Love, InshAllah Read online

  “What else?”

  “I love your hands. I love your skin. I love your ras. I love your taste. I love your lips. I love your neck. I love your legs.” His voice trailed as he pulled me in for a deep kiss, and more.

  It was impossible not to cry. The next morning, I drove Yusuf to meet up with the rest of the tour. They’d hit the road immediately for Louisiana. Then Georgia. Then D.C.

  I wanted to ask him about the D.C. girl. I wanted to ask him about us. But I didn’t want to ruin the moment. I needed to appreciate this for what it was, didn’t I?

  Whatever the future held didn’t lessen the truth of what I was feeling right now. I believed that our hearts are intended for use; now, I was putting my beliefs into practice. I was letting myself fall in love, and in the end, wasn’t that what was important?

  Yusuf paused, drumming his leg with his fingers, and looked over at me soberly.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I’m going to miss you,” he said.

  “I’m going to miss you, too,” I said. I grabbed his hand and kept my eyes on the road, blinking away tears.

  In the end, I never told him that I knew about the girl in D.C. I just didn’t have the heart to.

  Allahu alim.

  “You are so super cute in real life. I didn’t expect this,” Yusuf said, amazed. We were standing outside, taking last-minute pictures while the rest of the posse packed the trailer.

  “Well,” I said, looking up at him, hands around his waist, “I didn’t think you’d be such a goofy dork.”

  We got our last kisses and cuddles in. The photos from our last moments alone together are my favorite pictures ever.

  And then he was gone. They were all gone. I was alone in Austin, Texas, 1,500 miles from home. I pulled my car over to the side of the road and cried.

  My pilgrimage—a week spent with a rambunctious posse of Muslim punks, all misfits on a personal journey trying to define themselves and not let others define them—was complete. It had been a pilgrimage both unlike and very similar to the one I had performed in Mecca years and years earlier—a journey into my internal spiritual self, finding a collective people I connected with, and finally feeling like I belonged.

  I had fallen in love in the best way—with a boy, with like-minded people, and, maybe most important, with being honestly and truly myself. I had found a family that was cut from the same contradictory cloth and going through the same blasphemous struggles as I was. I had found myself, and I had let myself go. I had punk-rocked, prayed, loved, moshed, laughed, skated, cuddled, rocked, touched, kissed, and cried.

  It wasn’t just a story about my falling in love with a guy, or following a band, or going on an adventure. It was about love, punk, and punk-drunk love. People who got me, really got me, and all that I came with.

  Ramadan was around the corner. It was time for the slow roll back home to Los Angeles and Khalifornia. I charted a two-week course, one that would take me through the site of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, a Muslim graveyard on the border of Texas, a Native American reservation in Santa Fe, and the rim of the Grand Canyon. My life would never be the same—but my adventure wasn’t over yet.

  With reckless courage in my heart, I wiped away my tears. “Bismillah,” I whispered, starting up my engine, and turned west, toward home.

  Alif:

  Where It All Begins

  The Birds, the Bees, and My Hole

  Zahra Noorbakhsh

  Finally. My first year of high school was over, and summer was here. My mother was dropping me off to go to the movies with Jen, Kim, Laura, and Ryan. Wait. Oh, crap, I had forgotten about Ryan! There he was, walking with my girlfriends to the ticket booth. I knew that if my mom saw him, she would never trust me again and would confine me to the house for the rest of the summer.

  My parents were so strict that I couldn’t go anywhere without their practically doing a background check on everyone who would be there. Regardless of how chaste the event was, they had to be sure there wouldn’t be any boys present to tempt me down the path of loose women. The thing is, I was a late bloomer and had absolutely no interest in dating—what I knew of it, anyway, based on Molly Ringwald’s characters in John Hughes films like Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink. Though I could barely admit that I “liked” guys, my days of blissful ignorance about the world of dating were about to be over.

  I had told my mom that it would be just my girlfriends and me at the movies. How could I forget that Ryan was coming?

