Standing Alone (13 page)

MECCA
—It saddens me to realize that Khadijah could never have lived in modern-day Saudi Arabia. The Saudi government doesn't allow women to run businesses in their own names. When I opened a local paper, the
Riyadh Daily
, I read, to my horror, that the trend of Saudi women working as babysitters was so noteworthy it made headlines: “Saudi Women as Babysitters Getting Common.”

The article said Saudi women wanted to make money caring for children inside their homes. A teacher protested the trend: “How can a mother allow her daughter to work with people she does not know and how can the father or husband allow this?” Her rhetorical question had its answer in history. They can. Khadijah would never have met the man she nurtured into a prophet if she hadn't worked with people she
did not know.

Like the ban on women business owners and the discouragement of working women, so many modern Islamic traditions that are imposed upon women contradict the practices that existed in the seventh century when Islam first emerged.

My mother was born into a traditional Muslim family where women didn't work for others. They worked only in the home for their husbands, children, and families. Her family observed a strict gender segregation, or purdah. Literally “curtain,” purdah effectively separates men and women into “domestic harems.” In my mother's family this strict gender segregation stayed in place even at times of death. When my mother was about two years old, her father, Ali Ansari, fell suddenly ill. Her mother, Zohra Ansari, kept leaving the room when men visited her ailing husband. Even at that critical time, she didn't dare cross the hudud, the boundaries. As a result, my maternal grandmother was in another room when her husband took his last breath. Years later she told a relative that she lived with the regret of not having been with her husband when he died. As my mother grew up she saw women scamper into a back room whenever men unrelated to them arrived for a visit. They rarely debated politics, business, or religion with men to whom they weren't related, and hardly even when they were. My mother inherited a deep sense of hudud. From her teen
years, she covered herself with the traditional black burka that covers the face and body in a gown.

But my mother was always a rebel. As a young woman, she irked an aunt when a servant revealed that my mother and a cousin had removed their burka at their women's college, Nirmala Niketan. (They did it to avoid social embarrassment among their less traditional classmates.) She wasn't allowed to complete college and was soon married off instead to my father in an arranged marriage. When she disembarked onto the train platform in the city of Hyderabad, she got a strong signal about the turn her life had taken. Her new mother-in-law, a more liberal Muslim woman than her own mother, took off her burka. Stunned, my mother never wore the burka again except when she visited her family.

Transformed dramatically in the first days of marriage, my mother looked as fragile as a china doll in her newlywed photos, but she had a strong will that defined the rest of her marriage. She clashed quickly and regularly with the traditional expectations of my father's mother. And yet my mother was dependent on her mother-in-law and the rest of my father's family for her well-being. When my father left for his first jaunt to America, she vowed she would never put herself in such a position of dependency ever again. For my mother, America held out the same promise it had for countless other immigrants: intellectual freedom, economic independence, and personal liberation. At the huge emotional cost of leaving her children behind until they could afford to reunite us, she left to join my father in America with these dreams tucked secretly into her belongings.

If the traditions of Saudi society had applied to my mother in America in the 1960s, it probably would have been many more years before I was reunited with my parents in America. To raise money for airplane tickets for my brother and me, my mother ran a babysitting service out of their house in Piscataway, New Jersey, caring for children named Eda, Laura, and Chris. Laura called my mother “her mother in the red house.” Another girl sent my mother into a panic one day when she put Vicks on her face. Fathers sometimes dropped their children off when my father wasn't home; my father was neither threatened nor offended by that. My mother retained her sense of modesty, but even such interactions were a huge departure from her upbringing in India.

After my brother and I arrived, my mother continued to babysit to make money. Business was in her blood. An older brother, Anwar Ansari, had started a wholesale business in India manufacturing and exporting clothes, like the embroidered kurta (or tunic) popular with hippies in those days. Though, as far as she knew, few woman in her family had ever worked outside
the home, my mother, unfettered in America, sold these shirts. With the family and boxes of kurta piled into our green Rambler station wagon, my parents carted folding tables to the Rutgers student union in New Brunswick and a flea market called Great Eastern. My brother and I enjoyed the thrill of our weekend outings. My mother mingled equally and easily with women and men, and my religiously devout Muslim father had no conflicts of faith over my mother's work. After a few years my mother helped her brother open a showroom, India Village Industries, on Broadway in New York City. There she worked all day with hard-bitten managers from India, negotiating with retailers and inspecting supplies.

