In a single generation they had gone from migrating the peninsula with the seasons to living in windowless housing blocks. I pulled my knees up and popped my head into the neck of my jalabiya like a turtle. I was bloated and getting fat now. I feared I was changing into my aunts, these once wiry and tough women used to hard desert life fated to being beached in front of the television. But their nomadic instincts adapted to the situation and ended up manifesting themselves in new ways—for example, in the regular changing of interior decoration. It was seasonal: every few months everyone got together and traded their curtains and carpets to get the feeling of having a new room. Instead of a change in place, they ended up changing their wallpaper or zoning out with the TV on mute, satellite views of Mecca alternating with angles of the Kaaba from different surveillance cameras. Like the photorealistic tropical island on Faraj’s door, there was something so melancholy about all these flattened, unattainable places and dreams and urges. They were filling the house with a sense of defeat. By the end of that summer, I was convinced that all the women in my family had forgotten what it was like to be fearless and what it had once meant to be free.
14
UPSILON SCORPII • THE STING •
Everything was changing, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. The house was hectic with preparations for Uncle Faraj’s imminent wedding in Saudi, and very little of it had to do with the groom, who was sent on errands, mostly to the tailors or the souq. A photo of Amna, the bride-to-be, circulated around the house. She was fat but beautiful, or rather fat and beautiful, and everyone used the word delouaa to describe her, as though it were a good thing to be the human equivalent of veal—milk-fed and sheltered. I spent a lot of time staring at the picture, studying what set of attributes stacked up to make her such a prized beauty. She was five years older than me, cinched into a tight dress, body contorted to display her hair and ass and face all at once. Her makeup was extreme and caused her to look like a drag queen, a persistent look that is still the fashion in the Gulf.
I stood in front of the mirror in Falak’s wardrobe and pulled my jalabiya in tight to reveal a bloated paunch, lopsided hips, and flat butt. Something terrible seemed to have happened to my body over the past two months in Doha. Rather than feeling the fabled sense of completion everyone kept promising womanhood would bring, I felt frantic and aimless, as though I’d lost something important. I became cranky and aggressive and paced the house, loitering in doorways and moaning in English about how bored I was. I pestered Tiny, the maid, while she made flatbread on a burner in the carport; I bothered Umi while she churned butter in her goatskin and Aunt Zayna while she pumped milk from her swollen breast to feed her baby. It was as though when Falak told me not to go there, she had drawn a line in the sand and dared me to cross it, and I always ended up back at the side door that led to the men’s majlis. The majlis had begun to take on, for me, the expansive feeling of the “outside.”
I peeked into the majlis. Aunt Moody’s sons were playing Super Nintendo. I sized the three of them up. Like most boys from our family they were wiry, with sharp, beaky noses. I watched silently as the little one worked Sub-Zero up into decapitating Johnny Cage. I stepped in, lurking at the back of the majlis. AbdAllah was the most hostile, and the youngest seemed almost afraid. It was like walking into a bar and wanting a turn at the pool table. I shuffled up closer and sat behind them to watch. AbdAllah scooted away from me, then lost to Zayed when he took his eyes off the screen. I reached for the player B controls to get a turn. I took my place and blinged through the players. Of course, I chose Sonya Blade. Zayed eyed me sideways and waved his hand in front of his face like I stunk. His brothers egged him on as Sub-Zero and Sonya appeared on the screen. Thumbing a random combination of buttons I kicked his ass.
But rather than my getting to play the next round fair and square, AbdAllah grabbed the controls out of my grip and backed away. He hoarded the game console up to his chest. “Okay, you played, now go back inside.”
They weren’t afraid of me, I knew. They were scared of what might happen if they got caught with me. All I wanted to do was play Mortal fucking Kombat.
“Give it to me!” I roared, and lurched for the controls.
