Mariya Ali

Perspective.

Am I a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty kinda person?  I definitely try to be in the former category, but in all honesty, sometimes I like to sit and wallow in self pity.  Sometimes, I like to moan.  Sometimes, I just like a break from the world being a perfect place, because it really isn’t.  Yes, there is a lot of good in the world, but bad things do happen to good people and good things also happen to bad people.  It sucks and it’s okay to be annoyed about it.

Life has taught me that there is justice and karma for everything. What goes around comes around, but when the bigger picture isn’t visible, I really think it’s okay to have a day when you just think “man, this sucks”.  It’s okay to acknowledge it’s not fair and sucks without being admonished for not being happy every second of the day.  It’s okay to feel bad emotions, process them and then shift gears to being positive.  From my experience, if I keep trying to be positive about something that I really should be hurt by, eventually it all just catches up with me and I’m engulfed in an avalanche of self pity, victimisation, self blame and a feeling of helplessness.

Sometimes I just like to have an international life-really-sucks day in Mariyaverse, where I curl up with a duvet, watch Bridge Jones and spend some quality time with my two favourite men: Ben and Jerry.  Which I think is perfectly acceptable, but I guess it depends on how you look at it. 

“I’d like to have a conversation with you when you’re free.  I wanted to know your experience of being a child of a mixed race marriage”, a good friend of mine asked.  She is married to someone from a different culture and struggled with whether it was wise for them to have children and how feasible it is to incorporate and intertwine two different backgrounds.

A (Sunni) friend of mine had a friend who married into the Bohra community. He was telling me how his friend never felt accepted. One of the reasons that mixed marriages are frowned upon is the issue of raising children. An often-used reason is that it’s hard to raise children and they end up “confused”. (Let’s be honest, my trusted friend Log Kya Kahenge plays a major part in this, but nobody will really come out and say it).

I would like to share my unique viewpoint as a child brought up in these circumstances. I thought the best way to approach this is through a list of pros and cons.

Pros

• I have a solid understanding of two different cultures
• I have the ability to connect to two different sets of people due to shared heritage
• I have a great sense of belonging, twice
• I understand two different religions (that believe in the same God – so really, there’s not much confusion there)
• I was raised bilingual
• I have two sets of friends
• I have contrasting families with very different ways of interacting with me
• I am proud of my heritage on both sides, so double the pride
• I have a skin colour that is brown enough to be considered “tan” and desirable to English people and fair enough to be desirable by Indians.  Win-win
• I have a cool story behind my name
• I get to have a very different relationship with both sides of my grandparents and experience their love in very different ways
• Both sets of parents have different interests, so I can do a wider variety of activities with them. (Plays with dad and bollywood movies with mum)
• Both parents have different cultural outlooks on parenting so I get to have the best of both methods
• I didn’t get kicked out of my house when I went to university
• My mum cooks Indian and English food
• Kheer as well as apple pie (It deserves a separate bullet point)
• I have a better ability to be open as well as respectful of adults
• I can bring aspects of both cultures to the other.  E.g. English manners and Indian respect for elders
• Hearing my dad attempt to pronounce Gujrati words is hilarious

Cons

• My mum had to work extra hard to raise me as a bohri Indian.  Incorporating English was easy as it was where I was raised
• Learning and retaining Gujrati was hard.  When half of the adults in your household don’t speak Gujrati, any family interaction was in English.  Essentially the only time I spoke solely in Gujrati was speaking to my mum, as my grandfather and brother communicated with me in English.  I make a lot of grammar mistakes in Gujrati, but at the end of the day, it’s better than a lot of people whose parents are both bohri.  I can communicate well in both Gujrati and Hindi
• I would sometimes (or maybe a little more often than that) resent having to go to Masjid, reasoning that as I am half bohri, I only need to attend 50% of the time.  I think pretty much all of my friends feel the same way about going to Masjid, so I don’t think this is exclusive to being mixed
• Some people look down on my dad because he is not “bohri enough”. I have to ignore multiple pleas from my grandmother to teach him Gujrati
• One of my parents had to take a back seat.  I think mixed children work if you predominantly raise them in one culture (the harder one to adopt).  As they grow older they will be more inquisitive and explore their other heritage, but at a formative age it may be better to stress one while incorporating some aspects of the other.

In conclusion, raising a child in a mixed marriage has some challenges, but I would say that the pros outweigh the cons.  Plus, I think my brother and I have turned out okay.

Earlier today I was walking to the ice cream shop with my 7 year old cousin Naqiyah, when she suddenly put her arm in front of me to stop me from taking another step. I looked down and saw that I was just about to step on a pine cone.  She picked it up and looked at it with the fresh eyes and wonder of a child. She touched it, inspected it and smelt it. She took a moment, paused her life and appreciated the beauty of something that I was just about to step on. This led me to wonder how many other small, beautiful things in the world we miss because we are too busy going about our daily life.  I took a moment to think about the things that I have experienced/seen in the past couple of days and have compiled a list of beautiful things and experiences that I didn’t stop to take in.  Better late than never I guess.

1. An instant connection with another human’s soul.  That feeling when you meet someone and instantly instinctively know that this friendship will be special and long lasting.

2. The smell of grass after rain

3. Directly looking into someone’s eyes and holding that contact

4. A random act of kindness from a stranger

5.  When you want to buy something and are slightly short of cash, then the cashier says “Don’t worry about it”

6. A squeezy hug

7. The patterns that are made by light through a stained glass window

8. Picking up a dandelion, making a wish and blowing it

9. Having a lady bug land on you and then crawl over your hand

10. A cat weaving in and out of your legs

It’s a shame that I missed the opportunity to stop and appreciate the true happiness that the beauty of these small things brought me.  One thing’s for sure though, going forward I resolve to stop and take a moment to acknowledge and enjoy the beauty all around me. From now on no more stepping on pine cones.