Morton drives an inconspicuous silver minivan while tracking down criminals.

Constable Lisa Morton knocked on the door of an unassuming Calgary home after receiving the report of a break-and-enter. She was greeted by an elderly religious Jewish woman wearing a wig who, after allowing Morton to enter, informed her, “You’ll have coffee.”

“No, no thanks,” Morton replied. “I’ll just get to work.”

“Fine,” the woman said. “You’ll have tea.”

There’s no sense in arguing with an older woman who has made up her mind. While her cup of tea was being readied, Morton went to check out the window where the burglar got in. She wanted to use a fingerprinting dust that would stain the walls but checked first to make sure it was okay with the homeowner. The woman reacted as if the question were ridiculous.

“Whaddaya think, I can’t paint it?” she said.

Sure enough, the dust turned up the burglar’s sweaty handprint on the semi-gloss paint. The window he’d climbed through was so high that he’d had to hoist himself up to get in, leaving evidence behind. The burglar obviously didn’t know much about the Identification section of the Calgary Crime Scenes Unit, where Morton has worked for the last three years.

“He was toast,” Morton recalls.

She managed to lift four fingerprints from the inside of the windowsill. The prints turned out to be in the police database, since their owner had been involved in previous criminal activity. Morton recognized the name attached to the prints, and the burglar was arrested soon after.

But first, Morton followed her hostess into the kitchen where she drank her mandatory and well-deserved tea.

Morton gets ready to hit the road in search of a criminal.

All in a day’s work

Lisa Morton has been a Calgary police officer for 10 years, and has belonged to the Crime Scenes Unit for the last three.

Her day is dictated by the laptop, and by a police radio hooked up to her unmarked minivan. The radio squawks and crackles reports of recovered stolen cars and other crime scenes from officers, and from Morton’s partner, who drives a separate car.

The Identification section where Morton works is responsible for checking out murder scenes by examining body positioning, extrapolating the direction of bullets based on wounds and point of entry, and finding evidence that would say nothing to an untrained eye, but that, to her, speaks volumes.

“I’m really good at figuring out what caused certain types of blood splatter,” Morton says, conjuring a hypothetical crime scene on a nearby wall with a wave of her hands. “Like, for example, the guy had to be standing here and shot from this angle for his blood to spray this way.”

On a slow day, Morton will head to one of the police service’s giant storage lockers for recovered stolen cars, and will spend hours going over a car with a flashlight. She’s looking for evidence and fingerprints on metal, glass, and plastic so that a suspect can be connected to the theft, and charged.

It’s possible to drive past her, completely unaware that she’s a cop. The silver minivan that Morton drives makes it easy to mistake her for a soccer mom.

She dresses in plain clothes, which she finds more practical than her uniform because “I’m less likely to rip the back of my stretch pants when I’m crawling on my hands and knees.”

She wears no makeup, and has an outdoorsy, no-nonsense look about her. Darkening roots peek out of her ash-blonde hair, which falls down the back of her black Calgary Police windbreaker.

Morton keeps her van heater on low. It’s no wonder, since the woman seems to create enough heat of her own. She’s a talker who waves around her hands and arms to illustrate her every point. Her enthusiasm might get her mistaken for a rookie who has yet to become jaded. It’s hard to believe that this woman will ever become cynical about her job.

While Morton says, repeatedly, that she’s a cop before anything else, she relishes the more specialized nature of her current position with Ident (Identification section), puzzling out the who, what, where, when, and why of crime scenes.

“My boyfriend thinks I’m crazy,” she admits. “I’ll sit there for hours and try to puzzle out [a crime scene] and I think it’s fun.”

Morton dusts a beer can for fingerprints.

The glamour of garbage digging

The Calgary Police Crime Scene Unit is no CSI: Miami or CSI: New York. The TV shows’ high tech machinery identify the culprit and victim while officers sip on chai lattes and toss around theories. Their world is a far cry from real life.

Instead, the fingerprinting lab smells and looks more like a high school photography room, with a vinegar tang of chemicals, smudged, worn countertops, and cement floors.

