by Zarqa Nawaz
“Excuse me,” said my mother. “Can my daughter play with you?”
Kathleen looked first at my mother and then at me. She was momentarily confused by the odd scene of a sad, petulant child wearing a summer dress with brown corduroy pants in the radiating heat, sporting braids that went out of style a hundred years ago, standing beside a large Pakistani woman wearing a long shirt and baggy pantaloons that ballooned like sails in the wind. My mother looked like a pirate and I her oppressed first mate. My stomach growled as I mouthed a silent prayer: God, please kill me now. But I lived, and Kathleen finally made up her mind.
“Sure, she can play,” said Kathleen and handed me the rope so I could take over. My mother went home. The joy of that moment made me temporarily forget that I was supposed to be miserable. In fact, Kathleen was also happy to be released from the laborious chore of turning the rope. Until a girl tripped, the rope turners weren’t allowed back into the game, and today nobody was falling down. By a bizarre turn of events, both of us had been freed from our bondage.
From that day forward, I always played jump rope with the popular girls. Turns out that skipping rope on the playground was a meritocracy, so as long as my wrists still worked, I was allowed into their circle, even if I was dressed for the wrong century. Apparently, all I had to do was ask. And yes, I was thankful to God, who clearly worked in mysterious ways.
The next week, as my mother packed my sandwich, I looked at her.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Do you want tuna instead of peanut butter?”
“Could you put the chicken drumsticks back into my lunch?” I asked. “I kinda miss them.”
Hairy Legs
My eight-year-old brother Muzammal took our baby brother Muddaththir, both named because our parents couldn’t think of longer or more unpronounceable names, into the washroom and locked the door. He took out my father’s razor and drew it over Dutch’s* face. The blade immediately cut his cheek, and there was blood and screaming everywhere.
My poor mother couldn’t understand what had happened until she finally got the bathroom door open.
“What are you doing?” she shrieked.
“Shaving Dutch,” said Muzammal, as if it were the most logical thing in the world.
I hid because I didn’t want the blame to fall where it should have—on my freshly shaved legs.
Shaving my legs had required the stealth and persistence of a trained spy. In our house, my father’s face was the only thing that was respectably shaved. My mother had grown up in Islamabad, Pakistan, where gym class didn’t exist. She and her friends skipped rope during their breaks for exercise, legs and arms safely covered by their cotton shalwar kameez. My mother had never seen anyone in shorts until she came to Canada. Good Muslims didn’t wear such scantily revealing clothes, although if it was a requirement for this mysterious gym class, she’d relent. The shorts weren’t an issue for me. It was what they revealed: hairy legs. My mother had been taught that shaving legs was un-Islamic. It was forbidden to change God’s creation. But God had made her hairless, so it was easy for her to take the moral high ground. In our home, Muslims were simply not leg-shavers. Only white people did things like that, which only reinforced my mother’s belief that it was a sin. So I went undercover.
My mother would have been a feminist’s dream with her belief that au naturel was better. But the students in Fallingdale Elementary School’s fifth-grade gym class were not well versed in Gloria Steinem.
“The kids in gym class stare at me,” I pleaded.
“Ignore them,” she said.
But they wouldn’t ignore me, because the ugly truth was that, when it came to hair, I was my father’s daughter.
Once, as a young man living in England, my father went swimming in the local pool. As he waded in, the curly, thick, matted black hair that covered his entire body expanded and rose in the water, and the children swimming with him screamed and ran out. They thought a bear had just fallen into the pool.
I inherited that hairy gene, and I didn’t need a swimming pool to be mistaken for something that belonged in a zoo. The hair on my legs was long, thick and black. I complained bitterly to my mother—it was her fault that this hairy gene afflicted me.
“You had an arranged marriage. Why didn’t you ask the matchmaker to pull up Daddy’s pant leg?”
“Your father had a good job,” replied my mother. “That’s all the matchmaker was interested in.”
Stupid matchmaker.
