Does My Head Look Big in This? (11 page)

“You’ll persuade them,” I say. “You’re so strong and . . . stable.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sometimes the thought of taking off my hijab crosses my mind. I guess because it’s still new to me. How inconsistent is that?”

“Don’t be silly. There are times I freak out about exams and uni and all that stuff. And there are times I’m ready to take on my parents, the vegetable and animal kingdom, the solar system, the entire universe. No one can be gutsy all the time. Imagine how obnoxious and snotty they’d be.”

Eileen has a point. I’ve been strong and defiant in some situations and an absolute wuss in others. Like the time I took the day off school to avoid playing in a final basketball match that I was freaking out about. On the other hand, I remember attending a Grade Six camp dance wearing a dress when everybody else was wearing jeans and runners.

All the girls had planned to dress up and then somehow the plans changed without me knowing. I’d fought with my mum to buy me a dress and shoes and even though she’d warned me that nobody would wear a dress at a farm camp, I insisted and she spent about one hundred dollars on an outfit. I felt so guilty that I’d made her fork out all that money that I decided to wear the dress anyway. I’ll never forget everybody laughing at me when I walked in to the barn with my heels and polka-dot black-and-white dress. There was hay on the floor, a Spice Girls track booming and denim in every corner. It’s one of those humiliating memories which will be forever etched in my mind.

But the point is, maybe people have to go through a lion and mouse syndrome at different points in their life. One thing seems certain. If I survived a polka-dot dress experience on a primary school camp then something tells me that I’ve got it in me to survive wearing the hijab.

On Sunday morning my dad and I are dumped with a list of Mum’s neurotic cleaning chores so that she can concentrate on cooking a banquet for tonight’s dinner with her younger brother, Uncle Joe, and his family. This time my dad’s stuck putting our DVDs and video tapes in alphabetical order. But he draws the line at organizing them in categories.

Afterwards, I help Mum out in the kitchen. Peeling veggies, rolling the vine leaves and doing whatever other support-staff work she needs me to.

Whenever someone’s invited to our house, my mum cooks as if she’s feeding the entire southern hemisphere. There are no discount percentages on fat content, no carb-free sauces, and don’t even dare to suggest salad dressing with a low GI index. My mum is into making an impression when she cooks and her diet regime is therefore non-existent whenever we have visitors.

Uncle Joe and Aunt Mandy crack me up. Big time. Uncle Joe is the complete opposite of my mum. He was born Ismail and my Aunt Mandy was born Aysha. I’m still trying to figure out where Joe and Mandy came from.

They’re not into Islam or Arabic culture like we are. They’re more into changing their names, peroxiding their hair and acting like they were born in Wagga Wagga and not Jerusalem. They’re always freaking out about us being “fanatics”. For example, in Ramadan, we’re “mad” to fast. When it’s prayer time, they ask us why we bother. When we buy halal food, we’re “too extreme”. I remember the time we went to a buffet dinner and my mum asked the chef if the pork was carved on the same cutting board as the lamb. Uncle Joe just about had convulsions, and went aggro at my mum for being so “embarrassing”. So my mum laughed in his face, walked up to the manager and told her that her brother, the man with the heavy gold chains eating the potato salad, was wondering if it was possible for them to start to use a separate cutting board as a courtesy to those who don’t eat pork. The manager immediately walked up to Uncle Joe and started sucking up to him, saying sorry about ten times in the space of one minute. Uncle Joe was livid.

My cousins are Samantha, who’s in her second year at uni, and George, who’s nine and quite possibly the most irritating human being in the world. As soon as he walks into our house tonight he rolls back his eyelids, sticks his tongue out at me and then yells out that Samantha had the runs on Tuesday. There has to be a scientific research centre that will agree to conduct a study on this kid.

