This piece is part of the Mehfil folio, which features original art by Jasjyot Singh Hans.

“Phupho Noor?”

Noor became aware that she was in someone’s bedroom. The floor was covered with a long familiar rug, like the kind that the neighbors used to bring back from the big city, its woollen florals casting her favorite colors across the floor: olive green, deep red, peacock blue. Her gaze swept past the white fringes of the rug to land on a couple boxes of books with English titles, and then to a pile of boy’s clothes strewn across a hardwood floor. There was a window, glass panes, and linen curtains. She had not been in a house like this before. Where am I? Turning around, she saw a person. Noor gasped.

“Phupho, it’s okay! I’m Farzin. I, uh … called you.”

Noor locked eyes with the person who called her Phupho, apparently one of her brother’s children, much older than any of her younger brothers had been when she last saw them. What year is it? What have I been doing? She started to remember. After she had died, she went traveling for a while, sort of. There were flickers of K2, a mountain not so far from her village that she’d heard so much about during life. The Great Wall, the northern lights, the Mariana Trench, the pyramids, the Kaaba, Al Aqsa, and places beyond the blue sphere … She went to the bright round moon. The images of these places felt like half-thoughts, as if the many tiny threads of consciousness that made up her soul floated whichever way the universe pulled them.

However, this moment felt different. This person in front of her had summoned her somehow—and here she was, materialized. The floating threads were all anchored together into a body. It wasn’t quite like being alive, but she could think and feel as one person again. 

“I’m … yes. I’m Noor.” English was not a language she spoke in life, but death seemed to offer more than one inexplicable skill. She looked at the person before her. Her father’s nose, the knitted brow, the wide-eyed curiosity. Of course. “My youngest brother. You’re his …”

“Yes, I’m his child.” Farzin nodded vigorously. “I know he was very young when … when you …”

“When I died.” Noor looked around the room again, this time noting the moldings on the window and bedroom door. “How did you call me? Where am I? And what year is it?”

Farzin took a deep breath and their stricken expression softened a bit. They explained what had happened to Noor’s family since she last knew them, in 1949. Of Noor’s eleven siblings, only one remained in this world: her youngest brother Yousaf. He ended up in Flushing, Queens, in the eighties and made his way from there to New Jersey. Noor had had many living niblings spread out in places like California, New Jersey, Oslo, parts of the U.K., and the village back in Punjab, but most of them had passed over the years. 

Farzin said, “It’s summer now and lately, I’ve been spending long days in the mountains and thinking about how I didn’t know many of my cousins from my dad’s side, and how I didn’t know you. And I wanted to know you.”

***

She’s here! I can’t believe it. Noor didn’t seem like a ghost at all, if that was even the right word for her. She looked a lot like Farzin, sharing a similar muscular build and sharp facial features. There were differences, too. Noor was two inches shorter and her much thicker hair had a middle part visible beneath her dupatta and a wide braid that fell to her waist. After a few volleys of questions and answers, Farzin’s aunt seemed to warm up, finally accepting the seat offered to her.

For Farzin, asking and answering questions never felt this easy with family elders—but then, Noor wasn’t quite an elder. She died at the age of twenty, and here she was with a nibling that outlived her by fifteen years. Farzin plopped onto the bed, a few feet away from the desk. Their mind was buzzing with questions. How did Noor get here? Why did she leave when she was so young?

Will she understand me?

***

Noor’s stiff posture relaxed into the leather desk chair. For all the religious study she had done as a young girl, Noor had never expected an afterlife to land her in this place, New Jersey. But here was this fascinating and familiar person and, for all her winding post-corporeal travels, Noor’s curiosity about this nibling felt like a promise of sorts. Is the universe trying to show me something? As Farzin talked about their life, Noor started to remember parts of her own. They talked in half-stories, the middle of one story lending itself to the beginning of another. Farzin paused. “Phupho Noor, I don’t know quite how this works. I’ve never summoned someone before, and I don’t know if you’re in a rush to go. Would you stay for a bit?”

Noor laughed at the question. She had never been summoned before, either. In life, she hadn’t considered that there could be a generation after hers that would be interested to know her. Well, why not? Noor flipped open the nearest book, hoping her supernatural loophole meant that she could also read English. “Okay, yes, I’ll stay. For a little while.”

Fast friends, Farzin and Noor fell into a week of life together. They went to Farzin’s mountain and picked berries, pine needles, and Queen Anne’s lace, and they made delicious food with their foraged findings: flower fritters with berry compote, a refreshing pine needle soda to wash it down. Farzin explained which mushrooms were okay to eat, while Noor described the fields of jute she grew up next to and how the tall grass of the Northeast Corridor reminded her of them. They dusted off Farzin’s old sketchbooks and asked Yousaf to sit still so that they could sketch him. Noor had always wanted to draw with charcoal and was curious to know her little brother as an eighty-year-old man. He still fidgeted when sitting, as he did as a boy, but they managed to produce a likeness.

