Imported Mothers

I occasionally see articles about Gulf Arab sex tourism in India. Wealthy Sunni GCC nationals abuse and mock religion by entering into contractual Islamic marriages with impoverished young Indian women and girls with the intention of divorcing them after a few weeks of sexually exploiting and abusing them. It is a disgusting practice that is not at all uncommon, but is not discussed very much in the Gulf. It should be widely condemned. Just like wealthy Western men who go to places like Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia, Latin American countries, and elsewhere for sex tourism, wealthy Gulf Arab men engage in this form of exploitation, and some choose to give this grotesque practice an Islamic twist by deeming it “halal” or permissible according to religious mores with a dubious marriage contract. Though quite frankly, plenty don’t care and don’t bother and go on sex tours in East Africa, Thailand, and other nearby countries just to visit prostitutes in the same way that Western men do.

It is usually this issue of supposedly religiously condoned sex tourism that I read about. But I actually wanted to hash out another issue.

I was thinking about the marriages of GCC national men (of various ethnic backgrounds, not only Arab) and Indian women (from various Indian regions, but most often Hyderabadi Muslim background). I had students and friends who were the children of these marriages. I am not sure how very common this phenomenon is today (gonna be 2013 TOMORROW), but gauging from the number of young women I met who had Indian mothers, at some point (80s and 90s) this was extremely common, and certainly it still happens contemporarily.

I knew these girls well, and on occasion even met their mothers. Let me explain a bit about the social context of these marriages.

There are Gulf Arab men who wish to marry but who cannot economically afford to gain the acceptance of a proposal from a Gulf Arab family. Some of the governments in these countries actually gives a substantial financial marriage gift to the groom when two Gulf Arabs marry. The monetary gift is supposed to help the couple start out, and is also an incentive to get Gulf men to marry Gulf women, since men who marry foreigners do not get the money. As far as I know, this gift is only available for first marriages. But the marriage stipend isn’t enough for some families to consent to a union between their daughter and someone else. Good family/tribal status, a good education, a decent job, social privilege, and money to provide housing to a bride, and a nice car are often major considerations. Many men just don’t have these things. They aren’t rich by Gulf standards, but they are wealthy by the standards of underprivileged families in India, so these men seek brides from there. A second reason is this: Suppose a Gulf Arab man wants to engage in polygyny. It is hard to find a modern, educated, never married before (virgin) Gulf Arab woman to agree to this. So he goes to India to find someone who he believes will be more docile and whose family will be accepting of the situation. I’d say most of these GCC-national + Indian bride marriages involve polygyny. The docility issue is tied to the third reason. Gulf Arab women have not yet gained full social equality with their male counterparts, but they are educated and modern minded. They are much more empowered than their grandmothers. Many Gulf men find this threatening. They seek an Indian bride who is supposedly more submissive. If he mistreated a Gulf Arab woman, her family would give him problems and encourage her to divorce him. An Indian woman will be completely alone with no support system and nowhere to turn, so she will be completely dependent on her husband. (Reminds me of white American men who seek Filipina or other Asian brides because they say white women have lost their femininity and they want a supposedly submissive and petite Asian woman to give them back massages and treat them like kings. Barf.)

Anyway, you have these various factors at play. I had a friend once who was of Ajami origin and a UAE national. The Ajami, known locally as the Ayaimi, are Sunnis from the South of Iran, and this community has significant numbers in Dubai. They speak a dialect of Farsi (called Ayaimi) and many claim to have mixed Arab and Persian heritage. In the UAE, they are not considered to be Arabs, though, but a type of Iranians. My friend was the daughter of his father’s first wife, who was also an Ayaimi woman. Her father also married a Hyderabadi woman. My friend joked that her dad loved Hyderabadi biryani so much that he just had to have a Hyderabadi wife. He then married a Persian (Farsi speaking, and not a speaker of the Ayaimi dialect) who was younger than my friend. Her family was not very wealthy, and I wondered how her dad could support all these wives and the children that came from these marriages. This all sounds very sensational. I want to make it clear that most UAE nationals I knew were NOT in polygynous marriages nor were they children of such families. Polygyny is the exception and not the rule there. But unlike in other Muslim countries where polygyny is considered permissible, but socially frowned upon, and for the most part rare, in the UAE (and other GCC states) polygyny among locals is pretty much completely socially condoned without question. It is a sign of wealth and virility for men, and considered a Sunnah that is desirable to practice. Anyway, it is complex, but since I told you this sensational (yet completely true) anecdote about my friend’s family situation, I just felt I should give a bit more background on what perceptions of polygny are like in the UAE and generally in the Gulf because the stereotype outside of the Gulf is that every man has four wives when this is far from true, and most have only one. But yep, so this man, my friend’s father…he claims to have married a Hyderabadi woman for the biryani. Um, yeah.

So, these marriages take place. They are real marriages. There is no intention to divorce. The wives are kept as normal wives would be. Except for one thing. You see, in Gulf social hierarchies, Indian people are considered to be low. They are not all thought of as laborers—I don’t just mean in that way. I mean that Gulf Arabs consider them to be inherently inferior due to their Indianness. According to locals, Indians are dark skinned and unattractive. They are poor. They have bad manners. There are a lot of stereotypes about them. It is complex, though. Many Gulf Arabs watch Hindi movies and love Bollywood stars. I had many students with crushes on Bollywood heroes, whose faces they used as screen savers on their laptops. They enjoy Indian food and speak pidgin Hindi…some can even speak Hindi fairly well. But the prejudice is there. (It’s hard to explain…maybe it’s like how in the US gringos love Mexican restaurants but often have terrible terrible stereotypes about Mexican people, not really an exact parallel, but just to try to explain the layers of racism.) So what happens when a Gulf man marries an Indian woman and brings her into his extended family structure? She is there alone. She has no power or support in that family. She is from a stigmatized ethnic group. Although there are many, many well-educated and professional Indian people in the Gulf and especially in Dubai, she is not one of them. She will no doubt be from a very poor Indian family and may not have much of an education—Indians of a “good family” do not send their daughters off to the Gulf to get married. These are very poor families who will take advantage of the dowry (mehr) given by the Arab man, the fact that no dowry (jahez) will be required by him as may have been from an Indian groom, and by the fact that their daughter will be “well settled” in a Gulf home rather than remain in their poor family in India. The dynamics of this type of marriage are very unfair from the start, and involve exploitation and economic coercion.

I knew some half Indian girls who were very open about being mixed. They were into Indian culture. When I say Indian culture, I mean that same sort of essentialized Indian culture that many of us India-Pakistan-Bangladesh affiliated people know in the US; Bollywood and Hindi oriented—this isn’t the vastness of cultures within India, but these are this is the essentialized face of Indianness in diasporic contexts. The girls don’t know much about Hyderabad, per se. Some travelled to India often and knew their Indian grandparents, but some did not. Their grandparents sometimes lived in very poor conditions in a completely different world than the relatively privileged worlds they inhabited in the comparatively well developed UAE. But they like to wear bangles and sometimes special 22k Indian gold earrings or necklaces. They show off that they know Hindi. They don’t feel shy about being part Indian. Once I had the students give presentations on a person who they considered to be their hero. A half-Indian student gave the presentation on her maternal grandfather who lived in Hyderabad. She showed the class many pictures of him and her mother’s Indian family and the family’s home there.

