Fic: Each Sentiment Within Border (Little Mosque on the Prairie)

Oct 06, 2008 22:20


Title: Each Sentiment Within Border
Fandom: Little Mosque on the Prairie
Disclaimer: I, as per usual, own nothing. I just borrow and wreck havoc.
Spoilers: Seasons 1 -3
Summary: Five Things Amaar's Parents Dont' Want Him to Know
Author's Notes: Alright, so I, being a contrary person, like to watch and write fic for shows that no one else in fandom watches. Good times. I started this last spring, before the finale aired, but only finished it today. Also, I have no idea if we were ever given Amaar's parents names, so I christened them myself. Thought I ought to post this before Wednesday's episode airs, since it looks like his parents will be playing a large role there and will probably throw off all of my lovely characterization.  Hurrah for Canadian TV fic!  (sign #48492 that I am a huge dork)


I. to speak my griefs unspeakable

When he is little, Amaar thinks his parents are from England. It’s almost true and it’s an easy lie to perpetuate. No need to be reminded of Uganda. It’s easier to tell their young son that they are from England, that they went to school in England, and that that is where the family went after leaving India.

Much easier than telling the truth.

Nazmin, his mother, remembers men coming in the night. Screams and blood-streaked walls. Crouching beneath the floorboards in the pantry with the black cook and his family. Crying with a large, onion-scented hand over her mouth as the soldiers passed above. She remembers being passed off from relative to relative after that, until finally, finally she made it to Kenya and then from there, with her Aunt and Uncle, to London.

Amir, his father, remembers listening to the radio in his flat in London, remembers the headlines in the newspapers. Going through every day as though everything was normal, all the while wondering if his family was still alive. His brothers were in town with him, one of his sisters too, and they met on the weekends, sitting in silent rooms, feeling the horror of their situation weighing down on them. It wasn’t until years later, after he had immigrated to Canada, that he learnt what happened. A friend, a black neighbour, wrote to him. Told him how his father had been beaten until his head caved in and his blood no longer ran, how his mother and sisters had been raped and then shot on the spot, their bodies left in the dusty yard.

There are some things, his parents think, that Amaar is better off not knowing, that they themselves would rather forget.

II. love sought is good, but given unsought is better

They eloped. Eventually, there was proper marriage, organized by Nazmin’s outraged Aunt and Amir’s furious elder sister, but before all that, there was an unorthodox romance.

She was only eighteen when they met, a bright undergraduate at the University. He had seen her one day, while there visiting an old professor for lunch, and had been struck by her. He could never say why. She wasn’t stunningly pretty or attractively outgoing. She was steady and methodical even then, still scarred almost a year later from what she had witnessed back home. Maybe that was what he had seen, he later said, maybe he saw her hurt soul and knew that he could be the one to heal her. She laughed when he said that, but there was a special smile, an acknowledgement that yes, that is what he had done.

They used to meet for coffee, sit at one of the small tables at the back of the café, grinning and talking, overwhelmed by a surplus of caffeine and each other. And then one day they had decided not to go to the café, but to the registrar’s office at city hall. And that had been that. They were married. Their families were aghast and pulled together a proper religious ceremony, held four weeks later, and after that, at least within the family, their heretical elopement was never mentioned again.

They celebrate the official wedding date as their anniversary. A dinner out. A cloyingly sentimental Hallmark card. An extravagant bouquet of flowers. But every year, 29 days before that, they trade little gifts. They don’t talk when they exchange the gifts, which themselves are usually small - a pair of novelty Maple Leaf’s socks, a tacky Taj Mahal key chain, one year a framed postcard from Cambridge - but they keep them, placing them reverently in a plastic tote they keep under the bed and sometimes, when they need to remember what drew them to each other, they’ll pull out the box and delve into its treasures. They’ll pull out the plastic teething ring Nazmin gave Amir the year she was pregnant with Amaar. They’ll laugh over the paperback copy of Anne of Green Gables Amir presented her with the year they moved to Canada. They’ll cry over a small pink bootie that a little foot never grew large enough to fit.

And then they’ll put the box away, but not their memories of what it contains.

III. oh!... I knew men could despair, but I did not know what that word meant

.

They are terrified when he tells them that he wants to be an imam.

“Do you think he’s turning into a fundamentalist, the kind they talk about on the TV?” Amir wonders aloud in bed one night. Nazmin smacks him lightly across the arm.

“Of course not, you stupid man.”

“They always talk about mosques as recruiting grounds, Peter Mansbridge did a special on them last week. Maybe that’s what’s happened. Maybe we should have gone with him to prayers more.”

