Imaan Mirza 

The non-italicized text reflects Mohsin Hamid's words during our conversation in Lahore on August 30th, 2024, while the italicized portions capture my personal musings.

Lahore exists where it is because there are five — or really, six — great rivers in the northwest of the South Asian subcontinent. If you were approaching from Central Asia, as many traders and invaders used to do, you would go from Kabul, cross through into Peshawar, then leave the hills for the plains. As you cross the plains, you would cross these rivers, and find Lahore situated in the middle of the Punjab — the five rivers.

You and I are on the eastern side of the river, the protected side, the side that invaders would have to cross to get to Lahore, if coming from the northwest. On this side, there was a walled city and a fort, and that was old Lahore. As you proceed out from old Lahore, you find older parts of Lahore, and eventually, you get to the British colonial part of Lahore, centered around Mall Road. It has the National College of Arts, where Rudyard Kipling's father was the first principal. Then, as you continue out from there, you come to the older suburbs, like Gulberg, where we are now, which were laid out in the 1950s and 60s. If you keep going, you encounter newer suburbs, places like Defence, which are now getting close to the India border. Lahore is nestled right up against the border with India, and it's historically been a sprawling, flat city on the side of a river but not really facing the river, unlike, say, the Seine flowing through Paris. Lahore has its back to the river, probably because of flooding concerns. There's a canal that runs through it, which is sort of like Lahore's little river, with sprawling suburbs and housing developments. More recently, it's begun to go vertical. Where we are now, near Main Boulevard, you see 20-story buildings, with more and more coming up, along with higher buildings and office towers. We're in what feels like 1960s Lahore—about a half-hour drive from the year 1000 Lahore, but also only about a half-hour drive from 2022 Lahore. The city has grown, in my lifetime, from about 3 million people, to over 12 million today.

I visited Lahore at the end of August. It was hot, of course, but not the kind of hot about which you can commiserate with Lahoris, who’ve seen hotter days. They will smile at your delicate season-bred sensibilities to the climate and tell you to visit the city in December, when the city is chilled without central heating, but heated by the wedding season.

“Baahir se ai hui hoon,” I’d grimace.

, a common refrain for those who've left the country. I was doing senior thesis research in the Punjab Public Library, the National Archives of Pakistan, and South Asia Resource & Research Center, paging through periodicals crumbling in my hands. The English periodicals weren’t cataloged, but I pleaded with the archivists, rather pathetically: I was a student from America, after all, I’d come all this way to look at the archives, here, I even had a letter from Harvard. This revelation was costly —

I was charged 10 rupees per photo I’d taken by the archivists, because I was from baahir, and because I spoke Urdu laden with the linguistic insecurity bespeaking a foreigner — mixing up grammatical structures, intonating incorrect vowel sounds, resorting to English words, far exceeding the acceptable threshold. I wore desi clothes, too, to mask my foreignness, as I embarked on these archival excursions, kurtis that covered my behind, linen pants to offset the heat: outfits that members from my class background no longer seem to wear in Pakistan. It is all ‘Western’ clothes in the East now; my Nani said that desi clothes are “peindu.”

I met with Mohsin the day before my return to Cambridge. I’d off-handedly emailed his agent after reading his

, because I’d cried, and I was startled, by my response, into action. I read

on the plane to Lahore, and I remember thinking:

And then, that bitter-sweet, sinking feeling:

 he’s said everything I've ever wanted to say, and better!

Mohsin and I met at a restaurant in Gulberg, swanky and well-populated. It was late, maybe around 2 o'clock, but Lahoris were still lunching.

There has been enormous growth in the middle class of Lahore, which includes both migrants from other parts of Pakistan and social mobility within Lahore. When I was growing up, there were a handful of elite schools that most middle class kids went to, and you would often know the people—somebody's family was in this school, your cousin was in that school. Now there are lots and lots of schools, and the Lahore my children are growing up in is much more like a big city where you may have no idea where your best friends are. Their friends are scattered across many different schools.

It has become a more impersonal, bigger, but also in some ways more dynamic city, much more polluted. One of the biggest changes is that the Lahore of my childhood was a Lahore where the winter, from November until March, had gorgeous weather — you'd be outside all the time. But now, not anymore. Now, it's like a Blade Runner-ish, post-apocalyptic situation, with horrific air quality, where you run your air purifiers, and the kids can't go to sports practice, and everyone tries to stay indoors. That's not entirely charming. It has become a big city in both good and bad ways.

Recently, it has been a very difficult time, both economically and politically, not just for Lahore but for all of Pakistan. I can't say that I feel enormously optimistic. But that said, when I travel, people aren't in a very optimistic mood in the UK either, or in the US. So maybe it’s not an optimistic mood anywhere.

I think that it's dangerous to be despondent, because when everyone is despondent, then what emerges is like a politics of reactionary nostalgia. You know, whether that's going back to like Islam of 800 years ago, or going back to like America 100 years ago or Britain 50 years ago: these reactionary nostalgic politics are born out of a sense of despondency. So if we actually want to find a more inclusive, progressive future, we have to be optimistic about the future, and so I try to write novels, which, in their own way, are critically optimistic. Now, that being said, you’ve caught me at a sort of somewhat despondent moment, and why I'm not publishing a novel at this very second.

I think writing a novel is like having to tell your kid: 

That's just how it is. We're all dead, you know.

 You know it's true, but maybe not the best mode of parenting. If it is, I don't know, it's just not how I parent. But if you sort of say, look, there's amazing beauty and truth and interesting things possible while we are here for a temporary time — that feels like a better stance than that. Similarly, there's so much desperately wrong with the world that is heading into terrible directions, and yet: there is the possibility for better things to happen.

