Authors: Day Rusk
I
Finally
understood the meaning of “Ignorance is bliss.”
I had satisfied my curiosity and now I didn’t know what to do with myself.
What could I do? For all intents and purposes, Safia had been murdered by her family because she had defied them and fallen in love with me; everyone knew this but no one could prove it, so the reality of the situation was they were going to get away with it.
What could I do, besides taking the law into my own hands? I thought about it and I thought about it seriously. Safia’s parents had taken her life because in their opinion her actions had dishonored them and the family; that was justification enough for them to commit murder. Their actions, taking another’s life over something frivolous, well it dishonored my world, the society I lived in. It brought shame to my legal system that anyone could get away with murder. So, was that not enough justification for me to dish out my own brand of vigilante justice – to balance the books, so to speak? If I was going to follow their medieval code of morality and justice, then they’d have to be the first to understand the concept of an eye for an eye.
I dreamed about it; oh God, how I dreamed about it.
When I saw her father standing there in the grocery store, I so wanted to just punch him and punch him and punch him; there was such anger in me that I wanted the satisfaction of seeing blood.
I was changing.
I’d been through a lot in life, but then again, many of us have. My misery is no worse than anyone else’s – it just seems that way because it was mine. I know that. Even losing two parents, both of them still relatively young, and both who should have had many more years ahead of them, hadn’t turned me bitter. I’m sure in some way, unbeknownst to me it did have a lasting effect on me, but nothing obvious; I was still my same old peace loving self after I had gotten over the grief of both losses. Their deaths had not noticeably changed me.
I do have a temper; I’m definitely no Saint, that’s for sure. I am like my Father and my Grandfather - even tempered. It takes, or in their cases, took a lot for us to get angry. We have what you would call a slow simmer, and even then, it’s hard for people to ignite us - to get that simmer blazing. I, like my Father, tended to let a lot of things just go, figuring there’s no point in getting upset about everything; this tendency certainly had a way of bothering my Mother, who couldn’t understand why my Father wasn’t getting upset at certain things, at least more than he was. I’ve had relationships where I was confronted by the same thing; girlfriends who wanted me to be madder at a situation than I actually was or ever could be. I guess both my Father and I also had a tendency to try and avoid confrontations. We tended to enjoy ourselves when everything was going along well and everyone was happy.
That doesn’t mean we’ve never gotten mad. Because of that slow simmer I was talking about, when we did get mad, watch out; when I’m truly angry, when something has pushed me past the point where I can’t just brush it off, I’m like a man possessed. If it’s with some guy and we’re going to get into a fist fight, that’s bad, because anger fills me up and takes over all my senses. In my younger days, I had a bad habit of punching walls when I was really upset – luckily that wasn’t often, not so much for the walls, but my poor fist and knuckles. In the heat of anger, I just couldn’t feel pain, so it wasn’t a good idea to engage me in anything physical. When I calmed down, yes, the pain came, and sometimes more than I’d bargained for. There were a few wall instances where I had to drive myself to a hospital to get my hand x-rayed after I’d settled down.
I was never an angry person, but I was now. I found I existed now with a continuous, underlying hatred I knew was not going to go away. It was irrational, but it was there. I tried to only think of the good things about Safia’s and my relationship, but as much as I tried, the bad always came through. Although I didn’t really know them, the way her parents treated her fueled my anger. I wanted them to pay for the pain they had caused her in that way. The idea of their beliefs and culture also started to anger me; it was everything they believed in and cherished that had led them to do what they did to Safia, and I’m not just talking about ultimately killing her, but turning their backs on her – withdrawing their love and the pain that must have caused. I hated every time I picked up a newspaper and saw that some ethnic group – usually of South Asian descent – was telling me I had to accommodate them and their beliefs. I had to
accommodate
them, but I was looked upon as a terrible person if I wanted to even say something like, “Merry Christmas.” No, it had to be, “Happy Holidays,” so as not to offend those immigrants who came from a non-Christian background. Why couldn’t they say “Happy Holidays,” and let me say “Merry Christmas”? Why couldn’t they accommodate me and the traditions of my country, the country they came to, to make a better life for themselves and their families? I didn’t give a rat’s ass if I saw a newspaper promoting one of their religious holidays, like Ramadan, Diwali or Eid. As far as I was concerned they should celebrate it, and let me celebrate my culture and holidays.
On the radio I heard many times that we here in the Western world had no culture; that infuriated me even more; we had long-standing traditions we held dear; we had culture, and if they couldn’t see that, that was their problem; these were people who fled their homelands looking for a better life, and then spent all their time trying to turn their adopted homeland and better life, into what they had fled. Adopt all those attitudes they had in the country they left, and watch over the decades, as their adopted country began to fail them as well.
My brief relationship with Safia introduced me to a new culture, and it had gone horribly wrong. Now, while I know I was placing a lot of different cultures into one category, everything I heard about it, every complaint they had about how they deserved this or deserved that was getting under my skin. It shouldn’t have; we lived in a free society where people are able to ask for and rally for whatever they want; they may not get it, but they’re free to pursue anything, just so long as they go about it legally. All I heard was complaining. Complaining! Complaining! COMPLAINING!
Once I knew what had really happened to Safia, the real anger started eating away at my soul – the cancer was growing and I was doing nothing to try and stop its progress; I had no idea what I could have done. I guess I should have sought someone out to speak with, unburden my soul to, and try to make sense out of it all, but I didn’t, I kept to myself. I didn’t even want counsel from family and friends on the matter. I knew I was heading down the wrong path and that it could only lead to something bad and destructive, but I really didn’t want to be detoured from that path.
