Good Muslim Boy (12 page)

Melbourne, Australia, 1995–97

In school, I was placed in a class with other kids like me: losers who couldn’t speak
the language. English was taught by Ms Hunter, a woman in her early forties who had
a way of making sure every student listened to her with absorbed rapture. It had
to do with her choices of clothing, which made her look a decade younger, a decade
feistier and a decade spicier.

Ninos was the dirtiest and naughtiest of us all—a horny, acne-prone nineteen-year-old
Christian Iraqi. He had failed this class twice before, which he insisted was nowhere
near a deliberate attempt to clock more hours in the presence of Ms Hunter’s ‘saucy
wagon’.

That saucy wagon had some interesting ideas. Ms Hunter was a three-time divorcee,
and liked to engage us in debates over why Arab men were permitted to marry four
wives, while their wives were distinctly not afforded that luxury.

Enter yours painfully.

Upon my arrival in Ms Hunter’s class, I quickly established myself as the resident
philosopher with worse English than anybody’s, who nonetheless liked to challenge
everyone on everything. I was already in her bad books for saying ‘sex-cuse me’ (‘It’s
excuse me
’), and for accidentally calling her old (when she was forced to explain
the finer points of ‘Miss’, which was used for younger single women, versus ‘Mzzz’,
which was for women like herself).

‘
Sex
-cuse me,
Mzzzz
Hunter,’ I said. ‘Let me telling you why Muslim man can marry
four womans and one woman cannot marry four mans.’ It was a regular sermon. ‘Okay,
you have a container of water, in it one litre of water and you pour the water in
four glasses. Good?’

She gave a brief nod.

‘Very good. So we have four water coming from one source. If I ask you, Mzzz Hunter,
the first glass of water, who it comes from, you will say the container. I say the
second glass, who it come from? You say still container. But! If I take glasses and
pour them back in container, can you tell me which water belong to which glass? Of
course no! All is mixed. You do not know which is which.’

‘So what?’ she said, sceptically.

‘So. When there is one container, ONE MAN’—it was time to bring home the analogy—‘his
children all have one father. But if woman marry four husbands, and she has children,
who is father
? You don’t know. All mixed. See, Islam think of everything,’ I concluded,
pleased as a cock in the morning.

‘You can get DNA testing,’ she flatly replied.

‘What this one, DNA?’ I asked.

‘It’s a scientific test which reveals who the father is.’

‘But the container…I was told it is always right,’ I exhaled, face reddening.

‘I’m not sure you’ve quite nailed this one, Osamah.’

At the bus stop that afternoon, I consulted with Moe Greene. Even though he didn’t
go to a language school, he still caught the bus with me.

Moe Greene was a street-smart boy, with a heart soft enough to feed the entire planet
twice over yet hard enough to withstand its worst volcanoes: strong, short-tempered,
no-fuss Moe. He’d named himself Moe Greene after watching
The Godfather
. In the film,
Fredo tells Michael Corleone not to speak aggressively at a character named Moe Greene:
‘Don’t you know who that is? That’s
Moe Greene
!’

‘Moe!’ I said. ‘You know my teacher, the one who always makes me sin.’

‘Why?’

‘One day red dress, one day pink dress, one day pink and red dress, one day dress
so low I see a vertical line where her chest is…but anyway, she is divorced three
times.’

‘Nothing wrong with strong car with a little mileage,’ shrugged Moe. Even at eleven,
he was a bit ahead of me sexually.

‘Why is Ms Hunter like a car? Anyway, she said something weird in class today—she
said I didn’t nail something, like with a hammer. Any ideas on that one?’

‘Of course!’ he enthused. ‘Come with me!’

We alighted the bus at the hardware store.

The next day, I snuck into the classroom early. It was already decorated with the
results of our assignments, all our artwork clipped and pinned to the walls—lots
of refugee slogans about peace and equality. I was determined to up the ante.

I whipped out my brand-new hammer and proceeded to nail a framed essay on the wall
outlining my views on the issue of Arab men and plural marriage. Moe Green’s words
from the hardware store echoed through my mind:

‘They celebrate your point of view here in Australia, even if it’s fucked.’

I’d even spell-checked the essay. It looked damn good on the wall; there was no way
I hadn’t nailed it.

