by Zarqa Nawaz
“Some parts of it,” I said.
“Is my grandmother’s house going to fall down when it rains?”
Ibrahim gave me a withering look. I wondered if the Red Cross organizers ever had this problem.
“No,” I said. “My grandmother is from Pakistan, too, but she lives in a house made with … aluminum siding.” What was my grandmother’s house made of? I probably should have gone for that visit with my mother.
“I want to phone my nani and make sure she’s okay.”
“The phones at the camp only call as far as Toronto. But how about we go swimming instead, and we’ll call your parents tomorrow?”
That seemed to mollify her.
That evening, the kids all gathered in the community hall for the sunset and night prayers. Since we were travelling, we had special dispensation to combine the two prayers. We laid out the broken cardboard boxes, which had dried in the sun.
“So cardboard is a vital part of your religion,” said Dwayne.
“No,” I said patiently. “It just protects our knees when we pray.” He was disappointed. I felt guilty, like we should be weirder just to make him happy.
“What are you gonna pray for?” he asked.
“Not to be in charge of this camp,” I said. Dwayne looked unimpressed.
“And to be able to sprout my second head, finally.”
“Would you have to cover both your heads with a scarf?” he asked, looking at me hopefully.
“Probably,” I said.
Ibrahim wanted to know what we had in store for the night program.
“It’s going to be a lecture, right?” he asked hopefully.
“No,” I replied. “It’s going to be a debate about the merits of public schools versus full-time Islamic schools.”
“I attended a full-time Islamic school,” said Ibrahim. “And I know it’s better.”
“Well, I attended a full-time public school, and I think it’s better.”
“It’s obvious that you don’t have a proper grasp of Islam,” said Ibrahim. “If you went to Islamic school, we would have proper etiquette between the boys and girls.”
“Excuse me,” said Lumya. “Has the debate started?”
Again I put the kids into mixed-gender teams and let each team debate the issue. Ibrahim was clearly uncomfortable with this sort of arrangement.
“I doubt they’ll have sex while debating,” I assured him.
“Please don’t make fun of me,” he said, steaming.
I was being hard on him. If something did happen, the parents would be furious. With me. The kids, however, loved it.
“We never get to argue about stuff like this in the mosque,” said Musa, a fifteen-year-old boy. “When I get home I’m gonna tell my parents all the reasons why they should pull me out of Islamic school.”
Ibrahim scowled at me. I decided to move on to the nightly recreational games. How controversial could those be? Abdullah had wanted us to think outside the box and so I did. Traditionally, Muslims performed skits during entertainment, which were excruciatingly boring. A girl dressed up as the Qur’an, crying because everyone wants to watch TV and no one wants to read her. I couldn’t go there. I wanted to come up with something funny that no one had ever done at Muslim camp before. There was a popular game show on television called The Newlywed Game, where couples competed to answer tricky questions about their new spouses. In retrospect, I may have been pouring gasoline on the Muslim box and setting it on fire. But at the time, it seemed like a great idea.
“But no one here is married.” Ibrahim looked confused.
“But that’s what makes it so fun,” I replied.
“We can’t put the girls and boys together for a game like this.”
“Even I know that,” I said, insulted that my Islamic credentials were being questioned. “The boys will be paired with boys, and the girls will be paired with girls.”
“You mean a boy has to pretend to be a wife,” sniffed Ibrahim.
“Well, he can’t have a female wife,” I replied. “Or we risk premarital relations.”
“Fine,” said Ibrahim. “Give me the questions.”
Ibrahim took his groups to another part of the mess hall. The first question was easy.
Question #1: What chocolate bar best describes your husband’s intelligence?
Possible answers: Cadbury Thick Chocolate Bar, Cadbury Flake Chocolate Bar or Aero.
“I get it,” said Lumya. “The chocolate bars are metaphors for our husband’s intelligence.”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering if analyzing the game ruined it.
Question #2: What movie reminds you of your husband when he kisses you?
Possible answers: Jaws, Sudden Impact, Splash.
“I get it,” said Lumya. “The movies are a euphemism for your husband’s technique for kissing.” She was swift.
My problems started with the next question.
Question #3: What British rock band best describes your husband on your wedding night?
Possible answers: Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Half Man, Half Biscuit, Throbbing Gristle.
I should have realized that this was a bad idea. I had wrongly assumed that because the game was about married people, sex wouldn’t be such a big deal. I had forgotten that my contestants were not married and some of them were still shy about the subject. Lumya came up to me. She was quivering slightly.
“This question refers to sex, right?” she whispered.
“Sort of,” I replied, not sure how to answer. She was satisfied and seemed to go into a trance. Then Ibrahim came up to me.
“I get this is supposed to be funny and everything,” he said, “but some of us are uncomfortable with the idea of assessing our ‘spouse’s’ … amorous behaviour.”
“You know it’s just a joke,” I said.
“I’m not that uptight,” said Ibrahim. “It’s just, for guys this is …”
“Uncomfortable,” I said.
“That women may one day think of us this way.”
“Okay, I get it,” I said. “How about you guys finish up the game and we’ll move on to night activities? We can make S’mores by the campfire and tell jinn stories.”
