“O my father! Do as you are commanded. You will find me, God willing, among those who are patient.” –Qur’an 37:102
1.
The butcher entered the crowded pen, where goats wagged their tails and climbed over one another. He grabbed one at random and pushed it toward me. I stroked its matted head, fearful of germs, not looking into its eyes. My sister Hajra rubbed another goat on the head. We both looked up at the sky, the clouds portending rain. The city’s muezzins announced the afternoon call to prayer, unsynchronized, the holy message distorted into an incoherent round of mournful voices.
I was born in America, and my father had not done my haqiqa after my birth. Without the ceremonial sacrifice of a goat, I was not a confirmed Muslim, and my marriage to my Pakistani fiancé would not be sanctified. We were in Pakistan, preparing for my wedding.
My mother thought that no relative of ours was worth sharing three goats’ worth of meat with, so she decided to give it to charity. We blessed the goats that would make my sisters and me real Muslims.
My sisters were named for the wives of Ibrahim, Sara and Hajra, two women who delivered prophets into the world. But Sara wasn’t there. “Someone bless it already,” the butcher said, wrangling the bleating animal by its collar. My mother patted Sara’s goat on the head. We were supposed to watch as the blood spilled from the jugular of the animal that gave its life for us. Instead, we turned our backs to the butcher. We did not see him raise his knife. We did not hear him proclaim Allahu Akbar.
“What’s the point in slaughter in the name of God?” My father railed, arms folded over his belly. “We’re not even going to eat these goats. We just wasted money on superstition.”
“It is a waste,” my mother said. “Like having kids was a waste of my life. Sara doesn’t have the guts to tell us she’s not coming to her sister’s wedding, or when she’ll marry the white boy she’s been living with. She never picks up when we call. Today we did our duty as Muslim parents, but she gave up on duty and Islam a long time ago.”
“But an arranged marriage? It’s like penning two animals together.”
“We’re giving her to good people.”
“You don’t know that. I can barely live here–how will she?”
“Would you rather she live in America and do the same as her sister? What’s right and honorable and better for us all?”
“Pointless, barbaric blood-letting ceremony,” my father said. “Someone invented the story of Ibrahim and Hajra’s son Ishmail to convince the tribes of Arabia that Islam wouldn’t abrogate their pagan traditions, like animal sacrifice. It has no meaning beyond that.”
“Today the poor get to eat meat because of you, Abbu,” I said. “Doesn’t that count for something?”
“You don’t know what you’re getting into.” Did only the rain wet his cheeks? “Why do I have to give you up?”
“Your father has such a small heart,” my mother said, rain drizzling onto her face. Now the voice of a single muezzin rang clear, long and haunting, the other voices having ceased. “So sick of his homeland already. Having wasted forty years in America, he doesn’t remember that his father was a mufti, and that God will look favorably upon him for acts done in His honor. But be proud: today you are a Muslim. Trust in God. And don’t ever look back.”
2.
After the wedding, my husband took me to Kuwait, where he worked as an engineer. I found work at an advertising company that paid me a quarter of the salary I earned as an engineer in the United States. My boss did not allow his workers to talk beyond a wave of the hand and a quick good morning. “What kind of rule is this?” my husband asked. “He just doesn’t want you to compare salaries.”
In America we never took time off from school or work for sickness, let alone to celebrate Muslim holidays, so my first real Eid-al-Adha was in Kuwait with my husband. He texted me at work: “Please ask for your holidays. We’ll both enjoy five days off.” The day before the holiday, I told my boss I’d be seeing him in five days. He told me he’d see me tomorrow.
I left the office and called my husband. “You don’t have a contract, so you don’t exist in the company,” he said. “He might not even pay you on time. It happened to me–I didn’t get my salary for four months once, and I still have thousands of dollars frozen by the company–it happens all the time here–but I don’t want it to happen to you. You’re not an emergency worker. They don’t need you to come in. And this is not America. This is a Muslim country and you are a Muslim. The government announced the national holiday. Be firm. You will take five days.” I went back to the office and told my boss I had to take time off, getting pressure from home. He warned me about a deduction in my salary. I left the office worried that I might have to start looking for another job.
