by Irfan Yusuf
I tried following the instructions of Aunty Maureen’s friend, clearing my mind of other thoughts and allowing it to wander. My mind certainly wandered. It kept wandering back to the same place—the soreness in my arm! It was such a simple test. All I was asking the TM God to do was to make the pain in my arm bearable. But the TM God couldn’t reduce the pain. Of course I took this as proof that Islam was a better religion than theirs. Then again, my own recitation of special Arabic prayers and verses from the Koran didn’t help too much either.
Mum has always been a very devout Muslim, though her understanding of Islam is heavily influenced by her Indian upbringing. Mum places a lot of emphasis on the importance of avoiding alcohol, but she rarely wore anything resembling a hijab or other head covering when she went out anywhere.
Mum was extremely particular about her nemaaz. However, her employers at the pharmaceutical factory did not provide any facilities for her to perform her prayers in privacy. She therefore used to perform her prayers behind her car in the factory car park.
Mum used to complain about a co-worker who was of Turkish background, who would poke fun at Mum for saying her prayers. The co-worker also started teasing Mum when she found out that Mum avoided drinking alcohol altogether.
On one particular occasion, Mum came home late in a state of deep distress. Her co-workers had offered to take her to dinner. It was her birthday, and Mum was taken to a local club known as the ‘El-Rancho’. There, some of her co-workers grabbed hold of her hands while another held her neck to force her face upwards. The Turkish co-worker then tried to pour beer down Mum’s throat. Mum shook her head violently and immediately spat the beer out and into the face of her Turkish co-worker, who subsequently lodged a complaint against Mum with her management at work. Mum was later counselled by her managers.
Mum felt an enormous injustice had been done to her. For the first time in all her years in Australia, she felt like she had been discriminated against on the basis of her religion. She felt this to be a gross insult to her religious sentiments. What made things worse was that the injustice was done by someone from a Muslim background.
For me, this was another source of youthful disillusionment. How could a Muslim do this to another Muslim? Didn’t this Turkish woman know how sinful it was to drink alcohol? Didn’t she understand that she would get loads and loads of gunna written on her scroll of deeds by the angel sitting on her left shoulder? But perhaps Turks were not real Muslims. They’d built their own special Turkish mosques where my uncles said only Turkish people were allowed to perform their nemaaz. It seemed a no-brainer to a seven-year-old brain like mine that South Asians were better Muslims than Turks.
Bullying was still a part of my school life, where the law of the jungle seemed to rule. In one incident, a boy from a local Pakistani family was pushed and bashed by classmates on his way home from school. One of the kicks hit him in the head and proved fatal. It had our close-knit South Asian community distressed and terrified.
As far as my dad was concerned, the lesson of all this was clear. The only way to deal with bullies was to use my superior size and weight to my advantage. Each time I came home after copping a beating at school, Dad and I would have the same conversation.
‘I see you have been hit again.’
‘Yes, that’s what caused the black eye.’
‘Did you hit them back?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s against the school rules to hit people.’
‘Yes, but they hit you. Isn’t that against the school rules?’
‘But they always get away with it.’
‘They get away with it because you don’t hit back! I am disappointed with you.’
I once broke some bones during a rather violent game of British Bulldog 123. This game involved running from one ‘base’ (in this case, the wall of the art room building) to the other base (a footpath at the other end of the playground). A certain number of boys were selected to stand between bases, their job being to tackle anyone who wasn’t touching at least part of a base. The poor tacklee had to be pinned down to the ground as the tackler counted loudly to three. If the count was successfully concluded without the tacklee regaining their feet and running off, the tacklee joined the ranks of the tackler. The last man standing at a base was the winner.
BB123 was one of my favourite games, as it was one of the few sports I always seemed to win. True, my victories related more to being the tallest and chubbiest boy in the class than actual skill, but I took it as credit nonetheless. The principal banned the game for being too violent, but we disagreed. Admittedly, we didn’t allow girls to play. I’m not sure if we imposed that rule for occupational health and safety reasons or if it was just young boys honing our patriarchal skills.
There were a number of obvious flaws in this game. Firstly, our tackling exercises often accidentally involved other children who weren’t part of the game. Those of us who regularly played British Bulldog regarded ourselves as the playground elite, and we frequently used our elite status to knock down anyone in our path. It was the kind of behaviour I found handy in later years during factional games in the Young Liberals.
A second problem with the game was that larger boys tended to have a slight advantage over the others. It was one I took maximum relish in. It was my chance to get revenge on all those bullies. I’d stick my fist out as I ran between bases scaring them away. Sometimes I was able to defeat three or four of them at once. Being the fatso had its advantages.
During one game, I had almost reached the footpath base when a coalition of three or four much smaller boys tackled me. Actually, I’d have to confess it was more likely me who had tackled them. Thankfully, I had made it safely onto the footpath, but the combined pressure of dragging the boys along with me and landing heavily led to my breaking a bone at the top of my left arm.
At first I didn’t realise what had happened. I was quite friendly with these boys, who were also on the receiving end of bullying. Then suddenly I was in excruciating pain, and was carried away by these same boys to the sick bay near the principal’s office.
