Hot Pink in the City

by Medeia Sharif

  "What's this?" Nasreen asks.

  "I don't know," I say. "We didn't record this."

  The voice trills on, coming from the soulful gut of whoever is singing. Nasreen and I lift our heads to look each other in the eye. She grabs the cassette holder and studies the label. The front is blank, with lined paper for note-taking. Then she turns it so we can look at the spine.

  My jaw drops.

  Most of the cassettes in the boxes have labels on the spine as well as in the front, but this only had writing on the spine and on the inner flap of the insert. Umm Kulthum, it says in English on the spine. On the inner flap is a list of songs in Arabic.

  The breath is knocked out of me. "We recorded over one of Uncle's tapes!" I gasp. "He'll kill us."

  "Holy moly shit," Nasreen says. "We did. I thought this was blank."

  "I did too."

  "Dad sometimes has duplicates. Let's see if he has other Umm Kulthum tapes. She's his favorite singer!"

  "I know!"

  There are three shallow boxes, and we look through all of them. Let there be another Umm Kulthum tape with the same songs. Pretty please with a cherry on top. Umm Kulthum, who's deceased, has to be the most popular Middle Eastern singer out there. She was Egyptian, but people all over the world adore her, and my uncle is one of her biggest fans. Not only does he have all these collages, but he's also gone to her live concerts before he immigrated here.

  I don't want to fall in Uncle's bad graces on my first day in town. What if he treats me like his own child and grounds me? Maybe he'll lock his radio up when he's not here so that I have no access to Madonna. I can forget asking him for permission to see her in concert. My parents will get wind of this and never trust me again to travel by myself. I'll be a prisoner during my stay in New York as well as in Miami when I go back home to a tongue-lashing. You shamed the family! I hear my mother's voice in my head. Yes, I did something bad. How do I make things right?

  Chapter Four

  You must respect your aunt and uncle, follow all their rules, and be careful with their home and belongings. Don't make a mess. Pick up after yourself and offer to do chores.

  Do not make yourself and the family look bad!

  My parents' words fill up my head. They're all the way in Florida, but I can hear them loud and clear.

  I'm practically useless when it comes to deciphering Arabic and Farsi script, since I recognize random letters and sounds, but Nasreen is better at reading it than me. We split ourselves between boxes. I check out one box of cassettes, she the other. For the third one, we lay everything out on the floor and inspect together. I hope Uncle doesn't notice that everything is out of order. I don't think he alphabetized his collection, but I'm sure he'll notice the cassettes aren't in the order he last left them.

  "Okay, here's some more Umm," Nasreen says. She finds a cassette with a picture of the singer. Her hair is in a bouffant and she's wearing sunglasses. She looks majestic in a beautiful ball gown.

  "Open it," I say.

  We look inside. Actually, it's other artists singing covers to her songs based on Nasreen's reading of Farsi. "This isn't her," she says.

  I look at the tape we recorded over and the spool looks intact. The tape has no scars or other marks on it. It looks practically new. What did we do?

  We search some more. We find another cassette that's a mixtape of several Arabic singers, but according to what Uncle scrawled on the insert there's only one Umm song on it.

  "So the cassette we ruined was the best and only Kulthum tape Uncle had?" I ask.

  "Apparently so," Nasreen says. Her voice is flat. Even the spikes of her hair look like they're drooping. No amount of hairspray can uplift us. We made a boo-boo of massive proportions.

  Omar is behind the curtain, still playing with his new gifts and enjoying the toys I handed him. At least he doesn't know about this. "My dad only has a soft drink and fries at McDonalds since he's really there for his friends," Nasreen says. "Mom is almost done with dinner, so he should be here soonish."

  I gasp at the thought of him coming home. I also think about tonight, which is when I should be calling my parents to tell them I arrived here safe and sound. I told them I would call around nine. I can't tell them about what I did. They'll be so embarrassed. This will totally be the last trip they ever send me on. I hope my parents don't take soccer away from me, because I live for practices and games -- that sport is in my blood. They've taken away phone and TV privileges in the past, so I wouldn't be surprised if they limit my freedom even more.