., but rather, if we do something, it's possible that things can get better. And that kind of critical optimism, I think, is useful. It comes back in a way to these Gaza protests right on us. Are they really doing anything for foreign policy? Who knows.

People are trying to shape the future that requires a certain degree of optimism, and it's only because of that kind of optimism on not just the Gaza protest, but a million different other things, that change happens. So for me, that position of critical optimism is essential. Really. The alternative is just a reactionary, ‘might makes right.’

I've been reading a lot about the "brain drain" crisis and how it's been reported that 700,000 people left Pakistan this past year. The destinations are telling; lower to middle-class, single men, fly to the Gulf, where initiatives like the Saudi Vision 2030 demand labor, so much labor, that the trickle to these states has reliably increased. The elite, on the other hand, debate which American and British and Canadian colleges to send their kids to. Harvard kids bemoan the “brain drain” matriculation to careers in finance and consulting, but in Pakistan, it is the hordes of people eager, anxious, to leave the country. There’s no civil war, no dire or desperate impetus for this exodus.

While I was in Lahore, my family said much of the same: nazar na lage, we are so proud you are studying at Harvard, stay in America, what is there for you to do in Pakistan, why are you writing about our country for your thesis? Write about America instead.

Well, there are two things I will say. The first is that when I moved back to Lahore in 2009 from London, it was a difficult moment politically. Around the time of Benazir's assassination, the restoration of democracy after the Musharraf period, the lawyers' movement—there was a lot happening. But we had a considerable degree of free expression in Pakistan. We have nothing like free expression in Pakistan today. It has been a very sad trajectory, and today we live in a society that is enormously restrictive of speech. It's been growing that way for a long time, but it has reached its highest degree more recently.

Now, of course, in 1980s Pakistan under dictator General Zia-ul-Haq, we had very restricted speech. But then with the arrival of satellite dishes, the period of democracy in the 1990s, the Musharraf government—which was actually quite pro-free speech even though it was a dictatorship—there was a 20-year period of opening up. Now we have seen, over the last 15 years, a period of closing down, which coincided with my return here. The vibrant sort of self-criticism and critique is much less, which creates its own sort of mood. I have always thought that one of the things that saved Pakistan from a fate like Iraq or Syria—countries that are totally driven by civil wars—is that in Pakistan, we didn't just have an all-powerful dictatorship. We had moments of dictatorship interspersed with moments of democracy or semi-democracy. We had imperfectly functioning but somewhat functioning courts, media, etc. I think moving away from that makes us a more fragile society. So, I'm not feeling particularly optimistic, but that said, it's just a blink in history, and things could change. Things might change dramatically, but at the moment, most people I talk to feel utterly despondent. They feel they can't articulate their thoughts politically, and they feel economically like the country is stuck.

I was told I would like it because it was by a Pakistani and about refugees (don’t ask). Turns out, I really did like it, and so I read

next, about a white man who wakes up many pigments darker.

followed, thematically ranging from 9/11 and racial politics, class struggles and doomed romantic relationships. Two of the books take place in Lahore, and the rest draw some kind of inspiration from Lahore. Mohsin has made a really compelling case for Lahore’s promotion to the ranks of City-hood, akin to New York City and London, due to their cosmopolitan characters and layered histories. “Lahore, Lahore Hai,” Lahoris say: Lahore’s Lahore.

I think the country is stuck in a way, because you can imagine two paradigms for how to build an economy. One paradigm is the one we've been told in Pakistan to follow, which is this geoeconomics idea—that our location is our asset. We leverage our position into some kind of economic gain, which is really a rentier model. I don't think that has worked particularly well. The other model would be to focus on the people. The amazing thing about the people is that Pakistan keeps producing a huge pool of very talented, hardworking, creative people, and it takes enormous mismanagement to prevent them from having a very successful country. But we have mismanaged ourselves.

Our driver’s son has just completed a bachelor's in computer science and is looking for a tech job. Lahore is a place where lots of people go to university. I think the statistic is that more than 300,000 students are enrolled at universities in Lahore today, which is a number probably as big or maybe even bigger than Boston. These people come out into the world, and if we had a system in place where we allowed them to flourish, I think we'd be doing great, but we don't. As you say, many of them desperately want to leave. I don't have much hair —but the guy who used to cut my hair for years moved to Canada. He's there now. This brain drain is an immense waste of potential. So, I'm not saying that people shouldn't leave; everyone has the right to look for a better life. But I'm saying it's a real shame that a place like Lahore, which could be so much more than it is, is letting that potential slip away.

to be taking place in Scandinavian countries, based on the names of the protagonists. Mohsin did something similar in

— blurring the features of character and place. Still, identifying features make themselves evident to the reader, irrespective of the valiant attempt to obscure. The city in

, for example, feels distinctly like Lahore, despite Mohsin’s deliberate veiling of its identity.

My sense is that readers make novels in concert with writers. And in a way, I tend to try to write novels that give space for readers to make it up. The way this works is that, you know, I'll go into an interview and somebody will say, "Why did you decide to set this novel in the United States?" or, "Why is it set in Sweden?" or, you know... And I'm like, "You know, this is set in the UK, isn't it?" What's happening is each reader is making their own novel, and they each make different novels.

And so I try to write novels that give a lot of space for readers to do that. Just enough imaginative strokes that there's something for the reader to build on, but lots of space. In 

, Saeed's mother is killed, and the book talks about his mother, but his mother doesn't have a name. Now, what function does that serve by not naming her?

