The Girl Who Fell to Earth

by Sophia Al-Maria

  I was still brooding over having to leave my magazine in Amsterdam when I emerged onto the catwalk of Abu Dhabi International Airport, suitcase jittering across the studded rubber tile behind me. Customs hadn’t even bothered scanning my luggage, and I had passed through the stand of security guards as if I were invisible. The men who guarded the sliding doors marked “UAE Border” had way bigger problems than a kid with a magazine full of artistic nude pictures.

  I joined the parade of other passengers milling toward the parking lot. As we passed into the arrivals hall I felt the sharpness of a thousand eyes pecking me out like a painted bird. They craned over the railing, Indian and Arab men silently expressing everything from mild curiosity to personal offense at my bare, bony legs. It had been a really long time since I’d seen my father’s face, and now I reminded myself of his identifying features. He was a brown man with a mustache . . . but so was everyone else here. Each configuration of facial hair and skin tone along my path was different, but none of them was the one I was looking for. I tried to hold an image of him in my head and clenched my mind around it like a fist. But it was like holding a handful of sand. All the half-recollected details of his face just slipped away.

  Then it occurred to me with panicked alarm, “What if he doesn’t recognize me?” The changes in my body had been pretty abstract until now. I felt my new height and my new heft and the hairiness of my legs. For the first time I took stock of my short haircut, my greasy face that needed washing, and these American clothes that suddenly made me feel indecently exposed. Like an animal sinking into a tar pit, my body felt like a burden. I slowed as I came to the end of the hall, each step heavier as I neared the exit. Were the soles of my shoes melting to the floor, or was I just tired?

  The sweat of bodies folded over me in a heady arbor—the distinct aroma of the Arabian Gulf. Even now the scent of salty perspiration laced with oud has a soporific effect on me. It is the smell of my father’s armpits and, thus, an elusive port of safety. If I didn’t recognize his face, maybe I’d recognize his smell. I found an empty spot on a marble ledge and fell asleep in the shade of a plastic palm tree like some postmodern pastoral scene—dozing shepherdess replaced by jetlagged young traveler.

  When I woke the airport was quieter and Baba was rousting me out of the pebble-filled planter and leading me to the car. “You were early,” he said as he buckled me into the passenger seat. I pretended to be asleep and peered at him through my eyelashes. He looked like the photo we had over the hearth in Gramma’s house. Stern and silent.

  Hesitant to let on I was awake, I grasped for the appropriate way to address him or a greeting to open the floodgates of the father-daughter conversation I imagined we were supposed to have, the kind that TV dads had with TV kids in their TV homes. But when nothing came to mind I resolved it was best to remain in stasis. Tomorrow I could start over, I thought. I could wake up and say good morning as though only a night had passed since we’d left him. I practiced this in my head, planning to kiss his cheek and give him a hug. But these thoughts were crushed in a bottleneck of nameless emotion fizzing up in my throat. I yawned to pop the pressure in my ear and rolled over to face the window. Tall streetlamps studded the desert road in a nauseating rhythm and tears puddled on my cheeks. Before they fell I felt his hand vise the nape of my neck, just like he used to do when pulling my teeth—it worked like some kind of Vulcan nerve pinch. The reeling stopped and I began to drift, this time peacefully, orange light dashing me into the darkness, mind steadying to a place where nothing was the matter and everything was forgiven.

  Next morning I awoke at sunrise in a familiar bed, the old one from our flat in the city with a scalloped headboard painted with fluffy clouds. The room was empty but for a mirror and a baby’s crib. The walls were covered in stickers and crayon markings, signs of my other siblings. I wondered where they were and then I wondered how many there were. Ma and Baba had a mutually enforced “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy about Flu’s pregnancies, but I guessed from the crib that there had been a few new additions. Beside the bed was a new jalabiya, a polyester slip, a fanila, some barrettes, a copy of Majid comics, and a black shala to cover my hair with.

