EQUALIZERS

by Zeba Fazli

They said it was going to be the biggest storm of the year. Ordinarily you would have doubted that, but this time you didn’t have a choice but to fear the worst. Interchangeable CNN anchors said this particular storm system was supposed to sweep through the Northeast from Friday afternoon into Saturday morning, dumping snow and sleet on Southington, Connecticut for eighteen heinous hours. Which left almost a day for the roads to be plowed and parking lots salted and power lines restored before Sabrina Api’s shotgun-ish Christmas Eve wedding in Fairfield. No one at this point was sure of anything, least of all whether your cousin’s wedding had a prayer of surviving.

You had a half-day of school that Friday, but your cousin Maheen wore you down with her furious Emoji-laden texts at five that morning and made you skip to help her, Sabrina Api, their mom Lubna Khala, and your mom yell at the DJ, makeup artist, imam, and whoever else to whom those countless phone numbers belonged to make sure this wedding fucking happened—Maheen’s words, not yours.

At the end of the day, you all slumped over couches and coffee tables with mugs of chai teetering on armrests and pillows. Trying to be positive, your mom said, “Allah ka shukar hai you booked Sunday.”

That had been due more to serendipity than to the grace of God, you thought. There hadn’t been enough notice to book a Saturday.

Sabrina Api stared at her still-bare hands (the henna artist was supposed to come for the mehndi ceremony tomorrow night, but had preemptively canceled). After a moment, she took an enormous gulp out of the nearest mug (yours), wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her UConn T-shirt, and declared, “I don’t care if there’s a blizzard or a power outage or if there’s no food, I’m getting married in two days.”

To which no one had the heart to say, Maybe not.

According to the succession of phone calls that interrupted dinner, the out-of-towners were getting understandably antsy as the snowfall grew heavier. You could imagine them wondering belatedly, over the drone of the Weather Channel in their hotel rooms, whether they’d made a mistake in coming to what would soon be the epicenter of some enormous blizzard just to see that adorable spoiled brat get legally married to some gora before they ran off to the middle of nowhere, but you knew (everyone knew) they would not dare miss the chance.

***

Sabrina Api, Maheen, Ambar, and their parents ended up staying the night. They only lived about twenty minutes away, but for once everyone heeded the warnings on the news, cowed by the roar of the winds. They had stayed over more weekends than you could count, so the ballet of directing people into beds or onto the piles of comforters that would serve as makeshift mattresses (after one last round of chai) was better choreographed than anything you saw in Bollywood movies nowadays. Your brother Naveed put up token resistance when Faiza and Ambar took his room, more relieved that he wouldn’t have to deal with the sharp influx of girl in his space than frustrated about sleeping on the floor of your parents’ room. Your aunt and uncle took the guest room downstairs, which left Sabrina Api and Maheen with you in your and Faiza’s room. When good night was officially bid at eleven-thirty, your cousins bounded into your room like overexcited deer. Sabrina Api was the last inside, and after she kicked your door shut, she shouted, “WOOHOO! BLIZZARD PARTY AT SUNNO BABY’S HOUSE!”

It couldn’t be much of a party with the rest of your cousins held hostage in hotel rooms across town. “Dude, when did she last call me that?”

Maheen had the answer. “It was at that dinner with Chris’s family, remember, Api? Faiza was whining and your mom thought it was your fault and was like, ‘Sunno baby! Be! Good!’” The brown plastic frames of her glasses shook as she giggled.

In the face of this good-natured contagion, you relented and sat on a squishy mint-green beanbag chair, a decade-old relic. Maheen threw herself on the floor next to you and started pulling from her repertoire of voices, doing everyone from the grandmother you shared to Ayesha Khala to her dad to your dad to Naveed, while you provided pointed color commentary.

Meanwhile, Sabrina Api spun absently in your desk chair, picking up bottles of nail polish next to the files for your now-complete college applications with every revolution. After you got to your cousin Feroz (“I don’t know what part of the greater Chicago area you have to be from to be from da streets but it’s not fucking Evanston”), she cut in, holding a garish pink bottle, “I refuse to let you wear this. Your suit’s eggplant.”

Aubergine. “Wasn’t going to.”

Maheen got on her knees to inspect the nail polish bounty. “They have better colors at the salon.” She sat back down, unimpressed. “Why bother?” You could have asked the same thing of Sabrina Api regarding her wed- ding. If it happened at all, Sunday would just be the legal-religious wedding, the nikkah, plus a moderate reception. The real, totally-outsized celebrations would come this summer. This was just to make sure Sabrina and Chris were married before they started living together, a would-be glorious formality.

