The Bamboo Stalk (26 page)

He sat with me a long time that dawn. He showed an interest in me. He told me about himself and, without thinking about the warnings from my family, I couldn't help revealing everything about myself to him. He tried to reassure me. ‘Kuwait's wonderful,' he said. ‘The people here are kind.'

I paid close attention to what he said. I almost said, ‘That's because you're not a Kuwaiti who looks like a Filipino!' but I decided against it. After sunrise he said he had to go off to work and asked if we could meet up again in the same place. He stood up from the ground and put out his hand to shake mine. I put out my hand too and while I was standing up my chain slipped out from under my shirt, revealing the cross on the chain. I was flustered. I grabbed the cross with my fist to hide it.

Ibrahim smiled. ‘Don't worry,' he said. ‘You're seeking the path to God. One day you'll abandon things like that.'

‘But I love Jesus,' I replied.

‘We love him too,' he said spontaneously, to my surprise. ‘We believe in him and in the Virgin Mary.'

I liked what he said. ‘And do you pray to Jesus and to the Virgin Mary, like you pray to the Prophet Muhammad?' I asked him.

He shook his head. ‘We don't pray to the Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him. We pray directly to God,' he said. He looked at his watch and picked up his mobile phone. Before making a phone call, he said, ‘Before I go, I'm going to lend you something.'

He spoke on the phone with a friend of his who was living in the residence halls at the religious institute. Within five minutes his friend came in. He was a young Filipino who appeared to be in his early twenties. His hair was uncombed and his face was puffy from sleeping. He gave Ibrahim a small package and then left. While we were walking to the main door, Ibrahim passed the package to me. It was a DVD case with a picture of Anthony Quinn in a black turban on the cover, and at the top the title of the film:
The Message
. Just as we reached the door someone asked us to wait. It was the old man who had been reading the Qur'an in the corner. He hurried over towards us. ‘The mosque is for praying, not for exchanging films,' he said angrily. ‘That's
haram
.' He pulled the film rudely out of my hands and started to examine the cover, back and front. He gave it back to me without saying a word. He patted me on the shoulder, then turned his back on us and left the mosque.

I liked the film very much. I watched it several times. I liked the Prophet Muhammad, even though he didn't appear in the film. I liked Hamza, the Prophet's uncle. I liked the companions of the Prophet and their conversation with the Negus of Abyssinia. The conversation provided answers to many of the questions I had been thinking about. The film was not enough however: it made me interested in doing more research and finding out more. I started researching on the Internet. The first thing I read about was
The Message,
its crew, how it was filmed and how audiences responded. I was particularly interested in the director. I saw a picture of him on one website, smartly dressed in a suit and a black tie. I was stunned to read the news under the picture. It said that two months before I came back to Kuwait the director, Moustapha Akkad, and his daughter were killed in an Amman hotel in a bombing carried out by an Islamist group.

I left the laptop on the table and, puzzled, I went to lie down on my bed. Which one of the two was Islam? Was it what I had seen in
The Message
? Or was it what had put an end to the life of the director? Was it the Islam of Lapu-Lapu, the sultan of Mactan? Or the Islam of the Abu Sayyaf group in Mindanao? I was filled with confusion, fear and doubt. I wondered whether Satan had taken root in my mind while I was preparing a house for God in my heart.

Sometimes I really wished I could swap brains with my little brother Adrian, so that I could atone for a mistake that I don't even remember and spare my heart the uncertainty that I had in my mind.

 

19

Ramadan ended and it was Eid al-Fitr, the feast that follows the month of fasting. I spent the first day behind the curtain in my room, spying on the people visiting the family whose lives I had complicated. No one asked after me. No one sent me any festive greetings apart from Ghassan, who sent me a text message saying
Eid Mubarak
. The women were in their best clothes and had had their hair done. They came into the house through the inner courtyard. The men wore the usual traditional dress and had shiny new shoes on. Even the little boys, my aunts' children, were wearing traditional dress with headdresses just like the men. The servants were also celebrating the occasion by wearing new clothes. Through the glass door, which was half open, I could see Grandmother with her legs stretched out as usual. The children were kissing her on the forehead. She stuck her hand in her bag and gave out money to them. Happy, they went out into the inner courtyard and counted the money they had received from the grown-ups. The servants also received their share of presents for Eid and were very happy with them.

