Authors: Asra Nomani
A nine-year-old girl in the backseat popped her head up. Her name was Sumita. She had been reminiscing about the friends she'd left behind in Providence, Rhode Island. She wondered what kind of friends she would make in this new town. I was playing Wiffleball, focused on the game. When they pulled into the parking lot, the father called out to me.
They needed directions to the Pierpont Apartments. It was a towering building right behind the faculty apartments. I pointed the way. And then I invited them into our house.
My young mother stood in front of the stove and kneaded dough into balls to flatten into
rotis
for this family of six, the Sinhas, who had just walked into her home.
The friendship I was to forge with the nine-year-old girl in the backseat would be an unusual bond given the post-Independence divide between Hindus and Muslims in India. Circular scars the size of nickels sat on our left upper arms, reminders of the smallpox vaccinations we had gotten as children, much like children in America. But because they seemed to scar so much more distinctly on our brown skin, we considered them markings for our gang of child immigrants from India. Our friendship started with American baseball. The Sinha children, my brother, and I challenged the neighborsâthe Wolf clan of nine brothers and sistersâto baseball. Indians versus Americans. We weren't the Americans.
One day I came home from school with a permission slip. This one would allow us to learn to square-dance in Mrs. Gallagher's sixth grade. I begged my mother to sign it. In orhtodox Islam, though, after the age of nine, boys and girls were barely allowed to mingle if they weren't
related. Dancing was definitely out. My mother finally relented. And I learned to square-dance with a boy named David Stitzel. This was my last close encounter with a boy until I turned nineteen.
The next year we moved into our first house, set in the middle-class neighborhood of North Hills in Morgantown, a tract of development cut out of a mountain that sloped into a lush green valley. Our town was a classic small college town where drivers braked for college students crossing the road, townsfolk converged on High Street for the annual Christmas parade, and it made local news when the town hung plastic poinsettas on the lightposts for the holidays.
Two balconies with black steel railings balanced the back of our two-story house with pink aluminum siding and wall-to-wall carpeting. From the balconies, we looked into the valley and across to the swath of mountain that bordered it on the other side. We had a small community of families from India. Somehow, being thrown together in a town where everyone bought groceries at a store called Kroger, the aunties and uncles crossed geographic, religious, and caste boundaries that in India only the rebellious would touch. Baby-sitting Bobby and Misty, the children of a Hindu family named Majumdar, and walking their Pekingese dog named Pluto, I grew up not knowing these boundaries existed even though I washed my hands carefully with Ivory soap afterward. My mother had taught me the Muslim way. Dogs were dirty and
haram,
forbidden.
My family floated between the Hindus and Muslims, and I could see the contrasts in the two cultures. I dashed freely in relay races one Saturday night with Indian girls, my new friend Sumita among them, during a celebration of the Hindu festival of lights, Diwali. We arm-wrestled and waited eagerly during a raffle for three twenty-dollar J. C. Penney gift certificates. None of us won them. A J. C. Penney executive actually won one. We didn't like the food, but freedom burned in our lungs with the yelping we did during our Diwali hall Olympics.
The next night I entered another world. We rode down Riddle Avenue to the Medical Center Apartments for a Muslim Student Association dinner for our holiday, Bukreid. A bearded man directed my mother and me upstairs to a tiny one-room apartment packed with Arab women in head scarves and robes. The men carried food to our room in
casserole dishes. We weren't allowed downstairs, where the men were gathered with the main spread. My head hurt from the foreign sounds of Arabic echoing in my ear. I felt as if we were in a jail. My mother and I were both relieved to leave.
When the Majumdars, Sinhas, and Yusuffs, another Muslim immigrant family in town, came to dine at our house, the men sat in the living room and the women settled in the kitchen. There were no public displays of affection. I never saw my parents kiss, let alone hold hands. The couples arrived and left in the same cars, but, mostly wed in arranged marriages, they skirted nimbly around each other as if they had conceived their children through divine intervention. My mother invited the men first to the spread she had placed on our Montgomery Ward dining table. Chicken
biryani,
flat hand-kneaded
roti,
and plates of other steaming dishes. The women filled their plates after the men cleared out. Women and men intermingled only when they went for seconds.
