Published in Issue 63.1: Winter 2024
Barely a month into seventh grade and already Ruby had three crushes: a celebrity crush on Cary Elwes, the most beautiful man in the world; a romantic crush on Osama, a lanky, graceful Syrian boy at her masjid who could spin a basketball on one finger; and a platonic crush on the new girl Shauna, an artistic loner from Chicago. Ruby had spoken to Osama exactly never, and to Shauna only once. Since joining their class at Covington, Shauna ate lunch in the art room and spent every recess cross-legged on the Class of ’65 bench, drawing in her sketch pad.
During recess Ruby would steal glances at Shauna from the picnic table, where she sat with her friends Ellen and Melanie, weaving braid bracelets or reading a novel she’d pilfered from her older sister’s bookshelf. One Friday Ruby looked up from Jane Eyre and observed Shauna scowling at her drawing, tapping the end of her pencil to the dimple in the center of her chin.
“Oh!” gasped Ruby as Shauna ripped the page from the pad.
“Are you okay?” Ellen asked.
Shauna crumpled her drawing and threw it in the trash.
“I’m fine,” Ruby said. “Bertha just set fire to Thornfield.”
Halfway through French, Ruby left with the bathroom pass. She walked past the life cycle of a tree display (Every Tree Starts as a Seed!), went out the side door, and cut a sharp left onto the playground. Shauna’s drawing was at the top of the trash, underneath a Kit Kat wrapper and a Hi-C juice box. Ruby stuffed it into the kangaroo pocket of her Covington hoodie, the fat squirrel on the hopscotch board her only witness. In the furthest stall of the bathroom next to the science lab, her go-to if she ever needed to take a dump at school, she examined the drawing, smoothing it out against her hairy thighs.
It was a rough sketch, but Ruby realized, to her delight, that the handsome man with sharp cheekbones, aquiline nose, generous lips, and a sweep of hair across the forehead looked just like Cary Elwes in The Princess Bride. Even if this wasn’t Shauna’s intention, it felt like fate. Ruby could not allow Cary Elwes to decompose in a landfill, sandwiched between dirty diapers and Capri Suns. She would keep him, make him her own.
* * *
Ever since Muna, an Arab girl from Ruby’s masjid, eloped with a white boy she met at Hudson Valley Community College, the grown-ups had been freaking out. Muna’s parents prayed and fasted and brought their kids to the masjid, yet their daughter still went astray. Where had the parents gone wrong? Was the mistake that they came to this country? That they’d allowed her to attend community college? What should the other adults, as parents and guardians of the next Muslim American generation, do to prevent this from happening again?
The collective answer of the Brothers and Sisters who ran the masjid was to issue frequent and foreboding reminders of what was halal and what was haram, and to describe with increasing specificity the tortures of the hellfire. Ruby’s Sunday School teacher, Sister Lubna, had once had Muna as a student. Since Muna’s elopement, she’d been ending every class with a lecture. Today’s lecture had her pacing circles around the portable whiteboard, clasping and unclasping her hands behind her flowing, beaded abaya.
“I remember,” she told them, “when one day my oldest daughter came home from kindergarten. ‘Mama,’ she says, ‘I have to give valentines to everyone in my class, even the boys!’ You see? You see how they do it? Kindergarten boy gives kindergarten girl a Will you be my valentine? card with nice Snoopy on it, and we are supposed to think it’s sweet and innocent. But it is not innocent. It is the beginning. They are laying the foundation of a house. A haram house. By grade six, they want you to have a real valentine. By grade eleven, they want you to go on a date with your valentine—girl and boy, alone together. Dating, fornication! It starts with Snoopy, and ends with sex. But Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta’ala has given us aql, intelligence, and guided us in how to live. I have faith in you girls. You will not be like Zulaikha, you will not give in to lust. Sisters, you are smarter than them. You know when Snoopy is just Snoopy and when he is really Shaitaan.”
Ruby inwardly rolled her eyes but applauded along with the others; it was the first of Sister Lubna’s doom-and-gloom lectures to end in a pep talk. After dismissal Ruby and her friend Nafisa ate Sour Cream and Onion Pringles on the cement steps of the women’s entrance, waiting for Nafisa’s mom, who was always late, to pick them up. Osama was playing basketball in the parking lot. Whenever he missed, which was not often, he did a cute one-legged chicken dance, flapping his elbows twice as he drove one knee into his chest.
“It sucks how Sister Lubna makes me pronounce everything ten times,” Nafisa said. “I don’t yell at her when she calls pencil ‘bencil,’ but she acts like if you can’t pronounce ‘ayn’ you’re a subpar Muslim. And the whole Snoopy thing, how dramatic can you get?”
“I’ll never look at Snoopy the same way again,” Ruby said. “Also, when Sister Lubna warned us not to be like Zulaikha, what did she mean? Wasn’t Zulaikha the wife of the guy who buys Prophet Yusuf in Egypt?”
