I don’t think I ever had a burning desire to be a politician, but I’m quite sure my relentless questioning about why girls were not allowed to do the same things as boys drove my mother to the end of her tether.
Growing up in Lahore, on the top of my list was doing everything my two older brothers were allowed to do – stay out late at night, play cricket, fly kites on the large cement rooftop of my home, study engineering and work professionally. Permission from my parents to play cricket and fly kites was hard fought, while studying and working as a civil engineer came much more easily.
In my early teens I often sneaked up to the roof, quiet as a mouse, on a rickety bamboo ladder outside our kitchen door, to join my brother and his friends flying kites till I was ‘discovered’ and hauled down by my mother yelling, ‘Mehreen, come down this minute. You know you shouldn’t be up there with the boys! You will ruin your complexion!’
Climbing to the roof and my mother’s protestations happened almost every day during the spring kite season until my mother finally gave in to what she called my ‘stubbornness’. This same persistence served me well in negotiating a truce on cricket. While I wasn’t allowed to play with my older brother and his friends, I did get permission to play with the younger brothers of my girlfriends in the neighbourhood, as long as it was in the front yards of our homes and not on the local community cricket pitch. I remember summer evenings spent hitting fours and sixes, the elation felt at making more runs than the boys, and going home to eat luscious, juicy mangoes to celebrate a game well played.
Now, as an MP in the NSW Parliament, those childhood tussles in Pakistan are a distant memory, but my passion to change what I see as unfair has not dampened. The reasoning, skills and determination I honed on my mother come in handy in the political arena, helping me to contest long-held views and archaic laws that need changing, from decriminalising abortion in NSW, to marriage equality and fighting racism.
In a strongly patriarchal society, where there are clearly discriminatory laws and sexist attitudes working against women, I was lucky enough to have a father who valued equal education for his sons and daughters (all four of us did civil engineering as our first degree). For my father, also a civil engineer, a good education was as much about opening up your mind to think deeply and critically as it was about increasing the capacity for earning a good income. Both he and my mother resisted attempts from family members and friends to find me a ‘suitable boy’ right after I had finished high school.
Knowingly or unknowingly, a number of women have had a profound influence on the choices I’ve made in life. The four that stand out are my mother, my grandmother, my paternal aunt and my mother-in-law. All of these women taught me, in their unique ways, to be strong and to live life with meaning and purpose. Their guidance, advice and love have given me the resilience and passion to help make me who I am today. I hope to do the same for my daughter.
My mother is generous, kind and trusting. She is the favourite aunt, and the loving niece and daughter of the family. Friends and family turn to her for advice, and more often than not she puts others’ needs before her own. These traits could well brand her as a typical ‘mother’, always ready to sacrifice herself to nurture others. But her very gentle and acquiescing nature hides strength within.
She rode a bicycle to college in the 50s, she travelled the world with my father, leaving their three young children (I was two years old at the time) in the care of her parents, and she embraced social media and email when she was in her sixties. While some of her attitudes are quite conventional, in many other ways she pushes boundaries without making a fuss, and still shows me how to break the mould. I think she learnt this from her mother who was fun, active, dynamic and independent well into her eighties. In my grandmother’s home, I was free to play cricket and fly kites to my heart’s content, morning, noon or night.
My aunt was a writer, a poet, an activist and feminist. Her husband passed away when I was four and I always saw her as fiercely independent. On extended family gatherings when discussions around the dining table turned to heated debates on politics and religion, she was often the only female voice arguing loudly for women’s rights and progressive politics. She was spunky and fiery and her views connected very deeply with me. Given that I spent a lot of time with her, I’m sure my urge for gender equality is her direct influence. She taught me to stand up for myself no matter the circumstances.
My mother-in-law left a lasting mark even though she was only in my life for a short period of time. Like my aunt, she was widowed when quite young, and was left with four children aged between eight and eighteen. The respect her three sons have for the women in their lives is testament to what a positive role she played. She died in 2001 shortly after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease. I miss her honest, forthright and wise advice. But what I most admired was her calmness, despite facing difficult circumstances throughout life, and especially the way she did what had to be done without seeking any recognition or reward.
