I HAVE ALWAYS WONDERED HOW one is supposed to look like one’s religion. Save for outward tokens such as a turban or a topi, a beard or a burqa, how can one give instant proof of one’s religious beliefs? Yet, growing up in Delhi, all through my school, college and university, while negotiating an assortment of jobs and offices, not to say myriad social occasions, I have heard this comment delivered in tones ranging from surprise to approval. With time I have understood that the speaker is trying to give me a back-handed compliment. Since I don’t look like a Muslim, I am ‘okay’, I am not quite one of ‘them’ − the bomb-throwing, beef-smuggling, jihad-spouting Muslim of popular imagination. By extension, I might even − at a stretch − be considered one of ‘us’.
So, I don’t look like the Muslim of general perception. For one, I don’t have a beard, nor do I wear surma in my eyes or a skullcap on my head. I may be forgiven for that since I am not a man. But I also don’t conform to most people’s idea of a Muslim woman. I sound like anyone raised in Delhi, snobbish as we are − in South Delhi to be precise. I dress no better and no worse than any woman of my social class, not to mention age. I wear my hair short, un-camouflaged by the hijab. In short, I look like any average Delhi person.
Yet I have this other layer to my being, another skin you might call it; that is my Muslimness. This other skin gets revealed every now and then when I break into chaste Urdu or am outraged when Muslim youth are pulled out of buses and trains, beaten and killed; or express horror at our apathy towards the Rohingya crisis or puzzlement at those who equate vegetarianism with non-violence and vice versa. In my mind, there is no duality. I am a Muslim and an Indian in no particular order. I am both. What is more, I see no reason to be either embarrassed or defensive if some random Muslim youth decides to join the ISIS (whose numbers, incidentally, are minuscule) or, for that matter, cheer for Pakistan when it wins a cricket match (though given its present team such instances are increasingly rare, but in my childhood Pakistan won more matches than it lost). Then, of course, there is my second name which is a dead giveaway of my being ‘Muhammadan’!
Far from camouflaging my identity, I want to celebrate being an Indian and being a Muslim. And I wish to do so in the only way I know – through my writings. What is more, and this I want to say as clearly and as loudly as I can, I am not a minority within a minority. I am the voice of the Muslim middle class, a fairly new entity but a sizeable one in the seven decades it has taken to grow since its numbers were completely decimated in the Partition of 1947. And it is this large entity that the world, and India in particular, must acknowledge and learn to deal with.
What is more, the Indian Muslims are not all cut from the same cloth; they are marked by regional and ethnic differences, not to mention the very obvious ones of social class, financial standing and education. A great many among this vast heterogeneous mass are practicing Muslims or even devoutly religious, yes, but even they are far, far removed from the wildeyed Islamists dreaming of a pan-Islamic umma. Given that the Muslim population is roughly 172 million, save for the stray IS sympathizers, in my considered opinion, the overwhelming majority does not show any propensity towards terrorism. Also, the idea of converting India from a Dar-ul Harb (land of unbelievers) to a Dar-ul Islam (land of Islam) through whatever means available to them lies more in the minds of rightwing Hindu extremists than Muslims.
Be it films or popular culture, the demonization of the Muslims has only increased their sense of isolation and victimhood. In pre-globalization India, the film industry routinely depicted Muslims as smugglers or as paan-chewing, surma-wearing hoodlums dressed in pathan suits or as qawwali-singing debauched men who divorced their wives for the most
frivolous of reasons. Post-liberalization, these caricatures were replaced by sinister dons sitting in West Asian havens planning the destruction of Indian cities and, more recently, as tech-savvy but devout Muslims who have been radicalized and turned into cold-blooded jihadists. Subtly but surely, several motifs have crept into the public discourse such as: the
strategic entrapment of Hindu girls by Muslim boys as part of a larger game-plan dubbed ‘love jihad’; the blithe disregard for Hindu sentiments in killing and consuming cows for meat; the sheer nuisance of causing a law-and-order situation every Friday when Muslims congregate in large numbers and listen to khutbas about all sorts of regressive things such as ‘don’t take your kids for polio shots’ or ‘don’t put your money in banks as interest is haraam’; their refusal to sing ‘Vande Mataram’ in a blatant display of their innate anti-nationalism; and so on and so forth.
