The Good, the Bad and the Anxiety

When I came to a small university town in the US over 7 years ago, I was unprepared for much of what I saw and experienced. The boundless ignorance of most US Americans, "Oh, you are from Pakistan isn't that like a state in India?" or "Isn't I-ran next to Nicaragua?" or " She is Hungarian ... so, she is from Hungaria?" The frighteningly clean, sterile and empty buses. The ghost towns with a spattering of people and cars on the streets and oh-my-god, no children! The half a chicken-with-skin served to me at the college cafeteria that I could never-ever finish even a quarter of. The preposterous amount of garbage everywhere. Free, unending reams of computer paper and toilet paper that no one kept count of...

One of the most bizarre experiences, however, was how other Pakistanis, especially older adults, treated me - a "single Pakistani girl" in Umreeka. One auntie who worked in my University, always ended our encounters, not with a casual "b'bye or a well-meant "khudha-hafiz" but with explicit references to "stay good". The first few times auntie bade farewell this way; I was not particularly surprised. When it became a ritual, however, that I came to expect even when I ran into her inside a public bathroom, I became suspicious. What could I be doing - unconsciously - that provoked such commands? Stealing liquid soap from the restroom? Leching at the campus men? Cackling during namaaz-e-jummah?

Auntie's peculiar commandment became clearer to me, however, when I realized that most Pakistani adults, complete strangers or cordial acquaintances, quickly became my self-appointed moral guardians when they discovered I lived alone: a single Paksitani girl in Umreeka, without the protection and guidance of a strong mard and minus the watchful eye of an appropriately old and boring matron.

Had I been the obviously tart-ish female - sporting a leather mini-skirt and bleached hair, cigarette dangling from obscenely lipsticked-lips, who hopped form one orgy to the next - I would have been quickly written off with devout and frightened mutterings of "tobah, tobah". Or if I had been the obviously good type of female - fully covered from head to toe, never making eye-contact (let alone conversation) with men and attending all religious functions (how else but religiously?), I would have been taken under righteous wings and protected from the evil western culture. But, I was - inconveniently - on the borderline: avid interest in Pakistan but unabashed feminist; not boy-friended, and yet not appearing to wilt with shame in the company of men.

This borderline behavior caused a great deal of anxiety to my university aunties and uncles. They could not reconcile what they thought were contradictory behavior patterns and attitudes. I saw their eyes assessing me; trying to figure out if I was actually evil and debauched under this almost good demeanor; waiting for me to do something, say something that would have me pegged as a bad girl. Till such time, they thought, there was hope that I could be fully converted. So they kept encouraging me, in not very subtle ways, to stay good. Unfortunately, the combination of my decreasing patience, several feminist courses and college idealism/rebellion led to an inevitable drifting apart. Particularly, as the stay-good auntie decided to run off with another man after twenty odd years of being married to the (subsequently) bewildered uncle. The drifting apart notwithstanding, auntie's notorious romance made it clear that her own staying good had been the real source of her anxiety, which she had been projecting on me.

Once I moved out of college, got respectably married and moved to a city with a bigger South Asian population, the anxiety of my acquaintances turned to more mundane issues: was my husband henpecked or a real mard? Was he getting portly from home cooked food? When were we going the full monty and producing children to add to the diaper heap of the world? The complete strangers (of which there were many more), however, ignorant that I do have a male guardian to enforce a path of unwavering goodness, still feel compelled to intervene. Travelling with white male friends, without my husband, I have been interrogated by gas-station attendants, secret-police-style: "Where are you from? Who are these men?" as if caught committing some heinous crime. (I shudder to think what Pakistani women in long-term relationships with white men have to endure).

One summer day I was buying fruit from a middle-aged Pakistani man. Soon he found out I was Pakistani - they always ask and I usually tell. We found that we had both lived in the same city at some point in our lives. He asked me my name, marital status, residence and the location of my family. Finally, when we had depleted the ready stock of chitchat and I detected some discomfort on his part, I asked him the price of mangoes. In response, he pleaded, "Beti, kameez pehna karo." I almost died. Had I forgotten to put on my T-shirt as planned in the morning and gone to work in my underwear? (Was I at least color coordinated?) Why had my colleagues not commented? Was this the right time to dash headlong into oncoming traffic? As these questions whizzed in my mind, I happened to glance at my torso. Phew! It was completely covered. I was wearing a regular summer T-shirt. Of course, it was not quite the chogha or shuttlecock burqa that this maniac would have preferred, but it covered my body adequately. Relief turned to rage. What the hell did this guy mean? Did he want to dictate to me, just because we were from the same country, shared a language and because I was polite to him, the length and width of my clothes?

So, what is my point? Well, I have two that are sort of related. First of all, why do we (and this is certainly not limited to Pakistanis) have such a problem with complexity and ambivalence? Why do people have to be divided neatly into a handful of boxes? Why can't a woman wear western clothes without being considered "modern" and western (with all the baggage that comes with those terms, negative or positive)? Why can't men and women talk comfortably with each other without righteous onlookers assuming that daal mein kuch kaala hai? Why can't I be a good Muslim unless I simper modestly under a hijaab? Can't we make choices about how to lead our lives without someone out there thinking that we are breaking a religious or cultural law? Who decides what these laws are anyway? What does it mean to be a "Muslim"? A Pakistani (Woman)?

My second point is about the treatment of women in the so-called public sphere. Generally, women are considered and treated like property. In private they are private property. (So, we musn't interfere if a man beats up his wife.) And, not surprisingly, women in public - without a clear identification tag linking them to a man - are public property. As a fellow student from Mardan had the good grace to inform me, "agar koi aurat bighair chadar kay sarak par niklaygi toe usko toe mard cheraingay. woh toe yehi chaahti hai." So all those pinching, jostling men who walk up and down the alleys of jumma bazaar and bhori bazaar seem to think. In fact, they are equal opportunity harassers, paying no heed to the subtleties pointed out by our pal from Mardan. Chadar or no chadar, little girl or bari amma, they grab what they can - literally.

The notion of women in public being public property does not change when we come to the US. (The inveterate desi harassers still harass other desi women much more than women from any other racial group). There is an interesting new twist to the dynamics in a foreign country, however. Those that won't or can't harass take it upon themselves to chide and preach. Their very manhood is threatened when they see a Pakistani woman behaving, in their opinion, inappropriately. The honor of preserving the traditions that charade as religion and culture - the very traditions that oppress and degrade us - which has been bestowed upon us is policed with greater ferocity. And, when we seem to be stepping out of line, anyone from a fellow bus rider to a university professor does not agonize over telling us so. Are we national property? A national public monument to be preserved and displayed in just the right way? Is any deviation from the designated path is an egregious crime that forces gas station attendants to act Mossad agents?

I wonder if this anxiety, like auntie's, is about people's own sense of integrity and "goodness."