As we approached the end of the year, we were getting lazy about covering our tracks. While Suhail made plans for his big move to America, I started to wonder if I’d ever even get my rejection letter from NYU. I might still be wondering about it today had I not dropped my Nokia down under the seat of Faraj’s truck on the way back from school one day. I was rooting around blindly for the handset when I felt a familiar envelope deep under the seat. I didn’t need to pull it out to know what it was, and I don’t need to tell you that I thought it was the end of the world. Faraj had neglected to send my application.
I hurled myself into the backseat of the truck and blubbed, crying away my big New York dreams of a new career in a new town. But it wasn’t the end of the world, not yet, anyway. Things had to get more discouraging first. After my initial meltdown, Ma and Baba each came back to me with plan Bs.
Baba called the house phone first with an idea: “My neighbor lady is very nice. She can teach you Quran lessons. Maybe you come here to Abu Dhabi, improve your Arabic!”
I hung up the phone. I would rather spelunk in a cave full of guano than spend time in that dismal Abu Dhabi government-housing block.
Ma’s suggestion was no less bleak: “Well, you know, honey, the military is not a bad option for you. In fact, it would do you some good. Teach you discipline, get you in shape. And if you did go to college, they’d pay for it!”
I remembered the type of person who used to go out for JROTC in school in America and shuddered at the thought of flag duty. I wouldn’t last two seconds with that bunch of World of Warcraft and paintball veterans. After Ma hung up I hurled myself into a pillow and had a screaming fit that scared my little cousins into hiding.
That night I went onto the roof to call Suhail. He pieced together the story through my sobs. I lay on my back watching a little red satellite cross the night, blinking through my tears. He promised he’d come up with another plan B for me too, and said I should arrange to meet him after school the next day. He only had a few weeks before leaving. His father was so proud of the MIT acceptance that he had offered to buy Suhail an apartment and set up a home for him in the States. Knowing this might be our last meeting made things urgent. But the slew of bad news wasn’t over yet. The next day the principal called me into his office and informed me that without payment of tuition within the next two weeks, I wouldn’t receive my diploma.
That afternoon, Suhail picked me up from a bank of bushes near the beach at the Sheraton. As usual, I lay down flat in the back and we played a game where I guessed our location based on things viewable from my angle. I called them while he drove: “Rainbow!” “Oryx!” “Crazy Signal!” When we got to our secret house I collapsed in his arms, waiting to hear his plan B, hoping it would save me. He knew a guy who knew someone who could get me into a university without my having to apply. There was no deadline—I just had to gather some papers from school, write a letter, and give it all to Suhail.
“You could just go there for a little while so you don’t fall behind, and then transfer to NYU once you get accepted next semester.”
“If,” I corrected him. But I already felt better. Just a half hour with Suhail seemed to tap so deeply into my oxytocin levels that I didn’t even care where it was I’d be going. “So where is it?” I asked as an afterthought from the back of his car as we drove back.
“Cairo.”
“Cairo,” I repeated to myself. I had no cartoon image of Cairo in my head, unlike New York, but I did have the Egyptian accents of every Arabic-dubbed Disney film to go by. I was just wondering how one would translate the song “There Are No Cats in America” when Suhail slammed on the brakes and I tumbled up over the seat.
“Shit,” he said, glancing into his rearview mirror. I didn’t need to turn my head to know.
We’d been caught. Faraj was early, parked by the main entrance of the hotel. It wasn’t exactly in flagrante, but to Faraj the circumstantial evidence was enough. “I’m so sorry!” I whispered to Suhail, and scrambled out.
Faraj put me, cop-style, into the backseat and slammed the door, catching my abaya with it. He walked around the front of the car and glared back through the headlights at Suhail, scanning his license plate and dialing my father at once. I willed Baba to pick up the phone; he would be able to explain a way out for me. But he wasn’t answering his phone. I was on my own.
“It’s not what you think!” I shouted at Faraj as we drove off and I wept in the backseat. Kohl striped my cheeks like claw marks and I swallowed back my whimpers while frantically texting Suhail.
“Did you think your uncle is an idiot?”
