The Other Half of You

by Michael Mohammed Ahmad

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

' I only ever asked you for one thing,' my father said, a quiver in his voice. 'Just this one thing.' It was as though I had smashed the Ten Commandments. 'Oh father,' I cried, grovelling at his ankles while my mother and siblings looked on. 'The one thing you asked of me - is everything.' Bani Adam has known all his life what was expected of him. To marry the right kind of girl. To make the House of Adam proud. But Bani wanted more than this - he wanted to make his own choices. Being the first in his Australian Muslim family to go to university, he could see a different way. Years later, Bani will write his story to his son, Kahlil. Telling him of the choices that were made on Bani's behalf and those that he made for himself. Of the hurt he caused and the heartache he carries. Of the mistakes he made and the lessons he learned. In this moving and timely novel, Michael Mohammed Ahmad balances the complexities of modern love with the demands of family, tradition and faith. The Other Half of You is the powerful, insightful and unforgettable new novel from the Miles Franklin shortlisted author of The Lebs. PRAISE FOR THE LEBS WINNER NSW Premier's Literary Awards Multicultural NSW Award 2019 SHORTLISTED Miles Franklin Literary Award 2019 'an open-eyed and highly charismatic novel broiling with fight, tenderness and ambition' Big Issue 'wonderfully vivid and compelling . . . utterly authentic' Books+Publishing

Release date: May 26, 2021

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 352

Sample

RUST IS MY BLOOD. Stardust is my soul. And you are the blood of my soul. Kah-lil: the back of the tongue taking a trip to the front of the palate to ululate, at one, on the teeth. You come tearing through your mother and into this universe like zamzam water, which sprung from the desert of your ancestors. Kah. Lil. You are thrown into your mother’s frail and freckled and fair arms. Aajin against aajin – dough against dough. Kahlil. I have seen you emerge from her with my face on your face, and in this way, we three are connected for eternity. But do you know, my aajin, my zamzam, my blood soul, my rust and stardust, that you may have never been sent forth as a living arrow, at least not through the bow of your mother and me, looking like the little White Wog that you are, were it not for the Brown girl who wore a cross. You brought me here. Now let me take you back.



Back when the internet was foreign to our third-world parents, I met her on a dial-up chat site. This was the only way that Lebs like me, who grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney and went to Punchbowl Boys High School, knew how to find girls. My online name was Leb-Prince. Hers was Desert-Girl. She sent me a message that said, Can I be your princess? I gave her my mobile number and for three months she called me every morning as soon as she woke up. She told me her real name was Sahara and that she had spent her childhood at a women’s refuge in Glebe and that she used to suck on old chicken bones. She had a bubbly voice that bounced like argileh every time she giggled. I told her I had a big broken nose. She said she didn’t care about looks, so I asked her to meet me in person. ‘I’m not pretty either,’ she warned. That was the first time I wanted to hold her. I did not expect a woman to be thin and fair and blonde and blue-eyed and button-nosed.

She agreed to have a coffee with me in Newtown on 1 February, my nineteenth birthday, even though neither of us drank coffee. ‘I can meet you at that cafe near the cinema, Sin-Key,’ I told her. Sahara chuckled and said it was pronounced, ‘Chin-Kway’. She was wiser than any Leb girl I had ever met in Bankstown, those girls who said ‘Macdanas’ instead of ‘McDonald’s’.

Sahara was sitting at a table in the cafe, dressed in a wife-beater and reading A Woman of No Importance when I arrived. I knew I loved her the moment she raised her tomato-shaped head and looked at me. Her eyes were big and brown and bright and sad. I could see her entire childhood at the centre of her pupils – her father beating her mother in front of her, and the chicken bones she hid under her bed. Maybe love comes in pieces; and I loved the pieces I’d gathered from her over the phone, and now I loved the sight of her. Or maybe love is just one piece; and I was already in love with all of her, and she was going to be beautiful to me no matter what.

