The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel

by Mohja Kahf

  Khadra also found the trio of golden-skinned teen boys out on the front steps trying desperately to be sophisticated and "ai'ight," and she saw the pair of tender-faced doe-eyed teen girls sauntering and giggling to be noticed. And it was at these same conservative weddings that Khadra caught on film the religious Muslim men at their sweetest, because they let her in where they would not have let a male photographer, or a woman not of their community. She caught her breath once, because of the unguarded wonder and fragility with which the young man in her viewfinder was gazing at his bride. Because that is one nice thing you can say about religious subcultures, she found herself admitting: Muslim, Christian, or Jewish, they try to cultivate an innocence and gentleness in men that goes against the macho model prevalent in the secular world.

  While photographing an Arab bride and groom once, she almost thought she saw Juma through her camera, Juma tall and dark, during those fifteen minutes when she loved him, Juma gazing at her. A memory of sandalwood scent came to her. When she looked up from the lens, the illusion passed.

  It wasn't all weddings and ghosts from her past. A growing interest of hers was nature photography. She loved photographing insects; she could lose herself in the whirring wings. She'd sent her color work on greenbottle and bluebottle fly larvae ("Ecologists of the Diptera Order: Nature's Recyclers") to Joy Shelby, who now worked for the Center for Environmental Education at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. Joy said her director raved over it. "If you ever want to apply for a job here, you'd have a supporter," Joy told her.

  "What kind of job?"

  "Documentation of flora and fauna. Managing the Bergendahl Papers-there's tons of slides and photograph of Dunes species."

  "Hey, I've heard of him. Norman Bergendahl? From the turn of the century, right? I even have a print of one of his nature sketches-a Dunes trail."

  "How'd you come across that?"

  "Oh, here and there. I collect Indiana landscapes you know."

  "You do not. You hate Indiana landscapes."

  The funny thing was, in Philadelphia she felt like a Hoosier. A henna'ed Hoosier, but a Hoosier nonetheless: she wanted people to move a little slower, talk a little less, but stay a little longer.

  -Rabia, ninth-century Iraqi poet

  "Are you going to the mosque?" Wajdy asked Khadra on the phone. It was so unorthodox, his daughter living so far out from under his wing, neither husband nor brother by her side. There were, of course, other sorts of Arabs, other kinds of Muslims, who would've been quite easy with such a thing. For Khadra's parents, it was new and uneasy ground. Her father wanted her to go to Philadelphia's main Arab/South Asian mosque, where the imam was an old Dawah conference buddy of his, whom he could ask to look out for his daughter.

  "I need a break from mosques," she said.

  "Are you praying?" Ebtehaj would then ask. And Khadra wanted to answer: "Not five but five hundred times a day," or "By being mindful and grateful with every breath I take," or even "God is not an asshole, alhamdulilah." But she kept quiet about the spiritual nourishment she was learning to give herself. The lack of a mosque was a blessing for her spiritual life. She had to turn inward, for the first time.

  Philadelphia, unlike Indianapolis, had a diverse array of mosques to choose from. Besides the one with her father's friend, there was the Black Sunni, the Shia center, the NOI place, student enclaves at each university, and suburban mosques full of immigrant professionals. There was also a radical mosque in a little apartment over a shop on Chestnut Street, where a small colony was congealing around a Libyan sheikh and his Kuwaiti sidekick. There was even a gay/lesbian congregation that met in a secret location that changed every week.

  Up in Allentown there was a Circassian community center, which gathered in a lot of Chechnyans, Turks, Bosnians, and Albanians. They held folk dances once a month. In full peasant costume, young men and women linked arms and stepped in time and, their parents hoped, found life partners among their own kind.

  Then there was the Sufi lodge-the dergah. It sat deep down a dirt road in the Pennsylvania countryside, and the hard winters made the log building hard to get to, surrounded as it often was by great drifting masses of snow. With its Iroquois-longhouse shape, the dergah was the only mosque Khadra had ever seen that looked American. Really American in its style and the way it sat rooted in its physical surroundings, looking like it belonged.

