The Girl Who Fell to Earth (14 page)

We loitered for ten minutes near a booth and then Faraj dialed a number, keeping his eye on the house the whole time. He seemed surprised to hear a man answer and handed me the phone. I said in my most grown-up voice, “Good evening, is Kholoud there? This is her English teacher calling.”

Faraj grinned, pleased at how foreign and therefore official I sounded. I heard a shuffling and a woman's voice came softly across the line.

“Hello?” It came in a half-whisper.

Faraj yanked the phone out of my hand and breathed deeply into the phone. She kept the ruse up, responding as though he were her English teacher. A date and place were set for a rendezvous, and she pledged she'd be there no matter how elaborately she'd have to lie. So began my job as go-between for Faraj and Kholoud in the final days leading up to his marriage to Amna.

That night we cruised through Doha with the windows down, passing through Electricity Street on our way—a miniaturized version of Piccadilly Circus, where even the tiniest shop front boasted a massive bank of neon. All the signs were fairly abstract, like “Amira Services” and “Al-Maha Machinery.” Signs like these flickered with epileptic intensity over otherwise unmarked doors. I remember in particular the outrageous promise of “World of Magic,” which turned out to be a carpet wholesaler. We came out of the manic
souq
area and onto the corniche, the smooth rim of concrete that ran the length of the city from the port to the Sheraton still standing at the far end of the bay. Except for the young shoots of office towers now sprouting up around it, it was the same as I'd remembered it.

When we came to a red light I could see Faraj sifting through his English vocabulary for something to say, finally settling on “thank you.”

I didn't know how to express the vicarious rush of freedom and happiness I was experiencing, so I just grinned at him.

Now that we were in cahoots, conversation flowed more naturally. He'd stop and start his cassette tapes and quiz me on Aline Khalaf lyrics: “Fire! Wind!” she crooned. “Heart! Ember!” I called back, proud of my new Arabic words. But Faraj wasn't being a teacher consciously; he just thought it was funny to hear me sing Aline Khalaf songs. Sometimes after that, he talked to me about how pent up and angry he was for not being able to marry outside the tribe. After my mother, one outsider married into the family had proved enough, so Faraj's hopes of marrying a non-Bedouin girl from the city were crushed. As it turned out, Faraj, the only man of the household, had had little choice in the matter.

 

All through August, I rode shotgun in the Patrol. Faraj offered small, helpful hints as to mistakes I was making. For example, he demonstrated for me how to walk in my
abaya
while giving the effect of floating just above the ground. Even today I haven't mastered how to walk in a light, skimming motion to replace my cow-hocked trod. During my apprenticeship to Faraj, I learned the subtleties of courtship in Qatar and the ins and outs of phone dating before mobile phones. After a few weeks, I was able to pick up on the complex, subtle, and usually unsuccessful exchanges going on in public all the time. As we walked through the mall, boys slowed down and muttered their numbers at women, who on closer sight were old enough to be their mothers. Men slipped notes with their phone numbers into the open purses of girls drifting past. There was an intense energy of longing and desire that hung over the long strips of mall corridors, and it had nothing to do with what was displayed in the windows of the shops.

The night of the rendezvous with Kholoud came, and Faraj called me to his room. It was tiny and mostly filled with his bed, a twin-size cot. Above this hung a poster of the Emirati singer Ahlam. She smiled down on us maniacally, face masked with the painted-on joy of a circus clown. Cassette tapes littered the pillows at the head of the bed, and a tape player lay propped against the wall. There was no other furniture in the space, although the screen of a small television peered out of a wall of bedding the family stored for camping trips. At the top of this dam of polyester blankets and pillows he had placed a plastic tea tray and filled it with his prize possessions: bottles of
oud
, a pair of diamanté silver cuff links, a white leather slipcase for when he wanted to change the look of his bleep, and a pretty gilded Quran. It occurred to me then that Faraj, for all the comparative liberty he had, was still cloistered from the world, if in a different way than his sisters.

The meeting with Kholoud was set for Aladdin's Kingdom on Family Day, which was the only day her father would permit her to leave the house. Family Day is a Gulf institution in which once a week, every week, public spaces are inverted to become effectively private. Malls, beaches, and fun parks like Aladdin's Kingdom become female-only, a shift happens, and single men are not allowed in. Women use the opportunity to eat in the food courts, pelt the monkeys in the zoo with snack food, and lose their lunches on the Pirate Ship. The only way a male can enter the gates of one of these pop-up women's countries is as chaperone to a female family member. This is where I came in. Alone, Faraj could not pass security at the smoking oil lamp marking the entrance to Aladdin's Kingdom; with me in tow it would be easy.

