SHEARS: By Conan Young
Monday, May 30th, 2011George decided, after twenty-two years, five months, and four days, to get a haircut. Not that his hair was messy or unkempt. Tradition required that he keep it washed and free of tangles. Nor was it conspicuous in public, since he kept his long braids coiled under a turban, as did generations of his ancestors.
“My own brother. How could you turn your back on God?”
“It’s not about that,” said George.
“You’re ashamed of your own heritage, aren’t you? Just like before!”
“Sanji, I’m sorry, but I must. This is my decision.”
George wasn’t always George. He was once Jagdish Singh, at least before the shooting. However, not even a legal name change could mollify the paranoid stares he often received from fellow New Yorkers. All it took was one incident to shatter any naïve impressions of American tolerance.
“Go back to Afghanistan!” the gunman had screamed. George struck the pavement hard. Yet the blood on his clothes wasn’t his own. Sanji had shoved him aside and taken the bullet. It had been a few months after September 11, 2001.
“I saved your life. You owe me!” said Sanji.
“Tell me. What’s to stop it from happening again?” George had already unwound his turban, removed his hair comb, and set aside his decorative knife. “You think it matters to those Islamophobes whether you’re Sikh or Muslim? We all look the same.”
“So you just give up? Abandon your faith?”
George slammed the drawer where he kept the shears. “When you got shot, where was God? When those hijackers murdered three thousand people, where was God? Those hijackers believed they were instructed by God.”
“Then you agree with them?” Sanji looked on with shame as George held up the shears, but there was little he could do once his older brother’s mind was made up.
“No. God has abandoned me. I must leave it all behind.” The blades snapped shut. George’s long braids fell to the floor.
Sanji shook his head. He stood with his back to the window.
“All these years I’ve stuck by your side,” Sanji said and slowly unwound his turban, the same white turban he was wearing the day he got shot. Fresh blood still flowed from the bullet wound in his forehead and trickled down his face like tears. “But you would rather forget me. Betray my memory.”
“Sanji, wait.”
George reached out to take his brother’s hand, but Sanji faded like the morning fog.
The sunset was grey as a cloudy day. George laid his cut braids and gathered artifacts on Sanji’s grave, all part of the past.
“I’m sorry. I had no other choice. Will you forgive me?”
But nobody answered. Not even God.
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©2011 Conan Young
