by M G Vassanji
There were occasional student demonstrations on the Ann Arbor campus, for some cause or another having to do with racism, and Aslam naturally couldn’t resist the action. I had to warn him, “Don’t forget we are only guests here, Aslam.” To which he would say, “Don’t you understand, Rumi, in America you are free to express yourself. There are all kinds of opinions here.” When I smiled at this, thinking, So America’s not so bad, he added, “Even if at the end of the day it doesn’t make a rat’s arse of a difference.” We spoke in Urdu, always, but he had a way of incorporating into it new expressions he had learned. It seemed that he adapted more to American ways than I did.
Towards the end of two years, his scholarship was running out. One day we learned that a couple from India who had become our friends and were in similar circumstances to us were leaving for Canada as immigrants. “Why don’t we apply and see what happens? We don’t have to go there, but let’s give ourselves a choice!” I said. Aslam agreed, just to make me happy. And was trapped.
Fairly quickly we found work in Toronto from which to make a start, he as a freelance journalist, then a copy editor, I as a sessional teacher of English as a Second Language. We were modestly comfortable, reasonably happy, living in rental accommodation first in Bloor West then Don Mills. Something remained missing, however: the clamour of children. Echoes from my school in Karachi were a memory that kept pulling at me, while our folks missed no chance to send us reminders. But to my every hint or suggestion, the idealist would say he was not keen to bring more of “them” into a troubled, overpopulated world. Finally, when I found a permanent job and we became more secure and older and the evenings began to seem a little empty, he relented. Why not? We’ll make good parents. Tariq was born. Overnight he changed, became the doting, anxious father. Two years later came Zahra. Aslam had brought his politics with him, but apart from a few demos, once when the Ku Klux Klan marched through Little India, activism simply amounted to having opinions and following world news, which he devoured. There remained some hope that we might return to Pakistan, both our families begging us to do so. Jobs awaited us, we were assured. We had stayed away too long. Our parents thirsted (their word) to see the grandchildren. But time passed, the children grew older and started school, and back there fundamentalism was on the rise; we knew we would not be going home to stay.
Toronto was gently liberal. The NDP, our party, was moderately left and during elections we allowed them to put up their signs on our lawn. You could say that now I had truly tamed the tiger, defanged the fiery old radical and turned him into a family man. Carrying bags of groceries, shoveling snow in winter, or sitting on the stairs struggling to put a snowsuit on Tariq, he was hardly the charismatic radical I had fallen in love with. But love and attraction evolve too, don’t they? He was a happy father, he would make any sacrifice for his kids.
Then came that fateful day when two tall iconic buildings in New York collapsed like blocks of melting ice cream.
* * *
—
War was threatened, and we joined the protests. Saturday mornings we packed our lunches and took the subway downtown to go and march with a few thousand others on University Avenue in front of the American consulate. We were under no illusions. This demo lacked the noise and electricity, the conviction of our youth marches, missing was the expectation—the belief—that we could make a difference. Today’s youth had mostly stayed away; we ourselves were older, subdued and orderly. Quite without hope. But protest we must, we felt, against a needless war.
There were bombings in Karachi and Lahore, where our families lived. And in London, Bali, and Delhi. Nowhere seemed safe. But then why didn’t we come out against these acts of terror, Zahra asked one evening at our dinner table congress. She confessed that in her history class she had boasted that on Saturdays her parents joined the protests against war in Iraq. Her teacher had queried, “Are you a Muslim?” and all eyes turned to fix on Zahra. The teacher followed with the other question, Why didn’t Muslims protest against Islamic terrorism? Yes, yes, echoed her classmates. Why didn’t they? I had been asked this question too, by my own pupils, and Aslam had seen it in a newspaper column. We looked at each other. We had no answer. There could be no answer. What is Islamic about an act of terror? How do you protest against terrorism? Do terrorists have a local embassy, do they listen to opinions? We commiserate with friends and neighbours, with anyone we can. With ordinary people, like you and I, who could have been the victims. Does it have to be repeated all the time that Islam is a religious faith, it’s not genetic? How does my family bear responsibility for 9/11? Do we now have to wear a badge declaring our origins, swear our loyalty and innocence, deny affiliation with any criminal calling himself a Muslim?
