Untethered

It was the silence that she noticed first. As they drove, Canberra unfolded in a series of stunning panoramas...

The streets were empty, rows of brick houses flanked by trees in the bright summer sunlight. The only signs of life were the flutter of clothes on a line, a child's toys in one of the yards.

It was beautiful and devastatingly quiet.

Zia, with her small daughter, has just flown into Australia from Colombo in Sri Lanka. She is used to being surrounded by family and friends, to "the chatter of people," neighbors' TVs and radios, traffic noise, church bells, prayer calls from the mosques, and peddlers calling their wares: "the sound track of the life she knew looped in her head."

For many Asians arriving in Australia, even big cities like Sydney and Melbourne seem very quiet compared to what they are used to, especially at night, and especially in the suburbs where the streets are often deserted after 9:00 PM. Canberra, so spacious and carefully planned, hardly seems like a city at all.

When Zia's husband first spoke of moving to another country, Zia dreamed of "the luxuries and freedoms that life in 'the First World' promised." She had joined Rashid on overseas business trips and had experienced the anonymity of being a stranger in a different culture. In New York, in jeans and a sweater that Rashid had bought her at Macy's, she had set out to explore "wearing her new clothes like a new personality," no longer the Muslim woman in "clothes that reached her ankles, shawls draped over her chest."

Moving to Canberra, however, was a permanent move away from the instability in Sri Lanka, where the effects of the Tamil war against the government still lingered and where, more recently, there was a growing wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric. "Hardline Buddhist groups" were spreading rumors against Muslims. There had been "talk of a riot on the outskirts of the city," and, "a group of men on motorbikes had thrown rocks at a Muslim owned shop," like the fabric shop owned by Zia's father, causing violent retaliation from Muslim youths.

"Several people injured and in hospital," Umar said. "And you've heard the rumours? They're saying that Aras, the clothing chain owned by Muslims, is serving poisoned sweets to Buddhist women that will turn them sterile and prevent Sinhala population growth. Can you imagine?"

Rashid was worried, too, about the dengue spreading again in the city. The papers were full of advertisement trying to attract people with his qualifications and experience skill to Western counties and "a new life"; and many of their friends who were young professionals had emigrated and now had Facebook profiles in which "everything looked brighter and fresher" than it did in Colombo.

The first half of Untethered, "Leaving," immerses the reader in Zia's life in Sri Lanka. It begins by describing her first meeting with Rashid and his parents and sister, as they consider an arranged marriage organized by their chosen matchmaker. Zia has only recently left school, and to please her loving parents, has reluctantly turned down a place at university so that she would "meet these criteria" of Muslim families "looking for a wife for their sons." "All the marriage proposal ads. in the newspapers stated that prospective bridegrooms preferred a "fair, slim, pretty girl'' who (as Rashid's parents also require) is respectable and "educated but not too educated." Zia fits these criteria, except that she is not "fair." As her prospective mother-in-law tells her son—"People will laugh if you marry her—when you could have any girl in Colombo"—and she keeps reminding him of other girls who are "fairer," "prettier," and "with bigger dowries."

Rashid, however, is fed-up with "doing the rounds" to choose a wife, and after spending two years in a post-graduate scholarship at an American University and learning something of feminist thinking from his girl-friend there, he questions this "male privilege." "I really liked her," he tells his mother after this first meeting and, firmly, "It feels right... She's the one."

The elaborate wedding preparations, the meetings and negotiations between families, the care and love of Zia's parents, and ultimately, the marriage ceremony at the Hilton, attended by "hundreds" of guests but in which, as Muslim custom decrees, Zia takes no active part, all are brought vividly to life.

Zia had begged her father to let the formal ceremony take place in the reception hall so that she could watch it:

The Imam's voice, low and melodious, floated across the room as he began the ceremony with, "Bismillah hir Rahman nir Raheem." In the name of God, most gracious, most merciful. He took Rashid's hand and placed it on her father's, asking Dada to repeat the words, first in Arabic then in Tamil, "I give you my daughter, who has been in my guardianship, in marriage, with God as my witness."

Then it was Rasid's turn, saying that he accepted the care and guardianship of Zia, that his mahr or bridal gift to her was a gold neckace.He stumbled over the Arabic and Tamil words that sounded less graceful in his unaccustomed tongue; like Zia, he too had grown up speaking English.

Watching the men in her life make promises on her behalf, Zia feels "an irrevocable loss" at having been only an observer at "this scared moment" in her life.

After the wedding, as is usual in their culture, Rashid moves into Zia's family home, and as they get to know each other, Zia learns of the occasional dark moods which sometimes possess him and seem to cut her off from him. With Rashid at work and her family's routines going on as usual around her, Zia finds being a wife is not "the full time job" she had imagined. Only when she becomes pregnant does she seem to find a purpose in life, and because Rashid is doing so well at work, he rents an apartment in a brand new complex, employs a maid to do the cooking and cleaning, and they move away from Zia's family home. Rashid becomes more relaxed, but when a neighbor's five-year-old son dies of dengue fever, and the newspapers report Buddhist mobs are becoming more dangerous, Zia, "even in their bubble of wealth and safety," is anxious, and they think seriously about emigrating.