If it was a mother whose name was my mother's name, then that wouldn't be your mother's name; it would just be this particular character who has died. But when it's "his mother" who has died, it is almost natural for you to impart that word with what you understand a mother to be, which is, of course, influenced by who your mother is. And so it has a different weight, that death.

Pakistan seems to have split in half: the upper class is patriotic to itself, allegiant to those who exist in the same circles, to the West; and the poor masses are outside of this, an ‘imposition’ on the wealthy, the victims of unnamed issues.

, says: "People are fed up with subsisting on the droppings of the rich. The time's ripe for revolution." In The Last White Man, Anders the protagonist posits a Robin Hood paradigm: "It is a poor person's right to skim money." The money in question is his own.

Pakistanis are always prophesying the death of our country, but I’m convinced that Murad Bacha’s

When I came back to Pakistan at the age of nine in 1980, I remember seeing a cleaning lady at my grandfather's house. And I could tell this person is different from us. You know, she looks different, she dresses differently, she speaks differently; her demeanor is very different. She's not one of the family. I remember turning to my mom and saying, you know, my parents, and saying, "Is she a slave?" "No, it's not a slave, like a servant." And I was like, "Oh, okay." But coming from the States, I didn't know what a servant was, and I could only associate in my imagination. My natural thing was, "This is some person who's like an enslaved person, right? Like, why are they acting so differently? Why are they being treated like this?"

And so that encounter of a partly Americanized consciousness with this Pakistani reality has always stayed with me. And I guess I've just been attuned to class. But then on top of that, I think having lived in different places and become a kind of chameleon as a kid—how do I fit in? Wherever I go, to fit in, you have to observe quite closely, right? If, you're going to be a green lizard on a green wall, you have to know that the wall is green.

So you very quickly begin to read the way class functions. You know, here in Lahore, in New York City, at Harvard College, for example. And so I became very interested in this, as both an insider and an outsider. You know, somebody who, at various times, has been an elite, and also on the outside, arriving in California as a foreigner, becoming kind of a Californian kid, returning to Pakistan as a foreigner, becoming a Pakistani kid, going to the States, having this elite job, then after 9/11 being this weirdly othered — and then, kind of a feared — person. So being on both sides of these divides has made me very attuned to it.

So I look at class, very aware that it has been constructed, that this isn't the innate way of things. We have made these structures. There's no reason why I went to Harvard, and somebody else is serving us coffee right now. Some system exists that allowed that to occur. Not that I'm saying there's no free will, and there's no difference in, you know, somebody's ability or work ethic, but those things occur inside a much more powerful systemic structure. So I write about that.

, describes himself as a member class of professionals with dwindling wealth, and how the decline of wealth in Pakistan is far outstripping the pace at which status is declining.

It’s kind of true. My Dada is a member of a ‘country club’ — for which there is a robust ecosystem in urban Pakistan — called Gymkhana. I’m pretty sure his loyalty to Gymkhana far surpasses that of Lahore, or even Pakistan.

I spent many days of my childhood summers and winters in this club, which has changed much over the span of my life, allowing for more Pakistanis, of different family and class backgrounds to join, about which my Dada grumbles. Now, as an nearly-minted American citizen, armed to the teeth with my democratic self-righteousness, I find myself offended by these clubs.

Yup. All these clubs that non-White members couldn't belong to until, like, 1947.

I think that, increasingly, money is coming to be a stand-in for social class, not just here, but everywhere. So, you know, whatever the norms of how a billionaire was supposed to conduct themselves in the US up until recently, you know, are now gone, right? And the sort of crass "I have the power, I can do what I want. I'm gonna tell Harvard what to do. I'm gonna tell the country what to do. I'm gonna tell you what to do." This is new, right. And there are a 

 of people who were not ancestral billionaires. They are self made billionaires, right? And they are the new power class in the United States. Well, something similar is happening [in Pakistan], whether it is somebody who's risen up in the military or in the bureaucracy or in, you know, in the private sector, or whatever, how people have made their money, they made it, and then they have this power. And so I think, I think all over the world, we're seeing old class hierarchies, you know, being upended, not replaced with a more egalitarian society, but with new class hierarchy, obviously. And I think one of the things that I suppose is quite interesting is, you know, we imagine that power acts from a class privileged position, let's say, in the US to a class unprivileged position in Pakistan. But actually it's much more complicated than that.

In fact, if one perceives one’s class position as very vulnerable, that results in all sorts of things. Like Osama bin Laden was a very weird guy, you know? Why was he so incensed by what he saw? So many of the sort of 9/11 and post 9/11 actors that we read about were upper middle class or wealthy people. Think about the US War of Independence: a lot of these were like slave owning gazillionaires from their time, rising up against Britain. Like, these Thomas Jefferson type figures, even George Washington? These weren't like the poor peasants. They weren't, you know, Ho Chi Minh. They were, in a sense, upper class Americans. So oftentimes, in the contest between cultures, ideas, and society, what we're actually seeing is a displaced upper class, or a slighted upper class, or an upper middle class jousting for power. And so we see that in Pakistan too. And part of the tension between the clerical-minded, religious-minded power base in Pakistan, and a more secular-minded power base in Pakistan, is the unresolved conflict of two sets of elites, deciding which is the 

 elite. So I think when you start looking for this stuff similarly, in the US, in the conflict between the cultural elite of newspaper writers and the money elite, there are two different elites that are in contest. And so they have different cultural values. And for me — not quite like an insider in any of them — but a semi participant in many of them, I feel like I write from a sort of insider-outsider standpoint.

