The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (10 page)

"Okay! What card games you know?"

Khadra's mother didn't approve of playing cards but they were in the house because TEta brought them and, as she was an elder, Ebtehaj couldn't say anything.

"Not haram if we're not gambling," Teta had crowed triumphantly, shuffling the halves of the deck with expert fingers.

More so than perhaps any other state, Indiana's population was native born, white, and Protestant.... This population homogeneity was ... so significant that it is perhaps best to seek an understanding of it ... by considering first the people . . . that partly contradicted the images of sameness.

-James H. Madison, The Indiana Way

Zuhura called her mother from Bloomington to say she was heading home right after the African Students' meeting. Luqman told her not to travel so late, because the Klansmen were returning from Skokie, where they'd not been allowed to have the big rally they had planned. Simmonsville, Martinsville, Greenwood, Plainfield, not to mention Indianapolis-all these towns had sent out truckloads of bigots to the march, and they'd be pulling into the last stretch of home right about then, mad as hornets.

"Christian terrorists on the loose," Luqman said. "Skip the stupid meeting." Then he complained to her parents about her stubbornness.

"Maybe Luqman's right," Uncle Yusuf told Aunt Ayesha. "I'll go get her." They phoned Zuhura to tell her this, but she'd already left.

Four hours later Aunt Ayesha started to pace. She figured two hours for the meeting and an hour, tops, for the drive home. By one a.m. she was frantic. Uncle Yusuf went to the police, but they said you had to wait forty-eight hours because she was an adult. They were maddening.

"College girl, Friday night? Probably at a party," they said.

Party? They didn't know Zuhura. They didn't know who she was. All they knew were typical American girls.

Yusuf took his wide-bodied Impala and went out with Abdulla and Luqman to look for his stepdaughter, since the police were refusing to help. Wajdy took two other Dawah men and went out in his station wagon. While Yusuf sped to Bloomington, Wajdy's search team drove slowly over the route Zuhura usually took, stopping at filling stations to show Zuhuras picture. Ayesha was persuaded to stay home only when her husband pointed out that they needed someone by the phone in case she called. Ebtehaj went to be with her, putting the kids to bed over at Khadija's.

"She's stalled somewhere and walking to a phone, that's all," Ebtehaj said to Ayesha. "Inshallah. "

There was no sign of her. The men found a tall young man in the Eigenmann Dorm lounge, where foreign students hung out. He recognized her picture.

"Sure, everybody knows the Big Z," the student said, looking at the photo. Luqman frowned. "We all have a great deal of respect for her," the student added hastily.

He dropped a bombshell. She hadn't been at the African Students meeting.

"That's not possible," Yusuf said. Luqman narrowed his eyes and exchanged a look with Abdulla.

"She could have come late," the student said doubtfully. "I left early."

Where had she been? Why had she said she was going to the meeting, and then not gone? A small cleft opened between Zuhura's stated plans and her actions. And a gap of doubt in the minds of those who knew her.

Morning broke with no Zuhura. The Dawah men went back and covered the same stretch of road in daylight. By now they knew they were searching for something bad-a car that had veered off the road into some ditch where she lay, bled out. Or worse. They feared what they might find.

Yusuf went back and forth to the police station in Indianapolis and the Monroe County Sheriff's Department. The police search finally began. But two, three, four days passed and she was still nowhere to be found. Hope sputtered out. Except in Ayesha, who was fierce.

The women took turns going over to her apartment to pray with her, and to make her tea and see that she ate something, and to cook for Yusuf and Tayiba. Ebtehaj, on her shift, cleaned the kitchen, Ayesha being too preoccuppied to notice the dirty cups piling up in dangerously teetering towers. Looking over her shoulder at Ayesha, Ebtehaj also took the opportunity to toothbrush-scrub her baseboards, the dust on which always bothered her when she came for dinner. Ayesha sat hunched on the couch, her eyes bloodshot through the fierce pointy glasses. Every time the phone rang she jumped. She didn't like to be seen crying, but these women wouldn't leave her alone, so instead of crying, she shouted.

"Leave my baseboards alone! I clean my own kitchen!"

