No cliches, but imprecise

In 2010, 17 year old Hira is selected along with about 70 other Pakistani teenagers for a 10 month exchange program which will take her/them to America. Living a comfortable, upper-class life in Rawalpindi with her parents and 12 year old brother Faisal, this is of course a big adventure for Hira.

Her father is fairly traditional – Hira fought him to be allowed to wear a sari to her O-Level farewell party, and although she wanted to retort his pant shirt is like

some goddamn Mountbatten, I had wanted to ask but didn’t because it had been years since I had gotten a beating and it would be a shame to change that, but also, because I knew the game. Culture and civilisation looked best on a woman’s body” (p40)

Hira is well aware she is supposed to be a good Pakistani Muslim girl and all that being a good Pakistani Muslim girl entails, but she rebels at times.

At sixteen, I was tired of limits, aghast that life could be so small” (p6)

while also knowing just how to conform, and sometimes liking to conform and liking the rewards of conformity – acceptance, belonging, approval. Sometimes Hira is deliberately provocative, like when the school is measuring their khameezs to make sure they are not shortened, Hira has already been approved, but says to the teacher with clear sarcasm,

Allah approves of this length, ma’am” (p9)

Later, in America, when she stops eating halal meat and her mother asks her if the beef stew with non-halal meat tasted different, she retorts, “

Yes, the cow tasted sad that it wasn’t killed to Allah-u-Akbar” I said, regretting it even as the words spilled out” (p146)H

Hira is spiky throughout, and knows she is more outspoken than is good for her.

Hira’s Ammi is not very traditional at all, and in fact, Hira had worried her mother might be an atheist. Ammi’s

contract with it was strictly social, the dupatta often thin and sheer” (p19)

Hira herself seems more attached to her faith, even if her interpretation of it is nowhere near as parochial as her father’s.

There are some nice passages describing the Pakistan of Hira’s childhood, its landscape, its domesticity, its textures and daily routines. There are also, as expected, many comparisons between Pakistan and America, given that we are seeing through Hira’s eyes, and if some are a little worn, they still came across as authentic – like the shock of the currency exchange, to the casual physical intimacies in the US, the absence of water for washing after going to the toilet, the finding everything from the airport carpeting to the landscape spotless, the quiet of the nights, the having to source food for oneself and be independent, etc.

The newness of America beckoned. Kelly and Amy appeared crisp, like newly tailored clothes… “ (p42).

Hira also realises people communicate very differently, even if she is fluent in English, but social norms go beyond language fluency:

They had told us at orientation that Americans were verbose […] It seemed marvellous to me that someone could talk so much, and with such little reciprocation required” (p71)

But Hira does settle in, even if she has to make some adjustments,

I didn’t yet realize that the cornerstone of American high school athletics was unadulterated pain” (p68).

Kelly, her host mother, is enthusiastic about Hira’s stay, while Amy, her daughter who is the same age as Hira, is friendly but not wildly excited. Kelly however, is more of the stereotype of the well-meaning and naïve American.

Kelly loves it when I posit myself as a virgin to America” (p2)

When Hira says she has never seen an avocado, Kelly delights in telling her. Kelly grew up in San Francisco but chose to settle in Oregon.

Almost every house but the Wilkins’ had an American flag waving from its porch. This was pick-up truck and RV country. Kelle was an ex-vegan with a German Catholic mother” (p76)

Kelly makes a big effort to make Hira feel welcome, but Hira recognises it is a gesture, a kind one, but a gesture. Kelly may call Hira one of her daughters, but the two girls are of course treated differently, for e.g. Kelly pays for Amy, and Hira has to pay for herself.

In rural and not very affluent Lakeview, Hira realises she and the other exchange student from Oman, both children from professional classes, expect to go to university/college, while most of their Lakeview classmates do not, and may end up working on a farm or at Target. They had gushing hot water, and her family did not, and

they were American citizens and I would spend my life grovelling at embassies” (p133)

but she had prospects they did not.

The novel tries to be very self-aware and not adopt cliches and sad old stereotypes:

There’s a strain of story this could fall into. The foreigner trying to fit in, hindered by accent and Fahrenheit and the Imperial system. The intelligent immigrant turned hapless by America. The outsider on the periphery of America. The entranced documenter of America.

              The truth – I was bloody bored. It is hard to overstate how much of an abstraction a new country remains to the foreigner, and for how long. […]

              The counter-intuitive thing about newness is that it’s not even interesting. Within weeks, I went from homesick, to curious about America, to realizing how elementary my curiosities were, such cliches within themselves that I lost any desire to entertain them. Toilet paper, shoes inside the house, bananas with stickers on them. The month came first, then the day. Everyone loved it when you brought these things up. But I could grasp at America only from the outside, surmise only what was obvious, and that didn’t excite me. I was an artificial entanglement, one that made me feel like I had been sent back a few grades” (p98).

I was not always clear what Hira was driving at. What was this artificial entanglement? Does she mean finding America foreign, is a construct only? Then again, Hira is still a teenager, and she herself may not be very clear what she means or wants. A shortcoming we cannot lay at Hira’s door, however, is the way the author annoyingly keeps including non-English words, without explanation and without even contextual meaning, sometimes, words which are important to the story. For example, in a party, one young Pakistani couple say they want to leave America and return to set up home in Pakistan. An older friend says,

What does living in that kabaarkhana have to do with culture” (p166)

The author may throw in Urdu words for cultural verisimilitude, but it is not a fun trick to keep playing on the reader unless it somehow is a necessary literary device. In this instance (unlike in most other instances), pages on, we happen to find out ‘kabaarkhana’ means ‘junkyard’ – which is fairly key to understanding how the older friend felt, and in what direction his derogation was taking. Also, sometimes it feels unnecessary. In a grocery store:

We got bhindi, gobhi, and cilantro” (p158)

Why name some items in Urdu and some in English? Also, these are vegetables, not dishes, so why not use English words in an English novel? How does refusing to use their English names add to the novel?  It happens so frequently that it begins to feel like the author wants to make her non-desi readers feel excluded from some secret superiority she is nursing, perhaps. As I said, annoying. And maybe even just rude, to use a language others will not understand without explaining. There are also places where the lily is perhaps overgilded, like when expressing the great loss of her grandfather, Hira thinks,

Ammi tells me that my grandmother is selling the house and moving in with my oldest uncle. The blue house is gone. My mother is an orphan. My grandfather is dead” (210)

Wait a moment…her mum’s mum is still alive, so how is her mother an orphan? Or is this just overdramatization?

But all that said, I appreciate this author taking on a theme of newly arrived diasporic South Asian woman in America, while resisting cliches and the obvious and the roads too much travelled. There is originality shown here, there is thought and reflection, it tells a story convincingly, and gives us a protagonist who is flawed and plausible, likely plausible because flawed. So a worthwhile read in the end, not surprising, but at least not stale.

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