Crown

2.

My grandmother ruined my first crush for me. It was so long ago I forgot the girl’s name – it began with an R and hit a sharp, slurring S at some point, or was it an L? Never mind. Before school started she sat by a sycamore with her legs crisscrossed in the grass with a book between them. She wore a pink polo and blue jeans. She always smelled like chlorine. She would smile wide, wave, and say good morning to me when I walked by. The girl was dark like me with a pointy noise, and, all in all, was no princess. What you need to imagine was how her smile traveled to the rising tips of her ears, and how a shy boy like me would settle for such an enchantment for the rest of his life. I fell for her again, when, in cafeteria, I spied her chomping on cheerios beside her dwarfish brother. Or, yet again, in class, when she spoke and inflected her voice, low and calm, to be taken seriously. That was lovely. And her eyes were hazelnuts – in size, shape, and hue. When she smiled, dents formed in her cheeks that mirrored her eyebrows. Hold on. There’s so much of my life in this moment.

My grandmother wanted none of what she saw as she dropped me off to school the first day of fourth grade. My grandmother held onto the dearest dreams she brought with her from over the sea. She hoped that I would find a girl from the mountains, fair with sparkling eyes, skin that turned orange in the spring, like one of her sons should have done. My grandmother said we were descendant of Afghan kings. In reality we weren’t at all. My grandmother also read romance novels regularly. This girl reminded her of one of those villains who spoiled one’s youth away with dirty deeds worth detailing on the privacy of a page.

At the end of my first day my grandmother rolled the window down before we pulled out the parking lot and signaled for the girl I liked to come over. My grandmother told her to have a play date with me come Friday.

“Jeez, thanks,” the girl said. She was headed to soccer practice, cleats hung over her shoulder. “I’ll have to ask my parents.”

  I was a nervous boy, the type to see a cute girl and then make sure not to look at her anytime I passed her afterwards. My grandmother knew this.

That night I begged my grandmother to cancel the whole thing. I swore to stop liking the girl. My grandmother was by the television watching soap operas with all the house fans circled by her side. This was the year her teeth yellowed most from the smoking. Outside, through the long windows, our Labrador was asleep with her ears pointed up. Against the house’s exterior flowerpots dotted the floor, filled with soil and flower seeds. The television light danced in my grandmother’s eyes; she was glad I had come to my senses. From then on began the best years of my life.

A small archway extended from the front door of our house. The house was by a cement bridge that was in the same plane of the roof’s grey asphalt shingles. My father, who dreamed of living by the ocean as a boy, said this was the next best thing.

“If you listen closely, Jamal,” my father said. “All the passing cars with their tires kissing the pavement sound like a sea. Don’t they? You have to focus, Jamal. Listen.”

  Our front lawn was fenced from the road and the house’s rose paint was always chipping on the sides. I’d stare out from my window when woken by a nightmare of a dying family member, as I feared a drunk driver would lose his grip of the wheel and smash through the fence corner, crushing my grandmother’s magnolias, the wheels spitting up soil before docking into my beloved bicycle.

My bike’s frame was baby blue and the handles were white. It sparkled sometimes and on those days I’d rather take photos of it than ride it into town. My childhood was one long summer until the day it wasn’t. Green street signs poked out of tree trunks as I pedaled by. Grass grew through the cracks. Lawn mowers mumbled. Air brushed my neck, pushed by the cars cruising by with their windows down, music marching into my ears. I chewed this bubblegum my father first gave to me at the movies and its taste evoked the smell of warm butter from thereon. The town’s road was narrow and its white lines were faded since the cars had no other choice but to drive over them. I biked past the growling auto shop where the Lebanese men working waved salaam and I saluted them because I thought it looked cool.

My younger brother Ya and I assembled the best VHS tape library of cartoons and anime purchased from the mall video store. Mall trips with our grandmother were my favorite pilgrimage for this reason.

“Quick,” my grandmother said. She swung her shawl over her shoulder. “Catch the cart in the lot.” She worried that people’s recklessness would lead to scratches on the cars parked right around the department store that we sped our way through to get to the video shop. I marveled at the Japanese anime videotapes with their creamy cover art. I took whiffs of the fresh film rolls. The mellow man behind the register warned us about new tapes coming next week before we scurried out.

