X Does Not Mark My Spot: Voices from the South Asian Diaspora

volume.

Introduction

Writings from the South Asian Diaspora

Roksana Badruddoja

In this anthology, I explore the perceptions of the South Asian Diaspora and how they view themselves in comparison to broader normative North American societies (read as white, male, heterosexual, and Christian). This edited volume illuminates the paradoxes of national belonging (and not belonging) of two generations—the one-and-a-half and second-generation¹—of diasporic South Asians in the United States and Canada, with selections written by individuals in their twenties, thirties, and forties. The authors featured here explore the meanings of culture and cultural identity; investigate the intimate boundaries of their bodies and romantic partnerships; discuss the hegemonic constructions of race and ethnicity in North America and the politics of brownness; and, finally, question the notions of home and mobile diasporas. A distinguishing feature of the anthology is that it is organized through the lens of age, beginning with individual experiences in childhood. The selections themselves come from a wide range of literary genres, from fiction to social scientific inquiry to poetry to comedic script, to name a few, to capture the experiences of the South Asian Diaspora. The anthology further contributes to the research on the complex construct of identity begun by such notable scholars as the late Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (2001) and the late Edward Said (1979).

The final illustration by Aparna (Pampi) Das, entitled Inimtemigrate, captures the essential framework in which the anthology is embedded. Drawing on Purkayastha (2005), Kibria (2011), and jain (2011), Das, through her illustrative art, challenges the notion of linear assimilation, lucidly depicting the messy nature of diasporic travels and the resulting complexities of identities. Purkayastha vividly describes how ethnic identification among diasporic South Asians is negotiated through the invention of traditions; she emphasizes that racial and ethnic identifications are contextual and negotiable. Kibria sheds light on how contemporary South Asian transnational and diasporic subjects forge identities and coalitions based on racialization processes and the politics of location. And, like jain—who contributed to the anthology—the authors reveal the complexities of belonging by articulating their identities at the intersections of a constellation of loyalties that are multiple, contradictory, constantly shifting, and overlapping along gender, sexual, class, ethnic, and national lines. Using Purkayastha, Kibria, and jain as platforms, I situate this volume as a further expression of South Asian diasporic experiences.

Next, two seminal and critically acclaimed Third Wave (1990s to present) anthologies were published in 2001. Both focused on women of color, including South Asian women.² The first, Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, edited by Daisy Hernández and Bushra Rehman, is a broad collection of essays by young women writers, academics, and activists from a multitude of cultures and sexual orientations. The topics range from cultural and religious customs, from the perspectives of a Nigerian woman who comes to the United States to study to an Indian-American woman who grapples with familial expectations around marriage. In general, the contributors look at their lives and families and consider how these experiences have influenced their understanding of feminism. The authors express a more radical, racialized feminism that broadens the movement beyond its early incarnation. The second anthology, Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality (Husain 2006), is another diverse collection of personal narratives and prose by Muslim women whose experiences and observations are poignant in today’s politically and religiously charged environment. Edited by Sarah Husain (another creative and insightful contributor to the anthology), the voices in this volume range from a woman mourning the death of a cousin killed in a suicide bombing to a transsexual remembering with fondness the donning of the veil he no longer wears as a Muslim man. The contributors seek to dispel the image of the veil as the age-old symbol of Muslim women’s repression and move beyond sterile representations and narrow debates about the contemporary realities of Muslim women.

Like Colonize This! and Voices of Resistance, this anthology goes beyond traditional binary identification rubrics like man/ woman, straight/gay, Christian/Muslim or Hindu/Muslim, and Canadian/South Asian, reaching out to those who identify themselves outside of these constructions. In identity work, this translates into having many faces and facets instead of being limited to a fixed role/identity. The anthology also encourages the readers to engage with the valuable research agenda of understanding individual subjectivity.