  "We have to hide the evidence," I say.

  Nasreen grabs the Madonna-Aunt's voice-my protest-Umm Kulthum tape, and we rush into her room. I wish her door had a lock, but I'm pretty sure I gave Omar enough goodies to occupy him until late tonight.

  "So what should we do?" Nasreen asks.

  "Well, we definitely can't have Uncle or anyone else find the tape," I say. "Once he hears Madonna and my voice, he'll know I did this and that you're my accomplice. We need to destroy this tape but keep the box and insert for when we find a replacement."

  "Good idea. Some of those cassettes were gifts, but my dad does buy tapes here. I'm sure we'll find a replacement."

  We brainstorm and do the following: Nasreen finds a Bon Jovi cassette box minus the tape since she lent it to a friend who never returned it, and I take a black marker and scribble all over the ruined tape so that if anyone were to find it he or she would never figure it was Uncle's cassette. Then Nasreen cuts the spool of the tape with scissors. I slip the ruined tape into the Bon Jovi holder. The Bon Jovi-destroyed Umm cassette is now in my purse so I can dispose of it in an outdoor garbage can the next time I go out. Nasreen puts the original cassette box under a stack of clothes in her closet for the replacement tape we'll find. We act like we're in Iran, with intelligence officers spying on us. Stories of the old country told to us by our parents have seeped into our bones. We're really going out of our way to disguise, hide, and throw out the cassette we bungled.

  "It's not like your dad is the secret police," I say.

  Nasreen snorts. "You don't live with him," she says. "They open my mail. Colleges send me material I requested, and sometimes I don't see it until weeks later. Don't underestimate my parents."

  That sucks. Even my parents respect my privacy by not opening my mail. I guess we are doing the right thing by getting rid of this tape. Poor Umm. She had a brilliant singing voice, and I messed with it. Umm is like Madonna to Uncle. I covered my room with Madonna posters, and his home has Umm collages. Umm has a magical voice that transports you somewhere else -- I'm positive if I knew Arabic then this feeling would be stronger for me -- and Madonna takes me someplace else, into her world where everything is cool. Hours ago I was upset that I forgot to pack Madonna with me, and Uncle will feel the same way when he can't find this tape. I vow to find a tape to replace it since I ruined Uncle's best copy of her songs. If only the write-protect tabs had been broken in, then we never would have recorded over it. It's amazing how something so small, a tiny piece of plastic, makes a world of difference.

  "Ooooooh, I'm telling," someone murmurs behind the door.

  I jump, and so does Nasreen. We look behind us and see a big brown eye peering at us through a crack in the door. Sneaky little booger.

  "You two are up to no good," Omar says, opening the door wider.

  "You little..." Nasreen utters.

  "Watch it," he says, sounding far older than his age. "You can't afford to say anything bad about me. Why did one of you say 'replacement' awhile ago? Did you mess up one of Baba's tapes? You know he loves his music, and he never wanted either one of you touching his tapes or his radio."

  What I would do if he were my brother, but I can't do anything. I'm in his home. I swallow a lump in my throat. All the balls are in his corner. I already thought I paid for his affections and his silence not too long ago, but I didn't give him enough. He wants more. But what more can we give him?

  "So which tape did y
ou break?" he asks. "And how? Did it snap in two while you were playing it? Did you record over it? What happened? What singer was it?"

  He lists all the possibilities of what can happen to a fragile tape, but we're not telling him anything. "Don't worry about it," I say.

  "I'm not going to be quiet about this. What can the two of you do for me? Huh? And make it snappy, because I have a busy evening ahead of me."

  Chapter Five

  Nasreen and I sit in her room eating lokum, aka Turkish delight. It's this gelatinous, sweet thing covered with powder with nuts inside. The powder falls onto my lap and it's even funnier on Nasreen, who's dressed in black. She looks upset, although the powder across her mouth, chin, and shirt look comical. Sitting on the floor of her room, we have to cheer ourselves up somehow. Auntie doesn't have chocolate on hand in the kitchen, but there's lokum.