But because you valued your sanity, you didn’t ask. “I canceled my appointment.”

The sisters blinked.

“Yours are fine,” you added hastily, “I just don’t want to. Especially if the sn—”

“Don’t say snow, Sania.” Sabrina Api launched herself onto the floor too. “That’s all I’ve heard for the past week. It was all my eyebrow lady talked about, and she never talks to me.”

Maheen caught your eyes and you knew what she was thinking:

Better they worry about the blizzard than about her marrying a white guy.

“Still,” Sabrina Api mused, “I’d totally come back all the time just to see Jyoti. She’s seen me at my literal worst and never turned me away.”

“To be fair, you do pay her to not turn you away.”

Maheen chimed in, “Don’t worry. It’s Cleveland, you’ll find someone.” “Did you? At school?” you asked. It was not a facetious question. She

was the first one among the New England cousins to go away for col- lege, and as a result you now found her both annoying and vaguely more fascinating.

Maheen, however, judged it facetious by precedent. “If I didn’t, Mummy would make me come home every week. And seriously, Rose Hill isn’t totally shitty.”

“She hasn’t left Southington, of course she thinks it’s shitty,” Sabrina Api said knowingly.

“Hasn’t left yet. Also, Sania, I thought you wanted me to review all your college essays?”

“I, uh, didn’t want to bug you. Everything’s done now.”

“Oh?” Maheen hauled all of your applications down from your desk and began thumbing through them. “Just saying, I resent all these non-Fordham apps. Just come with me and we’ll have the time of our fucking lives. Liter- ally nothing could be better.”

Sabrina Api skimmed the materials Maheen discarded with the blasé attitude of the recent graduate. Eventually she held up the first page of your UCLA application and announced, “I like this one.” Like she expected it to matter to you. Which it did. “But girl, you gotta up your game if you’re going to convince your dad to let you go to another time zone.”

“How’d you get your dad to let you move to Cleveland?”

She shrugged. “I’m getting married. You could go to college anywhere.” “You could marry any guy you occasionally hooked up with junior year.” “I love Chris, smartass.”

“Fucking Cleveland, though.” You tried to imagine what Chris saw in Ohio that would possess him to attend law school there and failed. “I mean, if you’re going to leave, go somewhere worth it, you know?”

Maheen smiled. “You’re so narrow-minded. It’s so cute.” At your milk-curdling look, she added, “Oh, I’m not being hypocritical! It’s just that things change when you leave for college.”

“It’s been one semester. You came home every two weeks.”

“You won’t get it until you experience it. Which you will, no matter where you end up. Here or LA or, you know.” Maheen paused. Deliberately. “Wherever.”

You clenched a single fist. “Where do you think I’ll end up?” “I know right now you think college is the end-all-b—”

“You think I’ll just be stuck in Connecticut for the rest of my life?

Because you get to live in New York, no one else can?” “The fuck do you mean? Haroon just gr—”

“What makes you so fucking special now?” “Did I say that? God!”

Sabrina Api glared down the bridge of her nose at her sister. “Oh my God, Maheen, like you weren’t as bad last year. Chill. And you too, Sania. No one’s trying to undermine you.” With the tone she used whenever you and Maheen fought, whenever something crossed the line from affection- ate ribbing to deep unpleasantness, she elaborated, “It’s not just about where you go, she means. It’s more important what you do when you get there.” She scrambled up to her feet and clambered over the mound of pillows that your bed supported. She lay down on her stomach, so her head dangled just off the edge of the mattress. You could see up her nostrils.

They were disappointingly clear. “Are we good?”

Maheen didn’t like being shown up. She’d always been touchy, but you’d noticed since she’d come back for winter break that she’d gotten worse.

Autonomy and New York City did weird things to sheltered brown girls, you supposed.

“Obviously,” she exhaled, “I want the best for you, and two seconds ago I said I really hoped you’d join me, but whatever. Whatever happens, you’ll be fine. You’ll look back on this in a year and you’ll laugh and say this exact speech to whoever’s next. Feroz or Wali, right?” She gave you a smile that signaled détente, but you couldn’t bring yourself to accept it, even when she repeated, “You’ll be fine anywhere.”

“Just like I’ll be fine anywhere,” Sabrina Api cut in, her eyes blazing underneath freshly-threaded eyebrows. “Inshallah Sania will find her destiny or whatever, Maheen’s obviously on the right path to hers, and somehow I . . . found it. And I’ll live it, even if it is in Ohio.”

