A lot of these clients were Pakistani and lived on Coney Island Avenue. When she realized this, she decided it was time to move. By then, Roohi could afford a bigger office and hire an assistant. She says moving to Coney Island was the best business decision she has made. “Even though the people are not that easy to live with, they’re still my people,” says Roohi chuckling as she describes the conservative atmosphere of the neighborhood in which she lives in.
For Roohi, working as an accountant in Little Pakistan has often been frustrating. When she opened her firm six years ago, and her clientele slowly grew, other male accountants in the vicinity were enraged, and blamed her for stealing their customers. “The only thing they could do to get back at me, was talk about my personal life, spread rumors and slander my name,” says Roohi, “and it was easy for them because I was a woman.” This alleged jealousy still exists, and Roohi is aware that she is still at the center of many discussions and the butt of many jokes.
Lately, Roohi has started lying to some of her older female friends from the neighborhood about her marital status. “They just don’t understand how I could live on my own without a man,” she says, laughing, “so I just tell them I have a husband but he’s traveling for work or something, just to get them off my backs!”
As Roohi consults with her clients, her warm Urdu chatter flows out towards the waiting room. Before she begins talking about finances, she always offers her client a cup of chai, a Pakistani tradition. While she waits for Shermeen, her intern, to bring in this steaming cup of tea, she inquires about her client’s family and children, whose names and ages she remembers.
Roohi is wearing a full-sleeved orange shirt that loosely clings to her frame, and long formal black pants. A thin scarf hangs around her neck with its ends falling down toward her waist, draping her body. It is an attempt to imitate the larger dupatta, a wide scarf Pakistani women wear draped over their shoulders, covering their chests for modesty. This is usually worn on top of the traditional Pakistani outfit, the shalwar kameez, a long shirt that comes down to a woman’s knees, with pants that look like wide pajamas underneath. “Many of my customers and most of their wives don’t approve of how I dress,” says Roohi with a guilty smile, “ but this is what I feel most comfortable in when I work.”
What Roohi wears is modern compared to the traditional Pakistani outfit that almost all immigrant women are wearing outside her office, on Coney Island Avenue. At this point in the afternoon, the sunny wide two-way avenue, lined with three- and four-story buildings containing an array of small storefronts flashing ethnic clothing and jewelry, is cluttered with stay-at-home moms who have just picked their kids up from school and are buying some groceries on their way home. They gossip away with fellow mothers in Urdu, Punjabi, and many Pakistani dialects.
Across the street, 40-year-old Kausar Parveen has recently opened a fabric store, which she runs by herself with occasional assistance from her mother. The store is named Medina Fabrics after a sacred Islamic city in Saudi Arabia—a name that she hopes will bring with it blessings for her and her family, who like the majority of other settled Pakistani immigrants are Muslim. Parveen’s fabric store is a small un-partitioned section within Raheela’s Beauty Salon, a two room space teeming with Pakistani women ranging in age from 10 to 50. Twelve years ago, Raheela convinced her husband to let her open the salon, and it quickly became very successful. Her husband quit his job and now helps her run her business.
Walking down these couple of blocks, it is hard to believe at times that one is still in New York. “Little Pakistan,” the short stretch of Coney Island Avenue from Avenue H to around 18th Avenue, feels like a protected bubble for the 30,000 Pakistanis who live in the area. English is rarely heard, the smell of curry pervades the afternoon air, and a majority of the women do not work outside their homes.
Some men in the community consider it demeaning if their wives earn money, and forbid them from doing so. Yet a lot of women voluntarily choose not to work. “They’ll make excuse after excuse,” explains an exasperated Roohi, who is close friends with many housewives in the community. “They’ll cry to me and complain about their husbands. If he mistreats them in any way, that is, he doesn’t give them money, or even worse, beats them, they’ll come to me asking for help, claiming they want to be self-sufficient. But when I push them to take a step forward and look for a job, they back out. Whose going to take care of the children they ask? It’s just too difficult.”
According to Roohi, a lot of these women lack the confidence required to work in a community like Little Pakistan. Roohi, who grew up in Lahore, feels that she is one of a very few women taking advantage of the freedom and opportunities that America has to offer. She says that many of her friends, who are also first generation Pakistani immigrants, have spent most of their lives relying on their fathers, brothers and husbands to provide for them, and they continue to do so when they move here.
“In Pakistan they were raised in a society where the expectations are that the women will not work outside home when they grow up or get married. Then when they come here they hold on to these expectations and try and follow the same lifestyle,” explains Kavita Ramdas, CEO and president of the Global Fund for Women, an organization that aims to empower women worldwide through such measures as increasing girls’ access to education, defending women’s right to health care and reproductive rights, and preventing domestic violence. “These women get on a plane for the first time in their lives and land up in Brooklyn. They’re going to cling to the only thing that they know. It is not like now that they are in America they can break free of all those conventional rules and regulations they grew up with in Pakistan and go out and work. In some ways it might actually be a lot harder for a new immigrant woman to start working here, now that they’re in an environment where she is in a lot less control.”
According to Ramdas, herself a first generation South-Asian women settled in the United States, this experience is not unique to recent South Asian immigrants. “This can also be seen in Italian families who have been settled here for ages and stick to their age-old customs and traditions. Sometimes the Pakistani immigrant families here are more backward than the ones in Pakistan. While more and more women in Pakistan have started joining the working community, these immigrant families are stuck in some sort of time warp. Unlike the people in Pakistan this group is kind of frozen in time, where there’s no notion of progress.”
Many of these women believe that it is a woman’s duty to take care of the home, while the husband goes out to work. “They really think it’s just the man’s job to earn,” says Farah Affreedi, 33, managing editor of a weekly Urdu newspaper called Sada-e-Pakistan. “They ask me, ‘Why do you work? That is why you have a husband.’”
Affreedi, who is a mother of three, and at work the boss of ten, says that she works for herself. After graduating from Drexel University with a degree in computer science, she came back to Midwood and started working with her father, the founder of the newspaper. She was married and had a daughter, but still took over the position of managing editor when her father retired. Luckily for her, her husband always supported her decision to work. “I don’t do it for the money, “ explains Affreedi, “My husband earns enough to comfortably support a family of five. I need to do this for me. I can’t cook and I can’t clean. I can just do what I do.”
