Now as a mother with grown children in Florida, she is still defying tradition, wearing makeup and fingernail polish as well as jeans and T-shirts in public. (She gives cosmetics as presents to her cousins in India, and they clamor for her latest stateside buys.) Her soft and wavy shoulder-length black hair frames her delicately featured face—no head coverings for her. She shrugs off the finger-wagging she gets from the more orthodox in the south Florida Muslim community.
“I don’t need to wear the hijab because I know what I am,” Fay declared recently as she sat in her café and catering business, Khana Kh’zana (“Food Treasures”) in Coral Springs, a long cherished dream of hers. The hijab, she adds, is a relic of the past, and she still rebels at the thought of others telling her how to live her life. “They say, ‘You can’t do that,’ but why?”
And what is worse, Fay asks: having a good heart but not always obeying the rules of the faith to prove to the world that you are a “good” Muslim? Or being a “good” Muslim in public who privately violates the Quran command to love one another? For her, the worst hypocrites are the religious who make a show of their piety but have hardened hearts and cheat and lie to others.
To her, it is a sign of progress that Muslim women are wearing clothes they want—as long as they are modest. She applauds that women in Afghanistan are regaining rights, and that in other Muslim countries women are enjoying new opportunities for work and education. “Women are waking up,” she says, in spite of the Islamic zealots throughout the world who try to impose their values on others. “There are a lot of fanatics,” she says. “It’s sad to see.”
Many years earlier, Fay’s relatives were only trying to help her when they criticized her Western clothes. She would answer them by pointing to her heart. As she once told a criticizing “auntie” in India, “I have a clean heart. I love everyone.”
And in fact, she prays every day, just like her family does in India.
Her customers at Khana Kh’zana appreciate not only her Indian cuisine (from her own recipes—Indian gourmet cooking has been a hobby of hers for years). They value Fay herself, the warm proprietress who will ask how her customers are doing. She runs the cash register and knows her customers by their first name. If she doesn’t, she asks.
Recently a reserved Indian couple came in to sample one of her dishes. They didn’t get out the door, though, before they told Fay where they were from: he from Bombay, she from New Delhi. Soon they were chatting about the ways of India and how they missed the cuisine. Fay regaled them with food stories—how she trains her cooks and prepares dishes from family-held recipes—and had the Indian couple laughing. By the time their food was served, they were promising to come back.
“Fay is wonderful; very sweet,” says one regular customer, who has a taste for ethnic food but who doesn’t always feel comfortable at some restaurants. Fay, on the other hand, has always been friendly and welcoming.
Fay says it comes naturally. Her mother and father were open to all people and cultures. “My parents were very broad-minded even though they were religious,” she says. Her father liked nothing better than a good murder mystery; her mother subscribed to the American magazine Good Housekeeping. Like many other Indian parents, they emphasized education. Fay went to a convent school and later a French convent college. As the schools introduced her to Christian holidays, Fay spread ashes across her forehead for Ash Wednesday, celebrated Easter, and sang Christmas carols. While home in Hindu-dominant India, she became accustomed to celebrating Hindu festivities as well. To this day, this multicultural mix of holidays has stayed with Fay, who still carts a Christmas tree into her Florida home each year. She knows that some local Muslims raise their eyebrows at that but Fay shrugs off the reproaches. “I love all holidays,” she says. She is known, after all, for the rich banquets of food she prepares during Ramadan, when Muslims are able to eat only at sundown, after fasting all day. It is Fay, after all, to whom Muslim friends go to ask what her plans are for the Ramadan dinners.
As a teenager she fell in love with an Indian boy five years older than she, who was going to college in the United States. At the same time, her mother became seriously ill with cancer, and died. Now that her mother—her champion for a love match—was gone, relatives were fretting that “no one is in the house to monitor her,” meaning Fay. Their solution: an arranged marriage. They had already been matchmaking, picking out a doctor for her. Fay would have nothing to do with it. “They were going to marry me off to some stupid guy who is a doctor,” she wailed to her boyfriend’s mother. But the older woman had a solution: marry her son first. Fay eloped: She was seventeen, he twenty-two. In 1969, the couple moved to America, first to the Washington, D.C., area and later to Florida.
Fay adapted to life in the United States quickly and positively. “I feel it’s the only country in the world where immigrants don’t feel like second-class citizens.” Likewise, she’ll have none of the talk of other immigrants who pine for their native country. All she has to do, she says, is remember India’s trash-strewn streets, its polluted skies. “Here,” she says, “it is so clean.”
For Fay, the United States has been a place of opportunity. She was able to quickly find a job in Washington and, later, to work as an administrator for Motorola in Florida. She quickly worked her way up the corporate ladder to become the senior administrator for facilities. “My boss used to say I was the boss,” she says with a laugh. “I loved every day at Motorola. I was treated very well.”
Motorola had a policy of allowing its Islamic employees to meet in a room for prayer on Fridays, the traditional day of the week for Muslims to attend mosque. Fay treasures those times. Today, as a business owner who works six days a week, “I don’t have time” to go to services, she says.
