The Girl Who Fell to Earth (17 page)

I could see all sorts of things that wealth and the attendant cosmopolitanism that comes with prosperity and brisk business travel had brought the Gulf. Equally, I was witness to the fact that my family did not seem to be benefiting from any of it. That said, we were by no means blameless for falling off the camel of “progress” in the night.

Generally speaking, my aunts, uncles, and even Flu were mistrustful of the educational system. For this reason it was common for kids in our family to miss large chunks of the school year simply due to the widely held belief that long desert camping trips were more valuable as education. In a world where learning to scrape the meat from a lizard's back was an important survival skill, Al-Dafira kids would have thrived. However, that was not the world we were living in anymore. As a rule, almost all of my cousins, both male and female, were held back in school, and it was normal to drop out to get married. The lack of success in school led to a generally negative collective opinion of it. This paved the way for a generation of individuals who could survive alone in the desert but who if placed at a desk were considered failures. Needless to say, this general status of abjection was upsetting to me. In addition to this, my privileged place among the wealthiest kids in the country only served to make me feel more confused, more belligerent, and more alone than I had ever been in America.

Umi Safya encouraged us not to care about being accepted by the “moderns,” as the non-Bedouin city-folk were referred to. Umi complained about how they had begun to impose ideas about class that had not existed before. “Nowadays, all the girls want weddings in fancy hotels, not tents, and they want personal drivers for shopping trips to spend money they don't have. They want
marka
handbags and shoes.” And she was right—all of the Gulf had a bad case of the nouveaux riches. This was big trouble for other families like ours, because we had the nouveau part without the riche.

When I was just a visitor, no one expected me to pray. And when I was new, no one expected me to roust myself at 5 a.m. Now that I was a resident taking up my mouthful of the house's food rations, I was expected to pray
at least
three times a day. Umi entered in the dark every morning and jangled her cane through the rungs of the metal bunk bed like a dinner triangle, yelling “
Goomu! Al-Salah!
” It had come to pass by now that I was too ashamed to admit I didn't really have enough memorized to pray properly. I sat down on the bottom bunk and stared at Falak's back while she went about her prostrations. She looked like a ghost silhouetted in her soft white
khimar
, the only skin showing the soles of her feet, mottled orange from an old henna job. I listened to her prayers as I hunched there on the bed. She whispered a verse, words knocking against the backs of her teeth as she spoke them without opening her mouth. It was a soothing repetition. I imagined that holding those sounds in my mouth would be refreshing, like sucking on a mint.

When she left the room I locked the door behind her and timidly unrolled the carpet and
khimar
like a spiritual scavenger. I felt silly wrapped in my aunt's sheet, standing at the foot of her carpet, right hand over left at my belly. What could I do? I assured myself it would be the effort that counted, and I called the verses I could remember up from pit of my childhood memory. The first part came easily, and apart for a fumbled line in the middle, the full
Fatiha
tumbled out of me. But then I was at a loss, because the rest of the words were empty.

I gave up and knelt down on the carpet feeling like an idiot. My mind wandered the maze-line that bordered the carpet. It was bright electric blue, and for the first time I noticed that the design on the carpet was actually a view looking out through a colonnade to the
Kaaba
. I kept parsing through the verses I knew, tracing them with my finger in the Quran, wishing I understood, expecting some kind of epiphany to come from pronouncing the syllables. It reminded me of staring at a Magic Eye puzzle in the newspaper—retraining my vision into recognizing another dimension.

Then I had a moment of strange out-of-self objectivity, like the surprise when you look in the mirror and notice how alien and weird human faces really are. I felt shrinkingly small and epically distant from everyone and everything I knew. The earth was turning on its axis under me, and it was making me dizzy. That old star phobia started coming back and I wanted something to cling to. And as the situation would have it, that thing came in the form of a boy.

18

EPSILON CANIS MAJORIS  •  THE VIRGINS  •   

Suhail and I were paired together during a physics unit on diffraction. It was unusual for Qataris of the opposite sex to be paired up, and in truth, the boys and girls generally kept a respectful distance from one another in school. There was a sort of silent but sacred Las Vegas bond between the Qataris—whatever happened in school stayed in school. Still, the girls were very careful about their appearance (perhaps no more so than image-obsessed teenage girls anywhere else), and the boys who loved kicking the backs of foreign girls' chairs adjusted their behavior when a Qatari girl was present. As these things generally go, I had noticed Suhail because he wasn't like the other boys. So when we finally sat beside each other, watching Mr. Kindi work out an equation on the whiteboard, I was sprung.

“The beam shape of a radar antenna can be analyzed using diffraction equations,” Mr. Kindi explained in the background. The foreground of my brain was fizzing with the nearness of the boy next to me. “So today we are going to do a fun experiment with diffraction. Does anyone know who this is?” He passed an envelope around the class with a thirty-five-dirham postage stamp on it.

“Ibn Haitham,” Suhail said, too quietly to be heard.

I was impressed. His apparent fluency in Islamic science and his ability to recognize the smudgy little portrait were intimidating in themselves. But the thing that beguiled me most was his indifference to getting credit for it, a trait that was rare in a culture where practically every activity was given a résumé-padding certification and even the most minor milestone was commemorated with a trophy.

