Bollywood Hijab 1985
by Leila C. Nadir
Cary Adams, Bollywood Hijab 1985, digital photograph, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Bollywood Hijab 1985
Leila C. Nadir | SEPT 2023 | Issue 27
The problem was sex. And by sex, I mean kissing. Especially kissing between unmarried people or underaged kids. That was the worst kind of sex—I mean, kissing—and that was the kind American media liked best. The United States of America cannot imagine a single storyline without the Obligatory Premarital Kiss. I know because as a kid I tested out all the safest show options.
At ten years old, I begged and I begged and I swore to my father that this new show I heard about wouldn’t be un-Muslim. “It’s a sitcom about the closeness of family, Baba! That’s why it’s called Family Ties!” Girls in fifth grade were always talking about films, shows, programs, sitcoms, and I could never understand what they were saying. Their English was arranged and meaningful in ways I couldn’t decipher, like I lived in some alternate universe missing from US maps, like pop culture was a foreign dialect because I lived in Primetime Blackout.
Another time I begged to watch a Christmas special. Surely stop-animated reindeer wouldn’t offend? “It’s a cartoon about a deer with a red nose, Baba!” I said. I pushed my little brother’s shoulder. We’d planned a stealthy double-tag attack, I say my line, then you say yours. “Rudolph’s nose lights up the night sky for Santa, Baba jaan,” Mohammed said. Six-year-old Fatima twirled her hair and tried to advance our cause. “Lutfan, Baba jaan!”
But every time we secured a ruling in our favor and Mohammed and I high-fived and sallied up to the screen, Baba regretted his decision and so did I. Because the Kiss was everywhere. The Kiss was unavoidable. Even Rudolph attracted a long-lashed flirty mate. Like I said, there was an Obligatory Premarital Kiss in every American storyline. It began with eye-flutters, head-tilts, boy and girl touching hands (or hooves), and I half-shut my eyes, ready for my father to pounce over the coffee table—over me, Mohammed, and Fatima sprawled on the Afghan rug—to stab the power button with his finger and kill the incoming pollution. Sometimes he cried out, genuinely disappointed, “Everything is Sex in America!” Like he’d truly believed network television was going to come through this time and not blast pornography into his home.
The only media that slipped through my father’s entertainment ban were Bollywood films, because back in 1985, India’s censors still banned kissing from screens. We rented the movies from the Indian Bazaar, a Rochester storefront where my father bought massive burlap bags of basmati rice for the palau or chalau that my American mother served almost every dinner. The videotapes were lined up on a shelf beside the register and Baba let me pick a few out, which I did by comparing the prettiness of actresses on the covers.
On his way out the door, Baba hoisted one burlap rice sack onto each shoulder, and at the van he dropped the bags into the trunk with a double-thud. I climbed into the passenger seat, grateful for the stack of Bollywood VHS tapes balanced on my lap. At least I’d get to see what happened at the end of these films.
Every American show I saw ended with my frustration. Did the boy and girl kiss? Did they get married and live happily forever? Or did they get in a knock-out physical fight and push each other around and break ceramic and glass objects and scream insults about how they’d always hated each other? Love in America seemed so unpredictable. But not in India. Weddings in India sucked.
Every Indian bride was depressed. I learned a lot from Bollywood. Their parents were always on the verge of financial disaster, and the only way to save the family from becoming, I don’t know, something horrific like middle class, was to marry a daughter off to the first creeper with a sizable bank account. Sadly, the girl was always in love already with a handsome and charming young man who wore flared jeans and did fun stuff like dance and sing on the poor side of town on top of café tables. And the two of them always had a secret plan to get married, but nobody cared what these girls wanted. The whole world, all the wedding guests, especially the parents, cheered and celebrated while the girls covered their tear-soaked faces with headscarves on the days they were forced to marry the rich geezers. I was guilty too. I should’ve been sad for the girls, but their wedding saris—oh my God, they were the most breathtaking outfits I’d ever seen, the most luminous red fabric, endlessly draping, layers pouring. The girls could hardly move, they had to walk slow, their youth stolen, and under the fabric so much crying and crying—but the gold, so much gold, so much glittering gold! Gold nose rings, gold finger rings, gold bangles, gold chains, gold earrings—and all of it shimmering with a brilliant red headscarf embroidered with even more gold.
That was what I wanted. A silky red headscarf embroidered with gold. I imagined girls at the mosque where I attended Islamic classes admiring my hijab straight out of Bollywood. It never occurred to me that the films’ leading ladies were likely Hindu, not Muslim, worshiping not Allah but Shiva and Vishnu. Since there was an Obligatory Premarital Kiss in every American plot line, I spent my childhood immersed in Bollywood, reading subtitles, learning Hindi vocabulary, absorbing stories from a culture I understood not at all. I had a whole vision of the future. My Bollywood hijab would put me on the map, and being noticed on a map would mean all the pieces of my body—English, Persian, Islam, Arabic, Hindi, Bollywood, America, Afghanistan—would rearrange into neat harmonious shape, with clear definition, finally fitting together.
Leila C. Nadir is an Afghan-American writer and artist working on a memoir that examines the global geopolitics that invade our living rooms and the intimate violences that reverberate across the planet. She has received awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf, de Groot Foundation, Tin House, Aspen Summer Words, and Maine Arts Commission. Her writing has appeared (or will soon) in Michigan Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, Khôra, Shenandoah, North American Review, Asian American Literary Review, Aster(ix), and ASAP/J.
Cary Adams is an interspecies kin-maker, folk-punk musician, environmental artist, and creative-critical researcher investigating a modern memory disorder that he and his collaborator Leila Nadir call “industrial amnesia.” His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Musum and has been supported by awards, fellowships, and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Franklin Furnace Fund, and the Maine Arts Commission.