Does My Head Look Big in This? (33 page)

I call Leila’s mobile, but it’s still switched off. I ring her house but nobody answers. So I send her a text message anyway:
HEY
SWEET
,
MISS
U 2
MUCH
.
GUESS
WHAT?
AM
PUTTING
LAW
DOWN
ON
MY
UNI
PREFERENCES
.
MAYBE
WE’LL
BE
IN
CLASS 2GETHER
AGAIN
!
WOULD
BE
GR
8.
I
MISS
U
.
SALAMS
.

I go to bed on a bit of a high. In the scheme of my life, it’s only a debate, right? But I feel like I’ve turned a corner tonight. Call it what you want. Proving myself. Competing as an equal. Living up to my potential. Whatever way you want to analyse it, I go to bed feeling like nothing can stop me.

41

I
walk in our front door and the trampoline starts going in my chest again. Leila’s mum is sitting on the couch next to my mum. I stare at her. She stares back. My mum is throwing furious looks at me but I ignore her.

“My daughter talking to you?”

“No.” My mum tenses up and then hurls an ultimatum at me in Arabic to stop being so cruel and rude. I plonk myself down on a chair.

“She hasn’t called,” I force out in as civil a voice as possible. She nods and I’m taken aback. I was expecting a long list of accusations. I notice her face. It’s so thin and drawn. It’s not just that she’s lost weight. There’s something else. It’s like the anger and tension have fallen away. There’s something so quiet about her face now.

“I . . . no cope,” she says softly, looking at my mum.

“I scared . . . I. . .” She coughs and my mum squeezes her hand.

“Just tell me this, Aunty. You grew up without any freedom. So why do you want Leila to go through the same?”

“
Amal
,” my mum whispers.

Leila’s mum looks at me wearily and heaves a huge sigh. I’m dumbfounded. She should have at least cursed me to purgatory by now.

“You think I no have freedom? I feel free. I have my own house and my own life and I happy. Why you always say bad thing about this? Why you judge me?”

“Because you didn’t have choices, and now you want to take Leila’s choices away too. And that’s not what Islam is about.”

“You think my culture I just throw away? It is my culture. It is me. All I know is how I grow up and what my mum taught me. It is my village culture and my family culture and my home culture. If you losing your culture you becoming nothing. Are you wanting have no culture?”

“I’m picking and choosing what I like and what I don’t like. But Islam is where my rights come from, so if some crappy cultural rule says I have to chuck out my education or sit at home for life, then stuff it.” I’m expecting her to well and truly lose it now. But she simply sighs again and stands up.

“I tired now,” she says to my mum. “I go home and sleep. My husband he try cook dinner tonight. He upset for me you know? So he say you rest, I cook.” She chuckles softly. “He no even know how boil the egg.”

My mum smiles and hugs her and they walk across the room to the front hall. I look at her as I stand awkwardly in front of my chair. She turns back to look at me.

“If Leila calling . . . just tell her I want her home. I . . . let her go school and we no talk marry now . . . just. . .” She stops and shrugs her shoulders, biting on her lip to distract attention away from her quivering chin.

I don’t know what to say or do. She nods at me and turns back to my mum, kissing and hugging her goodbye.

I sit down on the couch confused. I’ve never understood Leila’s mum and I’ve never wanted to. I always thought she resented Leila. All she did was yell and scream and criticize her. But tonight she didn’t even challenge me when I insulted her. And what’s even more staggering is that she’s actually compromising. Never in a million years could I have imagined her backing down.

There’s something so different in her eyes now. Something maternal, and it’s a shock because I’ve never associated the word maternal with Leila’s mum. I’ve always understood her in terms of conflict and stress. Arguing with Leila, complaining about Hakan, fighting with Leila’s father, pressuring Yasmeen. All I saw was a bitter, backward woman who only cared about clean dishes, ironed tea towels and marrying her daughter off.

But I think I was wrong. Somehow her love for Leila seems no less than my own mum’s love for me.

I feel guilty. I never tried to bring Leila and her mum together. I never gave myself the chance to see things from Leila’s mum’s perspective and to understand her fears. It was easier to dismiss her as an ignorant villager. All those times I laughed behind her back with Yasmeen, ridiculed her paranoia about us being harassed on public transport or her obvious denial about Hakan.

It’s not that I was arrogant. It’s the fact that I felt that somehow, because I’m being educated and brought up in an open-minded environment, I had the
right
to be arrogant and superior.

All this time I’ve been walking around thinking I’ve become pious because I’ve made the difficult decision to wear the hijab. I’ve been assuming that now that I’m wearing it full-time, I’ve earned all my brownie points.

But what’s the good of being true to your religion on the outside, if you don’t change what’s on the inside, where it really counts?

I’ve been kidding myself. Putting on the hijab isn’t the end of the journey. It’s just the beginning of it.

42

R
amadan begins. We wake up at 3.45 a.m. to eat our
suhoor
,
our pre-dawn meal. I can’t really stomach more than a slice of toast and a hot drink. My dad insists that I drink tea as it quenches the thirst. I’m up for any piece of advice, given I won’t be touching any food or drink, including water, from dawn until dusk.

