My first exposure to Pakistani/Indian music did not come from my Mian. I had known him for a few months by then - long enough to know he was really from Pakistan and not from Brunei - and my roommate was in college for musin composition. We both worked together at a Bookstore and Roommate was in the last year of a piano composition degree and forced me to attend recitatls. At the bookstore, you could special order in all sorts of wierd stuff and after we learned that Mr. Mian (not yet Mian at that time since the word mian means husband, but you get the point) was from Pakistan, Roommate ordered a CD, after looking into Pakistani music history a bit. "Pakistan's biggest music star" Roomate told me, was Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. We played the CD at blarringly loud volumes in our apartment and looked strangely at each other until Roommate asked me "Do you like it?"
Friday, January 21, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Developments in Language
Remember my terrible, horrible, no good very bad Urdu skills? (If you need a memory refresher, a sampling of my Urdu skills can be found here here and here.) Well, that's all about to change folks! I am officially enrolled in a formal Urdu class - it starts next week!
The inspiration for this was actually another gori wife. A college friend of M's married an American girl a few years ago and they were visiting our house. She mentioned that she'd found a formal Urdu class where they lived and I thought "Wha?! If there's an Urdu class THERE, I should certainly be able to find one HERE!" So I renewed my old google searches and though it took a while, I did find a local class. I yelped it, then I emailed the Big Bad Blonde Bahu to make sure her bad experiences with Hindi class weren't from the same place (they weren't.) Then I finally buckled down and sold me old law school textbooks online so I could justify the fee. THEN, FINALLY - I was enrolled! Only 8.5 years after meeting a Pakistani boy and 7+ years of marriage, and I finally might crack this thing.
Wish me luck. I'm alternating between being nervous that I'll never be able to master it and self-assured that I'll walk into the room with a pretty big head start what with the 7-8 years of Urdu vocabulary I've somehow built up by osmosis in my head. After all, I doubt many people in the class will already know how to say "We will become three bad blenders" in Urdu on Day One. Right?
Riiiiiight....
The inspiration for this was actually another gori wife. A college friend of M's married an American girl a few years ago and they were visiting our house. She mentioned that she'd found a formal Urdu class where they lived and I thought "Wha?! If there's an Urdu class THERE, I should certainly be able to find one HERE!" So I renewed my old google searches and though it took a while, I did find a local class. I yelped it, then I emailed the Big Bad Blonde Bahu to make sure her bad experiences with Hindi class weren't from the same place (they weren't.) Then I finally buckled down and sold me old law school textbooks online so I could justify the fee. THEN, FINALLY - I was enrolled! Only 8.5 years after meeting a Pakistani boy and 7+ years of marriage, and I finally might crack this thing.
Wish me luck. I'm alternating between being nervous that I'll never be able to master it and self-assured that I'll walk into the room with a pretty big head start what with the 7-8 years of Urdu vocabulary I've somehow built up by osmosis in my head. After all, I doubt many people in the class will already know how to say "We will become three bad blenders" in Urdu on Day One. Right?
Riiiiiight....
Monday, January 17, 2011
First Brush With Pakistan
I once met a guy of Pakistani heritage, and he lied about where he was from. And I'm not talking about the year 2002 and the man I would eventually marry. I'm talking about way back in 1997! And I didn't find out the truth about that for 10 years, which makes my Mian's two month lie look like a comparatively smaller deal, I guess.
I lived in California when I was in fourth and fifth grade. I made friends with a neighbor girl and she became the longest lasting friendship I've ever had. We actually were just casual friends when we were young, she was two grades higher than I was and changed both her home and school until we rarely saw each other. But somehow after I moved all the way across the country, we began to write letters to each other. Then phone calls. Then her family came to my state for a vacation and invited me along for a few days. Somehow we'd managed to become best friends strictly through cross-country correspondence. Then, the summer before my senior year of high school,. my parents bought me a plane ticket (I can't even remember the occasion, maybe it was a birthday present or something) to fly back to California and visit for two weeks. It was on this trip that my best friend introduced me to her boyfriend.
She'd met him online, and they'd been dating for a while by the time I met him. I don't know much about him, and I remember even less than I probably once knew, but I remember being told that he was "Persian." I've heard that a lot since, people calling themselves Persian. I always want to say "Oh yeah, show me your passport from Persia, then." On that trip, the details I remember were that he was vacationing with his family in France and I had to use my 2 years of high school french on the phone to ask for him at his hotel because somehow his parents already hated my best friend and might recognize her voice. My friend told me that they'd found out their son was dating an American girl and wanted him to date a girl from his culture - even though his mother was not Pakistani! Also I remember when he got back, we went for dinner and he tried to order something that wasn't on the menu - some delightful potato pasta dish he'd just had in Italy, could the waitress please ask the chef if he could prepare it even though it wasn't on the menu. Turns out it was gnocchi - oh, and did I mention we were dining at that fine establishment known to connoisseurs as The Olive Garden? I don't think he or I liked each other very much, for various reasons. Anyway, they dated for a few years and broke up.