Then there were other girls who you could tell were uncomfortable by their mixed identities. And it was an insult for someone to say “You have an Indian mother.” So no wonder they felt this way. I also knew a girl in Oman whose father was of Zanzibari Omani origin and who told everyone that her mom was an Omani Arab, but everyone told me behind her back that her mother was an Indian. She hid the fact because she was ashamed of it and the judgement it brought. I was totally shocked that anyone would lie about the ethnicity of their mother, but once I understood how things worked there a little better, I came to see the complexity she faced when it came to her identity.

When it comes to marriage, it is hard for multiracial half-Indian Gulf nationals. The prejudices come into play. Pure Arab families want to marry those with supposed racial purity and with good and documented tribal lineages. (I have very high suspicions that given the intertwined histories of the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, East Africa, and Coastal West India that Gulf nationals are actually a lot more multiracial than they think they are!) Cousins are preferred. Mixed multiracial people are undesirable, even if they are cousins. I knew half-Indians who married other half-Indians. I also knew a lot of half Indians who somehow ended up marrying into Al Baloosh families. You see, the Baloosh are a non-Arab ethnic group who have roots in Pakistani and Iranian Balochistan. Within Balochistan and within Pakistan, Baloch are culturally more on the Iranian-tribesman side and not desi, culturally speaking. In the Gulf, Balooshis are looked at as Indian-ish. Some like to play up the Iranian-ness, since that is more prestigious than Indianness. But when I would press for a person’s family’s place of origin, it was more often in Pakistani Balochistan and not Iran, which within the Gulf is seen as making them more Indian/desi. Some Balooshis embrace this Indian thing as well, and are very into Indian culture and speak Hindi and so on. It’s funny how that works for diasporic communities….so strange because in the sub-continent, a Baloch tribesman in Pakistan and a random Indian person would be looked at as two extremely different identities, but in the Gulf, they are lumped together as desi and Indian. Yes, even if from Pakistan—the average Gulf national people don’t know much about Pakistan and partition or Muslim majority regions in the subcontinent or two nation theory or any such thing, and some of them see Pakistanis as sort of another type of Indian.  Another twist on this is that there are a large number of Afro-Baloch in the UAE and Oman. They are descendants of mercenaries, traders, and slaves of African or partial African descent in Pakistan and Iran, especially in the Makran region. They are among the main black ethnic groups in the Gulf. They are lower on the social ladder, especially when it comes to intermarriage. So it is these groups who marry more easily with people who are part Arab and part Indian. Not to mention that for whatever reason, a lot of Balooshi men also go to Hyderabad for brides, it is not just Arabs who do it. So I often met people who were half Hyderabadi Indian and half Baloch/Balooshi. (Sorry for the confusing nomenclature, but Baloch people are called Balooshis in the Gulf.)

I should also say that I knew of Indian-Arab matches that were love marriages, not just this situation of Gulf men going to poor families in India for brides. I knew a half Keralite half Gulf Arab girl whose parents had met while working together, and a half-Sindhi (Pakistani Muslim) half Gulf Arab girl whose parents had met because they grew up in the same neighborhood in Dubai. This girl exuded Sindhi pride and showed off that she could speak Urdu and Sindhi very well. I also knew Gulf national women who had married Indian or Pakistani men. So it’s not all tales of exploitation. But yep. The exploitation and economic coercion factor is there whenever one analyzes marriages where a GCC national has flown to India for a bride.

Anyway, I often found myself thinking about the social dynamics of these marriages and the children produced from such unions. I was hesitant to talk about such issues directly, and gauged a lot simply from observation. It was something I would have liked to ask about, but wouldn’t that be silly, patronizing, and possibly insulting if I asked someone to explain their identity to me in this context. These issues are unspoken. These half-Indian girls and women I knew were just regular people in my life, and I didn’t want to put them on the spot. In the social settings of the GGC, these girls are thought of as half-Indian, and they are part of Gulf society. They aren’t really part of Indian society within India, where I guess they would be viewed as “half Arab.” So I haven’t given much thought to it from that angle, per se, but I wonder how they are looked upon when they visit India or when they interact with the very large sections of diverse but often socially compartmentalized Indian communities in the Gulf. I knew women who had entered into this type of marriage. I knew their children. I wonder how they would feel if they read what I wrote here and of my assessment of their familial situations. Their mothers did not appear to be pitiable and downtrodden people. They just lived their lives. We didn’t speak of prejudices or of the social issues. But I was keenly aware of the dynamics of their situations, as they must have also been.

 

Sushi Living

For the past few months I have been attending a monthly women’s halaqah that is mostly attended by Shias, and the organizers are Shia. It is an inter-sect group, though, and the presenters are both Sunni and Shia. I also went last week to attend an event affiliated with the same group in which we heard a recitation of Dua Kumail followed by a short discussion on some ayaat from a particular Surah from the Quran. There is another meeting this Thursday and then the following Thursday during Ramadan, and Inshallah I plan to attend those, too.  We pray in a Shia jamaat at these events.

Throughout my time various Muslim American communities, I have always had a couple of Shia friends who participated in our local Sunni mosques and Muslim groups, perhaps due to lack of Shia oriented options. I remember having Shia friends complain to me about Obnoxious Aunties at the mosque who came up to them and told them Shi’ism was the wrong path and that they should convert to Sunni Islam. I actually had some similar experiences when I lived in Oman, which is an Ibaadhi majority country. Occasionally an Ibaadhi person would just say, “Why don’t you convert to Ibaadhism? It is better.” Though I was a sectarian minority in Oman, and though there has been political and even physical fighting between various sects in Oman, I never felt threatened or offended by such suggestions. Although it didn’t occur to me at the time, perhaps this was because deep down I knew that Sunnism is the global majority sect, and outside of this tiny Omani bubble I would suffer no personal judgement or persecution for being a Sunni. I can’t say that the same thing is the case for Shia friends who have been told to convert to Sunnism by Obnoxious Aunties. Although there is a history of warring between Ibaadhis and members of other sects, it is regionally limited and not something as widely known as strife between Sunni and Shia. Although I see the devastation of Sunni Shia tensions playing out in places like Pakistan, Afganistan, and Iraq, I also look at the long history of coexistence and even syncretic  lifestyles among Sunni and Shia. My mother in law told me that in her childhood in Lucknow, Sunnis regularly observed Muharram’s public sobriety, and that on special occasions, it was important to pay respects to the Shia Imambara no matter what one’s sect was. This is really the way we should be living, I suppose.

I don’t mean to sound self-important, but I am really proud to be part of this inter-sect group. I like the idea of Sunnis and Shias learning and worshiping together. These are bridges that should be frequently crossed. During these halaqas, we get to hear from a larger variety of sources of knowledge and traditions, which is enriching.