This anthology constructs diasporic identities that assert a sense of belonging to their place of upbringing while also proclaiming a difference that characterizes their experiences of being an Other (Badruddoja 2013). Contrary to the clash of culture thesis, the contributors are not abandoning existing cultural traditions. Rather, they are redefining them. The authors reject the hegemonic conception of a unitary self, highlighting their own visibility. The anthology also focuses on the experiences of the South Asian Diaspora in the 21st century by taking identities that had hitherto been largely marginalized or overlooked and introducing them to the center. This suggests that binary differences evaporate in the face of critical thought. South Asians in North America are indeed moving into the center of society, influencing patterns of race, ethnicity, culture, economy, education, and politics. That is, they are challenging dominant discourses through their own definitions. It is precisely for this reason that I have chosen to unmark words from the family of South Asian languages. Just like the words jeans, daughter or son, and grandmother are not italicized in American and Canadian English texts, I do not italicize words such as shalwar kameez, beta, and nani. I step away from ethnic markedness.

The readers of this volume will gain a sense that multiple dimensions of identity cannot be understood as autonomous and mutually exclusive components. Instead, they should be understood within a dialectical framework, each identity variable feeding off and into the others (ibid.). The assumption is that identities may not be pigeonholed into neat little categories unless forced to do so by the imposition of normative orders, such as gender and race (McCall 2001). The contributors emphasize a range of diverse experiences from multiple identities that do not fit neatly into any extant categories. In this way, a central objective of this anthology is to deconstruct artificial normative social categories and power relations, producing a more nuanced construction of identities within the South Asian Diaspora. The anthology as a whole is situated on the margins of both imperialist forms of western nationalisms and desi cultural nationalism—where nationhood is defined through shared (inherited) culture—and within intersecting coordinates of power: race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and nation.

Clearly the cultural climate of the anthology is informed by the success of Third Wave anthologies. The Third Wave and other movements that worked to destabilize aspects of identity through various social and cultural movements inform the twenty-, thirty-, and forty-something generations’ expressions of self. This anthology has a topical focus that resonates with pressing contemporary issues. Its mix of theoretical critique, political analysis, and story, all of which are highly personal, interesting, and readable, lends itself to general interest readers.

I begin the anthology with an exploration around the meanings of culture and cultural identity. In Chapter 1, entitled A Landscape of a Different Kind, the authors write about shared patterns of behaviors and interactions and the affective understandings that are learned through the process of socialization. In other words, the central theme is interrogating notions of culture: What is it? How is it produced? And what is its role? The contributors remind us that we perceive, interpret, express, and respond to the social realities around us through shared knowledge and schemes.

In this introductory chapter, the readers will discover that culture is an integral variable in articulating selfhood. One of my contributors, Ashini J. Desai, in Trick or Treating on Diwali writes,

When an Indian man opened one door,

one Princess peered inside and saw

people she knew well –

a woman in a salwaar-kameez and

a sari-clad grandmother behind her.

Candy fell into her bag, but

she stood there.

Waiting for more.

Waiting for something that should come next.

Something should be said.

Happy Halloween.

Happy Diwali, she said softly.

Clearly, cultural identity here refers to what it means to grow up within the South Asian diaspora: on being brown and what it means to grow up brown transnationally (read, east to west). Desai’s poem encourages me to employ the metaphor of the life cycle—from childhood to adolescence— to organize the writings in this chapter.

The readings in Chapter 1 are heartwarming, funny, and familiar. The readers experiences celebrating Halloween as a child with Desai to a bitter recess as a classmate sneers, Ugly girl, brown girl, why don’t you go back where you come from?! in Nirmala Nataraj’s The Day Things Fall Apart and Start to Make Sense. From here, the stories move into pubescence. The authors write about milestones—such as shaving one’s legs for the first time (see Grade Six by Deepa Sood) to buying a first bra (see Mom and the Esprit Bag by Leena Pendharkar)— within a diasporic desi cultural context. Sumithra Raghavan writes an exceptionally intense and touching story entitled Paint it Brown, in which she describes growing up with vitiligo. She uses her personal experiences to comment on the larger social structures of race and race relations in the United States. The first chapter comes to an end by shifting to adulthood. The authors share memories of college (see What in the World is an Uhrmhust? by Surya Kundu) and discuss career choices (see Art is not a Luxury; it is Survival by Vidhya Shanker).

In Chapter 2, Boundaries of the Heart and Body, the contributors address under-documented issues in the lives of South Asians: gender, sexuality and sexual experiences, motherhood, and intimate partnerships.

