The house seemed to be permanently under construction; whenever another down-and-out family member needed a place to sleep, they just knocked the walls out to add a back room. In the desert this would have been easy—weave another flap, add another meter to the tent—but on a government-supplied block of land they had to be secretive about it. Thus the lean-to and the low-ceilinged cinder-block rooms jutted out of the main house and hunched below the line of the outer wall so no one would know they had been built. Despite the crowded house I did end up steeping myself in a copy of Dune that I had stowed away in my suitcase, if for nothing else than to comfort myself with a bit of English amid the all-guttural Bedu Arabic I was slowly starting to pick up. Between chapters I watched Carrie and Hellraiser and other rated-R horror films with Falak and played Super Nintendo in the majlis, neither of which required any subtitling. This was at the beginning of the Arabsat satellite TV revolution in the Middle East, and we watched things I’d never have been allowed to see under Ma’s watch. Against all usual notions of cultural permissiveness, Doha was surprisingly free for me compared to Puyallup. There was no curfew, no diet, and no one able to read my diary. I was as happy as I ever remembered being as the days of the first month slipped by in a hallucinatory dream of boisterous evenings in the sala and quiet mornings reading from Herbert. I began to fantasize about living there; it was chaos, but it was nice to have nothing whatsoever expected of me. Still, the notion that I might fit into the tribe for longer than a summer vacation was false. For the moment, my place was honorary and free, like Paul Atreides being tolerated at first by the Fremen. But I’d have to prove myself with a longer stint of living there to become anything more than “the visitor.”
Since I wasn’t leaving the house much, my first big task was getting the lay of the clan. Falak and Alia dragged a box of photos out of an old metal trunk in Umi’s room. They pointed faces out as we went through the black-and-white stacks. Alia pointed out our grandfather Jabir, thobe humbly short, bisht threadbare, beard surprisingly similar to the one worn by my grandfather Kaarle in his Klondike photo. This picture of my grandfather, with a broad khanjar and rifle strapped across his torso with leather straps, reminded me of the crysknives of Dune and sent my imagination spinning.
Farther into the trunk we found a studio photograph taken in Kuwait circa 1968. We saw Umi Safya with Mohamed, my uncle, and Matar, my father. Her face was covered with a leathery berga, but her long braids were out and layered over her shoulders. Silver rings studded her knuckles and at her knee was Baba, as spindly thin and skittish as a goat kid. He would have been nine. By then, Ma would have been driving a Ford Galaxie that guzzled fuel from the oil field her future husband was born on. Between 1968 and the present, the Gulf had sped up while America slowed down. Time was more precious here; perhaps that accounted for Alia and the other girls seeming to have aged faster than me. I felt like an astronaut landing back on earth and finding everyone she ever loved to be older. The wrinkles of the Gulf were premature and showed in everything I looked at, the decrepit streets and even the houses crumbling, though some were less than a decade old. And it showed in the relative maturity of my cousins, who, though many of them had never been to the downtown area of Doha, had to serve as the go-betweens for their parents in the transition from the desert to the city, helping the older generation to fill out paperwork, fix electrical outlets, and learn to work a washing machine.
While the rest of the Gulf was modernizing, our family had remained a time capsule of tradition or, depending on how some people felt about Al-Dafira, a bastion of backwardness. It was by going through Umi Safya’s trunk that I began to understand how close I had come to not being born at all. It would have been so easy for Baba to have stayed safely in this world he knew. It must have seemed so impossible, the thought of leaving. The fact that he did leave his home, fell in love with my mother, had me . . . it was all just so improbable.
We kept shuffling through photo after photo, some only a few years old and of family still living the old way in the desert. Falak laughed at a photo of herself as a baby riding bare-bottomed on Umi’s shoulder, hair wild as a bird’s nest on top of her tiny squinting face. In one photograph dated just the year before, the black gash of a hair-house tent was pitched against the faint vertical stripes of our new towering city in the distance. The little figures in the photo looked to me like time travelers.
Falak squinted into the photo, trying to make out who they were. “That’s your brother Badr with the dog.” She pointed him out.
“How can you tell?” I asked. The boy was facing away from the camera, clothed in a brown winter thobe.
Falak shrugged as though it were obvious. “The shape of his head, the way he’s standing.”
I stared long at the little figure but gleaned no clues. It seemed the uncanny gift of recognition that was hardwired into everyone else’s brains had skipped me. Even as a child I remembered being confused by the veiled women all around me and felt a strange jealousy when still-crawling babies were able to pick their mothers out of a lineup of identically perfumed and identically veiled women. I thought that if by chance one generation and half a world were removed from the equation, I might have been living one of the last of the ancient ways on earth. I tried to express my thoughts to Falak and Alia, but they were only interested in a heart-shaped Gulf Colours flip-book full of wedding portraits.
