I’d lied at school. My neck did not hurt from looking up at my house’s high ceilings or the sky too much. It actually pained from perpetually looking down. Although that wasn’t my fault either. Amma taught me to walk looking down. She said it was the way of our beloved Prophet Muhammad. Eyes are the greatest, most vulnerable way into sin. Keep them down, she taught Piru and I. 

I’d always been small. Even at age eight, I was considered small. I think the reason for my small height is I keep looking down, even when I’m not walking. The limits of our vision are the limits of our world. My sky was very close to my head. And I was always careful my head didn’t get into the clouds, as Amma cautioned against. She told us about Ms Beena, Nabila aunty’s daughter, who Amma sent us to for tuitions when we were in kindergarten. Ms Beena looked like an eggplant because she was always wearing purple. She was also very fat, but lately had become saggy. Now she looked like an eggplant that had been mushed and made flat by pounding upon it repeatedly. Amma told us she let her head grow into the clouds.

When I asked Amma how that could be, since Ms Beena is evidently still on the ground, she said that the sky we could see with our eyes was the first sky. That’s why we should always be careful we do not reach the first sky, as that would mean trespassing on the property of Allah. We read about the layers of sky in our Quran class. We were taught in the madrassa by Tayyaba baji, who had banana-like features. She had an oval face and an elongated, straight body. Her otherwise dark face had pale-yellow patches, which I thought was because she was an overripe banana. She taught us about the seven layers of sky, and that Allah resides at the top layer. I asked Tayyaba Baji if Allah’s head was in the clouds too. She looked at me sternly and said Allah doesn’t have a head. That night, I imagined Allah as the headless ghost in Harry Potter. 

In our Quran class, there was a girl named Qirat who was studying to memorize the Quran. Piru and I were fascinated by her. She used to recite very fast, so much so none of us at the class were able to understand what exactly she was reciting. She could very well have been singing an Urdu rap song and baji wouldn’t be able to tell. But baji could always tell. Baji was the sweetest teacher I ever had who always wore bright pink, and blue, and yellow colored clothes, and never hit any of her students. Except Qirat. 

Whenever it was Qirat’s turn to recite her lesson of the day, which was a quarter of a sipara from the Quran, baji turned into someone else. Whenever Qirat went up to baji for her turn, I told Piru to watch baji turn from a banana to a chili. Baji hit Qirat on the cheek after each word, and after every hit, Qirat moved slightly further from baji so she would have to strain her arm more to reach her face. After a number of hits, Qirat would be so far away from baji that it was impossible for her to reach her face without standing up. Each turn of Qirat’s recitation ended up with both her and baji’s face and eyes red, with Qirat’s face also wet with sweat and tears. 

But Qirat was also determined to stay that way. After each of her turns, Piru and I and everyone else in the madrassa felt sorry for her. But whenever we all walked out of the madrassa together, Qirat was more cheerful than anyone else, always excited about the Indian soap dramas she will watch when she reaches home. It was as if she had gotten used to the hits, the humiliation. 

One afternoon, Amma had gone to nani’s place, leaving Piru and I with Dadda. She told us she’d talked to baji and that we would not be going to the madrassa. Piru and I were excited to get an extra two hours of TV. I think Allah must have sensed that excitement and confused it for betrayal. Our electricity shut down off schedule. Piru and I were bored, Dadda had gone to sleep with instructions to not disturb her. 

“Want to play a game?” I asked Piru. 

“You always pick boring games.” 

“No, this is a new one.”

Piru and I played lots of role-playing games. Gordon Ramsay and the idiot sandwich. Waqar Zaka and the contestant who couldn’t believe his selection. This time, we had to take turns roleplaying as baji and Qirat. Since Piru was two years older than me, she decided she would play baji’s role first. I wore my scarf around my head and knotted it tightly around my neck. I picked a sipara from dadda’s wooden cupboard and hoisted it on a pillow in front of me. Piru had come wearing Amma’s dupatta evenly covering her head, neck, and chest. She had also brought a pen which she firmly secured between her index finger and thumb, saying she was playing her own version of baji, like we sometimes heard the actors on TV talk about their roles in movies. 

