The Others Read Online Free PDF Page A

composed pages of highbrow critique on my behavior or outlook, although in her view I was heading in utterly the wrong direction. I was always aware of her ultimate and decisive solution to anything.
Get used to it or get out
.
    I would explain away her canned response to my complaints on the grounds that she had never had the experience of giving to others, giving to the community, something she had produced through her own efforts, something she cared about, in the way that I believed, at the time, that the world would become a more pleasant and better place if we rubbed and polished its outer skin a little, if we plunged a random hand into the world’s brain, wherever that was, and reorganized things in there just a bit. The path to God is clear and unobstructed, so why do we always find ways to open new potholes at some points on the road, while we pile up the dirt and create new obstructions at others? That way, we squander the chance that each person has to find his own particular map. Does not God say in His Holy Word, Wheresoever you turn, God’s face is there? Hiba’s response to all of this was to thump my empty head sharply, as if it were a watermelon, tapping out its long-running delusions and phantoms. Wake up, girl! A time will come in which you will be exactly like one of those dust motes that you try to wave away but you can never get rid of. You will become another Hidaya—whose name, after all, means
Guidance
.
    Always before when I had heard this notion of Hiba’s, I would not let her get away with it, but now I would find myself asking her, You think so? I was making a serious attempt to alter the face of the world, but it looked like it was only my face that had undergone any change. Now I do not have so many questions that move with the speed of a 260-mile-per-hour wind; I very nearly have nothing left within me. Who gives me the right to be so adrift? So rebellious, such a harlot, an
aahira
, arriving like a prophet who has no miracle to show, who grasps the microphone and with a quasi-artificial humility and a tremulous conviction, speaks to others on the subject of God?
    I stared at the wall, on and on, as I traced Fairuz’s voice with my own. Gradually her voice faded and my fragile voice could no longer hold onto any substance. On the edge of words: that is where I found myself, thinking something that took me by surprise and filled me with dread. I could not leave enough room there for Hiba to descend into my hell. Rather than letting her in, I would have to give myself an extra layer of protection; I could not drop the veil of my pretense in front of her. Angels cannot possibly fall from the height of seven heavens after a single little error, and was I not Hiba’s angel?
    I hurried to the bathroom, in a fast attempt to pull myself together, dying for a cigarette. One cigarette that the tightness of my throat would put out, just as the cigarette itself put out an urgent need I felt to drain the filth from my insides in the shape of an incoherent story where the details were missing. If I did it, if I told that story, I would blast a hole in Hiba’s heart with the acidity of this old, festering news. Even in the sights of a person who sins abundantly, my sin was not one to be forgiven. And I was blindly taking a huge chance that I would have no roof to shelter me, nor a pillow to give me any rest. I would be an exile from God’s sphere and from Hiba’s world as well.
    Never mind. I am not suffocating now. I will breathe deeply, deeply … deeply. The need in my blood will fade. An evening without cigarettes—the world won’t end. Sooner or later, the accursed longing for nicotine will stop knocking against my head. I am fine. I am really well, really well. I feel dizzy, but it is not a problem if my dizziness is still here, the twelfth night after Dai. My body is expelling the filth from within, after all, and my eyes are draining the impurities they hold. Soon, I will be able to