Hijabistan

by Sabyn Javeri

  Strangely, she could not remember lighting it.

  The Lovers

  It was the time of the year when day merges into night without a single change of light. We lay on our stomachs on the grass, our legs criss-crossing behind us like a pair of scissors, our mouths stuffed with illicit chocolates. It was 1986. The city was London and I was seven. Everything was as it ought to have been.

  Next to me lay my cousin Ready. He had a habit of spreading his nine-year-old body like a dead crab and being absolutely still, at times, not even blinking.

  ‘Ready!’ I said. Not a single movement. I wondered again why he was called Ready, for he was anything but. No matter what the occasion. The only thing he could do was eat. And when he wasn’t eating, he was hiding. And when he was hiding, it was usually because he was eating.

  He’d been eating a doughnut the first time I saw him. We’d arrived from a small town just outside of Lahore to their semi-detached house in a sprawling suburban London council estate. My father hoped to find a job nearby and till then we were to stay with relatives we had never met before. Four people stood in a row at the doorway in descending order of height. At first, they seemed to me like any other Pakistani-English family. Ready’s father, especially, was a cut-to-cut copy of my own. Tall, imposing and silent. His mother, however, seemed a little different from mine. I couldn’t pinpoint it, but later at dinner, when her scarf kept sliding off her head, I realized it was because she probably didn’t wear it all the time like my mother. Mummy Jee however quickly got out a heap of hairpins and nailed it in place. For the rest of our stay, it stayed glued to Aunty’s head, as if it had been painted on.

  And then there was Aliya, Ready’s older sister and fifteen.

  ‘That age’, my mother had said. When I asked what she meant, Mummy Jee gave me a look and told me off for eavesdropping.

  ‘How could it be eavesdropping if you are talking right in front of us?’ I argued, but she did not answer. She did that a lot. When I exceeded the number of questions I was allowed to ask, which was usually no more than two, she told me to go play.

  ‘But play what?’ I would ask, and be met with silence.

  And so today, here I was, lolling on the grass with Ready after being told to go play, which Ready explained actually meant ‘go away’ when said by adults. But now that we saw Aliya approaching, it meant we had been summoned back and whatever it was that had been brewing between our mothers was over. Since our arrival, at least one hour a day was spent with Mummy Jee lecturing Aunty about something or the other that needed correcting. Today, they had been gesturing wildly with their hands, shaking their heads as their voices rose between shrill highs and almost whispers. In between, my mother cursed the Whites and the Blacks and someone else whose true colours, she said, were yet to be seen.

  Unlike Ready, Aliya was tall and thin, with a long black ponytail tumbling down her back. I thought it made her look like a mermaid. And perhaps for this reason, her mother had told her this morning to put on a headscarf. Standing behind her, Mummy Jee looked like an extra head that had grown over Aunty’s shoulder as she nodded approvingly and threw in a few words of her own for good measure.

  ‘Never trust the stranger’s gaze,’ she warned Aliya. ‘Men in this country have only one thing on their minds. God forbid, even the women here you can’t trust!’

  Aliya listened patiently, then left the house slamming the door behind her. She came home just before her father was due back and, amidst much shouting and tears, Aunty threatened to tell him if she ever did that again. My mother took her place over the shoulder and said, ‘What would the relatives in Pakistan say!’

  Once again, Aliya listened wordlessly, then went up to her room. The sound of furious typing could be heard as she jabbed the keys of the old typewriter that took up most of her desk.

  ‘Ya Allah,’ my mother exclaimed. ‘What on earth is that noise? It sounds like a machine gun.’

  Aunty smiled and said, ‘No, no, sister, my Aliya likes to write. She even got a prize for a poem.’

  ‘Do you know what we call women who write poetry in our culture?’ Mummy Jee snickered, ‘Courtesans!’

