Life as a Unicorn

I spent the entire production of CATS, my long-awaited beacon of hope, trying to avert my gaze from the spandex of the male cats. Rather than relishing the details of a show that I knew and loved so intimately, I sat there miserably, seeing only damning temptations. I remember very little about the actual production. The only clear memory I have is of looking at my mother during it and speculating: If she had a gun and found out I was gay – would she shoot me? For a very long time, a little part of me always believed that she would.

Another thing that made this all even more horrific was that in Islam class, we had also been taught that if we had more sins on our left shoulder than good deeds on our right by the time we died, not only would we be sentenced to eternal torture, but so would our mothers for failing us. No pressure. By the age of eleven, I knew hell was a certainty, and to calm the guilt of bringing my mother down with me, it helped to see her as someone who deserved to go to hell. It was a lose–lose situation, granted, but I needed a narrative that would stop me feeling like the root of all evil. As a survival tactic, I began to mythologise my parents as dragons that I needed to slay so I could live freely as an adult – I was definitely going to burn in the afterlife, but at least I could be some sort of hero here on earth. Picture them as villains, and you’ll no longer be the kid in the wrong. That was my only coping mechanism. And then I found something that convinced me that Mama was indeed planning to shoot me down.

My mother, as she rushed out of the house one day, left a copy of the book she was reading on the living-room table: A Child Called It. The book, in case you’ve not heard of it, is an autobiographical account by Dave Pelzer of his mother’s brutal and nightmarish abuse of him as a young child (when he was, somewhat eerily, a similar age to me when I found it). I read it from cover to cover in one gut-stirring sitting, feasting on the tales of a mother stabbing her son, forcing bleach down his throat, and gassing him with Clorox in a bathroom. Maybe Mama’s planning on doing the same to me to get the gay out? Am I her child called It? As I read it, I visualised all the torturous assaults taking place in our house, and pretty swiftly every room was a psychological site of Mama’s potential abuse. This might sound odd, but the book was a comfort for me; it confirmed that my mother could be a woman plotting my murder. The book was like a ghost coming to tell me that it wasn’t all my fault, that it was others who were causing my pain. The child is a total survivor, and he ultimately triumphs in a world violently against him. Perhaps I projected myself onto his narrative, telling myself I would eventually get out of a household that might have me shot for my sexuality. Or maybe I felt deep down that I deserved this kind of abuse from my mother, and wanted to believe that she really did see me as A Child Called It; painful as the thought was, at least it was simpler than questioning how Mama could love me even if the deepest part of me was something she hated. Either way, when I put down the book and returned it to the place my mother had left it, I went to the bathroom, locked the door, and lay on the cold marble floor again, imagining Mama through the door trying to gas me with Clorox fumes. After I got up, I washed my face in hot water, like a soldier readying myself for combat. I was going to get out of this a survivor.

What I didn’t realise then was how much my life was about to change. Later that year my father was offered a new job with Majid, and our family moved from Bahrain to London. It was time to find some armour; for I was about to enter a whole new battlefield.

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