Reading and writing in Arabic came back to me easily from when I had learned as a child. However, the guts to speak it didn’t. At night I snuck onto the roof and sat amid the antennae and wires that ran through the dust. Up there I’d stare into the darkness and practice saying words aloud while the televisions blared downstairs. The vastness of the sky was less terrifying than in the open desert, but I still stayed close to the satellite dish in case I had to hang on to something to avoid falling up. The glottal stops and gargles just came out as odd amphibious croaks. When I wasn’t on the roof doing my impression of Kermit the Frog reading Quran, I was lurking in the corners of rooms, surveilling the occupants. It was like being the Predator trying to activate camouflage into floral wallpaper: ridiculous. The complexities of the language, movements, and silent communication were impossible to imitate, despite my timid attempts at chirping into misunderstood conversations. My aunts rewarded my efforts at assimilation by not paying any attention to me, which was a relief. In America, being housebound meant a whole lot of navel-gazing. Now, even though I never left the house, I never once had to turn to myself for entertainment.
It was difficult to keep a firm grasp on the passing of days. No one was in school or working, so one morning blended in with the next, and before I’d gotten my footing, it had been a month. Late at night I snuck into the majlis to play Mortal Kombat on Moody’s sons’ Nintendo. I wasn’t supposed to be there—it had been years since the other girls had even been into the majlis—but I was new, so the house was lenient with me breaking these taboos.
Early one morning, more than a month into my stay, Ma called to inform me it was my birthday. I’d completely forgotten. She opened the phone call with, “Are you homesick yet?” trying to gauge if I’d been exorcised of my perverse Americanized interests yet.
“No. Not really. I love it so much here,” I lied spitefully and sat back, wrapping my toes in the phone cord while she talked. “Thirteen years ago today . . .” she began as she always began her unexpurgated telling of my birth, which seemed to change slightly every year to include new details. The way she told me about my epic push through the birth canal made it sound as though I had forged the Northwest Passage.
“You squalled when they finally got you out. It was thundering and lightning outside because a summer storm started up.”
I was eager to have a few practice rounds on the Nintendo, which I noticed was sitting beside the TV, dormant.
“And after they wiped you clean of all the mess, your Gramma held you up and looked into your big black eyes. And you know what she said?”
I
cringed deeply, knowing the embarrassing line she was about to deliver.
“She said to me, ‘Gale,’ she said, ‘that is a wise baby.’ ”
It was then I began to notice a new, strange pain in my stomach that had been insinuating itself for days. “Can I go now?” I asked urgently, suddenly wanting to curl up into the fetal position.
“I didn’t realize you were so busy.” Her voice was tinged with hurt. “This is long-distance so . . . I miss you.” Cruelly, I didn’t reply and waited for her to hang up the phone.
Back in the women’s quarters, Falak wrapped a shala around my eyes and led me through the house. I clutched my belly to warm up the aching part and followed her blindly into the living room, where she removed the scarf and yelled, “Surprise!” in my ear. A boom box squatted on top of the TV with a stack of tapes. The fixings looked more forlorn than festive. A shiny banner spelling out “MERRY XMAS” dangled from the doorjamb, and balloons sniffled along the confetti-strewn carpet like octopi on the seafloor.
“Thank you!” I grasped Falak in a sweaty hug.
“What will you wear?” she asked.
I shrugged. “This?” I looked down at the kitten-print jala-biya I hadn’t changed in three days.
“No. No. It is a costume party.” She held up a sari to illustrate. “I’ll be a Bollywood starlet.”
“What’ll I be?” I asked. “I don’t have a costume.”
“That’s easy,” Falak answered. “You can be a boyah for your birthday.” She went on to explain to me that a boyah was a tomboy.
The word was so much a part of daily parlance that no one seemed to make the connection that it was just a feminine conjugation of the English word boy.
“Like Princess Sapphire?” I asked her, equating the word to the mysterious cross-dressing anime heroine from my childhood in Apartment 1303.
“Exactly.”
Falak cobbled together a costume for me from one of Moody’s sons’ crisp white thobes, a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses pilfered from Faraj’s room, and eyeliner, which she used to draw a mustache. The gutra was harder to keep on my head than a shala, and the billowy wide-legged sirwal made me feel disturbingly exposed. While she dressed me, Falak explained the origins of the boyah, which she claimed had begun in the university. In retrospect I gather that the combination of captivity and segregation had caused a sexually charged ecosystem to arise, similar to that of a women’s prison. From this was born the boyah. Although there were no showers to drop soap in, it was best to avoid going into the university bathroom stalls alone. My imagination went wild while Falak described roving girl gangs with short hair and mustaches who ruled the campus, intimidating teachers and students alike. As with many gang cultures, boyah stylings had trickled down to the high schools of the city. But it became more than drag or inflecting your walk with butch swagger. There is a prismatic range of boyah types, from hetero-dabblers to the most earnest bull dyke.
After Maghreb prayer our guests started arriving. I stood off in a corner and received greetings. We mocked the way men kissed, nose-to-nose in a slightly aggressive version of an Eskimo uga-muga. One-two-three, we pecked, the number depending on how long it had been since we’d seen each other. The arrivals expanded out from first cousins to “clan-cousins”—which had become my private term for anyone of indeterminate relation. They came by the truckful, Suburbans and Nissans dropping the girls off at the door. On entering the room everyone dropped their abayas to dramatically reveal themselves as doctors, tennis players, princesses, farm girls in straw hats, and even a tuxedo-clad vampire.
