Qureshi In Spite of Oceans

Migrant Voices
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7509-5899-8
Verlag: THP Ireland
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

In Spite of Oceans: Migrant Voices explores the individual journeys of generations in transition from the South Asian subcontinent to England. Poignantly written, and based on real events and interviews, what emerges is the story of lives between cultures, of families reconciling customs and traditions away from their ancestral roots, and of the tensions this necessarily creates. We hear from the young bride from Bangladesh, married to a stranger, who comes to England to navigate life with a man she cannot love; from an Indian father who struggles to come to terms with his son's mental illness and hides it from people he knows; about how a mother and daughter's relationship was shattered in the clash over the Pakistani traditions her daughter chooses not to follow. Each narrative describes a journey that is both literal and deeply emotional, exploring the hold an inherited culture can have on the decisions and choices we make. At times heart-breaking, at times inspirational, In Spite of Oceans brings to life the pull of the past and the push of the future, and the evolving nature of what we understand as home.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Qureshi, Huma

Leseproben

1

Learning to drive

Afra travels light. In her small suitcase, she carries only one simple sari, three long dresses, a cardigan and a few plain undergarments. In the inside pocket of her handbag, she keeps her passport and copies of her maths degree.

It is not much, for a young woman about to move countries. It is even less, for a bride. She does not mind. She does not care for her dowry, the heavy saris her mother gave her or the gold gifted to her by her in-laws.

‘I will not need them,’ she tells her mother and her mother-in-law when they try to give her ornate saris to carry, telling her a wife will need more than what she has packed. ‘I will not need them where I am going.’

There is not much of her dowry left to take, in any case. Weeks after their wedding, she gave most of her trousseau away after Abbas told her she looked like a prostitute in the saris her mother had picked out for her in her favourite colour, the oranges of henna stains, and painstakingly folded into the wardrobe her father had bought for her to take to her new marital home. Her in-laws, new cousins and cousins’ wives and aunts and women whose names she was yet to learn, bounded into her room, plucking free saris in varying shades of amber and ochre and autumn as if the rice harvest had come early to Sylhet this year.

‘Take them,’ Afra shrugged. ‘Take them all.’ As they helped themselves, they thought her a funny girl, to give her beautiful clothes away.

Later, Abbas threw the few things that were left into the courtyard in a drunken rage. Her clothes, the plain ones she had stitched herself; dinky pots of lurid make-up pastes given to her by her college friends; inexpensive but pretty little bracelets from her four younger sisters; her father’s copy of Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage which he said she could keep; folders of maths notes from the degree she was studying for before the marriage proposal came. Abbas threw it all into the courtyard, storming like a hurricane towards her.

‘I never wanted this! I never wanted you!’ He jabbed his fingers towards her, pushed his face so close to hers she could smell his sour breath and see the spittle bubble on his cracked lips. The few things she had kept for herself lay ruined in a dirty heap in the middle of the courtyard. Afraid of her new husband to whom she had been married for less than a month, she turned and ran while her mother-in-law tried desperately to restrain her son. ‘I never wanted her!’ he screamed at his mother. ‘I never wanted her! You did this!’

That was nearly a year ago. Afra has not seen Abbas since. After he threw her things into the courtyard, his brother hurriedly arranged for Abbas to go back to England, where he had been living before his wedding to Afra and where it had already been decided upon their brief engagement that she would join him.

‘You go back and you make things better,’ he told his younger brother. ‘You make a living and you go back with her.’

Abbas left quickly but Afra did not go with him. In the first interview for her visa which her brother-in-law had arranged for her at the British High Commission in Dhaka, Afra told the commission officer in the privacy of the interview room that she did not need a visa after all.

‘I am married to a stranger. I do not want to go to England with him. I want to stay in Bangladesh,’ she said in her college-taught English, shunning the interpreter who looked on, stunned by this young woman who was not even trying to impress like all the others who came in nervous and polite, overdressed in smart shoes and starched clothes and desperate for the stamp on their passport that would let them leave for a new life.

The officer raised an eyebrow, nodded and said ‘Very well’. Then he refused her application and wished her the best.

But now Afra is going. In her second visa interview she told the officer, a fair-haired Englishman named Mark, that she was ready to leave.