Morton and her colleagues make do with the limited resources they have. Morton winks when explaining, “Both boys and girls use the same powder room here.” The “powder room” contains the dark magnetic fingerprint powder recognizable from TV, a couple of small feather dusters, a flashlight, a magnifying glass, and a garbage bag full of pop and beer cans.

Morton whips out a can from a garbage bin and proceeds to demonstrate how to dust for prints.

“You’d be amazed at the prints we can lift from cans, chip bags, chocolate bar wrappers,” she says. “Stuff people throw into the back of a car that they’ve stolen or are in while out committing another crime.”

The lab also includes two rooms with humidifiers that work in conjunction with certain chemicals, and are used to lift prints off special materials like cardboard or plastic.

One of the humidifiers is the size of a fridge. That’s overkill if you’re trying to lift a print from an object as small as a knife. For such smaller items, a police officer rigged up a second humidifier out of a cardboard box, cut a door in the side and used a pop can to hold the chemicals. “We use what’s handy,” Morton explains.

Next is the dry room. This room resembles a garage more than anything else. Any evidence that comes in wet or blood-soaked is stored in a locker in the dry room to ensure that it isn’t tampered with.

Morton smiles at a joke Bourassa made while relaxing in the Medical Examiner’s office.

Bodies, bone-saws, and ball-busters

A frequent stop for Morton is the Calgary medical examiner’s office, which suffers the indignity of being constantly mistaken for the post office across the street.

Out of all the offices on Morton’s daily rounds — including the personal desks at the police department downtown — the medical examiner’s looks the most welcoming, despite the dead body lying exposed on a gurney.

Morton plops herself down in the office space directly across from the corpse and, in full view of the autopsy equipment, starts talking with some of the medical examiners. Here, there are computers present, and all the equipment looks shiny and new. The facilities are brightly lit, warm, and smell like Glade air freshener.

But the fresh sweet smell fades when a round electric bone-saw (about the size of a fist and 10 times as loud as a dentist’s drill) starts whirring nearby, operated by one of the medical examiners. The hot, smoky smell of the drill on tooth and bone fills the air.

Morton and Kendra Bourassa, a technician, ignore the drill and remain seated in the office while chatting, their conversation shifting from the birth of a colleague’s baby to exactly how old you have to be before you’re considered a ‘cougar’ (an older woman who chases younger men). Bourassa ups the estrogen level in the room a notch and describes the time she had to castrate a body during an autopsy while a couple of male police officers watched.

“The guys said ‘we saw the way you handled that guy’s balls and we’re gonna call you the ball-buster,” Bourassa laughs.

A woman may not have to be a ball-buster to survive in law enforcement but it doesn’t hurt to be tough or have a sense of humor. Although the ratio of men to women in the medical examiner’s office is about equal, there are definitely more male cops in Ident than female. Morton says she has never been at a disadvantage.

It may help that Morton is physically imposing at 5’10” and about 210 pounds — a stature that counterbalances her bouncy nature. She’s an approachable police officer who also looks like she can take down the bad guys. Morton gleefully tells the tale of when she got a tip from a resident about a stolen car, back when she was a beat cop. Morton found the car along with the thief at a gas station, and confronted him alone.

“He sorta took a look at me and realized I was alone.”

Not at all threatened by a lone female police officer, the suspect allowed Morton to pat him down with his back turned to her and his hands on the hood of the car.

“As I was patting him down, I kept talking so he wouldn’t hear me reach for my cuffs. I had them on him so fast he had no idea what had happened.”

Morton cuffed the suspect in a single move, a technique all officers are taught during training. On the way to the police station, the suspect tried to strike up a conversation with her from the back seat.

“You’re a big girl, eh?” he asked Morton.

“Yup.”

“You work out?”

“Yeah, you kind of have to for my job.”

“You must be a farm girl.”

“Yup.” (Morton lives far from Calgary’s white-collar bustle with her boyfriend, another police officer. They own three horses and 10 cows.)

Thinking she wasn’t watching him, the suspect tried to take some drugs, including a capsule of hemp oil. The two proceeded to get into what Morton calls a “tussle,” ending with Morton’s foot stomped down on the suspect’s neck.

