by Sabyn Javeri
‘And me?’
There is a strange unfamiliar look in his eyes and for a second the woman feels as if needles are being pierced into her body. Needles sharpened with guilt and coloured with hubris. She knows she has hurt him.
She envelops him in her long black cloak and whispers, ‘My devotion is for Allah, but all my passion is for you.’
‘Prove it.’
‘I will.’
SPRING
When the flowers found face again, spring scattered the air with tiny blossoms and the scent of love. People stopped throwing themselves on subway tracks, postmen started delivering lost mail, and the English started smiling, the husband and wife decided to visit the park.
The man and woman lie on the grass. Such peace surrounds them that passers-by are forced to stop and look at them. They are still. He in a brown suit that reflects his coffee-bean skin like an aura around him and she enveloped in a long, black garment, which makes her look like a mythical creature from afar. How long had they been lying there? Still and serene amidst the tiny pink daisies sprouting among the mustard green leaves of Hyde Park, they seem almost organic. A newborn’s tranquillity reflects off their faces, as if they had been birthed right then and there in that very spot. They do not touch but seem to have an unbreakable connection.
‘I could lie in your arms forever,’ he whispers in her ears. The spell is broken. She smooths her scarf and laughs.
‘I mean it,’ he persists.
‘What a thought, husband. You should find something more useful to do,’ she teases him.
‘I think… I really do. I think we have a connection. Whatever this bond is … it makes me want to live … forever.’
‘The way you talk,’ she laughs, ‘you sound like some spoilt English public school boy. Who’d think you were a good ol’ Muslim lad from south London.’
‘Oye, watch it.’ And he holds her close. Closer than the darkness that surrounds them as the sun sets and night ushers in all kinds of mystique.
SUMMER
The night is still and restless at once. The night is ironic. The night is significant. Tonight, a dream is being filled with bags of hope and make-believe, the kind that angels preach in faraway heaven when God makes a mistake. If only the meaning of events did not elude us as they unroll through our lives.
The bed stretches beneath them like sand. Desperate for some sparks of wisdom to prove his love, the husband whispers, ‘I think I love you more than I love life. I want to live inside you.’
‘Hush,’ she places her palm against his mouth. She feels as if perfumed clouds have descended upon their dark airless house. He climbs upon her and, entering her, whispers, ‘Let me make you my home.’
She pushes him off and straddles him between her knees. With her long dark hair covering her breasts, she looks like an ancient goddess. The goddess laughs.
‘Like the tinkling of a thousand wine glasses. Like the gushing of a hundred fountains,’ he muses as she moves above him.
When the pleasure has run through them, she turns to him and says solemnly, ‘It is all His greatness, you know. He creates us and he instils this love inside our hearts. What you are feeling, my beloved husband, is Allah’s magnitude.’
‘I think what I’m feeling is love for my wife.’
‘And I thank Him for putting that love in your heart.’
Their eyes lock and they gaze into a painted future until he suddenly turns his head away.
‘What if one day I went away, wife? Would you miss me?’
She points her index finger upwards and says, ‘There is no soul but has a protector over it.’1
‘Is your faith really so strong, wife?’
‘Strong enough to be able to withstand suspicious glances and funny remarks.’
‘Sometimes I feel bad my family got you married to me and brought you to London, far away from your family in Pakistan. You must feel so awkward here.’
‘No, I don’t feel awkward. I don’t know why you keep asking me that.’
He props himself up on one elbow and traces her chin with his index finger. ‘You won’t like this but … why don’t you just stop wearing your hijab?’
She turns away her face and he feels a river of remorse gush through his body.
‘Are you ashamed of me?’ she asks without looking at him.
He remains silent.
‘I worry about you,’ he says, his gaze elsewhere. ‘That’s all.’
‘Well, let me tell you something.’ Her voice is firm and controlled as she looks him in the eye. ‘I’m not ashamed of my faith. My hijab is part of me. It’s my Muslimness. It sort of announces my arrival. Anyway, why do you people in the West always think that hijab is a symbol
of submission?’
‘I don’t know, maybe because it forces you to
cover up?’
‘And to bare herself is a woman’s right?’
He stares at her before he begins to laugh.
Later, he asks her what she wants to do most in the world and she tells him she wants to travel the world. ‘I promise,’ he says. ‘I promise I will take you, hijab and all,’ he winks and she throws a pillow at him. It bursts into a rain of soft feathers and they are locked in a timeless moment. Across the feathers, they silently confess to each other a bond that no marriage union, whether arranged as theirs or through love and courtship, could have created. A bond of friendship.
AUTUMN
A season of grey, neither night nor day. It was that time of year when stones bled and birds fled to the south.
A season of migration for some and for others, a season of betrayal.
When the tears finally come, they flow like a flood. She buries her nose in his shirt and tries to inhale his essence. ‘Why did you leave me like this?’ she keeps asking. In the same city as she, not too far away, a whole world lies burnt. Flesh and plastic mingling with steel as flames lick at every inch of their being. They tell her that her husband is dead. ‘He that was born to the earth shall return one day to his Maker.’ It is not his death she mourns but the fact that they suspect him as the suicide bomber.