The kids were excited. Dwayne brought out marshmallows, crackers and chocolate.
“Is it okay if I join you?” he asked. “I love campfires.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Is this part of your religion?”
“It’s kind of a ritual at Muslim camp,” I replied, taking the marshmallows from him. “Kind of like ghost stories at white-people camp.”
I looked at the bag in my hands. Marshmallows can be a very controversial subject among Muslims. All marshmallows contain gelatin, and sometimes gelatin is sourced from pigs’ feet. Halal marshmallows have gelatin made from plants. As the kids chanted “S’mores! S’mores! S’mores!” around me, it dawned on me: This bag wasn’t from the halal meat store. This was an emergency. I pulled Ibrahim to one side.
“We can’t use these,” I hissed at him.
“You can’t make a S’more without marshmallows,” said Ibrahim, much too loudly.
“Shhh! Keep your voice down!” I said. “We don’t know the source of the gelatin. It could be from a pig!” I could feel my pulse racing.
Ibrahim looked surprisingly unprovoked. “Look, God says don’t eat pork. This is a marshmallow, not a pork chop. The gelatin in it is so highly processed, you can’t even really consider it pork-related anymore.”
I was speechless. This guy had been Mr. Muslim all day, but he was okay with the dubious marshmallows?
“But aren’t we hiding something serious from the kids?” I said, feeling as if I had just let the kids go to third base and done nothing about it. Was I defiling their bodies? Was I serving them treats of the devil? Sugary balls of pig fluff?
“Let’s just get on with this,” said Ibrahim. “I hate it when Muslims get caught up in trivialities.”
“Fine,” I said. “But other
people don’t think like you do, so we take the origins of this marshmallow bag with us to the grave.”
“To the grave,” he said.
“Pinky swear,” I said, holding out my hand.
“That’s too forward,” he said.
“Can I tell the first story?” asked Musa, who was hovering nearby. I hoped he hadn’t heard our conversation.
Ibrahim was swiping a finger across his throat in an urgent manner. I wasn’t sure if he was telling me to stop Musa or scratching an itch. Since he was always a little agitated, it was hard to tell. I went with itch.
“Sure,” I said. “The scarier, the better.”
“In my grandmother’s village in Pakistan, there’s a jinn who sneaks into the houses at night when kids are sleeping in their beds,” Musa began.
“Is it easier to sneak in because the houses are made of cardboard?” asked Maria, still obsessing about her grandmother.
“Probably,” said Musa, not to be deterred. “Plus the jinn had the ability to turn into a dog so no one would suspect it was a jinn.”
“How could you tell it wasn’t just a dog?” asked Maria.
It was a fair question. But it didn’t stymie Musa.
“Because one foot remained human. That was the way you could tell he wasn’t a person.”
I was starting to understand that maybe Ibrahim’s neck hadn’t been itchy.
“You could tell this jinn was coming when you heard the steps. The human foot dragged.”
The children gasped. Ibrahim gave me a contemptuous look.
“What was it going to do to the children?” asked Maria.
“Jinn possess children so they become like them,” he said.
“What does ‘possess’ mean?” asked a terrified Maria.
“It means that they take over your bodies and minds,” Musa explained. “But they can only do it at night when you go to sleep.”
“I don’t want to sleep,” said Maria. There was murmuring among all the campers.
“Don’t worry, jinn only come out in secluded areas,” said Musa.
“We’re pretty secluded,” said Lumya.
“But they prefer secluded areas with graveyards,” Musa assured her.
Everyone seemed to relax.
“There’s an Aboriginal graveyard about a mile from here,” said Dwayne in a helpful tone.
Everyone looked petrified. Even Ibrahim looked a little sick. The children’s paranoia had also infected me. We believed in the jinn, so all these stories could be real, and if they were, we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I suddenly wanted to be anywhere but here, but there was no way back to our cabins without travelling in the woods at night. I felt paralyzed. The other campers had the same thought I did.
“I don’t want to go back to the cabins in the dark,” said Maria. We couldn’t stay by the campfire all night. Or could we?
And then we heard the sound. Steps and then a scraping noise.
“Oh, very funny, Ibrahim,” I said, trying to cut the tension. Jinn stories around the campfire always brought out the pranksters.
“It’s not me,” said Ibrahim. He did a quick count of the campers.
“We’re all here,” said Lumya. The sounds of the odd walking got louder.
Thump. Scrape. Thump. Scrape.
“How do you get rid of jinn?” asked Dwayne, looking a little whiter than usual.
“You say a prayer,” said Ibrahim. “Which was it?”
“I think it’s sura Baqarah,” said Lumya.
“No, that sura takes two hours to recite—we’ll all be possessed by then.”
I thought I was going to die of fright right there. I really didn’t know what to do anymore.
“Salaam alaikum, boys and girls,” bellowed a loud, Guyanese-accented voice. All the kids looked up, and there was Brother Abdullah, on crutches, with his foot in bandages.
Ibrahim lunged at him in relief. All the horror of the last few minutes seeped out of me. I felt like Jell-O.
“Thank Allah you’re here,” said Ibrahim.
