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After several hours of laboriously pouring over her dissertation, Naz turns to the facebook for a brief moment of relief. She quickly scans the homepage for the highlights of the day. No, no new messages, no requests for friendship, no upcoming birthdays, no comments on any of her pictures. Still, as per habit, she clicks on her profile and quickly scrolls down to her wall messages. No, nothing new there either. The pink rose sent to her two days ago is still the last message on her wall. Naz does not know how to react to this virtual rose with its cryptic message: “Happy Valentine's Day!”. Each time she sees it, she has this mixed feeling of delight and unease. While she likes the fact that she is its recipient, she doesn't appreciate the fact that it is sent to her as a public gift. In her mind, it benefits the sender more than pampering her. After all, Chris is her husband, and they reside under the same roof. Why on earth then, does he need to make such a public display of his love for her? Naz doubts that Chris is indirectly trying to impress his women friends on the net by showing them how he is also a caring and loving husband, besides being the optimum intellectual that they know him to be. Anyway, what's the point of ruining the pleasure of getting a gift, even if it is a virtual one. Naz just hopes that Chris remembers today to bring her a real rose, or just a card with a line or two from the bottom of his heart. Thinking of her own little gift for him that still hasn't been wrapped, she quickly clicks back to the homepage to logout.
Just as her finger is about to hit the mouse again, she notices Chris's name popping up on several places of the page. Hmmn, so Mr. Congeniality has been quite active today. Curiosity ceases Naz's better senses. Instead of quitting the program, she clicks on Chris's name, and instantly arrives on his page. She hurriedly pulls the arrow on the right margin of her computer screen down to where it gets to his messages. The last post is from Mumtaz, his T. A at East West University. Mumtaz's brief message reads: “Happy Valentine's Day to you too! My 'I have no idea what to get u hubby' gave me my gift last night”. This prompts Naz to go to Mumtaz's page and see the original post by Chris: “Happy Valentine's Day to you. . . make your husband buy you something nice!! . . . This is what husbands are for. . . or so I've been told”. How hypocritical! Naz fumes. The man who rushed to work this morning without even wishing his own wife on Valentine's Day, is advising other women on the responsibilities of a good husband! “Ask him what he gave his own wife on this special day?,” at the spur of agitation, she quickly types in the line on Mumtaz's wall and comes back to Chris'. Two more wall messages from his ex- female students have been added to his wall, thanking him for the Valentine Day greetings that he must have sent a little while ago. Reading the posts, for a second Naz feels like she is prying into someone else's private space, but the very next moment she tries to justify her sneekiness by thinking out loud: “What the hell, it is a public forum after all. What you write there is up for anyone to read. Besides, Chris is my husband, and I have every right to see what kind of Valentine Day wishes he is sending out to other women”. While she is still trying to provide logic to her nosiness, it seems to her that the little icons with the faces of the girls on them are cracking up in a sinister smile. Her efforts to fathom the thoughts behind the smiles transport her to other times, other places . . . .
Naz is not very good at remembering dates, but she knows that it was also a Valentine's Day. That year they were in Memphis. Chris had presented a heart shaped chocolate box to Maria, his professor who was a single mother, and notoriously famous for dating her guy students. Though they had just started going out, Naz had vehemently opposed this friendly gesture of Chris'. That had led to a serious fight that ruined their day. Then there was this Valentine's Day in Dhaka. When Chris told her how he bought a red rose from a road-side flower stall and took it over to Nazneen, the would-be Mayor's wife, Naz's first impulse was to laugh it away, but later she had created fuss over it. Not that she really cares for celebrating Valentine's Day; in her mind it is just another one of those commercialized American excuses for selling and buying stuff. Yet, according to her own South Asian understanding of this day, it is supposed to celebrate romantic love, and not just friendship amongst friends. No matter how Chris tried to gloss over his own interpretation of the day, for Naz, the heart, the red rose, the cupid and the arrow --- these are symbols of a romantic love; hence, the agitation, the bitterness . . . .