  "I'd like to build a TEta-mosque," she said to Jihad on the phone. Except for Teta's unconscious reflection of her country's provincial racist attitudes, which in the fantasy mosque they'd change and make right, of course. "You'd pray, then you'd listen to music and poetry and wisdom from all over the world. You'd go walking arm in arm with your counterpart in every other religion and just relate as humans under the sun. Everyone would be beautiful-there'd be a special sort of lamplight that made you beautiful."

  "Divine lamplight. Yeah," Jihad laughed wistfully. He remembered that last phone call from Syria. There was no shouting FINE FINE THANKS BE TO GOD AND YOU? There was only Wajdy talking in a low voice and then slumping in a chair. Teta was dead, and they were all bereft. No, Khadra didn't get to bury her bones. None of them did, for all the hundreds of times she'd begged them to do so. The strong smell of sabun ghar, laurel soap, came to Khadra with the sorrowful news. She wished she had a cake of it.

  Khadra didn't miss having a regular congregation until it came to Teta dying.

  She needed to do something to mourn. Khadra was all by herself in Philadelphia-meaning, there was no one who knew her family, who knew what she had lost. That was when she began to feel that her prized, newfound solitude and the sweet relief of being outside the shell of a tight-knit community had a sliver of loneliness that came with it.

  At one mosque, the imam told her that an absentee funeral prayer was not permitted in his school of Islamic law. But another that she tried said it was no problem. "Janaza for our sister, Nuwar Abdal- Fattah Shamy of Damascus, Syria, great-aunt of our sister Khadra Shamy," he said, and then raised his hands, Allahu akbar. "He did it right after maghreb prayer, so the whole congregation was there to pray for Teta. Such a comfort to Khadra, the sound of their prayer and their breaths, and she didn't even mind that the women prayed on a secluded mezzanine. If you looked over the railing, you saw of the men only a bird's-eye view of the balding pate of the imam and the white prayer kerchiefs of the Indo-Pak men and the leather kufis of a smattering of African-American brothers. She felt the tenderness of being in a space she knew intimately, of hearing the collective "amen," of sharing the loss of her Teta in this prayer language.

  Through her business contacts, Khadra was invited to photograph the Philadelphia Muslim Ladies' Luncheon, an annual affair hosted by the Warith Deen community, held in a grand banquet room. She felt a rush when she found herself in the high-ceilinged room filled with the energies of elegant, eloquent black and brown women. I miss this, Khadra thought. A lawyer named Maryam Jameelah Jones spoke at the event, so wittily and intelligently that she couldn't help but feel Teta would have liked her.

  "But there was a smile on her face, cherie," Auntie Hayat said when Khadra telephoned her to cry over Teta. "And-Khadra? I went down three months later-" in Syria you "go down" into a tomb, like the Roman catacombs, down a staircase to low, cavelike rooms under the earth where the dead were laid. "I went down there with a cousin of hers, and she was preserved."

  "She was what?" Khadra asked, not certain what she'd just been told. Poor Auntie Hayat was fading fast. When she spoke to her on the phone, she worried that she wasn't all there.

  "Her body was fresh. I saw it. Not decomposing." At the words "body" and "fresh," Khadra flashed on Teta's fleshy back in the steamy bath. Her surrendering body, giving itself up in all its soft flab, to life and now to death.

  "And the roots of her hair-they were black. I swear to you, Khadra."

  Stories like this circulated all the time in Syria about people who were much loved. Miracle stories. Myths in the composing part of the cyc
le, starting to take shape.

  "What about the poet?" Khadra asked Aunt Hayat. "How did he take the news of Teta's death?"

  "What poet?" Hayat said.

  If I should die tonight, the self is all the attempts we made to know ... the self is a blue farmhouse on a green hill under a black sky, three white horses swish their tails as they graze nearby

  -Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

  Khadra reached for the last copy of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. A beanpole-thin woman wearing a long sweater over stirrup leggings reached for it at the same time.

  "You take it," Khadra said. "I wasn't going to buy it, anyway." She'd intended to browse it at the bookstore, just to see what all the fuss was about.

  They got to talking, and the woman offered to lend it to her after she'd read it. "I'm Seemi," she said, sticking out her hand. She had quick nervy movements.

