Tehmina Khan's ​Things She Could Never Have

Reviewed by Aaron Schneider

Mawenzi House, 2017

“To Allah We Pray,” the second story in Tehmina Khan’s debut collection Things She Could Never Have, contains a conversation that neatly encapsulates the often-fraught meshing of worlds that is at the heart of the book’s stories. While his sister, Fatima, watches, Zain, who is newly returned to Karachi from studying in Toronto, plans a celebratory night out on the town with his friend Raza and the bottle of Black Label he has smuggled through customs:

“Hurry up. I don’t want to miss the Maghreb payer at the mosque.”

 “What? You never mentioned anything about praying,” said Zain.

“It’ll take just fifteen minutes. We’ll be in and out before you know it. Babar is coming over to my place at seven. He will bring a bottle of Absolut with him.”

“Well done, the two of you. First pray, then drink,” said Fatima, standing at the doorway. “Perhaps next time, for greater efficiency, you could try doing both at the same time!”

“At least, I pray. Also, you can’t pray while drunk, which is why I always pray before,” said Raza, smiling, his eyes skidding away from hers.
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Fatima shook her head, returned the smile, and walked away. “Have fun. Play hard. Oh sorry, I meant, pray hard!”

Here, the worlds blend relatively seamlessly: Zain drinks and doesn’t pray regularly, but doesn’t mind praying, and goes with Raza to the mosque. Raza prays and drinks without being bothered by the contradiction. And Fatima’s teasing is just that—lighthearted disapproval produced for the sake of dramatic effect and a good closing line rather than genuine condemnation. But sometimes the worlds collide violently. In the story’s conclusion, the two friends’ casual and untroubled mixture of secular pleasure and religious observance slams into militant Wahhabism when the mosque in which they are praying is destroyed by a suicide bomber. From the end of the story, the conversation between Zain, Raza and Fatima looks very different, and this is what Khan’s stories do best—draw together separate, often conflicting realities, building up their layered meanings through juxtaposition and contrast.
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In the first story in the book, “Whisperings of the Devil,” Khan delves into the background of the suicide bomber of “To Allah We Pray.” Haseeb is the son of woman who works as a servant of a rich family in Karachi. His mother is favoured, and the family pays for him to attend a private school where he is being taught English. When his mother is wrongly accused of stealing a blue diamond ring and fired, she is forced to pull Haseed out of the private school she can no longer afford, and, because she has no other way to provide her son with an education, enrolls him in the Wahhabist madrasa where he is radicalised. At the core of the story are two contrasting moments that explain Haseed’s transformation from aspiring student to suicide bomber. Haseed is with his mother when the husband and wife confront her in the kitchen, and overhears them talking to each other after they leave the room:

“These people, they make me so angry. Did you see the shameless way in which she swore on her boy’s life? Serves her right, if we call the police,” Asad said, switching to English from Urdu, as he took the stairs two at a time, reaching their room before Farida.

“We can’t call the police. You know what they will do to her and her druggie husband. She probably stole it for that fool of a man. How many times have I told her to divorce him? He makes her work and them blows the money on his habit.”
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Haseeb’s face was one fire. He was glad that his mother could not understand their words. He put his arm around her and led her out the kitchen door into the night.

The education that the couple has subsidized allows Haseed to be privy to their poisonous condescension, allows him to see past the illusion of their fairness and benevolence to the callous dehumanization of their servants. Haseed is also set apart by his special knowledge, separated from his mother who doesn’t know English and can only guess at the feelings of her now ex-employers, and rejected along with his mother by the people who have separated him from her. Before the story’s tragic conclusion, Haseed’s teacher sends him home to leave an envelope of money for his mother to find after the bombing. He hides the money in rice container, and tells her nothing about what he is about to do:

He lied to her that he was going to play cricket with the other boys, and he felt sorry about the worry he would cause her by not returning, but she would not understand the honour of being selected for his task.
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There was so much that his illiterate mother did not understand. She went out in public without covering herself properly. Her scarf was always falling off her head onto her shoulders, revealing her hair to any passing man. She prayed infrequently. She did not understand that there was one true Islam. You were either a Wahhabi, or you were an infidel.

He is again positioned in relation to a figure of authority and separated from his mother by a special understanding that she does not possess. The first scene helps to make sense of the second, and, when they are read together, they complicate Haseed’s radicalisation, embedding it in a matrix of alienation, class resentment, and, most interestingly, the difficult and sometimes wounding privilege of knowledge.