  There was no adjective in the world that would make my mom see past my geeky, lanky, pasty, computer nerd, Mormon classmate Ryan’s Y chromosome. She was totally going to freak. She was going to remind me that we were Iranian Muslims, not Americans. These lectures always reminded me of when she’d explained to me in kindergarten that Christians believed in Santa and got presents, and we didn’t . . . so we simply didn’t. It just wasn’t fair.

  There was no way she was going to let me go to the movies with a man. Ryan was only fourteen, but to my mom, he was a man. He could’ve been eight or forty; it was all the same. When I was in middle school, she didn’t approve of all the “men” exercising with me in gym class. She didn’t like that I was friends with so many of the “men” in my sixth-grade history class, or that girls and eleven-year-old “men” were playing coed T-ball at recess.

  As we made our way through parking-lot traffic in our Danville, California, suburb, I strategized about ways to navigate our argument. I could already hear her in my head: Zahra, what do you mean this man is just your friend? A young girl is not friends with a man! It is not right. Mageh Kafir hasti?You want to be like these filthy American ladies who go home with dis guy and dat guy, and blah blah blah . . . ?

  This is such bullshit! I thought to myself.

  I had a pretty good feminist rant stashed away that just might hit home: “Mom,” I’d begin, “you didn’t raise your eldest daughter to stay quiet and avoid making friends or talking to people because of creed or stature or even sex . . . ” Wait, I can’t say “sex.” She’ll flip out. “Gender.” Remember “gender” . . . Forget it. Take the easy way out: Lie. Just lie and say you don’t know him. He’s not with you.You don’t even know whose friend he is.

  I snapped back to reality when I realized how close we were to where my friends were now standing . . . without Ryan. I looked around, scanning the crowds feverishly, but couldn’t see him anywhere. Perfect!

  “Zahra! Hey, Zahra!” It was Ryan, tapping on my window. “I got your ticket.”

  Godammit, Ryan, you polite-ass Mormon, I thought. You don’t need to come say hi!

  My mom rolled down the window.

  “Is this your mom? Hi, my name’s Ryan! I’m a friend of Zahra’s. We’ve got Algebra together. Hey, Zahra, I got your ticket already and saved us seats.You saved me on my math test, so I figured I owe ya. Anyway, great to meet you, Mrs. Noorka-baba-kaka-kesh.”

  He shook my mom’s hand, gave me my ticket, and ran into the theater, waving.

  Thanks, Ryan. You just ended my summer and any hope I had of a normal adolescence. I couldn’t even look at my mother, so I kept staring straight ahead. I could feel her glaring at me.

  “Zahra,” she began.

  Here we go, I thought.

  “Zahra, are you going to go?” she asked.

  “What?” I asked, confused. Was this some kind of reverse psychology?

  “Maman jaan, there’s traffic behind me—get your bag,” she complained.

  I grabbed my bag, undid my seat belt, and reached for the door handle of salvation.

  “Wait,” she said.

  Fuck! I waited too long.

  A spot opened up in front of us, so she rolled in and parked the car. We sat in silence for what felt like forever. What the hell was going on? She didn’t seem mad. I didn’t know what to think or what to prepare for.

  Maybe Ryan’s politeness impressed her, I thought. Maybe she’s going to take back everything she’s said about men. Ma
ybe she’s going to apologize for all the times she yelled at me, because she now realizes how great my friends actually are. Wow. I really underestimated my mom. I guess the toughest thing about being the firstborn daughter of immigrant parents is that they have to catch up to you as they assimilate into a foreign culture.

  Maybe I needed to initiate this dialogue, to tell her it was okay if she felt bad about all the mean things she’d said before about my guy friends or the “American ladies.”

  “Mom—”

  “Zahra,” she cut me off, “I just wanted to tell you . . . ” She had a distant look in her eyes, but then suddenly zeroed in on me with intense concentration.

  “Zahra, you have a hole. And for the rest of your life, men will want to put their penis in your hole. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you look like, who is your ‘friend.’ Even at the movies, maman jaan, wherever—it does not change. Ri-anne seems like a very nice man, but he is a man. And all he wants is your hole. So, I will pick you up here at five o’clock. Have fun, maman jaan,” she said.