While the entire Muslim community has suffered because of this steady infiltration of misconceptions and piling up of images and ideas − each more offensive and alienating than the other − a culture and way of life too has suffered due to this stereotyping. Urdu, which has no mooring in Islam, is identified with all Muslims − completely ignoring the fact that Muslims in Kerala speak Malayalam, those from Assam speak Assamese and so on. Popular culture has long depicted Urdu poets and nawabs as sorry creatures steeped in nostalgia and pathos or, worse still, romanticized sherwani-clad heroes and heroines in ghararas in what were once euphemistically called ‘Muslim socials’. When not banal or limiting, some depictions are outright offensive, such as the recurring representation of Muslims as pillaging invaders who looted and burnt temples or lascivious medieval sultans lusting after chaste Rajput queens when not tearing off chunks of raw meat with their bare teeth like savages. Is this forsaking of reality for an erroneous perception not tantamount to aggravated assault? Is this deliberate othering not a form of violence: a violence to the mind and spirit? And what of the actual spike in communal violence and the increase in the number of hate crimes? And the vigilantism that has spiralled out of control from a carefully-orchestrated anti-beef hysteria?
So, how are the Muslims themselves responding to this violence around them, one that is very systematically directed against them? What answer can they give when Union Ministers claim that profits from (Muslim-owned and allegedly illegal) slaughterhouses are directed to fund terrorist activities? Or when the Taj Mahal is written off by a duly
elected MLA for being ‘a blot on the nation’ built as it is by ‘traitors’? And so it goes on. The Indian Muslim is scared and silent, cowed down by the scale and strength of the violence all around him. He is waiting for his Hindu brethren to speak up. He might go for the occasional protest march but there too he is fearful to be seen holding up a placard that says ‘Not in My Name’ or ‘Break the Silence’.
‘Barq girti hai to bechare Musalmanon par’ (lightning strikes only on the Muslims) wrote Allama Iqbal in his long poem addressed to God entitled ‘Shikwa’ (Complaint). And indeed for a century and a half, to be precise since the brutal aftermath of the First War of Independence of 1857, Indian Muslims have been labouring under a sense of siege, of being persecuted and punished for the sins of their fathers, of being wrongly accused of sins of omission and of being at the receiving end of all sorts of indignities, humiliations and violations. In the years after the Partition, accused of being traitors whose rightful place was on the other side of the border, a border that their forefathers had helped create, they were reduced to pawns in a game of electoral politics. The elections of 2014 held up a mirror to the Indian Muslims; the results proved more effectively than any rhetoric how marginalized they have become and how ineffectual in the larger scheme. When it comes to a game of numbers, the Muslim vote amounts to nothing. Their effacement from the body politic seems total.
Clearly, there is much the Indian Muslims need to do to better their lot, to be more integrated and more upwardly mobile in a purely socioeconomic sense. The indices on which they falter, which were so ably pointed out by the Sachar Commission report, are too obvious to be quibbled over. What is equally important is for the rest of the country, and especially the Hindu majority, to adjust the lens through which they view Muslims. There is an urge, as widespread as it is unarticulated among the Muslims of India, to be seen for who or what they are − no better or worse than their neighbours and peers, with no especial propensity towards violence nor any inherent violent tendencies brought on or encouraged by their faith. The binary of bharatiya and videshi, sanskari and ku-sanskari constantly thrust in their faces is not only hurtful and untrue but reinforces stereotypes and pushes Muslims further into the margins. Far from being perpetrators of violence they see themselves as victims of violence. For India to retain its health and vigour as a plural society, this imbalance must be recognized and addressed.
*
If you had peeked in through the dusty, grey windows only a few minutes earlier, you would have seen a middle-aged man and a young woman struggling with each other. You would not be wrong in thinking the man was trying to climb on to thewriggling girl. But no, it wasn’t what you think it was. He wasn’t particularly forceful and she not really shy. What was taking place was actually in custom with what tradition demanded. A girl should not give her body away too easily and a man should show a bit of force. And so they went back and forth, tussling and tossing, each knowing in their heart of hearts that this was a mere formality. Like any other transaction in this part of the world, sex outside of marriage too had its norms which had to be observed.
