Halal: Honor and Shame as a White Woman in a Brown Man’s World

This essay was birthed when I was pregnant with my son Eben, who is now one. 

We were at our neighborhood chai shop as a family and had sat down at a table sipping our tiny cups of chai– two filled to the top, and two filled halfway for the boys. We come to this chai shop regularly and it has become a sweet toddler rite of passage. It’s the first time Chacha gives them their own half cup of chai. Chacha, who is kind, generous, and as direct as they come, is not afraid to give us all the advice in the world about our boys and what is good or bad for them. For the sake of relationship, we thank him and let them take some sips, but we take sips from their cups “just to make sure it’s not too hot.” Afterwards, we walked home under the setting sun, the boys sharing a tiny bag of Slantys that they bought with the ten rupees Chacha gave them as we said our goodbyes.

Some days later, I wrote in a social media post:

“When I first stepped foot in this country as a 14-year old, I was a reticent guest at best. I never would have guessed that life would circle me back here as a grown woman with a family of my own. Who would have ever thought? But God is kind, and in His kindness somehow rendered a tenderness for this land from what started as anything but.

Even as I have learned to embrace it as our home, I am still unsure what this country thinks of me in return. I try to take care to be culturally sensitive and aware, but there are many days I feel as if I owe an apology for existing as a woman in a very man’s world. The other day I asked Josh to pick up some roti from our neighborhood chai shop on his way home from school. He came in the door with a pink plastic bag of steaming roti fresh from the tandoor, and a piece of advice for me from a man at this chai shop which we visit so regularly: your wife needs to wear a bigger chadar.

A pregnant pause. I know this kind man said it with every good intention, but I shrink inside as I listened to my husband relay these words. Shame gnaws at me. I understand this advice is probably related to my belly that is swollen with a baby boy I can’t hide no matter how shapeless my clothes, no matter how hard I try. What am I supposed to do?”

I did what I felt was the right thing to do and, wanting to believe his words were well intended, I took them to heart. I began wrapping myself in my biggest, drapiest chadars when walking the streets of our neighborhood and other more conservative areas. Even so, it took me a while to find the courage to revisit our neighborhood chai shop again. Eventually I did. I remember the chadar I draped myself in on that day, how carefully I pulled it down and around my body, my belly. I remember where I sat at the table with my husband across from me, purposefully angled in a way so as to more easily converse with Chacha behind him. 

I remember how a man sat down at the next table over from us, his chair pointed towards me but behind Josh’s line of sight, and proceeded to openly stare at me for the next ten minutes until we finished our chai, thanked Chacha, and said goodbye. And I remember the feeling inside when, as we walked home, I asked Josh if that man was the one who had given him that piece of advice– your wife needs to wear a bigger chadar– and he nodded yes. I felt sick inside. After trying so hard not to sink with shame, to take this man’s words to heart as having been well meant, what right did he have to eat me alive with his gaze while I sat draped in the biggest chadar I could find?

In the months that have passed since that event, I have been questioning, processing, wrestling and praying through my role as a woman in this cultural context, and more broadly reflecting on the burdens carried by women here, seen and unseen.

We participated in a month-long Urdu language camp at Hill Lodge in Murree this past summer. In one of my group lessons, the teacher asked us to take turns coming up with sentences about women. When it came time for me to offer a sentence I said “Auraten bhari bojh uthati hai.” Women carry heavy burdens. The teacher, a male, looked at me quizzically but then nodded in agreement, “Yes, many women do carry things that are heavy.”

My teacher may have thought I was referring to physical loads, and that is true. How many times have I seen women walking up a hill from a mountain stream carrying full clay pots of water on their covered heads, or bending beneath huge sheaves of crops on their backs? 

But what I meant, which no words or pictures alone can fully convey, is the unseen weight women carry here, the invisible burdens they bear.

As an aside, because I think it is important for me to say, I am very aware that I think and feel and write through a lens that is shaped by my lived experience as a Caucasian Christian woman. I welcome and invite insight and stories from friends and followers whose identity and lived experience is different from mine, especially those whose understanding of my cultural context is deeper, stronger, and more innate than mine. I am thankful to call this place my home, but I am a guest here and have everything to learn from those who truly belong.

I was taught by both adults and peers when I first moved to Pakistan at 14 years old to cover up and keep my eyes down. This is long ingrained in me now. But, even before entering this country and culture, the modesty messaging that had shaped my view of my female self was to be careful not to wear, do, or say anything that could make me a stumbling block to the males around me. I “came of age” in what I think was the height of purity ring culture, and I wore my own with pride all through my young adulthood. 

I spent a summer as an intern for an NGO working with marginalized populations in India and while there I remember sitting beside a young girl whom I knew had experienced significant trauma in the form of trafficking. I remember how she played with each of the rings on my fingers, including my purity ring, and I was deeply moved by the realization that for this girl and so many others, what I had been taught about purity– saving my body and soul for my future husband– had not ever been a choice for her. I had no idea that this experience that was quite emotional for me would so quickly be followed by a traumatic event which further called to question my concept of purity.