Faraj wrestled my Nokia out of my hands and threw it out the window. I howled and spun in my seat to look out the back windshield. I saw my little green light forlorn in the darkness of the street. It flashed on and off for a moment—I was sure it was Suhail calling—but then it disappeared under the treads of a big sweet-water truck.
Faraj took his place beside Falak in the silent treatment for the remainder of the semester, while Suhail and I skulked in the hall after school, looking longingly at each other out of Faraj’s sight. That month was spent in a sort of mourning period for our imminent separation. As much as it was a time of sorrow over having to part, there were a few miraculous events that made it easier to cope. For one, with Suhail’s help I was accepted into the American University in Cairo. No boot camp or Quran lessons after all. I was to start immediately during the summer semester to catch up on my modern standard Arabic. And second—what of the financial hurdles of tuition in Doha and international student rates in Cairo? In short, through the help of certain advocates in the school, my situation caught the attention of a powerful but secret patron who takes education very seriously. A proxy (imagine Mr. Pumblechook in an abaya) was sent to Umi Safya’s house to confirm the direness of my straits. A week before graduation, I was extracted like Pip Pirrip from my home and given the message that someone had great expectations for me. Qatar is in many ways a place where miracles happen, and to that individual, who personally saw to it that I would receive an education—I will always be grateful.
19
DELTA VIRGINIS • THE HOWLER •
If I felt like Pip being rescued from my lot in Doha, arriving in Cairo made me feel like Luke Skywalker entering into Mos Eisley—fresh off the moisture farm. The time between being plucked from my lowly lot in Doha and landing in Egypt had only been a matter of weeks, so my head was spinning. A gruff man eyed me as I came out into the parking lot of the airport. He was leaning against a flamboyantly decorated cab decaled with hearts and cartoon blood drips as though it had just hit and run. “Going somewhere?” he grunted at me through a puff of Cleopatra cigarette. I peered around for other options, but strangely, no one else was vulturing for my fare. I got into the car and was whisked across town via the Sixth of October Bridge.
The ride was improbably smooth as we hurtled through the tangled lanes, and even though he was steering with only one finger, the driver guided us as surely as if we were on a maglev track. We sped above the old Cairo, squeezing at high speed between minibuses and motorcycles like a Fiat hovercraft. Neon-lined minarets and fluorescent-lit office blocks whizzed by in my periphery, and I dug my fingers into the ripped foam of the backseat for dear life. It looked oddly futuristic for such an ancient city. But first impressions fade, and anything probably would have dazzled me coming from the gravelly backwater that Doha still was at the turn of the millennium. I rolled down my window as we crossed over the Nile. It was dotted with little colored lights, pleasure boats blasting festive party music from busted speakers as they passed under us in the snaking black current.
At seventeen, I’d never been to a real metropolis before. Tacoma, Seattle, Abu Dhabi, Doha—although they were technically cities, they were all quaint hamlets in comparison to this. Equal parts disoriented and exhilarated, I wondered what Suhail might be doing at that exact moment all the way in Boston and felt all the frustration and fears of the past mon
ths burn off as we descended into my new home.
The first order of the next day was to go to the Qatari Ladies Home, where I could stay for free. It was on a leafy street in Mohandeseen, innocuous from the outside, wretched on the inside. The officious proprietor gave me the full tour. Although she was Egyptian, she had carefully studied the details of being a fine Qatari lady, and so, similar to religious converts, she felt the need to compensate by out-Qatari-ing Qataris. She wore a very sleek age-inappropriate abaya and lots of ostentatious jewelry. She carried a very expensive Louis Vuitton wallet, gesticulating with it while she gave me her tour of the building. She listed their facilities: satellite television, a fleet of drivers, and so on. Every tenant had two maids to look after her—one to clean and one to cook. As ludicrously decadent as all this sounds, the rooms were all deeply dismal. As we made our way through the halls, she opened different apartment doors at random without knocking, surprising the wan-looking girls behind them. Disinfectant evaporated off damp cement floors as she bragged, “The maids are all live-in.” She led me to a scene of maids who were old enough to be the students’ grandmothers having lunch and watching TV in a little staff room.