The quotient of brown kids had now doubled to two. And we were both just as hairy. My Sikh friend Jasminder and I compared our legs and commiserated with each other. Neither of our mothers was a leg-shaver.
“Someone told me once that tarantulas are the Marilyn Monroes of the insect world,” said Jas.
“No one’s mistaking me for Marilyn Monroe,” I replied sadly.
I got more and more nervous about gym class, making up every excuse to get out of it. I had the flu, I had cramps, I had cramps with the flu. The poor gym teachers had no idea what was wrong with me—possibly Ebola?—but it seemed to be contagious: Jas had it too. I had no idea how to tell them that I was too embarrassed to appear in the gym uniform.
Desperate, Jas and I scoured our school rules for an exception to the uniform. And there, like a mirage in the desert, floated the word that would save us: leotards. Jas and I locked eyes; our torment was over. I marched straight home after school and convinced my father to buy me black tights and a one-piece bodysuit to wear on top.
The wait for gym class was agony, but the time finally arrived after lunch. While the other girls changed out in the open, I hid in a bathroom cubicle so my furry legs wouldn’t attract the disbelieving gaze of my classmates. After all the other girls, including Jas, had filed out into the gym, I emerged from my creaky stall like a butterfly emerging from her cocoon. Examining myself in the mirror, I was a triumph. Not a hair in sight. I tied up my laces and trotted out to the gym floor, ready to be newly embraced by my classmates.
The entire class came to a standstill as the other students took me in. I was tall and gangly for my age. If my father had looked like a bear, I looked like a giant black spider wearing shiny white gym shoes.
I heard a snicker. Someone whistled. In a panic, my eyes desperately searched for Jas, who was surely also transformed into a spider. When I found her, she was looking at me just as astonished as the others. Her oversized T-shirt fell gently over her black leggings. I was a fool. A spandex-wrapped fool.
After this final gym-class humiliation, I finally broke down and snuck into my parents’ bathroom to find my father’s razor. He had the old-fashioned kind, where you had to unscrew the metal top, insert a double-edged blade and reassemble. I locked the door. I didn’t know anything about using a razor or the usefulness of shaving cream. So I hacked at my dry legs like I was hacking my way through a forest with a butter knife. It was time-consuming and painful, but it worked. For the first time in my life, I had finally rid myself of the dreaded hair.
My father must have wondered why his razor was always dull, but neither he nor my mother was any the wiser. With two boys under nine, my parents weren’t paying attention to me—but Muzammal was. Watching my comings and goings with my father’s razor made him curious about shaving, and what better way to find out how razors work than to shave our one-year-old baby brother?
After Dutch was stitched up at the emergency room and brought home, my father decided to hide the razor blades and my mother made sure we went to the mosque regularly. Clearly something strange was going on with their kids, and they couldn’t figure out what. I had avoided my parents’ wrath, but now I had another problem. All the hair grew back on my legs.
One day during my Qur’an study class, I asked my teacher, Sister Maryam, the question that was tormenting me. After all, I didn’t want to burn in hell because I shaved my legs, a sin that surely must have been up there with murder and eating bacon, but gym class was hell on earth.
“Is it un-
Islamic to shave your legs?” I asked.
“Let me see your legs,” she asked. I pulled up my pants.
“For you, it might be un-Islamic if you didn’t do something about that.”
I told her my sad razor-blade story. She was appalled I had even thought about becoming a leg-shaver.
“It makes the hair grow back thicker,” she said.
I was horrified. That was possible?
“You have to rip the hair out from the root, and eventually it will never come back.”
Ripping hair out from the root was a concept that I’d never heard of before. It sounded painful. But less painful than the stares that I was getting in gym class.
Sister Maryam taught me how to make halawa. It took a lot of practice and patience. I almost gave up, but life was too short and my hair was too long. Once I mastered the recipe (see page 241), I never looked back.