As Naz is still blankly gazing at the screen in front of her, and her mind is replaying past stumbling experiences of the day, suddenly another message pops up on Chris' wall. “Thankx for the pictures Chris! Happy Valentine's Day to you too!!” It is Asma, another one of Chris's Bangladeshi female students. Asma is one of those burqa clad confused university girls who obediently carry around an extra garb of modesty, but do not hesitate to pose before the camera every opportunity they can muster. Chris must have tagged some of her photos from the innumerable ones she features in, in his class albums. But what pisses Naz most is, the way these girls address Chris by his first name! These Bangadeshi girls show no respect for the teachers any more. Naz is amazed at the fast pace of their so called modernization. Besides, Chris must have also encouraged them to shed off their inhibitions, and join the race of 'liberated women' of America. The way they did not hesitate to jump in the same rikshaw with him, and took the liberty of calling him up at the dead of nights to discuss their personal problems! After all, he was not just another professor and advisor, he was their white liberal friend as well, through him they expected to fulfill God alone knows which version of their American dream? Naz's anger keeps mounting as she reads and rereads more posts, exchanging cordial Valentine greetings with her husband, and displaying more of his initiative and their excitement. In a moment of blinding rage she sends this pokingly curt note to Chris, the content of which better not be disclosed here for the sake of some privacy that ought to be maintained in marriages that still, hopefully, have a long way to go.
Anyway, just after the 'post' button has been irretrievably hit, Naz chides herself for over reacting to her husband's, what she would like to believe, innocently friendly gestures. She finally decides to get out of the facebook, and concentrate on her own work in hand. But wait, her note just disappeared! Did he delete it from his wall! Naz can't believe it! This throws her back into the earlier state of unsettling confusion, and as a reply to what she considers to be her husband's insensitivity towards her, she wipes out the now pathetic looking pink rose from her wall.
Before I go any further into this story, and fill you in on how this couple resolved their latest Valentine's Day crisis, let me add that just last night they had a huge fight over money, and that is kind of responsible for the dark shadow looming behind the scene I just narrated. Yes, the green monster that is responsible for ruining many regular marriages, only compounds the problems that ensue in an inter-racial marriage. Actually, this is what I have been trying to get to. The theme of my story is neither the latest fad of facebooking, nor the 'progressiveness' of girls in private universities of Dhaka, but the pros and cons of inter-racial marriages seen particularly from an Eastern wife's perspective. Being in one of these cross-cultural polyglot marriages myself, it is a rather difficult subject for me to elucidate. But for the benefit of readers like you, I will try to highlight some of those sticky areas of contention that pose a challenge to anomalous couples like us. Now, it is not necessarily the common love triangle, or transgression of marital fidelity that poses fractions in marital relationships of mixed couples. Minor things, like the real meaning of Valentine's Day may trigger off a huge misunderstanding. On the other hand, major issues such as shift of cultural space and the pressures of political-economy of the time can also pose unsurmountable challenges for marital harmony of such couples, leading to unfathomable pain and humiliation on both sides. But before I take you into real life incidents where dislocation and religio-cultural disparity popped their ugly heads between a perfectly loving couple, permit me some literary digression.
Let us take the case of Shamman and Taylor in Ismat Chughtai's novel, The Crooked Line, for instance. At the back drop of their romantic affair we have the last days of colonial rule in India. Taylor is an Irish journalist stationed in Bankipur. Shamman is a politically aware, outspoken school teacher. They are both witty conversationalists, and they both love spicy food. After a couple of meetings, the opposite elements in them pull them together and they decide to get married. But soon the piercing gazes of the onlookers, both Indians and British, make the couple uneasy. They feel like they have betrayed their own people somehow by befriending their enemy. As the pressure of the conflicting races creep into their blood, they start bickering and fighting with each other. The heat of India works its way into Taylor's system, making him increasingly intolerant of his wife. Finally he decides to leave for the war. He signs over his estate in Shamman's name, but does not have the chance to know about their yet to be born child that she is carrying. Shamman is baffled by her husband's cowardly retreat, and left alone incriminately to face the boiling political situation at home.
