The Aftermath - Part 4

I forget sometimes. I am always thinking of her, of course, but sometimes realization hits me like a wall of bricks at the most inopportune moments. I am cooking, or sitting in a very important meeting, or playing with my daughter, and I am reminded very suddenly — jarringly — that she is not here anymore. It's a momentary disorientation, an inadvertent pause in the swiftness of the day. And then I begrudge this knowledge, this rediscovered truth of my mother's gaping absence in my life. How long did the forgetfulness last, I wonder. How long was I able to trick myself into believing that her voice is waiting for me at the other end of the phone? Was it seconds, minutes, hours? It couldn't be hours. And so I think back to the time I had hit this wall of bricks the last time. In the morning while making coffee, last night, the week before, and so on. 

I feel forever trapped in the vortex of that night, and I remember most clearly only the warmth of clothes just out of the dryer, the smell of the fabric softener, the softness of each fabric and the neat piles I made while my daughter slept. I remember being suspended in a state of numb acceptance and impending action: she’s gone, now what? I often feel this way now — the time to come stretches vastly and uncertainly, while the time past remains unmoving, unforgiving. I still don’t talk about it — there is not much to say and yet there is so much to experience, to feel, to go through. Two years elapsed between the first and second paragraphs of this post, but I am still right there, in the eye of the storm, teetering.

The Aftermath - Part 3

It feels odd to discover at this age and this stage in my life what it is like to share the ordinary details of my domestic life with my father. There was never a need to do this when my mother was alive. We had a WhatsApp group, “Noor Ladies Only,” that documented the everyday travails of three young women navigating their lives and kitchens in different parts of the world, peppered by their beautiful mother’s selfies. When I look back through that group chat, I feel very strongly that it is a powerful time capsule, capable of taking me back to her, the Urdu script of her messages showing her hope, her resolve to fight the disease that was slowly colonizing her body, her devotion to her family. The group is silent now. We are trying to fill the silence with noise in “Noor Siblings Only,” “Noor Sisters Only,” and “The Noors – Papa & Kids.” It’s the last group that surprises me most often because of the obvious need for its existence and the fact that this need was felt most acutely only after my mother’s death.

It never occurred to us to have a space just with our father when our mother was with us. When Mama was alive, we had a whole-family WhatsApp group, too, but no one ever used it. Once a year, someone would send a message for Eid, and then we would all forget about it. Strangely, sometimes I feel that in dying, our mother propelled us towards our father. Perhaps the force of love she always held tight to her chest was set free upon her children, and we, drowning in our despair came up for air and held on to our father. Our father, in his particular way, allowed himself to be pulled by the current while holding our heads above water. He, being the father that he is, saved his children from drowning without making a sound.

I don’t know what we gave back to him – perhaps something that should have been his for years already. An openness. An acceptance. A love that does not have qualifiers, complaints, or expectations – the kind of love my mother gave to him (and us). It is strange to love my father so fiercely again at 32, like the way I used to love him at 12 – with a single-minded devotion, with unquestioning respect, with a grateful sense of pride for all he had achieved in his life, with admiration for his life-long struggle to rise above his circumstances, to give his family a secure future, to fight fate, to pour himself into his art. How fascinating this man is – I realize – something my mother always said, but I never saw. “I find him admirable,” she would say. “He fascinates me. There isn’t a man I have met in my life who is quite like him.” I shrugged off her comments. Sometimes I rolled my eyes at her. “You’re hopeless, Mama."