More on Changez: he describes his White interlocutor — with whom he dialogues, for the entirety of the Lahore-based novella — as having that

. I’ve painfully experienced the same: a few days earlier, I was sitting in my grandparent’s car, just a few miles away from the restaurant at which I met Mohsin. A woman selling hair ties knocked on the window, and I rolled it down to give her some money, and she said:

 Yeah, you should be giving me dollars, because you're not from here.

And I hadn't said a word. Normally, when I’m shopping with my Nani at bargaining markets like Liberty, my Nani will hiss at me not to speak English. I got that. But based on nothing — just my person — she’d discerned my foreignness. I was awed by her canny, the accuracy of her foreign-dar, reaching this conclusion from so little.

In a sense, you’re one of the ones who was fortunate enough to get up and out, and you made it. And then you come back here, all rich, and people want a piece of that.

I don't know if they even think of you actually, as a foreigner, exactly, but in the sense that within the category of people from Pakistan, there are those who got out and made lots of money, and those who didn't. So are you a foreigner?

Or are you the really rich cousin who left — you're just like the rest of us, but you have a lot more money because you got out and the others didn't. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but certainly there is that thing where some people in Pakistan have been elevated to this saintly class of foreign passport holder. Others are still living the benighted life of being unable to leave. My former hairdresser is now fortunate to be in Thailand, and my current hairdresser is stuck here.

So there is that now, but there is also, of course, the whole idea of Whiteness, because there are many different skin colors in Pakistan. You know, in my own family, there are people who look White, people who look dark — we have everything.

It isn't exactly racial, but it is also not entirely neutral, right? It's not, 

, because they're all Pakistanis. But on the other hand, there is a certain plus to being lighter skin: a pigmentocracy. So it's very confusing. You know, it's not exactly the American understanding of race, but it's also not like, 

 It does make a difference, but it's not race. What is it?

It’s a bit like you're foreign, like you have a second passport, to see somebody who would pass as White in the United States — but it's just a Pakistani and Pakistan. But it also has advantages to having light skin, in the American context, and that complicates how we think of these things, what the imaginary is. Now, would they have those advantages if we hadn't had a colonial history and invaders coming? Maybe, if we had always been invaded from south to the north, and the powerful people were Southerners, we’d have the exact opposite pigmentocracy, but we don't. It leads to this position of being able to feel that there isn't just one way of imagining things, and that the American imaginary on race is not the only one. What 

 Pakistani is kind of an interesting question. You know, am I a foreigner or not? All of these things are all wide open and so they're worth exploring, partly because one is trying to figure out what one thinks. You know, what do you think about the situation? Who knows?

Well, write a novel, and see if you can figure it out.

Fall 2024 - Land

Features

Mohsin

When I was a diapered infant, my parents left Karachi because of the political situation. It doesn’t really mean much, because Pakistani politics have chronically worsened since the country’s inception. But it’s delightfully vague and one of the few things to which pontifical, mustached Pakistani men, sitting around chai and rusk, can all solemnly bob their heads in agreement.

It just so happened that the Saudis were beginning to look for labor, and a lot of it. Cheap, manual labor, absolutely, but skilled technicians, too, the kind of people who wouldn’t have to be trained. To many, it seemed like the Saudis were throwing their oil money at anyone, a gold rush that compelled my parents to pack up their bags and two children and move to Jeddah, the second-largest city in the kingdom.

Jeddah was an hour away from Makkah, the holiest city in Islam. My parents thought that we could easily sink into the anonymity of a Muslim-majority country. They felt that Jeddah could be home.

I lived in Jeddah for twelve years. Even now, when I think of that little city by the Red Sea, I don’t think of it as home, not exactly. I could navigate the city blindfolded, but I couldn’t tell you if it ever was home to me.

In Jeddah, Mama started donning the hijab. Baba considered growing a beard because the Prophet Muhammad had been bearded. Prayer mats would sprawl languidly on the floors of our house, the top right corner curled inward. Someone who had just finished praying wouldn’t bother folding the prayer mat because they knew they’d be returning to pray again shortly.

My parents regularly took me and my brother to the Friday community prayer at our local mosque, with its latticed windows and slender, calligraphed minarets. The communal prayer was preceded by sermons in Arabic, little of which I understood. Although the imam performed the prayers with the men, his absence only deepened my reverence for him. I projected grandiose meaning onto his sermons, which boomed from the loudspeaker in the boxy womens’ prayer room. It was at Friday prayer that I felt most unselfconscious, as an eight-year-old, sitting on the prayer rug between the peeling, cracking walls of the room, enjoying the sensation of rubbing my feet back and forth against the softness of the rug. No one was perceiving me; we were all the same for those thirty minutes.

As my family exited the mosque one Friday, I glimpsed the imam, in his royal white thobe and Saudi kaffiyah. I was surprised to see him leave at the same time as my family; I had imagined he performed additional prayers after the mandatory ones that he led for the congregation. His hands cradled a Quran and a golden tasbih.

As the imam made his way out of the mosque, I watched a small brown beggar boy approach him eagerly. He said something to the imam, but the imam kept walking, ignoring the boy. I pressed my nose against the car window, the oil on my nose leaving imprints on the glass, gawking at the boy, who scampered away as the imam swung the door of his car shut. I wanted to go and talk to the boy, but what would I say? Something kept me paralyzed in my seat, too — perhaps a fear that the imam would somehow find out about my indiscretion through some supernatural, prophetic power.

After that day, I could always see the small boy as the imam barked at us through the loudspeaker. As my Arabic improved with age and experience, I began to understand the substance of his sermons: that the lot of us were bad Muslims, and that we needed to atone for our sins.

