Chapter 2 Asma #3
“Okay, aunty,” Salma said, standing up and wiping her tears.
Asma didn’t move. “Sorry. I’m not doing it, Sal.” She was suddenly, deeply grateful for college.
Salma lightly kicked Asma’s feet and said in a contrived accent, “We send you to college, and you get all these strange ideas.” As she walked away, in her regular voice, she cackled, “I’ll tell them you have your period or something.”
Asma snickered. Her old standby for getting out of everything religious. She could take on anything if Salma was by her side.
She watched her sister enter the hallway to the kitchen and out of view.
Even that hallway, built to obstruct the view between the men’s and women’s areas, annoyed Asma.
Any pleasure at Salma’s leveraging their inside joke disappeared.
She knew what the Islamic teaching was: Women were so treasured that they needed to be protected.
But all Asma saw was that they were second-class citizens, sequestered away and always receiving less.
Less education, less and lower-quality food, less attention.
Her sociology class had her wondering how many undiscovered female Galileos and Einsteins had been born but died washing their family’s underclothes and taking care of their aging parents.
She hated coming to mosque because it brought up these thoughts.
Recognizing the truths underlying her religion and culture became less avoidable the older she got and made her sour.
She had no ability to control what others expected of her or how they saw her.
And the things that were so important to her seemed not to matter to anyone else.
She felt like an object, a mere receptacle, into which her family and her culture poured their dictates and norms. Sometimes, she wanted to break it all and shatter their expectations.
Her mother returned to their spot and sat down. Before either could say anything, a young boy came over and said shyly, “Aunty, uncle wants to know if you have his medicine.”
What medicine was her father on?
Her mother reached into her handbag and shifted its contents around, the clickety-clack sound of jostling items strangely comforting.
Asma remembered being a child and the mystery of her mother’s handbag captivating her.
She and Salma would carefully empty and catalog the contents, searching for clues, anything that might reveal the secret life of their mother.
But all they ever found were things like a long-forgotten lipstick of some nondescript shade of brown, an old makeup compact with more silver than powder, a bundle of safety clips, a roll of tape, a wallet of promotional or reward cards from various gas stations and fast-food places, a gum wrapper, an empty Tic Tac container, small pieces of paper with random writing, a needle and thread, and a broken nail file.
Finally, she pulled out a bottle of pills. “Do I give it to you or meet him at the kitchen door?”
Classic. Her mother was most comfortable taking orders, preferring a just-doing-what-I’m-told existence, so different from her own do-what-you-want-and-apologize-later.
But asking a nine-year-old for permission seemed a bit much.
Asma took the bottle from her mother’s outstretched hand. “Here. I’ll take it.”
“Maybe Salma should . . .” her mother said, looking around.
Asma paused, willing her mother to look at her. “Short hair isn’t a sin, Ami.” She told the boy to tell her father to meet her at the kitchen door and then followed him as he darted like a minnow through the sea of women.
As she walked into the kitchen from the women’s side, she noticed several new Pakistani men in their twenties who she’d never seen before.
Had new families joined the congregation?
As they passed the door in which she stood, she could feel their eyes settle on her.
She didn’t care whether it was with judgment or admiration.
She understood the currency traded on in her culture.
Here, women were supposed to keep their eyes lowered and play coy, be above reproach, and indicate nothing.
If a girl was interested in a boy, after reciprocated glances, she was supposed to tell her parents, and something that passed as courtship would begin and lead to marriage.
Even before she’d started college, that whole process of indirect and diluted signaling felt small and stupid.
The elusive thrill of seeing a new male of eligible age, a newcomer, meant nothing to her.
She could have anyone she wanted at college.
She stood in the doorway, pleased that her unapologetic presence was causing consternation among the men.
She felt like an eyesore, the men’s eyes trained on her as she stood solid and unmoving.
Her father walked into the opposite end of the kitchen from the men’s side, his face turned to the men next to him and behind him.