But now the two bodies lay still in the shadowy Karachi flat. One pale as ivory, the other like melting dark chocolate, both breathing heavily. Every now and then, the noise of a motorcycle roaring past or the sound of a rickshaw spluttering along thelane outside punctuated the silence, but it did nothing to stir the immobile bodies that lay still, like scattered pieces of a broken earthen pitcher. Each lost in their own thoughts, each reflecting on the terms of the transaction.
The transaction, or ‘the date’, as the girl liked to think of it, had begun with a question. A question that the girl now thought was more of an assumption, for it really could not be answered any other way but with a yes. If you were to ask her how ithappened, she would have said it all began with a new scarf. You see, it had been only a few months since she had joined the man’s workforce and, that day, he had called her into his glass cabin. She knew she had been punctual and hard-working and had no reason to fear, yet felt a rising panic grip her throat as she pushed open the glass door.
Smoothing her dupatta over her head and holding it close to her skin, she stood waiting. When he pretended not to see her,she cleared her throat. ‘Yes, sir?’ she asked with some trepidation in her voice.
The man leaned back in his chair, the creaking of the faux leather under his bulk reminding her of a series of small farts.
‘Come in, please.’
She looked up, surprised to hear his voice which was strangely seductive and husky, unlike his looks which she had found repulsive and reptilian.
‘The manager was saying your mother is unwell?’
‘Sir …’ she began, but lost her words to a wave of embarrassment. She felt herself blush, for the sick mother had been an excuse to leave early the past few days.
Perhaps he mistook her silence for grief or maybe he knew her kind only too well. But whatever the reason, he asked her if she would like an advance on her salary.
The girl had left his glass cubicle with immense relief and just a little spark of excitement.
In the coming days, he called her in many times. Mostly to ask about her mother and then about her own life. Was she married, where did she live, did she like working here … The girl was only too happy to get away from the blank glare of thecomputer and the oppressive heat of the overhead fan into his air-conditioned office. Till one day, he asked her if she would like to meet him outside of work.
And then the man had, as if to answer his own question, pushed a small square box – wrapped in shiny silver paper andadorned with an elaborate bow – across his expansive chipboard-and-formica desk, towards her. He did not look at her. And she did not look away from the present. There were very few occasions in her life when she had received gifts, and this overlyshiny, glitzy wrapped box appealed to her. Without accepting it outright, she began a guessing game in her head.
A perfume, some chocolate, jewellery?
The man leaned back in his chair, finally glancing up at her. He seemed to be guessing her reaction. Given her non-designer cotton shalwar-kameez with the white chiffon dupatta wound loosely around her hennaed hair and patchy bleached skin, whitened unevenly by local fairness creams, he seemed confident that she would accept his proposition. This was despite the fact that in the past there had been one or two young women, of the same class and background, who had chosen to take the moral high ground. He recalled now how most of the receptionists who came to work for him had some sort of a sixth sense as to what was required, but there had been a few who had pretended not to understand him and left without notice.
He narrowed his eyes, watching her watch the gift. No, she was not their kind. There was something about the way thiswoman stared for hours at the blank screen of her computer, stirring only when the phones rang. A break-up or an unrequitedlove or perhaps some trouble at home, he mused. But whatever it was, if she was searching for something to fulfil her dreams,he would help her.
He sat up suddenly and she stepped back instinctively. Gingerly, he placed his hand on the shiny silver square. Her eyes travelled all the way from the box to the hair covering the back of his hand to the gold of the watch peeking out from beneathhis stiff white cuffs, up the length of his short arm, narrow shoulders, thick neck, and to the round, almost football-like headthat sat stiffly on his shoulders.
He smiled crookedly.
She looked away, a dizzying wave overcoming her. What surprised her was not guilt, but the lack of it. Why wasn’t she revolted? Where was the disgust? Instead, she felt the prick of excitement, as if she was about to embark on a thrilling adventure.
He lifted the lid of the box and pulled out a beautiful silk scarf. ‘For you,’ he said.
The fabric was embellished with faux gems and she was enthralled. But at the same time, her brow furrowed. It was a headscarf.
‘A beautiful girl like you should be hidden from prying eyes.’
