In My Father's Country (6 page)

“Yeah, dude. And then I said that if he didn’t get lost soon, I was going to kick his ass.”

“You were going to kick his ass?”

“You should have seen the look on his face!”

“Tell me what you said again,” Khalid would say.

Aziz or Emal would open his mouth, but before he could utter a word Khalid would add, “How did you say that in English? Because I’m sure the kid who stole your seat doesn’t speak Pashtu.”

Ha! We’d stumble up the street laughing. We all knew the truth: None of us was able to carry on long conversations in English with anyone. Once we got to our uncles’ house one of us would make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and another one would get six glasses out of the cupboard. We had been told that all American children love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and ate them with milk. From the beginning, I liked my PB&J with orange juice, which would make Najiba cross.

“Americans drink milk with their sandwiches. You have to drink
milk
,” she would insist. But I preferred orange juice. I realized I would have to accept that I was not like the rest of them. Eventually, I gave up PB&Js altogether, in order to avoid that conversation.

We had figured out that no one was going to know if we watched a little TV; that there was no alarm at the Professor’s office that would go off if we touched the set while he was at work. So we decided we would
watch a single episode of
Saved by the Bell
every day after school. Emal was skinny, with a long, thin face; we said he looked like Screech Powers, the nerdy kid. Khalid was stocky, with dimples and white teeth. We said he looked like A.C., the jock. Najiba, Jamila, and I, with our dark hair, brown eyes, and baggy dark T-shirts and pants, didn’t look like any teenage American girl on TV.

We allowed ourselves one show. We didn’t dare watch another, in case the Professor came home and discovered that the TV was still warm. By four-thirty we would be sitting at the dining room table or on the living room sofa doing our homework. When the Professor returned from work around six o’clock it was as if he’d entered a study hall.

S
EVEN

A
year passed, then two. By the second year we spoke English, although I was still too shy to speak up in class. Once, when I was asked a question in chemistry, without thinking I stood up beside my desk, as I had learned to do in Pakistan, and answered in Urdu. Did my classmates snicker? I don’t remember. I do remember that Mr. Ping, the teacher, encouraged me to answer in English next time. I sank back into my seat, turning pink.

The most difficult part of my life those first few years was that, much as I tried to obey my uncles, I always seemed to be doing something that would cause a stir. My senior year, in AP English, I decided to write my thesis comparing
Romeo and Juliet
to
Laila Majnu
, a much older Pashtun folktale of young lovers who are doomed never to be together.

In Afghanistan the tale is passed down from mother to daughter. Afghan women very rarely read or write, so the story is memorized, and has become part of Pashtun oral history. My aunt Babo used to tell it to us when we lived in Pakistan. We would sit on the veranda and drink tea. I would sit closest to her; I didn’t want to miss a single word. As the eldest daughter in my family, I had the responsibility to learn the tale so that I could pass it on to my daughters, continuing the tradition of my great-great-grandmothers. It could take three or four days to tell one of these tales. She would tell us half an hour’s worth before she would need
to stop and prepare tea for the men or make a meal or sweep the floors. The next day she would sit us down and resume right where she’d left off.

When we read
Romeo and Juliet
in high school, I was shocked by how similar this story was to
Laila Majnu
—the young lovers, the family disapproval, the desperation to be together, the tragic ending. One day after class I approached Mrs. Johnson, who was sitting at her desk marking papers.

“I think Shakespeare stole the story of
Romeo and Juliet
from my people, and I would like to write my senior thesis on this.”

“Wow! That is some claim! What makes you think that?” She put her pen down and leaned toward me. She was a tiny, middle-aged lady, kind and enthusiastic.

I briefly told her the tale, and how it had been around for centuries, and how Babo used to tell it to us between chores. Her eyes brightened as I spoke. When I finished she clapped her hands together. “This is wonderful,” she said. “Work out an outline and let’s have another chat once I look at that. I’d like you to present this to the class.”

“You mean … stand up in front of the whole class?” Impossible, I thought. Only a few theses were chosen for presentations. It was considered a great honor. It also meant standing in front of the class speaking English for the entire period, fifty minutes.

