Good Muslim Boy

by Osamah Sami

  ‘You are going where?’ insisted the beard, still in Persian.

  ‘I don’t understand your words,’ insisted my dad, smiling and waving his hands about.

  All at once, I started to giggle uncontrollably. We were pulling a scam, and it was working.

  The officer clocked me, scowled, and took our passports into a back room. Everything went still. What was happening? None of us could speak.

  I wanted to talk. I wanted to roar. I wanted to whisper.

  I wanted to let the world know I was here.

  A bunch of soldiers were surrounding us, in the corner. Some of them were pretty young. I tried to breathe normally but for some reason I couldn’t. My chest was heavy, like I was in a sealed cube.

  Who were we, anyway? Did we really scare the authorities this much? Why did they need to point their guns at us? Dad was tough, but not scary. I was strong, but not that strong. I could probably take one of the guards—if he was tied up. Moe Greene was another story; he could have taken three.

  I was itching to move. Everyone was so still. Even passengers had stopped coming in and out of the terminal.

  I wondered if lightning was just God’s way of breaking tension in the skies. I wondered if earthquakes were just the earthly equivalent.

  I knew that if I moved, the guards would spring to action. I had a sudden, undeniable urge to untie and retie my shoes. Surely just one shoe—surely that wouldn’t get me killed?

  I wondered if it would, though. Dad had told me to be still.

  But before I knew it, I was dropping to the ground. I fiddled with my shoelaces.

  No shots were fired. Not even a ‘freeze or we’ll shoot’.

  They didn’t. Say. Anything. What a disappointing relief. And how strange that fiddling with one’s shoes could feel so much like freedom.

  Nobody was shooting me. Well, except my family, with their eyes. But they couldn’t say anything, any more than I could.

  So I untied my shoe, then retied it, at first gingerly, then really going to town. I untied and retied it, over and over again. The guards seemed to be okay with me doing this, for now.

  Suddenly, one moved his gun in a ‘stop it’ gesture. I took the point and stood up and stared at the dull roof.

  But the dull roof stayed dull, and I stayed fidgety. When you’re twelve, it’s hard not to act like it.

  I looked over at a banner sprawled across the wall. It said in Persian: America cannot dare do a damn thing to us.

  It was a famous saying of Ayatollah Khomeini’s, which was often found spray-painted on walls all over the country. I wondered about these Americans, and why they wanted to do damn things. I wondered if Australia was anything like them—I wondered if they were the devil too.

  I began mimicking the Ayatollah in my head, daring the Americans to try and get us. I raised my hand to the sign, like I was greeting a dictator. A great voice boomed behind me, electrocuting me.

  It was the customs officer. He was back, and standing right over me. My heart seized. Shit. How long had he been standing there? How long had I been standing there? Had I been mouthing the words?

  Why, for once, could I not just be?

  ‘You can read our leader’s words on that banner?’ the beard said carefully.

  I just blinked back at him, wondering what I should do.

  Then for once, I stopped wondering and went into autopilot mode. I began reciting the Arabic alphabet, which incidentally is exactly the same as its Persian counterpart. They’re similar in writing—like English and Italian—but they, of course, are completely different languages.

  I continued to blurt the letters in Arabic, showing I could ‘read’ the banner but certainly could not understand the words.

  The beard kept gazing at me. He then grabbed my ear and leaned in: ‘I know you can understand me…I know it…You’re just lucky I can’t prove it,’ he said in a low voice.

  I pulled my eyes away, still reciting.

  The beard handed Dad the passports and ushered us to the departure gates.

  I looked over at my father. I wondered if he was proud of me.

  THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION

  The desert, Iran, 2013: three days until visa expires

  By 1 am, the bus has had to do plenty of stopping; we’re two hours into our trip and we are still getting nowhere. I take the opportunity to coordinate with my family back home, where my brother tells me the community has been flooding the mosque to do the Fatiha, which is held over three successive nights. It’s only to be expected—Dad was the cleric there—but still, it warms my heart.

  I look out the window to see what the hold-up is, and see that it’s just a long queue to fill up on diesel. Are you kidding me? We didn’t do this before it left the terminal?

  The driver notices my anxiousness. ‘Easy, kid,’ he calls back. ‘Just relax. I told you, we either get there or we don’t.’

  A passenger in his forties, a cleric, like my dad, puts in his two cents’ worth. ‘Job, the prophet, was known for his patience,’ he begins. I am in absolutely no mood for a parable. Is anyone?

  Thirty minutes later, we are on the road to Mashhad again. It’s just the bus, the highway, the desolate desert and my thoughts. My body wants to sleep, is desperate to, but my brain just can’t. I wonder if I should pop a Tramadol to help me stay awake, but decide against it for no reason other than an article I read in high school about a girl ODing on a single pill. The best I can hope for, relaxation-wise, is to gaze up at all the stars. Some party they’re having up there.