I-as-Qirat started reciting the sipara, but instead of the actual words from the Quran, I was reciting gibberish. After every pause between the gibberish, Piru-as-baji hit me hard on the face. Sometimes on my left cheek, sometimes on my right. We both laughed after each hit. Then, when my face was completely red and I couldn’t take it any longer, we switched. Piru-as-Qirat reciting gibberish from the sipara, I-as-baji hitting her hard on the face, laughing. By the end of the game, we compared the redness of our faces, and voted on who played which character best. I was always better as Baji and Piru was the best at playing Qirat. This soon became a favorite game that we could never tire of. Once, we played this game for almost one hour, switching back and forth between roles. We knew Amma would never approve so we decided never to talk about it with anyone. This was mine and Piru’s little secret. 

*

We had a maid come to our house every day to sweep and mop and wash our clothes and bathroom. Her name was Rani, and Piru and I always found it tragic that her name meant “Queen” but she was a maid. She also brought her daughter, Nazish, to work, who was about five or six years older than Piru. Although, because she dropped out of school after completing grade five to work with her mother full-time, Piru and I knew more about everything than her. 

Nazish loved listening to Bollywood songs and her favorite actor was Emraan Hashmi. Since Rani could not operate her mobile phone, its primary user was Nazish. One weekend morning, Nazish asked me to check where her songs were stored on the phone. Nazish had a huge number of Emraan Hashmi songs stored on her mom’s phone with videos. At home, although Piru and I watched much TV, we were never allowed to watch kissing scenes or scenes which involved bare skin, especially if bare skin was touching another. 

I asked Nazish to continue working because it would take some time to locate her songs. I played the first song in the list, Aashiq Banaya Aapne, which started with a frantic, sloppy kiss followed immediately with Emraan Hashmi untying the girl’s top’s knot from the back, letting it loose and fall. I’d heard about butterflies floating in your stomach, in Bollywood films, and from girls in my school, but what I felt was different. It wasn’t in my stomach but a little lower, and it was more hungry mice than butterflies. It felt good. Then just as quickly, without warning, I felt my thighs cold and wet. I’d peed, I was sure. Though Amma often told Piru and I, when retelling our childhood to us, that it was Piru who always wet the bed and never I. “You were a disciplined daughter from the beginning,” she boasted to everyone from maternal family to paternal, neighbors, and my teachers. 

Still, I went to the bathroom to check if I’d gotten carried away and really had peed. When I squatted on the toilet, nothing came out, nor did I smell of pee. I came back out and handed the phone to Nazish, showing her where her song list was saved. 

“You know, my boyfriend downloaded these songs for me.” Nazish smiled with pride, like Baji sometimes did when talking about her achievements in the alimah course she was doing. Then she added, “Don’t tell my Amma,” which sounded like shame to me. Like Piru and I had decided not to tell Amma of our role-playing game. I felt bad for both our mothers in that moment. They kept no secrets from us, not even the ones inside their bodies.

In the evenings, Piru and I played with the neighborhood girls outside. We were only allowed to move and play within the two corners of our street, as Amma could only watch us within that area from the balcony. If we were lost from Amma’s vision, we were lost to the world, she’d told us. 

I often saw Ms Beena looking out from her window at us, and then past us. She didn’t look like she belonged here anymore. One night, before going to sleep, I asked Amma what happens when one’s head grows into the clouds. 

“It gets stuck there,” she said. Then, looking at my confused face, she added, “Like I hook your uniform on the door hinge?”

“So Ms Beena’s head is hooked to the clouds. What happens then?”

“Allah knows best. We should just keep our eyes to the ground and pray that our sins be forgiven,” she said. Realizing I was going to ask another question, she quickly added, “You should not think about such people so much. Recite your dua and go to sleep now.” 

