The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (22 page)

I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief, such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such caliber, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self esteem, their native culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.

Even now, fifty years past independence, the greed and cynicism of the British still haunted the Mawdudi house. At a loss as to how to respond, I kept quiet.

In the course of the interview that followed, Haider Farooq would become impatient with Ali’s translation. He would interrupt, correct him, and put what was said in starker and more brutal terms. My questions were brushed off with an equally dismissive and curt wave of his hand. It was as if I’d disturbed a wasp’s nest. It was hard to believe this man once nurtured a fondness for stray kittens.

Ali Mawdudi didn’t seem at all fazed by his father’s interruptions. In contrast to Haider Farooq’s intensely felt Urdu, the Mawlana’s grandson spoke English with a rather laid-back cowboy accent, punctuating and softening his father’s angry declarations with the leitmotif “basically, what he is saying is…” At one point I asked Ali if he had been educated in America. He glanced at me and looked away. I work for a call center, he replied tonelessly, soliciting funds for American charities. It was the only question I would be allowed to ask for some time.

Instead, Haider Farooq Mawdudi embarked on a long monologue in which he explained the circumstances that had led to Maryam’s correspondence with his father. He described his father’s first impressions of her and her impression of him. The situation that had led to her exile in Pattoki was addressed, as were the reasons for her removal and commitment to the Paagal Khanaah. Finally Ali seemed to pause and look at his father. He turned to me.

Your husband is Muslim?

I had been busy noting all the curious and profound ways in which Haider Farooq’s version of events differed from Maryam’s. It took me a moment to respond.

No, I said. Ali continued his translation.

As the evening wore on, I felt like I was becoming increasingly mired in a game of Mother, May I? Every time I found an opening to ask a question, Haider Farooq would sense my impatience and proceed down a road he knew I had no interest in traveling. In fact, it was quite often in a direction that took me further and further away from where I thought I would be. By the time I realized this, I had completely forgotten the question I’d wanted to ask. I left his house stunned.

When I returned to Gulberg that night, I looked up Lord Macaulay’s 1835 address to the British Parliament. Macaulay had mandated that under British rule India would adopt English over Sanskrit or Arabic as the medium of higher education. The quote, I learned, was a fabrication, and a fairly well known one at that. Ironically, its origins had been traced to a publication of Indian Hindu fundamentalists. Thomas Babington Macaulay hadn’t even been in England in 1835.

CHAPTER 8

A War Between and Within

“Haven’t you met her yet?” Haider Farooq had thundered. I had been wondering if someone was going to turn on a few more lights. The room was terribly dark; I could barely make out his features.

“Isn’t it clear there is something wrong with her?! Even the most anti-Western Islamists would see why the West got rid of her!”

Once again Ali stepped in to translate his father’s intemperance into a lower key. “The way Maryam was talking, he said, it was pretty aggressive. From her eyes you could guess, from her eyes you could tell, she was crazy. She would look right at you. Basically, what my father is saying is, someone who is mentally not well, mentally ill, that person doesn’t have one direction. He might go in one direction one day and in another direction another. She couldn’t be a true Muslim if she was insane.”

“You played Ping-Pong with her,” I said, with a note of accusation in my voice that sounded inane. I was trying to find the sweet-tempered boy he once had been in the merciless and unforgiving man he had become. I was losing hope. Haider Farooq interrupted his son to answer me directly in English.

“Yes, I was the only supporter of her in my house. My whole family was against her. They said she was a bad woman, and told my father to throw her out of the house, send her to the madhouse.”

“But your father didn’t.”

“No, my father, he was in shock!”

He looked away. Ali resumed translating.

“When she first met him, the shock was mutual. She basically thought he was a young man and instead she found out he was an old guy. She said she needed a razor to shave her legs. He couldn’t follow her English so she lifted her shalwar and she bared her leg!”

I was aware of Mawdudi’s strong views on “the feminine urge to display.” In
Purdah and the Status of Women,
he didn’t mention shaved legs, only makeup, fancy hairdos, gauzy and bright clothes. Though such things were frowned upon, they were not legislated against. “No law can be made to check and control this tendency, as it springs from the woman’s own heart,” he cautioned. Only thorough self-scrutiny can reveal whether such displays are filled with “hidden evil desire.” I was certain Maryam’s motives were innocent, but I couldn’t begin to imagine the Mawlana’s response to a naked female calf. Nakedness of any sort (including one’s own) was “the breeding place for the germs of indecency and obscenity.”

“After Mawlana Mawdudi recovered from the insult,” Ali continued, “he arranged for Maryam to go and live with this rich landlord in Pattoki who would adopt her and pass all his property on to her. And again she was under the impression that this man would be a young guy and she would marry him.”