“The adrenaline is pumping and the stuff you’re capable of is pretty incredible,” Morton explains. “But you crash right after. I remember shaking because my energy dropped so low. So I had a Coke to bring it back up.”

Crimes and misdemeanors

Morton’s rural private life stands in sharp contrast to her career investigating city crime, but with her strong physical presence and her infectious enthusiasm, it all seems to work for her.

When she first started working as a cop, she and her partner answered a frantic call from a mother whose son was slashing his wrists. When they arrived at the scene, they both agreed that Morton should talk to the boy. The boy’s father had left home when he was young, and it was more likely he would respond to a woman’s authority.
  
After another suicide attempt and a second call from the mother, Morton went back to talk with the boy. This time the boy confided that his father, and a friend of the father’s, had sexually abused him when he went to visit. Based on the boy’s testimony, the father was arrested and charged.

Ten years later, Morton ran into the same boy after her partner pulled him over for speeding. Remembering, Morton shakes her head in wonder. “The fact that this kid was still alive was pretty amazing,” she recalls. “That I was able to reach him and have an impact on his life, wow.”

But she still gave the kid a ticket.

In The Fray Contributor

‘Hkun Pa-O’ is in Burmese lettering on the author’s bag.

By early evening, the vendors in Chiang Mai’s night bazaar are already chatting amongst themselves, their words and laughter floating back and forth between the crowds. Their covered metal stalls were wheeled out in the afternoon, and now they line both sides of the wide sidewalks; imprisoning us all in the still air of this makeshift corridor. The path is only two tourists wide, forcing sweaty strangers to squeeze and bump past each other. The confines of the stalls selling souvenir t-shirts, pillow covers, candle holders, and Diesel jeans extend for blocks, broken only occasionally by the glass fronts of air-conditioned shops like Boots and Swensen’s, or by the wide entrances leading to more shops within covered plazas.

My mission here is focused. I have perfected the look that says “save your breath, I’m not buying,” without being overly diffident or rude. At least, that’s what I like I think. I try to weave my way through with the grace of a seasoned expat, but am thwarted at every step. First a young tourist creates a bottleneck as she stands in the path, trying to squeeze in and out of a T-shirt one size too small. Next, a group of French people huddle around a calculator, haggling over the cost of a blanket. A compassionate stranger stands aside so I can pass in the other lane, but I soon become blocked by an old couple who refuse to walk single file. Shoulder to shoulder, they move at a snail’s pace. I think evil thoughts behind their backs.

Most of the shoppers pay no heed to the vendors, inching and pushing along, studying the goods, they don’t make eye contact until they are ready to bargain. Perhaps they are afraid of triggering an onslaught of sales tactics. But the vendors here are not so pushy. Some of them doze off in their chairs. They seem to be in their own world, but I can see that they notice the shoppers. I feel special when they remember me, and smile in recognition. I can hear their words following me, quiet comments and curious glances that fly ahead to catch someone else’s attention.

A man catches my eye and asks a now familiar question, “Where’d you get your bag?” The man is blind in one eye, and has a big smile; I’ve had this conversation with him more than once. “A gift from a student,” I tell him. He asks where I am from, what I do. Others who’ve stopped me before say nothing more, their curiosity guarded and their faces inscrutable.

I never ask questions in return. Simple questions could reveal topics unsafe for discussion, and I am reluctant to put them on the spot. Still, I know why my bag catches their eyes. It is like any other hill-tribe bag around here, but it is the Burmese lettering that people notice. It was a heartfelt farewell gift from Hkun Sai, a former student. The simple white letters spell out his clan name, “Pa-O.” From Burma’s Shan state, the Pa-O is one of the country’s smallest ethnic groups, and the one at the greatest risk of losing its culture to the encroachments of civil war. I don’t know how exactly the vendors can tell my bag is from Shan state, but they can. Some of the men volunteer with visible pride the information that Shan state is theirs. I wonder if they are disappointed when I tell them the bag was a gift, that I have never been to Burma.