After we'd been waved in with a larger crowd of children and nannies, we looked for a place to wait. The air was heavy with popcorn dust and burnt sugar. Faraj walked cautiously down the path, sweat like dew on the bristles of his upper lip. He obviously felt like a trespasser, a stranger, maybe even a criminal. We found a bench alongside the perimeter fence of the amusement park and watched the Zipper swing and the Tea Cups plunge and spin women and children. It was eerily quiet on the outskirts of the park, carnival music drowned out by the heavy creak of pivoting metal. Faraj was too nervous to look around much, so I had to keep a lookout for the signal Kholoud had promised us. We waited almost an hour before it came, and only I saw her.

At least I
hoped
it was Kholoud who led us to the Gravitron, a squat, UFO-type ride that used centrifugal force to pin you to sliding slats of pleather. It was full of kids, so we weren't able to make our way over to where Kholoud and her friends were. They were holding hands silently, watching Faraj and me. As the ride started up, the force suctioned their veils to their faces and their
abaya
s to their bodies. Faraj strained to turn his head away from the alluring sight but he was just as pinned back, his white
gutra
sucked against the wall like wet toilet paper. The hint of Kholoud's body through thin black rayon, outlined in flickering Gravitron light, was lurid. Her
niqab
was folded up to her eyes and revealed a perfect hot-pink pout glistening with lip gloss. She blindly tried to pull it back down over her face, but it was too late and, anyway, she was smiling. Swept up in the melodrama playing out before me, I felt a swell of pity for my immobilized uncle, days away from marrying a girl he didn't love.

Faraj and I tottered out ahead of Kholoud, unsure of our footing on the metal ramp. Faraj herded me to the outer edge of the Gravitron, where no one could see us. He stuffed something into my hand and said, “When she comes out, give this to her.” He looked around anxiously and then backed off a ways and tried to look casual near a garbage can. I stood at the end of the corral waiting for Kholoud to emerge, so caught up in the drama that I started to pit out through my
abaya
. She and her friends exited the ride last and zigzagged through the fence toward me. As she approached, she held her hand out, palm up, for me to deliver the gift. She was obviously familiar with this trick. One of her friends put her hand on my shoulder and drew me into a stroll away from Faraj while Kholoud read the note without breaking stride.

Kholoud came to the end of the note and addressed me, her voice warbled with a sob. “Tell your uncle I hate him,” she declared. Then she ripped his note into pieces, all the while looking over my shoulder directly at Faraj. He was standing at the garbage can, looking like he might cry. The girl holding my shoulder released me and I was left to drift in their wake, as confused at her reaction to my uncle's farewell note as he was. I went back to Faraj and we sat together on the bench, watching the scraps of his love letter as they were swept up with the litter of candy wrappers and cans of Shani.

15

MU DRACONIS  •  THE DANCER  •   

The road to Saudi was a bleak memento mori marked every few kilometers by the twisted husks of crashed cars. We were on our way to Al-Hasa in Saudi Arabia, where Faraj's bride awaited him and the wedding, and I was looking forward to seeing Baba again before catching my flight home. We were crowded into Faraj's Nissan Patrol and through the
berga
covering my face, I couldn't see where I ended and the other girls started, for all the black fabric we were draped in. To make the journey even more uncomfortable, the A/C was still broken. So with the windows down and our
abaya
s aloft in the wind, we approached the Saudi border like a bat with a great flapping wingspan of rayon and polyester.

More than a week had passed since the rendezvous with Kholoud and her message of rejection. After that, Faraj had seemed to gentle down as the marriage grew near, and was now fully resigned to his fate. He seemed almost relieved. As much as the rules of the tribe were a snare he was tangled up in, they were also a safety net for when decisions were too difficult to make. Now, with the wedding only days away, the whole clan had begun to converge on Al-Hasa. They came en masse down Salwa road, past the U.S. Air Force base and onward in a caravan of trucks. It reminded me of traveling in the Suburban full of kids out to Saudi when Dima and I were little. The pileup at the border was mostly other relatives, or so it seemed as Faraj made rounds with the car, honking, waving, and revving the overheating engine at cars full of people. He pulled up alongside a small trailer with an image of a woman in a
berga
painted onto the flapping door. I tumbled out with the rest and waited while Faraj doled our passports out of a stack, checking the photos and then holding them out to us without even checking to see who was who. His skill at telling us apart even with our faces covered was impressive.

Inside the trailer, an overweight woman reclined on pillows on the floor next to a radio. Irritated at the interruption, she got up and received the jumble of our passports all at once. She flipped through the pages, yawning with boredom, and scanned the photos, calling our names out individually.

“Falak!” she barked. Falak lifted her veil for the woman to compare to the photo. She roughly stamped the passport and called my name out. “Safya!” I lifted my
berga
for her to compare my face. She squinted at me, then looked down at the photo. She shook her head forbiddingly. “Why does it say here born in USA?”

