Sharing worlds of difference

• Sharon Verghis

  @SVerghis

  
• 12:00AM June 29, 2019
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Ayesha Shamsi, a lonely wannabe poet, drags herself every day to her dreary job as a substitute teacher but hungers for a creative life and a future dictated by her own wants.

Jalaluddin’s novel, set in the Indian-Muslim community in Toronto, has been billed as a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice. It relates how these star-crossed lovers (Shakespeare rubs shoulders with Austen from start to finish) find themselves, each other and try for a happy-ever-after ending.

On the first reading, I admit I groaned a little. I knew what was coming: Bollywood, bangles, big feasts and bigger weddings — ethnic exotica 101. Cue lavish descriptions of mughlai chicken and mutton biryani; wedding finery and courtship proposals; a cheesy subplot involving a forced marriage, a feisty best friend/matchmaker, an ultraconservative dragon of an Indian mother, a Greek chorus of disapproving aunties and, of course, a quirky, wise elder (in this case, Ayesha’s cool, liberal, Shakespeare-quoting grandfather, who deserves a book of his own).

It’s a lucrative formula: decorative, sanitised, packaged for Western consumption. Jalaluddin’s book is part of a booming sub-niche in ethnic chicklit, tapping into burgeoning commercial demand from young, well-educated, professional non-white women keen to see to their own stories reflected back at them.

A Muslim romantic dramedy novel? Commercial death in the good old days. Now publishers — and increasingly filmmakers — are saying yes. Ayesha At Last has been optioned by Pascal Pictures on the back of the unexpected box office success of Crazy Rich Asians.

All good. I’m happy that we’re seeing diversity, in whatever mashed-up, cliched, market-friendly form. And Ayesha At Last yielded a lot on the second reading. Buried in between cooking lessons and bridal gear, there are some thought-provoking moments. Jalaluddin’s take on Islam in modern life focuses not on the clash of cultures between Islam and the West, but the far more interesting schisms within Islam itself: moderate versus fundamental.

Khalid with his ‘‘fundy’’ beard, skullcap and tasbih beads, “like an apparition from the seventh century”, starts out regarding Westernised, outspoken Ayesha as a heathen. In his view, there is only one way to be a good Muslim. Ayesha, he thinks, is not ‘‘Muslim enough’’. She takes a crowbar to his prejudice when, in a feisty slam-poetry evening at a boozy local club, she challenges him from onstage. Like Westerners who taunt her for her hijab, he is just as bad, she says. “What do I see when I look at you? I see any other human being who doesn’t have a clue.”

In tiny slices, Jalaluddin shines a spotlight on how young, observant Muslims maintain their faith in the secular societies of the West. When he is distressed, Khalid seeks comfort in his local mosque, presided over by a friendly imam. To him, this is a sanctuary, shelter, a connection to his late father who always attended Friday prayers. It’s a peaceful place in hectic modern life. In the wake of the Christchurch massacre, I find it unbearably sad.

Thought-provoking, too, is Canadian-born Khalid’s external adherence to his faith. “Long ago, he decided to be honest about who he was, an observant Muslim man who walked the faith both outwardly and inwardly.” Khalid does so in the face of rampant hostility. He almost loses his job over his robes and skullcap, courtesy of his viciously (if comically so) Islamophobic boss.

Ayesha, meanwhile, wears her funky purple hijab, even though it makes her vulnerable to abuse from strangers. She doesn’t see it as revolutionary act, but Khalid does. He tells her gently at one point that she is a rebel and outlier too — even if she doesn’t realise it.

“You wear a hijab. That’s an act of faith and bravery.” Personally, I would have loved more of this in the book.

But it’s not all serious. There is humour in Khalid’s Mr Bean-style observations (his robes, he earnestly notes, “provide great air circulation”); in a side story about a Muslim porn site for so-called ‘‘veil-chasers’’ (www.unveiledhotties.com); in a Muslim wannable life coach and wrestler who plans to trademark the Punch of the Seven Veils; in the outraged declaration by spoilt princess Hafsa that “only serial killers aren’t on social media”.

Sydney-based author and screenwriter Amal Awad covers completely different territory in her book Fridays with My Folks. “On Fridays,’’ she writes, “I become a collector of memories.’’

In 2013, Awad’s father was diagnosed with kidney failure. It has a profound, seismic impact on this close-knit immigrant family. Plunged into a sudden navigation of a new reality, they struggle to make sense of their shock and grief. How to deal with a sudden, brutal decline in a loved, admired parent? How do we negotiate this as adult children?

