Good Muslim Boy by Osamah Sami

must have felt particularly close to me.
He started talking about his fondness for liquor.
    Before the Ayatollah Khomeini revolution, during the Shah era, he’d tasted what he
called the Mister John Walker.
    ‘The Mister Walker is one that plonks you out with happy dreams,’ he said, dreamily.
‘Dreams of freedom and the smell of air without blood…’ There was a glitter in his
gaze. ‘It’s also good for your eyes,’ he confided. ‘You start seeing your wife in
ways you never had before. You’ll see the super goggles I’m talking about when you
grow up.’
    ‘Does Mister Walker make your wife less older?’ I asked. Mr Rashidi’s wife was noticeably
his senior.
    ‘Yes, Osamah,’ he said wistfully. ‘It takes a decade off her. And that’s only one
benefit.’
    I sat there, amazed and astonished and feeling important, having been worthy of my
teacher’s sharing a punishable secret with me. If anyone else had heard such a confession
in Iran, he’d have been sacked and imprisoned and, naturally, tortured. I felt an
admiration for this rebel of a man, more than any religious authority I’d been brought
up to worship. I felt cool, in other words. He puffed cigarette smoke out his nose,
and gestured to his pack of Marlboros.
    ‘Osamah, my boy, don’t think this stuff’s what’s gonna kill you. There’s a stronger
killer, something that suffocates you stronger than the gas. When you grow up, you’ll
know what I mean,’ he said, again, mysteriously.
    ‘Why do I have to learn everything when I grow up?’ I asked him. ‘Why can’t I just
know now?’
    Mr Rashidi just patted my shaved head, got up and walked into the kitchen, still
beaming his signature smile. He kissed his wife on the shoulder and made his way
to the fridge. He retrieved a bottle of Mister John Walker, an illegal import, no
doubt, walked to the front door, opened it, and stepped out onto the street.
    I watched him look over the street, impassively, pour the bottle on himself, shout,
‘God is Great!’ and then self-immolate. He was flapping as the flames engulfed him,
but his wife flapped even harder, helpless and screaming. There was nothing she could
do. I just watched Mr Rashidi until he dropped onto the concrete. I read the Koran,
silently, to brighten his burned soul.

School crime and punishment
    Mr Rashidi was still fresh in his grave when the surviving teachers began to routinely
belt the socks off me. Other kids got beaten too, but I was an Arab, and so I had
to cop a lot of discipline.
    The necessity for discipline made the teachers work hard. The ever-growing need for
new and interesting torture techniques opened their imaginations, fuelled their creativities.
Instruments ranged from the wooden ruler to the garden hose to the electric cable,
applied as needed to the knuckles or the bare soles of the feet. This was not as
fun as I am making it out to be. The fun part was walking home if it was snowing;
with your feet fresh from the lashings, it was a blessing to be numb. It still stung,
but it dulled your pain receptors.
    If your hair was long enough that a teacher could grip it in their fingers, it was
deemed too long, inspiring them to perform what they dubbed an ‘intersection’.
    I detested shaved, short hair.
    Not from vanity. I’d seen too many dead soldiers on the street, and shaved heads
were the one thing they had in common. I always pushed it, growing my hair to three
centimetres’ length. But you had to be careful: nothing delighted the teachers more
than hair long enough to grip and twist between their fingers. Or, almost nothing.
They also took special pleasure in the intersections. This involved shaving in a
cross-shape, leaving four patches of longer hair, causing strangers by the side of
the road to call cruel and droll remarks on your walk home, mainly about watching
your step when you crossed the intersection. ‘Nice grass patches! Can sheep herd
on them?’
    The thing about kids is that they’re prone