Category Archives: Lujain AlMulla

Lipstick by Lujain AlMulla

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by Lujain Al Mulla

The ceremony was over. Almost over. We could tell because of the unnecessary aggrandizement of official personnel, who frankly had sod all to do with the graduation of this year’s batch of students, being lavished with words of thanks in yet another speech stitched with cliches. Formalities, formalities—enough to make your stomach churn. Many thanks to this guy, that one and the other. Flatter fest galore! In all honesty, I could only gather the odd chain of honourifics strung to important names and flowery well-wishing words directed at the graduates. You couldn’t hear much over the raucous noise in the stadium stands, but I could get the sense that it was a monotonous drone of ceremonial civility.

“Let’s get out of here before it gets too crowded at the exit”, I whispered, or rather, shouted in my cousin’s ear. She nodded and obliged.

Luckily for us, we had spotted two chairs as soon as we arrived at the venue, a tad late I should add, facing the centre of the stadium field, at the back of the stands, but close enough to see our cousin beaming in her graduates chair.

“The rest of the gang are sat over there” she pointed into the distance, “at the very end of the stands. Let’s try to catch up with them before they leave. We’ll wait for Dhai at the end, there, take some photos, and maybe head out to a nice place for dinner with her, yeah?”

“Why not”. We got up from our seats and made our way waddling sideways down the row towards the stairway. We alternated between excuse mes and sorrys for every person seated who had to have their view of the pitch replaced momentarily with our derrieres. After finally getting there, we realized that we now had to somehow make a way between a crowd of people who couldn’t find a seat and so decided to watch the ceremony standing on the stairs. Great. I was Moses and I was splitting the Red Sea with an outstretched arm for a staff. Pardon me. Pardon me. Pardon me. And we were finally down that flight of stairs. Now what? We had made it to the bottom platform but there was no way we could make it across. People were packed across it like sardines.

“We should try moving in the opposite direction and maybe we’ll find a way down to the pitch”, I suggested and of course, my cousin had no choice but to follow suit. A little less stacked with people, we scrunched our shoulders and zigzagged our way across the platform, occasionally ducking when we blocked the view of someone taking a photograph. All we needed was a military uniform and we were reenacting an episode of the Great War—two soldiers struggling across a row of  trenches. We jumped at the sound of a big bang coming from above and for a second I wondered if my conscience was taking the World War 1 scenario I was dreaming up a little too seriously. “Incoming!” I felt the urge to yell. But it wasn’t the bang of a missile, it was the evening’s firework display. And surely enough, people were now stopping to watch the fireworks, stacking up like tiles in a game of Tetris and I was having that moment of panic when you frantically try to stop the tiles from filling up the whole screen. Game over.

We were now faced with a choice. Either join the crowd and ooh and aah at the mediocre fireworks display, or take a detour up a flight of stairs that lead us nowhere closer to where we were trying to go. We took the stairs and we were back in the stands, clueless.

“Now what do we do?” I asked with little hope. My cousin pointed up the tiers with wide eyes. I looked to where she was pointing and surely enough, I saw a group of people sliding across the very back of the stands, making a way to the far left. It was our best shot and so we darted back up the stairs—a flight that wasn’t so crowded—and made it to the back wall. We shuffled sideways through the little space between the wall and the last tier, making it a fair distance across, and after stepping into several puddles of goo, our passage was blocked by metal rails that sloped all the way down. No big deal; I put one leg up and over the rails and then the other, and voila. Now, my cousin’s turn. She looked at me with a sardonic smile.

“What is it? Come on get over here”

“I’m in a skirt”

“Come on! After that Indiana Jones obstacle course, you’re going to let a skirt stop you! No one’s looking. Everyone’s heading downstairs. Look, I’ll sit on the rails in front of you and somehow cover it up”.

Just when she was about to go for it, we noticed two guys standing adjacent to us, arms folded as if ready to watch a live spectacle.

“Okay, now I’m definitely not crossing over with those sleazebags standing there”, she whispered, “just go ahead without me. I’ll try to make a way through the crowd”. We both looked downstairs with a gulp.

“You won’t make it through alive”. This was the part in every Hollywood film where the hero goes “I won’t desert you”, and, of course, I wouldn’t want to disrupt the Indiana Jones scenario reeling in my head, so I jumped back over the rails and we made our way down the tiered seats, finally coming to a halt at the back of a line of people heading towards some screened exit.

