The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel

by Mohja Kahf

  "Here," Aunt Ayesha said. She handed Khadra a chunky black box. It was one of the new instant cameras! "This way, no film clerk sees us without hijab." Giving Khadra a packet of instant film, too, she said "You figure it out for us." She did, excited at the chance to use this new kind of camera.

  "Dag!" Hanifa exclaimed, peering over Khadra's shoulder at the first picture as it developed before their eyes.

  The henna artist knelt upon a carpet of rose petals at Zuhura's feet, drawing the arabesques on her palms and soles that gave the party its name. Guests sipping sugarcane juice clustered around to get a look at the emerging designs. Tayiba henna'd after the bride, followed by their Kenyan cousins from Chicago, and then Khadra and Hanifa were permitted to henna their hands.

  Hanifa's design smeared because all she wanted to do was dance. She whirled like she was melting down to her "heart of light." "Come on!" she called to her friend, laughing, out of breath, but Khadra shook her head and was careful with her hands.

  At prayer time, the women rustled back into their headscarves, the hairdos giving them funny shapes. First, though, there was a bit of a shuffle at the bathroom, those whose ablutions were broken hastily remembering to renew them and emerging with wet elbows, dabbing with paper towels at mascara slightly running. Tayiba made the call to prayer in a strong and tender voice.

  Tayiba's mother graciously invited Khadra's mother to lead. Ebtehaj declined three times, inviting Ayesha to do it, and then finally accepted and stepped into the middle of the line of women standing pressed into each other's sides. "Allahu akbar," she began.

  Khadra, wedged between bony Aunt Ayesha and plump Aunt Fatma, knelt as they knelt and went down with them into prostration on the floor, her nose and forehead pressed into the clean bedsheets. Around her were the overlapping rhythms of women's whispered glorias to the Lord on High ... and something else, a jarring noise, coming from outside. Slurb! Thwack! Plshshst! They might not have heard, if not for the quiet of prayer.

  No one broke prayer. Ebtehaj continued in her imaming, as if oblivious, and even after she salam'd there was no indication on her face of having been disturbed in her glorifications. She had this: the ability to block out the assault of the world while engaged in prayer. But Khadra, as soon as she salam'd, ran to the window and lifted up a corner of the taped-up vinyl and pressed her hands around her face so she could see out into the night.

  "Mama! Aunt Ayesha!" she cried. And everybody ran outside. Including Zuhura, who immediately transformed from a henna'd bride to a pre-law student activist, taking charge and calling out directions: "Don't touch anything! Don't step in the footprints!"

  The struggling boxwood hedge at the entrance was slimed with rotten eggs and tomatoes. Toilet paper was everywhere. Markings in white spray paint were blazoned across the windowpanes of the clubhouse. Aghast, Khadra snapped pictures of them: FUCK YOU, RAGHEADS. DIE. They were signed: KKK, 100% USA.

  The energy that was buried with the rise of the Christian nations must come back into the world; nothing can prevent it. Many of us, I think, both long to see this happen and are terrified of it...

  -James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

  The only Muslims on television were Arab oil-sheiks, who were supposedly bad because they made America have an energy crisis. Teachers at Khadra's school had to pass out purple-ink mimeographed worksheets that said "Switch off the lights when you leave the room!" And President Carter pleaded with Americans to use less gas. Nasty Arab sheiks appeared on Charlie's Angels, forcing the shy angel, Kelly, to bellydance.

  "As if the oil in Arab ground wasn't our own national treasure, to use to develop our own countries," Wajdy harumphed. He got up to adjust the strip of aluminum foil coiled around the rabbit-ear antennae, then sat back on the couch in his checkered double-knit polyester pants.

  "Not that they will, those degenerate Saudi princes," Ebtehaj said.

  "Whoremongering on the French Riviera," Wajdy agreed.

  Ebtehaj nudged him and said, "Language, Wajdy-the children" and then she got up and switched the channel to Carol Burnett and Friends.

  Charlie's Angels was not appropriate viewing for Muslims even though Khadra watched it on the sly at Hanifa's. Khadra liked Sabrina best because she never wore bikinis but dressed modestly, and was serious and smart and respected herself. Sabrina was almost the Muslim Charlie's Angel, she and Hanifa agreed.

  All the Muslims in the Timbers were glued to their televisions when Roots, the miniseries, came out.