I really know very little about Shi’ism, though. I’d like to learn more. At a friend’s suggestion, I am planning to watch the Iranian serial the Mukhtar-Nama. I may watch it dubbed Urdu. I have been watching really silly and trivial stuff in Urdu for the past few months (Humsafar, Maat, Durr-e Shahvar, etc) when I could be watching something that adds to my knowledge and perspective instead of just titillating me with saas-bahu dramaybaazi and romantic tension.

This particular Shia group that I have fallen in with is progressive oriented and much more gender egalitarian than some of my other study options around here. I have no idea if this is common for Shias. (Common for Twelvers, that is. I know Ismailis are very egalitarian in their jamaatkhanas.) Actually, I am sure it is not that common. But this group is good about such things, at least. For example, when we met as a mixed gender group for the du’a recitation, both men and women read aloud and recited and participated very actively in the discussion. The woman who read the dua in English used gender-egalitarian language when she spoke of the Worshiper, rather than just saying “He…” and so on. That is a nice and refreshing change from some other types of mixed gender halaqas I have attended where women sat in the back and had to ask questions by writing them down on slips of paper.

So, that is what I have been up to lately in terms of my spiritual life.

 

Thareed: A Blessed Dish

So, I put my self into a situation where I have to give a halaqa on something. It can be very short, maybe 2-5 minutes. I chose the topic of food. I like food and I enjoy learning about it and talking about it, too. Oh, and eating it. I wanted to focus on a blessed food. Everyone knows about honey and nigella seeds (kalonji/habat barakah/siyaah daanah—for some reason there is always a lot of confusion among people about what these little things are in English versus whatever language). But a couple years ago I solved a food mystery that I had in my mind since my early days as a Muslim. I discovered what thareed was. And I actually cooked thareed. So, what is thareed? Let me reflect on the dish here so that I can lay out my thoughts on it in preparation for the halaqa.

Salmaan (R) said that the Messenger of Allah (S) said: Blessings are found in three things, the Group (Al-Jama’ah), Ath-thareed (a type of food) and As-Sahoor (the Pre-dawn meal).” [At-Tabaraanee, Abu Na'eem]

My quest on thareed started years ago without me even knowing it. I had come across this hadees, probably during one of my first Ramzaans. I thought to myself, what is this thing, thareed? Why would there be blessings in something and there be no way to know what this is? Is this a food of Arabia during the early Islamic era that has been lost to modern man? Pffft! I want to know, I want the blessings! I recall asking one or two people and getting shoulder shrugs and “I dunno.” And then I just forgot about it, although I saw the hadees again a few more times, as it comes up when one reads about the benefits of sehri (assuhoor or the meal that one eats undertaking a fast that begins at dawn).

Through serendipity, I ended up having a version of thareed years later when I lived in the Gulf. I first had it in Oman as margooga. I had it at a friend’s house for Eid. We had driven from Muscat to her home of Ja’alan, not far from the Eastern coast. The margooga was made with khubz ragaag (raqaaq = delicate) or very thin flat bread that sort of resembles a South India dosa. It was served in a giant thaal (a large flat plate) and drenched in a meaty goat and tomato stew (marag/saloona). I have a great memory of sitting with my friends in their courtyard eating communally from this thaal filled with margooga. We ate with our hands. It is a lovely memory and that was a lovely Eid. I also tried mathbi (meat cooked on heated stones) that Eid.

A couple of years later, at a class party in the UAE, a student brought a giant thaal of flat bread soaking in goat broth and topped with delicious, tender goat meat. My students invited me to sit around the giant thaal and we took part in sharing this meal. Some students remarked on the quality and freshness of the meat, and the girl who brought the dish said that the meat was freshly slaughtered for this dish for us, and the animal was raised at home. The dish was thareed. It wasn’t made with khubz ragaag, but a very thin flat bread, sort of like a type of Irani naan. This dish was similar to the margooga but it didn’t contain tomatoes. The goat shorba was clear. It was so rich and delicious. That was probably one of the best meals of my life. It sounds like such a weird thing to enjoy, but really, the bread was so flavorful as it was drenched in the extremely rich broth. I am not good at judging freshness and quality of meat, but the meat was indeed very tender and the goat had a very clean taste with no hint of a gamey flavor.

At some point, I realized that this Gulf dish of margooga/thareed (some will argue on points of difference, mainly the bread used) was the thareed of the hadees. I also discovered at some point that in some regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, this dish is prepared by Pashtoons, and it goes by a variety of names in the Pashtoon regions, depending on the Pashto dialect of the people who prepare it. Some of those names are painda, soobutt, and randa chargha.

I also found that some desis make this dish, calling it suraid (an Urdu-ization of thuraid, a diminutive of thareed), or simply “roti ke tukray.” For this dish, a highly seasoned shorba is prepared from chicken or mutton, and then the same principle is applied, shredded bread is soaked in this shorba and the meat is served on top. This is not a dish made in my husband’s family, though I have found that some people have heard of it, though many have not.

The dish is best eaten with the hands. It is mushy and soggy and perhaps not everyone would enjoy the texture upon the first time trying it. But there is this element of being a comfort food to the dish. It’s like Thanksgiving stuffing or something. Carbs soaking in meaty gravy. If you like that sort of thing, you will like this dish.

So, why would it be blessed? There must be some underlying reason. A dish can’t just be blessed for the sake of being blessed. Or can it? Perhaps it is special because its preparation is a way to avoid wasting leftover flat bread. Perhaps because it traditionally eaten communally from a single dish. The act of eating this way promotes amity and strengthens bonds between the diners. Though I suppose traditionally this was and still is the way of eating many dishes in some Gulf Arab communities. It is also a very rich and nourishing one-pot-meal, especially if its preparation includes vegetables. I don’t know. But I do enjoy the idea of consuming something that has religious and historical merit. What should I say in my pontification on the dish for the halaqa? Do YOU know anything about thareed?

Here is a recipe for suraid, or desi style thareed, from my (sad, pathetic, never updated!) food blog. You can see pics of the dish, there, too.

 

A Book- The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism

I recently read The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism on Maryam Jameelah.

Here are links to some gripping excerpts from the book:

http://www.thefridaytimes.com/22042011/page26.shtml

(part 1)

http://www.thefridaytimes.com/29042011/page22.shtml

(part 2)

http://www.deborahbaker.net/books3.htm

(author Deborah Baker’s website)

Let’s call Maryam Jameelah  ”MJ,” and just remind yourself that I don’t mean Michael Jackson so as not to become confused if you actually read through all of this

Muslim readers, just curious, how many of you have heard of her or read anything by her? If  you or your SO or family members are from Pakistan, have you/they heard of her?

My husband had never heard of her. Neither had a handful of Muslim and Pakistani people who I asked when I started reading the book. I learned of her when I was living in Oman when a friend of mine gave me a copy of MJ’s correspondences with Maulana Maududi. My friend was an older Zanzibari lady, so she reads about Islam mostly in the English language, as do some South Asian Muslims. (Colonialism connection there.) I had been a Muslim for several years in the US before I moved to Oman, so that means that I spent years in an English speaking Muslim context without coming across Maryam Jameelah’s name or writings.

