Real Differences

by S. L. Lim

  ‘So she cancelled her order,’ Linda explained, while I poured milk onto my cornflakes. ‘It was awkward, because the first company had already bought all of the materials. But she hadn’t signed any contract. Legally, there wasn’t any obligation to take the cards. They were pretty angry, though. The woman came and shouted at her in the street.’

  ‘Well, that’s understandable,’ I said. ‘Did she really need to cancel the order? Small businesses like that really struggle. And even if they didn’t make much of a loss on the parchment and stuff, they had probably spent ages talking to her about designs and so on.’

  Linda looked at me pityingly, as if I was too adorably naive to be alive. ‘Oh, no, but you can’t do that. You can’t turn down an opportunity like that. Not when it’s a wedding,’ she added.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Well, she’s getting married. She has to be a grown-up now. She has to look after her family.’ Linda tugged a strand of hair and then let it go, as if to release her own thoughts. She touched me lightly on the arm, to show that she didn’t want to start an argument.

  After that I started to notice things. Sometimes Linda would cancel a date we had made, without any particular reason – she would move an event from Saturday to Sunday, for example, just because it suited her schedule slightly better, even if it didn’t necessarily suit mine. She had a way of casually dropping into conversation some favour or service to be rendered, like lending her your lawnmower; she did this so naturally and frankly it did not occur to you that you could still refuse. (In the end, you would not see your lawnmower again for quite some time, and you would end up being responsible for its transport.)

  I remember driving to the shops in the middle of a thunderstorm once. She was cooking dinner for the both of us, and had forgotten to buy a sprig of mint which she was planning to use as a garnish. When I got back and handed over the plastic-wrapped package, she said ‘Thanks’ in an automatic way, like you do when a stranger moves aside to let you pass on a crowded bus. It was as if driving out in a storm for a single sprig of mint was quite an ordinary thing for a boyfriend to do.

  For a while I was disappointed, and then I wasn’t anymore. In a fundamental way, Linda was more honest than I. She had her code of adulthood, which meant adhering to one’s interest at all cost. Whether from her experiences or due to some intrinsic part of her personality, she had become convinced at an early age that other people were fickle, and human relations inherently extractive. The only rational response was to take what you could get, before your so-called friends vanished in a puff of smoke, or your boyfriend revealed the duplicity she seemed to anticipate from all men. The strawberry sweetness was both reality and ruse: she had leached her persona of frustration, anger and regret, believing no potential partner would tolerate such unseemly displays of emotion. She kept strict control over her mind and heart. She could be moved by a work of art, but only temporarily: it was something to be consumed, not to be consumed by. Having survived some damage, probably early on, she must have sworn never again to allow herself to become destabilised by something so mercurial as passion.

  I went through a rescue phase. I thought there must have been some trauma in her past, and constructed elaborate fantasies around the idea of saving her from herself. Eventually it dawned on me that it didn’t matter what had caused it, nature or nurture; at the age of thirty, she was unlikely to change except under her own volition. Once you knew what to expect it was all right, and I tried to put a positive interpretation on her behaviour: she was tougher than me, she was a survivor. This added gravitas to our relationship what it took away in intimacy.

  Besides, I was discovering how much fun it was to be coupled. Not ‘going out’, not ‘seeing someone’, but really coupled – or as much as you can be without getting mortgages involved. We spent almost all of our nights together; we did not consider attending a party or event except in one another’s company. It was amazing how I could make her happy just by existing. There were times when I would make what to me was a perfectly serious remark – I would say, for instance, that I liked wearing velcro shoes for the convenience – and Linda would burst into laughter, as though I had just said something hilarious and quaintly adorable. Each morning I stabbed my finger at the alarm clock in a gesture of great purpose, as if summoning the troops. My body felt capable and relaxed; even the pimples along my hairline had cleared up. Looking objectively at my circumstances, I found it hard not to feel that the universe was on my side.

