the class casper

I thought I was seeing things.

‘Ammu (Uncle) Rajai, the elderly school handyman who shares my grandfather’s name and green eyes, had ushered this new student into my classroom without explanation.

Is this– Ahmad? But Ahmad is right here.

Then, I remembered. When I saw Ahmad a couple months back, I thought he was Abdelrahman. This boy here, then, this one was Abdelrahman. Yes, these were the serious, narrowing eyes of Abdelrahman. Wow. He has the beginnings of a mustache.

Over a year ago, I met Abdelrahman as a boy of thirteen whose body and mind couldn’t for a moment sit still.

He was the class jester. Throughout that three-day workshop, he had footnoted my every sentence with a witticism and, as my brother does with my mom, he kept me so busy smiling that it was impossible to get upset with him.

Abdelrahman was also one heck of an orator. He performed a poem by Mahmoud Darwish in which a mother bewails her son’s loss. By the end of the poem, Abdelrahman was a-wailing and we swore to one another that he cried real tears. Add a few dozen pounds, a fellahi gown and scarf and he could’ve easily passed for a bereaved Palestinian mother.

And now, over a year later, he was back.

I had asked after him when classes first started, and an administrator informed me that the boy had moved out of town. He now attended a public school.

I didn’t inquire after the details then, but it saddened me. He was one of the students I best remembered. He was the one who, after hearing that I was part-Libyan, drew himself as a soccer player in green uniform and wrote, “Kirmal Leebya. For Libya’s sake.”

I thought I’d never see him again.

But yesterday, one of my boys ran into him on the street, and so here he was.

It was like seeing a ghost, really, a dead man who grew a little taller instead of more rotten with time.

And I’m glad he came, because I used to think my students a rowdy bunch, but no. Abdelrahman really helps to put things in perspective.

The boy is a one-man show. Every two minutes, he’s in a different seat, with his arm around a different boy. It’s like teaching an Animaniac. Next to him, the rest of the boys seemed subdued, the girls nonexistent. Today, my students were all — and I included — a sort of audience for this boy’s remorseless humor.

In fact, his peers made him out to be the very embodiment of vice. I suggested moving him to another seat and, to my surprise, those boys arm-wavingly protested.

“No, please! He’ll talk to us. We’ll talk to him. We won’t focus. We won’t. We won’t.” They were like believers who underestimate their own faith and beg not to be tested.

“If you  bring him over,” Ahmad raised his hands in surrender, “then it’s ‘amas’ooliytik (at your risk). Don’t ask us about the consequences.” He clapped his hands, as if clearing himself of blame.

After class, Abdelrahman apologized for the stir he’d caused.

“Miss, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Wallahi (by God), I’m sorry. I apologize. I’m sorry–”

There’s something ridiculous, even mocking about apologizing this profusely. It was my turn to narrow my eyes at him. If humor is a defense mechanism, this boy must have mountains to hide, and a herculean wit to man the gates.

Still, I didn’t know why he felt the need to fire so many sorries at me. It’s not like I was dodging his apologies and bolting away.

“I believe you. I believed you the first time you said it.” He quieted down, like a ghost who, mid-shout, realized that a bustling crowd could hear him, that he didn’t have to shout anymore.

“So, we have class this Wednesday?” He asked, almost embarrassed.

“Yes. 1 pm.”

“Alright. I’ll be there.”

“Hey,” I called after him. “Welcome back.”

a feather for show and tell

I usually walk home from UJ, but with 25 copies of a chapter book in my hands (5 more than I had ordered) and a torn bag to carry them in, I wasn’t up for the walk.

Outside the University of Jordan crowds assemble, awaiting taxis, buses and carpools. Waiting there, to me, is like flushing time down the toilet. So I generally walk downstream  of the (human) traffic (try not to think of the toilet metaphor here), pass major forks in the road and, if I must take a taxi, wait at some juncture where fresh taxis come in — ones not already laden with passengers.

But clearly I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Several girls were already standing by when I got there.

I took a post among them and waited my turn. But my turn came and went, and with it many other girls. Girls who would brazenly walk into a taxi and climb in, even though they just joined the crowd.

Anyway, another girl and I were the last of the bunch to go, though we were the first to come. The sun was setting and we were still standing on the sidewalk for the gawking pleasure of drivers-by. What’s worse, help was not necessarily on the way.

Empty taxi cabs waved us away — their salaries must be exceedingly high — and full cabs drove on the far side of the road to signal their disinterest.

If a cab ever did stop, I reasoned, I’d probably get shy and let her go ahead, which means I’ll have to wait alone on the side of the road at sunset. Or I could talk to her.

“Excuse me, where are you headed?”

She named an affluent neighborhood, south of my place. I told her where I lived.

“You’re not from here, are you?” She asked.

Do Jordanians not share? I wondered. Is it the way I dress? Talk? Carry books? Everything about me was suspect. So be it. Guilty as charged. I confessed my otherness.

“I’m not from here either.”

“Really?” A stranger in city where I’m estranged is my friend. “Where are you from?”

“Lebanon.”

“The US.”

“And you’re a teacher?” She asked.

“Yes! How did you know?”

“The books. When I saw you, I said, you don’t carry a stack of books like that unless you’re a teacher.”

“And you’re a teacher, too? What is it, science? I majored in science! And my mom’s a teacher. I think she teaches the same curriculum, actually.”

