The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel

by Mohja Kahf

  "Listen, Mindy Oberholtzer is a dumpy housewife, pregnant out to here, with a husband who beats her," Tayiba said. "Brent Lott is on probation for meth-Hang on-Sumaya, stop that! You stop that right now! Okay. Where was I?"

  "Brent Lott."

  "Oh yeah. He's probably sitting around in his undershirt scratching himself like the loser he is. And Curtis Stephenson ran for city council and lost, and now he sells insurance out of a trashy little strip mall. Make you feel better?"

  Khadra laughed. "Yes," she said. "But you're still not getting me out to Indiana. What about the other Lott?"

  "Oh. Well, he did go to law school. He's a lawyer somewhere. Cleveland, I think."

  "Cleveland's good punishment."

  "Remember that Allison girl? They called her Allison Bone?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, she was being molested by her stepdad the whole time she was growing up. Her and her little sister."

  Khadra gasped. No wonder the Bone had run away from home so many times. There were far worse childhoods than her own. A surge of gratitude filled her. For home, for her parents, for the community of aunties and uncles who were like family.

  Actually, Khadra had gone as far into Indiana as South Bend for a visit to her parents one summer. It had been manageable. She'd driven into the state and her gut didn't lurch like it did at the thought of central Indiana. Because South Bend was not really that flat hopeless flatness. The women with the secretary hair, the men with the loose, spotted, white-man jowls, the young good-ol'-boy, football-player-rapist boys-those people in Indiana that wouldn't ever change. No, the north was comfortingly off-kilter. Foreignborn immigrants, Polish and Hungarian and even Arab, built the industrial cities of north Indiana. People with parents who had accents. It was okay.

  American culture has not been a blending pot so much as a river Lethe for all its peoples, their languages and arts. Have we baptized our children there only to wonder later to whom they pray?

  -Thulani Davis, The Village Voice

  In the kitchen, Ebtehaj was getting worked up about the Bosnian crisis. "You see, you see, what is happening in Bosnia shows that you can never be true friends with the unbelievers!" she declared. The Shamys' new house had been built in the 1940s, with one of those large kitchens that was its own room, before open floor plans became the way of American architecture. The backsplash tiles were olive green and butter yellow. Mellow afternoon sunshine was filtering in from the backyard through the kitchen window-now her parents had a window over the sink, so you could look out while washing dishes. It was nice to see them in a real kitchen instead of a cramped kitchenette. Of course, even here, Wajdy had installed long fluorescent lights to save energy. Khadra sighed.

  Her parents looked so small and vulnerable to her now. Wajdy's hair and beard were grayer, his forehead higher; she could see the worry lines in his forehead under the ugly neon glare. She wished she could smooth them away. Her mother's hair was thinner too. You could see the skin through it, and her cheek with its faint scent of Nivea felt even softer to the touch, like it was going to crumble into powder.

  "Those Muslims in Bosnia," her mother went on in a strong voice that caused Khadra to blink out of her woolgathering, "hundreds of years they've lived with the kuffar of their land, taking them for friends and even marrying them, and still the kuffar, in the end, turn on them and murder them. The women are being raped by their own neighbors!" There was no denying that horrible fact, but Khadra didn't like where her mother was going with it. It was pointless to have friendships that crossed lines of religion?

  "It goes to show that, in the end, Muslims must become strong again in the world, and get nuclear arms, and depend on themselves. Only they can save themselves from destruction," Ebtehaj said.

  Khadra's father was washing a bundle of parsley sprigs. He shooed a fly. "They bite in late spring," he said, "I've never seen a fly that bites. Pests."

  "Blackflies. Only the female bites."

  "You know about them?" He shook water from the parsley and put the bunch in a small orange colander. He gave it a shake.

  "From working in the entomology department."

  "Is there a bug spray against them?"

  Khadra shrugged. "Just the regular stuff. I remember there was a huge fight between someone in the department who was researching ways to make better sprays to kill the blackfly, and another entomologist who said, we are going about this all wrong. We shouldn't be focused on destroying the blackfly itself, it may have benefits to other animals-we should work on fighting the disease they spread when they bite."

  "They spread disease? Yee!" Ebtehaj said, shuddering.

