The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel

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The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel Page 4

by Mohja Kahf


  Thumbtacked underneath it was a framed postcard picture of an oil lamp glowing in a niche. Rather than quaint old oil lamps, of course, fluorescent tubes were the actual source of light in the house-there was an energy crisis, after all.

  The Dawah Center officers, including Khadra's father, worked long hours for low salaries. Denied themselves other careers where they could have made more money. Got home haircuts from their wives, lived simple and frugal lives. Yusuf Thoreau, the office accountant, was so scrupulous with Dawah money that if he accidentally took a pen home he charged himself for it. The Center wives took turns cleaning house, right down to the toilet bowls, to save on cleaning bills, and the Dawah men mowed the lawn and did the maintenance work themselves. Service for the sake of the On-High.

  On the other side of the chainlink fence in the Center yard, an elderly white woman could often be found working in her vegetable garden. This morning, she marched with spry step to the Dawah Center door, ignoring the men around the red pick-up, and announced to Zuhura and to Kuldip Khan, who had joined her on the porch, "I am Mrs. Moore. I am a Friend. Here is some rhubarb." She presented long reddish stalks that mystified Kuldip, the onearmed Pakistani editor of the Dawah newsletter, The Islamic Forerunner. He'd lost his right arm in a printing-press accident in Rawalpindi and wore a prosthetic one, most days.

  He thanked her profusely.

  "Salam alaykom, "Mrs. Moore said.

  "Wa alaikum assalam, wa rahmatulla!" Zuhura responded, beaming at her.

  "You speak Arabic, then?" Kuldip said, surprised. He spoke Urdu but, of course, read Arabic.

  "Bits and pieces," the woman said, her face half hidden under her voluminous straw hat. "Just enough to get around when I lived in Syria, you know."

  "You've lived in the Middle East?"

  "Although you could get around just as well with French in those days," Mrs. Moore went on. "But I prided myself on learning a bit of the language wherever I was. Unlike Agatha, who never bothered."

  Kuldip, who had never been able to cure himself of being an Agatha Christie reader, despite discovering, in secondary school, that her writing reeked of Orientalism, was going to ask, his voice squeaking excitedly, "the Agatha?" but Mrs. Moore was already pottering down the sidewalk, getting baleful stares from the crowd at the pick-up.

  "Where did this wonderful rhubarb come from?" Trish Nabolsy asked, coming out of the front door as Zuhura stepped in to put the stalks in the fridge. Kuldip explained the unexpected gift of the morning as Mrs. Moore waved good-bye.

  "Well, praise be," Trish said. Like Kuldip, she'd come out to keep an eye on the worrisome situation across the street. Trish was an American convert with bright red hair, eyelashes so pale she seemed to have none, and freckles all over her face. Her husband, Omar, was the Dawah general director and looked like an Arab Marlboro Man, rugged and mustached. He and Trish and their four sons lived in a notoriously messy white clapboard house. Khadra and Eyad rode to many a Dawah youth camp in the Nabolsys' muddy Volkswagen. The Shamy kids loved going to Aunt Trish's: the Nabolsy house was messy, but you could do stuff there-finger paint and rock polish and wood burn, or feed Ramsey's iguana or the hamster that belonged to little Jalaludin (called JD). "As long as you don't feed the hamster to the iguana," Sammy, the oldest boy, joked. And Danny, the nicest brother, would push you on the tire swing that hung off a fat four-trunked cottonwood tree in the front yard. Or all the kids together could play air hockey or ping-pong in the basement, amid the beat-up armchairs and cobwebby signs that said "McGovern" and "My Mercy Prevaileth over My Wrath."

  Trish didn't like it when people assumed she became a Muslim for her husband. "I was Muslim for years before I met Omar," she'd bristle. She'd been in the peace movement in the 1960s at a place called Haight-Asbury in San Francisco. She was unique in the Dawah Center community because she was the only woman who didn't cover her hair, except during prayers. It was the special project of Khadra's mother to persuade Trish to "perfect her Islam," as she put it, by covering that red hair with hijab.

