Pretty in Pink: Sahar Zawam’s prom dress was a baby pink confection with a white underskirt and matching pink shawl, bought from Kids’ World on Church Avenue.

Palwasha Khan sits on the bottom corner of her bed while her cousin stands behind her, spritzing, combing, and curling Palwasha’s hair, scolding loudly each time the teenager moves to answer her phone. Palwasha and her sister’s beds are strewn with shawls, salwar kameezs, hair dryers, hairspray bottles, make-up kits, cell phones, handbags, and pink and purple Pokémon lunch boxes full of gold bangles and necklaces. On the TV, a Bollywood movie — Yes Boss — is playing on mute but everyone is familiar with the story, a complicated love triangle in which an ad exec unhappily woos the girl he loves for his boss. On the wall by the door, stickers describe the primary teachings of Islam: “Who is Mohammad?”, “What is the Quran?”, “What was the effect of Islam on the world?” The girls’ mother walks in and out of the room every so often, checking on her daughters’ progress, which is way too slow.

It’s pre-prom madness Muslima style…

Brooklyn blues

The first time Sahar Zawam realized that being Muslim could make a dent in her social life was when she realized she wouldn’t be able to attend her high school prom.

That particularly American rite of passage was off-limits to the Egyptian-American teenager studying at Midwood High School because Islam forbids its female followers from removing their headscarves or wearing revealing clothes in front of men other than family members.

A lot of Muslim girls at Midwood High, which caters to a large Pakistani and Arab population, were facing the same dilemma. But rather than break the dictates of their religion for the sake of a party — even if it was their prom — last year, two Midwood seniors decided to organize a prom exclusively for Muslim girls.

Abitssam Moflehi, a Yemeni-American, and Farrah Abuzahria, a Palestinian-American, had heard about Islamic proms being held in Dearborn, Michigan. If Muslim girls could party in Michigan, why not in Brooklyn, they asked themselves.

The two seniors rented a small hall in Midwood and sold tickets to Muslim girls (Muslimas) they knew at $15 a head. They promoted the event not only at Midwood High but also in other neighborhood schools, and in mosques and youth centers. Girls who were going told other girls about it and, very quickly, word got around.

On the day of the prom, almost 80 girls showed up at Widdi Hall, coming from all over the Midwood area and beyond.

“The girls were unbelievable!” Sahar recalls. “You know, before they get inside the hall, they still have to wear the hijab. So these girls walk in with their black hijabs, they walk in, and they were like whoosh!” Sahar mimes a girl dramatically pulling apart the edges of her all-concealing, black drapes to reveal the dazzling gown she is wearing inside.

“It was like these girls had never had a party in their whole lives. You should have seen the smiles on these girls’ faces. They were so happy!

That was last year, 2004.

This year, Sahar was president of the Midwood High School Islamic Society and a senior to boot, so responsibility for organizing the 2005 Islamic Girls Prom fell on her shoulders.

Salwa Zawam (left) models the figure-hugging leopard fur print dress she wore to the prom while her younger sister, Noha (right), shows off her Black and pink floral print dress. Their seven-year-old sister, Zainab (center), wears a scarlet two-piece outfit she would have worn to the prom if she had been allowed to attend. Zainab now says that she never wanted to go but her older sisters remember her crying at home because she wasn’t going to the party with them.

Making-up is hard to do

The morning of the prom, the two Pakistani sisters, Palwasha and Sabah Khan, rush to Midwood High to pick up their report cards, then go shopping for hair spray and other accessories, returning home at one — having skipped lunch — to start getting dressed.

The sisters have decided to wear matching salwar kameezs — a traditional Pakistani outfit consisting of loose pants and a knee-length, matching tunic on top — made of translucent black chiffon with flowers embroidered in gold thread all over the bodice.

But an hour and a half later — only an hour before they are supposed to be arranging chairs and blowing up balloons in Widdi Hall, the venue for the prom once again — Palwasha is still having her hair done.

Sabah hasn’t even changed yet. She and her friend, Aisha, are still straightening their hair while Aisha’s cousin, Mishi, is in the adjacent bedroom, working on the computer.

Another Midwood girl, Anam, arrives, dolled up in a tight-fitting sheath with a blue-and-gold diagonal stripe design. Over it, she is wearing a gold knit jacket. Her false nails have been painted a copper sulphate blue to match her bright blue eyeshadow and bright blue sandals. Anam has come from having her hair done at a nearby Chinese salon but doesn’t like the results. (She’d wanted her hair swept up but the hairdresser did it down. She’d wanted fancy but the hairdresser did simple.) She has come to Palwasha’s for moral support and hairstyling advice.

Just then, Mishi walks in, having changed into her prom dress: a simple silk salwar kameez in blue. But she hates it. “I look like a married person!” she wails, looking ready to burst into tears. Anam rushes to console her, forgetting her own predicament. “It’s okay because your face is pretty,” she tells Mishi and herds her back to the bathroom to jazz up the outfit.

