Like most road trips, my recent six day drive from New York to New Mexico offered discoveries both expected and surprising.  New Jersey goes by quickly.  Pennsylvania does not.  Virginia is fond of the giant crosses, often set on hills overlooking the highway and lit up at night.  The coffee options at Wawa and Pilot span several continents.  The first two motels we stayed at, in Virginia and then Tennessee, were run by Gujaratis.  There is no desi discount.  Walk down Broadway in Nashville on a Tuesday afternoon and you will hear live bands playing in nearly every bar along the strip, mostly to empty houses, but there’s something special about a city where you can hear live music nearly anytime of day and instrument cases are common accessories.

There is great Guatemalan food in Oklahoma City, and a burger place called South Park in western Arkansas that makes the best heart-attack-now onion rings.  Driving down the actual Route 66 while singing along to the Depeche Mode version of “Route 66” might be dorky but is also infinitely rewarding.

Off of highway 40, in a beautiful, desolate part of New Mexico, there is a truck stop with a random Punjabi dhaba, where you can have an Indian lunch buffet and buy enough Haldiram snack mixes to last you until California.

Somewhere in the Texas panhandle, we started listening to the cd version of Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady” (read by Elizabeth McGovern, best known right now for her role as Cora on my latest television obsession, Downton Abbey).  I had read the book a long time ago, and had forgotten the cliffhanger ending – will Isabel Archer take charge of her own destiny?  The general consensus among lit critics is that she does not, but, driving in New Mexico, awed by the endless blue stretch of sky, broken only by distant, snow-capped mountains, the answer was obvious.  She does.  She does.

photos by AVT.

My story, “Love Like That,” is the title story of a new love-themed young adult anthology by Penguin India, an anthology of “1o stories to warm the heart.”  My story features the work of famed Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and an unlikely bond in a New Jersey parking lot (oh, those New Jersey parking lots).  The anthology also features well-known Indian authors Jerry Pinto, Rupa Gulab, Ira Trivedi and Milan Vohra, among others.  The perfect gift for your angst-ridden Valentine!

Buy it here.

You can read the section which cites my book here.

Okay, just kidding about the last one.  These email forwards from Haroon range from interesting to benign to cheesy to preachy to annoying to inaccurate.  But I recently received one that horrified me.  Now here is something that can definitely make you sick.

Subject heading (verbatim): Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) Hadees and and also What he saw when he went on Me’raj This is very important!

“Let us see the fate of that wife who does not sleep with her husband. The Messenger of Islam (SAW) is reported to have said, “Any woman who sleeps at a distance from her husband (i.e. is not next to him during the night) is cursed by the angels till morning sets in.” [Nahjul Fasaahah, Pg. 36].

The Incident of Me’raj

The chief of the faithfuls Ali ibne Abi Talib (AS) says, “One day I and Fatima paid a visit to Holy Prophet (AS) who began crying. I asked, “O Messenger of God (AS) may my father and mother be sacrificed for you, what is the reason for your crying?”

He (SAW) replied, “O Ali the night on which I went to Me’raj (ascension) I saw some women of my ummat facing severe chastisement and I am crying for them.

One was being hung by her hair and her head was boiling.

The second one was eating the flesh of her own body and fire was burning beneath her.

The third was being hung with her chest clenched.

The fourth women’s legs were tied with her hands and snakes and pythons were making a feast out of her.

The fifth one was deaf, dumb and blind and she was laid in a fire-case. Her brains were burning and melting through her nose and her body was being torn apart by leprosy and other similar diseases.

 Another women had her legs burned by the hellfire.

The seventh one I saw had her flesh being cut into pieces with scissors of fire.

The eighth one’s face and hands were being burnt and she was eating her own burnt skin.

Yet another women had her face like a pig and her body like a donkey and she was subjected to thousands of different chastisements.

The tenth one had her face like a bitch. Fire was being inducted from her rectum and extracted from her mouth and angels were constantly beating her on her head and face with sticks of fire.”

Janabe Fatema Zahra (SA) enquired , “O beloved father please inform us about the misdeeds or sins of these women for which they were subjected to such severe chastisement by the Almighty? 

