Excerpt from 'Far Away From Here' | Fiction

How dare Fatima come home and act all nonchalant, like she hadn’t left and stopped calling shortly after the storm. Asking Tahani questions about what she’d been up to like it was all perfectly normal

Salam alaykum friends,

I pray you're well and finding time to return to the page, however that may look for you right now. My own writing has struggled this year, but I’m gently trying to ease back into a routine and work with the season I find myself in. I pray Allah instills barakah in our time – so that our words may flow like milk and honey –and grants us the courage to tell true stories, always.

This week’s post is an excerpt from Ambata Kazi’s debut novel, Far Away From Here. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Ambata in various capacities over the years, and I’ve read (and loved!) a huge chunk of her short stories. She also wrote one of our most-read posts, How to Write an Effective Short Story. So it brings me immense joy to share her fiction with the Qalb community.

Part of our mission is to spotlight the work of Muslim women writers to encourage us to read, review, buy, and uplift their books. Our successes are interconnected, and pre-ordering a debut novel can make a significant difference in its trajectory.

As I read through some early reviews of Ambata’s book on NetGalley, I noticed a few that zeroed in on the “Muslim-ness” of the story. This reminded me of how important it is for us to also read and review books like these—to normalise Muslim experiences in literature, to tell our stories, and to make space for each other on the shelf.

---

About Far Away From Here by Ambata Kazi:

In New Orleans, it’s been five years since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the heart and soul of both the city and its residents. Three young Black Muslim friends have reconnected after drifting apart as teenagers: Fatima left with the floodwaters of Katrina following the murder of her childhood love and fiancé, Wakeel, and has now returned to reluctantly care for Wakeel’s mother. Tahani rebelled against a strict Muslim upbringing and feels stifled in her life as a single mother, trying to make ends meet while craving a creative outlet. And Saif, the cousin of Wakeel, must reconcile with Fatima over how his illicit past played a role in his cousin’s death.

All three struggle to envision a future for themselves that they can actively shape. A testament to the stories we tell ourselves and each other, Far Away From Here is a coming-of-age novel threaded with themes of community, tradition, faith, and the courage to own one’s narrative.

Tahani drove away from Mama Tayyibah and Baba Kareem’s home feeling distressed. The nerve of Fatima, showing up, smiling, acting like nothing had ever happened—well after she got over the shock of how Tahani looked, how she had changed, a shock Fatima tried to conceal, but too late. Her eyes growing wide, then blinking several times before they settled on a spot over Tahani’s shoulder. Tahani had stuck her chin out to Fatima, leveling her eyes, the defiant posture she’d perfected over the last five years when anyone questioned her about how she was living her life. She turned the music and the AC up, the air blowing the ends of her curls back and forth over her collar bone, making her feel briefly young and carefree, not a bone tired single mom going to pick up her kids.

How dare Fatima come home and act all nonchalant, like she hadn’t left and stopped calling shortly after the storm. Asking Tahani questions about what she’d been up to like it was all perfectly normal, like they’d never been close friends. But okay, had they been, really? Sure they spent a lot of time together, so accustomed to each other’s houses they could walk around them with their eyes shut (one of their favorite games) and not hit a wall, but she couldn’t recall them ever sharing secrets or anything deep like that. They just always hung together. They’d known each other all their lives, what secrets did they even have? Their lives, then, had been open doors.

Tahani remembered when Wakeel started courting Fatima. She’d been as excited as Fatima was when he came back, seeing the two of them together picking back up seamlessly, like two separate puzzle pieces finally finding each other. Some things just look right together, and that was Fatima and Wakeel. They had the same dark brown skin color and tallish, slim bodies, but it was more than just the physical resemblance. Some couples you could just look at and see their whole lives play out in the smiles they shared, the way they set their eyes on each other like no one else was around.

Tahani couldn’t recall any special moments with her and Wakeel, but he was a fixture of her childhood, always so easy to get along with. He knew everybody and everybody knew him. Tahani remembered how the elders' faces lit up whenever Wakeel came around. He was a promise of the future, a sign that everything was going to be okay. And then he was gone, snuffed out. Tahani knew it wasn’t right, that Allah never took a soul as punishment, that every life taken held a lesson for the living, a purpose, but still she asked sometimes, Why? Why Wakeel? They were all so hurt by it. And then Fatima just picked up and left, like only she had lost somebody, like they weren’t all hurting.