I would boil water, sugar and lemon juice until it turned into a sticky, golden concoction. I would roll it into a ball, apply it to my legs, then rip the halawa off. Sometimes I didn’t wait for the halawa to cool, which was a huge mistake because it was like applying napalm to your legs. It burned. Not deterred, I boiled halawa like my life depended on it.
My mother watched incredulously but couldn’t complain. In her mind, Arabs trumped South Asians when it came to Islam, since Arabs speak Arabic, the language of the Qur’an. And since Arabs, like Sister Maryam, are manic about hair removal, hair removal couldn’t be un-Islamic. Going to the mosque had finally paid off. Hair removal had gone from sin to religious requirement. My mother must have wondered at how Islam seemed to evolve when you leave your home country.
I looked like a leopard with random tufts of hair that I missed on my legs, but the halawa staved off humiliation. I joined the track team, my teammates overlooked my strange, patchy appearance, and we broke the school record in the hundred-metre relay.
The doorknobs in the house were always sticky. But my parents tolerated it. My father’s razors were no longer dull and no one was going to the emergency room.
* Even as his big sister, I couldn’t say Muddaththir, so I called him Dutch for short.
Hijab
Teenage rebellion is a rite of passage. Throwing away the conventions with which our parents raised us helps us define who we are. Around the time I turned thirteen, this involved throwing away my hair. Short hair was part of my plan to burn and pillage my parents’ world view. But I needed to recruit some outside help.
“How short do you want it?” asked Aunty Firoza as she appraised the black waves that fell past my waist all the way to my butt.
“Cut it all off,” I said.
“That’s pretty dramatic.”
“Exactly.”
“How do your parents feel about this?” asked Aunty Firoza, as she slowly worked the blades of my mother’s giant sewing scissors through my hair.
“They’re fine,” I said. It was technically a lie. My mother had resigned herself to my decision but refused to wield the scissors, so I’d had to ask her friend. My father was definitely opposed. Whenever I mentioned it, he’d pull out the Qur’an and say it was forbidden. All he could point to, though, was a verse about following the Prophet. My father said that the Prophet Muhammad would not approve and therefore he didn’t approve, but really I think he didn’t approve and was hoping the Prophet would back him up. In my father’s world, a woman’s hair was her glory. In my world, it was a pain in the ass.
“Why can’t I cut my hair?” I had asked my mother.
“Only modern Muslims do things like that,” she said.
It took me years to understand that not being “modern” didn’t mean that we couldn’t use electricity or drive a motorized vehicle. What it meant was we were going to look like the Amish but still drive cars, as long as it was to the mosque and not the liquor store. “Modern” Muslims acted like white people—had short hair, wore miniskirts and, the biggest heresy of all, talked to boys on the phone.
There was no Islamic prohibition against cutting hair, but I knew I was facing the last remnant of my parents’ old-world mentality. I’d had enough. I wanted a rebellion for my head. I decided my parents were terrible Muslims—what other explanation was there for people who invoked non-existent verses of the Qur’an to prop up arbitrary rules? And so the hair had to go, partly because I was done with looking like I belonged on Little House on the Prairie but mostly because it would drive my parents crazy.
When Aunty Firoza finished with the scissors, I was left with a bad but serviceable bob. The last time my hair had been this short, I was five. I felt totally liberated. I had won another battle against my parents’ restrictive lifestyle. My father was livid, but he couldn’t yell at another man’s wife. Plus he didn’t have a religious leg to stand on. Aunty Firoza avoided my father’s gaze and quickly went home. My mother consoled him: They had come to a new land; things had to change.
But to make sure they didn’t change too much, my parents sent Muzammal and me to Muslim camp every summer.
This camp was full of city-slicker modern Muslims with short haircuts and tight jeans, while my brother and I were the equivalent of backward, illiterate village Muslims. It was just like white-people camp except everyone was brown. My parents clearly didn’t know what was going on, and the two of us were thrilled and kept our mouths shut. Muslim summer camp was an escape from my parents, and they probably felt the same about me.
