One Half from the East

  His are bold, shiny. Mine are fluttering, frightened little things.

  “You just sit there and let things happen to you. If we were playing soccer instead of ghursai, you would look more like the ball than a player.”

  My face burns. I’m feeling exposed—like he can see my insides from where he stands.

  I should walk away. But I can’t because every word from his mouth is true, and it’s hard to walk away from someone who knows me so well. Part of me wants to know what he’ll say next, as much as it might hurt.

  “Don’t you have anything to say? Where’s your voice?” he mocks. “If you don’t have anything to say, maybe you should run home and play with your sister’s dolls.”

  Was he talking about Alia?

  “What do you know about my sister?” My head is spinning. My breaths are shallow and tight. I get the words out with a whole lot of effort. “Why do you think you know me?”

  The boy grabs my shoulders with both of his hands. His fingers are so strong, I can feel them pressing into the ligaments that connect my arm to my body. I think he might throw me to the ground and walk away, but he doesn’t. Instead, he brings his face to my ear and whispers a truth that will be mine and his.

  “I know you because I am you.”

  Nine

  I know you because I am you.

  I hadn’t expected him to say that.

  My mother watches me. When school started I dragged my feet. I wanted to go but wasn’t sure what people would say to me. All that changed after that boy breathed that one heavy sentence into my ear.

  I have to see him again.

  My mother tries to decipher my new enthusiasm. She hasn’t seen me this eager to go to school since we were in Kabul, but I was a girl then and our family was different.

  My sisters and I leave the house together. It’s chilly and I’m glad I have a boys’ sweater on over my shirt. At the end of the main road, Neela turns left to go toward her school. When we were in Kabul, my parents had started talking about her going to college. There’s nothing after high school in this village, though, and Neela knows that. In the village, we take what we can get. Water, electricity, schooling—none of it’s guaranteed.

  I duck into my classroom. My teacher already seems to have lost interest in me. I’m just another student to her now. The boy next to me is sharpening his pencil.

  We’re instructed to recite our multiplication tables. I don’t mind the math, so the morning goes by quickly.

  Recess comes and I’m the first one out the door. The sun is bright and heat radiates from the earth. I look for him, but he’s not in the yard. I scan from left to right, searching for figures of the right height, looking for a blue hat and reminding myself he might not be wearing it today. When my eyes fall on him, I feel my heart pause.

  He . . . Should I call him he or she? He, I decide, because that’s what he wants to be. He is walking with his three friends. I’ve seen them playing soccer, reading magazines, and kicking at each other as if they were kung fu masters. Having seen one or two American movies starring Bruce Lee, the gravity-defying actor, I am ready to tell them they look amateurish. Their kicks are askew, their arms choppy. I watch the boy in the blue hat. He manages to catch his friend’s foot as it flies toward him. He laughs and pushes the foot to the right, sending his friend spinning. I feel myself start to smile.

  Not bad . . . for a girl.

  I watch his body. Even though he is about three years older than me, his body is not. I don’t see knobs on his chest. I don’t know what else to look for. If he hadn’t told me, I never would have known. He moves as the rest of them move. I wonder how he’s trained his body to do that. I feel meek and flimsy watching him.

  I move closer to his friends. Are they girls too? I stare at them, trying to analyze the angles of their jaws, the shapes of their hands. I narrow in on their upper lips and eyebrows, hoping hair will separate reality from disguise. In the end, I’m not sure either way. If the boy with the blue cap managed to trick me, everyone is a question mark.

  “Hey! Hey, you! What are you staring at?”

  I’m startled when I realize one of the boys has noticed me. I run my fingers along the bark of a mulberry tree that shades the schoolyard and turn my eyes to the ground.

  “Don’t act like you didn’t hear me!”

  The blue hat boy turns around and realizes I’m the gawker his friend has caught. I raise my hand and shrug my shoulders in a messy gesture of admission and apology. I don’t know if he understands, but the blue-hat boy’s face goes serious. He says something to his friends and walks in my direction.

