I’d never been to a police station. It looked nothing like the police stations I’d seen back in London on EastEnders. It was in a large villa, on a residential street, and only a couple of windows on the ground floor at the back had bars on them.
We went inside and Stick Thin Policeman was waiting for us at the reception. He led us into his office, which was full of expensive-looking brown leather sofas, and he sat in a black chair behind a massive mahogany desk.
I sat on one of the sofas next to Saffa, gripping her hand tightly, and Baba sat on a visitor’s chair in front of the desk.
“I’ll be making the report,” Stick Thin Policeman said, again addressing Baba. He asked Baba for his and Saffa’s national ID cards, and then called in a young Indian man in a waiter’s waistcoat, the ‘tea boy,’ and told him to make photocopies. Baba wrote down our address and his contact details for the police report.
“Can you please ask your daughter to tell us exactly what happened?”
Saffa shook her head and turned to me. “Sara, I can’t,” she whispered.
“Can I talk on her behalf?” I asked the policeman in Arabic. “She’s still too upset to talk.”
“No problem,” the policeman replied. “You tell us what she told you.”
I told him, mustering the best Arabic I could, that a middle-aged South Asian man with a black beard and moustache, wearing a blue boiler suit, pushed my sister into the dirty alleyway beside the dukaan where sewage water trickled in a line over the sandy and stony ground. He pinned her against the wall. The branches and leaves from the willow tree in the front yard of the villa next door hid them from plain view of the street.
Saffa in that moment froze from shock and couldn’t fight back, as he pressed his lips against hers and groped her breasts. The handles of the blue plastic bag she held tightly cut red grooves into the folds of her fingers. I told him how he slid his hand down the elastic waistband of her school skirt, into her knickers, and assaulted her with his hand for several minutes until he let her go. The whole time he didn’t say a word.
When I got to the part about her knickers, Baba’s face lost all of its colour.
“Why didn’t you fight back?” Baba asked Saffa in English.
Saffa started to cry again. “I couldn’t move. It was like I was trapped inside my body.”
Stick Thin Policeman had finished typing and looked up at Baba. “Now that we have a description of him we’ll send patrol cars to your local area to see if we can find anyone that fits his profile, and we’ll bring anyone we suspect in for questioning. It may be that your daughter will have to identify him from photographs. We’ll call you if we have any leads.”
Baba and Stick Thin Policeman stood up and shook hands. During the time we were there, I didn’t see any police women. No one from the police had asked Saffa if she needed any counselling or if she was okay.
The car drive home was silent. Baba stopped at the local mosque near our house to pray maghrib prayer. The sun had started to set, sending brilliant pink rays across the sky. Saffa and I were sat together in the back seat, my hand in hers.
“You were very brave at the police station.”
Saffa nodded, trying to blink away her tears.
When Baba had finished praying and came back to the car, he turned to Saffa. “What did you buy from the shop earlier?”
“Some cans of Pepsi and Galaxy bars,” Saffa replied.
“You know Pepsi is manufactured by a Zionist company,” he replied. “And we’re supposed to be boycotting Zionist products. Maybe this was a punishment from God.”
Saffa and I looked at each other bewildered. Was he actually serious? I was about to open my mouth but Saffa squeezed my hand tight and shook her head. For her sake I didn’t say a word.
I waited until we were home and Baba had gone out to the mosque again to pray ishaa before telling Mum what he’d said in the car. Mum was sat on the living room sofa, holding Saffa in her arms.
“Please don’t tell me this. You’re just making me hate him even more.” She let Saffa go and put her head between her hands. “Sara, you need to understand that I have nowhere to go if I take you kids and leave him. And that’s if he lets me take you. The laws here give him the power to stop us all from travelling. I have no rights here as a married woman, and you know my family in England won’t help me unless I leave Islam.”
“Why don’t you do it then? Just lie and tell your parents that you’re leaving the religion but secretly stay Muslim. They can’t remove Islam from your heart,” I said.
“I’m scared.” Mum looked up. “I’m scared that if I disobey my husband, if I lie and pretend to leave my religion, that Allah will punish me. Maybe this misery is a test from Allah. Maybe I just need to stay strong and Allah will reward me when I die in jannah.”
“I don’t believe Allah created us to be miserable all our lives and I definitely don’t believe he will stop you from going to Heaven. If there’s a way out, a way to be happy, we should take it. If your parents say they’ll have us back we should take the chance. We’ll still be Muslim without Baba,” I argued.
“Baba will be back from the mosque any minute now,” Mum said, ending our conversation. “Take Saffa upstairs.”
“Come, let me take you to bed.” I held out my hand to Saffa, and she rose from the sofa and took it. We quietly exited the living room while Mum muttered every swear word under the sun about Baba.
*
Mum allowed Saffa to take a week off school under the premise that she was sick. Mum and I searched for a child psychologist but unfortunately, in the mid 2000s, there was no such thing. There were psychiatrists who dealt with adults suffering from mental illnesses, but no counselling services. Mum and I had to do the counselling with Saffa ourselves.
“None of this is your fault,” we repeated over and over to Saffa. “Don’t let Baba make you think otherwise.”
If Saffa was withdrawn before, now she didn’t even speak. I’d talk to her and be met with silence. She was losing weight. Most days the only meal she ate was the sandwich Mum made for her packed lunch.
Saffa didn’t speak to anyone for a whole month. The first words she said when she broke her silence were around the dinner table one evening where she looked at Baba and said, “I don’t want to wear the hijab anymore.”
I expected Baba to say something, but he sat in silence staring at Saffa.
“You said that wearing the hijab would protect me, and it didn’t,” Saffa said.
Baba looked down at his plate and didn’t say a word.
The next day, Saffa went to school minus her headscarf. A few days later she cut her hair into a short bob with a short straight fringe, and then she dyed it black with one of those home box dye kits. Still Baba didn’t say anything.
Mum joked that she looked like a goth. Unlike me, Saffa was blessed with Mum’s English hair genes, and with her straight hair, her new hairstyle made her look like Emily the Strange.
Saffa seemed to have taken Mum’s comment literally because she took on a new gothic persona completely. Apart from when the amus were over and we were strictly forbidden from being seen or heard, she would play heavy metal, blaring bands like HIM, Evanescence and Lacuna Coil. None of us had dared to play English music out loud.
“Sara, tell Saffa to turn that music down. She’ll attract demons and djinns to the house,” Baba said, as we sat in the living room while Saffa’s music blared from upstairs.
I was gobsmacked that he was allowing heavy metal, a genre of music that conservative Muslims associated with devil worshipping, to be played out loud.
He may not have openly admitted it, but I believe his new-found leniency with Saffa was his way of saying he was sorry for how he’d behaved with her.