‘I have heard a lot about England,’ she said. ‘I have heard I can get an education there. Here, I just do everything for everyone else. In England, perhaps I can stand up on my own two feet. I will work there. I will get a job. It is the only place where I can be free.’

The officer looked at her, this small, serious woman who, according to her passport, was only 19 years old.

He deliberated and then he said, ‘No more questions.’ Her passport was stamped immediately, and her small suitcase has been packed ever since.

Abbas is on his way back to Bangladesh from England for the first time since their marriage. He is coming to collect her. After six weeks, they will leave together. Her mother and her mother-in-law are proudly telling everyone, relieved at finally being able to say, ‘He is coming for her, she will go with him. They will be happy in their lives together.’

Though Afra has had her suitcase packed, she is not excited like her mother. But she is ready to go. She is frustrated and bored, being a wife in Bangladesh to a man overseas, when all she really wants is a job, a purpose, something to call her own. Still, she does not know what they will do for money although she read in a letter to his mother that Abbas has a job as a waiter now at a friend’s restaurant in a city called Durham. She does not know much about Durham. But the thought of moving to an unknown country and an unknown city does not scare her. She just wants to go.

Her father gives her a notebook. It is filled with neatly written phone numbers of uncles and aunts, who are not relatives but friends of her family settled in London. He tells her these friends will look after her no matter what she needs. This notebook and the copies she carries of her maths degree calm the few sparkling nerves she allows herself to feel. She is weary of Bangladesh and she wants to be free.

Afra was not told married life would be like this. She was told her husband was a straightforward man, an honest man, that is what her family said. She thought, at the very least, that he would speak to her kindly and that one day, perhaps, they might love each other. But it has not happened yet. For how could it? He has been away for so long.

Though her throat tightens when she thinks of parting from her father, she hopes the distance this new country will bring will separate her from the hurt that those around her brought to her, put upon her and bound her in. She hopes her hurt will scatter and then disappear, like the tear-shaped raindrops that fell so heavily the month she married.

When she was young, she had been promised much. First it was little things, a bike and new books. And then it was bigger things, an education and a job. Her father wanted it all for her, his eldest daughter whose name he called out first as soon as he got home. In his gestures and words, he promised her the world. He promised her a co-education at the college he went to, a modern life ahead of her of independence.

It was the late 1960s. It was East Pakistan. Afra’s father was a liberal and he believed his little girl could grow up to be different to the women that had surrounded him all his life. He had seen first his sister, and then his own wife, limited by their basic primary school education, prepared only for marriage, housekeeping and nothing else. Afra would be different, he decided. He took her to the library, cycled with her on the back of his bike, talked to her about books, and other things she did not yet understand like politics and college courses even though she was still a child.

‘One day,’ he said proudly as she showed him her latest round-up of top marks from school, ‘one day this daughter of mine will be so successful! She will drive a car, and I will sit at the back and she will take me around. Just watch!’ Her mother shrieked in shame. No daughter of hers would ever drive a car, she retaliated.

But the dreams both Afra and her father had hoped for never came or if they did, they were quickly taken away. For a day she rode on a shiny new bike from her father before her mother replaced it with a sewing machine, declaring it a far better way for a teenage girl to pass her time. When her father brought home bundles of new books he thought would expand his daughter’s young mind, her brother wrote his name in them instead.

Then in 1971 things changed. Her father, a customs officer for the government, grew terrified of the soldiers from West Pakistan who ruled violently in the streets. Twice they came for him. Twice he begged to be freed and then refused to speak of what had happened to him, shaking his head gravely instead, turning blankly away, unable to look into another person’s eyes for too long. Brave men, liberal men like her father, lived in fear of a bloody civil war that threatened their everything.

Her mother made Afra stay home and indoors, away from the stories they heard of the rape of young girls, of torture, of beatings and kidnappings. Afra was only 10 years old when the war broke out but her mother, who was married herself at 11, insisted she be married quickly because five daughters in the house was a risk.

‘Let her be protected in her husband’s house. We cannot let her go out,’ she urged in a whisper.

Her father grew quieter, his face worn and worried and resigned. He agreed.

‘It is for the best, beti jaan,’ he told Afra when he explained she could not return to school for a year.

Afra’s mother looked every day for the red smudge of blood that would declare her daughter’s readiness for marriage. But for two years it did not come, despite her prayers. When it finally did, the war was over and then all of a sudden, the rush of suitors...