Baba gave me five hundred riyals to clothe myself for school. Falak took me to Souq Al-Jaber, where apparently all the trendy girls got their uniform fabric. She enlightened me as to various tricks, fashions, and rules as we browsed the stalls filled with reams of colorful prints and weaves.
“In high school you wear long skirts and white shirts,” Falak said meaningfully as we looked at the tailor’s spiral notebook full of ballpoint variations on the long-skirt design.
“So?” I said, flipping through the pleated, seamed, and mermaid patterns.
“You can’t wear those.” She gestured at the ragged hem of my jeans poking out from under my abaya.
I looked down at the dirty denim sticking out like a rat’s tail. I got the hint.
We bought several meters of black and blue and maroon cotton for my skirts, and the tailor bashfully measured me over my abaya. Next we went to Sana and Splash (pronounced “Suhblash”) for shirts and accesswarat like barrettes and plastic bracelets. As a gift, Falak furnished me with an array of boofs—these were just glorified hair clips handy for keeping shalas on. They were designed to give the illusion (and allure) of bounteous piles of thick, healthy hair underneath the veil. Basically the large hair clips of flowers and feathers were the female equivalent of a pair of socks masquerading as a bulge in a guy’s trousers.
By the end of our shopping spree, my abaya was dredged in dust and the shala wasn’t much better for wear, sliding off my head into a silky noose around my neck. My makeover was almost complete, except for one thing: after the tailor’s fee we didn’t have enough money for a new abaya. Falak promised to let me borrow some of hers until Eid, when my father would give me more money.
Falak’s room back in Umi Safya’s house was well-loved and cozy. During the day it was left open so it was a playroom for my many young cousins, and at night my two pregnant aunts slept on roll-out mats while Falak and I used the bunk. The night before school I was surprised to enter our bedroom to find a small desk in the corner of the room and a little stationery set waiting for me. On it was a note from Falak that simply read “good luck” in Arabic. I sat at the little desk area of my own and fondled my new pens and sniffed the pages of my fresh notebook, and then locked it all away in the one drawer under the desk that secured with a little key. I fell asleep that night to the naive hope that tomorrow was going to be the start of something new, with no shame, no guilt, and no mistakes in it.
A lot had happened since I’d been away. Faraj’s marriage had lasted all of three weeks before Amna asked for a divorce. He had moved back in with Umi (some male-pattern uselessness is universal) and gotten a job as a night security guard. Because of his graveyard shift, Faraj was usually available to drive me to and from my new school. On the first day the old truck announced our arrival with a horrible black emission and a sputtering cough. The engine gargled as we coasted past the red, white, and blue gates, and then Faraj idled it to a crawl in front of my new classmates. They were a lot of good-looking, Bijan-clad senior boys leaning against their Jaguars and Land Rovers. The girls were all beautiful and looked grown-up, their clothes fresh off the backs of mall mannequins.
I started to wish I had something other than a public school uniform on under my abaya. They were all so well-adjusted and pleasingly diverse compared to Puyallup. It was like 90210 if it were acted entirely with international exchange students cast by Benetton. They came from India, Norway, Sudan, and Colombia, the offspring of ambassadors and oil barons. But the weirdly utopian assortment of cultures had boiled down into a patty-melt pastiche of an America I knew from experience didn’t exist offscreen.
The truck groaned and settled down on its wheels with a cough just as we pulled up in front of a troupe of very classy-looking Qatari girls.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said aloud, echoing every teen sitcom I’d ever seen.
Some of the girls were in abaya and some were out. They looked down their noses at the Suburban through their D&G sunglasses. “Who are they?” Faraj asked as the girls backed away into the foyer and out of sight. His presence seemed to have spooked them. I slid low in my seat to avoid attracting any more attention, but Faraj was glam-blasted. “They look, they look . . . like angels!” he murmured like a fever-stricken madman.
