Real Differences

by S. L. Lim

  She wasn’t the only one. Certain brothers who made a great show of avoiding conversations with the sisters could be found cheerfully exchanging gossip with kufr women, going on picnics and beach trips where the standard of behaviour would be decidedly lower than in a properly Muslim environment. Once he saw one of Uthman’s crew chase a white girl across the library lawn. He caught her round the waist and they fell on the grass together, laughing. Tony felt his idealism twist back on itself into disappointment.

  In his second semester, another new convert signed up to ISOC. Like Tony, she was a first year; unlike Tony, she was white. Eyes widened with surprise and respect when she walked into the room, seemingly unconscious of the swathe that she was cutting through their consciousness. Her very body was a triumphant argument for the role of Islam in the West. She too was hounded for conversion stories, and the rules about free mixing of the sexes were dramatically slackened for this purpose. They could not stop staring at her freckled skin, her blue eyes bashful beneath the headscarf; there was always a swarm of volunteers offering to teach her how to pray. When she made a mistake people corrected her eagerly, bashfully, hanging on to her apologies as if they were made of precious stones. Once, Tony heard an old Arabic woman, the mother of one of the society’s members, exclaim ecstatically, ‘Your children will be so fair, mash’allah!’ Watching her with five or six believers gathered round her skirts, listening to her startled, breathless laugh, Tony rolled his eyes in disgust. She must be loving every second of it, he thought.

  He continued to be jealous of this girl Katherine until one day he overheard three ISOC members canvassing her views on foreign policy. ‘Yeah, that’s right, and what do you think about Iraq? What about Afghanistan?’ It was all ostensibly convivial, but you could tell there was an undertone to it. Katherine’s eager and ardent demeanour did not slip, but her opinions became steadily more extreme as the conversation went on. ‘Yeah, it’s absolutely horrible what’s been happening!’ ‘Of course I don’t believe that it was Muslims. The Americans can spot a meteor coming from space a thousand miles away. Are they seriously expecting us to think they didn’t know it was coming?’ Tony and her questioners all blinked at the strategic ‘us’, then her interrogators leaned back, apparently satisfied. He saw a flash of bewildered cynicism cross Katherine’s face, and thought, She knows what a trophy she is. Unexpectedly, he found himself deeply moved by this Katherine, who he had not even spoken to. I wish we could pray together, he thought. He hated it, this impulse that was even in himself: a sycophantic longing to be close to whiteness in all its forms.

  Oddly enough, Hasan had not joined ISOC. Tony hadn’t heard from him in ages, although he was definitely around on campus. Once in a crowd on the walkway he thought he’d glimpsed the back of his head; he called out and walked towards him, arms outstretched in simple gladness, until it turned out it was not his friend at all. Hasan was strangely distant, fielding Tony’s questions with polite non-responses. They met once for lunch, and then he stopped returning Tony’s texts. It was almost as if he was scared someone would see the two of them together.

  Soon it was Ramadan. Life became long and slow, the days unfurling themselves into vistas of exhaustion. The first week was the worst, the thirst and hunger building to an agonising pitch; afterwards, they subsided into a dull but constant companion. It was high summer, so by evening Tony’s mouth was parched and his limbs felt watery with exhaustion. He developed strange habits, like reading takeaway menus more intensely than the novels he’d studied at school. At ISOC, people liked to reminisce about Ramadans past: about grandparents gathered in the evenings, mothers rising to cook before dawn.

  After sunset, Tony would rifle furiously through the cupboard. One evening, finding nothing but generic-brand Coco Pops, he tore the cardboard with his hand and gouged at the packaging with his keys. There was cereal on his chin and drops of milk all over the stainless-steel kitchen countertop. Cereal box in hand, he crumpled down in front of the TV. He flicked over to the news: more war in Syria; a woman had died from drinking too much water in a competition hosted by some stupid radio station. He closed his eyes, swaying back and forth with enormous fatigue. Allah was somewhere, he supposed, but he had never felt so alone.

