Honor Aside

Chapter 7

I thought of running many times over the years, in different forms. That included thinking of suicide and thinking of somehow being financially independent and able to move out. My parents had always impressed upon us the importance of being able to rely on family, which required maintaining constant contact. I heard, "Only family helps you when things really go badly," many times growing up. I didn't fully believe them, but trusting others was difficult. They would tell us not to tell other people about what went on at home, as if it was a huge secret that they fought and made things miserable for all involved. The fighting would get worse in the fall and winter, when we were mostly stuck at home. Sometimes, they went weeks without directly talking to each other. I wanted out, constantly. I daydreamed about different people in different lives to try to escape. The environment at home could be tense, hostile, and volatile. Sometimes it was good, but even then I couldn't relax. There was still too much repression and surveillance.

I stopped wearing a hijab in public when I was 20. A decade of my life had been spent anxiously covering myself. At first, I wore the scarf loosely around my head when I left in the mornings. I would take off the scarf before I got on the train. Once, in winter, I had a scarf loosely on my head under my jacket hood during my commute. As I got off the train, I pulled off the hood and the scarf at the same time. The girl who had sat across from me cleared her throat to get my attention and glared at me all the way down the escalator to the street. A Muslim girl taking off her hijab when she gets to school or work is such a stereotype. We all heard about the story of Aqsa Parvez, who took off her hijab at school. The imams all denounced the violence, but they didn't even try to fix the problem. Religious people engage in top-down thinking. They start with a premise (that their religion must be correct) and work their way down to the details. Example: "Islam is a religion of peace. This is not what God wants us to do. This could not have been caused by religion. It was a dysfunctional family with a troubled father-daughter relationship, and many of those exist even outside of the Muslim community." I think in Muslim families with progressive values, women's freedom exists in spite of religion, not because of it. That's true of any religion or culture that prioritizes repression of free thought and sexuality in an abstract quest to "preserve the family unit." Eventually, my family figured out that I was serious about not wearing the hijab. I had complained for years about how having my hair up all the time gave me headaches, and how especially uncomfortable it was in summer. Every step along the way, I have had to fight and push and sometimes bitch and nag about things in order to have control over my future. And I try not to be bitter about it, even though having to do that can leave you in a lonely place. Most other people don't understand and they take simple things for granted. They have energy for things that you don't, because you've been pushing for the bare minimum they've been given. My parents would often tell me I should start covering my hair again, but I brushed it off.

I finished my master's degree just as the pandemic began. This was a degree that I thought I had wanted, but then again, my dad pushed me hard toward it and what happens is you take your own positive feeling toward what they want and feel relieved that you don't absolutely hate it, because you don't really have the option not to do it. My mom's constant "I'm praying for you, I'm praying that somehow you succeed," which was often sprinkled with a joking but deprecating, "You better be trying because otherwise your dad will marry you off," created anxiety more than anything. If I'd done something they didn't like, I would have had to fend off a rabidly anxious mother and an openly hostile father. I would have had to constantly justify what I was doing and why, and be made to feel like a burden. "I don't know why I even cook for you, you're not even doing what I want," etc. I already had enough of that when I did what they wanted.

I struggled through that degree, eventually becoming a teacher like my sister. I made many friends along the way, and with my therapist, I continued to learn how to open up to people and deal with the many stresses in my life. At the end of my first year, my parents tried to force me to get engaged to someone from the community who made good money and lived only a 7-hour flight away. My sister had just "gotten" married a few months before. It was time for me to go through the humiliating pre-marriage rituals, be paraded like a prize animal even though my mom would whisper to me that I looked terrible in some way or another. I tried to be assertive with my parents about how I would meet this guy and his family. My dad laughed at me as I spoke, calling me disrespectful, and my mom yelled at me for being too loud. I wasn't allowed to be louder than the elder to whom I was speaking, she would often say. I wanted to kick her teeth in sometimes. Antisocial loser. I got them to agree that we wouldn't meet the family until their son was home visiting for the holidays, and that we would meet them in a restaurant instead of their house. A couple of weeks later, we went to their house for dinner to meet just the parents. My dad had decided without telling me, and I was livid. They seemed nice enough, though. A few days after that, I met the son when his entire family came to our house for dinner. My parents kept telling me what I should say to him. I insisted on meeting with him alone for coffee once after these two dinners. My parents agreed. He seemed nice enough, but my parents expected me to decide whether I wanted to marry him after meeting the guy three times. They had graciously allowed me to meet him alone, and the next day, it was time to pay up and tell them what they wanted to hear.

