Suddenly, Under Suspicion

On court, the Lakers were flattening the Phoenix Suns. High in the stands at Staples Center, Ramneek Walia stood and cheered. His purple and gold Lakers shirt tagged him as an insider, a die-hard fan. Earlier, he had stood, hand over his heart, singing along to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He hadn’t been pleased when the crowd clapped and whistled after the national anthem--”I think that’s disrespectful.”

He and his friends, all in beards and turbans, elicited hardly a glance from those in their row and rows adjacent, to whom they are by now “high-five friends.” Looking around, Walia, a season-ticket holder, said, “I feel very comfortable in here. But the minute I walk outside, it all changes. You see people pointing fingers, saying, ‘Here comes the Taliban.’”

Walia, 27, is a Sikh, a disciple of a monotheistic religion founded in India in the 15th century. Born in the United States to parents who emigrated more than 30 years ago from India, he was educated at USC. Los Angeles is home, a place where he always “just kind of fit in”--until Sept. 11 when, he said, “suddenly all that changed.”

Now, he rarely ventures out alone. “My parents really worry about me. My mom told me not to come to the [Lakers] games.” He feels, he said, “naked,” like the emperor in the classic children’s tale who wondered why everyone was suddenly staring at him and whispering. “You’re so carefree one moment, and the next you’re watching every movement people make.”

At the USC-UCLA game at the Coliseum a couple weeks ago, he was surprised to be hassled as he and two turbaned friends walked through Exhibition Park to their car. Yes, he was wearing a USC shirt and the taunters were UCLA fans, but it went beyond that.

“It was really hostile, kind of scary,” he said, “people saying really bad things like [expletive] you, Taliban [expletive]. Hundreds of people must have seen what was going on, but not one person came to our aid. But what can you do?”

Ramneek, an independent financial consultant in La Habra, is the older son in a close-knit family. As Sikhs who choose to wear turbans, in deference to their religious beliefs, the men of the family know they are taking a risk, that people are all too quick to mistake them for Muslims, and all too quick to blame Muslims for the terrorist attacks.

Their decision has created conflict within the family.

“We are more scared this time than ever before,” said his father, Rajinder Walia, 57, whose black turban and green plaid sport shirt seem symbolic of his embrace of two cultures. Sitting in his expansive home in La Habra Heights, he recalls how Sikhs--who number about 2,000 families in Southern California--were harassed during the Gulf War. It’s the same, he said, “any time anything goes wrong in the Middle East. They think we’re Middle Easterners.”

Just as he wears his turban partially as a gesture of Sikh pride, he wears his patriotism, his love for America, on his sleeve. He has been a citizen since 1975 and is “mad as hell” at the terrorists. “If I laid my eyes on Bin Laden, I’d kill him with my naked hands.”

Before Sept. 11, his wife, Saran, 53, wore a salwar kameez, a traditional Indian pants costume, to work at the boutique she co-owns in the Little India section of Artesia, where her shopkeeper neighbors are an Indian Muslim and a Pakistani Muslim. Since the terrorist attacks she has been wearing Western dress. She is proud that her sons, Ramneek and Rasneek, 21, a Cal Poly Pomona student, choose to wear the turban, yet it makes her nervous.

“It’s just like Christians wearing a cross,” she said. “If you keep wearing this cross, you might have a chance of getting killed” by those who do not understand your beliefs. Still, she knows, asking her sons to take off their turbans would be “pushing them to dishonor a part of their religion.”

To the world’s estimated 20 million Sikhs--about 500,000 of whom live in the United States--the turban, mandated centuries ago by their gurus, is sacred. Once a symbol of royalty, it has become a symbol of holy dedication, dignity and self-respect. Rajinder is a baptized Sikh, a member of the Khalsa, a voluntary order of men and women who have dedicated themselves to the highest values and traditions of Sikhism. Before he would remove his turban in public, he said, it would have to be a “question of life or death.”

An engineer by training who now has a mortgage business, he recalls seeking a job through a headhunter soon after arriving in the United States. He was told he had the job, but he couldn’t wear his turban. “I said I’d rather not have the job.”

He worships each Wednesday evening and Sunday morning at a Sikh gurudawara, or temple, in Buena Park. Asked the tenets of Sikhism, he said, “basically there are three teachings: the oneness of a loving God who is attainable through meditation; honesty and hard work; and the sharing of blessings.”

