The Girl Who Fell to Earth (12 page)

There was a derelict playground directly under our window. At the center was a flatbed merry-go-round creaking slowly in the wind. I imagined its steel heating up in the sun, just waiting for some hapless kid to come along and sear their flesh on the handlebars. Instead of wanting to run down and have a go on the swings, I just felt a churning twist of self-conscious dread that I was getting too old for it. Across the courtyard, a little girl pressed her face to a window. She smeared her forehead along the glass, pouting down at the playground that taunted her.

“Well, you're a grown-up now, Safya, what you decide? Go stay with the women in Doha or stay here alone?” Baba interrupted my observation.

A pair of hands removed the little girl from her perch at the window. I wondered how many girls were even given a choice?

“I'll go.”

The next day he took me back to the airport and checked me in, then found a pay booth near the entrance, where he called ahead to Doha. I leaned against the window watching businessmen get into taxis and migrant laborers load onto buses. A big beast of a Rolls Royce steamed up. Its windows were tinted dusky purple; it rode low on its chassis and the wide body was painted pearlescent white. Mesmerized, I wandered away down the hall to get a view of the front of the car while Baba negotiated a place for me in Umi Safya's crowded house. The grill gleamed, grinning like a huge albino crocodile. Paralyzed with curiosity, I watched as a female driver in a chauffeur's uniform stepped out against the wind and opened the back door to release a violent burst of flapping black fabric. And like birds escaping the croc's belly, a family of Emirati women emerged from the red-leather interior, leaving a scurry of porters to unload their luggage. I watched, readjusting my own unruly
shala
as theirs whipped frantically around their heads and yet stayed improbably in place. The skein swept in V-formation through the departure hall. Their floor-skimming
abayas
disguised their gait so that for a moment before they disappeared into the first-class area I believed they might be flying.

Dazzled by the display I'd just witnessed, I returned to Baba's side just as he hung up the phone. “Who were
they
?” I asked him, gawking after the fancy ladies.

“Don't look to them,” he cautioned, and maneuvered me in the opposite direction, toward the economy-class terminal entrance.

“When you get to Doha your uncle Faraj will pick you up. Do you remember him?”

“Ugh. I
think
so,” I lied, wanting to avoid another confusing genealogical breakdown.

“You remember your auntie Falak?”

This one I knew. “Yes!”

He was unimpressed. “Falak and Faraj are twins.”

“OK. Got it,” I confirmed, like I was memorizing a mission.

“Your Uncle Faraj is getting married in Saudi Arabia at the end of the summer. That is the next time I will see you.
N'zayn?
”

The warble of a sob seized my throat. “
N'zayn
.”

I lingered in a window as Baba returned to his illegally parked rental sedan. The wind was getting stronger. He had to hold his
gutra
down to keep it from blowing away in the wind. He turned once to wave good-bye and then stepped in and drove off. I stayed brooding at the window, writing my name backward, then erasing it in the condensation, until my gate for Doha was called.

13

ETA URSAE MAJORIS  •  DAUGHTERS OF THE BIER  •   

It's difficult to explain what it's like to be welcomed home to a place you've never been. The levels of excitement when I reached the house were totally disproportionate to how I felt. Sounds and smells resonated strongest, a familiarity that felt like it came from a dream. Cousins my age like Alia were already wearing
abayas
and seemed preternaturally old to me. The names and faces were the same but now they were shy, unsure of how to treat me. Alia held a baby on her hip and looked at least eighteen. It was as though a childhood spent caring for younger siblings while her parents floundered in adjustment to city life had made this twelve-year-old girl a matron.

The living room was full of people, and as I passed into their arms they adorned me with bangles and anointed me with perfume and stuffed handfuls of candy into my pockets. I was taken to my grandmother, who sat on the floor at the center of the room flanked by her eldest daughters, my aunts Moody and Zayna. She lifted the corner of her black
berga
and exposed her smooth cheek, offering it up to me for a kiss. I remembered this same gesture from when I met her in the tent in the desert in Saudi.

“Welcome to your home,” she said, and held my arm tight while she manacled a heavy silver bangle onto my wrist.

Despite the grand welcome, I could barely gather the corners of my mouth up into a smile of gratitude. It was an inexplicably angsty moment shadowed with a vague suspicion of walking into some kind of a trap.

Cousins whom I remembered by face but not name hugged close, battling to sit near me. They touched my short hair and ransacked my suitcase and talked at me even though I didn't understand. If we'd had a language barrier before, I couldn't remember it. When we were young I guessed we must have just spoken to one another in our respective languages, happy not to understand before falling into a game of double dutch. Now that we were too old for jump rope, we compared the tone of our skin, measured ourselves back-to-back, and grinned stupidly at one another. These, after all, were the things that transcended language.

