A Sinner in Mecca

by Parvez Sharma

  “But why do we want to wish him peace every time, Khala?” I asked.

  “Because he would wish the very same for you, Parvez.”

  And then, “Khala, what did Rasoolullah look like?”

  A question that has created much worldwide mayhem. But it was safe to ask Khala. Each time she would add newer, magical details until, for my childish imagination, Muhammad became real. A rather handsome man—even in my pre-sexual mind these descriptions of him would evoke a forbidden longing I could not explain. I somehow knew that any articulation of this complex longing was forbidden enough to conceal, even from Khala.

  Khala’s descriptions of the Prophet began with her reminding us that Islam was the best religion because, amongst so many other good things, it also forbade us from any kind of idol worship. (This idea of Islam being the most superior religion creates dangerous duality worldviews when in hands not quite like my childhood Khala’s.) We were forever forbidden to depict Muhammad, the Rasoolullah, pictorially. The consequences, she would emphasize, were divinely dire. Ironically, ask most devout Muslims, and they will be able to describe what Muhammad looked like in great, often poetic detail, but they know the line that can never be crossed. So we children often drew pictures of Khala’s stories, but never of Muhammad.

  Once Khala was convinced that we would not attempt to draw any pictures of the Prophet, she would begin. “Rasoolullah, peace be upon Him, was tall. He had a sturdy build with long, muscular limbs and tapering fingers. The hair of his head was long and thick and wavy, just like your curls, Parvez.” When she directly referenced me in these stories, a thrill of recognition and blissful affirmation rushed through my body. This proved that I was better than the other children.

  “His forehead was large and prominent, his eyelashes were long and thick, his nose was sloping, his mouth was large, and his teeth were well set. His cheeks were spare and he had a pleasant smile. His eyes were large and black with a touch of brown. His beard was thick, and at the time of his death, he had seventeen gray hairs in it. He had a fine line of hair over his neck and chest. He was fair of complexion and altogether was so handsome that Abu Bakr, peace be upon him, composed this couplet about him: ‘As there is no darkness in the moonlit night, so is Mustafa (Muhammad), the well-wisher, bright.’ Now, children, who is Abu Bakr?”

  I would raise my hand before she had finished asking the question, informing everyone that Abu Bakr was our first khalifa (“caliph”), and he was also the Prophet’s father-in-law and one of his senior sahaba (“companions”). Khala would smile approvingly at me. And in an instant, my Eid was made. In just a few years, I would know that my version of Islam’s history was heavily influenced by Sunni (Hannafi) ideology, and for the Shia there is a completely different line of Muhammad’s inheritors.

  In her little sessions, Khala made sure that we understood that the Quran was divided into chapters called Surah and each chapter was made up of verses, which were called Ayah. This was hardly Quranic study. I was just being taught the basics and the eight essential Surahs. Khala’s Quran came heavily edited.

  I now hope she might even have been proud of the man I have become. She made sure I would never forget her. I never have.

  In 1998, I set forth on my first pilgrimage to what I would now probably call the land-of-the-not-so-free. We couldn’t make the connection to JFK, our intended destination. After some commotion, Kuwait Airways put us in a hotel near Kuwait International Airport for a night’s unanticipated layover.

  So on June 17, 1998, I set foot on foreign Arab soil, the soil likely once trod by Prophet Muhammad. It was only my second time out of India. Looking back, I feel this was no coincidence. The airport was a surreal display. Glitzy marble and brass columns, glistening so clean you could eat off the floor. Kuwaiti sheikhs in their flowing white robes glided around as if floating on air.

  A stern-looking official took our passports and told us we could collect them in the morning. I didn’t know it then, but this would not be the first time an authoritarian Arab regime would confiscate my passport. We were herded into an air-conditioned bus, drove through the barren desert, and there it was: fancier than anything I had seen. The oil-rich gulf monarchies’ endless thirst for tall towers had begun. In the not-so-distant future, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, and the Kingdom Tower in Mecca, the world’s third-tallest, would prove that Gulf Arabs loved their skyscrapers, given that they didn’t really have much else for topography. The former provided enough glam to draw the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills in as they gamboled around Dubai in a future season finale. Kuwait had similarly tall ambitions but could never really catch up to Dubai.

