The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (6 page)

Indianapolis is not so bad-not unpleasing in places, really.

-Theodore Dreiser, A Hoosier Holiday

Crunching over gravel, Khadra pulls the hatchback into the driveway of the blue Victorian house, almost expecting to see Mr. Hubbard and his truck across the street, even after all these years. She wonders if the old coot is still alive. She pulls her tangerine scarf, which has slipped down to her shoulders, back up around her face. This was going to be the Dawah Center's last summer in the old house. Staffers were preparing to move the offices into a glassand-concrete box off the interstate.

This summer of 1992 is a crossroads for the Dawah Center. Until now, it's run on donations scrounged from its own hard-up membership. But bigger donors have begun to take interest: wealthy Muslim businessmen and bankers from Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Malaysia. At the same time, there are those who want the organization to outgrow its immigrant founders and their "back-home" concerns, and to become more American. To face squarely the needs of those Muslims permanently settled in America. The American-bred children of immigrants are clamoring for more say. So are indigenous American Muslims, who until now have been the neglected stepchildren of Dawah. The move to corporate-style offices will begin a new phase of Dawah. Already its flyers look slicker.

Khadra isn't sure how she feels about the change. It's nice to see the upgrading to the same level of professionalism many American churches and nonprofits already enjoy. At the same time, there was something so homey about the earnest pamphlets with bad English, and she will miss all that. She will miss the house most of all, the aging blue Victorian with its cream-colored shutters and misshapen crabapple trees.

Khadra takes a canvas tarp from the car. Dufflebag of workout clothes, an old self-help book with a torn cover (Recovery for Adult Children of Missionaries)-she pushes those aside and yanks out the ice chest that holds her film. Strapping her Pentax manual over her shoulder, she loads it and snaps a few shots of the gnarled crab apples, the old mulberry, the one she and her brothers and their friends used to climb and pick clean and hang upside down from. Every kid should have a mulberry tree.

A smooth 'fro'd head, then a whole man, comes out of the earth behind the tree and appears in Khadra's viewfinder. Handsome, broad-shouldered. It's been ages since she's seen him. "Hey, Hakim," she says lightly, but with pleasure.

"Khadra!" Hakim has emerged fully from the cellar carrying a crate of pamphlets. "Hey, assalamu alaikum. So it's true you're back." He has a beard now, and his hairline is higher, but Hakim she'd know in any guise. He drops a yellowed pamphlet and she picks it up, glancing at the familiar typeface. It's from the '70s and announces a program theme of "Preserving Our Islamic Identity in the Midwest."

"Only for a visit," Khadra replies as she hands it to him.

She is, in fact, back in Indiana on assignment. The news desk of a Philadelphia- based magazine, Alternative Americas, for which she works, is doing a feature on minority religious communities in Middle America and has decided to feature the Indianapolis Muslims among them-to Khadra's dismay. She cringes at the thought of putting her own community in the spotlight. She doesn't think she herself can take one more of those shots of masses of Muslim butts up in the air during prayer or the cliched Muslim woman looking inscrutable and oppressed in a voluminous veil.

When her boss, Sterling Ross, himself a globetrotting photojournalist, had learned of her connection to the Indianapolis Muslim community, that she'd actually grown up in it, he'd been ecstatic. "Behind the veil! Wow! A keyhole view of the hidden, inside world of Muslims." He was impossible to discourage, since it seemed like a hard-to-top scoop to him. He walked away, leaving Khadra still uncertain.

"I don't think so," she muttered, and exchanged looks that said volumes about the limits of white liberalism with Ernesto, the photo editor.

"You'll have creative control, Khadra," Ernesto told her soothingly. "You're the one behind the lens."

Khadra fiddled with a dusty stack of issues of Photo District News on a damaged wooden end table. Ernesto seemed to know where he was going in the field. Herself, she'd stumbled from job to job, unsure of her direction. She knew what she loved doing-social photography, and nature-bugs, mainly-yeah, and also architectural. This last came from loving the space inside mosques. She knew what she didn't want-corporate work, advertising, being around people focused on the surfaces of things. Hard news photojournalism? Too fast and furious. Then there was art photography, like her friend Blu produced, but that didn't seem to be Khadra's thing either. Meantime, she had to pay the rent.

She'd been thrilled when she got the job with Alternative Americas, after having spent a number of years doing morgue photography and selling photos to stock houses. It gave her the creative leeway she wanted, the right pace. It's just lately she'd been growing impatient. Then this assignment came along and, even though her stomach sank at the thought of Indiana, she knew she had to do it. Thinking about her career direction would have to wait.

