Woman in Niqab By Aaliyah Bilal

The day after my return home from Egypt I sat with my mother and her sister Linda, telling them about my time over there. I mentioned things I thought they wanted to hear. The Sphinx, I told them, wasn’t as big as it looked in the glossy magazines. Compared to the great pyramids on the far side of Giza, it was kind of petite with round, nubile features. The atmosphere was light. Except for prayer times when the adhan would drift up from a thousand minarets and hover in midair like a chorus of ghosts, the cities were filled with happy sounds—children laughing in the streets, the striking of hand drums, and the rhythmic clapping of distant celebrations. And all of it was covered in a haze of golden dust that primed everything for memory like the sepia tinge of old photographs.

 

We were in the temple after the Friday prayer. We sat at the end of a long table in the downstairs multipurpose room eating the roast beef, stewed cabbage, and apple cobbler the kitchen sisters worked all morning to prepare. My mom and aunt ate their food as I went on, looking up occasionally to show they weren’t ignoring me.

 

“That all sounds very interesting, Imani,” Aunt Linda said, “but I want to know the real story…like that right there.” She pointed a plastic fork at my uncovered hair. “Is that something you picked up while you were in Cairo?”

 

It was an interesting question coming from her. Temple women had certain standards of dress that my aunt barely fit. She had pretenses to good taste though her clothes always made her look like a Midwestern stage mom. Her version of covering involved stuffing her dyed blonde hair into a bedazzled baseball cap, which she wore along with shimmery tracksuits. Her lips were always painted fire engine red—a big taboo—and she never removed the polish from her claw-length nails at prayer times, as was the custom. My mother played by the rules, donning West African head wraps and floor-length skirts under loose-fitting tunics. It might have been something to quarrel over, but Aunt Linda was a full decade older than her and, as with most things between them, the younger rarely said a contrary word.

 

The truth was that Aunt Linda didn’t expect real answers when she asked kids questions, and while I was seventeen—a rising senior in high school and not quite a child anymore—I knew my aunt wouldn’t care about my reasons. My mind was made up—I was determined to stop covering and there wasn’t anything she or my mom could do about it.

 

I sort of shrugged, took a bite of cabbage, and scanned the room. The temple women sat at the other tables, some coddling infants while others walked around in long, delicate fabrics in colors as brilliant as the striped shades of test screen TV. The men traded salaams in jeans and T-shirts with keffiyahs draped at their necks, while the city professionals talked business in suits and Jinnah caps. Food smells blended harmoniously with the sweet scent of musk wafting up from incense burning in the temple bookstore. It was the usual parade of characters, though not so usual beyond the temple walls, and I marveled at it—so much so that for a moment I could almost forget the weight of air at our end of the table.

 

My mother was silent. She sat, shaking her head, looking from me back to the sickle cell anemia pamphlet she was pretending to read. She’d been acting strange since the previous afternoon when, driving up to the airport arrivals hall, she found me standing on the curb with my hair braided in two long plaits at the sides of my face—the first time since puberty that I’d ever gone outside without a headscarf.

 

On the drive home from the airport she talked mostly about my father, whom neither of us had seen or heard from for a solid month before my departure. Only days before my return home, she started making plans to meet with a lawyer.

 

“You know he still thinks I’m totally clueless about everything,” she said, “but as they say, whatever’s done in darkness always comes to light.”

 

 

She didn’t fight me too hard on the hair stuff the first night; my mother had been too preoccupied with the state of her marriage for that, but it was the constant staring of the temple folks that Friday at my uncovered hair—particularly by the Imam (the last good man on earth as far as she was concerned)—that pushed her over the edge.

 

It placed my aunt in the unusual position of mediator between us.

 

“That’s just what you get for sending her to that lily white school out in Grantville. You should have put her in the Clara Muhammad system, but no…Does Dawud know about this?” Aunt Linda asked and my mother shook her head.

 

“He has yet to call and even acknowledge that his daughter has made it back to America,” my mother said, eyes still glued to the pamphlet.

 

“You may have an easy time with your mom and me, but wait until he sees you. He’s going to lose his mind.”

 

Over a period of years I watched my father morph into someone I couldn’t recognize. He loved music, and could talk for hours about Coltrane, Monk, and Charlie Parker. “With Monk,” he would say, “people dogged his technique, but they weren’t looking at the essence of what he was doing. You don’t need to prove nothing to no one when you’ve got the essence down pat.”