  #

  He was walking away from prayers when he saw a boy, presumably a student, handing out some leaflets. The boy was not conspicuously Islamic – he did not even have a beard, and he wore jeans and a T-shirt – but the flyers featured an enormous crescent moon. Curious, Tony was about to pick one up when a junior member of ISOC pushed past and started flapping his hands wildly in the stranger’s direction.

  ‘Excuse me, excuse me, what are you doing over here? These people have just come out of the prayers that we organised. You’re not meant to talk to them right now. They are an ISOC resource.’

  The stranger appeared not to notice at first. Then he turned slowly round, revealing an expression of pained bewilderment. ‘An ISOC resource? What’s the problem, brother? It’s not a competition. We’re just sharing information on the faith with our fellow Muslims.’ He returned serenely to his pamphleting.

  The ISOC guy was practically hyperventilating. ‘No, you don’t understand, why are you doing this? How can you compete with us – how can you form an organisation with the exact same aims as a pre-existing organisation? We booked this room, we organised these prayers! Why are you coming here to undermine us?’ He bloviated for a while, then deflated and walked back into the prayer venue.

  Tony approached the leafleter. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, feeling embarrassed – because he wanted too much; it made him vulnerable. ‘Can I have one of those papers, please?’

  Immediately he felt silly, pleading in a frightened little voice for a flyer, from a volunteer whose job it was to hand out flyers. The stranger, however, did not appear to be affected by his awkwardness at all. ‘Of course,’ he said, and passed one over.

  There was a pause while Tony was caught in the dilemma of whether to stick the flyer into his pocket, thus potentially crumpling it; or read it on the spot, thus ignoring the volunteer. Neither choice seemed ideal, socially speaking. ‘Why didn’t the ISOC people want you to give these out?’ he asked. ‘I mean, you’re just sharing information, right?’ He looked down at the words. A theory and beginning of practice for an Islamic world. In the bottom right corner, in very small letters, it said: A Publication of the Haqq.

  ‘Ohhh,’ said Tony suddenly, remembering. ‘This is what Hasan was talking about! I remember in high school, you see. The guy who first introduced me to Islam mentioned these people once. Then I went to a talk, where there was this amazing speaker …’

  He described the event, the school hall and the debaters, the intellectual theatre. He described the younger man, the second guest speaker who had spoken so compellingly on the nature of ideology. The stranger’s eyes lit up. ‘Oh! You must be thinking of Brother Abdul. He’s a member of ours, one of the founders of the Sydney chapter. He went to this uni – he was an Arts student, but you shouldn’t hold that against him. I love it when he owns white liberals. Did he say the part about the secular framework?’ They both laughed, and Tony realised what he was experiencing for the first time with a fellow Muslim: reminiscences. Shared memories. Camaraderie. Friendly banter. It was such an unexpected gift, he felt like crying messily into his jumper.

  ‘So, how are you enjoying ISOC?’

  ‘Well …’ Tony was not a good liar. ‘I mean, I’m glad they exist. I appreciate them organising prayers and stuff. But sometimes I feel like they’re missing the point a little. All of these rules, the way you dress, the way you hold your hands – sometimes it feels like they’re clinging on to tradition just for the sake of it. I know there’s a lot I’m very ignorant about, and I want to be corrected, I want to learn. But there are so many things that I can’t help doing wrong, and I wish …’

  ‘Aha.’ The stranger smiled. ‘I think I know exactly what you’re thinking of. “Excuse me, brother, is t
hat a speck of dust I see on your jacket? Does that invalidate your prayer and also your entire life to date?”’ Tony burst out laughing, not because it was funny but because it was so true. ‘As if any of that matters in the real world. Oh, don’t worry about them. These people run the mosque as if it’s their own private clique. They say people like us aren’t pious enough – but what matters is in here, what you believe in your heart. Not whether you know all of the tiny details. Of course, it’s important to learn, and we’ll help you to do that, but we won’t bully you for not having been born knowing the whole encyclopaedia of rules.’