Public schools in Saudi Arabia were only open to Saudi citizens. Thankfully, Baba’s bank paid for my tuition at a private British international school, a ten-minute walk from my house. Like most private international schools, the student body at mine was small, around sixty students, and included very wealthy natives, many of whom were princes from the ever-proliferating Saudi royal family.

Of the Arabs, we had a smattering of Jordanians, Syrians, Lebanese, Yemenis, Palestinians. There was another, smaller, group that comprised a mixture of expats, from Japan, from South Africa, from Malaysia, many from the Indian subcontinent. We were all in the same classes and extracurriculars. But the Saudis only ever invited other Arabs to their extravagant birthday parties. Likewise, expats spent time with each other exclusively, at the mall and during our lunch breaks at school. There was some mixing, but it was only a select few that transcended these borders.

We were also separated in our residences. My family lived in a “compound” — a small, gated community with rented houses designed to hold expats. Expats were relegated to compounds because we weren’t permitted to purchase property. Our existences in Saudi Arabia were supposed to be transient and nomadic. We had no path to Saudi naturalization.

Compounds were a respite from the cultural hegemony of Saudi wahhabism. I loved my compound with its identical, blank-canvas villas that connected such that every private fight could be heard by the surrounding units. The compound had everything I could ever think to want as a girl: a swimming pool, a supermarket, a tennis and basketball court, a recreation room with foosball and an air hockey table. I spent my time divided between school and the compound — I don’t remember being anywhere else. It was culturally insulated from the rest of Saudi society; women could sunbathe by the pool in bikinis and alcohol could be consumed without penalty from the mutaw’aa, the religious police that prowled the kingdom and the perimeters of our compounds. It was clear to me that the mutawa’aa were policing expat behavior because I only ever saw the mutawa’aa interact with foreigners, with their broken Arabic, in malls and other public spaces. Saudis weren’t permitted to enter compounds for reasons that were easy for me, then, to conjecture: so that the Saudis might be protected from the vices of us, the morally depraved expats, corrupting Saudi wahhabism with our heretical ideas. It is only now, after all these years, that I wonder if the compounds were designed to keep us safe from them — people like the mutawa’aa and my imam.

The school imported most of our teachers from the UK. The students would joke that the only qualifying factor to become a teacher was to flaunt a British accent; the teachers’ accents lent an authority to their words, even if some of them lacked the experience to back it up. In class, I would often muse about why these white people would forsake their free lives in the West for restricted ones in the Middle East. We had no bars, no cinemas — just endless, soulless malls, in which the stores would close during each of the five prayers, interrupting shoppers.

Our teachers made us watch cartoons on the BBC, read storybooks by Enid Blyton, and study the Tudors. We weren’t ever really sure why, but now I think it was because it was what they knew our parents wanted us to consume: the savory parts of English culture. Our teachers, for instance, never taught us about the role the British played in the history of our countries. We celebrated the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, too, the sixtieth anniversary of her accession to the throne. Red and white and blue balloons soared into the sky that day, characteristically cloudless on our school’s cricket pitch. I remember a sea of brown faces of varying shades, dark heads, unkempt school uniforms. I remember my warbling voice, louder than that of my peers, proud to remember the verses of the anthem beyond 

; I remember feeling a stirring in my heart, maybe for the first time, toward a country that I still didn’t know had colonized my people. Although the school had a total of one white-faced British student represented in its student body, all of us — the Saudis, the Arabs, the expats — cosplayed British school children. When our school received a letter from Buckingham Palace, effusively thanking us for our celebrations, I felt like Queen Elizabeth II was thanking me personally.

My academic rival in school was a boy called Paresh Uppal. His father was a banker, like mine, and he lived in a neighboring compound. He was Indian and Hindu. He smelled like delicious Indian food and oiled his hair regularly. I called him PU,

 I knew it was unkind. But I was just insecure that I, too, smelled like Mama’s Pakistani food, despite my fastidious attempts to mask its stench with my Victoria’s Secret Pure Seduction body mist.

Paresh and I were sort of friends. We had inherited our parents’ suspicion for the others’ country and kept each other at arm’s length. Ironically, I held no such suspicion for my British teachers. Still, we were bereft of friendship options and found solidarity in each other’s loneliness. We would spend our lunch breaks lolling on benches, legs swinging. Around noon, the sun would cut long shadows over our hunched figures. We would quiz each other on Arabic verb conjugations, eager to one-up the other.

On their way to the football field, our classmates would snicker at us. I was okay with the teasing about my nerdiness, but I hated the speculations about my relationship with Paresh. He wasn’t Muslim, so it wasn’t even a real option. I hated that people felt like it was plausible, that I might like someone like him. The implication that we shared a social station in our school rankled me, too, because Paresh was bullied a lot. Sometimes, during our breaks, some of the Saudi boys would tug him away from his books and force him to recite the shahada, an Islamic declaration of faith said at the time of conversion. When he was returned to our table, his brown scrawny arms mottled with white scratches, I could see in his eyes that he hadn’t acquiesced, that the Saudis, for maybe the first time, hadn’t gotten what they’d wanted.

I knew that I was supposed to respect Paresh’s commitment to his values or whatever, but all I remember feeling was resentment. Just say the shahada, I would think as we walked silently to class. I felt like Paresh wasn’t teaching the Saudi boys a lesson; he was trying to prove that he was better than them. And we both knew that he wasn’t, at least not in Saudi Arabia.