But I see it now – it descends upon me like an epiphany, the meaning of my mother’s words. He inspires fascination and admiration in me, too. I see why I am the way I am – hungry for more, for lofty goals, for new avenues to prove myself, to make a difference and a positive impact. I have always been his daughter, but now I see how alike we really are. It took me a long time to purposefully forget this fact, and its resurfaced knowledge crashes upon me with a blunt indifferent pain. Who is my father and why was my mother so devoted to him until her last breath? Isn’t is utterly fascinating, the story of this young orphan, who fought abject poverty and his slated fate to be completely mediocre and forgettable, and instead achieved fame, fortune, and the highest civilian honor of his nation -- all because he dared to believe that he could do something extraordinary in life and then went on to demonstrate this belief in his art. My parents are those rare people who fed their family from their art. They loved what they did for a living, and for a while, they did it together. I, like my father, have always run towards what I love, tried to find contentment in my work, but have always been riddled with this certainty that there is more I could be doing, there is a lot more work to do. And so, like him, I keep searching.

My father, now 66, rises early, does not believe in vacation, and works constantly. When he is not working on his projects, he is working around the house. He likes to work with his hands on everything from assembling furniture to cooking. In our WhatApp group, “The Noors – Papa & Kids,” he sent pictures of turnip curry he cooked one afternoon in response to the culinary creations of his three girls and the street food adventures of his son. The frame was artistically composed in his signature style: the food presented in a clear serving dish, a pomegranate, an apple, and a grapefruit in a bowl next to it, a small box of milk, two rotis. The caption reads: “Made shaljam for my Rukhsana today and said a prayer for her. I hope the aroma of this effort reaches her. Ameen.”

This is how we live every day after her – a little high, a little low. Always we find each other, these five wandering souls – the Noor Papa and his kids.

The Aftermath - Part 2

Some days, it becomes too much to bear. How can we carry this vast grief inside us and not be overcome by it? Those are brutal days. Whatever this thing is, this living, writhing, evolving thing takes over every sense and we, her children, break apart. Why did she have to go? Why did this have to happen? Why couldn't we have more time? Inconsequential, useless, ridiculous questions -- I reflect in moments of collectedness -- but in the throes of this emotional downdraft, they become our combined focus: why, why, why, why. It's endless and dark and lonely, this strange motherless realm of our lives. 

Being a child of writers, I often try to contain it in my writing. I tell my friends, "I have so much to say about this." But the truth is, I haven't yet figured out how to morph this state of mind and body into words. I am unable to describe the exact feeling of falling I experience on a routine basis when I wake up from a dream in which she was with me. A perpetual free-fall. It's like cutting through a whirlpool of air, limbs heavy and resistant to movement, the body forgetting to breathe, forgetting to think, forgetting to even look for an anchor, remembering only this: no mama, no mama, no mama.

Who was this woman, my friend, my mother, who taught me so many lessons in her life, but strangely, even more lessons in her death? It is the most surreal and unnerving experience to realize that your mother in her death has taught you the fundamentals of love. To someone who is as jaded and pragmatic as me, there is an actual movement of resistance that is planned, developed, and implemented by the brain without the slightest hesitancy. But there it is, plain for anyone who cares to see. My mother in her life and in her death imparted only love. It will take me years and perhaps my whole life to fully understand the extent of her capacity to love, and similarly, her unexpressed need to be loved in return. We used to have long, deep, meaningful conversations. I was a friend to her, and she to me. I asked her probing questions. How did you feel when such and such happened? What was your physiological response? Did you cry? What was the dominant emotion? Why do you care so much for people? What do you look for in a person? She was forthcoming in her responses. Her answers: Deeply shaken and hurt; my heart sank; yes, buckets; a sense of betrayal; because I am made this way and I believe people are fundamentally good rather than bad; honesty. And yet, today I realize that maybe I didn't know her completely after all. Maybe I was asking the wrong questions. Maybe I was just peeling away at the surface, and she like always, was letting me have my way.

Where are you now when I have so many more questions, I whisper into the still, empty air. I drive over the Dumbarton bridge to and from work in a strange communion with all the other lonely travelers around me. Who knows about the sea of grief surging within each person's shallow chest? I feel we are all sharers of each other's private heartbreak as we snake our way across the bridge over the bay that has swelled with recent rains. I cry most freely in the car over this bridge, the water steely blue and tranquil under the grey portentous sky, cyclists in their neon vests and helmets whizzing by the rush hour traffic, and all these people, isolated like me, caught in the current of their thoughts.