After baby Farah is born, Rashid performs the customary ceremonies for her, and after watching a TV program about Australia, Rashid decides:

"Their skilled migration programme is the most accessible right now. I think I'd get a visa quite easily... And the healthcare and education would be world-class. Farah would have the benefit of all that. So will other children we'll have. It'll be a new life for us for our family.

Australia, Zia. That's where we'll go."

Part 2 of the book, "Settling in," presents a very different picture. Rashid has been in Canberra for months before Zia and Farah get there. Both he and Zia had been through an extensive vetting program to prove that they were "skilled, qualified, healthy" and "would not," as the immigration forms described, be "a burden to the Australian taxpayer," yet Rashid has not been able to find suitable work and has taken a job "working shifts as a cleaner both day and night."

Zia, at home alone with Farah in the little townhouse Rashid has rented, is desperately lonely, homesick, and shocked Rashid has to do this work.

Almost all the jobs that were a fit for his skills were in the public service which required you to be an Australian citizen. He would probably have a better chance in Sydney or Melbourne but the condition of their permanent residency was that they would stay in Canberra for at least two years.

Rashid has become distant and moody, too, and Zia would feel his dark mood "penetrating the very rooms they were in until she could hardy breathe." She begins to wait for some sign of his mood when he gets home from work before approaching him. In Sri Lanka, she would turn to her family—only now, "there was nowhere to retreat except within herself."

In spite of the information Zia has been given about playgroups, clubs, and migrant support groups, she is too nervous to talk to the Australians who respond to her phone calls, and feels "defeated" by the thought of having to take two or three buses to get to any nearby suburb. Only when Farah starts preschool and makes a friend whose mother, Jenny, introduces herself, does she begin to relax.

Jenny's life as a single parent amazes Zia:

how had Jenny managed to raise Amy on her own? Wasn't it hard? Had she struggled?

It was a life so far removed from her own experience and one that in the world she was from would be viewed as a calamity, inviting judgement and pity, a belief that this was a woman with questionable morals who had brought such hardship on herself. And yet, looking at Jenny as she walked beside her, so easy and free, so comfortable in her own skin, Zia felt only a mild stirring of envy...

Still looking for a suitable job, Rashid sees a recruiter. She recommends he take his masters degree off his CV so he can try for an "Admin Role" rather than the sort of managerial role he had in Sri Lanka, and that he drop "Ahmed" from his name and adopt one that sounds "a bit more Anglo..." Rashid angrily understands that "the more foreign he seemed, the less likely employers were to hire him." When he does get an interview for a job in a government department, he faces an intimidating panel of three people, plus a "scribe," in a formal setting, which is nothing like the sort of interviews he is used to. He is so unprepared for the sort of questions they ask him that he knows he has "made a fool of himself." He tells Zia nothing about it when he gets home.

Two more sections of the book, "Winter" and "Spring," not only reflect Canberra's changes of season, but also the changes of circumstances for Zia and Rashid. "Winter" is not wholly bleak. Rashid benefits from a chance encounter. Zia becomes more independent and revels in this, but the grief each of them suffer at the loss of a baby, sets them further apart.

Meanwhile, Jenny reads one of the fairy stories Zia has been writing for Farah and suggests Zia could "think of becoming a writer." This is far from anything Zia has ever contemplated, but Jenny takes the story, saying she would "design it into a book and illustrate it for Amy and Farah." When Zia tells Rashid, he is angry she might think he cannot support the family, but Zia continues, secretly, to write. Much later, after a chance encounter with Pete, who helps her when she takes the wrong bus and ends up lost in an unfamiliar suburb, Zia begins to take driving lessons with him. She and Pete find things in common, which draw them to each other. Eventually Zia writes a moving story about their relationship (it is included in Untethered) and submits it for an assignment she has been given in a creative writing class she has joined.

Ayesha Inoon writes beautifully and knowledgeably about the experience of leaving, as Zia does, "everything and everybody they had know and loved all their lives to begin a new life in a different country." Both Zia and Rashid struggle through the process of adapting to an unfamiliar culture, to different values and expectations, and eventually, to new opportunities and a new way of living. Zia, in particular, learns independence and the strength to make hard decisions, yet this is a book full of warmth, life, and love. It reflects, too, some of the best characteristics of Australians and Australian culture, but it also offers a thought-provoking view of government policies related to skilled migration. As Rashid concludes after seeing the recruiter:

Immigration, it seemed was the great equalizer—no matter where you came from or how you came to Australia, no matter who you were before, you had to let it all go and reinvent yourself.

He'd gone home filled with despair. He was never going to get the kind of job he wanted (or was qualified to do) and he was never going to return to the kind of role he was used to. Moving to Australia had been fatal to his career.

Even if he changed his name to Richard.