Her bosses were also sympathetic when, while fasting during Ramadan, she would be dragging by mid-afternoon after not eating all day. “By two p.m. I would be exhausted,” so her bosses allowed her to take afternoon naps—compensation for time saved by not going on morning and lunch breaks. She would wake up refreshed and able to finish her work without breaking the fast.
After 9/11, friends at work came up to her to offer comfort. She still remembers how sweet they were, assuring her that they knew she as a Muslim wasn’t part of any terrorist plot. They knew that the terrorists were not like Fay and other hard-working, patriotic Muslims they had seen at Motorola.
She stayed with the company for twenty-five years until accepting a buyout to open her eatery and catering business. She is grateful for her time there but glad she has been able to achieve her dream of making a living from her hobby, Indian cuisine. She loves having her own business. At first, her husband didn’t want her to run a restaurant, so she started a catering business. With its rich offerings of saffron-spiced goat, chicken or vegetable biryani, lemon-spiced chicken, fish masala fry, and beef grilled on skewers it took off quickly. When the state food inspector complimented Fay on her cuisine, he suggested that she should have a few tables in front, so he could sit down and enjoy all the good food! She took his advice, and within nine months, Khana Kh’zana became so popular that Fay had exhausted her supply of business cards and nearly all of her menus.
Since that time, one Muslim customer commented that he saw only Hindu art in her eatery. Not true, Fay was quick to retort. She pointed to a work of Muslim art on a wall near the kitchen. And she offered to put up any art that the man wanted to give her. If a Jewish customer brought in a Star of David she would put that up as well, she adds. “I love all cultures.”
As Fay gets older, however, she feels she is the one who’s a stickler for tradition. She has witnessed changes in her family in India. The women are now wearing Western-style dresses and pants. Fay can’t bring herself to do that, at least when she is visiting her elderly relatives in Bombay, especially her grandmother. On such occasions she wears the traditional Indian clothing. But in the United States she dons comfortable jeans and khakis.
She also is distressed at
seeing the way her native country has grown to favor what she considers cheap, tawdry entertainment that features nude women. Indians have become worse than Westerners, she claims. That, in her opinion, is definitely not progress.
Still, she has seen traditional Indian ways work for her family, even in the new millennium. Her shy son couldn’t find a wife in Florida despite being six foot two and good-looking. At one point he urged his mother to look for a bride for him. “Who, me?” was Fay’s response. Nevertheless, she decided to help. When the family next went to Bombay they made an appointment with a family who had a marriageable daughter. Fay’s son was quite taken with her—and so was Fay. The young couple, after corresponding with each other by e-mail, fell in love in cyberspace. They are now happily married, also living and working in Florida.
Things have worked out for Fay. She is grateful that as a young girl she ended up in a country where her family could freely choose how to live, and where Fay could wear and do what she wanted, working and succeeding at a career she wanted.
14
CASSY’S CRISIS: REMOVING HER SCARF TO GET HER DAUGHTER BACK
A LOOK AT NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD CASSY DAVID would never hint that this polite, freshly scrubbed Midwestern teenager in jeans is anything other than a young woman taking her college entrance exams in the hope of studying nursing. Cassy has already experienced more than many do in a lifetime. She has been married to a professor, lived in his native Egypt, given birth to his daughter, endured emotional abuse in a strange land, and fled home to rural South Dakota. Even there, she was far from safe. Forced by her estranged husband to appear in court to defend custody of her now toddler daughter here in the United States—the judge ultimately deciding her husband was better educated to take care of their daughter, at least for now—Cassy last heard her daughter shrieking for her mother as she was taken away to board a plane to Cairo.
“It was heartbreaking, terrible,” Cassy admits. “I remember it in a blur, yet it seems as if it just happened yesterday. To this day I can hear my daughter screaming.”
As Cassy tries to get her life back in order, and regain custody of her child, she wants other young Muslim women to know that this, too, can happen to them, especially if they are American-born.
Cassy is still a Muslim but she has given up wearing the hijab. As soon as she got out of Egypt she took it off—and hasn’t put it back on. Much of the reason for this is practical: She wants to get a job and earn enough money to go to college and pay for her daughter to visit her for ten weeks in the summer, as the judge required in his final order when he awarded the father primary custody.
“I realized that if I was wearing the hijab it would be harder for me to get a job,” she says matter of factly.
When she herself was an infant, her single mother, Anisah David (see chapter 27), converted to Islam and Cassy was raised in a Muslim home. Growing up in rural South Dakota, Cassy was sometimes painfully aware that she was “different.”
When she was in middle school she tied a tiny scarf around her head as a sort of hijab. She didn’t want one too big. “I didn’t want the other kids to freak out.” This was in a small rural school and everyone knew each other. “They knew I was different. They knew I didn’t eat pork, that I had a special diet. They knew I got out early on Friday to go to the mosque.”
By the end of middle school she was ready to be home-schooled by her college-educated mother like her brother had been. It had bothered her that some of her teachers didn’t know the subjects they were talking about, especially in history classes. Cassy says she had been to historical re-enactments such as Civil War battles with her mother and knew the facts behind them better than her instructors did.