The Aftermath

On January 12, when I found out my mother had died, before she was declared dead by the emergency room doctors, before even the paramedics said there was no pulse, my immediate inclination was to deny it -- vehemently, violently. “Shut up and stop being an idiot!” I told my sister who had called from just a few towns north of me in California to tell me that our mother had collapsed suddenly in her home in Lahore, Pakistan. “I just spoke to her 15 minutes ago. She’s fine. You’re being dramatic,” I said coldly, intending to hurt her for her stupidity as big sisters are wont to do. My sister, God bless her, was surprisingly calm in a moment that can only be described as surreal. “I am not being dramatic. I am clam. Mama has collapsed. They are calling the paramedics. Ainee, are you there? Are you listening? Ainee, she’s gone, right? She’s gone.” It was the oddest sensation. I felt shut in, closed off. I went back to folding laundry, painstakingly, precisely, making neat piles as I eventually heard from the paramedics, then the emergency room doctor, and finally in the guttural, unbelieving voice of my brother that my mother was indeed no more. “Just get here, Ainee,” said my brother. “Just get here now!” As he was hanging up the phone, I heard him yelling at someone, “I am her son! I am her son!”

I didn’t break down until I sat at Dubai International Airport, waiting for my husband to sort out our 11-hour stay at the airport hotel. I was exhausted from our 16-hour flight from San Francisco, Jahan was dozing in my lap, and I was scrolling through Facebook, which had erupted with various notes, messages, and official and unofficial obituaries. And yet, it was a simple post that broke through the wave of detachment I was riding. My brother had posted an update to his friends, “My mother passed away. Will give you updates ASAP. Please pray.” Here was my 19-year-old brother living through an event that will certainly be one of the most harrowing of his lifetime, but to go through such a heartbreak so early, to bear this burden at such a young age -- how cruel, how unfair! And it was then that I thought of the unfairness of my mother’s death as it pertained to me -- how I had been cheated out of more time with her. Who, in this big vicious world, will love me now as she loved me? How lonesome and isolated I felt at that teeming airport with my own daughter safe in her mother’s lap still having the luxury to dream.

I wrote a lot about grief when I was writing regularly. Having read some of my older posts, I can tell that my anecdotal observations were not far from the truth. It hits you in waves, that part is true. It is harsh, unforgiving, brutal. What I didn’t appreciate was the power it imparts, like a vessel you harness to gain enough strength to kiss your mother’s cold, cold face, her soft eyelids, her shining forehead, her lips spread in a smile. You break and build yourself up again with every touch, you break and come together, break and come together until you are forever marked by your loss, marked by this gaping absence. There is a nakedness in this grief, the sense of being flayed open, laid bare for the world to see.

I am deeply uncomfortable with the lack of privacy that surrounds bereavement -- the way the family surrounds their departed loved one, gazing at their still faces, everyone around them wanting to offer comfort, to condole, to let them know how sorry they are, when all a daughter or a son would ever want at a time like this is to keep looking on at their parent’s face, to give them one more, just one more kiss, to touch their cheek, to say sorry, to say “I love you” over and over, and to finally, painfully, forcibly say good bye. When I reached the open verandah of Adil Hospital, Lahore, where some of the last rites were to be performed for my mother, I asked the other mourners, mostly other family members, to give me and my siblings a few moments alone with my mother. I wanted to be allowed the dignity to mourn in an enclosure of love and loss that is only shared by the four of us, her bereaved children. In these private moments, I allowed myself to be her baby, her first-born thirty-two year old daughter who is a mother herself, but still at the very core of my identity and existence, her baby. The four of us will remember these precious minutes as our deeply private and shared experience of heartbreak. And there is nothing more to be said about that.

