Good Muslim Boy Read online

  Not dying on my seventh birthday

  There had actually been a lot of uncertainty over whether or not I’d even make it to seven alive. The air raids had been fierce of late.

  And a few weeks before my seventh birthday, I’d had a dream I was going to die a little boy—but it ended in excitement. The angel that had come to take my life away also happened to be super-duper sexy—which was the reason I’d never recounted the dream to my mum, knowing she’d ban me from dreaming naughty.

  I did eventually draw the dream—and when the women of the house saw my drawing, instead of applauding, as they usually did, they asked me who the woman was. Why did she have a hook for a hand? Why was she standing in a graveyard? And why was she blonde?

  When I told them it was the angel of death, they gasped and asked me to redraw her, only this time in black drapes, and faceless.

  This in turn got me banned from staying up to watch the illegal satellite channels—which were my window on the world, my sanctuary. The channels showed uncensored Hollywood films, in black and white; the TV was installed by my mum’s brother Salman but he never watched it.

  Instead Adnan, Mum’s other brother, was glued to the tube whenever he got a break from service. We stayed up late, mesmerised by the white folks and their mysterious, alien activities.

  ‘Marlon Marnrow. She is fantastic! Even in black and white she looks colourful,’ he drooled.

  I asked what would happen if we got caught watching foreign TV.

  ‘Jail. Torture. Death. Who knows? One thing’s for sure: a sordid end.’

  ‘What’s sordid, Uncle Adnan?’

  ‘Bad, terrible, horrible,’ he said. ‘But don’t think negative. Don’t think about getting caught. Poker face, poker face, poker face. When I fight on the front line, I don’t think to myself, Oh, what happens if they catch me? No. I think about survival. And, of course, about what sauce I’ll put on my club sandwich if I ever make it back to base alive.’

  He was a joker, but the sauce line made me hungry.

  It turned out the vision of my death was just a mirage. Nanni made the birthday cake; I saved three months’ pocket money to buy the candles, when really what I wanted to spend it on was blue jeans.

  When I went to light the candles, Mum suggested, cheerfully, that I should wait till they dropped a bomb on us so they’d get lit up for free.

  Blue jeans blues

  The reason I wanted a pair of jeans so much was that I was sick of being mocked by the Iranian kids.

  I wore a dishdasha and it made me the laughing stock of the town. My Farsi wasn’t bad, and if only I had a pair of blue denims I was sure they’d stop calling me funny names. ‘A is for Arab, B is for baboon,’ they’d say. ‘Shroud-wearing camel.’ The names weren’t actually that funny.

  My cousins, who did wear jeans, fitted in so easily, fitted in with the ease of Vaseline. But Mum wanted me to be a proud Arab, and wear the dishdasha full-time. She also knew it would be impossible for me to save up for some jeans, so she made a deal with me: if I paid for them myself, I’d have her blessing to wear them. Clever lady.

  I’d saved nearly enough twice, but each time I’d got close, I’d had to break the piggy bank because we needed food. The time I’d bought my birthday candles I’d splurged on a soccer ball too—another way to show the Persian boys that I was cool. That I could bring a ball, and we could all play.

  I arrived with the soccer ball, the dishdasha tucked inside my pants, creating this unattractive, unruly bulge. ‘How many months pregnant are you?’ they asked. ‘Did you eat Saddam Hussein?’ Mansour, a ten-year-old whose father had been killed—martyred—last year, scoffed before he took my ball, withdrew a knife, and sliced my ball in two. He yelled at me to go back to my dirt hole.

  Schools had been shutting down more and more regularly thanks to the heavy bombardments. By default, I didn’t like school—no kid does, let alone a bullied one—but I was bored enough to crave it like an addict.

  I spent the dusty days wandering the streets looking for the leather boots of fallen soldiers. When I found some, I’d take them back to the basement of our apartment, cut them carefully into the shapes of flags, paint them in flag colours, then jerry-rig them onto large sheets of newspaper and glue them on. When they had dried, I’d ‘frame’ them, not using glass, but plastic bags, and use the bootlaces to decorate the edges.

  Then I’d use numberplates nicked from abandoned army jeeps to give each collage an ‘ID’. I took the plates to the local blacksmith, who cut them up for free into individual letters and numbers—which I’d use to come up with a plausible name and death-date for the departed, and glue them to the canvas, something like A L I 9–9–1988.

  After spending countless hours, I’d finished my twelfth piece. The number twelve is significant for a Muslim Shiite, since we believe there are twelve imams, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, who continue his lineage. In the hope that this figure would bode well for my works, I finally took them to the local mosque, telling my mum I was going there to learn to read the Koran.

  The mosque was small and beautiful, with aqua doors and entrance arch. It had a small fountain for ablution, a small hall for prayer. Its two minarets had been destroyed by bombs, which enhanced the appeal: people actually came here and prayed a bomb would drop right then, in which case they would die as martyrs. I didn’t yet have those aspirations.