When we returned to her office, she seemed confident that her tour had sufficiently impressed me and took out a stack of papers for me to sign while she rattled off the rules like fine print.
“The curfew is five p.m. every night but for Thursdays, when you are allowed to go to a restaurant for dinner.”
I almost choked. Even if this place was free of charge, I couldn’t move backward on the track I’d laid away from the constraints of Puyallup and Doha. I needed a place where Suhail could come and stay. I gave my excuse: “I’m unsure how this would work. You see, I have class until eight p.m. on some nights.”
She barely restrained a sneer as she eyed me up and down; to her that sounded like a fine excuse for getting up to no good. I would have done anything to dodge falling under this lady’s matron law. “Well, habibti, perhaps this is not the home for you after all.”
The university’s hostel was my next option, and I was disappointed to find that it was full of Americans and Gulf Arabs. Because the dorm was full of CIA wannabes and daughters of sheikhs, I kept to myself, knowing we’d have nothing in common to talk about. I spent my first week trying unsuccessfully to get through on the phone to Suhail and the next sulking in the computer lab. I felt trapped by my jealousy and wrote mortifying, bitter e-mails to Suhail as a way of distracting myself from the stray place I now found myself stranded in.
The American University in Cairo was the kind of place everyone in Egypt had heard of but knew nothing about. I knew nothing about it at all when I arrived, but soon found that it was elite and mysterious in the same way the American school in Doha had seemed to Faraj. And just like in Doha, I found myself having to make tiresome explanations about where I was coming from to the people I was categorized with. The demographic of AUC was split up into generalized ranks, the cracks of which I slipped through. The vast majority of the university was composed of advantaged Egyptians pursuing full four-year degrees in computer science or broadcast journalism. The next largest group was foreign exchange students on study-abroad programs. Among them were cliques of hippies from Evergreen in Washington State, poli-sci majors from Georgetown, and Muslim-American kids from all over just wanting to study Arabic. Those were the main draws for the U.S. intake. The rest of the students were wonderfully assorted: sons of Palestinian politicians, Japanese Egyptology otaku, Swedish human rights researchers, exiled African intellectuals, and a disproportionately large number of Bohra women from India who were nicknamed “Bo-Peeps” on campus for their frilly Muslim dress.
In 2001, the American University in Cairo still consisted of three main campuses huddled together at the southeastern lip of Tahrir Square. The most iconic of these was “Main.” It was a gorgeous stone building constructed in the 1860s for the Minister of Education, Khairy Pasha. Ornery cats roamed the maze of tiny halls, and from the roof I could stand and watch the five-story palm trees sway peacefully in the exhaust fumes wafting up from Tahrir Square. The second campus, “Greek,” was a Brutalist cement fortress consisting of the sociology and journalism departments, as well as the library. On entry there were huge double-wide steps forming the main promenade. It had a reputation as a catwalk, which everyone entering the campus was subjected to, and a meeting place, which meant there was always a big audience when you walked by. Farther afield there was “Falaki” and “Rare”—the first named after the nineteenth-century Egyptian astronomer, the second after the type of books it housed. Falaki was a modern building housing the art and computer departments, and Rare was the kind of library/lecture hall in which you could imagine Aleister Crowley fingering through the card catalogue for “Pharaonic curse.”
The walk to these outlying campuses was infamous, as schoolboys from the nearby Lycée came to ogle, grab, and generally harass the women who were bitterly assumed by the neighborhood to be the spoiled daughters of Egypt’s most powerful and wealthy. Some of these kids were no more than ten, and they really didn’t care who you were. As long as you had tits, they were looking for an in. And by in, I mean the passing chance to grab a handful of private flesh and groan grotesquely at you.