It will take us the rest of our lives to make sense of this cruelty. Why, in the midst of such hope with her cancer shrinking and her health improving, did she have to be yanked away from us so suddenly; how could she simply cease to breathe when fifteen minutes before she was dozing and sleepily talking to her daughter and granddaughter; what could have caused such an absolute separation in a matter of minutes, seconds? But we remind ourselves that the deterioration of body and mind that is inevitable with a stage 4 cancer diagnosis was not something our mother withstood -- and for that, we are grateful. She, in a sleepy haze of routine post-chemo weakness, asked for her son, and then with her last breath uttered the name of the man she had loved fiercely and definitively since she was 24 years old. “Shah Gee,” she whispered to my aunt who was with her. “Shah Gee,” she said again before closing her eyes for the last time. And Shah Gee, my father, a man still seeking his magnum opus, a man who has loved his family thoroughly in his own way, but who has also worshipped his work, was on his way to Karachi airport after packing up his shoot for the day to fly to Lahore, planning to surprise his ill wife by appearing on her doorstep with his disarming smile, which is all she ever wanted. And this one time, fate betrayed my otherwise fortunate father as he rushed to the terminal and received my aunt’s call. My aunt placed the phone next to my mother’s ear, but she was already soaring to her final journey, her eyes quietly closed, not a sound emerging from her lips.

Later, I saw my father and it struck me how I have never seen him this way before -- sort of unformed, raw around the edges, crumpled, sagging like a balloon slowly losing air through an invisible leak. Perhaps I never fully appreciated before the depth of friendship and love that existed between my parents despite their many, many differences. When my mother chided me in life, “You do not understand,” she was right. I didn’t. I still don’t. An inexplicable bond held them to each other, holds them to each other still -- the constituents of it I still haven’t been able to parse out completely -- love, trust, honesty, children -- these are superficial and common details. Seeing my father now, I realize what I never realized in my mother’s life, what I never saw in her pain and heartbreak when she faced the biggest betrayal of her life from my father and yet continued to love him with the untamed devotion of a dervish. Seeing in my father’s face his aberrant heart sinking and rising, his breath catching in his throat, his words deteriorating as they emerge from his mouth, I see not mere love, but almost a spiritual awakening. He may have been just as devoted to my mother all her life (although popular Pakistani press and anyone who has a mouth will disagree), but his face now holds a grave pall of the responsibility to carry all that she left behind. Her love, her pain, her loyalty, her fidelity, her existence -- seem to have concentrated in her last utterance of his name and sublimated to reach him, take hold of him, possess him. I know he will never stop mourning her just as I know I am their daughter. It is a fact of life.

She would smile now, if she could see us weary and wretched here without her. “I told you so,” she’d say. “I told you so.”

A Wanderer Returns

From the beginning, this is exactly how it was supposed to be. 

Without ceremony or preamble, I am returning to Pakistan after nearly 14 years of being in California. I am traveling alone -- my daughter and husband, both of whom became a part of my life when I had already planted myself firmly in the identity of an immigrant, will stay behind. I am going for 10 days including travel time. Time, I imagine, will fly, but I will also have a heightened sense of its flight. I will feel it in its most concentrated form -- sort of like seeing heavily pigmented color, touching the purest of silk, experiencing the tug of life that pulls a baby into this world. 

The anticipation frightens me. I am most afraid of finding out that the place that exists in my memory is inaccurate -- a composite of my imagination and past -- the Lahore I have been writing about is frozen only on the pages that I have filled. I feel each sense coming to attention in the days before my departure, ready to call me out as an imposter. I am perpetually at an impasse with myself. The places I remember are no longer a part of the city I was raised in. A few days ago, my sister asked me, "What do you remember?" And I said, "Kalma Chowk." Her smile held sympathy, "There is no Kalma Chowk anymore."