  I picked up the cotton fanila, tiny rosettes stitched along the neck. Leaving me an undershirt was proof Baba hadn’t expected me to have grown into a B-cup. The slip fit fine, but static made it stick to the hair on my legs like Velcro. A pretty girl modeled a tastefully striped nightie on the cover of the jalabiya packaging. But the garment I pulled from the plastic bore no resemblance to the one she was wearing. I popped my head out the itchy neckhole and looked in the mirror to find a shapeless mass of fabric patterned with strange cartoon creatures of indeterminate phylum. No matter how I tried to flatten it, the stiff white ruff stuck up around my face and made me feel like a dog in a funnel collar. Last I picked up the shala, my first veil, nested in with an array of kids’ clothing. Despite the fabric being incredibly light, the veil held a heavy musk of ambergris. I wrapped it around my head several times into a loose wimple as I’d seen the women in the airport do, but when I let go it just slipped away into a limp coil around my neck.

  Baba was sitting on the floor with a newspaper and breakfast of pocket bread and eggs. “Marhaba! Benti!” he cried, and held out his hands for me like he was receiving a present. Bending down for a kiss on the cheek, I gave him an electrical shock instead. “Wow, you get so big!” I could hear the echoes of Gramma in his bad English. I folded myself down beside him. “Ha? Tell me. What you will do this summer?” He dealt me a piece of bread over the swirl of egg.

  “I dunno,” I grunted. “Aren’t I going to stay here with you?”

  “Wella, you know, I thought you can stay here with me. But you are so grown up now.” I caved my chest back and hoped he wouldn’t notice I needed a bra. “I think you might be happier if you go to Doha and stay with Umi Safya.”

  I looked around the flat; it was almost completely empty. The only decoration was a glow-in-the-dark Mecca clock hanging on the wall over his head, the minute and hour hands ticking from the center of the Kaaba. “Did you just move here or something?”

  He got up to make me a cup of tea. “No. I been here, maybe three years.”

  “Then how come there’s no furniture? How come no one is here?”

  “This is the living,” he answered. “If I want to go, I just go. You know your baba.” He smiled at me.

  “You find the shala?” I nodded. “Good. It’s a gift from Abir. You remember Abir?”

  I tensed. Baba loved to test me on my knowledge of the extended tribal tree. I filed through my hazy memory of relatives, Abrar, Alia, Afra, Afia, sure, but I came up blank at the name Abir.

  “Abir! You must remember! You met her when you were little in Saudi.”

  I slowly ripped my bread, hoping he’d change the subject. He clicked his tongue as though he were ashamed. I was starting to worry this was some kind of a riddle—maybe I should know her. “What’s her face like?” I tried.

  He looked at me as if I were an idiot. “How should I know? I’ve never seen her face.” Sufficiently convinced it wasn’t a trick question, I went back to my egg while Baba explained. “She is my father’s—that’s your grandfather Jabir—milk-brother’s son’s wife’s sister by marriage.”

  I gulped, trying to digest both the eggs and the flimsy familial tissue linking myself to the nice (faceless) lady who had given me the gift of the shala. “What’s a milk-brother?”

  “If your mother couldn’t give you milk when you are a baby and you drank from a different mother, you would be milk-sister to her other children,” he explained patiently.

  Suddenly, the stillness of the room was broken with a loud racket from the hallway. It was a pack of children surging up the stairs, knocking every door they passed on the way up. I got up to investigate and peeked into the dim stairwell where a rabble of boys and girls, all in mini-thobes and jalabiyas in varying states of dirtiness, were playing keep-away with a ball
oon. It floated up and down the landing, and the kids, the oldest of whom couldn’t have been more than seven, tumbled after it. They didn’t see me, all eyes on the gently floating orb, little fists brandishing pencils, keening for the first jab.

  “Who are they?” I asked, quietly closing the door so as not to draw their attention.

  “Your cousins.”

  I remembered that cousin was a term used loosely here. “Why are they awake?” It was 6 a.m. at the latest. Baba shrugged. The stampede shook the ceiling like an earthquake. “Do they go to school?”

  “Mostly the families here don’t have jinsia, so they can’t go to school.”

  I understood the word jinsia. It meant the very essence of a person’s being, your sex, your personality, your nationality, your identity, and, in this situation, citizenship. “Is that why Flu and the kids stay in Doha?”

  “Yes.”

  A loud detonation of helium came from the stairwell, followed by the siren-like howl of one of the littlest kids. Baba ignored the sound, plopping in several spoonfuls of sugar to sweeten the tea. He poured it from glass to glass for me as though I were still a little kid liable to scald herself.

