Good Muslim Boy (10 page)

‘You can read our leader’s words on that banner?’ the beard said carefully.

I just blinked back at him, wondering what I should do.

Then for once, I stopped wondering and went into autopilot mode. I began reciting
the Arabic alphabet, which incidentally is exactly the same as its Persian counterpart.
They’re similar in writing—like English and Italian—but they, of course, are completely
different languages.

I continued to blurt the letters in Arabic, showing I could ‘read’ the banner but
certainly could not
understand
the words.

The beard kept gazing at me. He then grabbed my ear and leaned in: ‘I know you can
understand me…I know it…You’re just lucky I can’t prove it,’ he said in a low voice.

I pulled my eyes away, still reciting.

The beard handed Dad the passports and ushered us to the departure gates.

I looked over at my father. I wondered if he was proud of me.

The desert, Iran, 2013: three days until visa expires

By 1 am, the bus has had to do plenty of stopping; we’re two hours into our trip
and we are still getting nowhere. I take the opportunity to coordinate with my family
back home, where my brother tells me the community has been flooding the mosque to
do the
Fatiha
, which is held over three successive nights. It’s only to be expected—Dad
was the cleric there—but still, it warms my heart.

I look out the window to see what the hold-up is, and see that it’s just a long queue
to fill up on diesel. Are you kidding me? We didn’t do this before it left the terminal?

The driver notices my anxiousness. ‘Easy, kid,’ he calls back. ‘Just relax. I told
you, we either get there or we don’t.’

A passenger in his forties, a cleric, like my dad, puts in his two cents’ worth.
‘Job, the prophet, was known for his patience,’ he begins. I am in absolutely no
mood for a parable. Is anyone?

Thirty minutes later, we are on the road to Mashhad again. It’s just the bus, the
highway, the desolate desert and my thoughts.
My body wants to sleep, is desperate
to, but my brain just can’t. I wonder if I should pop a Tramadol to help me stay
awake, but decide against it for no reason other than an article I read in high school
about a girl ODing on a single pill. The best I can hope for, relaxation-wise, is
to gaze up at all the stars. Some party they’re having up there.

◆ ◆ ◆

‘Quick toilet break!’ shouts the driver.

It’s 3.40 am.

At 4.05 am, we’re still waiting for one last man. The driver is yelling out for him
into the dark and empty desert, but the empty desert shows no signs of calling back.
The cleric to my left, who I have nicknamed Cleric Job, raises a hand to calm me:
It will be okay
.

Just then, a tall, fat man with a decent beard going emerges from the desert with
a teacup in his hand. Where the fuck do you find a cup of tea in the desert after
midnight? It’s flat, lightless plains of sand as far as the eye can see, well beyond
the limits of the headlights. Must’ve gone far for that tea.

‘You ass,’ I seethe through gritted teeth. ‘Hop on the bus before you delay us even
further with your utter selfishness.’

Before you could click your fingers, a small gang of bearded men rise up from seats
behind me and approach, wielding large kitchen knives. Turns out, the fat man is
the leader of a small Kurdish tribe.

The driver tries to calm things, while Cleric Job chants prayers, asking for a divine
intervention. All I’m armed with is Dad’s walking stick. I lift it like a sword.

‘You know who you were talking to?’ asks one of the Kurds, swivelling his shiny blade
towards my general intestinal zone.

‘I don’t fucking care!’ I yell. It feels good to do this. You can’t yell at a bureaucrat,
but you can yell at anyone who’s pointing a knife at you, as it tends to invite a
response. ‘It was a toilet break, not a jerk break.’

‘We’re fucking Kurds!’ he shouts, moving up the bus. ‘You don’t mess with us!’

Cleric Job stands in the middle, requesting patience from both sides. But I have
turned into a mad beast. I bellow from the pits of my belly. ‘I’m crazier than you,
fucker! I’m half-Kurd, half-Iraqi, half-Iranian, half-Aussie, half-animal! My dad’s
sitting in a fridge in some morgue in this fucking country, I have to be out of this
damn place in three days and I don’t have shit! You want to stab me? Go right ahead,
but I’ll fucking stand here and take you all down with me!’

Silence falls across the bus, a blanket that settles, soft and slow. The Kurds stare
at me from under it, eyes glinting like their knives. I breathe in oxygen and breathe
out rage: you can see it. You can sense that I’m not bluffing.

