In My Father's Country by Saima Wahab

front of the class, the happier I felt. The next day after class I told Ms. Johnson about my movie-rental idea. She thought it was brilliant.
    That night, when he came home from work, I told Uncle A about Romeo and Juliet and how I was convinced Shakespeare had stolen the idea from the Afghans and how Ms. Johnson thought my idea was genius and how I was only one of a few students who’d been asked to present my thesis to the class, and how I wanted to round out my speech with clips from the Indian movie of Laila Majnu and could he please rent the movie for me so that I could start writing?
    Uncle A nodded as he listened, then said he would discuss it with the Professor. Uncle A was a master at the inscrutable Pashtun expression. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I assumed he would say yes, because this was for an important school paper. Hadn’t he told us eight thousand times since the day we arrived that he and the Professor expected us to excel at school? Wasn’t that the entire reason we left our mothers and home in Afghanistan and came to America?
    A few days passed, and neither the Professor nor Uncle A said anything to me. I thought perhaps they had forgotten about it, and so I tried to work up the courage to ask them again. Then it was Sunday, and we sat down for our usual, much dreaded Sunday meeting. Before I’d fully settled into my chair, the Professor demanded, “Why are you obsessed with this love story?”
    He looked directly at me. Usually the Professor addressed all of us.
    “It’s part of my presentation for English class. My thesis,” I explained. “Ms. Johnson asked me, and I—”
    “Why did you choose a love story?”
    “We are reading Romeo and Juliet in class,” I said. Najiba and the others looked at me, wide-eyed. What had I done to be singled out this way again?
    “Is there a boy in your class that you like? Is that what this is about?”
    “It was a class assignment.”
    “Who is this boy that you love?”
    “There is no boy. I just wanted to share my culture,” I said quietly, mortified.
    “You know I didn’t bring you here so you could fall in love with a boy in your class and watch Indian movies together. I didn’t bring youto America so you could hanky-panky.” I felt hot shame burning my face. I had no idea what hanky-panky meant, but from the disgust on his face, I knew it was not anything a good Pashtun woman should ever be accused of.
    There was nothing I could say. The Professor and Uncle A leaned forward on their forearms. They thought I was lying. Everything that came out of my mouth sounded feeble, ridiculous. Uncle A asked whether I was going to marry this boy. The Professor threatened to send me back to the village to get me married, to control my going wild, and told me how shameful it would be to waste the chance of a lifetime this way.
    I returned to Ms. Johnson in tears. I told her I couldn’t do the presentation because it was not going to be possible to rent the movie.
    “What do you mean not possible? Did you try all the video stores? Maybe Movie Madness has it. They have a lot of older foreign films.”
    “No, no, it’s not that.” I started to cry. “It’s just not possible.”
    “But why, Saima? What’s happened?”
    I felt the tears in my eyes. It would shame my family to tell her anything about what went on at home. I couldn’t possibly share with her my uncles’ disapproval, or try to describe the shame I felt at being singled out in the Sunday meeting. “My uncles forbid it,” I said.
    “Would you like me to talk to them about it?” asked Ms. Johnson.
    “No!” I cried.
    “Or I could write them a note and tell them that you’re renting the movie for your thesis.”
    “That won’t work either,” I said. If they knew I was talking to an outsider about this, they would be even more furious.
    In the end, Ms. Johnson rented Laila Majnu for me. English was the final period of the day, and I was the last one to present. I stood