A few disclaimers before we get into this:
- I’m not Muslim or Bengali or South Asian. I’m a Black bi woman from a religious family. So in some ways, yes, I can relate to Rukhsana. But I cannot makes any statements about this being good Muslim/Bangladeshi rep. I can only talk about what it was like for me reading the book.
- Content and Trigger Warnings: As a book about a very traumatic coming out for a young girl, this book has many, many mentions and depictions of homophobia. This book also explicitly talks about and alludes to sexual assault and rape, islamophobia, sexism, hate crimes, and death.
- Of course, spoilers.
So, wow, I loved this book so much! Oh my gosh it was phenomenal. It had me on the edge of my seat the entire time. I listened to the audiobook, read by Richa Shukla, and I think that enhanced the overall experience for me. She did such a wonderful job! Here’s the blurb:
Seventeen-year-old Rukhsana Ali tries her hardest to live up to her conservative Muslim parents’ expectations, but lately she’s finding that impossible to do. She rolls her eyes when they blatantly favour her brother and saves her crop tops and makeup for parties her parents don’t know about. If she can just hold out another few months, Rukhsana will be out of her familial home and away from her parents’ ever-watchful eyes at Caltech, a place where she thinks she can finally be herself. But when she is caught kissing her girlfriend Ariana, her devastated parents take Rukhsana to Bangladesh, where everything she had been planning is out of reach. There, immersed in a world of tradition and arranged marriages, Rukhsana finds the perspective she’s been looking for in her grandmother’s old diary. The only question left for her to answer is: Can she fight for the life she wants without losing her family in the process?
Sabina Khan does a fantastic job of creating a story that not only follows Rukhsana experience of coming out, but also goes into great detail about arranged marriages, what it’s like being queer in a religion and country that persecutes queer people, colorism, sexism, sexual assault, interracial relationships, the experience of being an immigrant and the child of an immigrant, gender roles, and still manages to be an enthralling, funny, and heart-warming read.
Let’s start with arranged marriages. I’ve definitely heard of arranged marriages but I’m not from a culture that has them so I was never aware of the intricacies. And wow, there are many nuances to it! Some families don’t let their child have any say in their potential spouse. Some families let their child meet a few different suitors and choose which one they would like to marry. In some cases, parents want to do right by their kids and give them a good spouse. In other cases, some parents want to simply marry off their daughter so that they can focus their resources on their son, as we see with Rukhsana’s grandmother. There’s so much that goes into being a good candidate: how much education you’ve received, your family history; women especially have to look a very, very specific way. There are match makers and a number of different religious ceremonies leading up to the engagement and wedding.
Another aspect we see is that marrying for love is frowned up. It’s not about marrying to be happy, it’s about marrying to not bring shame to your family, marrying to uphold cultural traditions and expectations, marrying for resources. Marrying for love could bring ruin upon your family. We see this with quite a few characters in the story. Rukhsana’s cousin, Shaila, is in love with someone she met at college in Bangladeshi. However, both of them know they can never marry each other because he comes from a poor family. Sohail, Rukhsana’s friend/pretend-fiancé, is gay and he must keep his relationship a secret, just like she had to do with her girlfriend, Ariana. Ifran, one of Rukhsana’s American-Bengali friends, is in love with a white girl named Sarah, and if that got out, his family would never accept it. In the dynamics of arranged marriages, you see that’s there this obligation of doing right by your family. There’s this deep pressure of, “if you do this, what will people think of our family? What will happen to our reputation?” As an outsider looking in, it was an in-depth look into a dynamic in many cultures that I’d never thought much about.
Next up, this book deeply explores gender roles. From the very first chapter, we get a clear picture that men and women are not treated equally. Rukhsana can’t leave to go to her friend’s house until she helps with the cooking, even though her brother, Aamir, is right there and volunteers to help. She, as a young woman, must know how to cook in order to be a good wife. Additionally, we see that her schooling takes a back seat to her brother’s, even though she has better grades than him, is graduating soon, and is getting a full scholarship to her dream school, CalTech. At one point in the story, her parents even pull her out of school and have no problem doing so since they don’t see her education as a priority. There’s a line later in the book by the matchmaker that stands out to me which goes something like, “your future husband’s family might not want a girl who has gone to college, you’ll have to see if they approve of that.” That line perfectly summarizes the idea that a woman’s focus should be on her husband and her family, not herself.