The smiling vendor who always stops me is one of those men. He asks if I know about Shan state. When I answer yes, he gives a silent nod; I like to think it is one of approval. I am the one left with curiosity, about his life, his past, his injury, but I continue on my mission. I quickly cross the street, waving off the tuk-tuk drivers, pass a monotony of souvenirs. I head towards a glass case full of sparkling silver. There is a group of women in immaculate black burqas choosing their purchases with confidence. I peer around them politely, looking for Nang Nang’s familiar round face.

I met Nang Nang and Hkun Sai, classmates, when I first came to Chiang Mai last August. My arrival here was random and hurried. With a rapidly expiring Australian student visa, I had neither the funds nor the desire to return home. I had the general goal of building a career in human rights, particularly with refugees, but no job prospects. With two weeks to spare, I purchased a one way ticket to Thailand and sent an application off to the Burma Volunteers Program, hoping for a three month placement that would provide room and board. When they offered me a two-month paying gig at the School for Shan State Youth Nationalities, I didn’t have to think too hard. I set off for Chiang Mai, armed only with a contact number, and having never heard of Shan state.

The School for Shan State Nationalities Youth (SSSNY) was founded almost four years ago by Nang Charm Tong, a 24 year-old Shan woman and activist, who also founded the Shan Women’s Action Network (SWAN). The school provides post-secondary training to students of any ethnicity from Shan state, and they work to promote individuals’ right to an education.
Their location is not public, and for safety, the students are mainly confined to the school for the duration of the term.

There were 22 students when I arrived 7 months into the term. Most of them were younger than my own 26 years, and had names it took me a month to remember. Hkun Sai, at 33, was the oldest. He was the most outspoken about an individual’s right to their own culture and language. Although confident in his opinions, his inability to make a direct statement often borders on a stutter. He loves dancing, in the traditional style with dainty steps and graceful hand movements, even to his classmates’ bouncy pop music. He would sometimes express frustration that he wasn’t allowed to wear his traditional longyi, or Burmese style sarong; it might have aroused suspicion among the neighbors.

Nang Nang, 18, is ethnic Shan, and is one of three girls who went on to work in the night bazaar. She is cheerful, but often had to be coaxed to speak out in class. Like all the girls, though, she freely joined in arguments about women’s rights. Pan Pan, who is ethnic Karen, also went to work in the same shop. Recently turned 18, Pan Pan appears dainty and girly, but has no compunctions about stating her mind. Once when she spotted me in the night bazaar, she ran after me down the street to give me a hug and tell me she misses me so much she can’t stand it. Nu Lat, also Shan, was the youngest in the class, at 17. She’s confident, but not as gregarious as Pan Pan. She too went to work in the night bazaar, selling clothes.

Along a sidewalk of the night bazaar, vendors rest under cover from the rain.

When a refugee is not a refugee

Shan is the largest state in Burma, bordering the north of Thailand and the southwest of China. At least half of its 8 million people are Shan, but there are also Karen, Kachin, Mon, Wa and Lahu, and Pa-O. Its history as a nation is not well documented, and is often overshadowed by Burma’s. The state became a British protectorate in 1887, two years after Burma became a British colony. Between 1942 and 1945 the Japanese invaded with the aid of the Burma Independence Army. The British regained control after the Burmese forces switched sides. Shan leaders met with General Aung San of Burma and signed the Panglong Accord in 1947, whereby they agreed to join the Union of Burma when it gained independence the following year. In return, Shan state was given the right to secede after 10 years. After Aung San was assassinated, no government of Burma since has recognized the constitutional clause which grants Shan state the right to independence.

Burmese troops entered Shan state in 1952 and declared martial law, ostensibly to fight Chinese Kuomintang forces there. According to the Burmese junta, General Ne Win seized control of the government in 1962 amid the chaos of civil war. According to Shan sources, civil war broke out after Ne Win’s military staged their coup and tore up the constitution.  In the new constitution, there was no secession clause. Socialist Burma became a unitary state; Shan leaders and the royal family went into exile.