I was led into the back of the house, where I was shown into all the bedrooms one by one and where women I didn't recognize (new wives of old uncles) were nursing, changing diapers, or sleeping. As we wound through the hallway it seemed to go on and on like a warren. A wide door papered with a giant poster of a desert island stuck out conspicuously at the end of the hallway.

“Whose room is that?” I asked, pointing to the metal handle that ripped through the beach.

“Right now only Faraj. Next month, his bride.”

“That makes four new brides in the house,” someone tallied up.

If I hadn't already observed it, this drove home that the living conditions were tight. I was allotted half a bunk in Aunt Falak's room and was relieved to see her perched atop a steel bunk bed watching TV.

“
Marhaba
, Sweyfiya!” she said, twisting “Safya” up into an affectionate pet name and spreading her arms in welcome. I climbed up the ladder to give her a kiss. “
Burra!
” she screeched at the kids who had followed me in, and shut the door behind them. “You can come in here if you want to be alone, okay?”

I agreed to her offer and slept off my jet lag while she resumed watching
Predator 2
and occasionally banging the door to scare off the kids whispering mysteriously to each other in the hall.

 

It's a common misconception that all Gulf Arabs are rich. So I feel the need here to lay out the fact that our family absolutely was and is not. Marginalized from the moment borders, cities, and politics began to solidify in the Gulf, Bedouin families like those in Al-Dafira had a difficult time adapting to urban life. In the '80s, the governments of many Gulf countries had planned boroughs and filled them with relocated Bedouin. Parts of the Al-Dafira tribe had been crossing back and forth through the neck of the peninsula between Saudi and Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE for generations. While the disorienting effects of industry and modernity dizzied the tribe, invisible lines were being drawn in the sand under their feet and on the papers they couldn't read. Sides of the border were taken and families were broken up. Each patriarch had to choose his nationality: Saudi or Qatari or Emirati? For those who chose Qatar, they each received one house called a
beit shaabi
. These “folk houses” were stocky one-story blocks set back behind twelve-foot-tall walls of concrete erected to protect the women's privacy. What they didn't factor in was that out in the desert, there was no privacy. Even if men and women socialized separately, things were much more fluid than “culturally sensitive” urban planning allowed for. There were two living rooms for each house: a
majlis
for the men and a
sala
for the women. And like a labyrinth opening out, once you passed through the public area of the women's section, there was a long turned hallway with five doors that led on to bedrooms, packed with blankets and carpets and coffee pots and all the trappings of old life—everything shoved into a room with a large bed that was in turn piled at night with at least one family of four to each.

The house seemed to be permanently under construction; whenever another down-and-out family member needed a place to sleep, they just knocked the walls out to add a back room. In the desert this would have been easy—weave another flap, add another meter to the tent—but on a government-supplied block of land they had to be secretive about it. Thus the lean-to and the low-ceilinged cinder-block rooms jutted out of the main house and hunched below the line of the outer wall so no one would know they had been built. Despite the crowded house I did end up steeping myself in a copy of
Dune
that I had stowed away in my suitcase, if for nothing else than to comfort myself with a bit of English amid the all-guttural Bedu Arabic I was slowly starting to pick up. Between chapters I watched
Carrie
and
Hellraiser
and other rated-R horror films with Falak and played Super Nintendo in the
majlis
, neither of which required any subtitling. This was at the beginning of the Arabsat satellite TV revolution in the Middle East, and we watched things I'd
never
have been allowed to see under Ma's watch. Against all usual notions of cultural permissiveness, Doha was surprisingly free for me compared to Puyallup. There was no curfew, no diet, and no one able to read my diary. I was as happy as I ever remembered being as the days of the first month slipped by in a hallucinatory dream of boisterous evenings in the
sala
and quiet mornings reading from Herbert. I began to fantasize about living there; it was chaos, but it was nice to have nothing whatsoever expected of me. Still, the notion that I might fit into the tribe for longer than a summer vacation was false. For the moment, my place was honorary and free, like Paul Atreides being tolerated at first by the Fremen. But I'd have to prove myself with a longer stint of living there to become anything more than “the visitor.”

Since I wasn't leaving the house much, my first big task was getting the lay of the clan. Falak and Alia dragged a box of photos out of an old metal trunk in Umi's room. They pointed faces out as we went through the black-and-white stacks. Alia pointed out our grandfather Jabir,
thobe
humbly short,
bisht
threadbare, beard surprisingly similar to the one worn by my grandfather Kaarle in his Klondike photo. This picture of my grandfather, with a broad
khanjar
and rifle strapped across his torso with leather straps, reminded me of the crysknives of
Dune
and sent my imagination spinning.