Upon being given the book of MJ and Maududi correspondences, I remember being fascinated by her story because she and I had something in common-namely that she and I are both Muslim converts of Jewish heritage. MJ was born in 1934 to a secular Jewish family in the NYC area, but converted to Islam and moved to Pakistan where she married and settled for the rest of her life. She was a white, Western woman who supposedly gave up a privileged American life for a strict orthodox Jamaat-e-Islami recommended austere Muslim Pakistani life. She had the potential to confirm the supremacy of the Jamaat-e-Islaami narrative by rejecting the Evillle materialism of the West in the nobler quest for the boons of the Akhirah. As an author and intellectual, she wrote in that polemic, absolutist, grandiose way (to use Baker’s terms) that neo-orthodox oriented Muslims lap up. But I think her time of relevancy was over decades ago and the author is making it seem like she is currently as influential.

Years ago, when I read her writing, I was quite put off. Like her mentor Maududi, she was vehemently anti-Western and her Islam was a Salafist neo-orthodox Islam. As with many Salafist oriented writings, I found myself cringing at the ridiculousness of some of the anti-Western assertions put forth as truths in her writing; I recall reading something about Western feminism being a path towards an all-female, lesbian, Amazonian style society or some such utter nonsense. I read this maybe 7-8 years ago, so I can’t remember precisely what it was that she wrote, but some of her writings are available online…I have been lazy to find where I read the Amazonian society thing because I couldn’t find it from a quick google, if anyone knows please let me know…I did find one article in which she suggests that feminism leads to lesbianism here. Her thinking and her writings reflect the colonial and post-colonial times in which she grew up. I agree generally with her criticisms of Western imperialism. I think the long-lasting negative effects of colonialism are pretty clear to us today. But I disagree with her idea of “pure Islam” (which really means rigid, literalist Saudi styled Salafi Islam) as the solution to the ailments of the global Muslim Ummah.

Anyhow-I never gave MJ much thought after having a good eye-roll at her writing all those years ago, but after reading the above linked excerpts from the book in The Friday Times, a mix of nosiness and curiosity came over me and I had to know more about her. Maryam Jameelah is featured as one of the VIPs of modern Islam in Makers of Contemporary Islam by John Esposito. But unlike Baker suggests in her book, I have never seen MJ pamphlets in Islamic centers, and have not heard of her mentioned often, possibly not again since that time in Oman from the above mentioned friend. I think her style of anti-Western discourse is actually very passé for contemporary Western based Muslims. There are certainly some forms of anti-Western rhetoric, but MJ’s was an older anti-technology, anti-modernization ideology that equated modernization with Westernization, and while I am aware there are some fringe Salafi-oriented groups (like Tableeghi Jamaat) who still preach such things, these ideas are not broadly current among us. Clearly this discourse is still prevalent in certain circles in Pakistan, though.

Here is a link to the MJ chapter in Makers of Contemporary Islam- worth a perusal if you are interested.

Apparently, MJ is a person of great importance. That is the take author Deborah Baker has. The author exposes MJ’s unusual life circumstances, and both the author and MJ are fixated on the presumed divide between Islam and The West. Baker seems to agree with MJ that the divide is ultimately unbridgeable. (I disagree, especially in our era of globalization, global inter-connection, and as a Western Muslim myself.) Baker also exposes a lot of dysfunction in MJ’s life, ultimately painting MJ as a lunatic—or perhaps she just pieces together enough evidence to prove that MJ was a lunatic. MJ was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was hospitalized several times for mental breakdowns and psychotic behavior, including a hospitalization in Lahore shortly after she arrived in Pakistan. As a reader, I felt somehow guiltily impertinent and voyeuristic during certain parts of this book, especially since MJ is still alive and residing in Lahore.

Baker delves into the relationship between Maulana Maududi’s and Maryam Jameelah’s writings and the War on Terror. Among the historical factors surrounding the current War on Terror situation are the neo-orthodox Salafist Islamic movements that arose as a reaction to the subjugations of colonialism and post-colonial imperialism. Thinkers like Maududi come from that climate. I do see connections between Maududi’s influence and part of the reasons why Pakistan has become religiously radicalized in some segments of society. For example, the long-lasting injustice against Ahmedi Muslims, including periodic incidents of violence committed against Ahmedi Muslims in Pakistan are connected to Maududi’s anti-Ahmedi stance. Interestingly, I learned from Baker’s book that Maududi didn’t understand the monster he created and lamented it to other elderly Jamaat-e-Islami colleagues in his later years. But all of this blasphemy law insanity, hudud ordinance injustice, and the anti-Ahmedi, anti-Ismaili-Shi’a, and anti-Shi’a rhetoric can be tied to him, not as the originator of such ideas, but as a main source of propagation due to his scale of influence. Baker takes things a step further and blames Maududi and Maryam Jameelah for 9/11. She actually blames MJ to her face and reports on MJ’s unprepared and lame response. I think that both Maududi (and MJ, if she really had such significance) have some small hand indirectly in jihadist/terrorist form of radicalization simply because the Islamist rhetorical foundations of the later extremist movements are connected to these older movements. In the same sense, so do the colonizers who created the oppressive climates that spurred these movements in the first place, right? Anyway, it is a common and irresponsible insinuation in Western rhetoric that neo-orthodox Islamist movements and extremist-terrorist movements are one and the same. I don’t think MJ ever called Muslims to attack The West, just to reject it. Some violent extremists have been influenced by Maududi’s thoughts since their version of ultra-orthodox so called “pure” Islam comes from the same Islamist theological movements, but to my knowledge, he never specifically called for Muslims to rise up and go to the West to attack people, either. As a matter of fact, as far as I know, the Jamaat-e-Islaami vision of an Islamic society is based on individual commitment to their neo-orthodox version of Islam as a logical-intellectual domino effect towards their styling of a  ’Shari’ah based’ society, and not on a forceful overthrow or physical attack on any establishment, Western or otherwise. So, I don’t think Baker should have gone and told a 75 year old granny that she personally caused 9/11, which is essentially what Baker did to MJ. In some ways, that seemed like a twist to make MJ’s story extra relevant and interesting to readers. I think MJ envisioned some self-sufficient, powerful “pure Islam” Shari’ah state, and saw resisting the West/Modernity as a way to achieve this, but I don’t think she advocated offensive militant jihad or offensive terrorism.

Anyhow, it is a fascinating book, even though it is essentially a piece of gossip that defames MJ and causes her to look like a loon. Since many of MJ’s ultra-orthodox, anti-Western premises are so disagreeable, perhaps it is a good thing to know the back story and know how deranged she was (is?) because this discredits her and her ideas. But I still feel bad for MJ because she was ultimately just a young idealist, and now just an elderly woman living in a dingy room in Lahore. Apparently, a couple of MJ’s children emigrated to the US from Pakistan as adults.

Though I don’t think MJ is currently as popular or important as Baker suggests, MJ is an interesting figure to learn about. Baker made a sort of peace with MJ’s story at the end, and ended up corresponding with her. As a result of the meetings between MJ and Baker, MJ produced an article in 2009 in which she condemned terrorism, the Taliban, and the destruction of girls’ schools in Northern Pakistan “under the false pretext of Islam.” (p. 222-223) Baker sent MJ some magazines, and wondered in the last line of the book what other reading material she should send to MJ. Well, how about Progressive Muslims: Essays on Justice, Gender, and Pluralism, or any of the books by Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl?

