I don't want to be that token Muslim friend

A few days after my eighth birthday in December 1992, I was standing at the window of my house, which overlooked the railway tracks in Andheri.

On the empty tracks, I saw two men shove a sword into another man’s body. I wonder sometimes if I had imagined it, but the terror I felt was real.

Soon after the incident, my family, like many other Muslims in the colony, took refuge in our Hindu neighbours’ homes.

But that fear never went away. As an adult, when I read about the Gujarat riots, I feared another holocaust, this time with Muslims as victims.

So when Narendra Modi — under whose watch the riots had taken place — became prime minister in 2014, my fears escalated. Who can forget testimonies and images of the Muslim women raped and killed by mobs during riots?

I grew up in a Muslim household that taught me nothing but love and acceptance. My parents offered their namaz five times a day, but never expected the same from my brother and I.

Nor did they stop us from having lunch with that Maharashtrian girl or talking to the Gujarati boy or going to that Catholic girl’s home.

They never identified our friends or theirs with the god they prayed to.

We were packed off for Ganesh aarti every evening to the mandal near our house during Ganesh Chaturthi; my mother would buy me the perfect outfit for Dandiya and we celebrated Christmas at home with decorations and a turkey dinner.

But rarely was the same courtesy extended to me. A friend’s father once asked me how I felt about Islamic terrorism and what "my people" were doing about it.

I didn’t understand why I was being held responsible for horrible people doing horrible things. This was more than a decade ago, but nothing has changed since.

More recently, after Donald Trump ordered a ban on people from seven predominantly Muslim countries, I found myself arguing with a guy I met on Tinder.

He expected me to see why the ban made sense, and wanted to hold me accountable for Islamic terrorism worldwide.

Growing up, I struggled to find my identity. Adolescence is hard for everyone; for me the ordeal was exacerbated.

Being fat and Muslim, most of my teenage years and young adulthood were spent being confronted with two statements: “You would be so pretty if you lost weight”, and “You don’t seem Muslim at all”.

I can’t remember ever reacting strongly, but the heaviness of those sentences rested on my heart.

I was a fat girl. I was Muslim.

As a consequence, I rebelled against everything Islamic my family did because I believed the rhetoric that Islam was a problem.

Except during Eid, of course. Who would be stupid enough to rebel against excellent food and family time? The more I came into my own, however, the more I realised that instead of fighting my heritage,

I needed to embrace it.

My parents gave us many freedoms, including in matters of the heart. So they are the first people I turn to in times of trouble — when I have problems professionally, when I fall in love, when a guy breaks my heart and so on.

So when most people meet my family, they are "pleasantly" surprised about how “cool” we are, without understanding the irony of what they say.

I am a fat, non-Muslim Muslim girl. I am a token Muslim friend.

My tattoos, the ever-changing colour of my hair, the string of cuss words flying carelessly from my mouth, the bindis I sometimes wear on my forehead, the cigarette in my mouth, the whiskey glass in my hand are supposedly symptoms of my non Muslim-ness.

People wonder if I am Bengali, Punjabi or Parsi, and then display signs of utter shock when I disclose that I am Muslim. I usually laugh off the reactions.

Sometimes, though, I don’t feel generous enough to countenance this patronising nod by people, especially when I hear variations of the insult replicated in different situations.

Indians abroad, for instance, often get asked: “How do you speak such good English?”

I am most enraged when someone says to a Black person: “You don’t seem Black at all, you’re different.”

This tone is not only presumptuous, but also epitomises the heinous fact that judgments have been made, or behaviours predicted by the colour of one’s skin, or the god one worships.

Muslims, especially Muslim women, are not measured with the same yardstick as the rest of the world.

While everyone else is allowed to be the way they want to, when a Muslim family shows signs of seeming conservatism (for instance, girls wearing the hijab), they are termed backward and fundamentalist.

I often find myself defending the choices of members of my family who practise Islam more than my parents; I have to assert time and again that they too are well-educated and conscientious members of society.

In much the same vein, I have to denounce radical Islam each time there is a terror attack.

As a Muslim woman, I feel most comfortable on my travels abroad, except the anxiety I feel at immigration counters of airports, the kind of anxiety that most Muslims are familiar with.

During my travels, I have made wonderful friends in hostels and carpools. This is not to say people from other countries are more accepting, but that the more you travel and meet people different from you, the more you learn to accept.

I feel equally comfortable when I work on international films shot in India.

A film set allows me to become a part of this wonderful, diverse family working together to fulfil a creative vision. There’s little time then for prejudices to play out.

Of course there are also many people I’ve met in the course of my life in India, to whom all of this has never mattered.

There are those friends I’ve known for over two decades whom I met way before prejudice even had the chance to grow in our young minds.

And then there are those I met as a young adult and the bonding took place over a T-shirt or a book or as a fellow survivor of a gruelling mass communications course.

Sometimes I wonder if I am oversensitive about being a Muslim woman.

But then I wonder, if it affects me, a person with privilege all that much, how must it be for a young Muslim girl in a hijab, who has to defend not only her choice of dressing, but also continually bear the mantle of radical Islam on her shoulders?

My hope is that some day we will see each other as individuals, made up of atoms and molecules and a personality that’s their own.

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