An hour later, I was still in pain, screaming out: ‘I think I’m dying!’ At this point, the principal decided my drama-queen antics were getting on her nerves and she called my father. She also insisted I was not to tell Dad exactly how I was injured. I promised I wouldn’t tell him.
Within five minutes, Dad arrived in his Mini. He had cut short his class and demanded immediate answers. The conversation went something like this:
‘How did this happen to you, son?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘How is that possible? It only happened an hour ago.’
‘I can’t say.’
‘But I’m your dad. Why can’t you tell me?’
‘The principal ordered me not to tell you exactly how it happened.’
Dad looked towards the now horrified face of the principal before returning to look at me. He had reached his own conclusions about what happened, and he wasn’t impressed.
‘They punched you again, didn’t they? How many times do I have to tell you? When they fight you, you must fight back! You are bigger and smarter than them! I’m so disappointed in you. What sort of weakling son do I have?’
The sort of weakling son who managed to almost fend off four kids in a game of British Bulldog 123, I thought to myself.
Dad started arguing with the principal about the lack of supervision. The principal, in turn, started arguing that fighting bullying with more bullying wasn’t the way to go.
‘Mr Yusuf, you must believe me. Teaching Irfan to bully the bullies is not the way to handle this problem,’ the principal lectured this senior lecturer.
‘Well, you people should be supervising the playground properly! Now let me ask Irfan how many kids punched him and who was supervising.’
I could see their argument was becoming more heated, but I was more concerned with the intense pain in my left a
rm. This was no time for civil war between two major sources of authority in my young life, which now seemed like it was almost certainly going to be cut short. I did the only logical thing: I started crying out special Arabic prayers and verses from the Koran that Mum had taught me to say when one approaches death or is in the presence of someone dying.
‘Irfan, tell me how many boys did this to you,’ Dad demanded in great alarm.
‘Ya sin!’ I cried out in pain. ‘Wal qur’anil hakim. Innaka laminal mursalin. Aala siratim-mustaqim …’
By now the principal was convinced it wasn’t just a bone or two of mine that had cracked.
‘Irfan, what’s wrong? Why are you talking this gibberish?’
‘Miss, this isn’t gibberish. It’s Ya Sin. From the Koran. Mum taught it to me.’
‘Your mum taught you to sin?’
Matters became more confused when I blurted out the names of the boys. They were the same friendly boys who had dragged me on their shoulders to the sick bay. They were called out of their class and marched to the principal’s office. They must have wondered what was happening when they saw me writhing in pain and reciting incoherent prayers. My dad took one look at these small, somewhat scrawny kids and became livid.
‘Irfan, are you telling me a boy of your size couldn’t beat these little boys in a fight?’
Faced with Dad’s abandonment of his fact-finding mission I pretended to faint. Dad and the four boys carried me to his Mini, and I was driven to the local hospital for some X-rays. It turned out I had broken the top round part of the bone of my left arm. My arm was placed in a sling and I was prescribed some rather nasty-tasting painkillers which I couldn’t easily swallow.
At school, we had scripture classes one afternoon a week. Believe it or not, my parents had fairly liberal views about religious education, so long as no one tried to drag their son out of his South Asian cultural and spiritual universe too early. They never imagined us living anywhere except Australia, and insisted I learn other people’s faiths. This meant I never missed out on scripture classes, and it was left to me to choose which denomination to attend. In those days there was no Muslim scripture, though after one experience at the mosque, my parents would not have let me go even if there was.
At the time, Sydney only had two or three mosques. The closest mosque to us was on the other side of town in the dingy inner-city suburb of Surry Hills. The mosque ran a Saturday school, and the teacher there was of Arabic-speaking background. My parents strongly objected to his teaching methods. I objected to the fact that it was a Saturday school and not a Sunday school like the one all my friends attended.
One thing that really got up my mum’s nose was that the teacher used to teach us the Koran whilst keeping it on the floor. This was a complete sacrilege in our religious culture where the Koran was always to be treated with reverence. At home we kept it on the top shelf of our bookshelf, never allowing another book to be placed over it. It was always wrapped in cloth, and we would always make sure we had washed our hands before touching it.
Mum once walked in on our Saturday school lesson wearing the kind of translucent dupatta she always wore on her head during religious occasions. She was horrified to see that, apart from myself, all the kids and the teacher had their Korans placed on the floor. The teacher himself was quite perturbed by Mum’s lax attitude towards wearing what he felt was appropriate headgear.
‘Sistarr, you shoodh be wearing za brobarr hedskarrf,’ he reminded her.
‘Look at yoo! Vaat hipoocreet yoo are. Yoo mek childrun put Kooraan on dirrty caarput.’
Clearly Mum thought paying reverence to Allah’s book mattered more than adopting what she thought was an Arab cultural fixation with women’s headdress. It was to be the first, last and only time I attended Muslim Saturday school!