  Seemi Dost was a recent immigrant from Pakistan, born and raised in Punjab. She'd originally come to the U.S. to get a doctorate in literature, but now trained horses that provided therapy to autistic and disturbed children.

  Khadra found that she enjoyed venting with her about her experiences with conservative religion. Seemi was an agnostic, and hated anything that smacked of what she called Islamic fundamentalism, or "fundies," only she tended to put all of religion into that box. Her parents were both lawyers who butted up against the influence of Jamaati Islami people in the Pakistani courts.

  After Khadra had read the book, her new friend invited her to a public reading in support of the author. Khadra turned her down.

  "But we have to support him!" Seemi said. "I thought we were on the same page!"

  "But I don't like the nasty way he writes about the Prophet," she replied. "And I'm sick of Western publishers getting away with anything they want to put out about Muslims. I'm"should she admit this to Seemi?-"I'm kind of glad someone's standing up to them-even though I disagree with the extremes they're going to-"

  "What?" Seemi didn't appear to hear the last part. "So you support the farwa on his life? You support this-this fundamentalist shit?"

  "I don't." Khadra said, taken aback at her vehemence. Her progressive friend was being kind of a fascist, she thought. "I'd go if the protest was just against that. And I don't want his book burned, either." It was all so confusing. She wasn't against freedom of speech. "But that doesn't mean I want to go out and read it in public. It offends me." She'd told Blu of her mixed feelings about the book, and Blu had said, "I'm with you on this one."

  "That's bogus!" Seemi snapped. "And it doesn't even make sense. You can't have it both ways. You either come out and support him, or you're one of them. There's no room here for any other position!"

  It was their first fight about religion, but not their last.

  Seemi dated Veejay Radhakrishnan, American-born of Hindu parentage, an aspiring actor who lived in Manhattan. He'd been an extra in Peter Brooks's multiethnic production of the great Indian epic The Mahabharata. Khadra went over and watched it on video with him and Seemi and their friends. She loved it. She'd never seen anything like it.

  "I grew up with South Asian Muslim friends," she explained, "but I never really got exposed to the Hindu part of South Asian culture. The emphasis was on the Muslim identity, you know?"

  "See, that's the opposite of me," Seemi said. "My father is this hard-boiled, whisky-drinking atheist, and my mother is a die-hard feminist. They're divorced. But whatever their differences, they both encouraged me and my brother to be totally open-minded about people from other religions."

  "Plus, you know, in South Asia, you can't very well ignore Hinduism," Veejay said. "It's part of the shared culture of the land."

  "Can we watch my favorite scene again?" Khadra asked. Her friends rolled their eyes and cued The Mahabharata tape to the part where Duhasena tries to rip the sari off Draupadi, to humiliate her before the court, and Draupadi prays, and Krishna stands invisible behind her and grants her miles and miles of sari, a never-ending sari to keep her covered. Finally, the evil man, trumped, trips and falls on his rump in the small mountain of yellow silk.

  "That sort of Muslim you're defending would never allow me and Veejay to be together, if they had their way," Seemi said, another day. There was an edge in her voice. She led a gentle brown mare into a stall.

  "I'm not defending their views. I'm defending their right to have their views. There's a difference." Khadra maneuvered carefully over a pile of horse manure that needed shoveling.

  "You're doing more than that."

  "Well-I guess so-I'm humanizing them." She could easily picture those in the Dawah Center-her own mother and father, for example-frowning and turning away from Seemi and her family. Shaking their heads and calling them "lost Muslims, led astray by Satan, following their base ego desires instead of God's Law." That sort of phrase came easily to them. But turning into those sneering figures in the news photos Seemi'd pointed out to her, their faces twisted, throwing acid? Khadra could not fathom that. There were several steps between the narrowminded but stable and sane Muslims of her old community, and these-these-what amounted to thugs, really. How did those acid-throwers get what they got from her religion, from the same religion?

  "So who's the latest guy your mother's proposing a preposterous arranged marriage with?" Seemi said with a sideways look. Khadra had shared that her single status was an unbearable limbo for her mother, who, with crazymaking regularity, called with ideas for rectifying it.

