Laughing All the Way to the Mosque

by Zarqa Nawaz

  It was as close as my mother had ever come to understanding me.

  “Journalism school suits you,” she said. “You’re much happier there than when you were doing your BSc.”

  “Is the one-eyed fisherman accountant going to wait?”

  “Oh, he got married.”

  “That was fast,” I said, relieved.

  “Not really,” said my mother. “The good ones always go quickly.”

  “Well, there’s always more fish in the sea,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.

  “Remember, a career can’t replace companionship,” she said as she added some cumin to the sizzling onions. “I just pray that I can get you married before I die.”

  Always the tragic backdrop.

  I passed editing the second time around and thrived in journalism school. I had never really explored my creative side before. My grades suddenly went from Cs to As. And I actually won an award for one of my stories.

  When I told the head of the journalism department, he said, “Good. Now we don’t have to kick you out of journalism school.”

  I felt like I had dodged the bullet, and then I saw the instructor who had interviewed me for admission.

  “I remember you,” he said. “I heard you’re doing really well.”

  “Thanks,” I replied, a little nervous.

  “By the way, I found out about Norplant,” he said.

  “Oh, did you start dating a younger woman?”

  “No, I have a daughter who’s on it,” he said. “She had a pretty good laugh when I told her about this ‘new’ discovery of yours. She’s had it in her arm for about a year.”

  “Sorry about that,” I said sheepishly. “I didn’t know how else to impress you. I never had a chance to interview the prime minister when I was growing up.”

  “You really did want to be a doctor, didn’t you?”

  “More than anything else in the world,” I replied. “But when that didn’t work out, my mother got fixated on getting me married. She’s a little old-fashioned. She believes that marriage is the most important thing in your life. I think she’s insane.”

  “No, your mother’s right,” said the professor. “My wife is the reason my life was worth living. Don’t discount your mother’s advice.”

  “So you’re not angry with me for lying?”

  “Half of journalism is bullshitting to get stories,” he said. “You need to be creative in this business to get ahead.”

  “Thanks for not ratting me out,” I replied.

  “No problem, but I do have one favour to ask.”

  “What’s that?” I said with trepidation.

  “I’m looking to start dating again. What’s your mother’s number?”

  I looked aghast. “She doesn’t date white men.”

  “I’m sure I could change her mind.”

  “Plus you’d have to convert and become Muslim.”

  “It’s an interesting faith,” he said. “I’m agnostic but I’m willing to give Islam a try. Could I call her?”

  “She’s actually not a widow,” I said. “My parents have been married for over twenty years, more or less happily. I don’t think my dad would take a call from you well. And my mother even less so. She doesn’t consider white people marriage material. No offence.”

  “None taken,” he said. “I was just pulling your leg. I figure now we’re even for the Norplant hoax. So how are you liking journalism?”

  “I love it. I didn’t think I had a future until now.”

  “It’s the most exciting career in the world, isn’t it?”

  “Like fishnet stockings,” I said.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  Meeting Sami

  Muzammal wanted to marry Suzanne. My brother might as well have told my parents that he wanted to marry a lemur. It probably would have made more sense to them.

  “Birds of a feather stick together,” said my father, stunned.

  “But we’re different birds from you guys,” Muzammal replied.

  In my parents’ universe, there had never been a marriage outside of our extended Punjabi tribe. For my parents, tribal marriages were sacred. Suzanne’s Scottish background, although tribal in its own way, didn’t register for my parents. Nevertheless, the Scottish and Punjabi highlands were destined to mesh, come hell or high water. In our case, hell first.

  My mother immediately recognized a strategic opportunity. For years she had been wringing her hands watching my singular obsession with becoming the next Barbara Walters. In her eyes, I wasn’t taking her marriage concerns seriously enough. She needed an ally, and who better than Muzammal?

  “Your sister must be married first. You know that.”

  He didn’t know that.

  In Pakistan, a sister always marries before a brother, even if he’s older, otherwise rumours spread throughout the village. The sister’s damaged goods. She must have six toes on one foot or a horribly hairy back or, perhaps worse, the genetic malady of speaking her mind.

  “But we live in Oakville, not Faisalabad. No one thinks that way anymore,” argued Muzammal.

  No one except my mother and all her friends, and that was enough. The worst thing for a Pakistani mother was a single daughter, so she tied all our fates together. Until I got married, no one else could get married to anyone, brown or white.

  When she made her decision, even my younger brother, Muddaththir, who was just turning eighteen, started to worry.

  “Am I going to have to wait too?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said my mother.

  “But she might take forever to unload,” he said. “She’s kind of weird.”

  “There’s a man out there who will believe that’s an attractive quality,” said my mother. “Find him.”

  Muzammal was loyal and good and wouldn’t disobey my parents. I was now cornered by a traditional mother and two desperate single brothers.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to get married. I did. The idea of a husband who loved me for exactly who I was appealed to me. I’d meet him while working as a journalist and win him over with my goofy personality. But I was just one year out of journalism school and needed to gain experience by working in a regional location—none of the Toronto radio stations would even consider my resumé for full-time work. The catch-22 was that my mother wouldn’t let me leave home till I got married.