  When Umaru, Kunte Kinte's father, came on screen, Wajdy cried, "You see? They're Muslims! Umaru is `Umar.' It's Arabic!"

  "Africanized Arabic," Jamal said, leaning back on the couch in his dashiki shirt.

  "Yes, Arabic!" Wajdy repeated, not really listening to him.

  Khadra hated Miss Ann the most. Because she was supposed to be Kizzy's friend. That girl refused to help Kizzy at all when she was dragged away to be sold. All Miss Ann would've had to do was say something to her daddy, the plantation owner. Stick up for Kizzy. Instead, she frowned and turned away. Some friend! When old lady Kizzy spit in old Miss Ann's cup? She deserved it.

  The Lott boys started mocking Hakim and Hanifa as "Kunte" and "Kizzy." Khadra would've liked to spit in their cup.

  The Lott boys were not the only kids in the neighborhood, of course. There were plenty of other kids. There was Ginny Debs, a white girl with bottle glasses who invited Khadra for a sleepover. Khadra was not allowed to go to sleepovers.

  "Girls whose parents care anything about their well-being do not allow them to spend the night at someone else's house," her father said firmly. "It's depraved indifference," a phrase he'd picked up from Streets of San Francisco, a program he enjoyed now and then after the kids were asleep.

  "Does she have a brother? How old? What is her father like?" her mother said. "Does he drink alcohol? Will he walk around drunk in his undershirt and try to touch you? No? How do we know he won't? We don't know, do we? We don't know anything about these people." Khadra was allowed to go to the party, but not to sleep over.

  "Be careful of impurities!" her mother called after her in Arabic from the door of the Debs' house. Ebtehaj was leaving her daughter at an American house for the first time. She took one last sizing-up look around the living room, yesterday's Indianapolis Star headlines ("Drunken boyfriend rapes woman's daughter, 12." "Junkie mother passed out while ten-year-old starts house fire") flashing through her head.

  Ebtehaj whispered three Kursis for her daughter's safety as she slipped behind the wheel of the station wagon. The thought of staying parked outside the kuffar house until pick-up time crossed Ebtehaj's mind, but she cast a final doubtful glance at the door and pulled away.

  Just as she did, Ginny Debs's mother was picking up the phone.

  Her neighbor on the line said, "You know what you have in your driveway?"

  Mrs. Debs looked out the window. "It's just one of the mothers dropping off her kid," she said.

  "Hmmph," the neighbor said, and then hung up.

  Livvy Morton, with her bangs rolled into a Lincoln Log across her forehead, was the next experiment in having American friends.

  "Does she have a religion, this Libby, Liddy-what is her name?" Ebtehaj said, looking up from her leatherbound Volume Four of al-Ghazali's Revival of Religious Knowledge.

  "Livvy. Oh yes, her parents are real strick." Khadra said. "They're, um ... a type of Christian, she told me but I forget. It starts with a P."

  "Protestant?" her father said, pronouncing it protesTANT.

  That wasn't it. "It rhymes with librarian."

  "Does she have any morals?" her mother said.

  "Oh yeah, definitely," Khadra said. "Her parents don't drink or smoke. They don't approve of dancing or rock music. And Livvy and her sister-she only has a sister, no brothers in the house-are not allowed to date. Not till they're seniors."

  And so that was why Livvy wasn't popular and why she would hang with Khadra. She was not bottom-of-the-barrel untouchable
like Khadra but uninviteable-to-parties unpopular. Mindy and JoBeth called Livvy a "virgin" and snickered whenever she passed them in the hall, pasty-faced and bewildered.

  "Hmmph," Wajdy said, his head bent intently to his task of regluing the buckle onto his old black briefcase from Syria, using the nifty new super-strong glue. That Americans allowed their kids to do this thing they called "dating" boggled his mind. How could any decent father hand his daughter over to a boy and tell them, go on, go out into the night, hold hands, touch each other? Some profound perversion of the soul made American men accept this pimpery.

  Livvy taught Khadra how to sing "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog." See, first you turned your back to your audience, knees bent, hands on your thighs, beating time. Then you jumped around facing your audience and sang the first line, the title line, at the top of your lungs. Then you broke into dancing for "Was a mighty good friend of mine." Both Livvy and Khadra came from no-drinking families, so they skipped the line about the bullfrog always having some "mighty fine wine" for his friend. At the last, jubilant Joy to you and me." Livvy and Khadra would point to each other and shimmy their shoulders.