His words seemed to thaw whatever ice had formed at seeing the piece of cloth, instead of the perfume or jewellery she hadimagined. She saw herself through his eyes. A little voice in her head kept repeating, ‘beautiful girl’. She saw herself as she imagined he did – attractive, fair-skinned, delicate, decent. At this, her thoughts halted momentarily as she wondered what her favourite heroine in the TV dramas she watched regularly, would do. The tune of Humsafer played in her mind and she was reminded of the drama’s overly pious and sacrificial heroine, but she dismissed the thought as she remembered the actress Mahira’s smoking habit – something she was unapologetic about despite public outrage. Mahira would do the same, the woman told herself as she picked up the box. She hid the box in the folds of her dupatta wordlessly.
The man’s smile widened. ‘You’re welcome,’ he whispered to her, retreating back.
It began innocently enough, with drop-offs near home and coffees at the mall. The only change that people around hernoticed was that she had started wearing the headscarf he had given her in a tightly wound hijab, and complimented it with along abaya that she took off only when she was inside the office. Perhaps some part of her wanted to be hidden from the rest of the world, like the secret inside her. But to her family, she said it was because people harassed her on public transport. The family, in turn, was only too glad that she had embraced the right path.
The right path had many deviations, mostly in the form of dimly lit restaurants and secluded parks. The day came when they met at a Chinese restaurant off Tariq Road, where they ate greasy chowmein in the eerie red light of a dimly lit corner. Afterthat, they walked quietly to his small car and got in. She noticed he didn’t turn on the AC. To outsiders, they seemed like anyother married couple.
That day, he invited her to a friend’s flat. She was smart enough to know what it meant, naïve enough to know what it didn’t.
In the partly furnished flat, he offered her a bracelet. It was nothing valuable, yet she felt a wave of gratitude wash over her. ‘He cares,’ she heard a voice repeat over and over in her head. She knew he was married. She knew he knew she wasn’t. And she knew what it meant. But still, she was willing to risk it. She did not know why. She dared not ask herself why. Perhaps she had never learnt to question in the first place.
He managed to get her to lie down on the narrow slated bed. And as she looked with feigned interest at the frayed frame of the rusty glass window, he peeled away her clothes. She lay limp, like a newborn, stifling all desire and displaying only abored disinterest to what was happening to her body. Once he was inside her, she seemed to relax and he thrust hard.
‘No,’ she cried, struggling against him, and he looked up at her in surprise.
With great effort, as he slowed to a stop, he asked, ‘Do you really want me to stop?’
She looked at his sweaty face, his eyes half-moons, and shook her head. He buried his face in her breast and thrust twice more before collapsing on her like a dead crab. From below, she watched his small body splattered over her. She prodded him gently.
‘Shall I turn over?’ she asked, slightly annoyed at how abruptly the greatly anticipated adventure was over. If he was surprised at her words, he didn’t show it.
With an almost Herculean effort, he raised himself up on his elbows and she turned over, her hips staring up at him like two brown mole hills. He was not aroused. Like a ticker at the bottom of a news channel, a thought kept running through his mind: This is not her first time.
‘What happened?’ the girl’s muffled voice broke into his thoughts.
He looked down at her face pressed into the pillow, her hips thrusting up at him invitingly, and willed himself to feel something. But all he could see now was the creeping cellulite, the stark contrast of dark against light on her dimply skin, rough at some places and scaly at others. He gently turned her over. What stared up at him put him off even more. He peered closely and noticed what he had missed in his excitement earlier.
‘I’m sorry,’ he heaved.
The girl stared at him. He looked to her like an injured wolf.
Embarrassed, he grabbed his thigh and began to massage it vigorously. ‘Think I’ve pulled a muscle,’ he groaned in fake pain that did little to convince her. Both knew that the moment had passed.
Annoyed, she pushed him aside. She didn’t expect it to be his first time, she thought bitterly, realizing exactly what it was that was hurting her much-married boss. She sat up and grabbed her clothes from where he had tossed them on the floor. She watched him stare at her as she wriggled into them as discreetly as she could. She knew what he was looking at.
Finally, the man could not contain himself any longer and said, ‘You have hair.’
She looked down at the thatch between her legs and stood stickily with her feet apart.