Tahani hmphed again under her breath at the magically returned Fatima. And had the nerve to act pious. On some benevolent air. Unh-unh. Tahani didn’t trust it. There was something behind the serene smiles and vague alhamdulillah’s about her own life in Atlanta. Fatima was hiding something.

Tahani pulled up at her co-worker Danielle’s house in Gentilly just as the sun reached its lowest point, blinding everybody and washing everything in gold. Danielle was in her thirties and didn’t have kids, but she offered to help Tahani with hers on her days off from the salon, and even picked them up sometimes depending on her shifts. She wouldn’t accept payment; instead Tahani repaid her by running errands, picking up lunch on work days and making grocery and drugstore runs on her way to get the girls.

Between Danielle and Mama Jennifer who ran a twenty-four hour daycare out of her Uptown home and had “raised half of all Hollygrove children for decades,” so she said, Tahani was able to juggle work and childcare and just make rent, utilities, and food, despite the gas she burned to get from Gentilly to Uptown and across the river to the Westbank and back again six days a week. Aliyah starting school next year would bring some ease financially but would also mean another daily stop in addition to making arrangements to pick her up from school. Tahani sometimes convinced herself she could take on a second job but as it was, other than the few evening hours and the five hours a night she slept, it seemed she was always working already. She had only Sundays to rest and snuggle with her babies, and even then, sometimes she took in an extra head at her home, but only if it was somebody she really liked and trusted. Somebody who wouldn’t leech.

Danielle’s was half of a little red brick shotgun house off Mirabeau and Elysian Fields. A black Corolla Tahani didn’t recognize was parked in the driveway behind Danielle’s white CR-V. Walking up the cobblestone path, she noticed the front door was slightly ajar. She stepped up to the porch and tapped lightly on the door with her fingertips before entering.

“Hello?” Tahani called into the darkened foyer.

Seeing lights flashing from the living room to the left, she headed that way and found her daughters close together on the couch, TV light bathing their faces, Aliyah clutching a remote in her lap.

“Umi,” they cried, sliding off the couch like noodles.

The living room was also dark. Tahani switched the light on.

“Where’s Ms. Danielle?” she asked.

“She’s with the man in her bedroom,” Aliyah replied.

“The man in her—?”

Tahani stopped short and tried to compose herself. She smiled tightly at the girls.

“Where’s your bags? Let’s go get some ice cream.”

The girls scrambled to gather their things and were in their shoes in rapid time. Tahani hustled them out and slammed the front door behind her extra hard. If her girls hadn’t been on the lawn looking at her, their little spidey-sense detecting something not quite right, she would have done it again for good measure. She smiled at them again and struck her tickle monster pose, hands curved into bear claws in front of her face, pretending to chase them to speed them up. They squealed and ran to the car, hopping into their booster seats. She peeled away from the curb without even buckling her seatbelt, her breath ragged between her clenched teeth. She drove two blocks before she felt her chest begin to rise and fall, air actually entering her lungs and loosening her limbs.

At Baskin-Robbins, she picked up her phone from the cupholder and saw she had three missed calls from Danielle. She swiped past the notifications and sent a text to Mama Jennifer. Not having to run errands for Danielle anymore wouldn’t make up for the extra childcare costs, but she’d figure something out. She ordered a double scoop of Gold Medal Ribbon for herself and two kids’ cones of mint chocolate chip for Aliyah and strawberry for Safia and sank into the booth, scooping a heaping spoonful of ice cream into her mouth. The sweet and cold of the ice cream hit the sensitive nerve on the tooth that had been bothering her lately, the one that needed to be checked but she didn’t have insurance beyond Medicaid, and she welcomed the pain as an opportunity to feel something other than despair. She closed her eyes while the girls bounced in their seats, high on a sugary cloud.

---

If you enjoyed this please spread the word with family, friends, colleagues and everyone you know, and don’t forget to support Ambata by pre-ordering her book.

We are now open for submissions and we’ll love to read your stories too! Head over to our submissions page for more details.

Wishing you a blessed, restorative and fulfilling weekend ahead!

Love and duas,

Suad from Qalb Writers Collective