 

All Time Classic Hindi Movies

Do you like Hindi films? You can probably guess that I like them, and I do. Aren’t they fantastic? Hindi films are widely loved far beyond India. I have personally met people from many countries (Everywhere! Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kenya, Egypt, Oman, and the UAE) who can communicate in very basic Hindi from years of watching Hindi films. I don’t think that one can learn Hindi simply by watching Hindi films, but if you are learning Hindi (or Urdu), it is great to use them as a learning tool to get greater exposure to the language. As a matter of fact, this site has learning tools such as transliterated lyrics, film guides, and filmi vocabulary lists, which are very useful. It also has a page dedicated to explaining cultural information that might come up for people who are less familiar with desi culture, which answers questions like: “What does it mean when someone tugs their ears?” and “What does it mean when someone wags their thumb?”

In the UAE as a teacher, I once had a student tell me that her hobby was singing. I jokingly asked her to sing something for the class, and she burst into song. In a sweet, clear voice, she serenaded us, and it was a filmi song. She sang “Bole chooriyan, bole kangana, hay main ho gayiiiii, teri saajna. Tere bin jiyo nayo lagda, main te mar gayiaaaaa…,” then suddenly the entire class of Emirati girls joined her and they sung the rest of the song together. It was a surreal experience.

We have our own iconic films in my native culture-The Wizard of Oz, Grease, Forrest Gump, Titanic, and many more. My culture is punctuated with references to these types of films. Similarly, in a very general way, one could learn a little bit about Indian culture from Hindi films, especially the classics.

One often hears the expression “Old is Gold,” about classic Hindi films and film songs. What films are evergreen, iconic classics that you would recommend to someone who wanted to experience the best of the Hindi film industry?

Here is a list that I have created. Which of these films have you seen? Which ones did you love? Are there any favorites that you just ‘don’t get’? Any that you’d add to the list? I will put a (*) by my personal favorites:

Sri Chaar Sau Bees/ Sri 420

Mother India

Guide *

Mirch Masala*

Arth*

Masoom*

Mughal e Azam

Pakeeza

Silsila

Kabhi Kabhi

Amar, Akbar, Anthony

Sholay

Ham Aapke Hain Kaun?*

Maine Pyaar Kiya*

Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak

Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge

Umrao Jaan (original)**** (I love this film. It is sooo tryst and beautiful!)

Kuch Kuch Hota Hai*

Ham Dil De Chuke Sanam

Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham

Devdas

Parineeta

Bandit Queen

Mr. and Mrs. Iyer*

Munna Bhai MBBS

Dil To Paagal Hai

Lamhe

Chandni

Edit: My husband would like it if I add his faves (not an exhaustive list): Namak Halaal, Mausam, Amar Prem, Aapki Qasam, Basera, Karishma, Jo Jeeta Voh Sikandar, Faraar, Yaaraana, Qurbaani,  Lagaan, and Kaala Pathar. He also loves most Amir Khan films. He loved 3 Idiots.

I haven’t seen any of these except for Namak Halaal, Jo Jeeta Voh Sikandar, Lagaan, and 3 Idiots. More for me to explore!

 

Spanish up to speed

My Spanish has gotten a lot better since I’ve been back in Texas. I never lost the ability to understand, but I was having a hard time communicating everything I wanted to say at first. I used to speak fairly fluently when I was younger, so it was frustrating to feel so clumsy when speaking. When I first came back, I was talking to a lady and she told me that her mother got attacked by bees. I could understand everything she was saying, that her mother (who lives back in her home country) was going out from a beach house towards the sea and went into a little cabana and disturbed a hive and suddenly the bees swarmed her and there was a pool nearby so she jumped in the pool and the bees kept on attacking her when she would come up for air. Her poor mother was hospitalized and kept developing bumps on her skin for weeks after the attack because the bee venom was coming out of her system through her skin. Her mother is elderly and it was a very traumatic experience for her to say the least. Anyhow, so the lady is telling me this, and I am listening and stunned by the terrible story, but I was unable to articulate anything appropriate to say back to her. Obviously it was a sensitive situation and all I could muster was “Oh, that’s terrible.” “Oh, and how is she now?” I talked to this other friend and told her that while the lady was telling me the story, I was just shaking my head up and down and couldn’t think of anything to say. My friend told me that when she came to the US she noticed that when English speakers had conversations with her, they always interjected to show that they were listening and following along. She says that in Mexico people don’t interrupt as much. I was like, okay, if that is the case, then that’s good for me so that I can think of something useful to say if someone is telling me something sensitive about a problem or ill health or whatever. Anyway, I still make a lot of mistakes when I speak, but I have a very good (Mexican!) accent and I feel a lot more comfortable communicating now. Recently, a neighbor was telling me that she had been married three times and that people were always shocked by that, but it wasn’t her fault. Her first husband turned out to be gay. Oh, I had A LOT to say about that situation! Women always suffer so much! I feel sorry for him, too because he probably didn’t want to acknowledge his feelings or didn’t understand them or just wanted to conform to avoid prejudice, but your life was ruined due to all of this. I just blabbed on en español like a motormouth. Anyway, her second husband had some emotional problems and became physically abusive, so she left him. But she has been married to #3 for nearly a decade and he is a great guy. So good for her.

Where I live, Spanish is very useful. As a teen, when I worked in food shops, customers would just start out speaking in Spanish sometimes, never asking if I could understand or not. Now, even with hijab on, people sometimes still start out in Spanish with me or comfortably switch to Spanish with me without asking about my hijab or acting like it is weird if I switch into Spanish (I only switch if I notice that their English is far worse than my Spanish, just to facilitate ease in the communication). Once, in the Walmart, I asked an employee where the shampoo was. She looked at me and I could see her eyes on my hijab, but she just said to me in Spanish “Over there near to the pharmacy.” Sometimes, I can understand people who are talking about me in Spanish. Once these two ladies were standing near to me and said that I looked like a nun and started laughing. At one of the taco trucks near to my house, the owner has called me Mother Superior because of my headscarf, ribbing me in that Mexican Uncle sort of teasing way.

Sometimes people do ask about my origins and my religion. “No, I am not Mexican, I am Anglo. I just speak Spanish cuz I grew up here, I did study it in high school also. Why am I wearing this? Oh, because I am a Muslim and it is in our faith. No, my husband isn’t Arab, he is Pakistani. No, well, I converted out of conviction, not for my husband. I was a Muslim before I met my husband.” That’s how it goes. I have had a lot of hispanohablantes ask me much more sophisticated questions about my faith than the English speaking strangers do, for whatever reason. Mostly other Anglos stick to hijab questions. I have tried to analyze why that might be, but haven’t come to any conclusion.

