Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [51]
That night, as the study circle became chaotic and splintered, Flim and I were able to sneak downstairs to a broken but functional TV in the garage and catch our sitcoms.
“We should invite Shias more often,” Flim noted.
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One of the ways Ammi kept Flim and me in line was by threatening to send us back to Pakistan. If Flim watched too much TV or I failed to do my homework, Ammi sat us down while she made a fake international call to an obscure relative and loudly discussed what kind of child labor Flim would be best at, or how fat was the Punjabi girl with whom my marriage was being arranged.
Pops’s preferred means of regulation was to keep me busy with the Tablighi Jamaat, the merry band of missionaries from Pakistan who sent sorties to the West to make certain that Muslims in America didn’t give in to hedonism.
I disliked being sent to hang out with them, but I had no choice. What Pops said, I did.
My first American experience with the Jamaat was in the Pacific Northwest. A Tablighi delegation composed of bearded and turbaned Punjabi villagers, most of them middle-aged men who didn’t speak any English, wearing rolled-up pants and Velcro-closed sneakers, came to visit our mosque. It was an ambulatory group: they had walked all the way from Kansas, seeing a considerable part of America along the way. They held the state of Washington in considerable esteem, because “we have heard there is a city here called Walla Walla”—which they thought stood for “Wallah Wallah.”
They spent three nights and three long days at the local mosque. Over my staunch objections, Pops commanded me to keep them company. With a long face I showed up at the mosque the first day. The Tablighis were delighted to meet me.
“Mashallah! Our friend! Where are you from? Do you speak Punjabi? Tell us about America! Come, come. Sit here and talk to us!” Like a celebrity I was led through the mosque’s basement, where they were sitting on their sleeping mats, flipping tasbih beads or reading from the Quran while the designated chai server for the night wandered through ladling a stiff brown brew into their Styrofoam cups. I was passed from youngest to oldest—a toothless elder who put his arm around me and gave me an hour-long presentation on the bismillah verse. My celebrity, it occurred to me after a while, was of criminality. In their eyes I was an immoral, westoxified, and fallen entity who required their spiritual ministration to “be better.” They compared life in the West with an illness and made me feel diseased.
In the morning, after a breakfast of parathas and fried eggs, I was plopped into a rental car with three of the Tablighis and a driver they had hired, and we headed out to make gasht, or mission, in the local community. Since they didn’t know anything about local neighborhoods, nor did they know a single Muslim in the city, they asked me where they should begin their proselytizing.
We ended up at the house of a computer scientist named Dr. Hameed, who used to be a member of the Tablighi Jamaat. Because he observed strict purdah, the inside of his house was split in two—a men’s and women’s section—by a curtain. After we sat down, Dr. Hameed praised the elders of the Tablighi Jamaat for finding him a good wife who practiced Islam absolutely.
There was a feminine cough from other side of the curtain, followed by the slight clinking of a tea tray. Dr. Hameed stuck his head through the perforation, whispered to his wife, and then pulled out the tray. I tried to see the other side through the fluttering curtain, figuring that his wife must be very frightening or very beautiful to be so protected.
We ate biscuits and sipped tea companionably. The silence was broken only occasionally, when one of the delegates lobbed Dr. Hameed a softball question about how computers could be used in the service of Islam. The Tablighis wanted to get out of there; they had nothing to add to the Islam of a man who kept his wife behind a curtain: