Free And the World Changed by Muneeza Shamsie Page A

She tucks the edges behind her ears and slowly, in a movement that is almost tender, places her shaking hands on the shaggy heads of the men who hold her feet captive. “My sons, I forgave your fathers long ago,” she says in a flat,emotionless voice pitched so low that it takes some time for the words to register, “How else could I live?”
    On my way home, hanging on to the red taillights of the cars on the Katy Freeway, my thoughts tumble through a chaos of words and images: And then the words churn madly, throwing up fragments of verse by the Bolivian poet, Pedro Shimose. The words throb in an endless, circular rhythm:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Defend yourself against me
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  against my father and the father of my father
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  still living in me
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Against my force and shouting in schools and cathedrals
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Against my camera, against my pencil
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  against my TV-spots.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Defend yourself against me,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  please, woman,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  defend yourself!

EXISTING AT THE CENTER, WATCHING FROM THE EDGES: MANDALAS

    Roshni Rustomji

    Born in Bombay (now Mumbai), Roshni Rustomji (1938– ) grew up in Karachi and was educated there at the Mama Parsi High School and the College of Home Economics. She graduated from the American University at Beirut and earned further degrees at Duke University, and the University of California at Berkeley.
    Rustomji lives between the United States and Mexico and is a professor emerita from Sonoma StateUniversity, where she taught from 1973 to 1993. She has been an adjunct faculty member at the New College of California, San Francisco, since 1997 and was a visiting scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University from 1997 to 2005.
    She has coedited the anthologies Blood into Ink: South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write War (Westview, 1994), Living in America: Fiction and Poetry by South Asian American Writers (Westview, 1995), and (with Elenita Mandoza Strobel and Rajini Srikanth) Encounters: People of Asian Descent in the Americas (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). She has also written a novel, The Braided Tongue (TSAR, 2003).
    â€œExisting at the Center, Watching from the Edges: Mandalas” knits together the many cultures and countries in which Rustomji has lived to describe the war, prejudice, and violence that she has experienced across half a century. The memoir begins in Mexico, framed by the image of la llorona , the timeless weeping woman of Mexican lore and Rustomji’s own tears at the news of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in Pakistan. Rustomji sets two of her entries against the horror of the twenty-first century’s savage new weapon—the suicide bomber. Other entries include Rustomji’s childhood memory of Partition in Karachi 1947, which becomes a metaphor for the conflicts that Rustomji has experienced during her many migrations. She cleverly interweaves the images of the anti-Vietnam protests and popular culture of that era with references to the battles of ancient Greece and India—and of the great discourses of Hindu philosophy in the sacred text and epic, the Mahabharata , between the God Krishna and the warrior Arjun, who reluctantly fights his kinsmen on the field of Kurukshetra. “Mandalas,” the word of Sanskrit origin in the title signifies both the universe and the quest for unity, while Rustomji’s friend, Mama Glafira, is an important maternal figure in Oaxaca, who embodies humanity and compassion. Rustomji says, “Mama Glafira is a very real person and this is the title that I and many others use for her. She is also known as madrina [Godmother] or Doña. She is a woman held in great respect and affection by many people in Oaxaca because of the care and support she gives to nearly