One afternoon, it came exploding out of me. I was watching the news. The marching troops were so awesome, so powerful, that I gave in. Crawling under the korsi (a low table covered in blankets with a heater attached), I squeezed my eyes really tight and pictured soldiers walking up to me one by one as I lay naked on a dirt road. They each leaned over and looked at my body, admiring it and wanting me. I got a funny feeling in my tummy when I thought of that. A dangerous, powerful explosion washed over my little body and made me feel like a queen. A feeling of urgency overwhelmed me. So I put my hands in my panties and touched myself where it throbbed. I had found a secret and it would take me to a place of ethereal and majestic beauty—my beautiful secret world. I felt higher than anyone else. I felt invincible.
All my first cousins were boys. They teased and chased me constantly, and I began to love it more and more. They were the first people I’d found whom I could actually seek out to receive male attention. I began dressing deliberately in my best girlie clothes, swaying my hips and flirting as I walked out on the street to play. I had a huge crush on the slightly older twin boys who lived next door. In my attempts to get them to like me and want me, I did what worked: I acted coy and needy, even though I was really quite a tomboy.
One summer afternoon, while all the adults slept, I asked the twins to teach me to tie my shoelaces. I sat at the bottom of the stone steps leading to the second floor of our house, and slid up my skirt to reveal my bare legs. As they stood over me, I lifted one leg up to them so they would see all the way up to the top of my thigh. Then, slowly, they taught me to tie my laces. Their skin felt hot on mine. And I felt loved.
He Shows Me Cartoons and Takes Me Places. My Dad never does that. And so I gave Him Sex in Return.
Iwalked up the massive jaw of stone gray steps. Up, up, to the second floor. Looking down, I saw my candy-pink nail-varnished toenails poking through my plastic slippers. Still I carried on, my heart beating with excitement and the dirty shame of the duty I had to perform. I was a bad girl. I would go to hell. Definitely. I was five years old.
The man was renting the apartment from my grandmother. He was single and full of energy. He had thick black-rug hair and was playful with me. His name was Mr. Karimi. I played with him all the time. In the afternoons, he let me ride in his white Peykan car, which shook and prattled, the engine’s wet purring guzzling greedily around the sunny, sleeping neighborhood.
My grandmother was sleeping downstairs. My mummy was at work at the university. I couldn’t wait till she came back with the duck bread. I wanted to go outside. I was dying to steal some fruit from the neighbor’s persimmon tree. The fat bellies of the pregnant fruit were ready to burst. I wanted to pick monkey flowers with the other girls and chase the twin boys next door.
I didn’t know why I liked Mr. Karimi. His room was dark and he prayed all the time. I didn’t understand why. He always said I should pray with him, and sometimes I did. I loved the smell of the Mohr. It smelled like the heavenly damp clay of the rain-soaked ground. I loved the safe feeling of throwing the slippery chador around my head and body, and I loved praying to God. It was peaceful. I’d learned all the prayers by heart, but only the shorter children’s versions.
Karimi finished praying and smiled at me. Then he called me into the room. A golliwog sat on the shelf with a big head full of tight, black curls. Its puffed-up lips were like two sausages, and it had a pair of bulging eyes inside a nodding head. Karimi turned the wall projector on. It was Bugs Bunny. He drew the curtains shut and closed the door, then locked it with a key. In the silence I heard only the warm humming of the projector and the thumping of my heart.
Karimi sat me on his lap facing the wall. On the screen, Bugs Bunny jumped up and down like a demented yo-yo. I love cartoons. Karimi must like me. He let me watch them because he liked the special place between my legs, the soft, squishy place where I weed from. His fingers felt too thick and there were too many of them. He was so unhygienic—didn’t he know that place was germy? His fingers were going to smell.
I heard a zip . The cartoon was so colorful. So full of crazy characters. I wished it had a princess in it. Karimi’s breath was hot as he whispered things against my neck that I didn’t understand. There was something between my legs. It was what boys like my cousin had. I thought Karimi must love me. We were doing something bad. I would go to hell. I would definitely go to hell.
Karimi finally stood up and unlocked the door. He went to the bathroom, washed his hands, came back, and put some socks on. The cartoon was over. I could go now. The room smelled like holy rose water.
I don’t know which came first anymore, my childhood sense of sexuality or the lodger upstairs.
Karimi had moved in because my mother wasn’t earning enough to take care of us. One day I heard her telling my grandmother that my father had taken the money she had hidden under the carpet to pay for his opium.
Karimi had a black mustache just like my father. But he was tall and wore crisp white shirts. He smelled like sweat, but I liked him. He was kind to me. When I sat in the passenger seat of his car, I felt like a spoiled rich girl.
Karimi did many things for me, and I started to spend a lot of time with him. When I went in search of his companionship every afternoon, I knew what was going to happen—and yet I did it, again and again: Facing Mecca, he taught me how to recite the Qur’an and say the afternoon prayer, kneeling on the mat, pressing our foreheads against the Mohr, and muttering it under our breaths. Afterward he’d take me to his bedroom. He’d always lock the door. The projector hummed warmly. I was scared. Frightened. Never had cartoons triggered such adrenaline in me. The bedroom of this man was where I belonged and it would be unnatural for me to leave it. No one was ever going to help me. When he put me on his lap, however, my place was confirmed in the flames of hell—and I knew that too. I was a bad girl. Tainted. I knew then that this was my destiny. I must love it. I must love this. This—it is who I am. He loves me; he takes care of me; he shows me cartoons and takes me places. My dad doesn’t do these things. His fingers would slip into my panties. I wanted to vomit from fear, but I gave him love instead.
I sat still afterward until he washed his hands and told me to go downstairs. He didn’t even have the courtesy to show me girlie cartoons like Cinderella , only Pink Panther and Bugs Bunny—and I hated him for that.
Though a sliver of me got off on the sexual contact with Mr. Karimi, I knew what he did was disgusting and unnatural. What made me happy was playing sexual games with the boys and girls my own age.
During afternoon siestas, the nightly gunfire, and whenever panic erupted in the neighborhood, I got together with my cousins and neighbors, male and female, and played our games— mummy and daddy or doctor and nurse. Skirts would be lifted, tiny trousers would be unzipped, and we would show each other our down-there, each of us examining, touching.
I began to feel more sexually aware of my body, and because of this, whenever my grandmother took me to the local public bathhouse, I became rigidly shy and self-conscious of my nakedness.Our shower was nice enough, but going to the public bathhouse was like being reborn in body and soul. It was a ritual event, where everyone went for hours to luxuriously scrub and steam themselves as they exchanged gossip, drank ice-cold Coca-Cola, and exfoliated until their skin sparkled.
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