Page 260 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

yet, mismatch them so everyone has a good laugh. Mother said what I had was

“strong bones.” She said her own mother had had the same build. Eventually,
she stopped, having figured, I guess, that big-boned was not something a girl
wanted to be called.
I did lobby Baba to let me try out for the volleyball team, but he took me in
his arms and gently cupped his hands around my head. Who would take me to
practice? he reasoned. Who would drive me to games? Oh, I wish we had the
luxury, Pari, like your friends’ parents, but we have a living to make, your
mother and I. I won’t have us back on welfare. You understand, my love. I know
you do.
Despite the need to make a living, Baba found the time to drive me to Farsi
lessons down in Campbell. Every Tuesday afternoon, after regular school, I sat

in Farsi class and, like a fish made to swim upstream, tried to guide the pen,
against my hand’s own nature, from right to left. I begged Baba to end the Farsi
classes, but he refused. He said I would appreciate later the gift he was giving
me. He said that if culture was a house, then language was the key to the front
door, to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without
a proper home or a legitimate identity.
Then there was Sundays, when I put on a white cotton scarf, and he dropped
me off at the mosque in Hayward for Koran lessons. The room where we studied
—a dozen other Afghan girls and I—was tiny, had no air-conditioning, and
smelled of unwashed linen. The windows were narrow and set high, the way

prison-cell windows always are in the movies. The lady who taught us was the
wife of a grocer in Fremont. I liked her best when she told us stories about the
Prophet’s life, which I found interesting—how he had lived his childhood in the
desert, how the angel Gabriel had appeared to him in a cave and commanded
him to recite verses, how everyone who met him was struck by his kind and
luminous face. But she spent the bulk of the time running down a long list,
warning us against all the things we had to avoid at all cost as virtuous young
Muslim girls lest we be corrupted by Western culture: boys—first and foremost,
naturally—but also rap music, Madonna, Melrose Place, shorts, dancing,
swimming in public, cheerleading, alcohol, bacon, pepperoni, non-halal burgers,
and a slew of other things. I sat on the floor, sweating in the heat, my feet falling
asleep, wishing I could lift the scarf from my hair, but, of course, you couldn’t
do that in a mosque. I looked up at the windows, but they allowed only narrow
slits of sky. I longed for the moment when I exited the mosque, when fresh air
first struck my face and I always felt a loosening inside my chest, the relief of an
uncomfortable knot coming undone.