     After that we got up to the second floor food court from the escalators. I felt like a pharaoh on them, rubbing their rubber rails, being transported along a pyramid’s path. Mall food courts in particular were my favorite places in the whole world as a kid – with the bright lights and signs, the mix of several sweet, spiced, and salted scents, and their significant showings of rural and suburban immigrants. I always ate egg rolls at the food court. My father used to tell me about how he dreamt about America when he was younger. I knew I felt this feeling of his at the mall food court.   

   When we all finished our food, my brother and I begged for our grandmother to check out one of the kids clothing stores with us, especially on weekends when we didn’t complain at all during the car-rides, as that alone seemed like a good deed to us. Years later, at her funeral, I figured out for the first time how virtuous it was of my grandmother to never complain about how long the car rides were for her.

       My grandmother inspected the clothing store’s in-season jackets. She said jackets lasted lifetimes and that was about the only thing worth wasting money on.

     “Come over here, wear this one,” my grandmother said. “Walk in it for a second. I need to see how it looks.”

      She was suspicious of the store’s displays and demanded to see things as they were. I saw the sense in her insanity. With its light brown wooden floors and tables, its posters of posing children chuckling at each other, and its intense ceiling lights that ignited every cloth color, the store rendered everything vivid to my vision before a few steps outside restored the dull reality. My grandmother pointed out the posters to me and said, “Those are as fake as a painting.”

    My brother and I argued over what she meant.

      “Nano said that because no one is happy all the time like they are in the photos.”

      “I think she means that pictures tell lies to our eyes,” I said. “That’s why she wants us reading books and not playing PlayStation.”

      I stuck to the pants and jeans section of the store as a measure to set as much space between myself and the clothes modeling my grandmother so insisted on. I remember the first time a pair of black jeans jumped to my sight. Someone misplaced them and left them unfolded on top of the sea of standard blue jeans. I tried the black pair on over my pants since I feared the fitting room with its imperfect locks. Every pillar in the store had a mirror to which I tested my appearance as I touched the tokens in my pockets that were cold and broken.

      We stopped at the South Asian spice shop on the way home from the mall and saw one of the storeowners scrubbing graffiti slurs off the glass. My grandmother let me help clean up considering all that could be read were the pink-purple clouds I smeared into smaller circles. We wiped the windows down as the Windex wept.

       The fresh fragrance of balsamic incense filled the front of the halal grocery. In the back was the butchery, where customers could see the meat cut off the skinned bodies. Seven South Asian languages were spoken. A boy bigger than his clothes worked alongside his father and uncles. On his nose was a crescent cut from his collision with a glass door. Before his family immigrated to the States, he bare-knuckle boxed his childhood away. His life now was more complicated; matching hundreds of faces in a scattered community to the voices rushing orders over the phone. He had to manage school too where there was no one there for him. He was a role model to me, and always greeted me by my real name. What was so beautiful about the boy was that he never looked sad at work. More muscular than his thick mustached and big-bellied father who wore a white coat with more integrity than a doctor, the boy was caring, complex. I read this in his hands as they always gestured to take any supply box off his uncles, some of whom who knew happier lives in their home country, but gave everything up for the greater opportunity they wanted for their kids. His mother headed the register and accounts and her short smiles his way added energy to his eyes.

      If you know the feeling of loss, you know that there is beauty in everything immigrants do, especially us children with anonymous ancestry, where one’s last name was determined by our father’s first name, family surnames washing away with the wave of each generation, not to mention a past before the India-Pakistan partition – a past perhaps forever raped and dead like the bloody heaps of human bodies shuttled in town trains during the split. There was nothing left for me there in a motherland where I looked like they looked, ate what they ate, watched what they watched, but talked in the native tongue like a foreigner.

      I played piano as a boy but I botched whatever art there was to the music. The rectangular room with its rapping radiator hardly had space for one to open the door without bumping the black bench of the piano. The piano was old and out of tune, the wood rough. My fingers lacked life upon the keys’ withered wood. My fingers disliked being apart and were too slow to keep tempo. Up above the piano hung a bulletin board with tiny tacks jabbing its sand skin. The tacks held up a calendar with my initials inked into the Saturday boxes by the time, 9 a.m., J.M.

To my right, my teacher Ms. Kunz sat in a chestnut chair, one leg crossed over the other at the knees, her head hovering up and down to the music, her thin hair swinging ever so slightly, her clay nose nestled to her face unlike my own projecting Pinocchio. Ms. Kunz had a long neck like my mother’s, and her native German sometimes slid into her English, w’s and v’s dancing around each other in a fashion not all too different from Urdu or Hindi. My grandmother was the one to urge me to take music lessons. She said artists made magic, that they spun straw into gold; whenever I practiced piano alone or, when I waited for Ms. Kunz as she rushed to purchase her pumpkin pie spiced coffee from the café next door, I repeated to myself I am a king, I am a king, I am a king. It was in those moments I played best though there was no one else to hear.