In my own case, I can remember hushed conversations between my parents about one marriage proposal or another. Once I overheard my grandfather chiding my mum. ‘You’re leaving it too late. Once she becomes an engineer, it will be harder to find a good match. She will be more educated than many men, and she’ll have stronger opinions about who to marry.’
I’d get anxious because I wanted to finish my degree and work professionally before getting married. I wasn’t even sure if I ever wanted to marry.
I would brace myself to refuse when they came to ask my view. But my parents knew me well by then, and knew what I wanted, so those conversations never happened till I was a fully-fledged engineer working in the largest consulting firm in Pakistan.
As it happened, I met my husband, also an engineer, at work. We secretly fell in love, and our wedding was arranged by my beloved aunt and his aunt, both friends.
People are surprised to hear that I never planned to be a politician, that it all happened quite organically or perhaps accidentally. In fact, I’ve never been one to rigidly plan, but rather when there’s a fork in the road I will take the road less travelled. Growing up in Pakistan in the 60s and 70s in an environment where, for girls and young women especially, many key life decisions are made by their parents or family elders, forward planning just didn’t make much sense. So for me, life was more about taking up an opportunity when it arose or fighting a battle when it was needed.
My mother and I often talk about life’s quirks that take us in such different directions from what we may have planned. She can’t believe her daughter, who resolutely refused to go to school in her early school years, has ended up with a couple of higher degrees, a career in engineering, and is a member of parliament in NSW.
I have to admit, there are days when I’m sitting in the chamber of the oldest parliament in Australia, amongst the rough and tumble of NSW politics, and it seems utterly surreal. After all, I am a political ‘outsider’ in more ways than one. I grew up a world away. I moved to Sydney from Lahore with my husband and one-year-old son when I was twenty-eight, joined the Greens in my late thirties, and was elected to take up my role as an MP in my forties. I didn’t come through the so-called political ranks of student unions, party apparatchiks or political staffers, but after spending a couple of very fulfilling decades working as an academic, and in consulting and local government. Engineering is my career; politics, my calling.
It is undeniable that the gender inequality in my country of birth results in the oppression of women through violence, lack of educational opportunities and limited access to equal work. In my experience, this has fed into the generalised view that Pakistani women have little agency. But Pakistan is a country of huge contradictions. For example, Pakistan had its first woman prime minister decades before Australia. I became more aware of this dichotomy after moving here and realising gender equality is also an issue in Australia.
This is quite opposite to what I had imagined – I had naively believed that patriarchy and sexism were issues no longer existing in the ‘West’. The Legislative Council of NSW Parliament, where I sit, is a reminder of how much still needs to be done to close the gender gap. There are only nine women members out of forty-two, the lowest percentage of any house of parliament across the country at the moment. This is also a reminder of how perceptions can be so different from reality.
The culture and values I was surrounded by did not look down on women as they aged, nor did women become invisible. Quite contrary to the stereotype of older women as passive and ineffective, or labelled as hags or witches, I remember my mother, grandmother, aunt and mother-in-law at their most influential, vibrant and independent in their fifties and sixties and even later. And beyond them, I was surrounded and loved by doctors, musicians, artists, teachers and scholars, stay-at-home mums, nannies and house help – a big community of women mostly a generation older than me.
The notion of a stereotypical Pakistani woman, or indeed a typical Australian woman, of any age, is alien to me. My life’s journey continues to be unconfined by labels. If this were not the case, would I have completed a master’s degree and a PhD as a mother with two young children and in my late thirties? Or gone into politics for that matter, at an age when society deems women to be invisible? Perhaps not.