  “Is there anyone my age here?”

  “No girls are here now. All of them are in Doha or Saudia for the summer break.”

  He handed me the tepid, syrupy tea and rattled off names of cousins I could visit with there. “Also your Auntie Falak. Flu. Your little sisters.”

  I got up to skulk by the window. Even though the prospect of spending three months in these empty rooms surrounded by the noise of the feral cousins depressed me, I wanted to stay a while longer.

  I surveyed the turf. We were surrounded by undeveloped desert, sliced to the south by the highway to Abu Dhabi and to the north by power lines. The apartment we were in was part of a larger complex of buildings, each one an identical, squat square. They were similar in design to a council-estate scheme—well-intentioned but badly planned, all full of utopian details that only worked in the model. For example, the shopping arcades running underneath each building probably looked great in balsa wood. But where the mock-up would have been bustling with miniature commerce, the real places turned into creepy corridors full of garbage, with sand collecting along the unused shop fronts. This place, I would learn, was mostly full of Bedouin like Baba who for various reasons (political or financial or just by accident) found themselves on the periphery of society. Even in Doha they lived in zones of temporary-turned-permanent government housing and spent their lives waiting for jobs or the call to prayer or their favorite TV show to come on.

  There was a derelict playground directly under our window. At the center was a flatbed merry-go-round creaking slowly in the wind. I imagined its steel heating up in the sun, just waiting for some hapless kid to come along and sear their flesh on the handlebars. Instead of wanting to run down and have a go on the swings, I just felt a churning twist of self-conscious dread that I was getting too old for it. Across the courtyard, a little girl pressed her face to a window. She smeared her forehead along the glass, pouting down at the playground that taunted her.

  “Well, you’re a grown-up now, Safya, what you decide? Go stay with the women in Doha or stay here alone?” Baba interrupted my observation.

  A pair of hands removed the little girl from her perch at the window. I wondered how many girls were even given a choice?

  “I’ll go.”

  The next day he took me back to the airport and checked me in, then found a pay booth near the entrance, where he called ahead to Doha. I leaned against the window watching businessmen get into taxis and migrant laborers load onto buses. A big beast of a Rolls Royce steamed up. Its windows were tinted dusky purple; it rode low on its chassis and the wide body was painted pearlescent white. Mesmerized, I wandered away down the hall to get a view of the front of the car while Baba negotiated a place for me in Umi Safya’s crowded house. The grill gleamed, grinning like a huge albino crocodile. Paralyzed with curiosity, I watched as a female driver in a chauffeur’s uniform stepped out against the wind and opened the back door to release a violent burst of flapping black fabric. And like birds escaping the croc’s belly, a family of Emirati women emerged from the red-leather interior, leaving a scurry of porters to unload their luggage. I watched, readjusting my own unruly shala as theirs whipped frantically around their heads and yet stayed improbably in place. The skein swept in V-formation through the departure hall. Their floor-skimming abayas disguised their gait so that for a moment before they disappeared into the first-class area I believed they might be flying.

  Dazzled by the display I’d just witnessed, I returned to Baba’s side just as he hung up the phone. “Who were they?” I asked him, gawking after the fancy ladies.

  “Don’t look to them,” he cautioned, and maneuvered me in the opposite direction, toward the economy-class terminal entrance.

  “When you get to Doha your uncle Faraj will pick you up. Do you remember him?”

  “Ugh. I think so,” I lied, wanting to avoid another confusing genealogical breakdown.

  “You remember your auntie Falak?”

  This one I knew. “Yes!”

  He was unimpressed. “Falak and Faraj are twins.”

  “OK. Got it,” I confirmed, like I was memorizing a mission.

  “Your Uncle Faraj is getting married in Saudi Arabia at the end of the summer. That is the next time I will see you. N’zayn?”

  The warble of a sob seized my throat. “N’zayn.”

  I lingered in a window as Baba returned to his illegally parked rental sedan. The wind was getting stronger. He had to hold his gutra down to keep it from blowing away in the wind. He turned once to wave good-bye and then stepped in and drove off. I stayed brooding at the window, writing my name backward, then erasing it in the condensation, until my gate for Doha was called.

