The Others (8 page)

Overwhelming feelings of loss toward Hiba blanketed me more heavily than did the comforter on my bed, and my heart remained cold. The night before yesterday, a long, sharp blade had pierced my body’s midsection. Yet I could not stop scolding myself harshly for its self-centered reaction. Why should I not be the happiest girl in the world, because she was the happiest? Didn’t we always feel the same way about things? But I was not marrying that American Fadil. He had not encircled
my
right ring finger with an engagement ring. No one had released their celebratory trills on my behalf.

Oh, I was not angry at him, nor at her, not at all. It was just that I felt so very alone, and for the first time. And to make it worse, Hiba was so completely preoccupied with other things that she did not even notice! She now had someone who filled her completely, so what use did she have for me? My problem lay not in Hiba’s engagement, but in how cheaply she could replace me with somebody else, and how completely, to the point where she did not even have enough sympathy for me to grant me a decent separation period in which to become accustomed to her absence. Or, barring that, time in which I could at least learn to claim that I had forgotten her, or subjugate myself into accepting my loss of her! The swiftness with which it had happened, and my obliviousness had given me no opportunity to consider such a possibility before it landed on me, redoubling my feelings of loss.

I repeated to myself that this was just another difficult day and at least I could count on it coming to an end. I had to bathe in cold water. The water heater was empty but I could not shake the numbness and yesterday’s lingering odor from my body without bathing. And then I could not find an ironed shirt or a clean pair of socks, but Edna was still asleep. So I delayed the driver of the car that carried me to the college every day for five minutes. Even so, the day’s hardships had not really and truly begun.

With the rain typical of February’s first days, a gray sky, and streets blocked by flowing water, it was hard to get anywhere. A drive that would normally take half an hour took twice that long, and I arrived at the college late, a few minutes after eight o’clock. The entry gate for students arriving in private cars was all but closed. Another minute and the only way I could have entered campus would have been to pass by the security guard women once I had shown them my university ID, which I never carried in my wallet unless we were in the middle of exams. It was not a question of neglect so much as it was a little cheating that we had inherited from the generation of girls who preceded us. One could generally and sensibly assume that we would not be carrying our ID cards. If one of the supervisors—these women who watched us so closely—were to seize us for any transgression outside the lecture halls (which they did not enter), we would always make the excuse that we had forgotten our IDs, and then we could use any name we might invent and thereby escape the punishment of having fifty riyals deducted from our allowances.

It was a trick I had not been compelled to use, so far anyway, since the rules were more relaxed for those of us who were in the science departments than they were in the arts, where everything was really intensely regulated. That was true except when the month of Muharram started, the month when we Shi‘is commemorated Hussain’s death, even if we were not allowed to do so publicly. They would lock the building entries and erect search points that were just like the roadblocks out on the ordinary roads. In Muharram, the major infraction incurring punishment and a fine was the wearing of black shirts. To wear a black shirt at that time of year, as well as a few other special days scattered throughout the year, was customary for Shi‘is. In response to this policy of punishment at the college, we insisted on wearing them in what appeared a silent resistance to an efficient and tangible attempt to banish our difference—even a simple difference in the color of our clothing.

We did not give the issue more prominence than it deserved. We got through it with a bit of joking and a lot of looking the other way. We managed to avoid letting the idea that we were being constrained and oppressed control us. And if the microscope we were always under magnified everything, still, we could slip out from under it with ease and without causing an artificial or excessive confrontation. We wore regular blouses over our black shirts as camouflage. Or we recorded our names as violators of the rule and went peaceably on to our lectures, supplicating God out loud to help these supervisors. We reckoned that they would be obliged to count what was almost a third of the entire student population of the college or even more as transgressors. To feign ignorance is also an effective policy. Doing so does not make light of your adversary; it just neutralizes your foe’s argument. We would have been far more likely to find this policy altogether beneath us had we been given alternative solutions.

