Good Muslim Boy (5 page)

‘How can I help you young boys?’ said Mr X.

‘Are you Mr X?’ I asked, suddenly unsure. He was a bearded old man in a
kofia
hat.

‘I don’t know about this X thing,’ he said, ‘but I highly recommend this new photo
of the Ayatollah. He’s overlooking a nature strip. Very colourful, sure to bring
a zing to your decor.’

Musty jumped in. ‘We want the Mr Walker.’

‘What do you think of the Ayatollah?’ asked Mr X.

‘He’s, uh…’ I searched for a response. A trap, as usual. If I said I loved the Ayatollah,
it would prove I had religious affiliations and expose our thuggy costumes as a terrible
front. If I said I hated the Ayatollah, he could hand us to the authorities for a
lengthy punishment.

‘Get out of my shop,’ concluded Mr X, gesturing to the exit with as much force and
finality as a cricket umpire.

A real thug would’ve known how to respond to this scenario. As for me and Musty,
we never learned the correct response. We tried schemes like this one time and time
again, with various alcohol vendors—there were many men like Mr X. But they always
chose not to deal with such unconvincing clients, who could always be gathering intel
for the Piety Police. The punishment for selling alcohol was either jail or death.

Calling them the ‘Piety Police’ may sound like a diminutive term, but there was a
Persian proverb that duly applied to these people: ‘Don’t scoff at chilli, so puny
and small—gorge a handful and your balls will fall.’

They were better known as the Monkerat, which literally means ‘against vice’. They
worked undercover, and had a talent for smashing people’s teeth—in or out, it was
up to them. They landed precise punches.

They were different to regular police. They only executed religious warrants. Beardless
men were slapped around, as were young ladies who left the house with but a strand
of hair poking out from under their hijabs. As for beardless men like me who tried
to chat up girls like these? We made the perfect public punching bags for the Monkerat.

The Monkerat shaved their beards to blend in with the sinners. They popped their
top two shirt buttons, wore silver chains like me. They slicked back their hair and
hung around noteworthy hotspots of sin. They chewed gum far too indolently, spat
on the sidewalk to look ‘hard’. They even used their prayer beads like genuine street
rats did, spinning them in circles round their index fingers while they smoked cigarettes
hands-free.

They were very good at what they did, always three moves ahead. Of course, we all
spent countless hours trying to make
them. We analysed gum-chewing techniques, comparing
the styles of thugs to those of the average man on the street: thugs chewed like
camels, while the average person chewed gum like a cow. A novice Monkerat would ham
his chewing and show too much tongue. But that was when they were novices; they got
real good, real quick.

They also spat their phlegm differently. A real spitter with no agenda wouldn’t care
where their chunky throat soup might land; a rookie Monkerat would hesitate, look
around, lest he accidentally dirty a freshly painted wall.

Following this logic, I one day saw a thug spit on a wall that had a slogan from
the Ayatollah sprawled across it in official font. A Monkerat would never go as far
as blasphemy—that would be like a cop taking real heroin, which doesn’t happen, most
of the time. I sauntered up to him to get the goss about an alcohol vendor.

‘Sup,’ I said, bouncing up and down like a gangster.

‘Fuck off,’ the thug replied.

‘Take it easy, bro,’ I said.

‘You with the pigs? They send you?’ He looked me up and down. Lately, the Monkerat
had been hiring kids younger than me.

‘No, swear to God.’

‘Swear on your father’s eyes,’ he said. ‘Say, “May he go blind if I’m lying.”’

‘May my dad go blind if I’m a cop rat,’ I said solemnly. ‘Now can you please tell
me who’s selling some liquid around here?’

‘What sorta liquid?’

‘You know. Get high.’

‘Alcohol?’ he said.

My face turned pale. A real thug would never use that word. I inspected his attire
again, as casually as I could, trying to pick
out a glitch, and suddenly there it
was: he was wearing black business socks beneath his basketball shoes.

I shook my head and addressed him formally. I was very close to having a very real
problem. ‘What alcohol?’ I spat. ‘Damn you and your evil mind! This is the Islamic
Republic! If I
ever
catch you loitering here again, I’ll report you to the Monkerat!
Be gone!’