Sahara smiled like a child and said in the bubbling voice I had come to know so well, ‘Heya Bani.’ She was broad-shouldered and solid for a Leb chick, who were often busty but thin everywhere else, and she was dark-skinned for a Lebanese Christian, the tanned complexion of a sand-girl, a copper coating that glowed golden in the daylight. Her hair was dark brown and bushy and her eyebrows were thick, her nose pudgy and cheeks puffy. Sahara’s gaze on me was like the sun, too powerful for my eyes to bear. As though it were against my will, I found my glare dropping down past our table and at her feet. Her legs, much like her shoulders and arms, were thick, and she’d shaved them only to the point where you could still see the black dots of her stubble. She wore black flip-flops and her second toes were longer than her big toes. They reminded me of Uma Thurman’s toes in Kill Bill, when The Bride stares at them inside the yellow car and tries to make them twitch. Fine black hairs covered Sahara’s big toes and ran all the way up her legs towards her denim shorts. Again, I thought about the chicks I’d grown up with in Bankstown. Those girls straightened and dyed their hair blonde and wore skimpy singlets and skinny jeans; they were always drenched in make-up like clowns and waxed every part of their bodies – legs, arms, armpits, eyebrows and whiskers. Sahara was something else: too much Glebe in her to be a Leb, too much Lebanon in her to be a hippie.

Staring back into her eyes, my heart roared inside my chest as though it were trying to break free from my rib cage. You see, Kahlil, I already knew that I was not allowed to be with a girl who was not an Arab Muslim Alawite. It did not matter that Sahara was Lebanese, that our parents and grandparents had come from the same village and had the same complexions. She was Christian. And it wouldn’t have mattered if she converted to Muslim, because she could never convert to Alawite, a branch of Shi’ism that could only be passed on through our bloodline. I heard my father’s voice inside my head. Ten Ramadans ago, while breaking our fast on halal cheeseburgers at Lakemba McDonald’s, he said to me, ‘You can drink, you can gamble, you don’t need to pray, I will throw you the biggest wedding, I will buy you the biggest house, on one condition: you don’t ever marry an outsider.’ That’s what we called a person who wasn’t Arab Muslim Alawite – outsider. My father had told me stories of Alawites foolish enough to take one, that they had been disowned and banished and then struck down by a thunderbolt from Allah for having contaminated our divine origin. In contrast, he reassured me how much easier it would be with a girl from our tribe: ‘You will be free, rich, protected, safe, included, loved.’

For the next twenty-four months Sahara and I dated in secret, spending most of our time at her housing commission unit. On her bed, which was just a mattress on the floor, she shared her story with me. Her mother, Lola, was a triplet who had twenty-one siblings. She came to Australia alone and against her father’s blessing to be with the man she loved, a taxi driver from Jabal Mohsen named Antoun, who whipped her with his belt for nine years. Sahara’s earliest memory was fleeing to the refuge with her mother late one night while her father was out doing his taxi route. By the time she and Lola had been offered a home by the housing commission, her parents were divorced and she never saw her father again. Nor did she ever meet any of her father’s relatives, who called her mother a whore for leaving him, or her mother’s relatives, who blamed Lola and disowned her for choosing the wrong man against their wishes. Over the years, Sahara’s mother met a handful of other migrant women in those housing commission units in a similar situation to her own, and they all got jobs at the only kebab shop on Glebe Point Road, where they worked and gossiped during the daytime. Meanwhile, Sahara attended Glebe High School, failing all her subjects until she dropped out in Year 9 and got an evening job at Ultimo McDonald’s. This set-up meant that I almost never saw my girlfriend’s mother – while she was out during the day, Sahara would be at home, and just as her mother was returning, Sahara would leave for work and I left with her. All except for this one time when I had fallen asleep on the couch and Sahara left for work without waking me up. Her mother covered me in a blanket and watched television on mute until I stirred. I shook the sleep from my face as the petite olive-skinned woman took in a deep sigh, her hand to her chest, and said in Arabic, ‘This home belongs to children whose fathers do not want them. If your father doesn’t want you, you can stay here with us.’