  A chair stands in front of the door so Omar can't snoop on us any longer. He's the reason we're glum and eating sugar. He demanded twenty dollars, so both of us are ten dollars poorer. He didn't even know all the details of our crime, but the looks on our faces and our hiding in Nasreen's room tipped him off that we did something bad.

  I might end up completely poor by the time I leave if Omar consistently blackmails us. He promised to stay silent about the broken tape with this twenty-dollar fee, but I don't trust him. He'll always have this thing to hold over our heads. And if I keep losing money, I'll definitely never ever get Madonna tickets. There's no use asking Uncle if I can even go if I don't have the money, and it would raise my parents' suspicions if I were to ask them for more money. If they stick some bills in an envelope, I'll get it in a few days, but I can't ask. Mom and Dad thought they had given me adequate funds for this trip. And some trip it is. I just got here and I'm already miserable. The excitement of the city and the possibilities within it disappear. Omar's smug face, my lighter wallet, and the Kulthum tape I destroyed swim in my head.

  Not only is a tin can of lokum by us, but we also have Uncle's radio. No longer wanting to be in the living room, a stone's throw from Omar's curtained alcove, we took the radio so we can use it in the privacy of Nasreen's room. I have a blank tape -- an actual blank tape this time -- sitting on Nasreen's dresser, but I'm not in the mood to do any recording. Listening to Madonna would put me in a better mood, but I don't have the will to find her music. Also, with Auntie around, I don't know if she'll barge in and ruin things -- we barricaded the door, so she might pound on it with one fist while a spoonful of food is in the other. Not only do we need Uncle out of the way, but we need Auntie out of the apartment too, although it seems like she never leaves.

  I hear the clash of pots and pans as she finishes making dinner. "We need to put all this stuff away," Nasreen mumbles. "My dad is a creature of habit, and, looking at the clock, he should be here any minute."

  Instead of being afraid that he's coming, that he'll find us with his radio in the bedroom instead of in the living room, where there's a dent in the carpet from its bulk sitting there constantly, I'm slow to move. I lift the radio, move the chair aside, and walk into the living room. The dent is dark against light beige. I put the radio back on the carpet, between the sofa and entertainment system, and it fits inside the dent perfectly. I'm laying this radio to rest. It brought us to no good this afternoon.

  The phone rings, and Auntie rushes to it, as if she's going to miss something important. She doesn't want anyone to wait, as if that makes her a bad person. It isn't wrong to let people wait instead of catering to them all the time. All she does is try to make others happy. I wonder what makes her happy, or maybe what she's already doing is all she wants.

  When she picks up the phone and begins to speak Farsi, it's apparent she's talking to a friend. Her eyes roll up to the ceiling in ecstasy, and she's smiling. Auntie is friendly, a hostess, a people person, a face stuffer who wants you to eat everything on the plate -- after all, there are people starving in Ethiopia, and we should be grateful for what we have.

  "Yes, our niece is here... Farhad's niece, from his mother's side... she's sixteen... I haven't really thought about marriage, but it does sound like a good idea... your nephew Nabil sounds like a good match for her."

  The lokum sits heavy in my stomach. It seems like all the older women in my family are looking for husbands for me. At home my mother talks about boys she knows, young men her friends have told her about, sons of friends. Meanwhile, I don't want to be tied down. I'm still in school! And I'd like to find someone on my own. Ideas of the summer fling I've daydreamed about float in my head, but the people around me want to set me up with someone right now or in the near future.

  Auntie hangs up the phone. "Don't look like that," she smiles. "My friend saw a picture of you and thinks you're quite pretty for her nephew. But we're not putting pressure on you."

  Yeah, right. It sounds like pressure to me.

  "Dinner's almost ready and your uncle is almost home, so why don't you wash up. It looks like you've eaten lokum. I'm so glad you like it. Oh, before you eat dinner, maybe you should call your parents already and let them know you're okay instead of waiting until tonight. You might go to bed early and miss calling them."

  I wash my hands and return to the living room. I look at the green curtains that mask the alcove. My monster of a little cousin is behind them. He'll probably hear my entire conversation with my parents. He's in a central location where he can watch everyone. Outside of his room, he's sneaking around, opening doors, and peeking in at people. Nasty little spy.