At what point do you give up all you ever believed and decide to embrace the path of self-destruction – willingly?
Anger filled my heart and soul and, really, all it took was for me to see a brown person for it to rear its ugly head. Like I said, it was irrational, and unhealthy, but it was there and instead of correcting it, I was savoring it. I was in the wrong headspace; I was on my way to truly being broken and I didn’t care.
I was receiving notifications from my publisher that the book was coming along well; I’d been sent some artwork for the cover and such, but I just told my agent to tell them everything was fine; I liked what they were doing and they didn’t need to bother me with the details of its publishing or when it was going to be released. At one time I’d hoped the book would do well, but I no longer cared. I was being pushed to reveal what the topic of my next book would be; they wanted to know if it was really going to be about honor killings and how I planned to handle the subject matter; I guess the police department’s PR representative had checked up on me. They wanted to know, but I kept putting off both my agent and publisher. I wasn’t about to write about honor killings and I had no other topic that interested me. To tell the truth, I had no desire to write anything anymore.
How’d I spend my days?
I found myself, more and more, keeping tabs on Safia’s family. Armed with what I knew, I developed an unhealthy obsession with them. I was keeping tabs on them but I didn’t exactly know why. I’d spend days on end parked somewhere near the grocery store where I could keep an eye on the place. I watched as Safia’s parents came and went, and as Rijja and Safia’s brother Saif came and went. I watched them on a daily basis, both at the store and their home. I watched and the more I watched, the angrier I got.
They were going about their lives like nothing was wrong. Had they forgotten Safia and what they had done to her so quickly – so casually!
Instead of being wracked with guilt over what they had done, they were moving on, living their lives, making money and, no doubt, enjoying themselves. Safia was dead and they were living their goddamned lives.
I was torturing myself, for sure. I knew I had to drive away and just leave them all behind. The more I saw them, the more I wanted to do something – embrace the vigilante justice that up until now I had managed to suppress.
I recall one time watching Saif waiting to cross the street to get to his parent’s grocery store. The street was pretty busy and he was looking to jaywalk. The temptation to turn on my engine, put the car in drive and cut him down when he finally tried to make his way across the street, overwhelmed me. The little prick, the one who is rumored to have committed the dirty deed against his sister, my lover, deserved nothing better than to be hit and dragged by a car to his death. I only hoped that I’d be able to hear his screams of pain and agony over the sound of my engine as I dragged him along. And if he wouldn’t drag, I’d back up and run over him again and again if that’s what it took. The very sight of him made me sick. My hand had been on the ignition key as I watched him waiting to navigate the busy street, and although I can’t say for sure, I came very close to carrying out my fantasy of running him down. So damn close.
It was because of that, that very moment that I knew I needed to get control of myself –I needed to change. You read what I wrote above; that was sick, not the thoughts of a well man. I was scaring myself with my anger and the hatred growing within me, and knew that now was the moment to embrace it and start lashing out, acting upon the violence it desired, or to back off and try and find a way to deal with it and get back to some place sane.
Saif made it across the street safely; my decision, as difficult as it was for me to make, was to try and embrace sanity. I drove away, promising myself that that was my last visit to Safia’s parent’s grocery store and their home. They had been a negative factor in my life from the moment I knew they existed; it was time to take that power of negativity away from them and forget they ever existed.
It was also time I found a way to deal with my newfound problems with brown people. This wasn’t me; it was not who I wanted to be and I knew for sure, it was not who my parents wanted me to become.
Forgetting everything and just moving on, well that wasn’t my style. Sometimes I wished it were, life would be a lot easier, but it wasn’t. The other option was losing myself at the bottom of a bottle; possibly with a little recreational drug use on the side. The pros were many famous authors throughout the centuries have combated addictions while at the same time churning out what have become literary classics. Maybe addiction was that one ingredient that would take me from a competent writer to a great and brilliant writer. The con, of course, was I loved my liver, the ability to stand up straight, take a solid dump, and I had an aversion of gutters – just the word alone sounded unappealing. If a fight club existed anywhere nearby, I’d have joined; I wasn’t much of a fighter, but I’m sure being pummeled every night would eventually dull the senses, and maybe even encourage some permanent memory loss or brain damage. I checked the yellow pages, no fight clubs.
I had very few options; and while I joked about it, in the back of my mind, as I considered what I was going to do, Safia made her presence known. As I considered my anger and hatred, I realized it was all about how I felt; I was being self-indulgent. Everything was focused on me, her parents, Muslims and brown people in general; I realized when I stopped and finally got control of myself, that in all this anger and grief, I’d forgotten her – the true victim of everything. While I had the ability to make choices and decide what I was going to do, how I was going to handle everything, she didn’t have that luxury. Maybe it was time to put away the anger and focus on doing something productive; something that would possibly honor the memory of Safia – a celebration of her life; it was time I thought of honoring her, making sure her short existence here was not without purpose, would be remembered forever, as opposed to simply giving in to my hatred; hatred in no way was a reflection of the woman she’d been; all the time she was dealing with her family, being kicked out of the house and disowned, she never, and I mean NEVER had anything negative to say about them. She had every right to rail against her parents, her sister and brother, but she didn’t; she still loved them and wanted to be a part of their lives no matter how they had treated her.
Why couldn’t I learn through her example?
Well, because she was a better person than me; whereas she brought light, I was darkness, only saved from myself because she was willing to share herself with me. She brought the light into my life.
Safia. She was all that really mattered.