Sikhism was founded in 1469 by Guru Nanak, who denounced the Indian caste system and proclaimed women social and political equals. Historically, Sikhs have had to defend themselves against Muslim persecution. “We’re totally against [Bin Laden]. We don’t believe in his teachings,” Saran said, “ ... but we’ve been put in the same basket.”

Many Afghan Sikhs fled to India or the West when the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1980. A small minority today in that country, Sikhs were forced to suppress their religious practices, keep a low profile and make compromises in order to avoid trouble with the Taliban. Although wearing the burka is a violation of Sikh tenets, Sikh women in Afghanistan do so in public. Sikhism is not accepted by the Taliban as a legitimate religion, but because Sikhs have a 500-year history in the country, and have played an important economic role, they have been more or less tolerated by the Taliban. Since the war began, some have fled; others have homes or businesses and choose to stay despite the hardships.

Here, the underlying fear Sikhs feel in the wake of the terrorist attacks is not unfounded. The image of Osama bin Laden, with his beard and turban, is indelibly etched in America’s psyche. In what authorities have labeled a hate crime, a turban-wearing Sikh immigrant was shot and killed outside his Arizona gas station on Sept. 15. Reported incidents of harassment of Sikhs nationwide--ranging from suspicious fires at temples to racial profiling at airports to vandalism and physical attacks, including the stabbing of a Sikh woman in San Diego--have been posted on the Internet at Sikhnet.com. “No one has physically assaulted me, but I’ve seen a lot of fingers and a lot of shouting,” said Rajinder, who tries to ignore the taunts and the yells of “Go home!” or “Ayatollah!” Like any mother, Saran has always worried when her sons go out at night. “Now,” she said, “you never know who’s out there. People are so ignorant. Kids here have to learn that everybody who wears a turban is not an Arab or a sheik.”

She and her husband canceled plans to celebrate their 33rd wedding anniversary in La Jolla recently, and considered instead an evening at the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. But Rajinder was uneasy about that too, worried that they might encounter people who’d been drinking and would start something. They wound up having dinner at an Acapulco chain restaurant in Industry. Even so, Saran just wanted to eat and get out of there.

“We are carrying double the stress--the stress a normal American family is carrying, and an additional stress.” Her husband calls it a “double whammy. As Americans, we hate what’s happened, and we feel helpless to undo anything. When people start looking with suspicion at us, that kind of breaks your heart.”

All three Walia men choose to wear the turban. Ramneek adopted the turban as a sixth-grader, when he told his classmates, “This is the way I’m actually supposed to look. Today I will know who are my friends.”

When he tried out for his high school soccer team, he was told he couldn’t wear his turban as it might give him an advantage in heading the ball. “I was in a tug of war with myself,” he said, finally deciding that he would set the better example by abiding by the game’s rules. So, he wore his hair in a ponytail and played.

Saran’s younger son, Rasneek, was only 5 when he decided he wanted to wear a peatka, a small turban with a topknot commonly worn by young Sikh boys. When her sons started wearing the turban, Saran stopped cutting their hair. “A proper Sikh is not supposed to cut his hair,” she said; it is considered a gift from God. Ramneek’s beard, which reaches to mid-chest, is pinned up beneath his chin. Some grown men are now opting to wear the peatka, which is small enough to be covered with a Western style hat or baseball cap when out in public. For the women, turban wearing is not an issue, as only a tiny fraction of very Orthodox Sikh women wear them.

For the older generation of Sikhs, harassment based on appearance is not new. But to the younger generation, feeling suddenly insecure in the place where they’ve grown up is a nasty shock. Ramneek was apprehensive about flying to Reno recently for a friend’s pre-wedding party. He knew that the average person on a plane was “going to be very uncomfortable if the guy next to him was wearing a turban.” And, he had heard of Sikhs being forced to remove their turbans at security checkpoints and run a comb through their long hair.

On the day of Ramneek’s flight, 12 of the 14 men in his party, of whom seven were Sikhs, had their baggage inspected at check-in at LAX. One had a metal detector wand passed over his turban. At the gate, five of the 14 were taken aside, had wands passed over them and were patted down after being selected by seat number for a final check.

