The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (41 page)

"Well, why are you Muslim then? If anything else is just as good."

Khadra thinks for a minute. "Love," she says slowly. "Love and attachment. I love the Quran, for example. And the forms and rhythms of salah. I keep coming back to it. It has a resonance for me."

"But you think someone else can pray another way and find a path to God?" Tayiba counters.

"Absolutely."

Tayiba regards her with the look of those who have stayed put toward those who have gone away and returned, full of ideas they think are original, and expecting attention for it. There has been a lot of slow, meaningful work to be done in the community while her friend has been traipsing about the world. Even if it's not as cameraready as Khadra's angst-filled poses. Who has been doing the real work? She has, that's who. Tayiba, true and steady on her course, through a thousand thankless tasks for her family and community. Alhamdulilah.

"Why do you have to see that as so threatening? Why does it have to be either-or?" Khadra begins. But she stops short at the sight of a giant glossy display poster:

ISLAMIC BATHROOM HYGIENE IN AMERICA AT LAST! **** The Istinjaa 4000XL**** ORDER NOW.

"Oh my God, check this out!"

"Tired of plastic squirt bottles and other makeshift personal cleanliness methods?" Tayiba reads. She bursts out laughing.

Khadra continues reading aloud, "'Install the Istinjaa 400XL Personal Cleansing System and appreciate the difference!Affixes to standard plumbing fixtures. Gentle hosing action is respectful to your fan! Fully adjustable nozzle goes from pulsing to streaming spray. Long, flexible metal-coil tubing stretches even to that hard-to-reach najasa. ' " Hardto-reach najasa! Respectful to yourfarj! Oh my God, this is a hoot!"

"I don't see why," Tayiba grins. "It's really very needed."

"It is, it totally is! I mean, I love it! I love Muslim-American ingenuity! God, the problems this would have solved in my childhood."

"We, um-we actually installed one last year."

"I'm getting one," Khadra says, eyes bright with pleasure. "I'm `ordering now.' I don't care if I rent. I'll talk my landlord into letting me install it. It's like, the future is here, Tayiba! The American Muslim future is here, and it is the Istinjaa 4000XL."

At the Marion County Memorial Gardens, Khadra rummages in her car for one of the henna packets she bought at the bazaar. She and Aunt Ayesha make their way to Zuhura's grave. Alhamdu lilahi rabil alamin, Arrahmani 'rahim, they begin. Praise be to God, Lord of all the worlds, the Merciful, the Compassionate ... they recite a Fatiha for Zuhura. Khadra opens the satchel of henna and sprinkles a little bit of the powder into the grass, her tangerine depatta draped loosely over her shoulder and fluttering over Zuhura's gravestone. Aunt Ayesha pulls a few weeds.

"Thanks for coming with me," Khadra says, sitting on a nearby bench. "On my own, I wouldn't have found it."

"I'm glad we could do it together," Aunt Ayesha says, sitting next to her. She wears round glasses now, making her face look softer, but her gaze is no less intense.

"You must be very proud of Tayiba," Khadra says, to fill the awkward silence.

"Yes." She brightens. They've been working together as a motherdaughter team on several committees.

"She turned out the way I was supposed to, I guess," Khadra blurts. She didn't have to say that. She always feels nervous around Aunt Ayesha. "My mother-" she stops there.

Her mother's old friend is quiet for a moment. After a while she says, "We put a lot of weight on your shoulders, didn't we?"

Khadra is caught off guard by the gentleness of her tone.

"Not just you-all our children." She glances toward the headstone. "But especially you girls. You had a lot to measure up to."

She's right, Khadra thinks. It was a lot. It was.

"We were so young when we came, you must know that," Aunt Ayesha says slowly. Khadra realizes with a start that her parents had been younger than she is now when they moved to Indiana. "Young in a strange land, your mother was, like me. We were both a little jumpy. Afraid of losing something precious. Not only like that, "she says, nodding in the direction of the grave. "although that is a terrible part of it. Of being swallowed up by this land, reduced to nothing."