  He did not even wait for Tony to confirm that he had been bullied. Tony looked down at his shoes, ashamed but also relieved. It was cathartic just having somebody put words to the isolation he had been feeling.

  ‘I’d like to get involved with your organisation,’ he said. ‘Really, I would love to. Can you tell me how?’

  The stranger placed a firm hand on Tony’s shoulder. Remarkably, the gesture felt truly brotherly rather than patronising. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘We’d be very glad to have you. I’m Can, by the way. Let me prank you.’ He pulled out his phone. ‘I think we’re going to get on very well together.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Andie, drowsing, dreamed about the real world. Reality, she believed, should occur among physical deeds; it could not dwell in the arrangement of figures and words, which were as insubstantial as the auras the nineteenth-century mystics had believed in. Reality did not persist amid policy documents or university degrees; reality was calories and flesh. And as she continued to dream, she wondered half-whimsically how she could know if she was real herself – and if she wasn’t, whether she could one day become so, like the puppet in the story. This, she recognised even in her sleep, was a futile line of reasoning, because being real is not something you can play at. It struck her, as she slipped back and forth on the border of consciousness, that the real world was in Indonesia.

  #

  ‘Going back’ had long been a refrain of Andie’s childhood. She was born in Sydney, to Indonesian Chinese migrants. Her mother and father, raised in Jakarta, had left voluntarily rather than under fear of riot and theft, and harboured none of Daisy’s bitterness towards their hometown. They had come to Sydney on working visas, planning to stay for a year or two. Through various conversations with the immigration department, this ‘year or two’ had been extended and cajoled into more than a decade, during which time their only child, Andie, was born. They bought a house in the western suburbs and planted trees in the backyard. Andie was enrolled at school, and they lived as if they would be rooted in Sydney forever. Yet for all their attachment to their new country, they preserved a curious linguistic nostalgia: they never called Indonesia by name, always referring to it as ‘back home’ instead. Back home, there were friends in every corner. But you would never trust the police; they did nothing for a problem, nothing. The doctors did not care, not like the nice Aussies who worked at the bulk billing surgery; they would throw a pill at you and tell you to go away. Everything was cheaper over there, people understood the value of money. There were market stalls where you could buy the delicious foods you couldn’t get over here.

  All of this talk about going ‘back home’ was just that, talk. Andie’s parents had no intention of ever returning to Jakarta. Unfortunately, the Department of Immigration had other plans. By the time Andie was eight, the warning letters had started to arrive. These continued sporadically for years, while Andie’s parents begged and wangled and devised ever more ingenious excuses. Eventually, though, the bureaucratic foot came down, and her parents were determined to be unlawful non-citizens. At the time, Andie was topping her class in almost everything. She did debating after school, and also showed up at the free weekend dance classes. Her teachers all adored her. She had been told that she might be sent to Indonesia, but it didn’t seem possible. She wandered around the playground, the familiar scene seeming to flicker and dissolve before her eyes. Nothing had sense.

  Then the riots broke out in Jakarta. ‘Violence,’ the BBC man said in his best concerned-guy voice, ‘is growing increasingly widespread. There are concerns for the minority ethnic-Chinese population …’ All conflicts look the same to people who haven’t lived through them, and Andie stared, uncomprehending, at the mass of humanity on the screen. It seemed impossible; it had nothing to do with her – just crowds and fists and angry voices. But her parents were in a state of high excitement. The next day, they jumped in the car and drove to Legal Aid; only weeks later, they were in possession of the magical golden ticket: refugee status. Official citizenship shortly followed. Andie sang the anthem in the council hall, exhausted by unnameable emotions. She did not feel relieved, as she had never truly believed they could be sent away. Deportation was like death: a final phenomenon of nature.

