Make a good first impression. Do not arrive after a three-day flight through the Middle East; do not enter the apartment in the middle of the night. Do not explain, your voice apologetic, that no airline could’ve delivered you to Michigan at a more opportune time, that your new roommate’s preferred British, Canadian, and European Airlines do not travel to your country by the Bay of Bengal. Your parents used their emergency savings to put you on the only available flight, but she would only view this story with amusement, or worse, pity.

Do not mention how you squeezed down the aisle, knees trembling at two in the morning, struggling to secure your snack-filled luggage inside the overhead compartment, wishing the flight attendants would notice your petite size and offer to help. You sank into a window seat and clutched the plastic folder with your I-20 form and passport to your chest like stolen treasure. Your parents have drilled into you the dangers of being without official documents outside your country. Your roommate would likely read this as paranoid and view you with suspicion.

Other things you should not mention: the turbulence that made the plane jiggle like lychee jellies, the candy you secretly ate with your friends in primary school. Or how the several hundred bodies in an enclosed space thousands of feet above the earth made you feel like you were holding your breath under the sea. Or how the airline food was bland and soggy. Across the aisle, an emaciated migrant worker sat ramrod-straight in his seat, eyes closed, right arm hanging limply over the armrest. You noticed the string of amber prayer beads coiled around his hand, the tip of his index finger grazing each bead before letting it slip, bead after bead falling and rising in an endless cycle until slowly it stopped.

During dinner, the flight attendant shook him awake and asked in a shrill voice which of the two entrées he’d like: chicken or vegetarian. He woke bleary-eyed and shook his head. He gesticulated wildly and blurted out a single word: “Taka.” The flight attendant curled her lips as if she smelled something bad. Other passengers looked on with confusion and curiosity. You leaned across and informed the man, speaking in Bangla, that the meal was included in his ticket and that he wouldn’t be charged extra. He apologized in broken English to the flight attendant’s back as she turned to retrieve his tray, then thanked you profusely in a rural dialect even you found challenging to understand. You waited for your own meal, for which you no longer had much of an appetite, and thought about your illiterate farmer parents and grandparents who barely survived the 1974 famine, and how lucky you were that the tides had turned for your generation when the country stabilized in the nineties. You escaped the flight attendant’s disdain because you wear nice clothes and speak English fluently on your voyage to the West, a full-ride scholarship covering almost everything.

But when your roommate asks out of politeness what you did for sixteen hours, you tell her none of this. You can say you slept through the entire flight or that you snorted to yourself, watching one Jim Carrey movie after another, but do not admit you listened to Qur’an audiobooks beneath the flashing red seatbelt signs, reciting Ayatul Kursi under your breath and thinking about the prayers you missed. She wouldn’t understand.

Do not bother her with tales of the long layovers, either, how you fell like a log across the first three empty seats you could find, smelling Popeyes and McDonald’s for the first time in airports that were large but less shiny than you expected. Do not elaborate on the unexpected hurdles you encountered upon first landing on American soil, how the TSA agents took you out of line and prodded growling dogs to sniff you and ripped open your only suitcase, patted your body up and down with their metal detectors and ordered you to turn your pockets out in front of crowds of people whose only complaint was the long wait. They found nothing but took away your shoes anyway to check them for bombs—a new pair you’d bought in a cheap store in Dhaka for traveling abroad for the first time.

Do not tell your white American roommate how you were detained for hours in a small, padded room behind the immigration counter. Cellphones were restricted, but you didn’t know, so you were yelled at for only looking at yours, turned off, showing a blank cracked screen. You were among the handful who had Third World passports, all considered fake. Don’t mention they didn’t have a plausible reason for confiscating them or talk about how American embassies are the most guarded and powerful places in the world, where a stamp on a VISA requires standing in line for hours and providing hundreds of bank documents during the interview, but where one typographical error can instantly put you at the back of the line. By the time they released you at LAX, you missed your connecting flight to Michigan.

#

You drag your suitcase to the apartment and tell your roommate that you are late because of bad weather, bad weather, and more bad weather. She moves from the door to make room for you to enter and the hallway light illuminates her face, makes it appear even paler against the dark of her room. Our room, you think. She tells you she once had her flight to Canada cancelled because of a winter storm, snow piling up on the runway too fast to be swept away. You’ve never seen snow, but you can picture a lone plane standing on an empty runway and cottony swirls rapidly falling from an onyx sky. You soon learn that your roommate goes to Canada a lot to visit a much older boyfriend and to drink. You surmise that Canada must have a lower drinking age. And that weekends aren’t spent doing homework or working a second job, that there are parties to attend and bars to frequent, with crowds of jostling people and fake IDs. This is a sharp departure from your understanding of America as a land of laws, a dictum you were fed your entire childhood. Rules are clearly ignored and broken for banal reasons. During Welcome Week, you stay inside to sort out forms and settle your Goodwill haul and recover from your jet lag, but your roommate is gone for nights at a stretch. She returns Saturday at dawn, the sky freshly streaked golden and periwinkle, and boasts of wild shenanigans, parties with drugs and hook-ups. You marvel at the miraculous impossibility that she and the rest of these revelers never get caught. The university is overwhelmingly White and Christian, but it hasn’t yet dawned on you that cops leave White fun alone, that for them, illicit substance abuse is considered a part of growing up. You on the other hand are a transplant and haven’t yet gathered that the likelihood of you thriving here is slim, wrecked with all sorts of odds.