  I got out of the car and staggered toward the theater. I was horrified and astounded. I have a what?! A hole? Where? Was that what I had missed in sex ed the one day I had the flu? Was I the last girl on Earth to find out about my hole?

  I’d never felt so completely clueless about or protective of my body in my entire life. I’d thought I had a pretty clear idea of sex. It didn’t look all that complicated: a lot of kissing and touching and groping and people mashing their bodies together under bedsheets. There were no “holes” in Sixteen Candles!

  Suddenly, crossing the parking lot to the theater was like being a scared, limping animal in a wide-open meadow with sleazy hole-hunters lurking about. I couldn’t look a single guy in the face.

  I busted my way through the double doors of the theater and accidentally made eye contact with the concessions guy, who was lasciviously filling up a large swirly snow cone and staring at me. I imagined him halting mid-ICEE, flinging it in the air, and then leaping across the counter, making a beeline for my hole.

  I had to find my friends.

  I saw Ryan sitting third-row center, with an empty seat saved for me next to him. Nothing about my relationship with him felt platonic anymore. I felt awkward and clumsy. I felt like . . . like . . . like I was on a date. Omigod, was this a date? My vision was blurring. I couldn’t think fast enough.

  He bought me my ticket.

  He met my mother.

  We’re sitting next to each other.

  Did he ever really need help with algebra?

  I sat through all of Johnny Mnemonic with my jeans pulled up to my waist and my legs crossed tightly together. Every time my legs started to relax and slide open, I felt like I was exposing my hole to the world, and clamped them back together again. The longer I held my legs together, the angrier I became at Ryan. Look at him, all stupid-faced and smiling, sitting there dipping his disgusting hands into the greasy popcorn. This movie sucks.Why is he smiling? He’s probably thinking about holes. Gross! All I knew at that point was that, date or not, he’d better not be thinking about my hole, or I was going to kick his ass.

  I was twenty-two years old when I lost my virginity. That’s right, twenty-two. And no, I wasn’t married, or engaged to be married, or even in an exclusive relationship.

  By Iranian standards, I imagine the response to be: Why are you talking about your virginity publicly? You are totally embarrassing your parents; your two million first to fifth cousins, aunts, and uncles around the world; their Iranian friends and the Iranian friends of their friends; Iranians who know them or of them; Iranians who know you; and Iranians who live near you. Just pray to God that word of this never gets to your grandparents.

  By Muslim standards . . . well, I suppose it depends on how observant you are. By the standards of the Abrahamic religions, I imagine the response is something like: Whore!

  By mainstream American standards: That’s a little late. Did you have some kind of personal issue?

  Yes, I did! It’s called being the firstborn, first-generation daughter in an Iranian Muslim household. I thought I could skate through life as a happy, assimilated American woman if I could just make my “hole” invisible to men.

  My mom’s crash course in sex ed was a scare tactic that kept me at arm’s length from guys throughout my teens. American culture only reinforced that fear with the confusion surrounding sex in high school. If a girl had sex, she was a slut or, at the very least, the victim of endless gossip. If she didn’t have sex, she was either naive and sheltered or a frigid prude.

  The only place where I felt I could be safe from judgment was asexuality: a place of fist pumps, video games, oversize black hoodies, and comfortable physical distances.

  But by the time I made it out of high school and began college, I didn’t want to be invisible anymore. I wanted to be seen, desired, even. I was no longer hiding from “men”—I wanted to be found. I did not want to save my virginity for marriage. I hadn’t yet been in love, but didn’t want to be in a relationship defined by the status of my “hole.”

  When I started UC Berkeley, I found myself in a land of hipsters where androgynous, Cartoon Network–watching tomboys were a catch. I went on my first-ever date with Dean, a nerdy, Nietzsche-loving philosophy major and “minimal house music” DJ from the Midwest.

  I first fell for him in the car on our way to a mutual friend’s house. We had the same propensity for dark and often inappropriate humor, peppered with unidentifiable foreign accents. Our jokes degenerated into silliness, until I was dying with laughter and had to pull the car over to catch my breath. Dean turned to me, eyes twinkling, and said, “This is the most fun I’ve had since I hung out with my best friend in high school.”