  “Ummi, what am I supposed to tell prospective employers?” I said, frustrated at her obstinacy.

  “Ask them if they know any good Muslim men,” said my mother. Her fear was that I’d get so obsessed with my career that I’d never try to find a partner. So she wouldn’t let me have one without the other.

  “You need to try flirting.” Coming from my mother, this was rich. My mom insisted that flirting was forbidden in Islam, a sin on par with rape, murder and pillaging. I’d never been able to find that verse in the Qur’an, but my mother insisted you had to read between the lines. If she was suggesting flirting, I knew she was getting incredibly desperate.

  “And smiling,” she said. “Work on your small talk.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Ask them where they buy their prayer mats from,” she said.

  Getting advice about seduction from a mother who had an arranged marriage seemed counterintuitive. Both my parents firmly believed an arranged marriage was why they were still together. “Dating is the reason relationships fall apart,” she’d tell me. “All this talking and getting to know each other in a love marriage. And what happens? You’re still disappointed. If you have an arranged marriage, you don’t call it disappointment, you call it a husband.”

  “How could you marry someone you never saw before?” I asked her. It just boggled my mind.

  “That’s the way things were back then,” she said. “Love comes afterwards.”

  She had a point. They had been together for twenty-five years.

  “Why can’t love come first?” I asked.

  “White people fall in love
beforehand,” said my mother, “and they still get divorced. So one method isn’t superior to the other.” I had a suspicion that she thought her method was superior. For sure it was less of a hassle for the parents when the kids had no say in their marriage partners.

  I couldn’t get a real job, Muzammal couldn’t get married, and my mother couldn’t get any sleep. Barbara Walters never had this problem.

  My parents feverishly worked their network of family friends to find the perfect husband. They insisted he come from a narrow tribal area of Pakistan known as the Punjab. They wanted to cement ties back home, and I was their mortar. My parents hit a rich vein of Punjabi men who lived in the United States, were completing PhDs and needed landed immigrant status with a Canadian bride attached to it. I had morphed into a citizenship with benefits.

  One day I came home from CBC, where I was working on a freelance radio project, and slumped onto a chair in the kitchen. There were samosas on the table, an unexpected treat. As I snatched one, I noticed my mother looking me up and down.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Maybe you should put on some nice clothes,” said my mother.

  “To eat samosas? They don’t really care how I look.”

  She shifted awkwardly in her seat.

  “There’s a nice man sitting in the living room.”

  “In the living room? Now?” This was clearly an ambush. I jumped to my feet, looking for an exit.

  “He’s the son of my father’s brother’s nephew’s friend from college,” said my mother. “He’s here for some tea.” She shoved a tray into my hands and pushed me out to the living room. Clearly my outfit was good enough.

  Sitting on the brown floral couch was a brown guy dressed in a black suit who was obviously just as nervous as I was. I smiled at him awkwardly as I poured him some tea. We sat silently sipping together. It was excruciating.

  “So, where do you buy your prayer mats?”

  “Pakistan,” he said. “Isn’t that where everyone gets them?”

  I smiled. I was flirting!

  “What did you study?” he asked.

  “Journalism,” I replied.

  “That’s nice. So your parents told you about the condition?” he asked, munching nervously on a samosa.

  “What condition?”

  “I have to live in Pakistan for a few years after I finish my PhD.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?” I asked, not making the connection.

  “Of course you’d have to live in Karachi too.”

  Oh.

  I tried to imagine working for the Karachi Herald. It might count as a regional paper, but I wasn’t sure Barbara would approve.

  As I listened to the awkward buzz of the heating vent, I wondered if we had any chemistry. Maybe he was perfect for me but I didn’t know it. Marriage could end so many of my problems in one fell swoop. I went into the kitchen and told my mother I thought I could make it work. After all, she had had to move out of the country she loved, so why not me? She was thrilled. I went back into the living room with a tray of cookies.

  “So you don’t have a problem with moving to Pakistan?”

  “We go where God sends us,” I said.

  “I don’t really believe in God,” he replied.

  Wait a minute.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean, Islam is an old and venerated faith. But I prefer science over religion.”

  I excused myself, went to the kitchen and told my mother I was wrong. He wasn’t the one after all. I couldn’t marry him.

  “Why not?” said my mother. “You two were getting along so well.”

  “He doesn’t believe in God,” I replied. My mother went quiet. Although we both had radically different opinions on faith, we finally intersected on one issue.

  “Fine,” said my mother with difficulty. “At the very least, he has to believe in a higher power. We’ll vet them more carefully next time. Who knew that Muslims could also be atheists?”