  “What are you doing?” he says when he gets close enough that I can hear him.

  “I was hoping . . . I wanted to talk to you some more because . . . Did you mean what you said?”

  He raises his eyebrows. He wants me to say it.

  I take a deep breath in and exhale my question, careful to lower my voice even though there’s no one within yards of us.

  “Are you a bacha posh?”

  “Of course I am,” he says with a funny smile. His voice is softer than it was the last time we spoke. Something heavy in the air between us disappears. I can’t help but stare at his lips and his face. Just for a second, I can see him as a girl. I picture him with long hair and his face makes total sense. “But I’m not new to this like you are. You better get used to it quickly or you’ll attract a lot of attention—and it won’t be good attention.”

  I bite my lip. I know he’s right. Several kids look at me with curiosity. Others don’t notice me at all. Then there are the rare ones that stare outright, like they’ve spotted an extinct animal.

  “What should I do?”

  “You’re a bacha posh. Forget everything else and be a boy.”

  “But I’ve been a girl my whole life. How can I forget everything?”

  “It’s not as hard as you might think.” He fidgets with his hat, adjusts the rim so it shields his eyes from the sun. “I think I can help you.”

  “What’s your name?” I ask him.

  “Rahim.” His grin is mischievous.

  “Rahim,” I repeat. “And before?”

  “Rahima,” he says. His grin fades. Her grin fades? What should I call this person? I figure he won’t like me very much if I refer to him as a girl in any way, even if it’s just in my head. I make up my mind that Rahim will be a boy and nothing else. “But now that name sounds like it belongs to someone else. I don’t think I would even turn my head if I heard someone calling Rahima on the street.”

  Is it possible to leave your name behind? Could I ever not be Obayda? I can’t imagine it. That might be what’s holding me back from being like Rahim.

  We sit on an old tire left on the side of the schoolyard. Rahim is wearing jeans thinned at the knees and a polo T-shirt. I’m wearing cargo pants meant for a boy younger than me, so my ankles stick out.

  “Was it hard for you?”

  He does not ask me what I mean. He does not shy away from the question. He knows why I’m asking. It’s nice being able to talk to someone who gets me.

  I know you because I am you.

  “In the beginning I was a girl dressed in boy clothes. That was really hard. I didn’t know how to act. I wanted to cross my legs and fix my head scarf.” He laughs at the thought of it. I laugh too, trying to imagine what Rahim would look like with a head scarf tied over his W-I-Z-A-R-D-S hat. It’s as silly as the American actor dressed like a grandmother.

  “But then I realized I couldn’t be a girl dressed in boy clothes. I had to be a boy wearing my clothes. This is the best thing. You can wake up and throw on those ugly, too-short pants and run to school. You should jump up and down and be loud when you want to be and eat all you can. You should tell people what you think and score goals and let your father look at you like you’re the future president of Afghanistan.”

  “How do I do that?”

  Rahim stares at me. He bites his lip. I start to regret my question.
I feel like he’s about to pick me apart in that painful way that he does.

  “Stand up,” he says. His voice goes from delicate to rough in no time.

  I do it, wondering for a split second if I have tire treads on my backside.

  “Do you remember what I told you the other day? Look at the way you stand, the way you hide your eyes. Being a boy is not all in your pants. It’s in your head. It’s in your shoulders.” He’s jabbing at me to make his point.

  “Cut it out,” I mutter.

  “What?” Rahim cocks his head to the side and flicks my earlobe. I swipe at his hand, but I’m too late and get nothing but air.

  “I said cut it out!” I’m annoyed. Rahim has a way of spoiling conversations with his antics. I don’t want to be his punching bag.

  He palms my forehead and pushes me toward the ground.

  This time I kick at him. I fall to the ground but manage to bring my foot to his shin on my way down. He lets out a howl and claps triumphantly.