I was alone in my room. I imagined myself wearing white and kissing Grandmother on the head to wish her a happy Eid. But then I drove the idea out of my mind, tired of idle fantasies. I turned my back on the curtain and looked around the room for Inang Choleng. I found her withdrawn into her shell under the bed. I lay on my stomach under the bed. I picked her up and stood
up with her in my hands. I brought her face close to my forehead so that she could plant a kiss on it. She didn't do so. I made a kissing sound with my lips to trick myself into thinking that the tortoise had kissed me. I put her on the floor, then went to the small fridge in the corner. I came back with an Eid present for her – a lovely, succulent lettuce leaf. I brought her face close to mine and whispered, ‘Happy Eid.'

*   *   *

Around noon, after the Eid well-wishers had gone, Khawla knocked on the door of my room, which was half open. She pushed it open and stayed where she was in the doorway, without stepping over the threshold. ‘Happy Eid,' I said, beating her to it. She wished me well with a friendly smile, but she had nothing in her hand.

‘Aren't you going to come in and wish Grandmother a happy Eid?' she asked me. ‘After everyone's gone? Once she's sure no one will see the face that brings shame on the family?' I said. The words just slipped out of my mouth, involuntarily. I was pointing at my own face as I spoke. ‘Khawla!' I said angrily. ‘Why do they treat me this way?'

She was still smiling, though there was no longer anything to smile about. ‘It's not easy, Isa,' she said, looking at the ground.

‘Grandmother and Awatif are religious people,' I said excitedly. ‘They pray a lot. Is God against me too?' Khawla didn't answer. I walked towards the door where she was standing.

‘The Buddha says in his teachings that people are equal and that no one is better than anyone else, other than in their knowledge and their ability to control their desires,' I said.

‘We're not Buddhists,' she said, shaking her head.

I took the chain with the cross from the drawer near my bed. ‘And in the Bible, St Paul the Apostle says there's no longer any difference between Jews and non-Jews, between slaves and those who are free, between men and women. They are all one in Jesus Christ,' I told her.

She cast a suspicious look at me. She was about to answer but I didn't give her time. ‘I know, I know, you're not Christians.'

I went to my laptop and turned the screen for her to see a website page that I had left open since the night before. ‘The Prophet Muhammad, in his farewell sermon, said, “All mankind is from Adam and Eve. An Arab is not superior to a non-Arab nor is a non-Arab superior to an Arab; also a white person is not superior to a black person nor a black person to a white person, other then in piety and good deeds.”'

I folded the screen down on to the keyboard. ‘I'm not
that
evil,' I added.

‘Enough!' said Khawla, and her raised voice shut me up.

‘I'm sorry,' she added, and she did look remorseful. ‘But this has nothing to do with religion.'

It's hard to explain what I gathered from Khawla. Perhaps that's what Ghassan meant by things that are hard to explain and hard to understand. My existence, Khawla explained, reduced the family's status in society. Other families of the same class might not agree to marry into our family because of me. They would look at our family with contempt. ‘If you recognised me, would that make you bidoon?' I asked her in my usual stupidity. My question surprised her.

‘Did Ghassan tell you about the bidoon?' she asked. ‘Anyway, that's not what this is about,' she added before I had time to answer. Khawla explained to me what Ghassan had failed to explain. In Kuwait, I gathered, people didn't set much store by the word
Kuwaiti
, even if they were Kuwaiti, because it didn't mean much. There were different kinds of Kuwaitis, different levels, different classes that distinguished themselves from other classes. I don't mean to exaggerate. This doesn't happen only in Kuwait. In the Philippines as well rich families have similar attitudes. I didn't argue with her on the question of intermarriage, because every family is free to choose, and it was nothing new to me. Filipinos of Chinese origin, for example, don't intermarry with ordinary people in the Philippines, for reasons of their own. They prefer to marry their own kind. But they don't put other people in categories in this way, outside their own circles, as either above them or below them. But I saw absolutely no justification for what Khawla said about people despising each other.

