Growing up in Australia, I just wanted to be like everyone else

When I was growing up I had only one simple wish: to be like everyone else.

But there were a lot of things in my life that frequently reminded me of how not like everyone else I was.

Every Monday when my year three teacher — the type of woman who wore skirts with butterflies on them — would ask our class to recount our weekend in our journals, I would write a variation of the same thing: 'This weekend I went to a party.'

I was not, however, an early adopter of the party scene. What I was actually writing about was the fact that every weekend I went to a 'dawat'.

Our weekly dawat with fellow South-Asian families

Dawat is an Urdu word meaning 'feast or gathering'.

Every weekend, someone from my parents' large group of migrant South-Asian friends would host other South-Asian families at their home (sometimes at a park or community hall to mix things up) for a dawat.

On arrival, we would be greeted by a table groaning full of Pakistani food — everything from biryani and nihari to haleem — prepared by whichever gold bangle-wearing Pakistani aunty (regardless of blood relation, every adult was either an 'aunty' or an 'uncle') was hosting the dawat.

The kids would peel off to the backyard or playroom, the uncles would discuss politics in the lounge room, and the aunties would chat in the kitchen.

We would all eat and then a few hours later pile back into our station wagon and head home.

As an eight-year-old writing in my journal, however, I knew many of the details of these dawats were what made me different from my mainly white classmates.

I was fairly sure no-one in my class even knew what a shalwar kameez was.

What if I bumped into a classmate wearing my shalwar kameez?

My second-worst fear (the first being getting less than 20 out of 20 on our weekly spelling test) was that I would bump into one of my classmates dressed in shalwar kameez when my mum made me run into the supermarket to pick something up on our way to a dawat.

I could refer to them as parties and emphasise BBQ dawats (where of course everything was coated in a strong layer of spices), as my classmates seemed to frequently attend barbecues.

But dawats were only the tip of the iceberg.

There were other parts of my life that were even more difficult to conceal and made me even more different from everyone else: my after-school Quran lessons.

For Muslim kids, learning to read the Quran is a common rite of passage.

While most Muslims don't speak or understand Arabic, every Muslim child is expected to learn to read the Quran growing up.

Despite being prodigious at school, I was a terrible Quran student.

Around me, other kids would keep progressing and eventually graduate (these were great days because we would be allowed to finish class early and get to enjoy some fun-sized chocolate or a piece of baklava) and I would be stuck on the same chapter.

Eventually, even my parents gave up and withdrew me from Quran class.

My not having finished the Quran, unlike the rest of my siblings, became a running family joke.

Lifting the veil

It was only years later as an adult when I was travelling and happened across a copy of Muhammad Asad's famous English translation of the Quran, that I was finally able to appreciate the Quran and finish reading it in Arabic.

Asad was a writer and linguist, and one of the most famous European converts to Islam. Much of his work, in his words, involved lifting "the heavy veil that separates Islam and its culture from the occidental mind".

His poetic translation of the Quran also helped to lift a veil separating two different parts of myself.

So now, well into adulthood, I'm finally eligible to have my Ameen!

I think I'll have a dawat. Dress code is, of course, your most fabulous shalwar kameez.

Fatima Malick is a lawyer and writer from Sydney.