Steemit Novel (Ch.3) The Unbordered Queen

What do people have most in common with one another? Is it fear?

I didn’t fit in at school. From the moment I walked on campus, I felt out of place. It was an academy for international students in Cairo and the student body was made up of ghoulish, pretentious children. They were the offspring of American expats and rich Egyptians. They smelled like hamburgers and hummus. My presence exacerbated the social divide. The Egyptians saw me as too westernized, the Americans saw me as Egyptian.

Making friends turned out to be hard and I was quieter than how I used to be. In Canada, I engaged with others. Here, I was the awkward girl who didn’t speak. The Americans used baseball and Dr. Pepper to pretend they never left home, and the Egyptians retaliated with thicker accents and nationalistic flair. I started hating my name.

In Canada, I always said my name, Malika, in a western pronunciation. When I said my name here, the Egyptians mocked me for it. They said it back to me, over-anglicizing the syllables. I was a fake, a traitor Middle Easterner with blood on her hands. I started avoiding interaction at school. At lunch, I sat with the students already given up on trying to be cool. I joined them in agreement. I also become complacent with my studies. It didn’t matter anymore. The hours of the day clung to the walls like beads of condensation.

Fortunately, I liked playing with my poor friends at home. They were peasants, “falaheen”, as they are called in Egypt - a word the Egyptians at my school said with disdain. I judged them for it. For whatever reason, I felt more at peace with the poor kids as we played games in the garden of our villa. I wasn’t an athlete at school, but I played soccer with boys at home. I never wanted the playing to stop. At the end of each night, when we were all tired and dirty, the realization would come to me - I slept upstairs in the house and my friends slept in the garden, in their one-room home. All seven of them, the whole family, slept in one small room. It wasn’t gratitude I felt, it was shame. I didn’t deserve to sleep upstairs any more than they did.

My poor friends didn’t know the kind of life I had at school. They lived in a culture where boys and girls didn’t interact much. It didn’t bother me that I wasn’t a real girl to them. Girls were hunted. I hid my school life from my friends because I didn’t want to seem foreign, and I didn’t want them to be jealous. Behind the villa walls, Sherif, the second-oldest son, watched girls walk by in the street through a narrow slit in the green gate. He would jump up and make kissing noises at them, then duck back down to hide before they caught sight. He liked harassing girls. I preferred not to be the object of such desperate desire, but I enjoyed the games.

One night, we played until our pores with filled with sweat and dust. It would have been like any other night, but when I went upstairs, I found my father suffering from severe pain in his head. I saw him weep. "It is too much! Stop!" He begged of his pain. With worry dripping from her long dark lashes, my mother yelled, “Get the doctor!” The maid telephoned the physician and he came to our home immediately to inspect my father. The doctor asked very simple questions.

“Do you know your name?”

“Kamal,” my father answered.

“And your age?” the doctor asked.

“Sixteen.”

That was the moment we knew something was terribly wrong. That was the night everything changed. When the doctor’s sagging cheeks exhaled the words, “check your husband into a hospital right now,” the warm Cairo air turned to ice.