Salaam, Love by Ayesha Mattu

Author:Ayesha Mattu [Mattu, Ayesha; Maznavi, Nura]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7976-8
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2014-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

How Did I End Up Here?

By Arif Choudhury

“Any dates lined up, Ma?”

“No.”

I was exhausted. After almost thirty hours of travel I finally arrived in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. I took a nap, woke up, and was now talking to my mother, who had arrived two weeks earlier to visit relatives.

“Am I meeting any girls?”

“No.”

“What? None?”

“There are no dates.”

I was disappointed. I had come to Bangladesh to take care of family business, visit relatives, and reconnect with a country that I loved to visit as a child. While I was here I had also hoped to meet my future bride. That last part sounded odd when I thought it. How did I end up here?

Before I was born, my parents immigrated to the U.S. from what is now Bangladesh. I grew up in the northern, majority-white suburbs of Chicago. As the eldest child in an immigrant family I realized that my parents couldn’t teach me everything about America so I turned to television. It seemed like the most dependable source of information and I watched countless hours. Like the other boys in the neighborhood, my favorite shows were Knight Rider and The A-Team. I developed crushes on the women I saw, including Wonder Woman and Jeannie—one had an invisible jet and a golden lasso while the other one could grant wishes! My more age-appropriate affections were focused on Punky Brewster.

When I wasn’t watching TV, I daydreamed. Often, I’d wonder what it would be like to be a grown-up like my father. Being a grown man meant having a job, being married, and raising a family. Sometimes, I imagined being married to Wonder Woman. I later learned that Wonder Woman was really an actress named Lynda Carter. So, I then imagined I’d marry Lynda Carter. But she was over twenty years older than me. If I couldn’t marry Lynda Carter, I imagined the next best thing: I’d marry a woman like her. I’d marry a white woman.

This was easier said than done. In Islamic Sunday school, the uncles and aunties were teaching me to be a good, practicing Muslim. I learned about the life of the Prophet and the lives of the Sahabah, about fiqh and shariah. They told me that Muslims weren’t supposed to date as they do in the West, that sex was for after marriage and so were other forms of physical affection. I wanted to be a good Muslim, so I avoided dating in high school. Even while I was being bombarded with images of love, romance, and sex in TV, movies, music, and literature, I knew that to be a good Muslim boy I must avoid romantic, physical relations with girls.

During senior year in high school, I was walking through the hallway between classes when Mary stopped me to ask, “How’s Beth doing?”

“I don’t know. Fine, I guess. How should I know?”

“She told me that you two were going out.”

“Wait, what? We’re going out?”

I thought about it. A bunch of us would all go to the movies in a group, but the last few times I went to the movies it was only Beth and me.

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