Sarita James, in Mom, Dad, Let me Find my Own Husband, focuses on the role marriage plays in her life and how she responds to her family’s expectations around it. James writes,

My Suitable Boy was seven years older than I with a gentle Superman wave of hair at his forehead and broad shoulders that defied the reedy build of our south Indian heritage. The son of a family friend, he often visited us in our northeast Indiana town, a few miles east of the Dan Quayle museum. Affable with dinner guests and handy with sports scores, he was adored by my parents. And I realized quickly, despite my parents’ denials, that they wanted me to marry him.

James, along with Malini Sekhar in TTGM (Time to Get Married), uncovers that indeed heterosexual ethno-religious endogamous marriage is a key demand of womanhood and that marriage typically constitutes the yardstick for policing female subjectivities in cultural nationalist terms (Badruddoja 2013).

Another theme in the chapter involves queer theory, people of color, and third-world activism. For minorities marginalized through sexuality, uneven development in space has compounded their sense of isolation (ibid.). In a poem entitled Drag, Farzana Doctor says,

I put on the ridah

Drape myself in modesty

And I am in drag

In disguise as a good Bohra girl…

I ask maasi to snap my picture instead

So I will remember the day

History hovered over my lesbian body

Disguised as a good Bohra girl

Doctor underscores her disconnectedness from mainstream communities—a disconnectedness that limits her access to resources and networks widely open to her heterosexual counterparts. Doctor deftly addresses the complex limitations of movement and self-expression of queer people of color.

Next, in Red Hair, Nauman Mir twists our expectations around honor killings, challenging the readers to rethink so-called primordial or essentialized characteristics—that women are naturally forgiving and nurturing—often foisted upon community identities. I follow the tenor of Mir’s fiction in order to describe my own experiences of pregnancy. In The Yonic Myths of Motherhood: An Autoethnographic Account of Contesting Maternal Ideology, I tortuously divulge a secret,

I wanted out! I wanted it out at any cost. Inside of me, this life was eating me alive, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. The pain of carrying a living being—a gift from god so everyone told me—felt like a bulldozer driving over my body back and forth repeatedly for seven months. I began to develop a hatred for the life inside of me. I wanted to rip my belly apart and take her out.

The contributions in Chapter 2 are lyrical, temperamental, cathartic, emotive, and volatile. Hence, I (dis)organize the texts in the chapter in order to express disruptions—from lust to love to broken hearts to marriage to cheating to motherhood to incest. I reflect that emotions, like identities, are multifaceted and interlacing.

The authors of the volume continue to visit paradoxes, difficulties, unity, and diversity in Chapter 3, Projects of Identity. They do so by focusing on contemporary racial and ethnic structures and how diasporic South Asians forge identities and coalitions based on imposed racial and ethnic politics (see Kibria 1993). Once again, poetically, Ashini J. Desai describes her personal struggles with national (not-)belonging, (forced) assimilation, and multiculturalism in The Peppermint Generation:

Is that what my generation has become?

Swirled red and white clichés

like peppermints in neatly twisted plastic wrappers

gleaming in ceramic candy dishes,

free for the taking,

unwrapping,

dissecting.

That is not how it works.

When you unwrap the mint

you don’t taste the red or the white.

Just one clean coolness.

Refreshing.

Desai points out that national belonging and its relationship with multiculturalism is subject to a heavily contested debate. Desai’s work allows me to further convey that multiculturalism’s importance for society is huge (Badruddoja 2013). First, it developed considerably in western countries in only a few decades, and second, its emergence involves the transformation of critical dimensions, such as race, ethnicity, gender, culture, family relationships and relation to ancestors, sexuality, religion, death, and belonging to a nation or community. A central theme that emerges from X Does Not Mark My Spot: Voices from the South Asian Diaspora is how diasporic South Asians perform their identities.

The readers will be further welcomed into Chapter 3 by poems and essays that speak to the processes of colonization, Orientalism, hegemonic formations, forced assimilation, and racialization, culminating in the emptying and hallowing effects on identity-work. Vidhya Shanker’s Racism off the Rack: Labels Belong to Clothes, Not to Shoppers is notable. She describes attending a graduation ceremony,

The graduate I came to support wore formal attire he would have worn in his native country of Nigeria, as did his wife. Many people, from many corners of the world, remarked at how wonderful it was that they wore their traditional costumes. They are not costumes; my friends were not trying to dress up like Nigerians.