I flicked a mesbah around my forefinger, the sting of prayer beads pinching my knuckles, winding me up into a macho mood. Aunt Moody brought a tray of juice boxes around. I pulled a Vimto from the stack and punctured a hole in the carton, purple juice bubbling up and over onto my thobe.
“Don’t get the thobe dirty! Vimto is harder to get out than blood,” Moody warned.
The berry juice burst—a bright tang in my mouth—and I promised I’d be extra careful. Ma never used to allow us to drink the stuff; the taste was so vivid and the dye so dark she said it was practically poison and that back in America it was probably illegal.
Little kids bunched around me trying to wipe away my mustache. Aunt Moody stood guard at the door to make sure none of the boys broke in, and when they crawled onto the windowsill to peep, she shoved her asa through the grill at them. Falak plugged a mic into the boom box and the entertainments commenced. She emceed with ceremony, introducing each girl by her costume.
“Ooo! It’s Dracula with his bride, Princess Jasmine.” My aunt Zayna, the vampire, batted her cape (a cut-up abaya) and pretended to maul Princess Jasmine. Applause and hoots were milked from the peanut gallery piled around me.
“Allah! Woooow! Andre Agassi!” My cousin Aya bounced forth swinging a badminton racket. Next a figure in a pair of pajamas and a crappy latex mask shuffled forward, eliciting genuine shrieks from the littlest kids. “And this is . . .” Falak didn’t know what to call it. Only mumbles escaped the mask. She barely held back laughter as the monster went and sat down out of the way. The boys had started rattling the window outside; Moody thwacked them away with her stick.
After dinner, some of the girls performed synchronized dances to the Kuwaiti band Miami and Egyptian megastar Amr Diab, although the music could barely be heard over the general mayhem of having almost forty women and children crammed into the living room. They jigged and reeled and did the electric slide and whipped their long hair back and forth. I was feeling woozy and vaguely nauseous; the ache in my belly was spreading. I made a break for the bathroom but when I got to the door, Moody stopped me. A nasal, old Saudi song came on.
“We need a man to dance to this one!” Moody said, and shoved me into the center of the room. Some of the other girls got up and waited for my lead.
“Yella! Dance!” They pushed me.
I held my elbow like I’d seen men do on TV and moved the sword up and down like a tollgate. My stomach wrenched and then fell into a numb relief. Just as I was starting to feel the a-rhythm of the khaleeji drumbeat, I realized that something slick was spreading down my leg. The clapping fell out of time and the air filled with whispers. I slowed my rock-step as another gush burst down the leg of the white cotton of the sirwal. I looked down at my front, pinpricks of a blackish red saturating out to form a thick streak on the white thobe. Fear, shock, and humiliation rolled through me in fast succession. Getting my first period was way worse than spilling Vimto on the thobe. Falak rushed me out of the room to help clean up the blood. She taught me how to rig a huge, three-inch-thick mattress of cotton up to my hips with clip-on bands.
The following week was spent just trying to forget what happened and trying to get comfortable. I was secluded in Falak’s bedroom, too mortified from the public arrival of my “cycle,” as everyone kept calling it, to venture out into the greater house. I cradled a hot water bottle over my belly and was served a steady diet of soup and hot tea. “Don’t bathe,” I was warned, “it just makes it take longer to go away.” To entertain me in my convalescence, Falak broke out her collection of pirated Betamax tapes. She was stocked with 1980s horror films and Bollywood melodramas. She brought me a little pink package of pills. It reminded me of an oyster ridged with tiny white pearls. “One every day and wella, no more period!” I popped one and waited for it to cure me, turning the package over to read “contraception” printed crisply on the back. As it turned out, the doctors there prescribed the pill regularly to girls who complained of difficult periods, never telling them what it was actually for.
“So there are some things you should know now.” Falak pulled a bag from her closet, broaching the subject nervously as though to remind me she was only the messenger. “You shouldn’t go outside without abaya anymore.”
She pulled an abaya from the bag. It was made of Crepe Lexus, a bionic, unwrinkleable black synthetic fabric from Japan. I tried it on blankly, wondering why she was s
o nervous about my reaction. I’d wrapped my head up in a shala and covered my face in a berga before, but this was the first time I’d tried on the full-body covering of an abaya.
“Thank you,” I told her, and hung it on the coat hanger with hers.
“One other thing. You can’t go into the majlis side of the house anymore.”
Wearing abaya was fine with me—it was just an outfit—but being exiled from playing video games because I got my period seemed like punishment.
After that, I spent a lot of time lying beside Aunt Moody in the sala watching the TV on mute. “It didn’t used to be like this,” she said to cheer me up. “When your father and me were little, we used to run wild in the desert! Watching TV outside, howling at the moon with the Salukis.” She seemed to brighten while she spoke. “We had nothing but a flap of goat hair between us and the stars—now we have this!” She slapped the thick cement wall separating the room we were in from the majlis. “In the old days, if I wanted to go for a walk with the goats, I went for a walk! As I preferred! In any direction I felt!”
The Girl Who Fell to Earth Page 11