Cleric Job begins to chant a religious prayer. A few other stunned passengers follow.
And then the Kurds back off.

‘I am sorry for your father’s loss,’ Cleric Job tells me. ‘Like the story of Job—’

‘Fuck Job,’ I snap back, thankfully in English. I then switch to Farsi, which has
the added bonus of calming my shit down. ‘Thanks, cleric, for your words. I know
of tests and patience. I always preach about life’s beauties and brutalities myself,
but I’m only human. And I have a thousand things to do.’

◆ ◆ ◆

The bus stops again an hour later. It’s still very dark outside—an endless desert,
endless dark, except the endless stars. Before I
have time to make known my disappointment
at the hold-up, a pride of soldiers storms the bus, barking garbled instructions.

I’m sitting right at the front, the first one under fire.

‘ID!’ he yells.

I withdraw my swim pass and show it to the soldier.

He looks at it with righteous rage. ‘What’s this?’ he shouts, ‘What’s this?’ waving
the card back at me.

I start yelling back in English.

The soldier points his gun at me and instructs me to disembark. I pretend I don’t
understand him. The English words keep spurting out.

‘We have an illegal on this bus,’ I can hear the soldiers calling back out to their
colleagues, spreading it further down the bus.

I want to believe that this cannot be happening, but the machine guns and the yelling
men are doing their best to make it absolutely clear that this is the real deal.
It’s not just a hazy, all-night bus ride anymore, drifting in and out of peace, gazing
blearily at the stars.
Things like this
can happen, and now it really is. By the
time they find out my passport really is in the cemetery, by the time they cross-check,
by the time I’m out of jail, it will be way beyond too late to get my dad’s body
back home.

While the other soldiers sweep the bus, shaking people down for their IDs and looking
through their bags for trafficked contraband, the commander handles me personally.

‘What’s this?’ he barks, pointing at my guitar.

Again, I pretend I don’t understand, making a point of gesturing—please—not to be
rough with it. I want to come up with a backstory for my character who can’t speak
Farsi, but I’m only thinking survival, so I just bite my tongue.

‘And what’s
this
?’ asks a soldier quietly.

He’s found the Tramadol strips.

‘Drugs?’ he says in Persian.

I have to step carefully.

‘Panadol. Do you know? Headache. Panadol. For headache.’ I point to my head, wincing
to mimic pain. If anyone here can read English, I am fucked.

‘Where is your passport? Passport? Do you know what I am saying? Passport?’ the commander
shouts. All over the world, there are certain people who believe that you’ll suddenly
speak their language if they only yell it at you loudly enough times.

I reward this theory. ‘Yes! Yes! Passport! In hotel! You know? Hotel!’ I thank heavens
the words for ‘passport’ and ‘hotel’ are the same in both English and Farsi—and that
the soldiers seem to believe I can’t understand their conversation.

One soldier, to his commander, in Farsi: ‘He looks Arab. I think he’s having us on.’

The commander: ‘No Arab can talk English that good.’

He turns to me, and in a cracked accent asks, ‘Hotel? You, where?’

‘Mashhad. Hotel in Mashhad. Passport in hotel.’

‘Your passport is in a Mashhad hotel? Maybe you come back with us to the station
and we make some calls,’ he says in Farsi, his English clearly running out of fuel.

I’m not meant to have understood these words, but they’d sound bad in any language.
‘No,’ I start to protest. Then the hand of God comes in.

‘Excuse me, sergeant,’ says Cleric Job. ‘He is from Australia.’

‘Sorry, Sheikh, but do you speak English?’

‘No, but you’re right, he is an Arab, and I speak Arabic. And those were headache
tablets you found in his backpack; he’s had a tough time with that since getting
on this bus. I think everyone here will tell you the same.’

The commander looks over his head, towards the back of the bus. To my surprise, the
Kurds stand in unison and echo the cleric’s words.

I am overwhelmed with feeling. I don’t know what to say. I take out my iPhone, switch
it on and flip wildly through the photos, showing the commander every pic I can,
pushing my case beyond reasonable doubt.