With the human tide we create, and this mark of our difference we wear, we are suddenly manifest and can no longer be ignored. The question of our otherness is no longer left to guesswork, in the shape of our features or the particular sorts of names we bear, nor in our mutual withdrawal into our own kind, looking as though we are accumulations of flesh inside a different and larger body that does not fit us very well at all. Our distinction glares now: it is the black shirt that we have worn with stunning persistence, happily giving up our allowances for the month of Muharram, letting the money go to our adversaries. We give up, too, the peace that we could have been harvesting, had we been content, submissive to our circumstances. Together, as one mass, we turn into an enormous rolling question, like a snowball growing bigger and bigger. What are those people? Where does their difference lurk?

What is so frightening, from the start, about our being different? Is it because we form a storm of question marks, moving fiercely through an undistinguished and previously unnoticed space in this nation, that never before experienced the essence or function of questioning, or of being in a state of difference? Is it because we release an intensity of presence that remains unacknowledged on the map of the world, or between the thighs of a recognized tribe? Is it because we breach an unannounced law, one that requires us to cloud over our dissimilarity from the universal and only mold that the other is supposed to know and follow, and from all that is real and correct?

My late arrival was a parsimonious little smile of good luck, because it meant that I did not have to pass alongside a section of the quadrangle where there gathered those we had named
banat al-balad
, the country girls, a space between Science Buildings One and Two. Thus I did not have to exhaust the waning energy in my veins with any encounters, any long exchanges of greetings and questions that always come up after the weekend break; specifically queries having to do with Hiba’s engagement. A little cluster of classmates had reserved a seat for me so that I didn’t have to deal with searching for one in the big hall or dragging a chair from another lecture hall in behind me. Moreover, our lecturer had not arrived yet, and anyway she did not care if a whole half an hour of lecture time was frittered away in meaningless chatter or if students came in late through the rear door to the lecture hall, whether they had an excuse or not.

I made the most of this bit of time. I went down to the cafeteria and ordered a coffee. The woman behind the glass counter front raised her eyebrows when I asked for two spoonfuls of instant coffee and three of sugar. I did not understand what the secret was behind her wonder. Was it the concentration of coffee or the sweetness of the sugar? I did not have any small change and neither did she, so I added in a cheese croissant and a chocolate bar and gave her ten riyals.

I sat down at the white marble table, fished my cell phone out of my bag, and left a missed call for Dai. If she wasn’t busy right now, she would call back without a doubt. I needed her voice, with its easy tone, somewhere between gelatin and the viscosity of honey. Whenever Dai laughed, I felt the ether surrounding her loosen its joints in some fundamental sense, to the point of dislocation. I would truly feel that she was curing me.

She did return my call. Her words were two warm palms undoing the nodes of pain in my neck and releasing a faint aah of pleasure. I heard a fine-grained laugh when I informed her that I had bought the cheese croissant for her, and she exclaimed, You fox, you! It only took one added minute to shed my hateful feelings toward this Saturday, the first day of school after the Friday break, and I would even have belted out that old song with her, the one that mixed nonsense words with the days of the week to teach them to little kids,
al-sabt sabamabut
,
wa’l ahad raan raan, wa’l ithneen
… My mother would always sing that to me when I was depressed on a Friday evening because the weekend was over and I’d soon have to wake up in the morning and face a Saturday that would drag on heavily forever. I had all but fixed a long-lasting smile on my face when her phone suddenly went dead. Maybe it was the bad weather bringing the network down, or maybe the battery was gone, or whatever—never mind, it was not a problem at all. I waited another minute, and when she did not call back, I headed into my lecture.

The sudden sharp sound of my phone, more like two thuds than a continuous ringing, interrupted the professor, who was immersed in explaining something, and all eyes swung to the back where I sat. I did not show any obvious confusion or embarrassment, so as to avoid letting them know that the sound had come from my bag. The
duktoora
rapped the blackboard with her chalk to regain the attention of all the girls in the lecture hall, offering a bare little smile that reduced me to dumb embarrassment. I had never forgotten to switch the ring on my cell phone to silent; I was not one to take any chances, fearful of being thrown out of the lecture in the usual humiliating manner doled out to those who committed a transgression like this.

