The chairs of Abbu

As a child, I was told by my brother that our father had invented chairs, and I believed it.

Not a chair – not some specialized chair, something like might be trademarked and profited from – but rather chairs as in the entire notion of chairs. As in there had been no chairs, not anywhere, none at all, and then Abbu came along and invented one and now there were chairs.

Do not think me a fool. I was skeptical at first and I challenged my brother on his claim.

Ammi

Mother we call Ammi and she winces every time there’s a curse word on the t.v. Winces, like a you-walk-up-and-pretend-to-throw-something-at-her-head wince.

It’s visceral. 

She is not faking this.

Strange that a woman so smart so strong can be all but taken out by a single “damn”.

Once, in their home, I saw Abbu watching “Die Hard”. Ammi appeared nearly epileptic. And on Thanksgiving this year, Abbu flipping through channels on the t.v. said, “Hey, look: ‘Django Unchained’!” but we all talked him down from it, barely.

We laughed and laughed about it, too, but wow: How I wish the power of words could set off physical reactions in me.

Cloudhead

“You’ll never find a husband in the sky.”

I am eight years old the first time Ammi tells me this. Eight! My attention, such as it is at the time, is on a flock of dark birds – migrating, probably – which fills the street loudly. The birds land on power lines together. Immediately dart back off the power lines together. Change direction. Once. Twice. Together.

I assure you, it is far more remarkable than anything happening on the ground.

At eight years old, I am not looking for a husband. I dismiss my mother’s words as nonsense, perhaps a weak translation of some saying that made more sense when her mother said it to her.

But now I am twenty-four and she says it again and it’s still just as stupid a saying as it was when I was eight.

There’s a lot going on up there in the sky and it should be seen. 

Groundling husbands be damned!

Abbu the conqueror

I opened my front door yesterday and do you know what I found there?  

My mother, standing alone and looking worried. I very nearly screamed, such was my shock at seeing her. For a moment, it could have gone either way, screaming or not screaming. In the end – mercifully – no scream was forthcoming. (Alhamdulillah…)

Thumbs up!

That night, after their visit, I called my parents to learn what they’d thought of the place where I work. My thirty-eighth floor office? My boss? My co-workers? My floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over Buffalo Bayou and all points west?

I love my workplace and I hoped they would, too!

But Ammi was silent. She did not wish to say.

“What is wrong, Ammi?” I asked, gently prodding. All I got was more silence.

At long last she spoke and said, “Nasreen, I do not like that place.”

Well, this troubled me. What was it I was not seeing? What was so awful that she could not even bring herself to name it?

“I did not want to say it,” Ammi said, “but the keypads on your doors are bad.”

Wha-?! The keypads on our doors are biometric. I walk up, I press my thumb on a little red square, it reads my thumbprint, and the door opens.

“When we visited Faisal,” she continued, “he watched a program on the television where the people had keypads like those. Then bad men came and cut off the workers’ thumbs to break into the office!”

I did not laugh. I said, “Ammi, Faisal was watching ‘The Blacklist’! It is a crime drama. It is not real.”

She said, “Do not laugh at your mother, Nasreen!”

I did not laugh at her.

I did not laugh at her then. I did not at her laugh later.

But I did send her this groovy picture of me and my cousin to prove that our thumbs were intact: 

A visit from my parents

My parents came by this week to see the place where I work.

I try to picture them: Climbing into the big green Chevy Lumina. Abbu reaching over, gently checking to make sure Ammi is secure before clicking his own seatbelt into place. The car rolls back out of the driveway, slowly, coming to a complete halt for one, two, three full seconds before the horns of angry drivers begin to sound.

Undeterred, Abbu checks every mirror twice. He looks all around him and waits for the nod from Ammi confirming he may now put the car into gear and their journey may begin.

And they’re off.

In my head, I see them, traveling at precisely ten miles per hour down Interstate 45. They navigate the one-way downtown streets, all the time staring at the heights of the buildings rather than at the streets themselves.

In this version of events that I imagine, it is a great wonder they make it to see me at all. Yet I know – I know! – that it could not possibly have happened in any other way.