He must have been telling a joke because the men all burst out laughing.
He turned and saw Asma, and blanched. There was nothing in her feminist-theory class that gave guidance on how to practically challenge the patriarchy.
She was unsure of what to do. Should she step into the kitchen and hand her father his medicine?
Should she withdraw to the women’s area?
Instead, she drew herself to her full six-foot height, emissary of the faces and burdened bodies next door, and looked boldly around the room, meeting the eyes of any man that dared meet her gaze.
Her father’s eyes darted around the room quickly.
She could tell that he wanted her to disappear and was weighing whether to ignore her.
Instead, he walked over, snatched the bottle from her hand, and merged himself into the food line without a word.
Asma didn’t move, unsure of how to exit on her own terms. She noticed at the drink table that there were small bottles of mango juice, a prized commodity that would be gone by the time the women started serving themselves.
Asma sauntered over, took two bottles, and leisurely started back toward the door.
The men and the boys gave her a wide berth as though she were radioactive.
She paused, liking the power she was able to wield in this room without even trying, turned back, and grabbed a third bottle for her mother.
After the meal, Asma saw her father standing outside, his signal that he was ready to leave.
He was not one to dawdle, especially with a storm coming.
If her family was leaving, so was she. There was nothing for her here.
Besides, she needed to tell them what she had come to say.
Maybe the timing was perfect. If it didn’t go well, they could get in their respective cars and drive away from each other, no awkward and barely concealed hostility to avoid.
She held her mother’s bag while she put her shoes on.
She could hear the sound of clanking dishes and activity coming from the kitchen, aware that she was leaving having neither helped set up nor clean up the kitchen and, in that way, was no different from the men.
Increasingly, there were moments when Asma believed she was beyond empty gestures like coming to mosque as an appeasement strategy, beyond the reach of her parents’ muddled expectations.
Life at college was exactly as she’d dreamed.
She had found people with whom she could be her true self, wear what she wanted, come back early in the morning wearing the same clothes she had left her dorm in, and not worry about being questioned about what she did, where she was, and whom she was with.
She was friends with women, men, gay, straight, Black, brown, Asian, and white.
She had no limits and didn’t have to pretend to be anything for anyone.
She was free to figure things out in her own way without the ever-present sense that she was being watched and judged.
But now, being in this parking lot in a decrepit part of town, seeing the mix of lower-income whites, Blacks, and immigrants, she remembered where she actually came from.
After witnessing the careless affluence of people at college, for whom ordering a late-night pizza or sharing their Budweiser seemed to be so easy and without consequence, Asma thought her surroundings seemed even more shabby.
It didn’t embarrass her or make her feel ashamed. It just made her acutely self-aware.
She took a deep breath and stopped in the middle of the walkway. “Abu, I have to talk to you. Ami, you too.”
Close at her side, Salma breathed, “Not here, Asma.”
Her parents kept walking, her father tall and thin and her mother short and round.
The space they took up in the world reflected in the space maintained between them.
A weak sun pierced the gloom. What would it feel like to want to turn to her parents for guidance or comfort?
She felt that she was meant for another life, or maybe other parents.
“Abu,” Asma said again.
He wheeled around. “Have we taught you nothing?”
“I . . . I wanted to let you know that I, um, got a pretty substantial part in the school’s production of Pippin.” It sounded scripted because it was.
They stood rooted in spot, waiting for something to happen so they could all react to it. Her father gazed into the donut shop. Her mother looked at the ground. Salma stared at the slow trickle of people leaving the mosque. It was almost as though no one heard her.
“Did your mother give you permission? Or was that your Mamoo?”
Out of the corner of her eye, Asma saw her mother flinch. She didn’t know if he was referring to her hair or the play. It didn’t matter; the answer to both was the same. She was an adult and didn’t need someone to give her permission. She remained silent.
“It was so beautiful,” he said. “It was one of the few things about you that . . . look at you now. You look like a boy.”