I sat there smiling at my desk as everyone filed into the room, led by Ms Hunter,
this time in a pink dress. I couldn’t wait for my reward.

A lot of time in the classroom was devoted to analogy, as in ‘pig is to pork as cow
is to beef’.

‘Mzzz! Mzzz!’ I buzzed.

‘Yes, Osamah,’ Ms Hunter said.

‘I cannot retain that example in my head.’ Pork, of course, was illegal in Islam.

‘Right, just settle down, we’ll try again. Pen is to author as brush is to artist;
lyrics are to a lyricist as music is to a composer.’

‘Mzzz, we don’t listen to music either. It’s a sin,’ I said.

Ninos jumped in. ‘Don’t listen to him, Ms Hunter. This boy comes from a radical city,
radical upbringing, radical everything.’

‘Hmm,’ Ms Hunter hummed. ‘Alright. I’ll give you a sentence; you fill in the blanks.’

‘Which you, Mzzz?’ I asked.

‘All of you.’

‘Ms Hunter,’ I said. ‘English is funny. You is you as in just-you, as in everybody-you.
Very misleading.’

Ms Hunter was used to dealing with interruptions like these. She acknowledged them
and quickly moved on. ‘Here’s the sentence. Ice is to Eskimos as desert is to…?’

‘Arabs,’ Lara replied.

Lara was a seventeen-year-old Christian Iraqi who I always managed to sit directly
behind. Her hair was wild and wavy.
Ninos liked to tease her for being overweight,
which she was, but still I saw a rainbow every time she spoke.

‘Well done! Very good, Lara!’ Ms Hunter applauded.

‘Some Arabic countries don’t have desert, but,’ I said.

‘It’s a generalisation, but it works in this instance, so it’s fine,’ she said cheerily.

‘Ms Hunter, I have analogy for Osamah,’ Ninos quipped. ‘He is annoying like fingernails
on the blackboard.’

‘Very good, Ninos,’ she said. ‘Very, very good. But, you know—be gentle, next time.
I’ll give you all a one-week window to come up with a good analogy, and then we’ll
come back and share them in class.’

‘One-week window, Mzzz?’ I asked.

It was one too many questions. ‘Yes, and I need coffee.’ She got up and left in the
middle of class.

At the bus stop, I consulted Moe Greene again: the human dictionary.

‘One-week window,’ I offered.

‘Bro. Very easy indeed. I know a guy,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’

We ended up, of course, at a glass shop off Sydney Road.

‘We need a one-week window,’ I said, a bit too serious. ‘Do you have in stock?’

‘Not sure what you mean, mate,’ said the scrawny sales guy. ‘You mean make it in
one week?’

‘Yes, yes,’ I said impatiently. ‘What’s the best you can do?’

‘What sort of size were you looking for?’

I considered this. ‘It’s for a classroom.’

‘Rightio, well, we’ve got plenty of options, but if you wanted something simple…’

‘No, not simple,’ I replied. ‘I want something very, very outstanding.’

This was going to be difficult for the best budget I could offer,
but the salesman
had some glass he said he didn’t need. ‘You don’t even have to wait a week,’ he said
happily. ‘You can pick it up right now.’

So I rocked up to class at eight-fifteen the following morning, having lugged a window-sized
width of glass there on the bus. I strode straight to Ms Hunter’s desk and leaned
the glass against the wood. She’d given us a week; I’d got it done in twenty-four
hours.

Needless to say, I was her favourite student.

On Ms Hunter’s birthday, she sat behind her desk sipping coffee from one of her many
Parisian-themed mugs. This one read,
J’adore Paris
.

It was adorned with a picture of a gorgeous French
siren
, a phrase that I’d picked
up when many others eluded me. I used it everywhere; I couldn’t help myself. This
beautiful continent was swathed in sirens.

Ms Hunter not the least of them. She wore a bright orange dress today, and lubricated
the edge of her mug with her splendid lips. I watched closely as the residue of her
rich red lipstick ringed the fancy mug with additional glamour.

She wouldn’t say how old she was today. When I’d pressed her, she told me it was
rude to ask a woman her age. So I’d gone ahead and bought a card and guesstimated
forty-four.

It seemed like a safe number. If I tried forty, she might say, ‘What, you think I’m
still a kid?’ If I guessed fifty, she might well tell me off for thinking she was
old.