She tries to tell them that he had gone to the US embassy for a visa. But they are only interested in knowing if he had visited Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq … Did he know other terrorist networks … Was he working alone or with someone? She concentrates on the blue of their uniform to block out her husband’s absence. As if she were talking to a friend and not to the police, she says, ‘We wanted to have children. We were going to start a family. The firstborn … if it was a son, we were going to name him Mohammed. After the Prophet. And if it was a daughter, we’d call her Ayesha. We were going to have four children. We were … so happy.’
She wipes a single tear from her cheek and looks at the man in blue. He is holding out some papers at her.
‘You think he is the killer just because he was Muslim?’
The man stays silent, but in her head, she imagines him saying, ‘You are an extremist. You dress like one. Your husband has to be the suicide bomber who killed himself, injuring many others, outside the US embassy.’
The good wife is loyal. From right to left and left to right, she shakes her head, as if possessed. ‘No, sir, my husband wasn’t suicidal; he was a very happy man. He told me himself that he loved me more than the world. He wanted to live forever.’
When the man says nothing, she starts beating her chest and shouting, ‘No, sir, he wasn’t an extremist or a terrorist. He was a good man. My husband was a good man. It was my faith that killed him. It was my love of God, for which he wanted to prove his worth. I killed him. I am the killer.’
‘We won’t get anything out of her today,’ the man murmurs to his colleague. A woman with long and slender white fingers hands her a tissue.
Later, when she has stopped crying, they tell her they have intelligence that he was part of a sleeper cell. He was an Islamist.
‘You are wrong,’ she argues. ‘He did not even want me to
wear the hijab. He just wanted to be normal. To be accepted, like everyone else.’
Looks are exchanged before one of them says, ‘Perhaps it was a front.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He may have been using you. Perhaps he was an extremist masquerading as a moderate man. He was dangerous. We have information…’
She feels the world around her sway just a little before her head hits the ground.
WINTER ONCE AGAIN
The heavy curtain of rain strung with the white lace of fog bade the autumn goodbye, heralding the unstoppable change of seasons. Once again, darkness had prevailed. A season in between.
At the funeral, she wore her shroud in black. The veil still hung across her face and she fiddled with the edges. Women were not allowed into the graveyard, but they hadn’t been able to stop her.
When the first fistful of soil was thrown into the grave, she cried, ‘He is returning to his Maker.’ The few present looked at her, astonished.
‘Don’t cry for him,’ she said in between huge sobs that shook her entire body. ‘Don’t cry for him,’ she kept saying as she stood by the mud grave where they buried a few of his teeth – the only parts of him that survived the blast.
She was the last one left.
The good wife now became the good widow. That was the last time she left her husband’s house. ‘Any time now,’ she would repeat to herself, ‘he’d return home and take me into his arms, prying me away from my prayers. Any time now.’
* * *
First published in Trespass, London, 2009.
Coach Annie
At first I was a curiosity, a nuance, then a nuisance, an irritation, a problem and finally a thing of hate. They say when people start to hate you, it’s because they are afraid of you. Afraid of your power. Well, I was getting plenty of hate. Did that make me powerful? I suppose so.
I’d always been the odd one out in our little Yorkshire town. The Paki girl with the headscarf and the spots. In that order, believe it or not. It should have been the other way around. The spots came first. Angry red dots that decorated my face like a Christmas tree. My mother made me scrape my oily skin with wire mesh and wash my face with hard soap, every day – but that only made it worse. My face became dry and scaly like the skin of a desert lizard. The eczema spread to my scalp and, slowly but surely, my hair began to fall off.
I was the only daughter amidst four sons, and my mother could not bear the shame. That’s when the headscarf came into the picture. One day, she approached me with a beautiful pink cloth and wrapped it around my bald head, tucking the ends under my chin. The look of joy in her eyes was unforgettable. I too felt as if I had finally validated my femininity to her.
She made it out to be a religious thing, bragging to our neighbours about how devout her little girl was, and somewhere along the way, I began to believe it too. I took my hijab very seriously, even if not my prayers. I suppose, at that point, I just preferred the cloth to a wig. Believe me, wearing a wig is a bit of a challenge when you’re just eight. Having a piece of cloth wrapped around my head was a lot easier than juggling a mop of hair when the biggest thrill in life was running senseless in the backyard with my brothers, mum shouting that we’re the devil’s lot. No one listened to her. Even back then.
Sometimes I wondered if she was invisible, for, despite her shrill voice, people had a habit of walking off while she was talking. And she loved to talk. Those days, it was about my hijab. She couldn’t gloat enough about how we were all going to heaven thanks to her virtuous daughter, how proud she was of me for wearing the hijab and embracing God’s will, of my big, big sacrifice. I usually stared blankly while she babbled away, wondering how slapping a piece of cloth on one’s head could guarantee free entry into the pearly gates. And why she didn’t wear one herself if it was, indeed, so special.
