The Girl Who Fell to Earth (13 page)

“No. Not really. I love it so much here,” I lied spitefully and sat back, wrapping my toes in the phone cord while she talked. “Thirteen years ago today . . .” she began as she always began her unexpurgated telling of my birth, which seemed to change slightly every year to include new details. The way she told me about my epic push through the birth canal made it sound as though I had forged the Northwest Passage.

“You squalled when they finally got you out. It was thundering and lightning outside because a summer storm started up.”

I was eager to have a few practice rounds on the Nintendo, which I noticed was sitting beside the TV, dormant.

“And after they wiped you clean of all the mess, your Gramma held you up and looked into your big black eyes. And you know what she said?”

I cringed deeply, knowing the embarrassing line she was about to deliver.

“She said to me, ‘Gale,' she said, ‘
that
is a wise baby.' ”

It was then I began to notice a new, strange pain in my stomach that had been insinuating itself for days. “Can I go now?” I asked urgently, suddenly wanting to curl up into the fetal position.

“I didn't realize you were so busy.” Her voice was tinged with hurt. “This is long-distance so . . . I miss you.” Cruelly, I didn't reply and waited for her to hang up the phone.

Back in the women's quarters, Falak wrapped a
shala
around my eyes and led me through the house. I clutched my belly to warm up the aching part and followed her blindly into the living room, where she removed the scarf and yelled, “Surprise!” in my ear. A boom box squatted on top of the TV with a stack of tapes. The fixings looked more forlorn than festive. A shiny banner spelling out “MERRY XMAS” dangled from the doorjamb, and balloons sniffled along the confetti-strewn carpet like octopi on the seafloor.

“Thank you!” I grasped Falak in a sweaty hug.

“What will you wear?” she asked.

I shrugged. “This?” I looked down at the kitten-print
jala-biya
I hadn't changed in three days.

“No. No. It is a costume party.” She held up a sari to illustrate. “I'll be a Bollywood starlet.”

“What'll I be?” I asked. “I don't have a costume.”

“That's easy,” Falak answered. “You can be a
boyah
for your birthday.” She went on to explain to me that a
boyah
was a tomboy.

The word was so much a part of daily parlance that no one seemed to make the connection that it was just a feminine conjugation of the English word
boy
.

“Like Princess Sapphire?” I asked her, equating the word to the mysterious cross-dressing anime heroine from my childhood in Apartment 1303.

“Exactly.”

Falak cobbled together a costume for me from one of Moody's sons' crisp white
thobes
, a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses pilfered from Faraj's room, and eyeliner, which she used to draw a mustache. The
gutra
was harder to keep on my head than a
shala
, and the billowy wide-legged
sirwal
made me feel disturbingly exposed. While she dressed me, Falak explained the origins of the
boyah
, which she claimed had begun in the university. In retrospect I gather that the combination of captivity and segregation had caused a sexually charged ecosystem to arise, similar to that of a women's prison. From this was born the
boyah
. Although there were no showers to drop soap in, it was best to avoid going into the university bathroom stalls alone. My imagination went wild while Falak described roving girl gangs with short hair and mustaches who ruled the campus, intimidating teachers and students alike. As with many gang cultures
,
boyah
stylings had trickled down to the high schools of the city
.
But it became more than drag or inflecting your walk with butch swagger. There is a prismatic range of
boyah
types, from hetero-dabblers to the most earnest bull dyke.

After
Maghreb
prayer our guests started arriving. I stood off in a corner and received greetings. We mocked the way men kissed, nose-to-nose in a slightly aggressive version of an Eskimo uga-muga. One-two-three, we pecked, the number depending on how long it had been since we'd seen each other. The arrivals expanded out from first cousins to “clan-cousins”—which had become my private term for anyone of indeterminate relation. They came by the truckful, Suburbans and Nissans dropping the girls off at the door. On entering the room everyone dropped their
abayas
to dramatically reveal themselves as doctors, tennis players, princesses, farm girls in straw hats, and even a tuxedo-clad vampire.

I flicked a
mesbah
around my forefinger, the sting of prayer beads pinching my knuckles, winding me up into a macho mood. Aunt Moody brought a tray of juice boxes around. I pulled a Vimto from the stack and punctured a hole in the carton, purple juice bubbling up and over onto my
thobe
.