“But Maryam had refused her many suitors, she had resigned herself to not marrying in Pattoki,” I protested, struggling to get a word in. The idea that Maryam had set her cap on marrying Mawdudi before arriving in Pakistan, only to pivot to settle on the prospect of marrying Baijan one month later, was hard to swallow. Peggy had led her parents to believe she hadn’t taken her many suitors seriously, but according to Haider Farooq, she thought of little else but marriage.

Had Maryam arrived at her decision not to marry because she was fearful of marrying a complete stranger, as I had supposed, or, as Haider Farooq insisted, because her suitors, on meeting her, could see that underneath that burqa was a crazy person? Perhaps they decided she was crazy simply because she looked them in the eye, just as she had Mawdudi. It was unforgivable for an unmarried woman to look a man in the eye, even through a burqa. Adultery, Mawdudi believed, first springs from “the evil look.” I imagined, too, that Maryam didn’t strike a demure and silent pose. She would have wanted to talk. That would be another strike against her.

“No, I am telling you. When she got there she was very upset about the fact that the wealthy landlord too was an old man. She beat up his wife. They came to Lahore to complain to Mawdudi. They were really upset, they were crying. That is why the Mawlana committed her.”

I dismissed the desperate-to-be-wed and wife-beating home wrecker that Haider Farooq imagined Maryam to be as nothing more than a kind of bizarre cultural mistranslation. Though Maryam obviously had a temper, I hardly thought she was as dangerous as he made out.

It was only when Haider began talking about Maryam’s engagement to Mohammad Yusuf Khan that my sense of certainty was thrown entirely off; I felt like a carpenter who, while he is dutifully milling old boards, sees his saw bite on a hidden nail, sending splinters flying in all directions. Only then did it occur to me that I had made the same mistake his father had made. From a series of letters, I had conjured an entire being. I imagined I knew Maryam Jameelah.

There was pandemonium, Ali said. Mohammad Yusuf Khan’s first wife had arrived at the house in Icchra, children and mother-in-law in tow, deeply upset that her husband had taken a second wife. She begged Begum Mawdudi to do something. The Mawlana was furious. “I give you something to work on and you just mess it up,” he yelled at Mohammad Yusuf Khan. “How dare you have done this thing!”

As a way of explaining his actions, Khan told Mawdudi that the marriage was Maryam’s idea. She kept saying this English word,
marriage,
over and over, he protested. He didn’t know what it meant; he had to ask someone.

Mohammad Yusuf Khan did not speak a word of English, Ali Farooq explained; he was a simple Pathan. When he learned what the word meant, he went back to Maryam to confirm that she wanted to get married. Maryam took that as a proposal.

I burst out laughing. He was joking, no? When I glanced at Haider Farooq, he looked positively murderous.

Ali continued relentlessly. “Mawdudi felt obligated to Mohammad Yusuf Khan because he had gone to prison on behalf of the Jamaat-e-Islami. He gave him odd jobs to do to help him support his large family.” In Haider’s telling, Mawdudi found out that Mohammad Yusuf Khan had taken Maryam out of the asylum only when Maryam showed up at Mawdudi’s door in a wedding dress, beaming and triumphant, with Khan at her side and his furious wife behind them.

Mawdudi registered a kidnapping case against Khan and brought a suit against the hospital, Haider Farooq told me. He believed that, as Maryam’s guardian, he alone had the authority to sign for her release. Eventually, he dropped the case. According to Haider Farooq, he banned them both from ever crossing his threshold again.

I was flummoxed. I had assumed that Mohammad Yusuf Khan married Maryam Jameelah as a loyal party worker, to help his beloved leader out of a difficult spot. Like marrying the boss’s daughter, I had supposed. But if he didn’t marry her to curry favor, but in fact married her without Mawdudi’s permission and at the risk of his displeasure, why had he done it? A number of possibilities presented themselves. I settled on one and turned to Haider Farooq. Had he married her for love? I felt ridiculous immediately. Even Peggy had never mentioned anything like love.

“Why?” Haider Farooq asked, a note of rising disbelief in his voice, as if I were the most foolish woman he had ever come across. A torrent of Urdu ensued, and his eyes flashed in my direction. I felt pinned to the chair. Ali translated a gentler version. “Because Yusuf Khan imagined that he could make a lot of money off her books,” he said laconically. “Get his children into the U.S. and live over there, start educating over there. That was the only reason. Nothing like love.”