Rain fell on Kuwait for four days of the five-day holiday. My husband and I walked by the gulf and took photos to send home. We remembered our wedding day, when the groom’s car couldn’t leave the house because of monsoon flooding in Karachi, and I arrived barefoot in a wet shalwar to the wedding hall, my dress wrapped high around my waist to keep it from getting drenched. We stayed awake on our first night together, watching the rain through our bedroom window.
My husband sent money to his family in Karachi for our share of the sacrificial cow, to be distributed in equal thirds among family, friends and relatives, and the poor. A cow consists of seven shares. For the eighth family member (me), my father-in-law sacrificed a goat.
Our friends in Kuwait shared their goat meat with us. My husband hacked the bones into smaller pieces and I threw out the parts that looked like entrails. The meat took hours to cook–it would not become tender–and we shared burnt pilaf with my husband’s cousin, leaving the window open to let out the smoke and to watch the rain.
My paycheck was two days late. The money for the holiday had been deducted.
3.
My mother-in-law lopped off hunks of blue cow’s flesh before dropping the remaining red pieces into a pot of onions, garlic, and ghee.
“Take these packets to your aunt,” she said. “Since you’re my daughter-in-law, she’s not just my friend. She’s now my relative. I have never felt so disrespected. We’ll show her what true hospitality looks like.” In one fat, livid fist she shook the plastic bag my aunt gave her. “Half a kilo is all the meat she brings you? From eight goats? This is an insult.”
“They must have been some skinny goats,” my husband said from the sofa in front of the television. “Leave her alone.”
My father-in-law, soft-spoken and polite like my husband, calmed his wife down, and explained to me that if I were to live within the culture, I would need to learn the etiquette for what’s proper and respectful. I tried to recall the kilograms-to-pounds conversion.
All day long my mother-in-law kneeled over a plastic sheet spread on her kitchen floor, sweating over hundreds of pounds of meat with the servants, while my sister-in-law packaged and labeled them with the names of relatives and friends. Beggars and former servants buzzed the gate and collected packets of beef and a few rupees, from our house as well as every other house in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, my husband and his brothers slept in the guestroom, dressed in undershirts and shalwars, their embroidered kameezes laid across the divan. My father-in-law slept in front of the TV, tuned to a wrestling show telecasted from the United States. I drifted from room to room with nothing to do, having changed from my best clothes into home clothes since no one was coming to visit and, with my husband asleep, I wouldn’t be going anywhere. I waited for my sister-in-law’s baby to wake up from her nap so I could play with her.
I called my father. “Eid Mubarak, Abbu.”
“Khair Mubarak. How have you been?”
“Bored, but good.”
“Bored, on a holiday?”
“Could be worse.”
“You getting enough to eat?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Anybody giving you a hard time?”
“Nothing I can’t handle,” I said. “Abbu, I’m fine.”
We ate a late breakfast of kidney and liver, and pullao for lunch. The servant was cooking shredded beef for dinner. When my husband woke up he drove me to my aunt’s house.
“I’m sending her double what she sent you,” my mother-in-law told me, thrusting a plastic bag full of beef my way. “I don’t know what kind of people you are. But that’s the kind of people I am.”
My aunt served us tea, biscuits, and potato and chicken cutlets with ketchup. She wiped her eyes with the edge of her shawl and sat down slowly next to me, gripping both of her knees, then ordered the servant to bring me a glass of milk, knowing I don’t drink tea.
“Why did you bring beef? You know we can’t eat red meat.”
My cousin’s wife sat next to me. “We couldn’t afford more than a goat this year,” she confided. I calculated how much meat might have been left over after subtracting portions for family and charity.
When I got home, I borrowed a hard avocado from the baby’s fridge upstairs and, with a withered onion and tomato, made guacamole.
“You’re sick of beef already? We’ll eat like this for three months at least, or as long as the meat lasts in the freezer,” my sister-in-law told me, spooning the mixture onto a piece of naan with a strip of beef.
“They should have given most of it away to the poor at the slaughtering yards, rather than haul it all home,” she said, while we watched the servants douse the blood-soaked kitchen floor with water. “If you don’t give the poor and relatives their due, whatever’s left doesn’t keep.” But that’s the kind of people my mother-in-law was.
My aunt must have opened the packet of beef after we left. The meat in every package we sent out that year was blue. She must have chucked it in the garbage, the cats that play in her garden dragging the parcel out, licking clean the plastic it came in.