‘Yes,’ she said matter-of-factly.
He looked at her headscarf, tossed ruthlessly on to the floor when they first began kissing, then back at her pubic hair.
‘But … but it is not pious.’
For a second, she was stunned at this assumption of her piety. Had he really forgotten that the scarf was his gift, she thought with a rising annoyance. She thought she heard him mutter something about making an honest woman out of her and, suddenly, the absurdity of the whole situation struck her.
She threw back her head and laughed so loudly that for a moment he felt frightened of this little creature that had let out a laugh as ferocious as a lion’s roar. He was reminded of the time when, once, he had taken his kids to the zoo and they had seen a lioness open her mouth and yawn. It had seemed to him like some sort of soundless laugh and he had felt in that momentas if he were being mocked. He felt it again now, with her uproarious laughter ringing in the tiny room.
‘It is,’ she said in between mouthfuls of suffocating laughter. Feeling the weight of his gaze on her, she willed herself to stop. She turned away, a clownish smile still plastered on her face, as she struggled to tie her bra. With a sacrificial sigh, he got up to help her and she instinctively pulled away. She wasn’t sure why she did that, but knew that this scrutiny of his had sprung up some sort of distance between them.
In a softer tone, she said, ‘I can do it myself.’
He remained silent but she thought she saw a hint of a smirk.
‘But,’ she said as she pushed her hands through the sleeves of her long kurta, ‘you shouldn’t make assumptions, you know.’
‘I wasn’t,’ he said as he handed her the scarf.
She paused before taking it in. She found herself wondering if he agreed with her or if he really believed her to be someone she had never claimed to be.
She opened her mouth to say something, but he looked away. Like a fish trying to breathe, she opened and closed her mouth, wondering if he wanted her to leave. As if to quietly send the message across, he glanced purposefully at his watch.
She wanted at that moment to hit him. But she couldn’t. He was her boss.
To keep her hands busy, she started buttoning her abaya, the long string of buttons demanding her focus.
‘So tell me,’ he said, leaning back against a pillow and lighting a cigarette. ‘You wear an abaya, a hijab, you probably prayfive times a day, but you don’t remove your pubic hair? I mean …’ He let out a long slow exhale and continued, ‘Isn’t that impure? Napak? Against Sunnah? What is that Hadith? Hair should not be longer than a grain of rice …’ He paused and then suddenly, realizing the irony of the situation, began to laugh. Watching his sheepish laughter, she too was reminded of an animal. Except to her, the shrill pitch of his laugh was reminiscent of a hyena.
She smoothed the folds of her abaya and stepped in front of the floor-length mirror. Slowly, she raised her waist-length hair to the top of her head in a topknot, then began to tie her hijab around it. Then came the sunglasses. And in a moment, she had transformed into just about any other woman on the streets of Karachi, making her way home after a hard day’s work, plodding away at a mundane, office job.
Addressing him through the mirror, she said, ‘It’s uncomfortable.’
But the man had moved on. He was going through his phone, his thumb furiously texting, messaging, his eyes scrolling up and down the screen.
‘I said—’ she began, then stopped mid-sentence. Instead, she looked at him through the mirror. In that moment, as the man on the bed scrolled through his phone, he seemed no different from any other man. She tore her eyes away from him and stared at her own reflection. It seemed to be mocking her.
‘Why am I doing this?’ she whispered to herself. Looking at him again, she took in his sunken chest, his protruding stomach. The thick reading glasses resting on his even thicker nose, and the deep brown of his skin almost merging with the mahogany of the eyeglasses. But it wasn’t his looks that repelled her. It was his indifference that bothered her.
And in that moment, she knew why.
He made her feel wanted. Even if only for a few minutes.
And now, as she tugged her hijab into place and picked up her bag, she thought with affectionate pity that it was sweet of him. It was sweet of him to think she dressed modestly and probably prayed five times. It was sweet of him to think … to think that she was pious. Pure.
She pulled up the folds of the hijab across her mouth and nostrils and thought how in this aspect he was like her family. They too had been pleasantly surprised when she started wearing the hijab and the abaya. They too had thought her pious.
‘Let them,’ she whispered to herself as she crossed the distance across the rug, from the mirror to the bed.
