I Am Thunder

by Muhammad Khan

  ‘Why are we running away?’ I asked. ‘Shouldn’t we stick around to report them to the police?’

  ‘No, sister,’ Jameel said firmly, eyes locked on the road ahead. ‘Your faith in the British police is misplaced. There is no justice for Muslims, except from Muslims.’

  Thirty minutes later, Jameel and Arif dropped me off on the Broadway. I watched the Micra vanish into traffic. My heart was still racing, my fists clenched tighter than lumps of coal. I walked home in a daze.

  CHAPTER 25

  The next day, Mr Dunthorpe handed me and Arif letters to give to our parents asking them to explain why we’d been absent. My heart dropped. I’d never skipped a day of school before. Worriedly I looked across at Arif. He winked, and – just like that – my fears melted away. Of course it was no big deal. I’d seen tons of people get these letters before, sometimes weekly.

  Yesterday we had shared something special. It had ended in chaos and fear, and I’d seen a side of the world I’d have been a lot happier not knowing about. But in the space before the violence, there’d been warmth and understanding. Maybe I was way off base, but I was actually starting to think Arif wanted to be more than friends.

  ‘Where were you?’ demanded Sarabi, with eyes like saucers.

  ‘You know I was with Arif,’ I replied, trying not to smirk. ‘Oh, don’t give me Mum Face. It’s not like I’ve ever bunked off school before.’

  ‘I’m worried about you, Muzna. First you start hanging out with boys; then you start skipping school. What next? Hmm? Sneaking off to get an abortion?’

  Her words shot me down. ‘OK,’ I said, my eyes growing moist. ‘First off, it’s not “boys” – just Arif. Second, I was at a religious gathering. And third, “abortion”? Really?’

  Sarabi dropped her eyes, ashamed. ‘OK, I’m sorry. That part was out of order. But promise me you’ll never do anything like it again!’

  I wanted to ask her who the hell she thought she was – my mother? But the better part of me knew she was just trying to be a good friend. I sighed and nodded.

  ‘What sort of a place is a religious gathering for a first date, anyway?’ she asked, pacified.

  ‘We’re Muslims, Sarabi. We do things differently.’

  ‘Muslims and Sikhs are not that different, in spite of what our parents might say. Anyway,’ she said, relaxing a little, ‘did you hear that Tallulah’s dumped her boyfriend?’

  ‘Which one?’ I asked, pretending to care.

  ‘Shh!’ Sarabi said, giggling. ‘Matt – the tall one that looks like that guy off X Factor. You know, with the dimples?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘What’d he do?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t there, but . . .’ Sarabi said reluctantly, throwing nervous little looks over her shoulders.

  ‘But?’

  ‘Well, there was a party at one of their houses, and apparently Matt got drunk and took a different girl upstairs for you-know-what.’

  Wow. Sarabi couldn’t even say the word ‘sex’. Why did our parents do this to us? Did they want us to be traumatized on our wedding nights?

  ‘And,’ she continued, ‘someone told Tallulah. So she stormed upstairs to see if it was true. You’ll never believe this! When she caught him, Matt said he thought the girl he was . . .’

  ‘Screwing.’

  ‘Yes, that,’ she said, pointing. ‘He said he thought she was Tallulah!’

  ‘No way!’

  ‘So Tallulah snaps a photo of them for revenge. Now it’s gone viral!’

  ‘Blow a day off school, and miss all the drama, huh?’ I said.

  On a gloomy Tuesday that threatened to rain down buckets, but couldn’t work up to anything more than a drizzle, my RS teacher asked me if I could run an errand for her. She’d left our worksheets on the photocopier again. Since I’d been made to sit next to a regular fart machine, I was happy to go. Just for the oxygen.

  Coming out of Building A, I decided to cut across the muddy field to get to Building D. Lost in thought, I ended up smack-bang in the middle of a violent game of rugby: mud flying, boys charging, testosterone pumping – I noped out of there FAST. Then something caught my eye.

  Arif was standing on the sidelines in his rugby kit chatting to Tallulah.

  I stared at them, puzzled. Only then did Sarabi’s ominous words come back to haunt me: Tallulah broke up with Matt. Little Miss Perfect was a free agent. Arif was hands down the best-looking boy at Falstrum. Why had I not seen this coming?