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  ‘Quick toilet break!’ shouts the driver.

  It’s 3.40 am.

  At 4.05 am, we’re still waiting for one last man. The driver is yelling out for him into the dark and empty desert, but the empty desert shows no signs of calling back. The cleric to my left, who I have nicknamed Cleric Job, raises a hand to calm me: It will be okay.

  Just then, a tall, fat man with a decent beard going emerges from the desert with a teacup in his hand. Where the fuck do you find a cup of tea in the desert after midnight? It’s flat, lightless plains of sand as far as the eye can see, well beyond the limits of the headlights. Must’ve gone far for that tea.

  ‘You ass,’ I seethe through gritted teeth. ‘Hop on the bus before you delay us even further with your utter selfishness.’

  Before you could click your fingers, a small gang of bearded men rise up from seats behind me and approach, wielding large kitchen knives. Turns out, the fat man is the leader of a small Kurdish tribe.

  The driver tries to calm things, while Cleric Job chants prayers, asking for a divine intervention. All I’m armed with is Dad’s walking stick. I lift it like a sword.

  ‘You know who you were talking to?’ asks one of the Kurds, swivelling his shiny blade towards my general intestinal zone.

  ‘I don’t fucking care!’ I yell. It feels good to do this. You can’t yell at a bureaucrat, but you can yell at anyone who’s pointing a knife at you, as it tends to invite a response. ‘It was a toilet break, not a jerk break.’

  ‘We’re fuc
king Kurds!’ he shouts, moving up the bus. ‘You don’t mess with us!’

  Cleric Job stands in the middle, requesting patience from both sides. But I have turned into a mad beast. I bellow from the pits of my belly. ‘I’m crazier than you, fucker! I’m half-Kurd, half-Iraqi, half-Iranian, half-Aussie, half-animal! My dad’s sitting in a fridge in some morgue in this fucking country, I have to be out of this damn place in three days and I don’t have shit! You want to stab me? Go right ahead, but I’ll fucking stand here and take you all down with me!’

  Silence falls across the bus, a blanket that settles, soft and slow. The Kurds stare at me from under it, eyes glinting like their knives. I breathe in oxygen and breathe out rage: you can see it. You can sense that I’m not bluffing.

  Cleric Job begins to chant a religious prayer. A few other stunned passengers follow. And then the Kurds back off.

  ‘I am sorry for your father’s loss,’ Cleric Job tells me. ‘Like the story of Job—’

  ‘Fuck Job,’ I snap back, thankfully in English. I then switch to Farsi, which has the added bonus of calming my shit down. ‘Thanks, cleric, for your words. I know of tests and patience. I always preach about life’s beauties and brutalities myself, but I’m only human. And I have a thousand things to do.’

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  The bus stops again an hour later. It’s still very dark outside—an endless desert, endless dark, except the endless stars. Before I have time to make known my disappointment at the hold-up, a pride of soldiers storms the bus, barking garbled instructions.

  I’m sitting right at the front, the first one under fire.

  ‘ID!’ he yells.

  I withdraw my swim pass and show it to the soldier.

  He looks at it with righteous rage. ‘What’s this?’ he shouts, ‘What’s this?’ waving the card back at me.

  I start yelling back in English.

  The soldier points his gun at me and instructs me to disembark. I pretend I don’t understand him. The English words keep spurting out.

  ‘We have an illegal on this bus,’ I can hear the soldiers calling back out to their colleagues, spreading it further down the bus.

  I want to believe that this cannot be happening, but the machine guns and the yelling men are doing their best to make it absolutely clear that this is the real deal. It’s not just a hazy, all-night bus ride anymore, drifting in and out of peace, gazing blearily at the stars. Things like this can happen, and now it really is. By the time they find out my passport really is in the cemetery, by the time they cross-check, by the time I’m out of jail, it will be way beyond too late to get my dad’s body back home.

  While the other soldiers sweep the bus, shaking people down for their IDs and looking through their bags for trafficked contraband, the commander handles me personally.

  ‘What’s this?’ he barks, pointing at my guitar.

  Again, I pretend I don’t understand, making a point of gesturing—please—not to be rough with it. I want to come up with a backstory for my character who can’t speak Farsi, but I’m only thinking survival, so I just bite my tongue.

  ‘And what’s this?’ asks a soldier quietly.

  He’s found the Tramadol strips.

  ‘Drugs?’ he says in Persian.

  I have to step carefully.

  ‘Panadol. Do you know? Headache. Panadol. For headache.’ I point to my head, wincing to mimic pain. If anyone here can read English, I am fucked.

  ‘Where is your passport? Passport? Do you know what I am saying? Passport?’ the commander shouts. All over the world, there are certain people who believe that you’ll suddenly speak their language if they only yell it at you loudly enough times.