“But you must. This is such a unique angle. I know you can do it.”

“I wish I had the same faith in myself,” I replied.

That day on the bus I leaned my head against the window and fretted. Khalid had graduated and was now in college. Najiba and Jamila were in high school now, along with Aziz, Emal, and me. They chattered with one another in Pashtu. They should be speaking English, I thought. We passed a video store and suddenly I had an idea. Indians had made a Bollywood movie of this folklore, called
Laila Majnu
. I would ask Uncle A to rent it for me, and then I could show clips to the class. The clips would take up most of the fifty minutes. I would only have to talk for twenty minutes, thirty max. The fewer minutes I imagined myself talking in front of the class, the happier I felt. The next day after class I told Ms. Johnson about my movie-rental idea. She thought it was brilliant.

That night, when he came home from work, I told Uncle A about
Romeo and Juliet
and how I was convinced Shakespeare had stolen the idea from the Afghans and how Ms. Johnson thought my idea was genius and how I was only one of a few students who’d been asked to present my thesis to the class, and how I wanted to round out my speech with clips from the Indian movie of
Laila Majnu
and could he please rent the movie for me so that I could start writing?

Uncle A nodded as he listened, then said he would discuss it with the Professor. Uncle A was a master at the inscrutable Pashtun expression. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I assumed he would say yes, because this was for an important school paper. Hadn’t he told us eight thousand times since the day we arrived that he and the Professor expected us to excel at school? Wasn’t that the entire reason we left our mothers and home in Afghanistan and came to America?

A few days passed, and neither the Professor nor Uncle A said anything to me. I thought perhaps they had forgotten about it, and so I tried to work up the courage to ask them again. Then it was Sunday, and we sat down for our usual, much dreaded Sunday meeting. Before I’d fully settled into my chair, the Professor demanded, “Why are you obsessed with this love story?”

He looked directly at me. Usually the Professor addressed all of us.

“It’s part of my presentation for English class. My thesis,” I explained. “Ms. Johnson asked me, and I—”

“Why did you choose a love story?”

“We are reading
Romeo and Juliet
in class,” I said. Najiba and the others looked at me, wide-eyed. What had I done to be singled out this way again?

“Is there a boy in your class that you like? Is that what this is about?”

“It was a class assignment.”

“Who is this boy that you love?”

“There is no boy. I just wanted to share my culture,” I said quietly, mortified.

“You know I didn’t bring you here so you could fall in love with a boy in your class and watch Indian movies together. I didn’t bring you
to America so you could hanky-panky.” I felt hot shame burning my face. I had no idea what
hanky-panky
meant, but from the disgust on his face, I knew it was not anything a good Pashtun woman should ever be accused of.

There was nothing I could say. The Professor and Uncle A leaned forward on their forearms. They thought I was lying. Everything that came out of my mouth sounded feeble, ridiculous. Uncle A asked whether I was going to marry this boy. The Professor threatened to send me back to the village to get me married, to control my going wild, and told me how shameful it would be to waste the chance of a lifetime this way.

I returned to Ms. Johnson in tears. I told her I couldn’t do the presentation because it was not going to be possible to rent the movie.

“What do you mean not possible? Did you try all the video stores? Maybe Movie Madness has it. They have a lot of older foreign films.”

“No, no, it’s not that.” I started to cry. “It’s just not possible.”

“But why, Saima? What’s happened?”

I felt the tears in my eyes. It would shame my family to tell her anything about what went on at home. I couldn’t possibly share with her my uncles’ disapproval, or try to describe the shame I felt at being singled out in the Sunday meeting. “My uncles forbid it,” I said.

“Would you like me to talk to them about it?” asked Ms. Johnson.

“No!” I cried.

“Or I could write them a note and tell them that you’re renting the movie for your thesis.”

“That won’t work either,” I said. If they knew I was talking to an outsider about this, they would be even more furious.