At the aftermath of 9/11, my personal experience in Dhaka with a white husband, was comparable to that of Shamman's to some extent. As Muslims in America began to be suspected and harassed unnecessarily at every turn, and as more and more American soldiers started bombarding the sacred cities of Iraq, its impact boomeranged on the whites residing in Bangladesh as well. Walking down on the streets of Dhaka we often tried to turn a deaf ear to the nasty comments intended towards us by strangers. Even some of my friends and relatives tried to hint that it was bad enough that being a Muslim, I had dared to defile my religion by marrying a non-Muslim, not to speak of marrying an American. Though my husband tried his best to maintain a nonchalant exterior, I could sense his silent protestation, and a desire to get back at his imperceptive critics when he would walk down the mosque lane, particularly on Fridays during the Jumma prayer time, in his shorts. I would follow him silently, supporting his freedom to choose his attire, but deep down pray for not getting spotted by anyone that I know. This one time we were at the Municipality Office for our daughter's birth certificate, when I had to fill the slot for the father's religion. Since my husband had dawned a kurta and pajama, and had a full beard, I kind of hoped that people will mistake him for being a middle Eastern, and let me fill out the form. But once they saw that he was an American, he was asked about his religion. I wanted to be done with the formality as soon as possible and leave the place, but my husband chose that very moment to bring out his worst sarcastic self. He decided to flabbergast the people with weird comments about his religious orientation. First he said he was an atheist, then he quickly changed his version and said he was a pagan. When the guy at the counter stared at me with bulging eyes that wondered, where I picked this loony from, my husband decided to settle for being a Zen Buddhist! That day I was mad at my husband. But the day at the Passport Office when the officer started asking us who was the bread earner in the house, for that is how they decide the spousal rights, I respected my husband's calm. He let me take the man on my own grounds and with my own arguments. I declared that I was the one who married the man, and I was the one who wore the pants in the house. No matter how I protested and justified my act of marrying a 'foreigner,' the reason for having to do so, wore me out. A kind of guilt, mixed with unnameable anger always gripped me when venomous looks of onlookers in government offices, in malls and private parties checked us out from top to toe as if we were some kind of freaks who had commited a sin, but were trying to pass it in the name of courage and passion. This kind of incongruous public scrutiny unsettled my husband too, and sowed seeds of conflict in our marital existence, waiting to errupt at some unguarded moment.
Then there were those poor Bangladeshis who would look at my husband like he was God himself who had descended into my country, and run after him calling him “bondhu” or “boss. ” These people in turn, played their part in thrusting the bone of contention between us. Not that I am not a charitable person, but when I would see my husband dropping a fifty taka or hundred taka note in their hand, instead of feeling happy, I would react like Shamman did when she saw Taylor over tipping the cab drivers of India. “This is the ploy you use to rule this country,” she had marked (279). I too saw my husbands overtly generous gestures towards our maids and beggars as his attempts at buying their very souls. Not that I didn't appreciate his concern for these people, but I just could not approve of his methodology of trying to help them. This undoubtedly generated much unwanted stress and strain on both sides.
Like Shamman again, I also hated those upper class natives who felt elated when they received the slightest attention from a white man. For their kind brought out the latent master instinct in my husband that Shamman had detected in Taylor, and that made her break into this tirade: “They don't know that the Englishman only socializes with them so he can return to his country and surprise people by telling them that he has observed and studied the Hindustanis so closely, and that neither did they bite him nor did dark colour muddy his whiteness. Here are the savage monkeys who have been civilized by the English” (270-271). Indeed, it is my own grounding in postcolonial literature and theory that often deluded my vision, and I grossly superimpozed my anger towards British colonizers and American imperialists in general, on my poor husband. But let me tell you, his white man's burden syndrom did not help much either!
Now let's look at another story of inter-racial marriage that also turned sour because of the external forces upon which the couple had no control. I have Meena Alexander's fiction, Manhatttan Music in mind. Sandhya and Stephen are the main protagonists here who meet in India and fall in love. Stephen is a kind and gentle husband. He believes that in America he will be able give Sandhya all kinds of happiness, but the burden of living a diasporan life proves too much for the latter. When she is faced by the skin-head dot-busters of Manhattan who hate her dark skin and call her derogatory names like “Paki,” Sandhya is shattered at the core. She knows that just carrying an American last name as a talisman cannot guard her against the life of alienation that is her fate because of her dark skin color. But no matter how hard she tries, she feels that she can not relate her pain of uprootedness to Stephen because he is an American. She misses home so much that she gets pulled towards Rasheed, an Arab exile, with whom she can share better the pain of her dislocation. She also carries around a sense of guilt for having left her ailing parents, her country, and her culture behind. As “libation to the god of guilt,” Sandhya buys all kinds of American gifts for her folks back at home, but nothing really assuages her feeling of being a pariah (41). Eventually she commits suicide leaving behind a five year old daughter and a completely baffled husband.