So here she is. Back in Indiana. Back to India-aana-yeah okay. Hakim loads the crate of pamphlets in the bed of his pick-up. He moves effortlessly, as if holding back his strength for bigger things. It's "Imam Hakim" now, of course. His star had risen during his grad school years at Harvard Divinity, where he'd been a campus Muslim leader. He'd done summer Arabic in Cairo and Islamic sciences stints in Medina and Damascus. When he'd come back, he had a wife, Mahasen, a fourth-generation African American Muslim whose grandparents had been with Elijah, peace be upon him, and whose great-grandparents had followed Noble Drew Ali. Khadra could only imagine the dinner-table discussion between generations in that family. From Moorish Science to Nation doctrine to the brief Bilalian phase, now capped by Mahasen the conservo-neo-traditional orthodox-with-a-twist-of-Wahhabi! But what about Hakim, where's his thinking "at" these days, she wonders. She knows him well enough not to try to pin a label on him. There are layers to Hakim.

"Need a ride?" the man in question asks awkwardly.

"I have to drive my own car," Khadra says, gratified at this sign that his characteristic kindness toward her is as ever. "But mind if I-?" she holds up her camera, and he waves permission. Behind him, the gnarly trees-click-shee, click-shee-the open cellar door, the blue-and-white home office of Islam in America-click-shee click-shee click-shee-Hakim's deep amber face with the Indiana sunshine full on him, bringing out the coppery undertones. His arms bared to the elbow, the glint of his silver wristwatch. Something missing. She looks again through the viewfinder, because in there she can zoom in without him noticing her gaze. The ring. Where is his silver wedding ring?

Hakim disappears into the house for a moment, leaving Khadra to head for the backyard. The crab apples are still green and small. The mulberries are closer to ripeness. She spies a large straw hat bobbing amid the greenery across the back fence. "Mrs. Moore!"

"Why, Khadra!" The familiar neighbor makes her way over to the fence. Khadra can feel her frail tremulous bones as she hugs her.

"How have you been? How's life in Philadelphia?"

"Fine, it's fine. I went to the Quaker Meeting Hall like you suggested."

"Yes?"

"It was the strangest thing."

Mrs. Moore raises an eyebrow.

"Silence. The prayer was-silence. I mean, that was the whole service. Someone leading the people through a whole hour of silence. I've never seen anything like it."

Mrs. Moore smiles.

"That's how Quakers pray, then, through silence?"

Mrs. Moore looks at Khadra as though she has already said too many words. "You have grown," she says, and goes back to her garden.

Khadra follows Hakim's pick-up, with its tattered green "As for me and my house, we serve Allah" bumper sticker, south out of Simmonsville into hill country. But what did "his house" consist of? Last she'd heard, he and Mahasen were doing fine, although no kids. He'd always had a restless edge, an unsatisfied seeker in him. It was not just career ambition, the kind that got him to Harvard, although it could manifest that way; it was more. It was a search for something underlying, a quest for what is real. Is he satisfied now?

Beanblossom, Helmsburg, Needmore-passing the turn-off for Hindustan, a blink-in-the-road whose name Uncle Kuldip used to find enormously funny, stopping to take a picture of himself next to the highway sign. The road to B-town had eaten part of her foot, as the Arabic saying goes, or, in the American idiom, she knew it like the back of her hand. The last time she'd been in Bloomington, she'd lived in the Tulip Tree Apartments, whose hallways smelled of curry and kabsa all afternoon, so thick that a mile away you could tell what was cooking and who was doing the cooking-Saudis, was it today? Or, at the other end of Muslim sectarian politics, Iranians? Or were the Malaysians frying squid?

Before the garment industry emerged, introducing its readymade sizes-clothes that do not know a body do not acknowledge each body's distinctiveness ... we in the East ... were making fabrics that were increasing in beauty ... refining [our] expression of the unique relationship between the cloth and the body ... Who, these days, sees in a length of cloth its origin, its place of birth, the caravans' voyages?

-Hoda Barakat, The Tiller of Water

Here is something new. On Old State Road 37 near Bloomington, a placard at a construction site says "Coming soon: Dagom Gaden Tensung Ling Monastery." Khadra does a double take. She gets a mental image of Hubbard hobbling angrily across the street from a colony of tiny men in orange robes. But no, times have changed. Haven't they? As if to prove it, a car whizzes by her, its bumper sticker proclaiming "Visualize whirled peas."