We were fast becoming acquainted. We were going to tag-team the next taxi. We were going home.

They say eed wahda ma bitsaffi‘ (one hand cannot clap), but, with books busying two of our hands, our two free hands hailed cabs on perpendicular streets, we eventually clapped down on a taxi.

In the cab, our similarities gave way to differences. She loved her native Lebanon and hated Jordan. I haven’t seen Lebanon and I like Jordan just fine.  She was three years married, with a one-year old girl. I am single and that’s that.

When the cab neared my place, she kindly refused my dinar. As I hurriedly prepared to jump out of the (slowly) moving vehicle (the driver wouldn’t come to a stop), it struck me that I might never see her again. It was that keen nostalgia I often felt when parting with friends, a nostalgia rarely renewed in their absence.

Then, to the impatient driver’s anguish, she asked for my number. I recited it in English (my default language setting) and the taxi sped away.

It’s been a week and she hasn’t called me, nor do I think she will. For all I know, she may have taken it down wrong, accidentally or deliberately deleted it even. And still, I’m happy she took it.

Giving (if not swapping) phone numbers or emails, the very existence of Facebook or Twitter — these make me feel as though, at will, I can throw a noose around someone who, otherwise, would have fallen off the face of the earth. (Alternatively, I could let them plummet to a painful and untimely death. I’m so self-important.)

While throwing a noose can be her salvation (or mine), nooses (and clingy whiny contacts) also have a reputation for strangling. So, let’s rethink the metaphor.

When I take an acquaintance’s contact information, I’m effectively plucking one of her feathers and stowing it away. It serves as a quill (an instrument for keeping in touch), an autograph of sorts (evidence of our overstated relationship, should she become wildly famous), a moneymaker (I can sell it on eBay, also when she becomes wildly famous), a source of DNA (in case I’d like to clone her; not sure why). Most importantly, though, it serves as a keepsake, reminding less of the person than of the times we shared.

So, in that taxi, I got plucked at the last moment. Apart from demoting me on the pecking order, this also means I don’t have her number.

But I’m not entirely plucked. I have something by which to remember that friendly stranger. I, too, have a feather from her, one that is longer than a number but easier to recall. I just showed it to you, didn’t I?

a magic trick

Today, I made one of my eighth-grade boys cry.

He was listening to the radio in class. I asked him to turn it off several times but, I’d turn my back a moment and it’d be on again. Arabic pop music on a cell phone, with the boys of that table crowded around. When I saw that they had fewer than three lines of writing on each of their journal pages, I snapped. (They were supposed to have had a page done by then.)

“Please step outside, Abdelrahman.”

The straight- and brown-haired boy took a few steps towards the door, then stopped hesitantly and raised his eyebrows at me as if to say, “Do I have to? Like really really?”

Yes, really really, I thought. “Wait outside ’til I call you back. Two minutes.”

Class went on. We started a collective story-writing activity. The story we came up with was about a boy who ventures out into the forest with his friend Akram on a moonlit night, only to be transformed upon being bitten by a wolf into a wolf, bearing a silver pendant. The friend-turned-wolf defends Akram against the rest of the pack and is dangerously wounded. Akram then searches for the flower embossed on the silver pendant and uses it to nurse his friend to health (and, magically, to humanity).

As this whole midsummer night’s dream unfolded, Abdelrahman stood outside, like a model on a magazine cover, with legs loosely crossed, arms folded against his chest, leaning proudly and a little indignantly against the wall. That’s what I saw anyway when one of his friends reminded me of him. My two-minute sentence had turned into a fifteen-minute purgatory. I don’t know which hurt him more, the humiliation of being out there for so long or the sense of being utterly and inconsolably forgotten.

Not surprisingly, when I invited him back in, he shook his head ever so slightly and shrugged his eyebrows as if to say “there’s no use.” Although I knew that I owed him a few minutes of persuasion-time, so that he could come back to class with a few shards of dignity, I couldn’t leave the class to be with him, so I didn’t press him further.

One of the boys offered to cajole him but returned, to my distress, without Abdelrahman. Another boy said he’d give it a try. He was successful.

Moments later, there was a ruckus on that table again. The boys were crowded around Abdelrahman. This time, it wasn’t to listen to music, but to comfort him.

“Miss! Miss! He’s crying.”

But Miss! Miss! didn’t know what to do.

I grew up believing that there are two ways to reconcile yourself to a crying child. The first is called the Mama Method. This one involves physical, verbal and psychological expressions of compassion. The second is called the Baba Method. It’s a silent but powerful hug that magically makes you feel safe and right again.

I did neither. I stood anxiously by as his friends teased him, patted his back and squeezed their heads together as if in a huddle. One boy sarcastically quoted a famous Arabic poem of praise, “Rajulun warrijalu qaleelu. A man, and men are few.”

Although Abdulrahman’s head was buried in his arms, I could see that he was now laughing. I was relieved.

As he left for break, I waved him over, but he either didn’t see me or pretended not to. I think he expected me to chastise him further because, when I spoke to him at the start of class, he seemed startled that I apologized.

“Do you forgive me?”

His hand froze in the bag of potato chips. He smiled a toothy smile, looked bashfully down, nodded like a happy puppy and went on munching.

My professors at UJ often joke that their students are present in body but not in mind. Today, I became the teacher whose absentmindedness literally made her student disappear. Lucky for me, that magic trick was not irreversible.