  My room was a nouveau riche wonderland of gold faucets and a massive shower. In my Delhi apartment, I’d used a bucket to wash. Within a few minutes of entering the room, I used the glitzy shower with all manner of controls and settings. I also saw my first Jacuzzi bathtub and bidet. I had no idea what they were. The wonders of Google and a laptop had still not arrived in my life.

  Faux-gold carvings with arrows pointing toward Mecca had been engraved on the bed-stands, so the faithful would know where to direct their daily prayers. I was not a supplicating Muslim at the time, so I paid no heed to the calls for nighttime prayers that rang out from several mosques around my hotel.

  I flipped channels on an enormous TV. The new Al Jazeera network was hosting an interview with the Saudi “jihadi” Osama bin Laden. At the television channel where I worked in Delhi, Al Jazeera was monitored constantly and that network was almost single-handedly making Osama a global celebrity. His fame rested on what he called his “jihad” in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation, which was long over. In a sense, he was a jobless terrorist. His movements between Afghanistan and the abhorred Pakistan provoked much fearful debate among the hardly neutral senior journalists at my channel. And jihad was a few years away from becoming the most famous word on the planet.

  Bin Laden was framed off-center with carefully placed Kalashnikovs. Despite being in what appeared to be a cave, he had a carefully controlled media persona. His thoughts seemed disjointed. At one moment he railed against the wrongful occupations of Muslim lands by infidels and then moved to boasting about his father’s renovation work in Mecca, in “the Prophet’s holy site,” meaning Medina and at Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem. He spoke of the injustice of “that” Jewish occupier (deliberately not naming Israel) of Jerusalem, of Palestine, and of the torture of hundreds of thousands of innocent “Muslim Palestinian lives.” And then there was familiar anti-American and anti-British rhetoric.

  I had followed bin Laden’s story with interest ever since it broke on Indian television. He seemed always to be giving interviews. Osama bin Laden’s soothing voice lulled me to sleep that night.

  “What brings you here?” asked the black border agent once I made it to New York. I had never seen a black person, growing up in racist and classist India. My first visit to my mythical America was beginning!

  “To visit my family and vacation,” I replied.

  “Welcome to America. Enjoy.” It was like she was serving a massive ice cream sundae. She stamped my passport. Strangely clad men in long black coats and tall hats stood at the baggage carousel. The Kuwait Airways bags were coming out on a carousel shared by the Israeli airline El Al. I had never seen orthodox Jews or met anyone who was Jewish. The irony of the shared carousel is only in retrospect.

  In later years my cousin who picked me up said, “You came out and bent over to kiss the soil.” I always say I have no such recollection, even though part of my brain thinks I might melodramatically have. It was the soil of Bill Clinton’s America: I hope history will not remember him merely as the president who was impeached for getting a blowjob.

  “F-O-B—that’s what you are,” said my cousin. “Fresh Off the Boat! Knows nothing! We will even have to get you new clothes! And some deodorant to make you smell better!” he laughed.

  New York dazzled me. And if the central thesi
s of the uber-phenom The Secret is true, I must have put a super-strong intention into the universe because it would become home. Manhattan, years later, strangely felt like an island that trapped yet protected me.

  The next night, I was taken to my first-ever gay club. My straight cousin and his straight friends joined. They were comfortable enough in their sexualities not to be threatened. I stuffed dollar bills into two butts gyrating on the bar. All of my gay activity in India had happened while my mother lay dying and thus was furtive, fast, and, to my mind, filthy. She’d always told me sex was shameful in her indirect conversations on the subject.

  I followed an unattainably handsome black man into what looked like a back room with heavy curtains. Inside it was my mother’s definition of sex. Filth.

  The evening after that, my cousin and I schlepped to the Bronx for a game at Yankee stadium. America was large, floodlit, and filled with giant colas and heaping baskets of fries and Coke. I bit into my first hot dog and then in shock asked, “Is it pork?” My cousin confirmed it was kosher, the Jewish version of halal.

