Read Online The Sweetness of Tears by Nafisa Haji - Free Book Online Page B

years after. Jaffer and I got into a fight, a very bad one—I don’t remember over what. We were trading insults of the usual kind lobbed back and forth between boys. I pushed him, hard. He fell on his wrist, breaking the new watch Dada had given him for his birthday. A digital watch, with a calculator on it.
    He was furious, standing up to rush at me with his fists stretched out in front of him, shouting, “You bastard! Look what you’ve done! You’re a bloody, mad bastard, Sadiq! Just like your father! And your mother is a whore, marrying that son-of-a-bitch Sunni bastard. No wonder your father killed himself!”
    I didn’t even hear him. Not at that moment. I was fending off his blows as he shouted the words. Dada came running at the sound of the commotion we were causing in the lounge.
    “Jaffer! Shut your mouth! Get out! Go home! Now!” Dada shouted as I’d never heard him shout before.
    The expression on his face, the fury in his voice, made me stop and turn, my anger at Jaffer suddenly dissolved, to look into Dada’s face very carefully. His eyes would not meet mine. I reviewed what Jaffer had said, what I hadn’t really listened to as I warded him off. Dada turned and left the room. It took me a few hours to go and find him, to ask him about what my cousin had said.
    “Don’t listen to him, Sadiq. It’s all nonsense, what Jaffer said. You boys! What horrible things you’ll say out of anger. Lies, all lies.”
    I pretended—to him and to myself—that I was convinced and reassured. If Dada was lying, covering up the truth, a part of me decided that I didn’t want to know. Jaffer came over later and apologized. I told him I was sorry about his watch. He never raised the subject again.
    Neither did I, too distracted by the gift Dada bought for me the very next day. A car of my own, though I was still too young to legally drive it. Dada sent Sharif Muhammad to obtain a license for me—illegally, bribe in hand—and, after Sharif Muhammad taught me to drive, Jaffer and I were free to wander around town on our own, to pursue a suddenly feverish social life that began to involve other licenses that my grandfather did not approve of when he found out. I am ashamed, now, to think of how I fought with him—an old man who had given me everything and anything I wanted. But I thought I was a man. He himself had told me I was. I spent the money he gave me as if it were no object, buying gifts for my friends, picking up the tabs at restaurants, buying booze and hashish for everyone. Soon, Jaffer was no longer allowed to go out with me. But no one could stop me . I was the youngest at every party and felt I had something to prove. The slightest provocation was all it took for me to come to blows. I deserved the reputation I had—racing my car against others’, equally indulged—for being wild and reckless.
    One day, I drove home from a party in the early hours of the morning, in a thoroughly inebriated state. I was veering and swerving my way home, missing turns and running stoplights. I turned fast onto one street, too fast and too late to stop when I saw them. A woman and a small child.
    I remember the sound of the screech of the brakes. I remember her face, caught in the headlights, her scream, the sickening thud of steel hitting vulnerable flesh, her body flying and then disappearing off to my side. The car was stopped. I pushed open the door and stood to see what—who—I’d hit. The woman was crumpled on the ground, the child kneeling beside her, howling. Men started to spill out from a mosque up the street, where the dawn prayer had just ended. I heard shouting. Someone stopped to check on my victim. The rest of the men gathered menacingly into a clump, heading in my direction. I didn’t think. I jumped into the car, turned the engine, and fled, remembering nothing of the rest of the way home.
    When I got there, I honked for the chowkidar —the gatekeeper—to let me in at the gate. Bleary-eyed and