 

After a while his vinyl album collection began to disappear. His conversation, once full of reflections, turned into lecturing. He started wearing a thobe everyday, then grew a full beard and dyed it orange. And in the months before he left home, my father stopped coming to temple altogether, preferring the immigrant spaces where, as he liked to say, traditions were more pure and closer to the true source of the religion.

 

“He doesn’t want to see me.” I blurted out the words and Aunt Linda peered at me as if longing for an explanation, though she stopped short of asking.

 

Then she went on to talk about—who knows what? I saw her mouth move and her wagging an index finger in my direction though whatever followed blurred into a muddle of shadow and sound.

 

~

 

I traveled with the Luqmans—a temple family my parents were close to before Mr. Luqman found a new job and moved them all to Philadelphia. When she heard about our situation, Mrs. Luqman begged that I come along with her and her two daughters, telling my mom it would help get my mind off of things.

 

We were reunited in New York where our flights connected East. I remembered Mrs. Luqman just as she appeared, broad-shouldered and stately, like Leontyne Price. She wore a long black dress, a tightly wound turban and large pearl clip-ons. She held me close on first contact—the way people do when comforting the bereaved. I shook hands with her daughters: Sumayyah, just a toddler when I last saw her, now eight years old and bubbly, and Qadirah, who was my age though more subdued than I recalled. She stood to greet me at her mother’s command, her eyes downcast, then plopped immediately back into her seat. It made Mrs. Luqman peer at Qadirah, who had resumed skimming through a copy of Vogue magazine, lifting the thick volume so high that it blocked her mother’s face.

 

“I know you’re going to simply love this trip,” Mrs. Luqman said in a tone loud enough for her daughter to hear. “From everything your mom says, you’re a most deserving girl.”

 

On the plane ride over Mrs. Luqman said, the treble in her voice worn off by drowsiness, “I’m not sure if your mom has told you, but a lot of what you’re going to hear about Egypt is going to be totally wrong. They’re going to tell you everything but the truth. That whole place was built by black people. Like everybody else in this world, they’re just ashamed of their African roots, that’s all.”

 

When we landed to Cairo she said, “Of course they would call this place the Heliopolis Airport. If it came from Greece it must be something to hold on to.” Summayah bobbed ahead of us, practicing the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian” dance, completely unaware of her mother, while Qadirah dragged her luggage along, hearing everything but saying nothing.

 

This is Cairo.

 

When we arrived at our first place of residence in Ma’adi, we were greeted by a large group of children. They had been playing on the street, though when our tour van pulled up to the apartment building they stopped their games and crowded near the door.

 

They looked at us blankly, their expressions all terrified wonder. Then, one little girl, who was Sumayyah’s height, waved at us. We all smiled at them and immediately they all giggled as if on command. Another girl approached Sumayyah, inviting her into the game they were playing. That was before a tall man in a white turban and long grey thobe emerged from the building, causing the children to scatter.

 

Mr. Abdel Messeh, our guide, told us that he was the boab of the place where we were staying. “If you need anything at all while I am away, please let him know.”

 

The boab lived on the first floor with his children and his wife Khadijah—a happily round woman, who came up morning and night to prepare our meals.

 

The flat was opulent in a way that one couldn’t gather from the façade. It had marble floors throughout, with high ceilings and two large bedrooms. I assumed Mrs. Luqman would mention something about the European look of the place, though she said nothing at all about it. Instead, she inspected the flat and smiled broadly.

 

“This is what a dollar gets you outside the U. S. of A!”

 

“I should apologize for my mom.” Qadirah opened up in our shared room. “I try to tell her how ridiculous she sounds with her conspiracy theories, but she’s too stubborn to listen.”

 

I told her it didn’t bother me—that I was just happy to be away from home doing something other than thinking about my parents.

 

Qadirah nodded, with a sympathetic frown come over her face, and paused from unpacking her things. Then she perked up. “I wonder if in a weird way,” she said, “you feel free. I mean, without your father around telling you what to do all the time.”

 

She couldn’t know the ways I vacillated between pure rage and the hope that somehow my parents might save their marriage. Qadirah still had a mom and a dad living under the same roof. She could persist under the adolescent notion that things would be better if the people who secured her life simply weren’t there.

 

“No.” I was polite. “I can’t say it feels that way.”

 

Qadirah looked at me like I misunderstood. She rifled through her luggage and lifted a large pile of scarves that had been folded into neat little squares. “I mean free from this,” she said, shaking the scarves until they lost their form and fell messily onto the bed.

 

I didn’t respond and she filled the emptiness, sitting on the bed, looking at her hands.

 

“I can’t wait to go to college,” she said. “I’m going to move so far away from home that my parents will never even dream of coming to visit. They’re so full of it.”

