Madonna and Me (18 page)

Come July, dancing down the aisle to Madonna, I will embrace the creation of my own impossible family, marrying the traditional and the queer in a perfectly imperfect union.

Soniah Kamal

 

 

 

 

 

I WAS STANDING before my full-length mirror holding bloodstained cotton balls to my ears when my mother barged into my room and gazed at me in despair. Like all good Pakistani girls, getting my earlobes pierced was a traditional rite of passage, but I was seventeen years old and I had just plunged a sewing needle into my cartilage six times in each ear. It hurt, but I felt good.

“Do you think you are Madonna?!” my mother yelled.

I stood before her in fingerless blue lace gloves, black rubber bracelets, red leggings and a white shirt over a black bra. My mother eyed me with sorrow and worry. Good Pakistani girls did not dress this way, not if they wanted to fulfill their parents’ dream of making a decent respectable marriage. I felt my mother’s pain as she yelled again, “Do you think you are Madonna?!”

Madonna came into my life when I was fourteen years old. At the time, we lived in Jeddah, a hot, dusty, port city with a brilliant blue cornice alongside the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. I attended an international school that apparently provided the best education. But because it was co-ed, my parents constantly reminded me that good Muslim girls did not speak to boys, under any circumstances. And as long as we were
good girls
, all was okay.

One afternoon I was visiting a school friend, Shannon. I was allowed to go to Shannon’s house because she had no brothers and she was Irish Catholic. My mother believed Irish Catholics were just like Muslims: appropriately strict with their daughters. My mother would have been appalled if she’d seen Shannon prancing around her house in a skimpy tank top and underwear. The only Western clothes I was permitted to wear were loose, long shirts, jeans, and dresses and skirts, as long as they were paired with knee-high socks. I felt foolish and ugly in those socks. But I couldn’t even take them off at school because I was not allowed to shave my desperately-in-need-of-a-shave legs. Nor was I allowed to grow my nails or wear makeup. I couldn’t figure out what being a good Muslim or Pakistani had to do with hairy legs, short nails, and zero makeup.

On this particular afternoon, we lounged in Shannon’s bedroom, sipping chilled cans of Vimto grape soda and listening to music. Shannon had bought a new audio cassette. The girl on the cover reminded me of Pakistani singer Nur Jehan. They shared a plump, sultry, victorious mien, as if they’d just eaten the creamiest pastry in the world.

“Tell me what you think?” Shannon said as she pressed play.

The tune: catchy. The beat: like bubbles popping. The rhythm: joyous, cheery. Before we knew it we were jumping on the bed through “Holiday” and “Everybody,” yelling bits of the choruses we’d picked up. Finally we collapsed, and I passed my verdict: Madonna sounded like a squeaky mouse. Shannon laughed and agreed. Then she asked, “Do you want hear a really
sexy
song?”

“Okay,” I said with false bravado—in my home, “sexy” was a bad word.

“Like a Virgin” throbbed through the speakers. If Shannon hadn’t been sitting there, my mouth would have fallen open at hearing the word “virgin” out loud, but Shannon was belting it out as if it were no big deal. Perhaps it wasn’t. Shannon’s parents expected her to be a virgin until marriage, but dating, boyfriends, crushes, and first kisses were dinner-table fodder at her house. At my home, dating, boyfriends, crushes, and kisses were all
bad
words, and not only was I expected to be a virgin at marriage but woe betide I had
anything
to do with any male before my wedding night.

When the song was over, I said, “My parents think
virgin
is a bad word.” I rolled my eyes even as I asked Allah to forgive me for saying “virgin” and for speaking ill about my parents.

Shannon popped her gum. “My dad would die if he heard this song.”

“My dad would kill me if he even heard me hearing this song.”

A few weeks later, my mother allowed me to attend Shannon’s birthday party because she thought it was girls-only. Because I was the only Pakistani/Muslim at the party, I relaxed—my parents knew no one here, so nothing would get back to them. Streamers and balloons decorated the walls. Boys and girls stood at opposite ends of the room, finding refuge behind Pepsis and potato chips until Shannon’s mother shepherded us into the center and warned us to start having fun. “Material Girl” blasted through the room and everyone started to move.

“Who is this?” I asked Shannon.

“Madonna,” she said.

“The Mouse?”

“Yep. The Mouse. I like her.”

“Me too.”

Our movements intensified through “Borderline,” and by the time “Into the Groove” came on, we were all jiggling our butts off.

Then a slow song came on: “Crazy for You.” Amid giggles equally shy and coy, everyone paired up and began to slow-dance. I had never been in such close proximity to a boy. My parents would be mortified. Not that B, with his black spectacles and knobby knees, qualified in my mind as a “boy”; he was simply a classmate who happened to not be a girl. I felt guilty even as I consoled myself that if Shannon could dance like this with her mother in the room, then surely it couldn’t be such a crime.

Still, I felt I was letting down my parents and Allah. But if the Christian God and Muslim God were one and the same, then how could one religion deem slow-dancing all right and the other deem it bad? I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for an answer.

The next day, I begged my father to drive me to a supermarket with a music department so I could purchase every Madonna song available. I winced as my father glanced at the cassette covers. Madonna’s curls were unruly, eyebrows brash, mouth bold, nose absolutely beautiful, but most of all, I loved her defiant gaze: She resembled a tigress that’d spotted her favorite meal.

My parents were connoisseurs of
ghazals
(a form of poetry that could be put to music and sung), as well as Indian film songs. Their small collection of English music consisted of ABBA, Boney M., and the Bee Gees. My father, inspecting Madonna on the covers, asked me who she was. I told him: “A new singer I heard at Shannon’s house.” He pursed his lips. For a moment I feared he would screen the songs. I could just imagine his heart attack over “like a virgin touched for the very first time” or “crazy for you, touch me once and you’ll know it’s true.”