  I once read a book about the human mind which told you to ask yourself several times a day, Are you conscious? When I did this, the answer was invariably both yes and no. I knew that I felt happy and free, but when I asked myself, What are you thinking of?, I had no answer. I was conscious of being conscious after the question, but not immediately before. Where does the mind go, during these intervals of happiness?

  Still, I hardly had time to think about it. At work there was constant activity, which drowned out the need for cogitation, and in the evenings, draped across the couch, Linda’s body resting lightly on top of mine, it didn’t seem to matter if some questions remained unanswered. For the moment, the unexamined life felt just fine.

  #

  Tony was starting university. This event had a mythical quality to it; his parents had been planning for it since well before he was born. He was studying civil engineering – he had won a scholarship, just like his father. Daisy grumbled incessantly. ‘With your brains, you should be doing law! That’s where the money is. There’s no point being like your father – he only did what he did because he had no other choice.’ Arwin grunted in the corner. Tony understood that he was not supposed to take this too seriously. His mother could not bear to praise him directly; she had to do it in circles, implying that anything he chose would be beneath him. Arwin said, ‘Very good’ in a begrudging way, as if the compliment had to be wrung physically from his body.

  The scale of the campus was marvellous. The buildings were fantastically ugly and modernist, an insurrection of colours and asymmetric shapes. What they lacked in coherence, they more than made up for in the scale of their ambition. There was an avenue of trees running down the campus, and if you strayed from the main walkway you might find yourself in an unexpected green hollow, with a sundial or a statue of a naked nymph for company. The scale of the student population was even more disconcerting. At high school, your friends would never allow you to be different from how they had always known you to be. Here it was different: you could be anyone or nobody if you so chose. There were so many people it was hard to think of them as individuals at all.

  Classes were easy enough, after the rigours of final-year high school. The first two maths lectures were laughably easy, which made all the supposed young adults throughout the lecture hall giggle. Tony declined to join them. He had enough natural grace to be embarrassed for the lecturer, a small woman with obvious enthusiasm for the subject. Tony thought she was a good enough teacher, but the others mocked her constantly: her weight and her verbal tics and her supposed lack of sexual attractiveness. This was all the more cringeworthy since some of the jokes were actually pretty funny.

  Outside of class, it was all brightly coloured T-shirts and outstretched hands offering free samples. Leading the conviviality was a team of Welcome to Uni volunteers, who whipped up a kind of mass-organised team-spirited hilarity. There were student societies for every permutation of interest and identity: the Chinese Catholics, bike repairers, Hindu vegetarians and medieval re-enactors. Tony would have joined this last group, except for a fortunate intuition that the novelty would soon wear off.

  The one campus group he did join was the Islamic Society, ISOC. ‘Excuse me, is this where I sign up?’ he asked an affable, lanky figure, who was sucking a lollipop and leaning his elbows on the table. The young man rubbed his eyes. ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ he said sleepily, re-wrapping the lollipop and stowing it in his front pocket. ‘And do you have questions?’ He gest
ured with his elbow at a stack of pamphlets. ‘You see, Islam is the only religion which is proved by science. This one here is about the Quran and modern biology, embryos. This one here is about miracles, and this is the holy Quran on chloroplasts.’

  ‘No, no. I mean, yes, I do have questions,’ said Tony. ‘I mean,’ he added hurriedly, ‘I do have questions, but not, you know, just not as an outsider. I’m already a Muslim, you see. I just want to know where I can … pray, and stuff.’ He cursed himself for adding the ‘and stuff’, which seemed to trivialise his meaning.

  The young man’s eyes widened. ‘Ohhh,’ he said, ‘you must be … I mean, not assuming, but did you grow up –’

  Tony sighed. ‘I wasn’t born Muslim, if that’s what you’re asking. So yes, I’m a revert.’

  ‘Wow! That’s great! Congratulations! If you don’t mind me asking, how old were you?’

  ‘Sixteen. That was two years ago. I’m eighteen now.’

  ‘And your background …?’