  "Buy a nylon shirt, they can't bite through it. Like, bicycle gear," Khadra offered.

  "Wajdy, don't garden without protection," Ebtehaj broke in.

  Khadra plucked a parsley leaf from the bunch and ate it, bitter and fragrant.

  "The parsley is for the tabouleh," her mother said. She had some bulgur soaking in a small bowl.

  Wajdy brightened-"Do you know that all these ingredientsparsley, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers-are from our own garden in the back? Manna for the wanderers!"

  "Praise be to the Provider." Khadra smiled as she gathered parsley together by the stems on the cutting board. She rocked the curved knife back and forth over it, hands wet and flecked with green bits. Parsley should always be the main ingredient in tabouleh, finely chopped. Most people didn't understand how small you must chop parsley, tomatoes, everything for tabouleh: infinitesimally small. But Khadra took pride in her tabouleh skills.

  "Our biggest fear was always losing you," Ebtehaj sighed, scraping a small mountain of finely chopped tomatoes into the bowl. "Losing our children to America. Having you not keep Islam one hundred percent."

  Khadra rolled her eyes inwardly. She resented her mother assuming that she didn't "keep Islam," or love God just as much, just because she had come to disagree with her parents' idea of Islam. As if Islam belonged to them. Khadra sighed and went around to her mother and kissed her soft Nivea-scented cheek. "I'm not lost," she whispered. "I'm right here." And there she was, hands flecked with parsley.

  Ebtehaj looked doubtful. "You're not practicing proper Islam anymore. You're watering it down. That's the first step to losing it." She poured the moist bulgur over the bright green and red mix in the bowl and began adding the final touches-salt, lemon zest, olive oil.

  "You know what tabouleh tastes like the way Americans make it?" For tabouleh was a new fad in America. Suddenly it came in boxes at the Kroger's, a sign of the new decade, the 1990s. "It tastes like spew. That's what," Ebtehaj said. "Tasteless, vinegary, ugh. There are rules to tabouleh, Khadra. You don't follow the rules, you don't get the taste of Islam."

  Late into the night waiting for Eyad and Omayma to arrive up from Indianapolis, they sat on the country-plaid couch set and talked about the old crowd. "Do you keep in touch with Tayiba?" Ebtehaj asked. "She was always a good girl, a good influence for you. Nice stable marriage, three children."

  Khadra did not take the bait.

  "Her father left his Dawah job, you know," Wajdy put in. "Last year or so. He works for an American firm now-non-Muslim, I mean."

  Eyad and Omayma arrived with their children in the old Plymouth Reliant-K, with its "I [heart] Islam" bumper sticker, that was still the family car, Eyad being in his residency and on a budget that was challenging with two children. And Jihad came home from the gig he'd been playing. So the Shamys had a reunion that weekend. They went to Sears and had a family portrait taken: one with Wajdy, Ebtehaj, and the three Shamy kids, and another including Omayma and the babies, and then Eyad and Omayma went ahead and took one of their family. The three photos together would make a nice triptych.

  "I appreciate you and Omayma coming up while I'm here," Khadra said to Eyad. "Especially with the babies at this difficult age." The little girl, Coethar, was two and a half and the new baby boy, Khalid, was seven months old.

  "Irish twins," Omayma joked.
>
  Khadra was annoyed to see that childbearing hadn't made her sister-in-law dumpy. Yet.

  Early the next morning Khadra came down to make coffee and found Eyad giving Coethar a bottle in the gliding rocker.

  "Omayma's nursing Khalid," he said with a yawn. "We almost had Coethar weaned off the bottle, but she regressed when the baby was born."

  Khadra filled a coffee mug-with its perky "My kitchen is halal!" logo-and sat down to talk to her brother.

  The great leaps that had transplanted Eyad, in early childhood, from Syria to America and from Square One to Indiana, had been all the gadding about he could tolerate in his life. He wanted nothing more now than to settle in one place among people who valued him, and to put down roots there. Unlike Hakim, he was not a seeker, not on a quest for anything.

  "Nice to see you like this," she said, patting his shoulder.

  Eyad smiled down at his daughter's radiant face. "You know, when we first got married, I worried that I might be sterile."

  "Huh?" Khadra said.