  ‘No, no,’ Aunty said. ‘It is for schoolwork…’

  Mummy Jee placed her hand on Aunty’s arm and smiled her most patient smile. ‘Ishrat, you are so naive. All this poetry-shoetry is not good for our girls. Puts all kinds of ideas in their heads. Romance-shomance…’

  ‘But, sister,’ Aunty said, ‘it’s part of her schoolwork. And my daughter must study. Just think, if she is educated, at least she will have some choice in life. You know my neighbour is a sixty-year-old woman who lives by herself! I tell you…’

  Mother pressed a palm over her mouth. ‘It is all this London-Shondon’s doing. Back home, nobody would even think such a thing. You will see, Ishrat. You will see the result of all your mod-run talk when your daughter runs off with a foreigner!’

  While Mummy Jee berated Aunty, Ready and I took advantage of the situation and asked to go to the sweet shop. They nodded distractedly.

  ‘Money?’ I asked.

  Not wanting to let go of this opportunity, Mummy untied the end of her dupatta and thrust a pound coin in my hand.

  ‘Lay phur,’ she said, ‘now go play.’

  That was our cue to race out of the house and towards the corner shop at the end of the street. Though it was still bright, I knew it was late in the day. It felt good to be out in London, at what – going by the clock, at least – was night time. Ready and I entered the shop full of excitement, but before we could reach the pic ’n’ mix section, we stopped dead in our tracks.

  Aliya stood before us, tall and lanky in her jeans, her headscarf lopsided as if it had dropped unexpectedly on her head. She looked equally shocked, by the look of her half-open mouth. Quickly, she slipped her hand in her pocket and it was then I noticed what she had been holding. Another hand.

  Like the Churchill dog I had seen in the insurance advert, our heads bobbed up and down as we traced the hand that now hung limp by the side of the person, to his face. A brown face. We felt our shoulders drop and our necks relax, but then Aliya said, ‘This is my friend, Ram.’

  If I could pin one moment in my life when I instinctively knew my right from wrong without anyone telling me so, it was this. I knew intuitively that I should not be where I was, had not meant to see what I saw and was not prepared to hear what I was hearing. I looked at Ready and nodded. It was time to do what my cousin did best: disappear.

  Later, under the makeshift tent in his bedroom, we felt the bedsheet rise. Aliya peered in at us, her jet-black pupils dilating, then suddenly enlarging as she leaned in towards us. She said nothing and we pretended to ignore her. But after the sheet dropped back down, both of us let out a long, slow breath.

  ‘Ready?’ Ready asked, and we both snuck as far back under the tent as we possibly could without popping out from the other side.

  As it so often happens in life when we want to bury something deep down inside ourselves, our bodies try to throw it back up. First, Ready and I had a bout of vomiting. This was followed by a persistent cough. As we coughed and sneezed, it was all we could do to keep the words slipping out with the phlegm. When that settled, we developed a constant itch. As we scratched our skins, our tongues itched to unload the secret our hearts refused to bury.

  We avoided the grown-ups to the point that, one day, just before we were to leave for Bradford where my father had found a job, my mother caught me by the ear and said, ‘Out with it! What have you broken, you little devil, and where have you hidden it?’

  A string of wasn’t-mes followed, but she would have none of it. ‘Hand it over,’ she said, pointing to the revered candies. I reached into my pocket, but as my hand drew out the toffees, the words slipped out too. ‘We saw Aliya with a boy.’ Instantly, my body felt lighter.

  My mother’s eyes widened and I watched her forehead disappear under her headscarf. ‘I knew it,’ she said, and the load shifted
to my heart. It felt heavy and slippery as it sank lower and lower into the cavity of my chest, stopping just before it dropped into my stomach.

  ‘Please don’t hurt her.’

  ‘Go play.’

  ‘But,’ I protested.

  ‘Just leave, and don’t say a word to anyone.’

  Shutting the door behind me, I saw Mummy Jee take Aunty’s elbow and turn her around.

  In the evening, before we left their house, Aliya gave me a chocolate bar.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered and I nodded, feeling guilty for letting her think her secret was safe with me. Try as I might, I could not eat her offering. I left London holding on to the now sticky, sweaty chocolate, waving a sluggish goodbye to my new friends. I wondered when I would see them again.