  I pick up the phone and call my mother. "How are you, Asma?" she asks. She talks in a hybrid of Farsi and English, switching between the two. "How was your flight?"

  "Great." I don't tell her about wearing makeup, handsome Abe, and I most certainly don't breathe a word about the Kulthum tape.

  "You be on your best behavior. We trust you by yourself over there. We shouldn't hear a negative word from your uncle and aunt, but I know we won't hear such things."

  "Right." I gulp. This is too much for me. I ruined a tape containing music from the Madonna of the Middle East, I lost money to my bratty cousin, and my aunt is mentioning the word "marriage" and me in her conversations to friends. I have many more days of this...

  ***

  Nasreen's taste-testing and Auntie interrupting my music recording at least had one good result. Dinner is fantastic. Succulent beef, a rich gravy, and delicate rice fill up my tummy, although I'm not eating as much as I normally do. My nerves rattle through me. I quake hearing the clattering of forks, knives, and saltshakers. Nasreen picks at her food. Omar quickly finishes dinner and asks if he can leave. With these long summer days, he can play outside in the evenings with his friends. Just as Omar is about to leave, there's a knock on the door. I see a glimpse of four of his friends, some taller and older-looking than him, and Omar goes with them to a playground across the street. Before the door closes on him and his friends, I stare at his back pockets, picturing my money in them. If he knew what was going on inside of me, he probably would have stayed to torture me. My eyes dart up to my uncle and aunt. Nasreen is also watching. We're particularly interested in Uncle. Auntie doesn't touch the music collection because it's her husband's evening-time hobby.

  After dinner, Uncle makes tea. Auntie does practically everything around the home, but he'll actually make tea. It's his one domestic chore. He puts a kettle on the stove, and then he organizes newspapers and magazines on the coffee table. I sit at the small dining table that's between the kitchen and living room. The tea is done. Uncle asks if I want any and I say no. I'm too busy observing him that I don't want to have anything scorch my throat.

  I notice some faint cracks in the wall and the grains of rice that have fallen on the tablecloth. I'm a daydreamer, someone who can count ceiling tiles in class or study the inside of her mouth with her tongue when taking a test not studied for. Now my mind isn't able to distract itself. Uncle blows on his tea and sips on it. Sluuuuurp. Sluuuuurp. Sluuuuurp. I've never heard th
at sound come from a human before, but that's Uncle's loud tea-drinking sound. He sounds like a vacuum suction.

  He eats a piece of baklava. Auntie's baklava has the right amount of buttery crispiness in each layer. Since I had lokum with pistachio already, I pass on the baklava with walnuts. Maybe tomorrow I'll taste it, if there's even a tomorrow. It's amazing how a small tape seems to be dictating my life, my happiness, and my whole entire stay in a city I was looking forward to exploring. It doesn't even matter that I'm in New York City. I could be in London, Paris, or Amsterdam... my actions from earlier today would dim the brightness of any city.

  It's as I predicted. Uncle heads to his shelf, where all the cassettes are. "What am I in the mood for?" he says in English.

  "Why don't you play something instrumental?" Nasreen asks. "Don't you love it when you get a break from a singer's voice?"

  "I do like that, but I want to hear lyrics, something that will put me in a good mood. How about Googoosh?"

  "Yes, play Googoosh!" Nasreen insists. She's a bit loud and fake. She doesn't even like that type of music. If it's not in English and doesn't involve guitars, she doesn't care to hear it.

  Uncle's thin, brown fingers skim through his cassettes and records. They have large, bubbly Arabic, Farsi, or some other foreign script, while the bootleg materials have inserts covered in marker. If only the markings on the Kulthum tape had been more conspicuous -- I would have noticed that a full tape was in the cassette player and we wouldn't have recorded over it. This dread wouldn't be seizing me right now.

  "I love Googoosh, but I will play her some other time. I think I'll play Umm Kulthum."

  My body becomes rigid while Nasreen turns pale -- I mean, paler than normal.

  "Where is that tape?" Uncle mumbles.