It had come to seem that the more real and constant fear we lived under was not of a bomb on a train but of being thought of as people who might plant one. Or tacitly support the murderers who did. Our safe world, our complacent life “in the best country in the world” had been shattered. We did not know who we were anymore. Everything was wrong about us: where we came from, the way we looked, our names. We had proudly called ourselves Canadians, with a background. Everyone has a background. But now we were Muslims first, to others and to ourselves. Terrorism was ours, a disease we had brought with us. We felt ashamed, afraid to say the wrong thing or be misunderstood. We found ourselves speaking quietly and casting furtive glances whenever we discussed politics, even Canadian politics. We warned the kids to behave. What do you tell a girl who thinks one of her teachers consistently gives her the suspicious eye? Or a boy who is taunted with calls of “Osama”? The terror was in us now.
* * *
—
“Extremism is dangerous. It should be opposed,” I said to him, as though he promoted it. “We’ve always believed that. Terrorism is murder.”
“Of course. It’s murder, nothing else.”
Formulas, mantras that must be repeated over and over for the sake of the kids, who were now upstairs, ears peeled as always for discussions downstairs.
In Madrid that morning a train had been bombed.
In the brief silence that fell between us we eyed each other, much remaining unsaid. This was no time for nuances, to point out that many more innocent people had already died in the attack on Iraq than at the World Trade Center, that the entire country faced destruction, that even in the United States innocent people were being tortured or taken away merely on suspicion, without trials. We had already quietly stopped going to the protests. It was as though we didn’t trust our own kids to be sensible and know the limits of dissent, and we had to mislead or lie to them. Suddenly we would drop our voices, or talk loudly when we wished them to hear something edifying.
I said, now dropping my voice, “We must keep telling them the same thing. Terrorism is murder. Violence cannot be justified. We live in a safe and democratic country. And remember, don’t talk politics when they are around.”
“I know. But they are not stupid—thank God. They can see what’s going on in the world. They will form their own opinions.”
And they can read our faces. They’ll see anxiety and bitterness. And they are brown, their names are Muslim. How do we cope with that?
They knew about their father’s radical student days in Karachi. He had boasted about his activism, at a time when it was all right to do so. He told them how he had come out in support of minorities in Pakistan and against its army’s atrocities in Bangladesh, against apartheid in South Africa, British policies on Rhodesia, and America’s war in Vietnam. In Toronto he had marched against the Ku Klux Klan. I was there too, I told them, though not as loudly. Neither of us had wanted them to grow up complacent, disengaged from the world. Now we both desired to erase those pictures of protest from their minds, my husband more than I. A panicky father.
“Terrorists are criminals,” out of the blue he would announce solemnly to Tarik with a nod. “Remember that.
” They were envious of our freedoms and privileges. They were psychopaths. Islam possessed backward and dangerous ideas. Remember that.
Was this the radical I had married? The intellectual who worshipped Noam Chomsky, Frantz Fanon, and Che Guevara? Previously he would have analyzed the issues, spoken of state and radical terrorism, terms that he himself taught me; he would have brought up the example of the Sufis, who practiced mystical and joyful forms of Islam that embraced all faiths. He was well read. He knew nuance. But he abandoned it all for fear that his kids, his son, Tariq, especially, might turn brash and radical—and then what? Trapped in a sting operation by the authorities into attempting something stupid. Arrested and tortured.
“I don’t want Tariq doing something silly…even saying something can land him in—”
“Guantanamo? You’re the one being silly…”
But Tariq, sensing his anxiety, had learned to bait him. He was at that age. At the dinner table he would come up with arguments that would have alarmed me if I didn’t know my son better. But Aslam readily took the bait and spluttered and argued and raged, and the two would be at each other.
