Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [102]
“There’s this boy, he’s a desi,” she said to me about an Indian guy at her college. “He stalks me. He follows me from morning when I get to school till night when I get home.”
“What a freak.”
“I know, right! It’s so hot!” she said.
“Wait. You like that?” I asked.
“God, yes. I love knowing I’m turning guys on. It makes me feel like a casual slut!”
I spent days turning my tongue in Jullanar—or dreaming of it—and spent nights scouting women online just in case someone more interesting turned up:
I maintained contact with a girl in Tehran who was looking to find a Westerner to marry.
I corresponded with a woman in Saudi Arabia who was already married but was trying to escape her husband and was looking for a good brother overseas.
There was a white convert from a troubled family who couldn’t reconcile her Islam with her increasing levels of bisexuality. From time to time she called me to complain about the single-sex dance parties that the sisters in her community threw, where beautiful married and unmarried girls took off their hijabs. “They get into the little black dresses they have under their abayas and then dance on each other!” she said in a fit of frustration.
I chatted on the phone with a sister who liked to call me after she’d finished the early-morning fajr prayer and before she went to work. An only child, she had me pull sex stories from the Internet featuring brother-sister action and read them to her on the phone. “I can’t get to them myself because I share a computer with my family,” she explained sheepishly. She tended to hang up as soon as she climaxed, leaving me feeling used.
Then there was Anis. She was a pretty little hijabi I first got to know online. Although she had just entered college in a distant state when I first “met” her, she was on the cusp of getting married to a guy from New York. Our e-mail exchanges were mostly about how little she knew about sex and sexuality. I was, of course, more than eager to relieve her of her timidity.
“You don’t have to be shy about being explicit with me,” I wrote. “Muslims enjoy discussing sex.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Didn’t you know that Imam Ghazali, one of Islam’s foremost scholars, wrote a work called The Etiquette of Consummation? It contains instructions about what a man should do to and for a woman. Did you know that it’s your right as a Muslima to demand sex from your husband—and he can’t say no?”
“I had no idea the scholars said such things,” she wrote.
“Surely you’ve heard of Ibn Hazm, the great Spanish jurist.”
“Of course,” she replied.
“He also wrote a lot about sex,” I informed her, my fingers flying across the keyboard. “His most famous book is called The Ring of the Dove. It’s a tome about courtly love, but the metaphor in the title actually refers to the head of a penis. So you see: the West learned its sexual explicitness from Islam!”
“I didn’t know that,” she wrote. “Well, if it’s the Islamic thing to do, I think I’m ready to talk about sex. You can ask me stuff and I’ll answer. Ask me anything.”
I went straight to the head of the matter. “Have you gone down on your fiancé?”
“No,” she replied. “He went down on me, but I told him I wasn’t ready to do it to him.”
“When do you think you will be ready?” I typed.
“I told him that next time we see each other I want to do it. Thing is, to be quite honest I don’t know how it works. As in technically.”
That was my in. “I could give you instructions,” I offered. “Especially since I want to ensure that your courtship is successful and you end up in a proper Islamic marriage.”
“That would be great!”
“There’s just one condition,” I stipulated.
“Anything.”
“When you go down on him, you have to imagine that you’re doing it to me.”
“I was already planning on it,” she wrote, adding the wink emoticon.
“Excellent!”
“Now I have a condition,” she countered.