  "Hey!" Khadra stopped short. "Not that there's anything wrong with arranged marriage," she found herself saying, rather hotly.

  Seemi seemed amused. "Really? You like it?"

  "I'm not saying I like or don't like it," Khadra hedged. "I'm just saying, that in itself is not the problem. It's not this terrible tragic movie-of-the-week thing, okay."

  "It works for some people," Seemi conceded.

  "Yeah. It does." She hadn't expected Seemi to agree with her just now.

  -Lord Byron, Don Juan 1:60

  She'd met Chrnf at photography school, and they'd kept in touch as friends, but it wasn't until Saddam invaded Kuwait that they started getting together. On August 2, 1990, a phone call woke her up. "Did you hear?" a man's voice said. "Do you think America is going to let him get away with it? How come Reagan could invade tiny Grenada whenever he wanted, but an Arab can't invade a small country in his own backyard, answer me that?"

  Khadra looked at the time. It was six a.m. "Unh," she said. "Who is this?"

  ChrIf Benzid was twenty-five like Khadra, stocky, with curly brown hair that fell down around his dimpled chin. Of pale Berber stock from Tunisia. They jogged together in Fairmount Park along the Schuylkill River. A family of Muslims, the classically observant sort with the beards and hijabs, was praying under a tall cottonwood tree.

  "Why do these people have to make a spectacle of themselves all the time?" Chr►f said.

  "These people? Which people?" she said, panting. Two joggers separated around them, man woman black white, and rejoined up ahead.

  "Muslims."

  "Uh, you're a Muslim yourself."

  "Not like that, man. I'm a secular Muslim. These religious Muslims, they always have to embarrass themselves, on some level. Alls I know is, they give us a bad name. Like, let's make sure the entire world knows we're religious nuts. Look at them, praying in the middle of the park with their rear-ends in the air. Besides being uncouth, it's so arrogant, on some level. Look at us, we pray."

  "I pray." Khadra felt it was unfair of him to generalize about their motives, or to assume all religious Muslims were alike.

  He only lost his footing for a second. "But you pray in private."

  "I prefer to. But sometimes you can't avoid praying in public-if you believe in the prayer times."

  "Well, I don't see you over there in line with them."

  "I'm on my period," she shrugged, startling him. Oho, thinks he's so progressive, but finds it shocking for a woman to mention her period.

 
; Chrif irked her to pieces, but they kept going out. They needed each other because Baghdad was being bombed. "Oh God, oh God." Khadra and Chrif were out with his friends, a cousin who was a cabdriving civil engineer, and an Algerian couple, when the first greeny night-vision shots of the carpet-bombing of the city of Baghdad were aired. They watched these images as they shone down eerily upon them from the TV set above the bar, seeing the fiery glow dropping from dark sky into dark city. Some guys at a booth shouted "Whoo! Nuke 'em!" and they looked at each other. The Algerian woman pushed her plate away. Her husband opened his billfold, shaking his head. Khadra had her hand on her mouth in horror. Chrif dropped a tip on the table as the waiter came toward them, tray aloft, and stared bewildered after them as they filed out, faces sad and drawn.

  Khadra covered her face when the screen showed shots of a Baghdad street in rubble. "Oh my God, it looks just like Damascus. Oh my God."

  What hit Chrif hardest was when the suspension bridge went down. "The bridge, the beautiful bridge." He'd been there, visited as a kid, remembered the bridge. "Bad enough Algiers is being wiped out by the goddamn fundamentalists," he muttered. Khadra opened her mouth to protest that the ruling junta was just as guilty, but decided to leave it alone. "Now we have to watch another Arab capital destroyed," he went on.

  From a distance, all Arab cities looked like home. A place you could have been in when the bomb came down. A brown or olive face that could have been your little sister's, your father's, broken in sorrow. ChrIf was outraged at the way the U.S. government twisted the arm of the media throughout the entire operation.

  "You can see what they're not showing you," he said, jabbing his finger at the images on the screen. "You can almost see it in your mind's eye, right out of camera range. Why won't they show it?" He was working toward a posting in the Middle East with an international newswire service. He was going to go there and show it.

  Omayma said, "I hope Bush takes out Saddam. He's evil."