After leaving the basketball court, I went back to my favourite spot to sketch: a bench under some oak trees at the top of the hill, overlooking Brockwell Park and the surrounding neighbourhood.
This park was definitely my favourite place in the whole of London, especially early in the mornings when the mist rolled down from the hill and gave the green slopes an unearthly, magical feel. That was my favourite time to walk, when I shared the park with no one but the dog walkers and running enthusiasts. This was before the park filled up with yummy mummies and their toddlers in their state-of-the-art buggies, before the groups of teenagers coming out to use the basketball courts, the school kids determined to conquer the climbing frame, before the families carrying bags of stale bread came to feed the ducks and the Canada geese, before the barbecues, the Frisbee games and kite flyers.
This was my time to be alone with my thoughts, to process, to reflect. To be honest, I often felt like praying when I was up there, surrounded by the sounds of nature and the miracles of creation. It would be easy, really. Just work out the direction to pray, the qiblah, stand up and offer two raka’at, simples.
But even though I longed to feel the earth beneath my fingers and smell the scent of the grass as I touched my forehead to the ground in sujud, I had never plucked up the courage to do it. What if someone saw me? What if people stared? Would they take me for some extremist nutter and call the park ranger?
No, safer to sit and contemplate. I could always read from my pocket-sized Qur’an without attracting too much attention.
Sigh.
The life of a post-9/11, 7/7 Muslim in London.
It was almost Zuhr time, around midday, so I knew that my sketching time was limited. I would have to go and get started on the housework before long. I opened my bag and took out the heavy sketch pad. I had started a drawing the week before, a landscape that stretched from one end of the park to the other.
I looked at it again, my head tilted to one side. It was quite good, very good in places. I moved my fingers lightly over the page, unsure where to start. I did a bit of shading, hardened a couple of edges, smudged some outlines. But I just wasn’t feeling it anymore. Was it the fact that the empty green I had been sketching the other morning was now dotted with people? Or was it that I had other things on my mind?
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I took it out and saw it was a text from my best mate, Rania. Need to get outfits and heels for UMP show this Sun! U in?
Rania’s mum, Auntie Azra, was an event organiser and was arranging the annual Urban Muslim Princess (UMP) fashion show and dinner party. She had invited us girls to come along to celebrate the end of our A levels – and to launch Rania’s first designer clothing collection. I was way beyond excited because I had seen the collection grow from the mood board stage to actual outfits that we were going to wear on the catwalk! How awesome was that?
All money raised was going to help a Muslim charity that worked with orphaned victims of war. The irony of laying on a lavish three course meal in order to feed starving orphans was not lost on me but I had learned to live with it. Some people help by going without, others help by going out into the field to volunteer, and still others help by paying to have a halal version of a prom. Don’t judge.
I texted her back: No doubt!
I turned the page of my sketch book. I felt like doing something different…
I chose a slim stick of charcoal and started to skip it over the paper, concentrating on the picture I could see quite clearly in my head. Lines blended into others, shading deepened the shadows, the flat side of the stick gave me the coverage I needed. I drew, deliberately ignoring the implications of the image I was creating, deliberately focusing on the technical side, not the emotional memory that was fuelling it.
And then it was done. I closed my eyes and turned away, clearing my mind. I always did that before looking at my work after I had finished. It helped me to look at it with fresh eyes and spot the mistakes.
I turned back to the sketchbook that lay open on the grass in front of me. My breath caught. It was good. It was really good, possibly the best I had done in a long time.
It was a drawing of a hand, a strong, beautiful hand, the fingers tipped by perfect fingernails. A hand holding a basketball with a mole below the little finger.
And it was obvious who the hand belonged to.
Mr Light Eyes.
***
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about life, it’s this: when you are not supposed to do something, you will find it near impossible to resist and when you have to do something, you’ll find any number of excuses to avoid doing it.
Take that morning. As soon as I saw that boy – Ali – and saw the way his face lit up, I knew that there was something potentially wonderful there. Wonderful or dangerous. And, given my circumstances – being a practising Muslim and expected not to even be able to recognise a member of the opposite gender (ahem) – it could only be dangerous. Tragic, even. You see, in my community, it doesn’t really work the way it does in the movies: boy meets girl, boy fancies girl, boy asks girl out, they go out, discover they are amazingly compatible soul mates and begin a torrid affair with lots of romantic dates and passionate encounters and a nice dose of happily ever after at the end of the movie.
In my community, a ‘boy meets girl’ romance normally results in heartbreak, betrayal and a damaged reputation – for the girl, of course! In every scenario I had ever seen, it was the girl who paid the price for entertaining the guy’s advances. Because that’s what guys do, right? They try it. They keep knocking and knocking and knocking until someone lets them in. That’s their job. The job of a girl with her head screwed on is to not be the fool who opens the door to the fitnah dressed up like Prince Charming.
So, back to the paradox of the human condition: I knew all this. I was painfully aware of the price to be paid for embarking on a pointless obsession that could so easily lead to the haram, the forbidden. So I mastered myself. Every time he popped into my head, it is like I was closing the curtains, shutting him out. I probably wouldn’t ever see him again, anyway.
I would not talk about him.
I would definitely not ask Zayd about him.
I would not even think about him.
At all.
No one needed to see my drawing. It could be my little secret.