She sat down at the edge and gently pulled his phone away.
‘I’m leaving now.’
He nodded indulgently and pulled out his wallet. ‘For the taxi,’ he said.
She hesitated before taking it. It was almost as if he were putting a price on it. Better a price than a name, she thought firmly as she took in the money five times the cost of a taxi ride back.
‘He cares about me,’ she told herself as she shut the door behind her. ‘He cares a lot.’ She counted the money and stuffed it quickly into her purse before boarding the bus, a part of her knowing that her services were no longer needed.
On the bus, she camouflaged herself amidst the other veiled women, all shrinking into themselves, willing their bodies to become invisible and unfeeling to the pinching and groping that no number of hijabs and burkhas seemed to deter.
Ten minutes before her stop, she texted her younger brother to meet her at the bus stop. And he was there, probably nagged by her mother, blackmailed into helping his sister who, crippled by her gender, was helpless in walking home alone.
She stepped off the bus behind three other abaya-clad ladies, and almost burst into raucous laughter again as her brother approached the woman in front of her and called her ‘Api’.
The woman ignored him and her brother seemed embarrassed.
‘You all look the same,’ he grumbled. ‘In this sea of black burkhas, I can’t tell who is who.’
She frowned as she mounted the motorbike her fifteen-year-old brother was allowed to ride but was off limits to her. As they sped through the narrow lanes and dug-up roads towards the airless cement cage they called home, she looked in the bike’s side mirrors and watched the road behind them disappear in a haze of grey exhaust smoke. She smiled. The sunglasses were the first to go, then the headscarf, which she tugged at till it came loose. She spent the rest of the bumpy ride feeling the breeze on her face and scalp, and thinking about how she would spend the money.
*
The story of covering my hair, my face, my entire body, including my hands, is rooted in my mother’s story. And her story of covering is wrapped up in her relationship with immigration and assimilation. Like the other girls in her hometown in Pakistan,my mother started covering her hair when she was a young child. But for the first few years after immigrating, she and my dadtried to assimilate into a white Canada. My father immigrated in the sixties with a twelfth- grade education and a diploma inmetallurgy. He worked in construction as a welder and pipe fitter. He ‘brought’ – his words, not mine – my mother to Toronto after marrying her. She was eighteen years old and bewildered by every- thing she saw. In the winter she was stunned by theextreme cold; in the summer she was horrified at the white bodies lounging in the sun around the swimming pool located in the centre of the apartment complex where she lived. She would peer down from her tiny apartment, dazed and disgusted by the lack of shame. She hated her tiny apart- ment, she always said it made her feel like an animal in a cage. She missed the courtyards and fresh air of Pakistan. She was terrified of escalators. I inherited that fear from her. To this day, my heart quickens a bit just before step-ping on.
But still, under my father’s influence, she tried to assimi- late. They both did. Pictures of my parents from the seventies capturethe people they were trying to be. My father is some- times clean-shaven, and other times sports a fashionable trim beard. He looks a bit dodgy in his three-piece, checkered, mustard suits, and handsome in his flared pants and Ray Ban sunglasses. He poses infront of his Mustang, sometimes lean- ing against it, other times standing behind its open front door. My mother smiles uncertainlyin bell-bottoms and a vest, with a kerchief on her head, pushing a stroller in High Park.
These pictures show two young South Asians desperately trying to fit in, to be accepted, to be white. But they were not white,they were brown. And 1970s white Canada did not let them forget it. ‘Paki’ is the only slur they shared with us. Even now, whenthey say it, I get a sense of how much it hurt them. How it took the wind out of their sails. How it made them want to give up andgo back home. And they did both of those things – gave up and tried to go back home.
Many immigrants talk about the ‘Dream of Return’. One day, I’ll go home. I’ll make enough money to go back, back to a country I belongin, to a place that feels like home. But the cruel fact of immigration is that once you leave, you never really have a home. You and the place you leave behind transform, ceaselessly, infinitely, so that when – if – you encounter each other again, you areunrecognisable to one another. When you visit the neighbourhood you grew up in, you wonder, Is this the street our house was on?Or was it the next street over? Are we even in the right area? Your relatives and friends marvel, Is that really you? My god, I didn’t recognise you!But still, the Dream of Return remains strong; it is a dream that those immigrants cling to most desperately who do not findhome in the places to which they immigrate, where they become citizens, where they pay taxes, where they have their children,where they lose their children.