Women have to do a lot of things in order to be presentable, both as a representative of their family and as a potential bride. They have to do many things to be considered a good wife where men simply don’t. They have the freedoms that women are not afforded. We see this most clearly in Rukhsana’s grandmother’s story and I will once again mention the trigger warning as this section will talk about rape and sexual assault. Rukhsana’s grandmother was forced into an arranged marriage because her parents wanted to put all their resources into her brother — he is deemed more valuable. Her husband is much, much older than her and at first, he treats her nicely, but once it’s time to have sex, things get violent and aggressive quickly. She was not taught how to have sex, she’s a very young teen, about 14/15, still a child really, and she’s afraid. The book depicts the entire experience of her being raped and it is not easy to read for us or Rukhsana, who is relaying the story to us as she reads it from her grandmother’s journal. Her mother in law is just as abusive as her husband. Things change when she gets pregnant. She’s treated lovingly because everyone thinks she is going to have a boy. She no longer had to work as a housekeeper in her own home or get beaten. That is, until she gives birth to a girl, Rukhsana’s mother. She and her daughter are treated with the utmost disdain. They reduce the amount of food they give both of them because they view it as a waste of resources. Eventually, she is pregnant again and she’s not treated as nicely for fear of it being another girl. She fears for her life if it isn’t a boy. But it is a boy, Rukhsana’s uncle. He’s immediately treated perfectly. In light of this, we see that her daughter is no longer the bright and curious child she once was. A sadness settles in her as she realizes her father treats her very differently from her brother. One day, her husband very ominously mentions how things will be different once their daughter grows up. She is uncertain what he means but she fears for her daughter. That fear becomes a realty when her husband starts raping their daughter. Her grandmother ties to stop it but he beats her until she passes out. What an absolutely horrific thing to endure as a mother and a child. (I’m glad he was eventually murdered.)
Next, I wanna briefly discuss colorism. As a Black person, colorism is a concept I am very aware of. The author does a masterful job slipping in little details and mentions of colorism to show how ingrained it is in in the Asian/South Asian society. There are many mentions of lighter skin being praised and darker skin being looked down on.
Now I want to talk about immigration. I’m an immigrant living in America, so these dynamics are no stranger to me. We see the way that being the child of immigrants impacts the way Rukhsana interacts with her white friends and her Bengali friends. Her white friends and girlfriend very clearly have no idea what it’s like being from an immigrant family and make claims about how she should just be able to do certain things. I really appreciate the author showing this dynamic that I myself have experienced. I did not like her friends or her girlfriend, but I don’t mean that as a criticism of the book. On the contrary, I think the author perfectly captured what it’s like interacting with white Americans as an immigrant. White people really do not just get it and sometimes they didn’t even try to get it. To me, it was always obvious and understandable why Rukhsana couldn’t just come out or couldn’t just run away. But those interactions highlight perfectly how white Americans will often refuse to see the world from a viewpoint different from their own. There’s a duality to Rukhsana that I think every person who is from a racial/cultural minority experiences when interacting with white people. I appreciate that the author included those details. We also see that while being Bengali is who she is, it’s her culture, we also see this disconnect when she goes to Bangladesh. I experience that often when I go back to my home country. Despite it being my culture, I still feel a disconnect, a distance, I can feel like an outsider in my own culture sometimes. I haven’t seen that depicted in a story before so I felt understood reading that.
Finally, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Rukhsana is a lesbian. The intersection of who she is comes to a head when her mom walks in on her and her girlfriend, Ariana, kissing. We get an in-depth look at homophobia in an immigrant/religious household. And boy, is the homophobia intense. Rukhsana is basically beaten, kidnapped, forced to get married, and even exorcised at one point, all in an attempt to “stop” her from being gay and bringing shame to her family. It’s awful and scary. But, we also see that Rukhsana is equally judgmental. She thinks no one in her community will accept her for who she is — an outlook that Khan challenges. She fears Ifran will out her but he’s very accepting, she’s afraid to tell Shaila, who is deeply hurt and offended by the assumption, we see the awkwardness of her telling Sohail, and my favorite, we see the gentleness of her grandmother accepting her completely for who she is. I cried when she came out to her grandmother. In this book, we see that yes, cultures and religions can be oppressive and homophobic, but not everyone from that culture feels the exact some way and judgment for doing so can be its own form of harm.
I love love love this book. I glad that a happy ending was possible, even though we got it for a very sad reason. Not every book about a young person coming out has a happy ending, which is very valid, but I think books like this are important because they show that a reconciliation can be possible. I’m so glad her parents recognized the errors of their ways and that they have a lot of work to do to repair the relationship. We need books that show that just as much as we need books that don’t have that.