Umi Safya’s house, Madinat Al-Dafira, was just a few miles away from the school, and until this morning Faraj had been completely oblivious to the fact that this unreal enclave of Americana plucked from a different, imaginary TV world existed so close by.
I slid out the car door, shutting it quietly and hoping against hope that I’d remain unnoticed in my ill-fitting borrowed abaya and non-marka, or luxury brand, bag.
Although the characters were all different, the stage was set the same. The school seemed so excessively unreal I half expected the front to be a painted plank façade. I was surprised to enter and find that the illusion of an all-American high school didn’t only continue inside the building, but became more intense. The halls were stacked with steel lockers, the same make as the ones in Puyallup; the floor was the same speckled linoleum; and with the A/Cs it had the same slightly frigid but stale breeze running throughout. I recognized the biology textbooks stacked beside the entrance to one of the classrooms. A bulletin board by the principal’s office was lined with enthusiastic sayings and purple paper letters that shouted in all caps, “Shoot for the Stars, Seniors!”
The Qatari girls who’d given Faraj and me the nasty looks approached me in the hall. The shortest one had deeply kohled eyes and a nose ring.
“Hey, I’m Noor. This is Fatima and Sara. We just wanted to tell you, you don’t have to wear your abaya here.”
“Thanks,” I said, keeping it on to be contrary.
“So who’s the habarbish?” Noor asked me.
“What?”
“That guy you came with.”
“That’s my uncle.” Fatima and Sara tittered.
“No way!” Noor exclaimed. “But he’s sooo Bedu!”
It took me a slow minute to get that she was using the word Bedouin the way an American might talk about rednecks. I replied thinly, “Is there something wrong with that?”
“It’s just, he looks like the kind of guy who hangs around the mall staring at us ’cause he’s unemployed with nothing better to do.” Here Noor did an impression of a habarbish, with teeth bucked and eyes bulged.
“He’s got a job,” I retorted.
“I’m sure he does,” Noor smirked.
My daily routine on school days started with the bathroom.
Despite the fact that the Gulf is the most water-stressed place on earth, for some reason the bathrooms always seemed to be sopping wet. In Umi’s house there was no toilet paper. Instead we had a length of garden hose without a nozzle to wash with. The toilet was of the scary squat type, which meant I spent a lot of my time constipated with dread. The shower was a metal nozzle jutting out over the toilet and draining into a hole in the floor. Every morning I got up after Fajer prayer to take the first shower—if I waited too long into the morning the water tank on the roof turned into a boiling cauldron and left scald marks down my back.
In Falak’s bedroom I’d change under my jalabiya so she couldn’t see what I was wearing. I put on jeans and a T-shirt, and over them my school-uniform long skirt, so it appeared I was wearing my “proper” school clothes. Over that I wore my open abaya and shala. Lastly, when I left the house I’d toss the shala over my face to hide my identity from nosy neighbors. Riding with Faraj every morning and afternoon provided a neutralizing space, like going into the decontamination chamber before entering or exiting a space station. In addition to the neutrality of his presence, I was able to shed layers on the way to school in the following order:
First roundabout out of Madinat Al-Dafira—uncover face.
Inside school’s front gate—shala off.
Locker—abaya.
Bathroom—skirt off.
Class—jeans and T-shirt.
When s
chool let out I’d do the opposite. On the way home Faraj forced me to tell him all about the restricted other world I lived in. To Faraj it was Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous; to me, it was just confusing. He seemed endlessly curious about the rich kids and what their day-to-day lives were like. They were some of the very privileged few whom Faraj had only ever seen passing in Lambos along the corniche.
