Sequined Headscarf

September 26, 2008

September 26, 2008

This evening, I sit typing away in my living room with a beautiful headscarf wrapped around my neck. It is shimmery white and transparent, dotted with silver sequins that catch the light like tiny disco balls, and fringed at the ends. It was a spontaneous gift from a stranger, an old woman with a brown, weathered face like a walnut, who walked with her hands clasped together in front of her, and this scarf around her head. She was the grandmother of the 5 children that roamed the giant 4-story house whose soccer field we rented out this afternoon.

This mansion-like house stands across the street from our school like the answer to a “which one does not belong” puzzle: a lush, green Garden of Eden in the middle of the now-familiar dusty brown landscape. A trailer is parked in the backyard next to the soccer field, and beyond the yard and trailer, way way yonder, dozens of cows can be seen grazing (on what?) over the distant hills that presumably also belonged to the family. These people were rich! I picked up one of the adorable kids from her perch in the (probably imported) grass and took her on a tour of her own yard, waving her little baby arm at her father and burying her nose in the bright pink and purple flowers so she could get a whiff of their perfume. After I put her back down- away from the opening in the fence so she wouldn't get hit again with the soccer ball- I wandered over to the front porch where the women of the house were hanging around. The older women- the mother and grandmother- were wrapped up in the traditional black robes and headscarves, but the girl was still young so she could wear whatever she wanted and let her hair flow free. Naturally, I do not remember what the little girl was wearing, nor what color her hair was. Instead, my eyes were drawn to the unusual, and I found the transparent, white scarf covering the old women's hair to be particularly beautiful, the way the sequins caught the light of the sun. 

“Juana,” I said, pointing to the scarf. Juana means “pretty”, or “cute”, and you can use it for things as well as people- babies and women- so it's a pretty handy Kurdish word to know. The old woman responded by touching her scarf and pointing at me with a questioning gaze and some Kurdish babble.

“Zor juana (very pretty),” I said again with a smile because I wasn't sure what she was saying. Before I knew it, the old woman was taking off her scarf and handing it to me. I bent my head down and let her put it on me over my own hair, catching a whiff of the grandmotherly scent that remained with the scarf even after the scarf had left the old woman's head. I spoke with the women for a bit longer. One of them was named Bufr, meaning “snow”, and another Triska, meaning “lightning” I think. I heard someone calling my own name from the field. Game over, time to go! We lost, but it was fun because I got to play as a stand-in for a few minutes, during which I kicked 1 leg, 1 ankle, and zero soccer balls.

Later, I wore this scarf during my visit to the big mosque, where Niroj and I got locked in the women's section and had to bang our way out. That's right, we banged on the window until a stranger walked by and heard our ruckus. And then we banged some more because the first guy walked away and never came back, the clueless idiot.