"No-of course-but-just a little grime-you might have missed it, sister-" Ebtehaj said, with the foaming toothbrush in her yellow-latex-gloved hand, hoping while the argument went on to tackle just one more gritty corner.

They found Zuhura's car. It had a flat tire. The spare and jack were still in the trunk. There was no evidence of a struggle. Just the usual Zuhura props: her dog-eared LSAT prep book and a paper sack with her prescription migraine medicine and her over-the-counter caffeine pills. Her backpack was on the seat, heavy with textbooks. Her macram6 purse was there too, with her wallet in it. That didn't bode well.

"Martinsville? How did her car get to Martinsville?" No one knew. A little ways down the road from her car there were skid marks. Nothing else.

The scene at the Dawah Center was subdued. People lowered their voices when Yusuf entered the room, and stole looks at Ayesha's empty desk.

"Even if she is found alive now, she is ruined," Abdulla said in a low voice.

"No," Ebtehaj said flatly to her daughter. "You can't go on a field trip." She pushed away the permission slip that would allow Khadra to go with her classmates to Conner Prairie, the historical village.

"But, Mama! Everyone's going! The whole school'll be empty."

"Good. Then you can stay home. Right here next to me. You can help me scrub baseboards."

"Great."

"And go take a shower. You're filthy."

"I am not."

Ebtehaj slammed a jar of dried mint on the kitchen table and Khadra jumped. "BATH!" she yelled. "Now. "

Days later, Zuhura's body was found in a ravine near Beanblossom Bridge. Murdered. Raped. Cuts on her hands, her hijab and clothes in shreds-the grown-ups didn't want to give details in front of the children, but it was in the news.

Some aunties said someone may have given Zuhura the evil eye, maybe someone who saw her radiant at the henna party and did not praise God. Such forgetting unleashed evil forces, and you never knew what form they would take. A fire, a crash, or maybe what had happened to Zuhura. When they heard, Khadra and Hanifa and Tayiba each had unvoiced fears that she could have been the one. You could give someone the eye even if you didn't mean to. Just by forgetting the Divine Name. And who, who lived in a state of constant mindfulness?

Some folks at the Dawah Center didn't believe in the evil eye. The erudite Kuldip said it was superstition, and superstition was close to idolatry. How could it be idoloatry, Wajdy argued, when it was right there in the Quran? Ebtehaj said, of course the eye was real. The Prophet had said so.

Poor Aunt Ayesha. No one had ever seen her like this. She insisted with her usual forcefulness on going to the morgue, even though Uncle Yusuf told her it would be better not to.

"What if it's not true?" she said. "Only I can tell for sure if it's my daughter! What if it's all a mistake?"

When she saw the body she froze. What if God was tricking her senses? All she really knew was it seemed to be Zuhura. What did the Queen of Sheba say in the Quran? When Solomon showed her the impossible sight of her own throne in his polished court where it couldn't, simply couldn't, be-she wisely said "This seems to be it." Your senses can trick you. They are not the final arbiter. Only God, the Unseen, is the final arbiter.

Ayesha trembled. She took off her rhinestone-studded turquoise cat's eye glasses and wiped them. And they did not crucify him, but it was made to seem to them as if they did. The Quran said that. The Quran said that about Jesus, peace be upon him. It was made to seem to them.

Sometimes God did things like that. Made things seem what they were not. But why? But why? It was a test. It was a test. A test for the believers. For men who believe and women who believe. Ayesha peered through the morgue window again. Her glasses clattered to the floor. She didn't bother to retrieve them. What was the point? Why was God making her see this? Yusuf bent and picked up her glasses and tried to give them to her; she pushed them away. Her eyes were too bleary to see clearly, and she didn't want to look anymore, anyway.

Without the familiar glasses, she looked naked, broken. All her fierceness gone. Yusuf had to keep his arms around her shoulders to hold her up. Her body was so small suddenly. Who knew she was so petite under the voluminous robes she liked to wear? Whereas before, you couldn't be in a room with Aunt Ayesha without being intensely aware of her presence, now she came and left all crumpled, like nothing. People tried not to look at Ayesha because it was so hard to see her like that, and there were many men and women alike, and even a few bewildered children, who almost wished she would fix them with one of her famous unnerving stares.