#

The semester begins. You learn your roommate’s name, her major, and which part of Michigan she’s from, but nothing more than that. You eat together only once in public, in the dining hall. You understand that to her you are a roommate. Not a friend. A careful delineation exists between the two, and you, a Muslim from the Third World, cannot cross that line. Don’t compare being roommates here with sharing a room back home. Here, extensive guidelines and warnings are printed on colorful sheets the RAs hand to you at move-in and suggest you tape to your fridge. In Bangladesh, sharing a room is considered trivial and forged out of necessity, and yet the experience often bonds roommates for life. Cultural expectations and hospitality inspire each set of parents, when they visit on weekends, to bring enough food to last the week. In America, the cupboard shelves get divided in two, and your roommate marks her territory with Post-It notes. She never offers you a ride to the grocery store where you both shop, sometimes at the same time. You walk alone, which you don’t mind until the first October frost arrives on parametric winds. Don’t bother offering home-cooked meals your Ma suggests to break the ice — your roommate is picky and only takes a few bites to be polite before throwing away platefuls of rice and lentils, which you discover one day while taking out the trash. You complain that she never takes out the trash, and that’s the closest thing to an argument you have with her. You rescind your objections and continue to do your chores and sometimes hers too, because it’s easier, though you barely have any time with six full classes, a requirement for international students to maintain their financial aid offer and legal status.

#

Don’t be surprised by how little your roommate works or how often she goes out or how much she complains on social media. She claims she is young and is exploring her options around campus. A group of international students you meet while updating your address on your I-20 form at the International Center warn you that Americans have no sense of responsibility or duty. Their primary concerns are coordinating to take classes with their friends and getting into fraternities and sororities. The idea of spending all that time and money to just make friends seems ludicrous to you, like the red plastic cups that litter the university lawns every Sunday morning. American life strikes you as aimless. Still, in light of the news from home that sends you reeling—students beaten to death by netas installed by the government to stifle protests in universities—you have nothing to complain about.

You wake up, pray, go to the library. Structure tethers you to home and a bygone era where school was deemed the most important aspect of your life by everyone around you. You now work on computers with Wi-Fi that does not move at the crawling speed of a traffic jam. Calculus is unfamiliar, governed by language that eschews the mere placement of numbers into equations, but you persevere and learn to understand. You cherish the creative space of your classes—the freedom with which you are encouraged to ask questions, the professors expected to answer—but you don’t mention where you’re from out of fear people will assume you don’t know enough. You are amazed at the amount of free time provided to students, the absence of mandatory tutoring sessions in coaching centers that last till midnight. Here, you study on your own, a novelty. Here, you go to office hours and learn to engage in professional rapport with professors who appreciate your sincerity. Here, you sit cross-legged on bright green grass, and sunshine glides through leaves shiny as butter, and you suddenly realize that “eve-teasing” isn’t common here, that you may never suffer sexual harassment again.

#

Back in the apartment, don’t speak loudly in your native tongue during calls to your mother and aunt because your language seems to scare your roommate. You wonder how someone like her got into a university that boasts of its dedication to diversity and inclusion. You have yet to fully understand White privilege, White angst, and White revenge. Don’t be surprised that her friends look like her and talk like her and avoid you when they come to take her out. In America, social life is compartmentalized, existing separately from weekdays. You don’t have to talk and interact with one another to survive—you only speak to people on weekends, while drunk. You don’t know your roommate’s friends’ names, but whenever they arrive, you must greet them politely—they love a polite greeting—and then pretend you’re just leaving to meet someone else. They will never be your friends, but they look down their noses at you for not having any friends of your own. The irony helps inspire your polite smiles.

But don’t feel obligated to be the Good Muslim Roommate forever. Resist their effacement of you. There are instances when you must put your foot down, aspects of yourself you are compelled to preserve. You have a portable bidet stashed behind the toilet. You don’t allow weed in the apartment, no matter how edgy your roommate wants to be. You befriend the international students, commiserate with them, make plans to change apartments as soon as you can.

#

By the semester’s end, you have an arsenal of new, disparate words in your vocabulary from the GenEd and core classes you’ve taken—anemology, and isomorphism, and ontology, and eudaemonism, and phenomenology—with no discernible way of connecting these concepts, configuring a visualization. But at the turn of the year, alone in the apartment because you couldn’t afford to go home for winter break, you look out the window and see snow falling for the first time and hear the wind whistling a plaintive tune among the barren white oaks and the flock of Canadian geese huddling together out on the patios. You understand this moment is a sign: you can survive this. You have grit. You’ve always had grit. How else did you get here?

You take your suitcase out of the closet and dust it clean. Soon, you’ll step outside in your worn flip-flops, snow crunching beneath your feet, snow you can mold into any shape you want in your hands, and you’ll walk onward, dragging your suitcase, and leave behind all those things that made you the Good Muslim Roommate. To be the Good Muslim Roommate is to be invisible—until you are not. Until you can no longer be.