“Don't get the
thobe
dirty! Vimto is harder to get out than blood,” Moody warned.

The berry juice burst—a bright tang in my mouth—and I promised I'd be extra careful. Ma never used to allow us to drink the stuff; the taste was so vivid and the dye so dark she said it was practically poison and that back in America it was probably illegal.

Little kids bunched around me trying to wipe away my mustache. Aunt Moody stood guard at the door to make sure none of the boys broke in, and when they crawled onto the windowsill to peep, she shoved her
asa
through the grill at them. Falak plugged a mic into the boom box and the entertainments commenced. She emceed with ceremony, introducing each girl by her costume.

“
Ooo!
It's Dracula with his bride, Princess Jasmine.” My aunt Zayna, the vampire, batted her cape (a cut-up
abaya
) and pretended to maul Princess Jasmine. Applause and hoots were milked from the peanut gallery piled around me.

“Allah! Woooow! Andre Agassi!” My cousin Aya bounced forth swinging a badminton racket. Next a figure in a pair of pajamas and a crappy latex mask shuffled forward, eliciting genuine shrieks from the littlest kids. “And this is . . .” Falak didn't know what to call it. Only mumbles escaped the mask. She barely held back laughter as the monster went and sat down out of the way. The boys had started rattling the window outside; Moody thwacked them away with her stick.

After dinner, some of the girls performed synchronized dances to the Kuwaiti band Miami and Egyptian megastar Amr Diab, although the music could barely be heard over the general mayhem of having almost forty women and children crammed into the living room. They jigged and reeled and did the electric slide and whipped their long hair back and forth. I was feeling woozy and vaguely nauseous; the ache in my belly was spreading. I made a break for the bathroom but when I got to the door, Moody stopped me. A nasal, old Saudi song came on.

“We need a man to dance to this one!” Moody said, and shoved me into the center of the room. Some of the other girls got up and waited for my lead.

“
Yella!
Dance!” They pushed me.

I held my elbow like I'd seen men do on TV and moved the sword up and down like a tollgate. My stomach wrenched and then fell into a numb relief. Just as I was starting to feel the a-rhythm of the
khaleeji
drumbeat, I realized that something slick was spreading down my leg. The clapping fell out of time and the air filled with whispers. I slowed my rock-step as another gush burst down the leg of the white cotton of the
sirwal
. I looked down at my front, pinpricks of a blackish red saturating out to form a thick streak on the white
thobe
. Fear, shock, and humiliation rolled through me in fast succession. Getting my first period was
way
worse than spilling Vimto on the
thobe
. Falak rushed me out of the room to help clean up the blood. She taught me how to rig a huge, three-inch-thick mattress of cotton up to my hips with clip-on bands.

The following week was spent just trying to forget what happened and trying to get comfortable. I was secluded in Falak's bedroom, too mortified from the public arrival of my “cycle,” as everyone kept calling it, to venture out into the greater house. I cradled a hot water bottle over my belly and was served a steady diet of soup and hot tea. “Don't bathe,” I was warned, “it just makes it take longer to go away.” To entertain me in my convalescence, Falak broke out her collection of pirated Betamax tapes. She was stocked with 1980s horror films and Bollywood melodramas. She brought me a little pink package of pills. It reminded me of an oyster ridged with tiny white pearls. “One every day and
wella
, no more period!” I popped one and waited for it to cure me, turning the package over to read “contraception” printed crisply on the back. As it turned out, the doctors there prescribed the pill regularly to girls who complained of difficult periods, never telling them what it was actually for.

“So there are some things you should know now.” Falak pulled a bag from her closet, broaching the subject nervously as though to remind me she was only the messenger. “You shouldn't go outside without
abaya
anymore.”

She pulled an
abaya
from the bag. It was made of Crepe Lexus, a bionic, unwrinkleable black synthetic fabric from Japan. I tried it on blankly, wondering why she was so nervous about my reaction. I'd wrapped my head up in a
shala
and covered my face in a
berga
before, but this was the first time I'd tried on the full-body covering of an
abaya
.

“Thank you,” I told her, and hung it on the coat hanger with hers.

“One other thing. You can't go into the
majlis
side of the house anymore.”

