Free Once Were Radicals by Irfan Yusuf Page B

not being allowed to marry each other notwithstanding their extreme love. Instead, they had to marry someone their parents approved of, even if it drove them crazy enough to sing God-awful songs.
    What confused me even more was that all my Aussie friends told me how their parents fell in love and then married. Australia was such a rich country full of marriedcouples still madly in love. Meanwhile, India and Pakistan were full of poor people and religious teachers wielding big sticks. But where was the love? No wonder they’re so poor.
    To make matters worse, Mum taught me that there was this thing called adultery. She said it was a terrible sin, one of those sins given the label of
haraam
and which God rarely forgave. I wasn’t sure exactly what adultery was. It reminded me of a trip we took to Las Vegas when we were overseas. We were stopped at a red light, and I looked out the window to the neon sign of a cinema. The sign read ‘Adult movies’. I was confused and sought the advice of my elders.
    â€˜Dad, what are these adult movies?’
    â€˜Son, you shouldn’t worry about them right now. Wait until you are a little older,’ Dad replied.
    â€˜Okay, Dad. So what you’re saying is that I can come back to watch adult movies when I’m an adult.’
    For some reason Dad laughed while Mum was most upset. Now, many months after this incident, she was warning me of something that sounded similar.
    â€˜Adulturry vairry bad
gunna
[sin]. It
haraam
!’
    â€˜Mum, what is adultery? Is it something like adult movies?’
    â€˜Adulturry iz lowe before marrij.’
    Love before marriage? Now I was totally confused. Indian movies were full of stories about love before marriage. But I couldn’t watch American movies showing the same thing until I became an adult. And even more confusing was that I wasn’t allowed to love someone before marrying them.This proved particularly troubling when I fell in love for the first time in my teens.

    Part of our struggle in returning to Australia involved Mum having to find work. Despite holding a Masters degree and many years’ experience in office management, Mum was satisfied with a job as a process worker.
    Mum was embarrassed to socialise with Anglo-Australians, whom she would refer to as
gori
(white woman). At the time, I thought it was because Mum saw them as culturally impure in some way. In fact, it was because Mum was embarrassed about speaking English with a thick Indian accent.
    Mum knew that the only way she could get a job was to go to the local office of the Commonwealth Employment Service (CES). She was afraid to go there, but on her second visit she met this
gori
with long hair tied in a pigtail and wearing a sari.
    Maureen was a follower of the Brahma Kumari sect. She was married to a Malaysian Chinese man who was also a devotee. Maureen was trying to learn Hindi, and Mum offered to teach her. In return, Maureen set Mum up in a job at a local pharmaceutical factory. Mum was so stoked about getting the job that she declared Maureen her sister. So from then on, we had a
gori
aunty named Maureen.
    Aunty Maureen became my first real
gori
Muslim aunty. Again, my simplistic understanding led me to think that women who wore saris were Muslim. Yet Maureen was a strange Muslim. She never ate any meat, while all our other South Asian friends (including those who were Hindu) did. Also, she was married to a man from a strange place calledMalaysia. I’d never heard of this country. What made me even more confused was that her husband was Chinese. Didn’t Chinese come from China?
    We used to visit Maureen quite regularly, and would participate in some of the social activities of the Brahma Kumaris. Mum taught Maureen Hindi the way she taught us—by forcing all of us to sit and watch wretched Indian and Pakistani movies. Mum also taught Maureen some special vegetarian recipes and how to sew Indian clothes.
    Around this time, I