I’m talking about immigration out of necessity, out of desperation. A better word for this might be ‘exile’, except it’s not that you’ve been banished from your country of origin, but rather that the sorry state of the nation you’re born into and your own socio-economic class leave you no choice but to try your luck elsewhere if you dare hope for a better future.
Whatever the geopolitics of the region, or the forces of the global capitalist system that led you to find yourself in thisposition, it does not really matter to you. All that matters is that you would rather stay home, but you know there is no hope foryou there. If you want a better future, you must leave. And you must go to a wealthier nation, a nation that is privileged by theglobal structures of inequality. You leave because you understand the bleak future that lies ahead. And if you’re really lucky, maybe you’ll amass enough wealth to return home and help your parents and siblings and extended family. They’ll need it, because if they stay put – as most of them will – their future will turn out even bleaker than you could have ever imagined. Poverty will destroy your family, it will ravage the bodies of your loved ones, they will fight over scraps, they will die young from preventable diseases, without access to the basic medical attention that might have saved them.
It is these immigrants that hold tight to the Dream of Return. This immigration is not the immigration of the wealthy eliteof this world. It is not the immigration of those who hop nations and continents in pursuit of adventure, hobbies, an escape from boredom. Those people never actually immigrate, though in conversation they might stop and ponder with unnecessaryprofundity, I guess I’m an immi- grant, too! These people don’t really think of themselves as immigrants at all; they’re expats. Peoplewho always belong somewhere – somewhere else – and always have the luxury to head home, their real home, anytime they so desire.
But immigrants of my parents’ ilk cannot do this, they cannot just head home. They must accumulate wealth so that theycan survive when they get back to a home they no longer recognise. For such immigrants, the Dream of Return remains justthat, a dream that motivates them those first years and then slowly wanes and dies as they age. The Dream of Return dies formost immigrants well before they are buried in the foreign land that will become the closest thing to home that they will ever know.
My parents did not take their rejection well. They resented and bristled at the racism they experienced, at the regular insults and demands to ‘go home’. So, after about a decade of trying the assimilation route, they decided to go back to Pakistan. On this front – going home – they failed, though they tried four times – no small feat with six children. Each time, they soldeverything, said goodbye to their friends and adios to Canada, and relocated to Pakistan for real this time. Each time, theirbusinesses flopped, they were cheated out of their money, or some such thing, and they came back to Canada to try again.
There was no possibility in their minds of remaining forever in Canada and making it their home. Under a steady barrage of racism and xenophobia, my parents gave up on trying to assimilate into Canadian society. Fine, if you won’t have us, we don’twant to belong to you anyways. Classic bitter grapes strategy. I know it is supposed to be ‘sour grapes’, not ‘bitter grapes’, but whenyou are born and raised in Canada speaking Urdu as your first language, you’re going to mess up metaphors. And when you do, you come to expect the superior looks and condescending corrections, even when they don’t make sense. I mean, ‘bitter grapes’ makes more sense than ‘sour grapes’. Concord grapes are sour and they taste awesome. Bitter grapes makes more sense. Think about it.
Anyways, the year I was born, my mother started wear- ing a hijab. She retired her pants, and sewed herself some shalwarkameez. My father grew out his beard like the Prophet’s, at least one fist-length long. And they both brought their children along for the ride on this anti- assimilationist train. Surely they thought they were protect- ing us, saving us from therejection that had scarred them so deeply. If we never wanted to belong in the first place, we wouldn’t care when people mocked us, treated us with contempt, were unfriendly to us. My parents pulled my older brother and sister out of choir, chess club, track and all other extra-curricular activities. They got rid of the TV, stopped listening to music and quit reading anything that could be a purveyor of ‘Western’ culture. Instead, they focused their energies on studying Islam, learning to recite the Qur’an properly, listening to Islamic lectures from Urdu-speaking preachers on audio cassettes. If all they were going to be was ‘Paki’, they might as well be proper Pakis, learn their culture and their religion. Be the people they were going to get shit for being.
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