  Even as tears sprang to my eyes, my treacherous feet carried me closer. I had to know the truth, even if it killed me. The blustery wind worked in my favour, carrying their voices towards me, while masking the sound of my own shoes squelching in the mud.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Tallulah drawled. Her newly done ombré hair flapped like satin in the wind. ‘It’s this weekend. You know, you’re not allowed to refuse a girl on her birthday.’ She pouted, flaunting those sexy bee-stung lips of hers.

  ‘Nah, parties ain’t my thing, fam,’ Arif replied, wiping sweat off his brow.

  She pressed her palm to his left pec. ‘Then tell me what is . . .’ she purred. Her hand slid down his torso, caressing every contour.

  It felt like she’d hooked a crowbar under my ribs and was trying to rip out my heart.

  Arif caught her hand as it passed the checkpoint of his navel. Suddenly our eyes met, and I froze – a rabbit in the headlights; a perv at the window.

  ‘She is,’ he said. Tossing her hand away like trash, he jogged towards me, leaving Tallulah stunned.

  Was the matrix glitching? Could any straight guy say no to that succubus?

  As Arif closed the gap between us, all tall and handsome, my eyes were drawn to the rippling muscles in his hairy legs.

  ‘Assalaamu alaykum,’ he said, flashing his heroic smile.

  My heart grew wings seconds before a wave of hatred hit me like a truck. I glanced back to see Tallulah blasting me with high-octane evils. Even Arif felt them.

  ‘We’re Muslims, innit?’ he told her with a wink.

  The bee-stung lips retracted into a hyphen. Without another word, she stormed off. Arif chuckled loudly, but I was bricking it. I’d beaten the Queen Bee in a game of love. Tallulah and her massive fandom would never forgive it.

  ‘What you doing here, then?’ Arif asked, scratching his sweaty chest. ‘Come to check me out in my PE kit?’ He gave me a wink that made my body tingle.

  ‘N-no. Running an errand for my disorganized RS teacher . . . Oh crap!’ It was insane how quickly I forgot things when I was around Arif. ‘Laters!’

  ‘Message me tonight!’ he called.

  ‘Er . . . OK!’

  CHAPTER 26

  ‘Go on. Have a read of this,’ Arif said, waving a rolled-up newspaper at me. Dust motes shimmered like glitter in the hazy sunlight.

  He’d texted me the night before, asking if I could help out with some geography homework. Not my strongest point, but if it meant spending more time with Arif, I was so up for it. So here we were, up in the school library: me nose-deep in a stuffy geography textbook; Arif treating a chair like a hammock.

  Only now the sexy-doofus was distracting me.

  ‘Trying to finish your homework, here,’ I reminded.

  Pitching forward, he swiped his geography book from under my pen, and flung it in the general direction of his bag. ‘Forget my boring homework.’

  ‘But you’ll get detention!’ I protested, with growing confusion.

  ‘Nah, man,’ he said, placing two newspapers down in front of me. ‘Half-done homework ain’t the same as not-done homework. This one’s from 2015; and this here’s 2011.’

  Warily, I looked at the article on the left. On 7th January 2015, two brothers had forced their way into the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris and started shooting. It was supposed to be payback for publishing a cartoon mocking the Prophet Muhammad; it ended up making 1.8 billion of us look bad. The journalist wasn’t shy about using phrases like ‘Islamist barbarians’ and �
�savages from another time’.

  I felt sick to the pit of my stomach. Why did these people have to grab the headlines and make their own religion look bad? It was almost like they were bred in an evil factory somewhere.

  I shuddered, pushing the article away.

  ‘Now take a look at this one,’ he said gently.

  The second article was about a white Norwegian man who had bombed a government building killing eight people. He’d then driven down to a summer camp and sprayed sixty-nine people with bullets, most of them teenagers. His beef? Along with a load of other crazy ideas, Muslim immigration. The guy claimed to be ‘one hundred per cent Christian’.

  ‘Biased reporting,’ I said. ‘The brothers were “Islamic terrorists”, but this guy just gets called crazy. Surely they all are to do something like that?’

  ‘Smart lass!’ he said. ‘Now, look at this.’

  ‘I’m done,’ I said, fanning my moist eyes. ‘This stuff really upsets me.’