 

Just then we were called to dinner. I had time enough to unpack a little, wash up and consider that Qadirah was like the other girls I knew, who as soon as they left home abandoned everything connecting them to the temple. They were the kind, I was sure, that I would never become.

 

This is Cairo.

 

Madame Khadijah prepared a lavish meal for our arrival. She stood nearby as we ate, laughing heartily when Summayah turned away her portion of ful medames and blushing when she went back for second and third helpings of her excellent koshari.

 

She asked us, “Are you family from Egypt? Grandmother? Grandfather?” All of us were cinnamon in tone and looked not unlike the people we’d seen so far. Maybe it was reasonable to assume we might be from Egypt, though I knew better than to answer.

 

Mrs. Luqman was quick to say, “Yes, we are Egyptian. We are all descended from the people of ancient Kemet.” She made a big circle with her arms as if holding us all inside.

 

Mrs. Khadijah laughed, totally oblivious to her meaning, which made Qadirah cover her mouth to chuckle.

 

I pointed at the baladi bread basket, which we’d emptied within minutes of sitting down to eat.

 

Mrs. Khadijah sent me downstairs to the boab who walked with me the short distance from our building to the local baker’s shop.

 

We stood there waiting for the artisan to complete our order, when a little boy with skin like night approached me from behind.

 

“Hello, mum,” he said in perfect English, a hand outstretched, his eyes waxing like tiny moons. I really liked Egypt though would never claim it as my own. In that moment with the boy I felt a strange connection, a kind of instantaneous identification; the sort of familiarity that temple folks spoke about after visits to West Africa.

 

I reached into my purse to grab a few coins when the boab moved in front of me. He forcefully shooed the boy away and sent him running down the street. The boab frowned as he watched him go. He muttered a string of words; one sounding like “Sudani” and then something else said in scathing Arabic that I didn’t understand. He shook an angry fist in the air until the boy disappeared around a corner.

 

This, too (I learned), is Cairo.

 

~

 

A booming voice planted at the foot of the stairs made all of the temple folks turn away from their chatter. It was Brother Mustafa who wore inch-thick glasses that made his eyes look like tiny black pebbles. In a voice raspy from years of selling T-shirts on the street, he announced that the shurah meeting would be starting in a few minutes. Anyone concerned with fundraising or helping organize the temple’s 12-step outreach program was encouraged to come. A small trail of people followed him from behind but most stayed, and the room returned to a hum of conversation.

 

As he spoke I scanned the room looking for Sister Abdul-Mubarak—one of the temple seniors who approached me weeks before when she learned about my trip. She’d been on the pilgrimage years back, she’d said, but always wanted to go to Cairo. I went with the intention to bring her something nice and settled on a delicate-looking scarab jewelry box bought from the Khan al-Khalili souk. I carried it with me to temple that Friday and was hoping she would appear so I could give it to her and see the surprise on her face.

 

“I remember the Luqmans,” Aunt Linda said, through chews of gravy-dipped roast beef. “I know they are decent people, but was Mrs. Luqman too strict? Sometimes when parents are too strict the children go in the wrong direction.”

 

Mom and I traded a brief glance. I knew in the moment that, like me, she was thinking of Aunt Linda’s son’s—my cousins Saeed and Kareem. I thought of the times years back when she would chase them around the house with a leather strap when they punctured her waterbed or tore strands from the beaded curtains she hung at the mouth of her kitchen. It had been years since I’d seen them. Each time I begged my mother to let me visit my cousins, she said that where they were was no place a girl like me should ever have to go. I looked again at my aunt, though her glance betrayed any sense of irony.

 

“You know what I read the other day?” Aunt Linda went on, “A girl—twenty years old—in school here in the city was out running with some girlfriends one night and got assaulted right in the middle of the street. Yes, child! Her girlfriends were in sweatpants. She was the only one in a tank top and biking shorts. You see that? Dress like that out here and you’ll pay for it one way or another.”

 

A woman in full niqab entered the multipurpose room from upstairs. I watched as she walked around, never settling in any of the chairs. She didn’t stand in line to wait for food. She moved from corner to corner of the room, then disappeared behind the curtain to the women’s bathroom.

 

“Excuse me.” Aunt Linda tapped me on the shoulder. “Can I distract you for a minute? What would you tell that girl who was assaulted? Is there something she could have done to avoid that situation?”

 

“What about the guy that assaulted her,” I said, though I was still thinking of the woman. “Isn’t it his fault?”

 

“What your aunt is trying to say,” my mother interjected, “is that hijab is a protection for you.”