To my surprise, the other kids’ desks were totally free of birthday presents. I didn’t
want anyone to think I was sucking up. But the respect I paid my teachers was the
same as that I paid my parents—teachers
taught
me. Without people like
Ms Hunter,
I just had Moe and Ninos. Moe was responsible for the hardware-store and window-shopping
disasters. All Ninos had taught me was how to blow up condoms like balloons.

True to this logic, I approached the desk.

‘Happy birthday, Mzzz,’ I said, proudly brandishing the card and a gift-wrapped box
which contained a Persian cuisine cookbook. My mother had selected this on a trip
to Kmart, the theory being that Australians needed to learn to cook proper food.

‘Why, thank you, Osamah,’ Ms Hunter replied, stuttering from the shock. ‘That is
very kind. I’m not sure if I can accept it.’ She began to get very emotional.

‘Mzzz. Can I sing “Happy Birthday” in Persian to you, and then English, because I
have never done it in both languages?’

She looked at me, eyes welling up. I burst out in Persian, chanting ‘
Tavalodet Mobarak,
Tavalodet Mobarak
…’

Lara jumped in, asking if she could do it in Arabic. So together, we chanted: ‘
Sana
helwa ya gameela, Sana helwa Anesa Hunter
…’

Now other Arabic speakers joined us, joyous. It gave me goosebumps. The classroom
roared with ‘Happy Birthdays’. A couple of Chinese students piped up in their native
language; others followed: Indian, Vietnamese and Urdu.

It was too much for Ms Hunter. I wished I could freeze the moment. She never told
us how old she was; if she was offended by the estimate I’d written on the card,
she never showed it. I was probably wrong, but I didn’t care, and still don’t. I
had got it right, invoking our mighty chorus of ‘Happy Birthdays’—the details themselves
were unimportant.

As I was packing up to go home, two hands slapped over my eyes, rendering me sightless.

‘Guess who?’ Ninos whispered hoarsely. He was so lazy, he didn’t bother to disguise
his voice.

He let go. ‘Hey, I left something in class,’ he said. He opened his desk drawer and
whisked out a magazine. ‘Wanna see?’

‘Yes, I love magazines,’ I said seriously. ‘What’s the topic?’

He turned around, exaggerating the conspiracy. I rolled my eyes, then wandered over
and looked at the magazine.

OH.

MY.

GOD.

It was a picture of a woman.

Her legs were open at 180 degrees.

She was holding a machine gun.

The questions demolished me. What side did she fight for? Where the hell was her
combat gear? Why did her face look sleepy, but, you know, different sleepy? And did
all girls’ genitalia look like that?

But I pulled back. ‘No, Ninos! I don’t want to look at that!’

He shrugged and closed the magazine.

‘No,’ I moaned. ‘Just one more peek.’

He grinned, and spread the centrefold again.

‘No!’ I yelped. ‘That’s horrible. Show me another page.’

He gladly flipped to a fresh picture, this one of a woman wearing a stethoscope and
nurse’s cap. Her legs were spread like a Thanksgiving turkey.

‘No more,’ I pleaded.

He giggled and tucked the magazine into his bag. But the magazine had shocked a moment
of honesty out of me. ‘Ninos,’ I said, heart thudding. ‘I want to ask Lara the question.
I want to ask her if she’d like to eat a sandwich with me in the yard.’

‘You dog,’ he howled. ‘Go watch some sexy movies and learn some proper English! Girls
don’t want your sandwiches.
They want you to pound them. In the movies I watch, they
scream so.’

‘No, no, no,’ I said vehemently. ‘Lara is a good girl.’ The truth was, I wouldn’t
have minded getting naughtier with Lara—the sandwich was designed as a test. If she
said yes to the sandwich and things were going well, I thought maybe we could share
a smoothie too.

Ninos squinted at me like I was a mental patient, and he was a doctor about to declare
me a lost cause. He left the classroom without adding a word, the magazine of dark
treasures going with him.

The end-of-school bell had already gone. I had built up the courage to show Lara
my poem. I made it sound fancy using a few solid English words I had learned. The
most exciting part was that yesterday I had learned the word
brine
—not in class but
rather after buying canned fish in a supermarket aisle—and I made a quick edit so
the poem could sound even fancier.