We Are Not in Pakistan (18 page)

Without Grandma Miriam, Kathleen wouldn't have long black hair and a too-prominent “Pakistani nose.” And she wouldn't get so mocha-toned in summer that her skin got out of sync with her hazel eyes.

“Weird-looking,” she overheard her last teacher say. “Probably Hispanic.”

A bike approaches; Grandma veers left over the dividing yellow line.

“Keep right, Grandma,” says Kathleen. “We are not in Pakistan.” Even Dorothy knew when she wasn't in Kansas any more.

Grandma stoops over flowers. “Allah!” she says.

“They're just daisies, Grandma.” People at school will think she's Muslim.

“No, see these blue prairie flowers beside the daisies. I never know their names.” Black eyes shine and crinkle.

Kathleen scuffs along, the scent of grass and morning moving past her. The glacier is getting bigger, stabbing icicles between her ribs.

The other girls won't have come to a new city. They won't have moved into an attic bedroom at their grandparents' house. They will have best friends already, will have been in twos since first grade. They will already have boyfriends — all the cool guys will be taken. And they won't be wearing last year's fashions.

Grandma's fault. Tankinis, tank-tops and spaghetti straps were not allowed. Nor were bare midriffs. Hipster jeans were forbidden. And no Nikes, absolutely no Nikes.

“Nike has sweatshops,” Grandma said during the back-to-school sales, as she removed a pair of shoes from Kathleen's shopping cart.

“You have carpets made by children in Lahore.”

“How else should children learn their family's trade?” she said. “Those aren't sweatshops nowadays, not since the government took them over.”

“Socialism,” said Kathleen, just to make her mad.

“Regulation for the better,” said Grandma.

“Bet there's a class in carpet weaving — want me to sign up?”

“Lord forgive you for teasing Grandma,” she said.

Now cyclists on a tandem bike whiz by, an American flag stirring gently behind them. A jogger huffs and pumps past. Gold letters stencilled on the path: Newhall.

“Thanks, Grandma, I'll go from here.”

“Nonsense.” Her hat cocks toward Kathleen. “I should meet your teacher, introduce myself.”

Kathleen kicks a heel across the lettering. “Oh, no, Mom's introduced herself already. Really, I'll be fine. My teacher is probably very busy — first day and all.”

Grandma looks thwarted but ready for another try.

“And Grandpa Terry's alone,” Kathleen adds adroitly.

Grandma tilts her wrist to read the time. “I'll pick you up this afternoon. Meet me right here, darling.”

“I'll come home myself.” Kathleen sounds firm and even, like her father giving instructions at one of his construction projects.

“Kathleen,” says Grandma, “in my world, we don't allow young girls to walk home alone.”

She didn't say “you,” she said “young girls.”

Inside, Kathleen's glacier clenches and expands. “I'm glad we don't live in your world,” she says, plumping her cheeks into sulk mode. Ignoring her grandmother's outstretched arms, she sprints up the incline to the brown brick school buildings. At the top she glances back to the bike path.

Grandma Miriam is waving her hat. “Three-thirty!” she yells, and points at her watch.

•   •   •

“How was school?”

“Okay,” says Kathleen, shifting the clinging weight of her backpack.

But school had been better than okay. Kathleen had popped out in front during the summer, and boys noticed her, buzzing about like flies. She acted as if she didn't need them — that helped too. She signed up for guitar lessons, foiling Grandma's wish for her to learn piano. Kathleen and another newbie, Jodie, a Chilean-American kid from Minneapolis, got together in the cafeteria.

Thanks to Jodie, Kathleen had fared better than other new kids; one girl with dark eyes and a nose like her own sat through lunch all alone. You'd think by now she'd have figured out that even if you're wearing jeans, a white scarf tucked behind your ears and brought forward to cover them up screams “Muslim” so loud people can hear it a mile away. Nope, the girl was totally out of it.

Grandma rests her hand on Kathleen's head. “Coming toward me just now, you looked exactly like a little girl in Pakistan. Did anyone ask where you got the lovely shape of your eyes, your silky black hair?”

“Yeah. I told them my dad's Black Irish.”

A second's pause. “So he is, darling. But there's a lot of me in you.”