‘Ba’ed al-shar,’ I mumbled, half-asleep. ‘May such a fate be prolonged.’ Her daughter had not finished school, but she was a girl who understood the importance of being earnest – so I spent the next morning on Sahara’s mattress explaining why the comma needed to be put in, and the next afternoon in her kitchen explaining why the comma needed to be taken out. Sahara made spaghetti bolognaise for me, which she couldn’t eat herself because she was a vegetarian; and I used the sheet of Lebanese bread in her freezer and whatever vegetables she had in the fridge to bake her a homemade pizza, which I cooked for too long and burned to charcoal. Sahara cracked up at me and said, ‘Next time leave the comma in and take the pizza out.’

Being the first in my family to go to university, I could exaggerate to my parents about how much time a student was required to spend on campus, and when I wasn’t at lectures and tutorials, which absorbed only two days of my week, I was hiding out in Glebe with Sahara. She rubbed my back with her bare masculine hands while I wrote uni essays about Madam Bovary and Anna Karenina and Romeo and Juliet and Layla and Majnun. We too were doomed like these tragic figures of literature; one day my people would tear us from one another. Already the rumours were spreading like scabies. Aunt Yasmine spotted me at Broadway Shopping Centre holding hands with a girl who wore a cross around her neck. Aunt Yasmine told Aunt Amina and Aunt Amina told Aunt Mariam and Aunt Mariam told Uncle Ibrahim and Uncle Ibrahim told Uncle Osama and Uncle Osama told my godfather and my godfather told his daughter to pass a message onto me via my sister Yocheved, who attended the same hair salon as her. Yocheved came home with blonde streaks through her black hair and a sunken frown through her teeth, delivering my godfather’s memo on trembling lips: We will never allow you to disgrace us with that whore. Hearing those words was like having a fork jammed into my neck. Yocheved, who was only a year younger than me and had the same big crooked nose, took my hand gently in hers. At only five foot four, which was average for a Leb girl, she looked up at me and said, ‘I’d rather be a whore than a slave.’ I knew then that I could turn to my siblings for support: my gym-junkie older brother, Bilal, who said to me, ‘Sahara’s a top chick, bro,’ and my sixteen-year-old emo sister, Lulu, who said, ‘I heard she doesn’t shave her legs – that’s so cool,’ and my twelve-year-old introverted sister, Abira, who said, ‘Sahara sounds like the name of a restaurant,’ and my chubby three-year-old sister, Amani, who said, ‘Do you have some salt and vinegar chips?’

On my twenty-first birthday, Sahara bought me a toothbrush. It was light purple with hard bristles. I waited until I arrived at her place every morning to brush my teeth and I would brush them again every evening before I went back home, back to my parents and my five siblings in Lakemba, who thought I had spent my day on campus. I loved that toothbrush. I loved knowing that inside Sahara’s bathroom was a toothbrush that belonged to me sitting beside the one that belonged to her. I loved that toothbrush and the bathroom where that toothbrush slept, the bathroom that was tight and tiled blue and lined with candles on the windowsill. We spent a lot of time together in that bathroom. I kept a lighter in the back pocket of my bumbag so I could always light the wicks for Sahara. She would undress me down to my boxer shorts, and I would undress her down to her underpants and bra – you see, we had promised to keep our bodies from one another until we were married. I would stand half-naked in her shower, warm water running through my thick black curly hair and down my slender arms and flat chest, and Sahara would wash me with her hands, soapy brown hands like the clay of Mecca. Then she would step under the water and I would stand behind her and wash her hair, her dark-brown hair – dark brown until the setting sun peered through the bathroom window and illuminated the flames of the candles before the light hit us, and then her hair was like honey. I remember the smell of her conditioner. Butter and sugar and milk. Her smell.

