The Highway to Heaven Gig (an excerpt from an upcoming short story)
On the way to Santa Monica, the grey Corolla stopped at a gas station along the one-laned highway for snacks, cold drinks and ablutions. Brother Akbar or Brother God-is-Great, as everyone called him, removed a Ziploc bag from the glove compartment, took out five wooden miswak twigs, and handed one to each of the men, and tucked the last into the pocket of his long white jubba. They conducted a brief shura session before opening the car doors to make sure that everyone’s opinions were respected and when everyone had spoken, decided to take turns going inside, reminding each other to remember Allah and to wipe the sink after they washed their feet inside it. The people using the washroom after them should testify to the truth of what they were trying to do.
In actuality, these regular folks around them, just filling up gas and buying fruit from the fruit stands on their way to a day at the beach, were not the goal of Brother God-is-Great’s crew. Their real mission was to go to the houses of Muslim people in Utah and save the saved. The five men in the car had met three days ago and had been given this assignment at a local mosque in Orange County after brief introductions. But they were brothers in Islam and had left their homes, their families and their Netflix to preach the word of God in a Godless land. Even though they were focused on other Muslims, no one could predict where the rain of grace would shower its mercy. The speaker yesterday had reminded them that a nurse he knew had recently declared her faith after seeing her Muslim palliative-care patient take painstaking and for that matter, heroic steps to maintain his practice of washing his bottom with pure water, all the way until the moment of death.
Shan, sitting in the back seat, was a Caltech student, had been doing his Ph.D in synthetic biology. Last October he had fudged a lab result in order to finally get to the publishing stage and was now being sued by his supervisor and the whole university along with her. He had tried to tell the supervisory board that there was so much pressure, that he had been suffering from anxiety, hadn’t slept more than two hours a night for months, trying to figure out why the T-cells were migrating backwards, but it was too late for mental health excuses. Initially his mother had been happy that he had started going to the mosque and had told him that it was always a good time to turn to God. But she was furious when he told her that he was actually joining the Tablighi Jamat for more than a month. He had phoned her to let her know that he wouldn’t be taking his cell phone along. As the Jamat leader at the mosque had predicted, she tried to stop him.
“You don’t know the first thing about your religion and now you think you can teach others! You are an academic. I understand you are going through a terrible time with all this stuff going on, but things will get better. You know what, just pray the normal prayers, like the rest of us, just regular prayers, for God’s sake, just pray and get your act together. You are a brilliant student, you can recover from this, these are just bumps in the road, just trust me, listen to us for once.”
“The only way to learn is by doing,” he had mumbled while texting Brother God-is-Great his location along with a copy of his Canadian passport and student visa.
“Doing what!” she screamed, “Walking around, knocking on the doors of total strangers like a ridiculous insurance salesman!” She suddenly became quiet and calm, “Shan, these people are a cult, they don’t even read the Quran, they are just peasants, they don’t even use forks. You’re not going to fit in, this isn’t what Islam is, just walking around and telling people to be good. This is not logical, Shan, please, come home for a few weeks instead, we’ll go to Europe or Turkey or anywhere you want. You need a holiday, you need to get away.”
And that was what he was doing now, just getting away, but this time for something real, not just another shopping trip or foodie fest. Shan’s head felt remarkably clear, his thoughts lucid and directional, even if his voice sounded garbled and strange. It was good to hear his mother pleading. It made him feel like he was doing the right thing. The preacher at the mosque told them that the sacrifice was what paved the way for inner understanding.
Brother God-is-Great had picked him up in front of the Broad Center on campus. Shan left his own car in the parkade, walked past the orange trees towards the idling car and sat in the passenger seat. They shook hands and said their customary salams, Brother GIG’s greetings longer and heartier than Shan’s. There was a gold plastic disk hanging on the rearview mirror. Brother GIG pointed to it, reminding him to say the supplication for driving a vehicle. There were three men sitting in the backseat of the Corolla. Shan said salam to them quietly.
