That Thing We Call a Heart by Sheba Karim

Author:Sheba Karim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-04-02T04:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

I WAS STILL A bit high when I got home, and a little nervous about hanging out with my mother, but I was also flying from my amazing meal with Jamie and our second minivan make-out session. Being with my mother turned out to be super fun, because instead of focusing on what she wasn’t (a liberal white mom who I could talk to about Jamie), I was able to relax and enjoy her for what she was: gentle and caring and a pretty good sport. I joked with her like I joked with Farah, tailoring my humor to her more refined nature. I even threatened to put a pea under her mattress to see if she’d feel it and she laughed and said “What nonsense,” a phrase she’d stolen from my father, which got me cracking jokes about Dad, a source of endless comedic fodder, both imagined and real, like the time this auntie got a nose job and he asked her point-blank at a party what had happened to her face.

I hadn’t seen my mother laugh so much in ages, and it made me guilty, because she should have had a couple of children to make her laugh and she had only one, who’d been doing a pretty miserable job of it.

After we got home from the cheesy rom-com, my mother hugged me and said, “I had such a lovely time. I hope we have more times like this before you leave for school.”

Maybe the secret to getting along with your parents was marijuana.

I went to bed exhausted but unable to sleep; my mind was too wired, my thoughts lucid but tangled. I thought of rom-coms and Bollywood and how we loved them because they were so predictable, how strange it was to see Farah smoke weed in a hijab, how she so openly displayed her Muslim identity whereas if someone saw me they wouldn’t know I was Muslim unless they asked, what Jamie said about his mother not loving his stepfather. I circled back to rom-coms, thinking about the universal happily ever after they had in common with Bollywood films, and I wondered if my parents loved each other, not the love you settle into because you’ve lived with a person for so long, but love like in a Faiz poem, love like in a Bollywood movie. Had they ever felt that way about each other? My mother had chosen him out of several suitors, but they hadn’t really known each other before the wedding. Was my father capable of such a depth of emotion? And if he was, could he even express it? And if he wasn’t, did that secretly upset my mother?

A little agitated, I turned on the bedside lamp, comforted by the sight of familiar objects: Big Muchli, the purple stuffed whale I’d had since I was four, on the pillow next to me, the Radiohead OK Computer poster over my desk, my clothes from today hanging over my desk chair. Everything in its right place.

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