by Amal Awad
“I think you’re exaggerating, don’t you? Hakeem isn’t a jerk,” I said. “And if he is any or all of those things, it’s nothing to do with his fundyness. That’s just his personality.”
I didn’t ask Lara why she was in such a rage for me to marry someone who she deemed obsessive and controlling. Better not to open that treasure chest of Lara wisdom.
Lara shrugged. “Whatever. So? Is he?”
“I don’t know,” I said, exasperated. “I’m not sure we have the same definition of fundy.”
“That’s because there are too many kinds,” she lamented.
“Then maybe you should just forget about Jamal,” I said. “He’s generally pretty observant.”
Thoughtful pause from Lara’s end. “No, I shouldn’t be hasty.”
After dinner, Lara begged me to drive to a café she’d heard about in the area. “They make a sticky date pudding to die for!” she assured me, although I neglected to enquire who gave her this tip. She was already launching into directions.
Ten minutes later, I conceded that Lara had no idea where she was going. We were totally lost. I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with the North Shore, but I didn’t know it well. Five minutes after that, we also had a flat tyre, apparently caused by a nail. It’d probably been there for ages too, waiting patiently for its moment of glory. Choosing the most inopportune time to suck the life out of the tyre and leave me stranded.
“Oh gawd!” said Lara helpfully. She kicked the tyre and let out a momumental sigh.
“Lara, I have no idea where we are.”
“Of course you do! We’re in-.” Lara looked around and pointed before pausing dramatically. “Well, that shop over there looks familiar.”
“Health Barn?”
“Okay, maybe we’re lost. I could have sworn this was the right way.”
I blamed myself really. I should have known better than to listen to her on a matter such as street directions, or even café recommendations.
“This is not my fault,” announced Lara a moment later.
“No, of course not, it’s mine.”
“Okay, what are we going to do?”
“Call roadside assistance, I guess.”
“Yes! Of course. What’s their number?”
“One sec.” I got back inside the car and fumbled through my glove compartment until I found what I was looking for.
Oh bugger.
My account had expired two weeks ago. Renewing it was on my list of “to dos” (higher up on the list than “join the gym”), I just never quite got around to it. A vision of the renewal notices sitting neatly on my desk at work popped into my head. Things had just gotten so busy lately. I was vaguely appalled by my own disorganised state. What else had I neglected to renew? Had I paid all my bills?
I whimpered.
“What is it?” said Lara, coming around to stand in front of me.
“My account’s expired.”
“So? Just ask them to come anyway! Renew it now!”
“I suppose I could.” I dialled the company and after several button-presses, I was put through to an actual human being, although not before Lara grabbed the phone off me and yelled something colourful at the automatic voice-prompt message.
“We can renew it, that’s no problem, Samira,” said the kind customer service assistant.
“Oh, thank you, that’s wonderful,” I breathed.
Lara smiled and gave me the thumbs-up.
“So could we get some assistance now?” I asked.
“Sure. I just need an address or a point of interest,” she said.
I supplied the lady with the necessary information. She typed it all in then said, “Great. The current wait is approximately two hours.”
“Pardon me?” I said, my heart diving into my stomach. “Did you say two hours?”
“Yes, we have a huge backlog. It’s Saturday night.”
“Oh, I see. Is there any possibility at all of someone coming sooner?”
“It’s possible, but I can’t guarantee anything,” she said, apologetically.
She did seem rather lovely, so I didn’t want to be rude. It’s just that it was getting rather late, and the lovely lady from the roadside company was all cheery, and well, she didn’t know my mother.
“All right, well, thank you,” I finally said. I hung up with her and Lara shook her head in bewildered question.
“What?”
“They’re not coming for at least two hours!”
“Crap,” said Lara. “Your mum’s gonna kill you.”
I nodded. Mum still imposed curfew. Tragic, I know. But, as I was reminded so often, as long as I was living under their roof, and as long as there were “nutso” (plural) on the streets, I was to be home before midnight.
