But their family values were conservative, more so than most families in our circle of friends. I was not allowed to sleep over at friends’ houses. I was always chaperoned. I was driving at age fifteen but never alone, and when at nineteen I played the role of Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie in college and Pakistan TV wanted to film it in their studio, Daddy allowed it on one condition: he would be present during the taping. I was the only student whose parent watched over the taping—I stood out among my peers, but I also knew that it wasn’t that they didn’t trust me. These were the rules my family lived by. I still remember the stern look on Daddy’s face when he came home one day and found me serving tea to a male visitor who had dropped by to see him. He called me into the adjoining room and said, “You will never go in the presence of a male visitor unless I am present or unless his wife is present. Not your mother, not your grandmother. Is that clear?” Very clear. I was fifteen, and I understood; he was safeguarding my reputation.
Jedi Mamoon, my uncle who was in his twenties, sat me down one evening and gave me a talk on “protecting your reputation among the guys.” A young man, he had taken notice of how boys talked about girls, what traits in a young lady won their respect, and which ones they dissed. I had no idea. The nuances—how to converse without crossing the line—is what I may not have figured out on my own. I listened, feeling awkward but also absorbing it. I took his advice seriously. I now had more than instincts to rely on.
Daddy had a beautiful voice and loved music. Often when we entertained, Daddy would sing for his guests. I was seven when Mummy started teaching me to sing. She would write the lyrics and ask me to sing to her. Daddy taught me to sing Doris Day’s “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be).” Daddy would sit me down with my sister Neena and have us listen to songs on the radio and sing along in a chorus. I can’t say that I enjoyed it—I would rather have played outside—but we were trained to be obedient. When family visited, singing sessions were held in the drawing room, and the children had to sit and sing. When visitors came, I was asked to sing for them. It was only when I entered my teens that I began to enjoy music. My talent as a singer was recognized, and soon I was being asked to sing at school events. By this time I had graduated from the convent and gone into a public high school.
In college, I was hailed for my singing. I entered girls-only student contests, winning first prize, and my parents beamed with pride. But it stopped there. When I was approached by the local TV station and asked to perform, the answer was NO. Girls from respectable families did not sing in public, and most certainly were NOT professional singers. And that was that!
My granddaughter Laila has my music genes. Listen to her sing “Let It Go,” from the movie Frozen.
I was in my teens when Pakistan and India went to war, and I tasted the threat of enemy invasion and promised myself never to lay eyes on an Indian. Life has taught me otherwise.
This was the sixties. There was segregation of the sexes for unmarried women and men. However, it was considered appropriate for married people to mingle, within certain limits. I was a city girl, and that was the city culture.
I left home for the first time to go to the College of Home Economics in Lahore for my baccalaureate degree. Daddy took me, and on the train, gave me a piece of advice. “You are going to be on your own for the next four years. Remember that the only restrictions that apply to you are the ones you impose on yourself. We have done our part in defining the boundaries. Now it is up to you.” In that moment I realized that Daddy was placing his trust in me, and with it the weight of responsibility. I made a promise to honor that trust.
I kept that promise. I fiercely guarded my reputation as a “nice girl.” I was fifteen, very young, on my own, and there were temptations galore. But Daddy had trusted his daughter to uphold the family reputation, and I wasn’t going to let him down. My clean reputation won me many marriage proposals.
Once Upon a Time, Again
“What about you, Daddy?” Saqib asked Khalid.
“Daada Jan will tell you,” he said, referring to his father, who was visiting us.
And my father-in-law would tell the story of his lost roots. His parents had perished in the great earthquake of Quetta in 1935, and a wealthy lawyer took him and his brother in. He never found his parents’ family. He had always wanted to be a doctor, but circumstances got in the way, and he promised himself that he would raise his sons to be doctors. He married within his adopted extended family. As a stationmaster in the railways, he had a modest income, and with a family of eight children, making ends meet was a challenge. My mother-in-law was well educated, talented, and wise, and she knew how to stretch the rupee. The gateway to their future was clear: their sons had to become doctors. Doctor sons would bring economic prosperity to the family, raise their stature in society, and open the door for suitable husbands for their daughters. Keeping their eyes on the prize, they both put all their energies, resources, and planning into the education of their children. They had two mottos: one: study, study, and no play; and two: don’t make friends. Don’t make friends! How can a child not have friends?! Because, my father-in-law explained to me, friends are a distraction. If they want to play, they have seven siblings to play with; I wanted them under my roof, under my eye, and to keep them studying. After they finished their homework, he would make up home-homework for them and make them do it; and when they finished, mother would make up more homework for them and watch over them as they did it. When that was finished, father would ask Khalid to write a speech and then make him stand in the doorway and deliver that speech to passersby. Notwithstanding the rigorous study routine, these were happy children, despite what popular understanding might lead you to expect. I saw the high esteem they held their parents in, the utmost respect the siblings have for one another. And they are wholesome, regular, typical, adults. As for their career choice, they were not given a choice. They were told that they had to become doctors, and that was it. Three of the four sons became doctors; and all four daughters married well. The sons took over the financial responsibility of the family, their socioeconomic status rose, and my father-in-law would proudly say, “I have two factories in America,” referring to his two older sons, both doctors.
