For Tilly.
I'm too lazy to look up actual Shari'a punishments again, so I apologize for any accidental fabrication. It's pretty close, but you never know. ^_~ This was using photo prompt #2 from Cal's Contest, and uses characters (or character) from my Nano, Among the Infidels. Sources/references at the end.
___
__
AHMADINEJAD (THROUGH TRANSLATOR): In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have it.
(LAUGHTER)
__
Haroun didn’t have enough fingers for the number of laws he had broken. Lying there in smuggled Levi’s in the basement of his cousin’s house, he tried to count them--using toes, knees, cracks in the floor. He pillowed his head with canvas sacks of his aunt's rice and stared at the ceiling as a rusted fan blew his eyes dry. The rhythm of its labored clicking was unsteady and made the line of numbers in his head tangle into a knotted mess.
The neighbor, Safran, was next to him, flicking through banned American songs on Haroun’s iPod. He couldn’t read the titles, but he recognized the lyrics from pirated mixtapes—smuggled in from Pakistan, from Turkey. When Haroun ran out of cracks in the floor, he counted Safran's fingernails, though he couldn't touch them. He would never touch them.
He dreamt with his eyes open, blinking as though he was about to cry. His mind was drowsy with the constant stream of foreign words in his head—Persian was like a pretty little sparrow flitting just out of reach of his fingers. There was static behind his ears, where the English used to be. He hadn’t seen American Idol or Tyra in two weeks.
In the city, the only American idol was one fit to be burnt.
He tipped the screen toward Haroun's face. “You watch this show, in America?” he asked—he’d stumbled into Degrassi, on actors crying and pacing.
“Yeah.”
He laughed. “I don’t know what they’re saying.”
Haroun shifted closer to him and peered into the screen—Safran smelled like soap and Lebanese cologne. “Oh, this is the one where Craig’s dad finally takes him back and then, like, dies on the spot. Then Craig goes crazy at the dance and starts tearing stuff up.”
“Dance?”
He skipped through several scenes until the last, where a boy slid his hands onto a girl’s hips and they danced, swaying back and forth, gently, with his lips grazing her forehead. Safran’s eyes went wide. “They let you do that?”
“I don’t do it, but. Twenty lashes?”
Safran looked at him. “Twenty lashes.” His mouth spread wide in a yawn. He clicked through to something loud and acoustic, and dragged a paper bag filled with clothes to his side. The bag crinkled as he curled up and stared into the fan, eyes opening and shutting, languid.
Haroun still had the empty shell of his cell phone in his pocket—the inside had been removed and confiscated. It was a comforting shape against his thigh, even if he couldn’t call Leila.
Leila. Twenty lashes more.
The air was thick and hot, even in the basement. Safran’s eyes settled shut and his eyelashes wove themselves together, his hand slipping and resting against his stomach.
Haroun stared at the dust on the ceiling. He was homesick for a place that wasn’t technically his home—a place that didn’t like him very much, either. Safran only put up with him because he was a foreigner; all American boys were like him, and all American boys were slightly toxic. They were toxic but exotic and fascinating, like tree frogs or bird spiders.
He glanced over, a hot guilty pit settling in his stomach. It felt like rape, looking at this pretty sleeping Shia boy—thick lips (fifty), a small patch of skin where his shirt fell from his body (sixty), the inseam of his jeans (a hundred). Haroun was never very good with math, but he knew what he wanted would split his spine raw.
But who would know? The windows were covered in dirt and not even the zealous mullah would stoop down to scrape it away. There—in America—he was a freak. Here he was a sinner; a satanic liability. He had fatwa written on his forehead like a crude tattoo.
Haroun turned on his side, toward the wall.
He dreamt with his eyes closed.
__
President Ahmadinejad Delivers Remarks at Columbia University
