Standing Alone Read Free Page B

hold it in. We were all praying and praying!” When my brother survived, I prayed in relief and vowed never to curse anyone. “I was afraid we would lose bhaya [the Urdu honorific for “older brother”]! Thank you so much God for teaching me not to say such bad things and for saving bhaya!” So much is said about Catholic and Jewish guilt, but Muslim culture has its own guilt trips, and I absorbed all the messages that told me my sins could cause damnation. To counter these messages, I looked for inspiration in other sources.
    From early on I found strength in the stories of women who challenged tradition. I talked in my journal about Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women , a tale of strong women, as “my most favorite book.”
    At many different times in my life, I also felt my culture trying to confine me and define me. From that early age, I could feel the difference between circumstances that were oppressive and those that weren’t. I enjoyed a gathering one night celebrating the Hindu holiday of Diwali, or a festival of lights. “Us girls had relay races in the hall and arm wrestling (I beat them all). . . . It was fun all in all.” I continued: “The next night . . . there was an Islamic association party. It stunk! The ladies had to go up to a little efficiency apt. (owned by one of the members) because they weren’t to sit with men. There were like 15 people in one dinky room! The men carried the food up and oh! it was as if we were in jail!”
    As I entered into adulthood I began confronting the boundaries in my life, accepting them at times and daring to challenge them at other times. My father had his own struggles reconciling his culture with his beliefs, but as a scientist he firmly believed in having an open mind and pursuing intellectual inquiry, and he encouraged me to develop these attributes. My father crossed state borders to drive me to New York City so that I could do a summer internship at Harper’s magazine, but he was also crossing a much more profound kind of line: the cultural tradition that a daughter didn’t leave her father’s home except to go to her husband’s house.
    Indeed, to respect these traditions, my parents told me to apply to only my hometown school of West Virginia University, but even there I continued resisting traditional Muslim boundaries. At the age of eighteen, I kissed a man for the first time, and he wasn’t my husband. In the study carrels in a building called Colson Hall, our shoes slipped off during an all-night study session, his toes crossed the unspoken physical boundarythat my culture and religion had put around me, and he dared to touch my bare feet. The next year I crossed the most sacred of boundaries of a woman’s body and consummated my love, but it wasn’t my wedding night. I wept in confusion over the truths of my physical and emotional urgings and the expectations of my religion and tradition.
    I broke my parents’ hearts with my social trespasses. I tried to live a double life, but they knew enough to be disappointed. Still, my parents did not remain captive to their cultural traditions, because higher values overrode their fears, and they allowed me to do my graduate work at American University in Washington, D.C. By doing so they helped me find economic opportunity and professional status. I worked for twelve years as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal beginning in 1988, flying into new cities, diving into rental cars, and navigating my way to interview CEOs and senators. I spent my young adulthood trying to understand the amalgamation of identities within me.
    In 2000 I took a leave from the Journal and traveled alone to India to report and write a book. If my Indian world is divided into a “North” that includes the West and a “South” that includes the East, I am a daughter of the South, but a woman of the North. I went to India as an author to research