10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

There was so much she wanted to know. In her mind she kept replaying the last moments of her life, asking herself where things had gone wrong—a futile exercise since time could not be unraveled as though it were a ball of yarn.

In the first minute following her death, Tequila Leila’s consciousness began to ebb, slowly and steadily, like a tide receding from the shore.

Her gut said, Oh, I like it here; I’m not going up there again.

Her heart protested, Don’t be silly. Why stay in a place where nothing ever happens? It’s boring.

Why leave a place where nothing ever happens? It’s safe, her gut said.

[...]

Just because you think it’s safe here, it doesn’t mean this is the right place for you, her heart countered. Sometimes where you feel most safe is where you least belong.

Leila had come to understand that feelings of tenderness must always be hidden—that such things could only be revealed behind closed doors and never spoken about afterwards. This was the only form of affection she had learned from grown-ups, and the teaching would come with dire consequences.

“What’s your name?” he shouted at her over the wind.

She told him. “And what’s yours?”

“Me? Don’t have a name yet.”

“Everyone has a name.”

“Well, true . . . but I don’t like mine. For now you can call me Hiç—‘Nothing’.”

Auntie glanced out of the window, intimidated by the world far and beyond. It was one of the endless troubles of her life that, even after all this time, and even after she had had two children, her fear of being kicked out of this house had not abated in the slightest. She still did not feel secure.

“What about people in Canada or Korea or France?” Leila asked.

“What about them?”

“Well, you know . . . they are not Muslim, generally. What happens to them after they die? I mean, the angels can’t ask them to recite our prayers.”

Baba said, “Why not? Everyone gets the same questions.”

“But those people in other countries can’t recite the Qur’an, can they?”

“Exactly. Anyone who is not a proper Muslim will fail the angels’ exam. Straight to hell. That’s why we must spread Allah’s message to as many people as possible. That’s how we’ll save their souls.”

Baba never hit Leila. Neither before nor after. Though a man of several shortcomings, he never displayed physical aggression or uncontrolled wrath. So for bringing this impulse out in him, for rousing something so dark, so alien to his character, he would always hold her responsible.

She, too, blamed herself and would continue to do so for years to come.

Like a trapped butterfly, thought Leila. That’s what her brother had been in their midst. She feared they had all let this beautiful child down, one by one, including herself, mostly herself.

“Look, I’ll write to you every week,” Leila promised. “We’ll see each other again.”

“Won’t you be safer here?”

Although Leila did not say this aloud, somewhere in her soul echoed the words she had a feeling she had heard before: Just because you think it’s safe here, it doesn’t mean this is the right place for you.

“My shiekh says Allah will curse you and I will live to see the day. That will be my compensation.”

There were drops of condensation on the window. She touched one gently with her fingertip, held it for a second, and then let go, watching it roll down. A pain throbbed somewhere inside her body, in a place she was unable to locate.

“Don’t phone us again,” he said. “If you do, we’ll tell the operator we are not accepting the call. We don’t have a daughter called Leyla. Leyla Afife Kamile: you don’t deserve those names.”

You said cows recognize people who have hurt them in the past. Sheep can identify faces as well. But I ask myself, what good does it do them to remember so much when they can’t change a thing?

Her gut warned her that there was more to him than the considerate, gentle young man she saw and she had to be very careful. But her heart pushed her forward—just like it had done when, as a newborn baby, she had lain motionless under a blanket of salt.

But it wasn’t out of sheer kindness or an admission of some unconfessed guilt that Bitter Ma had given her much-needed blessing. D/Ali had paid her a hefty sum—an amount unheard of on the street of brothels. Later on, when Leila would pressure him about where he had got the money from, he would say his comrades had chipped in. The revolution, he claimed, was all for love and for lovers.

Now, as her brain came to a standstill, and all memories dissolved into a wall of fog, thick as sorrow, the very last thing she saw in her mind was the bright pink birthday cake.

Clothing: a gold-sequinned dress (torn), high-heeled shoes, lace underwear. A clutch bag containing an ID card, a lipstick, a notebook, a fountain pen and house keys. No money, no jewellery (might have been stolen).

The time of death is estimated to be between 3:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. No sign of sexual intercourse detected. The victim was beaten with a heavy (blunt) instrument and strangled to death after being knocked unconscious.

While it was true that nothing could take the place of a loving, happy blood family, in the absence of one, a good water family could wash away the hurt and pain collected inside like black soot. [...] But those who had never experienced what it felt like to be spurned by their own relatives would not understand this truth in a million years. They would never know that there were times when water ran thicker than blood.

“My mother—I used to call her Auntie—she often felt the same way, maybe worse. People always told her to fight depression. But I have a feeling that as soon as we see something as our enemy, we make it stronger. [...] Maybe what you need to do is befriend your depression.”

Not once had he touched any of the women. He took pride in that — being beyond the needs of the flesh. Cold as steel, each time he had watched from the side, until the very end.

“Look, maybe for believers like you the body is trivial . . . temporary. But not for me. And you know what? I’ve fought so hard for my body! For these”—she pointed to her breasts—“for my cheekbones . . .” She stopped. “Sorry if that sounds frivolous. [...] But I need you to see that the body matters too.”

[...] it seemed to Nalan that religion—and power and money and ideology and politics—acted like a hood too. All these superstitions and predictions and beliefs deprived human beings of sight, keeping them under control, but deep within weakening their self-esteem to such a point that they now feared anything, everything.

Religion had always been a source of hope, resilience and love—a lift that carried her up from the basement of darkness into a spiritual light. It pained her that the same lift could just as easily take others all the way down. [...] [S]he would love to ask Him just one simple question: “Why did you allow Yourself to be so widely misunderstood, my beautiful and merciful God?”

[...] it didn’t matter anymore, the question of why they were not meeting his comrades and of what the revolution was going to be like in that bright future that might or might not come. Perhaps nothing was worth worrying about in a city where everything was constantly shifting and dissolving, and the only thing they could ever rely on was this moment in time, which was already half gone.

“Nice to see you, finally,” said the fish. “What took you so long?”

[...]

Smiling at her confusion, the blue betta fish said, “Follow me.”

Now finding her voice, Leila said, with a shyness she could not conceal, “I don’t know how to swim. I never learned.”

“Don’t worry about that. You know everything you need to know.”