My situation had been thrown glaringly into focus by the proximity of my American and Arab worlds, which existed within a few roundabouts of each other. Despite the nearness, I managed to miss a lot of school at the beginning while Faraj and I got into a regular rhythm. Some mornings when he was late coming back from his night shift, I’d sit with Umi Safya in her room while she gave herself a shot of insulin and listened to the news on her little red Viking radio. She sat flat on the floor in a posture like a baby’s: back straight, legs akimbo, coffee and dates and newspaper and Quran and radio and telephone arrayed around her like discarded toys. She kept the cane alongside her at all times so that if the phone rang she could flip it off the hook and drag it toward her with its silver claw. I used the phone to call Faraj to wake him up, but he rarely answered. If the living room clock struck nine, well into first period, I’d just end up changing back into my jalabiya and going back to bed. When Faraj did get me to school I hopped out and raced into the hall, where I’d strip down to my jeans and Converse and toss my abaya in a wad into my locker. The commute between Madinat Al-Dafira and the American school began to give me cultural whiplash. I felt like a deep-sea diver, adjusting constantly to the pressures of the two very different environments. And just like the bends, it was painful.
It took stepping outside the tribal boundaries (something I hadn’t ever done before) to see how Al-Dafira was perceived within the larger, national context. I discovered through being cornered in class discussions that apparently we were notorious for being backward, brutish barbarians who were culturally impenetrable even to fellow Qataris. According to my new classmates, Al-Dafira boys were “scary dudes”—backdunesmen and bumpkins who packed huge clubs called ajeras in their cars just in case of a skirmish. What was even more disconcerting to me was that no one seemed to know anything at all about the women I knew and loved.
Things should have started to get better as I began to figure out my place within the tribe, the school, and the city. I was now able to keep my shala on properly and had made friends with the Qatari girls at the school. The kids I was in school with were from power families, and I now started to understand that the relationship between my family and theirs was analogous to that between the Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia and the Rockefellers. There might be more of us, but numbers weren’t everything.
I could see all sorts of things that wealth and the attendant cosmopolitanism that comes with prosperity and brisk business travel had brought the Gulf. Equally, I was witness to the fact that my family did not seem to be benefiting from any of it. That said, we were by no means blameless for falling off the camel of “progress” in the night.
Generally speaking, my aunts, uncles, and even Flu were mistrustful of the educational system. For this reason it was common for kids in our family to miss large chunks of the school year simply due to the widely held belief that long desert camping trips were more valuable as education. In a world where learning to scrape the meat from a lizard’s back was an important survival skill, Al-Dafira kids would have thrived. However, that was not the world we were living in anymore. As a rule, almost all of my cousins, both male and female, were held back in school, and it was normal to drop out to get married. The lack of success in school led to a generally negative collective opinion of it. This paved the way for a generation of individuals who could survive alone in the desert but who if placed at a desk were considered failures. Needless to say, this general status of abjection was upsetting to me. In addition to this, my privileged place among the wealthiest kids in the country only served to make me feel more confused, more belligerent, and more alone than I had ever been in America.
Umi Safya encouraged us not to care about being accepted by the “moderns,” as the non-Bedouin city-folk were referred to. Umi complained about how they had begun to impose ideas about class that had not existed before. “Nowadays, all the girls want weddings in fancy hotels, not tents, and they want personal drivers for shopping trips to spend money they don’t have. They want marka handbags and shoes.” And she was right—all of the Gulf had a bad case of the nouveaux riches. This was big trouble for other families like ours, because we had the nouveau part without the riche.
When I was just a visitor, no one expected me to pray. And when I was new, no one expected me to roust myself at 5 a.m. Now that I was a resident taking up my mouthful of the house’s food rations, I was expected to pray at least three times a day. Umi entered in the dark every morning and jangled her cane through the rungs of the metal bunk bed like a dinner triangle, yelling “Goomu! Al-Salah!” It had come to pass by now that I was too ashamed to admit I didn’t really have enough memorized to pray properly. I sat down on the bottom bunk and stared at Falak’s back while she went about her prostrations. She looked like a ghost silhouetted in her soft white khimar, the only skin showing the soles of her feet, mottled orange from an old henna job. I listened to her prayers as I hunched there on the bed. She whispered a verse, words knocking against the backs of her teeth as she spoke them without opening her mouth. It was a soothing repetition. I imagined that holding those sounds in my mouth would be refreshing, like sucking on a mint.