Now my father-in-law turns to me and says, “Bia, I have some advice for you. I have no problem with you working, but if it gets in the way of your children’s education, then you should not work. And second, don’t let your children make friends.”
So I humored him. For as long as he was visiting, I changed my routine. I would walk in the house after work and call out, “Children, Mummy’s home. Have you done your homework?” I’d poke my head in the living room, “Salaam. Let me check their homework, and then I will be with you.” I would do just that, and once the homework was under control, I would attend to my in-laws and to dinner. My father-in-law was the happiest man in the world. Every time someone came to visit, he would say, “Bia is the best. Do you know what is the first thing she does when she comes home from work?” One day, Saqib’s friend from the neighborhood came to play. My father-in-law reserved judgment until he saw the little boy’s mother show up in our backyard. She looked over to see what her son was doing, waved at me, made some small talk, hung around for a few minutes, and left. My father-in-law looked at me and said, “Her son will become a doctor.”
Khalid and I made a pact when Auntie Hameeda came to visit us. Asim was four months old. “Bia, my mother is not used to seeing men working in the kitchen. It won’t sit well with her if she sees me doing kitchen work.” I told him not to worry. As long as Auntie Hameeda was here, my kitchen would be a no-man zone. And that is how we kept it whenever she visited. I wonder if my children noticed. If that was a double-life thing, I gladly embraced it.
Seeing Is Understanding
I didn’t want my boys to look upon Pakistani culture as foreign, strange, and out-of-synch with time. Of course, they could not have the same appreciation that I have, but I wanted them to
understand and respect the culture, perhaps adopt some of its beauty. Stories can only take you so far, and I didn’t want them to have the next best thing to being there. I wanted them to be there—to directly experience the squeeze of an embrace, the warmth in conversational exchange, the deference given to family elders, the chatter in an extended family household, the sound of the adhan. I wanted them to watch my mother prepare for my father’s arrival from the office—put away her sewing, fix her hair, freshen up her makeup. On one of our visits to Pakistan, when Saqib was five, I asked him, “So what do you like about Pakistan?”
“Two things,” he said with conviction. “Lots of relatives, and lots of animals.”
I had never missed the animals, so relieved was I to see the streets of New York free of the clutter of cows and donkeys and the whiff of dung, and I couldn’t understand why the Central Park horse carriages were such a novelty. Seeing Pakistan through the eyes of my children, I wondered if that is what it had been for me when I returned from England.
“Would you like to spend the summer in Pakistan this year, when we go for hajj?” I asked Saqib and Asim, when they were thirteen and eleven.
“Yippee!”
They left with my parents and flew back by themselves. After that, my goal was to get them to Pakistan every summer. Sometimes we would take them and return back to work, leaving them behind, and sometimes they would go by themselves. In those years, they played and bonded with their cousins; reveled in stories told by their grandparents; listened to Pakistani music; delighted in the performance of a monkey dance and snake charmer; felt stricken at the sight of maimed children begging on the street; were puzzled seeing the eunuchs singing at the front gate; went scurrying for their prayer rugs at the sound of the adhan; chased the goats in the street; took donkey rides; sat with Mummy as she took inventory of the laundry delivered by the dhobi; watched Aurangzeb bargain for vegetables; kept Razia company in the kitchen as she boiled the milk just delivered by the milkman; and smiled shyly every time a visitor said, “Look how big you got.” Something must have stirred in them, because when Saqib got accepted into medical school at SUNY Syracuse, he announced, “I want to take a year off.”
“And do what?”
“I want to go to Pakistan.”
“Why? Why do you want to waste a year?”
“I want to go back to my roots.” He had tears in his eyes. “I will work there. It’s not a waste—what’s a year in a lifetime? The medical school has agreed to defer my admission.”
He wants to go back to his roots. My dear, dear child. Of course you should go.
The Association of Physicians of Pakistani Descent of North America runs a public health nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Pakistan. Khalid, a life member of the organization, put Saqib in touch with them. He was accepted into the program, run from their office in Rawalpindi, and off he went. He stayed with Mummy and Daddy and spent a year conducting health interview surveys in one hundred and forty villages all over Pakistan. I had never set foot in a village, and now Saqib was seeing Pakistan as I had never seen it. He navigated the dirt roads on crowded buses, slept outdoors on the roped charpoi with no bedding, and to quench his thirst drank fistfuls of water from the village pond. Yikes! As he sat outdoors on a charpoi on the clay floor conducting interviews, surrounded by village men and women sitting on the floor with arms wrapped around their bent knees, people so poor they couldn’t afford to feed themselves would serve him tea. He was moved by their hospitality, the look of sincerity in their eyes, their nods of appreciation, and their quiet acceptance of fate. He wrote to me that on one of the bus rides, he sat next to an old man who asked him, “How much money does your father make?” Saqib was to learn that, from the Pakistani perspective, asking your salary is a standard get-to-know question. Which reminds me: when my father-in-law was visiting, and friends came to visit us to pay their respects to him, he would ask Khalid.