Ibrahim, the only other TJ member at Caltech, had told Shan that Brother GIG was a recent convert. His faith was way more authentic and sincere than any of the Muslims by birth; he was ready to sacrifice everything for his religion and he had done exactly that: his wife divorced him, his parents and extended family disowned him, he quit his job at In-and-Out Burgers because they sold pork there, and he gave away both his dog, Chaos, who was impure and his record collection which was unholy. Luckily he was taken in by Uncle Alam, who was not actually his uncle but was a well-known real estate agent in LA, with forty years of experience and dozens of properties. Uncle Alam was a senior TJ (Tablighi Jamat) worker and he took Brother GIG in, let him live in an unrented property he had and took him along when he drove to Chicago for a three-day chilla at the new mosque. There Brother GIG had been a star, with his Santa-angel cheeks, his gem-blue eyes and his rich velvety voice. Thirty-eight people had put up their hand to join the next couple of missions going out, all from hearing Brother GIG weep copiously as he belted out the six principles of TJ: to declare the faith, to pray, to respect fellow Muslims, to have a sincere intention and to go out and spread the word. Uncle Alam decided immediately that Brother GIG could go out on his own and gave him the assignment to Sandy, Utah. Shan had wondered why Ibrahim wasn’t going out with them. He knew so much about Brother GIG.
“Shan, you go inside first,” Brother GIG said, “we’ll wait here and then when we all have washed up, we’ll lay out this plastic tablecloth over in the playground and pray together, shoulder to shoulder. It’s important that people see us being unashamed, nah, not unashamed, PROUD of the faith that lives in here,” he thumped his massive chest and pulled down his reddish beard and shaped it into a cone that ended near his belly button. A young girl slammed the door of her Ferrari next to the Corolla. Her bright orange tube top slipped down to her waist as she turned around. She tugged it up and slapped her oiled midriff playfully and laughed as she walked past the five men. Four of them stared and Brother GIG lowered his gaze. Shan turned and walked after her. “The life of this world is temporary, what concerns us is the six heavens above and the six feet of dirt that we will go into…” Shan heard Brother GIG continue behind him as he walked towards the gas station store. He too lowered his gaze, right down to the girl’s bell bottoms, flaring around a pair of silver flip flops, and painted orange toes. At Caltech, the girls almost never laughed. They knew that laughing, or even smiling, meant the grants would go to a man instead. When he had first started at Caltech, he had dreamed that he would find a partner there, maybe even in his own lab, someone who shared his passion for research, they would discover life and each other together. It didn’t take long for him to realize that discoveries and passion were just quaint, stupid ideas that governments used to get kids to go into science-based programs and then go on to offer themselves as slaves and one-celled amoebas to their lab-giant supervisors. Shan’s supervisor had won a Nobel prize. She had told him that he was finished in the world of research.
“Hey man, what can I get you?” The young man working behind the counter was tanned and smiley, with big teeth and scattered freckles over his nose and cheeks and into his ears.
“Umm, hello, we were going to get gas and also, uh, could I use the restroom?”
“Is that it?” the clerk said, pointing to the Corolla.
Shan nodded and took out a $100 bill. TJ workers were supposed to dip into their own pockets for the missions, but he didn’t know if they were supposed to split it. His stipend would end soon anyways, so he might as well do some good with it while he had something in his wallet. Brother GIG might have some money because he did maintenance work on Uncle Alam’s properties, but the other three looked worse off than Shan. Two of them were elderly Pakistani men, maybe even blood brothers, frail and quiet, with wrinkled shalwar kameez and Lancome duffle bags, probably free gift-with-purchases their wives had made years before, the original bright pink now worn to the color of a cadaver’s tongue. The fifth man was Moroccan or Tunisian or maybe Algerian, somewhere in west Africa where they spoke Arabic. His name was Awaad and he was a civil engineer who drove a taxi. He had not spoken once since they had left Madina Market, where Brother GIG had bought halal bologna, ground beef and chicken livers and put it in the cooler that he had kept in the trunk stuffed in between the shabby luggage.
Shan made wudhu quickly and went over his teeth with Brother GIG’s twig. Shan had been taught to do ablutions by his Dada, his dad’s dad. He had been six at the time and Dada had taken him to the one and only mosque in Red Deer. The mosque was a small office space in a mini mall with a Popeye’s Chicken on one side and a Liquor Store on the other. Dada had bought him ice cream after prayers. As he fished out a splintery piece of wood from between his molars, Shan realized that his Dada was exactly what the TJ preacher had been talking about – a Muslim who had just lost himself in the world. Dada had an electric toothbrush and had probably never used a miswak in his life. Shan made wudhu all over again, repeating it, this time concentrating on the water hitting his elbows, scrubbing between his toes, patting the top of his head and the back of his neck carefully, all the while staring at himself in the mirror. Dada was always reminding his children and grandchildren to work hard, buy RRSP’s, paint their fences, mow their lawns, attend town hall meetings, check their water heaters, and take care of their neighbours. He had insisted that all of them apply to Ivy League schools. He had never emphasized death and the afterlife. He was part of the reason that Shan had put so much faith in a system of knowledge which was not only ultimately irrelevant but corrupt at the same time.