To your and Maheen’s expressions of mild disbelief, she continued, “I know everyone thinks it’s just a thing, but . . . this isn’t easy for Chris, either. Law school is bad enough, and being alone too . . . I mean, it sucks.” You and Maheen fell silent at the sight of her of all people being contemplative. She rarely was: not when she first told you about the econ major she was “seeing” who only wore wrinkled plaid button-downs and never washed his jeans; not when she said, a few months later, at a family friend’s birthday party your mothers forced you to attend, that “things” were “get- ting kinda serious.” Not even when she Skyped all the cousins at 3 a.m one September morning, or at least everyone who could be texted at two- thirty and yelled at to be online by three, to tell you all that she was finally engaged.

They’d been together for over two years, but you had never taken it seriously. And, as you would hasten to add to Maheen or Faiza or anyone else in the cousins group text Sabrina Api didn’t know existed, it wasn’t because Chris was some kind of Protestant you couldn’t differentiate from other kinds of Protestants. It wasn’t because he had been a pothead in high school or because he wasn’t sure where in Germany his mom’s side was from.

It was not him you doubted, exactly. It was her.

She was Sabrina Api (just the suffix meant she was an older sister to you): a Kardashian-disdaining Yash-Chopra-movie-marathoning Austen- adoring television-scorning Pinterest-addicted occasional-shot-downing twenty-two-year-old dumbass. You hoped you would be ready for what- ever your future—or fate, or destiny, or whatever—held when you came to it, and Maheen believed she was well on her way there, but there was no way Sabrina Api was truly prepared to face it and get married.

“Don’t look at me like that! We’ll survive it,” the dulhan-to-hopefully-be snapped, imperious and tender, “as long as we’re together.”

You waited a moment before you let yourself catch Maheen’s eye. And then you both pretended to barf in unison, your conflict, the umpteenth one in all your years living side by side, buried with a bout of mimed projectile vomiting.

***

After Lubna Khala first broke the news that Sabrina was engaged, Papa had (sensibly) asked Chris why they couldn’t wait to marry. His answer had been, “I love Sabrina.” When Papa asked (less sensibly) whether love was enough, Chris had responded, “I see your point, Javed Uncle, but I couldn’t be away from her for three years. I’m willing to make this work with her, and with all of you.”

Papa had been impressed that Chris knew his name. Which he did because he’d gone out to dinner the night before with you, Sabrina Api, and Ahmer Bhai, one of the Boston cousins who happened to be in town to bring his mother to her Hartford-based ophthalmologist and could there- fore help teach a two-hour course on Pakistani family dynamics.

Together, the three of you told Chris that Feroz’s delusions of gangsta glamour were not to be indulged; that he couldn’t succumb to the seven- year-old twins Hafsa and Hassan if they ever asked for sweets since they were deadly allergic to most artificial food colorings; that Ayesha Khala, as the youngest of the aunts, was the closest he would come at first to an ally; that Faiza and Ambar had a serious love/hate/jealousy thing going on that was too complicated to explain; that Tasneem Bhabi had suffered two miscarriages so discussing children was utterly off-limits; that Daniya

Mumani, Kamran Mamu’s second wife, was still frosted out by all the other adults for pretty much no reason, so he should not get too too friendly

with her or risk getting his future parents-in-law to think even less of him; that Umair Mamu shouldn’t be engaged with for more than three-minute conversations for risk of him extrapolating from whatever he’d said and responding with, “In the Holy Qur’an . . .”

But this week, with the constant coming and going, Chris had done pretty well. His only misstep was getting stuck with Umair Mamu, which turned out to be a good thing, as he answered the question no one else was quite ready to ask to his face: Yeah, I’m converting.

The relative ease with which he navigated everything and the fact of his imminent conversion had worked in his favor. Just yesterday, in fact, you’d heard Kamran Mamu grunt to your mom that the boy might not be all that bad after all.

You had wanted to say, “That’s a wonderfully ringing endorsement of your niece’s fiancé,” but that would have caused a scene, and you were not exactly one for scenes. In public, anyway.

***

Ambar did pop in, as you all knew she would, at about twelve-thirty, com- plaining about the noise from you and Maheen choreographing a dance for the summer wedding. In response, Sabrina Api scooped up her littlest sister and spun her round and round to the cheery Hindi song, even though she was half-asleep and cranky, which led to Faiza joining in ten minutes later, to not be upstaged by Ambar. The now-enlarged blizzard dance party went on for longer than you knew, until Sabrina Api’s phone buzzed (drunk text from a friend, she said) and at last one of you saw the time. By two, the adrenaline had worn off, and your house was finally quiet (except for the hums of the washing machine and dishwasher, and the occasional creak- bang from the radiators.)

