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Why do women from India and Nepal migrate to Kuwait? What are their work arrangements? How many of them convert and what explains their conversion to Islam? This book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of women and migration due to its analytic focus on their religious conversions. Chapter One, “Temporariness,” situates Everyday Conversations in the literatures of feminist, post-colonial, and cultural studies theories and summarizes Ahmad’s research approach. Her ethnographic fieldwork, based on interviews with South Asian women working in Kuwait, allows her to map their experience as domestic workers and explores how and why many choose to convert to Islam. The uncertainty of their situation is linked to Kuwait’s citizenship laws and kafala system, which renders migrant workers, including women, dependent on their sponsoring families, regardless of how long they have lived in Kuwait. Chapter Two, “Suspension,” looks at the transitory nature of life for Kuwait’s domestic workers, who live in a state of limbo, suspended between two families and countries and afforded only temporary legal status. Ahmad contextualizes their circumstances within the history of Kuwait’s twentieth and twenty-first century development and its exclusionary immigration laws. Chapter Three, “Naram,” (Urdu/Hindi: softness, malleability) addresses the interiorization of social expectations on domestic workers. Ahmad defines the idea of naram as “the underlying normative expectation they [female domestic workers] are subject to and become subjects of: that they adapt themselves unobtrusively to a new social milieu” (105). This malleability helps the women adapt to the new culture, language, and household relations in Kuwait. In contrast, the women interviewed by Ahmad suggest male migrants from South Asia do not possess this trait. Thus, Ahmad relates being naram as a feature of South Asian gender roles that also impacts choices made in new host countries. This characteristic also in part explains how women are attracted to learning more about Islam, as it relates to the subjectivity of their Kuwait experience. In Chapter Four, “Housetalk,” Ahmad analyzes everyday relationships and conversations in the household. She demonstrates through the stories of different workers how household life reveals the pervasive influence of MESA R o M E S 52 2 2018