A real thug would have belted me. The Monkerat just froze.

It was no use trying to spot them most of the time; they were chameleons. They had
a cloak of invisibility unique around the world, thicker and blanker than any other
police I’ve ever seen. That was what happened when you took your job this seriously.

In the end, all we could do was dutifully grow our beards. But we were young, and
our faces ended up looking as patchy as KFC chicken wings.

It sucked being cold in winter, and it sucked being in school. But when summer engulfed
the city, and we went on break from school, it still sucked being poor. It always
did. I wanted to buy an ice-cream, but I was dreaming even bigger. I wanted to buy
a cool, luxurious smoothie.

And this was why I moved into a lucrative new business: the provision and sale of
fireworks, both legal and illegal. I recruited my cousins and Moe Greene.

We knew of a few Afghan boys who smuggled fireworks across the border, so I negotiated
with them to get some merchandise on credit. I had to swear on my mother’s eyes
that I would not rat them out to the cops and then swear on my mother’s womb that
I would pay them back.

After consulting with my cousins, we decided to give our goods peculiar names, to
find a point of difference and ensure a
wildfire word-of-mouth campaign. We stocked
the Hitler 1000 rocket—small and Russian-made—and the Genghis Khan, a Chinese-made
missile that packed a bigger punch. Our other bestsellers included the Attila the
Hun 441, the Pharaoh 2000 BC, and the God’s Fury 3000. Each name had its internal
logic, sometimes multiple layers. The Pharaoh was Egyptian-made, but it also concealed
a rocket within a rocket—inside a tomb, if you will. Better yet, the inner shell
generally detonated a while after the initial rocket had popped. Just like a real
Pharaoh, it was built to be resurrected. We also sold a Bin Laden for the right fee.

We decided not to cater for weddings or birthdays, or the ever-popular return-of-POW
celebrations. It was important not to sell our rockets to just anyone, because (a)
they could be Monkerat, and (b) if they didn’t know how to set the rockets off, the
explosions could be fierce. It was a fast way to get yourself comfy one-bedroom lodgings
at the local hospital.

The return-of-POW celebrations were particularly tempting: scores of POWs were trickling
back into the country, so we knew that we could make a lot of dough. But one day,
we’d sold some rockets to the excited child of one of these returning war heroes.
The boy had set off the thunderous fireworks upon his dad’s return—and the father,
upon hearing the ear-splitting blasts, was forced into nightmarish flashbacks of
his days on the front lines. He completely lost his mind, right there and then. He
stripped off his boots and fatigues in front of the entire neighbourhood, and ran
through the streets of Qom wearing nothing but his socks and a freshly stained set
of underpants.

It was a volatile business. Like certain alcohol vendors, our base of operations
had to be constantly on the move. We eventually settled at the foothills of the mountains,
which had a huge geographical advantage. We knew the landscape well, and there was
a low possibility of ambush. We bought two-way
radios and tuned them to the police
band. One of us would climb the mountain—a full half-kilometre—where he could get
a good view of the police. In the event of a police raid, he’d send an emergency
signal, a mirror-flash from our comrade at the peak.

Every Friday, we smoked cigarettes atop Prophet Khezr Mountain, tucked inside the
small worship cabin, which was built from logs and rocks. Legend had it that the
Prophet Khezr, born a thousand years before Christ, had passed through this mountain,
built the chapel as a place of prayer, and then vanished, by act of God. The ancient
sanctuary was a deeply spiritual place. It was also the perfect stash-spot for our
illegal fireworks.

‘Sami-Sami-Musty,’ I radioed up the mountain.

‘Come in, Sami, over,’ Musty replied.

‘The plain clear, over?’

‘Clear as plastic, over.’

‘Double-check, over.’

‘Shit, I think I see cops. Over.’

For the most part, we aborted missions purely from paranoia—which was still better
than getting too comfortable.

The whole job was arduous, and sneaking around only made it more so. We’d instruct
buyers to leave their money by a certain cave, and direct them to another cave, where
their product was stored. Some buyers ripped us off by depositing fake money. One
of them threw in a note that read,
Go fuck yourself
.