As it was, my father presumed that all entertainers hailed from questionable stock. Whether this belief was unique to him or part of our culture, I had yet to discover. Either way, his disdain did not deter his own pleasure in listening to music or watching classical dances in Indian films. This dichotomy left me irritated and annoyed.

Eventually, my father handed me the bag. At home I whisked my mother’s tape player into my room. Door shut, volume low, I crooned along with Madonna for the rest of the evening. Even though I still felt guilty for having slow-danced, I kept playing “Crazy for You.”

At one point during the evening, my mother popped her head in to inquire if I’d prayed that day. I whipped out my prayer mat and a head covering (mandatory only while praying) before rushing through the ritual so I could return to the songs. I particularly liked “Live to Tell,” despite not gleaning the secret that was burning inside of her. And “Like a Virgin” thrilled me. It really was the sexiest!

Madonna, everyone at school proclaimed, was the Queen of Sexiness. I agreed, even though I wasn’t altogether sure what “sexy” meant. One day, B, the boy I’d danced with at Shannon’s party, passed me a note in class: “U R Sexy.” My face burned. I thought I was going to pass out. “Sexy” scared me. Sexy was in the same category as “shame-shame,” our euphemism for genitals. I felt ashamed and dirty, as if I
had
done something sinful.

And I had: I had slow-danced with B, and had thus inadvertently invited him to say such a thing about me. Guilt gnawed at me. I loved my parents and didn’t want to let them down no matter how annoying or unreasonable they could be. Red-faced, I crumpled B’s note and did not even tell Shannon.

Instead, I decided to take my mother up on her constant assurances that I could ask her
anything
. I ambushed her in the kitchen just as she was pouring chickpeas into sautéed onions.

“What exactly does
sexy
mean?”

My mother turned off the stove, led me to the kitchen table, and held my gaze.

“Why exactly do you want to know?” she asked.

I told her I’d overheard a boy at school say it to a girl. My mother sighed, muttering that this was what came of sending girls to co-ed schools. Sexy, she proceeded to inform me, was a very, very bad thing—it was a girl who wanted boys to want her in a shameful way,
that not only should I never say the word but I should also distance myself from those who did. She ended with a kiss to my forehead and an order to pray to Allah to instill in me the sense to know right from wrong.

So I got down on my mat and prayed. Afterward, I continued to sit and talk to Allah, as was my habit. “Allah-mian,” I said, “if sexy is so bad and I am sexy then how is it my fault, since I have purposefully done nothing to be this way?” Allah did not answer, but rising from the prayer mat I decided to take a break from listening to the Queen of Sexy.

Perhaps Madonna would have truly disappeared from my life had another friend, Anya, not returned from her summer vacation in the United States with a VHS tape in tow: Madonna’s Virgin Tour.

One afternoon, while my father was at work and my mother recuperated in her bedroom after being on-call (she was an anesthesiologist), Anya and Shannon and I congregated in my living room to watch the video. We were three excited girls perched on the edge of a green velvet sofa, waiting for a cassette to rewind, not knowing that when the world changes, this is how it happens, in ordinary living rooms on ordinary afternoons.

When the concert began, Madonna’s silhouette appeared on the dark stage and she began to sing “Dress You Up.” The visual quality may have been grainy and the audio not perfectly clear, but strobe lights pulsed, smoke billowed, the crowd cheered, and there was Madonna—gliding, pirouetting, gyrating across the stage like lightning come to life. I was mesmerized; a strange energy engulfed me, my shoulders were sprouting wings, my stomach birthing butterflies, my feet growing light. I felt I was readying for flight.

Madonna was hypnotic—her voice, her body, her daring moves and attire: high-heel ankle boots, leggings that ended midcalf, black bracelets engulfing her wrists in lieu of the glass bangles favored by Pakistanis, and Christian crosses worn as pendants and earrings. (“Madonna is Catholic just like me,” Shannon informed us gleefully.)
Each time Madonna lifted her arms—and she lifted her arms plenty—her transparent top rode up to expose her midriff and bits of her bra. I was embarrassed for her, but because she wasn’t embarrassed for herself, I felt stupid for being embarrassed.

I watched, riveted, as she went from costume to costume until she was dressed in wedding-style white lace with white leggings, white boots, crosses and rosaries galore, to sing “Like a Virgin.” “Will you marry me?” she asked the audience, and they roared back. Madonna was immorality and morality entwined like stripes on a candy cane. Madonna was magic. Madonna was madness. The concert ended with a man—Madonna’s real-life father—barreling on stage to drag her away as if she were a naughty girl. At that moment I felt akin to Madonna.
I was Madonna
. She understood my life, so I gave her my soul. No matter that it had been an act, and that she returned to the stage to do a curtsy.

When the concert was over, Anya, Shannon, and I peered bashfully at each other.

“That was great.”

“Greater than great.”

“It was the sexiest.”

Breaking into giddy shrieks, we rewound the tape and watched it all over again. The third time around, we rose to copy Madonna’s moves, and that was when my mother walked into the living room and found us awkwardly flailing about. We instantly stopped and sat down.

“It’s a Madonna concert,” I blurted out. And, as if sensing my nervousness, Shannon and Anya also began bombarding my mother with assurances.

“It’s the latest thing in the States.”

“She’s huge there. Like Michael Jackson.”

“Everyone’s watching this video.”

“And copying her dancing.”

“She’s Catholic,” I added sheepishly.

To my surprise, my mother sat down with us and watched for a while before announcing that her moves were more gymnastics than dance. But she didn’t tell me to turn it off. Instead my mother smiled and told me to move the glass coffee table to one side if we were going to dance. Then she left. I wonder if Madonna had mesmerized her too.