“Okay, now let’s see how we’d all look with mustaches!” Farzin and Noor drew on each others’ faces, giggling. “We look pretty good!” Noor marvelled at how short Farzin’s hair was cut and how they looked so much like Yousaf.

Farzin tried making roti and keema the way Noor liked. Noor politely tasted and said, “I’m sorry, did these ingredients get mailed here from Punjab? This tastes a week old even though you just made it.” There was more success with burritos, mac and cheese, and pizza. “We had cows on the farm, but I never had this! I didn’t think there could be something more delicious than milk!” Noor said, shoveling another bowl of Annie’s white cheddar shells into her mouth.

At the end of the week, Farzin invited Noor to a drag party. Farzin tried their best to explain what it was. “It’s where you can look like anything. Dress like anyone. Be anyone without worrying what anyone will think.”

Farzin wore knee-length black shorts, a black tank top, and leather boots. Noor wore a floral maxi dress, flats, and a lavender shawl. They were ready.

And they sang together. Well, mostly Farzin sang a few songs they’d learned over the years and Noor corrected their Punjabi. Noor didn’t know any of those songs. “We didn’t have much music.” Occasionally, she’d recognize a phrase here and there. “I heard that song somewhere, but the words were different.” As their excursion involved bridge-and-tunnel travel, Farzin had plenty of time to explain the commuter rail and the subway on the way to Brooklyn. The two arrived at the party just as night settled upon the city. The shiny queens on the dance floor took to Noor right away, one pulling her up on stage to dance. Noor had never danced before, but the music and lights guided her instincts as she mirrored the beautiful people around her. Farzin cheered for her from the floor. A stranger in the crowd showed Noor how to offer up cash tips to the performers, as another stranger pulled Farzin into the DJ booth, needing an extra pair of hands for an upcoming set change.

For Noor, this afterlife felt like a dream. She surveyed the room, her gaze falling upon people openly loving each other in ways that she had never known to be acceptable. So beautiful. A ray of light reflecting off of the large disco ball landed on Farzin’s shoulder as they sipped a drink across the room and had their arm around someone handsome. Noor’s family would never have allowed any of this, and yet so many people that looked like Noor and Farzin were living a life of unrestrained truth, here in this tiny bar.

After the final drag performance, Noor asked Farzin why she was here. “You never told me why you called for me.”

Farzin shrugged and splayed their hands on the table between them. “I’ve thought about you since I was a teenager. My father never said much about you—not because he didn’t care, but he just didn’t know what happened and he said the family never talked about it. As I started to understand myself, I couldn’t help but wonder if we might be alike in some ways. I’m seeing that maybe we are and maybe we aren’t. And you don’t have to tell me why you decided to leave the world. I’m just glad you’re here now and that we could know each other for a time.”

Noor was quiet for a moment, allowing the sound from the speakers above to fill the space between them for a moment. “What do you think you understand about me?”

Farzin responded, “I … I don’t know. I think that you are different from people you grew up with in the village. I think you never got a chance to explore that.”

“A chance to explore what? You might have heard about stories of village life from your father, but I promise, you have no idea how I lived.” Noor twirled the end of her braid with an index finger and whipped it behind her back. “You think I had no imagination because I didn’t go to school in the big city? Because I was working on the land instead of singing in the mountains and collecting pine needles?”

Farzin took a breath. “Of course not. I just needed to know there was someone like you. Someone from my family who could see me in this world and not judge me—in fact, someone who would celebrate what I celebrate.”

Noor nodded. “I see why that is important. I didn’t have anyone like that. But you don’t need me, Farzin. Look around you!”

“It’s not so much that I don’t have anyone—I have people here, alhamdulillah. But, we’re far from where our ancestors lived. And we live like this …” Farzin gestured around the room. “It’s like living not one, but two distances away from who we might have been. My chosen family, my friends, me—we are queer. We know there are so many ways to be good. And I always thought, Well, I didn’t come from strangers. There had to be someone…”

Noor touched the crinkle between Farzin’s eyes with her thumb. It was a motion that she remembered her own mother doing to soothe a much younger Noor when she cried. “Yes, we don’t come from strangers. I am happy you think yourself to be like me, and I am happy you summoned me.”

Walking to the train, they marveled at how beautiful the moon looked. It was so big tonight, close to the earth, craters like dimples within reach. Noor said that she had left the world during a full moon, because that’s the first place she wanted to be afterward.

“What’s it like to fly?” Farzin asked, sensing that Noor was thinking about going back there again. Before Noor could answer, they asked another question: “Do you want to stay and give it another try?”

“You’re asking me what it’s like to fly? You already know!” She pointed back to the drag bar with her thumb. “I saw how you flew in there.”