Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [45]
BOOK II
The American—Amir
In which the author leaves Pakistan and arrives in the United States, where, living in the Bible Belt, he attempts to navigate life in high school while dealing with his parents, who are now fundamentalists
1
By 1991, when I was ten years old, we left Sehra Kush and moved to an agrarian town in Eastern Punjab. It was a place where pushing heroin addicts off porches was considered a form of entertainment, and planting rice and raising cattle were the primary means of livelihood. Pops was able to establish a successful clinic there, and we were even able to purchase a car, one of the few in the area. One day my family received a letter that prompted much jubilation. It was from the U.S. consulate in Lahore. The immigration application that Ammi and Pops had filed for us many years earlier had finally come through. We could become legal residents of the United States. We immediately sold all of our possessions for cash and bought plane tickets that would take us to JFK International Airport. Pops, Ammi, Flim, and I arrived in the States with three thousand dollars; eight suitcases of clothes, dishes, and valuables; and a steel trunk full of brass Buddhas and Santas—which Pops planned to use to start an import-export business.
When we landed there was no one in the five boroughs that we could call. Joining the bustling throngs, we stepped out into the smoggy air of New York City, wondering what to do. Out of desperation Pops approached a small man that he correctly identified as Pakistani, who was standing beside a hotel shuttle curbside. The two men engaged in a game of “Where are you from and who do you know?” In a few minutes Pops had learned that an acquaintance of his from med school in the Dominican Republic was living in Brooklyn—and conveniently his wife was out of town, which meant that his apartment potentially had space to host guests. We gave the old friend a call—an hour-long process that involved finding U.S. coins and mastering a foreign pay phone—and were rewarded: he came to our hotel to pick us up in a blue Chevy, hosted us for a few days, and helped us find an apartment in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood where bearded men in big black hats and women in long skirts stoically walked to the synagogue on Saturdays.
Flim and I attended public school. Before sending us off, Pops made it very clear that we could eat only halal, which meant no pork or meat of any kind that wasn’t prepared in the Islamic way. In addition to many yarmulke-wearing Jewish children at school, there were thugged-out black kids wearing jeans backwards like Kris Kross, and fake-thug Italians with Vanilla Ice haircuts. The school also served numerous Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean children, as well as Lithuanians, Russians, and Ukrainians. Finally, there was also a large contingent of Albanians, with whom I started hanging out because they were Muslim—but whom I abandoned after I learned that they ate pork, which was haram, forbidden.
It wasn’t long before Ammi found a local Bangladeshi woman who held Islamic classes at her apartment every summer. Many other immigrant kids—Arabs, Indians, and Pakistanis—also attended. Girls in hijab and boys with baby beards trudged over to the building, jointly took an elevator to the apartment, jointly walked up the hallway, and then split up in two different rooms because Islam said it was immodest for boys and girls to do things jointly.
Prayers were conducted in the boiler room in the basement of our building, with quite a few other Muslim families in attendance. We even had an imam—an old man who lived down the hall from us and led prayers as if he were in the grandest of mosques. The paint in the basement was peeling, and on cold days the wind howled menacingly through cracked windows. On humid days the entire place smelled of feet. However, as much as I disliked our makeshift masjid, when I went down the elevator, my hands and feet dripping with water from the ablution, if old Jewish and Irish and Italian