While Shanker’s friends were not trying to dress up like Nigerians, Ranjit Souri, in "The Indian Wants The Indian Wants the Bronx, finds a white male actor dressing up" like an Indian man in Israel Horovitz’s 1968 play The Indian Wants the Bronx. Actor Souri shares a shock: The lights came up and I was jolted by the sight of a young white actor playing the part of the Indian. And Sarah Husain, in NYC: When all Wars come Home, reconnects me with a fearful memory of removing my 24-karat gold chain housing a small medallion with the word Allah etched into it in Arabic before I entered LaGuardia Airport on a day sometime after September 11, 2001:

a bengali photojournalist gets killed

on a corner of an east nyc block

by few latino men, as children

stand, their hands clutching, caught

peeking on the side of a building’s shade

ever wonder? why a pakistani woman

living in queens for almost ten years

speaks not one word of English,

gives birth to her third child, while

her husband’s detained

in some INS prison, without money to pay her bills,

no groceries, no rent, no money for his defense

a fifteen year old muslim girl gets raped

by an eighteen year old hindu boy

not in gujrat, india but palo alto, california.

To close Chapter 3, the contributors continue to explore topics related to ways in which the South Asian Diaspora in North America are racialized and the ways in which South Asians respond to postcolonial racial projects. The authors implicitly ask questions such as: How is race defined and what is my race really?; If I don’t really know what race is, then what is my racial identity?; What, if anything, does my race indicate about me? and Should I use race to construct myself? The authors refer to imposed racial categories and discuss the ways in which they adapt to racial affronts from others.

I conclude the anthology with a short but powerfully telling chapter, Chapter 4, which I entitle Where are you from? Here, I extend on Third Wave literature, which often ignores the subject of home. I accomplish this by bringing attention to the social and geographical constructions of home: What is it? And where is it? As a second-generation Bangladeshi- American woman, born to and raised by immigrant parents in the United States, I conceptualized this chapter from a personal self project, one that stemmed from not being able to coherently articulate the answer to the question, Where are you from? (Badruddoja 2013). I have come to realize through my research that I am not alone in my struggles to answer the question of home satisfactorily. The authors who contributed to this volume address assimilationist configurations of the questions What is home? and Where are you from?

In this chapter, I draw on the authors’ rich personal experiences of travel in order to think through the concept of home. The readers are greeted with three soulfully haunting poems: The Migration by Meeta Kaur, Mourning my History (We came on Ships) by Rajiv Mohabir, and Lunchline by Nafeesa Syeed. I use these poems to create a foundation for the metanarrative the authors collectively convey: the messy and complicated nature of home, belonging, and identity. In honor and celebration of diverse experiences from multiple identities, I chose to interweave the narratives about diasporic memories of the homeland in a manner that brings forth and solidifies that home and identity-work are not static, or neat, or clean. Rather, home, belonging, and identity often mimic a back-and-forth movement like a pendulum.

In Entry into the Sacred Temple, Nirmala Nataraj describes a trip to Mahabalipuram (in south India),

Before our trip, I’d pointed out Mahabalipuram on a map and told my mother, This is where I want to go. I remembered it from the huge picture books (reeking of cardamom and that other unidentifiable redolence I’ve come to associate with India)… For so long, Mahabalipuram had been an invisible string hitching me to a history that wasn’t and had never really been mine. The sick conjecture I had before coming is finally confirmed: Brown skin isn’t enough. I am guilty as charged. A foreigner. I am both mournful and relieved.

Nataraj describes home as embedded in a linear construction of place, which is situated, fixed, and safe (Badruddoja 2013). Neelam Patel, author of Call Me Confused, Please, and Amna Ahmad, in her piece Claiming Desiland, both corroborate Nataraj’s experiences and sentiments while traveling in India.

sarwat rumi shares an alternative diasporic memory of the homeland. In her poem i remember your hands, rumi softly expresses her love for her maternal grandmother—nani—who lived in Dhaka, Bangladesh. rumi’s text is followed by a drawing by Aparna (Pampi) Das as a girl with her paternal grandmother in Dida and Me.

