Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [82]
“No!” I exclaimed, horrified.
“You’ll do it this summer,” he said firmly. “I don’t want to hear the slightest rebellion from you. The Quran prohibits you from disobeying your parents—and remember, you claim to be very Islamic.”
“How can you do this?” I pleaded. “Please. This is despotism!”
Pops didn’t waver. “What did your Ibn Taymiya say? A thousand days of despotism are better than one day of anarchy? Don’t be an anarchist. Listen to your despotic father. That is Islam, after all.”
That night was torture. I felt stars crashing around my head, and the sliver of the moon sliced my arteries open. I opened a copy of the Quran and cried into it. Bilqis was to have been my wall between the secularity outside and the Islam within. She was supposed to be my protection. I felt vulnerable.
As I lay weeping, there was a soft knock and Ammi came inside. She took my hand and brushed my face. “Don’t worry about marriage. We’ll visit Pakistan for the summer and see if we can find you a nice wife there.” Then she kissed me and left.
When I returned to Manhattan I was terribly upset at having to give up Bilqis, though I did as my father ordered and called her to break things off. A day or two later it occurred to me that if I went to an Islamic country to find a wife, as Ammi had suggested, the girl wouldn’t need to be convinced to wear hijab as Bilqis had to be. In fact, I might even find someone who wore the full niqab.
The possibility of upgrading from Bilqis filled me with excitement. If I had a niqabi wife, my piety quotient would be off the charts—I could even take multiple wives without anyone batting an eye.
Another advantage in going to Pakistan was that I could take some time to investigate my lineage to the first Caliph.
Suddenly the world was conspiring on behalf of my Islam.
8
Pops had to work so it was just me, Ammi, and Flim on the trip. We argued a lot during the planning stage about which airline to take. The clearest sign that a Pakistani immigrant had made it in America was when he returned in a foreign air carrier, but since we hadn’t, we ended up taking Pakistan International Airlines to Karachi.
As I looked around me on the plane, I saw that the greater part of the passengers were working-class—rugged and worn from driving cabs and filling tanks on turnpikes, serving as cooks in desi restaurants named Shalimar. They laughed and joked the whole way because they were going home. For them America was simply a work station. It could just as easily be Dubai, Australia, or England. They were going back with paychecks that were meager in America but in Pakistan ballooned from the exchange rate. They looked forward to giving their families a chance to buy nice things. Maybe an AC for an aged mother. Maybe wedding clothes for a niece.
Others in the plane were like us. The quiet and morose bunch. We were the ones that had gone to the United States in order to make money and make a home—and had found that getting a paycheck in America was far easier than feeling a part of the country. Now, neither fully American nor fully Pakistani, we called ourselves Muslims and hoped that religion was enough to identify us in a world full of nations.
I didn’t like where I was sitting. There were three college-aged girls in front of me. They wore jeans and short T-shirts, and each time they reached for something, I could see a span of waist and bare back. Immodest sluts, I thought. Why couldn’t they be more like the girl sitting to my right? She was a pretty girl wrapped fully in a black chador. I wondered why the brazen types couldn’t see how much more grace the girl in the chador had. I almost nudged Ammi, seated to my left, and pointed at the modest girl as a potential wife.
My proximity to the slutty girls caused piety to bubble up protectively inside me. I went off to join the Islamic mile-high club and prayed in the corridor near the kitchenette.
When I returned to my seat, I pulled my book from