 

Then Aunt Linda said, “Hijab says to a bad man, ‘This girl’s off limits.’”

 

“But what about when it doesn’t?” I asked.

 

My mother looked at me confused though Aunt Linda wore an expression like she’d been called something unholy. She then proceeded to rattle off a list of things she’d do if her kids ever “talked back” to her that began, “They’d be the youngest patients up at Dentures Direct because I would have knocked the teeth right out their mouths…”

 

Some moments later, the Imam’s wife walked by. Aunt Linda noticed and her expression changed from a snarl to a smile. She pursed her mouth and nodded. “I’m doing fine, sister. I’m just fine. You know…just trying to stay on the straight path, Insha Allah!”

 

~

 

The day before we caught the train headed up the river delta toward Alexandria, Mr. Abdel Messeh moved us from Ma’adi to an apartment in Zamalek, which was closer to the railway station. The new place was on a tree-lined street with large apartment buildings that seemed plucked out of Paris’s 5^th arrondissement. Moving in to that night’s dwelling was unremarkable, except that seconds after we disembarked the van a woman in a full covering appeared at some distance down the road—a woman whom, in the aftermath, none of the Luqmans claimed to have seen.

 

The others lugged their bags into the marble foyer of our temporary residence though I watched her in silence. The sight of her standing in the street puzzled me. All of my exposure to women in niqab taught me that they were always tended to; that you’d never find such a woman in public without a male to accompany her. They were the aristocrats of the Arab world who would never dare spend time in public and suffer the indecency of being seen by everyday people. And yet there she was—a hand clutching a purse at her side, her head ticking hurriedly back and forth.

 

A car disturbed the quiet, vrooming past me in the direction of the shrouded woman. It stopped before her. Then, I saw the woman duck into the vehicle and watched the car pull off before she even had a chance to close the door.

I would try to make sense of what I saw that afternoon and constantly returned to the same conclusion—but no, it couldn’t be. That was fantasy—just the sort of thing the temple folks would call a perversion of reality. She was probably an extremely pious woman. More than likely that was her husband, a brother, or an uncle just swinging by to pick her up, all except that there was no care in the gesture. I looked again down the road, just as Mrs. Luqman called me back onto the sidewalk, and the car was gone, as if all it had been was a desert apparition—there, and suddenly not there.

 

We stayed in Alexandria for only two days before our trip to Luxor, and got to see the rebuilt library, eat fried squid, and watch the cold Mediterranean waters crash onto the rocky shoreline. The city was sparse with people and Mrs. Luqman allowed me a bit more freedom than usual. I explored the side streets and the markets and I took tons of pictures.

 

Back at the hotel I sat on the bed, scrolling through the frames, when Qadirah came into the room to say that someone was on the phone for me.

 

“Hey, baby girl.” It was my father. “It’s been a long time since I’ve heard from you so I had to track you down.” I should have felt upset at this—How was it my obligation to reach out to him?—but I let his voice wash over me, appreciating the notes of concern. “How are you enjoying Egypt?” I told him everything was fine. I told him I missed him and wondered when he was coming home.

 

“I’m just glad you’re having fun,” he redirected. “That’s all I want for you. You know, I don’t know what you heard but I have a feeling there’s a lot of misinformation going on about why your mother and I are having problems these days. I wanted you to know that I don’t want to end the marriage personally, your mother does. I’ve just been growing in my deen and that’s where she and I disagree.”

 

“Mom is in the deen, too,” I said. I immediately regretted the smallness in my voice. Then I asked him, “Dad, have you been talking to another woman?”

 

The phone seemed to go dead for an instant. I heard him sigh.

 

“Imani, it’s not that simple. Let me explain because this is difficult for a young person to understand. As a man, this deen gives us certain…rights and responsibilities. First, there’s nothing incorrect going on between me and this woman.”

 

I felt the receiver slip as my hand grew sweaty.

 

“She’s a real believer, very deep in the deen. She knows three juz of Quran and makes all of her prayers on time. Honestly, I think you would like her.”

 

I asked him if I knew her.

 

“Maybe, but I don’t think so,” he said. “She wears a full covering so if you’ve seen her you probably wouldn’t know it.”

 

And then, I lost it.

 

“I can’t believe,” I said, “that you would call me after a month of not reaching out just so I could co-sign your affair. And that woman!” I choked up. “You think I’m so impressed that she wears niqab? Don’t you know that prostitutes wear the veil over here?”