I spent the first week on campus pinging from office to office and eating for free at new-student orientations. My assumption that entering the fold as a Qatari would simplify things was a mistake. Rather than allowing me to disappear into the flock with my Arab peers as I’d hoped, it had two adverse effects. First, the university assumed that as a Gulf Arab I was wealthy and therefore ineligible for any kind of scholarship or work-study situation. Second, I was forced to sit for remedial English aptitude tests and was automatically enrolled in college-level Arabic. The first day of class we were required to write our opinions on a very complicated article about pan-Arabism, which the class had deconstructed together while I was sitting with them. I struggled to follow as the professor, a jowly man called Dr. Zaydan, rattled on about the essay and then opened the floor for discussion. I took down the best notes I could, finally piecing them with my dictionary’s help into a single unreadable sentence I inferred to mean something like “The Arab personal identification she has no borders.”
After class I approached Dr. Zaydan to plead my case. There was no way I would be able to endure an entire semester being beaten with my own linguistic weaknesses. But Dr. Zaydan was suspicious from decades of lazy students trying to avoid hard work. He managed to twist my qualms in my mouth and make me feel like a dunce in a few sharp words. He leaned back in his chair and looked over the frames of his glasses at the enrollment list. He ran his finger down it, found me, tapped my name, laced his fingers, and looked up at me with a fake-patient smile.
“Explain to me, Miss Al-Dafira, why do you need to be in a different class?”
“Because my Arabic is broken.”
“This class is here to fix it. All of your peers have broken Arabic. What makes you think you are a special case?”
He said this with a mocking upswing in his voice, as though he had never heard of something so absurd. The only way out was to authenticate my inauthenticity. I began a monologue in Gulf pidgin about my origins, hoping that the combination of bad grammar, bad accent, and misused vocabulary would convince him. But it only seemed to make him angry.
“Don’t try that stuttering Arabic with me. I lived in the Gulf. I know your family. You are the original Arabs! The nomads of the nomads! The Arabic language originates with your people! You should be proud.”
I felt my face getting hot. This blow was low. “I am proud,” I retorted, a little confused over how he knew who my family was and to hear that the language I learned in Umi Safya’s house might be more than a dying dialect.
Dr. Zaydan continued, “You are more proud of your American culture, aren’t you? You must be. You give English precedence over Arabic because it is easy.”
“Doesn’t everyone speak th
eir mother tongue first?” I stuck up for myself.
“Believe me, you are not the first to beg exemption from my course. Your generation is lazy!”
The more he ranted, the more he seemed to convince himself that I was trying to con him. I didn’t even need to speak. Apparently I had touched a nerve.
“Yes. You want to migrate into English! A primitive language! And you want to forget your noble origins.”
I took the moment of silence to slip something in edgewise. “I don’t know how I can prove it to you, doctor.”
He sighed, unenrolling me from the class by crossing my name off his list. “Well, Miss Al-Dafira, you can’t.”
Two days later, just halfway through the first week, I had settled all my courses except for a replacement for Arabic. I finally tested into a modern Arabic literature in translation class instead, where the reading list included Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, Adrift on the Nile by Naguib Mahfouz, and Zaat by Sonallah Ibrahim. From the back of the class on the top floor of the main campus I had a good view of the square and the traffic below. Conversation at AUC was always political, despite the relative class-homogeneity of the students who attended. In this particular course, I had learned early on to stay out of it, as Mohamed, the wispy-bearded son of a prominent Muslim Brotherhood figure, and Magda, the outspoken daughter of a university professor, argued over whether Nawal El Saadawi was a shit-stirrer or a saint. We had just watched a documentary about the notorious Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi to augment our reading of Woman at Point Zero, which had thrown the class into three consecutive days of maddening circular debate. I had received tacit hints during the summer semester that certain subjects were best left for Egyptians to debate. This was one of them. Still, although the class was full of born-and-bred Egyptians, it was Magda and Mohamed who dominated the class discussions while the professor looked on with mild amusement. These two contrary young Egyptians were so fully and impressively themselves that when they spoke, no one questioned them, not even the professor. The words they used, the clothes they wore, the little signifiers like Mohamed’s baby zebiba prayer mark and Magda’s pierced nose, were all consistent with who they were. I knew one needed a strong foundation from which to argue so persuasively, and equally I knew that I shouldn’t wallow over the fact that I had no base to argue from. I envied Magda’s eloquence. And however often Mohamed said things that made me want to weed-whack his beard, I did admire his passion.
The Girl Who Fell to Earth Page 17