  The group across the street was the doing of a man named Orvil Hubbard. Hubbard was a tall, gaunt man with a crew cut and a limp, who liked to wear his old army uniform with the Congressional Medal of Honor pinned on whenever he protested against the Muslim presence. He'd announced at a city council meeting that, due to the incursions of "certain parties" on the character of their town, he and other private citizens were forming the American Protectors of the Environs of Simmonsville, and whoever wanted to join was welcome. "I'm not speaking from ignorance," he'd said quietly. "I've lived in their countries, and I know. They will destroy the character of our town."

  The first act of the Protectors, as they came to be known, was to call Immigration and Naturalization authorities, charging that the Center harbored illegal immigrants. Hubbard had paced across the street, hoping to see someone hauled off and arrested. The INS raid yielded no illegals. But they did find Sammy Nabolsy's secret BB gun, which he'd hidden in the garden shed of the Dawah Center, and which got him in tons of trouble with his father.

  Hubbard was disappointed, but not ready to give up. His next move was to invoke zoning ordinances. Today he was waiting across the street for the zoning inspector, who arrived shortly and began his tour of the Victorian house, with Wajdy Shamy at his side. Zuhura followed them. While the building inspector was measuring the shutters, she looked over his shoulder and said, "Did you know that zoning law has often been used as a tool to keep people of other races out?"

  Jotting things on his clipboard, the white man nodded politely but paid no attention to her.

  "I was going to say-I just wanted to know if you intend-" she pressed, dogging his steps, and he scowled slightly. Wajdy gently but firmly signaled for her to go back into the house.

  Zuhura was not accustomed to being brushed aside. She did not have the habits and mein of most of the Indiana black women the building inspector would have come across in his life, or their understanding of the unspoken rules of "getting along" in this place where they lived. She was likely to accost and question you, man or woman, even if you had an air of authority, and she did so with an attitude that assumed her objections would be addressed. Fully. Her mother was the same.

  These were good skills for a lawyer, as Zuhura hoped one day to be. Like the sharp rational faculties of Aisha, the early Muslim woman beloved of Sunnis, they were good skills for the propagation of Islam, and the Dawah culture encouraged them, in girls as well as in boys. They were not, however, the best skills for getting along as a foreign newcomer in Simmonsville, or as black woman in the social landscape of central Indiana. Zuhura didn't fit into this landscape. She didn't fit what the locals thought they knew about someone who looked like her as they saw her approaching. And so there was always a sense of something off-kilter, a bristle in the air that went around with her. It was as if her physical presence was a challenge to knowledge held dear, to some core that made them who they were, and so the hair on the back of their sun-reddened necks stood on end at the sight of her, without them even being aware of it, necessarily. At the sound of her voice, something went "click" and disconnected between them and her. Both sides might continue speaking, but the line between them was dead.

  It wasn't just Zuhura. The Dawah people as a whole didn't know much about the character of their new environs. In grad school carrels, they'd put their heads together over a map and said, "There! That's the middle of the country, so Muslims in all parts of the land can find us." That Indianapolis, besides being centrally located, had an international airport, low crime rates, and affordable land, was enough, to their minds. None of them had ties to the people there, not even Trish-she was from California. Some, like Aunt Khadija, did come from the black Muslim population native to northern Indianapolis. About the lives of the small-town residents of Simmonsville and southern Indianapolis, however, the shopkeepers and schoolteachers, the beer-and-peanuts crowd and the country club set, much less the outlying landscape of central Indi
ana with its farmers in crisis, many facing foreclosure in the 1970s, the Dawah folk knew next to nothing, and didn't care to know. They bent their heads to their task.

  Ayesha didn't know why, but there was something slightly familiar about the figure of Hubbard limping beside his truck, suspiciously watching the exchange between her inquisitive daughter and the building inspector. She couldn't put her finger on it. Her step crunched over the gravel as she went to her car in the driveway of the Victorian house. She knew one thing: she was already tired of Hubbard and his plots. They were draining precious energy, the Center's and hers.

  "Klansmen without sheets," Ayesha sniffed to Kuldip, who had followed her out with a box of bulk mail, holding it rather awkwardly to his chest.

  "He has a prosthetic leg from stepping on a mine in Korea," Mrs. Moore said quietly, over the chain-link fence. Ayesha jumped, not expecting anyone to have overheard her comment.