 

I said this emphatically and he was silent. I went on, talking about mom and her suffering before I was interrupted by the male voice of an automated Telecom Egypt phone operator saying that my call had been disconnected. No one could coax me out of the room that night, not after what my father did, and not after I’d cursed him on the basis of something I didn’t know to be absolutely true.

 

The next day I tried to go back to normal, covering my hair for the rest of my time away, but the cloth always shifted out of place. I waited for the Luqmans to make their connection in New York and when they disappeared down the boarding dock, I removed the scarf in a single tug and told myself it would be forever.

 

~

 

Aunt Linda and my mother were off on a tangent when Sister Abdul-Mubarak appeared at the temple entryway, headed for the dinner line. They didn’t notice me smile and wave at her. They didn’t see her look back at me smiling, nor did they see her smile turn into a squint, then a frown. She was with a group of pioneer sisters—women who lived in that space since the days of Malcolm, who were present for the breaking of the ground beneath our feet. I knew then that she would not draw close enough to say hello, much less accept the gift.

 

I couldn’t finish the apple cobbler. I reached for one of the braids and immediately moved my hand away upon feeling it. How strange: the way something so plain and unassuming as a braid could feel so unseemly.

 

The woman in niqab re-emerged from the bathroom. I stared at her, intent to make out her features through the small patch that exposed her eyes. We traded glances for a prolonged instant before she exited the building through the temple front door.

 

“But what are you going to do about people who think you’re, you know, out there?” Aunt Linda said. I heard the screeching of a folding chair in a far corner and the mute sounds of shoes on linoleum. “No offense, Imani,” she said to me, “you’re young and you’re curious but Sheila, you’re not just going to let her go out with people thinking she’s a bad woman.”

 

Mom shifted in her seat. She put the pamphlet down and peered at Aunt Linda as if she were looking at something far away.

 

“Your mother’s not going to tell you this but you’re going to be walking around one day and it’s not going to matter that you’ve been to Cairo or Alexandria or to the moon and back. Those people are going to think, ‘Who would let their daughter go outside like that?’”

 

“Just what are you saying about my child?,” my mother said, her voice curled with newborn incredulity. “I know you’re not calling her a…”

 

“Now don’t go putting words in my mouth, Sheila.” Aunt Linda interrupted; her voice shook in a way I’d never heard it do when she talked to my mother. “You know I would never speak an insulting word to my own flesh and blood!” They whispered but in whispering, their words came out hissing and sharp. I looked around, hoping that no one around us would sense what was really happening.

 

“Get your things,” Mom told me. She grabbed her purse and turned again to her sister. By then there were a few eyes on us. Aunt Linda lowered the bill of her cap until it pointed to the ground.

 

“If you are so worried about what these kids are up to these days,” she said, “you should start with your own. Maybe then they would be out here with the rest of us, and not wasting away in Lorton. Come on, Imani.” My mother started for the door. I followed her but not before an even deeper shame came over me. I looked back to see Aunt Linda hunched over her cobbler. She stared into it, poking the contents with her fork like searching for an answer.

 

The drive home was mostly quiet. There was only the sound of the engine and tires on asphalt and the rasp of my own fingers scratching the filigree side of the scarab jewelry box. The rosy light of dusk illuminated the sky. It made me think of the end of summer. There were four more weeks of vacation before the start of my senior year of high school and yet I was already missing fireflies and eight o’clock sunsets.

 

“Penny for your thoughts.” My mother’s voice was soft and coaxing.

 

I told her I was sorry. That I felt like I had triggered a falling out between her and her sister.

 

“Girl?!” She was teasingly flippant. “We’ll be back to normal by midweek. Don’t you even worry about that. After all of the things your aunt has said and done, she should be relieved I didn’t really give her a piece of my mind.”

 

The tightness in my shoulders, that I didn’t know was there, seemed to release.

 

“I changed my mind,” I said. “I’m going to start covering again.”

 

My mom wrinkled her nose. “Are you doing this for me? I’m not going to force you. The last thing I want is for you to hate me.”

 

“Only at the temple,” I said. “I just don’t think that I can cover outside anymore.”

 

We passed beyond the city limits and approached a grove of trees that to me had always signaled the nearness of home. The pink residue of day sped further toward the horizon and all else turned a royal azure. Venus and a crescent moon appeared in the eastern sky.

 

“Honey, I think I will learn to be okay with this choice. I should have defended you, but I know that covering is a protection. I know it is. I guess the only thing I don’t quite understand is, what happened?”

 

That’s when I looked to my mother, took a deep breath, and began to tell her everything.

 

 

 

 

Aaliyah Bilal is a writer based in Shanghai, China. She is working on a novel.