To be fair, she tried. But Mum couldn’t bring herself to wear one regularly, though she covered her head loosely with a shawl when she stepped out. Too much trouble, she’d say, buying me beautiful silk scarves to tie around my head instead. But I preferred her tea cloths to the fancy embroidered ones she got for me from Bradford. I just couldn’t handle the silky material she preferred. It skidded all over. The plain, coarse, skull-hugging hijab suited me. Snug and neat along my bony skull, slipping on like a balaclava, and staying there. It sure stopped our nosy Pakistani neighbours from speculating what sins my mother had committed for baldness to befall me.
I think we all assumed it would be a temporary thing. But my hair never grew back. Instead, the hijab grew on me. It became an extension of me. A part of me. It kept me grounded. Reminded me that God was watching out for me. I was no longer just the odd-looking girl with the wrong skin, wrong colour, wrong hair. Instead, I was that Muslim girl.
People left me alone. And believe me, it suited me just fine.
Did it get lonely? Yes, it did. But that was okay because I had four younger brothers to take up all my time. I was happy to play football in the yard with them when we weren’t all fighting and trying to kill each other.
Fast forward to my teen years and I found myself being offered a government grant to go to university to study sports therapy. Part of the deal was that for six months prior, I had to work with the community youth with whatever task was assigned to me, be it teaching or coaching or care-giving. My only hesitation was that it meant getting out there and helping strangers. Usually troubled ones. It meant interaction. And I was scared. I was used to hiding away, melting into the scenery, avoiding socialization at all costs. Having an overprotective mother helped. My life was just school and home. I rarely went out. I couldn’t ever remember talking to a stranger.
‘This is your chance to get an education. Grab it,’ my brothers told me and, not for the first time, I wondered why they were so different from my shy and reticent father whose world, like mine, was the factory and home. ‘Give it a try,’ my brothers urged. ‘People would give an arm and a leg to get a full scholarship.’
So I went ahead and signed up, waiting for my first assignment.
I’d been tossing a ball around in the community centre one chilly January morning when one of the bosses stepped out, asking for a volunteer. I watched curiously as the suited man said in a high-pitched, anxious voice that he needed someone to coach a team. I should have known by the tremble in his voice that this was no little league. I offered myself, and the sacrificial cow that
I was, the gods were satiated.
I still don’t know if God was trying to help me or kill me. All I know is that he was testing me. First day on the pitch and I found myself trying to tell a bunch of towering Geordie lads with learning difficulties, that
I was there to coach them. There was a fair bit of laughter and I saw myself through their eyes. A five feet two inches Asian girl with a headscarf. Not exactly cutting the stereotypical cult figure of a macho coach with a gut, slapping his thighs and yelling, ‘Come on’.
The shock was mutual, for I had expected young boys, not six-feet–tall, gigantic lads with special needs. But while I hid my fear, they made their feelings crystal clear. They didn’t say anything; no, those lads didn’t. But on the pitch, the anger and the fury at being told what to do by a wee little lass in a hijab came out. They fell on me, kicked me, pushed me, roughed me up.
All part of the game. I can’t complain.
Someone once told me that part of winning was showing up. So I showed up day in and day out. My bruises got deeper, my bones cracked some more, one swollen eye stopped opening all the way. I took it on the chin. Like a sport.
It became a kind of joke. But then I was used to jokes. On me, that is.
The joke is on me. Like my headscarf, it was part of me. Chin up, I’d tell myself and march out into the field, my mother yelling at me that I should forget uni-shuni and go see a doctor to get my head checked, and that I should get a normal job at the supermarket checkout like all the other Asian girls my age.
Sometimes, even my brot
hers winced when they saw my injuries.
‘There are easier ways to kill yourself,’ my younger brother said to me one day, as he carried me off the field after a particularly gruelling match. But I shook my head.
‘I love sports,’ I managed to say between the blood oozing from my mouth. ‘I love the field.’
The attempts to accidently yank off the headscarf were many, though none was successful. I always wondered what they expected to find. The roughest guy in my team was the smallest lad on the pitch, and he was usually the one doing the headlocks. The biggest guy, his brother, usually went for my whistle. Gio and Sacha. They were simple guys with a black-and-white view of the world, sure that everything bad had to do with my kind. So sure that sometimes even my own faith shook.
It was around then that 7/7 happened. I went home and cried my lashless eyes out. It seemed so senseless. But I guess violence made the world go around. It was like night and day, I often thought. Where there is love, there is hate. And if hate is power, then perhaps this was a struggle between the love of power and the power of love.
I would soon find out.
Six weeks down, I was nearly done with my coaching credits when a player tripped me. I broke my ankle. Sadly, it didn’t break my spirit. I showed up, crutch and all. Faith can make you do a lot of illogical things, but sometimes it can also give you the strength to push ahead.
I showed up, ready for more abuse. But something changed that day.
‘Man, Annie, there ain’t no stopping you, is there?’ One of the players said, cracking a smile.
I shook my head. Truth was, I didn’t know any better. There was nothing else out there for me. Off the field, I was the bald, eczema-ridden, Muslim fundo. On the field, I was fire. It fired me up, football.
‘Why don’t you play professional?’ the same player asked me later that day.
I smiled and pointed to my headscarf. ‘They don’t allow professional footballers to wear a hijab.’