I remember my first Ramadan fast. I’d begged my mum to let me fast from dawn until dusk “like the grown-ups”. I was in Grade Four. She let me fast until recess. Ramadans passed and recess became lunch time, lunch time became an afternoon snack. Pretty soon I was fasting for the full haul.

It took me some time to realize that Ramadan is not just about hunger and thirst. I guess that when we’re a McValue meal away from relieving a hunger pain in a world where millions of people are dying of starvation, empathy does more to your conscience than a news report.

But there are pig-outs.

Boy are there pig-outs. After-dusk gorges. I know it defeats the purpose, but after sixteen hours I’ve got meat and salad and bread and Tim Tams and cheese and tomato melted on Turkish toast and
maklobe
and tortellini and carrot cake and pizzas with the lot minus the lot and souvlaki and sitting under an ice cream tap with my mouth wide open. . . Pretty terrible, actually.

I remember understanding what Ramadan was all about when I was in Grade Six, at a birthday party. It was the usual primary school scene: cake, fairy bread, chocolate, lollies, chips and not a single Muslim friend connected to my family who could lag on me if I cheated. It took half an hour and I caved. Big time. I wiped out the Mars bars, squashed CCs on top of my party pies and ravaged through the jelly beans. And then, when we were playing musical chairs and I was burping and hiccuping proof that I’d been a fat guts, I was overwhelmed with guilt. I broke down in tears, got disqualified from the game (I sat down to cry, which was considered hogging a chair) and went home early.

But it kind of dawned on me then that at the end of the day nobody knows what I do behind closed doors. Except God. One of my all-time favourite verses in the Koran is when God says, “We have created man and know what his soul is whispering within him. We are closer to him than his jugular vein”.

Boy does that verse give me the shivers. I think about my jugular vein, how it collects the blood from my head, runs it down my neck to unite with my other major veins, and I suddenly grasp how certain I am that God is watching over me. Sometimes I get this temptation to sneak into the kitchen and eat a biscuit, or to take a sip of water when I’m gargling my mouth. My parents won’t know. My friends wouldn’t have a clue. But I guess that’s just not the way it works.

Despite Mrs Vaselli disapproving of my fasting (she thinks it’s a waste of time given that I don’t have salvation) she’s insisted I visit her whenever I can after dinner to eat dessert with her. She always seems to be baking cakes now. When we’re polishing off a batch of scones I try to dig for news about how she’s going with her son.

“Tings be good. It take time. But zey be good.”

Naturally, I think this is an invitation for me to ask her a zillion questions. “What did he say when you called? Did you talk to his wife? When will he be visiting you?”

She smiles quietly and tells me to help myself to more tea. “We starting new, Amal. It take time. . . Now you drinking more tea or you fainting at school tomorrow. Next year you trying Lent wiz me. Better for you.”

“No problem, Mrs Vaselli,” I say and she grins at me.

43

“
I
think I’m going mental,” Simone says when she picks me up from my house for a walk in our local park after school. “Want to know why?”

“Spill it.”

“I think. . . I’m not sure. . . I mean, I could be wrong. . . I know I’m wrong . . . it’s just a guess—”

“
Simone
.”

“OK . . . do you think Josh might like . . . me?”

“Well DOH!”

Her eyes widen in surprise. “Really?”

“
Simone
, stop being a Neanderthal, will you? It’s bloody obvious he’s interested in you!”

“Well, OK, little things keep happening and I don’t know if they mean anything because I just can’t imagine that he’d like me.”

“Stop! Have you got a pen and paper?”

“
No.
Why?”

“Just check your bag and I’ll check mine. Come on, let’s sit down over there at that bench.”

She looks at me incredulously but follows me over. We both rummage through our bags and manage to produce a sharpened lip liner and a piece of paper.

“What are you doing?”

“We’re going to write it down. Make a list of all the little things you say he does which might show he likes you and the reasons why you think he doesn’t.”

“You have issues.”

“I know but just accept it and start listing.”

This is what she comes up with:

Reasons why Josh might like me

•  
 Just a coincidence??? E.g.: next to my locker when I’m there & starts up a conversation so when I’m finished packing my things away we walk off together &
talk (?)

•  
When something funny happens in class he looks my way to lock eyes with me(?), to see if I’m laughing

•  
Called me a couple of times. Says it’s about school work but that conversation lasts 2.5 seconds & then he’s changing the topic talking about all kinds of stuff (?)

•  
St Kilda day. Did he deliberately want to sit next to me on roller-coaster?

Reasons why Josh might not like me

•  
Cannot write down or Amal will probably try to have a Dr Phil moment with me

When she’s finished, she passes the list over to me.

“What’s with all the question marks?”

“What’s wrong with them?!”

“Forget it! Well then, what’s with this Dr Phil comment? You know you can say what you want to me.”

She explodes into a fit of laughter. “Really now?”

“Fine. Anyway, based on this list you have nothing to worry about. He’s obviously got the hots for you.”

“Guess what Mum said last night? She comes into my room when I’m finished on a call with Josh and she sits me down for a D & M session.”

“Don’t you just hate those?”

“Big time. She goes that she’s so overjoyed that a guy has
finally
shown an interest in me. And then she goes that I should start a crash diet – apparently Liz Hurley does a watercress soup diet and she’s heard it’s simply
fab
– so that I can quickly lose some kilos before – check this out – he loses interest.”