“Family is fate, but it is also a choice” – Attica Locke in The
Cutting Season
I got a do-over.
Last Christmas, I got a frightening phone call. My father was in the hospital after a stroke.
Something in my perspective shifted that night while I held a ten-hour vigil
next to the phone with my two-month-old daughter in my arms, waiting to hear
news of my father. This whole time away from home had just been one long
overcast night in the season of monsoons. The air had been heavy with rain,
drunk on the humidity, thick and suffocating.
But it had passed. The sun was coming up, turning the far end of my
horizon a murky orange-gray.
And I make that choice consciously every day. Sometimes I resent my choice, but most of the time I am grateful that I had the privilege of making it.
Sometimes, in rare instances, life gives you a do-over. Like
the morning sun that peeks through laden monsoon clouds in Lahore, the air
still damp, nursing a hangover from the rain that fell through the night, a
second chance emerges in your life. It comes so naturally that for a few
moments, you don’t even recognize it. Slowly, you begin to see it. As the sky
lightens on those mornings after rain, the sun seeping into the horizon
fluidly, one smooth stroke of an artist, you begin to feel your mood lifting. You are excited for the possibilities a new day brings.
The sun rises. That is set in stone – you have no choice in
the matter. Depending on your belief system, some things are just decided for
you by a higher power, or happened to you by sheer random chance. Your family
for instance – you did not choose where you’d be born and to whom. That just…happened.
You were dealt a set of cards and you simply had to play the game. I was blessed
with an amazing family. Sisters who looked up to me, a brother completely
devoted to his eldest sister, and parents who did not tire of singing praises
of their first-born. I was a star of my father's house.
When I grew up enough to understand, really understand my
family, I started to recognize cracks, unnoticeable at first like those thin
lines that show up on cheap stoneware dinner plates after you use your steak
knife on them too many times. Gradually, they became more prominent like a
slightly jagged line running from the rim to the bottom of a coffee mug. Stark.
Jarring. Unnerving. You don’t stop loving the people you love just because it
requires more effort. Instead, you dive deep within yourself, unpack the hidden
reserves of tolerance and forgiveness and kindness and give it your all. You try to
love fiercely, obstinately, unapologetically. But sometimes you fail. And when
you fail, you run away, like I did. I came away from home slathered in an
adolescent’s anger. I didn’t just leave home; I left my father. “There. That will
show him,” I thought. I ran away from the cracks in the china and let someone
else put it back together.
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| Daddy's Girl. |
Nothing mattered. The only thing that had any meaning in my
life was my father. I prayed for a second chance with him. I prayed for an
opportunity to make things right. And I got it. This time, I did not just end
up as my father’s daughter by fate. I chose to be his daughter.
And I make that choice consciously every day. Sometimes I resent my choice, but most of the time I am grateful that I had the privilege of making it.