Sahara’s cheeks were high and round and shiny when she smiled. I pressed mine against them until they warped and flattened into one another. And when our cheeks were apart, I called her every two hours. I needed to know she was safe.

‘Hey Sahara.’

‘Hey Bani.’

‘Bye Sahara.’

‘Bye Bani.’

If she didn’t answer I’d panic. My heart would thud. My hands would sweat. My thoughts would spiral into madness – something’s happened to her, she’s been hit by a car, she’s been mugged, she’s been raped, she’s hurt, she’s dead, she’s gone. I would crawl into bed and keep calling her while my parents and siblings clattered in the living room. I knew how many times Sahara’s phone would ring before it went to voicemail. Twelve. Each time I counted and listened to her notification: ‘Calm down, Bani. Everyone else, leave a message.’ I would hang up and call again. When she finally answered, my agony vanished and my sanity returned, my heart rate eased and my thoughts became clear. She was safe. She had twenty-six missed calls because she was at the movies and there was no reception in the cinema, but she was safe. I sat up on my bed and held my phone tightly to my ear.

‘Hey Sahara.’

‘Hey Bani.’

‘Bye Sahara.’

‘Bye Bani.’

Then we would hang up at the same time and everything would be still and quiet in my room; every time we hung up except this one time. As I stared at my reflection in the wardrobe mirror, wondering how Sahara could ever love a boy whose nose looked like a boomerang, my bedroom door exploded open. My father stood in the doorway, his face like a shard of brick, the veins in his neck palpitating, his shredded arms seething. ‘People are talking!’ he screamed.

I sprung to my feet; they spasmed as soon as I hit the floor. From the moment I had set my eyes on Sahara I knew this day was coming and no amount of toothbrushes could have prepared me for it. My father had taught me long ago that he was the source of all my strength and all my weakness – I was only six and playing with my marbles outside our first house in Alexandria, which we shared with my grandmother; my uncle Osama; his wife and their three daughters; my uncle Ibrahim, a divorced drug addict who lived in the backyard garage; his two daughters, who were with us three nights a week; and my youngest uncle, Ali. From the alleyway that joined our street, a large drunken man with an M-shaped moustache approached me, grunting, ‘Get ye dad’s fucking ute out me driveway!’ But my dad didn’t own a ute and there were no driveways on our street. Just as the man leaned in to touch my face, Dad swept out of the house and threw an over-the-top jab, knocking him onto the kerb. Picking me up with one hand, as if I were a piece of bread, my father carried me inside and said, ‘If that man touched you, I’d have killed him.’ From then on I feared my dad, not like I feared barking dogs and child molesters, but like I feared the sun, which gave me life, and could just as easily incinerate me.

Back in my bedroom, my mother and five siblings piled up in the corridor behind Dad, their faces white, as though they were the Brady Bunch. Maybe they were sad that I would be forced to give up the woman I loved, or maybe they were terrified to see what Dad would do if I refused to give her up – banish me, disown me, stand aside and watch as God struck me down. Mum held Dad by the arm, trying to ease him out of the room, as he pummelled his open palm into the doorframe. She would not have wanted me to marry an outsider either, but if my father accepted Sahara, she would follow his will. When my dad asked for her hand twenty-two years ago she looked at his biceps, which were like potatoes, and responded, ‘Mashallah, if you slap me, you’ll send me flying, I will be your wife.’ This was how my mother measured the strength of a man: against her own. They were married three weeks later. Bilal was born nine months after that. I was born twelve months after him. And Yocheved was born twelve months after me.

‘What? What’s going on?’ I said to my father, teeth clattering. I had to play dumb to find out how much he knew – maybe he had just found the lighter in my bumbag and thought I was smoking cigarettes. ‘I do not accept this girl,’ he said firmly, his voice as precise and certain as the Wahhabis of Lakemba Mosque.

