Homeland Elegies(19)
Ayesha M is six years younger than I am, the second daughter of my father’s youngest sister. I remember a waif of a girl, gangly and game—at least when her domineering older sister, Huma, wasn’t around to step on her impulses—who grew up into a lithe, lovely woman with more than just a recognizable portion of the offbeat gamine that she was the summer I was thirteen and back in Pakistan with my folks, visiting their various siblings and their families. One afternoon, when we were over at Ayesha and Huma’s house for tea, the girls persuaded me to play Ken to their respective Barbies in the living room. Huma was ten. Ayesha was seven. The play veered, perhaps inevitably, into the question of marriage. Would my Ken marry Huma’s Barbie or Ayesha’s? (Only their outfits distinguished the two blond dolls, this being well before the era of anything like Brown Barbie—let alone Hijarbie.) The question led to an argument between the sisters about which one of them would marry their father. The claim went back and forth, Huma increasingly irritated at Ayesha’s insistent desperation to be included in the quartet of their father’s possible wives, until the older sister announced to the younger with finality that it would be their mother and her, and no one else. By this point, Ayesha was ready to cry, but before she did, she blurted out a surprising rejoinder:
“I don’t care, because, anyway, I’m going to marry Rasool-e-Pak.”3
Huma snickered. “I already told you. You can’t. He’s dead.”
“I don’t care. Mom said Rasool-e-Pak married Ayesha when she was nine, and she became his favorite wife.”
“I said he’s dead, dumbhead.”
“I don’t care. I’m going to do the same.”
“You’re so stupid.”
“You’re so stupid.”
“No, you are.”
“You are.”
And on and on, until Huma finally snatched her sister’s Barbie and smacked it against the fireplace tile, putting a crack in its face. That’s when Ayesha broke into tears and stormed out.
Everyone in Ayesha and Huma’s family had green cards, but it wasn’t until two years later that their parents would decide to sell their Islamabad home and relocate to Atlanta, where their father, after working for Coca-Cola in Pakistan since the late 1970s, had been offered a job at the US headquarters. They bought a house in Decatur, east of downtown, where they were delighted to find a vibrant (though small) Muslim community. That first year, Ayesha met Farooq, a ten-year-old whose Pakistani family had emigrated from Kenya. I didn’t hear about Farooq until they were in their midteens, and I wouldn’t meet him until he and Ayesha were in their midtwenties and getting married, at which point I found him slick and insincere and mostly neglectful of his fiancée in ways that would have shocked me even if I wasn’t seeing them on the eve of their “special day.” When I later heard from my mother that Ayesha was unhappy back in Islamabad—where they moved after the wedding, Farooq thinking his American MBA would get him further there, faster—I assumed the problem was not Pakistan but Farooq. I hope I won’t be taken for trying to prove my deductive capacities by sharing what the family would all find out in due course: Farooq was abusive, sometimes physically, and Ayesha had taken (and been hiding) it for years. For all his forward American thinking, my father would address his niece’s predicament in true Punjabi style: he called a cousin in the village, the sort of fellow who could round up a crew and pay someone a visit that wouldn’t easily be forgotten. Last I heard, Ayesha had decided to stay in Atlanta with the children year-round; Farooq was spending most of his time in Islamabad.
But well before any of this would happen:
During the rehearsal dinner the day before their wedding, Ayesha gave a speech in which she told a story. (Celebratory rehearsal dinners replete with roasts and speeches and, usually, with the bride and groom in Western garb are a new and still uncommon custom in Pakistani American weddings; the time for public palaver of this sort is at the end of the sequence of wedding events, during the walima, when the bride and groom host their guests as a newly married couple.) Ayesha was wearing a stunning emerald-green column gown, her thin-as-stick forearms each covered with rows of golden bangles that murmured as she moved. Her hennaed hands unfolded the paper on which she’d made notes as she lifted her lightly trembling lips to the microphone to speak. In a quavering voice, she told us that since she was a very little girl, she’d always had the feeling she was going to meet her husband when she was nine. She didn’t know why she thought that, but she did. What happened when she was nine? That was how old she was when her family found its way to Decatur. “Goooo, Bulldogs,” she added with a fist pump for the sizable contingent of fellow Decatur High grads in the audience. And nine was how old she was when her family ended up sitting next to another local Pakistani family at a Fuddruckers one Friday night during their first few months in Georgia. That night, she shared pickles with the boy who would end up as her husband, Farooq. Looking back now, she said, her voice breaking as she teared up, she knew that meeting him then was kismet. Meant to be.
Of course, it’s impossible to know for certain if her mother’s telling her that the Prophet had married his favorite wife at nine was the decisive early prompt that led to Farooq. What is certain, though, is that the story Ayesha told us during her rehearsal dinner was one she’d told herself countless times, and that this story was if not inspired, then certainly legitimized by that oft-told tale of the Prophet and his child bride, and that all this made it somehow easier for her to stay in a relationship—and, later, a marriage—that might not have been the best thing for her. The Prophet’s relationships with women, however progressive and egalitarian some of them might have been for those medieval times, can hardly be taken as exemplary today. This might seem obvious—it certainly is to me—but so many I love very dearly don’t see it that way at all.