I am not saying that the purity culture and modesty messaging rooted in conservative Christian values that I grew up with is wrong. But as a (I hope) recovering people-pleaser, perfectionist, and rule-follower, I do think it has had an impact on my concept of my female self– from the time I was a girl until now, a grown woman, wife and mom. I know that this rhetoric has had a significant bearing on my anxiety-ridden relationship with breastfeeding over the years, a struggle made more complex in our cultural context where women are often covered from head to toe, not to mention the pregnant and breastfeeding women who are mostly hidden away at home. 

Until Eben, I slogged through the season of breastfeeding because I knew I could and therefore should, but I never found it to be the sweet bonding experience I had heard about from friends and on social media. Unless I was holed up at home with no one but my own husband and children, figuring out how and where to feed my baby was something that caused me so much mental and emotional stress, to the point of sweat and tears sometimes. But somehow I learned to find actual joy in breastfeeding and nursing Eben for the last time was the first time I have felt sad when weaning any of our babies. That, to me, is evidence of healing which I never even thought to pray for. Like I said, God is kind.

The other day, while driving through the capital city, we noticed a number of pink buses driving around, all with “Chief Minister Pink Bus for Women Initiative” painted on the side. As I internally processed, trying to figure out why the idea didn’t automatically enthuse me, Josh spoke out loud for me. “That goes to show how deep the problem is ingrained in society, that women have to ride in their own bus to feel safe.” These buses are much like family rooms in restaurants and chai shops, oftentimes a dark attic, basement, or curtained-off corner designated for any groups with at least one female. I can never decide whether I feel more discouraged by the fact that women are not welcome to sit freely outside like men are allowed to, or grateful that the men who own these establishments have gone out of their way to create a space where women like me can sit comfortably inside, out of the line of sight of male customers and passersby.

Josh reminded me recently how I told him during our first year that I didn’t think I could survive here long-term, not without withering inside. I’m so thankful this is not how I feel anymore. Even still, I know that it wears on me. Usually it happens when we go back for a visit to Canada or the US and I am surprised by how light I feel, existing in public without feeling the need to hide or apologize. While this may be true for me in my passport countries, I know it is the reverse for so many who, try as they might, cannot seem to exist without a fight for their life in the place they have every right to call home.

When I feel most disheartened or frustrated by the realities of women here, the heavy burdens their bodies and souls bear, there is no greater redress than what I see in the Gospels. Jesus, time and again, broke norms that are very similar to that of my own host culture in order to seek, speak to, befriend, defend and bestow honour on women. 

It never fails to give me pause, reading these stories. The way he spoke to the woman at the well, or how he wrote in the sand to defend a woman who otherwise would have been put to death. The unclean woman he commended rather than shamed for reaching through a crowd to touch his clothes in hopes of being healed of chronic disease. The time he visited the home of two sisters and patiently turned the feminine competition between them into a teaching moment. The religious leader’s young daughter, already dead, to whom he took by the hand and said, “Little girl, I say to you, arise.” 

Perhaps the most meaningful for me is the time he appeared to Mary first, rather than any of his male disciples, and it wasn’t until she heard him call her by name that she knew it was him– her teacher, her friend. It must not have been the first time he had spoken her name out loud.

When I think about Jesus calling me by name, I too am undone– I and the cobwebs of self-consciousness and shame that sometimes blur my vision even as I cover up and avert my gaze. As a woman, this is all the truth I need. If Jesus sought, spoke to, befriended, defended and bestowed honour on women young and old, then it goes without saying that women, too, are worthy. 

However less visible women are expected to be here (and perhaps, to some extent, everywhere), if you have eyes and any powers of observancy, you can’t help but see all the ways they are stronger, braver and wiser than they are made out to be, carrying unseen and untold weight from such a young age. 

They are the little girls dressed in rags, begging in the streets. They are the brave Swati girls walking miles to and from school, black scarves wrapped around their heads. They are the lonely teenage girls working as nannies in cities far away from their village homes. They are the nurses and teachers in training, their families trying as they might to find them a respectable profession where they will be safe. They are the young wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters-in-law, spending their days at home raising children and serving the families they married into, whether arranged or by choice. They are the working women, starting and leading businesses, schools, non-profits with skill and passion because they have been taught they can and should make a difference in this world. They are the women standing calf-deep in flooded rice paddies across Punjab, heads covered as they bend over, painstakingly cutting stalks of rice by hand. 

She is the Kashmiri shepherdess and smile-lined mother of six, who crossed the river and poured piles of walnuts from their own trees into my dupatta while leading their flock of goats up and down their terraced hills. 

She is the young mom of two I met at the park yesterday, wrapped in her biggest chadar that could not hide her freckled nose or her sparkling green eyes. 

She is an entire story of hardship and strength and quiet courage so many will never know. 

She, too, is worthy.