  "Really?" Kuldip said. He found this interesting, as someone who wore a prosthetic limb himself. He did not ask how she knew. Americans knew things about each other. They learned them in places mysterious to Kuldip, such as golf courses and bars and, naturally, in their own homes, where he rarely had reason to go.

  Indianapolis is not so bad-not unpleasing in places, really.

  -Theodore Dreiser, A Hoosier Holiday

  Crunching over gravel, Khadra pulls the hatchback into the driveway of the blue Victorian house, almost expecting to see Mr. Hubbard and his truck across the street, even after all these years. She wonders if the old coot is still alive. She pulls her tangerine scarf, which has slipped down to her shoulders, back up around her face. This was going to be the Dawah Center's last summer in the old house. Staffers were preparing to move the offices into a glassand-concrete box off the interstate.

  This summer of 1992 is a crossroads for the Dawah Center. Until now, it's run on donations scrounged from its own hard-up membership. But bigger donors have begun to take interest: wealthy Muslim businessmen and bankers from Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Malaysia. At the same time, there are those who want the organization to outgrow its immigrant founders and their "back-home" concerns, and to become more American. To face squarely the needs of those Muslims permanently settled in America. The American-bred children of immigrants are clamoring for more say. So are indigenous American Muslims, who until now have been the neglected stepchildren of Dawah. The move to corporate-style offices will begin a new phase of Dawah. Already its flyers look slicker.

  Khadra isn't sure how she feels about the change. It's nice to see the upgrading to the same level of professionalism many American churches and nonprofits already enjoy. At the same time, there was something so homey about the earnest pamphlets with bad English, and she will miss all that. She will miss the house most of all, the aging blue Victorian with its cream-colored shutters and misshapen crabapple trees.

  Khadra takes a canvas tarp from the car. Dufflebag of workout clothes, an old self-help book with a torn cover (Recovery for Adult Children of Missionaries)-she pushes those aside and yanks out the ice chest that holds her film. Strapping her Pentax manual over her shoulder, she loads it and snaps a few shots of the gnarled crab apples, the old mulberry, the one she and her brothers and their friends used to climb and pick clean and hang upside down from. Every kid should have a mulberry tree.

  A smooth 'fro'd head, then a whole man, comes out of the earth behind the tree and appears in Khadra's viewfinder. Handsome, broad-shouldered. It's been ages since she's seen him. "Hey, Hakim," she says lightly, but with pleasure.

  "Khadra!" Hakim has emerged fully from the cellar carrying a crate of pamphlets. "Hey, assalamu alaikum. So it's true you're back." He has a beard now, and his hairline is higher, but Hakim she'd know in any guise. He drops a yellowed pamphlet and she picks it up, glancing at the familiar typeface. It's from the '70s and announces a program theme of "Preserving Our Islamic Identity in the Midwest."

  "Only for a visit," Khadra replies as she hands it to him.

  She is, in fact, back in Indiana on assignment. The news desk of a Philadelphia- based magazine, Alternative Americas, for which she works, is doing a feature on minority religious communities in Middle America and has decided to feature the Indianapolis Muslims among them-to Khadra's dismay. She cringes at the thought of putting her own community in the spotlight. She doesn't think she herself can take one more of those shots of masses of Muslim butts up in the air during prayer or the cliched Muslim woman looking inscrutable and oppressed in a voluminous veil.

  When her boss, Sterling Ross, himself a globetrotting photojournalist, had learned of her connection to the Indianapolis Muslim community, that she'd actually grown up in it, he'd been ecstatic. "Behind the veil! Wow! A keyhole view of the hidden, inside world of Muslims." He was impossible to discourage, since it seemed like a hard-to-top scoop to him. He walked away, leaving Khadra still uncertain.

  "I don't think so," she muttered, and exchanged looks that said volumes about the limits of white liberalism with Ernesto, the photo editor.

  "You'll have creative control, Khadra," Ernesto told her soothingly. "You're the one behind the lens."

  Khadra fiddled with a dusty stack of issues of Photo District News on a damaged wooden end table. Ernesto seemed to know where he was going in the field. Herself, she'd stumbled from job to job, unsure of her direction. She knew what she loved doing-social photography, and nature-bugs, mainly-yeah, and also architectural. This last came from loving the space inside mosques. She knew what she didn't want-corporate work, advertising, being around people focused on the surfaces of things. Hard news photojournalism? Too fast and furious. Then there was art photography, like her friend Blu produced, but that didn't seem to be Khadra's thing either. Meantime, she had to pay the rent.