More friends turn up at the door and through it all, Palwasha’s cell phone rings constantly with girlfriends calling to ask for last minute advice about what to wear. One girl calls from Canal Street where she is still looking for the perfect dress. Another calls for a second opinion on her selection, and Palwasha asks back: “Which shoes are you wearing? The fashionable ones?”

By four o’clock, the girls are nowhere close to being ready for the prom that is supposed to be starting now. They stand in a row, the first girl fixing the second girl’s dress with pins, while the second girl straightens a third girl’s hair. Palwasha’s hair is not yet finished; she’s been moving around and answering her cell phone so often that her cousin hasn’t finished setting her curls.

An hour late, (from left) Sabah, Irum, and Palwasha rush to get to the prom.

Get the party started

Over at Widdi Hall, the venue for the prom, a steady stream of Muslim girls are being dropped off by their parents, only to find that the main doors to the hall locked.

Worried phone calls to Sahar Zawam reveal that the party’s main organizer is still at home, frantically getting ready herself.

Sahar and four of her younger sisters arrive half an hour late at four thirty and get to work, setting up tables for the trays of food they have brought with them, bringing down the stereo system from the upstairs office, and arranging a corner of the room for photo-taking.

Sahar has roped in her entire family to help with preparations. Her restaurant-owner father has been cooking since seven this morning, making macaroni-and-cheese, fried chicken cutlets, barbecued ribs, salad, jerk chicken, and fried rice for the party. Sahar’s mother has been ferrying her daughter to and from the bakery and supermarket all day, buying a large rectangular cake with the words “Muslima Prom of 2005” written in icing.

Chairs are pushed to the sides to clear the central floor space for dancing. Tables and more chairs are set up along the ends of the room for people to sit and eat.

As the hall is being readied, more girls arrive, including Palwasha and Sabah Khan who have finished dressing at last.

As they enter, the girls nearest the door turn to check out the newcomers. For a few seconds, there is a pause as each side tries to recognize the other without the usual scarves they wear in school. Then realization dawns and the screaming and hugging starts.

Girls who see each other only once a year at the prom reunite like long-lost lovers in a Bollywood movie. One girl who studied at Midwood until 11th grade and then moved to Boston with her family, has returned to New York City solely for the prom. A girl from upstate New York who found out about the prom during a mosque camp in Brooklyn two days earlier, had her father drive her three hours from home so she could attend. Girls whose friends and cousins attended the prom last year, turn up this year to see what all the hoo-ha was about. Two girls attending a Palestinian baby shower being held in the adjacent hall hear the commotion and decide to switch parties, buying their tickets at the door.

Almost 75 girls are inside Widdi Hall tonight: Pakistanis, Egyptians, Sudanese, Yemenis, Palestinians, Kosovars, Puerto Rican and African-American girls who have converted to Islam, Bangladeshis, Turks, and Afghanis. The entire female Muslim world is represented in this small hall in Brooklyn tonight, wearing every color imaginable (though pink seems to be the hot favorite).

Papa, don’t preach

Outside the main hall, in the small lobby area that is the only way in, Nureen Abuzahria, a hefty Palestinian mother of five with a thick Brooklyn accent, sits and watches the door, making sure that only those people who are supposed to gain entry.

Nureen was the chaperone-cum-watchman at last year’s prom as well, and she agreed to fill that role again this year since three of her daughters are attending the party.

Muslim parents have a reputation of being very protective of their daughters but Nureen fully supports the party. “This party is something to let off steam,” she tells me in between spoonfuls of fried rice and three different types of chicken curry. “The girls do here what they can’t anywhere else. Instead of going into the bedroom and dancing in front of the mirror, they can dance here.”

Tanzeen Rahman, a 10th grader at Midwood High whose parents emigrated from Bangladesh, takes a break from the wild dancing going on inside the hall, pleading two left feet, and sits with me in the lobby for a while. Tanzeen, in a deep red sari with a gold border, explains it like this: “I wear a hijab, see? And no one gets to see my hair. And all the girls who do show their hair, and put on make-up, they look all pretty. This prom gives me a chance to actually feel like a girl. I can do up my hair and feel pretty.”

Tanzeen plans on attending both proms — Islamic and American — in her senior year though she prefers the former. “Even though there aren’t guys to dance with here, it’s even better, you know what I mean? You get to be yourself. You get to have fun with your girlfriends.” But Tanzeen still wants to attend her American prom. She sees it as a chance to say goodbye to her entire class, not just her Muslim girlfriends. She considers her parents more liberal than most and is confident that they will let her attend the American prom.

But other parents are more wary. Some refused to give their daughters permission to attend even the Islamic prom, although this is the second year that the prom is being organized. A few mothers drop by the hall unannounced while the party is in full swing to make sure that there really are no boys around. Nureen interrupts her dinner to meet them at the door and explain that no men will be allowed to enter the hall on her watch.

When they finally realize what the party is all about, some mothers are overwhelmed. One mother hugs Sahar repeatedly, saying, “I can’t believe you would think of something like this. Thank you so much! Thank you for giving this opportunity to my daughter.”