  ‘Chinese, from Indonesia.’ Tony added the qualification automatically, then wondered why he had done so. His parents liked to distinguish themselves from those born in China, who they referred to with some disdain as ‘China people’; they were thought to be rougher, more vulgar and less educated than their diaspora relatives. ‘Anyway, I was wondering, how do I get involved, do you take volunteers, how can I – is there a prayer room?’

  The young man straightened up. ‘Oh, yes. Of course.’ He seemed to have recovered somewhat from the shock of meeting a Muslim who didn’t look the way that Muslims were supposed to. He fished in a box under the table and drew out a piece of paper. ‘We’ll be so glad to have you. A convert – wow.’ Scribbling down some extra details, he handed the note to Tony. ‘We meet on Friday at one p.m. for prayer. Come to the Pavilion, there’s a social event afterwards. I’m Uthman, by the way. So pleased to meet you.’ They shook hands, and Tony went off with a feeling that he had just completed a test whose exact nature still eluded him.

  Friday prayers, when they came around, were an utter joy. Hundreds of bodies bending and rising in unison, the room dense with spiritual concentration. Tony, sneaking a look at the waves of bent heads and prostrated bodies, had a sense of intense fellowship tinged with disbelief. It seemed remarkable that so many people, their consciousness entirely discrete from his, could believe in just the same God as he did. They seemed entirely mysterious to him, their inner lives impenetrable. Yet some of them must be reverts like him, from hostile families and condescendingly secular schools. What a delight it would be, just to be able to talk openly about his experiences! With someone who knew what it was like to have your parents twitch with rage when you spoke about your faith. Who understood how it felt to know that all of your friends were hiding their distaste behind a hypocritical open-mindedness.

  After prayers, the promised socialising occurred. Tony hung around alone until he saw Uthman waving dramatically, beckoning him over. ‘Everyone, this is Tony, he’s a first year. He converted to Islam just two years ago!’ Everyone listened, rapt, as Tony told the story: how he had been raised Roman Catholic, barely practising, but had felt discomfited by his parents’ transactional attitude towards religion – they only prayed when they wanted something. How the three-personed concept of God had never quite made sense to him, and how he had longed for the divine force to be unified. How quite by chance the guest Islamic speaker at his school had opened a door for him, and how the door had widened until the truth which flooded in was overwhelming.

  When he finished there was brief silence, and then the gathering broke into applause. Uthman slapped him on the back. ‘Congratulations, brother!’ Then there was the burbling of talk as people turned to discuss him with their companions. Tony picked out the phrase ‘fresh convert’, which was uttered with some regularity. He wasn’t sure if he liked this. ‘Fresh’, he was discovering, was used at uni to denote a person who didn’t quite know what he was doing; who couldn’t help, despite his best intentions, being clueless and faintly ridiculous. ‘Well,’ he said hesitantly, ‘I don’t like to use the word ‘convert’. I prefer ‘revert’. Everyone is born a Muslim, but some of us are unlucky enough to be misled by the people around us.’

  There was another silence, which was broken by Uthman’s too hearty agreement. ‘Excellent, excellent!’ he said, smiling just a little too broadly. He punched Tony on the shoulder. ‘This is just what we need. A revert with the passion to help us remember what we have forgotten.’ There were nods all round, but Tony thought he detected something ironic in the smiles.

  The next week, just after prayers, one of the others came and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Your hands. You should be holding them like this.’ He gripped Tony’s fingers, bent them and pressed them firmly together. ‘You are making dua. Your hands are like a beggar’s, like a bowl – you are pleading with Allah, begging his forgiveness, not demanding things from him like an equal. You must make yourself humble.’ Tony tried to thank him for his advice, but he was already walking away.

  Over the next few months, the corrections accumulated. Place your hands on your knees when you bend, otherwise your prayer is invalidated. Right hand over the left hand, brother, not on your chest, that is a woman’s position. That logo on your shirt – are you sure that is permissible? What is that tie? A man should not wear silk – are you sure that’s one hundred per cent cotton? Are you a Hanafi? Then why do you pray like a Hanafi? Why are you getting angry when I’m only trying to guide you from your mistakes? Fear Allah, brother.

