Free The Others by Siba al-Harez Page A

her, or subjugate myself into accepting my loss of her! The swiftness with which it had happened, and my obliviousness had given me no opportunity to consider such a possibility before it landed on me, redoubling my feelings of loss.
    I repeated to myself that this was just another difficult day and at least I could count on it coming to an end. I had to bathe in cold water. The water heater was empty but I could not shake the numbness and yesterday’s lingering odor from my body without bathing. And then I could not find an ironed shirt or a clean pair of socks, but Edna was still asleep. So I delayed the driver of the car that carried me to the college every day for five minutes. Even so, the day’s hardships had not really and truly begun.
    With the rain typical of February’s first days, a gray sky, and streets blocked by flowing water, it was hard to get anywhere. A drive that would normally take half an hour took twice that long, and I arrived at the college late, a few minutes after eight o’clock. The entry gate for students arriving in private cars was all but closed. Another minute and the only way I could have entered campus would have been to pass by the security guard women once I had shown them my university ID, which I never carried in my wallet unless we were in the middle of exams. It was not a question of neglect so much as it was a little cheating that we had inherited from the generation of girls who preceded us. One could generally and sensibly assume that we would not be carrying our ID cards. If one of the supervisors—these women who watched us so closely—were to seize us for any transgression outside the lecture halls (which they did not enter), we would always make the excuse that we had forgotten our IDs, and then we could use any name we might invent and thereby escape the punishment of having fifty riyals deducted from our allowances.
    It was a trick I had not been compelled to use, so far anyway, since the rules were more relaxed for those of us who were in the science departments than they were in the arts, where everything was really intensely regulated. That was true except when the month of Muharram started, the month when we Shi‘is commemorated Hussain’s death, even if we were not allowed to do so publicly. They would lock the building entries and erect search points that were just like the roadblocks out on the ordinary roads. In Muharram, the major infraction incurring punishment and a fine was the wearing of black shirts. To wear a black shirt at that time of year, as well as a few other special days scattered throughout the year, was customary for Shi‘is. In response to this policy of punishment at the college, we insisted on wearing them in what appeared a silent resistance to an efficient and tangible attempt to banish our difference—even a simple difference in the color of our clothing.
    We did not give the issue more prominence than it deserved. We got through it with a bit of joking and a lot of looking the other way. We managed to avoid letting the idea that we were being constrained and oppressed control us. And if the microscope we were always under magnified everything, still, we could slip out from under it with ease and without causing an artificial or excessive confrontation. We wore regular blouses over our black shirts as camouflage. Or we recorded our names as violators of the rule and went peaceably on to our lectures, supplicating God out loud to help these supervisors. We reckoned that they would be obliged to count what was almost a third of the entire student population of the college or even more as transgressors. To feign ignorance is also an effective policy. Doing so does not make light of your adversary; it just neutralizes your foe’s argument. We would have been far more likely to find this policy altogether beneath us had we been given alternative solutions.
    With the human tide we create, and this mark of our difference we wear, we are suddenly