Because the night

Not only religion prevents these Muslim girls, mostly from working class backgrounds, from attending their school’s American prom. Financial factors are another reason.

“The [prom] at Midwood High School, you had to pay $125 for the ticket because they took them to the Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan,” Sahar tells me afterwards. “Girls were spending $400 for their dress not to mention $100 for the nails and makeup and hair. And the limos! $150 for the limos. I had girlfriends coming back after the day of their prom and when I asked them about it, they said they spent over $1,500.”

Sahar and her sisters spent less than $150 each for their dresses, shoes, and other accessories. Add to that the $15 ticket price, and you get less than $200 for a night to remember. (No girl arrived in a limo.) Both Muslim girls (and boys) find it difficult asking their parents to foot a $1500 bill for a party that many Muslims find rather licentious.

Many Muslim students in Midwood did not attend their school’s graduation ceremony because it cost too much as well. According to Sahar, tickets for the Midwood High School graduation cost $120.

So halfway through the Islamic Prom, after most of the girls have arrived and most of the photos have been taken, and the afternoon Asr prayer observed, Sahar announces over the microphone that there will be a graduation ceremony for all the seniors who missed their schools’ function. She calls the seniors on stage one at a time to loud applause, much catcalling and even a few tears. She gives each one a gift box, and then makes them wear the Midwood High cap and gown (no matter which school they come from) while a Polaroid photo is taken.

After that, the party starts in earnest. A pile of discarded shoes — sandals, slippers, and heels — forms in a corner of the hall. “The heels, they were not working,” Sahar tells me. Hairpins are discarded as stylized dos are pulled back into simple ponytails. Fancy shawls and jackets are cast aside. Make-up is washed away by perspiration as the girls shake, wiggle, and boogie non-stop.

Everyone has brought their favorite dance CDs with them and is bombarding the two DJs — Sahar’s twin sisters — with requests. The twins have devised a system where they play two songs from each ethnic/national group until they run through all represented groups, and then start all over again. So there are two Egyptian songs, then two Spanish songs, two English songs, two Bhangra songs, and so on, while everyone is on the floor bopping away.
    
They form a large circle in the middle of the dance floor and when, say, an Urdu or Hindi song comes on, the Pakistani girls go to the middle of the circle and start swaying their hips and clapping their hands in time with the music. Everyone watches for a while, and then they jump in, creating variations of the steps they have just seen. When they can’t manage that, they dance to an inner beat. Two girls start doing the Macarena and pretty soon, the entire hall is following their moves even though a Middle Eastern pop song is playing on the music system. Later, while everyone else is dancing to a Bollywood hit, the two girls start dancing the tango, their locked hands pointing forward as they cut through the crowd, going from one end of the hall to the other.

“Each one shows their cultural dance,” Nureen says, as everyone joins hands and forms a big circle to start learning the steps of a Palestinian folk dance. Tap your right foot twice, then kick forward, while bending your knees slightly. Keep doing that as the circle turns to the right with each kick. “But guess which dance they all know? The American dancing! The hip-hop! Usher comes on and they all know what to do! It joins them together. God bless America!”

“Every night, in my dreams…”

As the clock strikes eleven, it is finally time to wrap up the party. The hall has only been booked until ten; the girls are already an hour late in closing.

But when Sahar announces that the prom has to end, a furor breaks out. “One more song! Just one more song!” the girls shout.

But when the DJs give in and play one last song — a Hindi number — the Arabs start shouting, “That’s not fair! You have to play one Arab song as well!” And so the DJs have to put on an Arab number.

Then the Turks start complaining.

Eventually Sahar’s mother steps in. She walks over to the hi-fi and pulls out the plug. “That’s it!” she says. “The party’s over!”

The girls start calling their parents to come pick them up.

But even without the music, some girls don’t want the night to end. Salwa, another of Sahar’s sisters, starts singing the theme song from the movie, Titanic, “Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feel you…” and soon other girls are singing along and slow-dancing to the lyrics.

When the new school year starts, Salwa will be President of Midwood High’s Islamic Society and therefore the organizer of the 2006 Islamic Girls Prom while her big sister attends Pace University in downtown Manhattan.

“Next year, hopefully, we’re going to have almost double the number of girls,” Salwa says, dreaming aloud. “We’re going to have to find a bigger hall.”

Expand it beyond Brooklyn, one girl suggests. Someone else suggests a grander venue. Maybe the Waldorf. More sponsors for the party. Maybe Mayor Bloomberg.

If not the mayor then at least the school principal. Salwa plans on asking Midwood High School’s principal, Steve Zwisohn, and other high school principals within the area, to help sponsor next year’s prom. “What’s the difference between us and everyone else who gets to have a prom?” she asks. “We work as hard in school. We have 90 and above averages in school. We all passed our Regents [state exams]; we’re all good people; we all do community service. What’s the difference between us and them?”