Since 1962, Shan state has been home base to no less than three major armed resistance forces at any given time, as well as smaller forces with shifting allegiances. With mergers and splinters, armies have changed names and changed leaders. At present, the Shan State Army (SSA) has formed the strongest resistance to the junta. It is one of the last groups to refuse a cease-fire agreement with the government.

In return, the people of Shan state have faced the greatest retaliation. Since 1996, more than 300,000 people have been forcibly relocated, their villages burned and surrounded by landmines or armed guards. Some of my students can no longer return to their homes. SWAN’s 2002 report, “License to Rape,” details over 175 incidents of rape and assault involving 625 girls and women. Perpetrated by Burmese forces over a 5-year period, 145 rapes were committed by commanding officers, and only one rapist was ever punished.

That the Junta uses forced labor is common knowledge. Firsthand accounts given to the Shan Human Rights Foundation (SHRF) reveal that men, women, and children alike are forced to work as military porters; they are often used as human minesweepers. The evidence points to a military campaign targeting civilians. With no where else to turn, people flee over the border to Thailand.

The Thai government limits refugee status to those who are “fleeing fighting.” The Shan are excluded from this definition. Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has stated that the Shan are “cousins” who can easily integrate into Thai society, and do not need humanitarian aid. Without legal rights or protection, they are left vulnerable. In April, 500 Shan were given temporary refuge inside the Thai border after their camp near an SSA base was shelled. In May, after the Thai Government announced a crackdown on illegal immigrants, the 500 were ordered to return. Although they were given a month to move, the army immediately began blockading their supplies coming from the Burmese side. Of the 500, half are orphans.

There are official refugee camps along the border for Karen and Karenni, which are supported by international non-governmental organizations. Groups like the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees cannot access the Shan because they have no legal recognition as “persons of concern.” Those Shan in unofficial camps along the border, estimated to be over 5,000, receive support and aid from grassroots organizations like SWAN, SHRF and the Shan State Army. The SHRF estimates there are more than 200,000 Shan seeking refuge in Thailand.

Although safer, life in Thailand is not easy. Many Shan work as fruit-pickers, often living with their families on the edges of the longan, mango, or strawberry orchards. If they are lucky, their children may attend classes taught by “barefoot teachers,” volunteers from NGOs or the SSA who teach secretly in the fields.  Although they can register as guest workers and obtain permits, this offers little protection from harsh working conditions. Agricultural workers are exposed to dangerous pesticides; factory workers are exposed to paint and chemical fumes. Many employers deduct the cost of the permit from wages already below minimum wage. Most families must live on much less than $100 a month, not enough for both food and rent in Thailand.

From a friend’s guest-house in the centre of Chiang Mai, we can see two families living on the open concrete floors of a building under construction. He’s been told the families are Thai, and will live in the subsidized housing when it is complete. I think they are Shan with no where else to go.

When a foreigner is not a foreigner

After their school term ended, many of my students returned to working for their own organizations, conducting research and human rights documentation. A few went on to further training. Of the three, Nang Nang is the only one who stayed at the night bazaar. Pan Pan, who loves languages and wants more than anything to study abroad, is now studying French. When I visit Nang Nang at work she is happy to see me, escaping from the dreary bored faces behind the counter to greet me with a hug and an exclamation of  “Ahh! Teacher!” There are a few other women working at the small shop front but I rarely see her chatting with them. A few of them are Shan as well. In my brief conversation with one girl, she plainly told me I’d gotten fat. Sometimes Nang Nang complains about gossips, but she doesn’t give details.

Nang Nang came to Thailand with her family when she was 16. When she first arrived, she worked briefly in construction and then at a restaurant. She says the job at the night bazaar is her favorite, but it hardly seems like much of a choice to me. As her teacher, I tried my best to convince her to attend a program for training in human rights education. She turned it down. Without any financial resources, she was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to find another job as good she has. Her pay is around $100 a month plus commission, working 70 hours a week. It’s a sum paltry by my standards, but fair in local terms. Most migrant workers get paid half as much for doing twice the work of their Thai counterparts and this employer, at least, pays everyone the same.

