Free American Dervish: A Novel by Ayad Akhtar

she went all out and had her hair completely redone, coming home one evening in Sue Ellen’s latest, her sensuous tresses gone, the hair on top of her head spiked with gel. (Mina—like Mother, Father, and I—was an avid watcher of Dallas, and a devoted admirer of the lovely, long-suffering Ewing wife played by Linda Gray.) We must have looked shocked, for Mina turned red and immediately began to explain in embarrassed tones that one of her fellow students needed someone to practice on and that no one else had volunteered. But Mina didn’t need to fear. Our shock was really just astonishment. The fact was: she looked incredible. With her new do, Mina was, if possible, even more beautiful. Or I should say, beautiful in an entirely new way. Her fashionable hairstyle made her a modern woman, an American woman, an astonishing prospect to folks like us who never would have thought we could look like that.
    Mother spent most of dinner commenting on what the hairstyle did to her best friend’s face: the way it brought forth her bone structure; further elongated her almond eyes; created space to appreciate the fineness of her features. Father was impressed, too. At one point, he pointed at Mina’s head as he addressed his wife:
    “Maybe you should try something like that.”
    But Mother wasn’t keen on the idea. At least not yet. It would be years before she would attempt anything even vaguely like Mina’s modern makeover. For now, Mother’s hair would remain as it was: straight, falling halfway down her back, subject only to the luxury of an occasional henna coloring or permanent to give it body. Mother was more than content to live vicariously through her best friend, whether this meant purchasing Mina a vanity case filled with the latest cosmetics for her first birthday here in America, or driving her to the mall to peruse the racks for the latest styles. Mother enjoyed these outings tremendously, but she was always sure to make it known she was just “tagging along.” It was all just for Mina’s sake, of course.
     
    For once, life in our home was settling into a peaceful, lively rhythm which none of us was accustomed to by nature or experience. I’m not convinced we were prepared to be happy. After all, we were formed and informed (to various degrees) by an Eastern mythos profoundly at odds with the American notion of happily-ever-after. For though we longed for happiness, we did not expect it. This was our cultural text, the message imprinted in even the movie videos my parents rented from the local Indo-Pak grocer—the only place you could find Indian films in town—lavish tales of unconsummated love, or love consummated at the price of death. These films were so unlike anything a paying American audience could ever have taken seriously as the truth about life. Americans would only have laughed in disbelief.
    How ironic, then, that such disbelief was what Mina and my parents felt for the relentlessly hopeful narratives they would sit through at the local multiplexes just then opening their doors for business in the early eighties: They couldn’t see in Hollywood’s rosy pictures of life’s possibilities anything other than, at best, wishful thinking and, at worst, childish distraction. As a vision of life, they couldn’t have taken it any more seriously than the popcorn they ate during the show could be taken for a meal. Instead, it was to the Indian weepies that they went to experience the pathos and color that felt to them like the truth about life. These were the moving pictures that had given shape and sound to their souls, stories painted from a darker palette, limned with haunting songs and built from images of elegiac beauty that conveyed an unvarying message:
    Do not expect anything other than loss, pain, sorrow.
    Like the odor of masala lingering along our hallways, the expectation of unhappiness hovered in the air we breathed, and even though Mina’s presence among us had opened a window,