Now that I am back in America, the incongruity of sticking out like a sore black thumb often grips me like it had gripped Sandhya. Despite my Green Card or eventual citizenship one day, and despite my academic qualifications, the color of my skin will always decide in advance what kind of treatment I am to receive from most people here. Also, despite my American dreams, many of which have already been fulfilled, I will always feel adrift, I will always crave for the sound, the smell and the taste of Bengal. Like Sandhya, I also bear in silence the emotional strains of selecting my own marital partner. In fact, I have the added pressure of leaving behind two sons from my previous marriage. I often feel that I have bartered away a very precious part of my motherhood in order to keep alive the woman in me who wanted to love with the passion of a million Zulekhas, Laila's and Heers of the East. The price for such audacity has been paid, and there is still more paying to be done.
Speaking of the sacrifices and punishments that are fated for 'erring' women like us, I am reminded of yet another literary figure who dared to step across the forbidden threshold for love, and who had to pay heavily for such transgressions. It is Tilo, the protagonist of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's novel, The Mistress of Spices. When Tilo decides to make Raven her life partner, not only does she have to give up her magical powers invested in spices, she also has to lose the friendship of her sister Mistresses, and the blessings of her First Mother. Nonetheless, when Tilo laments: “I who now have only myself to hold me up,” I don't see a weakling in her seeking for refuge in the arms of a White lover, rather, I see in her the power of Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine in Jasmine, who had the courage to fight real hard against her destiny, and reposition the stars. Like Tilo and Jasmine, I am a striver, but my metamorphosis from pain and tragedy to renewal and hope did not involve change of name and identity in order to suit my new life and environment. In fact, I do not approve of Tilo's adaptation of her new identity as Maya, or Jasmine's becoming of Jane and later Jase. For myself, I have stubbornly retained my maiden name; even my signature has part my ex-husband's name. Sometimes it deprives me of the automatic facilities that would have come with the name Mrs. White, or the ties that I would have felt with my daughter's last name, but this is my version of the private space in marriage, which my husband insists that we must have. Not only my space, but a lot of my time is also my own now. I don't have to wait on a husband, cook for him or do his laundry like typical housewives are expected to do. But this is not to say that I assume that my American marriage will be roses all the way. Now I also don't have the liberty of demanding my dower or my maintenance, or keeping my property exclusively to myself, as Muslim wives are legally permitted to do. Indeed, legal guarantee doesn't necessarily ensure these rights in reality, still as a Muslim woman I know that I am entitled to them. As an American wife, I have other legal rights no doubt, but here too in order to enjoy those rights you have to have money and power. Besides, in this country a career for myself is not a matter of choice any more, it is a matter of utter necessity. At times when my five year old daughter pushes away her macaroni n' cheese dinner and demands biryani, or pulls me by the arm and says, “khopa me” right now, so that she can have a bun on top of her head like Karina Kapoor, while I am in midst of hundred deadlines that I have to meet, that is when I feel that I have to be a multi-tasking automaton, or I don't exist in this system. But I cannot complain about the facilities I received back at home, for my husband is quick to remind me that I can't have the best of both worlds.
Of course, my search for bliss in marriage had never been an outlandish utopian one. Like Tilo, all I want is an earthly paradise in midst of soot, rubble and burnt flesh. But like Tilo again, I also want to ask my American: do you understand the value of all my sacrifices? Are you dreaming my dream? And like her I want to say to him: “You have loved me for the color of my skin, the accent of my speaking, the quaintness of my customs which promised you the magic you no longer found in the women of your own land. In your yearning you have made me into that which I am not” (309). Tilo did not blame her lover too much for doing that because she did the same with him. I have also mistakenly projected on my American husband hues that were not his. But now we both hope that we rejuvinate each other simply by being who we are.
So, do I still have to tell you how Naz and Chris solved their Valentine's Day quarrel? Do you think Chris bought a bunch of roses and a bottle of wine and made up with his wife with a kiss and a hug? Or do you think that he felt so put off that he turned off his mobile, hit the nearest bar, and kept getting drunk till late? Again, what do you think Naz did? Did she apologize for her rude message and made up by preparing a candle-light dinner for her husband? Or, did she lock herself in the guest-room and cried herself to sleep? Perhaps they did none of the above. To know what really happened that day, send an e-mail either at: hafiza_khn@yahoo.com, or write to: ameriman@yahoo.com