Budhos speaks up for Muslim immigrants in post-9/11 US

NEW YORK: Part Indian author Marina Budhos has created a stir in the United States with her new novel which touches on the bold theme of fear and prejudice faced by bewildered Muslim immigrants living in post-9/11 America in the aftermath of terrorism, orange alerts and the Patriot Act.

“I was keeping my ear to the ground and learnt there were a lot of Bangladeshi immigrants who were undocumented. After 9/11 the lives of hundreds were shattered by harassment, detainment and deportation,” Budhos told a sellout crowd in chic Gallery Arts India at a reading from Ask Me No Questions which hit US bookstores in February. The book is flying off book shelves so quickly that her publisher Simon and Schuster has ordered a second reprint. 

“I wrote quickly as inspiration for the book came in a rush. I had interviewed immigrant teenagers for another book and their voices never left my head. I kept in touch with them and after 9/11 asked what was happening with their families. Then one morning I opened the New York Times to read about families fleeing to the Canadian border in hopes of getting asylum. I was struck by how these children had grown up in America believing this was home — it was as if overnight everything had been snatched from them. Illegal immigrants who had lived for years in the US suddenly found themselves unwelcome in the only country they had ever known.” 

The book has struck a chord because shortly after the September 2001 terror attacks the Department of Homeland Security launched a controversial programme that required tens of thousands of men from 25 Muslim nations to register with the immigration service.

According to Budhos, it became “an unwieldy dragnet” that snagged bewildered immigrants into the bureaucratic net of deportation. Many Muslim men were detained, questioned and then the process of deportation began even for minor infractions such as forgetting to notify the authorities when they changed an address or misfiled an application.

Ask Me No Questions opens with slacker Bangladeshi teenager Nadira and her academically brilliant sister Aisha fleeing to the Canadian border. “For years they lived on expired visas in New York City, hoping they can realise their dream of becoming legal citizens of the US. But after 9/11, everything changes. Suddenly, being Muslim means being dangerous. A suspected terrorist,” read Budhos from her book. 

Budhos who has been a Fulbright Scholar to Kolkata, India in 1992 said she related to the subject because of her mixed race background. She was born in Queens, New York, the child of an Indian-Guyanese father and a Jewish-American mother who met in the 1950s when her father worked for the Indian Consulate in Manhattan.

“My own father was a Guyanese Indian immigrant, who really never lost the fear that his citizenship could be taken away from him. Every time we crossed a border, he would panic, fumble with his passport,” said Budhos.

Kolkata-born Rita Wolf who has acted in hits such as My Beautiful Launderette and Slipstream said she and Nabeel Sarwar had talked Budhos into turning her book into a movie. “When I read the book I said this is cinema, pure cinema. We are in the process of turning Ask Me No Questions into a movie,” said Wolf.

In 1990, Wolf co-founded the Kali Theatre Company to produce the work of Asian women writers and to tell Asian stories.