in just one place, so no one knows what to do. And the treatment is making it worse. But God knows best. InshAllah, she will recover.”
One night, after returning from a visit, Mariya asked me to braid
her hair. On those nights, Mariya did not wheedle me into midnight antics, and from her slumped posture and blunted voice I recognized a rare
trace of her despair.
“I know a secret,” Mariya said as I took her thick, smooth hair
into my fingers, separating the sheet into three parts, “I know what’s really wrong with Ammi. What they won’t tell us.” She paused, and so did
my fingers. “Keep going!” she said.
“You’re lying.” I forced my hands to move. “We already know.”
“I’m telling the truth, Aisha! It’s simple. My family is cursed.”
“You’re crazy! There’s no such thing.”
“Yes!” she said, slinking her shoulders and turning her head to
look back at me. The primordial braid fell out of my hands. “Think about
it, Aisha! It’s what killed my papa when I was a baby and it’s what’s wrong
with Ammi now!”
“How do you know?” I asked, and then I wondered, “What about
you?”
“I’m still young. I’m safe for now. And my daadhi told me. She
says curses are real. She says it’s called the evil eye.”
Nazr was the word she used. And though I must have laughed
and discarded her statements in the moment, I believed her. After all,
Mariya was from Pakistan—a place I knew only from her stories, where
the possibility of witchcraft was real, where jinn and dervishes walked
alongside man, and justice was served by prayer and curse alone.
Despite her upbringing in Pakistan, Mariya spoke fluid English
and wrote cursive: tall, ornate letters that were prettier and more decipherable than my own slanted print. When she wasn’t scaling objects
in the backyard or sprinting through the house, Mariya read fat chapter
books—my library books, which I hadn’t so much as touched.
“Look at how Mariya reads so well,” my parents would say. “Why
don’t you?”
But Mariya spoke English with an accent, heavy syllabled, with lumbering intonation. In the last weeks of summer vacation, we spoke to each
other in English alone, listened to tapes of Hooked on Phonics and read
126