Once Were Radicals

by Irfan Yusuf

  My dad, who also loved joking around, found this most amusing. ‘Boom boom! That was a good joke, Dr Singh,’ he declared. He still uses that line to this day when his grandsons fall ill.

  I was quite confused and thought they were laughing at me, and like any full-blooded mummy’s boy, I started crying. After we got home, my parents explained what the joke was about. They told me that Sikhs were somehow different to us Muslims. Their religious men grow beards and wear turbans like religious Muslim men, and their women wear the same loose clothes as my mum. They even worship the same God, speak the same language and eat the same food. Their religious songs sound like our Sufi qawwali songs.

  In fact, Guru Nanak (the founder of the Sikh faith and regarded by many Indian Muslims as a Sufi saint) performed the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca at least once. And in terms of popular stereotypes, Sikhs were even more Islamic than we were. After all, they carry daggers (albeit ceremonial ones, but still rather sharp), while we don’t. But according to my parents, Sikhs and Muslims were different. For a five-year-old it was a case of ‘Go figure’!

  My Sikh uncle and all our other South Asian family friends would make a special pilgrimage once a month. As always, it was a truly ecumenical affair, though the object of our worship was more associated with our worldly (or should that be culinary?) desires.

  The place of pilgrimage was in a faraway place at the end of Sydney’s famous Bondi beach. We used to travel for at least an hour in my mother’s Volkswagen from our East Ryde home to buy our supply of basmati rice, various kinds of masala (spices) and achar (pickles).

  The store was owned by an Indian family who rarely spoke Urdu or Hindi unless they were addressed in Urdu. The man wore an embroidered skullcap, and his wife would sometimes cover her head with a small scarf. She used to give my siblings and I free ice cream and would greet us with khudahafiz (a traditional Indo-Pakistani greeting which meant ‘may God keep you under His protection’).

  I assumed that Mr and Mrs Moses, who ran the spice store, were Muslims, just like us. They had to be Muslims—they had relatively dark skin like us, they apparently never sold or ate pork, they could speak Urdu/Hindi and they sold and ate spicy food. They even greeted us with khudahafiz, which I always thought was a Muslim greeting. It wasn’t until years later that Mum explained to me that our spice vendors were in fact Jewish.

  I was brought up in the electorate of a man who was to become Australia’s most conservative prime minister, John Howard. The 1970s was a time when Christian sectarianism was still strong in ‘white’ Australia and Catholic school children were bullied for being the wrong … um … who knows? The bullies certainly didn’t.

  My first school was the local Ryde East Public School where I copped plenty of bullying. Mostly it was due to the colour of my skin. Kids can be very cruel, and one kid in particular insisted on pushing me around and labelling me ‘nigger’ and ‘boong’. He also used to tease my mum, who would pick me up each day in her Volkswagen Beetle. Mum’s insistence on wearing saris meant that everyone poked fun at just how different we looked.

  One day, I was walking home from school when I was approached by a white-skinned Anglo-Australian boy wearing a different school uniform to mine: he wore a blue shirt with a yellow cross embroidered on the shirt pocket, and his school bag had the words ‘Spiritus Sanctus’ sewn into them. I knew that he lived up the road from me, so when he asked if he could walk home with me, I said yes.

  As we got on our way, the bullies from my class approach ed me. Normally, these boys would push me around, trip me over, kick and punch me or run off with my school bag. But on this occasion, they completely avoided me and started picking on my new-found friend. I couldn’t understand this—white boys picking on other white boys? I always assumed you only got picked on if you were different. What was so different about my friend?

  I asked the bullies about this the next day.

  ‘Why are you bullying him? He’s just like you,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if his mum wears a sari and drives a daggy car.’

  ‘He’s not like us. He’s a fucking Catholic!’ was the response.

  That afternoon, I ran home and told my mum this amazing revelation.

  ‘Mum, I discovered there are these people who have white skin and look Australian but still get teased and bashed up just like me.’

  Annoyed at my atrocious Urdu, Mum replied in Hindlish. ‘That very is-stranj. Vy dhey hit him?’

  ‘The boys at school say it’s because they are Catholic.’

