Free The Others by Siba al-Harez Page B

manifest and can no longer be ignored. The question of our otherness is no longer left to guesswork, in the shape of our features or the particular sorts of names we bear, nor in our mutual withdrawal into our own kind, looking as though we are accumulations of flesh inside a different and larger body that does not fit us very well at all. Our distinction glares now: it is the black shirt that we have worn with stunning persistence, happily giving up our allowances for the month of Muharram, letting the money go to our adversaries. We give up, too, the peace that we could have been harvesting, had we been content, submissive to our circumstances. Together, as one mass, we turn into an enormous rolling question, like a snowball growing bigger and bigger. What are those people? Where does their difference lurk?
    What is so frightening, from the start, about our being different? Is it because we form a storm of question marks, moving fiercely through an undistinguished and previously unnoticed space in this nation, that never before experienced the essence or function of questioning, or of being in a state of difference? Is it because we release an intensity of presence that remains unacknowledged on the map of the world, or between the thighs of a recognized tribe? Is it because we breach an unannounced law, one that requires us to cloud over our dissimilarity from the universal and only mold that the other is supposed to know and follow, and from all that is real and correct?
    My late arrival was a parsimonious little smile of good luck, because it meant that I did not have to pass alongside a section of the quadrangle where there gathered those we had named
banat al-balad
, the country girls, a space between Science Buildings One and Two. Thus I did not have to exhaust the waning energy in my veins with any encounters, any long exchanges of greetings and questions that always come up after the weekend break; specifically queries having to do with Hiba’s engagement. A little cluster of classmates had reserved a seat for me so that I didn’t have to deal with searching for one in the big hall or dragging a chair from another lecture hall in behind me. Moreover, our lecturer had not arrived yet, and anyway she did not care if a whole half an hour of lecture time was frittered away in meaningless chatter or if students came in late through the rear door to the lecture hall, whether they had an excuse or not.
    I made the most of this bit of time. I went down to the cafeteria and ordered a coffee. The woman behind the glass counter front raised her eyebrows when I asked for two spoonfuls of instant coffee and three of sugar. I did not understand what the secret was behind her wonder. Was it the concentration of coffee or the sweetness of the sugar? I did not have any small change and neither did she, so I added in a cheese croissant and a chocolate bar and gave her ten riyals.
    I sat down at the white marble table, fished my cell phone out of my bag, and left a missed call for Dai. If she wasn’t busy right now, she would call back without a doubt. I needed her voice, with its easy tone, somewhere between gelatin and the viscosity of honey. Whenever Dai laughed, I felt the ether surrounding her loosen its joints in some fundamental sense, to the point of dislocation. I would truly feel that she was curing me.
    She did return my call. Her words were two warm palms undoing the nodes of pain in my neck and releasing a faint aah of pleasure. I heard a fine-grained laugh when I informed her that I had bought the cheese croissant for her, and she exclaimed, You fox, you! It only took one added minute to shed my hateful feelings toward this Saturday, the first day of school after the Friday break, and I would even have belted out that old song with her, the one that mixed nonsense words with the days of the week to teach them to little kids,
al-sabt sabamabut
,
wa’l ahad raan raan, wa’l ithneen
… My mother would always sing that