Chapter 1

THE HOMECOMING

17th of SHa’baan 1417

(December 28, 1996)

When seen through a window of an airplane, high above in the misty clouds, Manhattan distinguishes itself by its twin towers, or the World Trade Center, jutting its mammoth hunk of steel and glass through the haze like a modern tower of Babel reaching towards God.

In the plane Maryam, the adoptive mother, held the baby Imam to the window so that he may see this incredible marvel of man, not only the towers themselves but the buildings surrounding them. Maryam never knew how man had built such a city. She thought man had a desperate need to produce instead of consume, create instead of devour, and these nervous fits of production and accomplishment resulted, with speed and with grace, this enormous complex called Manhattan, always expanding as exemplified by these buildings. She knew the baby Imam would never remember such a sight, but she held him to the window just in case.

“This is our home,” she whispered into his ear.

The journey lasted seventeen hours. Maryam and her husband, Queresh, were glad to be over with it, and when she gazed through the plastic windows upon those buildings of Manhattan piercing the sky, a joy seeped into her heart, and she hoped a similar joy possessed the baby Imam as well.

The plane veered from the Manhattan skyline and touched down safely at Kennedy International Airport. The passengers clapped in relief as the plane finally landed. While taxiing on the runway, Maryam saw fields of grass intersected by tarmac, placards in pilot-speak fixed to the ground, and other planes rolling to other destinations.

After crawling through customs where officials stamped their passports, after waiting on a long serpentine line, Queresh and Maryam were finally free to collect their baggage, hail a taxi, and speed along the Van Wyck Expressway towards Manhattan. The winter had left its mark upon the terrain. A brownish snow covered the sides of the highway, and the air carried a Northerly chill. The city had been overtaken by a bitter cold. Luckily Maryam and Queresh dressed properly in heavy wool jackets. They wrapped the baby Imam in an additional woolen blanket.

In the taxi Maryam held the baby Imam and had already fallen in love with him. She did not know what Queresh thought of the new member of the family. He seemed quiet and distant in the plane and now in the taxi. She could sense neither a happiness nor sadness, but she at least knew this small child brought back an elusive purpose to her life, and that main purpose, which had been dreadfully missing, was to become a mother, since Maryam could not have children herself.

Her days had been a tumult of loss. She was born in Surat, India, and she had developed into the care-taker of her own family. Her mother died shortly after her birth. She loved her father dearly. He had died mysteriously of a heart attack when Maryam was sixteen. As a care-taker she gave her three brothers nothing less than her love, because this particular woman overflowed with a bountiful love. At a young age she changed the diapers. She fed them milk and made their food. She held them as they slept. She married Queresh of Arabia at the age of seventeen, as her father had arranged. She was left her brothers behind in Surat. Queresh prospered in the importation of fine silk garments.

She loved her husband but loved and missed her family more. Maryam tried to have children with Queresh, but after a short pregnancy, she miscarried the child. The doctors said she could never have children, and this crushing blow to her maternal dream manifested itself by a lengthy depression. In the United States she had hoped her three younger brothers would someday join her. She worked vigorously for their immigration visas. She submitted affidavits and applications at the Federal Building just south of Houston street almost every day, but while doing so, her three brothers also perished, two from heart failures similar to her father’s, the third from hepatitis. When she heard of their young and untimely deaths, she cried flowing tears. Her husband sent her to psychiatrists, but they never rescued her from the sorrow of losing her immediate family and the inability to have children. Her husband thought she mourned too much and the psychiatrists would keep her out of a long depression which captured her for months.

Depression, more than anything, is a form of mental apathy. The victim has trouble departing from a prolonged passive state. When one sees along a Manhattan sidewalk a woman holding a mangled coffee cup, showing her deformities, like an amputated leg or a bulging tumor from her forehead, or a single tooth hanging from her blackened gums as she cautiously stares into the oblivion of an abyss, the onlooker cannot help but find for her a loose dime. Depression is such a portrait but a portrait within. It is a mind broken by loss and hopelessness. There can be little difference between the woman who begs on the street and that woman who suffers from depression. Depression does not eat quickly. Rather it chews slowly, ripping apart the tender sinews of reality and forcing the victim to take drastic measures just to be rid of the vacancy, the loneliness, and the inherent sadness of the illness. Herein lies the paradox of depression: the woman under its spell can do nothing physical or mental to fight that hopelessness.