Wearing
abaya
was fine with me—it was just an outfit—but being exiled from playing video games because I got my period seemed like punishment.

After that, I spent a lot of time lying beside Aunt Moody in the
sala
watching the TV on mute. “It didn't used to be like this,” she said to cheer me up. “When your father and me were little, we used to run wild in the desert! Watching TV outside, howling at the moon with the Salukis.” She seemed to brighten while she spoke. “We had nothing but a flap of goat hair between us and the stars—now we have this!” She slapped the thick cement wall separating the room we were in from the
majlis
. “In the old days, if I wanted to go for a walk with the goats, I went for a walk! As I preferred! In any direction I felt!”

In a single generation they had gone from migrating the peninsula with the seasons to living in windowless housing blocks. I pulled my knees up and popped my head into the neck of my
jalabiya
like a turtle. I was bloated and getting fat now. I feared I was changing into my aunts, these once wiry and tough women used to hard desert life fated to being beached in front of the television. But their nomadic instincts adapted to the situation and ended up manifesting themselves in new ways—for example, in the regular changing of interior decoration. It was seasonal: every few months everyone got together and traded their curtains and carpets to get the feeling of having a new room. Instead of a change in place, they ended up changing their wallpaper or zoning out with the TV on mute, satellite views of Mecca alternating with angles of the
Kaaba
from different surveillance cameras. Like the photorealistic tropical island on Faraj's door, there was something so melancholy about all these flattened, unattainable places and dreams and urges. They were filling the house with a sense of defeat. By the end of that summer, I was convinced that all the women in my family had forgotten what it was like to be fearless and what it had once meant to be free.

14

UPSILON SCORPII  •  THE STING  •   

Everything was changing, and I couldn't do anything to stop it. The house was hectic with preparations for Uncle Faraj's imminent wedding in Saudi, and very little of it had to do with the groom, who was sent on errands, mostly to the tailors or the
souq
. A photo of Amna, the bride-to-be, circulated around the house. She was fat but beautiful, or rather fat
and
beautiful, and everyone used the word
delouaa
to describe her, as though it were a good thing to be the human equivalent of veal—milk-fed and sheltered. I spent a lot of time staring at the picture, studying what set of attributes stacked up to make her such a prized beauty. She was five years older than me, cinched into a tight dress, body contorted to display her hair and ass and face all at once. Her makeup was extreme and caused her to look like a drag queen, a persistent look that is still the fashion in the Gulf.

I stood in front of the mirror in Falak's wardrobe and pulled my
jalabiya
in tight to reveal a bloated paunch, lopsided hips, and flat butt. Something terrible seemed to have happened to my body over the past two months in Doha. Rather than feeling the fabled sense of completion everyone kept promising womanhood would bring, I felt frantic and aimless, as though I'd lost something important. I became cranky and aggressive and paced the house, loitering in doorways and moaning in English about how bored I was. I pestered Tiny, the maid, while she made flatbread on a burner in the carport; I bothered Umi while she churned butter in her goatskin and Aunt Zayna while she pumped milk from her swollen breast to feed her baby. It was as though when Falak told me not to go there, she had drawn a line in the sand and dared me to cross it, and I always ended up back at the side door that led to the men's
majlis
. The
majlis
had begun to take on, for me, the expansive feeling of the “outside.”

I peeked into the
majlis
. Aunt Moody's sons were playing Super Nintendo. I sized the three of them up. Like most boys from our family they were wiry, with sharp, beaky noses. I watched silently as the little one worked Sub-Zero up into decapitating Johnny Cage. I stepped in, lurking at the back of the
majlis
. AbdAllah was the most hostile, and the youngest seemed almost afraid. It was like walking into a bar and wanting a turn at the pool table. I shuffled up closer and sat behind them to watch. AbdAllah scooted away from me, then lost to Zayed when he took his eyes off the screen. I reached for the player B controls to get a turn. I took my place and blinged through the players. Of course, I chose Sonya Blade. Zayed eyed me sideways and waved his hand in front of his face like I stunk. His brothers egged him on as Sub-Zero and Sonya appeared on the screen. Thumbing a random combination of buttons I kicked his ass.

But rather than my getting to play the next round fair and square, AbdAllah grabbed the controls out of my grip and backed away. He hoarded the game console up to his chest. “Okay, you played, now go back inside.”