Then you were awake, and the smoke detector on your ceiling was shrieking like a certain type of Pakistani grandmother when told that alcohol would be served at her granddaughter’s wedding.

You and Maheen were sharing Faiza’s bed for the night, and you almost gouged each other’s eyes out crawling out of the clutches of your blankets. Ambar bolted out of the other room just as you two oriented yourselves to see in the darkness of the hallway. Your parents’ door was open, allowing the light from Mom’s bedside lamp to spill into the hall. Inside, Naveed was sitting up in his makeshift bed, his dinosaur Pillow Pet clutched firmly in his arms.

“Aaaapiiiii,” he droned to you, “make it stoooooop.”

Maheen, no longer relying on bat senses now that she had smashed her glasses onto her face, said, “Dude, are Faiza and Api seriously sleeping through this?”

You weren’t surprised at Faiza; last year she slept through half of Irfan Bhai’s wedding, and smoke alarms were nothing compared to desi wed- dings. And although Sabrina Api was not usually a heavy sleeper, the chaos of the week clearly made her cling to sleep.

“Naveed, go wake up Baji and Sabrina Api and I’ll go see what’s happening.”

You were not too hurried as you trod downstairs: there would have been more screaming if it was something, anyway, and the house, though it hummed with the sound of murmured, half-asleep conversations and bur- bled as water sloshed around in the pipes of the heating system, was pretty quiet. Sure enough, the alarm was off by the time you got downstairs, and Papa was trudging across the landing in the pajamas you and your siblings gave him on his last birthday.

“What happened?”

He gave you a heavy look. “Sabrina burned some chai. Go to sleep.” There were lights on in the kitchen, and shadows indicated a few silhouettes. You still couldn’t make out the muttered Urdu conversations. A moment later, a door slammed somewhere—the guest room?—and your mother bustled out of the kitchen to usher you and Papa upstairs.

You did not fail to notice that there was still one ponytailed shadow in the kitchen.

You wished you’d put on your slippers before you fled your room. Through the blinds lining the windows on the way to the kitchen, you glimpsed the snowfall whirling in the erratic, unforgiving wind like a dervish, the new alien snowdrift world settling on the deck, the trees, what- ever else was still in your backyard. The clouds seemed larger and closer to the ground, made golden by reflected light.

Sabrina Api was glowing, too, when you skidded around the corner to the kitchen. She was slumped over the table with an empty chipped floral mug sitting expectantly a few inches from her folded arms. You couldn’t see her face, but just her outline seemed kind of shimmery, as if you were looking at her over a flame. She was feverish, fueled by adrenaline and nerves.

She didn’t notice that she wasn’t alone. You shivered as you stood bare- foot on the tile and wondered why her parents and yours would leave her like this. By the time she did raise her head, you were pretty sure your toes were frostbitten. You shifted your weight under her gaze and tried not to groan at the cracking of your joints.

“He says we should cancel.”

You didn’t want to ask, but the way the reflection of the snowdrifts bled through the blinds to stain the kitchen made you feel a little stronger. The half-light and semi-dark became an equalizer; the snow gave you permission. “Is it really that bad?”

“Are you happy now?”

You glanced at the clock above the sink in order to avert your eyes. “It’s

. . . four twenty-two in the morning and I’m going to lose the feeling in my feet, you tell me.”

“You’re a bitch. You all are.” Sabrina Api’s voice was as clear as the pealing of a bell. Transparent, but not without substance. “I’m safe now. So are you all just delighted or what?”

Yes, delight was what you felt at four twenty-two in the morning with your stupid cousin lashing out at you for . . . what?

“Go to sleep. We’ll figure it out later. I mean, worst case scenario, Umair Mamu could officiate or something, he’s always talking about how he did it in Lah—”

“You really gotta learn when to shut up, Sania.”

Stung despite yourself, you said, “You keep asking stupid questions.”

She stared at you as if she was trying to tear away the voice of sweet acidity you’d developed—the one everyone had developed—to reveal what was underneath, what the truth of this was. “Then answer.”

She wanted to implicate you somehow, you personally or what you rep- resented (you weren’t sure which, or whether there was a difference) in the implosion of her upcoming wedding, and you felt almost powerless to stop her. But what was underneath? What was the truth of the thing?