I am not good with crowds and this was slowly turning into a nightmare situation. Five steps per minute, I think we were taking. People’s breath was getting thicker and the racket was getting louder as we squeezed into the crowd. We finally reached the bottom platform, and the exit was slowly appearing in view. We just had to bear through this last flock of people. Odors oozed from every which direction and I began to feel woozy. A woman behind me was so crammed up against me, I could feel every sweaty fold of her body and I began to feel sick.

“Could you please stop pushing”, I snapped at her, “we’re not moving!”. She mumbled some incoherent answer behind her burqa. Focus on the exit, now. Focus. Just when I thought I was regaining some sense of stability in my mind, I felt the woman’s hand on my shoulder. I tried to move forward so she would move it off. It worked for five seconds before she placed it on my shoulder again. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s strangers touching me, so I pushed forward again. She then placed both hands on my shoulders and I could feel a panic attack bubbling. We’re not doing the conga line dance. There’s no conga music playing. Get your grummy hands off me, I wanted to scream out. Instead, I just flicked them away. I think she got the message then.

Getting closer to the exit, we could see that it was a short narrow stairway that lead to the pitch ground. The Chariots of Fire theme tune was playing in my head—a fitting soundtrack since we were practically moving in slow motion. A few more steps and I would be freed from this nightmare. I could finally breathe air that wasn’t 50% vaporized sweat and 30% body odor. Chariots of Fire was now blaring in my head and getting to its climatic piano sequence. We crammed between a few more people and finally reached the light at the end of the tunnel. I hung on to the my cousin’s shirt and we trudged down that last flight of stairs. We made it. Now where’s that darned fireworks display?

I could feel my lungs expanding with crisp fresh air, but still squirming at the thought of that woman pressing up behind me. I shook out a few more shudders from my bones and relaxed. My cousin and I shared a big reassuring smile and just as I was about to gesture a “phew” by swiping the back of my hand across my forehead, I noticed a dark red smudge smeared across my hand. Blood? I wish it were blood. I would have reacted less frantically if it were blood. In fact, it was a lipstick stain. My every being was cringing and convulsing because, you see, I wasn’t wearing any lipstick. Have you ever seen a baby fall on its face and then choke on its breath for a few seconds before building up a roaring cry. That’s the only was I could describe how I was reacting. All I could picture was someone, somewhere on the stadium grounds reapplying their crimson shade of lipstick.

“GET. IT. OFF OF ME!”

Nostalgia by Lujain AlMulla

By Posted in Lujain AlMulla, Nostalgia 1 Comment

by Lujain Al Mulla

It’s Friday noon and I’m half asleep, laying in bed, listening to the drone of the air conditioning. I don’t remember the covers and pillow feeling this warm and fluffy last night. I smother myself in snugness, soaking it all up into my every limb as I stretch and yawn, brushing my legs over every last cool spot, then finally recoil back into a comfy muddle of lazy flesh. Laying still there for a while, I notice my mobile blinking red at me, trying to get my attention, going “wake up lazy bones; you’ve got messages”. It takes me a few seconds to conjure up the energy to lift my hand and grab that magical sprite of technology that I’ve grown so dependent on: the object I see last before falling asleep, and wake up to first thing in the morning.

With only one eye open still, I check the updates in my social networking life, and those of others. Twitter, Blackberry Messenger, Facebook: retweet that, reply to her, like that photo.

I’m up. I’m up and ready to get on with this predictably unremarkable day: the life of a 20 year old in plain old, capital of nowhere, Kuwait. It’s the weekend, so at least there’s that.

I get on with the usual deal: wash the face, brush the teeth, get the hiccoughs, tie the hair, get rid of the hiccoughs and hop downstairs to where my mother and grandmother are clearing the kitchen table of afternoon date cake, rusk and a pot of what my sense of smell picks up as tea—now cold tea, as I learn to my disappointment.

My grandmother quietly disappears out of the kitchen and into her room, probably to get her daily dose of radio—listening to the Kuwait News station, then turning the dial to wavelengths carrying Gulf folk music—reclining that way in bed until lunchtime, and such was her every afternoon. My mother follows suit, out the kitchen and back up the stairs to her room, I’d imagine, getting into a comfortable posture, in the direction of Mecca, with a copy of the Qur’an in her lap, picking up from where she left off reading. I take my exit cue as the third generation down this line of women, finding that I’ve no real appetite for food after just having woke up.