In addition to talking to people, I have been watching Spanish language TV (A guilty pleasure is Caso Cerrado) and also reading Spanish language magazines which I pick up in the check out aisle at the grocery store. I usually go for People En Español, but once I got this cheap tabloid magazine and in the back of it there were ads for psychics and healers and you will never guess what I saw. Among the pictures of Indigenous or Afro-Latino curanderos, there were ads that contained pictures of Sultan Qaboos (the ruler of Oman) and Madhuri Dixit (famous Indian actress). Since they look exotic, Gypsy, Eastern, or whatever, someone had just probably taken them from the internet and put them in their cheesy ads!

Anyway, it is good to be home and to slip back into the Texan life with our diverse population and bilingual English/Spanish atmosphere.

 

62,000 Minutes

According to an online date calculator, it is around 62,000 minutes until we arrive in Amreeka. That’s about 43 days. So much is going on. I am in the middle of a term at school. I have students to prepare to teach everyday. That keeps me busy, busy, busy Thank God. That’s what I am here for, right? 

 We are settling on a shipper. We have been discarding unneeded clothes and other items. But aside from those few things, it is just sitting and waiting for this huge life change to come. The major tasks of the move don’t start until right before we go. I am staring into my crystal ball, wondering how things will work out, but everything is hazy. Do I see foreboding clouds? Do I see a few glimmering flashes of light? My husband has been sending out job applications online for a few months. He actually has a couple of places interested in interviewing him. He is on a third level interview with a prominent company in California (Silicon Valley). What if we moved to California? My girls would be California girls. He has also finally asked his current employer about possible transfer to any of their US branches. He hasn’t given proper notice yet, though. His employer told him that they would look into this and get back to him. Two of the companies that contacted him for a future interview are in Texas. Right now we have nothing, and I am counting my chickens before they hatch, so to speak. But what if it came down to a choice between a major city in Texas and California? There are positives and negatives to any place. And I am just making khayaali pullao in my head.  Heaps of pullao.

I told our housekeeper a few weeks back that we would be going. I actually found her a new sponsor before I told her. The future sponsor is a colleague and I have known her for a few years. As she will be going to her home country for the summer, she is actually okay with letting my housekeeper go home to visit her family this summer, too. Alhamdulillah, this has worked out. This was another thing that had been giving me knots in my stomach. You see, before I leave the country, I have to either cancel her visa or she must transfer to someone else’s sponsorship, or I cannot leave the country. That’s the way the rules work here. I knew that she would find another sponsor pretty easily, but she has some requirements, such as staying in our neighborhood, and having certain timings off. If she went with just anyone, she couldn’t be guaranteed to get what she wanted in an employer. So now, alhamdulillah, she will be going to someone who agrees to her requirements, but will also be cool with her going on vacation this summer. Yay! If she hadn’t gone on vacation, we would have owed her the ticket money anyway, but of course it’s not the same thing and she really wanted to go home. So, inshallah khair.

I try to absorb the sights of Dubai, just because sometimes they are so surreal to me, and also so I don’t forget them. You see, we live on the edge of a desert. There are sand storms, especially at this time of year. The whole sky blackens, as if it were going to rain. But there is no rain. Just tiny sand tornadoes whipping around, sending granules of sandy irritation into my eyes, sending sand and dust underneath the front door, choking me if I take a deep breath. And sometimes there is no sand storm, but the sky is just gray. There is no sun. It can go for weeks like this. No sun.

And then there are surreal moments. On my way to work, I drive through a stretch of desert. I see cars with Oman license plates. I miss Oman. I see giant water tankers with scenes of Northern Pakistan painted on them. I have always meant to take pictures of them, but never have. I’d probably get in trouble for doing that for some reason. You can’t just go do stuff like that here. In front of me is big truck and I squint to read the Urdu lines painted on the back as we are stopped at a light (or it could be Pashto or something). Above it says ‘Haripur.’ Near to the license plate, the Urdu is very squiggly and I struggle to read it. Kabhi…Kabhi…it then becomes clear. Kabhi Haripur Ao, Na. I had been straining to read something so simple. The light turns green and the truck speeds away. For some reason Haripur sounded like it should be in India to me because of the nomenclature, but I google it and find it to be in the Sarhad. It looks like a beautiful place. Some Haripurwalla really, really loves Haripur. That sticker was most definitely not meant for my eyes in particular, and I had taken note of it randomly. But somehow I found it to be very interesting. I should make a bumper sticker that says ‘Kabhi Texas Ao, Na’.

I will soon be having Dubai lasts. Last meetings with friends. Last meals at favorite haunts. Hmmm, my last dosa at Saravana Bhavan. That will be a sad feeling. I have had friends come and go here, as that is the nature of the city. And now it is me who is doing the ‘going.’  The mango season is on now, and although we do get Indian mangoes in the US, there are special suppliers here with really great mangoes. Hmmm, and the litchis are in. Also, here we get Pakistani mangoes, too, straight from Sindh. I know those are available in Canada, but not in the US. I have already had some lasts. Last autumn I was keenly aware that it was my last season of ratab, fresh, ripe dates. I have always loved the ratab season. Hmmm, California has good dates, I hear.

 

Fantasy Goat Dish and Other News

1. My two daughters play together when I do stuff. Mashallah. It is just as I planned. They can keep each other busy while I do important things like cook lunch and surf on the internet. Two year gap has worked out, Mashallah. When Baby D. was alone at this age, I had to be the entertainment more often than not. I would have to put her in the high chair and give her some vegetable sticks to eat and a pot and pan to bang on while I cooked. Not now with Baby A. The girls play well and let me do my thing.

2. We got back from Pakistan yesterday. I had a good time. I always learn a lot of new things when I go there. Like cultural or historical information that is new to me, and new Urdu and Punjabi words and stuff.  While there, I mostly slept, ate A LOT, and shopped.  Karachi looked okay, all things considered. Everyone was doing the same ole same ole. Local businesses were flourishing even under the circumstances. The center of Karachi looked terrible after the Ashoura rioting, though. It was very sad to see. I went there at night and the whole area still looked bad. People were inside shuttered up shops tinkering away at repair work, trying to fix things so that they could re-open their businesses. I can only imagine all the income that these people are losing. Supposedly the government is gonna give them some money to fix their shops, too. I pray for the speedy recovery of that neighborhood. Despite being Muharram, there were a lot of weddings going on. I was at the beach, in parks, at malls, and everyone was just enjoying. It wasn’t like it is “on TV” in Pakistan. It never is.

3. I always have a list of things to eat when I go to a place, Karachi included. I hit most of the things on my list, but I missed sajji. I have never tried sajji before. I was reading about the cuisine of Balochistan and I came across the dish “sajji.” I also discovered that it is widely available in Karachi. Balochi food isn’t famous among non-Baloch, but it seems that this dish is. It is very much like Gulf Arab mashwi/showa/qouzi . Showa is my favorite dish of Omani cuisine.  I don’t know the specifics of this history, but some king or someone gave a chunk of Balochistan to the sultan of Oman at some point in history. There are many connections between the Gulf Arabs and South Asians, but Balochistan, especially Makran, has very strong connections. So I was thinking this might be a dish which is similar to showa. My husband’s aunt, who lived in the Middle East for a several years, also compared sajji to qouzi. So I was very curious.  I wanted to eat this dish, but circumstances prevented it. Inshallah one day I will get to try some authentic sajji. I don’t want chicken sajji either. Only goat sajji. It is one of those dishes that I have never tasted, but know from the way it sounds that it will be really good.