       Recitals were the worst. In the crowd there were kids waiting with violin decks cushioning their chins, sitting next to older brothers with red bumps spread across their face from a first shave. I never told my family about recitals. I feared they’d hear my heart beat over the wandering waltz, see my skin sweat on the semicircle church stage before I exited and sat in the back, a stranger to the pews the rest reclined in, their curious eyes following me down the steps, the town’s brown boy. Prior to each performance, the angel on the church ceiling caught my attention, a winged woman, robed, with a trumpet in her mouth and a school-bus-yellow sun rising above her hairline. At the mosque miles away they taught me two angels perched themselves on either shoulder, pen and paper in hand, recording the story of my life, the good and the bad. I asked this angel on the church ceiling to take the trumpet out of her mouth and tell me the notes I had forgotten. She never did. I concluded she was not an angel but just a painting.

     Put me through what you will, but never more through those church doors will I revisit my emotional sores. The church community brightened the neighborhood, or so they told me. What we had was miles away in another town, hidden in the woods, almost as if the building was ashamed, accompanied by a police car camped out on the road side during our holidays, officers on watch, either as protection for us or for the surrounding community. What a welcoming. Half the congregation parked in the nearby Wal-Mart parking lot, in the back, by the disposal dumpsters.

Most of the mosque’s imams arrived from some secret generation between me and my parents; if British, they were a bit brash from an unfortunate upbringing in a time when encounters with skinheads spoiled their childhoods in settings that were dark, dilapidated, sometimes sea-side, Southend. They learned two things, both brought to the forefront in London – the first was that they were too dark-skinned to be trusted by the white kids, and too light-skinned to be trusted by the black kids. The second was to stick at home all afternoon into the night to avoid any chance of paki bashing. 

I guess this was all part of your plan, for that generation of brown British boys – racing on and off of rides at the funfair – to be harassed by a group of Nazi salutes and initiation rites, fleeing but followed by blue vans of these young men with machetes. These skinheads killed my imam’s white friend for being a race traitor by smashing his head in with a hammer. My imam was thirteen when he witnessed his childhood friend die like that. He didn’t befriend another white kid after because he didn’t want to see another dear friend killed. Strangely, even though I didn’t like our imam at all, I can’t imagine a more pious act, to bear the burden of pain alone, to save others from what one couldn’t control.

I practiced piano until the end of high school. During my last lesson Ms. Kunz showed me a folded photo of her young daughters. I don’t remember their faces. I do remember Ms. Kunz’s glasses creeping down her nose as her voice trembled for the first time in all those years she taught me. She wore a kitten cardigan over her turtleneck.

“Something living is dearer to me than all the treasures in the world,” Ms. Kunz said.

  I told her she was right, that I’d rather be a good father than a king. A good citizen, a good friend to all even. Her eyes watered. Ms. Kunz said she’d miss me. She said though I didn’t know where I was going, she was sure of my success. She was sure I’d be an artist someday even if we agreed that the piano wasn’t my calling. Ms. Kunz said it was well time I plan on how to get to college and become my own man. I’d be the type of man one could trust. She was wrong.

     I stared at my sneakers. The individual strands of the black laces were breaking free and there was a small hole by my big toe. I thought about the few weeks that I said I was sick to miss a lesson, how Ms. Kunz never lost trust in me. She’d write me notes about feeling better that I threw away with no shame. I was scum for fooling such a caring creature as she. She embraced me that last day. Ms. Kunz was the only one I was ever certain loved me besides my grandmother. With strict presence and straight posture, she somehow spotted the mind in my chicken scratch writing style; she read each poem in my notebook that I wrote to accompany the music.  

    For the rest of my life I thrust her memory away because there were few joys as supreme as stumbling upon Ms. Kunz’ image under my eyelids, later, by chance, most often as I passed the music studio. The music studio sat in the center of town, where dull and bright colored houses checkerboarded the streets, in a brick building whose fire escape lead from the dentist’s down to the barber’s down to the first floor window where the back of Ms. Kunz’s head, in its strict stiffness, reeked of royalty in the most simple and stuffed of spaces.