Samantha and I are pretty close. I only see her at family things, as she spends almost every weekend hanging out with her boyfriend, Martin. I’ve met him a couple of times. He’s a real spunk. Seriously, ten out of ten. They’re crazy about each other. Although her parents may be really laid-back about religion and culture they’d never accept Samantha having a boyfriend. So whenever Samantha’s out with Martin, her parents are fed a story about her being over at a friend’s house for a study session.

Because we’re all just family I’m not wearing my hijab when they come over. So, up until dinner, I’m still the relative with flowing locks and “normal” looks.

My mother has gone all out tonight. She’s cooked a Palestinian dish called
mansaf
, basically rice mixed with pieces of chicken and pine nuts, dressed with a hot yoghurt soup. It’s in a plate that has the circumference of a semi-trailer tyre. She’s also made a massive bowl of
fatoosh
, salad topped with pieces of bread dipped in olive oil, with side dishes of pickled cucumber, radish and chillies, minced meat pastries and
warak aneb
, which are vine leaves stuffed with spicy rice. Everybody’s digging in when my mum announces that I’ve decided to wear hijab.

“But why?” my aunt wails.

“Yes, Jamila, why would you go and make her do that?” Uncle Joe shouts. “Isn’t it enough you wear it, so you have to force your daughter to as well?”

“
What?
Nobody made me! It was entirely
my
decision.”

“Jamila!” my uncle hisses in a tone which makes it obvious he’s ignored me.

“Oh, Ismail, just shoosh,” my mother says, rolling her eyes at him and helping herself to another serving of food.

“Dad’s name is
Joe,
Aunty!” George cuts in, hitting his fork on the table in protest.

“Oh shut up, will you?” Samantha groans.

“Maa! Samantha swore at me!”

“Samantha, don’t be rude to your brother.”

“Uncle Joe, I said it was
my
choice! Oh put a sock in it, George!”

“But Amal, honey,” my aunt says in a sickeningly patronizing tone, “why would you go and hide your hair? You’ve got such gorgeous hair.”

“Well, Aunt Mandy, to be perfectly honest with you, I’m losing my hair. The doctor said that my hair follicles can’t withstand excessive sun exposure, and if I don’t cover up I’ll be bald at my Year Twelve graduation ceremony.”

My dad snorts with laughter. My aunt and uncle don’t look amused. George sticks his tongue out at me and I go cross-eyed at him. After dinner Samantha and I lock ourselves up in my bedroom and sit on the window ledge. Samantha smokes, so we’ve got the incense candles burning, the Listerine handy, a can of air freshener, and the window wide open. Samantha’s also wearing gloves so her hands don’t smell. We’ve pretty much perfected the after-dinner routine.

Samantha inhales and quickly sticks her head out the window, directing her exhaled smoke into the open air. “Want a drag?”

“Nah.”

“You sure?”

“Nah, I’m right. Anyway, Mum and Dad would smell it on me even if I had a bath in disinfectant.”

“I think my parents know I smoke.”

“Yeah. I just reckon they’re in denial.”

“Big time. . . So tell me Miss
I’m-In-Love
, what is it about Adam?” She takes a last drag and closes the window, spraying her body with perfume and my room with air freshener. We jump on to my bed and lie down.

“He’s a great kisser.”

“WHAT?
You kissed?
”
She jumps up on the bed and I collapse into a fit of laughter.

“Ha ha, very funny. Sheez, you gave me a heart attack. For a second there I thought you’d broken your code of
drool don’t touch
!”

“Yeah, all the time. Recess, lunch, after school.”

“There’s more chance of Mum admitting she’s a fake blonde than of you doing that.”

We lie on our sides and face each other.

“So what is it about him then?”

“I don’t know. I can’t define it.” I lean my head back against the bedhead. “He’s really smart and ambitious and cute, and there are lots of guys like that but one day I just felt this connection and after that . . . I don’t know, I started to notice stuff about him.”

“Like?”

