Both men had no answer to my words, but I had more to say to my cousin. I turned to Rashid. “You posted that video without asking my permission. Now you’ve exposed me too.”
“People will be on our side, Hana Apa,” Rashid insisted. “We are forming alliances. People want to support communities who have been wronged. Don’t you want to help your mother, your sister, and Fahim? This is how you build a dam and counteract hate.”
I shook my head. He didn’t understand what he had done, but my brother-in-law did.
We helped Baba into the car in tense silence.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Baba noticed how quiet we were on the ride home. As we helped him up the stairs to the house, he asked what was wrong.
“Nothing, Baba. Everything is fine,” I replied, but he wasn’t convinced.
I looked up the post on my phone once we settled Baba in the kitchen. Fahim had disappeared into Fazeela’s room, Rashid to the basement. I sat on the couch and watched the video in its entirety, reliving a moment I had hoped to forget.
The picture was remarkably clear, but I watched the events as if from a great distance. I noted the surprised and then scared expressions on our faces. A flash of Rashid’s calm voice as he mocked our attackers. I relived the impact of my fall, Aydin’s fear as he crouched down beside me, the look of malevolent delight on our attackers’ faces at my pain.
I put down my phone, shaken once more by the randomness of the attack. My bruises hadn’t yet healed, and I realized that trying to ignore the incident hadn’t helped either. I picked up the phone again and looked at the view count on YouTube. It hovered near forty thousand already.
Footsteps on the stairs, and Fahim poked his head in. “Come upstairs. Fazee wants to talk to you and Rashid.”
I hadn’t spent a lot of time with my sister lately. She had mostly kept to her room and I had been busy running around fighting fires. But looking at her now, I realized the cantaloupe had grown a lot and my sister looked more rested. The circles under her eyes had started to disappear; the old fire was back in her eyes.
When my cousin walked into the room, she aimed that fire right at him. “What did you do, Rashid?” she asked in a dangerously pleasant voice.
Uh-oh. I hadn’t seen this version of Fazeela in a long time. My cousin was so dead.
Rashid looked at her in confusion. “I posted a video of the fight we had downtown. Didn’t your sister tell you?”
Fazeela whipped her head towards me. Shit. Now I was in trouble too.
“It wasn’t that bad. I was showing Rashid the city and these guys started hassling us. I fell down but I’m fine,” I said, babbling.
“Hanaan, what the hell were you thinking, keeping this to yourself? You were the victim of a hate crime. You should have reported it to the police immediately. Thank God nothing worse happened.”
“As I said to Fahim Bhai, we had things well in hand—” Rashid began, but my sister pinned him with a look so full of protective rage I nearly felt bad for him.
“What you did was worse. By posting this video, you have exposed our entire family to possible attack. Instead of it being an isolated incident that could have been dealt with appropriately, you have opened us up to the world. All this without seeking my sister’s consent! Rashid, you cannot post videos without permission.”
“I was trying to shame those men online, and also to raise attention for Three Sisters.”
“Even you can’t be that naive. Let me show you what you have done,” my sister said, her voice icy. She pulled up the video on YouTube and read a few of the comments posted in the past five minutes. They were vile and threatening.
When she looked up, Rashid had paled. “I am sorry, Apa,” he said in a low voice. “I wanted to inform the public about what had happened and use the attention to help our business.”
My heart softened at Rashid’s motives, and I reminded myself that he was eighteen years old, that he had acted impulsively but with good intentions. He had joined the fight for Three Sisters wholeheartedly and he had been calm in the face of our downtown attackers. Fazee and Fahim hadn’t been there to see that, but I remembered.
My sister was less impressed by his words. “I’ll be telling the rest of the family about the downtown attack and this video, including Kawkab Khala,” she said ominously. “In the meantime, Rashid, if you pull anything like this again, you’ll answer to me. Let’s just hope we can manage the fallout of your action.”
She looked at me next. “And no more secrets, Hana. Staying quiet about our problems is how we got into this mess with Three Sisters in the first place, and I’m sick of it. Now get out. Fahim and I need to talk.”
By mid-afternoon the view count had risen to fifty thousand, and I couldn’t stop reading the comments. Rashid had been right—many were positive. But many were also negative and scary. I jumped from post to post, from hate to support, from “ban all immigrants, especially Moslems” to allies taking our side. I read until the roiling unease in my stomach forced me to turn off the screen. It was time for my shift at Three Sisters anyway.
Fazee must have called ahead, because Mom cornered me the minute I walked into the nearly empty restaurant. “What is going on, Hana?” she demanded. “Were you attacked when you went downtown with Rashid? Your sister told me about the video, and people have been calling.” Her face was full of concern and worry.
I took a deep breath and filled her in, downplaying our encounter with the men. When I finished, she was quiet.
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” she said. “Are you sure you are all right?”