How does one reconcile with a loss that is not only intangible, but also indescribable? How does one begin to parse out the grief that surrounds estrangement? It didn't begin this way. In a lot of ways, this journey has been like seeing a child grow up. You know they are growing and changing, but you cannot trace the growth, hold them in your arms and realize that they have changed. But they are morphing into larger forms of themselves all the time, in front of your eyes, and you are blind to it until you see growth charts in a pediatrician's office, or see pictures of them from a few years ago or even a few months ago. It is only in retrospect, that you can see this magic -- the roundness of the face diminishing, the hair losing its curl, the child crawling, standing, walking, dancing... So fleeting, all of it, and yet it unfolds in precise detail for us without our notice. And so, when people ask me how is it that 14 years have gone by and I have not returned? How is it that I have managed to survive without the places and people I claim to love -- I only say, I don't know where the time went. 

These days, I have started to dream again. My dreams are mostly about forgetting things, or losing people. There is a profound sense of urgency that envelops me when I emerge from sleep. It is disorienting to find myself in my bed, the house humming quietly in the night, everything just as I arranged it before sleep descended -- the robe over the chair, the cup of water on the coaster, the phone blinking in the dark bearing missives from a different time zone. But if I speak frankly, I might say the messages are from a different world altogether.

"How is mama?"

"What is the chemo schedule?"

"Don't bring presents."

"I love you."

"Mama is dealing with everything like a champ."

What is this world? How did we get here, dragged to this very point in our shared existence by distance, decisions, grief, sickness, choices, independence, detachment...? How is it that a journey home comes about suddenly, without ceremony or preamble, after nearly 14 years, when what looms before me is not the thousands of miles I must cross defenselessly traversing air currents, or the people I must face who have changed and grown and lived and died, or the city I must go to that is past its monsoon prime for the year and will surely punish me in many ways for being gone too long -- no, none of this matters. What really holds me in a death grip of confrontation is a neat row of packages I created and tied with bows and pushed into the farthest recesses of my consciousness. They are what lie in wait at each step between here and there. How does one unravel and remember what's taken years to forget? How does one even begin to try? 

And despite all of this, I know with absolute conviction, it had to be this way. Like I said -- from the beginning, this is exactly how it was supposed to be. 

The Dissection of Grief - II

I have lately become very interested in our capacity and ability to cope with grief. There is an expression in Urdu that very aptly describes the feeling one has -- repetitively -- when one experiences loss. It literally translates into, “My heart is drowning. Mera dil doob raha hai. This is so accurate when one is dealing with grief. The chest feels laden, air is inhaled in large gulps, and there is this acute sensation of not having one’s bearing in the world, sinking.

Even immediately after experiencing a tragic loss, after drowning over and over, your body achieves homeostasis. You gravitate towards liquids at the very least to satiate your thirst even if your stomach will not accept solid food just yet. That, too, may be a physical manifestation of the psychology of grief. How can I eat to sustain my life when my loved one can no longer do so? It feels like a betrayal. And yet, food monopolizes the healing process. The bereaved family’s fridge fills up. Their counter-top is never clear. Someone is always bustling in the kitchen. “You must keep your strength up,” one hears. “You need to eat.” And despite the grief, despite the absence of appetite, one relents. One swallows a morsel after another until one’s heart leaps and sinks again, drowns again, survives again.

Beyond the immediate aftermath of a loss, however, grief evolves differently for individuals. We all deal with loss uniquely, we process tragedy in our own way, we heal on different timelines. Some people may like to talk about their loss. Others retreat into silence and introspection. Writers might experience a sudden burst of cathartic expression, or a deep freeze of it instead. Gradually, though, the bereaved begin to plateau and mirror each others’ level of grief peppered with some particular peaks and valleys. What happens then? What happens during this plateau stage, because we hear over and over that grief doesn’t truly go away. It lurks. It blossoms and withers, but never disappears.