Of course, the days of Arab-style discipline were long behind
us – meaning there was no more shoe-throwing and ear-pulling. Nevertheless, no one dared cross my mother when she was in a temper.
“Well sodding call someone else,” said Lara. “Omar?”
“There’s no way I’m calling Omar.” We would never hear the end of it. This was all Mum needed to keep me coming in at a reasonable hour. “Remember that time you broke down at night in the middle of nowhere?” Health Barn, despite being in a shopping district in the leafy North Shore area, would become “the middle of nowhere” forever after.
Mum and I had already had this fight before. The worst was a couple of years ago: we woke Dad up with the yelling. I’d come home half an hour late from a wedding and she wouldn’t let it go.
Finally I told her that she couldn’t control me, I was in my twenties, blah, blah, blah. Then Mum came back with this little gem: “I don’t care if you’re 40! As long as you live here, you won’t come home late.”
Following that was a bout of anxiety and an extended period of PMS-like symptoms. I didn’t particularly want a repeat of it.
Mum might have had a point on the safety, even though it pained me to admit it. I wasn’t exactly fond of driving very late at night, particularly on my own. I had an overwhelming fear of carjacking. That and the plastered loons yelling “Go back to your own country, [insert colourful term]!” tended to put a damper on things.
“Okay, so call… oh… Hakeem!” Lara did a little jump, pleased with her own genius. “Yes!”
“Ah yeah, that’s not gonna happen!”
“What? Why not? Just call him!” she pleaded.
“Lara, I’m not going to call Hakeem! Don’t be ridiculous!” I replied, getting a little high-pitched. He’d almost be worse than my mother. He’d be more silently fear-inducing.
“Have you got any better ideas?”
I paused. Damn it. “Well, we can just wait for roadside service to come. They might come earlier,” I said.
“Okay, honey, I’m not waiting two hours for roadside assistance. It’s cold, your mum killing you will also seriously bum me out. On top of that, even though my parents are much easier about this stuff than yours, they’ll hear it from your mum and things will get messy. If you don’t call him, I will!”
So she did. I refused, but Lara was determined. She grabbed my phone and called him and without pause asked him if he could come to our rescue. It was more of a demand, and I could almost feel the disapproval through the phone waves. This was all kinds of bad. Just as Hakeem and I were starting to get along again.
Before Hakeem arrived, I had to listen to Lara parrot on about everything from mad cow disease (at one point she thought she was experiencing symptoms), to the time she dated a boy in high school.
“Of course what stopped me from dating him properly,” she said, “was the thought of my parents finding out and then doing something awful. Then the BBC would make some crappy biopic about me, and that alone was enough to put me off. I really didn’t like him enough to risk it.”
I stared ahead, mentally whimpering, not wanting to open the present-day dating can of worms.
“Of course, they’d get some B-g
rade actress who was an extra on Eastenders or something equally tragic to play me,” continued Lara.
“Lara, you’ve never had a boyfriend, right?”
She paused. “Technically ... no.”
“You’ve just had a bit of fun?”
“A very little bit,” she offered, albeit grudgingly.
She was silent for one blissful moment.
“I don’t feel bad, you know,” said Lara.
“About?”
“Having some fun. With boys. I have my limits. It’s harder when they get you with the guilt though,” she said.
I shrugged. “I don’t know what to say, Lara.”
“Would you really go your whole life without even kissing a boy if you don’t get married?”
It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about it, of course. It did seem unfair, sometimes, that it was a matter of naseeb; you either got married or you’d end up a spinster like a supporting Jane Austen character who everyone liked but pitied. I didn’t think about it much though, because it wasn’t what I wanted for myself; it was better not to let the idea take root.
“I don’t know, Lara,” I replied. “I’m not the same person I was a few years ago. Who knows where I’ll be five years from now.”