“I don't look like a girl in Pakistan,” says Kathleen. “All of them wear those black things.”

“Burkhas? On TV you mean. CNN loves showing women in burkhas. But I didn't see many burkhas in Lahore when I was growing up.”

A woman encased in black tights rollerblades by. She pivots on one skate, faces back, gives a graceful wave. Grandma Miriam waves back.

“We were so cosmopolitan, then, darling. It's so different now because of the fundies in the rural areas.”

Fundies. She thinks she's being naughty because it rhymes with undies.

“For instance near Peshawar,” Grandma continues. “What you'd call farm country. So parochial they are — you know, just like Americans who haven't travelled. But my friends say, what if you didn't have the mosques? Would Musharraff or any other president give the homeless welfare? And who would take care of war refugees, orphans? At least the fundies give them food.”

Her friends say. Her Pakistani friends.
Mom says you never know who might be listening these days. If she were here, she'd shush Grandma from going on and on about Pakistan.

“… Women take their burkhas off in private, you know. And I wish you could see how lovely they are, how faèulous their jewellery is, how ornate are their clothes.”

Kathleen takes an over-the-shoulder glance. A few other kids are walking home — alone. No one she recognizes from class. A couple of women jog behind strollers. A few cyclists are leaning around a curve ahead.

A splash of colour flutters past, a butterfly. One flutter of its wing can affect what happens far away in Pakistan. But a butterfly in Pakistan can't affect much in America.

“If you love Pakistan so much, Grandma, why did you leave?”

Silence. Kathleen steals a look.

Grandma is so old. Kathleen is going to get famous and die young.

Can't she just answer? Anyone watching will think she doesn't speak English.

At the top of Lafayette Hill, Grandma has to stop and catch her breath. Lake Michigan brims before them, Eden blue.

“Our family,” says Grandma Miriam, so low Kathleen can't be sure she hears. “We had to leave. Slowly, gradually, each of us realized we had no future there. I went first by marrying your
grandpa, but then my brother and sister came away too. People in Pakistan didn't want us, Kathleen. We're Christians.”

Kathleen has never heard this from her mom, though Mom lived in Pakistan when she was little. Maybe she was too little to remember. Grandpa's Christian and he lived in Pakistan for years, but he's never mentioned anyone being mean to him. But then, Grandpa Terry's hair was natural blond before it got whiter than anyone else's. And you can't get a word out of him during football season and it's always football season. And he doesn't remember a lot of things. And even if he did, he wouldn't remember things the way Grandma does.

Kathleen believes her grandmother. Because her dad said quarrelling and hatred are all you can expect of Third World people.

By six each morning, when Kathleen comes downstairs, Miriam has woken up Safia, picked up her husband's dirty socks, tidied Safia's clothes, books, papers and mail. She has also done a couple of loads of laundry, washed the dishes in the porcelain sink, dried them with her embroidered dish towel, made Taj Mahal tea with cardamon and brewed coffee.

“I hate tea and coffee,” says Kathleen. “Got any OJ?” She opens the fridge but doesn't find any. This has happened every day since Kathleen and Mom unpacked their bags, but Grandma doesn't buy orange juice. What would it cost — a dollar? Two?

At six-fifteen, Miriam climbs the stairs to nag and chivvy Safia so she won't be late, the airport is a forty-minute drive. “It shouldn't be so hard for her to wake up,” she says. “I keep asking, Why do you have to sign up for so many hours of overtime? All she says is “'Time-and-a-half, Amiji, time-and-a-half.'”

Kathleen thinks Safia works way out at the airport and signs
up for hours of overtime so she doesn't have to talk to her.

Every second day, Grandma Miriam bakes cranberry bread for Grandpa. And in the past week, she has been walking Kathleen to school and meeting her afterwards. Grandma and Grandpa don't have a car for Kathleen to borrow. Which means that unless she rides the bus forty-five minutes to Jodie's house, she will end up staying home in the evenings. Which means she will have to swallow things with funny names like alloo cholas and eggplant bhartha, all served over an endless supply of cumin-scented rice.