Farther into the trunk we found a studio photograph taken in Kuwait circa 1968. We saw Umi Safya with Mohamed, my uncle, and Matar, my father. Her face was covered with a leathery
berga
, but her long braids were out and layered over her shoulders. Silver rings studded her knuckles and at her knee was Baba, as spindly thin and skittish as a goat kid. He would have been nine. By then, Ma would have been driving a Ford Galaxie that guzzled fuel from the oil field her future husband was born on. Between 1968 and the present, the Gulf had sped up while America slowed down. Time was more precious here; perhaps that accounted for Alia and the other girls seeming to have aged faster than me. I felt like an astronaut landing back on earth and finding everyone she ever loved to be older. The wrinkles of the Gulf were premature and showed in everything I looked at, the decrepit streets and even the houses crumbling, though some were less than a decade old. And it showed in the relative maturity of my cousins, who, though many of them had never been to the downtown area of Doha, had to serve as the go-betweens for their parents in the transition from the desert to the city, helping the older generation to fill out paperwork, fix electrical outlets, and learn to work a washing machine.

While the rest of the Gulf was modernizing, our family had remained a time capsule of tradition or, depending on how some people felt about Al-Dafira, a bastion of backwardness. It was by going through Umi Safya's trunk that I began to understand how close I had come to not being born at all. It would have been so easy for Baba to have stayed safely in this world he knew. It must have seemed so impossible, the thought of leaving. The fact that he did leave his home, fell in love with my mother, had me . . . it was all just so improbable.

We kept shuffling through photo after photo, some only a few years old and of family still living the old way in the desert. Falak laughed at a photo of herself as a baby riding bare-bottomed on Umi's shoulder, hair wild as a bird's nest on top of her tiny squinting face. In one photograph dated just the year before, the black gash of a hair-house tent was pitched against the faint vertical stripes of our new towering city in the distance. The little figures in the photo looked to me like time travelers.

Falak squinted into the photo, trying to make out who they were. “That's your brother Badr with the dog.” She pointed him out.

“How can you tell?” I asked. The boy was facing away from the camera, clothed in a brown winter
thobe
.

Falak shrugged as though it were obvious. “The shape of his head, the way he's standing.”

I stared long at the little figure but gleaned no clues. It seemed the uncanny gift of recognition that was hardwired into everyone else's brains had skipped me. Even as a child I remembered being confused by the veiled women all around me and felt a strange jealousy when still-crawling babies were able to pick their mothers out of a lineup of identically perfumed and identically veiled women. I thought that if by chance one generation and half a world were removed from the equation, I might have been living one of the last of the ancient ways on earth. I tried to express my thoughts to Falak and Alia, but they were only interested in a heart-shaped Gulf Colours flip-book full of wedding portraits.

Reading and writing in Arabic came back to me easily from when I had learned as a child. However, the guts to speak it didn't. At night I snuck onto the roof and sat amid the antennae and wires that ran through the dust. Up there I'd stare into the darkness and practice saying words aloud while the televisions blared downstairs. The vastness of the sky was less terrifying than in the open desert, but I still stayed close to the satellite dish in case I had to hang on to something to avoid falling up. The glottal stops and gargles just came out as odd amphibious croaks. When I wasn't on the roof doing my impression of Kermit the Frog reading Quran, I was lurking in the corners of rooms, surveilling the occupants. It was like being the Predator trying to activate camouflage into floral wallpaper: ridiculous. The complexities of the language, movements, and silent communication were impossible to imitate, despite my timid attempts at chirping into misunderstood conversations. My aunts rewarded my efforts at assimilation by not paying any attention to me, which was a relief. In America, being housebound meant a whole lot of navel-gazing. Now, even though I never left the house, I never once had to turn to myself for entertainment.

It was difficult to keep a firm grasp on the passing of days. No one was in school or working, so one morning blended in with the next, and before I'd gotten my footing, it had been a month. Late at night I snuck into the
majlis
to play
Mortal Kombat
on Moody's sons' Nintendo. I wasn't supposed to be there—it had been years since the other girls had even been into the
majlis
—but I was new, so the house was lenient with me breaking these taboos.

Early one morning, more than a month into my stay, Ma called to inform me it was my birthday. I'd completely forgotten. She opened the phone call with, “Are you homesick yet?” trying to gauge if I'd been exorcised of my perverse Americanized interests yet.