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* * *
With her Pakistani friends who do know of us as a couple, they see my foreignness, remark on it. “But she’s not Pakistani,” they say, as though this is a problem insurmountable. “She can’t speak the language.” At least they are honest about their feelings.
“Oh, you’re American, aren’t you,” her friends say occasionally, turning to me. To undercut their complaints about American culture (or to empathize with my condition, I’m never sure which), they add, “sorry.”
In truth I usually feel more comfortable with their perspectives than I do with the average American’s. I usually agree with their criticisms.
“I have the best of both worlds,” she says of me. “You have an American personality, but Asian values.”
At her favorite Pakistani restaurant, the man taking our orders, a non-Pakistani, doesn’t understand when she asks in English for three cups of tea.
“Teen chai,” I say.
“Ah, teen chai,” he agrees.
She and I laugh. She wants me to take over the ordering, so she can hear me stumbling in my American accent. Her culture will never be mine, nor mine hers. It’s a relief. It’s a relief to date someone who understands the odd composite that is me, who doesn’t expect me to explain my cultural inheritance. This, I think, is why she and I get along so easily. We accept each other as experts in our own experience.
I marvel sometimes at her ability to communicate, in human terms, despite her English being less flexible than her Urdu. There’s a simplicity that comes with speaking in one’s not-home tongue. There’s a clarity, too, for a certain kind of thinker.
What appeals to me in being with her is not her “foreignness.” It’s the way she feels like home. She’s similar to what I would’ve, could’ve been. When so much is ruled out, it leaves clarity around what is.
* * *
She will never marry, she tells me—and certainly never a woman. To be legally recognized in one country means giving official recognition to something that cannot exist in another.
With her country, I run up against the limits of American belief in possibility. It’s too intractable there. It’s not just about one’s own life, she tells me. It’s about protecting those one loves—her amma, her baba, her family—from their beliefs in a damaged afterlife, from death threats.
Even though she’ll defend Pakistan passionately against any criticism I might voice, against misrepresentations and the ways only certain stories are told, she, too, chafes at the restrictions women face. At the violence, the regressive religious fervor of conservatives. She knows her country won’t change anytime soon. She loves it anyway. I came across a quote when researching: “To love a Pakistani is to love Pakistan.” This, we agree, is true.
She doesn’t have the financial safety net that many here have. Her family is solidly middle-class. A middle-class Pakistani family of five has an income of, let’s say, $20,000 a year. She has a different kind of safety net. She understands the power of a close, loving family over an American passport, over wealth. She is firm in her sense of identity. She makes up her own mind about people and things. She is strong.
* * *
I want to spend time with her in Pakistan—will, pending the other chaos in my life. It’s easier, to tell certain internationals about what’s going on in my life. They don’t trust the police, understand how dealing with them can wreak havoc.
“You’ll probably feel the same way in Pakistan as you did in Egypt or India,” she tells me, by which she means the comparable poverty.
She knows of my experiences in Cairo, where a man trailed me through the city’s crowded streets, turn after turn, where a policeman I asked for directions assumed I was a prostitute for traveling alone, where I eventually settled for the refuge of a hijab, which rendered me seemingly invisible.
In Egypt I was culturally ignorant, doing all the things I wasn’t supposed to do—but the palpability of anger in Cairo’s streets was still unmistakable to me, so much so that I wasn’t surprised when Arab Spring erupted two weeks later.
“You were there two weeks before the revolution? Ah, you were there during the golden age,” an Egyptian acquaintance tells me, with a bitter laugh, to my surprise.
“What did you think of Egypt?” this acquaintance asks me. I can tell she’s hardened to the nonsense she hears, from people who know nothing of Egypt aside from their tour-bus adventures to the pyramids.
And I don’t know how to say traveling there was the first time I understood the sorts of things my parents felt they’d protected me from by virtue of my American birth. That it was the first time I’d confronted true poverty. That I came to understand the limitations women face, in moving freely and independently, as I became reliant on male traveling partners I met. That as an American who couldn’t read Arabic, every street sign meant I was lost. That any description fails, serves only as a projection of my vantage point, and anything more concrete was inaccessible to me. That the way the sun’s orange hues bounced off white buildings and smog and flooded the streets of swerving traffic was unlike any other sun I’d seen, even if it was the same.
Poverty wasn’t the main thrust shaping my perception of Egypt. It was the anger, the discontent, throbbing at an intensity unmatched elsewhere. In India I confirmed only how much cultural context I lacked. There, after our hired driver knocked over a woman with our car while turning onto a side street in Bangalore’s heavy traffic, I glimpsed how differently humans can be valued, based on life circumstance. This is explicitly true here, too, of course—just visible in different ways. He heckled and yelled out the window, rather than offering apologies or assistance. Strangers on the street pulled her aside as our driver kept driving, as we did nothing to intervene.
I have only snapshots of the places through which I’ve traveled. I had my American privilege, as well as my inability to leave my American judgments aside.
“It’ll be different,” I tell her. Not just because it’s an entirely different culture. “I’ll be traveling with you.”
On this we agree: we experience places differently through the eyes of those who know and love them. On this we agree, too: that a non-desi American shouldn’t bother going to Pakistan alone.
* * *
It’s funny how after you’re reduced, once you’re stripped of pride, after you’ve survived the realization of some of your worst fears, you meet those most capable of love. One of life’s compensations, perhaps.