  ‘Last one. Promise.’ He proffered the paper.

  I looked into his eyes and saw exactly how much it meant to him. Steeling myself for one last onslaught of mindless murdering, I took the newspaper.

  The final article was a small piece. This time the location was Sehwan, Pakistan. A suicide bomber had blown himself up at a shrine killing ninety people and injuring over three hundred others. It was a massive bloodbath, and ISIS had claimed responsibility.

  ‘Oh my God!’ I cried. ‘Three hundred people? How come I never heard about this?’

  His face was hard. ‘Simple: no hashtag, no filter, no solidarity,’ he said, his eyes hidden in shadow. ‘Brown lives don’t matter.’

  I stared at him, mouth agape.

  ‘Journalists ain’t got no shame with their two-cent Islamophobic reporting!’ Arif scowled, stuffing the newspapers back in his bag. ‘Terrorism kills more Muslims than any other group – but the papers don’t want to tell us that. I didn’t choose the terrorist life; the terrorist life chose me . . .’

  ‘Maybe I can help fix this,’ I said.

  ‘Eh? How do you mean?’ he asked.

  I cringed, realizing I’d vanished up my own bum. ‘I-I want to be a novelist some day.’ A finger crept to the corner of my mouth. I quickly folded my arms, banishing my childish gesture.

  ‘What, writing books and that?’ he asked absently.

  I nodded, then filled him in on my lifelong ambition.

  ‘Think about it,’ I added. ‘If people had some Muslim heroes to look up to, there’d be public outrage every time the media came up with this crap.’ I shot a dirty look in the general direction of the newspapers.

  ‘Yeah?’ He looked interested.

  ‘We’re that shady Other,’ I went on. ‘The group you’re allowed to hate on because we’re “terrorists” or “benefits scroungers”. People don’t get to see us as anything else. Soon they’ll even forget we’re people.’

  He cracked his knuckles.

  ‘Wait!’ I said, in the middle of a brainwave. ‘What if part of the problem is that we don’t put ourselves out there enough? Like, let’s say you’re really good at – I dunno – skateboarding.’

  He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Just go with it,’ I pleaded.

  Obediently his eyebrow dropped back into place.

  ‘So you’re this skateboarding genius, right? But your parents want you to be a doctor,’ I continued, not entirely sure where I was going with this. ‘But cos you’ve had it drilled into you that “parents know best”, you waste your life trying to become a doctor. Then one day you fail and end up on Benefits Street. Or worse: a criminal.’

  ‘Damn.’

  I nodded. ‘But, like, if someone had believed in you, you might’ve taken skateboarding to the next level.’

  ‘How?’ he said, trying not to laugh.

  ‘Worked your way up.’ I flapped my hands, trying to get him to use his imagination. ‘I’m not saying you’d be saving lives. But you might go on to become a world champion skateboarder and end up with your own line of skateboards or PlayStation games.’ I shrugged. ‘Good for you. Awesome for Muslims. Cos suddenly, hey! We’re not just terrorists any more. We’re also skateboarders.’ I punched the air. ‘Represent!’

  I saw the glimmer in his eyes. ‘It’s not even that. I know your parents are proper desi, but plenty of people’s folks are OK with ’em trying their hand at all sorts. So either we’re all failing, or Muslim success stories are being hidden from the general public.’

  I considered this. ‘Don’t make things easy for ourselves though, do we?’

  ‘How’d you mean?’

  ‘As a community. I mean, everybody’s so busy watching everybody else, instead of minding their own and just letting people live.’

  This made him chuckle.

  ‘And don’t get me started on forced marriages, honour killings, child brides, FGM, witchcraft—’

  Arif sat up sharply, sliding his leg off the table. ‘Whoa. That ain’t Islam, fam. That’s culture. Messed-up traditions people pass down to their kids.’

  I stared at him, thinking of my own parents. ‘What, even honour killings?’ I asked.

  ‘Course. The Prophet married off his own cousin to an ex-slave. Back then, that was proper dishonourable. People are ignorant, fam. Believe what they want to believe.’

  ‘You learned Islam from Jameel,’ I said. ‘How can you be sure it’s the right version?’

  ‘Cos Jameel’s me brother.’