When I went to camp that summer, triumphant with my short hair, I noticed the new person on staff. She was an Egyptian woman hired to be the camp doctor. She was beautiful and luminous. But she was different: Her hair was neatly covered with a headscarf, which she called a hijab.
I had never heard of a hijab. Whenever my father drove my brother and I to the mosque, I covered my hair with a flimsy piece of cloth that sat halfway off my head. I would whip it off as soon as we drove away from the mosque and never thought it could have a name. My aunts in Pakistan wore the burqa, and my mother wore a dupatta, which is a chiffon-like cloth that she would wear loosely over her head, Benazir Bhutto–style, during prayers. Even modern Muslim women placed paper napkins on their head when they heard Arabic spoken at a community potluck.
The hijab was a new, modern way of being modest. It came with very strict rules: No hair, no neck and no ears could show at all. Even my supposedly conservative Muslim mother didn’t cover her hair like that. Clearly I had not been guided correctly.
The doctor started to complain to the camp organizers that we weren’t being taught the correct way of dressing in Islam. “Why are all the girls wearing T-shirts and jeans?”
For me, dressing as a Muslim girl just meant wearing long, baggy tops and pants. I wasn’t following any specific rules other than looking unfashionably bad. So this hijab-wearing camp doctor was a revelation. There might be a way to be even more Muslim than my parents. It was intriguing. The hijab was not like the dupatta, sliding on and off according to the whims of the weather or the wearer. The hijab was like a uniform, attached to your head with pins and ties. Gale-force winds could not tear the hijab off a devout woman’s head.
After camp that summer, there was a buzz about hijabs in our mosque. A friend of mine, Aliya, decided to wear hijab full-time. This meant she would wear it to public school, and even to the mall, where everyone would be able to see her. Two weeks later, Sameena decided to wear it full-time as well. Hijab was a virus spreading among the girls. The lectures that we attended at the mosque were about the tyranny of the beauty industry and how Islam freed us by giving us back our dignity.
“A woman’s body should be protected from the indecent gaze of a man,” droned the lecturers.
A man’s indecent gaze had never lingered upon me, but still, the message made sense on a theoretical level.
Some Muslim man—always a man—would say things like, “You wouldn’t take a diamond necklace through Harlem unprotected, and a woman is more precious than a diamond, so why should she go uncovered?”
Somehow the racist, sexist perfection of this statement rang true in my unsuspicious, malleable young mind. I was more precious than a diamond! My parents had never compared me to jewellery, the nerve! There was even a verse in the Bible that said women should cover their hair. Every picture of Mary, the mother of Jesus, showed her hair covered. Nuns covered. Hijab was in the air.
But the best thing about hijab was that I had discovered it on my own—my parents had nothing to do with it, which meant that I could beat them at their own game: religion. I wanted so desperately to be different from them. Hijab was the answer. Some people think hijab is used to oppress people. It’s true. I used it to oppress my parents.
“I’m wearing a hijab to school,” I told my parents as I wrapped a sky-blue piece of georgette around my head, proud of my über-religious state.
They were stunned at first, but my father decided wearing hijab would mean I’d have more time to devote to school and not boys, which was fine by him. Where he got the idea that I was devoting any time to boys was beyond me, and I was disappointed by his lack of outrage. My mother reacted in a way I could have never predicted. She stared gape-mouthed at my clumsily wrapped blue head. How could she be dressed less modestly then her daughter? She had no choice but to wear hijab as well. I was furious—the hijab was my thing. How dare my mother adopt it as her own? But my anger quickly turned into that other primary teenage emotion: humiliation. My mother had always worn an elegant shalwar kameez with a diaphanous dupatta. She looked different from the other mothers, but beautiful in her own way. Unfortunately, she had no idea how to wear a hijab. Her severe cotton headscarf made her head resemble a tuna can. I was embarrassed to be seen with her in the mall.