‘See? Sydney Opera House.’ Flip. ‘See? MCG, a stadium in Australia…’

‘Can you ask him if he was at the Iran–Australia soccer match in 1997? The one where
we beat them to qualify for the World Cup?’ The officer asks the cleric.

I soon find out Cleric Job’s Arabic is as rusty as my first Datsun. I nod my head,
yes.

The soldier smiles. ‘Iran good football. Australia not very good football.’ He hands
back my swim pass, the Tramadol strips, the guitar. ‘Thank you for your cooperation,’
he says. With that, the soldiers vanish.

I don’t know what to say to the cleric, let alone the Kurds, who have gone back to
their mysterious business at the dark rear of the vehicle. We all just want to get
to Mashhad, sure, but none of us signed a contract saying they’d turn back the bus
if we weren’t all delivered in one piece—they didn’t have to help me.

‘Thank you for your cooperation,’ I whisper to the glass. The desert is slowly brightening,
but there are no signs of the soldiers’ truck. People are falling back to sleep,
as if it never happened at all.

Melbourne, Australia, 10 August 1995

One minute I was on my very first plane ride, thrilled and tired, jetting across
the continent in a cool tube of aluminium.

The next minute we landed, and everything was wrong. People swarmed around us, speaking
gibberish. The announcements were in gibberish, only from an official source. Stuck
to the walls and ceilings, the signs were gibberish too—except the luggage sign,
which was a picture of a bag.

I grabbed on to the image and clung for dear life. It was the only thing I knew here.
That, and my family.

‘Dad, look at that woman. She looks like a man.’

I meant that she was wearing jeans.

‘Here isn’t Qom, son,’ Dad said.

‘So why is Mum still covered up?’

Dad shrugged. ‘Ask her.’

There was no chance my mother would be removing her long abaya just now. She gritted
her teeth and stared ahead and moved through the surging crowd. She was openly terrified.

The customs officers were terrifying, even sans Kalashnikovs. They spoke to us confidently,
in neither Persian nor Arabic. The only member of my family who met them coolly was
my dad, who was still in his turban and clerical garb. I’d watched on the flight
as he filled out the arrival card in English. He’d attacked the form with gusto—not
simply checking the boxes, but embellishing the questions with additional info.

He handed the card to an officer, who studied it closely. As he did, his face changed:
the universal expression for ‘you’re in deep shit, sir’. It was a relief that I could
read this. He ushered us into a quiet zone.

‘Who’s this Allah?’ he asked my father. ‘Is he your legal sponsor?’

‘Yes, He sponsors everything.’

‘And is that his Christian name?’

‘No, not just Christian. Allah is for all humans.’

‘…Uh. Yep, what’s his surname?’

‘Allah is One. He created everything.’

The officer blinked at my father.

‘One sec,’ he said.

He left the room and came back with another tall, gunless dude.

‘Did you fill this out yourself, sir?’ the second officer asked. ‘You’ve written
here your next residence is in Allah’s hands.’

‘Yes,’ nodded my father. ‘Everything in life is in His hands.’

‘What’s going on, Abu-Osamah?’ Mum interjected, in Arabic.

‘Nothing, just official matters,’ said Dad. ‘Wherever we go, they follow.’

‘Sir, I need you to speak in English, please.’

From then on, Dad did so. But it wasn’t a language problem; it went far deeper than
that. He had written ‘inshallah’ beside ‘Are you planning to stay in Australia for
the next twelve months?’ because, as he explained now, ‘It’s in God’s hands if we
stay or not.’

This was very difficult for the customs officers to handle. They explained to my
father that we could not enter the country if they were not able to tick a simple
‘yes’.

Dad was very firm on this. ‘No,’ he insisted.

Now, they blinked in unison. ‘Okay, hang tight,’ they said.

They sent back a man in a suit.

‘Morning, sir,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Mr Mohammad, is it?’

‘Almost,’ Dad responded.

‘Dad, what is he saying?’ I asked.

‘They’re asking my name, just stay put,’ he said.

‘Your name on the passport is Mohammad,’ asserted the suit.

‘Abu-Osamah, don’t we have visas?’ Mum asked.

‘Okay, folks, just one at a time,’ the man in the suit said. He had a lot more natural
composure than the others; I did not know if this was better or worse for us. ‘Sir,
you have a permanent visa, but my colleagues believe you’re saying you won’t be staying
in the country, is that correct?’