“What does it matter?” Zahra would get up from the table, exasperated. “You two stop it! We live in Canada, look outside for a moment. That world is far away.” She would storm out.
Aslam became depressive. He put on weight and his blood pressure shot up. He stopped going to the gym, seeing accusing eyes everywhere. His squash partner Bendtner was, he told me privately, “Bush and Rumsfeld combined.”
I warned Tariq not to provoke his father.
“I only wanted an honest discussion with him, see what he thought.”
“There are better ways to do it.”
“Well, I’m not going to become a terrorist, if that’s what you think.”
“You should still be careful of what you say. Especially in school, or to your friends. We live in a time of war.”
“And we are the wrong colour and religion.”
I gave him a look and ruffled his hair. That was a fine one coming from him. Like his father, he didn’t believe in any faith. He pulled himself away from me with a smile. We had been a happy family, close to each other, cultured and educated, who enjoyed talking and debating issues. What had happened to us?
Gradually things became calmer, and we learned to cope with the world better. Obama came and brought hope. The war moved to Afghanistan and continued but seemed distant to us in Toronto. Acts of terrorism elsewhere alarmed us but not to disrupt our lives. Once, when we drove to Ann Arbor to see some friends, Aslam with his fierce look and his surname Sheikh hardly raised an eyebrow at Immigration but I was thoroughly questioned. We laughed and I got teased. It was how the world was and we were getting used to it. The extra scrutiny became the norm. Tariq quietened down but would fish out Aslam’s past issues of leftist magazines that he’d kept out of sight. “He’s smart,” Aslam said to me with approval. He had learned to trust the kids. Among ourselves we discussed Karachi and the violence in the streets there. I was planning to visit my parents, who said there was nothing wrong with Karachi, to which Aslam replied, “Everything is wrong with it,” but agreed I should go.
One Friday evening we returned home from seeing a play and, taking off our boots and coats, came into the living room, happy to see the kids. They were sitting quietly on the carpet watching a movie. But there was something wrong with the scene that momentarily made it seem like we were in the wrong house, and I gave a start. Zahra wore a scarf over her head. Not an ordinary scarf but a tight, blue hijab.
I gave a quick look at Aslam and put a finger to my lips.
“Well, well, new look!” I said in reply to Zahra’s challenging look. Tariq had an amused smile, and Aslam a rather lame one.
We had dinner, and later I went up to Zahra’s room to question her. She was sitting up in her bed, a textbook in her lap, obviously waiting for me to arrive.
“What’s with this thing?”
“What thing?”
“You know, this cloth on your head.”
“It’s called a hijab. I’m simply asserting my identity.”
“And what’s that?”
“My Muslim identity.”
“Well, I am a Muslim, you never saw me wearing that!”
“Maybe you were scared to.”
“I never wore it. When I was young we wore a loose dupatta, which fell to the shoulder anyway.”
She turned and gave me a long look, with those large brown eyes of hers, now accentuated by her head cover. She did look pretty.
“Have you thought how you would answer Allah, when your time comes?” she asked me quietly.
I took a deep breath. My heart was pounding. “I can deal with Allah. Let’s talk about this later, just you and I. Meanwhile come for dessert downstairs. We’ve brought back a nice chocolate cake.”
She got up and followed me. Tariq joined us on the landing.
At the table the three of us waited for Aslam to come down. When he did, he had changed into sweatpants and T-shirt and wore a strained smile.
“You’re waiting. Sorry,” he said. As he sat down he saw Zahra’s defying eyes on him. His approval, or disapproval, was what mattered most to her. He said, “Darling—you can wear anything you like. If it’s decent.”