Here, Shikha Malaviya astutely and rightfully complicates the nature of diasporic travels in Silver Bangles. Like the multiplicity of sounds created by the jingle of silver bangles, Malaviya takes the readers on a journey from the United Kingdom to India to the United States to India. In the context of the South Asian diaspora, the movement of the imaginary pendulum is informed by transatlantic movements, which are often circular. Malaviya’s piece leaves us breathless.

The end of the concluding chapter and the book climaxes with a multi-genre work entitled Quest for Culture by the gifted Annie Syed. In this piece, Syed blatantly and facetiously responds to the question Where are you from? with writing that is raw and riveting. Indeed, the contributors of this anthology critically problematize monolithic notions of home.

Collectively, this anthology is unique, not just in its topic but also in its approach, which goes beyond the questions of identity for the South Asian diaspora and links issues of belonging (and not-belonging) to work, culture, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, etc. One of the central messages of the volume is that there is a growing need for us to become increasingly integrated in order to better understand the world’s political, social, and economic issues that hegemonically maintain the cultural and economic hierarchies. The anthology fits well with both the popular reading and the academic markets covering multicultural literatures, Asian American studies, and women, gender, and sexuality studies.

Please accompany me on a journey to uncover, recover, and discover ourselves. You will pleasantly find that home is who you are and where you choose to make it.

Roksana Badruddoja

Manhattan,

1 May 2014

References

Anzaldúa, Gloria. La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness, in Kum-Kum Bhavnani (ed.), Feminism & ‘Race’. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Badruddoja, Roksana. Eyes of the Storms: The Voices of South Asian- American Women (Second Revised Edition). California: Cognella Academic Publishing, 2013.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Dasgupta, Shamita Das (ed.). A Patchwork Shawl: Chronicles of South Asian Women in America. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

Hernández, Daisy and Bushra Rehman (eds.). Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. California: Seal Press, 2002.

Husain, Sarah (ed.). Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality. California: Seal Press, 2006.

jain, anupama. How to be South Asian in America: Narrative of Ambivalence and Belonging. Pennsylvania: Temple University Press, 2011.

Kibria, Nazli. Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993.

———. Muslims in Motion: Islam and National Identity in the Bangladeshi Diaspora. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2011.

Kitchen Table Collective (ed.). Bolo! Bolo! A Collection of Writings by Second Generation South Asians Living in North America. Canada: South Asian Professionals Networking Association, 2000.

McCall, Leslie. Complex Inequality: Gender, Class, and Race in the New Economy. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Purkayastha, Bandana. Negotiating Ethnicity: Second-Generation South Asian-Americans Traverse a Transnational World. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

Ratti, Rakesh (ed.). A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience. Massachusetts: Alyson Publication, 1993.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York & Canada: Random House, 1979.

1. In the anthology, one-and-a-half-generation refers to those who arrived in the United States or Canada after age four but before age fourteen, and second-generation refers to those who were either born in the United States or Canada or arrived by the age of four.

2. See also Bolo! Bolo! A Collection of Writings by Second Generation South Asians Living in North America (Kitchen Table Collective 2000) ; A Patchwork Shawl: Chronicles of South Asian Women in America (Dasgupta 1998); and Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience (Ratti 1993).

CHAPTER 1

A Landscape of a Different Kind

Nashta

Bushra Rehman

I’d wake up to the smell of paratha

and ammi in the kitchen

making nashta for the whole family

She’d always be there by the kitchen stove

standing behind the smoke

rolling and frying the dough

And by her feet would be two

or three mice stuck in glue traps

trying to pull free

Sometimes their mouths

would be stuck,

or their whiskers

I’d want to touch them,

but ammi wouldn’t let me

She’d tell me to hurry

get to school, get ready

Meanwhile, the mice

would twitch and pull until

their eyes would go dull

then ammi would throw them out

But the next morning, there’d always be more

and I’d wake up to the smell of paratha

and ammi in the kitchen

making nashta for the whole family

and the mice would be there at her feet

stuck in their glue traps

trying to pull free

Trick or Treating on Diwali

Ashini J. Desai

There were two princesses –

one with curls of chocolate, another of amber,

two fluffs in lavender tulle,

tiaras and blinking shoes.

They flounced and twirled at each door, and

announced their royal names. They fluttered

their lashes and invited neighbors to gush at the glitter.

