Chapter 18 Salma #2
It was my job to bring the mail in from the mailbox at the end of our driveway.
After Thanksgiving, international letters started arriving from Pakistan.
When we were young, the tissue-thin blue tri-folded envelopes, emblazoned with par avion, arrived at least once a month.
I took outsize pride in those two little words.
We had received mail with French written on it!
They had long ago stopped arriving with any kind of regularity.
But after my parents’ return from Pakistan, it was like a spigot that had been left on.
Each day, we received more of the blue self-folding envelopes, regular envelopes stuffed thick with paper, manila envelopes, one-third covered with jewel-tone stamps with Arabic curlicues.
I put the envelopes gingerly on the kitchen table and watched the pile expand with growing unease.
When Ami returned home from work, she strode to the table immediately and tore through the envelopes as though they contained state secrets, lips moving almost silently. She didn’t even take her shoes off. She tracked her outside shoes through the house to get to those envelopes.
She had been prattling on about distant aunts, uncles, and cousins since they’d returned, and so, at first, I didn’t think much of it.
I assumed they were letters from family with whom they had reconnected.
But that didn’t explain her hunger for them.
And then, one day, I picked up an unsealed manila envelope in which opened letters were stored.
Without planning to, I spilled its contents onto the table.
Some were written in Urdu, so I couldn’t read them.
Some were written in English. I glanced at a few sentences of each and cringed at the overly formal or overly awkward writing.
And then pictures fell out. A sea of men. From awkward, pimply teenagers to middle-aged men that looked almost as old as Abu, from formal portraits to candid photos, they gazed out at me, dark and blaming. I sat down heavily. Was that discomfort I saw in their eyes or resignation?
The call for rishthas was not a bogeyman intended to scare Asma into submission.
It was actually in the works. These were letters of introduction sent from families.
There was no avoiding the meaning of these communications when they were accompanied with visuals.
I felt faint from understanding. What did these letters say?
How directly was the marriage proposal presented?
Did they inquire about the bride or tout only the groom’s accomplishments?
Did any of them ask Asma’s favorite flavor of ice cream?
I had told Asma at Thanksgiving that the idea of a rishtha was just for show.
A threat. How was I going to explain this?
How was she going to take it? I felt terrorized for her.
And then, at some point, I realized that as Asma’s fate went, so would mine.
The chances were high that one of these men would be selected for me.
Perhaps the thought had been floating around my mind, like a free radical.
But until I held those pictures and felt the finger oils of men on the other side of the world, the threat hadn’t attached itself to me.
I dropped the picture like it was on fire and considered ripping them all up and throwing the letters away.
But what would that accomplish? The waves of men that were eligible and available were endless, and another wave would surely wash ashore.
The thought of Asma finding any of these men acceptable would have been comical if it wasn’t so real.
She could turn down every single rishtha, and there would still be a line of men, hundreds deep, who were desperate to get to this country.
The thought made me feel nauseous. I never really considered how lucky we were to be in America.
Our being here was just a fact, as unremarkable as the Kohlmanns being our neighbors.
But it was hard to not see our privilege in the face of the unrelenting wave of people willing to sacrifice to live in this country.
Did the letters conjure for my mother the events of her long-ago betrothal and the circumstances in which it had been arranged?
Had she worried about how appealing she would look to strangers?
Had she, unconsciously, started wondering whether she was desirable and whether anyone would select her?
But then I remembered the actual circumstances around her marriage and felt a momentary pang for that young girl.
After hearing Mamoo’s story about Ami, I thought that perhaps I understood them, that I was piecing things together. But it was all illusory.
It was a weird time. A first-of-its-kind big-box store had opened in the next town and caused a seismic cultural shift in the area.
People from towns in a thirty-mile radius were drawn to the endless aisles and staggering number of choices.
Long known and familiar to everyone in Rosebud, for the first time we drew strange looks and whisperings from people who came from surrounding areas as we walked the aisles looking for shoes and Tupperware.
It was post-Reagan revolution, and the call to the primacy of self and individuality, at the expense of the shared and common good, had already begun.
Twelve years after our arrival we were being othered.
Everything seemed to be shifting, including myself.
The time at Mamoo and Aunty’s, away from the routine of school and my parents, had been like breathing different air.
It had given me a sense of perspective. High school would soon be over.
I could be anyone I wanted to be. The trouble was, I didn’t know who that was.
To whom did we belong? To whom did we owe loyalty?
They told us to be careful with these Americans, to remember who we were and stick to our own.
But we didn’t know anyone like us. They told us that this country was not our home.
But then they did exactly that—found a home among the Americans.
I didn’t want to only be that child who satisfied my parents’ expectations—their grateful appreciation that I didn’t cause problems was a kind of suffocation.
But what did I want from the world? Who was I supposed to be?
The void between knowing what I didn’t want and what I did want was vast. Asma appeared to be totally American with seemingly no limits to what she would do, other than maybe not eat pork.
That wasn’t going to be my way. I knew that.
But what was going to be my way? What did I want to keep from my culture?
What was I going to leave behind? Like all immigrants, I was determining my own unique amalgamation of old and new.
And perhaps in this way, I was no different from any other high school senior in the country, ready to leave home and find myself.
I wasn’t quite clear on where things stood with Asma.
Without the daily act of living together and the opportunities to work things out through small kindnesses, the slow accumulation of misunderstandings and resentments had grown.
At Mamoo’s, we had spent most of our time disagreeing about surface things and avoiding the sewage that lay below.
And then, of course, there was Thanksgiving.
We didn’t talk late at night. Even if I rang her, she didn’t call back.
I was aware my parents were watching me in a way I’d never felt before. Or was it that I was watching them in a way that I’d never done before?
Once, I heard them speaking in their room. They spoke in their typical combination of Urdu and Punjabi with a smattering of English thrown in.
“Are you going to be able to go this week?” Ami asked.
“I don’t know my area until I check in,” Abu said.
“What will you do when you see her?”
“If she’s going about her business, classes and whatnot, that’s good.”
“What if she’s up to . . . mischief?”
“What should I do?” Abu asked tiredly.
My days were cast with a green glow, an unnatural twilight where nothing was as it seemed and no one said what they meant.
I got into the same college as Asma. The financial aid packages wouldn’t be handed out until late January, and until then, it was equally plausible that I would be going to a top-tier university or a community college.
College, that pinhole of light and life, seemed small and far away.
The risk of getting hitched to a rishtha felt right around the corner.
As I walked to the school bus in the morning, the fog cleared, and life seemed to follow normal rules.
But then I’d return home, and the feelings of groundless anxiety and unsettlement took root again.
Envelopes I’d brought inside and pictures I knew I’d seen disappeared.
My parents stopped talking when I came into the room.
The corners whispered. Some days I felt like I was going mad.
I fell asleep to the rhythm of Ami’s pacing overhead.
I woke up as exhausted as I’d gone to bed, dimly aware of my restless dreams. The time at Mamoo and Aunty’s felt like it was only yesterday and, at the same time, years ago.
I started getting off the school bus early, taking the long way home, just to be out of the house for as long as I could.
I steeled for Christmas break. The thing with being a person who does not like conflict is that being around others who are fighting feels exactly like I am the one in the fight.
What would a monthlong stint of all of us in the same house be like?