‘This guy’s written
go suck twelve dicks
,’ I complained, more incredulous than frustrated.
‘Why?’

‘Who cares about the twelve dicks. He’s stolen the stuff,’ spat Musty.

‘Yeah, but why twelve? Why not seven or three or a thousand?’

‘Shut up, Osamah! We’re losing money here. We have to think.’

We all thought for a solid sunset, smoking quietly at the peak.

‘How about we pull off the
Persian
instruction sets from the packaging?’ I suggested.
‘Leave the Chinese ones on. That way people have to call us to learn how to set the
fireworks off.’ I got excited. ‘Maybe they leave their phone number alongside their
payment. And we can call them and give them the details on how to launch the rockets.’

It worked a treat. People still stole our goods sometimes, but they also became walking
billboards about the dangers of handling fireworks when you didn’t really know how.

It was still a taxing business, and it lasted no more than that unforgettable summer—unforgettable,
and grim. There was no way we could have known the group of teenage buyers was the
Monkerat—because they weren’t really the Monkerat, they were only their conscripts.
The boys looked street-hard, and
were
street-hard. They were honest-to-God juvies
who’d signed a deal with the District Court in exchange for early release.

The police tracked our payphones and rained down with brutal force. They deposited
us in a cell and bashed us to their liking. We gave a sworn statement that we would
all be good boys from then on.

When our parents came to pick us up, they gave us such a flogging that at one stage
I moaned, ‘I just want to go back to jail.’

I was man of the house again—only this time, my father hadn’t gone out to the front
line. He’d gone to a country called Australia to lecture, and to preach, which Mum
thought was more dangerous than the war. He’d gone there before, but only for four-week
periods, during a special religious month in the Muslim calendar. This time, he’d
been called there for a three-month stretch, so I’d switched to a less-risky method
of making cash: I was a legitimate
shoe-shiner, just outside the shrine. It wasn’t
exactly smoothie money, but it was enough for books.

I knew that Dad was in for a lot of kangaroos. (We’d watched a dubbed version of
Skippy
on TV.) I also knew there was a Queen who liked colourful hats for obscure
reasons. I learned more at the library: it was a country
and
a continent. Its white
people wore cowboy hats and raised sheep, while its indigenous people roamed nude
and hunted the white people with boomerangs, in retaliation for the white people’s
having hunted them with bullets.

In one journal I came across the Sydney Opera House: ‘that asinine building dubbed
the house of the opera which looks like a hideous cockscomb…’ Another article emphasised
the newness of the country, and placed great import on the population’s origins
as British convicts. Another told how Australia had never been through a
real
civil
conflict, and how its entire population didn’t match that of Iran’s capital. The
articles treated Australia with brevity and contempt. A Kangaroo Continent, impossibly
distant from the rest of the known world.

And Dad had gone to this strange, impractical land to lecture its people on Islamic
History and Arabic Literature.

He called international every day to see how we were doing, and to check that I was
taking care of the house. He was also making real money, and promised that when he
got home, we’d finally get to move into a house with actual bedrooms.

He told us about the place he was staying in, which was called Sydney. He didn’t
mention the Opera House or the beaches. Instead, he was entranced by the abundant
aisles of the supermarkets. He understood his audience: we, too, were amazed.

‘A thousand different types of cheese?’ I asked, flabbergasted.

‘A whole aisle dedicated to cheese! They have everything.’

‘What about butter?’

‘A thousand types of butter, too. And you don’t even have to have cheese and butter
for breakfast, because they have cereals for breakfast, a thousand types!’

This was clearly ridiculous. During and after the war, we’d been on rations. Each
family had received a coupon, entitling them to the basics: vegetable oil, sugar,
flour and rice. You could always buy more commodities on the black market, but that
was for wealthy families. Prices had been severely jacked up.

In Iran, there are six or seven different types of bread, each unique and ‘baked
on the spot’ at its own special bakery. But the problem of a small town like Qom’s
being flooded with a population more often found in a capital city was that bread
ran out before even half of us got a turn. As such, it was essential to line up as
early as 4 am, well before the dawn prayer. Unfortunately, the same situation applied
to buying milk, and it was my job to secure both necessities.