The Politics of Invitations

When I first came to America with my husband and my seven-month-old daughter, I felt intensely lonely. We moved from our rented apartment to a house with a sunroom that looked onto a messy, overgrown backyard . We spent a lot of time in the yard, mowing the lawn, bagging the trash. The house was not pretty. The wood siding was rotting, and the green paint was old and chipped. An ugly banana tree covered the front with its scraggly branches. I felt cut off from the world, from my country, from other Bangladeshis in the city. Where were they? I imagined them all having fun together, gathering at big parties. The feeling was most intense during holidays, like Eid or Bengali New Year. We were in the backyard, mowing the lawn, bagging the leaves, slapping mosquitos, dreaming of these parties that must be going on somewhere. It became my intense desire to get inside the circle of Bangladeshis living in Houston and get invited to these parties.

A childhood friend told me the trick. She told me to invite people, and they would invite me back. I started doing that, and in time, I had a circle.

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I started going to Bangladeshi parties when my daughter was getting teased in daycare. She was three years old then and getting bullied at the lab school she attended at my university for having dark skin and dark, curly hair. The other kids called her dirty and said her hair was ugly. She started drawing herself white with blue eyes. Once, when a friend bleached his hair, she kept asking him how he had done it. You could see in her eyes that she was constantly thinking about how she could get out of her body, straighten and whiten her hair. I wanted to give her an identity.  My idea was to show her Hindi movies with beautiful actresses, get satellite TV with Bangladeshi channels, and cultivate a Bangladeshi community. I wanted to show my daughter that there were people who looked like her, who ate like her, and spoke her language.

         But years later, when she was a teenager, whenever I would invite my Bangladeshi friends, she would shut herself in her bedroom and crawl into bed. When we went to someone’s house, she would find a bedroom and fall asleep, or she would get on her phone and start texting her school friends, ignoring all the Bangladeshis at the party. I felt angry and confused. I felt that because of her, I could not enjoy the company of my fellow countrymen and women.

She felt that the kids she was around at the parties were being raised to be just as white and racist, laughing about kids who wore their pants lower. Once, we picked her up from a debate competition and drove straight to a party, late, because she had stood first and had had to stay till the awards. She ran to the bathroom to change out of her skirt into a shalwar kameez, but the aunties at the party stood in a group talking about her skirt. She felt that it was a toxic group that failed to criticize a man who beat his wife but had lots to say about how a woman dressed. She said it was wrong that everyone had to think the same way to be in the group, a culture of consensus.

There were other problems, which turned Bangladeshi parties into a site of both deep desire and confusion for me. I wanted something from these parties, from the people with whom I associated, that they could not give me. If I ever got a call from a Bangladeshi, I abandoned my city friends and ran over there. The Bangladeshis we knew lived in the suburbs of Houston, forty minutes in any direction. They were more precious to me than the friends I saw every day, people who dropped off my kid, whom I could see simply by turning my head.

But I was always complaining about these parties. The men ate before the women and children. This enraged me. The women would go around with food stuck to their fingers, feeding small children, while the men helped themselves to second rounds, often finishing a food item before the women came to eat. I had never been put in my place more as a woman, so nakedly. If I entered the kitchen to get food and a man came along for seconds, I would bow my head and move out of the way. If I were seen talking to a man I knew, people would talk about me. The women talked about gold and saris and malls and proudly avoided talking about politics. This was most painful to me in 2003, when the US invaded Iraq, and the women would look at me blankly if I brought it up. Many of the women were housewives, forced to come to America through marriage, but the engineers and doctors were not very different from the housewives. In fact, they got along superbly, the capitalists and the capitalists’ wives. Only academics avoided the Bangladeshi crowd.

The houses were alien to me. The ceilings in Pearland were unnaturally large. And in Katy, all the houses had the same floor plan. People wanted to buy the same house. In a few years, my friends in Katy started buying their second houses, with three garages and two sets of stairs and a second story. One woman I was friends with cried to her husband until they also moved into their three-car-garage house.

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But I loved these parties. Only here, I felt at home, among my people, dressed in a sari, laughing and gossiping in Bangla. Everywhere else,I felt that I had to hide who I was or explain myself. When something happened back home, nobody in America cared. I remember when the BDR massacre happened in 2008, the horrifying killing of Bangladeshi forces that is still a mystery. I went around the office telling everyone, and everyone expressed polite sympathy. It was only by going to a Bangladeshi party that I could really talk.

At some point, we were attending two parties a day, two days a week. My childhood friend had been right. As long as I kept inviting people, my circle kept expanding. I became a familiar, beloved face. But the more parties we attended, the less my husband and I saw of each other. We would often wake up on a weekend day and hurry to get dressed, fighting with each other about who would look after the child while the other got dressed. At parties, we disappeared to the men’s and women’s rooms. We had two distinct socialization experiences. I didn’t know the men with whom my husband spent every weekend. By their organization of patriarchal hierarchy, these parties were deciding our relationship. The women would serve the men, call them bhaiya in a sweet voice, and in every word, in every sentence, let them know that they were superior. Sometimes, we didn’t even know which man was married to which woman.  I remember that I would arrange trips out of town; the women would say, as long as bhaiya is taking us, when I had been the one to research the place and find the directions and make the arrangements. Another interesting conflict was that my husband liked to cook. I don’t know where he had picked up an interest or skills, but he understood and enjoyed the technical aspects of cooking. Soon, people started to talk and laugh about me.

***

Now I am lonely again. We never get invitations. Every weekend, we are alone, sitting in our backyard, on the porch, staring out at our creations. We make garden beds, digging, drilling, welding, shifting soil from one place to another. We stare with pride at the yellow flowers of the okra plants, sitting on our back porch under the slow-moving southern fan, smoking cigarettes. Having understood racism through our first child, we no longer seek to be in the inner circle of friends for my second child. We no longer seek to assimilate in American society. We no longer stick to Bangladeshi communities for protection. We understand the politics of invitations. Now I know, when I want to be invited, to be included in a circle, I am asking for access to something exclusive.