November 1987
The ustaz is a small neat brown man with piercing eyes and hairless hands. In his nasal monotone he imparts his soul-saving secrets: how to wash your bumhole after taking a shit; why pigs are unclean; why the Chinese are unclean (they do not wash their bumholes and they eat pigs—who can argue with the algebraic logic of it?); why boys and girls should not mix; why Muslims and non-Muslims should not mix beyond the exigencies of living in a multiracial country. (What to do? We have to live with them. We got no choice.)
My whole body burns to hear it. My tongue writhes itself blue-black inside my mouth. I am sitting here like a piece of slime. Betraying my father with every breath. With every lazy muscle. With every word not spoken.
On and on the ustaz goes. About Muslims and kafirs. About the hell that awaits those who reject Islam. Its unique and diverse punishments, its infinite torments: renewable skin for repeated burnings-off; pus-and-blood beverages; trees that sprout bowel-boiling devil-head fruit. “Ohoho!” Reza would say if he were here. “So the most Gracious the most Merciful is not after all all that Gracious or Merciful—though he is impressively inventive!
But Reza is not here nor will he have the opportunity to air his scepticism and scorn before the ustaz because the special one-on-one sessions Latifah promised/threatened to arrange for him never materialized. One week Latifah was weakly pressing Reza to come downstairs for the ustaz; the following week Reza had a job at Shakey’s Pizza and nobody ever again spoke of the ustaz to him.
Perhaps that is why the ustaz fixes that narrow knowing look on me.
Or perhaps he looks at me like that because he knows who I am. Torn between the shame of being a blood relative of Salmah Majid and the titillation of sharing the gossip, Latifah might well have chosen the latter. I can picture it with no trouble: the lowering of voice and eyelids then the dropping of heavy hints.
Or my suspicions are unwarranted and the ustaz is a genius of observation and deduction.
Those who refuse to accept the Truth when it is given to them. Those who turn away from the Straight Path. Druggies drunkards gamblers adulterers but above all—here the ustaz looks right at me—Apostates. “To be born into Islam, to know of its glory, and then wilfully to turn away—there is nothing worse,” the ustaz says. And then again for effect so that even the note-passers and delinquents sit up and touch the backs of their tingling necks. “There is nothing worse. The hottest fires of Jahannam are reserved for such people.”