I initially struggled with the title of this story, “Whisperings of the Devil.” At first, I thought it referred to the teachings of Haeed’s Wahhabist teacher, and it seemed too easy, too pat by far. But then I realized that it could just as easily apply to words that Haseed overhears the rich couple say as they are walking away from his mother, words that are not whispered, but that come to him like whispers, from an adjacent room, as his rich benefactors walk out of his life. “Whisperings of the Devil” plays across the two poles of authority in the story, and neatly captures the complex juxtaposition at work. Khan’s stories are often like this title, deceptively simple at first glance, and richly complex when you delve into them.
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“Whisperings of the Devil” is not the only story that deals with the radicalisation of young Muslims. “Born on the First of July” is the story of Farah, a young woman in Toronto who flies to Syria to join Isis. It is told by her family members, each one taking their turn, each giving their own take on Farah’s disappearance. But, at the end of the story, it briefly widens out to juxtapose the impersonal views of the larger community with the intimate perspectives of the family members: 

“You should have taken her to a therapist when she began withdrawing. We knew something was up when she stopped attending family dinners.”

“You know, it’s because you didn’t give your girls religion and culture at home. If she had religion at home, she would not have had to go looking for it on the internet.”

[. . .]
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“It’s a mother’s job,” they tell my parents, shaking their heads in sorrow. “If the mother grounds the children properly, then they don’t wander off like that.” They look pointedly at my mother’s stylish skirt. You can almost see their brains at work: Whoever heard of a Pakistani woman of her generation wearing skirts? And now you have it, the result of all this pretentious liberalism.

The world of the family rubs up uncomfortably against the world of the broader community. These gossipy condemnations ring false, but they are more hurtful for being detached from the reality of Farah’s life. The story leaves one with both a sense of the intimacy of this tragedy, and the way its pries open the family, exposing their raw trauma to the critical gaze of their community.

Not all of the stories are so broad in scope or so consequential. Sometimes the worlds that meet, mesh and clash are domestic, and the drama is largely personal. In “Flying in Andalusia,” a married couple, Sobia and Salman, on vacation in Spain think separately about the marriage that they both, for different but related reasons, find dissatisfying. Salman regrets marrying Sobia to satisfy his family instead of running off with Karen, his first love. Sobia, who knows about Karen, chafes in a marriage where she is a distant second to the woman her husband would rather be with. Karen is juxtaposed with a Spanish man Sobia meets when she is out on a run and needs to use the bathroom. Nothing happens beyond Sobia using the bathroom and the man giving her a ride back to the villa she and Salman have rented. The do not even speak because the man knows no English, and Sobia doesn’t know Spanish. But, in the context of Sobia, Salman and Karen’s longstanding love triangle, the silent Spaniard who nods to Sobia when he drops her off and then drives away is one of the book’s most resonant figures.

In “Stealing Apples from Heaven,” these contrasts play out on an even smaller scale. Uzma and Saira are eight-year-old cousins visiting their grandmother in Abbottabad. Uzma is from Karachi and Saira lives in Minneapolis. The girls compare their lives, highlighting the differences between Pakistan and the United States. When Saira ruins her leather shoes by washing them and setting them to dry with Uzma’s washable canvas shoes, Saira’s mother gives her a protracted beating, upsetting both Uzma’s and the reader’s expectations about liberal emigres to America and conservative Pakistanis.

At times, the juxtaposition of worlds is deeply poignant, particularly in the stories in the collection dealing with hijra or transgender characters. In “A Stranger in My Own Home,” the narrator returns to her family as a woman. Her mother accepts her, and takes the gifts she has brought, but she cannot stay because of her intolerant brother, and, as her mother’s tears make clear at the end, her mother will not be able to visit her in Karachi either.
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Sometimes the worlds meet and mesh. Sometimes they collide violently. And sometimes they pass with only a glancing touch. But Khan’s stories are always richer for bringing them together. And this promising collection’s juxtapositions will reward any reader who spends time with them. 

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Aaron Schneider’s stories have appeared/are forthcoming in The Danforth Review, filling Station, The Puritan,Hamilton Arts and Letters, untethered, and The Maple Tree Literary Supplement. His story “Cara’s Men (As Told to You in Confidence)” was nominated for the Journey Prize by The Danforth Review. He runs the Creative Writers Speakers Series at Western University. His first book, Grass-Fed, is forthcoming from Quattro Books in the fall of 2018.