Like Glue
This piece was originally published in Muslim Women’s Stories edited by Rana Abdelhamid and Hira Baig.
I grew up in Brooklyn. The sounds of the quaint azaan in Arabi and Mehdi Hasan’s crash-course-on-love Urdu ghazal verses harmonized daily. When we weren’t playing outside, my sister Kumkum and I were glued to our cassette player. It was our podcast before podcasting became a thing. We were drawn to the depth of voices and the warmth that music and song brought in our souls. We’d act out sounds and share wild stories in our English and Bangla tongues. We destroyed many cassettes. She and I’d recorded songs by Bangladeshi sad-boy legend Bashir Ahmed; one of his classic’s in particular helped me understand how twisted Bangladeshi love is. In Amake Porate Jodi Eto Lage Bhalo (1969), he blissfully sings, “if what you love is seeing me burn, then continue to add fire and pour more hurt.” In Bangla this line is poetic and charming. I was quite impressed by the adamant lover but also curious to know more about this kind of love: why was he willing to pursue and take the pain of unrequited love rather than moving on? Bashir Ahmed’s oldies and the sisters’ naive rendition filled our apartment. We weren’t allowed NSYNC, Spice Girls, and others from that era. Radio and English music were forbidden in our home. Still, I secretly revelled in Shaggy, Sean Paul, and Mr. Vegas thanks to an older cousin-not-cousin. Dancehall pop made sense because I was a dancer.
I couldn’t say this out loud ever, but it’s true that I wanted to be an actress when I grew up. I was mesmerized by Kajol in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and the art of Bollywood theatrics and performance. I knew nothing about her but felt I knew her forever through the characters she played to perfection on screen. I also wanted to be a construction worker like my father, the hardest worker I’ve known. In the third grade, I decided I’d also be a writer thanks to Ann M. Martin’s The Baby-Sitters Club. I owned the entire series. See, these were dreams and I could dream for days. Abbu decided that I’d be a doctor. Over time, even I was saying I wanted to be one. However, I would’ve said no if my thoughts were considered, if they asked “what are your dreams?” One thing for sure, growing up I was a pushover and obedient, a troublemaker only in my mind. My father always had his way and I never pushed back. Another thing for sure, Kumkum nor I were not meant to be doctors, architects, and the like. Our souls wanted to make art with Ammu’s lipsticks, reenact Ishq (1997) (I played Kajol in our home iterations of the film), put on performances in our apartment hallway where I was femmeC attended by our four friends, and sing as needed to touch the souls around us. How different life would be if Ammu and Abbu recognized early on that their daughters were never meant to be doctors and engineers.
Kumkum and I were partners in life from her birth. My thinking is that she is my favorite gift from Allah. Homegirl came out of the womb free-spirited, ready to disrupt this world, the one that will never accommodate her kind. This meant that growing up, her ass was always getting beat up by our parents as punishment while being shamed for not being more like me, the good child. This is why we make a good team. This teamwork was clear from our Masjid days. For better context, she was 7 and I was 8. We strived to be better together, not better than the other. We wanted to be better in Qu’ranic studies than the other sister duos in our mosque. Our competitive spirit won us many distinguished certificates for Qur’an recitation and speeches on Islam. We’d even sing nasheed and surprise the crowd with our impeccable harmonization. I was confident in my sultry low notes while Kumkum reached her high Mariah Careys.
Somehow our sistership took a blunder when I was hospitalized with Lupus at 17. That year she was probably her most rebellious. With my parents’ full attention to caring for me and this unruly disease, it was an opportunity for Kumkum to explore Brooklyn on her own terms. For three months, my parents were adamantly doing hospital shifts throughout the day. Well, mostly my mother and a Khala from the neighborhood. My father, like Kumkum, seized the moment to deepen his leadership in the Chittagong Association, the boys club he’s part of. Nevertheless, none of us slept well that year.
Kumkum soaked her feet in all the things we weren’t allowed to do. She was making friends. She was hanging out with them too. We weren’t allowed to hangout with friends after school or on weekends or ever unless they came over to our home. She was riding the NYC subway, going to Coney Island beach with friends. Our father drove us to school every morning in his beat up but prized Ford and picked us up at dismissal. Both of us actually had a little freedom with when dismissal was because we were involved in after-school breathers (we’d say tutoring). I took on Concert Choir, Celebrate Life Club (that time we only knew to be pro-life), and the Yearbook Committee. The both of us also performed in our school’s rendition of the musical A Christmas Carol.
Being driven everywhere is unusual in non-suburban Brooklyn but not in some Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant households. It was his effort to protect us from the woes of this wicked world but really, to control us…because boys and oh the places we’d go if we weren’t driven and oh the things we’d know. Well, we appreciated the rides during Winter. Most of our woes were just boys and less of us getting into actual trouble.
It ain’t our fault boys liked us. We liked some of them too. What’s the big ol’ deal if we’re talking? Why exactly weren’t we allowed to talk to boys? And so when we’d get in trouble for petty shit, like the time a boy we knew nothing about called our house phone saying he was a classmate (we attended an all-girls high school so obviously this was fake news), we lost all phone privileges. We weren’t using the landline anyways, this is why we were ruining cassettes. We explained to Ammu that we didn’t know him nor how he obtained our number. This was the truth! She wouldn’t have it. She didn’t believe us. We were punished.
My diagnosis with Lupus was Kumkum’s time to be free. I didn’t see it in this light then. I was angry that my closest confidante wasn’t cracking jokes or singing Lata Mangeshkar’s Ashar Srabon by my bedside. She visited me infrequently and every time it felt like she wasn’t there. What was tragedy for me was liberation for her. And for the both us, a feminist revolution. In our own ways, we were finally learning to be free. All along we had been raised as one entity at home, treated like we needed to be the same, that we were supposed to be the same. Wearing the same frocks and Eid outfits was cute but to think that our styles are not what was imposed on us marvels me.
In the Intensive Care Unit, I spent a lot of time reflecting on the impositions of Lupus on my body. I self-debated and wrote about the ways in which I was no longer desirable after a boy I dated dumped me. Battling weight gain, hair loss, immobility, aggressive medicalization and experimental treatment plans, and isolation and self-harm, these pushed me to the beginnings of my political consciousness and realizing that Lupus’ onset hadn’t killed me but would require grit to survive.
Kumkum, too, experienced an awakening. She was indulging in the foods we weren’t eating at home. She especially fell in love with sushi and bubble tea from shops in Bensonhurst, finally familiarizing herself with the neighborhood our high school was in. Sabia also expanded her artwork in a Studio Art course at school, the only place that celebrated our potential, drawing and painting portraits and still life, scribbling henna designs wherever her pen would reach. She met Mary Jane too over newfound heavy metal bands and boys.
I hated her guts but wanted to be her. She hated mine too.
I returned home from the hospital but was unable to pick up where I left off. I was too immersed in reasoning with Allah about my unfamiliar body. Would I get used to it? I wanted to be out of the house, ride the train to school. I couldn’t do either for some time. I was homeschooled because walking was hard, climbing stairs were impossible. My relationship with Kumkum still suffered because we didn’t understand each other’s version of freedom.
Rihanna’s Live Your Life released in 2008 and it was my only respite and reminder to be thankful, to keep up. It played on repeat and was also my ringtone. It was my anthem for healing, and not just the pains of Lupus. Despite the friction of the chords in this phase, our sistership slowly prevailed. 2008 was the year of Live Your Life, Teri Ore, Pehli Nazar Mein, Desi Girl, and more. Our souls were still bound by music.
Kumkum and I were partners in life from her birth.