I suppose I surprised myself with my response, but it was an honest answer. I knew enough about life that it was all a bit hilly. Besides, a few years ago, I wouldn’t have been so easy about talking to boys, let alone having regular coffee catch-ups with them. I didn’t see anything wrong with it now, but I’d have felt crap about it in the past.
See? Growing, changing. Perspective could be such a beautiful thing – like hindsight, just more useful.
“What about you, Lara? Boys don’t just want to kiss. Would you ever, you know ... have sex before marriage?”
“Oh lord, no,” she said, easily. “That just introduces too many issues. Stuff you can’t bounce back from.”
Lara stared ahead, chewing over her own conclusion. I didn’t say it, but I was amazed that her only concerns were pregnancy or STDs. I couldn’t see myself going there because I’d been taught to think about it differently, and that way of thinking wasn’t going anywhere.
Still, I envied Lara’s ease a little. She understood Arab/Muslim Guilt, but it seemed to bounce off her before it could penetrate. She thought for herself, but still cared about the basics. I admired the truthfulness of it, though I could never tell her this because her head would explode.
As with all serious matters, Lara didn’t linger on the topic, swiftly changing gears. She worried Hakeem would miss us and was formulating a way to light up our position.
“Lara, I don’t have a flare back there. Will you just leave it?”
“We could use your headscarf. Wave it around! It’s light green, it’s bound to stick out!”
Fifteen minutes later, she was singing to me. To be fair, Lara had a beautiful voice. I could get goose bumps listening to her; it was one of the few times she wasn’t acting like a complete loon. She knew some Arabic songs, including a famous one by a popular Lebanese artist named Nancy Ajram that she was singing now. It was a playful one about courtship and treating a girl right.
“Ma fish haga tigi keda, ehda habibi keda,” she sang, cheerfully, from the kerb. She moved her shoulders in time to the melody, her arms half-raised elegantly like a belly dancer, her facial expressions flirty and cheeky like the singer’s in the video clip.
“Habibi, arrab, bos we bos we bos. Zaalan ez’aal, ez’aal nos we nos,” she powered on, her enthusiasm almost persuading me to join in. “Lahsan haba’aed, aba’aed ah we nos, we ahteeb enta akeed khasran!”
“My love, come closer. Look and look and look. If you’re angry, then be only a little angry,” were the words. “Be careful, otherwise I’ll leave you and you will be the loser!”
Arabs have always been poetic. Mind you, my translation didn’t really do the lyrics justice.
“I wanted to be a singer, you know,” said Lara, wistfully, when she finished the song.
We were on a quiet, not terribly well-lit street, sitting opposite Health Barn, a name that was now etched into my mind. The only noise came from an occasional car passing through and an orchestra of crickets nearby.
When I didn’t say anything, Lara continued. “I know, you’re thinking what’s new? It’s just one of my ‘things’, right?” She cocked her head to the side. “Singing was different though.”
“You never told me that,” I said, eventually swivelling around to face her.
She shrugged, looking ahead. “Nothing to tell. I was in every choir in school. I did a solo once at the Royal Albert Hall for some school spectacular thing. Dad wouldn’t even come to hear me sing. He was all like, sure, go for it, who’s going to be there anyway? Then on the night he got into a fight with my mum about it and wouldn’t go.”
“That sucks, hon,” I said, frowning.
Lara gave an exaggerated sigh then, twisting a little my way, she winked.
Hakeem arrived shortly later, finding us without trouble despite the absence of a flare.
Twenty minutes later he was wiping his hands on a towel as he crouched beside my back left tyre. He was ticked off, I was sure of it. I didn’t think it was so much that he had to change a tyre for me than that he was wondering why on earth I was where I was when I was.
“You really should learn how to change a tyre,” said Hakeem.
“Yes, yes, of course,” said Lara, who had her arms wrapped tightly around her. “Are we all done yet?”