I fell to my bedroom tiles, which were large and white like all the tiles in all the houses that belonged to all the Lebs of the west. My knees clapped against the porcelain as I wailed, ‘Please let me go, let me go to her, let me go.’

‘You will bring shame to the House of Adam,’ my father said. This was the only truth our people feared, not Allah or the Prophet Muhammad, nothing except the Arab tongue. Dad’s frown withered and a look of despair fell upon his sandstone face, his eyes a swirl of black and his nose protruding like a spear. ‘I only ever asked you for one thing,’ he said, a quiver in his voice. ‘Just this one thing.’ It was as though I had smashed the Ten Commandments.

‘Oh father,’ I cried, grovelling at his ankles while my mother and siblings looked on. ‘The one thing you asked of me – is everything.’

KAHLIL, MY HEART MEANDERING outside my body, know this, you are everything. And know that I called Sahara the next morning and told her I would run away to live with her and her mother. She whimpered, ‘My family is broken, Bani Adam, please don’t ask me to break yours.’ I knew then, as certain as I knew I was going to die, that this girl, who grew up with nothing, was worth more than anything I could ever offer her. As she said goodbye I thought of her eyelashes – when I took a siesta on her living room floor and drifted to sleep. Feeling a faint brush against my cheek, I woke to find her crouching beside me, blinking her eyes on me, kissing me with her lashes. By the time she hung up the phone, I was standing on the rooftop of a carpark in Bankstown, watching the sun paint the sky pink as it rose. My heart was imploding and my throat was clenching and there was no air. I could not go an hour without hearing her voice. Oh Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful, have mercy upon me – how could I go into a day and into a week and into a month and into a year and into eternity without Sahara?

Two hours later I called her. The phone rang twelve times and went to voicemail. ‘Calm down, Bani. Everyone else, leave a message.’ Two days later I called again. It rang twelve times and told me to calm down. Two weeks later, there were eighteen rings and then it beeped three times and automatically disconnected. Two months later it did not ring at all.

I tried to disappear into the streets of Lakemba, where I walked for hours amid the hijabs and the beards, searching for a tomato-faced girl who wore a cross. All I found was the gay Wog whom I met at the community arts centre in Bankstown five years earlier. Back then I had been trying to distinguish myself from the other Lebs at Punchbowl Boys High School by reading Dostoevsky and Faulkner and Hemingway. Then one day, while Bucky and I stood on the platform of Bankstown train station, he took me in his arms and told me I was beautiful exactly as I was, as a Leb. He was the first person to ever really love me that way, and it was gay, so fucken gay. But this time Bucky couldn’t help me – he was broken too. His boyfriend of three and a half years, an Anglo colonoscopist from Kings Cross, had left him for a Swedish cosmetic surgeon from North Sydney.

Like me, Bucky had been wandering around Lakemba like a stonehead, his dark eyes sunken and his fat lips flopped and his stubble-ridden cheeks sagging. That point on, I began picking him up from his parents’ home in Belmore once a week and taking him for a walk while his medication for manic depression kicked in. I had to lock his arm in mine to ensure he didn’t wander off in front of a car. During our strolls, I would talk, and he would listen, or at least this was how I interpreted his unresponsiveness. I asked, ‘Is Sahara putting in the comma right now?’ and he gave no answer. I asked, ‘Is Sahara taking out the comma right now?’ and he gave no answer.

Unable to feel her in my hood, I tried to feel Sahara among the cohort of working-class ethnic kids who were completing their arts degrees at the Bankstown campus of Western Sydney University. Like me, they were the first in their families to continue their education after high school – a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, my father and mother took great pride in my academic achievements, drifting around the Alawite mosque on Eid informing all their brothers and sisters and cousins and second cousins and our sheikhs and elders that I was destined to lead The Tribe; and on the other hand, they were confused and disappointed and ashamed that all I did with my arts degree was use it to contest their most fundamental beliefs:

Mum said, ‘Pooftas is yuck.’

I said, ‘Homophobia.’