They weren't afraid of me, I knew. They were scared of what might happen if they got caught
with
me. All I wanted to do was play
Mortal
fucking
Kombat
.

“Give it to me!” I roared, and lurched for the controls.

The punchy synth intro kicked in and wound me up. If they just let me play out a K.O. I was going to resign in peace and return to my place in the women's quarters. But now the boys were positioned together like stormtroopers in the corner of the
majlis
. I turned, pretending I was going to leave, but instead locked the door behind me.
It was on.
Preparing for the showdown, they tied their
thobes
up around their waists, exposing their baggy long underwear and skinny ankles to give themselves room to kick. I tied my
jalabiya
up around my hips and took my best Sumo wrestling stance.

I plowed for the middle one, lifting him over my shoulder and tossing him over my back. Too stunned to do anything and afraid to touch me, AbdAllah went down in similar fashion before gathering himself enough to grab my hair and drag me onto the floor.

“That's it!” I growled, hysterical and frenzied from the contact.

I blindly grabbed for him and got his leg. Pulling myself up, I bit the only place I could reach: his ankle. Then he started howling for mercy. The handle of the living room door rattled, and then Aunt Moody burst through the door. We all froze, the battle of the sexes halted by the shadow of authority. It was a moment of mid-battle action captured forever in my mind like a war memorial, the younger two boys tugging at my legs, my teeth clamped around my cousin's ankle while he made like he was going to scalp me.

“Separate!” she commanded.

The other three let go and I dropped the leg out of my mouth like a stunned dog with a bone.

“What is
wrong
with you?!” she shrilled.

The boys blanched, and I turned bright red.

“Shameful! Shameful! Shameful!”

—was the only thing I understood from her tirade. I found myself being yanked by the neck of my
jalabiya
out the door and marched back to the women's quarters. When we got back in the house Aunt Moody honked my left boob to illustrate I was too old to be playing with boys.

“One of my sons might want to marry you someday—”

“Ew!” I grimaced.

“Do you want them to remember you like that?” she pressed, as though incest were a desirable outcome to this situation.

Yes!
I thought to myself. I really wanted them to remember me as the one who could kick their asses.

After the skirmish in the
majlis
, Umi Safya came to the wise conclusion that I ought to get out of the house more. And so, having violated almost every expectation of a young woman of Al Dafira, I was banished from women's country to the passenger seat of my uncle Faraj's un-air-conditioned truck. Faraj had been nominated to be my caretaker. He had the right combination of free time (unemployment) and a ride. He did not, however, appreciate having to ferry me around town. I was an embarrassment to him as I slouched in the truck, scowling out the window, headphones over my
shala
, mouthing the lyrics to “Everybody Hurts” at a bus full of Filipino laborers.

Our communication barrier was deep. We had a mutually kept silence for the first week, and I had plenty of time to observe him while he drove from the post office to the Falcon Market to the paddock outside the city where Umi kept her goats. Aside from a brief peck on the cheek when he had picked me up at the airport, there had been no interaction between us. In addition to the stilted nature of our relationship, I found myself too grammatically challenged to address him. Having obtained all my knowledge of Arabic in the segregated classroom of my female family, I had never learned how to conjugate words in a masculine way. Faraj was equally uncommunicative with me, his English more nonexistent than my Arabic. And anyway, he seemed preoccupied with some secret business during our outings, pulling up off the road to check his pager, which everyone referred to as his “bleep.” Often he'd urgently pull into gas stations where he'd hole up in a phone booth for half an hour talking cautiously into the phone, rolling a bottle of cola over his face to keep cool.

Being a twin, Faraj really was the male version of Falak. He had a carefully contrived personal style: a perpetual two-day growth of facial hair and a starched cobra
-
style
gutra
worn at a jaunty angle. The combination made him look rakish and cool. His truck was similar in character, a two-door Nissan Patrol jumped up on extra-high wheels with blue racing stripes and a decal that read “
Masha'Allah
” in the back window. Every morning I rode out with him while he ran errands for my aunts and Umi Safya. Although I'd felt trapped and bored in the house, I realized that being a woman also spared you from another kind of boredom. This became abundantly clear to me on occasions such as the seven hours Faraj spent waiting in line at the Ministry of Municipal Affairs while I got heatstroke in the truck. As the sun reached its zenith, I started hallucinating that the waves of roiling heat had started to float over the truck. I was so seasick and dehydrated by the time Faraj returned that I had to vomit. He held my
shala
back while I puked.