The Holy Prophet (SAW) answered, “O Fatema, the woman who was being hung by her hair was the one who did not veil herself from the Na- Mehram men (men who are to mahram)

The one who was being hung by her tongue was rude to her husband and tortured him by her talks.  

The one who was being hung by her chest was depriving her husband of his sexual rights and pleasures. 

The one who was being hung by her legs was stepping out of her house without her husband’s permission.

The one who was eating her own flesh made her self up for other men. one whose hands and legs were tied together never purified her body and clothes. She never took the spiritual bath after her menstruation cycles or sexual intercourse and considered namaz (prayers) to be insignificant.

The one who was deaf, dumb and blind produced children out of adultery and claimed them to be of her husband.

The one whose flesh was being cut with scissors of fire use to come before men in such a way that they be attracted towards her.  

The one whose face and body were being burnt and who was eating her burnt flesh was the source of meeting of Na-Mehram boys and girls.

 The one whose face was like a pig and body like a donkey always lied and talked ill about others. [Biharul Anwar, Vol. 18, Pg. 45.]”

Needless to say, I was horrified.   This was so violently misogynistic that I shuddered to think who had typed up the email and labeled it as “very important.”   What I also could not understand is why, upon receiving this, Haroon, whose wife is an  independent woman with a successful career and who would never agree with a woman being hung by chest because she’d refused her husband’s “sexual rights,” did not hit delete immediately but chose instead to forward it on.

I had to assume, then, that Haroon didn’t actually read the email, that he simply saw the words “hadees” and “this is very important” in the subject line, took them at face value, and decided to forward it on (which is foolish on a different level, but anyway).

And then there were the supposed hadith themselves—there are definitely some misogynistic hadith out there, but these were beyond the pale.  Growing up, I’d heard the story about Prophet Muhammad visiting other prophets on his night journey to the heavens and taking their advice on lowering the number of required prayers, but never this one about him a woman being feasted on by snakes and pythons for thinking that namaaz was insignificant (whatever happened to ‘there is no compulsion in religion?’).   So, I did a little internet research.  All I could find about the first source, Nahjul Fasaahah (“The Peak of Rhetoric”), was that it’s a “magnificent book of 3200 hadith” written by Abu al-Qasim Payande, and I couldn’t find out anything about Mr. Payande.  Seems neither he nor the book are significant or important in  the history of Islamic theology.

In contrast, there was a lot more about the source of the second hadith, Biharul Anwar, as I explained to Haroon in my reply to him:

Dear Haroon,

I don’t know if you read though all of the forwards you send, but this one is particularly misogynistic and vitriolic. If people choose to believe in an Allah who will hang a woman by her legs for stepping out of the house without her husband’s permission, than god help us, and the future of Islam.  Everything we know of the prophet’s night journey is from hadith, which, given the “he said that he said that he said” chain of transmission, are not the most reliable, and the transmitters as well as the compilers are usually men who have their own (conscious and subconscious) personal biases.

Furthermore, the main hadith you forwarded is from Biharul Anwar, compiled by the Shi’i scholar Mulla Muhammad Baqir, known as ‘Allama Majlisi, 1000 years after the Prophet’s death.  It “has 110 volumes. Majlisi wrote it to gather all the wisdom he could find, in order to preserve that knowledge for following generations. His goal was to collect every single narration available, not to sift through and find the reliable ones, so only a trained scholar can determine which ones are authentic.”

It is hadith like these that give Islam a bad name and are used as excuses for subjugating women and forwarding this email only contributes to this.  So I ask that you consider carefully the intent and authenticity of the emails you forward.  I don’t mind getting positive messages, but negative and terrible ones like these make for a bad start to the day…

Sincerely,
Sheba

Haroon never wrote back.

There is a rigorous method of following the chain of narration to verify the authenticity of a hadith, but this still relies upon the assumption that none of the companions of the Prophet, or others in the chain, had an imperfect memory, or ever told a lie, or placed a different emphasis on a word or words based on the current cultural context, or wanted to use a saying of the Prophet to justify/support something they themselves were doing or wanted to do, etc.  Unlike the Prophet, who had an all-knowing, almighty Allah to guide and correct him if he made a mistake, these narrators were ordinary men.   They were, perhaps, very good, even exceptional, men, but men just the same, with human fault and self-interest and misjudgment.  This doesn’t mean that some of the hadith can’t be verbatim what the Prophet said, but some may not be, and, ultimately, hadith, which are so often used to legitimize or prohibit behavior, are unproven hearsay.

