

            Every Tuesday Noor prepared dinner for Sameer. It was in a way part of the rent. She and Maryam were living in  a room that was attached to Sameer’s house. His family had always been a resource for immigrants. Maryam was a cousin and Noor was her friend. Her lack of papers was a problem but if she kept a low profile it would be okay, Sameer thought. Anyway, it was unthinkable to say no.

            It was almost 7pm by the time everyone was in Noor’s tiny apartment. It would be better to do this in your apartment Sameer. It is too small here and your kitchen is much nicer. Besides you never use it. It is a waste of a good kitchen not to use it. Sameer just stared into space. He was messing with the cd player. This is a piece of crap! He said. Sorry, I can’t afford anything better. Maryam shouted from the bedroom. Just don’t break it. She said. She walked into eb living area a larger room that combined the living room with its sofa and TV and the kitchen divided by an island in the middle where the food was laid out. It was too small for a real dining table. There were four stools against the counter that faced the stove and counter where Noor was preparing he food. Suddenly Sameer switched off the modern Qawwali. music. Enough of that Sufi crap! Sameer said. Oh I see we are going to get a lecture on culture. Maryam said with extra sarcasm. I don’t mind. Noor said. You wouldn’t. Here’s your scarf. Maryam pushed the scarf onto her head while she wriggled free of it trying not to touch it with her hands. I have chili sauce allover my hands. Stop it! 

            Sameer looked at the two playing and he breathed heavily. Looking at Noor and Maryam made him feel powerful, and guilty at the same time. He was responsible for them in some way. They were his responsibility because he was their protector. If they were going to succeed it depended upon him. It was like a family matter. He was in a way a father and in a way he was a husband and a brother he could not sort it out. What is love what is lust what is brotherly what is the piety of faith and duty? All this and the tumultuousness of the days. The confusion of politics and war where the enemies were there in his own body fighting it out. This is what is right and what is wrong. He felt that these women, these girls really, were not seeing the real tragedy of the world, the real nightmare of it. They were playing like children playing house. He was feeling something very heavy that had fallen on him in the last few days and weeks. It felt to him like a grave responsibility to be the one who realized the depth of the conflict and who must therefore act to make things better. If he did not act he did not think he could bear the guilt.

            Noor sat down and looked at the food. To her it was a miracle of color and smells that she had somehow produced out of what seemed to her mostly imagination. She saw that Sameer was distracted and seemed uninterested in eating He was always distracted these days. Noor wanted to bring him back to his old self, which was almost the complete opposite. When she first met him he was alive with energy and with ambition. He was in a great job with a great car and loved to go around town to clubs. She went with him a few times, always with Maryam. She was concerned in those days that he might be attached to her that he might be interested in her for something more intimate and she wanted to avoid this at all costs. It was for her enough that she had to figure out how to make a living and to live in this precarious position of being a person without papers in a new city. To have her friend and her landlord of sorts become intimate would put everything at risk. That was how she saw it. That was what experience had taught her. Don’t shit where you live! That was what Maryam said about Sameer.

But for Noor no man was ever simply going to forget about the possibility of sex. It seemed to be the other great lesson she had learned in Quebec. She thought she was working for a man there who was safe, who was married already, who hd children and a life, and who was so completely out of her world that the relationship seemed to be, but for him evidently it was not. She rubbed the top of her index finger gently along the ridge of the scar on her cheek when she thought of him. It was the mark of what men might be thinking for her. It was the signature of that man. So she made no preconceptions about what Sameer might be thinking. And she walked that tightrope of being friendly and not being too friendly. It was painful but the price of having this kind of relationship. She needed him to be a good friend and good landlord. 

Things are piling up. Sameer said somewhat impulsively. Maryam took the opportunity to look secretively at Noor in a sidelong glance that seemed to be saying Look out. Don’t say a thing! She arched her eyebrows and her lips were very tense. Have you been thinking? It was a question that seemed to be coming from someplace very deep. Sameer seemed to be almost an injured animal, almost ready to cry. Maybe it started with the war in Syria or with the Boston bombing or with the troubles in Egypt. Somehow he had made it through a dozen years or war in Afghanistan and Iraq without breaking. All those years in middle school and high school with the abuse of being considered just another Muslim and maybe a terrorist, all the jokes and the poisonous silliness had made him dead to his culture and its past. He did what he had to and survived. In fact, he had become agnostic about politics and religion, getting through school and getting the job he dreamed about, getting in the on the bottom floor of a great new company, and becoming successful by his mid twenties. Now in his late twenties everything seemed to be coming apart.

Noor looked at Sameer and felt helpless. Maryam looked at him and felt angry: You are not Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. You did not grow up in Dagostan or somewhere else in the backside of Asia. You grew up right here. You are not some kind of twisted kid who can’t remember where he grew up and who will lose it when he feels a little anger. I am angry everyday. But I am not like some idiot who thinks he can get revenge for something he cannot even describe. And in service to a bunch of morons who have mapped out a strategy where they take no chances and other people get killed including children. And Syria is the worst because, there, people are fighting with the same people they used to live with in their own neighborhoods because they are Shia or Sunni or something else. It is not about god. It is about who gets rich and who runs things. That’s what it is always about whether you are in Kabul or in San Francisco. So you are rich, so you should just be rich and be happy.

If it was just like that, then where would you be? You are here you, live in this house, because our people and our blood mean something more than that. It means family and … other things … and God. Sameer was getting a little mean. You and Noor would be out on the street if it was just about what made me rich or what made me happy.

Could we stop and eat? Noor tried to get the attention back on the food. Maryam sat down on a stool and started to wrangled some food onto her plate. It looks good, Noor. She said. Sameer stood a moment and looked at them. He took a deep breath. I am sorry. I was … I had a bad time at work today. He sat down and the rom was silent for a long while. They ate and everyone seemed to be thinking the same thing, about how to break what seemed to be a genuine conflict. It was not going to be resolved with platitudes thought Noor. It was going to require honesty and honesty is dangerous. More dangerous than anything. It was a dangerous time. She always felt most prickled most alive to the danger. It was her intuition about possible danger that kept her from disaster she thought. So it was now a crucial time for care. Sameer was for her like an unexploded bomb. He would need careful defusing.

When the knock came on the door, Maryam jumped up as if she had been expecting it. I forgot to tell you. I invited someone else to dinner tonight. She then looked back with a strangely mischievous expression. Then she opened the door and let Jack into the room. Hi. he said.