When We Were Sisters: a Novel Read online

  This is a book of fiction. It’s not a memoir, it’s not an autobiography. It is art, it exists in the space of the imaginary. All characters, places, incidents, and events in this book are the product of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2022 by Fatimah Asghar

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  One World and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Northwestern University Press for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Another Attempt At The Telling” from The Shared World: Poems by Vievee Francis (Evanston, IL: TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2023, p. 10), copyright © 2023 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2023. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Asghar, Fatimah, author.

  Title: When we were sisters: a novel / by Fatimah Asghar.

  Description: First Edition. | New York: One World, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022004574 (print) | LCCN 2022004575 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593133460 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593133484 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

  Classification: LCC PS3601.S46 W48 2022 (print) | LCC PS3601.S46 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022004574

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2022004575

  Ebook ISBN 9780593133484

  oneworldlit.com

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Grace Han

  Cover images: artbesouro/Getty Images (figures); Malte Mueller/Getty Images (grass); Galina Kamenskaya/Getty Images (pattern)

  ep_prh_6.0_141492000_c0_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  1995

  arzoo

  him

  blood & not

  him

  strangers

  him

  a lord a fly

  her

  mer_ dil

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Fatimah Asghar

  About the Author

  The secret to knowing the secret is to speak, but we too often tell

  the stories of no matter and avoid the one story that does matter.

  In truth, we are bound by one story, so you’d think by now

  we’d tell it, at least to each other.

  —Vievee Francis

  •

  1995

  In a city, a man dies and all the Aunties who Aunty the neighborhood reach towards their phones. Their brown fingers cradle porcelain, the news spreading fast and careless as a common cold. Ring! [ ] is dead. Ring! Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un. Ring! How sad. Ring! Only a few years after his wife. Ring! And his daughters? Ring! Three of them, yes. Ring! Alive. Ring! Ya Allah. Ring! [ ] is dead.

  A man dies in a city he was not born in. Murdered. In the street. (Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un.) A man dies in a city he only lived in for a handful of years. (How lonely.) A man dies in a city that his children were born in, but a city that will never be theirs, in a country that will never be theirs, on land that will never be theirs. (Ya Allah.) A father dies and the city and his children keep on living, the lights twinkling from apartment building to apartment building. All around the city, breath flows easily. All around the man, breath slows to a stop. The sky, who sees everything, looks down at him. And the moon, who is full, shines her milky dress on his dead body, bedded by the cement street.

  * * *

  —

  In a city, a man dies. In a suburb in a different state, the man’s brother-in-law celebrates by adding an extension to his family’s house. A new deck spills out into their backyard. The man’s brother-in-law renovates the basement: old moldy carpet pulled up and Moroccan marble tiles put in its place. The brother-in-law pores over them at the Home Depot, comparing prices, how happy it will make his wife, white, who he married when he first came to America. A gorra? his mom asked, the brown women in his family looking at each other, confused. She found Islam because of me! he explained, exasperated, not understanding why people couldn’t see how he was going to earn extra points to heaven, his love enough to make someone convert. You went to America and fell out of love with us, his mom sighed, dramatic, as usual.

  But brown women were so plentiful. He knew he could have them. White women found every simple thing he did exciting. It opened him. The lota in the bathroom, a marvel. Basic fruit chaat, the spiciest thing they’d ever tasted. How interesting he could become. A gorra? his cousins in Pakistan echoed in disbelief, some whispering mashallah as others turned away from him. Yes, a gorra. His gorra, her slender nose, all her features pulled towards it, her voice fast like lightning. When they first married, she’d take him around to her American friends. Him: so exotic and fun. They had two sons: brown, but fair. For a while it was good. Or maybe never fully good, but bearable. But when the quiet arrived it stayed. Rooted into his bones. The coldness between them, rattling his chest on every inhale. He still gets to see his sons on weekends, lives in an apartment on his own. Her American friends, their selfishness, filling her head with ideas of a divorce.

  I divorce you. I divorce you. I—

  All the things he’s done to keep her from saying it a third time. Divorce. Ya Allah, what people would think. Divorce. He can’t even bring himself to think it a third time in a row. So American it bursts his skin to hives, so American it bows his head when he walks by the Pakistani men at the masjid who mutter about his failed business practices: the roofing scheme he tried to start, the gardening venture, the haraam liquor store. His failure: a reputation that clings to him. That clings to his wife. That clings to his sons. Even when he boasted about the great family he comes from. What they were back in Pakistan. Their name, their honor, what they contributed. People would be polite, they listened and nodded. Then they got tired. They would look away. If only he could make more money. Maybe he could see his sons more. Maybe he could see her more. Maybe she’d walk next to him as he entered the masjid.