  I could not follow the game. My cousin explained the rules, but my mind wandered back to my earliest memories of the Eid of the Sacrifice and how they were mixed in with India’s favorite sport: cricket. Cricket for me was a blood sport. The crack of the baseball bat could only send my mind back in time to the cricket games of my youth, where my childhood effeminacy evoked reliable bullying. Children can be cruel like no one else.

  I recalled the rivers of blood that ran through my childhood neighborhood as goats were slaughtered during Eid al-Adha. Then my mind brought up a memory of another bloody annual—exclusively Shia—ritual on Ashura, the tenth day of the Islamic calendar’s first month, Muharram: Bare-chested Shia men self-flagellating to commemorate the martyrdom of one of their greatest ancestors, Imam Husayn, who was killed in the Battle of Karbala in what is now present-day Iraq. Little boys, many my friends, played cricket in the bloody soil, caused by the procession. I joined them hesitantly, aware of my fear and the trauma of ridicule at my inability to excel in the national obsession. Shirtless Shia men, sinewy and drenched in sweat, walked past us in their annual Tazia (“mourning”) procession. I watched them, fascinated, perhaps feeling my first sexual arousal. They had metallic chains in their hands, which they called zanjeer (a type of chain), and they repeatedly and rhythmically whipped themselves. As zanjeer hit skin it left a trail of blood, which was oddly arousing. Trying to focus on my cricket and failing miserably, I could only stare at these muscular, hirsute men. Sectarian Shia-Sunni riots during this time often broke out.

  For a moment, I was back in the baseball game. My cousin cheered the Yankees on, and I noticed how big and sexy some of the players were. He had generously kept us out of the bleachers.

  I was back in India. Hindu-Muslim raged again. The dots connected in my nine-year-old mind. Some Hindus, as in years past, had left the carcass of a pig—that unholiest of unholy animals—for the Muslims in the local mosque, and the enraged Muslims had set fire to the homes of a Hindu community of primarily lowest-caste cobblers. My fear of cricket and my fascination with these men and the violence they created mingled and formed the momentary tapestry of an unusual childhood mind. Cricket was the one supreme religion both India and Pakistan shared. One particularly violent riot had erupted near our school when it was discovered that the Muslims had celebrated with sweets and firecrackers after the Pakistani team defeated India. “Katuas”—(circumcised) bastards—my school friends would spit out. Katua for them was the racial slur for Muslims.

  Generations of Indians had grown up obsessed with cricket, and there was nothing more exciting than an India-Pakistan match. Some Muslim families in the neighborhood distributed sweets when Pakistan won, while my parents told me to “be secular.” We were to root for the Indian team, because not doing so is unpatriotic. But I always secretly rooted for the Pakistani team, admiring their taller, and in my eyes more masculine, physiques.

  Besides my homosexuality, I would also grow up ashamed of the part of me that was Muslim.

  Years later, as a journalist in Delhi, I had befriended a cricket-obsessed hack whose theory was simple: the reasons the Pakistanis sometimes did so well against the Indian team was that they had the focus that can uniquely be instilled by Islam alone. The Hindus, he told me, just did not have that dedication. I challenged him with the names of Indian Muslims in the national team. But the question remained. Does the discipline of a good Muslim life make a Pakistani cricketer superior to a Hindu, Indian one?

  “Isn’t this just the most fun thing you have ever done?” yelled my cousin over the din.

  I smiled and nodded my head. I could not bear to tell him that none of it made any sense and therefore my mind was busy visiting other places.

  The intense intersections of ritual violence—sexualized in my pre-pubescent mind—with the real inter-religious violence I experienced and many insecurities of a lonely childhood never went away.

  I asked myself: Implausible as it sounded, was the discipline of Islam and indeed of jihad partly a genetic trait passed on from Muslim to Muslim, through blood ties?

  The blood of animals and humans flowed and swirled in my mind’s eye when the Yankees hit yet another home run.

  “Awesome game!” shouted my cousin. “This is the best of American sport that you just saw! Even better than cricket!”