But school sponsorship comes with restrictions. The girls would need security officers, signed letters of permission from parents, and additional chaperones: all conditions that Principal Zwisohn says must be met before the school can sponsor a student party. So maybe there won’t be any school sponsorship. Maybe instead the girls will ask local Muslim businesses to help defray some of the costs.

“It would be so cool to look back on this one day,” muses Sahar, thinking of future Islamic proms years from now. “Like, oh my god, we started with 70 people and now, it’s 3,000. It would be so cool.”

Outside the ballroom, after all the girls have left, the Zawam sisters pile into their mother’s car for the drive home. They relive the night during the drive back, arguing about who danced the best, laughing at how girls didn’t recognize each other without their scarves, sharing which part of the party was their favorite. As they reminisce, they massage feet aching from too much dancing.  

At home, their father is waiting up to ask, “How was the food?”

The girls reassure him. The food was so good there was none left behind — people ate seconds and thirds and packed more to take home.

Then throwing off their fancy dresses and jewelry, but without bothering to remove make-up and hairpins and false nails, the girls collapse into bed. Their once-a-year Cinderella night is over; they will be back to wearing hijabs tomorrow.

Anju Mary Paul

Almost every store along the stretch of Coney Island Avenue that runs through Midwood is Pakistani. From the Khoobsurat Beauty Salon for women, to the K. Prince Barber Shop for men. Then comes Zoha Money Transmitter, where you can exchange your Pakistani rupees for U.S. dollars or vice versa. Subhan Sweets and Tikka Restaurant is a good place to buy a cup of freshly brewed, milky, cardamom-flavored chai but not coffee.

The first sentences Ayesha ever typed into a computer were: “My name is Ayesha ayobe. I am 21 age.”

Over time, in bits and pieces, she told me more about herself:

“I come from Lahore, Pakistan one year.”
“My father work in chicken burger restaurant. My mother no work.”
“My brother Abdul 17 work in grocery store. My next brother Mohammad is 13 age in sixth grade. My next brother Usama is 5 age. He stay home with my mother.”
“My sister Aleena 16 no go school.”
“I no want to marry. No shaadi; single good!”
“I like America.”

There are Muslim women who come to America, live here for years, raise children and grandchildren, and never learn more than a few words of English. There are Muslim women who end up knowing no other woman (let alone man) in this country who is not a family friend or relative. I met Ayesha when I was looking for these women.

At first, I assumed Ayesha satisfied all of my easy categorizations about Muslim women. I saw her as representative of the many young Muslim women who come to America in their late teens and early 20s, too old to enroll in public school and be introduced, through American classmates and teachers, to American ways of life. As a result, they remain trapped at home, waiting to be married off by their families.

I eventually learned that Ayesha was not the stereotypical Muslim woman I had imagined: veiled, docile, and submissive. She clandestinely rebelled against the restrictive world her parents wanted her to live in, making secret forays to the life outside. That is why I have changed her name and those of others in her story: to protect Ayesha from the repercussions that will undoubtedly follow if the truth were to get out within her orthodox community.

But Ayesha also rebelled against the walls that I tried setting up around her, in my attempt to maintain a “proper” reporter/subject distance. And that is why I am no longer in contact with her.  

“You are my best friend!”

I met Ayesha at her very first computer class, held on a cold February day at an immigrant outreach organization in the Midwood stretch of Brooklyn. Three times a week, half a dozen women in headscarves — some recently arrived from Pakistan, others from Bangladesh, Yemen and Morocco — turned up at the organization’s office to learn basic computer skills.

At the start of that first class, the instructor asked his all-female, all-non-English-speaking, all-Muslim audience to log into their computers by typing in the password, OPTO. Ayesha didn’t know what a password was so she just sat in her place: a short, stocky, square-jawed woman dressed in a beige headscarf and faux leopard fur coat. Sitting behind Ayesha, I sensed her confusion and told her in English that she needed to type out the word “OPTO” into the computer.

She didn’t move and continued to stare at the computer screen in front of her.

I told her roughly the same thing in Hindi. “Computer meh O-P-T-O likho,” and then she got it.

Once logged on, Ayesha turned around in her seat and told me in Urdu that she was “bahooth khushi,” very happy, to have met me.

Later that same day, she told me, “Aap tho mera best friend hai!” You are my best friend!

“I am go to school.”

Besides studying the computer, Ayesha also took English as a Second Language classes at the community center. During her ESL lessons, Ayesha was always volunteering to read out loud or answer a question, and she completed the simple in-class exercises with only minimal mistakes.

“Make sentences with the words car, bird and school,” the instructor would write on the chalkboard.

And Ayesha would write:
“I have car.”
“I like a bird.”
“I am go to school.”

Ayesha was, in fact, one of the better students. Unlike the other women in her class, Ayesha had studied until 12th grade in Lahore and had learned to read and write a modicum of English.