With skirts raised, they raced

from house to house, only their giggles reaching

before they did.

When an Indian man opened one door,

one princess peered inside and saw

people she knew well –

a woman in a salwaar-kameez and

a sari-clad grandmother behind her.

Candy fell into her bag, but

she stood there.

Waiting for more.

Waiting for something that should come next.

Something should be said.

Happy Halloween.

Happy Diwali, she said softly.

Like a firecracker that was lit,

laughter was sparked.

The grandmother scurried

to see the Indian princess.

Happy Diwali! we all cheered.

She found her spirit and called

Happy Diwali! as she sprinted

to join her regal friend

who asked, "What is dee-wali?

I don’t know dee-wali,"

"It’s an Indian holiday.

Not everyone celebrates Diwali.

Everybody celebrates Halloween!"

She knew.

She has a holiday to call her own.

More than a footnote,

more than a date on a paper thin calendar

with a multi-hued multi-armed goddess.

A real holiday to light candles,

Share cookies and laddoos,

light firecrackers and sparklers.

Clinking bangles, twinkling bindis.

And spinning in a silk ghagra meant

for an Indian princess.

When We Raise a Wall, We Leave Dixie Out

Natasha Moni

That Christmas our father overstocked the room

beside our kitchen with peanut boxes for the doctors,

each one, cardboard white with a cartoon

emblem in hunter green, the happy detail

of a stocking cap atop every nut head. And when

we heard the flat of Mom’s sole disappearing,

we became architects

our hands the slippery

tools of reconstruction to lay

square by waxy square

along the Southern perimeter,

one uncertain tower below

our sure-fire feet and we would dip

over, pretend our legs were jelly,

elastic, something with bounce,

because we couldn’t imagine a landing

without recovery, and we were too young

for the lessons of the blood-orange

flag, with the X of stars

that blew in our neighbors’ yard.

kissing the ground

a song for r.a.k. (1969–2001)

sarwat rumi

i was not prepared for this

        to touch your skin

gone grey and cold.

i was not prepared for this

arabic rising from my throat.

i was not prepared for this

        praying

for your departed soul.

brother

can you hear

the sound of tears

kissing the ground?

i was not prepared

to hate us for this

to remember love deeper

        than the sea

our lives crossed above

we spirits more kindred

than i was prepared

to believe.

brother

can you hear

the sound of tears

kissing the ground?

i was not prepared to remember

that though i didn’t always like you

i’ve loved you since i was born

into our FOB/ABCD family:

        not of blood

but of coconut candy

                    mangoes and curries

                                and fish from rivers

deeper than the ocean

all our parents crossed

to plant deshi seeds

in this land of

       golden arches

                    movie popcorn

roadtrips to canada

                    vacations in florida

the station wagon that fit all ten of us

        crammed in

like the buses back home.

fractured identities

                    split

like a banana

        covered in kulfi

chocolate syrup

                    betel nuts

and sprinkles.

would it be easy

to take it like a man

bury    forget

the pain of a banyan tree

split      by gunshot lightning?

bury    forget

that i have had

triggers of my own.

brother

can you hear

the sound of tears

kissing the ground?

inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajiun.

The Day Things Fall Apart and Start to Make Sense

Nirmala Nataraj

Zuleikha’s stomach has become a smooth rock—an ossified replica of the cool, colorful candy that awaits her after recess. It is warm outside, and she’s surrounded by the lilting chirrups and screams of other seven-year-olds as they play and scamper about, already high on sugar and the impending litany of pre-spring break celebratory rites—the eating of candy being the greatest one of all. But all Zuleikha can think about is the occasional goldfish quiver in the small of her belly, puddling through the intractable cement feeling. Despite that sensation of her insides solidifying, she is melting on the outside—cold rivulets of perspiration are making her shiver. She curls up on a patch of sun-dappled grass and watches everyone from a distance.

Zuleikha should be excited. Her mouth should water for the speckly-purple pebbles, the delicate weight of them hidden like tiny, tulle-wrapped secrets in gossamer strands of Easter basket grass. It’s true that she’s been awaiting this all week. Her parents have never taken her trick-or-treating before; they don’t seem to comprehend that candy is, for kids, a momentary, well-deserved reprieve from the terrible injustice of being small. But