I grunted, not wanting my accent to give me away and looked in panic to Falak for help.

Luckily a line had started to form behind me, so the woman reluctantly stamped my passport and let us go.

I hung close to Falak as we walked through the border to the other side, where Faraj was waiting with the car. Dogs were barking in a kennel somewhere, and I glared out of my veil into the two-way mirrors that reflected the checkpoint booths as we passed. Far from finding it oppressive, I discovered that wearing a
berga
over my face was actually kind of fun. This was before
berga
became such a hot-button issue in the West, and wearing it was in no way political to me. Instead it was like undergoing an easy transformation into a bona fide Al-Dafira woman, anonymous, invisible, and with the sun and sand protection over my face: invincible. I felt as though I could go anywhere and, out of politeness, no one would bother me.

We came to the other side of the customs pavilion, where border guards pulled up the upholstery and rifled through the glove compartment of Faraj's truck. Several small cabins with palm trees were clustered at one end of the border, laundry hung out to dry on lines strung across the back of trucks.

“People live here?” I asked Falak.

She looked around and shrugged. “Probably people who get sick or have the wrong papers stay there.”

There was something so pleasing about these prefab homes in no-man's-land. As we crossed the border and headed northwest to Al-Hasa, I fantasized about being stranded back there at the border. How it would be to have my own little cabin with a palm tree in front, hemmed in tightly to these few stateless kilometers between the Qatari and Saudi borders, where the land belonged as much to me as to anyone else.

Al-Hasa was an oasis town where the famous Friday market used to draw Al-Dafira from all directions. We'd come a few days early to find cheap dresses for the wedding, and there were droves of deal-seeking Qataris just like us who came to Saudi to buy dates and clothes and jewelry and perfumes with strangely translated Chinese names like
Accidentally Wildly Jealous
for a few riyals less than they were priced in Doha.

Faraj drove us directly to the part of the
souq
where the
abayas
were cheap and the party dresses hot messes. The garments chosen by my aunts for Faraj's wedding were all froths of lace with huge drumstick-style sleeves. They each took turns in the tiny shop, trying on gowns more bedazzled than a Las Vegas showgirl's costume. A mannequin stood at the center of the tiny room, her head removed but her fiberglass body bolted to the platform. The details of her body were barely hinted at with softly molded indentations, and she sported a beaded Spandex tunic that quit mid-thigh and rained glass droplets down to her toes.

Aunt Moody emerged from the little changing booth in a spumescent mint-green number that came with a bag of matching accessories, including ribbon rosettes, colored contacts, and a vial of green glitter with which to dust her cleavage and hair if extra glam were required. “Safya! Aren't you going to try anything on?” she asked.

By this point I was so sweaty and tired and twisted up in my
abaya
that the thought of trying on a tulle-and-sequin dress was about as appealing as getting tarred and feathered. I shook my head and sat on the sidelines until decisions had been made about the gowns and we headed to a relative's house, where I collapsed onto the cushions and wondered dozily where Baba was and when he was going to turn up. He'd promised at the airport in Abu Dhabi that he'd be here. Where was he? Had he heard about my brawl with the cousins? Was he upset with me?

These questions were still swirling in my head when Aunt Moody interrupted my brooding. “Safya, you have to look your best! Everyone is expecting you to dance. They haven't seen you since you were small.”

I suppose this was her way of making peace, but I was hesitant to dance after my birthday incident.

“Your father will be proud if he knows his daughter danced.”

Moody really knew how to get at my underbelly. The next thing I knew I was on my feet being led around the room in an impromptu dance lesson. The elderly women all clapped in time with music from the television as Moody tied a
shala
around my hips so they could all assess my lumpen figure. She then made me clod-hop in time with her on the balls of my feet. Someone produced a dress for me to try on. It was ill-fitting and looked like the kind of confection a Bavarian princess might wear, all sky blue with puffed sleeves and a huge skirt tiered with ribbons. Moody paraded me to the middle of the room, where she left me standing in front of everyone, looking and feeling like a fairy-tale reject. I twisted slowly at the center of the carpet for everyone to have a look before they decided collectively, “It's perfect!”
This
, they decided, would be my gown.

The day before Faraj's wedding, squeals of pain ripped through the house. A shrill howl of “
M-Hagg-Sanaa
!” came from the bedroom.

“What's going on?” I asked. The door to the bride's room was locked.

More whimpering came from the other side of the door. “The
halawa
lady has arrived,” Falak replied ominously, and I sensed the slightest hint of sadistic glee in her eye.