  As it happens, I didn’t have to wait too long. During the Christmas break, my father had to go to London for work and, following Mummy Jee’s relentless grumbling about it being a woman’s fate to be left behind while the men went out to enjoy, he took us along. This time, we went to Ready’s house only for lunch.

  The first thing I noticed was how bare it seemed. The house was strangely quiet – not just in sound but in appearance too. After a while, I noticed all the pictures were gone. Even the family photographs had been removed. Just then, Ready came down. I was surprised to see him. He had lost weight and, when he opened his mouth, only a squeak emerged.

  My mother shook her head and smiled. ‘You are very nearly a man now,’ she said. He turned a deep shade of red before disappearing just as quietly as he had appeared.

  Later at lunch, I asked Ready if he wanted to play, but he turned away.

  ‘Men,’ my mother said and laughed.

  ‘Where is Aliya?’ I asked as Aunty served us. ‘Is she busy with her poetry?’ I giggled, winking at Ready as I did so. When he flinched, I looked up at Aunty who looked up at Uncle who looked away.

  ‘We sent her to Pakistan,’ he said.

  A silence descended upon the room, with the only sound punctuating the air being that of my mother’s chewing and swallowing.

  ‘Very good thing you did,’ my mother said, tucking a few stray strands of hair back under Aunty’s headscarf. Mummy’s hands flew busily above Aunty’s head like a pair of pesky flies as she pulled pins from her own head and tucked them into Aunty’s. ‘Who knows what shame-vame she would have brought to the family’s honour?’ A thin glint of saliva gleamed at the corners of her mouth.

  Before we left, I asked Aunty if I could go up to Aliya’s room. Inside, her old typewriter sat silent, its keys like hollowed dead eyes, its clownish smile reminding me of that first journey to London. I took a chocolate from my pocket and placed it under its rusty keys. Her old headscarf lay discarded at the edge, as if she had just gone out for a walk and would come back any time. I picked it up.

  Before leaving, I covered the typewriter with her hijab.

  * * *

  First published in Bengal Lights, 2013.

  A World without Men

  In ordinary circumstances, I would have taken her in. But this was an extraordinary situation. Firstly, she was my student. Secondly, she was a Muslim. Thirdly, she was invisible.

  Complicated as it sounds, it wasn’t really. The invisibility had more to do with being shrouded from head to toe in an elaborate veil than with anything more technical. And believe you me, the jilbab, as she called the all-encompassing veil, was the least of our complications. I suppose having something of a relationship with your student was higher on the list of risks. Albeit not as high as when the student is from an orthodox Muslim family with borderline bipolar tendencies and you are not:

  a)a Muslim

  b)a man

  c)a lesbian.

  Well, enough with the guessing game. I must let the story tell itself. Funny that I call it a story, for when I first started writing, I never thought I would be mining my own life for material. But there you have it, a classic case of ‘write what you know’.

  It all began simply enough. Not a very exciting beginning, I know, but bear with me, for the simplicity is deceptive. And that’s what my life has been all along – a paradox, an oxymoron, or in layman terms, something that looks simple on the surface but has so many tangled roots beneath it that my tongue grows fuzzy at the thought of an analogy that even begins to describe the mess my life is. Which is ironic, because only a few months ago, there would have been a deluge of literary terms ready to rush out of my big mouth. Why? Well, because that’s what I did for a living. Lecture. And that too, on the art of creativity.

  I grew up outside London and had a relatively normal childhood with a set of parents, unlike most other children in my neighbourhood who were brought up by single mothers. I was a happy child, fair-haired, with a ready smile, who grew up a confident young woman. That is, until I had my accident. Too much drinking and some other distractions led to me stepping in front of a bus late one night. I survived, but my self-esteem didn’t. A nasty gash on my forehead and a slight limp left me needy and confused. A point came when I felt the need to tell my story. I had a college degree in Humanities, but the desire to write had overcome everything. One failed novel later, I turned to teaching other aspiring writers how not to write.