When I interview Nang Nang about work, Pong, also 18, comes along to help translate. Pong, a classmate, attended a journalism training course after the School for Shan State and now works as an environmental journalist. They both tell me that their favorite thing about the night bazaar is the people from many different countries. They prefer being around foreigners, they say, because Thai people often look down on them. Migrant workers have become a stepping stone for the quickly rising middle class here, providing cheap labor for construction booms, and servants for Thai homes.

For Pong, the worst thing about the night bazaar is the strange men who catcall her; for Nang Nang, it is the fear of immigration agents. They operate undercover, single men shopping on their own, and when they hear the telltale signs of an accent, they ask to see IDs and work permits. Nang Nang has an ID and a permit which she recently paid a month’s wages to obtain. But it makes no difference, she is still illegal. The law restricts migrant workers to menial service and construction work, retail is off limits.  

Nang Nang has yet to be carded, though, and it seems her employer has paid the more important “fee” which makes agents skip this shop. Allegedly, the unofficial fine when caught is 10,000 baht, which is more than $250. The official fine is three months in jail, a fine, and deportation. In an unofficial deportation, one is simply dropped on the other side of the border. More fees and bribes can be paid to get back across again.  In official deportations, individuals are put on a plane and handed over to Burmese government officials. Leaving Burma without authorization is a crime punishable by a year or more in prison.

Neither Nang Nang nor Pong can give me an idea of how many Shan are working at the night bazaar; they tell me that they hear “many many people speaking Burmese.” That everyone is forced to learn and use Burmese in school breeds resentment among many, and a general reluctance to speak it at all. Nonetheless, it is often the only common language available. Nang Nang and Pong, however, do not talk with the other workers they hear speaking Burmese. If there is a sense of solidarity and community among the Shan in Thailand, it is not aired in the public markets of Chiang Mai. Blending in and keeping a low profile is key to surviving as an illegal immigrant, and this is easiest done alone.

When Nang Nang and I chat in front of her work, she always holds my hand. She is more generous in her affection than I am. When I first visited her at work, she told me laughingly about her co-workers’ shock that I had actually come to see her. I know it gives her some satisfaction then, to be seen holding my hand. I haven’t told her that it also brings me no small amount of joy. We make a strange image, standing there, hands clasped, between a trinket shop and CD rack, the crowd swarming around us. We stand on two sides of a divide: tourist, educated, white on one side; local, uneducated, poor on the other. I can see people looking at us oddly, some trying harder to hide it than others.

What makes me smile, is knowing what they cannot see — that the divide between us is not so great. With my students, I am their teacher and their friend; never the farang, or foreigner, that I will always be in Thailand. We share a certain camaraderie, being outsiders in a foreign land. Truth be told, they will tell anyone who will listen about Shan state and Burma. They speak matter-of-factly about the tragedies that are occurring there. If they do not share their personal stories with me, it is probably because I have never asked. I don’t really want to know. I can’t change their pasts, and I think they can handle it better than I could. Of what is going on in their hearts, I get only tiny glimpses, in wistful faces when they tell me of their homes, or in eyes tearing up at the mention of a father.

Before I leave Nang Nang at work, she tells me that Nu Lat has returned from her trip to Bangkok. She worries about her, but is envious that Nu Lat travels so freely, with no apparent fear of being caught. I tell her about Pan Pan studying French, but she seems uninterested. I wonder if they’ve had a falling out, but don’t ask. I also mention Hkun Sai, who is now living at a refugee camp while he applies for resettlement in the United States. We hug good-bye, and I promise to see her again soon. She steps back behind the counter and I step back into the flow of tourists, looking for my first opportunity to escape between the stalls and into the open air of the street.

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

Shan Herald Agency for News
URL: http://www.shanland.org

Shan Women’s Action Network
URL: http://www.shanwomen.org

TOPICS > SHAN

The Shan in Thailand: A Case of Protection and Assistance Failure
Written 06/22/2004 by Refugees International
URL: http://www.refugeesinternational.org/content/article/detail/972/?mission=1724

In The Fray Contributor

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