“I had a friend who had problems with a counselor harassing her about her head covering,” she adds. “A couple of times some kids tried to rip off her scarf. I didn’t want to deal with that.”
At the same time she wanted to get married right away. “I knew by age twelve I wanted to be married young. I didn’t see anything wrong with that as long as I found the right person.”
By the time she was fourteen or fifteen, she was trying to follow the Islamic rules as she knew them, and she appealed to her mother to be her gatekeeper and help her find a husband. The first candidate, a college student, didn’t work out: He decided he couldn’t support her while he was finishing his education. Then, a friend of the family, who was studying for his doctorate at South Dakota State University said he would look for a husband for Cassy. He even suggested his brother but it turned out that he was secretly engaged.
The grad student profusely apologized, telling Cassy “how beautiful he thought I was and how he thought I was a nice young lady.” Her mother told him not to feel bad and then suggested with a teasing laugh, “Why don’t you marry her?”
The next thing she knew, he called and asked to speak to her mother and stepfather. It turned out that he did want to marry Cassy.
Her mother told her it was up to her. For two weeks, Cassy pondered the thought and then agreed to the marriage proposal. At the time, he seemed like an ideal husband. She thought she knew him: He had been visiting her family’s home for five years as it was one of the few Muslim households in South Dakota. As she later learned, she had never really gotten to know him—he was in her home for the adults, not her—but she had always been struck by his good manners.
“I thought he was a very nice gentleman,” she says. “He seemed to be sweet-natured, very respectful. He seemed to know how to treat a lady.”
With excitement she looked forward to her marriage, which took place just six days after her sixteenth birthday in February 2002. The groom was in his early thirties—twice her age. Cassy didn’t believe the age difference would be a problem, as her grandparents had had a great marriage and there had been twenty years’ difference between them.
Plus, she says, “I had always wanted to go to Egypt.”
They did move to Egypt after they were married a few months and her husband had earned his doctorate. He’d had a little flat built—a condo with three bedrooms above his parents’ home, with which they shared a courtyard.
Cassy grew acclimated to Egypt. She loved watching the water buffalo pass by her house, usually with a little boy in tow. She even adjusted to the climate. “The weather was humid—difficult at first to get used to.”
But once she got used to Egypt’s weather, she says, “I just loved it. You would see huge puffy clouds. It barely rained, though. I think while I was there it rained only about five times and I was there two years.”
She is not sure when the marriage started going bad, perhaps when she became pregnant within months after arriving in Egypt. They had wanted to hold off from having children until she was older, but it was hard to obtain birth control in Egypt, Cassy says. “We kind of took chances,” she says.
In the fall of 2002 and early 2003, her husband began expressing anger at the United States for its intention to invade Iraq. He would watch Arabic television and seethe at the images of Iraqis being killed. “He was starting to hate the American government,” she says. “In a way I think he wanted me to hate the American government but I couldn’t. Things started going downhill. I also think there was the pressure of the baby coming.”
Even though Cassy’s husband was a professor at an Egyptian university, he didn’t make much money. Today, Cassy can earn more in a week as a factory or office worker in the United States than he does in a month in the Middle East.
Cassy tried to apologize profusely to keep peace in the home. “He had me apologizing for anything,” she says.
Her mother had always taught her that it was best that couples didn’t go to bed angry with each other and the only way to avoid that was for her to apologize so he wouldn’t remain mad.
He also was angry at Cassy for not studying more. He wanted her to study math and science four hours a day. She had her GED and wanted to go to college in Egypt and study early childhood development. But in her husband�
�s opinion she first needed a good background in the subjects he loved. The only problem: Cassy hated math and science.
In addition to this, he demanded that the house be immaculate. Cassy was supposed to spend hours a day cleaning the floors with an old vacuum cleaner. “He was concerned about bacteria and viruses,” she says.
Then Cassy’s mother came to visit. It had been agreed upon that she would come when Cassy was in her last months of pregnancy. She lived at their condo for about six months, to help with the birth and later with infant care, a situation that only added to the tensions.
By the time Cassy’s mother returned to the States the marriage was in shambles. Cassy was miserable.
Incredibly, she had lost thirty pounds even while pregnant: At five foot four, she had dropped to 150 pounds and while it was good that she had lost the excess weight, she was worried she wasn’t getting enough nutrition—especially milk and dairy products—for the baby. Her husband had put her on a diet in which she ate a cup of rice, a quarter pound of chicken, and salad.
He was also making her nervous by attempting to mold her into the person he thought she should become.
“He thought I didn’t have a system. He would tell me you can’t run a household without a good system. He would get upset if he thought I was falling behind.”
He also worried aloud that she wasn’t educated enough to raise their daughter, that perhaps others in the family would have to help out.
The blowup came in February 2004. Cassy had a baby shower at their condo for an American friend living in Egypt. Her father-in-law—whom she adored—became upset that Cassy was spending too much time with this friend and other expatriate Americans. “He seemed to have the idea I shouldn’t trust these American women,” Cassy says.
The Face Behind the Veil Page 10