“He’s not going to become a terrorist Amir.” Nazmin scoffs, her voice less certain than she would like. Because he’d mentioned studying in the Middle East and already she’s thinking of suicide bombers and impressionable, earnest young people doing the bidding of others.

Neither of them knows where this sudden conviction has come from. They are not a religious family, not by any means. They go to mosque once, maybe twice a month, have done ever since Amaar was a little boy, and not from any great sense of devotion, but because it was a matter of the community, of fitting in. No one they know actually prays five times a day, except maybe the Iman and really, that’s quite a large maybe as far as Nazmin is concerned. It’s a wealthy mosque, frequented by those too affluent to bother with religious observances, with traditions they mostly view as backwards and outdated, belonging to their long forgotten home lands.

On Fridays, Nazmin waits as long as possible to cover her head in the mosque and then pulls off her scarf as quickly as possible after prayers. In Toronto, she sees many women in the streets wearing the hijab, even the burqa, and it scares her, reminds her of the quiet women from her childhood, with their eyes always lowered, their voices never heard. Nazmin needs to be heard. The thought that her son is to become one of those angry, bearded men who tell women to hide their femininity turns her stomach.

For the first time since she was a girl, she finds something to pray for. That her son may stay strong, stay as she has raised him. That he may always respect the women around him, that he judge others fairly, that he be a good man.

And, she can’t resist adding, that he find a nice girl to marry. Preferably one who, like herself, needs to be heard and will make him a better man for all her sharp words.

IV. this is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased

They miss him. He calls them often, sounding excited and overwhelmed and so much happier than he did when he was still in Toronto.

“It’s a very strange little town,” is the first description they ever hear of Mercy. Months pass and they learn more about the town, its inhabitants (Muslim, Christian, and Undecided), and its strange goings-on.

They hear more about some people than others, and choose to infer from that what they will. At first, both of them think he is making some of the stories up. This Babar person sounded too incredible to be real, at least until the day he barged into the room while Amaar was on the phone with them and they got to hear one of his rants first-hand. Nazmin had snickered as she’d listened, but how proud she had been at the end, hearing Amaar calm the man down and proposing solutions to the problems presented. How far he had come, their son.

The Reverend was a different matter. It was he, it seemed, who was Amaar’s first real friend in Mercy and for that his parents were thankful. They worried that maybe Amaar wasn’t meeting enough people his own age, but at least he had found a friend who could advise him on his chosen profession.

Nazmin, however, was most interested in quite another friend. Amaar mentioned Rayyan in conversation sometimes, almost too casually, and there were other times Nazmin was certain that he left her out of his stories, knowing that even they couldn’t be dense enough to miss the evidence of his daily encounters with this girl. Of course, being a mother, Nazmin read between the lines.

Maybe she is wrong to hope, but that doesn’t stop her. She has always wanted a doctor in the family.

V. ah! devout though I may be, I am no less a man!

They know something is wrong in Mercy. The excitement that used to make Amaar trip over his words during their weekly phone calls is gone; now he talks slowly, like a tired old man, exhausted with the world and eager to be rid of it.

Amir thinks it is Mercy itself. “Of course he is bored there now,” he explains to Nazmin one night before bed. “Such a smart, outgoing boy needs more to occupy his time than prayer meetings and silly grain festivals.”

Maybe there is some of that, but Nazmin is not convinced. She has her suspicions, but to air them in front of Amir before they are confirmed would also exacerbate the situation. Amir, like Amaar, has a tendency to overreact.

It is the middle of the week when Amaar calls, at an hour when he must have known his father would be at work.

He calls her mommy, something he hasn’t done since he was a little boy. But he sounds like a little boy on the phone now, so lost and scared, and her heart aches knowing that he is in pain and so far away.

She isn’t surprised when he tells her that he’s coming home. He says he is not cut out for a religious life, or the prairies, and that he is coming home. He rambles along, spewing reason after reason why this is the right decision.

“Amaar,” she finally interrupts him, speaking softly, “tell me why you’re really coming home.”

There is a long, tired pause. She can imagine him sitting there, at his desk, one hand holding the phone to his ear, the other splayed over his face. She wishes she were there to hold him, to brush his hair off his face, as she did when he was little, back when there was no problem so big that she could not solve it for him.

“I did the right thing,” he finally says, “and it’s killing me inside.”

She is quiet on her end for a while, cursing a woman she has never met, wishing that Mercy wasn’t quite so far from Toronto, and trying desperately to keep herself from crying, because she is a mother and her child’s pain in her pain.

“Come home,” she finally tells him, “come home and we’ll make everything better.” She doesn’t entirely believe her own words, but like Amaar, she wants to.

fan fic: lmotp

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