In Year Seven, at 12 years old, Nadia Mansour began sitting next to me in maths. Maths was organized into “sets,” an academic hierarchy from which I derived much validation. Set 1 Maths was for the cleverest students, so I was surprised to see that Nadia had made the cut; she would often peer over my shoulder for the answers to our sums. I knew that her decision to sit next to me was because I was especially good at maths. Still, I saw her proximity as an opening — an exciting possibility that she wanted to befriend me.

She was the daughter of a Saudi business mogul. I knew she was wealthy because she owned a Kipling backpack and would buy food from the school cafeteria every day, a privilege that I was only granted on a fortnightly basis. All the wealthy people I knew were beautiful, and Nadia was no exception. The sun seemed to give her bronzy face a luminous, Princess Jasmine-esque glow while only spotlighting the constellations of pink acne on mine.

I resented how perfect she was, but I had hoped that by becoming her friend, some of her perfection might rub off on me. I imbued her presence next to me in math with all sorts of meaning. Like: maybe she secretly wanted to be friends but couldn’t because of her Saudi friends, who weren’t willing to commit a social transgression. I’d watched this storyline play out in a Disney Channel original movie and was more than happy to assume the role of the nerd, transformed by her friendship with the popular girl.

One day, Nadia invited me to her house to work on a school project, for which we were assigned to each other as partners. It was because she technically wasn’t allowed to enter my compound, but I was nevertheless thrilled. If we finished early, I wondered if she would invite me to swim in her pool or into her movie theater. Public movie theaters were forbidden in Saudi Arabia.

I normally took a minivan back to my compound from school, in which expat students were expected to pile in and crowd, some being forced to stand. After school that day, however, I followed Nadia into her SUV, as big as the minivan, with tinted glass windows. I spotted Paresh and reveled in the look he shot me, a bewildered — and envious, I was sure — witness to my social elevation. The optics of me climbing into Nadia’s car would be impossible to deny by its spectators. Nadia and I — we were friends.

, the driver greeted us. I sat in the passenger seat diagonal to him and glimpsed his chappals — the slippers that Baba wore only in the bathroom — and his fraying white shalwaar kameez, billowing in the car’s air conditioning. His beard was streaked golden with henna. But it was the way he greeted us, the way he sounded his vowels, that incriminated him. He wasn’t Saudi or Arab. He was Pakistani.

The driver asked in Urdu, as he reversed the car from the parking space. He was looking in the rear-view mirror, his eyes on mine. My skin prickled under his appraisal. Nadia looked curiously between us. Maybe it was the first time she’d ever heard her driver say more than a word or two. For a second, I considered feigning incomprehension.

 I mumbled, averting my gaze. Perhaps sensing my discomfort, he abandoned further attempts at conversation. I hated that the driver had called attention to my commonality with him, that he had sabotaged my chances at camouflaging myself in the landscape of Nadia’s world. That when Nadia looked at me now, she would never be able to see a best friend, only her chauffeur.

Thankfully, though, Nadia kept me by her side. She became my principal benefactor, sponsoring my now-daily cafeteria meals and excursions to the mall. I had hoped that she’d forgotten about my exchange with the driver, or that maybe she had just forgiven my transgression. The latter brought me little comfort; I knew it would still count as a strike against me. For what, I was still unclear, but I felt I needed to make up for something. I would hear about her family’s skiing vacations, about her father’s new hotels, about all sorts of Saudi high-society gossip. I didn’t really understand what they were talking about, but I’d always nod eagerly on cue.

Nadia had a boyfriend, and they would make out and do other inappropriate stuff. It was a little shocking to me because up until then, I thought Muslims didn’t kiss or have sex before marriage, especially not the kind of Muslims that Saudis were supposed to be: devout, conservative, pious. Islam was birthed in their country; Saudis had a special claim over the religion. Still, after the incident with the imam, I had begun to question that claim — a subversion that had surprised me.

Nadia relished in sharing details about their physical relationship to me. I knew I should have been flattered by the trust she placed in me, but I knew what her confidence really meant: she still didn’t consider me one of her own. She knew that I wouldn’t tell anyone, and that even if I did, no one would believe me — a lesser Muslim — over her. She’d often ask, 

 I would shake my head, but I think she always knew that I was lying. This, I knew, was part of being her friend.

Sometimes, I would spot Paresh sitting on the benches, alone.  Even when I felt most despondent about my progress with Nadia, I couldn’t bring myself to feel ashamed about ditching him for her; I was convinced that he would have done the same if he’d had the opportunity.

Once, Paresh intercepted me on the way to class from lunch break. He smelled good, like Axe deodorant. His hair wasn’t greased up anymore; it was dry and flattened against his forehead. Nadia gave me a slight nod, like she was granting me permission to converse with Paresh, before entering the school building. Paresh looked at me, but I couldn’t read his expression. He asked me about my grade on the last math exam. I sensed that he was trying to reestablish our rapport. I knew that this was his way of asking, 

can we go back to sitting together at lunch?

I stared at the familiar scars that ran down his arms. Don’t remember, I shrugged, and I left him behind.

My family was sitting at the dinner table. The adhan, a melody of Arabic words, was reverberating through our compound premises, but when I looked out the window to observe its source, all I could see was a swimming pool with two bikini-clad women sunbathing.

Baba waited for the imam to finish the call to prayer. Then, he announced, back erect, hands clasped: 

We’re moving to Indiana. In America. Insha’Allah. You will study in the top schools there.

I felt the spices of Mama’s chicken biryani well up against the walls of my throat. I reached for my mug of milk, hiding my face, to buy a few seconds to consider my response. Nadia’s friends were just beginning to accept my unwavering presence in their world. Things felt incomplete; I was at the precipice of finally belonging

in Jeddah. I could almost taste it, the sort of entitlement that I conjectured Saudis must have felt toward the Kingdom.

