I never found myself in any pink aisle. There was no box for me with glossy cellophane like heat and a neat packet of instructions in six languages. Evenings, I watched TV like a religion I moderately believed. I watched to see how the others lived, not
knowing
I was the Other, no laugh track in my living room, no tidy and
punctual
resolution waiting. I took tests in which Jane and William had so many apples, but never a friend named Khadija. I fasted through birthday parties and Christmas parties and ate leftover tajine at plastic lunch tables, picked at pepperoni from slices like blemishes and tried not to complain. I prayed at the wrong times in the wrong tongue. I hungered for Jell-O and Starbursts and margarine, could read mono- and diglycerides by five and knew what gelatin meant, where it
came from.
When I asked for anything good, like Cedar Point or slumber parties, I offered a quick Inshallah, as in Can Jordan sleep over this weekend,
Inshallah?,
peeking at my father as if he were a god. Sometimes, I thought my father was a god, I loved him that much. And the news thought this was an impossible thing—a Muslim girl who loved her father. But what did they know of my heart, or my father who drove fifty miles to buy me a doll like a Barbie because it looked like me, short brown hair underneath her hijab,
unthreatening
breasts and feet flat enough to carry her as far as she wanted to go? In my games, she traveled and didn’t marry, devoured any book she could curl her small, rigid fingers around. I called her Amira because it was a name like my sister’s, though I think her name was supposed to be Sara, that drawled A so like sorry, which she never, ever was.
Leila Chatti