With computers — because she didn’t have one at home, had never used one — Ayesha was more diffident. But she was also impatient to learn more. (All the women were.) She became angry with herself whenever she made a mistake. She would go, “Oh!” in frustration and smack her forehead with the palm of her hand or rest her head on the top of the keyboard. And whenever she got fed up, she had no qualms saying so to the instructor. She’d switch off her computer monitor, stand up, and announce simply, “I go.”

When she wasn’t in class, Ayesha would be busy with household chores and other tasks. “This weekend, I am cooking, I go to shopping at Bobby’s Store, I go to work,” she would say when asked to list her weekend activities.

Ayesha’s work involved conducting Quran classes in the homes of many of the Pakistani women in the neighborhood. Last time I checked, she had seven students. Other days, she would visit her friend Sana’s apartment on Newkirk Avenue.

Within a week of knowing her, I decided that Ayesha’s was the story I wanted to write.

I started actively courting her in order to ingratiate myself into her good books. I played down my Indian roots in case she was an India-bashing Pakistani nationalist. I didn’t mention that I was Christian. I brushed up on my Hindi. I taught her how to use the Shift and Backspace keys on the computer. I translated unfamiliar English words into Urdu for her.

It was hard not to admire Ayesha’s determination to ease what was surely a difficult adjusting process coming from Pakistan to the United States, and I wanted to help wherever I could.

I had gone through a similar ordeal when, at the age of five, I had left India with my family to move to Scotland. My older sister and I were the only Indians in our all-white Edinburgh public school. My sister, who already knew some English, had thrived; I, who could not speak a word of English, had been terrified. Not knowing how to handle a knife and fork in the school canteen, being teased by older students in the girls’ toilet, getting lost inside the school and being too afraid to ask for directions: everything was a nightmare.

As a fellow immigrant, I wanted to help Ayesha and if doing so meant that I was simultaneously helping myself get a story out of her, so much the better. It meant that my disinterested reporter status would be eroded slightly as I became chummier with Ayesha but I thought I had our relationship under control.

The following week in the middle of computer class, Ayesha turned around and told me, “Today, you come my house.”

Ayesha loves watching Bollywood flicks. Her current favorite movie is Raaz, a psychological thriller that also includes some steamy song-and-dance routines between the hero and heroine.

“There’s a special word: fob.”

To reach Ayesha’s apartment building from the community center, you have to travel a few bus stops up Coney Island Avenue.

Inside bus B68, it was standing room only. Russian grandmothers holding tight to their shopping bags brushed shoulders with Chinese mothers carrying infants on their laps. Together with old Hispanic men and one young Hasidic man, they occupied the seats in front. The back of the bus was filled with African American schoolchildren chatting and laughing loudly.

Ayesha, her younger sister Aleena, and I were the only South Asians onboard. We stood in the aisle — the surreptitious focus of 20 pairs of eyes — and I wondered if everyone assumed I was Muslim the way Ayesha and Aleena in their headscarves obviously were. I felt the urge to distance myself from the two girls.

The truth? Ayesha embarrassed me. Not because of her religion or her nationality but because of her lack of fashion sense.

In my interviews with first- and second-generation immigrant children in Midwood, time and again, the isolation a newcomer child faces when he has not yet learned how to blend into mainstream culture was raised. The teasing comes not just from white or black kids but also from other immigrant children. “There’s a special word people use: fob,” Reshmi Nair, the American-born daughter of Indian immigrant parents, explained to me. A fob was someone “fresh off the boat”, an outsider, not yet “with it”, and therefore very uncool.

Assimilation — the goal of any child who wants a peaceful school experience — meant dressing a particular way, speaking a particular way, knowing what to talk about. I’d learnt that lesson the hard way in Scotland and I’d spent the years since making sure I would never be identified as an outsider again.

Then along comes Ayesha with her monstrous leopard fur coat, her lack of English conversation, and her lack of New Yorker disaffection on public transportation, screaming out her fob status. As a topic she fascinated me, but as a person, she was not someone I wanted to be associated with. I had reverted to a high school hierarchy where the “cool” kids did not want to mix with the “uncool” kids.

And why did Ayesha want to associate with me? Was it really just a simple case of friendship-at-first-sight? Or did she too subscribe to the same high school mentality where, by hanging out with ‘cool’ me and my designer wool coat, she would become more like me?

“In Pakistan, it is very dirty.”

Ayesha’s apartment was in a brick-fronted building that fronted Coney Island Avenue. We entered a dimly lit hallway that had paint-splattered walls and empty paint cans abandoned by the chipped wooden staircase. What little light there was in the corridor managed to come through dirt-encased windows in the stairwell. There was dust everywhere.

The girls’ home on the second floor was tiny for a family of seven. The front door opened into the central kitchen-cum-dining-cum-living room from which two bedrooms led off. Queen-size mattresses rested on the floors of both bedrooms and in the corner of the living room. One of the bedroom mattresses was for the parents and the youngest son Usama, another for the two girls, and the living room mattress for the two older boys. Clothes hung on twine strung across one of the bedrooms.