Someone at the front yelled out, “Ibn Haitham!”

“That is correct!” Mr. Kindi proclaimed, enthused by the response he was getting.

Suhail smiled in quiet triumph as though the praise had been lavished on him. And that was all it took. The little hairs on my body stood on end and reached for him. I was charged, lit, on. His presence was like a burning ember right next to me, and as I warmed myself in his aura, I also noticed things: his big white teeth as perfect as Chiclets, the mustache bristling his boyish face, the comet of depigmentation scarring his cheek . . . and I yearned, which was a new feeling.

“And what was he famous for having observed?” Mr. Kindi cut into my daydream. Shifty silence.

Again Suhail answered quietly, “Solar eclipse.”

Mr. Kindi looked around the room hopefully. “Nobody?”

I nudged Suhail, exasperated for him. I grabbed his hand and raised it for him.

“Suhail, do you have the answer?” Mr. Kindi asked hopefully.

“He observed the eclipse of the sun.”

“Extra credit to you, sir, good.” Mr. Kindi turned his back to us and carried on with the lesson.

Suhail smiled at me, and I beamed back like a dope before sensing the gentle withdrawal of his hand from where I was still involuntarily gripping him. Rather than humiliate me (which I expected), Suhail carried on like normal, sharing the textbook and cooperating on the lab experiment, which was to build a functioning camera obscura.

The next Thursday, on the day of our unit quiz, he came to class with a note on folded-up graph paper. Suhail slipped it to me as he took his seat. Mr. Kindi handed out old Pee Chee folders as anti-cheat partitions, and my paramour disappeared behind the scribbled-over illustrations of young Americans playing basketball. Worried Mr. Kindi would think I was cheating, I managed to keep myself from opening the note in class. Suhail hadn't looked or even smiled at me like he usually did when he came into the room. I was certain it would contain either a cease-and-desist-looking-at-me-that-way order, or it would be a polite hint that maybe I ought to start using a different deodorant. By the time I escaped to a stall in the bathroom, my stomach was in such a nervous knot I was almost sick. I unfolded the note. I read what it said. I read it again. I panicked.

It said, in carefully practiced ballpoint,
I like you
.

 

The Gulf is an inhospitable place for young lovers. This much I knew from experience, tagging along with Faraj. The subterfuge involved gave even the most chaste relationship a contraband quality. But back then I had only been a kid—a mute, harmless, indifferent witness to my uncle's transgressions. Now, as I found myself falling in love for the first time under Faraj's watchful stewardship, I had some new thoughts about the way these things worked.

It must have taken tremendous courage for Suhail to write the note, and it was written with what I believed to be a certain effortless poetry. “
I like you
,” I repeated to myself. How could I resist? The weekend was a long and belabored process of drafting and redrafting a reply. What began as a fifteen-page panegyric I managed to whittle down to a trim five. Whatever unnamed urge had compelled me to run away from home was now driving me to run toward Suhail. Abstractly, I guess I understood that falling in love
here
might be the worst possible thing I could do. But when I lay awake and pined in my bunk bed, listening to my seven snoring aunts and cousins, I just didn't care.

Once we had established our status of reciprocated like, we were swept away and spent every break together. We kept a steady correspondence in carefully folded and sneakily exchanged notes. Although we were obviously interested in each other as bodies, there was a long period of telling that first went down. I say telling because it was similar to what therapy is meant to be like. I poured the entirety of me onto him in an eruption of memories and music and bile and half-baked ideas about what to do with my life, and in return was excited by his preferences and knowledge and ambitious plans for his promising future in planetary physics. We had a slew of unexpected things in common, including our love of
Al Amira Yakout
, dislike of Fonzies puff chips, and reverence for
Dune
and Carl Sagan. I gave him a mixtape of my favorite star-themed Bowie, Beck, and some appropriately angsty Fiona Apple. He burned me CDs of old Laiwa folk songs and taught me to how to strum his oud, which was the closest thing to a guitar in Doha.

Although we were intensely secretive, everybody knew. Suhail endured all kinds of harassment from the boys. “Qatari guys have dirty minds and big mouths, I'm just saying,” Noor warned me. But Suhail obviously had neither of those things. He was the one who helped me navigate the dos and don'ts of the system. And I knew that the other Qatari kids respected Suhail for that, and therefore, whatever they might have thought about me, they wouldn't talk.

Whatever surplus energy I had after the transitioning from school to home and back was spent trying to outwit my uncle in order to slip away and see Suhail. Ironically, the double-bluff drop-off, the Family Day fake-out, and other Gulf classics of tactical creeping I had learned from Faraj himself. I put all of his inadvertent lessons to good use during the course of the year. And like his and Kholoud's ill-fated relationship, Suhail's and mine was clumsy and innocent and completely unequal to the spy levels of deception we employed to see each other.

