Rakim and his mother moved to the West when he was but a child.
He only remembered bits and pieces from those days, the way one tends to half-remember things from early childhood, before one is even of age for kindergarten. Buildings, landscapes, certain people’s clothes or faces, being taught how to tie his shoes, how to wash his hands, how to echolocate, sand as far as the eye could see. Scattered flashes of his mother here and there, but no details from that era had survived unaided. He’d been too young to really remember. Mostly, he just remembered that she’d been kind to him. He remembered her fondly.
Rakim didn’t remember his father. As far as he could remember, it’d always been just his mother Irshad and him. She told him that his father had still been with them when he’d been very small, but that something bad had happened, and that he hadn’t been able to follow them where they’d been going. She supposed that perhaps there was a small chance he might join them someday, but she told him that she did not believe he would, and that he should not believe it either. He didn’t.
Irshad had to deal with the issues that came with being a single parent and with those that came with being a stranger in a strange land alike. From his perspective, she provided him with everything he needed. He didn’t think of himself as missing out on anything as such, not really. It was only when he grew older that he understood just how hard she’d had to work to keep them afloat the way she had, and to appreciate how much that had meant. At first he took it for granted, but when he grew old enough to hear of others whose mothers had been far less good to them than his had been to him, it chilled him. He couldn’t even imagine that.
There was an Arabic name and an English name for everything. People where they lived spoke English. Irshad understood this. Still, she didn’t want him to grow up without a sense of where he was really from. It could already be difficult for a child to learn one set of words for things, though. How was she to make him learn twice as much as another child? Part of him wanted to learn both since it seemed to matter to her, but he struggled with it, sometimes only remembering a word in one language, but not in the other.
They had moved in turbulent times.
It was during a time during which this profession was being particularly celebrated in their new nation that Irshad decided to become a firefighter. At first he understood this in childlike terms, as a boy who liked to play with fire trucks as some boys were wont to do. She told him stories of their ancestors as she tucked him into bed in the morning. She told him that, in her youth, she’d trained with a Sufi dervish, with a moth who could spin herself into a cocoon of flames in her whirling trances, and that, before her time, their ancestors had fought the Ifrits.
“So the Ifrits were bad, mother?” he’d asked her with a child’s innocence. “Only a few of them were, my son,” she’d told him. “We dealt with the few that we needed to. The rest we left alone.” “Oh, I see!” It’d seemed to have made sense to him. Why should they all have been bad? When he grew old enough to understand just how much of a risk she’d been taking every time she’d gotten into that truck on her way to a fire, his memories of those stories changed. He remembered them with the bittersweet irony of someone who understands that his mother had risked death almost every night, and had told him a story so that it wouldn’t drive him insane. Still, her narrative drove him.
She taught him to play with fire.
When he first started going to gym class at school, the other boys beat him up in the locker room. They told him that he should’ve been in the girls’ locker room, that he had no business being there. He didn’t understand what they meant. They told him he didn’t have ‘what it takes,’ that they were going to tell on him, that they’d have him sent back where he came from. He tried to hide it from his mother, because he was ashamed of what had happened to him, believing it must’ve been his fault somehow, but it couldn’t escape her notice forever.
“It was the oddest thing.” “What was, my son?” “They said I wasn’t a boy.” Irshad sighed, and shook her head. “Sometimes you’ll meet people who don’t understand what that means.” “They said I don’t belong.” “They don’t know you.” “What am I to do then, mother?” Irshad tried to talk to his principal. The principal told her she should remember that the locker room issue was still very contentious in a lot of places, and that while he could try to see where she was coming from, it wasn’t his place to make a stand for it. When he asked, unnerved, if Rakim had also been using the boys’ restroom without permission either, she simply stormed out.
“Don’t make me regret this,” she’d intoned, standing before him after having somehow cleared a small area of their otherwise cramped living space. “I won’t.” “Good,” she’d said. “Let me show you something.”
She began to move.
He was mesmerized by her movements. What manner of dance was this? The way she rose and fell, the way she stepped and span, arms whirling around her dizzyingly without ever hitting her wings as they went, driven by a single-minded sense of purpose and direction, made her look like she’d turned into some kind of fractal, aquatic hydra, determined to show the world the meaning of fluidity.
She paused.
“All of these movements mean something, my son. These are not just random movements. They’re an expression of our people. In time, you will learn that, with each of them, you can defend yourself from someone.” At this point she put her hand on his shoulder, holding her finger up to him to make sure she had his attention. “Now listen to me very carefully, Rakim,” she said. “Defend yourself. Defend people you care about, yes. Never attack anyone. If you attack someone... you’ll make me very sad, my son.”
So he did.
When the other boys came at him in the locker room, he was no longer afraid. After what happened, it was the last time any of them would come at him for a while. Despite her dislike of violence, she hadn’t seen it fit to chastise him for it. What shame was there in standing his ground? Without standing their ground, they’d never belong anywhere.
He loved her stories.
Irshad not only told him tales from his homeland, however, but, especially after the locker room incident, thought it important to read to him stories from the West nation as well, so their new nation wouldn’t seem quite so alien to him, so he could feel more like he belonged in it. One of these that ended up sticking in his mind after the fact was when she’d first read him the story of The Little Prince. “‘What’s essential is invisible to the eye,’” she’d chuckle happily as she read to him. “You see, Rakim? There’s hope for Westerners yet.”
In high school he got into a more serious fight. Irshad argued angrily with the same principal as before. The other boy would need stitches and a cast, with a broken nose. When she heard accusations that he’d thrown the first punch, she denied them vehemently, putting her honor on the line for him. She asked him how things had really happened this time. “Did they attack you?” “They... They said things about you, mother.” She frowned. “What things?” She didn’t teach him so he’d start fights. “Terrible things.” He wouldn’t meet her gaze. “Rakim, did they attack you?” Gentle, but unyielding.
“They said you bite people, mother,” he started shaking and hyperventilating. “The people you save from the flames.” He shook his head, overwhelmed. “Every time you go out there and I’m scared for your life!” He held back tears. “They said you wear a veil so no one sees their blood on your fangs...” He could no longer hold them back, and she wrapped her wing protectively around him, holding him in her arms. “I can’t blame you. Don’t do it again.”
He couldn’t hold back his anger either. “What right do any of them have! What do any of them know?” She did her best to answer. “People here are taught to rely on what they see. They’ve made us bats a symbol of fear because we don’t. The reason I wear this is so that people won’t. We bats get to know people by listening. Listen to people, Rakim.” Her blessing was also her curse. For her, the worst part of her job wasn’t the flames at all.
It was the siren.
It was the most excruciating thing a bat could possibly hear. She knew it was only a matter of time before it made her deaf. She bore it all the same, for the sake of helping others.
“Kindness is the most important thing. It won’t always be easy. Enlightenment rarely is. But I named you Rakim... ‘The Merciful.’ Please, for me, try to live this mercy in your life. Please, try to avoid hurting others when you can, even though they may deserve it. Please, try to help others when you can, even though they may not,” she told him.
“Be kind, my son.”