THE SENSE OF AN ENDING
When do you know it’s finally over? When he drapes his arm around you in bed and it feels like a log, and his body feels like a weight against you. But it’s you that’s turned cold, and you ache inside because you cannot revive that old feeling of warm security and contentment when he enveloped you, and you wonder. You want to ask how or why but you know it happens, and reasons don’t matter. The same way your once close brother and only sibling is now a perfect stranger, and your best friend in school speaks to you formally in English whenever you meet, which is not often.
She lifts up his hand and transports it slowly across her body and drops it gently back to his side. He’s not sleeping yet, probably asking himself these same questions.
That first time he held her from behind, they were standing at the door of her apartment. I always wanted to do that, he murmured, putting his hands inside her blouse and cupping both her breasts. She could feel him harden against her and responded ever so slightly with a jiggle. That was early days and he approached her with caution. They had declared their undying commitment to each other, and everything looked wonderful for the future.
Familiarity, they say. But that’s bullshit. On the contrary, there are times when she does feel an ache, a prick of emotion, the longing for that old love to return. It has to be there when you’ve spent all these years together. The happy and the sad moments and the obstacles overcome in the joint resumé of the marriage. But then one day life’s handed you a new pair of glasses, saying, Look, and you see those quirks and flaws in all their clarity that were once barely noticeable, you see the sharper face lines and the softer flesh, the slower movements and the thinning hair, the set ways that irritate, until little remains of that magic…when you waited anxiously, longed to see the familiar calm face again when he had been away for a conference. They had begun together in a spirit of adventure, having relished their single lives after college and now learning partnership. It was like going to a new country, like when she first left Dar for America, and everything was exciting. Nobody tells you about the anxiety of having children; how that frantic preoccupation eats your years away silently like acid, the time spent on schools and activities, in sheer worrying and doubting, and the money spent, because we wanted nothing but the best for them. Private schools, music lessons, sports camps. And finally, the boys are doing well. And we are spent.
There was no passion to begin with. She repeats the diagnosis, which has come to her only recently, she almost whispers the words aloud, her lips ungluing for a second, and she edges away from the clinging warmth of his
body aura as if repulsed. There was no passion. You read about it in those schoolgirl romances that came from England and saw it in the movies. She never experienced it, even to be thwarted in it. There was no sweet ache to nurse in the dark nights. She had waited vainly for that right, that perfect person to appear whom she desired beyond anything else; who consumed her soul. But this one came along in time and wanted her and she told herself not to be foolish. Life was not a night at the movies. He was the safe alternative, a bird in hand; a university professor, tall and fair, and not a bad face but for the beaky nose. Decent. Do you want a husband and family or not? Theirs was a cultivated love. Stable, mature, thoughtful, and almost arranged. An agreement to love. An option.
It was American Thanksgiving, and she had come for her dutiful visit from DC to see her mother in Toronto. Her mother had hinted on the phone that she had a nice surprise waiting for her. Nadia could guess. “What surprise is she talking of?” she asked her brother nevertheless when she gave him her arrival time. “You know,” he said. A boy, that’s what her mother said at the breakfast table when Nadia arrived, and he was a find. She had better get serious. There were girls lining up for him. Good family, good-looking, a prestigious job. It had been her father’s dear wish, he would find his eternal peace, his asal-me-wasal, only when she got married and settled down. The usual blackmail. Her father, who was healthy by all counts and took long walks every day, had collapsed with a heart attack a year ago, and her mother with her long list of ailments pined on, saying all the time, “I wish He would take me now. But even He’s waiting for our Nadia to marry.”
The next day, Azim had driven them to an apartment in Don Mills, where many Dar immigrants had come to stay. A frail-looking woman in a long dress, with almost translucent pale features, welcomed them with a smile; she was Sheru Bai, obviously the prospect’s mother. There was another woman present, Nuru Bai, her sister, and a younger woman, Parin, her daughter, visiting from Michigan where she was doing a Ph.D. And then there was he, looming uncomfortably behind the three women, the background but the important business.