When I had enrolled myself in the American school, Baba—who was still living in Abu Dhabi—swore Faraj and Falak to secrecy about the fact that my school was integrated. Although it was impossible to stop idle chat about the American girl, the one who danced, the one who fought with boys, the one who had crash-landed out of the sky and now expected acceptance, he still wanted to avoid as much gossip about me as he could. So as my male guardian in Doha, Faraj had an extra stake in ensuring that my honor remained intact. He had preemptively started to apply many of the same rules that had constrained his girlfriends, like Kholoud, to me. At least I knew where he got it from when he locked the door to the roof and took the key. This hypocrisy made me confrontational at the beginning and two-faced by the end. I let my anger at his hypocrisy simmer down and applied it instead to productive means of escape. However, Faraj had me checkmated for a while without even trying. The sheer volume of people in the house ensured that my phone calls were screened. I was only allowed to go to the mall with a chaperone. And Faraj cut into our after-school loitering by arriving on the dot every day and parking the humiliating
garumba
in a spot where he had a good vantage into the high school hallway.

Faraj did not do this because he suspected me of wrongdoing. But being sixteen and therefore equipped with an overblown sense of injustice, I was sure he was doing it on purpose. Now I understand that his reasons were twofold: The first, if misplaced, desire was to protect me from what appeared to him to be an unsafe environment. This concern was fair enough. Within our tribe, the awkwardness of my placeless situation was treated gently and sometimes (much to my annoyance) with pity. Comparatively little was expected of me, and as is often the case with those who have little to lose, they gave me everything—including the benefit of their doubt. But now I had entered into a hypercritical, ultrasensitive caste where the impartial rules of larger society would apply to me. If I were to misstep, however naive the fumble might be, the honor of my family would be at risk. The second of Faraj's reasons was less noble. With all this normalized socialization going on between boys and girls, Faraj was unable to keep his eyes in his head. I knew he meant well, but it was just embarrassing.

While the school days whizzed by in a fugue of touch-and-go contact with Suhail, my nights in our
beit shaabi
were gratingly slow. I mooched around the house, slumping from room to room and sighing. In the evenings I'd squeeze myself into a spot in the crammed
sala
, where I'd stare into the middle distance while my aunts and great-aunts reminisced about the old days. They exclaimed to Allah for forgiveness as they cackled at dirty jokes, which I was beginning to understand. Wool looped around their toes, my eldest aunts wove colored muzzles and straps to sell to moderns in the city who kept camels for show. But as I wafted around the house waiting for a chance to call Suhail, my mooning didn't escape
entirely
unnoticed.

Falak had inherited an old desktop PC from a university friend, and she now spent most of the day on the Internet trawling for pictures of exotic travel destinations and studio portraiture of fat babies. Her predilection for stockpiling screensavers didn't bother me in itself; in fact, I enjoyed watching her places-I'd-like-to-go slideshow. But with only one dial-up landline in the house, her Internet habit and my need for the phone rapidly escalated into a major point of contention between us. Desperate to call Suhail, there was more than one occasion when I snagged the phone cord under the door accidentally-on-purpose. I'd thread the cord as far as it would go, taking it off into a corner like a hungry animal. Often I'd hide out in the stairwell to the roof, where the winter blankets and mattresses offered some soundproofing. Meanwhile, Suhail's and my epistles had reached fever pitch, and I had started to run out of places to hide them. The locked drawer in my desk was full and there was nowhere else that could guarantee safety from Falak's prying eyes or the hands of my younger cousins, who had free roam of the house while I was gone during the day. I bought a lockbox from the
dukkan
and Suhail kept his letters in the glove compartment of his Land Cruiser. We knew that one dropped note in the hallway could lead directly to our expulsion, public humiliation, and the wrath of his parents, my family, and both our tribes, in a worst-case scenario.

When we had run out of room for our letters, and with Falak's Internet appetite only growing, Suhail went out and bought me my first phone. It was a Nokia 3210. Sleek graphite cover with laser-green display. If ever there was a fetishized, beloved object, that phone was it. I kept it on silent so no one knew I had it, and whenever the little display strobed on and off, my heart flickered with excitement. At the time, it was still uncommon for girls in our family to have mobile phones. The excuse within our household had been that obviously the only thing a girl could possibly need a mobile for was to talk secretly to a boy. Although this was obviously true in my case, I still think the argument is ridiculous. After all, men were the ones who spent long hours calling random numbers until they struck gold with bored and anonymous girls willing to chat.

It was only a matter of time before Falak found out about my mobile and, for that matter, about Suhail. I came home one day to find a note on my bed. It read:

 

I know what you have been doing. You don't want to know what will happen if I tell anybody. These are my last words to you until you stop.

 

It took me a moment to register what her words meant and what exactly she was threatening me with. The note had been written aggressively, with the pen pressed hard onto the page and each letter beginning from the bottom rather than the top, the way Arabic natives write in foreign alphabets. It reminded me of the day Ma read my diary, Falak's tense penmanship making me flash back to Ma's clenched teeth. I felt guilty and betrayed at once. In response, I left a letter on her bed. It read simply,
It isn't what you think
. Falak climbed down the rungs of her bunk and, without reading it, wadded my note up and tossed it onto the floor before flicking the lights out on me.