Like Falak and horror films, the one thing Faraj and were able to bond over was juice cocktails. The juice stalls were burrowed into the most unlikely places all over the city. By day the juice stall was an oasis of color in the drab tan of everyplace else. Plastic fruit festooned the windows, and signs die-cut to look like icicles promised relief from the heat. At night they turned into beacons of neon in otherwise dark residential neighborhoods, the garishly decorated interiors now fully visible through the shop-front windows. Our ritual on the way home every day was to pull up to Hot 'n' Cool Stall, where I'd read aloud from the menu, sounding out the transliterated letters of drinks like Tropical Storm, Year 2000, Land Cruiser, and Milky Banana. Faraj would honk like he was in rush-hour traffic until a pissed-off-looking Indian man slumped out to take our orders.

“One Rolex and one small Combyuter,” Faraj ordered.

It didn't matter what we asked for, Mercedes or Kerala Kiss, they all came out in the same gloopy swirl of sunset colors in a soggy cardboard cup. Then we'd sit together in the truck, slushing the straws around inside our drinks and listening to classic Mohammed Abdu on the radio.

It was on one such pit stop, sucking down a smoothie, when he finally broke the ice. I was absorbed in loudly vacuuming the froth off the bottom of my cup when he blurted out, in Arabic, “Are you happy here?”

I slushed the juice with my straw, suspicious of this unexpected attempt at chitchat. “Sure,” I answered. His question was loaded. I thought about how I felt freer here than I had in America. Plus there was more to look at, more to think about, even if there was less for me to do. “How are you?” I asked him.

He puffed his chest against the seatbelt and deflated in a sigh. “Not so good,
wella
, not so good.” He shook his head. “One minute.”

He held his finger up in front of me and produced a delicate envelope from somewhere in his
thobe
. He plucked a photo from it and laid it in the palm of my sticky hand. The image was of a girl, but it was most definitely
not
his fiancée, Amna. This girl was posed in front of a painted sky, her face was a perfect oval dented at the chin in a cute cleft, her nose was strong and hooked like a falcon, and her eyes were big and black. She wore lace gloves and her hands ramped under her face in what was meant to be a poetic pose of longing.
Why was he showing me this?
I wondered nervously, and handed the photo back to him.

“I need to see her before I get married,” he explained. “But her father won't let her answer the phone.” I knew what he was going to ask before he asked it. “Will you help?”

I'd already gotten in trouble twice this summer. The worst thing I could do now was to be implicated in an affair. Faraj's bleeper bleeped, and he jumped with it. He started the car and turned to me. “Well?” he asked, eager for an answer. “Fine,” I agreed grudgingly, and we drove off in a direction I hadn't been before.

My age and inexperience aside, it was becoming profoundly clear to me that love in the context of youth culture in Qatar was far more complex than anything I had ever seen on MTV. Because segregation between the sexes is so enforced, when a love affair does gain any kind of traction, like Faraj's did, it has to fly below the radar. As you can imagine, like anything forced to lurk in the shadows, love (which we know will always find a way) adapts and manifests itself in more subversive forms of expression. Falak had told me about
boyahs
, but they were only a small piece of the larger story.

“There she is,” Faraj said reverently as we pulled up to an impressive mansion. His tone was hushed, as though he were witnessing some kind of natural wonder. I followed his finger to a dark rooftop across a busy road from where we sat in a gas-station parking lot.

“Where?” I tried to focus my eyes to find this magical creature.

“There! The pink thing!” he whispered.

I followed his eyes to a patch of color cut through by shadow. It could have been anything—a piece of laundry, a toy—but then it moved and I saw a projectile glint in the streetlamp and land in the sand bordering the outside wall of the house.

“Okay, go see what she threw!”

I slumped across the road to investigate, a little resentful at being treated like his hunting dog. I came to the spot; a heavy glass perfume bottle lay shattered in the dust, a vessel to deliver her message. I plucked a piece of paper out of the crater of glass shards and ran back across to where Faraj was waiting. “Call me in ten minutes,” it read. “I'll be at the phone.”