Lambs to the laughter

It's easy to forget that 9/11 was really just a Tuesday.

- RAJA SEN

The first episode of Ramy Youssef's brilliant and nutty new animated series #1 Happy Family USA (streaming on Prime Video) is set on 10 September 2001. Two girls decide that the next day is the best possible day to come out of the closet, since one of them knew she was gay since she was 9 and the other since she was 11.

What, they reason, could be a better day than 9/11?

Understandably, these young ladies don't quite get the spotlight the next day—or at least not the spotlight that they want. Youssef's unlikely sitcom is about a Muslim family left struggling to fit into post-9/11 America, with FBI agents infiltrating their mosques and suddenly suspicious schoolmates. Suddenly, as the father of the Hussein family says, it isn't okay to look like themselves. Even if they're from Egypt.

This week in India, where heinous terrorist attacks in Pahalgam, Kashmir, have reignited the cyclical firestorm of anti-Muslim sentiment, the show's relevance hits like a steel-toed boot. It's tempting to view the American Muslim experience as removed from our own local discourse, but hatred has a way of mirroring itself across borders, language and decades. The Hussein family's struggle to exist without setting off alarms—literal or societal—feels painfully close to home.