  “Better,” he says. “Stand tall. Stick your chin out like you’re daring me to hit it. Set your feet apart. You’ve got boy parts, don’t forget. Keep your palms open and let your arms swing while you walk. If you hear something behind you, turn around and look for it. When you run, slap your whole foot on the ground, not just your toes. Are you carrying eggs in your pockets?”

  Eggs?

  “No? Then don’t walk like you are. Run like you’re not afraid of cracking any shells!”

  He points at my feet, nudges my chin and my elbows. I listen to his words and feel my body loosen. It’s easier to breathe. Why is that?

  “What else?”

  “You’re a boy, not a bacha posh, Obayd. If you get that, there is nothing else. You know your weaknesses now, don’t you? Boys aren’t supposed to have weaknesses. Boys are built of rock and metal. We eat meat and show our teeth.”

  “And girls?”

  “Girls are made of flower petals and paper bags. They eat berries and sip tea like something might jump out of the hot water and bite them.”

  I was torn—half of me angry at his depiction of girls and the other half of me proud not to be one for now.

  “I don’t know if that’s true,” I say. I don’t want to contradict him, but I’ve never thought of myself as a paper bag. “Tell me honestly, you’re happy being a bacha posh?”

  “Is that even a question? Why would I want to be anything else?” He looks at me as if I’ve got potatoes for ears. “You’re new to this, which means you know what it is to be a girl. Was it anything worth being?”

  I’m not sure how to answer. He starts to stroll the length of the schoolyard. I follow, trying to synchronize my pace with his. Left foot, right foot, left foot . . . his legs are longer than mine and I fall off beat often.

  “Me? I didn’t like it one bit. I didn’t realize I had a choice or I would have asked my mother to change me years ago. Do you know what I used to do when I was a girl? Help in the kitchen, help with the laundry, serve tea to guests, run from the boys in the streets . . .”

  I did all those things just a few weeks ago. Did I hate it? Maybe I did. Maybe it was all awful and I didn’t know any better. Maybe everything had been blurry till this exact moment, this one conversation.

  “It just feels so strange right now,” I confess.

  “It’ll get easier. It sort of just happens. For me, it happened the day I got this hat.” He points to his blue cap. “The day I got this hat, I knocked over four boys playing ghursai and stayed on my feet for the whole game. I haven’t fallen once as long as I have this hat on. It’s like a good-luck charm. Stick close by and it’ll rub off on you too.”

  Rahim looks over at his friends, who are heading back into the school. I feel lucky to have this exciting new friend. If we were girls, we wouldn’t have ever met. It’s only because we’re a special kind of boy that we have found each other. Maybe his hat has rubbed off on me already. When he turns back to me, I can see the girl in his eyes. He takes my hand and squeezes it between his long, thin fingers.

  “Nobody helped me when I first changed. But I’m going to help you. We’ll be like brothers!” He laughs. I laugh too—not because he’s funny, but because I’m happy.

  He always seems to have a look on his face, and now that I can stare at him straight on and not out of the corner of my eye, I can see what the look really is. Rahim looks like he can do anything.

  Ten

  I’ve been a bacha posh for four weeks and five days, and I’ve finally settled into my class. Sometimes a game of ghursai starts up at recess. Rahim and I play on the same field but never on the same team because pairing up might call attention to what we have in common. I’m a little better than I was during that first game, which is good because being friends with Rahim doesn’t mean anything once the attack command rings out. I can get almost halfway to the other team’s side, but I’m still one of the first to be knocked out. Every single time.

  I’ve gone from thinking Rahim was out to get me to being best friends with him. He even introduced me to his friends, Ashraf and Abdullah, and they like me, even though I’m younger than them.

  Rahim and I meet after school a few days a week. My sisters shoot me looks over their shoulders as they trudge home. I’m allowed to stay out for a while. Now that I have Rahim to talk to, I like having this extra time, and I use it. The distance between us and my sisters widens. Once they’re too far to hear, we can talk about the things that are about us and only us.