An English language textbook in Urdu was sitting on the dining table when I entered. (I learned later that Ayesha’s mother used it to teach herself English.) In a glass-fronted cupboard against a wall, various mismatched plates and crockery were stacked. Inside, I spotted a set of Corelle plates. The ones with the brown butterfly motif around the edge. The same ones my mother has back in India. Every upper middle class Indian housewife, who has visited the United States or has relatives here, owns at least one of these Corelle plates. Did the same rule apply to Pakistani housewives, I wondered. If yes, then this would mean that back in Pakistan, Ayesha’s mother would now be considered middle class.

I asked Ayesha’s mother if she liked the United States and she nodded her head vigorously.
“Pakistan meh, bahooth gundhi hai,” she said. In Pakistan, it is very dirty.
Recalling India’s slums and could understand why a person would want to escape that life. Ayesha’s Brooklyn apartment, while overcrowded and ramshackle, was at least clean.

With familiar South Asian hospitality, Ayesha’s mother insisted that I sit down and do nothing while she and her daughters prepared lunch. A Danish butter cookie tin filled with dough and another tin of wheat flour appeared and she started to roll flat the dough into chapattis, the round wheaten bread common to Pakistan and North India. Ayesha cooked the bread over an open flame on the stove and when they were done, stacked them onto a plate and rubbed butter on them. Leftover curries — channa (chickpea), vegetable-and-potato, and beef — from the day before were heated up in the microwave. The curries joined a plate of cucumber slices sprinkled with lemon juice, and a bottle of mango pickle.

As the food was being prepared, I played with Ayesha’s brother, Usama, still in his pajamas at 1:30 p.m. Usama wordlessly showed me his plastic lizard, his helicopter with only one of its blades remaining, and his rubber monster mask. He showed me photos from his last birthday, his first in the United States. The photos had been taken in the apartment and showed Usama and his family, all dressed up in their finest, standing stiffly before the camera, all slightly out of focus and misaligned.

“Why doesn’t Aleena go to school, Aunty?”

Ayesha had removed her coat and sweater, as soon as she stepped into the apartment, losing bulk as she did so. Next she removed her headscarf, letting her hair loose. It was a shock to see Ayesha’s hair, so long that the ends brushed the top of her wide hips. And her face, now that it was no longer framed by her scarf, looked softer and less masculine.

Everything about Ayesha changed once she was home. All her hesitation dropped away and her oldest-child confidence came rushing to the fore. As she spoke to her mother about her day, her voice took on the assurance that comes from talking in your mother tongue to someone who understands you completely. There was even a hint of bossiness in her tone as she ordered her sister Aleena to wash the dishes and lay the table.

Aleena was as shy and withdrawn inside the apartment as she was outside. She hardly spoke, whether in English or Urdu. She could write “My name is Aleena” on her own. They were about the only English words she seemed to know. She once wrote in my notebook – “im 16 years olD. I live in BrooKLyn.” – but only after I spelt out each word for her. In ESL class, she never completed (let alone understood) any of the exercises she was assigned; her sister did them for her when the teacher wasn’t looking.

I had once asked Aleena if she wanted to attend school in America but she shook her head, whispered no, and smiled guiltily at me.

In the apartment, I broached the topic once more.

“Why isn’t Aleena going to school, Aunty?” I asked the girls’ mother in Hindi, fully expecting a harangue against the loose morals fostered by the American public school system. And what use would an education be for a girl who was going to become a housewife anyway? But she nodded her head vigorously at my question and replied that yes, Aleena should be going to school but didn’t want to.

Aleena smiled guiltily once again. Suddenly, the situation seemed more about a young girl frightened by the prospect of change, rather than overbearing parents refusing to give their daughter the benefit of an education.

Ayesha added that it was difficult to talk to the school officials and asked if I would go with her to the school one day.

For a split second I hesitated, worried once again about journalistic detachment and the dangers of getting too involved with my subject. But then I said, yes, of course I’d go.

Ayesha’s new computer takes pride of place in the central kitchen-cum-dining-cum-living-cum-bedroom. Each month, as the family makes a little bit more money, new appliances fill up the apartment: a blender, a DVD player, a printer.

“Why you no come COPO?”

That was when the tide started to turn. From my shadowing Ayesha, it became Ayesha hounding me. It was no longer clear who had chosen whom, and who was the project.

When I didn’t show up for ESL or computer class, Ayesha would call me on my cell phone to ask what had happened.

Over weekends, she would call me using her boyfriend Yusof’s cell phone. Yusof, a 20-something Pakistani janitor working in Manhattan, was Ayesha’s third boyfriend. She would tell her mother that she was going to work, then met up with Yusof instead. Sometimes he would take her on the Q to downtown Manhattan for an afternoon in the city.

Ayesha would call to tell me that she was in Manhattan with Yusof. There was an unspoken suggestion that I should meet up with the two of them. We never did but I knew that if I continued to visit her in Brooklyn, it would only be a matter of time before I would have to invite her to my Greenwich Village apartment in return. Then Ayesha would have gained entree into my world.