  Two weeks later, Dean did not want to have sex with me. It was a beautiful Berkeley summer afternoon, and I was sitting on the bottom bunk of the bed across the room from him, listening to him explain that taking my virginity just put too much pressure on him. He said he couldn’t handle the weight, the responsibility, and the attachment I might feel after the deed was done.

  There I was, offering myself up, and I was being rejected . . . by a guy? A man! A hole-hunter! I wondered what my mother would say if she knew.

  What was I supposed to do now? Rub his back and tell him it was okay? Assure him that it’d be painless and that I wouldn’t think less of him afterward? Maybe I could offer him a drink, something to relax . . . like a roofie, a few hits of Viagra, or just a slap in the face.

  What the fuck, Dean? I wanted to yell. I shaved my legs. I got Brazilianed. I lotioned my entire body. I got my nails done. I’m wearing a hundred dollars’ worth of fancy underwear. I attended Pilates this morning so my abs would look hot. I risked UV rays and got a tan! I made an appointment with my doctor to discuss birth control options! I illegally downloaded porn to figure out some moves and blamed the computer viruses on my brother!

  I had come to Dean’s dorm room that day on a mission. I was my mother’s daughter, after all, and frankness among the women of our line was a virtue. So, from where I sat on the bunk bed, I said to the distraught man across the room, “Dean, I think it’s really wise to consider the repercussions of taking my virginity. This is certainly new turf for me, and I appreciate your honesty in telling me that you are not seeking a relationship. I’m not looking for a relationship, either. You see, Dean, at fifteen, sixteen, even seventeen, a girl hopes to find someone she trusts, before she . . . you know. At eighteen, nineteen, even twenty, she still kinda wants to be seduced. But by twenty-two, Dean, she pretty much just wants to get fucked. Does that clear up the confusion for you?”

  Dean stopped smiling, jumped up from where he was sitting, and kissed me hard on the lips. We fell against the bed, and he started taking off my clothes. He reached under my shirt, grabbed my bra by the sides, and pulled my top off with it. He grabbed hold of my belt buckle, stretched its leather, and tore off my jeans. I was in awe. His desire for me was incredible
. His eyes, intense and possessed, were locked on my body. Oh my God, I thought, this ravaging, pillaging beast wants my hole!

  His crazed, panicked rush mesmerized me. I had no idea why he was in such a hurry, but I was totally into it. I grabbed hold of his undershirt to help. He flung it off and we started on his pants. My hands ran up his bare chest as we lay back down. My heart was pounding.

  As I watched my pink panties fly up in the air, the sunlight from Dean’s dorm room window shining through the $50 lace, I felt giddy. Inside, I was screaming, This is it! This is it! This is it! I was jumping out of my skin with anticipation and excitement. I had to breathe. I had to clear my head. I had to relax, but I kept thinking, From here on out, Zahra, nobody can put the burden of virginity back on you. No man can claim it, because you’ve given it up to a man who doesn’t want to own you.

  Afterward, Dean asked me if I was okay and wanted to know how it had been for me. I said I wasn’t sure. It seemed dispiriting to ask if I was supposed to feel . . . more? Or if he had actually been inside me? Or if it was supposed to last longer? Instead, I asked him if we could try it again. He said something about “refractory periods,” then slid to my side and fell asleep. And that was it.

  I mean, I hadn’t expected Kristin Scott Thomas’s spasms in The English Patient, the acrobatics of 9½Weeks, or a round from Jenna Jameson’s “best of” clips. But this was supposed to be a rite of passage for me.

  This was the point at which I was supposed to look over at Dean in an irrational postcoital fog and think he was the one to whom I must forever bind myself because he’d shown me a whole new world, taken my virginity, owned a piece of me. Based on what? The fact that he had penetrated my hole for less than a minute?

  I started to feel overwhelmed by just how underwhelmed I was. It seemed like the most uneventful act of my life, and yet, based on everything I had heard up until this point, it was supposed to define me. Where was the transformation? The heavens were supposed to open up and reveal the secrets of the world! I didn’t feel any different.