  When his little sister was alive, when they were kids, she looked at him like he could do no wrong. Her eyes big and full of wonder. Bhai. No one else had ever looked at him like that. She grew up and got married, had kids, made her own life. And then she stopped looking at him that way. When she died he buried the pain deep in his stomach. Tried to convince his sons to love him while their mom called him a useless sack of shit behind his back.

  * * *

  —

  It’s not until his sister’s husband dies that his stomach begins to bubble. He realizes how much he’s missed that look from when they were kids, how she was the only one who believed he could do anything. How much he missed someone believing that about him. How, through her eyes, he believed it too.

  It’s sad business, his nieces orphaned a few states away. Sad business, their girlness. Sad business there was no boy among them. Sad business his wife can barely muster an Inna lillahi for. Sad business she doesn’t think about as she combs the hair of her two sons, getting them ready for school. Sad business, their dead dad’s money up for grabs, the promise
of a government check following the orphans until they turn eighteen: 161 checks that could come through for the youngest, 139 for the middle, 120 for the eldest—420 checks total, if they survive.

  I don’t want them staying with me, his wife says, lounging on the couch. One of their sons is upstairs coloring, the other son beside her watching TV, absorbed in a show where a badly drawn white boy with a large nose, three strands of hair, and an oversized green sweater vest is supposed to be eleven years old. Her two sons are in private school. Her manicured lawn. The Tupperware meal plans for all of them stacked in her fridge. Everything so orderly. Neat and separate—a blessing. Her failure husband is in his own apartment, away from them except for weekends.

  When she met him in college, he was brimming with potential. All her friends said he’d make a lot of money. Be an entrepreneur. She loved the stories he would tell; of places she’d never been. How close his skin felt to everything, like he was part of the world and not outside of it. His deep belly laugh, full of fireflies.

  It was a gamble, sure, marrying a brown man. But it made her edgy, something she never had been before. She always felt so outside of everything. Like she couldn’t even feel the grass under her feet. And then he came, so eager. Her veins started to open. She could feel more, the sun on her arms. His fingers, blending into the soil. A gamble. Even when she stood in front of the Imam, reciting there is no God but Allah, removed like she was observing herself, her eyes wandering to the different faces of the men in the mosque, wondering what her life would have been like if she’d met any one of them first. Here, people adored her. They welcomed her, doted on her even. The more she felt how easy it was to be adored, the more her husband’s need disturbed her. The more space she wanted. Separate, clean and distinct, a fence around her. And then his mom died. And his sister. Death, how cold it made him. She never fully understood that coldness, both her parents still alive, but so separate from her. He started to become that too: separate. No longer the man that was part of the world, the man she fell in love with, the man she used to envy. He became fenced, lining the walls of his own apartment with boxes like he was cushioning himself against destruction. So no one could get to him. But she couldn’t care less, loving how foreign she felt in this new community, how exotic. Her own parents, flabbergasted by her decision. But she had wanted to leave them as soon as she had left for college. Promised herself she would never go back. And now, here she was, in her own house, with her own kids. Her pristine little life. The one she had to claw out for herself. The three orphans, threatening to dirty it.

  It’ll be like they never existed, the Uncle says, sweaty, as though it’s his body placing the marble tiles on the floor, as though he’s lifted a finger.

  •

  arzoo

  I wanted to be her: her straight hair framing her thin face, her high cheekbones and slender nose, her dark brown skin, her long eyelashes calling towards the sky. I would stay up just so I could see her face right before she fell asleep, the moonlight on her cheeks. And when I was sweet, when I smiled just right, she would let me sleep next to her. My little radiator, she called me, and so I was: little, radiator, curled to her like a cat waiting to be touched.

  God of the playground. God of the eyelashes. God of the cheekbones. And like any good God deserves, I followed her, teetering, calling her name when she walked. Noreen, Noreen, Noreen. And unlike most Gods, she answered. She pulled me towards her, balancing me in the air with her feet pressed into my stomach, our fingertips touching as I floated.

  She asked for a bunk bed the day our father disappeared for good, when they made us all wear white and all the Aunties came to our house crying. I loved crying. It’s what I did best. Crybaby, crybaby, Noreen and Aisha would say, and I would cry more. I’m not a crybaby, I yelled, my eyes burning, but I knew I was and I hated myself for it. But now, it was okay to cry. I cried, delighted in the crying, and the adults who saw me cried harder, and so I cried harder still because I knew I was a good crier and no one could out-cry me.

  Your father is gone.