  He leaned his head back on the chair and closed his eyes briefly. "Because-ok-Mom used to tell me that-well, that masturbation makes you sterile."

  Khadra hooted.

  "Shut up," Eyad said, his ears red.

  "Eyad Shamy, you were pre-med. You still believed her by then?"

  "I guess she had me convinced it was some obscure fact modern secular science was in denial about. Ah, I dunno!" He shook his head. "The things you believe because they come from your parents."

  "They lied to us, Eyad." Khadra said

  "No, they didn't. Just because of that? Come on! No, they didn't."

  Khadra held the mug up to her mouth and hesitated. Go down this path with Eyad or not? La ilaha ila allah. "Are you going to lie to your son, Eyad? About that?"

  He opened his mouth in a protesting kind of way.

  "Good mo-orning!" Omayma sang out, Khalid on her hip, her feet slap-slapping in their clean slippers on the kitchen floor. "And a morning of glory to Go-od!"

  Khadra went with Jihad to a band practice session and hung out with them. Garry was lead guitar, Riley bass guitar, Brig drums, and Jihad keyboard. Khadra was delighted at the sight of them practicing together and wanted to take pictures. You could Visualize Whirled Peas looking at this group of gangly boys, she thought. How did these peas from such different pods ever get together? They called themselves The Clash of Civilizations. How appropriate. Garry was Nation of Islam, and Riley and Brig Whitcomb were the Mormon brothers who'd lived next door to the Shamys back in Fallen Timbers.

  The Whitcombs had ended up moving to South Bend a few years after Wajdy and Ebtehaj. "God wants to keep giving us the best neighbors ever!" Wajdy'd said, clapping John Whitcomb on the shoulder when they'd got back in touch. They were not quite neighbors, but only half an hour's drive distant. After Jihad was done with band practice, the Shamys went to their house for dinner.

  It was the first time Khadra could recall seeing her mother sit at a mixed-gender table. Her father had done so, many times, through years of Dawah work. But her mother had been reluctant. These were new horizons. You go, Mom, she thought.

  After the meal, Mrs. Whitcomb set out a giant blue-and-orange gelatin mold with cubed fruit floating in it. Ebtehaj's face fell. Had Norma forgotten that they couldn't eat gelatin?

  But Norma drew something out of her pocket. "I want to show you this," she said. It was the small box the gelatin powder had come in. "I found a Jell-O you can eat!" She read from the label, "Contains no animal products, " and then held the box out to Ebtehaj.

  Ebtehaj took it from her. She was floored-and touched. "How-where-how did you find it?"

  "From a vegan catalog," Norma said, pleased at her success. "It's from California."

  "Vee-veeg-what does this mean?" And the two old friends took their servings of bright bobbing jello and leaned their heads together, poring over the Pure Nourishment catalog and chatting cheerfully.

  Jihad caught his sister's eye across the table and grinned. Then he looked at Sariah Whitcomb and she smiled, as if they shared a secret.

  No matter how fast you run, Your shadow more than keeps up Sometimes, it's in front!

  Jalaluddin Rumi

  When the assignment comes up at Alternative Americas, Khadra ponders it.

  "Going back to Indianapolis might not be so bad," Maryam tells her.

  "Yeah. Maybe it will be good for my `self-actualization,' or whatever the damn phrase is," Khadra says.

  "Yoda's phrase?" Maryam says. "I mean, Mukhtar Bibi's?"

  Khadra smiles at the Star Wars nickname they've affectionately given the small, wrinkled sheikha of the Sufi lodge.

  "I think she calls it `manifesting ...'" Maryam says.

  "Manifesting the divine names in your own self," Khadra finishes off. She is ready for this assignment, she thinks.

  A few years before, she'd have only been able to see the dark side of the community she came from, the religious guilt-tripping and world-frowning. And a few years before that, in college, she still would've been gung-ho about conservative Islam, showing only the bright side, the slick PR-campaign side. She'd have criticized anyone who did otherwise as a "cultural traitor," a Salman Rushdie-not deserving death, of course, because she was never that radical-well, maybe in her black-scarf days-but deserving reprimand and protest and boycott, certainly.