  So began an endless blur of young Pakistani men studying at American schools. They came so frequently and left so quickly that I refused to learn their names and would refer to them only by their state of origin. Ohio didn’t want children. Wisconsin wasn’t willing to have a wife who worked. Louisiana didn’t seem like he wanted to work himself. Utah came highly recommended through my mother’s friend’s halal butcher’s second cousin but showed up smelling distinctly of whiskey.

  Every so often I would get my hopes up. California was sitting in the living room when I walked in one Saturday afternoon. He was cute, like a brown Richard Marx. He had grown up in Pakistan and was doing a PhD in a science-related field at Stanford. He told me a story about how I had visited Pakistan when I was five years old and wound up in a photograph with his elder brother, who had just graduated from high school. That photo hung in their family home.

  “I’ve been staring at you my entire life,” said Adil.

  I was smitten in all of five minutes. It was obviously a sign from God. I was being rewarded for having taken the scenic route through America’s heartland with stoic grace. Now a romantic, good-looking man was being handed to me on a silver platter.

  We talked about different subjects, and then we came to religion.

  “I believe in the Qur’an but not the hadith,” he said. Not again.

  “But you have to believe in the hadith,” I said, confused.

  “I don’t,” he said. “They turn faith into endless rules.”

  I liked those rules. They had given me structure. They had helped me torture my parents.

  “That’s crazy,” I said. “You can’t do that.”

  Apparently he could.

  After California excused himself, I stormed off to my room, dejected. Where was God when you needed a miracle? Then Muzammal knocked.

  “I might have found someone,” he said. He looked more relieved than me. I had forgotten what my stubbornness was costing him. Through my brother’s network of friends, he had heard about a young medical student named Samiul Haque.

  That name rang a bell. When I was in university, I would travel on the occasional weekend to visit my best friend, Rahat, who was studying at Queen’s. Rahat’s roommate, Sabreena, kept a photo of her brother Sami on the corkboard. One day, I went up to it and stared at the handsome young man, who looked like he was staring straight back at me. But he was already engaged to someone, so I walked away.

  Recently I had heard from Rahat that the engagement had ended, and I had briefly wondered what it would be like to meet the mysterious man I had admired in the picture. But Sami lived in Saskatchewan, which was like another universe. I had no idea how to reach him. But somehow he had found a way to reach me. The feeling of hope came back. Muzammal told me that Sami was completing a family medicine residency in La Ronge, which was seven hours north of Regina, just south of the sixtieth parallel. Muzammal also told me what I already knew from Sabreena: Sami had been born in Montreal to Bengali Canadian parents who had immigrated in the sixties, and had grown up on the Canadian prairies. His parents had left finding a spouse up to him.

  Muzammal looked at me hopefully. I decided it was the miracle I had prayed for.

  “I want to marry him,” I said. He was The One. Now someone just had to convince Sami.

  Muzammal was a little startled but wasn’t about to question providence. He sent out a message through the network that Sami could come and visit.

  My brother was living in residence at McMaster University and was difficult to reach. Sami phoned our house one evening when my parents were out.

  “My name is Sami,” said a very deep voice on the phone when I answered.

  “This is Zarqa,” I replied.

  Awkward silence.

  “Should I be talking to your brother?” he asked.

  “He’s not home,” I replied. “But I am.”

  “Are you okay with talking?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you
.”

  The words were like an arrow straight into my heart. No one I had met during the last few torturous months had ever said that to me. I felt my face flush. He had heard about me. And he was still calling.

  “Really?” was all I could manage.

  “You’re a journalist. That’s different. Everyone’s always trying to become a doctor these days. Like me, I guess!” He laughed in that deep voice of his. “I think you’d be an interesting person to meet.”

  “Sure,” I said. I could be interesting. “So you live in Saskatchewan? Is that one or two provinces over from Ontario?”

  There was another moment of silence.

  “So it’s true what they say about people from Toronto,” he said. “You guys are oblivious to the rest of the country.”

  I was oblivious to everything that wasn’t directly in front of me, but I felt I needed to save myself. “Sorry, I’m terrible at geography, I barely know that Spain is in South America.”

  “Spain is in southwest Europe,” said Sami.

  After another silence during which I strongly considered asking him about his prayer mat, he finally spoke.

  “So what are you up to these days work-wise?”

  “I’ve been looking for a job, but it seems that I’m going to need to leave the city for somewhere more remote. But, you know … that’s hard right now.” Because I have to get married first. I decided to keep that to myself since I wasn’t doing well with my opening lines.

  “There’s a CBC station up here,” he offered quietly.

  “Yeah, I checked,” I said. “It’s above a general store.” But we both knew that I couldn’t just pack up and work in that station. We’d have to decide about each other first.

  “I’d like to come and meet you,” he said.

  “How soon can you get here?” I said, trying to cover the desperation in my voice.

  He laughed. “I’m doing my residency, so I don’t have much flexibility. But I have a break at Thanksgiving, which is in ten weeks.”

  “TEN WEEKS!” I yelled. “That’s too long.”

  In retrospect, I was lucky he didn’t hang up right then and there. “I’m serious, I can’t come sooner,” he replied.