  The house filled with the women from the neighborhood, the women who we call Aunty: the one with her round face and thin nose with the gold loop glinting from it, her dimples pressed gentle into her cheeks. Another Aunty, who always smells like badaam and cinnamon. Then the Aunty with the spider hands, skin thin and crackled. And the last Aunty, with yellow teeth and hairs on her toes, who always has caramels in her bag. My father familyless in America except for us girls. But my father familied by the Aunties who picked up the phones and activated the Aunty Network.

  Today they crowd our living room as though it is the basement of the masjid, the Aunties holding the tasbihs in their hands, fingering each bead, rocking back and forth.

  Your father is gone. What can we do? The Aunties beat their hands into their chests.

  Their wails scatter throughout the entire house, frothing the windows, filling the stove, painting the walls. Their wails everywhere, turning our house into a House of Sadness.

  A bunk bed, Noreen demanded, dry-eyed, standing in front of me and Aisha. Arms crossed in front of her chest; bully of the playground. You can get us a bunk bed. Behind her, me and Aisha tried our best to look tough. Puffed out our chests. Yeah, a bunk bed, Aisha mimicked, as I nodded in agreement.

  A bunk bed in exchange for a father.

  What idiots. He was our father. We should have asked for more.

  Orphans, the Aunties say, and we become something new.

  No longer a daughter, no longer my father’s kid, but an orphan. Our mom is dead too, gone before I could speak. No one talks about her. Or how she died. Our dad the only parent we knew. Now, orphaned. Each Aunt touches her hand to my head to get her sawaab.

  My head, now a home for palms.

  Everyone’s unwashed fingers comb through my hair. Some of them grab at my forehead, their nails pressing into my skin, as though they’ll get extra by prying it open. The wailing in the room so loud it touches Allah. The wailing signaling Jannah, so that the announcement can be known. There are orphans here! Orphans that need to be cared for! Clothe them, feed them, be kind to them. They point to the Qur’an. Clothe them! I look down at the pink dress I’ve been wearing for three days, pouffed up like a princess. Feed them! My fingers sticky with popsicle. Be kind to them! The hands pushing into my forehead. The new thing I am, taking hold of all my other names.

  Noreen ran the playground. Hand on her hips, leg stuck out, daring anyone to step to her. A ball of force, a little sun, so bright it was hard to stare straight at her. Hair wild, sticking out from lopsided pigtails because our dad was our everything: our hairdresser, our chef, our reason for running home at the end of the day. And it seemed no one had ever taught him how to brush hair. We sat in front of him every morning with our mess of nest—twigs sticking straight out, leaves, thin streaks of daal and attah. He would try to run a comb through it, sometimes the plastic breaking off in a tangle, before he put in every sparkly bobble that he could find. Then we’d go to the park by ourselves while he whisked away to work, shouting Noreen, you’re in charge! Stay inside! Follow Noreen! from his car. And so we did, me and Aisha, trailing after Noreen as she stomped down the street even though we were supposed to be inside, as she paraded through our neighborhood, as the other kids stared from their windows, jealous at how we roamed around by ourselves, how Noreen took us to the park and we didn’t have an adult to tell us what to do. And every day, when he would come home we would pretend that we never left and he would beam, my little Noreen, my little gift. My father, his whole chest seemingly made of sparkly bobbles, all catching the sun.

  After he dies, the body is shipped from Pennsylvania to Lahore to be laid next to his parents, in the land where generations of his family have lived. In the math of what is considered family, me and my sisters are left out. When they close his casket, a VHS is sent to our house, which plays on the TV screen on repeat. A movie of our d
ead father’s bloated face, closed eyes, being put into soil we can’t touch. A place he is from, and so we are from, but we know nothing about. On the VHS, in the movie that now plays at all hours, his family members gather all around him. We crowd around the TV and press our dirty hands to the screen.

  When the Aunties let us take a break from the TV, the three of us go outside, still dressed in our white kurtas.

  I grab a fistful of dirt and throw it at Aisha.

  You’re dead now.

  The soil loud, a stain against what should be clean.

  She gathers soil in her fist and throws it at me.

  So are you.

  And like this, we make our own funerals, burying each other alive, until an Aunty spots us and yells.

  The Aunty pulls me to the side, hands me a plastic plate with a bright-orange jaleebi on it. Your father is gone. I look at the plate, its soft crunchy edges. Do you understand? He’s dead. He’s not coming back.

  Across the room, there is a me who sits by the window, waiting for our father’s car. She has my face, the long nose and big eyes, her hair, just like mine, pulled back into a braid. No one seems to notice her, this other me, sitting quietly by the window, eyes on the street. Instead, the Aunty just watches me. Her scratchy hand on my back, her veins blue and spidering down her fingers, trying to comfort me.

  But no one notices her, the girl who looks like me, across the room. She taps the window, the oil from her skin blemishes the glass.