4. I ended up getting 4 ready made suits and several unstitched suits. I also got some gifts for people, and some suits for my girls for the Eids of 2010. So now I will be busy going back and forth to the tailor. I got all the lining and trimming in Karachi though, so basically it is just a matter of dropping everything off. The fashion changes so quickly among the fashionable of Pakistan, so next time I go to Pakistan all of my suits will be very out of fashion…and I must be fashionable in Karachi even though I am a gori and don’t even live there, of course. Right now the qameezes are loosely fitted and long, and the up to the minute pants are a wide leg trouser (azaar). I will probably stitch a few pieces like that since I have always loved that look. It looks like a Vietnamese ao dai, which is a dress I love since it makes you look long and graceful even if you are short and stocky like yours truly. The rest of the suits I will sew in a classic cut because abroad it is just too impossible to keep up with the look of the minute. But it shows when people come from abroad and you can place the exact season of the last time they visited Pakistan because of how their suits are cut and the type of trimming sewn on.

5. I need to shed a few lbs after this trip to Pakistan. Two weeks did a lot of damage (I do it to myself, I do). I ate with gusto there. The food is just so good. A tomato actually tastes like a tomato. The radishes were sweet. The gulab jamans were out of this world…actually I prefer the kala jaman. I must have eaten 25 or so over two weeks. I had mustard greens and corn flour flat bread. I had afghani tikka laced with fatty charbi with long fluffy Qandahaari naans and alu bukharay ki chutney.  (I ate the chunks of brown toasted charbi, too!!! I know, BAD for my health but luscious taste!)  I had the delicious home cooked vegetables of my in-laws’ home. Abroad many people think of Pakistani cuisine as meat based, which it is. I suppose the iconic dishes of Pakistani cuisine are meat dishes.  But the veg and daal dishes, the “home food,” are  wonderful daily culinary delights. I had mungochi in shorba (mungochi are ground mung bean fritters similar to baray but made of mung ki daal instead of dhuli maash), various okra dishes, green bean dishes, paalak mixed with a sprinkle of methi, veg and meat combos like cauliflower and meat, turnip and meat, and so on. I ate kulfi with sheera and falooda every other night. I also had some excellent Western style baked goods from the coffee shops near to my in-laws home. If I lived in Pakistan I would surely start to resemble a she-water buffalo considering the pleasure I take in eating the foods there. Anyway.

6. I also cooked some vegetarian stuff for my MIL since she likes that sort of thing. I made Manchurian Balls, and Indian Chinese recipe of finely chopped vegetables bound with flour and deep fried, served in a brown Chinese style sauce. My cooking teacher-friend actually custom-made me a recipe for that on request. It came out AWESOME! And I made rajma. My MIL loved both dishes.

7. So now after all that eating, I’d better just have salads for like two months. Well, after today. Cuz um, we brought some kala jaman back with us, and they are luring me over to devour them as I type. YUM!

 

Eidukum Mubarak

Asalaam Aleikum wa eidukum mubarak. I wish everyone a blessed Eid.

Inshallah the nanny, Baby D, and I are driving to Muscat tomorrow. We wanted to go for Eid Al Fitr, but couldn’t make it because the holiday wasn’t announced in time to make plans. This time, we could kind of guess when to go. It is going to be a 4-5 hour drive with a one year old. I can’t say that I am looking forward to that. Lots of stops and loads of Cheerios will keep us sane, Inshallah. I haven’t been back to Muscat since before Cyclone Gonu. Several close friends’ homes were badly damaged. I feel really bad about that. One dear friend, Abla S, has invited us for lunch on the first day of Eid. She is also hosting guests from the UK and Bahrain. You know something about her? Her whole downstairs was destroyed in the cyclone, and so were all of the family cars. But this isn’t the first time in her life that she lost almost everything. When she was a teenager, her family home was destroyed in riots in Zanzibar when all of the Afro-Arabs had to leave. She fled on a boat. Subhanallah. She is now in her early 60s. She is a grandmother and a mother of 5 mashallah successful children. She is a really kind soul and is heavily involved with dawah work. We have been in touch a lot and whenever I go to Muscat I make it a point to meet up with her. We also met up in Jordan when I travelled there a couple summers ago. Anyhow, I just feel so terrible about her family home. I am not sure what to expect.

On Eid day 2, I am invited to lunch with another good friend, A. The lunch is at her in-law’s house. Hmmm, I actually wrote about her MIL before years ago on my old blog. We had gone to an iftaar at her MIL’s house, and her MIL kept asking “where are you from?” and I kept saying Texas. “But why is your face like that, are you and Arab, is your dad an Arab?” She kept pressing it, “but your face, but your color, blah blah” (I guess I have a really funny face?!?) and then after dinner I was like “my dad is Jewish.” and she was like “I KNEW IT! I felt as if a jinn had whispered it into my ear!” Hah hah I told this story to Abla S, and she said “A jinn? Maybe an angel whispered it into her ear!” Anyway, A’s MIL makes me uncomfortable. But she has hosted me on several different occasions, and I realize that she means well, but saying things bluntly is just part of her personality.

I need to meet up with a couple of other people. Another friend got married last Friday and I wasn’t able to attend her wedding. I am gonna stop by her mom’s house and give her a wedding gift. She won’t be intown cuz she is on honeymoon. But it will be nice to see her mom. Then I have to meet up with F. Al H. She was kind of upset at me for not stopping by the last time I was in town, so I am making it a point to get over to her.

My best friend G. won’t be in Muscat at the time. She is travelling to her family village. But we might meet up when she is driving through. She actually lives near to me in a town on the UAE/Oman border. She moved at the same time I moved. So she’ll be travelling towards Muscat on the way to her hometown.

One thing I am really really looking foward to in addition to catching up with friends is the Muscati Eid Al Adha specialty…the showa. It is this goat that is seasoned, wrapped in banana leaves (well, there are actually variations of it, some ppl use palm leaves, but the people I know are mostly Zanzibaris and they use banana leaves) and they bury it in the ground in an underground oven and cook it until it is just soooo tender and delicious. It is eaten with plain boiled rice, and Zanzibaris serve it with kachumbari, which is a relish of sliced onions, carrots, cucumbers, and tomatoes, in lemon juice with salt and black pepper. People usually give me some showa to take home. Last year I made NYC deli style sandwiches out of it. Omani Yiddish food? LOL. My best friend G. is also saving me some mathbee, which is the Eid Al Adha food in her home region. It is cow meat cooked on hot rocks. It is like delicious steak! I am sure I am gonna gain at least 2 kgs after this weekend!

I am bringing everyone sweets from Damascus Sweets here in Dubai. I dare say that this is the best shaami sweet shop in Dubai, well at least by my taste. There are no really good authentic Shaami sweet shops in Muscat, and actually not that many in Dubai. Omani and Gulf sweets in general are totally different than sweets in the rest of the Arab world. There is konafa and baqlawa and all at the regular grocery store, but it just isn’t that good. They often make a cheapy cheater’s version with *gasp* peanuts blended in with the other more expensive nuts. So the real thing is extra special. People like foreign stuff, especially authentic shaami sweets, as a novelty, so I know they are gonna like those sweets. People used to request them from me when I would go to Dubai and meet my husband on weekends after we were first married.