  From that moment onwards, as an act of solidarity with fellow oppressed foreigners, Mum decided to befriend every Catholic in the street. Suddenly our social circle expanded from just Indians to include Catholics of various ethnic backgrounds. Imagine my shock when I learned that even Indians and Pakistanis could be Catholic!

  Notwithstanding our new multicultural circle, Mum and Dad still believed the most important thing was that my siblings and I kept my parents’ culture alive. That certainly didn’t mean burning effigies or posters of the Pope. Even if that probably would have pleased the school bullies.

  As a child, being Muslim meant any number of things. It meant I had brown skin, spoke the same language as Bollywood movies and learned to read a revered holy book with a strange script read from right to left. The fact that I didn’t understand what the book actually said wasn’t terribly important. The main thing was that I could recognise which combination of letters made what sounds.

  Mum told me that Muslims believed in a man called ‘Hazrat Muhammad’. He was from Arabia, she said, but I wasn’t sure where this place was (I may have assumed it was somewhere near India or Pakistan). I never knew much about Hazrat Muhammad except that he was sent by God to teach people how to behave with proper manners towards other people. It sounded like the sort of thing my teachers did. I presumed Hazrat Muhammad was like a school teacher who threatened his followers with the cane if they misbehaved.

  Hazrat Muhammad also taught people how to worship God. We referred to God using various names, including ‘Allah’, ‘Khudah’ and ‘Parvar Digaar’. Some of my aunties called God ‘Bhagvaan’ or ‘Raam’. I rarely heard the word ‘God’ used, though Mum sometimes spoke about how we should ‘pirray to the God five time a day’.

  Occasionally, my parents would take me to the mosque. Most often this was on the two feast days of Eid. These were like our Islamic Christmas, except that we got to have two bites of the cherry.

  Being Muslim also meant learning certain prayers in a language which was neither English nor Hindi/Urdu. My mother told me this language was the one Hazrat Muhammad spoke, and was called ‘Arabi’. I was told that reciting these prayers was an important way of earning savaab, a special kind of divine currency which we could use after we die in order to purchase tickets to heaven. Reciting the prayers would also overcome any gunna, which was the negative divine currency (or perhaps a divine fine) which you get by doing naughty things (Mum’s typically cited example was disobeying one’s mother), and which would lead us to spend time in hell. The way to get to heaven was to make sure that you had maximum savaab and minimum gunna. Even if you had some gunna which Allah for some reason hadn’t forgiven, you had to spend a bit of time in a nasty place called jahannum (hell) which was a terrible place full of black-coloured smokeless fire and lots of screaming people. I imagined hell to be like a giant performance of the rock band Kiss that my sisters used to watch on the pop music show, Countdown.

  Mum also started teaching me how to read the special script from which I could make the sounds of these special prayer formulae. This was the script used to read the Koran (also spelt Qur’an). In fact, many of these prayers had been collected in the Koran. Young children learned to make the noises of the Koran by learning the alphabet from a booklet called a qaida or alphabet guide. So my first exposure to the now-dreaded word ‘qaida’ was to use it as a way to learn how to read ceremonial prayers!

  As a Muslim family, we weren’t too fussed about whether the mea
t we ate was halal. This wasn’t typical; most Muslim families we knew obsessed over eating halal.

  The word ‘halal’ literally means ‘permissible’. Mum taught me that our religion has a small category of actions that are forbidden (or haraam) and that earned you so much gunna that you’d need almost a miracle to leave jahannum and enter jannah (heaven). Everything else was deemed halal by default. When it comes to food, it means that as long as what you eat isn’t pig meat or containing alcohol, it’s all halal. And, of course, any drink containing alcohol was haraam.

  Some of my friends were quite paranoid about halal and haraam. Their parents insisted that just because the meat we ate wasn’t pork, this wasn’t enough to make it halal. They worried about the poor animal being killed in a certain way. I found this fixation with the method of killing an animal rather sickening. I knew that if I saw an animal being killed, I just wouldn’t be able to eat it.