The punchy synth intro kicked in and wound me up. If they just let me play out a K.O. I was going to resign in peace and return to my place in the women’s quarters. But now the boys were positioned together like stormtroopers in the corner of the majlis. I turned, pretending I was going to leave, but instead locked the door behind me. It was on. Preparing for the showdown, they tied their thobes up around their waists, exposing their baggy long underwear and skinny ankles to give themselves room to kick. I tied my jalabiya up around my hips and took my best Sumo wrestling stance.
I plowed for the middle one, lifting him over my shoulder and tossing him over my back. Too stunned to do anything and afraid to touch me, AbdAllah went down in similar fashion before gathering himself enough to grab my hair and drag me onto the floor.
“That’s it!” I growled, hysterical and frenzied from the contact.
I blindly grabbed for him and got his leg. Pulling myself up, I bit the only place I could reach: his ankle. Then he started howling for mercy. The handle of the living room door rattled, and then Aunt Moody burst through the door. We all froze, the battle of the sexes halted by the shadow of authority. It was a moment of mid-battle action captured forever in my mind like a war memorial, the younger two boys tugging at my legs, my teeth clamped around my cousin’s ankle while he made like he was going to scalp me.
“Separate!” she commanded.
The other three let go and I dropped the leg out of my mouth like a stunned dog with a bone.
“What is wrong with you?!” she shrilled.
The boys blanched, and I turned bright red.
“Shameful! Shameful! Shameful!”
—was the only thing I understood from her tirade. I found myself being yanked by the neck of my jalabiya out the door and marched back to the women’s quarters. When we got back in the house Aunt Moody honked my left boob to illustrate I was too old to be playing with boys.
“One of my sons might want to marry you someday—”
“Ew!” I grimaced.
“Do you want them to remember you like that?” she pressed, as though incest were a desirable outcome to this situation.
Yes! I thought to myself. I really wanted them to remember me as the one who could kick their asses.
After the skirmish in the majlis, Umi Safya came to the wise conclusion that I ought to get out of the house more. And so, having violated almost every expectation of a young woman of Al Dafira, I was banished from women’s country to the passenger seat of my uncle Faraj’s un-air-conditioned truck. Faraj had been nominated to be my caretaker. He had the right combination of free time (unemployment) and a ride. He did not, however, appreciate having to ferry me around town. I was an embarrassment to him as I slouched in the truck, scowling out the window, headphones over my shala, mouthing the lyrics to “Everybody Hurts” at a bus full of Filipino laborers.
Our communication barrier was deep. We had a mutually kept silence for the first week, and I had plenty of time to observe him while he drove from the post office to the Falcon Market to the paddock outside the city where Umi kept her goats. Aside from a brief peck on the cheek when he had picked me up at the airport, there had been no interaction between us. In addition to the stilted nature of our relationship, I found myself too grammatically challenged to address him. Having obtained all my knowledge of Arabic in the segregated classroom of my female family, I had never learned how to conjugate words in a masculine way. Faraj was equally uncommunicative with me, his English more nonexistent than my Arabic. And anyway, he seemed preoccupied with some secret business during our outings, pulling up off the road to check his pager, which everyone referred to as his “bleep.” Often he’d urgently pull into gas stations where he’d hole up in a phone booth for half an hour talking cautiously into the p
hone, rolling a bottle of cola over his face to keep cool.
Being a twin, Faraj really was the male version of Falak. He had a carefully contrived personal style: a perpetual two-day growth of facial hair and a starched cobra-style gutra worn at a jaunty angle. The combination made him look rakish and cool. His truck was similar in character, a two-door Nissan Patrol jumped up on extra-high wheels with blue racing stripes and a decal that read “Masha’Allah” in the back window. Every morning I rode out with him while he ran errands for my aunts and Umi Safya. Although I’d felt trapped and bored in the house, I realized that being a woman also spared you from another kind of boredom. This became abundantly clear to me on occasions such as the seven hours Faraj spent waiting in line at the Ministry of Municipal Affairs while I got heatstroke in the truck. As the sun reached its zenith, I started hallucinating that the waves of roiling heat had started to float over the truck. I was so seasick and dehydrated by the time Faraj returned that I had to vomit. He held my shala back while I puked.