“What does he do for a living?”
“He is a doctor.”
“How much property do they have?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“You mean you didn’t ask?”
“Of course I didn’t ask. You don’t ask these questions.”
“Why not? Don’t you want to know?”
“No. I don’t want to know.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s personal.”
“No, it isn’t. OK, I’ll ask them.”
“No. Promise me you won’t.”
Three years later, Asim made a post-graduation announcement. You guessed it. He had been accepted to the University of Michigan, School of Law, got a one-year deferment, and went off to pursue human rights in Pakistan. Nawaz Sharif was now prime minister, and here at home Bill Clinton had been elected for a second term. He worked with Asma Jahangir, a human rights lawyer, and pursued prison and child labor reform. Interviewing prisoners in the bowels of the jails, holding hands across the world to protest child labor stirred in him the yearning for public service. He wrote to me from there, “I don’t want to go behind corporate walls. I don’t want to forget these faces.”
The world has changed. Today if a young man said to his parents, “I want to go spend a year in Pakistan,” they are likely to tie him down and take away his passport.
Culturally Correct
One evening, in 1988, I called my friends: “Come over this evening for a cup of tea. We want to share an idea with you.” Three families came, and over a cup of a blend of Earl Grey and Lipton tea—my concoction—we put forth the idea: How about creating a Pakistani cultural association? An organization apart from and independent of the mosque. It’s not enough for our children to know the history of Pakistan—we want them to speak about it. It’s not enough for our children to be somewhat familiar with the music—we want them to sing it. It’s not enough to clap to the beat of a luddi or khattak dance; we want them to dance to the beat.
“Let’s do it”—a resounding yes.
I pulled out my yellow pad. “President.” I pointed to the one of the gentlemen. “Vice president.” I pointed to one of the ladies. “Who wants to be secretary?”
“You.” The fingers were pointing at me. Khalid was made founder and cochairman with another gentleman, and thus, between us four families, the Pakistani Cultural Association of Staten Island was formed.
Parents cheered when I held music classes in my living room, teaching children Pakistani national songs. Pakistanis cheered when we held the first celebration of Pakistan’s Independence Day in August, and our children gave speeches on the history of Pakistan and danced to the tune of bhangra. Politicians cheered as they dropped in to pay homage. And the borough of Staten Island cheered when our girls got up on the stage at Harmony Fair in Snug Harbor and performed the luddi, and we served chaat and pakoras at the Pakistan booth. That year, President Zia of Pakistan was killed in a mysterious plane crash, along with the American ambassador. Later that year, Pakistan elected a woman as its prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.
We left Staten Island many years ago, but the cultural association lives on. What didn’t happen, though, is that our children’s generation did not take up the torch. It was my dream that they would carry on what we had started for them, and the culture would live through the generations. They moved away, life happened, and when they got organized, it was to form professional organizations around their heritage or to get involved in faith-based activities. Asim cofounded the Muslim Bar Association of New York. Saqib was county commissioner of Boy Scouts in New Jersey. They have cut across national boundaries and created a network of professionals with a shared history and culture, in an American context, driven by civic consciousness. Daddy used to say, “My daughter is a major improvement over me.” I now say that about our children.
Taking Staten Island to Pakistan
Do my children still go back? Saqib was there for a family wedding in 2007. The last time Asim was there was when Daddy passed away in 2010. He had wanted to be b
y his bedside, say his farewell, and lay him to rest. Daddy couldn’t hold on and slipped away hours before Asim landed. Asim kneeled by his gravesite and wept, and I stood behind him, my heart weeping. I go every year, but I haven’t pushed my children. It’s not safe, as you all know. I am a product of that culture, so bombs notwithstanding, I go, but I don’t want to put my children in harm’s way. Each time I go, they say, “Mom, it’s not safe,” and I say, “I have to see my parents.” Now it’s my relatives. My mother yearned to hold Asim’s daughter, Asha. Each time she saw Sofia, Saqib’s youngest, on Skype, she wanted to reach out and poke her lovely chin, but the computer screen was the closest she got. On one of my visits, as I was leaving for New York, she gave me a pair of gold bracelets for Brinda, Asim’s wife. “I was hoping to give them to her when she came to Pakistan, but I don’t know if she will come in my lifetime, so take these for her.” Mummy died two years later.
PART FIVE
An American Muslim in New York
24.
An Arranged Marriage for My Sons?
I didn’t arrange Saqib’s marriage. I engineered it.
Threading My Prayer Rug Page 20