I found it funny that we were moving to a city — state? What was the difference? — with India in its name. I felt the urge to tell Paresh, to consult him about this new development, but I hadn’t spoken to him in so long that I didn’t know if I could.

My brother and I looked at each other mutely. I knew nothing about America, but we had heard recently of the joke candidate Trump running for President and his disdain for Muslims. He didn’t seem like good news, but at the time no one believed that he would actually win.

My brother didn’t look particularly shocked, and I was surprised to realize that neither was I. I guess we’d always known that our stay in Saudi Arabia would come to an end; I could never quite conceptualize Baba, shrunken in height and stature, or Mama, with grayed hair, living in Jeddah. Maybe a return to Pakistan seemed in order; even the United Kingdom, with our cultural proximity to the British at school, made more sense to me. But America had always been completely beyond the realm of possibility. There was an implied permanence to our move there.

I didn’t know what life looked like beyond the coast of the Red Sea, but I felt a deep sense of foreboding. In Saudi Arabia, I was one among many coffee-colored people — year-round, barring seasonality — and, even if the Saudis weren’t 

 people, I could still pretend like they were. I was good at shapeshifting; I had years of practice. But that wouldn’t be possible in America, not when culture 

 race would separate me from the status quo. The odds felt overwhelmingly stacked against me.

And yet a small part of me felt an unexpected thrill at the opportunity to start over, for the first time ever. Maybe in Indiana, I would be a Nadia Mansour. Maybe I would stand out in the ways Nadia Mansour did, in all her exotic Princess Jasmine glory. I fantasized about reinventing and workshopping myself, adopting a new accent and personality, starting from scratch. It was ridiculous to even consider, I chided myself reprovingly, but the idea was too delicious for me to refrain from indulging.

The day after Baba told us the news, Jeddah experienced its annual flash floods, prompting a week-long break from school. There was always talk of building a drainage system, but it always diminished as quickly as the water vaporized from the streets of Jeddah. These breaks always felt like a period of renewal for me, like a fresh haircut, like I could remake a part of myself and no one would feel the difference except in the subtle, but perhaps more significant, ways.

I’d spent the better part of the recess rehearsing how I’d break the news to everyone, how I’d talk about my new life in Indiana, how dramatic of a performance I would deliver. I’d never really had news to break before, and I feared ambivalence, like no one would really feel my absence, like my twelve years didn’t mean anything after all.

At the end of our daily lunch break, students would crowd around the water cooler before class. I felt that this would be the opportune time to break the news: I would make the announcement, and then we’d promptly enter the building for class. I wouldn’t really have time to answer questions, so the intrigue of my big news would be preserved.

Guys — I’m like — I guess I’m moving to America.

I quickly glanced at Nadia. I hadn’t told her beforehand. Her eyes were big, even bigger than they normally were, and they looked a little watery. Her perfectly chiseled eyebrows were furrowed, but whether she was upset that I was leaving (here my heart leaped at the thought) or unhappy that I hadn’t informed her first, I couldn’t tell.

Nadia recomposed her features quickly — too quickly. With dismay, I wondered if it was because she realized that she could easily find another brown, moony-faced expat to ride in her SUV and marvel at her life. I’d always felt like I’d fooled Nadia into believing I was a one-of-a-kind friend. But even now, looking at the crowd of my classmates encircling me now, I could identify other contenders for Nadia’s best friend. I wouldn’t be hard to replace.

 someone said, interrupting my thoughts, and we all erupted into laughter. It felt comforting, that we were laughing alongside each other, that we were all in on the joke. In the face of Trump, an imaginary, comically Islamophobic villain, it felt like we could be united. I delighted in the feeling of “us” versus 

. I’d never felt it before: a kinship with the Saudis and Arabs around me. It felt unfair that this seemed possible only in light of my imminent departure: this ephemeral, bittersweet taste of belonging.

I tried to catch Paresh’s eye; I wanted to see that he cared, though I knew I didn’t deserve it. He looked startled, and then momentarily disturbed, but maybe that was just wishful thinking on my end. He broke away from the group and walked into the building, leaving me behind. The group seemed to follow his cue, losing interest in my announcement. My few moments of fame were gone, and I was left alone, thinking about them — the 

 that I would soon be joining in America.

Later, I remember sitting in that Saudi Airlines aircraft, looking out at the landscape of Jeddah, its barrenness, the skinny palm trees, swaying in the coastal breeze. I listened to sad music to help elicit an emotional response that felt fitting for this farewell. I thought of my correctly accented British teachers, of Nadia and Paresh, of that one white kid in our school, of Queen Elizabeth II. I thought I would feel a stirring, but my heart was closed, like it was the day I saw the imam with that poor brown boy, and it stayed closed throughout that twelve hour flight.

Fall / Winter 2023

Jeddah

Asiyah is the oldest and largest center in NYC that accommodates the holistic needs of domestic violence victims who identify with the AMEMSA (Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian) or BIPOC populations.

*All names in this article are concealed to maintain the privacy of Asiyah clients.

When I was 19, I interned at a legal non-profit in NYC for survivors of domestic violence. I remember working with my first Pakistani client. I knew she was Pakistani because of her name; it was a little old-fashioned, too, so I knew that she’d grown up in Pakistan. I was assigned to help file for her reimbursements, from the non-profit, for her food expenditures. I looked over the receipts she’d shared with the non-profit: From the bulk orders and their erratic timing, I knew they were for Ramadan, and I felt my heart soften. I was scheduled to call her later that day, and I remember thinking I should bring Ramadan up and ask her how it went for her. I hoped that we could bond over the spiritualism of the month, how special it was. But then I felt like an idiot, because of course Ramadan wasn’t an easy month for her, she’d probably had to fast, alone, and look after her kids and deal with an asshole of a husband. Maybe she didn’t want to talk about it.