Out the hall and into the living room, I find my grandfather, sat on his usual spot watching nothing useful on the tele: a cooking show of sorts, making a summer fruit smoothy. Cooking is not exactly a pastime my grandfather is known to engage in; he’s most likely brewing over a concoction of his own in his head—the news he received two nights ago being the main ingredient in his pot of thoughts, I’m sure. I wipe off the nostalgic glimmer in his eyes:

“Grandad!” I say with a big smile, interrupting the perky fruit juice lady on screen. I walk up to give him a peck on his forehead, but he pulls my head down before I get the chance to, giving me a wet kiss on mine instead.

“sit down” he tells me. I do, right next to him, taking in the mild scent of sandalwood he has always smelt of.

“How about a hand massage, grandad?”

“you what?”

“a hand massage” I repeat louder, “like the one I gave you last week. Rub your hands?”

“Right. Well, if you’d like to” he mumbles back.

“I would. I’ll go get the lotion”

I walk into his bedroom and look for the bottle of lotion on his dresser. There it is. Before I leave I stay for a minute, looking around at all the family photos he has framed on the walls and displayed on dusty shelves. Old photos of my mother, aunts, uncles. Baby photos of cousins upon cousins. I know he has a few up there of me, so I look around, scanning face after face, and there! A three/four year old me sat on my grandmother’s lap, pulling her glasses off her face. An opaque orange tint is smeared across half the photo from when the film may have caught some light or some other photographic glitch I’m unfamiliar with. It hides a third subject in the frame and I can’t quite make out who it is. A cousin? A brother? A shame. Or perhaps not. A selfish little granddaughter inside me is glad I have my nan all to myself in this photo.

Another image grabs my attention, right under the one of me and nan. It hangs at an angle so I fix it; in a chipped wooden frame, it’s a black and white still of a young man dressed in a sharp suit, riding in the compartment of a train. Behind him, out the window, is a blurry, swept pastoral scene, rushing to keep up with the snap-shot. The man strongly resembles my brother, Ahmed, but also my cousin, Yousef. I see my mother in his eyes. My uncle Jassim has those wavy locks of hair. If I squint, I can almost see, well, I’m not quite sure: a morphed image of every member of my extended family.

It’s grandad, on a train to what someone has labeled as Switzerland at the bottom corner with a felt-tip. He looks like an Egyptian film star of the 30s or 40s—a notion that makes me smile.

I take two steps back. My shoulder hits the corner of a shelf, knocking over a frame that triggers a domino effect down a row of photos. I yelp in pain and panic, rushing to set them back in their places. I’m such a klutz. The shelf, I notice as I fix the frames back up, is exclusive to family graduation photos. Lined up across it is a dermatologist, a graphic designer, a computer engineer, two dentists, two accountants and three architects, all posing with their degrees. I make a mental note of a vacant spot where I can squeeze my own graduation photo by the end of this semester. I could always knock off one of the architects—we’ve plenty of those already. It’s about time we make room for a graduate of English lit.

I feel I could spend the rest of the day staring at every photo in the room. I almost forget why I came in here to begin with. I take one last inclusive look at all the pictures and walk back out the bedroom. I sit on the carpet, leaning on grandad’s chair, taking his hand. I hold it in mine. I study the back of it for a few seconds. It’s a leathery canvas depicting a blossom tree, painted with green veins and flowered with age spots. I could swear a few more buds have blossomed since I last rubbed his hand. I feel a sharp urge to cover it with kisses. But I don’t. I dab on the lotion instead, and begin the amateur massage session. I think I get more therapy out of it than he does. I don’t usually sit down for chats with him. Any conversation we engage in lasts for 20 seconds, tops, including the extra time I take to repeat what I’m saying a good three times for him to hear. I wish we did have longer ones where I could share things that were deeper than my uni schedule this semester or what’s cooking for lunch that day, but he’s a reserved man. I just can’t help but have a fancy to get access to his mind, to be let in where his memory is. It’s a saturated compartment, I’d imagine: too full to let short term intrusions settle in since we’ve been noticing that, recently, he forgets the small things more and more. But I’m sure that only means that the significant memories are still stored in there: lucid and in abundance. I look into his smokey gray eyes for a second, trying to penetrate through to them, to get a glimpse of his past, his childhood, his teenage years, to perhaps find out what he was doing on a train to Switzerland at such an adolescent age, and who had been there with him to take that shot. [End of Excerpt]