I thought about it for a while but deep down, I felt that I should say no. I was 22, so I wasn't ready to even think about marriage and kids with a stranger, even if he was. I told my parents no. They were disappointed but passed on the message to the guy's parents. For the next couple of days, my dad stewed over how I'd stubbornly turned away the best offer I would likely ever get. He tried to talk to me, but I found ways to disappear. One day, he and my mom made me sit down with them. My dad started with the usual points: I was getting older, my looks would fade, I needed to stop being a child, and I should want to avoid burdening my parents with the shame of trying to marry off a daughter past her prime. I said no, over and over. They wouldn't let me leave. That's what my dad does. He needs you to stay put while he figures out how to wear you down. My mom would sometimes point out during such conversations that I was making my dad late for work, even if he had started and continued to argue with me. They would act like I was being such a pain. And I would freeze somewhere inside, in the part of me that remembered all the times my mom threatened to leave forever if I didn't try hard enough in elementary school. He made me so afraid of a future that already seemed bleak and hopeless. My parents both spoke as if I only had to say yes and they'd finally be happy with me. Eventually, I said yes because they wore me down. My parents were happy. I went to my room and cried for hours, calling a friend who told me that while it was a tough situation, no one had really forced me so I had to own up to my actions. I texted the guy and arranged to meet near my house. I told my mom I was getting groceries and explained to the guy over coffee that my parents were putting a lot of pressure on me and were happy that I'd said yes to this match. He said his parents didn't consider us engaged, which was a shock to me. Apparently, they thought I had agreed to get to know him and his family better. I told him I just wasn't ready to think about marriage, and that was that. The next day, his parents called mine and (at his direction) carefully explained that there was no pressure for an engagement. For months afterward, my parents hounded me about the details. Had I somehow communicated with the guy? I repeatedly told them I hadn't. Give an inch and I'd be lost. Eventually, they decided that my perceived flip-flopping about a possible engagement must have turned his family off. So it was my fault, in the end.

I went back to school miserable and depressed. My family had all betrayed me in the worst way, even those who stood by or simply couldn't be counted upon for tangible help outrunning such monstrous expectations. I had no one, except for friends who urged me to try to find an ally within my family or religious community. "Hang in there" sounds a lot like "hang there" sometimes, to a downtrodden mind. And worse, I knew that I had failed to protect myself in that "discussion." I had failed to give my dad the run-around, to waste his time, to make the talk as useless as possible. I made it my mission to learn how to be firm and strong regardless of how much turmoil churned within, for the next time something like that should happen. If I was depressed and alone, I still needed to win. And winning meant making those conversations as unproductive as I could. I thought about how I needed to react to the sort of news that was usually shared in those awful talks. It was usually something that would disturb me or make me very happy, and my dad would want to see my reaction and suppress it or use it to his advantage. A lack of reaction would trigger criticism and speculation on my parents' part. I had to react briefly and slightly, making it clear that what had transpired was either vaguely good or bad but not particularly pertinent to my life. Impersonal, detached, composed. I became good at it, too. Conversations about when I might want to meet a prospective suitor suddenly became about my dad's high blood pressure and his refusal to take medication for it. Or about the state of local infrastructure, or the economy. I couldn't push things too far, because my mom was usually there to tell me that I was being disrespectful. I saw what he did, applying pressure about the same issue over and over again, from different angles, until the person gave in because there was no way out. They demanded a show of respect and deference, so I couldn't leave whenever I wanted. That would have simply shown that I wasn't as mature as I had been acting, and then the conversation would be delayed a day or two until I could act appropriately. They were sharks anticipating blood, but I'd stopped cutting years before.

Making myself immune to his attempted destabilizations was the best thing I ever did. It taught me to instantly build mental ramparts around what might be a sad, dejected person and prepare for battle. I wouldn't feel good when I went back into my own room, but at least I would have taken control in a miserable situation. I liked the challenge sometimes. I did that until I didn't have to force myself to talk to my dad anymore. My mom always urged me to try to get along with him. She said he had my best interests in mind. I just couldn't let go and relax into trusting him.