ESSAY: The Town Center Girl

They call her the Town Center Girl. It is a label for all children born out of wedlock. The Conservatives came up with the term because such children have no fathers in formal terms even though they may be their biological parent. Hence, the label reflects the fact that such children have nobody to claim them and are, figuratively, abandoned in the middle of the town for anybody interested in adopting them - out of humanity or whatever other reasons that drive them toward altruism.

If it was the civilized West, Amina could have had a normal happy family life even if her parents chose not to marry. But because she came into the world in the Indian Subcontinent, into a Muslim family, her biological father did not lay claim to her because bearing a child through extra marital sex invited a punishment of flogging in a public place - such punishment been a way to shame the “perpetrator” so that it serves as an example for other men to refrain from what is called in her society "illicit sex".

In the traditionalist and patriarchal Muslim society to which she was born, there was no escape for women such as Amina's mother Sarah because been the biological single mother was evidence enough that Sarah had engaged in extra marital sex.

Since Amina came into being at a time when there was no modern technology and forensic evidence such as DNA testing, which could otherwise have established the identity of her father, he chose not to "own" Amina and let her and her mother Sarah face whatever future that fate had conspired against them.

However, it could be claimed that destiny was not completely against the mother and daughter team. Sarah had land and property which would later be developed into a proper house with extra rooms where they both could live happily ever after depending on rent as the main source of their income.

I came into contact with Amina when we both did a Civil Service internship at a Government agency some years ago. There was an immediate connection of friendship between us, but I never dared to ask any sensitive or awkward questions because ours is a small village just in walking distance of the town and through the overactive grapevine I already knew about her "illegitimate" birth status.

With a perpetual smile on her face, it was easy for her to win over people, including myself, and I thought it was great that she was moving through life happily despite the disgrace her mother had fallen into.

In later years, Amina would tell me a lot of her private secrets, including about her mother who seemed to be a troubled person with a lot of unsolved personal issues. In fact, Amina said that her grandparents did not send Sarah to attend formal schooling at the village school.

"She must have had some sort of psychological problems for my grandparents' decision not to send her to school," Amina told me.

I wondered how Sarah could have found an escape, even for a few hours, so that Amina's father could make “illicit love” to Sarah that would result in Amina's conception.

In later years, when my friendship grew with Amina, she started telling me other secrets she had kept hidden for all these years, mainly concerning her personal life. This included the stress she was going through because her mother was scared of loneliness – perhaps a remnant of the fear of abandonment by Amina’s father.

Sarah demanded Amina to babysit her for the greater part of the day. During such babysitting sessions, Sarah would debate about issues which Amina was expected to listen to. Amina said that she now keeps up with all kinds of news on her cable television service so that she can counter the false information Sarah was absorbing and then projecting on Amina.

Amina said that her marriage and two children provided a kind of respite for her as she would be able to excuse herself to spend more time with her own nuclear family although all of them lived in the same house. Amina also said that she now is able to be independent and strong enough in character and temperament to disagree with relatives who demand her to have more children.

"Two children are enough," she said to me.

She told me how her husband would not let her go anywhere with a strange man (a "mahram" in Arabic which means a person who is not legit to get married to her) unless she was accompanied also by a girl friend. This brought to my mind the fact that some men of our village would not allow their wives to go riding scooters with other men. I understood this to be a caution by the husbands to prevent their wives from falling into gossip that they were been unfaithful to their husbands.

Hence, in order to ward off claims of infidelity, Amina never went out with me alone. If a girl friend was not available, she would invite me over to her house so that we can't engage in any "mischief" because her mother and husband would be there to observe her actions all throughout our meeting.

That was one reason I decided to create some distance between me and Amina. So I resorted to communicate with her through WhatsApp and refrain from visiting her at her house.

But then she started to get more engaging with me through online chat. And the persona she erected around herself now is nothing like the person I had considered only as a colleague years ago.

She started to visit my personal website more often than I would have liked to because she didn't hesitate to openly criticize me for my Liberal views reflected in my writings. She would even send me emails defending the fundamentalist Islamic views which I criticized on my website.

I actually posted these emails on my website upon her request because she was my friend and she wanted to see how others reacted to her newfound "born again Muslim" views.

I actually felt quite psychologically disturbed when she started to openly criticize my Liberal stand while, I assume, she was pretending to be my friend. She would actually break out in emotional outbursts whenever I post articles that criticized Islamic extremism. She would say that the Islamic faith is the only truth and that it has been proven by historical evidence that God (Allah) had sent prophets for all nations and times and therefore paganism and polytheism came to the human scene much later.

I have decided that I will gradually move away from her because her Islamic ideology and faith is not just contradictory and confusing but also because of her cognitive dissonance which has compartmentalized her mind resulting in her been able to be friends with me all the while while criticizing me on my website which is mentally upsetting to me. Needless to say, I now try to keep a distance from all toxic people and their negative vibes in order for me to sustain my mental health and psychological well-being.

The last time I had met her, she was wearing the hijab, and without even my inquiry, she took the initiative of telling me why. Her reason was similar to Pascal's wager.

I find this type of selective reasoning quite unsettling, so I decided to end my friendship with her altogether. I realized that it’s not worth wasting my time and energy on her. I came to the conclusion that only she can navigate herself out of the troubled religious and family wars bombarding her from all directions.