  During that same 1998 trip, my cousin bought me a special ticket to San Francisco, which I fast realized was hardly the capital of Planet Gay. My pilgrimage to the fabled Castro Street revealed just a short city block. A theater, a few restaurants, a gay bookshop, a coffee shop, and that was it.

  Pride arrived and so did I. The enemy nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh mingled here in a single tent. They were South Asian LGBT’s in this label-loving land. Or Desis (“from back home”). Growing up in India, it’s rare to meet a Pakistani or Bangladeshi, unlike in NYC, with the yellow-taxi cabbies who would be so abundant in my future home.

  San Francisco was a fast education in everything that lay between twink, bear, and dyke. Did this endless bacchanalia and exposed behinds, with some floats sponsored by corporate giants, really herald anything prideful?

  Night fell and brought with it a return to the sexual abandon of the shadowy, sweaty back room I had experienced at NYC’s Splash. This one was called the Power Exchange and was advertised as a bathhouse. I had never been to one. Rooms upon rooms spread out before me. Their doors ajar, naked men waiting, usually with their butts in the air. All you needed to do was walk in. I came upon a nude man in a leather sling—he was positioned such that his legs were up in the air. There was a line of semi-naked men waiting. It was dark but it was clear that this leather bottom was in it for the long haul. I did not join the line. No condoms were in sight. By day, I imagined these cubicles could easily transform into a call center for a tech company.

  Leaving, I wondered aloud to my friend, “What is there to be proud of?”

  I killed my mother when I was twenty-one. She lay dying of a painful cancer in the Indian city of Calcutta. I was busy coming out in far-away Delhi. Horny and thoughtless. Eager to experience the shabby kind of hedonism that a young, gay lifestyle could offer in third-world India, I traveled to what was billed as India’s first gay conference in Bombay despite her protestations. I barely saw her those last few months. And I never got to say goodbye.

  She had once spoken longingly of unmade pilgrimages, unfulfilled resolutions. And a place she called “God’s House,” where sins could be prayed away. I wondered if I would ever fulfill her dreams. I wondered if we would reconcile in earthly physical space or in the afterlife. I wondered if I could get her Urdu poetry published in a land more receptive to her language, in Pakistan, where it was their lingua franca.

  I did not cry at her funeral. I felt that the shame of my sexuality killed her. I knew that she died angry. The guilt of murdering a parent is an immense burden to carry. Mine felt particularly he
avy.

  New York’s Columbia University had granted me admission with no financial aid for the first year. I entreated the film department chair for a scholarship and his firm no meant I just couldn’t afford it. So I fell back on my second option, DC’s American University. In that town I could even stay for free with extended family. But they were daily reminders of my unfinished business with grief.

  By 2001, I was on triple duty. I was a full-time graduate student, an adjunct professor at American University, and a part-time employee in the media division at downtown DC’s World Bank. It was there that I had front-seat views to the smoke pouring from the Pentagon. I called my cousin. In a few minutes, cellphone reception would stop.

  “You have to come home right away,” he said. “We remember what went down in school in ’79.” Of course everyone remembered the Iran hostage crisis, which predictably generated hate in America. My school-going cousins had been mercilessly bullied for appearing Iranian, just because of their skin color. Children can be particularly cruel. “Just get home. Your beard and your skin color don’t help!”

  Rumors flew faster than fighter jets. George W. Bush and gang had disappeared. Hijacked planes were flying all over DC. One would hit the Capitol at any moment—a Capitol that was uncomfortably close. Another was well on its way to flying into the White House. I thought of thousands of TV-segment producers struggling to place accurate lower third infographics on a live calamity unfolding on cameras in real-time. Soon we were in split-screen mode—Towers and the Pentagon. I knew it was he. To date I don’t understand my prescience.

  Clearly the Feds, Langley, and Foggy Bottom were either glued to Osama bin Laden’s most melodramatic attempt to live in worldwide infamy forever or busy rushing home or to government bunkers. Osama bin Laden had pulled together the greatest show on earth, without resources like the US had. I wondered if he, too, watched it live and what his preferred network was.