  Khadra hums one ofTEtas tunes to herself. She has been picking up photographic supplies at a shop on Market Street when she sees a poster of a globe in a window that reminds her of something. But what? There's a Korean bodega next door. Two Egyptian women come toward her with plump faces and noses broadened in smiles, pushing baby carriages. `Assalamu alaikum, "she offers. They blink, and one of them says "-Quf?" and Khadra realizes they are not Egyptian but Puerto Rican. Then she sees herself reflected in the travel agency window with the globe poster and she remembers-it had been the same globe in the window of the Salam Mosque.

  And here she is. Eighteen years distant from that ten-year-old girl terrorized by neighborhood boys shouting "Foreigners go home!" and the girl bewildered by her mother's sobs of "We are not American!" as she scrubbed her clean of American dirt, eleven years away from the girl who cried into her pillow at the defeat the day the U.S. citizenship papers came, caught between homesick parents and a land that didn't want her. Not just didn't want her, but actively hated her, spit her out, made her defiant in her difference, yet at the same time made her unfit to live anywhere else. Going overseas was what enabled her to see that she was irrevocably American, in some way she couldn't pin down. Yet even now, she never thinks of herself as American, not really. When she says "Americans," "Americans do this or think that," she means someone else.

  And here she is in the window, and people bustling around her on the street-American people, filling the sidewalk, storefront after storefront, Greek pizza shop next to Afrocentric bookstore, Korean grocery next to Dave's Art and Photo Supply. Here in Philadelphia, America didn't seem so dead-against what Khadra was. The Pennsylvania terrain was hilly, with nooks and crannies in it that held more possibilities than the flat same-everywhere horizon of central Indiana, where a newcomer made an easy target. In Philly, it almost feels as if she, Khadra Shamy, she and her kind, are just the latest in a series of Americans, instead of trespassers on the homestead of the real Americans. Vaguely she recalls a scene from a TV version of The Martian Chronicles in which Rock Hudson tricks his kids. They've emigrated to Mars and things have been hard for them and they suddenly want to see Martians, they haven't seen any yet, there seem to be none on Mars. But Rock Hudson takes them to a pond and makes them look down. There, he says, there are the Martians. Real Martians-and they look and, in the mirror of the water, they see-themselves!

  She knows something valuable. She knows that faded globe in the window and, also, a piece of history that no one in America has acknowledged yet: a history of the Muslims of Indianapolis, 1970-1985. It sounds like the title of a library book. Or at
least a pretty good magazine article.

  Khadra has just finished shooting a workshop on "Raising GodConscious Children: Taqwa Today." It wasn't advertised as a "Sisters' Program"-apparently the new Dawah Center no longer offers parallel women's programs, its new gender integration being a sign of the changing times-but you could sort of tell by the topic that it would be mostly women, and sure enough. So twenty or thirty ladies like the aunties of her youth have just allowed her to shoot their animated, earnest faces while they discuss the challenges of raising spiritual kids in a materialistic world. She works lovingly around them, taking in the large hooked nose and the deep eye hollows of an older woman, Indian by way of two generations in Guyana, and the thin tired face of a white American married to a Sudanese man-she has raised five children in South CarolinaSouth Carolina?!-yeah, she says inshalla with a Southern lilt, Khadra notices.

  She thanks them and leaves. Down the hall she finds an empty meeting room. She needs space to sort and repack her stuff, and is immersed in this when she notices the room isn't empty after all. Down at the end of first row a man is sitting alone, his long legs crossed in front of him.

  "Hakim?" Him again. "What're you doing all by yourself in here?" she asks, just rhetorically. She is preoccupied with packing up her tripod.

  "Thinking," he says quietly.

  She glances over at him. "You-you okay, Hakim?"

  He stands up and stretches. "Yeah." He walks over to her. "Need help?"

  "Um-yeah, sure," she says. She wants him to stay in the room-though she's not sure why. "Could you put this away in that case over there?"

  He does, silently.

  "What was going on in here, some kinda session?" she says, more to keep conversation going than anything else.

  "Yeah."

  Something about the way he says it. "What? Did it get ugly?"

  He sits down in one of the auditorium folding chairs near her. "You know, Khadra, you tell people what they want to hear and you're a saint. Tell them what they don't want, though-"

  So he was their fallen star. So that was it. The fallen imam of the 1992 conference. She sits down a few seats away from him.