“Zulaikha tried to seduce him, don’t you remember?” Nafisa handed her the Pringles. “You finish these. I can already feel this monster zit about to erupt on my forehead.”
Osama made the next basket and whooped. His cocky athleticism was in stark contrast to the sensitive, brooding-poet figure Ruby thought should be her type. She wondered if they had anything in common besides Islam.
“How come the boys can play basketball but the girls can’t?” Ruby said. “It’s so unfair.”
“We’re not supposed to run because our boobs will move up and down. Haram.”
They were both twelve, but Nafisa had her period and wore a C cup bra. Ruby had no period yet; just teeny, hairy breasts and pubes that snaked down her thighs.
“Your boobs, maybe,” Ruby said. “Mine are TBD.”
Osama scored again and took a victory lap around the cement court. When he lifted his t-shirt to wipe his face, Ruby got a brief but glorious view of his taut cocoa stomach. Her lower body tingled and tensed. Worried Nafisa would notice, she bit her lip and stared into the empty Pringles can braced between her thighs.
You will not be like Zulaikha; you will not give in to lust. Ruby liked the word lust—its heft, the way it exhaled off the tongue. It sounded like it felt: powerful and enticing, with an element of danger. In English last week, they’d learned about onomatopoeia.
Woof. Bang. Pop.
Lust.
* * *
When Ruby got home, her mother was doing the Jane Fonda workout in the basement, dressed in a baggy t-shirt and a shalwar the same purple as Jane’s legwarmers. Ammi lay on the plaid carpet with her knees spread wide, her butt moving up and down as she squeezed and released.
“Don’t forget to breathe!” Ruby cried, in her best Jane Fonda imitation.
Ammi chuckled and waved her off. It always pleased Ruby to make her uptight mother laugh. In the living room, she took the English translation of the Quran off the highest shelf and read Sura Yusuf. The story of his childhood was familiar: Yusuf’s jealous half-brothers push him down a well, and he is rescued and taken to Egypt, where he’s sold to the wealthy Al-Aziz. Yusuf grows up to become a wise and beautiful man, and Al-Aziz’s wife, Zulaikha, who is not named in the Quranic version, tries to seduce him. Yusuf resists and Zulaikha tears the back of his shirt as he runs from her. Just like Pakistani Aunties, the women of Ancient Egypt love to gossip, and soon enough, Zulaikha’s failed seduction attempt has the ladies of the city talking. Zulaikha is in the throes of a violent love! She tried to seduce her slave!
In this situation, many women, like Ruby’s mother, whose main motivator in life was “what will people say,” would hide inside their houses or relocate to a different city, but not Zulaikha. Instead, she invites the ladies of the city to a banquet at her house. She supplies each lady with fruit to cut and a knife. Then she calls Yusuf to come out before them.
Upon beholding Yusuf, the ladies are so overcome by his beauty that they slice their own hands. They cry out that he can’t be a man, that he must be an angel, to which Zulaikha responds, Now do you see? This is what I’ve had to live with! She threatens to send Yusuf to prison if he doesn’t obey her. Yusuf says he prefers prison to the company of cunning women. In prison he begins to interpret dreams. Years later, when told the Pharoah wants to see him, he asks that the Pharoah speak to the ladies first. Before the Pharoah, Zulaikha and the ladies testify they know no evil of him, and Zulaikha confesses that she was the one who sought to seduce him. She asks for Allah’s forgiveness. Here, the ladies and Zulaikha, partially redeemed, exit the narrative.
Reading this, Ruby’s head was abuzz with so many questions she needed to lie down on her bed to think them through. If Yusuf first enters Zulaikha’s house as a boy and she looks after him, does this make him a kind of son? What does it say about lust that when Zulaikha initially comes on to Yusuf, he desires her back? If humans are made of clay and angels of light, what does it mean for Yusuf to look like an angel? Is his beauty such that it renders his clay celestial, luminous?
No one would mistake Osama for an angel. An angel-man probably never perspired and always smelled like roses, but at the end of every game Osama had sweat streaks down his shirt, half-moon stains in his armpits. Ruby liked Osama’s dark, earthy flesh, his unmistakable clay. She did not like that her stomach was hairier than his. But what did it matter when he wasn’t even aware she existed, although they occupied the same building most Sundays.
Ruby locked her bedroom door and took Shauna’s drawing out of her French textbook. In the beginning of The Princess Bride, when Cary Elwes is Farm Boy and the light strikes him a certain way, he could pass for an angel-man. And if he was an angel-man, then maybe this drawing could be a charm, a talisman, her very own Good Luck Cary Elwes.
“Sonia Ruby Ruby Sonia!” Ammi called from downstairs.
Ruby kissed Good Luck Cary Elwes’s plump, penciled lips. The safest place for him was in her locker at school, but now that she’d brought him home, she wanted to keep him and his good luck close, so she folded him in half and tucked him deep beneath her mattress.