When we moved to West Virginia in 1975, she got a job as a lab assistant in the home economics lab of West Virginia University, where I would visit her after school. A surly boss drove my mother from that job, however, and she returned to the home, where she guided me as always in my academic and religious life while she completed her BS degree at West Virginia University.

In the summer of 1981, with my father's encouragement, my mother stepped into a new role. First, she waved good-bye to me as I sat in a jet on the tarmac in Pittsburgh, about to fly to Oklahoma for a monthlong science camp sponsored by the National Science Foundation. We were so close: she wept as she saw me off, and inside the plane, at sixteen years old, I wept as I left my mother for only the second time since we'd been reunited in America. (The first time I had visited relatives.) When I returned, my mother was caught up in a flurry of activity: she was opening a boutique on busy Walnut Street in downtown Morgantown, where she would sell more of the kinds of clothes made in India that she had sold in New Jersey.

My father supported her fully. He worked beside her late into the night designing a sign for the storefront and advertisements he hung all around town. I had pushed my mother to spend so many weekends at the flea market that she named her boutique Ain's International after me, using the last syllable of my middle name, Quratulain, which means “coolness of the eye” (
ain
means “eye”). Starting with a deep-throated vowel sound, it proved to be a tricky name for Americans, but my mother was fine hearing my name pronounced like the English “Anne.” She reminded me that her brother used to call me Annie. Late that summer, just as university students returned to campus for the fall semester, my mother opened the doors on a beautiful store with rugged wood paneling and racks of beautiful flowing cotton and silk skirts from India. After school I'd spend the late afternoon there.

I felt proud of my mother as she asserted herself as an independent businesswoman. Watching her realize her dream in the public world encouraged me to strive to fulfill my own dreams. That year I was editor of my high school newspaper,
The Red and Blue Journal
, and I often laid out pages in the back of my mother's boutique. She never complained about the overpowering scent of rubber cement glue that wafted into the store. Over the years, from Bombay to Broadway, I watched my mother haggle with wholesalers with charm, a stiff spine, and, perhaps most important of all, her feet ready to walk out the door if they didn't compromise. This was bold work for her to do coming from a family where women weren't so openly engaged with men.

In her boutique my mother was like a second mother to many West Virginia University students away from home, and she was a friend to many of the Morgantown locals, some of them ex-hippies who believed in tolerance, peace, and kindness. What I appreciated about my mother was that during slow moments she would carefully read books she had pulled from my bookcases, such as the writings of immigrant women from India like Bharati Mukherjee and feminist writers from the Muslim world such as Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi. She had an open, literary mind. One day, as a young adult, I turned to my mother and said, “You are like a modern-day Khadijah.” She dismissed the idea immediately, returning to the task at hand: making that night's dinner.

On the hajj I came to fully realize that my mother is a wise and courageous woman in many ways. She is a woman who will hunch her back rather than sit up straight. I am a daughter who will scold her to straighten her back. I realized, however, that we can learn from the people who show courage without demanding perfection from them. We often have a guide when we embark on a journey, and she was mine. We need to seek out courageous people to be our guides, and we need to be courageous ourselves to fully learn from them. For me, my mother was a simple but brave guide, especially at moments such as her Kentucky Fried Chicken adventure.

On our second night in Mecca, my nephew, Samir, was hungry. “Let's go to Kentucky Fried Chicken,” he said to my mother in the hotel room. Back at home my mother wouldn't have hesitated, but here she calculated the risks carefully. My father, her authorized male chaperone, wasn't around. Since he was under the age of puberty, Samir wouldn't qualify for the role. My mother would be violating the Saudi law that requires an authorized male chaperone for all women venturing out in public.

I chafed at the bridle that constrained women's free movement in this Muslim country. It made me angry, and the contradictions in how this law was enforced baffled me. All around us on the streets of Mecca, directly outside the Ka'bah, dark-skinned women peddlers from Nigeria sat with babies swaddled to their backs and goods spread on blankets in front of them. With no men around as chaperones, they were unescorted, independent women earning a living. Nobody disturbed them. But other women had to worry. Our first night in Mecca I had gone to a pharmacy down the street from the Sheraton with my father. As he dawdled, I felt it was patronizing and paternalistic that I had to risk arrest if I went to the next store without him. I went anyway, but made sure my father joined me quickly.