Then, some five years later, I met a Pakistani guy. Then I married him a year after that, and went to Pakistan a year after that. But somehow I'd forgotten all about this guy until maybe a year after THAT. Then, somehow, and for no discernable reason, it occurred to me that Mr. Persian had a VERY EXTREMELY PAKISTANI name. So I googled him, and it turns out that he was Pakistani! And (I think, from what my googling tells me) that his father even started some Pakistani businessman organization or something like that. I can't find any confirmation that his mother was non-Pakistani, but it turns out that he and I have the same profession.
When I was in high school, and my best friend was dating this young, upwardly mobile wealthy guy, I had an interest in boys who were anything but upwardly mobile. We used to have this joke - that one day I would end up living in a trailer in the backyard of she and Mr. Persia/Pakistan's back yard. It didn't seem like Mr. Persia/Pakistan liked that joke very much. (The joke lasted well past the era of Mr. Persia/Pakistan, actually, because my taste in men didn't improve until I met my Mian.) Now, I wish I could somehow talk to that guy and ask him questions. I've always got questions for the children of Pakistani immigrants raised in America, especially if their mother is non-Pakistani! I'm raising one of those kids!
And I'd tell him how my life ended up strangely similar to his. Somehow it amuses me to think that I had a brief glimpse into my future when I met that guy...
I lived in California when I was in fourth and fifth grade. I made friends with a neighbor girl and she became the longest lasting friendship I've ever had. We actually were just casual friends when we were young, she was two grades higher than I was and changed both her home and school until we rarely saw each other. But somehow after I moved all the way across the country, we began to write letters to each other. Then phone calls. Then her family came to my state for a vacation and invited me along for a few days. Somehow we'd managed to become best friends strictly through cross-country correspondence. Then, the summer before my senior year of high school,. my parents bought me a plane ticket (I can't even remember the occasion, maybe it was a birthday present or something) to fly back to California and visit for two weeks. It was on this trip that my best friend introduced me to her boyfriend.
She'd met him online, and they'd been dating for a while by the time I met him. I don't know much about him, and I remember even less than I probably once knew, but I remember being told that he was "Persian." I've heard that a lot since, people calling themselves Persian. I always want to say "Oh yeah, show me your passport from Persia, then." On that trip, the details I remember were that he was vacationing with his family in France and I had to use my 2 years of high school french on the phone to ask for him at his hotel because somehow his parents already hated my best friend and might recognize her voice. My friend told me that they'd found out their son was dating an American girl and wanted him to date a girl from his culture - even though his mother was not Pakistani! Also I remember when he got back, we went for dinner and he tried to order something that wasn't on the menu - some delightful potato pasta dish he'd just had in Italy, could the waitress please ask the chef if he could prepare it even though it wasn't on the menu. Turns out it was gnocchi - oh, and did I mention we were dining at that fine establishment known to connoisseurs as The Olive Garden? I don't think he or I liked each other very much, for various reasons. Anyway, they dated for a few years and broke up.
Then, some five years later, I met a Pakistani guy. Then I married him a year after that, and went to Pakistan a year after that. But somehow I'd forgotten all about this guy until maybe a year after THAT. Then, somehow, and for no discernable reason, it occurred to me that Mr. Persian had a VERY EXTREMELY PAKISTANI name. So I googled him, and it turns out that he was Pakistani! And (I think, from what my googling tells me) that his father even started some Pakistani businessman organization or something like that. I can't find any confirmation that his mother was non-Pakistani, but it turns out that he and I have the same profession.
When I was in high school, and my best friend was dating this young, upwardly mobile wealthy guy, I had an interest in boys who were anything but upwardly mobile. We used to have this joke - that one day I would end up living in a trailer in the backyard of she and Mr. Persia/Pakistan's back yard. It didn't seem like Mr. Persia/Pakistan liked that joke very much. (The joke lasted well past the era of Mr. Persia/Pakistan, actually, because my taste in men didn't improve until I met my Mian.) Now, I wish I could somehow talk to that guy and ask him questions. I've always got questions for the children of Pakistani immigrants raised in America, especially if their mother is non-Pakistani! I'm raising one of those kids!
And I'd tell him how my life ended up strangely similar to his. Somehow it amuses me to think that I had a brief glimpse into my future when I met that guy...
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