  Our family was once invited by a Pakistani doctor for a special religious feast called Baqarah Eid (its proper Arabic name is Eid al-Adha). The man lived in Newcastle, to the north of Sydney. It was a long drive from our East Ryde home to Newcastle in those days, especially since we travelled in Mum’s Volkswagen. Now, with a direct freeway, the trip would take hardly two hours. But, the windy country roads being what they were, the journey was at least twice that long. And when you’re a kid any road journey seems to take forever.

  I was beside myself with hunger when we got there. Mum tried to placate my culinary emotions during the journey by telling me about the nice barbecued lunch we’d be enjoying when we arrived. Our host owned a large farm, and I’d get to play with all the animals.

  But on arrival, there were no barbecued steaks or sausages in sight, and the only animals were a few lambs, sheep and goats. Mum asked the uncle-host where the food was.

  ‘It is out there in the paddock, bhaabi [an Urdu term of respect used to address a married woman; it literally means ‘my brother’s wife’]. There are as many animals as there are families. Enjoy your Eid feast!’

  Within minutes, my parents had joined a host of uncles and aunties running towards the paddock. The lambs and goats recognised this stampede of Indian adults and ran for their lives. It was quite a sight to watch Indian aunties in their saris and uncles in their safari suits chasing these poor animals. There was probably more meat visibly hanging out of my aunties’ saris than hiding beneath the fur of the chased prey!

  In the end, only a few animals were caught (lucky for those that escaped). One was a small lamb whose throat was cut in front of me. The whole spectacle made me feel like throwing up. As if to add insult to (my comparatively small) injury (when compared to the greater injuries suffered by the sacrificial lambs), the aunties didn’t light any barbecue. Instead, the chunks of flesh were cooked into traditional Indian casseroles with huge doses of chilli that made the food inedible for all but the most experienced chilli-eating uncles. So much for Mum’s promise of a sumptuous barbecue!

  After this experience, I decided that this extra-halal meat wasn’t for me. I’d be happy to imagine meat coming in plastic containers from the local butcher or supermarket. As long as it wasn’t pork, I’d eat it.

  2

  Karachi culture shock

  When I was six, my father decided to take us all for an extended trip to Pakistan. So Mum resigned from her job and off we went.

  The long flight from Sydney to Karachi was horrible, the airline food was atrocious and my ears were painfully blocked for much of the trip. The only consolation was Mum’s promise that I’d enjoy myself immensely meeting all my cousins in Pakistan …

  So much for that! Pakistan was a huge culture shock for an Aussie kid. Even one like me, who could easily be lost in a crowded Pakistani bazaar. The place looked to me like it was drowning in dust, filth and poverty. It was almost the absolute opposite of everything I had experienced in Australia, and I was overwhelmed with a feeling of shame to have been born in such a place.

  The dirt was unbelievable. Streets were rarely swept, and even after they were, there was dust everywhere. Added to this was the way people regularly spat out the contents of their nasal passages onto the footpath or onto a wall. Sometimes this was mixed with the red paste of ‘paan’, a popular concoction of beetle leaf, beetle nuts and various herbal pastes that I initially found completely inedible.

  Karachi’s chaotic traffic was also a major shock. In Sydney, traffic lights controlled the flow of traffic and the police made sure people obeyed the road rules. Pakistan was the antithesis of this. Traffic was complete anarchy and there were no road rules. The police were absent, and in any event could not be trusted.

  The idea of spending a year in such a place appalled me. My mother said that if she heard me declare, ‘Let’s go back to Australia. This is a dirty country!’ one more time, she’d send me back as unaccompanied luggage.

  Pakistan was also a dangerous place. We went from being able to play on our Sydney street for hours to Mum frantically keeping us close to her side if we stepped out of our Karachi front door.

  Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was in power as Pakistan’s prime minister. My parents and their Pakistani friends in Sydney were largely supportive of Bhutto, but my relatives in Pakistan were much less supportive and added to our fear of the place by recounting stories of girls being kidnapped and abused by Bhutto and his cronies.

  The poverty in Pakistan was everywhere you looked. There were beggars crawling around on one-and-a-half legs and holding out a hand with a pair of fingers. So many of them were children of my age, and looked awfully hungry and ill and dressed in ragged and dirty clothes.