“The random searches aren’t as random as they say,” observed one, Sim Grewall, a pony-tailed Sikh who does not wear a turban. Still, save for a glaring-down by a man in a cowboy hat and some whispering and finger pointing in the terminal, things went smoothly. “Maybe,” observed Ramneek, “people have started to hear there are Sikhs out there.”

As Reno passengers waited to board, Linda Bowers of Carson City, Nev., approached, curious. She had been watching a Times photographer snapping Ramneek and wondered what was going on. Once he explained it to her, she relaxed. “I was nervous,” she admitted. “I don’t feel as nervous now. He has the same issues we all do.” Knowing he was a Sikh, she said she’d have no qualms about being seated next to him on the plane. Ramneek reported later that the round-trip flight proved uneventful.

“The fact that I make people nervous makes me nervous,” he said. He is pleased when people ask questions about him and his religion. “When that lady came up to me, I thought that was so cool. We’re such a small community in the world, we can’t fault people for not knowing [about us].”

On a recent day he was at a Home Depot, buying sprinklers for the home he and his wife of a year, Asha, 24, bought recently in Walnut. “As I was waiting in line, this guy asked me if people were mistreating me. He was genuinely concerned. There are a lot of nice people out there who really care.”

For the most part, his new neighbors have been welcoming. If someone slights or slurs him, he makes it a point not to respond. “I don’t want to say, ‘I’m not Muslim; I’m not Afghan,’ because then I’m basically saying, ‘Go get them, don’t get me.’” When people yell, “Go back to your own country!” he wants to tell them, “Hey, we’re American too. I was born here. I’ve been to India four times, and I’ve never felt that was my country.”

After Sept. 11, he stopped going to nightclubs. “You’re kind of setting yourself up,” he said. “My wife loves to go dancing, but we haven’t done that in a while.”

The family unit is strong. Since the attacks, Ramneek said, “We’ve relied on God to keep us all together. My parents are more conservative. They say, ‘Unless you have to go somewhere, don’t go.’ Before, my mother always encouraged us to venture out into the world and meet new people. This is the first time I’ve seen her like this.

“Their worst fear is that they’ll get a phone call and something’s happened to me or my brother.” Their father tells them, “Just take it easy for a few months.” Ramneek worries sometimes about his little brother, who seems to have no fear, convinced that people in Los Angeles are OK with people from different cultures.

Rasneek, a premed student who lives at home, took a proactive approach to combating prejudice. “I’m not what you think I am,” he told his classmates. “I’m not a terrorist.” Since, he said, he has really had no problems on campus. Off campus, there have been isolated incidents. Walking down the street with a couple of friends, he was yelled at: “Yo! What’s going on, Bin Laden?”

Still, there are only a handful of Sikhs on his campus, and he acknowledges being a little scared. “I’ve made a conscious effort not to be around that much. I just go to school and come home.”

A “deejay for hire,” Rasneek plays at weddings, receptions and clubs. Right after Sept. 11, he yielded to his parents’ pressure not to go out but has slowly resumed his normal lifestyle. “If someone comes up to me and accuses me of being someone I’m not, I’m prepared to answer all their questions or accusations. I’m not Muslim; I’m not Middle Eastern. I have no ties to Al Qaeda.” Although he occasionally covers his turban with a hat, he is not prepared to take it off--”I’d lose a great deal of who I am.”

Ramneek’s wife, Asha, is a UCLA graduate born in Spain to Sikh parents. The two families are longtime friends and, while this was not an arranged marriage, Saran said, the matchup was “wishful thinking.”

Until very recently, Asha and Ramneek lived with his parents, as is traditional. She works with her father-in-law, whom she calls Dad.

Asha, an attractive dark-haired young woman whose ethnic identity would be hard to pinpoint, wears Western dress and has not encountered the prejudice her husband has.

Still, she said, harassment of any family member “has a ripple effect on the people who live with them.” Both are fearful of flying, but, she said, if they don’t overcome that fear, “other people won’t see Sikhs on planes and we’re back to square one.”

She would never ask her husband to take off the turban--”That decision is between him and God.” But she has advised his younger brother not to go out clubbing, telling him to “think of yourself as other people think about women. You always tell me to be more cautious because I’m a woman. You’re at a disadvantage right now.”

Rajinder said that if he had a podium, he would tell all who would listen that Sikhs in America “will do anything to protect and defend their country and make sure the terrorists don’t get their way. We love America. God bless America.”