Like Falak and horror films, the one thing Faraj and were able to bond over was juice cocktails. The juice stalls were burrowed into the most unlikely places all over the city. By day the juice stall was an oasis of color in the drab tan of everyplace else. Plastic fruit festooned the windows, and signs die-cut to look like icicles promised relief from the heat. At night they turned into beacons of neon in otherwise dark residential neighborhoods, the garishly decorated interiors now fully visible through the shop-front windows. Our ritual on the way home every day was to pull up to Hot ’n’ Cool Stall, where I’d read aloud from the menu, sounding out the transliterated letters of drinks like Tropical Storm, Year 2000, Land Cruiser, and Milky Banana. Faraj would honk like he was in rush-hour traffic until a pissed-off-looking Indian man slumped out to take our orders.
“One Rolex and one small Combyuter,” Faraj ordered.
It didn’t matter what we asked for, Mercedes or Kerala Kiss, they all came out in the same gloopy swirl of sunset colors in a soggy cardboard cup. Then we’d sit together in the truck, slushing the straws around inside our drinks and listening to classic Mohammed Abdu on the radio.
It was on one such pit stop, sucking down a smoothie, when he finally broke the ice. I was absorbed in loudly vacuuming the froth off the bottom of my cup when he blurted out, in Arabic, “Are you happy here?”
I slushed the juice with my straw, suspicious of this unexpected attempt at chitchat. “Sure,” I answered. His question was loaded. I thought about how I felt freer here than I had in America. Plus there was more to look at, more to think about, even if there was less for me to do. “How are you?” I asked him.
He puffed his chest against the seatbelt and deflated in a sigh. “Not so good, wella, not so good.” He shook his head. “One minute.”
He held his finger up in front of me and produced a delicate envelope from somewhere in his thobe. He plucked a photo from it and laid it in the palm of my sticky hand. The image was of a girl, but it was most definitely not his fiancée, Amna. This girl was posed in front of a painted sky, her face was a perfect oval dented at the chin in a cute cleft, her nose was strong and hooked like a falcon, and her eyes were big and black. She wore lace gloves and her hands ramped under her face in what was meant to be a poetic pose of longing. Why was he showing me this? I wondered nervously, and handed the photo back to him.
“I need to see her before I get married,” he explained. “But her father won’t let her answer the phone.” I knew what he was going to ask before he asked it. “Will you help?”
I’d already gotten in trouble twice this summer. The worst thing I could do now was to be implicated in an affair. Faraj’s bleeper bleeped, and he jumped with it. He started the car and turned to me. “Well?” he asked, eager for an answer. “Fine,” I agreed grudgingly, and we drove off in a direction I hadn’t been before.
My age and inexperience aside, it was becoming profoundly clear to me that love in the context of youth culture in Qatar was far more complex than anything I had ever seen on MTV. Because segregation between the sexes is so enforced, when a love affair does gain any kind of traction, like Faraj’s did, it has to fly below the radar. As you can imagine, like anything forced to lurk in the shadows, love (which we know will always find a way) adapts and manifests itself in more subversive forms of expression. Falak had told me about boyahs, but they were only a small piece of the larger story.
“There she is,” Faraj said reverently as we pulled up to an impressive mansion. His tone was hushed, as though he were witnessing some kind of natural wonder. I followed his finger to a dark rooftop across a busy road from where we sat in a gas-station parking lot.
“Where?” I tried to focus my eyes to find this magical creature.
“There! The pink thing!” he whispered.
I followed his eyes to a patch of color cut through by shadow. It could have been anything—a piece of laundry, a toy—but then it moved and I saw a projectile glint in the streetlamp and land in the sand bordering the outside wall of the house.
“Okay, go see what she threw!”
I slumped across the road to investigate, a little resentful at being treated like his hunting dog. I came to the spot; a heavy glass perfume bottle lay shattered in the dust, a vessel to deliver her message. I plucked a piece of paper out of the crater of glass shards and ran back across to where Faraj was waiting. “Call me in ten minutes,” it read. “I’ll be at the phone.”