  I reward this theory. ‘Yes! Yes! Passport! In hotel! You know? Hotel!’ I thank heavens the words for ‘passport’ and ‘hotel’ are the same in both English and Farsi—and that the soldiers seem to believe I can’t understand their conversation.

  One soldier, to his commander, in Farsi: ‘He looks Arab. I think he’s having us on.’

  The commander: ‘No Arab can talk English that good.’

  He turns to me, and in a cracked accent asks, ‘Hotel? You, where?’

  ‘Mashhad. Hotel in Mashhad. Passport in hotel.’

  ‘Your passport is in a Mashhad hotel? Maybe you come back with us to the station and we make some calls,’ he says in Farsi, his English clearly running out of fuel.

  I’m not meant to have understood these words, but they’d sound bad in any language. ‘No,’ I start to protest. Then the hand of God comes in.

  ‘Excuse me, sergeant,’ says Cleric Job. ‘He is from Australia.’

  ‘Sorry, Sheikh, but do you speak English?’

  ‘No, but you’re right, he is an Arab, and I speak Arabic. And those were headache tablets you found in his backpack; he’s had a tough time with that since getting on this bus. I think everyone here will tell you the same.’

  The commander looks over his head, towards the back of the bus. To my surprise, the Kurds stand in unison and echo the cleric’s words.

  I am overwhelmed with feeling. I don’t know what to say. I take out my iPhone, switch it on and flip wildly through the photos, showing the commander every pic I can, pushing my case beyond reasonable doubt.

  ‘See? Sydney Opera House.’ Flip. ‘See? MCG, a stadium in Australia…’

  ‘Can you ask him if he was at the Iran–Australia soccer match in 1997? The one where we beat them to qualify for the World Cup?’ The officer asks the cleric.

  I soon find out Cleric Job’s Arabic is as rusty as my first Datsun. I nod my head, yes.

  The soldier smiles. ‘Iran good football. Australia not very good football.’ He hands back my swim pass, the Tramadol strips, the guitar. ‘Thank you for your cooperation,’ he says. With that, the soldiers vanish.

  I don’t know what to say to the cleric, let alone the Kurds, who have gone back to their mysterious business at the dark rear of the vehicle. We all just want to get to Mashhad, sure, but none of us signed a contract saying they’d turn back the bus if we weren’t all delivered in one piece—they didn’t have to help me.

  ‘Thank you for your cooperation,’ I whisper to the glass. The desert is slowly brightening, but there are no signs of the soldiers’ truck. People are falling back to sleep, as if it never happened at all.

  CULTURE SHOCK

  Melbourne, Australia, 10 August 1995

  Kangaroo Continent

  One minute I was on my very first plane ride, thrilled and tired, jetting across the continent in a cool tube of aluminium.

  The next minute we landed, and everything was wrong. People swarmed around us, speaking gibberish. The announcements were in gibberish, only from an official source. Stuck to the walls and ceilings, the signs were gibberish too—except the luggage sign, which was a picture of a bag.

  I grabbed on to the image and clung for dear life. It was the only thing I knew here. That, and my family.

  ‘Dad, look at that woman. She looks like a man.’

  I meant that she was wearing jeans.

  ‘Here isn’t Qom, son,’ Dad said.r />
  ‘So why is Mum still covered up?’

  Dad shrugged. ‘Ask her.’

  There was no chance my mother would be removing her long abaya just now. She gritted her teeth and stared ahead and moved through the surging crowd. She was openly terrified.

  The customs officers were terrifying, even sans Kalashnikovs. They spoke to us confidently, in neither Persian nor Arabic. The only member of my family who met them coolly was my dad, who was still in his turban and clerical garb. I’d watched on the flight as he filled out the arrival card in English. He’d attacked the form with gusto—not simply checking the boxes, but embellishing the questions with additional info.

  He handed the card to an officer, who studied it closely. As he did, his face changed: the universal expression for ‘you’re in deep shit, sir’. It was a relief that I could read this. He ushered us into a quiet zone.

  ‘Who’s this Allah?’ he asked my father. ‘Is he your legal sponsor?’

  ‘Yes, He sponsors everything.’

  ‘And is that his Christian name?’

  ‘No, not just Christian. Allah is for all humans.’

  ‘…Uh. Yep, what’s his surname?’

  ‘Allah is One. He created everything.’

  The officer blinked at my father.

  ‘One sec,’ he said.

  He left the room and came back with another tall, gunless dude.

  ‘Did you fill this out yourself, sir?’ the second officer asked. ‘You’ve written here your next residence is in Allah’s hands.’

  ‘Yes,’ nodded my father. ‘Everything in life is in His hands.’

  ‘What’s going on, Abu-Osamah?’ Mum interjected, in Arabic.

  ‘Nothing, just official matters,’ said Dad. ‘Wherever we go, they follow.’