In the kitchen, Ammi told Ruby and her older sister Sonia to peel garlic for her homemade garlic paste. She would make enough to fill a large mason jar and freeze the rest in ice trays. The time Ruby served an uncle visiting from Pakistan a glass of Pepsi with two garlic paste cubes in it had become the stuff of family lore. Distant relatives she’d never met knew her by this anecdote. This used to bother Ruby, though not anymore; she figured they would never know her anyway.
“Does this need to happen right now?” Sonia asked from the doorway, sliding her headphones down her neck. Lately, she always had a Walkman clipped to her jeans. “I was about to do another practice test.”
“You’ve been doing practice tests all day,” Ammi said. “Take a break.”
“Are you saying peeling garlic is more important than the PSAT?”
Ammi wiped her eyes, watery from the onion she’d just sliced. She was still in her exercise clothes, her hair tied back in a candy cane-striped scrunchie. “You shouldn’t take so much stress on yourself. On the last two tests, you got almost perfect scores.”
“Almost being the operative word,” Sonia said. “ Fine, but after this I’m going right back to work.”
Outside the window, Ruby saw her father toss an armful of leaves into a wheelbarrow and have a sip of Tab. Ammi had only been buying diet beverages ever since she tried on an old sari blouse and couldn’t get her arms in past her elbows.
The phone rang. Ammi said hello, followed by walaikum salam. She braced the earpiece against her shoulder and sliced onions as she listened, adding the occasional achcha or murmur of disapproval. “Let me find out,” she said. Pressing the phone to her chest, she asked Sonia, “Did you know Tasneem went to Miami?”
Sonia split apart a fresh garlic bulb. “What? I don’t know.”
She was lying; last week, at a community party, both Ruby and Sonia had heard Reema say that Tasneem went to Miami over Labor Day weekend with a few college friends. Sonia may have been a goody two shoes, but she was no tattletale.
“Ruby, you?”
“Me?” Ruby said. “How should I know?”
Ammi clucked her tongue and returned to her call. “Ai hai,” she said. “Oh ho.”
Sonia and Ruby shared a nervous look. Whatever it was, it was bad news, for Tasneem and for them.
“That was Nilofer Auntie on the phone,” Ammi said. “Her nephew Jamal, you know him, he works in DC now, he saw Tasneem on the beach in Miami wearing a bikini and took a photo.”
“He took a photo?” Ruby said.
“Yes, he took a photo of her nangi on the beach, and now everyone in New York New Jersey knows, and by tomorrow so will all of Mississauga, and in two days’ time, so will all of Karachi. Her mother was so happy—she’d just gotten a proposal for Tasneem, the boy is doing his medical residency at NYU—and now the proposal is canceled.” She scraped the onion slices into a pot and they sizzled in the hot oil. “First Muna, now Tasneem. It is too hard raising girls in this country.”
Sonia had become intensely focused on her garlic. When their mother got heated, Sonia laid low. But Ruby, for whom patriarchy was crystallizing from vague term to unjust reality, was too fired up to stay quiet.
“But this guy Jamal was in Miami too,” she said. “Why does no one care what he was doing there?”
“It doesn’t matter, he’s a boy.” Ammi opened the kitchen windows, then switched on the stove exhaust, raising her voice to be heard over its metallic hum. “Worse case, every boy can find some nice girl in Pakistan to marry him for a green card. But if a girl does something, people never forget. In fact, people want girls from good families to do bad things so they can talk about them.”
Ruby looked at Sonia, expecting her to be equally indignant, but Sonia’s headphones were back over her ears. Her peeled garlic pile was twice as big as Ruby’s.
“I think everyone in the community needs to get their head examined,” Ruby said.
“This is how it is. This is real life. That’s why I keep telling you two, don’t give them one single thing to wag their tongues about. Sonia, are you listening?”
Ruby refused to accept it. There had to be other ways to exist in the world, without this double standard, this hypocrisy and fear of gossip, judgment, Jahannam. Zulaikha may not be the heroine of the story, but it took gumption to host that banquet. Ruby admired that about her.
An edge of garlic peel pierced the skin underneath Ruby’s nail. She pulled it out, sucked the tiny drop of blood from the tip of her stinky finger. Maybe Sonia had the right idea. It was pointless to argue. Counterproductive even, because it might make their mother suspicious, and then she’d spy on them even more. Already every piece of mail, no matter who it was addressed to, was opened by their mother first.
You can read the rest of this story and more great content in out Winter 2024 issue, available for purchase in print and digital forms here.
Sheba Karim’s fiction and essays have been featured in 580 Split, Asia Literary Review, India Today, Literary Hub, Off Assignment, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, South Asian Review, The Rumpus, Time Out Delhi, and several anthologies in the United States and India. Her young adult novels have received various awards, including NPR Best Book of the Year and the South Asia Book Award. She lives in Nashville, where she is a Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University.