  For the most part, though, it was a gathering place for men unfit for war and old people, which lent it a retirement village air. That makes it sound depressing—there was a real sense of community. People felt alive there, and they rarely discussed the war. They loved to reminisce about old times, just like old people everywhere—things like how good the football team was, pre-revolution.

  I laid out my potato sack on the floor outside the doors, and set the Koran down next to me in case one of our neighbours, always nosy, happened to pass by.

  The sun was not friendly. It was making me earn every cent. I’d sweated a solid river by the time my first potential mark arrived—a young man, who must’ve either been home on leave or had done a runner.

  ‘Hey, kid,’ he said. I hated being called a kid. What kid doesn’t? While we were at it, hadn’t this guy been a kid once? Didn’t he remember how infuriating that word must’ve been? So why was he insulting me? The heat made me irritable. I decided to smile and respond in a way that might net me a sale.

  ‘Good afternoon, sir! How are you today? How’s things? Are you on leave? Perhaps you’re an escapee?’ I was rambling—a rush to be respectful.

  ‘Where did you learn your manners?’ he asked.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to accuse you of being an escapee, I just wanted to know if you were one. Obviously it’s none of my business. Sorry.’

  ‘You’re selling this shit outside a mosque? Is this a place of business or a place of worship?’

  It was one of those questions adults liked to ask that condemned you no matter how you responded. Maybe he really was an escapee, which would’ve pissed him off, knowing even a kid could see it. I was still thinking this over when, all in a flash, my artworks shattered under the young man’s boots.

  He stomped and stomped and stomped on them, and no matter
how much I cried, he just didn’t stop stomping on my work. They made a noise when breaking; I could hear they were in pain. The sounds made my heart clench like a fist.

  A crowd had gathered, and I already knew they’d side with him, because he was a man, and I was just a kid. Because he looked like a pious soldier, and I looked like a rascal.

  Because he was Persian and I was Arab—a little punk in a wet dishdasha. It was wet from the sweat; it was getting wetter from the tears, and I think I might have peed a little too.

  And just then, an old mosque patron saw my pocket-sized Koran and stopped the mob from harassing me further. He picked me up and walked me back home, where I knew I’d get a belting. And that was the day I realised jeans were probably not for me. God wanted me to be an unfashionable outsider.

  Six feet away from a killed soldier’s face

  On Saturdays, our family went to Golzare-Shohada, aka the Martyrs’ Rose Garden. Saddam had burned most of the parks—along with the farm fields and oil rigs—but the Martyrs’ Rose Garden was miraculously untouched. In my grandmother’s view, God had sent His angels to protect the martyrs’ souls because they’d failed to shield those martyrs’ bodies.

  ‘They work overtime, the angels,’ she hummed after her nightly prayers. ‘They’ve got a world full of ruin to save.’

  Dozens of bodies came here on a daily basis. Young, old. Almost always men. Almost always with blood seeping through their shrouds.

  That the park was a makeshift cemetery didn’t bother us boys. We got to play tiggy and hide-and-seek all day.

  ‘You’re it!’ I shouted as I elbowed my brother Moe Greene—to show him I was boss, I was older, I was stronger, and to get him back for eating my chocolate-spread sandwich, which he’d stolen when an air-raid siren provided a distraction. It had been in the fridge, clearly marked Osamah’s sandwich.

  Moe Greene didn’t show pain. He wore the dishdasha like me, which teaches you to take various kinds of punishment. It also handicaps you in a game of tiggy; while our cousins Mehdi and Musty could run like gazelles in their jeans, we had to shuffle like penguins in the dishdashas and the added disadvantage of sandals.

  We ran across patches of sand and dry, dead grass, weaving in between the palm trees that had somehow stayed alive through the searing summer temperatures of Abadan.

  Despite being a literal loser, I was enjoying myself. The free air, the freedom to run about without watching for landmines—it was liberating. Just nearby, Mum, Nanni and my aunts joined a group of wailing women to read the Koran for the souls of the martyrs. They were all mothers, grandmothers and aunts of the deceased. And in one case, a mistress, who the other women shunned—the martyr’s wife most pointedly and particularly. I didn’t know the extent of the adultery, but even at seven, I’d heard the rumours circulating the cemetery that the mistress had got gifts from the front line and the wife had not. My uncle Adnan often brought me shell casings and disarmed grenades, so I imagined she’d got a necklace made from those same materials.

  The mistress never showed her face, but I knew she was pretty from her soft voice and soft cries. The wife brayed like a donkey; the mistress cried melodically, almost as if she was composing her weeping on the go. For us kids, certain gravestones supplied the perfect cover; you could circle them endlessly and avoid becoming ‘it’. But most of them were clogged up by the women.

