Free The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf by Mohja Kahf Page A

right?" Zuhura's fiance said.
    "What?" She drew her hand out of his. She was living on coffee and No-Doz tablets-she had to, to keep up with as many classes as she was taking this semester-and everything made her tense.
    "Isn't that rich pampered Nigerian athlete in it?" Luqman said. "It's all men. Why you want to hang around men?"
    Zuhura's brow furrowed. She had a good answer, almost as scathing as one of her mother's reproofs, but she was beginning to see that her argumentation talents, while they suited her career ambitions, were not the skills needed for becoming Luqman's wife.
    Bolts of patterned cloth that Aunt Ayesha called leso arrived. Aunt Ayesha would write, on the edges of the cloth, secret messages in Swahili meant only for Zuhura, to be read on her wedding night. Zuhura's darkest ebony skin was soon flawless, softened and cleansed by the special baths her mother drew for her using ingredients sent by Kenyan relatives.
    "I'm going to get my hair braided," Tayiba said, her nostrils flaring with excitement. "Zuhura's having hers done, and my mother said I could do it too."

    "So?" Khadra shrugged. "I braid my hair all the time. You don't need a hair stylist for that."
    "Not braided like your hair," Hanifa said impatiently. "Braided like our hair. Tayiba-can I do it too?" Her eyes lit up, catching the sunlight. She was tired of the way she usually wore her hair, drawn into a poof on top her head. That was the style she'd graduated to after the multiple pigtails of childhood held with gumball hair holders that bounced this and thataway as she and Khadra had raced for the ice cream truck.
    "It's expensive," Tayiba said importantly. "You got to get permission."
    Hanifa ran home to do that, and her mother said yes, and she came back jubilant, the red sashes of her sundress fluttering behind her like pennants.
    "Can I watch?" Khadra asked Tayiba.
    "Sure," Tayiba said magnanimously.
    Khadra sat and watched Tayiba's enormous untrammeled hair go down into orderly braided rows for about half an hour before she started to get restless.
    "Why can't I braid my hair too?" she whined when she got home. Her mother had vetoed it. Eyad was pushing jihad in his plastic Big Wheel on the tiny back patio.
    "What, like the tribe of Zunuj?" Teta said from her lawn chair. Eyad looked up at the odd word, Zunuj. Teta stroked Khadra's coarse brown hair. "Such pretty hair, not like that repulsive hair of Abeed, all kinky and unnatural."
    Khadra pushed her hand away angrily. "You can't say that."
    "Say what?"

    `Abeed, "Eyad chimed in. "That's haram."
    "Again with the haram, this child. What did I do that's haram this time, hmm, te'eburni?"
    "It's haram to be racist," Khadra protested. "Eyad! Isn't it haram to be racist?"
    "Yeah. You can't say `abeed. "' He gave Testa a look that reminded her rather of his father in his teenaged years, when he started getting religion.
    Testa looked bewildered. Hurt. "What? That's just what we say in Syria. I am not a racist."
    It had been Testa who first noticed Khadra's breast buds coming in. She shared Khadra's bedroom during her visits.
    "You're going to have magnificent boobs, just like mine," Testa told her.
    "I am?" Khadra looked uncertainly at Tetas sagging bazoomies. She knew their dimensions well, from when Testa called her in to scrub her back during her weekly bath. Although Testa's back was turned, a modesty cloth on her lap, Khadra could see her heavy breasts hanging down her sides. They were monuments of Khadras childhood.
    "Like me in my prime," Testa amended, straightening her posture. "Women in my family have always had good ones. Not itty bitty almonds like your mother." She broke into song:
    I can see into your heart, and its a beautiful green place You are connected to my heart, can you follow the trace? God is beautiful, loves beauty, loves the heart you cultivate

    Teta had a song for everything and loved music. But Khadra's parents felt that music, while not outright haram, tended toward