Shan went back to the car. The group was reading Quran, leaning against the Corolla. One by one, the men washed up. They prayed a little ways from the gas station so as not to disturb anyone. They bowed in unison and could feel the prickly ground push up from the tablecloth under their foreheads when they went down in prostration. Tourists stared openly, regulars pretended not to see them and the clerk inside kept his hand on the panic button under the till.
The man who would host the group in Utah was a plastic surgeon named Dr. Rasheed. He owned a sprawling house near the Bell Canyon Trail. Brother GIG proudly told them that Dr. Rasheed had phoned three times while they were praying to find out what time they would arrive, as he wanted his wife to have fresh food ready for the group. Dr. Rasheed had put every cent of his savings into his cousin-in-law’s online ethnic clothing business, DesiLove, which had exploded internationally. The same year that Dr. Rasheed retired from his practice, his nine-month-old baby passed away and now he spent his time and money providing food and lodging for the TJ crews that passed through Utah on their missions. The Pakistani brothers in the back seat nodded, “mashaAllah” and Awaad said, “amazing, beautiful”, his sole verbiage on the trip so far. His hand went to up to his face to rub at the side of his cheek, then crossed his arms again, closed his eyes and rocked back and forth.
When they arrived, Dr. Rasheed was standing at the gate of his house, in a starched white shalwar kameez, a white crocheted skull cap on his shiny head, and an oversized wooden tasbeeh in his hand. He waved and ran over to the car, opened the door for Brother GIG, kissed him on the cheeks, hugged him three times, alternating sides and then kissed him again.
“Welcome, welcome to the guests of God.” He repeated the delighted embraces with the Pakistani brothers. Awaad put out his hand before Dr. Rasheed could come close to him. Shan stepped forward and greeted the energetic man, who was jumping around like he had just won the last prize on a game show.
“This is very kind of you to host us, Sir.”
“Ah, no, not at all. You are the ones on the accepted path of paradise. You have graced me and my home. From your presence will come all blessings.” Dr. Rasheed made a big show of expressing indignation upon seeing the cooler full of meat as the men unpacked the car. Most of the time, TJ workers were supposed to bring their bedding, supplies and cook their own food and not be a burden on anyone, but Dr. Rasheed was insistent and the cooler was carried away by a thin teenage boy wearing a baseball cap, the meat to be stored in the extra freezer in the third garage until the crew returned to LA.
Awaad hung back as the group moved up the brick steps to the front entrance of the house. He stopped and crouched down, putting his hand in the landscaped creek that ran beside the entrance walk. Brother GIG called him up to the house.
“Akhee, Awaad, we’re going to miss Maghreb.”
Awaad stood up and hurried up the steps. At the entrance, a carved wood frame with Arabic calligraphy hung over the door, “MashaAllah.” Shan was waiting for him at the door. A nylon figure in black swished past them, Shan thought he might have imagined it, but the figure came through again, this time with a tray. Two eyes blinked. They appeared to be floating in the sunset glow, beside a ponytail palm tree in the center of the tiled foyer. The tray bobbed before them, jutting into their stomachs.
“Please, take some. It’s mint lemonade. May Allah bless you and your journey.”
The TJ head in Orange County had told them not to talk to any females that they encountered, just to look down and pretend they hadn’t seen them. In this case, Shan hadn’t seen her. Her voice was excited and happy and Shan took the glass. Awaad declined.
“Downstairs, to your left.”
“May Allah reward you,” Shan said. The phrases felt more comfortable now. It had only been a few days, but he liked it. It was kind of royal and stiff, like he, Shan Choudhery, actually meant something, like there were rules about him, about his place in the world. He wasn’t random, there was always a correct response, no experimentation and unknown variables.