Whatever you believe about hadith, it’s safe to say that the hadith in Haroon’s forward were not the Prophet’s words, but that someone at some point made it up.  So I was thinking I’d make up my own, and I bet if I put it in an email with the words “hadith” and “very important” in the subject line, some people would forward it without even reading (though I do hope Haroon knows better now).

Subject:  Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) Hadith – What he saw when he went on Me’raj – This is very important!

Ayesha stated, “One day the Prophet was crying.  When I asked him why, he replied, ‘The night on which I went to Me’raj I saw my beloved wife Khadija. She said to me, ‘O Prophet of Islam!  Do not let your followers forget that your first wife was your only wife for twenty-five years, and that she was your source of strength, love and financial support, for I fear the ways of men’s hearts.  And I fear that they will forgo allegory and context and interpret the Quran strictly, to the detriment of women, and that they will put false words in your mouth to justify their mistreatment.’

‘But why do you cry?’ Ayesha then asked the Prophet.

‘Because,’ the Prophet said, ‘I fear she is right.’”

Call for Submissions: Anthology of South Asian Erotica (Tranquebar Press, India)

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.  – D. H. Lawrence

Sex.  You think about it, dream about it, watch it, do it, wish you were doing it, wish you weren’t, but you’d rather not write it, because it’s not respectable.  Because you’re concerned it won’t be taken seriously.  Because even when you do try to write about it, you find yourself holding back, out of modesty, or shame, or fear.  Because you worry about how your parents or even your friends will react when they read it.  Because you think you have nothing to say.

We believe you have something to say, and we want to hear it.

This call for submissions is for the second anthology of South Asian literary erotica to be published by India’s Tranquebar press.  Tranquebar’s first erotica anthology, Electric Feather, was a best seller and helped erotica gain recognition in the subcontinent as an important and influential literary genre.  With this second anthology, we hope to continue the success of the first one while including a greater diversity of voices and sexual experience.

What we’re looking for: Stories that are thoughtfully written, visceral and honest, involving South Asian characters, settings, and/or themes.  Stories can be titillating, dark, shocking, humorous, experimental, subversive; they can involve sex with others, sex with yourself, imagined sex, sexual fetishes—it’s entirely up to you.  We’re also interested in translations of erotica written in regional languages.

• Writers should be from South Asia or the South Asian diaspora
• Accepting fiction and narrative non-fiction
• 2,500 – 7,000 words
• Contributors will receive a one-time payment
• Please attach your submission as a Word document and include a brief bio in the body of the email

Email submissions to erotica.southasia@gmail.com by January 15, 2012.

Before Ledig, I’d only done one residency, at Hedgebrook.  Hedgebrook was wonderful, but since I was there a month before I started my MFA program, I don’t think I appreciated the whole “time away” to work on your book aspect of it like I do now.  Ledig is unique because of the international aspect—for my last two weeks there, I was the only American.  I met writers from Denmark, Germany, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, South Africa, Switzerland and Catalonia (do not make the mistake, as I did, of calling a Catalonian Spanish!).  I thoroughly enjoyed hearing what the writers found amusing about America—the signs along the road saying “Adopt-a-Highway,” for example, as well as the obsession in America over proposals (When will he propose?  How will he propose?  What ring will he propose with?  What do I do if he doesn’t propose?), which, according to the Swiss writer who lives in Paris, is also spreading to France, where there is a now a proposal-consultation agency for Frenchmen who want to make sure their proposals live up to the (American?) dream.

Most residencies, particularly in America, are in beautiful, natural settings, but what writers really compare them by is the food.  The food at Ledig was great, especially from Sunday-Thursday, when our lovely chef Rita cooked up gourmet meals in the kitchen.  It’s interesting how one’s perspective changes during a residency.   You start out being grateful for the mere fact that you’re even getting a free, home-cooked meal, but by the end, not only do you come to expect a great, home-cooked meal to be served promptly and with two sides, you also expect it to be followed by a delicious dessert, and when it’s time to leave, the idea of returning to a world where you have to figure out your own meals has become rather painful one.