Clearly it was religious bigotry, the Muslims said. Salam Mosque and Dawah people agreed. It was related to her vocal espousal of Muslim causes on campus, it was political. The Indianapolis Freeman-Uncle Jamal brought over a copy-said it was about race, said how could it not be, in light of the Skokie affair and recent area rumblings from the Klan? It called Zuhura "a young black woman" and didn't mention that she was Muslim at all. On the other hand, the Indianapolis Star pretended like race wasn't there at all, calling Zuhura a "foreign woman" and "an IU international student," as if her family didn't live right there in town. The Indianapolis News article treated it like just some random crime, giving it one tiny paragraph in the back pages. The front-page news was about a march. A photo that showed a group of white women yelling "Take Back the Night!"

"We liked her to pieces, but she was an opinionated little bit," a student council rep said in the college newspaper, and a classmate described her as "a little black spitfire." Tayiba passed the article to Khadra without comment.

"But that makes no sense," Khadra said, reading it. "Zuhura was big and tall." How could anyone call her "little?"

"She should not have been traipsing about the highways at midnight alone," Wajdy and Ebtehaj agreed in late-night kitchen-table voices. And the whispers and undertones around the water cooler at the Dawah Center agreed: She had been asking for trouble. Sad as it made them to say it. And her family should've given her more guidance. You protected your daughters.

"Women wash the body of a woman and men wash a man. It is a service incumbent upon members of the faith. Seven pieces of shroud for a woman; three for a man." Ebtehaj reviewed the janaza chapter in her tattered Fiqh al-Sunnah book and went out to take part in the washing of Zuhura. When she came home afterward she unwound her headscarf silently, shaking her head. She unzipped her long jilbab and folded it over her arm and went upstairs to take "the purification bath required of those who wash the dead. "

And what of the dead, where do they lie in a non-Muslim land? Next to kuffar graves whose graven images may deter visiting angels? And what do you do if a country's laws require burial in a box, when a Muslim should be buried with nothing but a seamless shroud between her and the receiving earth?

These were some of the questions of adjustment that the Dawah Center was created to address. In America, you could not be passive about enacting your faith; you had to "Do for Self." No one was there to do it for you, like in the Old Country. There were hardly any Muslim institutions yet in this wilderness. You had to study your faith, dig out the core principles from underneath all the customs that may have accrued around them in the old Muslim world, and find a way to act on those principles in the present conditions. The spring after Zuhuras funeral, the Dawah Center would print up a pamphlet giving all the answers in easy-to-follow directives based on sound shariah research. Wajdy Shamy was one of the authors. Untold numbers of the U.S. faithful appreciated How to Be Buried as a Muslim in America.

Maybe we don't belong here, Khadra thought, standing next to Hanifa in the crowd at Zuhura's graveside. Maybe she belonged in a place where she would not get shoved and called "raghead" every other day in the school hallway. Teachers, classmates-no one ever caught her assailants. They always melted into the crowd behind her.

The whole Indianapolis Muslim community came out for the funeral-they were all family-and a lot of students from Bloomington, even some non-Muslims. There was a Nigerian athlete, and another young black man who cried hard and left quickly, mystifying the Dawah folk. But he exchanged a few quiet words with Zuhura's mother, and she nodded, seeming satisfied.

Instead of looking for the killers, or rounding up any of the APES (American Protectors of the Environs of Simmonsville) for questioning, the police handcuffed Luqman and threw him in the back of a car. Where was he that night? they asked. Was Zuhura seeing someone on the side? they asked, maligning her morals with horrible questions. "No!" he shouted, "She was an honorable girl!" The Indianapolis Star reported on him being a suspect: Murder Possible Honor Killing-Middle Eastern Connection, they said, with a sidebar on "the oppression of women in Islam."

No charge of murder was brought against Luqman. He was deported anyway, on a technical visa violation.

Zuhura's murderer was never caught. The Dawah community labored on with its godly task, if a little heavier of heart. "Just like the early Muslims," Khadra's mother said. "When one fell, another one picked up the banner and struggled on."

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath it allwhat then would life be but despair?