I raised my bag to my lap and took out my cell phone with barely a movement. A message from Dai: SORRY I hng up on U. th angels of death passed by, Malik & Ridwan, & I was afrd they wld take my cell.

I gave myself the excuse that the lecture bored me, it was completely useless, and besides, the corner of the hall I was sitting in did not allow the professor to really see me clearly. Then I answered her, Hah! How cultured U R. Such politeness! Remember the names we respect—Shanqal and Manqal.

Among everyone at school there existed a strong competition to determine who was superior, the students in the sciences or those in the arts. This culture had prevailed so strongly and for so long, renewing itself with every new class, that one really might wonder what gave it such a long life. I have no idea who started it in the first place, nor from whom I picked it up. Just as my university ID had been handed over to me, so was the notion of this competition for precedence, and for my part, I supported it. The girls in the sciences faculty would say of those in the arts that they were superficial. They had a faulty way of thinking and they were idle, with enough free time, after all, to paint their nails and dye their skin with those tattoos that fade when you wash. This idea was so established that we thought we could tell where a girl belonged from her appearance—the way her blouse looked, the obvious care she took with her makeup—without ever needing to scrutinize her uniform to see that she wore a black skirt, as distinguished from the official navy blue skirt that science girls wore. Likewise, they had the same sort of things to say about us; we were silly, boastful, and lacked the criteria by which they measured femininity. You could pick one of us out, they would claim, by the soiled lab coat that she never took off and her thick-lensed eyeglasses.

And in what passed for amusement and whiling away time as opposed to wasting it, we tossed the ball back and forth. At the sciences goalpost, the scales tipped in favor of seriousness and practical thinking, while on the arts end, the balance favored relishing and living your life to its fullest. Naturally, practical reality was not exactly the same as our preconceived notions; nevertheless, a clear difference was there for all to see. I found it inconceivable to weigh such different brain types, one thinking about Wolfgang Pauli’s Exclusion Principle and the other the victories of the great conqueror Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi, or one contemplating Einstein’s relativity and the other, al-Farahidi’s grammar. It is true that our difference did not go so far that we would use the equation α + β = γ where they would use me + you = love (as they do). I certainly did notice students majoring in geography who had a tough time in their first year getting through the computations they had to have for their studies, justifying the difficulty by saying that calculations belonged to the field of mathematics, even though they had barely gone two years since studying math.

Hah, Shanqal she says! God take them, making terror for us wherever we go!

Shanqal and Manqal. These were not the heroes of some cartoon show on the Space Toon channel. They were our nicknames for the pair in charge of security at the college. These two women had arrived a year ago in green uniforms that looked like soldiers’ duds. Their presence was something new, and it spurred comments and rumors that flew from one mouth to the next. It was murmured that they were here because of some drug distribution ring. Or, maybe, skimpy-sleeve relationships—this said with a meaningful wink, for we knew well enough what kind of unseemly goings-on “skimpy-sleeve” alluded to. It was said to be related somehow to the scuffle that had happened the year before, an argument over religious doctrine between two students, one of whom was then expelled.

There really had been a squabble over a matter of dogma; it had led to a clear change in the college’s policy of banning certain practices. The change was that we were subject to searches at any moment. We could no longer pass religious books to anyone, even if they were compilations of devotional passages and supplications with which one could end one’s ritual prayers. Nor could we bring out our rosaries of dried clay beads, meager stand-ins for the symbolic flats of hardened soil on which Shi‘is pray when they cannot pray directly on bare ground. Personally, I no longer felt capable of handing out the magazine on the sly, so I began taking a chance on distributing limited copies of it on computer discs. I handed them out on the bus going home to avoid anyone getting blamed at school, myself included. The possibility that what I was doing would be revealed was practically nil, since our second-year courses included computer, and I could rely on our constant exchange of discs for cover. Things like this were certainly going on, but their connection to the expulsion of students or to the appearance of a pair of security personnel was not so clear, since even the announcement of the expulsion, which was posted on the announcement board in front of the Student Affairs Office, had alluded only to either cheating infractions in final exams or moral offenses that took place outside the college proper, in the area where students waited for their private means of transportation.