At 7’7” Alam Channa used to be the tallest man alive. According to
the Guinness Book of World Hoaxes he really wasn’t. Every red-blooded
Pakistani begged to differ (Take that Bob Wadlow!) Alam just wished the red-blooded
Pakistanis
would stop paying him so much damn attention and let him milk his cows in peace.
At 72.718281828… inches Aisha was the tallest member of the Merchant family.
She didn’t own a ruler as precise as that, but she liked to think there
might be a little bit of a transcendental number in her somewhere. When she
was little (young, that is), her dad called her Alam in honor of the late great
but
stopped doing it when her mom started to think it inappropriate that her daughter
be addressed via a masculine moniker.
Amina alternately worried that she mothered Aisha too much or not enough.
She always had an urge to confide in Aisha her own problems. It may have had
something
to do with Amina’s comparatively diminutive stature. At 5’3”--she
was actually a quarter of an inch taller but insisted on rounding down for
a nice clean or in her words “saaf sutri” height--Amina
was no colossus but she carried herself well. She couldn’t understand
why her daughter wouldn’t settle down with a decent, respectable height
like six feet and three quarters of an inch. Even six one, a white lie
strictly speaking, would’ve been “A okay” as far as Amina
was concerned. To Amina, e (i.e. 2.718281828…) was one in a long (and
unbroken) line of dirty channels on TV and Euler rhymed with Ferris Bueller
(the irresponsible conniving prototypical
American male, according to her) and not boiler as Aisha kept insisting until
she decided it didn’t matter whether her mother called her favorite t-shirt
(the front of which read “F+V=E+2”) the Oiler shirt or the Yooler
shirt. Amina routinely tried to get rid of the shirt, partly to put an end
to the bickering which occasionally reerupted and partly because of her hatred
of
all things math related, but Aisha always managed to pull it out of the Goodwill-bound
clothes in the nick of time.
Aisha loved Euler. She could still remember the first time
she learned that e raised to the product of theta and the square root of negative
one was equal
to the sum of the product of the sine of theta and the of the square root of
negative one and the cosine of theta. As Mr. Gomez, her overzealous pre-calculus
teacher, was busy constructing the proof for Euler’s formula on the board,
Aisha’s
brown eyes widened as she became increasingly excited. She couldn’t believe
that imaginary numbers, the trigonometric functions, and e (her favorite number
next to pi) could all be related with such graceful brevity. When he wrote “Q.E.D.” at
the bottom, she nearly came.
Aisha had a little sister, ten years younger than her, called Khadija. Khadija
was her parent’s second chance. Amina and her husband, Tariq, made sure
to do everything right the second time around. Khadija’s hijaab wearing
days started not long after her fetal caul wearing days came to an end. To
her, Aisha’s perpetually uncovered short brown hair was out of place,
unnatural, and just plain weird. To Aisha, Khadija resembled nothing more than
a teletubby.
Aisha was twelve when her brother was born. Khadija was two. Shehzad was
supposed to be the prince of the family, Tariq’s ally against the menacing
Merchant mademoiselles/Madame, Amina’s baby boy, and a cooties vaccine
for his sisters but he returned to his kingdom by the sea before the week was
through.
When her brother succumbed to influenza, Aisha
changed. It was as if a part of her was forever pledged to carrying on Shehzad’s
memory. That night, while her father (drunk for the first time in his life)
and her mother sat
in the living room of their home answering phone calls congratulating them
on the birth of their son, too shaken by the relentless “
Mubaraks” to
say anything other than “Thank you,” she cut her hair a dozen strands
at a time with an
Exact-O knife. She snuck out with the black and gold
topi that
would never adorn Shehzad’s head and made her way to the mosque.
It was thirty minutes before she reached the mosque, a
converted two bedroom house nearly two miles from her home. It seemed empty
and Aisha, sweaty, out
of breath, and determined adjusted the topi on her head and made her
way to the alcove at the head of the mosque and started to recite the call
to prayer.
With every “Allahuakbar” came more tears. She didn’t understand
much Arabic, but did her best to intone each verse as sarcastically as she
could manage. “God is great! Just great! Fantastic! Super! Great,
great, great, great, great, great, great, great!”
As Aisha stood there sobbing, a shadow in the back began
to move. It approached her slowly, and as it did it spoke “My boy, excellent
job, excellent, but it is late. You have missed the evening prayer by over
an hour. You must
come during the day.” The
imam placed his left hand on her shoulder and
raised the other to shake hers. When she turned her head, the imam’s
hand froze and he blinked with uncertainty. “Y-you are a girl.” Had
it been any other day, Aisha would’ve said “Duh.” Now she
just stood, the unwiped tears drying on her pale face, staring at him. His
right hand, raised in congratulations, now rose even higher and struck her
left cheek in condemnation. “This is America, asshole!” she screamed
as she ran from the mosque and back into the night.
“Look dad, I made a paratha.”
A bleary eyed Tariq looked at the proffered plate. On
it was a flat and perfectly circular piece of undercooked dough. Then he
looked at his daughter, Euclid
reincarnated as a ten-year-old girl. Guiltily peeking out of the side pocket
of Aisha’s blue overalls was a steel geometer’compass. At the
center of the paratha the compass’s pivot point was still visible. “It’s
lovely, baita.”
”Then the paratha
leaped out of the plate, powered and driven by an intense hate. It started
to grow
and also to glow. While changing its hue to green
as it grew it let out a shriek that left them all weak. Compounding its mass,
the maverick bread, switched from mocking the Merchants, to space-time’s
fabric instead.
“
Resistance is futile!” Then, its growth seemed to subside. Unbeknownst
to the Merchants, its mass was still growing. Eventually its density was sufficient
to significantly alter temporal causality. “Bless you”s preceded “achoo”s.
It kept going. Then, as its mass continued to grow, it started to shrink. “Finally,” thought
the Merchants in chorus, “the madness has come to an end.” But it
was too late. The point of infinite density had been reached. Time stood still.
The dream is over. What can I say? The dream is over. Yesterday.