A few weeks later, Ayesha called me again to tell me that her family had bought a computer and asked for help setting it up. Unfortunately their “new” computer turned out to be not so new and had no accompanying software or dial-up service. But Ayesha wanted to email. Email Yusof, I imagined. I explained what she would need to do before that could happen.

Then Ayesha asked if I could help her sixth-grader brother with his homework. So I stayed a while longer, going through Mohammad’s assignments with him. As I finally prepared to leave, Ayesha asked me to come again soon to have tea with her family. I couldn’t say no.

Somehow or other, Ayesha had taken over our reporter-subject relationship and revised the terms of our engagement. She had made herself a fixture in my life rather than a once-a-week anthropological experiment. She wanted me to become her computer technician, interpreter of official letters, Manhattan tour guide, and teacher. As she’d said from the beginning: her best friend.

I started avoiding her calls. When she did catch me unawares, I made up excuses as to why I was no longer attending the computer and ESL classes or visiting her home.

Yusof started calling me too, even when Ayesha wasn’t with him. I avoided his calls as well. When he finally got through, he told me that he and Ayesha were no longer an item. She had been double-dating and he had broken up with her as a result.

The next time I talked with Ayesha, I learnt that her new boyfriend (of a month) was the owner of a CD shop in Midwood, a 30-something Pakistani named Firoz. Firoz was a catch but once again, her parents didn’t know about her latest boyfriend. When her parents went out, leaving Ayesha at home alone, she would sneak Firoz into the apartment. She gave Firoz my cell phone number and had him call me from his shop, inviting me to come over for free CDs. I pleaded overwork and lack of time to avoid going down.

Eventually, Ayesha got the message and stopped calling.

Looking back now, I understand that Ayesha was trying to use me to reach out and grab at her version of American life: freedom, fun, learning, and independence. To me, living in America meant looking like an American. But for all my designer clothes, I think Ayesha’s idea of America was better than mine.

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

South Asian Women’s Organizations in the United States
URL:http://www.sawnet.org/orgns/#Pakistan

Anju Mary Paul

Where young Americans are made: The 9 Ball Pool Club on Coney Island Avenue, Brooklyn.

“Immigrant” is a four-letter word in Brooklyn schools. Much worse than “nigger.”You can call your best friend a nigger if he says something stupid, but to call someone an immigrant is to brand him a misfit, an intruder, someone who doesn’t belong.

Brooklyn is 40 percent immigrant, according to the Newest New Yorkers report, published by New York City’s Department of City Planning in January. In Midwood, the Brooklyn neighborhood south of Prospect Park, most immigrants come from Russia, Ukraine and Pakistan. Each country is well-represented in the trash-talking that goes on at the 9 Ball Pool Club on Coney Island Avenue.

At the pool hall, the teenaged sons of all those Russian, Ukrainian and Pakistani immigrants mix with boys from everywhere else: Afghanistan, Puerto Rico, Palestine and Bangladesh. Catholics, Jews and Muslims. White, brown, and black. They start to drift in from 2 p.m. when Lasha, one of the hall’s owners, opens its doors. Usually they hang around the two San Francisco Rush 2049 video machines by the door, one kid racing his virtual car, others hanging over his shoulders and backseat driving. Lasha sits behind his counter in the far corner of the hall and listens to Russian radio. When the place fills up a little, he switches on the television suspended from a corner of the ceiling that seems to only play MTV music videos.

The All-Americans

On a blustery afternoon in January, Fat Cat and Rabbi Rooski are waiting for someone with money in his pockets to walk through the pool hall door.

Seventeen, born in the United States but with parents from Puerto Rico, Fat Cat has shoulder-length brown hair, a round face and a short, round body. His voice is like a girl’s — a soft and sibilant Hispanic whisper — but each of his eyebrows has two parallel notches shaved out of it — a well-known gang identifier. Fat Cat is an “O.G.” — an Original Gang-member — so you don’t want to try calling him a girl.

Rabbi Rooski is from Ukraine, tall with short-cropped blond hair below a backward-turned baseball cap, and a slightly pimply face. The Rabbi came to the United States nine years ago, when he was eight. His real name is Edward. “Ed-waard,” he tells me, stretching out his name in a put-on Russian accent. (He normally speaks strict New Yorker.) “My name is Ed-uaardo. I come from Uu-kraine: The mah-therland of mah-fia country.”

The two boys are looking for pool partners willing to share the cost of an hour at a table. A tall, dark-skinned boy opens the door to the hall and instantly, the Rabbi is on him. “You got any money?” he asks. The boy, startled, shakes his head and walks right out.

“I’ve got money!” 13-year-old Ahmad from Pakistan pipes up. Ahmed “talks too much shit” according to Fat Cat. He’s been playing San Francisco Rush with Geis but he’d rather shoot pool with the big boys and this afternoon, the big boys can’t afford to say no.

I chip in a couple of bucks as well and together, three cool teens and one 29-year-old reporter, the four of us have enough money — $8 — to pay Lasha for a rack of balls.

