Good Muslim Boy by Osamah Sami

Author:Osamah Sami
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Hardie Grant Books
Published: 2015-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

LESSONS TO LEARN

Melbourne, Australia, 1995–97

Nailed it

In school, I was placed in a class with other kids like me: losers who couldn’t speak the language. English was taught by Ms Hunter, a woman in her early forties who had a way of making sure every student listened to her with absorbed rapture. It had to do with her choices of clothing, which made her look a decade younger, a decade feistier and a decade spicier.

Ninos was the dirtiest and naughtiest of us all—a horny, acne-prone nineteen-year-old Christian Iraqi. He had failed this class twice before, which he insisted was nowhere near a deliberate attempt to clock more hours in the presence of Ms Hunter’s ‘saucy wagon’.

That saucy wagon had some interesting ideas. Ms Hunter was a three-time divorcee, and liked to engage us in debates over why Arab men were permitted to marry four wives, while their wives were distinctly not afforded that luxury.

Enter yours painfully.

Upon my arrival in Ms Hunter’s class, I quickly established myself as the resident philosopher with worse English than anybody’s, who nonetheless liked to challenge everyone on everything. I was already in her bad books for saying ‘sex-cuse me’ (‘It’s excuse me’), and for accidentally calling her old (when she was forced to explain the finer points of ‘Miss’, which was used for younger single women, versus ‘Mzzz’, which was for women like herself).

‘Sex-cuse me, Mzzzz Hunter,’ I said. ‘Let me telling you why Muslim man can marry four womans and one woman cannot marry four mans.’ It was a regular sermon. ‘Okay, you have a container of water, in it one litre of water and you pour the water in four glasses. Good?’

She gave a brief nod.

‘Very good. So we have four water coming from one source. If I ask you, Mzzz Hunter, the first glass of water, who it comes from, you will say the container. I say the second glass, who it come from? You say still container. But! If I take glasses and pour them back in container, can you tell me which water belong to which glass? Of course no! All is mixed. You do not know which is which.’

‘So what?’ she said, sceptically.

‘So. When there is one container, ONE MAN’—it was time to bring home the analogy—‘his children all have one father. But if woman marry four husbands, and she has children, who is father? You don’t know. All mixed. See, Islam think of everything,’ I concluded, pleased as a cock in the morning.

‘You can get DNA testing,’ she flatly replied.

‘What this one, DNA?’ I asked.

‘It’s a scientific test which reveals who the father is.’

‘But the container…I was told it is always right,’ I exhaled, face reddening.

‘I’m not sure you’ve quite nailed this one, Osamah.’

At the bus stop that afternoon, I consulted with Moe Greene. Even though he didn’t go to a language school, he still caught the bus with me.

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