Kathleen is desperate for hamburger, pizza or a single mouthful of Uncle Ben's. She skips class a couple of times to walk over to the nearest McDonalds, but she has to eke out the twenty dollars Grandma gives Grandpa Terry every week so he can present it to Kathleen. In her world, Grandma says, it's the men who give allowances to the women in their families. “But,” she says with a conspiratorial giggle, “we women have to make endless allowances for men.”

We
women — huh!

Today is Sunday. Grandma sits in her customary corner of the couch, which she has draped with orangey-red “priceless” jamavar shawls to hide the holes in its upholstery. “Did you find a job, yet, darling?” says Grandma.

“Nope.”

Two days after school opened, Jodie found a waitress job at George Webb's diner, and lots of other kids have found burger-flipper jobs after school to escape their families, but Kathleen doesn't seem to get offers for anything but babysitting.

I have no patience with kids — they're brainless.

So Miriam settles down with the phone on her lap and begins phoning her friends and relatives, beginning with her sister in Calgary, her brother in Houston who may be “voluntarily departed” any day now to Lahore, and Sadruddin in New York (whom Kathleen has never met), who's almost like a relative.

Then she runs her finger down her list of friends. There's Anser Mahmood, who volunteered to go with the INS officers when they promised he'd be home the next day since he only had an expired visa. He spent the next four months in solitary at the Detention Center in Brooklyn and hasn't been the same since. “No point calling him.”

“And Aisha,” says Grandma. “No point calling her. The Immigration chaps arrested her husband Tosueef — anthrax possession, can you imagine — then they came back and searched his home. Aisha was taken away to the local jail and strip-searched. All for possession of a bottle of garam masala. Garam masala!” Grandma laughs. “I cook with it every day. They brought her before a judge, and no wonder she asked to be deported. Some vultures will probably take their beautiful home and all their new furniture.” She turns her pencil over and erases the name.

There's Shokeria Yagi who was abroad with her three sons and came home to find her husband had been taken away. There's Jalil Mirza to whom Grandma sent some money that got him and his two sons out of a Detention Center, but he's now stuck in a Red Cross shelter with his whole family. They're waiting their turn along with eight hundred others applying to Canada for asylum. Grandma erases their names.

Kathleen goes up to her room and turns on Eminem at full blast, but Grandma still racks up long distance bills calling Mohammad Akbar, who sold his 7-Eleven store on Devon Avenue in Chicago and moved to Winnipeg last year, Professor Nayeem, who changed his name to Gonzalez months ago to avoid domestic registration, and Habeeba in Schaumberg, Illinois, who manages the carwash since her husband was deported.

Kathleen comes downstairs wearing a Britney Spears tank top and shorts. Grandma is so set on telling her that everyone says she should “go into computers” that she doesn't curl up her nose immediately. She's convinced that Kathleen has to know “all about
computers.” A checker's job at a grocery, Sadruddin Uncle has said, will do it, teach Kathleen all about computers.

Grandma knows shit about computers. She can't even do e-mail.

“Your friends wouldn't know shit about computers if they weren't listed in the National Crime Info database,” says Kathleen, who wouldn't know about the database herself if Safia didn't keep bringing it up.

“Don't swear, Kathleen. There's no shame in that. All our names are on someone's silly list. Safia says they're only in the important ones, Galileo, CAPPS, IBIS.”

“Those are databases, not lists.”

“List, database, list — same thing. All I'm saying is: find out if you're good at computers. I was always accurate at typing — slow, but accurate. And when Safia took her test for the airlines, they told her she went sixty words per minute. I tell you, you'll be
fab
ulous at it.”

Kathleen uses computers every day in school. She will now give up trying to find a real after-school job to make sure she doesn't learn more about them.

Before school on September 11, now called Annual Patriot Day, Kathleen, her mother and Miriam watch the Secretary of State — Safia calls him Rummy — speak at Arlington cemetery about the triumph of Freedom over Tyranny.

“And to us to whom the task of justice has been sent from on high …” intones the chaplain. Grandma calls him the mullah. He ends with “God bless America.”

Kathleen's trying to figure out what to do with herself.

She was all ready for a Saturday at Octoberfest with Safia, when Safia was called in to work. She left muttering angrily — not
about the work, or that her plans with Kathleen were cancelled, but about “an eighty-seven billion dollar blank check made out to the likes of Halliburton.”