Mum’s respect for scripture wasn’t limited to the Koran. She also insisted we kept bibles and other holy books on the top shelf. Maybe she was hedging her religious bets in case we found out on the Day of Judgment that the Jews or Christians were right after all.
Mum had no theological or cultural reservations about my attending scripture lessons at school. She especially liked the fact that I was learning stories from the Old Testament about Moses parting the Red Sea and Joseph interpreting dreams because these same stories were in the Koran.
She also didn’t mind my getting involved in Christmas passion plays. In one performance, I played one of the three wise men from some strange country called ‘The East’. It took me a while to figure out why all of us were picked for this role (the other two boys were a boy from New Guinea and a girl with Chinese parents dressed up as a boy). The baby Jesus was played by a white-skinned baby doll, and our teacher insisted Mary and Joseph be played by blond-headed kids. Perhaps she thought Bethlehem was near the North Pole, and that Mary and Joseph lived next door to Santa.
4
Theology without scars
The incident with my broken arm proved to Dad that I simply wasn’t street-smart enough to survive in the rough-and-tumble world of a state high school. Or perhaps it was the lack of supervision that led him to consider sending me to a private school. Or perhaps it was more to do with academic standards. My parents, like most middle-class South Asians, insisted that their children excel academically. In my case this was even more important. Mum kept reminding me that I was their only son in the most Indian drama-queen manner.
‘Vee have high hope for yoo. Becuz yoo are my kaleje ka tukra.’
‘Huh? What does that mean, Mum?’
‘Yoo are peess of my keednee.’
‘Urrgh, yuk!’
How is this for linguistic confusion: Dad told me today that ‘Kaleje’ doesn’t mean kidney but rather heart! Mum had been misunderstanding the word all this time.
It didn’t help that I was at the top of my class, though I think my parents suspected this reflected more on the school than on me. In Pakistan school was far more difficult and challenging. We worked much harder, the discipline was much stricter and we had more homework. By contrast, school in Sydney was a breeze.
A number of uncles and aunties had started sending their kids to private schools. They argued that the standard of education was higher and the discipline was tougher, and that children who went to private schools managed to get better jobs and more opportunities than they’d otherwise have.
They were convinced that their children might face discrimination in the workforce when they grew up. The ideal professions were those where discrimination was almost absent. At the top of the list was medicine. Indian doctors never suffered racism as they were always needed. Plus all my doctor uncles used to spend half their time boasting about how much they earned and how much they paid the leasing company for their new Mercedes or Volvo.
Mum’s biggest fear was that I would have gori (white woman) girlfriends in high school, and perhaps even end up marrying a gori. She therefore insisted that I had to attend a single-sex school. To do otherwise might bring shame upon the family and lead to gossip. I soon learned that so much of Mum’s decision making was designed for reputation risk management, to minimise the possibility of gossip. Indians don’t have a specific chattering class—they’re all master chatterers.
My parents didn’t want me to miss out, so they did some calculations and made a few phone calls to different private schools. At first they tried a local Catholic school. My dad still talks about that experience of speaking to the principal. Their conversation went something like this:
‘Hello, Mr Principal. I am inquiring about enrolling my son at your school.’
‘Certainly, and what is the young boy’s family name.’
‘His name is Yusuf.’
‘You what? How is that spelt?’
‘Y-U-S—’
‘Hold on, let me grab a pen. Now, can you start again? This time a little slower.’
‘Y-U-S-U-F.’
‘Okay, let me repeat that back to you. U-F-S—’
‘Never
mind. How can I get him in? What fees do you charge?’
‘Fees are not an issue, Mr … er … Ufsusf.’
‘Excuse me, I can tell you how to say my name correctly. I do have a PhD …’
‘Sorry. I meant Dr Ufsusf.’
‘It’s Dr Yusuf.’
‘Yes, that’s what I meant. Anyway, tell me. Is the boy a Catholic?’
‘No, he isn’t.’
‘Okay, are you or your wife Catholic?’
‘No, we are not.’
‘Does the boy have any relatives who are Catholic?’
‘No.’
‘Well then, would you be prepared to have him baptised as a Catholic? That way, he could be enrolled without any hassles.’
‘Over my dead body!’
Dad and I visited various schools, and eventually narrowed the field down to two. There was a nearby Catholic school called St Ignatius College. The school looked like something out of sixteenth-century England, with statues of rather austere-looking men wearing funny hats and long robes. The school had both day students and boarders. I imagined what it would be like staying here at night and seeing these statues come to life like something out of a Michael Jackson music video.
More significant than possible nightmares were the cricket grounds. I was a complete cricket fanatic, though I was the only person in the family who supported Australia. Dad supported whoever won the game, while my sisters supported either Pakistan or the West Indies. The only thing we agreed upon was that we never supported England. In that sense, we were a truly Australian family.
Mum encouraged my fixation with what she called kirkit, hoping it might help me shed a few kilos. We were living in a new house around 1200 metres away from the old one. Across the road were large lush hospital grounds containing a single cricket net with a very rough surface for a pitch. Whenever we had family friends visiting, I would play cricket with their sons on this rough track which we referred to as the ‘Gaza Strip’.