  She'd been thrilled when she got the job with Alternative Americas, after having spent a number of years doing morgue photography and selling photos to stock houses. It gave her the creative leeway she wanted, the right pace. It's just lately she'd been growing impatient. Then this assignment came along and, even though her stomach sank at the thought of Indiana, she knew she had to do it. Thinking about her career direction would have to wait.

  So here she is. Back in Indiana. Back to India-aana-yeah okay. Hakim loads the crate of pamphlets in the bed of his pick-up. He moves effortlessly, as if holding back his strength for bigger things. It's "Imam Hakim" now, of course. His star had risen during his grad school years at Harvard Divinity, where he'd been a campus Muslim leader. He'd done summer Arabic in Cairo and Islamic sciences stints in Medina and Damascus. When he'd come back, he had a wife, Mahasen, a fourth-generation African American Muslim whose grandparents had been with Elijah, peace be upon him, and whose great-grandparents had followed Noble Drew Ali. Khadra could only imagine the dinner-table discussion between generations in that family. From Moorish Science to Nation doctrine to the brief Bilalian phase, now capped by Mahasen the conservo-neo-traditional orthodox-with-a-twist-of-Wahhabi! But what about Hakim, where's his thinking "at" these days, she wonders. She knows him well enough not to try to pin a label on him. There are layers to Hakim.

  "Need a ride?" the man in question asks awkwardly.

  "I have to drive my own car," Khadra says, gratified at this sign that his characteristic kindness toward her is as ever. "But mind if I-?" she holds up her camera, and he waves permission. Behind him, the gnarly trees-click-shee, click-shee-the open cellar door, the blue-and-white home office of Islam in America-click-shee click-shee click-shee-Hakim's deep amber face with the Indiana sunshine full on him, bringing out the coppery undertones. His arms bared to the elbow, the glint of his silver wristwatch. Something missing. She looks again through the viewfinder, because in there she can zoom in without him noticing her gaze. The ring. Where is his silver wedding ring?

  Hakim disappears into the house for a moment, leaving Khadra to head for the backyard. The crab apples are still green and small. The mulberries are closer to ripeness. She s
pies a large straw hat bobbing amid the greenery across the back fence. "Mrs. Moore!"

  "Why, Khadra!" The familiar neighbor makes her way over to the fence. Khadra can feel her frail tremulous bones as she hugs her.

  "How have you been? How's life in Philadelphia?"

  "Fine, it's fine. I went to the Quaker Meeting Hall like you suggested."

  "Yes?"

  "It was the strangest thing."

  Mrs. Moore raises an eyebrow.

  "Silence. The prayer was-silence. I mean, that was the whole service. Someone leading the people through a whole hour of silence. I've never seen anything like it."

  Mrs. Moore smiles.

  "That's how Quakers pray, then, through silence?"

  Mrs. Moore looks at Khadra as though she has already said too many words. "You have grown," she says, and goes back to her garden.

  Khadra follows Hakim's pick-up, with its tattered green "As for me and my house, we serve Allah" bumper sticker, south out of Simmonsville into hill country. But what did "his house" consist of? Last she'd heard, he and Mahasen were doing fine, although no kids. He'd always had a restless edge, an unsatisfied seeker in him. It was not just career ambition, the kind that got him to Harvard, although it could manifest that way; it was more. It was a search for something underlying, a quest for what is real. Is he satisfied now?

  Beanblossom, Helmsburg, Needmore-passing the turn-off for Hindustan, a blink-in-the-road whose name Uncle Kuldip used to find enormously funny, stopping to take a picture of himself next to the highway sign. The road to B-town had eaten part of her foot, as the Arabic saying goes, or, in the American idiom, she knew it like the back of her hand. The last time she'd been in Bloomington, she'd lived in the Tulip Tree Apartments, whose hallways smelled of curry and kabsa all afternoon, so thick that a mile away you could tell what was cooking and who was doing the cooking-Saudis, was it today? Or, at the other end of Muslim sectarian politics, Iranians? Or were the Malaysians frying squid?

 

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