“Like . . . the time I was waiting for the bus after school and I saw him walking across the quadrangle. One of the girls from Prep was running and stacked it on the ground. Adam helped her up, dusted the asphalt off her knees, had her laughing in a second. It was so different to how he usually is, you know, all macho and stuff in class and with the guys.”

Samantha cocks her head to the side and grins at me. “That is without doubt the corniest thing you have
ever
said! GAG!”

“Tell me about it!” I groan. “Man, I feel corny all the time! He says hi to me and I’m gliding for the rest of the day. It’s disgusting! But he’s just
so
cute.”

“Yeah, yeah. I get you. Martin and I are there too. Hey! You’re not going to believe what happened last weekend!”

“What?”

“I got busted.”

“For what?”

“I got home after four. No big deal. But Mum and Dad were waiting for me, like you see in the movies. Sitting on the couch, legs crossed, all pissed off and geared up for an argument. I walk in and first thing I want to do is laugh because Dad’s wearing this black satin robe with love hearts on it.”

“Oh my God, that’s gross.”

She shudders. “Don’t remind me.”

“So what happened?”

“Some idiot told Mum they’d seen me at a bar with a guy. She freaked out. They told her they’d seen us with our hands all over each other. It must have been an X-rated description because she went all
I’m too ashamed to repeat the details!
It was
so
embarrassing, Amal. Guess who told her?”

“Who?”

“Remember Rahul? The guy I dumped in the first year because he kept making me pay for everything and borrowed money off me to buy me a birthday present! The one whose dad is Indian and his mum is Egyptian. My mum knows his mum. Come on, you know the one!”

“Tight-arse Rahul? The one whose breath stunk? Every time we all went out he’d forgotten his wallet in the car or was waiting for a pay cheque from work!”

“Yeah, that idiot. Apparently he was at the same bar, saw us there,
rang
his mum and casually mentioned it to her! Within bloody seconds she’s squawking it to my mum on the phone!”

“No way! What did your parents say?”

“They went mental.”

“Were they pissed off about the whole bar scene?”

“Nah. They know I drink. That’s not a problem to them. It was me being with Martin. They think we’re sleeping together. God knows how detailed Rahul’s mum got with my mum. She’s such a bitch!

“Then, imagine this. Dad springs the cultural theory on me! He kept going on about how it’s not part of our culture. I couldn’t handle it from there. I mean, he can’t just use the culture argument whenever it suits him. For two decades we get the ‘we must be assimilated’ crap lecture and then in a minute we’ve suddenly got
Arabic roots
and
cultural expectations
.”

“Uncle Joe actually said that?”

“Would you believe it? This is coming from the man who thinks the word ‘foreign’ is the f-word of our times. All our lives George and me get it rammed down our throats that we’re to forget our culture and live as Aussies, whatever that means. But then when I do something that he doesn’t like, he does a three-sixty turn.”

“I can’t believe it.”

She groans. “I’m still in shock. Anyway, change the topic. Hey, I noticed after dinner Dad cornered you into a big pep talk about following in his footsteps and going into IT. Man, he doesn’t stop talking about how the whole family’s counting on you getting top marks and making the family proud.”

“Like my parents’ pep talks aren’t enough to handle,” I say.

“He raves on about how smart you are and your debating awards and how you’d never settle for
only
an Arts degree like me.”

I guess Samantha didn’t hear Uncle Joe telling me that he thinks that I’ve got no hope of a future if I continue to wear the hijab. According to his theory, in today’s climate Muslims are better off retreating and concealing their identity not only because they need to assimilate but also to get ahead in society.

Boy does that give me the creepy crawlies. OK, I know I said that I had it in me to “survive” but when an adult questions your ability you suddenly get butterflies. Is Uncle Joe right? Sure, I sometimes feel a strong temptation to retreat and to withdraw to the safety of anonymity. With the flick of a safety pin my hijab will fall off my head and I’ll look like an unhyphenated Aussie.