Ledig is in Ghent, NY, on the grounds of Art Omi, a sculpture park and international arts center, and it is also close to where I grew up.  I spent most of my early years wanting to leave the Catskill, NY environs and here I was, willingly returning.  Ledig is 15 minutes away from Hudson, NY, which is across the river from Catskill.  When I was growing up, there was nothing much to do in Hudson except go to the movies.  There were a few antique stores on Warren Street, which of course I never went to.   Now, Warren Street is lined with ridiculously expensive antique stores, hip restaurants, art galleries, cafes, clothing boutiques and a great wine store.

This story pretty much sums up the new Hudson—there’s an old-school diner on Warren Street that looks straight out of the 50s.  Some of the writers wanted to go there before they left so they could have the quintessential American diner experience.  So one Sunday morning, we pile in the car and go to the diner, only to walk in and discover that the diner is no longer a greasy spoon but an upscale restaurant serving food made with artisanal cheeses and organic produce and grass-fed meat and is the first restaurant in the USA to be certified Animal Welfare approved (though not quite what we were expecting, it was still very good).

Warren Street is also now home to a particular kind of hipsters, sporting ZZ Top-esque facial hair and self-important frowns (apparently if  these hipsters smile at strangers the can of PBR in their hands might implode).  They are mainly musicians, and Hudson now boasts a thriving live-music scene, with shows and open mics pretty much every night of the week.  Many of the musicians also hula-hoop, and there is, apparently, a hula-hooping night at one of the music venues.  The hipsters, one of the art gallery owners told me, are a recent phenomenon.

However, the Hudson renaissance is pretty much limited to Warren Street—go just one or two blocks and it’s the old Hudson I used to know with decrepit houses and the occasional crack den.  On the one hand, it’s wonderful to have so much more art and culture—one night, we went attended a reading featuring Gary Shteyngart and Paul La Farge (both of whom were super smart and funny—my favorite combination), and Jim Jarmusch was in attendance.  On the other hand, it’s a little disconcerting to see the demarcation between rich Warren Street and poor Hudson, and it sometimes feels like a bit of an artifice.  That said, I would have loved to have some art galleries and live music when I was growing up.  I can just imagine my dorky, four-eyed, awkward 13 year-old self standing outside one of the galleries, wistfully watching black-clad New York transplants drinking wine at an art opening and thinking to myself, one day, I want to be cool and attend art openings.   Little would that self-conscious 13-year-old self have imagined that, flash-forward 20 or so years later, she would be doing a reading at an art opening in Hudson.

Just as Hudson has changed, so has my relationship to it.  I used to pray to Allah to get me the hell out of Catskill, NY, and there I was at Ledig, biking around country lanes and happily hanging out on Warren Street.

My next residency begins in a week.  It’s at Millay Colony, just a few miles from Ledig, and I’ll no doubt be visiting Hudson again.  So here is an apple cider toast to upstate New York autumns, and to creating new memories in places you once hoped only to forget.

I recently received the above comment on my blog. In researching my novel, I’ve discovered many aspects of Islamic history and culture that I was previously unaware of. For example, everyone has heard of the Kama Sutra, but less well known is The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight, a 15th century sex manual written in Arabic by Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi. Nor did I realize just how much theological debate about Islam transpired in the medieval period, the golden era of Islamic philosophy. For example, the rationalist Mu’talizi school of thought, popular in the 8th-10th centuries, believed, among other things, that the Quran is a created and finite work because only Allah is eternal. In our world of increasing orthodoxy and strict interpretation, it’s hard to imagine Mu’talizism being part of the dialogue in many of today’s madrasahs.

The author’s derogatory comment about Western teens being proud to call themselves “Lesbos and homo” is also interesting, as well as rather ironic, considering there are numerous references to the desirability of beardless male youths and the men who want them throughout medieval Islamic culture. Of course, identity politics was different back then, but beauty and love and passion? Timeless. A small sampling below:

The Rakish Poet
Abu Nawas, the “bad boy of Baghdad,” is one of the greatest and most influential classical Arabic poets. Born in 756 AD, he was for a time a favored court poet of the renowned caliph Harun al-Rashid and is a recurring character in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.