“That’s amazing,” said Dwayne, “Muslims can turn dogs into human beings.”
“No, Muslims just get scared really easily,” I told Dwayne, disappointing him yet again.
With Abdullah’s sudden appearance, the jinn stories were forgotten and we had the courage to make it back to the mess hall for hot chocolate.
“I thought you broke your foot?” I said.
“Turns out it was just a bad sprain,” said Abdullah.
“It’s a sign from God that you came,” said Ibrahim.
“Yeah,” I said, agreeing with Ibrahim. “God works in mysterious ways.”
“Not that mysterious,” said Abdullah. “A phone call from a worried parent whose kid wanted to know if their grandmother was being swept away in rainstorm and then asked what a throbbing gristle was gave me an idea that things weren’t going so well.”
“It’s still a sign from God that we needed you,” said Ibrahim.
I felt insulted. “It’s a sign from God that we could use more support,” I said.
It was a God-off.
“You two, just relax,” said Abdullah. “No one knows what God’s signs are except for God.”
The counsellors got the kids off to their cabins.
“So, are you having a good time?” asked Abdullah.
“Not really, but I think I’ve figured out what I have to do next with my life.”
“And what’s that?”
“I was hoping to drop out of university because it’s too hard, but I figure I have to finish what I started.”
“That’s profound,” said Abdullah.
“It’s why God has sent me to this camp.”
“Actually, you volunteered,” said Abdullah.
“University is a breeze compared to this place. I’ll be grateful to get back to studying.”
I had needed a break. But this break had proved too arduous. I wanted to go back to figuring out Newton’s laws. University was a cakewalk compared to the real world, which I wasn’t ready to join just yet. Camp hadn’t exactly been a sign—more a whack to my head. But it worked.
Abdullah smiled at me. “As long as you’re not hearing voices, it’s all good.”
Medical School Reject
“What do you mean he has only one eye?” I heard my mother ask as I walked into the living room. “A fishing accident? … It’s his hobby? Hmm, I guess if you pull a fishing rod out of the water too quickly … Yes, that is an excellent salary though.”
My mother was on the phone, canvassing friends for rumours of eligible sons.
“Ummi, what are you doing?” I hissed, incredulous.
“Finding you a husband,” said my mother, covering the phone with one hand.
“But—”
“Don’t tell me that you have a prejudice against men with one eye, because that’s not very Islamic, is it?”
“No, but—”
“One eye, two eyes, what does it matter, as long as he has a good job. You don’t have to go fishing with him. In fact, when you marry him, best to keep him on dry land. Accountants need at least one good eye.” She returned to her call.
Her enthusiastic search for a husband was totally my fault. It had started the moment I got my rejection letter from the University of Toronto’s med school. I had read the first line—We regret to inform you—and started to feel a little woozy. My life was over. Since the day I was born, the Life Plan had been for me to be a doctor. Since I had been old enough to know what a career was, I had been groomed to be Dr. Zarqa. Never mind that I passed out when we took blood samples with a pipette to determine type. I just figured I’d will myself to love hemoglobin like some sort of med school vampire. But I couldn’t will myself to make sense of the byzantine world of science. Chemistry, physics and calculus had been my undoing and left me with an abysmal transcript that had failed to impress the med school selection committee. Turns out it takes more than an immigrant’s father’s lifelo
ng desire for his only daughter to become a doctor to influence the admissions process. So when I opened that letter, my life exploded. Life Plan A went up in smithereens. There was no Life Plan B.
But my mother always had a Plan B.
“Let’s get you married,” she said, happy that she could finally interfere with my life properly. Her biggest fear for me was that too much education might result in old, dried-up ovaries. Until the letter arrived, my father had squashed her matrimonial dreams for me, because he believed marriage was for women who failed to get into medical school.
I had officially become one of those failures.
My mother schemed while my father sulked. After a few days of her phone calls, I knew that desperate times called for desperate measures. I would have to talk to my mother about my feelings. I walked into the kitchen as she was adding water to a bowl of whole-wheat flour, making dough to cook rotis for dinner. As she expertly kneaded the mixture with her hands, I leaned against the counter.
“Ummi, I can’t get married yet,” I said.
“Why not?” she asked as the mixture turned into a ball of dough.
“I have to find myself.”
“You’re standing right there. What’s wrong with you?”
“I need to find a career,” I implored.
“Why can’t you find one after you’re married?”
“Because you of all people know how hard that is.”
My mother’s hands stopped momentarily in the dough. When she was my age, her father didn’t want her to further her education. In his world, only men needed to get educated, since they supported a family. Women stayed home and raised children, so minimal schooling was necessary. But my mother wanted more. Her sisters, who had been married young, sympathized with her. They waited until their parents left their small town for hajj, and then enrolled my mother in a boarding school in Murree, sixty kilometres northeast of Islamabad. After she completed her two years of teacher training, her marriage to my father was arranged quickly and she immigrated to England.
My mother’s life became consumed with a new country, a new life and a new baby. Her parents died in a car crash on their way to a wedding less than a year later. She never saw them again after her own wedding. Our little family became her everything. She never had a chance to teach.
