Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [76]
Locked in my room, I stood beside the window and looked out at the rowdy couples on the street flirting on a Friday night. With a mixture of fear and disgust, I watched people going in and out of a pub across the way—some staggering out drunk. There was a group of scantily clad women going into a Thai restaurant, followed by a young man with his hand on the small of a girl’s back. All of these immodest sights and sounds seemed to be purposefully joined in a conspiracy against my faith. I could see what I had always suspected: behind everyday life in America lay temptation, lay the demonic beckoning of freedom; it curled out of the sewers, splashed down from the skies, and infused itself into each human body. I was witnessing the slow but steady imperialism of secular life. It was insidious because it wrapped itself in sex. I was being chased by women now the way Moosa Farid had been chased by homosexuals when he first got to campus. It was horrible.
I sat on my bed and cursed Kara. She had been irresponsible, coming into the meeting like that. Stupid non-Muslim girl! She didn’t understand what was at stake. Nothing less than the future of Islam! She didn’t understand what a meticulously crafted and fragile shadow this Muslim man truly was. She didn’t understand that Islam was in a war, not just for its own integrity, but on behalf of all monotheism. Why did she make me want her? It must be because she didn’t respect me, the way all of Western culture didn’t respect Muslims.
The more I thought, the drowsier I became. Willing to drown my depression in sleep, I closed my eyes. Instead of darkness, I saw Kara—and I wanted her. I could picture her in my bed. I could imagine myself in bed with her. Clutching my sheets, I moaned into my pillow. I wanted to pick up the phone and tell her that I was coming over.
Suddenly tears formed in my eyes—tears of guilt and penance. Soon I was weeping, and I couldn’t stop myself. I did what I had only read about: I cried myself to sleep.
When I woke up the next morning, everything was inexplicably clear: Abu Bakr Ramaq needed a pious Muslim wife. Otherwise, he would commit fornication and no longer be worthy of serving the religion.
6
Her name was Bilqis. I met her—where else?—on AOL, in an Islam chat during a theological spat between various sects. She was bored by the vitriol and wanted to talk to someone who knew Islam at a higher level. Enter yours truly. I made a few jokes. Invoked a few famous scholars. Told her about the spiritual war between Islam and secularism. We started e-mailing. She sent me a picture. I sent her mine. I decided that she was good-looking enough to be a good wife for me.
Bilqis hadn’t been my first choice, though, because she didn’t wear hijab. In the biographical sketch that I had once painted in Moosa Farid’s company, my dream wife had to wear hijab. That’s why, before Bilqis, I had first courted a hijabi named Selena. Unfortunately, things hadn’t worked out with her. We had spent a lovely day together, sharing conversation and those ubiquitous Starbucks drinks—which she let me pay for—and then she had dropped me at my dorm when her boyfriend showed up. I had been left staring at her from my window with Moosa Farid reminding me, “You got played by a ho-jabi.”
Actually, Bilqis wasn’t my second choice either, because she lived far away, and I knew this would make it difficult to see her. In fact, after Selena but before Bilqis, I had courted a lovely, dark-haired Pakistani (who was contemplating putting on the hijab) due solely to her proximity. The problem with her was that I discovered she wrote poetry, and I—being an occasional poet myself—knew that poets were mentally unstable. I didn’t want a crazy person to become the eventual mother of my children. So she had been vetoed.
Thus