Good Muslim Boy by Osamah Sami Read Free Book Online Page B

down. I’ve barely slept in days, and
haven’t had anything to eat in all this time; nothing to drink either, except the
glass of water at the hospital last night. I stop at a felafel stand and grab two
sandwiches. I remember the last felafel stand—not so long ago, Dad was giving a man
who was down on his luck some money. I wonder where he is right now. What he and
his children are doing. I check the time and swallow the sandwiches. I don’t even
feel them go down, so I order another two. I down those with little chewing.
    Five sandwiches later, I go hotel hunting again. I try more than thirty hotels, motels,
hotels, serviced apartments—nothing. I look at my watch again. It’s midnight already.
    Snow falls, stiffening the tips of my fingers. I must’ve walked over twenty kilometres,
wearing a backpack, dragging luggage. I have to take a gamble. I cab it back to our
old hotel.
    I casually enter the lobby and collapse on the couch. It’s incredibly comfortable.
I sink right in, feeling the enervation drain out. The staff here know me; they know
I have no reservation for the night. I look nervously at the receptionist. He catches
my glance for half a second. He gives me a slight nod, gets back to his business,
and lets me close my eyes.

CHEEKY SON OF A CLERIC MAN
    Qom, Iran, 1995
    For Shiites, Qom was one of the holiest cities in Iran. It was home to the prestigious hawza ’ilmiyya , the largest Shiite seminary in the world, and the shrine to Hazrat
Ma’sooma—the eighth imam’s sister, and also the granddaughter of the Prophet.
    In other words, it was turban festival. It’s also where my family moved after the
eight-year war. You don’t have to be a geography enthusiast to see how bizarre this
would be to a seven-year-old kid. During the war, we lived in Abadan, on the Iraqi
border, always feeling the mortar shells caress our ears. And now, here we were,
in central Iran, about 200 kilometres from Tehran—probably the safest place we could’ve
been during the war, which now happened to be over.
    But I wasn’t a seven-year-old kid anymore. I was officially a teen. I’d been the
man of the house since age four, I’d smoked my first cigarette at seven, and I knew
how to assemble and dismantle a Kalashnikov by eleven.
    Dad was doing pretty well; he was now a qualified cleric. He taught at the hawza
’ilmiyya for 800 tomans a day, and lectured in Arabic Literature at the University
of Tehran. But 800 tomans is only about forty cents Australian, so the more things
changed, the more they’d stayed the same. We’d moved houses six times in Qom since
the war had ended. Nowadays, Mum and Dad, my two brothers and little sister and I
were renting someone’s basement.

The Mister John Walker
    Growing up in a family dominated by Arab speech, my Farsi wasn’t anywhere near as
good as the other kids’, and Dad had an uphill battle finding me a school. At meeting
after meeting, schools routinely rejected me, despite my eager recital of a Hafiz
poem I knew by heart (not that I had any idea of its meaning).
    Eventually, a teacher by the name of Mr Rashidi intervened and took pity on me. He
loved Dad’s love of the arts and theatre; he loved that Dad was a different man of
the cloth. Once enrolled, I picked up Farsi in no time.
    What’s more, I performed in every school play Mr Rashidi had written, and he even
had me over for dinner a bunch of times. One night, when his wife had cooked qormeh
sabzi —a traditional Persian herb stew, absolutely mouth-watering—Mr Rashidi offered
me a drag on one of his Marlboros. Mr Rashidi had lost his one and only son during
the war, a thirteen-year-old who’d enlisted as a minefield-clearer. He cleared one
mine. Perhaps because of this, Mr Rashidi treated me as an adult; he was always happy
to discuss complicated politics, and even fantasised openly about what it would be
like to stage an uncensored showcase of Romeo and Juliet in Iran.
    The night he offered me the Marlboro, he