“May Allah give you Jannah.” The figure slid open a glass door and disappeared, then reappeared again, black polyester sticking to walls and furniture, “Ahmed, Ahmed,” she screeched now, “Ahmed, take the loft rug downstairs to the basement where the men are praying, Ahmed, can you hear me, take the rug with the purple flowers downstairs.”
The thin boy barrelled through the foyer. Shaan followed him and Awaad took his time to look around the foyer before descending. Downstairs, it looked like someone was getting married. There were Christmas lights strung across the foundation pillars, candles lit along the bookshelves. Religious pamphlets and calligraphy covered three large bulletin boards across the longest wall. A set of bookshelves divided the room. Prayer mats were scattered everywhere. There were at least fifteen or twenty men already there, waiting to meet them. They came forward and hugged the travellers, competing with each other to stand beside them one of them in prayer.
Before they prayed the sunset prayer, Dr. Rasheed asked the travelers to give the standard evening bayaan. Brother GIG nodded towards Shan. It was his turn.
Shan hated public speaking. Every Thursday night, he had insomnia from worrying about the presentation the next day at his lab. There was always some detail he had overlooked, some minor calculation he had done too quickly, or a graphic that just looked childish now that ten pairs of eyes were assessing it. He stood up and faced the men lined up for prayer. Brother GIG had told him that it was easy to speak if you knew what to say. The six points were already laid out. In the Tablighi Jamat gatherings, everyone had to take turns speaking and everyone said the same thing every single night. Because human beings were forgetful creatures, their job was to remind each other. That was the whole purpose of speaking, to preach to each other the six points. It was simple.
Shan went through the six points smoothly. His voice was strong. One elderly man who was praying in a wheelchair shouted out at each point, “Indeed!” and most of the men standing nodded their heads happily and put their hands over their hearts. After the prayer, the travellers were seated on a small stage with cylindrical velvet cushions on the rug that Ahmed had nearly thrown down the stairs. The five traveling men were served dinner at their places while the relaxed against the rounded cushions. The locals lined up at two Costco folding tables covered with red and green tablecloths. They filled their plates with biryani and kebaab, drowning both in yoghurt sauce and green chutney and then garnishing the heap with pickled mango. Dr. Rasheed ran around the room, inspecting everyone’s plates, refilling, smiling, and doing more hugging as more people joined them from the patio doors.
Shan and Awaad were sitting next to each other when Dr. Rasheed bent down to refill their plates.
“Dr. Rasheed, can I have a word with you?” It was the most Shan had heard from Awaad all day.
“At your service, my brother, what can I do for you.”
Awaad put his plate down and wiped his mouth and nose with a napkin. He looked at Shan and then at Dr. Rasheed. He crossed his arms and uncrossed them and blew his nose and reached for another tissue. Shan was suddenly reminded of the Toronto 18, one of them had thought he was attending a retreat, when it was actually a training camp for attacks in the GTA.
“Was it too spicy? I even told my wife that one of you is Arab. I’m so sorry, I’ll order some donairs, there’s a great Middle Eastern restaurant close by, my brother in law will just run and pick it up.” Dr. Rasheed started to stand.
“No, no, the food was good, great, I ate, thank you, to you, I mean to your wife,” Awaad glanced over towards the walk-out windows, towards the sun setting behind the reddish mountains. The house seemed like it had once been tastefully furnished, but was now overlaid with cheap religious kitsch from Saudi interspersed . Awaad’s eyes were shining. His arms unfolded. “Dr. Rasheed, Allah is Beautiful and He loves beauty, right?”
“Ahh, yes, He is Beautiful, Merciful, Kind.” Dr. Rasheed brought together all the fingers of his right hand into a flower shape, kissed the tips and then swiped his hand up to the ceiling.
“Dr. Rasheed, I need a favour from you. I’m having problems with my wife.”
“Ah, I’m so sorry,” he touched first his right ear and then his left in a gesture that meant God have mercy! “Allah tests us all in different ways, may Allah ease your difficulties. You know, why don’t you let my wife call your wife, she’s actually a psychologist, she used to give counseling before we got married.” Shan tried to imagine the floating eyes in a clinic.
“No, no, that’s ok. Actually…” he stopped and removed something from the inner lining of his vest, “Doctor, I need you to fix something for me.”
“I’m sorry?”
Awaad showed him a picture. “Look here, you can do this for me?”
