Love from A to Z
S. K. Ali
To the best of good peoples, my parents.
And to other good peoples, Anu and Haju, without whom this book could not be.
This is a love story.
You’ve been warned.
MARVEL: TWO SATURDAYS IN MARCH
ON THE MORNING OF SATURDAY, March 14, fourteen-year-old Adam Chen went to the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha.
A thirteenth-century drawing of a tree caught his gaze. It wasn’t particularly striking or artistic. He didn’t know why this tree caused him to stride forward as if magnetized. (When he thinks about it now, his guess is thus: Trees were kind of missing in the landscape he found himself in at the time, and so he was hungry for them.)
Once he got close, he was rewarded with the name of the manuscript that housed this simple tree sketch: The Marvels of Creation and the Oddities of Existence.
He stood there thinking about this grand title for a long moment.
Then something clicked in his mind: Maybe that’s what living is—recognizing the marvels and oddities around you.
From that day, he vowed to record the marvels he knew to be true and the oddities he wished weren’t.
Adam, being Adam, found himself marveling more than ruminating on the weird bits of existing.
We pick up his Marvels and Oddities journal on March 7, four years after that Saturday at the Museum of Islamic Art.
Eighteen now, Adam is a freshman in college, but it’s important to know that he has stopped going to classes two months ago.
He has decided to live.
? ? ?
On the very late evening of Saturday, March 11, sixteen-year-old Zayneb Malik clicked on a link in her desperation to finish a project. She’d promised a Muslim Clothing Through the Ages poster for the Islamic History Fair at the mosque, and it was due in nine hours, give or take a few hours of sleep.
Perhaps it was because of the late hour, but the link was oddly intriguing to a girl looking for thirteenth-century hijab styles: Al-Qazwini’s Catalogue of Life as It Existed in the Islamic World, 1275 AD.
The link opened to an ancient book.
The Marvels of Creation and the Oddities of Existence.
A description of the book followed, but Zayneb could not read on.
“Marvels” and “oddities” perfectly described the reality of her life right then.
The next day, after returning from the history fair (and taking a nap), she began a journal and kept it going for the next two years, recording the wonders and thorns in the garden of her life.
Zayneb, being Zayneb, focused on the latter. She dedicated her journal entries to pruning the prickly overgrowth that stifled her young life.
By the time we meet her at eighteen, she’s become an expert gardener, ready to shear the world.
She’s also just been suspended from school.
A NOTE TO UNDERSTANDING THE STORY ABOUT TO UNFOLD
OTHER PEOPLE’S PRIVATE JOURNALS ARE tricky things. It feels strange to read them.
And if you do get to read one—say, if a diary were to fling open and stick to the window of the stalled subway car opposite your stalled subway car, and you had highly trained vision that allowed you to read tiny, tilted, cursive writing—even then, while devouring the details of a stranger’s life, you would be overwhelmed with guilt.
You may even look around to see if there are witnesses to your peering-and-gulping reading behavior.
In this case, rest assured that you are free to enjoy the thoughts of Adam and Zayneb shamelessly. They have donated their diaries in the cause of . . . yes, love . . . on three conditions. One, that I cut out two incidents (the first involving a stranger’s coffee cup, misplaced, that they both drank from by accident, and the second something I cannot write about here without quaking).
The other conditions are that I change their names and that I rewrite their entries in narrative form.
Done. Done. Done.
ZAYNEB
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6
ODDITY: HATERS
I HATE HATEFUL PEOPLE.*
Exhibit A: The woman seated beside me on the plane.
She swore under her breath when she saw me. Hijabi me.
Muslim me, on an airplane.
She lifted her carry-on suitcase and slammed it into the overhead bin so hard, I was sure she damaged the wheels on it.
Then she rolled her eyes and whisper-swore again when I took a long moment to get up from my aisle seat to let her in.
My lap had been full. I’d had my Marvels and Oddities journal, a pen, my phone, headphones, and the food I’d bought right before boarding—a saran-wrapped breakfast sandwich and coffee. I had to gather these and, while clutching them to me, slide out.
After Hateful Woman got into her seat, her actions were executed in staccato, each orchestrated to let me know she was mad at my presence. Setting her purse down on the floor, slam, snapping the seat pocket in front of her to punch her newspaper in, pow, pulling her seat belt strap from under her, yank.
“I’m going to need to get up to go to the bathroom quite a bit, you know,” she growled at me.
Nice to meet you, too.
“Okay,” I said, smiling my smile of deadly politeness. I’d recently learned that smiling calm-evilly in the face of haters, well, stranger haters, gets them more inflamed.
“You’ve got to be ready to move out of the way faster than that,” she said.