 “Why would we be happy if you’re not?” You would have liked to sit down, but she would hate it if you did. “All we care about is you being happy. That’s why we’re going through with this. That’s why this is happening—” You caught your mistake a beat too late and amended, “That’s why this was going to happen at all. How do you not get that?”

“Fuck you.”

“Stop, Sabrina Api. You’re just—you’re upset, and I get that—” “And you still don’t care.”

You cared more than her parents. They’d left her to cry and brood, probably after having been subjected to this very tirade. They didn’t know you’d trail after them and slip in their mess; they didn’t know you would find anything more than a burned chai saucepan cooling in the sink. And now that you’d seen her, you were no surer of what you were still doing here.

This was beyond you, and nothing in this house with these people had ever been beyond you.

“Don’t say that. You can’t do this shit to people who love you and want to make you happy.”

“When no one’s actually asked you what would make you happy, you have to.”

Were the past three months not a referendum on how far a family would go to make one of its youngest, sweetest, brattiest children happy? “Is that why he’s leaving you?”

“What?”

“Is that why he’s leaving you?” you repeated, trying not to cringe. “Because everything he did for you just wasn’t enough for you or some- thing? Is that it?”

You read her simmering silence as a yes, but you couldn’t truly fathom it. How could he have fallen short? Chris who was preparing to read the Kalma and convert in thirty-six hours? Chris who had endured hours of, “No, his dad is our uncle . . . no, not our blood uncle, the uncle by marriage,” Chris who had twitched under the glares of your grandfather Skyping from Lahore when he asked why he would not come to Pakistan and get married properly?

Looking at it that way . . . your and Sabrina Api’s world must have been too much for him. He’d grown uncomfortable with himself, with the idea that whatever he could ever do to appease you people wouldn’t be enough. Sabrina Api had never been more Sabrina Api than when she was planning her rush wedding and her move to Ohio at the same time, after all. The joy and holy rage and bursts of self-aware, self-absorbed nonsense had never seemed more characteristic than in these last few months. She had never been more alive.

Then the bells in Sabrina Api’s voice rang at a lower pitch, more fervent and solemn. “I never asked him to do all this.”

“Huh?”

“I never ever said that I wanted him to do all this. I . . .” Her voice fal- tered for the first time. “It’s so typical, you know? You fall for a brown girl and all of a sudden that’s all she is, right? That’s what you have to overcome together. But he didn’t—like, I can’t tell you to convert if it’ll just be a thing you do. That’s not religion. I didn’t want him to do something like that unless he wanted to for himself. And he didn’t.”

The conversion part at least had been obvious to everyone: no one con- verted for their fiancées because they were true believers. You had tried not to think it for Chris’s sake, but now—

“So . . . you’re angry?”

“Yeah, smartass,” she snapped, “I’m angry that someone I love tried to make himself into something he’s not to try to please my great-aunts and random uncles and family friends he’ll never see again instead of being the someone I love, and ended up hating me for it. Shocker.” She pushed back her chair, and it skidded against the tile like nails on a chalkboard.

If Chris had felt that he’d lost himself in the midst of all this flux, all these forces you could not name and weren’t sure you were party to, then what you felt now must not have been so different.

Your cousin was done talking: she listlessly returned the mug to the cab- inet where it belonged, and without another word, you followed her (from a respectable distance) back upstairs.

The door was ajar and Sabrina Api already nestled in your bed when you slipped inside. Maheen, meanwhile, was spread out on Faiza’s like she owned the place. And you were sure there was some part of her that regarded this house as her own, too, by nature of it being yours. You tried to nudge her over, but she just grunted and spread out more. Then, in your peripheral vision, you saw Sabrina Api sit up on the right side of your bed. You didn’t see it, but you heard the thumping of her hand patting the blankets to her left.

A conciliatory measure so soon was not unprecedented, but you hadn’t dreamed to expect it. And you were in no place to reject it, certainly not at four-thirty in the morning. So you started to pad across the carpet—

“Sania?”

—and tripped over the beanbag chair.

By the time you managed to struggled to sit up, Maheen had propped herself up on one elbow and was peering at you.

“The hell were you?” She sounded groggy and hoarse, utterly innocent. “You put out the fire or what?”

Oh, right, the smoke alarm. The fire you were supposed to be investigating. You waved from the site of your inglorious tumble, tangled in the growths the beanbag chair seemed to sprout like nocturnal flowers. You cracked a smile no one saw. “Clearly.”