  13

  ETA URSAE MAJORIS • DAUGHTERS OF THE BIER •

  It’s difficult to explain what it’s like to be welcomed home to a place you’ve never been. The levels of excitement when I reached the house were totally disproportionate to how I felt. Sounds and smells resonated strongest, a familiarity that felt like it came from a dream. Cousins my age like Alia were already wearing abayas and seemed preternaturally old to me. The names and faces were the same but now they were shy, unsure of how to treat me. Alia held a baby on her hip and looked at least eighteen. It was as though a childhood spent caring for younger siblings while her parents floundered in adjustment to city life had made this twelve-year-old girl a matron.

  The living room was full of people, and as I passed into their arms they adorned me with bangles and anointed me with perfume and stuffed handfuls of candy into my pockets. I was taken to my grandmother, who sat on the floor at the center of the room flanked by her eldest daughters, my aunts Moody and Zayna. She lifted the corner of her black berga and exposed her smooth cheek, offering it up to me for a kiss. I remembered this same gesture from when I met her in the tent in the desert in Saudi.

  “Welcome to your home,” she said, and held my arm tight while she manacled a heavy silver bangle onto my wrist.

  Despite the grand welcome, I could barely gather the corners of my mouth up into a smile of gratitude. It was an inexplicably angsty moment shadowed with a vague suspicion of walking into some kind of a trap.

  Cousins whom I remembered by face but not name hugged close, battling to sit near me. They touched my short hair and ransacked my suitcase and talked at me even though I didn’t understand. If we’d had a language barrier before, I couldn’t remember it. When we were young I guessed we must have just spoken to one another in our respective languages, happy not to understand before falling into a game of double dutch. Now that we were too old for jump rope, we compared the tone of our skin, measured ourselves back-to-back, and grinned stupidly at one another. These, after all, were the things that transcended language.

  I was led into the back of the house, where I was shown into all the be
drooms one by one and where women I didn’t recognize (new wives of old uncles) were nursing, changing diapers, or sleeping. As we wound through the hallway it seemed to go on and on like a warren. A wide door papered with a giant poster of a desert island stuck out conspicuously at the end of the hallway.

  “Whose room is that?” I asked, pointing to the metal handle that ripped through the beach.

  “Right now only Faraj. Next month, his bride.”

  “That makes four new brides in the house,” someone tallied up.

  If I hadn’t already observed it, this drove home that the living conditions were tight. I was allotted half a bunk in Aunt Falak’s room and was relieved to see her perched atop a steel bunk bed watching TV.

  “Marhaba, Sweyfiya!” she said, twisting “Safya” up into an affectionate pet name and spreading her arms in welcome. I climbed up the ladder to give her a kiss. “Burra!” she screeched at the kids who had followed me in, and shut the door behind them. “You can come in here if you want to be alone, okay?”

  I agreed to her offer and slept off my jet lag while she resumed watching Predator 2 and occasionally banging the door to scare off the kids whispering mysteriously to each other in the hall.

  It’s a common misconception that all Gulf Arabs are rich. So I feel the need here to lay out the fact that our family absolutely was and is not. Marginalized from the moment borders, cities, and politics began to solidify in the Gulf, Bedouin families like those in Al-Dafira had a difficult time adapting to urban life. In the ’80s, the governments of many Gulf countries had planned boroughs and filled them with relocated Bedouin. Parts of the Al-Dafira tribe had been crossing back and forth through the neck of the peninsula between Saudi and Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE for generations. While the disorienting effects of industry and modernity dizzied the tribe, invisible lines were being drawn in the sand under their feet and on the papers they couldn’t read. Sides of the border were taken and families were broken up. Each patriarch had to choose his nationality: Saudi or Qatari or Emirati? For those who chose Qatar, they each received one house called a beit shaabi. These “folk houses” were stocky one-story blocks set back behind twelve-foot-tall walls of concrete erected to protect the women’s privacy. What they didn’t factor in was that out in the desert, there was no privacy. Even if men and women socialized separately, things were much more fluid than “culturally sensitive” urban planning allowed for. There were two living rooms for each house: a majlis for the men and a sala for the women. And like a labyrinth opening out, once you passed through the public area of the women’s section, there was a long turned hallway with five doors that led on to bedrooms, packed with blankets and carpets and coffee pots and all the trappings of old life—everything shoved into a room with a large bed that was in turn piled at night with at least one family of four to each.