I like to think that we were able to make a special connection that day. We conversed easily in Urdu, speaking openly about our families and ties to Pakistan. She confided in me her yearning to leave her husband, with her children, and to find community with other Muslim and Pakistani women, but that she didn’t know if she’d find anything like that at the NYC shelters. As a Muslim, and as a Pakistani, she felt the NYC shelters weren’t built for women like her. Would they understand her religious obligations, respect her hijab, refrain from pigeonholing her into the archetypal Muslim woman-victim?

I knew that my non-profit had done the best we could to help her, but I remember spending the rest of the day thinking what more could and should be done for women like her: for immigrants, for South Asians, and for Muslims.

Fast forward to a few years later: I learned of the Asiyah Women’s Center, based in New York City and not quite like other women’s shelters. Asiyah  is the oldest and largest center in NYC that accommodates the holistic needs of domestic violence victims who identify with the AMEMSA (Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian) or BIPOC populations.

Asiyah, then, offers a bracing and crucial intervention: a shelter where cultural sensitivity and holistic support create meaningful change for its residents. Through counseling, community building, spiritual support, and advocacy, the center transforms lives. “Asiyah isn’t just about surviving; it’s about thriving,” a client

 shared with me over Zoom a few weeks ago.

For many clients, the journey to Asiyah is perilous. One NYC-based Muslim woman, who reached out to Asiyah after finding herself in an abusive relationship, reflects on her first contact with the center. “I wasn’t sure if what I was dealing with even counted as abuse,” she recalls. The night before reaching out, she had spent hours wandering the streets, eventually seeking shelter in a laundromat. She recalls that she reached out to Asiyah via email, trembling as she typed, before mustering the courage to give them a call. A social worker from Asiyah had answered, and had listened attentively. It was the first time she’d shared her experiences of abuse with anyone. To her relief, the social worker informed her that a bed was available at the shelter.

At Asiyah, clients are not treated as mere cases, moving in and out of the center like a revolving door.  Asiyah is intentional about creating a familial environment. For many of the AMEMSA clients, growing up in and coming from family- and community-oriented environments, this is especially crucial in their ability to heal. “It didn’t feel like a shelter. It felt more like a home,” one former client reminisced. “And the Asiyah team immediately felt like family. You know that they’re not going to judge you.”This client was especially moved by the celebration of milestones, sharing that the staff and residents “surprised [her] with a cake and Palestinian food for [her] birthday. “For the first time in a long while, I felt truly loved by the people around me.” She recalls how, later on, staff member Khalto Adla —

, the Arabic word for aunt, one of the in-shelter residents —supported her through medical procedures and with home-cooked meals: gestures that transformed her experience from one of survival to one of care and family. “There are strangers out there, who can really be good to another person. They don’t judge. They understand every situation.”

Despite the diversity in client backgrounds and experiences, another client shared that “we all understood each other, because we all had the same situation.” In this way, clients could grow to serve as mentors and support systems for new clients and residents of the shelter. One client shared that “when other clients come in, I’ll be the one to tell them that everything is going to be alright, you came to the right place. They helped me, and now they’re gonna help you. Don’t cry.” In this way, she feels proud to be able to “pour the same love into them as [Asiyah] poured into me.”

Asiyah is acutely aware of the systemic challenges faced by the women they serve, and proactively offers its clients support in myriad ways. They offer support with transportation, therapy, food for children of clients, professional development, and even apartment-hunting. With the support of Asiyah, one client now plans to attend UCLA and become a lawyer to advocate for other women in need. This client shared the important role Asiyah played in empowering her to dream big: “I [used to have] low self-esteem. [Before], I was always hearing negative things, getting beaten, of course, in my marriage. I wasn’t the best version of myself. Asiyah made the stronger version of me. I didn’t know I had so much potential inside of me. I didn’t know I could be strong.”

The Asiyah Center represents a novel space for many of their clients to freely and devotedly practice their Islam.  Before coming to the center, one client shared that she’d long contemplated converting to Islam, but felt hesitant given the violence she was experiencing, and the instability of her household. At Asiyah, she found a welcoming environment that allowed her to practice her faith freely, without judgment. Her time at the center led her to embrace Islam fully, becoming the first person in her family to convert. She shared that she’d always “imagined celebrating [Ramadan] alone,” but that her experience had proved remarkably different: “This Ramadan, I was surrounded by a supportive community of Muslim women at the center. We shared iftar meals and prayed together, enjoying halal food options.”

Even after women leave the shelter, one client shared how  “[The Asiyah Center] never abandoned me, even after I left the shelter. They always reached out to me after, to make sure that I was okay. Regular shelters don’t do that. Once you leave, that’s your own business, that’s what they tell you. But Asiyah — it’s a forever thing. They stay in touch with you. They want to know how you’re doing, how the kids are doing, and they tell you to stay strong.”

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, please don't hesitate to reach out to the Asiyah Center's confidential hotline at (718) 833-2425. Your safety is Asiyah's priority. To support the Asiyah Center's mission and help them continue providing vital resources and services, please consider making a donation at 

Imaan Mirza

Imaan Mirza

Features

Fall 2024 - Land

Mohsin

Fall / Winter 2023

Jeddah

Notes

Notes

The Asiyah Center