Oh, I thought. I watched the narrative edifice Maryam had constructed with her twenty-four letters home begin to weave back and forth, threatening complete collapse. For whose benefit, I wondered, had she narrated her happy ending, replete with a comically glowering Mawdudi at the supper table and a coyly written scene of her deflowering? Had she written this to allay her parents’ fears about her welfare or to establish her triumph? Was it meant as a piece of entertainment or of propaganda?

Putting aside my confusion, I asked Haider Farooq to explain why he thought his father had invited Margaret Marcus to live with his family as his adopted daughter. This was a more fundamental question. For the first time since I stepped through the door there was silence, broken by the sudden arrival of Haider’s wife. She turned on the light, offered me a plate of samosas, and retreated to the kitchen. When Haider Farooq answered, his voice was low.

“Because he felt sorry for her,” Ali said. “Maryam wrote him that to get her off Islam her parents got her admitted to a mental hospital. She was from a Jew family and her parents were forcing her to get married. Basically, he is saying Mawdudi wanted to rescue her from a marriage to a non-Muslim.”

“I’ve read the letters; she doesn’t say anything like that in the original letters.” I found my feet. The letters might not be reliable, but by now I could practically recite them.

“He is saying that he doesn’t think you have read all of the letters, those letters that he is talking about.”

“Where are they?” More letters, I thought bleakly.

“He is saying these letters are there but they basically can never be published.”

“She has them?”

“No, we have them.”

I followed Maryam Jameelah up a narrow cement staircase to the second floor, my attention fixed on the hiss made by her cheap sandals every time her foot hit the stairs. She had the side-to-side gait of an arthritic. I had arrived at the house unannounced the day before to arrange an interview. Maryam immediately recalled all the personal details I had included in the letter I sent eight months before. She recited them to me.

Maryam still lived with Mohammad Yusuf Khan in the old Hindu neighborhood of Sant Nagar. She shared the house with two stepsons, and their wives and children. Shafiqa had died in 1995, having raised nine children. Of Maryam’s own surviving children, her youngest son (named after Haider Farooq) now lived in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he owned a combination gas station and food mart. Her second son was in Pennsylvania. Her two daughters were still in Pakistan, but only one lived close enough to take her to the doctor. This was the only time Maryam ever left the house.

Instead, it appeared that Maryam Jameelah spent most of her time alone in her second-floor bedroom, where we were now headed for our interview. Here, under the harsh glare of tube lighting, she lived surrounded by eight locked steel almirahs containing her library. Inside the almirahs were countless books and the bound volumes of letters from her family. Here too were more newspaper clippings about her. Ancient copies of
National Geographic
and Time Life encyclopedias supplied by her mother over the years to fuel Maryam’s argument against the West were also stored in the almirahs. The only place to sit was on her unmade bed.

From the various bound volumes of family letters Maryam proceeded to pull out hidden photographs of her children and grandchildren to show me. Her husband didn’t approve of photographs, although, like Mawdudi, he sometimes sat for them with a disapproving expression on his face. It was a sin to have them, Maryam admitted, a sin to even look at them. But she couldn’t help herself. Above her bed she pointed out an air conditioner, bought with the small inheritance she received on her father’s death. She would like to do without such modern conveniences, she said, but during the summer her room is like an oven.

Maryam began our first conversation by describing to me the illnesses and deaths of her many longtime correspondents. Her voice was strangely high pitched and keening. Betty had moved into a nursing home without sending her the address, Maryam wailed. It had been years since she had heard from her. As she talked, she rocked her upper body, she flapped her hands; she couldn’t sit still. When she was agitated, she slapped her forehead. Her brows were arrowed steeply over her eyes, like a cartoon of anger. She wore a cheap acrylic sweater over layers of clothes against the cold.

Maryam ticked off the medications she had taken over the years, Thorazine and olanzapine among them, and spoke frankly about her illness. Because of her “nervousness,” her husband and Shafiqa had looked after her babies; she didn’t even nurse them. “I don’t know anyone else who would have done that,” she said, as if they had had a choice. Nor had she ever learned to cook. There were no canned or packaged foods in Pakistan; everything had to be made from scratch, she explained. It was too time-consuming for her, so Shafiqa and the other women of the household did the cooking. She had her books to write.

From one of her almirahs Maryam retrieved a 1953 edition of
Life
magazine with a cover story on the American teenager. Maryam put the magazine on my lap and slapped the front cover, her fingers lingering nervously over it as if she didn’t entirely trust me. Girls in fluffy sleeveless gowns sat and stood on a carpeted staircase of an upper-middle-class home, laughing and whispering. Inside the issue was a transcript of a girl gabbing on the phone with her boyfriend. Maryam wanted to make the point that she’d never had any part of such foolishness, but she couldn’t seem to take her eyes off the photographs.