Free The Taqwacores by Michael Knight Page A

was drinking with Johnny Cash,” he said, his head hanging off the far side of the bed.
    “Really.”
    “Yeah bro.” He heaved himself up to a sitting position and I noticed his mohawk had been bent out of shape by sleeping. “You ever listen to Johnny Cash?” The question threw me off.
    “I don’t listen to country,” I said, thinking that was the cool answer.
    “Johnny Cash isn’t country,” Jehangir snapped. “He’s bigger than country. Johnny Cash is the fucking SHIT, man. Johnny Cash rules the world.”
    “I didn’t know that.”
    “If you don’t know, now you know.”
    “So what was the dream about?”
    “We were in the bar that ‘A Boy Named Sue’ took place in. You know, the saloon where he finds his dad and they fight all over the place, breakin’ chairs and smashin’ through walls. We just sat on a pair of stools downing shots and laughing and I just wished I could be him, you know... I wanted to be Johnny Cash more than anything, just sitting next to him and he was so fucking old and withered you could see ten thousand years of pain and life on his face... and even when we laughed and sang songs I was hurting on the inside because I wanted to be him so bad, a fuckin’ Everyman Baritone Populist, fuckin’ beyond Time and Place. I can’t be that guy, you know, who just speaks to everyone.. . I’m too wrapped up in my mix-matching of disenfranchised subcultures.”
    “Damn,” I said.
    “I’m small,” said Jehangir. “I’m fuckin’ small.”
    “Your name means ‘World Conqueror,’ doesn’t it?”

    “Something like that. I’m named after a fuckin’ Mughal king.”
    “I know.”
    “His son built the Taj Mahal.”
    “Yep.”
    “Look at that shit,” he said, pointing to a small picture on his wall. I walked over to see it and found Jehangir, face a little younger and head concealed in turban, wearing a shalwar kameez in front of the Taj Mahal next to an older man in matching outfit besides his Jinnah hat.
    “That’s awesome,” I said.
    “See how my turban’s wrapped?” he asked. I looked closer. “I had never worn one before and had no idea what I was doing. I fuckin’ wrapped it Sikh-style.”
    “Oh, yeah, yeah—”
    “I just wanted to cover up my hawk, you know, I didn’t know there was a Sikh way and a Muslim way.”
    “Who’s that in the Jinnah?”
    “That’s my uncle.” I stared closer, tried to see the Jehangir-ness in him.
    “Were you really close?” I asked.
    “Yeah—I mean he wasn’t around all the time, he traveled a lot but I did get to see some of the world because of him.”
    “That’s cool.”
    “He took me to Makkah.”
    “Really?”
    “I don’t have any pictures of it because you know how they are over there.” I tried to picture Jehangir in the ihram garb with his orange mohawk standing tall.
    “How was it over there?”
    “Brother,” he said with each facial muscle striving to convey his conviction, “it’s unbelievable. That’s all I can say. I don’t even know how to explain it. You don’t even have thoughts there that
can possibly be expressed in language.”
    “Wow,” I said.
    “You know how in those photographs it looks like the people nearest the Ka’ba are kind of swirling around?”
    “Yeah.”
    “It really feels like that.”
    “Wow, you were that close?”
    “Yeah,” he replied.
    “Did you touch it?”
    “No, once you’re that close people start crawling all over each other, it looks like a bunkhouse brawl. I figured if I moved out of the way and let somebody else get their blessing, maybe I got baraka too.”
    “That makes sense.”
    “I hope so.”
    I left him and went down the hall, into the bathroom where out the open window I saw Fasiq sitting on the roof, Qur’an in hand.
    “As-salaamu alaikum,” I said from the bathroom.
    “Wa-alaikum as-salaam,” he slowly replied.
    Then Umar’s adhan filled the house.
    Albert sat on a couch as we lined up in front of the hole in the wall, Saudi’s