  And so she had continued growing, in every respect a model citizen. She worked twice as hard as everybody else: her English and her maths, her clarinet and her reading group. In drama class she always took the male part, since none of the other girls were sufficiently dedicated to their art to play Tybalt, Romeo or Macbeth. The near escape had left Andie with a curious inheritance: an eternal sense of precariousness, a heightened awareness of her own vulnerability. This manifested itself in moments of bravery, alternating with extreme timidity. She was an almost pathologically obedient daughter. On some level, she continued to believe that the slightest deviation from authority would send her spiralling off into the unknown.

  Initially, Andie’s parents had been elated when they learned that they could stay in Australia. Her mother, May, ran a laundromat, which had been doing tolerably well but not spectacularly so. Then one day a woman had come in and asked her to shorten a pair of pants which had been dragging under her heels. Oh, and maybe the pants themselves could be taken in – there’s nothing worse than clothes which just sort of hang there, don’t you think?

  May, whose instinctive response to any request from a white person was to immediately comply, had said, ‘How much?’ She had meant the length by which the pants should be shortened. But the woman had thought she was asking for a price, and said, ‘You tell me. Oh, actually –’ Then she had named a figure which May thought bordered on the obscene. Breathlessly, disbelieving, she had agreed. The customer, without even blinking, had paid up-front, pulling the money from her purse. ‘Wow,’ she’d commented. ‘That’s pretty good value.’ And later, seeing the quality of the work, she had remarked, ‘Hey, you’re really good at this. You know, you should advertise. I have lots of friends who would kill to get their clothes done this way.’

  Afterwards, May lay in bed staring at the ceiling. She was intensely conscious of the notes tucked away inside her cheap gold lamé wallet. The dollars fit snugly, as if they had always wanted to be there. She tried to calculate how long it would have taken her to earn this much in Jakarta. The currency conversion stumped her – as the days passed, Indonesia grew further and further away.

  She looked up DIY stencilling and had the words MAY LAM – MASTER TAILOR painted on the glass. She leaned back, satisfied with her own handiwork.

  ‘You’d better hope someone comes,’ her husband said dubiously. And oh, how they came. They came for buttons to be sewed back on, a five-minute service for which May charged ten whole dollars. A hundred and twenty Aussie dollars an hour! They came to have a tear in a perfect evening gown fixed up, some sequins sewn onto a little shrug, a jacket – which she altered, infinitesimally, to create that perfect fit. May had always known she had a gift for sewing, but it had never occurred to her that this gift could be monetised. She competed on both speed and quality: if they asked for a garment to be ready in four days, it was done in two. If they asked to change the straps on a party dress, she would tailor the skirt as well, and suggest adding something on the neckline. More often than not, her suggestion was received with ecstatic gratitude once the customer saw the results.

  Soon she had built up quite a followin
g. It amazed her, how much these Aussies were willing to pay for a simple task. Money came out of them like water, without their thinking about it, like going to the toilet. Everyone in this country seemed to have money, even the ones who liked to assure her they were ‘poor’. When she first heard them use that word, May could barely believe it. The ones who used it, university students, were dressed up in berets and brown corduroy skirts and coloured see-through stockings; they practically glowed with good health and vitality. How could they possibly be ‘poor’? She was fond of them all, but it was a complicated feeling. She was grateful for the business they provided, but sometimes her gratitude had an undertone of contempt. They were always so sweet and polite, but it was a sweetness which hadn’t been tested. Goodness is cheap over here, she thought. I want to see you be good when it starts to hurt, when you can no longer afford it.

  Andie’s father Peter didn’t do so well for himself. He had never been physically or temperamentally suited to driving taxis. He was an economics graduate from the Bandung Institute of Technology. This served no purpose other than to make him even more frustrated that the bulk of the fare accrued to the taxi licence owner rather than the actual driver. ‘Pure rent seeking!’ Andie once heard him muttering to himself. ‘They maintain an artificial scarcity, so they can do no work and reap the profits.’