Khadra nods. She knows that fear.

"And we were so idealistic, oof! Full of zeal! But we put it all on you. Too much. Wanting you to carry our vision for us, our identity -our entire identity, on your heads, imagine!" She laughs, and Khadra nods, because she's right-"on our heads" is right, she thinks. She's nailed it.

"Forgive us," Aunt Ayesha says abruptly, and then suddenly a sob catches in Khadra's throat-Aunt Ayesha is not the auntie she would have picked to cry in front of, but she can't help it-and now her cheeks are wet. Because she feels like something hard and leaden has just been lifted from her. Because her own mother would never have said that to her.

And Aunt Ayesha, of all people, takes her in her arms, her body so petite under the big, shoulder-padded robe. "But I'm going to get your jilbab dirty," Khadra says, sniffling into the broadcloth. "It's all snotty now.

"Usiwe na wasi-wasi, "she murmurs in Swahili, and then translates, "It's all right." And she doesn't even fumble for a tissue out of her pocket to clean where Khadra sniffled on her shoulder. "Never mind all that. It's all right."

Joy Harjo, "Eagle Poem"

The next day, Khadra pauses at the door of a large room where a panel is taking place on Zionism. "Zionist Agendas and the Islamic Movement in Palestine," "Zionist Media Influence," and "Christian Zionists in Washington" are among the topics announced. She walks down the isle, closer to the speaker. Here is the Islam of fear and defensiveness and political power-staking. It is tiresome. The shouting of the panel members and the rumb- ings of the audience make her tired. She is still as critical of Zionism as ever, but there are more intelligent ways to protest the injustice of Zionism, she thinks, as she walks down to the front of the hall. She focuses the camera on the current speaker, his mouth contorted with fierce words, nostrils angry. Do I shoot, do I take these pictures? Khadra sighs. Everyone already knows this face of Muslims. That's all they know.

"But it's part of the picture," her photo editor says, when she gets him on the phone, later.

"So many religious Muslims are not like this but full of genuine humility and gentleness," Khadra protests. She has already decided; she will not include the photo of the shouting angry Muslim. Enough already. Space is limited and there are new things to be said.

"Right. The type of nice kindly religious person that will very gently tell you you're going to hell," Ernesto replies. "They're in my diocese, too, believe me."

That's the thing. That's what makes the scene so difficult to figure out, for Khadra, so full of contradictions-the people are good people, in many ways-grounded, kindly. Khadra loves the people. And then at the same time she cannot stand their worldview, can no longer stand to be inside it. It is stifling and untenable not because it is Muslim, but in the same way sincere and goodhearted hardcore Christians and Jews are wrong, and hardcore leftists, and militant rightwingers and pulpit pounders of any sort. Even Seemi when she gets up on her progressive soapbox.

"Then help the viewer see all this," Ernesto says. "It's no use censoring yourself, Khadra. That's not how you get at the whole picture."

The whole picture. What did Ernesto know about the whole picture? And what is Alternative Americas, anyway? Just another part of the mainstream establishment, poised to take ads from the big corporations, dependent on the marketing of itself like any other for-profit venture, or a genuine class act of the alternative media, an intelligent path to visualizing those whirled peas? Now Khadra finds herself wondering if working at the magazine is enough for her. Where is her life going, what is her task? How is she serving humanity? Okay, that's way overreaching, the ironic undercutter in her protests. That's Dawah thinking. That's the missionary in you, like Exercise 23 in the book showed, remember? All she has to do is keep her inner flame going inside its niche; that one little goal connects her always to all humanity. Fine, she thinks, backing down, nothing grand, then, and returns to the basic question: Is this work something she can do with her whole self? That's the only "whole picture" she has to worry about. Yes, she decides. It is. This assignment is from my whole self, anyway. She will get to the end of it and figure out where to go from there.