So that’s the plan. In addition to catching up with people, I’ll be showing Muscat to the nanny. She has friends who lived there before and everyone always praises the place so she is excited about the trip.

Well, those are my plans. Inshallah all will be khair. Happy Eid!

 

Darzee tales

I’m kind of bummed cuz my stuff STILL isn’t ready at the tailors. What tailor? What stuff? A few weeks back I got two new shalwar qameez materials and I gave them to the tailor after searching for some kind of trendy and up to date ways to stitch them. I ended up subscribing to the Pakistani She Magazine. It is a Karachi based women’s interest magazine. It has some fun stuff like film reviews and fashion layouts (which help me because I am clueless about shalwar qameez fashions and I always feel so frumpy and out of it) and also some good articles dealing with women’s issues in the Pakistani context. So, anyway, I took my updated trendy self-made illustrations to my good old tailor Master Magan. To get to him, I have to drive for 30 minutes and then park somewhere and walk 15 minutes into a bazaar. I have tried other, closer places, but over the years he has proven to be the best. Anything expensive I give only to him. He works at a collective of master tailors owned by an Indian business man. The Master Tailors do the cutting, and the stitching is done in a workshop. They have embroidery, too, which is hard to find in Dubai. The whole set up makes their work very efficient and also very high quality. As everything else in Dubai has gotten to be more expensive, their stitching charges have risen as well, though their rates have always been slightly higher than average. But going to Master Magan is well worth the higher charge. So, I schlep my stuff over to Master Magan. When I arrived that day, his cutting table was a complete mess and there are some ladies standing there arguing with him. I wait patiently for my turn. When I plop my materials down on his table, he says “Can you bring these after Divali?” It’s really tight right now and you’ll have to wait.” I tell him that it is a lot of trouble for me to get here and can he just take my clothes, I don’t mind waiting a few weeks for them I knew he would be super busy because of Divali. He took my materials, noted down my instructions, and gave a date to pick up the finished suits. He was in a really grumpy mood and became exasperated with me because I don’t know all the tailoring lingo and special terms. He is usually patient about that, but this time he lets out his annoyance by teasing me a bit. No problem. Later, I tell him he is in a sour mood. I ask him if he likes sweets. I was thinking of going to the chaat and sweet shop across the street to bring him a snack or a plate of rasmalai or something. “Ah! I am diabetic,” he snaps. “Oh, I think you just need to sweeten your mood,” I say. He confesses, “Most people don’t talk to me the way you do. You are very polite. You must be employed somewhere, right?” “Yes I am a teacher,” I say. “Well, most of these ladies come in here and are very rude to me. They think they are all princesses. I have been here since 6 am. I am just really tired.” “Do you get overtime pay?” I ask. “We get nothing of the sort!” he replies. Anyhow, I finished up with him and decided that I wanted to give him a gift. I thought about it and I ended up having a mug made for him that says, “#1 Tailor: Master Magan” with a picture of a sunflower on a sunny day in the background. I have no idea if he reads English, and I suspect he is a tea drinker and never uses coffee mugs. But I just thought the mug would be kind of utilitarian and funny at the same time. Like he could keep pens and scissors in it on his table or something. Anyway, I went to him to pick up my stuff yesterday and guess what! It wasn’t ready. The place he works is usually so efficient that the single time in 3 years that my clothes weren’t ready on the collection date, I received a call informing me. This time I came in after the pick up date. The suits should have been ready. I didn’t say anything. There wouldn’t have been a point. I gave him the mug anyway and just laughed. Anyway, now I have to go back again! The long drive and the long walk, ugh! Usually I go with a friend who is interested in getting chaat or Gujarati thali with me for dinner, or I take the nanny and Baby D. So I am gonna have to arrange to go out there AGAIN! Aagh! Anyways, I have been spending too much money this month cuz guess what else I did in the bazaar? I got another two joras to have stitched. I really don’t wear shalwar qameez very often anyway. I am just wasting money. Anyhow, one is an expensive Pakistani made dark blue cotton with chikan kaari on it. The other is an inexpensive daily wear Indian suit. I chose it because even though the suit was just a weave with a block print design, it has a really pretty dupatta. I got a suit for the nanny, too. She picked a cotton one with a chiffon dupatta. The expensive blue suit I am gonna bring to Master Magan after I shrink it. My other suit and the nanny’s suit, I am gonna give to this new tailor I discovered near to my house. I am just trying him out. I already made some night gowns with him. He is Pakistani. He keeps asking where I am from (he thinks somewhere in Pakistan) but I never reveal the truth because he will then proceed to overcharge me. Hah hah I am such a trickster, he was like, hmmm, your style of speaking is from such and such place, so you must be from there! Am I right, am I right? Well, let’s say he is about a few hundred thousand miles wrong! I can tell by his accent that he is from Gujranwala. Heh heh heh.
Anyways, so now I have to make a big plan to go back to Master Magan. Maybe on Thursday—oh wait, scratch that, it’s Thanksgiving ain’t it? I just dunno. It is so hard to find free time and it’s hectic taking the baby. *Sigh* I’ll post pics if the suits come out nice.
I have some weird and crazy stories about tailors. In Oman, one was harassing me over the phone and I had to threaten to call the police because of it. That is common over here. The tailors sometimes get lonely and try to harass you for fun. That has happened to friends of mine, too. I know that sounds so crazy, but it is true. No one ever gives their real names to the tailor. Everyone always gives a man’s name, i.e. husband or brother. I didn’t realize about this when I first arrived in the region and the guy must have thought I was being a little too friendly or something. I dunno. I use my real info with Master Magan though cuz I trust him. Anywayz, another time, also in Oman, I went to this one tailor who was from this particular place in Pakistan. Then I discovered this tailor near to my apartment and I noticed that he was from the same place as the other guy. I mentioned to him that I had another tailor who was from the same place and his shop is in neighborhood X. I thought, well, Muscat is such a small place and communities are tight here. He must know the guy. Well, out of nowhere his face turned red and he puffed up in anger. He started screaming and told me this long long story in a shouting voice. Something like “I HATE that bastard! He stole that shop from me! You know that shop??? It is MYYY shop! He is sitting in MYYY shop, that thief! He is my cousin and do you treat your family that way? I am gonna kill that sister-f…” I mean he went totally crazy, he was cussing and yelling and I thought he might hurt me. I just shook my head and said “really, aha, really,” the whole time somehow escaped with my life. That was scary!
Anyways, the world of buying and stitching materials is a big part of life over here. I make pajamas, work clothes, shalwar qameezes, jalabiyyas, and also get ready made stuff altered fairly regularly. I had a high learning curve when I arrived. Despite the big headache it can be on occasion, that is one aspect of being here that I will miss when I leave the region. Though it is an *adventure* sometimes it sure is great to have clothes stitched to fit your exact shape and size and be able to play fashion designer and create your own clothes.