  A suffocating silence followed. Arif was super-protective of his brother, which I totally did not get. Jameel was like the anti-brother: cold and distant. But what did I know? I was an only child.

  ‘So, you wanna gimme a peek?’ His voice was soft, the awkwardness dismissed.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You know. At one of your stories,’ he said, rubbing his hands together.

  I hugged myself and shook my head. ‘You’re not gonna like them. They’re from before you clued me in on the difference between Islam and culture.’

  ‘I’ll love ’em. C’mon, stop playing hard to get.’ He caught my wrist. Our eyes met and I blushed.

  Writing stories was like the most personal thing you could ever do. It didn’t work unless you laid your soul bare. I didn’t want Arif to think of me as part of the problem. I wanted him to see me as a slayer of Islamophobia and ignorance.

  But maybe it was more important for him to see me as I was.

  I pulled out my phone and thumbed through the files. Each story was another piece of the Muzna Puzzle. About ten times more revealing than any cringe family photo album.

  ‘The Burning Bride?’ he read, squinting at my phone. ‘Mad ting. Heard it happens in some villages back home.’

  Arif was a slow reader. I tried not to smile, watching his lips move faintly as he journeyed from paragraph to paragraph. A couple of times he shifted about, trying to get more comfortable, but he stuck with it to the end.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked, sweating bullets. ‘I was in Year Nine. Just saying. And I totally didn’t know any better . . .’

  ‘You wrote this?’ he asked, doubtfully. ‘Raa, some day you’re gonna be bigger than Dickens or whatever his name was.’ His smile dropped, eyes widening. ‘Aw Muz, what you crying for, bae?’ Strong hands gripped my trembling shoulders.

  ‘I dunno.’ I sobbed. ‘I thought you’d be mad.’

  ‘Mad? Don’t be daft! Your story is about bad traditions.’ He brushed his beard. ‘Guess you could always add a bit on to make it clear it ain’t some “Muslim problem”.’

  I nodded enthusiastically. ‘Definitely.’

  ‘But those people in your story. Feel like I’ve met ’em before!’

  ‘Nobody gets me, Arif.’ I sniffed. ‘But I’m starting to think you do.’

  ‘Course I get you, dummy!’ he said, chuckling. ‘You got the heart of a poet, innit?’

  I stared at him, laughing and crying and nodding all at the same time – God, I must have loo
ked fugly. Feeling a lot braver, I said, ‘Can I share a quote? It’s one of my favourites.’

  ‘Knock yourself out.’ He closed his eyes, pointing his goatee at the ceiling.

  Taking a deep breath, I recited. ‘I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’

  His eyes sprang open. ‘You make that up?’

  ‘I wish! It’s Yeats. This amazing Irish poet.’

  ‘Dude had talent,’ he said, rubbing his jaw. ‘Allah is the most merciful. Think about it, yeah? He even puts beautiful thoughts in the dirty minds of the kuffar.’

  I froze.

  Was that how the kuffar saw us too – dirty? I glanced over at his bag, the vision triggering memories of old news stories. Beheader, paedophile, terrorist. With a sinking feeling, I began to think that they probably did.

  Half-term couldn’t have arrived sooner. We were completely burned out from the intense revision sessions each lesson had warped into. Every teacher acted like their subject was the only one that counted. The terrifying dragon that was our GCSEs – the legend we’d been warned about since Year 9 – was finally casting its mighty shadow over the horizon. I felt sick with worry. But Arif told me Allah had a plan. With Him in control of the universe, we had nothing to worry about.

  I regularly texted with Arif throughout the break. At first, only short, shy messages; but later, longer, emoji-filled ones. But no matter how much I wanted to, I could never get myself to add the kissing face. So I waited, hoping he’d do it first. Never happened. Boo! Still, messaging each other at midnight was fun. Almost like being in bed together.

  Then on Wednesday, Sarabi rained on my parade like a monsoon of misery.

  ‘We never do anything fun any more!’ she complained over the phone, as I lay back on my bed, picturing Arif looking HAWT in his rugby kit.

  ‘Well what do you want us to do?’ I asked.

  ‘I just want us to hang. You know? Like we used to. And for you to actually be there.’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘See what I mean? You’re not even listening!’

  ‘Don’t be dumb, Sarabi. Of course I’m listening.’