  “One little letter fell off the back end of my name and my world changed. It’s the smallest little letter, barely even a sound. Rahim . . . Rahima. See? If you say it fast enough, you could miss it. Who ever thought such a tiny little letter could make such a big difference?”

  Rahim has a lot he wants to teach me, things he couldn’t tell anyone who isn’t just like him. I’m ready to listen because no one else will tell me things—not even my mother.

  “How long have you been a boy?” I have so many questions to ask Rahim. Sometimes I forget the questions I thought up overnight, but it works out fine because there’s always something else to ask.

  “I’ve been a boy since I was nine years old. Not that different from you, actually.”

  “You don’t have any brothers?”

  “If I did, I wouldn’t be what I am,” he says simply. When it’s just the two of us, his voice is much softer than it is around the boys. “I’m the middle sister in my family. I’ve got two sisters older than me and two younger than me. Sometimes my father would pull us out of school. He didn’t like that boys were following us home or teasing us. He thought people would start talking.”

  I know what he means by that. Getting attention is not a good thing for girls in our village. Things were the same in Kabul, too. Even just a little attention from a stranger could get a girl dragged into the house so fast her feet might get left outside. It’s almost as if all girls are born knowing what could happen, so we try to move around outside like ghosts—keeping our voices low, our footsteps light, and our eyes to the ground.

  “So my aunt came up with this idea to make me a bacha posh. Now I come to school and no one bothers me. No one follows me. I even work after school.”

  His chest puffs out as he shares that last bit with me.

  “This was my aunt’s idea too,” I admit. “What work do you do?”

  “Do you know the electronics shop on the same block as the baker? I help out there. I’m learning a lot.”

  That seems awfully grown-up to me. I wonder if the job is harder than he’s making it sound. I know some kids who work in shops have it really rough, especially the ones who don’t go to school at all. I’m glad we’re not so poor that I have to carry bricks or sacks of rice. Fixing radios might be interesting, but I doubt I’d be lucky enough to find something so professional-sounding.

  “Do you know any other boys like us?” That’s what I call bacha poshes now—boys like us.

  “Lots,” he says, his eyes wide
for emphasis. They’ve got the unmistakable sparkle of a girl, but I guess most people don’t pay close attention.

  “Lots? Like how many? In this school?” I look up and down the dirt street. Have I missed spotting them?

  “No, no. Not here. But in other neighborhoods and in other villages.”

  I wonder what it would be like to meet them or if I would even recognize one the way Rahim recognized me. I think I would now that I’ve met Rahim. Until I got to know him, I found it hard to believe another bacha posh could really exist. But knowing there are two of us makes me look at all the boys around me and wonder if I’ll spot another.

  Rahim adjusts the cap on his head, which makes me think of something I noticed the first day I saw my new friend.

  “Hey, Rahim, what does why-zar-dis mean?”

  Rahim spins around to look at me. He looks confused. “What did you say?”

  “Your hat. I’ve been wondering what why-zar-dis means.” My words are slower this time.

  Rahim erupts in thick laughter. It seems to be coming from somewhere deep in his body.

  My face gets hot. I know for certain I’ve said the wrong thing. I want him to stop laughing. I fold my arms across my chest and wait for him to stop. When he doesn’t, I kick his calf.

  “Ow! What did you do that for?” he whines, rubbing his leg. He’s not laughing anymore. “Come on, Obayd. It was funny. Don’t be so sensitive.”

  “Don’t be such a jerk.”

  Rahim gets like this sometimes. I know it’s because he’s older than me and he’s been a boy longer, but it’s still annoying. He’s like Khala Aziza, my Let me tell you what you should do aunt.

  “It’s wizards,” he says plainly, which is just about as good as an apology. “My cousin in America sent me this hat. It’s a basketball team over there.”

  “Oh.”

  We keep walking. It’s late afternoon and Rahim is walking me home—something he always does. He says it’s because he likes walking, but I know he’s looking out for me too. I really like having a best friend who’s older than me. Rahim looks out for me the way my oldest sister, Neela, does, but it’s also different—more like an older brother, I guess.