Awad channels all her despair in this book. In interviews with lawmakers, healthcare professionals, retirees, geriatricians and other families like hers grappling with the decline of their parents, she addresses not just the inadequate response of the government to Australia’s looming demographic time bomb (by 2056, it is estimated there will be 8.7 million older Australians: 22 per cent of the population) when it comes to affordable and accessible aged care, but also the critical role played by the ‘‘sandwich generation’’ — mainly female, unpaid carers — and the impact of loneliness as well as the painful business of end-of-life decisions, from palliative care to euthanasia.

Awad investigates it all through the prism of her much-loved father’s decline.

Every Friday, she drives him to the local mosque for Jummah, Friday prayers. Outside, she spends time with her mother as they wait. Unplanned, she finds herself collecting her parents’ memories, from their childhoods to their life in Australia. Slowly, skins are shed, layers peeled. Their past comes alive: her mother is once again the gorgeous migrant seamstress with the kohl eyeliner, radiant in a trendy short dress, on a white Vespa, belting out Arabic love songs to defeat fear; her father is not the sickly dialysis patient but the handsome, fearless young man from Palestine who crossed the world in search of a fortune. It is a revelation. As Awad writes, “after all this time, my parents have become increasingly, simply more themselves”.

As she and her mother chat over lukewarm coffee in the hospital cafe, they find, too, a common language and bond — another revelation.

Arabs are a superstitious lot, Awad writes. In the foamy cloud of a latte, her mother looks for portents and symbols in the shape of a leaping fish, a boxing kangaroo. Awad joins in; there is a lighthearted bonding over these caffeine runes. She cracks up, too, over her mother’s acerbic Arabic proverbs. Referring her ­father’s morose face, her mother quips that “he’s like a groom at an Arab wedding”; referring to self-blindness, it’s “the camel doesn’t see its bump”; dealing with an adversary, it’s “before he eats me for dinner, I’ll eat him for lunch”.

Awad writes later, chastened: “My parents have their complex stories. How long have I diminished their pathways as being less complex than mine? They often speak to me in Arabic. I reply in English. How long have we spoken two different languages and how does that make them feel?”

What gives this book its heft and power is not facts and figures but this blunt personal insight.

“A lot of things begin to lose their shape and structure with age,” Awad writes. Her father’s self-worth has always been measured by work, activity, breadwinning. Now, at the end of his life, he is a deflated balloon, limp, silent. It strikes me powerfully; I, too, wondered about my father’s silent withdrawing in the last few years before his sudden death last year. He was gone, to me, before, he died — the father I knew in childhood, dynamic, active, a larger-than-life force.

As Awad writes, death, in the end, is not the real tragedy. The true sadness comes from witnessing this slow erasing at the end of rich, full, active lives. Intellect, memories, quirks, habits — all gone, often incrementally and cruelly so. Is a sudden death — a heart attack on the street, say — preferable to this slow, inexorable, slipping away? Perhaps.

As Awad says, “we are grieving because we are losing the ­person”.

On the face of it, Friday with My Folks and Ayesha At Last couldn’t be more different.

Yet strong threads connect them: the stubborn knot of family and duty and obligations, the daily navigating of two cultures, the role that dutiful daughters are obliged to play: like Jalaluddin’s Ayesha, who knows, painfully, that she is “part of both worlds, yet part of neither”, Awad walks a tricky tightrope “between worlds, between cultures”.

Both protagonists emerge sadder but wiser.

Self-knowledge is a gift beyond price, says Ayesha’s grandfather, quoting Hamlet: “We know what we are, but know not what we may be.” You don’t learn in good times — it is difficulty that clears our sight.

Awad, too, finds a new sense of equilibrium, of being OK with life not always being OK.

“I am far from where I began,” she writes at the end. “[These] Fridays have profoundly changed my life and how I view it. I have learned not only how to listen, to provide and be present without forcing others to be something they simply are not but I have also received an education in elders’ experiences.

“The way humans try to mend fractured relationships, to re-energise shapes so that life remains positive and beautiful, so that people feel they matter, even when they are dealing with the ephemeral nature of life. It’s a gift.”

Sharon Verghis is a journalist and writer.

Ayesha at Last

By Uzma Jalaluddin. Atlantic, 352pp, $29.99

Fridays With My Folks: Stories on Ageing, Illness and Life

By Amal Awad. Vintage, 288pp, $34.99

Sharon Verghis

@SVerghis