I loved one who loved me
And both of us succeeded
If absent I did not suspect
For love in my absence was true
If I wanted his mouth to
Kiss me and a crowd was round me
He’d rise without denial
To their eyes as I wished it

- Abu Nawas, Poem 321, Selections from the Diwan of Abu Nawas ibn Hani al Hakami, translated by Arthur Wormhoudt.

The Sultan
Mahmud of Ghazni, the powerful 11th century ruler and the first to style himself as “sultan,” had a famous love affair with Ayaz, one of his military slaves. The famous Persian poet Sa’adi refers to their love in Bustan, his collection of verses.

Some one found fault with the king of Ghazni, saying: “Ayaz, his favourite slave, possesses no beauty. It is strange that a nightingale should love a rose that has neither colour nor perfume.” This was told to Mahmud, who said: “My love, O sir, is for his virtues, not for his form and stature.”

- Sa’adi, Story of Sultan Mahmud and His Love for Ayaz, The Bustan of Saadi, tr. by A. Hart Edwards.

The Emperor
Babur was the founding emperor of the great Mughal Empire. In his memoir, he discusses his first and most passionate love.

During this time there was a boy from the camp market name Baburi…Before this experience I had never felt a desire for anyone, nor did I listen to talk of love or affection of speak such things…In the throes of love, in the foment of youth and madness, I wandered bareheaded and barefoot around the lanes and streets and through gardens and orchards…

- Babur, from his memoir The Baburnama, translated by William Thackeray.

The Forgotten
Rekhti is “a genre of Urdu poetry written from the late eighteenth century onward in India, which uses what the poets termed ‘women’s speech,’ has a female persona-speaker, and dwells on women’s lives and concerns. Poems by early-nineteenth-century Rekhti poets include representations of female-female love relations, among many other types of relations. These poems, although by major Urdu poets, have been largely excised from the prevailing canon of Urdu poetry.” -  Ruth Vanita, Married Among Their Companions”: Female Homoerotic Relations in Nineteenth-Century Urdu Rekhti Poetry in India, Journal of Women’s History, Spring 2004.

What else can I elegantly write about Sukho and Mukho’s daring intercourse
When their husbands forbade them to do what they were doing
They said, We are now famous everywhere as chapatbaz
Why not act upon it then—when going out to dance, why wear a veil?

- Jur’at (poet’s pen name). Chapatbaz refers to female homosexual activity.  For a full translation, see Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, eds., Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, New York: Palgrave-St Martin’s, 2000.

In this article, there’s a line that reads:  The writer said “the condition of South Asian women was kind of sad in the US.”  I don’t remember saying this, and if I did, it might have been in context of the women I used to represent when I worked as a lawyer for a South Asian battered women’s project in New York (and while some of these women were in “sad” situations, they were also strong, resilient, and courageous).   So basically I have no idea what I’m meant to be saying here, and it’s pretty clear the author of this article doesn’t either.  And then there’s this line: Karim’s parents cannot accept her as writer.  My parents have accepted me as a writer, they just wish I was still practicing law as well (it’s a rare parent that doesn’t want his/her child to have the security of a steady paycheck).  And, though I told this journalist several interesting things about the novel I’m writing about Razia, all she chooses to quote me on is: I am in the middle of the book.  Um, okay.

I prefer to answer questions over email, because then you’re less likely to be mis-or-badly quoted.  I had an interview with Cosmopolitan magazine in which they asked me, “What are five things in your makeup bag?” I listed the last thing as jasmine attar.  When Cosmo published this interview, this became and a jasmine perfume from Pakistan that I love.  I was a little perplexed as to why they’d changed my answer.   Thankfully, this was a harmless, albeit inaccurate, change.  (My attar is from Ajmer, not Pakistan).

But there has been some stand-out press as well, like Supriya Nair’s Mint review and Aditi Saxton’s article about me in The Sunday Standard.  The general lesson I’ve learned is that, if you are ever interviewed by journalists in India, have your direct quotes played back to you before publication, and hope for the best.