*

There was something else Amma did not know: I lied a lot. I didn’t lie because I was in trouble. I didn’t lie because it would save someone’s life, like all the Bollywood films I watched taught me. I didn’t lie because most times the truth hurts and it’s virtuous to lie instead. I lied because I liked lying. And then I lied even after I stopped liking it. 

The school Piru and I went to wasn’t where only the rich kids studied, though we did have some rich students in our class. My best friend, Maha, had been friends with me since first grade. Our mothers knew each other and only met thrice, once a year at the annual Parents-Teachers meeting, though they talked on the phone often when Maha and I called each other. 

Maha knew nothing about me. The Fiha she knew existed only in my imagination, and then in her memories. Imagined-Fiha still lived in a small house, but it was a magical small house. Upon entrance, everyone would be turned into a miniature version of themselves, and thus, the house appeared like a kingdom, exactly like the one from Mariposa & the Fairy Princess. I told Maha that since she was already so small like myself, the house appeared even bigger to us. I watched her pupils dilate as they reflected my face, and then my whole body. How something so tiny could store so much in themselves, I couldn’t understand. But then I thought of Nazish’s tiny mobile phone, and the many many videos stored on it and thought it was entirely possible. Our eyes are like mobile phones, I realized. That’s why they are capable of so much sin, like Amma said. Allah was actually a scientist. 

All my teachers and classmates knew there was something wrong with my neck. One day, in second grade, I twisted my neck so far right that the whole class heard a crack, which also cracked them up. It wasn’t painful to me but relieving. Seeing them all fascinated by my little trick, and especially because their necks couldn’t reproduce the same effect, I started twisting my neck more and more. Right, left, up, down. Crack, crack, crack, crack. At one point, I became a distraction to the class and Amma was made aware of it. 

The doctor recommended some exercises and said I shouldn’t look down too much. The doctor seemed like one of the women Amma did not approve of. She wasn’t wearing a scarf on her head and her chest was covered only with the heartbeat hearing machine. Maybe her head is in the clouds, too, I thought, like Ms Beena. One of the characteristics of people with their heads in the clouds is that they feel lonely, so they want other people to join them as well, Amma said. Maybe that’s why the doctor was stopping me from looking down. So the sky closes in on me. 

By third grade, everyone in my class was taller than me and talking about boys. A girl named Maria and I were the only two people who weren’t friends with any of the boys in our class. While the whole class played chor-police, boys as thieves and girls as cops, during the break time, Maria and I sat on a bench quietly and ate our lunch. During one of those times, I told Maria about my magical house. She said she would ask her Amma if she would let her come visit. I nodded. Then she asked me if my neck hurt so much because there was so much to look up at. I nodded and pretended it was a sad thing to have so much to look up at. 

I often had trouble falling asleep because of my neck. It took at least an hour to adjust my neck and arm on the pillow in such a way that both feel numb to me, and thus, painless. It took an additional hour to think about other things than my pain. Mostly, I thought about the magical house, as if, if I thought about it enough, it would be sure to come true. Even though I knew there was no such thing as magic, that Allah did not like those who did and thought about magic. My eyes often darted towards Piru sleeping beside me, and wished I was her. 

Some nights, mostly on weekends, I thought about Nazish and her boyfriend and her mobile phone and the videos on it. I felt the same exciting discomfort I always felt while watching the videos. On those nights, I clenched my thighs and eyes tightly together again and again, sending a vibration to my whole body and head. The quivering made me forget my neck, and everything else, as my head floated in the clouds, drifting slowly towards sleep. 

About the Author:

Javeria Hasnain is a Pakistani poet and writer from Karachi. She is a Fulbright scholar in the MFA program at The New School, NY. Her poems and prose have appeared in Poet Lore, Mascara Literary Review, beestung, among others. This is her first short story publication. She tweets @peelijay.

*Feature image by Bianca Van Dijk from Pixabay