Shan looked over at the picture in Awaad’s hands, it was of a man, with sculpted hair and a silky grey suit on. “Who’s that?”
“You don’t know Saber Al Rebai, everybody knows him, he’s a singer, from Tunisia, but everybody knows him, where have you been living? I love his nose, you can fix mine like that? I tried when I was in Lebanon but the war started again. Look here.” He outlined the contour and upturn of the singer’s nose with his index finger.
“May Allah forgive him,” Dr. Rasheed clucked his tongue and put his hands up towards the ceiling again. God was strong up there.
“I want you to make me the same nose as him, I will be indebted, may Allah reward you.”
Dr. Rasheed took out his miswak and chewed on it. He looked over at Shan seeming to expect some brotherhood. “Brother, with all due respect, I cannot do that, you are Allah’s creation…”
“Look,” Awaad interrupted, “this is the perfect opportunity for me, we are away from home for forty days, I can have it done here and then just let it heal and go back with my brothers here and nobody will know. I don’t have insurance, but here,” and he put three solid gold coins, stamped 999 on the marble tray set in front of him. The coins shone prettily beside the china cups filled with green tea and the bowls of dates and cashews. “They’re an ounce each.”
Dr. Rasheed rubbed his beard, pulling at the hairs individually until he had statically charged them into competing arrows. “My Brother, my love, may my parents be sacrificed for you, I cannot do this, you are asking me to do something against the Will of Allah, how can I do that!” He pushed the gold back towards Awaad.
“You don’t understand. This is a matter of life and death! It will benefit my religion even!” Awaad’s hands were trembling. He forced himself to smile and said, “Dr. Rasheed, Sir, you know that to save a single life is like saving all of humanity, like the Prophet said.” At this, both Shan and Dr. Rasheed put their hand to their chests and recited the customary durood on the Prophet’s name. “And I know that you will not ask me to give any further details, because a Muslim never engages in suspicion. You must use your God-given talent, you don’t own it, you are only a messenger, correct?”
“Brothers, brothers,” Brother GIG had climbed up to the stage. “Come come, shall we organize ourselves for tomorrow? I want to make a list of all the Muslim Brothers who live in this neighbourhood and try to call them before we go to visit?”
Dr. Rasheed pulled out a small black moleskin notebook and handed it to Brother GIG. “I won’t be able to join you tomorrow. I have an appointment, but this contains the phone numbers and email addresses of all the members of our congregation as well as some of business owners in this area. I will arrange for Ahmed and our local imam to accompany you in the van, so that you can all travel together.”
“Of course,” Brother GIG bowed halfway to Dr. Rasheed.
“Would you allow Brother Awaad to accompany me to my purpose? He speaks Arabic and I think he might be useful,” Dr. Rasheed said, speaking faster than usual.
“He is here to serve the community in any way he can.”
“I am indebted.”
“May Allah reward you.”
“May Allah give you Jannah.”
**
When the paper was finally published, Shan was the second-name author. He willingly told his associate, Jerry, to put his own name first, because Brother GIG had once warned him that arrogance could creep up when he least suspected it. The forty days in Utah had turned into four months and shortly after that, Shan was invited to join a liberal arts program at Brigham Young. Doing research with the Mormons was like being with the TJ brothers: no drinking, no swearing and plenty of wholesome self-deprecation. His paper received fairly decent coverage and not as much critique as Shan had imagined. His colleagues at Brigham Young had done a phenomenal job of scouring every possible Quranic textual reference to gene editing. The Journal for Islamic Studies review from Oxford College called Shan, “Modern Biology’s Ibn Sina.”
Brother GIG drove up from LA to congratulate Shan and then proposed to Shan for his sister, Elena, who was a professional weightlifter. She too, had recently witnessed. Their nikah ceremony was held in Dr. Rasheed’s backyard. Awaad, who was accepting an award on stage in Dubai, gave a shout-out to the new couple during his interview with Harper’s Bazaar Arabia. Dr. Rasheed’s wife projected the clip onto a white sheet pinned up between the gazebo poles. At the walima reception the next day, Elena signed a deal with Dr. Rasheed for a new line of fitness burqa’s, complete with extra thigh padding in the long black Lycra designed for squats. Shan was still on a grad school income and this side business would help. They would ask Awaad’s wife to model it, but without the face flap.