A case study for such a plateau period of grief is a happy occasion. How do the bereaved prepare themselves to feel happiness fully while also acknowledging their deep loss? Perhaps my view is biased because I am leveraging my own experience of having grieved and subsequently compartmentalized it to experience joy, but this is what’s true for me. The absence of the dead becomes a real, palpable entity. The void left by your loved one is there alongside you in that happiness. It is as though the person is gone, but this empty space is a living thing, a proxy, just as real as one’s hands clapping, as real as the palms slapping against each other, as real as the sound that results from this action. And this post-grief happiness is a fragile thing. One needs to nurture it like a fledgling bird, take it under one’s wings, give it the room and security to grow, or it will never thrive. But one also has this sense of the absence -- the very real absence -- encouraging the post-grief happiness, permitting it, and dare I say, blessing it.

And yet, the heart drowns at unexpected moments, maybe even in the infinitesimal silence between the clapping of one’s hands. It drowns and emerges again. And one braces oneself for the sinking, which will inevitably come when one least expects it.

Photos by Rebecca McCue

The Dead Teach Us Lessons

I have a very distinct memory of my cousin playing a metal harmonica as a boy. My cousin who died as a nearly 35-year-old father of two is forever preserved for me as that hazel-eyed child, playing an almost-melody on his harmonica. The trouble is, I cannot figure out if that memory is real or constructed. Maybe I heard from someone that he played the instrument and imagined the melody. Maybe it was someone else who played the harmonica and I conjured my dead cousin in his place. Or maybe he really did carry a small silver harmonica with a green trim in his pocket to play it from time to time. I have not asked my sisters if they remember him with the instrument, because I am afraid to shatter this image of him -- healthy, slightly brooding, slouching in a corner of the room, playing a tune.

I have another memory of him, too -- returning from an afternoon expedition across the neighborhood having collected small, unripe mangoes in a makeshift bundle created out of a t-shirt. We sliced the mangoes, a few of us kids together in the cool kitchen with the ceiling fan whirring, and sprinkled chaat masala on them. Then we ate each piece and scrunched up our faces as the tartness of the fruit hit our tongues. I am unsure about this memory also. Maybe it was another cousin who went stealing fruit from our neighbors' gardens that year -- the one who is alive and well. 

There are a few memories of him that I am sure of, most of them, I'd rather forget. We argued over something and didn't talk to each other for years. If we saw each other in our old neighborhood or in the home of a relative, I looked away, I stayed silent, I changed the course of my walk to avoid him. We didn't even fight over anything significant. It was absurd, really, and yet we kept hanging on to the silence for so many long years. I kept hanging on to it. Perhaps I would have broken the silence when I saw him last, over a dozen years ago, if I knew I would never have the chance to say another word to him. I don't even remember the last time I saw him -- it was so completely ordinary. It was probably one of those many occasions when I did my routine of seeing him and averting my eyes, not acknowledging his presence. I get so angry with myself when I think about this. How selfish. How immature. How absolutely frustrating. 

I am overcome with regret when I think of him -- and yet to this day, my solution to end complication is to walk away from it and never look back. I have learned on many occasions that this is a highly unhealthy way of dealing with unsavory emotions. It is extremely hard, however, to break this defense mechanism. 

There are certain realities that no one can argue with. Realities that afford no uncertainties, no what-ifs. He is dead. I am alive. We didn't speak for many years. I didn't get a chance to reconcile, see him as a father, meet his family in his presence. He couldn't do the same for me either. It is comforting to remind myself of the starkness of these realities, so I learn to value the people around me while they are still alive and not douse myself with regret after they are gone forever. It is humbling. 

There is one memory of him that swims to the surface without any effort at all. It is one I am certain of. For a year, I attended the girls' section of the same school that he went to. I was five years old. He was nearly ten. On two occasions while I was attending that school, he came to me to see how I was doing, concerned, brotherly, but reserved in his manner, speaking little, listening more. And one time, on this bright Spring afternoon, as I was about to sit in the car after school, I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to see his grinning face. My uncle, also his uncle, who was there to pick me up wrapped him in a hug, ruffled his curly hair. I don't remember what he said, what any of us said. I just remember the three of us standing on the side of the road, smiling, just happy to see each other. What a lark! How wonderful! What a marvelous co-incidence! That's what you think when such meetings happen -- that is why you get so happy when something like this occurs unexpectedly. You feel elated. And a little awed. And I miss that moment. I miss him as a boy with that disarming grin. I miss myself encompassed by that small happiness. I miss my uncle, loving us, his nephew and niece. 