Khadra arrives on the IU campus knee-deep in the golden Indiana day, time for duhr prayer. It has been transformed into Muslim Land for the weekend. Thousands of Muslims fill Assembly Hall, the great basketball stadium where the Hoosiers practice, turning the Big Ten bastion into a high-raftered mosque. Khadra enters the arena just as the imam calls the first "allahu akbar." She steps out of her cute strappy sandals and slips into a prayer line next to a woman whose petite body, a presence of bone and flesh under the fabric, brushes against her.

Several hundred Muslim foreheads touch the arena floor in unison, her own widow's-peaked one among them. Only a thin bedsheet between the forehead and the hardwood. Palm, palm, knee, knee, points of contact with the ground. Campus staffers in Go Big Red T-shirts watch the Muslims pray, their eyes widening when everyone goes down in prostration.

"Here is the way Muslims touch the ground," Khadra thinks in sajda. "Here is the way we shift our bodies daily, and alter our angle of looking." In prostration, you see the underbelly of things. Daddy longlegs moving carefully side to side. Old gum underneath a bleacher plank. Hems, sari edges, purse buckles beside your eye. Feet. Long bony toes of tall skinny women and little cushiony ones of short round women, the littlest toe barely there, tucked sideways shyly. In the rising posture, she looks down at her long tissuey skirt with its Mayan temple images in blue and bronze. Her mother's voice in her head tsk-tsks her bare feet. In response, she wriggles her stubby toes.

After the salam, Khadra decides she will try low camera angles. It is not the prayer she will photograph, not from the outside, but: what does the world look like from inside this prayer?

She helps fold the dormitory sheets that have served as prayer rugs. She picks up one end and someone picks up the other, a young woman who is perhaps Bosnian or East European, wearing a floral fcharpe. Khadra loves being in this forest of women in hijab, their khimars and saris and jilbabs and thobes and depattas fluttering and sweeping the floor and reaching out to everything. Compact Western clothing doesn't rustle, or float, or reach out to anything.

Khadra spots a familiar figure across the prayer hall. Stray red hairs are sticking out from under a calico prayer wrap. "Aunt Trish!" She is bent over someone in a wheelchair. She turns, pushing the wheelchair. It is Uncle Omar-Khadra gasps softly. She'd heard he had developed multiple sclerosis, but never dreamed it had gone this far so quickly. She remembers how he'd gone after Ramsey with a strap after catching him with Insaf Haqiqat when they were teens; he'd been powerful as an ox.

"Khadra Shamy?" Uncle Omar says through his big mustache. "I haven't seen you since you were this high! Where have you been hiding all these years?"

"Oh," she says brightly, "I'm in Philadelphia now."

"Why don't you have a baby in your hands and three more behind you?" he demands gruffly-winking.

"I-well-how are you?" Khadra says. "I was so sorry to hear-"

"It's stage three progressive," Aunt Trish explains. "He had to go to a wheelchair within a year of diagnosis." She is matter-of-fact about it, although he seems to slump at her words.

Khadra is about to add a word of condolence for Ramsey, but she doesn't have the heart to bring up another sorrow just then.

On her way to check in at the Union Hotel, Khadra picks up a bright green flyer.

FIRST TIME EVER AT THE DAWAH CONFERENCEISLAMIC ENTERTAINMENT CONCERTS FOR MUSLIM YOUTH!

• Nasheeds by Phat in the Phaith!

• Hijab Hip-Hop by Nia Group!

• Spoken Word to Your Mother, then Your Mother, then Your Mother-with Brother Bilal!

• Special Performance by The Clash of Civilizations! (Islamic behavior and attire required of all youth attending. Responsible adult chaperones to supervise. Concerts strictly in accordance with shariah restrictions as per Dawah Conference Committee Guidebook on Islamic Rules for Entertainment Programs.)

Was Hijab Hip-Hop a girl group? Hunh. The Dawah has evolved, Khadra muses, stuffing the flyer in her bag.

The Clash of Civilizations is her brother's band-her little brother Jihad. It's an eclectic group of boys. Sort of a Muslim John Cougar Mellencamp meets Wes Montgomery, with a Donny Osmond twist. There's Jihad and an African American Muslim teen from Gary named, coincidentally, Garry, but with two rs. Garry Abdullah. The Osmond twist is the Mormon component, Brig and Riley Whitcomb. They're leaving out the instruments this gig, singing a capella, so it will be acceptable to conservative Muslims who have issues with musical instruments.