  Unattended gravestones were even better for playing hide- and-seek. Right now, for instance, I was hiding behind the oldest headstone in the park, which belonged to a fourteen-year-old soldier named Reza. His mother went there every Friday, performing her many rituals for brightening the spirit of her departed son.

  She was always oblivious to our games of tiggy. Or so I thought. Maybe she didn’t get mad because she could remember her own son, who not that long ago had played just like this, in this park, before it had become a shrine for boys like hers.

  We had an unwritten rule not to hide behind children’s graves. But desperate times called for desperate measures. I did a quick prayer to assuage the guilt, but the guilt remained. All I could do was stare into the picture of Reza’s face, which had been engraved into the headstone.

  He had a stunning smile. He must have brushed his teeth twice a day, for sure. I made a deal with myself that I would be more like Reza, brush twice a day, instead of my current twice-a-week habit—so lazy. If I died, I wanted kids hiding behind my tombstone to think, Wow! Look at that smile. An example for other youngsters. You could always look good, dead especially.

  ‘Oi!’ Moe Greene shouted, jolting me out of my fantasy. ‘Move away from that tombstone.’

  I laughed nervously. ‘Okay, you found me.’ My cousins caught up. They all looked at me with disappointment, and pity.

  ‘What have we said about hiding behind baby graves?’ yelled Moe Greene. ‘You idioto!’

  I stopped myself from crying. I was the oldest boy. But my throat was warm, trying to let out an explosion. I knew I couldn’t hold it much longer.

  ‘Osamah,’ Nanni called, in the nick of time. ‘Come over here.’

  I wiped away the tears and trudged towards the women.

  ‘Oocha, read this passage of the Koran. I don’t know this one off by heart,’ she said. She was illiterate, and could only read the passages she’d memorised. Lines had long ago hijacked her face. She had a tattoo on her upper lip. It was a symbol, and I didn’t know what it meant. She lost her husband when my mum was seven.

  I’d once asked Mum what it had been like to lose her dad at seven. I was seven, and my own dad was on the front line. ‘You son of a shit,’ she’d said. ‘Why do you ask these questions? Two-legged goat, go sit and play.’

  Nanni had called me over to read for a newly arrived body. It was shrouded, seeping blood, and on its way into the ground, being lowered by a group of men chanting ‘God is Great’ and ‘Death to the Tyrant’. I had to invent some of the passage as I recited it, since I’d only been learning to read the Koran for the past year.

  ‘Nanni, it’s getting dark!’ I said. ‘I hate reading for a new body. It freaks me out.’ The arrival of bodies in the park was so common that we always just carried on playing when they came. When I got close to a corpse, I felt sick in my stomach. I could smell the dead.

  ‘Each verse you read from the Koran brightens their soul,’ she replied.

  The idea of brightening the soul fascinated me, even though I couldn’t explain it to my brain.

  I went to go on reading, but before I could, one of the men lost his grip on the shroud and slipped into the open grave. He pulled the corpse in after him and it landed right on his face. ‘Fucking vagina!’ he screamed.

  The religious chants stopped instantly. Nanni covered my ears. But I’d already heard it.

  The other men tried to pretend their friend had shouted something holy, but in the open grave, with the corpse on him, he was still freaking out, still yelling like a schoolboy.

  ‘Get this vagina corpse off me!’ he cried. My ears were poorly muffled. He shoved the body off him, violently. And just like that, the shroud opened.

  I threw up. Not on the corpse, thank God, but on Nanni’s lap. The martyr’s head was so flat it looked like an open book. A red book, a messy book that lo
oked nothing like a face. The mouth was wide open. It had no eyes.

  ‘Nanni,’ I said quietly. ‘When we read the Koran, does it just brighten his soul, or does it heal his face too?’

  No answer. I wondered if I’d be in trouble for vomiting on her lap. If reading the Koran was in fact meant to heal the martyr’s face, I wouldn’t want to be the one doing it. It’d take two years just to bring the martyr’s eyes back.

  THE DAY GOD DIED

  Mashhad, Iran, 2013

  There are more felafel stands in Mashhad than there are restaurants in Sydney. So it’s not strange that my dad and I have ended up at one where a man happens, in some small but crucial way, to need our help. The man is lucky because my father likes to help a stranger out.

  This is an unusual way of living in the world, as the next week of my life is about to demonstrate.

  The man is in his fifties, mostly bald; what hair he has is white. He’s talking to his three children, two girls and a boy; one of the daughters is swinging from his arms. They are pleading with him to buy them ‘regular’ felafels—not halves, not one piece of bread with just sauce and no salads. Soft drink, too. They’re thirsty. They play the promise card: he promised them today he’d buy regular felafel and drink.

  The man tries to shush the children, likely from embarrassment. He tries to whisper that he can’t buy these things, but he can’t even whisper—have you ever tried to speak with subtlety to three hungry kids? They keep hassling him, chasing the meal. The man is distraught, even anguished.