Grief and regret are so similar -- they never truly leave you alone. They dull and deepen, dull and deepen, on and on. And they are selfish. You hang on to them possessively, because they make you remember yourself as you were with the person who is no longer here. They are as much about you as the one who is absent. 


It would serve me well to remember this. 

Photos by Rebecca McCue

The Dissection of Grief

It laps up against you in waves. At the beginning, the tide is so strong, you fear you'll lose your footing and be carried away. Then, slowly, you feel the waves begin to break against rocks before reaching you, licking your ankles, and receding, a temperate reminder of the absence of land. It encumbers you, clings to you like wet clothes, weighing you down, or like cobwebs that you keep stripping from your hair, from your eyelashes, from your fingertips, trying to reach back, back, back, to make amends, if only, if only, if only. You think of it proportionally. You try to appropriate it. You try to contain it. More than anything, you try to comprehend it, but understanding eludes you. Your thoughts are carried into small whirlpools of confusion by strong downdrafts, away, away, away. 

Sometimes you forget. Especially in the morning, or when you are occupied by the all-consuming job of simply living day to day to day. Remembrance spreads slowly through you, from the center outwards, like an ice cube melting, shrinking and expanding at the same time, creating a rivulet on a previously dry surface. 

It doesn't ever disappear. It mellows and swells, swells and mellows, and you begin to have a strange respect for it, an appreciation, because it is bigger than you, the person experiencing it, and it holds so much of the person you are mourning, the one who is gone, and yet continues to exist in this small bubble of your grief. 

Photo by Rebecca McCue

Haye, Peshawar

My immediate expression of grief is the Urdu word haye delivered in varying intonations. I say it without thinking, without even paying attention to my reaction. It has escaped my lips so many times over the past two days, haye, haye, haye...

Haye (Urdu), most closely meaning "alack," an expression of regret or dismay.

Haye, haye, haye...

The most haunting memory of my childhood is of being awakened by my mother's screams, "Haye, haye, haye, haye, Guriya, haye, Guriya," after learning of her sister Guriya's sudden death, and of the aftermath: Her restrained sobs late into the night, her voice hoarse from screaming out her grief, her broken whispers grazing my five-year-old ears, "Haye, Guriya, haye, Guriya..."

Haye. Grief brims from this expression. With each utterance, grief grows bigger rather than diminishing, it balloons and consumes the mourner. To the aggrieved, who is gutted by his loss, this expression becomes a tether to life, two syllables holding fast a fractured reality.

What can you say about a loss of this magnitude? But even the word "loss" is misused here. It is not a loss. It is thievery. Loss implies carelessness, as though it were equivalent to misplacing your keys. This is a robbery of 141 lives. And what kind of cognitive dissonance must the aftermath bear? A mother's body betraying her every day, her eyes opening at the same time every morning with the intention of sending her child to school, and then the reality washing over her like winter rain - no more, no more, no more, haye, haye, haye. Does her voice betray her when she calls the child's name in the empty house at dinner time? How many ways does she remember her child? Photographs, dirty laundry, pens and pencils scattered on a desk, books strewn across a room, the screensaver on her laptop of smiling faces, the child's last Facebook post, maybe, "Tomorrow I will...." No tomorrow, no tomorrow, no tomorrow, haye, haye, haye.