Geis who has been abandoned by Ahmed, walks over to watch our game. From Yemen, Geis arrived in the States when he was less than a year old. He’s 13, short for his age, and thin. Geis prefers Bob’s Store, a video arcade down the street on Newkirk Avenue to Lasha’s, because arcade games are a lot cheaper than pool. But Bob gets angry with kids who loiter around his place and shouts at them when they start to fool around. Lasha is a lot more relaxed about a bunch of kids hanging out at his pool hall not doing anything. He shouts at the kids to be careful with his sticks, or to stop playing when their time runs out, but they never listen.

Fat Cat (right) with his friend David outside the Newkirk Avenue subway station.

The Non-Americans

The boys call Lasha an immigrant. It doesn’t help that he wears tight-fitting, brown corduroy pants and a beige, long-sleeved, turtleneck t-shirt with a sleeveless, brown leather jacket on top. He is a heavy-built bear of a man, who arrived in the United States from Georgia three years ago and has yet to acquire an American fashion sense or accent.

“Can you be an American if you weren’t born here?” I ask the boys, just to be sure.

“No!” Fat Cat and Ahmad reply immediately in unison. “Then you’re an immigrant.” To them it’s an either/or situation — American or Immigrant — you can’t be both. (They all see themselves as American.)

“You can try,” suggests Geis, but his undertone sounds doubtful.

“Can you tell just by looking at someone if he’s an immigrant?”

“Yeah,” the boys say confidently. “It’s the way he looks, the way he speaks, and all that. His dress is different. His voice.” They point out Shanl who’s been standing on the periphery of our conversation, quietly listening.

“He’s an immigrant! For sure!” they shout, happy to have found another one.

“How can you tell?”

“Just look at him!”

Shanl retreats inside his jacket and his eyes dart between the boys and me. He wants to be an American — he tells me afterwards that he is one — but he’s wearing the wrong kind of clothes: a white-and-blue striped, cotton polo t-shirt underneath a black jacket with a fur-trimmed hood. His jeans are the wrong shade of blue and his black-and-white sneakers are a no-brand variety. The other boys are in North Face, Nike and Sean John. They talk with a Brooklyn accent: the softened T’s, the rounded vowels. Shanl, who arrived in the United States from Pakistan a year ago, has yet to master this style of talking. He rarely speaks but when he does, his voice betrays his recent arrival.

Kamal (bottom) with his “brothers” (left to right) Asif, Mike, Angel, Chris, and Louis in the basketball court of Kamal’s old primary school: PS217 in Midwood.

“So what if you was born here?”

An American teenager living in Midwood, Brooklyn needs to have seen the new Usher video and the latest Will Smith blockbuster. An American teenager needs to know the rudiments of pool and basketball and football. He must know who is in which gang — whether it’s the Crips, the Latin Kings, or that Afghani gang across the street. He’s got to know how to talk — not to parents or inquisitive female reporters — but to other kids. Talk slang, talk back, talk big. An American teenager needs to have a command of the various accents of his neighborhood so he can make fun of friends’ backgrounds. In Midwood, that means being able to fake a passable Russian accent and a bad Pakistani one.

But there are immigrant children who can do all this — who look and speak like Americans — but who refuse to call themselves American.

When Kamal Uddin, a short 17-year-old, walks into the pool hall, in his bright red jacket and his slicked down fringe, he makes it a point to shake the hand of all the boys there. He tells me each of their names and the schools they go to. He grabs Fat Cat round the neck and tells me that Puerto Rican Anthony is his cousin. Wasif, from Afghanistan, is his best friend. Then he leans close and whispers that he used to have a crush on Geis’ sister from Yemen. As soon as the words come out, he straightens and says it was rather she who had a crush on him. He says there are no cliques drawn along ethnic or racial lines in the mixed pool hall crowd. “There’s just like a brotherhood thing, you know?”

But when I ask Kamal if he thinks of himself as an American, he says no. He tells me how after September 11th, the kids in his school started calling him names because of his brown skin and his Muslim faith. They started calling him an immigrant. Kamal says he never answered back. But one day, his principal heard one of the kids teasing him in the hallway. “You know what?” the principal reprimanded the girl, “You’re not a citizen either. You’re an immigrant too. We’re all immigrants except the Native Americans.”

Since that day, Kamal has worn the badge of an immigrant with pride. And that too is a peculiarly American trait. “I was born in Bangladesh. That’s my country,” he tells me. “I can’t just come to another and say, ‘This is my country.’ Nobody can come and tell me that this is my country. So what if you was born here? You still have a background, you know? Those people who are born here, those are the people who say, ‘Yeah, I’m American straight up. American, born and raised.’ But come on, so what? You still have a background. We’re all immigrants. Speak the truth, we’re all immigrants.”

STORY INDEX

TOPICS > IMMIGRATION IN NEW YORK >

The Newest New Yorkers Report 2005
URL:  http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/census/nny.html

ORGANIZATIONS >

The Council of Peoples Organization
URL: http://www.copousa.org

Anju Mary Paul