It’s a song for lovers, but it seems appropriate to you this afternoon, so reminiscent of those long-ago festival days in Chennai with the house buzzing this same way. The magic of Begum Akhtar’s voice possesses you to exclaim that you wish your granddaughter would one day be able to sing this very song.

Once again Tahera hedges, like last night, and you have to draw it out of her: Masha’Allah, Amina has been bestowed a supreme talent, the way she picks up songs after listening to them a few times, reproducing long melodies with a nimbleness of voice, even if she has to substitute words she doesn’t know with made-up lyrics. Yet the question of how—even whether—such talent should be nurtured is not easy to answer. It could be in violation of the Prophet’s teachings if it serves merely to distract and arouse—so the Hadiths say. Ismail himself considers it to be something best enjoyed as a gift, a source of private and personal happiness.

You listen, old sorrows and frustrations resurfacing. You remember the first time you saw Tahera in a hijab, when she and Ismail had come to receive you and her father at the Dallas airport, your first visit after she’d followed Ismail to the United States. You were meeting Arshad for the first time—your first grandchild, two months old then—and though Tahera was holding the baby up, it was her face you couldn’t drag your eyes off, a face small and scrunched in the hijab’s clutch.

Tahera has maintained that it was her decision to don the hijab. The decision to later robe her body in loose-fitting jilbabs was hers too, she’d claimed, for the freedom of movement it gave her, as well as freeing her from wasting time worrying about her personal appearance, time she could little spare after Amina was born. She has defended Ismail: Ismail held that he could advise her on the teachings of the Quran and the Hadiths, the various fatwas by learned Islamic scholars, but she must make the judgment call and decide for herself what is required by Allah, as must every Muslim, for Islam was revealed as a forward-thinking religion, meant for all ages.

How different her life would have been if she hadn’t insisted on marrying Ismail. Even from America, as her father wanted, there were other proposals. But she picked Ismail. “What’s wrong with being a practicing Muslim?” she’d argued. At least she wouldn’t be led astray on sinful paths, like Seema. She’d forced you and her father to give in.

“Why do this to yourself, Tahera?” you say. Meaning: Why burden herself with additional considerations, like whether the singing that gives one so much joy is a violation, or even namaz during one’s period if it gives comfort, as if life isn’t difficult enough already?

“Sometimes I wonder too,” she says, a little shamefacedly. “I worry I’m failing my children, especially with what’s happening in Irvine.”