Can you imagine, we say to each other, young mothers seeing our toddlers coloring and rolling out soft balls of play-doh with their chubby hands. Haye, those mothers, we say. Haye, Peshawar, we say. Can you imagine? The answer, quite clearly, is no. No, we cannot imagine. It is unfolding in front of our eyes, but we cannot imagine, because how could we? How could we, really, imagine those chubby hands never moving again? How could we ever imagine not hearing that sweet voice? How could we imagine not holding our babies? Could those mothers imagine this? No, and yet they are living through it. What they cannot imagine now perhaps is continuing to live in this new vacuum, leading an altered life in which the child in not present. And no matter how much we grieve for the parents and for those who were robbed from their families, we cannot truly imagine the depths of terror and pain reverberating through Peshawar right now. 

Years after my aunt's death, my mother was rolling out dough to make chapaatis. We were talking about families. I said, "Isn't it great that we are three sisters and you are three sisters, too?" She was quiet for a few moments. Her rolling pin faltered in its strokes and her face began to break along the lips. "We were four," she said. "We were four." 

Grief, when it enters your life, does not ever leave it. 

Please. Pray for Peshawar. Share their grief. Donate to education.

Things My Parents Don't Say

“How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way tiny ghosts of your living children haunted your heart; they could never know, and would hate it if they did, how their growing was a constant bereavement.”
― J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy

Vintage Noor circa 1987

A few weeks ago, my mother called me to say that she had found 6 photo albums of my toddler years in my father's closet. They were cleaning out the clothes and shoes, packing them up, because a big move is imminent. They found the albums tucked away on a shelf and spent hours poring over the pictures. "In those pictures, you look exactly like Jahan looks now," said my mother wistfully. I welled up at this thought -- that once, long ago, my parents must have showered the same attention on me that I now devote to Jahan. I imagined Jahan growing up and moving away from me. I imagined telling her this over the phone -- I saw your photos again, baby girl, you were such a cute toddler -- and felt a visceral ache. How hard had it been really for my parents to let me go, to say goodbye so I could pave my own path toward self-actualization and self-discovery? What is the extent of my parents' grief, really? 

Children are ubiquitously such selfish creatures, even after they become parents themselves. I have never paused before this particular instance to think how much my parents probably miss me -- and not so much me, but that little girl in the photos with those chubby cheeks and thick curls. They probably feel as though no time has passed and their girl has grown and taken flight. Do they find it to be an unfair decision? What does my mother think and does not say to me when I receive her frustrated chat on WhatsApp, "Really, Noorulain, what is happening? You never call." And what must she feel when I respond, "Sorry, Mom. Been really busy. Call you tomorrow. Kisses." "OK," she writes back. Then she sends me 3 pink hearts, and a bald smiley face blowing me a kiss. She is a funny lady. I love her dearly, and yet I haven't called her -- does she wonder if I have forgotten her or deprioritized her? Because how can I explain this -- Mom, life got in the way, I am a working mother, you know, and there's the time difference to contend with, you are 12 hours ahead after all, we don't live in the same day of the week half of the time, when the sun turns up outside my window, it's already dipped out of your sight, the skies above us are so different, you are so far away from me, I miss you, I love you, I think of you, I just haven't had the time to call...

It's hard to think about these things. It's heartbreaking to realize with absolute certainty that one day, I will look back and wonder where my sweet girl went and why my grown daughter doesn't call me back. I have never appreciated  this constant bereavement my parents must experience. It's a sweet kind of mourning, though, isn't it? Hopefully, they think they have raised strong, independent, responsible women -- who have all three left the nest now, made their own abodes with twigs and moss and the values their parents taught them.

And yet, I cannot shake this burden off my shoulders. I look back at Jahan's photos -- a few days old, swaddled in a blanket; a few months old wearing a white woolen dress, a red headband, a ready smile, her chubby cheeks rosy; her tiny teeth, her short hair, her inquisitive look at 12 months, 18 months, 2 years... How time flies, and how strange nature is. Parents are blind observers to their child's growth, each phase so different from the last, the present always solidifying in our memory and the past fluid and free, sometimes flowing into the river of consciousness, making a tiny ripple, and then merging with our current reality, fading away. This parting is such sweet sorrow.

I miss my mother now (as I always do). Must sign off to call her.