Of course, everyone’s life is about give and take, and mine is no different. There have been great opportunities throughout my career, but I would be lying if I said it has all been easy. Moving to Australia and starting from scratch was challenging. I had a husband and a baby son, and dreams of further study. We didn’t have jobs or any friends or relatives in Sydney. It took just one flight across the Indian Ocean to leave a whole life behind and with it the web of connections that had supported me till then. During the first few months in Sydney, I was sure we’d made the wrong decision. The isolation and loneliness made a gaping hole that was filled by my tears almost every night.
In Pakistan, society is close-knit and extended families often very large. Mine was no exception. My siblings and I were constantly surrounded by cousins, aunts, uncles, friends and people visiting our home or staying over (sometimes for weeks). This brought both pleasure and pain as we all learnt to share, negotiate and often give in to the needs and wants of others.
Embracing Australia as my home has been both challenging and extraordinarily rewarding. I brought with me my idea of a shared sense of living, and discovered the value Australians place on individuality. It was a constant negotiation between the two worlds and I was drawn to both. Lahore comes alive at night with shopping, eating out and visiting friends and family. When I arrived in Sydney, everything except pubs shut down at five pm. As teetotallers we ruled out the bars. Kings Cross became our Lahore in those early days. Pushing our young son in a stroller, we’d walk up and down Darlington Street, enjoying the lights, sounds and movement. Little did we know that the Cross was perhaps as inappropriate a place for a two-year-old as a pub! Over time, Sydney has changed and so have I. The local drinking hole is now a common venue for many meetings. I never would have thought that one day I would be hosting a public forum on legalising cannabis for adult recreational use in a pub.
Often people ask how I can identify both as an Australian and a Pakistani, but for me it was never a process of making lists of what I liked about either culture and then picking the traits I wanted. It happens as you live life. I don’t like vegemite, but am addicted to peanut butter. Does that make me any less Australian? I love the very Australian (and Pakistani) sport of cricket. Where does that put me on the spectrum of belonging?
In a post-9/11 world, people have also questioned my sense of belonging based not on my cultural background but on my faith. Recently, a crude caricature of Muslim women has been created by some in Australia. Being a Muslim woman in the public eye, I am told I am not free, that I am under the control of my husband and that every statement I make on any issue is influenced by my faith or motivated by a hidden agenda to change the so-called Australian way of life. I am told to go back to where I came from.
I’ve been told that white Australia is the real victim here. I get ‘Fuck off, you Muslim turd, and take your halal with you’, or ‘Don’t like it? Well there’s plenty of room in the cesspit you and yours crawled out of’, and more. I am sometimes not wanted in Australia because I’m a Muslim, which makes me incompatible with the supposedly modern and enlightened Australian way of life. But when I campaign for progressive change that most Australians want and support, such as abortion law reform, voluntary assisted dying, or the legalisation and regulation of adult use of cannabis, then suddenly those same people with their narrow views criticise me for not being a good Muslim. Their claims contest and question my ‘Australianness’ at every turn. I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.
For some, migrants of any persuasion will never be truly Australian, a strange contradiction in a country where a vast majority came from somewhere else.
The strong partnership between my husband and I is what has sustained us. Both of us have been able to make a home in a new place and follow a path that is mostly self-determined.
I love my life and try to live it to the fullest. My husband often nags me for not knowing my limits, for pushing myself too hard. These reproaches come after I’ve been running around and working for days without a break. However, his most recent reprimand came when I complained about aches and pains after playing cricket at the SCG as part of the NSW MPs team against the press gallery and Federal MPs in early 2017.
He was concerned I might get injured since I hadn’t played cricket for two decades. But I did play, returning to those days with my friends’ brothers in the front yards of our Lahore homes. My husband was there in the spectators stand to cheer me on – the only woman player on either team. It is with his unreserved love, support and encouragement, and the trouble-making streak I was perhaps born with, a streak buffed and polished by the amazing women in my life, that I have been able to boldly take up opportunities that may have been denied to me otherwise. And it is the rejection of these limits that society imposes on women, of what we should or shouldn’t do, or who we can or cannot be at a certain age that lets me be who I am, wherever I am.