  Out of breath from the dance and sweating, Livvy and Khadra went to the kitchen for cold water. Khadra banged the metal ice-cube tray on the counter. Ebtehaj, making fish sticks like she did when she was too busy preparing for Quran study to cook, right away set to offering Livvy food and drink. Khadra noticed her mother noticing how short Livvy's shorts were and how skimpy her halter-top. Wajdy came in from fixing the station wagon engine and washed his hands at the sink, nodding hello at Livvy and frowning slightly and tucking his head down.

  Suddenly poor virginal Livvy, standing there on the mustardyellow diamond patterned linoleum of the Shamy kitchen, seemed very naked to Khadra. She was all thin bare legs and shivering goose-pimply arms. Like you wanted to wrap a warm blanket around her. Did Livvy feel it too? She crossed her skinny arms across her bare midriff awkwardly. Her mousy hair fell forward over her pointy shoulderbones.

  "Let's go play chess," Khadra said. "It's in the living room."

  "I don't know how to play chest," Livvy said.

  This kind of surprised Khadra. She thought everybody played chess. Her father had taught her and Eyad when they were five or six.

  "Do you have Monopoly?" Livvy asked.

  "We're not allowed to have Monopoly," Khadra said. But she knew how to play; she played it over Hakim and Hanifa's house. Her father said it taught greed. Monopolies were haram in real life, and so was interest, so why play at them?

  "Checkers?" Livvy suggested.

  "Jihad lost three of the pieces. What about cards?"

  "Okay! What card games you know?"

  Khadra's mother didn't approve of playing cards but they were in the house because TEta brought them and, as she was an elder, Ebtehaj couldn't say anything.

  "Not haram if we're not gambling," Teta had crowed triumphantly, shuffling the halves of the deck with expert fingers.

  More so than perhaps any other state, Indiana's population was native born, white, and Protestant.... This population homogeneity was ... so significant that it is perhaps best to seek an understanding of it ... by considering first the people . . . that partly contradicted the images of sameness.

  -James H. Madison, The Indiana Way

  Zuhura called her mother from Bloomington to say she was heading home right after the African Students' meeting. Luqman told her not to travel so late, because the Klansmen were returning from Skokie, where they'd not been allowed to have the big rally they had planned. Simmonsville, Martinsville, Greenwood, Plainfield, not to mention Indianapolis-all these towns had sent out truckloads of bigots to the march, and they'd be pulling into the last stretch of home right about then, mad as hornets.

  "Christian terrorists on the loose," Luqman said. "Skip the stupid meeting." Then he complained to her parents about her stubbornness.

  "Maybe Luqman's right," Uncle Yusuf told Aunt Ayesha. "I'll go get her." They phoned Zuhura to tell her this, but she'd already left.

  Four hours later Aunt Ayesha started to pace. She figured two hours for the meeting and an hour, tops, for the drive home. By one a.m. she was frantic. Uncle Yusuf went to the police, but they said you had to wait forty-eight hours because she was an adult. They were maddening.

  "College girl, Friday night? Probably at a party," they said.

  Party? They didn't know Zuhura. They didn't know who she was. All they knew were typical American girls.

  Yusuf took his wide-bodied Impala and went out with Abdulla and Luqman to look for his stepdaughter, since the police were refusing to help. Wajdy took two other Dawah men and went out in his station wagon. While Yusuf sped to Bloomington, Wajdy's search team drove slowly over the route Zuhura usually took, stopping at filling stations to show Zuhuras picture. Ayesha was persuaded to stay home only when her husband pointed out that they needed someone by the phone in case she called. Ebtehaj went to be with her, putting the kids to bed over at Khadija's.

  "She's stalled somewhere and walking to a phone, that's all," Ebtehaj said to Ayesha. "Inshallah. "

  There was no sign of her. The men found a tall young man in the Eigenmann Dorm lounge, where foreign students hung out. He recognized her picture.

  "Sure, everybody knows the Big Z," the student said, looking at the photo. Luqman frowned. "We all have a great deal of respect for her," the student added hastily.

  He dropped a bombshell. She hadn't been at the African Students meeting.

  "That's not possible," Yusuf said. Luqman narrowed his eyes and exchanged a look with Abdulla.

  "She could have come late," the student said doubtfully. "I left early."