Halawa
, I would soon discover, was a kind of depilatory that not only rips hair out but removes a whole layer of skin. The
halawa
itself is a golden glop of boiled sugar, water, and lemon the consistency of thick honey. We all waited in the living room while the henna lady drew patterns on the hands and feet of my cousins. There were different styles of henna: North African henna looked like fish bones, Indian was all peacocks and paisley, Sudani was black dye in thick stripes, and Gulfi consisted of dots and florals.

Aunt Moody brought a canister of kerosene to mix with the green paste. “It'll make the henna
nice
and dark!” she claimed.

My turn came, and the henna lady suggested I try the newest
moda
—a sort of tribal-tattoo-style swirl placed like ass antlers on the lower back. Although my taste in fashion was dubious, I couldn't keep up with early '90s global trashiness and asked for regular old hands and feet. A few seconds after contact with my skin, the design started to burn itself into my flesh. Despite the pain, Moody was right; the kerosene did indeed give the henna a pleasing dark burgundy color. The bride emerged from her room a hairless wonder. Everyone crowded around to feel how soft her arms and legs were while the henna lady laid out newspaper and then laid Amna out on it flat. She got the whole deal: head and shoulders, knees and toes. The henna looked like an invasive ivy, crowding up from her ankles to her thighs.

Like everything else, the wedding was segregated into female and male receptions: two canvas tents were pitched beside each other on the road in front of the house. There was a catwalk-style dais at the center; swans and roses and a great big moon hung from the tent poles. Some of my cousins were snooty about the tents. Compared to the air-conditioned halls of hotels in Doha, this was straight ghetto. As was being roughly frisked for cameras by two stern security women at the entrance to the tent. They wore police caps pinned on top of their
hijabs
. The tent was full of freshly done-up usually veiled women in fringe miniskirts and braless chiffon numbers, which is why the only cameras allowed inside were those of the “professional ladies' photographers”—mostly Filipino women armed with ostentatious SLR cameras. They posed girls into demented glamour-shot poses that would then be traded among friends as mementos.

Immediately upon our entry a row of girls gathered for kisses. I felt like a pigeon bobbing my head in and out, cheek to cheek, coming to the end of the line with a greasy smear of rouge and powder on the right side of my face. Making my way to the end of this lineup, I saw Flu having her portrait taken with my younger sisters, pinky finger under chin, head cocked in an absurd cutesy pose.

“Safya! We're taking a photo for your baba! Come sit with us!” she called to me.

I wandered reluctantly over and hung near the edge of the frame. The photographer shoved me in front of the backdrop, which was supposed to be some kind of Alpine location and reminded me of Mount Rainier in the spring. We all sat there together frozen at various beauty angles waiting for the photo to be taken.

“I'm so proud of you! Look! You're like a real Al-Dafira girl now!” Flu said as she squeezed my shoulders and kissed my cheek. “Your baba will be proud to see you all grown up like this!”

I smiled as faintly as possible, worried the crust of makeup clinging to my face might crack.

We were served cellophane-wrapped wedding favors—shriveled pistachios and sugared almonds in nougat. The dinner included a whole baby lamb splayed out over a hill of rice. The lamb still had its eyes. Out of its back rose a tier of trays with condiments: yogurt, pickles, pepper, salt. The meat was butter-soft; I tore off pieces with my hands. But it wasn't until after dinner that the main event began. The stage in the middle of the tent filled up with dancing girls all decked out in vibrant violet, shimmery mustard gold, and all different rainbow brights. Flesh burst the seams of silk dresses and the party burst the canvas tent, barely shielding the celebration from the bored male relatives who idled outside the tent in their cars. Nervous virgins and divorcées took their places on a catwalk that was auction house, runway, and dance floor all at once. Black-robed mothers of marriageable sons moved close in anticipation. Each eligible girl clambered onto the stage and was announced by the Sudanese wedding singers, called
daghagat
. They played drums and sang into battered microphones, feedback issuing from the cheap speakers. All the songs sounded the same to me, yet the girls all had their favorites.

A whisper flew low over the room that the men were coming, and in seconds, all the colors turned to black as the entire party grabbed for cover under whatever
abaya
they could find. I soon found that I was the only person still uncovered, and skittered from one cluster of black to another looking for shelter before finally ducking under a table near the bride's end of the dais. I peeked out through the lace tablecloth as the lights dimmed and the drumming began. I hoped this might be my chance to spot Baba, but the only familiar face belonged to Faraj, who appeared in a spotlight at the entrance to the tent. He was flanked by the bride's brothers, who cantered at his sides. He had groomed his beard into a perfect
saksuka
that looked to me like a soda-can tab stamped around his mouth. One of Amna's brothers raised a sword over his head and swung it around as the group of them proceeded to where the bride was perched, huge dress taking up most of the love seat. The fear on her chubby face was disguised at a distance by a protective layer of makeup, but from up close where I hid under the table it was clear she was petrified.