The Others Read Online Free PDF Page B

I was still awake, and who would ask me urgently, What page have you gotten to? All of that stored-up motherliness in Hiba pelted down on me in a concentrated storm. On me, the girl who was one year younger than Hiba, but five years her senior in my studies. I clung to this motherly Hiba as if she were a last fortress that no one had yet been able to breach.
    Ever since I began at the college, and ever since I felt sure of a successful first year, I had gotten into the habit of picking up my results late, each term’s grades sometime during the following term. The woman who supervised my department in the student affairs office would give me odd looks. What level of unconcern was this, which led me to go all this time neglecting to pick up my grades, not knowing whether I had passed or not? Even worse, I would hold onto that sealed envelope carrying my grades until there came a time in which I needed some happy news that would lift me out of my moody state. Luck had never betrayed me until now. This time around, the result was a complete fizzle.
    And, Hiba, you are going to laugh at me when I tell you that I failed in the stupidest, most trivial subject possible. I made a dumb choice, passing up all the subjects in my major, in which failing would at least be honorable, and then I went and failed a general-ed course!
    Neither of us could sleep that night. But we both lay there rigidly, neither one wanting to turn over, so as not to let the other one surmise that she was awake. We each passed the hours of darkness counting the lambs of sleep—or the beasts of anxiety.

5
    I drew out the black notebook from a shadowy niche inside my chest. I recorded one more stroke, just as before I had recorded my very first sins: the first song I listened to, the first prayer I abandoned, the first ritual ablutions I postponed, the first longing I toyed with, the first fast day during which I ate, the first kiss … and now, the first full discovery of my body. I documented them all, with their dates and their details.
    If dates can be derisive, mocking, and sadistic—and carefully selected, of course—then that precisely was the status of my dates when they concerned Dai. Our first kiss was like the sweets at Qurqii’an, the evening halfway through the month of Ramadan when children gather in their new clothes to celebrate the birth of one of the Prophet’s grandsons, whom we revere, Hassan son of Ali. They go round to people’s homes to ask for candy. Or it was like yummy peanuts halfway through the month of Sha’ban. The prayer of the body, the night of my fate, my power, my own Lailat al-Qadar, but at the beginning of the final third of Ramadan instead of at its very end. I do not know if she was aware of it at the time, but with perfect mastery and precision, Dai gathered between her thumb and her index finger all those years of mine that were uselessly gone; she rubbed them until they became dust particles so fine that they no longer had any substance. Then she sat back, one leg crossed over the other, a crowned and contented queen. Radia, “the Lady Contented with God’s Will,” as so many Muslim queens have been named.
    In my past few years I have lived a double life. I prepare intensive summer courses in Islamic jurisprudence and the theology of Oneness that is the basis of Islamic belief and morals and the science of logic. I do volunteer work. I write for a magazine focused on the proper cultural education of the young. I march into battles doomed to fail, only so that my voice will have a place to resound, and my steps, a pavement on which to fall. In half of my responses, I am giving myself cover, and I try to leave the other half vague enough so that no one can observe what I have been doing in my life, far from the eyes of others, or can look into my thoughts, which would inevitably appear tarnished by stupidity or their deviation from the correct path of the upright.
    From a few stories and intrigues I knew that my