Khawla said, ‘In his unfinished novel, my father said we're Kuwaitis only in times of need. We become Kuwaitis when there's a crisis, but we soon go back to that horrible putting people in categories as soon as things calm down.'

I really needed to learn Arabic to read what my father had written. ‘What did Father want to say in his novel?' I asked Khawla.

She pursed her lips, uncertain how to answer. ‘I don't know, because the novel's full of contradictions. I dream about rewriting it one of these days,' she finally said.

I thought of saying, ‘It's no surprise it's like that if he was describing his surroundings,' but I held my tongue.

Khawla elaborated: ‘On the first page he says that one hand can't clap, but in the body of the story he calls on people to be as one hand. I can't understand why he calls on people to be as one hand when he's so sure that one hand couldn't clap.'

‘One hand can't clap, but it can slap. Some people don't need hands clapping for them. They need a good slap to wake them up,'
I said.

‘Isa, I don't like the way you talk!'

That wasn't really my style, nor the way I thought, but that was what I concluded my father wanted to say. Khawla said I might be right in what I said and that kind of talk might be acceptable from an insider, but no one would accept me coming from outside and criticising the situation in Kuwait. To change the subject, she asked about people in the Philippines. I told her in turn about the variety there, the mestizo families with Spanish or European roots, the families of Chinese origin, the northern tribes such as the Ifugao, the Aeta and many others. What I said about tribes caught her interest. ‘You have tribes too?' she asked.

‘We have lots,' I said. ‘The Ifugao, for example, have been famous for growing rice since ancient times.'

I went to the laptop to look for some pictures of them, half-naked on the terraced rice fields or in their traditional costume on special occasions. I turned the screen towards her. She nodded with interest at the pictures, still standing in the doorway. I was proud when I talked about people in the Philippines, and I wished I could have talked about people in Kuwait with the same enthusiasm. But that would only happen if I became one of them, and they refused to let me become one of them. And if I did manage to become one of them, where would they place me in their complicated social hierarchy? If they put me on the bottom level, would I talk about them so enthusiastically? Again, when times are hard, I wish I had Adrian's brain.

Khawla was still looking at the pictures I was showing her. ‘Our tribes are known for growing rice,' I said. ‘What are the tribes here famous for?'

‘For eating rice,' she said without thinking.

She laughed out loud as soon she spoke the words, delighted with her own comment as though she was laughing at a joke.

‘You seem to think they're ridiculous,' I said.

‘And they think we are too,' she replied.

I don't claim that such things don't exist in the Philippines, but people there are busy with more important things. Some people may look on others with contempt but it happens on a limited scale, and it's not as important as Khawla suggested it is in Kuwait. In Kuwait, my sister explained, some people boast that their ancestors built a wall around the old city, although all that's left of the wall is two gates, and others boast about events that took place many years ago around a red fort somewhere in Kuwait. Both groups claim they love their country, Khawla said, and both deny the existence of the other group. It was like watching a match between two teams. Large crowds of supporters, with me in the middle of them, on neither side.

I remembered the Philippines and wondered whether, if life there was as easy as it was in Kuwait, people would have time to make these social distinctions. Perhaps poverty brings advantages we aren't aware of.

There was something complicated in Kuwait that I didn't understand. All the social classes looked for a lower class on whose back they could ride, even if they had to create one. Then they would climb on to the shoulders of those in the class below, humiliate them and use them to ease the pressure from the class above.

I looked for my place among these classes. I looked down at my feet and saw nothing but the ground. The pressure on my shoulders put me in my place in my father's country.