Excerpt: Back In Pakistan

My welcome home to Pakistan was dominated by visitors congratulating my parents on the completion of my doctorate. These visits ranged from short evening dinners to stays of a few weeks. Our domestic help was kept busy making tea and snacks, lunches and dinners for the guests, while the rest of the family entertained them. I was repeatedly called into the living room to tell my tales of life among the fabled Americans. Finding it hard to deal with such a constant stream of company, I scurried back to my room whenever I could. One day, my mother rushed into my room when she heard me howling at our maid. “What’s the problem?” she asked with a tone of annoyance. I stood by my study table and complained angrily, “Ammi, I told this maid not to touch anything on my desk, but now it’s all disorganized. I can’t find anything.” The maid rushed to my mother and pleaded, “I never touched a thing. Her cousins went through her things and moved them around.” My mother smiled and answered dismissively, “Is that all?” I was furious. “I can’t stand this. They have no business coming into my room.” “And since when have you started cutting our home into rooms?” my mother asked with a stern face. “The next thing I know, you’ll even start locking your door.” I pouted with anger. She hugged me and asked, “What’s the big deal? Do you have secrets or what? We’re all still one family!” Thumping my foot on the ground, I raged, “That’s not the point. This is MY room and these are MY things. I don't want anyone to touch them.” My mother left, shaking her head with a sigh, “These American germs! I guess we’ll have to deal with such things now.” I was reminded that people never have to ask if they can come to visit or stay with us. They just arrive, and they leave when they want. Siblings use each other's things without asking and this is not considered rude. I had thought that regardless of my involvement in American culture, I was too Pakistani to change my basic attitudes, but I kept surprising myself. I had trouble re-adjusting to the group-thinking and group-living aspects of my culture, which affected my new sense of time and privacy the most. At an intellectual level, I knew that in Pakistan, privacy is linked only to the body. People cover their bodies thoroughly and touching only occurs between intimates or family members. Otherwise, everything other than the body gets blended into the ‘us’-oriented group lifestyle. However, American individual privacy is less linked to the body and more to the space around a person and the things that surround them. It is easy for Americans to expose their bodies to strangers by wearing mini-skirts, shorts or bikinis, but they are incensed if someone violates their space or uses their things without permission. I had not realized how much I had changed from ‘us’ to ‘I’. I started noticing that we hardly had words for anything related to the body or sex, but preferred using indirect phrases. Feeling shy about saying someone is pregnant, we would say, ‘her lap will be filled’ or ‘her feet are swollen’ or ‘you will become a mother soon’. For getting a woman married we would say ‘make her hands yellow (with henna)’, and for crimes like rape we would say, ‘dishonored’ or ‘adultery by force’. Talk of body or sex remained a very private matter, even among those who were intimate. This language gap is intentional because our culture believes that all personal matters should remain private. This attitude also makes it difficult for women, in particular, to complain if their intimate space has been violated. My readjustment into my family and cultural context was gradual. I joined our local women’s movement and saw that women drew strongest support to move ahead from their families. At the same time their worst suffering also came from the violence and humiliation meted out by their most loved ones. I saw them struggling but pushed back by the stigma attached to being a victim. People only reinforced that a wife is responsible for keeping the family together, so no matter what she experiences she bears the burden of keeping it together. Complaining was unforgivable. I started relearning my culture, with a strong sense of belonging and a passion to make it better, but first with a yearning to connect to every woman possible before making my future plans. This desire to connect and relearn my culture influenced my job hunt.