From Confused to Confident

By Mariam Qureshi

'Different Shapes and Sizes': Not Just a Grade-School Mantra

Even now, as a recent college graduate, I remember the inspirational poster in my third grade classroom that showed children of many different nationalities and said, “People come in all different shapes and sizes.” It was as if the poster were speaking to me personally, offering advice in an uncertain, awkward stage in my life when I was the lone Pakistani kid in a private school in the rural South. Southern Virginia was where diversity was virtually non-existent. That meant one could not wear madras pants on the golf course or think that the yearly membership fee at the local country club was hefty.

My tenuous feeling of inner peace was only further reinforced by Mrs. Hundley the guidance counselor, who came in weekly to keep the inherent amorality of third graders in check. And so, in keeping with the early 1990s buzz word multiculturalism, she told us that “the world would be a boring place if we were all alike.” Of course, I fully endorsed a statement that legitimized my own very multicultural home life, where the vestiges of the old world were still very much a part of the daily routine. While I firmly thought that I was around to make things interesting for my unworldly classmates, who had never ventured beyond the grassy knolls of the 18-hole golf course, I did not actually believe that there were actual differences among American-born Desis. Weren’t we all one homogenous group whose parents had immigrated to America and feared the

relatively corrupting dangers of American culture?

The rural South was not a haven for religious plurality, so I thought that my own lifestyle was the normative for all American-born Muslims. I believed this to the extent that that I had developed my own Cliff Notes-style summary to tell my curious classmates: “Muslims wear modest dress, avoid alcohol and do not engage in premarital relations with the opposite sex.”

While I was radically different than my preppy classmates, I thought I could at least find solidarity amongst the Desi subculture that I would discover in the promising horizons of undergraduate life. After all, weren’t all Desi Muslim girls wary of glittery halter tops or the low-rider denim trends of yesteryear? Wasn’t my definition of “modest” (short-sleeved shirts, jeans and maybe capri pants on a good day) rather unilateral? The latter seemed so obvious to me that I felt like I could make jokes about modest Muslim dress to any standard ABCD and have them fully understand what I meant. For example, in response to a Desi friend asking, “What are you wearing tonight?” I would respond, “A mini skirt and tank top.” This would be followed by hysterical laughter at the preposterous absurdity of a Muslim wearing such an outfit.

As a freshman at the University of North Carolina, I hardly expected 25,000 clones of myself, but I was surprised at the idiosyncratic diversity amongst the miniscule Desi Muslim population. However, I was still firmly convinced that many Pakistanis’ choice of dress was long-sleeved tops year-round, even in the scorching summer sun. This was not one’s ideal outfit of choice; after all, shorts and tank tops were more conducive to air flow. But there were Islamic guidelines to be followed. And of course, my grade-school shtick of, “What are you doing?” followed by the response “I’m swimming in a bikini!” never exhausted me.

My freshman year of college, though, my friend Sara (also a Muslim) asked me what I thought of a short, summery, halter dress while we were shopping. “Well, it would be hard to wear,” I said. “You would first have to wear a tank underneath to counter the deep V-neck. Then wear a cardigan over the dress to cover your shoulders, and finally put on knee-high winter boots so that your legs don’t show. Basically, you could only wear it in the winter.” Sensing what I perceived was Sara’s profound disappointment over my complex three-part suggestion and how un-Islamic the dress was, I quickly added, “The floral chiffon would really look nice in the dead of winter though!”

Later, though, I realized that my friend was much more liberal in her definition of “modest” dress than I was. My belief that all Pakistanis were fond of long-sleeved, loose-fitting shirts had been merely a gross generalization of what was actually a complex array of beliefs and values. And I felt saddened, not because my friend was not a Muslim in the narrow terms as I had defined it, but because my classic jokes were no longer so widely applicable. What I thought of as the absurd response that I was wearing a denim mini skirt was no longer so absurd for some people. I felt like an abandoned stand-up comic who had discovered through test audiences that her signature joke was anachronistic and irrelevant. I realized that not everyone defined “modesty” in the same way.

I had always thought that I was the normative Pakistani—the generalized average of what a child of an immigrant parent was like—relatively petite in size, fond of saag paneer (a spicy dish of spinach with an unaged Indian cheese) and fairly conservative, but not extremist. I did not wear anything with plunging neck lines, nor did I particularly love loose, ill-fitting pants with colorful patterns that M.C. Hammer had immortalized in the early 1990s. I realized in college, though, in a very "After School Special" type of way that people were different; there were people like Sara who wanted to (and did) wear cute summer dresses, and then there were people on the other end of the spectrum as well.

During my sophomore year of college, my friend Sukaina came back from Thanksgiving break a changed woman. She sat down next to me in a class, American Literature: 1930s to the Present, with a sparkling white hijab (a Muslim scarf covering the head) elaborately pinned around her head. The issue of the hijab had always been contextualized for me as something mandated for young women either by their brutal fathers who had a penchant for yelling, “Vear tha hijab in front of zee men!” or by the patriarchal Saudi government.

When I asked why she had decided to wear a hijab, she told me that she had an epiphany during the break; it was her choice, not an angry father’s or overbearing mother’s. Suddenly, Sukaina had the modest upper hand, so to speak. I was no longer the heteronormative model for the typical Muslim Desi. Sukaina wore loose long-sleeved clothing even when the temperature soared into the triple digits, always wearing that sweltering head scarf.

It was ironic that I learned more about myself and my own beliefs through my interactions with other people. In college, in a very stereotypical manner, I met Muslims who had different life experiences than mine. I had finally left the cultural vacuum that was the South and could see the differences in dress, choices and lifestyles that South Asian Muslims had. While we had similar cultural touchstones such as eating spicy food, having strict parents with accents and the boredom of Desi parties to discuss, we also had our inherent differences.

Ultimately, my obsessive desire to compartmentalize life, people and things in neatly labeled boxes was faulty. In my mind, for example, green beans and corn were “Vegetables,” Keanu Reeves and Denise Richards were filed under “Bad Actors” and Muslim Desis were categorized under “Hate Tube Tops.”

These categories are obviously too general for people. Just because some ABCDs share one common variable of South Asian Muslim immigrant parents, the rest of our religious and cultural choices are not in perfect harmony and synchronicity in the manner of Beavis and Butthead, Petrarch and Laura, or even Amitabh and Jaya Bachchan. The reality of South Asian Muslims is this: we are desperately and inordinately mismatched, and we establish identities that bridge the old and new worlds, a struggle that is idiosyncratic and unique.

My interactions with other people have changed my outlook but inevitably have done nothing to alter my clothing choices. After all, as that poster from grade school stated, people do come in different shapes and sizes, but they also make different lifestyle choices. And that is okay, even if it means that my halter top joke will inevitably be filed under “Not Applicable.”

Mariam Qureshi just graduated with a degree in English Lit (not biology!) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently a first year medical student at the Medical University of Ohio, where she hopes she will still find the time to analyze contemporary desi culture. Mariam can be reached at mariamqureshi1029@hotmail.com.

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