  Where had she been? Why had she said she was going to the meeting, and then not gone? A small cleft opened between Zuhura's stated plans and her actions. And a gap of doubt in the minds of those who knew her.

  Morning broke with no Zuhura. The Dawah men went back and covered the same stretch of road in daylight. By now they knew they were searching for something bad-a car that had veered off the road into some ditch where she lay, bled out. Or worse. They feared what they might find.

  Yusuf went back and forth to the police station in Indianapolis and the Monroe County Sheriff's Department. The police search finally began. But two, three, four days passed and she was still nowhere to be found. Hope sputtered out. Except in Ayesha, who was fierce.

  The women took turns going over to her apartment to pray with her, and to make her tea and see that she ate something, and to cook for Yusuf and Tayiba. Ebtehaj, on her shift, cleaned the kitchen, Ayesha being too preoccuppied to notice the dirty cups piling up in dangerously teetering towers. Looking over her shoulder at Ayesha, Ebtehaj also took the opportunity to toothbrush-scrub her baseboards, the dust on which always bothered her when she came for dinner. Ayesha sat hunched on the couch, her eyes bloodshot through the fierce pointy glasses. Every time the phone rang she jumped. She didn't like to be seen crying, but these women wouldn't leave her alone, so instead of crying, she shouted.

  "Leave my baseboards alone! I clean my own kitchen!"

  "No-of course-but-just a little grime-you might have missed it, sister-" Ebtehaj said, with the foaming toothbrush in her yellow-latex-gloved hand, hoping while the argument went on to tackle just one more gritty corner.

  They found Zuhura's car. It had a flat tire. The spare and jack were still in the trunk. There was no evidence of a struggle. Just the usual Zuhura props: her dog-eared LSAT prep book and a paper sack with her prescription migraine medicine and her over-the-counter caffeine pills. Her backpack was on the seat, heavy with textbooks. Her macram6 purse was there too, with her wallet in it. That didn't bode well.

  "Martinsville? How did her car get to Martinsville?" No one knew. A little ways down the road from her car there were skid marks. Nothing else.

  The scene at the Dawah Center was subdued. People lowered their voices when Yusuf entered the room, and stole looks at Ayesha's empty desk. />
  "Even if she is found alive now, she is ruined," Abdulla said in a low voice.

  "No," Ebtehaj said flatly to her daughter. "You can't go on a field trip." She pushed away the permission slip that would allow Khadra to go with her classmates to Conner Prairie, the historical village.

  "But, Mama! Everyone's going! The whole school'll be empty."

  "Good. Then you can stay home. Right here next to me. You can help me scrub baseboards."

  "Great."

  "And go take a shower. You're filthy."

  "I am not."

  Ebtehaj slammed a jar of dried mint on the kitchen table and Khadra jumped. "BATH!" she yelled. "Now. "

  Days later, Zuhura's body was found in a ravine near Beanblossom Bridge. Murdered. Raped. Cuts on her hands, her hijab and clothes in shreds-the grown-ups didn't want to give details in front of the children, but it was in the news.

  Some aunties said someone may have given Zuhura the evil eye, maybe someone who saw her radiant at the henna party and did not praise God. Such forgetting unleashed evil forces, and you never knew what form they would take. A fire, a crash, or maybe what had happened to Zuhura. When they heard, Khadra and Hanifa and Tayiba each had unvoiced fears that she could have been the one. You could give someone the eye even if you didn't mean to. Just by forgetting the Divine Name. And who, who lived in a state of constant mindfulness?

  Some folks at the Dawah Center didn't believe in the evil eye. The erudite Kuldip said it was superstition, and superstition was close to idolatry. How could it be idoloatry, Wajdy argued, when it was right there in the Quran? Ebtehaj said, of course the eye was real. The Prophet had said so.

  Poor Aunt Ayesha. No one had ever seen her like this. She insisted with her usual forcefulness on going to the morgue, even though Uncle Yusuf told her it would be better not to.

  "What if it's not true?" she said. "Only I can tell for sure if it's my daughter! What if it's all a mistake?"

  When she saw the body she froze. What if God was tricking her senses? All she really knew was it seemed to be Zuhura. What did the Queen of Sheba say in the Quran? When Solomon showed her the impossible sight of her own throne in his polished court where it couldn't, simply couldn't, be-she wisely said "This seems to be it." Your senses can trick you. They are not the final arbiter. Only God, the Unseen, is the final arbiter.