She ties her hair back with a faded green bandanna. (She remembers how she and some of the other girls used to wear bandannas for their earliest stabs at hijab, because ordinary Hoosier kids like Allison Bone wore bandannas all the time and the Muslim kids hoped to pass for normal in them.) Khadra goes out in a modest jogging outfit-long cotton drawstring pants and a three-quartersleeve T-shirt-and chooses a path on the outskirts of hardcore Islamistan, away from the part of campus overrun by conference Muslims.

God, she knows every inch of this place. It's a part of her. The stinky gingko tree-hers. Her Maryam tree, she called the mulberry -it let fall fresh ripe fruit upon her, like Maryam's tree in the Quran. There's the path where she biked with Joy and shouted about abortion. Here's where she waded in the waist-deep snowdrifts of more than one Indiana winter. This is where the mockingbirds used to swoop down and attack you as you ambled down the path, until somebody taped off a chunk of sidewalk and put up a handwritten sign, Mockingbirds Nesting, Do Not Disturb!

She slows to a power walk, cooling down. Rounds a corner and there is Hakim, sitting on a stone bench in the twilight. She waves. He is there when she circles back. They find themselves segueing down the same path toward Lindley Hall. Her sweat is cooling off, but her cheeks are still a little flushed.

"It's maghreb," Hakim observes.

"Mmm hmm," Khadra says absently. She is confused by her sudden heightened awareness of his body. A sensation comes to her, a physical memory of bike riding with him when they were kids, leaning back into his chest, his grip next to hers on the handlebars.

He looks at his watch. "Dang. I haven't prayed."

"Oh-er-" Khadra looks sheepish. "I haven't either. If we hustle back to the Union, we can just about do maghreb in time."

"Maghreb time is short."

She knows that. She also knows that, as a traveler, she can slide over the time limit and pray maghreb when she does the night prayer later. And she knows Hakim knows it.

"Wanna pray together? Here?" Hakim says, gesturing toward the grass.

A warm glow suffuses from her belly. From the jogging. "Sure, why not," she says. They veer off the path to a woodsy spot behind Lindley Hall, away from pedestrians.

"Got wudu?"

"You bet."

She unrolls her bandana and opens it into a little makeshift prayer scarf She does not stand behind Hakim-he glances around as if to locate her-but beside, leaving a few feet of grass between them.

After salam, they stay sitting on the grass a little while longer, leaning back out of the upright prayer posture into a more relaxed position, each one looking down at his or her finger joints. Hakim gazes at her face as they begin to rise. He leans toward her-she draws back a little-he reaches out and brushes her forehead very lightly with the tips of two fingers.

"Piece of grass," he says, holding out his open palm to show her. Smooth smooth man. They walk back, not talking much, the late afternoon buttering into evening. Butter, too, is his low voice beside her, his gait of smooth restraint.

"Hey-listen," he says, just before they part. "We're all going out to root for Hanifa in the race tomorrow. Me and my folks. Want to come?"

Is-is she being asked on a date? A date with the imam? She giggles inwardly. No, she corrects herself quickly, it's a family thing. He's asking me as a friend.

"I'd love to," she says, smiling widely.

She has time for a quick shower before her next shoot. Under the water, s! e thinks about Hakim. What is happening? In soooo confused, she -ould hear herself telling Seemi. She wishes she had a girlfriend here to talk to. It's too much to explain long distance. What is too much to explain? Has anything really even happened? Was that a lace moment, praying beside him on the grass? Does he feel it too, or is it just her? Is she imagining it, projecting, ohhhh what what what.

Okay, she says to herself, be your own inner girlfriend, think this through. Say it's real. Say it's lace. Then what? Hakim? Does she really want to go back in time to someone from her childhood, from the old mindset? But he isn't, any more than she is. Just because he grew up in it. He's on some kind of journey, he's somewhere betwixt and between, like she is. But he's an imam. Yeah, so? Got anything against imams? Nooo, Khadra doesn't. But what about him being freshly divorced? What is it Americans call that in dating terms-oh yeah: on the rebound. She knows all about that, and that it's potentially dangerous. Getting someone on the rebound is something to avoid. But clearly she is having trouble avoiding Hakim.