  Initially Tony was glad of the rituals, their detail and their stringency. This was what had drawn him in to Islam in the first place, its spiritual exactness. No strategic vagueness here, no elision of the question of what it meant to be godly in an ungodly environment. ‘A system of guidance for life cannot only be confined to a church, within a synagogue or a mosque. It has to be a part of everything that we do, everything that we are.’ He was embarrassed by his own ignorance of such matters as prayer and etiquette, but surely these deficiencies could be remedied. You could study Islam just like any other subject: if you applied yourself you would eventually become good at it. He would become truly Muslim, just like those who were born into the faith.

  After a while, though, it began to feel like he was running a race where the finish line kept moving. He could hardly turn around without breaching some point of etiquette, and those around him treated him as unbearably uncouth. No-one seemed to make any accommodation for the fact he had reverted only two years ago. All of his knowledge of Islamic practice had been gleaned from the internet while his parents weren’t looking. He began to suspect some of the others were deliberately trying to trip him up, so they could home in on his errors with condescending triumph. Brother, you must stand up straight and hold your body still during the khutbah, or else it’s disrespectful to the prayer. Now you must start again, because the first one has been invalidated. What are you eating – are you sure that it’s been certified? Oh, I wouldn’t trust that certification, how do you know that it’s really halal? Even the word ‘brother’ began to irk, since so many of the sentiments expressed were so very far from being brotherly. Unless you were thinking of Big Brother, or a religious version thereof. A nitpicking, obnoxious older brother, who found trivial fault with everything that you did.

  He tried his best to make friends. Wanting to make himself useful, he spent hours combing through a giant spreadsheet to find out which members of ISOC had not yet paid their annual fees. When he returned to the executive committee with the results of his labour, Uthman said, ‘Oh, excellent! Excellent! Very good.’ Then he glanced over Tony’s shoulder, as if hoping that a new topic of conversation would spring out from behind the curtain. The only time Uthman was comfortable having him around, Tony noticed, was when introducing him to members of ISOC who hadn’t yet heard about him. ‘This is Tony – have I told you about him? He reverted just over two years ago.’

  Everybody’s eyes would invaria
bly brighten. Not wanting to disappoint, Tony would begin the story all over again: the guest speakers at school; the feeling of unity under Allah which came upon him, flowing outwards. When he finished, more often than not there would be applause. His listeners would turn to each other and sigh: ‘Isn’t Allah wonderful?’ Once the story was over, however, they had nothing more to say to him. He seemed to have no function in their lives apart from something between an ill-behaving pet and a heartwarming example.

  The women, the sisters, kept mostly to themselves. You were supposed to avoid free mixing of the sexes unless there was some compelling excuse. Everybody seemed to have a different benchmark of how compelling the excuse had to be, but it was generally agreed that one-on-one conversations were best avoided. The women prayed apart from the men, at the back of the room. Some of the more devout would cast their eyes to the floor when Tony came walking past, though it was difficult to tell the difference between modesty and simple shyness. Tony regarded them with awe as they talked among themselves about what he supposed were arcane female subjects. Occasionally, when they thought he was not watching, they would burst into unfathomable giggles. Did they think about men’s bodies? But no, they couldn’t – women were naturally less subject to temptation than men were. He wondered what it would be like, to be liberated from the indignity of gross male urges.

  The most pious went to extraordinary lengths to avoid any hint of impropriety. One girl would draw back rapidly, urgently, if she and Tony were approaching a doorway at the same time – as if she were afraid their bodies would be squashed together in the frame. Tony found this admirable – that is, until some weeks later when he saw her leaning against a wall, happily chatting away to one of the non-Muslim boys in his calculus class. The boy in question was an enthusiastic drinker, fornicator and consumer of marijuana. He grew his own, and was most generous with it if anyone asked. Yet this supposed Muslimah, this girl who cringed if Tony’s hand so much as approached a doorknob lest his fingers brush her own, was laughing away at the kufr boy’s jokes, not flinching in the slightest when he stretched his arms out for a hug.