  The weird thing was that Mum rarely gave beggars money. I couldn’t understand why she was so heartless to such harmless and helpless children. I wondered what would happen if I became lost in the crowd and was forced to beg—would Mum be just as unkind to me? I kept pestering her to give at least something, but she refused, supported by my aunties who believed that begging was a profession, and beggars work for syndicates which provide them with food, accommodation and a cut of what they earn. They also believed that many beggars were drug addicts who spent their charity on buying more drugs.

  I didn’t quite believe all this but I did witness a street fight that proved a part of their beliefs could have been true. The fight started when a woman from one beggar group walked towards me and held out her hand. I gave her some coins and within seconds, I was surrounded by a host of beggars with all kinds of scary-looking disfigurements fighting each other over who had a greater right to the money. I felt like I had been transported into a scene from a Pakistani horror movie!

  It was still hard for me not to feel sorry for the child beggars. I often gave them my spending money when Mum or her relatives were too busy haggling and arguing with a shopkeeper over a few rupees. If I had no money, I’d give them one of my large collection of matchbox cars purchased from our local Sydney supermarket. I assumed that, like me, they would have spent their money on matchbox cars anyway. Except that mine were quality matchbox cars, not like the ones in Karachi which would fall apart after only a few hours of racing. It puzzled me when the young beggars would frown when I’d hand them such a quality toy guaranteeing them hours of fun. Some would even return my gift. In my spoilt six-year-old insensitive Aussie mind, Pakistani child beggars were awfully ungrateful.

  Pakistan had no shortage of dangers for the unwary. The footpaths were littered with treacherous potholes large enough even for a boy of my substantial physique to fall into. Mum found it hard enough to lift me in normal circumstances, and so I imagined she wouldn’t even attempt lifting me out of one of these potholes.

  Most Pakistani men and virtually all women wore a kind of shalwar kameez suit. Men from certain tribes often wore ceremonial prayer caps with turbans wrapped around them. For the first time, I saw women hidden in a tent-like garment called a burqa, but they were a minority. Most Pakistani women (including my mum) barely covered their heads when travelling outside.r />
  One aspect of Pakistan I found particularly distasteful was the toilet system. There were no public toilets, so it wasn’t unusual to see people crouched down on a street corner, their long shirts and loose pants only just concealing them whilst urinating or defecating. Admittedly they were more modest than some of the boys I saw in the playground back in Sydney, but to see adults doing this was rather disconcerting.

  At most homes, Pakistani toilets were little more than glorified holes in the ground, and they were typically stinking and dirty. The first time I used the toilet was at my aunt’s house where we lived. I presumed that, just like everything else in Pakistan, the toilet seat was missing or in need of repair. I called out to Mum.

  ‘Mum, where’s the toilet seat? Somebody seems to have taken the toilet seat.’

  My Urdu was still poor, and so Mum replied in Hindlish. ‘Yoo don’t vurri about sit, Eerfaan. Just pull pant down and is-start.’

  I did exactly as instructed. I pulled my pants down and started. What happened next isn’t deserving of too detailed a description. Suffice it to say that I remained standing, and felt extremely embarrassed. My trousers didn’t smell too good either. To make matters worse, there was no toilet paper and no flush.

  After patiently cleaning up the mess, Mum showed me how to use the toilet. The toilet area was on a raised tiled platform and located adjacent to the lounge room. The door didn’t have a lock, and opened outwards. Basically you entered wearing rubber thongs and crouched down whilst holding a piece of string connected to the door so as to stop the door from opening and everyone witnessing the spectacle. If the door was open, people seated in the lounge room and the adjacent kitchen could see you, and if the front door also happened to be open, then your neighbours could see you. So it was in your interests to make sure that the front door was shut and that you held firmly to the string on the toilet door.

  Mum also showed me how to wash after completing my toilet. People in third-world countries use water and their hand to wash their behinds. Mum insisted that I use my left hand to wash. I found this quite disgusting, but she reassured me it was okay as I would only use my right hand to eat. After I had done my business, I would have to manually drain the wastage of past meals using the lota (washing can).