“Yes, we’re all done. Samira, you’ll need to get a new tyre, okay?” he said, glancing at me.
I nodded obediently as Lara rushed over to the passenger’s side and jumped into the car.
“Do you know how to get home from here?” said Hakeem.
“Not exactly,” I replied. I would have been fine from Cate’s house, but I’d no idea where we were now.
Oh, I couldn’t look at him. He was annoyed. I was annoyed. For different reasons, but there was a lot of annoyance nonetheless.
Hakeem studied me for a moment. His expression eventually softened a little. He gave me clear directions and asked me to repeat them.
“Thank you,” I said, biting my lip. “Sorry for disturbing you.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “But you ought to be more careful in future.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” I mumbled, thinking that if this was a Facebook conversation, I’d be blowing on my knuckles by now. But everything seemed different lately. I felt immobilised. Defenceless. It was totally irritating.
“I didn’t say it was your fault. I said you have to be more careful.”
“Sorry,” I said, feeling deeply embarrassed. I almost wished we’d called Omar now.
“Next time don’t leave it so long,” he said. “Call me straight away. I know you can’t call your brother.”
Lara popped her head out of the window. “Samira! Come ooooooon, I want to goooooo.”
Hakeem smiled tightly. “Follow me. I’ll get you onto the freeway,” he said.
“Wait,” I said without thinking.
“Yes?”
“Um. How are you?”
“I’m okay. Alhamdulillah. Nothing has changed since we spoke the other day.”
I nodded. “That’s good. And work is good?”
“Work is fine. How about you? Still tackling the world of weddings with ease?”
I smiled awkwardly. “Yes. I just wanted to know if there was anything new,” I said, lamely. In fairness though, I really didn’t know what was going on in his life. I further deduced, after some brief consideration, that I did care to know.
“Things are same old, Samira. For me, anyway.”
I hesitated. “Yeah, same.”
We stood there stupidly for a moment, before my car horn pierced the silence.
“Samira!”
“Okay, okay!” I shook my head at Lara disapprovingly. “One second!”
Lara pouted formidably a
nd sat back in her seat.
“You should probably get going,” said Hakeem. “You don’t want your parents to worry.”
“You mean my mum, of course.”
“She’s pretty scary when she’s mad.”
I nodded and smiled. “Okay, well thank you again.”
“Do not send me anything!” he said as he walked away.
“I-.”
“No!” He waved a hand in my direction. “I know you! You’re already figuring out what to get me as a thank you gift.”
He eventually turned and I walked over to him.
I was always impressed by his height. It was of course a blessing from Allah. But, praise Allah, Hakeem was brilliantly tall and manly. Not that I noticed it much. Just remembered it somewhat whenever I saw him.
“I just-.”
“Samira,” he said, his tone growing more serious. “If you want to do anything for me, you will go home now, and drive safely. You will also stop taking directions from Lara.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hakeem sighed.
“Well, but before I go, have you watched The Princess Bride yet?”
“No, not yet,” he said. “I will though. I just want to watch it when I’ll have no interruptions, and when I’m feeling fresh. It looks intense.”
I rolled my eyes. “Very funny. I’ll have you know The Princess Bride is one of the greatest parody, spoof, comedies ever made.” I realised he must have assumed it was some cockamamie love story set in medieval times, all slow motion and sweeping music.
“I can appreciate that, hence my comment about intensity,” he replied, smiling.
I crossed my arms and looked away embarrassed. “I know you don’t take me seriously, but believe me, it has depth. It’s clever.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because I know, I’ve watched it so many times,” I replied now looking straight at him.
“No. Why would you think I don’t take you seriously?”
“You know, the usual, Samira’s an airhead. ‘Studied’ communications. Works as an assistant.” I did the air quotes. Not even Lara had the same professional reputation as me. While her high school results were less than stellar, she’d majored in the science strands. I was the artistic humanities grad. I may as well have been a hippie.