In the end, Ms. Johnson rented
Laila Majnu
for me. English was the final period of the day, and I was the last one to present. I stood up in my loose T-shirt and pants, with my scar between my eyebrows, and told the class about the similarities between
Romeo and Juliet
and
Laila Majnu
, about Afghan women and the tales they memorize, about Babo and her gift for recitation. About how there were no libraries where I grew up, except the human ones, and how stories were passed to the next generation through memorization. The bell rang, but no one moved. They sat
and listened, and when it was over a boy whose name I can no longer recall, the smartest boy in the class and the one whom I always thought of as my competition, came up to me as I was putting my papers back into my notebook. He was tall, with glasses and long brown hair. “Saima,” he said, “that was one of the most interesting and arresting presentations I’ve ever seen. You did an amazing job.” I didn’t understand his use of “arresting presentation” at the time, but I understood his tone and was very happy to hear it. Later I would realize that that was probably the first time most of my classmates had heard about a culture and people where it was still the norm to pass on cultural history and wisdom verbally and through folklore songs.

IN THOSE FIRST
years, I constantly forgave my uncles. It must have been easier for them when we first arrived, when we must have seemed like children. I had been fifteen—old enough to be married with a couple of kids in Afghanistan—but I was small, quiet, and had an amazing ability to fold into myself physically, to become almost unnoticeable. After a few years of eating healthy American food, we had grown a lot. We were all true teenagers now, with pimples and bad moods. What were they to do? I imagine they were afraid that we’d become too hard to control, and that by being even stricter they would be preventing us from becoming too Americanized and forgetting our life mission.

I might have continued making excuses for them, but then, at another Sunday meeting, the Professor announced that the worst thing imaginable had happened, and that he was shamed beyond repair. He glared at me. His fists were on the table. The others bent their heads reflexively.

“A boy called for you,” he said.

For a split second I thought they had conspired against me by making up something so insane. I thought they wanted to teach the others a lesson and to use me as an example. I honestly didn’t believe anyone had rung—we weren’t even allowed to answer the phone.

“A boy called this house and asked for Saima. Who is he?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“I knew you could not be trusted with all the freedoms we gave you by
bringing you here. You have become exactly what I was afraid you would become.”

“I swear I don’t know any boys,” I pleaded.

“You can no longer be trusted. I don’t see any reasons at all why I shouldn’t send you back to the village. Let them handle you the way you are meant to be handled.” The Professor had a way of saying exactly what would cut the deepest.

Shame and dread rose in me like a poisonous cloud, a familiar feeling. He had to know that I lived in constant terror of being sent back to what I perceived to be the cursed life of an Afghan woman. I had believed that once I came to America, that fear would leave me and I could relax enough to find my destiny in my new home—but it had not been that easy, especially with my uncles constantly threatening to take away my newfound liberties. I thought, I will never regain their trust. I should ask them just to send me back to Afghanistan immediately. I should just get it over with and leave here right now. But then another feeling rose in me, an alien one. I didn’t know any boys who would have called me. But even if I had, why did my uncles insist on making such a harmless thing seem so dishonorable and dirty? Knowing how important virtue is for a Pashtun woman, why did they always attack mine for no reason? Having done nothing wrong, I let myself be furious at my uncles for the first time. The anger was liberating and scary at the same time.

While I sat through yet another Sunday meeting, something amazing and life-altering was happening inside of me. We Pashtuns are famous for our temper and destructive anger. When we feel slighted or insulted, we take revenge, even if it means our own death—if we think it is necessary, we will gladly give our lives in the name of avenging whatever or whoever offended us. My uncles had truly insulted me, and for the first time I saw their offensive mind-set clearly. For a second, I am sure, murder passed through my eyes. But then something miraculous occurred: The American in me rose up to the Pashtun in me and saw the challenge in my uncles’ treatment of me. Instead of being angry at their implications that I was a woman of low morals who could not be trusted with freedoms, I decided that I would make it one of my life’s goals to
prove them wrong—to show them that I was capable of more than they had ever allowed me to envision for my future. The goal has fueled me time and time again. But little did I know then that I was embarking on a journey toward a destiny so far removed from the fate any Pashtun woman is born into.