We loitered for ten minutes near a booth and then Faraj dialed a number, keeping his eye on the house the whole time. He seemed surprised to hear a man answer and handed me the phone. I said in my most grown-up voice, “Good evening, is Kholoud there? This is her English teacher calling.”
Faraj grinned, pleased at how foreign and therefore official I sounded. I heard a shuffling and a woman’s voice came softly across the line.
“Hello?” It came in a half-whisper.
Faraj yanked the phone out of my hand and breathed deeply into the phone. She kept the ruse up, responding as though he were her English teacher. A date and place were set for a rendezvous, and she pledged she’d be there no matter how elaborately she’d have to lie. So began my job as go-between for Faraj and Kholoud in the final days leading up to his marriage to Amna.
That night we cruised through Doha with the windows down, passing through Electricity Street on our way—a miniaturized version of Piccadilly Circus, where even the tiniest shop front boasted a massive bank of neon. All the signs were fairly abstract, like “Amira Services” and “Al-Maha Machinery.” Signs like these flickered with epileptic intensity over otherwise unmarked doors. I remember in particular the outrageous promise of “World of Magic,” which turned out to be a carpet wholesaler. We came out of the manic souq area and onto the corniche, the smooth rim of concrete that ran the length of the city from the port to the Sheraton still standing at the far end of the bay. Except for the young shoots of office towers now sprouting up around it, it was the same as I’d remembered it.
When we came to a red light I could see Faraj sifting through his English vocabulary for something to say, finally settling on “thank you.”
I didn’t know how to express the vicarious rush of freedom and happiness I was experiencing, so I just grinned at him.
Now that we were in cahoots, conversation flowed more naturally. He’d stop and start his cassette tapes and quiz me on Aline Khalaf lyrics: “Fire! Wind!” she crooned. “Heart! Ember!” I called back, proud of my new Arabic words. But Faraj wasn’t being a teacher consciously; he just thought it was funny to hear me sing Aline Khalaf songs. Sometimes after that, he talked to me about how pent up and angry he was for not being able to marry outside the tribe. After my mother, one outsider married into the family had proved enough, so Faraj’s hopes of marrying a non-Bedouin girl from the city were crushed. As it turned out, Faraj, the only man of the household, had had little choice in the matter.
All through August, I rode shotgun in the Patrol. F
araj offered small, helpful hints as to mistakes I was making. For example, he demonstrated for me how to walk in my abaya while giving the effect of floating just above the ground. Even today I haven’t mastered how to walk in a light, skimming motion to replace my cow-hocked trod. During my apprenticeship to Faraj, I learned the subtleties of courtship in Qatar and the ins and outs of phone dating before mobile phones. After a few weeks, I was able to pick up on the complex, subtle, and usually unsuccessful exchanges going on in public all the time. As we walked through the mall, boys slowed down and muttered their numbers at women, who on closer sight were old enough to be their mothers. Men slipped notes with their phone numbers into the open purses of girls drifting past. There was an intense energy of longing and desire that hung over the long strips of mall corridors, and it had nothing to do with what was displayed in the windows of the shops.
The night of the rendezvous with Kholoud came, and Faraj called me to his room. It was tiny and mostly filled with his bed, a twin-size cot. Above this hung a poster of the Emirati singer Ahlam. She smiled down on us maniacally, face masked with the painted-on joy of a circus clown. Cassette tapes littered the pillows at the head of the bed, and a tape player lay propped against the wall. There was no other furniture in the space, although the screen of a small television peered out of a wall of bedding the family stored for camping trips. At the top of this dam of polyester blankets and pillows he had placed a plastic tea tray and filled it with his prize possessions: bottles of oud, a pair of diamanté silver cuff links, a white leather slipcase for when he wanted to change the look of his bleep, and a pretty gilded Quran. It occurred to me then that Faraj, for all the comparative liberty he had, was still cloistered from the world, if in a different way than his sisters.
The Girl Who Fell to Earth Page 12
