My father comes from the depths of the old walled city of Lahore. My mother is buried there, in the graveyard surrounding the tomb of our ancestor. Some of the best moments of my childhood were spent walking alongside my parents on the rough cobbled alleys of that neighborhood, trucks and tongas laden with wares, pushing pedestrians and bicyclists aside, the narrow spillways dug along the street gushing monsoon runoff, street food for every hour of the day, and the heady scent of rose petals outside the mosque — spiritual and scandalous at once.
All this to say that my father is a “real” Lahori from the “real” Lahore, the Lahore that is (and isn’t) in our history books, not the Lahore we know today with its metros and malls. He is (and by extension I am) from the city of gardens, not the concrete jungle it has become today. And he looks like he is from the heart of Punjab, his skin is the color of plowed earth, his eyes the shade of Rosewood bark. My mother’s family are Kashmiris. My maternal grandfather, an army accountant, with his stiff Nehru cap and ruddy complexion, moved with his family from city to city all across Pakistan. My mother felt that home was a lot of places, but mostly it was with my father.
Now, I really must tell you about this poem — because I look so much like my father (and nothing like my mother), various members of my family always commented on how dark I was all my life. My Nani, who was very loving and very lovely in all things except this, used to remark that I looked as if I had been “overcooked.” “Color-oriented casual cruelty” is what I call it now. There are many names for it and a lot of discourse now, so many people who read this poem will know exactly where it comes from. I wrote it when I was attending the Community if Writers Poetry Workshop at Squaw Valley in 2014 — sitting by the pool with my daughter and at war with all the childhood conditioning.
