Prologue–Chapter 2 Summary and Analysis
Prologue
In 1990, Hayat Shah was a college student somewhere in America. He remembers going to a basketball game, where he bought bratwursts for his friends and a beef hotdog for himself. The vendor mistakenly gave him a bratwurst as well, and he was about to point out the mistake when he decided that there was no particular reason why he should not eat pork. He bit into the bratwurst and enjoyed the unfamiliar taste.
The next day, Hayat had a class in Islamic History. The professor talked about scholars working in Yemen who had found variant versions of the Quran from the first two centuries after Muhammad, suggesting that “the bedrock Muslim belief in the Quran as the direct, unchanged, eternal word of God was a fiction.” The other two Muslims in the class were offended and walked out, but Hayat stayed and even joked with the professor that he was a Mutazalite, a member of a Muslim sect who did not accept the Quran as the perfect expression of God’s will.
After the class, Hayat talked to a Jewish girl called Rachel, with whom he had fallen in love. He arranged a date with Rachel but, before they met, heard that his aunt Mina had died. This affected him profoundly and stopped him from enjoying Rachel’s company. She asked him what was wrong, and he said that she might not like him if she knew the truth. The prologue ends with Rachel asking Hayat again to confide in her.
Chapter 1
Before he ever met Mina, Hayat often heard his mother talk about her. She was not really his aunt but his mother’s best friend, who had remained in Pakistan after Hayat’s parents came to America. Mina was highly intelligent and very beautiful. Her beauty attracted Hamed Suhail, a wealthy man from Karachi, whom she married. Mina thought that she could have been happy with Hamed, but his mother, Irshad, became increasingly abusive, always finding new ways to make Mina’s life as difficult as possible. On one occasion, she dragged Mina away from the dinner table by her hair. When Mina found out that she was pregnant, she decided to return to her family home in the Punjab, to have the baby in peace. As soon as the child was born, while she was still exhausted from labor, a lawyer came to her hospital bed to tell her that Hamed had divorced her.
Having given these details of Mina’s background, Hayat returns to his own childhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He recalls an incident when he was ten years old and looked outside to see his father’s car burning. One of his father’s mistresses had set fire to it after he broke a promise to her. Hayat’s mother was, by this time, well used to her husband’s infidelities and was almost pleased by this one. She thought that now he was clearly in her debt, and she would use his feelings of guilt to compel him to help her with her plans to bring Mina and her son, now four years old, to America.
Chapter 2
Hayat’s mother was right in thinking that her husband would assist in her plan to bring Mina to America. Soon after she had convinced Mina’s parents that she would be able to keep Mina safe from the corruption they associated with America, Mina arrived at the airport in Chicago and came to live with Hayat’s family.
Hayat was initially quiet and shy in Mina’s presence. One day, however, he was in a bad mood because his mother had refused him permission to go...
(This entire section contains 1004 words.)
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to an ice cream social, an event which his school held jointly with the neighboring church. Mina sensed Hayat’s frustration and told him not to hold it in. What he was feeling would only go away, she told him, if he allowed himself to feel it and let it out. He cried, Mina comforted him, and he felt better. After this, she told him that if he listened to his breathing, and the silence at the end of each breath, he would discover what he really wanted to do. Hayat found that he wanted to clean his bike and then ride it around the neighborhood, and in doing so, he forgot about the ice cream social. He also experienced a new feeling of completeness.
Analysis
This section of the book is primarily about Mina, who is presented in three different ways, through disrupted chronology. Hayat begins by reporting her death, introducing her as “the person who’d had, perhaps, the greatest influence on my life.” The importance of this influence is demonstrated by the way Hayat’s narrative of his college career in the prologue suddenly breaks off. He is subverting all the rules of Islam and enjoying the experience: tasting pork for the first time, questioning the Quran in his classes, and dating a beautiful Jewish girl. Suddenly, he finds himself unable to think about anything except Mina, who remains the focus of attention as he returns to his childhood in the transition from prologue to first chapter.
The first chapter gives Mina’s backstory from before Hayat knew her. She is depicted as a woman too brilliant for the dull, oppressive world in which she lives. Her beauty arouses the jealousy of her mother-in-law, who devotes herself to torturing the girl. As soon as she flees back to her family to have her baby in peace, it is strongly implied that her mother-in-law persuades or forces Mina’s husband to divorce her.
Four years later, Mina finally appears in person and immediately impresses Hayat as not only beautiful, but a more magnetic personality than he had expected. He is shy and sheepish in her presence, dazzled by this quality he sees in her. This spell is not broken but reinforced when he becomes closer to Mina, and she seems to understand him in a way neither of his parents do.