‘No,’ said Dad, ‘I just tell him how can anyone be sure of tomorrow? Except maybe
your breakfast, are you sure of your tomorrow?’

The suit peered at Dad. ‘If I were to say yes, what would you tell me?’

‘I say impossible. No one sure. Only Allah.’

‘Right. Yeah, of course.’

‘So inshallah we live here. Inshallah a big yes.’

‘Let’s just amend that to a yes, then, so you can be on your way…’

‘No,’ said my father. ‘Let me tell you a quick story.’

I didn’t understand the English, but I knew ‘inshallah’ well enough to know the story
would probably not be quick. Inshallah is one of those weird words that wasn’t really
built for a brief, efficient definition at a customs desk. For starters, it’s not
even a word: it’s just used like one, but it literally means ‘if God wills it’. It’s
also spoken like a heartbeat for many Muslims, who might use it for ‘yes’—after all,
nothing is certain:

‘Tonight, at my place?’

‘Inshallah.’

Meaning, yes, of course, barring an earthquake.

But it’s also capable of taking on a more complex shade of meaning, because you might
use it to convey exactly the opposite thing. ‘Inshallah, I will be at your place
tonight’ might mean that most certainly you
won’t
be there—because if it’s in God’s
hands, you’ve conveniently left open every possible reason not to go. You are clearly
not going, and you are ready to blame God. It’s very handy, in every situation other
than right now.

‘A man walked down the cobbled streets, his lips chapped by the sun,’ began my dad,
who had never met a parable he didn’t like, and on he went for several minutes.

‘…Nothing is sure in this life…Always say inshallah, but not after the fact! Before!
Okay?’ Dad concluded, looking hopefully at the suit.

The suit, of course, just blinked.

‘Right,’ he said.

‘I told him the inshallah story,’ Dad informed us cheerfully.

‘Wow, go Dad! Converting them to Islam!’

‘I was in Iraq, thinking I live in Iraq forever. Then what happened? Saddam happened.
I escape to Iran. Thinking I will live
there
forever. Then what happened? Persecution
happened. Then I come here…Nothing certain,’ Dad concluded.

‘So back to this card,’ the suit said. ‘Basically, there are some answers here which
have serious implications for your visa status. What we can do is strip you of your
visas and have you deported.’

Cue stunned expression from my dad.

They were specifically concerned about his ‘many convictions’. They’re the kinds
of things that stack up when you’re growing up in a country like Iraq, under the
rule of a dictator; it didn’t help that Dad nodded furiously, and said, ‘Yes, jailed
many times,’ and added that he’d once escaped from prison too.

‘What crimes have you been convicted of?’

‘Spreading papers against Saddam.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I once write on a paper
Down to Dictator
and they jail me, sentence me to die.’

The suit took a relaxed breath. ‘Okay, moving on,’ he said. ‘You’ve declared you’ve
brought in animals?’

‘Yes, in the bags.’

The suit was mystified: they’d already been through all our bags.

Dad was exasperated. ‘There!’ he said. He gesticulated wildly towards the several
cans of sardines, tuna and salmon. Then he looked more cautious. ‘Fish in English
is also animal, yes?’

Imagine there was a war in Australia and you had to flee to Iran. Any Bob or Jane
from Perth or Wodonga could just run for their lives and start all over again, no
worries, right? All they’d have to do is learn Farsi, the politics, the history and
culture. Bob would be, as the saying goes, their uncle.

We had moved to a neighbourhood in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, just metres
from the mosque, in exchange for Dad’s services as the new imam. Mum returned to
her housewife life, but with a fair dinkum difference: she got hooked on the Australian
Open and Aussie Rules, and sat glued to the TV for countless happy hours, watching
the Bombers take on Carlton and Collingwood. Football, or ‘footy’, was played with
a ball shaped like a watermelon, only it was wearing shoelaces. These factors meant
it had a weird bounce; it was not logical like soccer. Mum was fascinated by this,
leaving my sisters to do the chores—and leaving me with a lot of time to roam the
neighbourhood.

I won’t pretend I didn’t have my own steep learning curve.

I was excited to buy bread, after the reports Dad had sent home to Iran. He was right;
I didn’t have to line up at 5 am in the bread queue. But the fact I could buy bread
from the petrol station—this I couldn’t handle. It was absurd.