Dad said, ‘No education for the woman.’

I said, ‘Patriarchy.’

Mum said, ‘I wish my children had fair skin and blue eyes.’

I said, ‘White supremacy.’

Dad said, ‘Alawites only.’

I said, ‘Sahara.’

Sahara in the House of Adam. Sahara in the lecture theatre. Professor Roland, who was from Ireland and looked like a blimp, sounded like Liam Neeson and had sweat patches under the armpits of his shirt, spoke about Romeo and Juliet while I wrote over and over on my notepad, Sahara, Sahara, wherefore art thou Sahara? Sahara in her bed. Sahara upon my rib. Sahara in my head. Sahara in my words. The desert-girl was wondering, ‘What did you wanna be when you were a boy, Bani?’ And I said, ‘A verse-maker.’ And she asked, ‘Will you write a story for me?’ And I answered, ‘You are the story.’ And she said, ‘But I’m nothing special.’ And I replied, ‘A pen is nothing special.’ And she said, ‘Write that.’ And I said, ‘I already have.’

I roamed the university campus as a lost case, staring at the young Brown women and young Brown men around me, who all looked so bright with their unit readers held against their chests, and so beautiful with their dark hair cut and gelled and moussed and waxed and clipped and groomed. Yet I kept telling myself, No one will ever do. I stopped like a wilted flower in a long line at the student centre, waiting to submit my Graduate in Absentia forms. I was one month away from becoming the first university graduate in my family’s history, and I could imagine a version of reality where my parents and siblings and aunts and uncles and cousins were applauding and ululating and taking photographs inside the auditorium as I walked up to the stage to receive my degree. But every time I played out this fantasy, my heart twisted and my eyes twitched and my fingers shook and my stomach ached. Why should I give them the satisfaction? I thought. They show off about my education and at the same time they prevent me from using that education to actually improve my life!

I had been in line at the student centre for almost ten minutes before I noticed the head of long black curls in front of me. ‘I know these locks.’ The words just fell out of my mouth as she turned; sharp nose striking me like a defibrillator. Laila Haimi – Mrs Laila Haimi – returned to me. I had not seen her since Year 10, when she was my teacher in high school and introduced me to her favourite writers: James Joyce, who swooned among all the living and the dead; Gabriel García Márquez, who flew beside a very old man with enormous wings; and Vladimir Nabokov, who was stuck between aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. Day by day I sighed with passion; fantasising about Mrs Laila Haimi driving me down an endless desert road, away from Lebs and laws; every day until the day she left me to take on a head teacher position at another high school.

‘Subhaan-allah,’ she said to me in her squeaky voice; six years had not changed it even a bit, nor had it changed her skin, which was smooth and tight and fair. ‘Bani, you made it!’

As the line slowly moved forward, Mrs Laila Haimi told me about her life, details she could never tell me when I was her student – she had been beaten by her father and forced into an arranged marriage with her cousin when she was fresh out of high school. By the age of twenty, she’d had enough, disowning her parents and divorcing her cousin and enrolling at university, where she would begin her journey to becoming my English teacher and meeting her second husband, an engineer originally from Nigeria named Muhammad. After that she became a head teacher at a high school in The Hills Shire, and now she was a doctoral candidate in literary studies at the university. I stared silently at her as she spoke, my whole life undone. You see, I’d always wondered what happened when a past love came back into your world. Did your heart swell for them once again? No. Not when you had eyes. And not when they were on Sahara. There was so much I wanted to tell Mrs Laila Haimi about: my high school graduation, which involved me skolling an entire bottle of vodka and throwing up all over my bedroom tiles; my debut amateur boxing match, which ended with me breaking a Skip’s nose; my creative development with the White performance artists from the inner west, who called the Prophet Muhammad a camel f—; the F my professor gave me in Psychology 101 for submitting an essay titled ‘Freud Fucked My Mum’, and the High Distinction my professor gave me in. . .