In America, symbols of my religion expressed themselves in the strangest of places.
“What's this?” Miss Lafever, my phys ed student teacher, asked me one afternoon at Suncrest Junior High School as I curled my body into stretches. She pointed to three squiggles I had made on the top of my health quiz.
It was the Arabic numerological shorthand, 786, for the first line of the Qur'an:
“Bismillah ir-rahman ir-raheem.”
I was supposed to recite it before I ate, before I ran the mile race, before I did anything. Okay, I didn't know what it meant in English.
“What's it mean?” I asked my mother at home that evening.
“In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful,” my mother told me.
I vowed to tell Miss Lafever the next day, if I could remember during eighth-grade Grubby Day.
Whatever the limits, or because of the limits, my religion gave me a personal discipline. I wasn't tempted to date, party, or even wear skirts. I wore pants over my legs. I read
Go Ask Alice,
the tale of a teenage girl who beat drugs only to die anyway. I was grateful to have been born a Muslim. I saw it as a privilege. Whenever I was faced with a dilemma, I asked myself whether my choice would comply with the Qur'an. I was grateful
to faithfully do
namaz
for the relief it gave me. I knew better than to ask permission to go to the Drummond Chapel dances where girls like the McCroskey twins sealed their popularity.
I always knew when I had broken one of the rules. Once, when I was thirteen, I went out with Minh, my best friend Karen's adopted sister from Vietnam. Her mother only let her see her boyfriend on double dates. I joined her, set up with a blind date. When my date called me afterward at home, I was flattered, even if his face was pocketed with pimples.
My brother picked up the other phone line, listened in, and swore at my teenage suitor. “Don't ever call here again!” He never did.
We had our cultural breakthroughs. My mother layered slices of pasta carefully above cheese, tomato sauce, and
halal,
or Islamically kosher, ground beef for our first lasagna. We made our first turkey dinner when I was thirteen. My visiting cousin-sister, Ruby Apa, promptly vomited. A young Indian daughter of my parents' friend disco-danced surreptitiously in the hallway for Ruby Apa and me when we visited her family for dinner.
“That's great!” I shouted.
“Shhh!” she whispered. “My father doesn't let me.”
I wondered what it felt like to know love. Did my parents really love each other? I didn't know. I didn't think so. What were the chances of finding love in an arranged marriage? What about harmony?
I wondered if maybe I should find religion again. I had stopped lifting myself from bed to pray my nighttime
Isha namaz
before sleeping. I now appealed to God to help me with the struggles being waged inside me. When my mother taught me Islam, she would tell me, “It is the right path.”
But what was my path? Even when I ran, training for cross-country, I skirted the way trod by others and found my own.
I started at West Virginia University because my parents didn't believe a daughter should leave home even for studies. I remained an obedient daughter, but one night during my freshman year I challenged our understood order without even intending to do so.
It was just after 2
A.M
. on a Friday night when I turned our purple Pinto station wagon into our driveway off Cottonwood Street, bouncing as the car rolled over the gutter. My brother bound out the front door and
down the steps to meet me in front of the car in his white
kurta
and
pyjama,
flailing his arms in the air.
“Where the fuck were you?” he screamed as he lunged to open the passenger-side door and slammed it shut. He followed me into the house with a string of profanities. “You could have been raped!”
I tried to hold my ground. “I just went to a party.”
My father picked up the phone. “I just reported my daughter missing. She has come home now.” My first party, and my father called the police.
My mother sighed loudly in the living room. I heard the sighs from my bedroom.
“We should return to India,” my father said.
My mother agreed.
As the clock neared 3
A.M
., I heard my brother cough. He was still awake. My mother sniffled. She was still awake. I tried to sleep off the pain vibrating inside me from the reception I'd received when I got home. Maybe my brother knew something I didn't know. Later he told me he was just scared something had happened to me.