The petrol stations—like any public place—were fairylands of absurdity. When you
rocked up to this petrol station, at any hour, to buy your bread, nobody was talking
about how Australia had come to be. History was taught in school, but wasn’t a discussion
topic. Instead, everybody was obsessed by the weather. I quickly catalogued the phrases
you’d hear people toss around, on the same day, about the same temperature:

‘Oh, it’s a beautiful day!’

‘Oh, it’s a great day!’

‘Oh, it’s a sunny day!’

‘Oh, it’s a jolly day!’

‘Oh, it’s a pleasant day!’

‘Oh, it’s a cracker of a day!’

‘Oh, it’s a smashing day!’

‘Oh, it’s a ripper of a day!’

‘Oh, will you look at the sun?’

‘Oh, will you look at the sunshine?’

‘Oh, will you look at the sky?’

‘Oh, will you look at
that
?’

‘Oh, she’s a beauty today.’

‘Oh, how about that?’

‘Oh, how about that sun?’

‘Jeez, it’s a warm one!’

‘Jeez, it’s a beauty out there!’

(In fact, substitute ‘jeez’ for ‘oh’ in any of the above.)

One day, Mum asked me to go to the halal butcher to buy some sheep tongue. No problems;
I looked up ‘tongue’ in the
dictionary. The Arabic translation for ‘tongue’ was ‘language’;
I cross-checked with the Persian dictionary, which confirmed this.

I entered the butcher confidently.

‘Good afternoon, sir, can you please give me three languages?’

The butcher looked at me. ‘I can only speak two. English and Turkish.’

‘No, not
your
languages,’ I said. ‘I want sheep’s languages.’ I started desperately
pointing at my tongue. ‘I want a language like this,’ I said. ‘The one I am talking
with. This language, not your language. Sheep’s language.’

This alarmed the butcher, who picked up a large knife and waved me out of the shop.

When I ran out to the street, nobody was chanting ‘Death to America’. Or ‘Death to
Israel’. Or Nepal. Or Senegal. Or Honduras. Death to nobody! Furious chanting, in
that moment, might have been comforting.

Police did not take bribes here, which deeply troubled me. I would see them on the
street and think,
What if I get into some kind of serious trouble? How do I get out
of it?
But this fear was balanced by the fact they seemed not to stomp on people’s
faces. In fact, nobody stomped on anyone, not teachers, not parents. And yet society
stayed disciplined regardless.

Off the streets, it was worse. When you went to people’s houses, you did not have
to remove your shoes before passing through the door. And yet the houses stayed clean.
This was spooky.

And this was just the beginning of your problems. As with the weather—and pork, which
was confronting—Australians gave their bathrooms many names. There were
bathrooms
(upper-class usage only),
boys’/girls’ rooms
(rare-to-medium usage),
cans
(when a
carpenter asked where he’d find one of these, I brought him some tuna in a can),
crappers
(used like cans but more often,
especially by builders),
dunnies
(an Australian
classic),
honey buckets
(according to the dictionary, though I had never heard it),
johns
(yes! They used the name of their prophet for their faecal chairs),
lavatories
(no one said this, but it was written on the doors),
loos
(like dunnies but more
British—why, then, did they use this?),
pissers
(semi-popular with the dunny/crapper
crowd),
restrooms
(see
lavatories
),
powder rooms
(used by girls),
shithouses
or
shitters
(both employed by ockers),
urinals
(rare and formal—also strange. Men pissed standing
next to each other? They had no shame),
washrooms
(rare, unpopular and boring), and
water closets
(like the WC signs in uncensored Hollywood films. I had always wondered
what these letters meant).

People actually sat on toilet seats as if they were dining chairs. But while squats
were good for the quads and hamstrings, I had to admit the Western model was overall
more ergonomic.

Or it would’ve been. Many of these toilets, including ours, were allowed to face
Mecca. People emptied their bowls in sin all over the country, while facing the house
of God. We had to get a plumber in to redirect our own toilet, once we’d all got
sick of sitting on it sideways. It was awkward and painful; I almost pulled a hamstring.
When the plumber came round, he flushed the toilet, checked the tank and said, ‘But
your toilet is working!’ He did the job, incredulous. It cost a lot of money.