  Increasingly, I was beginning to realize that everyone had a book inside them and, just as a difficult labour can be eased with Epidural, they too needed help giving birth to the written word. Stillborns, or alive and kicking, was not up to me. My job was to help deliver. And so, instead of teaching the dead white writers whom no one wanted to read any more, I began teaching creative writing. The Art of Creativity is what my course was called, and I loved teaching it – or I used to, till I moved to this godforsaken town.

  Strange how life takes unexpected turns. A year ago, I’d been living in London, happily married, with a secure job, an antique aga in my kitchen and a cat (a proper Persian one at that). And then the recession hit. Utility took over creativity and business began to suffer. At the same time, my husband got a redundancy package and, instead of wallowing in self-pity like most men would do, he decided he wanted to travel the world – alone. He argued he wanted to rediscover himself and, like a graceful loser, I gave in. But, as they say, bad luck comes in threes. The cat ran away and the aga got a gas leak. To cut a long story short, my life fell apart.

  And I would have stayed under the covers, my head buried deep like an ostrich, if the husband hadn’t demanded we rent out the house. ‘It’s too big for one person. And you are not earning enough to pay the mortgage,’ he argued. ‘We’re going to end up losing the house,’ he said with the conviction of a clairvoyant, making me truly doubt my ability to manage my life. ‘Your stubbornness will go swimming in the sea if we miss any more mortgage payments,’ he went on. Always the logical one, I thought, yielding to his will.

  The husband and I parted ways, promising to meet in six months’ time to review our feelings. The money was bound to run out by then, I consoled myself, and he would return with his tail tucked between his legs. I told myself it would all work out in the end. It always did. I should have known then that there was something wrong with me.

  And so it was that I found myself thrown out of my own house as we let it to complete strangers for six months. Since it was a short let, we left all our things in the house. I still remember the strange feeling of being suspended in mid-air as I handed over my keys. I imagined the tenants lying down on my bed, sleeping on my pillow, using my toilet seat, and I felt like throwing up. The next few days, I stayed with a friend who constantly berated me for giving in to my conniving husband’s machinations. ‘How could you be so naïve?’ she said, throwing up her hands in the air. ‘How could you let him kick you out of the house, out of his life …’ After three days of her incessant nagging, I left without leaving a note.

  The whole episode made me want to get as far away from London as possible (while remaining on a train route, just in case I had to come back in a hurry). I scoured the job ads and found
a few positions worth applying for up north. I still don’t know what it was that attracted me to that godforsaken town, but then again, if we could explain our choices rationally, what drama would there be in life? And so it was that without any logic or reason, I moved to Leicester and found myself teaching the same Dead White Male writers I had come to abhor.

  Leicester was painful. And not just visually. The people looked like the ones I had spent a lifetime trying to get away from by moving to London. Suburban. Not a shred of urbanism in this place masquerading as a city. I shuddered to think that I might slip into their sloppiness and promised myself to stay away from puffy parkas, black trousers and imitation leather. But it didn’t matter how I dressed. I could never fit into their world. The students always laughed at me. In retrospect, I think they laughed at all the teachers. But at that time, struggling to shrug off my paranoia of returning to my provincial roots, I felt extremely self-conscious. Added to that, this was not my subject any more. I’d bullshat my way through the interview trying to get them to hire me.

  ‘We simply don’t offer any courses in creative writing,’ the administrator had said.

  Perhaps she took pity on my dejected face, for she said, ‘But we are looking for someone to teach English literature. Do you have any experience?’

  I hadn’t taught literature for a while, but it didn’t stop me from offering myself up to be slaughtered by a room full of freshmen. Till this day, I don’t know why I did it. I didn’t need the money so bad that I sold my soul. Perhaps I just needed the distraction. Or perhaps there was some greater will at play: that thing with feathers … hope, is it?