In the fall semester of my sophomore year, I arrived late one morning to my class, Women in Technological Development. The lights were out for a movie. I slipped into a seat next to a stranger and whispered to the darkened figure next to me, “Did it just start?”
A twist of fate that would uproot centuries of ancestry sat me there that day. When the professor switched on the lights, I saw I was seated next to a blue-eyed man with dirty-blond hair, a very American name, Michael, and a can of Coke on his desk. He spit Skoal chewing tobacco into it. He was in my Arabic class, too. He was a Special Forces medic in the Army Reserves, a Green Beret, who wanted to run covert operations in the Middle East while I wanted to work in the region as a journalist.
The temptations of the West overtook my family's shelter. Michael became Mike. He was the son of an engineer who worked with the Trident submarine. He started giving me rides home in his two-door Celica with a spotty gray paint job. I had him stop a block away from my house at the intersection of Headlee and Briarwood Avenues, where the McCroskey twins once challenged me to a race.
“Drop me off here,” I told him.
I was too afraid to go closer in case my parents or the Majumdars saw me emerge alone from a man's car.
He slowly initiated me into my first touches of intimacy with a man.
“Ki 'tab,”
we mouthed to each other behind adjoining carrels at Colson Library, practicing the Arabic word for book. He slipped his shoes off and played with my bare toes. I crossed a line I'd never dared before.
One night I studied with him in his room at the Pierpont Apartments, to where I had once directed the Sinhas. Pierpont was one of Morgantown's tallest buildings, with its nine floors spread like three spokes from a center. He massaged my shoulders. He massaged my feet. He led me to the lower mattress of a bunk bed. My feet hung over the edge. He leaned over me. I closed my eyes to his face closing in on me. He kissed me. It was sloppy, but it was my first kiss. I was nineteen.
My junior-year fall semester began. Mike wanted a more physical relationship. I didn't. He told me, “I think we should break up.”
I couldn't let that happen. I'd kissed him. I'd made a commitment. I relented. One night we dined at Wings & Things, a local Mexican fast-food restaurant. I didn't want to leave him. We returned to the trailer he shared with a friend from his Army Reserves Special Forces unit to watch
Hill Street Blues.
During a commercial, the axis of my life took a turn. He led me to his bedroom. I could see the white circle on his Levi's pocket left by his can of Skoal chewing tobacco.
I told him, “Turn off the light.”
I pressed one of my hands against the thin cardboard wall of faux paneling that separated the bedroom from the living room. It was a far cry from the cherished wedding night when I was supposed to lose my virginity. I was two years younger than my mother was when she first looked into my father's eyes. The closest I got to silk was his polyester camouflage blanket. Still, afterward, he said, “I love you.”
I loved him, but I was speechless. I felt happy, but I wept. This wasn't how I was supposed to lose my virginity. What was I one day going to tell my husband? At home, I told my parents I'd spent the night at my friend Christina Toh's house.
A year passed of these lies. At Western Sizzlin' Steak House on Patterson Avenue, next to the Kroger where we'd shopped since my
childhood days for Wheaties, sacks of onions, and bright orange tins of oregano, turmeric, and red pepper for my mother's
masala,
or mixes of ground spices, I told my father, “I want to move out.”
He was heartbroken. No proper Muslim girl left her family before she wed. My mother was not present, having gone to India to rescue my brother. Our family in India had been reporting worrisome tales of bizarre behavior. He had gone to India to play soccer, but he was now traveling aimlessly from one relative's house to the next, daring to grow his hair long and mingle with Hindus.
When they returned, my father and I went to New York to pick them up at the airport. We rested at the midtown Manhattan apartment of my mother's elder brother, Anwar Mamoo, off Lexington Avenue. It overlooked a
halal
meat shop that sold kosher meat to Muslims. My father told my mother that I was staying out late. That I wanted to move out. My mother had just gone through a hell that I couldn't appreciate. I was making another hell come to life for her. I admitted to her that I had a boyfriend.