In the Mecca Sheraton, my mother wasn't about to let her grandson stay hungry. She gathered up her resources and pulled her hijab over her head. “Okay, let's go,” she said.

As they crossed the street in their stealthy KFC run, Samir looked both ways for any religious police ready to swoop down on them. He urged my mother to move more quickly. “Hurry, Dadi! You might get arrested!” In front of the counter at KFC, Samir felt scared. “Are people going to say, ‘You can't come here'?”

They ordered carryout.

No matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom. . . . An absurd fictionality ruled our lives.

MECCA
—It was becoming clear to me that many Saudi women lived a different private life away from detection.

The rear of the Sheraton opened into a multistory shopping mall complex with an escalator running through it. It looked like any shopping mall in the West, but there was a strange mix of messages in this Saudi shopping mall. “Remember Elvis,” screamed a T-shirt, snug on a busty female mannequin. The silver lettering of the words encircled a broken heart. A woman from Indonesia drifted by with a pink gift wrapping bow on her head, to help her group spot her from a distance. She had a hand
towel over the bridge of her nose, covering the lower half of her face, with only her eyes peering out. In one shop pairs of high-heeled shoes labeled “Made in Italy” filled a shelf. A woman in a black burka wandered by a store window filled with sequined and denim purses.

We rode the escalator upstairs to a store with racks of blue jeans. I went through the racks and found a pastel green sleeveless nightie with a netting top. “Always New Fushon in Best Quality,” the tag read with a unique spelling for “fashion.” It was floor-length with a trim of green fur and a slit down the front. Safiyyah went through the racks too, eyeing the lingerie. She pushed away a red-and-black, hip-length nightie with a feather fringe. She stopped at a sheer peach gown with a matching sheer robe. “I think this might be an option for you,” she deadpanned.

Like her, I was shocked at what we were seeing sold on the open market. I stopped in my tracks in front of a tight, sky blue shirt with a plunging neckline. The only thing halal (based on Saudi law) about it was its long sleeves. Many of the words emblazoned on its front held double meaning not only for me but also for this strict Muslim society in which I had found myself.

Exhausted, we took refuge on the yellow-and-blue-striped sofas that lined the seventh-floor lounge of the Mecca Sheraton. Canadian pop star Avril Lavigne smiled out at us from a full-page feature on the MTV Asia Awards in the
Riyadh Daily
. “Look! Short sleeves,” I told Safiyyah, gesturing to the singer's bare arms. The image was shocking to me because we didn't dare bare our arms in public in Saudi Arabia. It was illegal. I thought even the newspapers would have to comply with the rule, but clearly the mass media here wasn't held to the same standards that ruled the lives of ordinary people. The newspaper's TV guide listed
The Oprah Winfrey Show
, with all of its mini-documentaries on American societal drama, on Star World. In a country where homosexuality was illegal and punishable by death,
Will and Grace
, the sitcom about a gay man and his female roommate, could be seen on the Comedy Channel. Our first night
in Mecca, my mother and Safiyyah spent the night watching a Saudi soap opera whose drama rivaled that of any American soap opera.

Saudi Arabian society seems to be defined by these contradictions. For women particularly, but not exclusively, the restrictions and repression breed not always compliance but rather conflict and dissonance. I know this because I lived this way myself for a decade, from my late teens into my late twenties. I lived a double life, secretly satisfying my curiosities about men while lying to my parents because I knew that I was crossing boundaries that weren't supposed to be crossed. I couldn't live with the lies, deceit, and hypocrisy after my marriage fell apart, when I realized that we aren't meant to suffer so deeply just to deny our true selves and realize societal, parental, and external expectations for ourselves. I decided then that I wasn't going to live with contradictions in my own life.

In any society governed by oppression and rules that don't make sense, there will be rebellion, even if it's expressed privately. To express such rebellion publicly is to me the sign of a mature individual and a mature society. From my experience, public disclosure allows for healthier expression and resolution.