When she left the room I locked the door behind her and timidly unrolled the carpet and khimar like a spiritual scavenger. I felt silly wrapped in my aunt’s sheet, standing at the foot of her carpet, right hand over left at my belly. What could I do? I assured myself it would be the effort that counted, and I called the verses I could remember up from pit of my childhood memory. The first part came easily, and apart for a fumbled line in the middle, the full Fatiha tumbled out of me. But then I was at a loss, because the rest of the words were empty.
I gave up and knelt down on the carpet feeling like an idiot. My mind wandered the maze-line that bordered the carpet. It was bright electric blue, and for the first time I noticed that the design on the carpet was actually a view looking out through a colonnade to the Kaaba. I kept parsing through the verses I knew, tracing them with my finger in the Quran, wishing I understood, expecting some kind of epiphany to come from pronouncing the syllables. It reminded me of staring at a Magic Eye puzzle in the newspaper—retraining my vision into recognizing another dimension.
Then I had a moment of strange out-of-self objectivity, like the surprise when you look in the mirror and notice how alien and weird human faces really are. I felt shrinkingly small and epically distant from everyone and everything I knew. The earth was turning on its axis under me, and it was making me dizzy. That old star phobia started coming back and I wanted something to cling to. And as the situation would have it, that thing came in the form of a boy.
18
EPSILON CANIS MAJORIS • THE VIRGINS •
Suhail and I were paired together during a physics unit on diffraction. It was unusual for Qataris of the opposite sex to be paired up, and in truth, the boys and girls generally kept a respectful distance from one another in school. There was a sort of silent but sacred Las Vegas bond between the Qataris—whatever happened in school stayed in school. Still, the girls were very careful about their appearance (perhaps no more so than image-obsessed teenage girls anywhere else), and the boys who loved kicking the backs of foreign girls’ chairs adjusted their behavior when a Qatari girl was present. As these things generally go, I had noticed Suhail because he wasn’t like the other boys. So when we finally sat beside each other, watching Mr. Kindi work out an equation on the whiteboard, I was sprung.
“The beam shape of a radar antenna can be analyzed using diffraction equations,” Mr. Kindi explained in the background. The foreground of my brain was fizzing with the nearn
ess of the boy next to me. “So today we are going to do a fun experiment with diffraction. Does anyone know who this is?” He passed an envelope around the class with a thirty-five-dirham postage stamp on it.
“Ibn Haitham,” Suhail said, too quietly to be heard.
I was impressed. His apparent fluency in Islamic science and his ability to recognize the smudgy little portrait were intimidating in themselves. But the thing that beguiled me most was his indifference to getting credit for it, a trait that was rare in a culture where practically every activity was given a résumé-padding certification and even the most minor milestone was commemorated with a trophy.
Someone at the front yelled out, “Ibn Haitham!”
“That is correct!” Mr. Kindi proclaimed, enthused by the response he was getting.
Suhail smiled in quiet triumph as though the praise had been lavished on him. And that was all it took. The little hairs on my body stood on end and reached for him. I was charged, lit, on. His presence was like a burning ember right next to me, and as I warmed myself in his aura, I also noticed things: his big white teeth as perfect as Chiclets, the mustache bristling his boyish face, the comet of depigmentation scarring his cheek . . . and I yearned, which was a new feeling.
“And what was he famous for having observed?” Mr. Kindi cut into my daydream. Shifty silence.
Again Suhail answered quietly, “Solar eclipse.”
Mr. Kindi looked around the room hopefully. “Nobody?”
I nudged Suhail, exasperated for him. I grabbed his hand and raised it for him.
“Suhail, do you have the answer?” Mr. Kindi asked hopefully.
“He observed the eclipse of the sun.”
“Extra credit to you, sir, good.” Mr. Kindi turned his back to us and carried on with the lesson.
The Girl Who Fell to Earth Page 15
