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 Old, The New

The first thing I noticed when I moved into my new home was the foreignness. The unfamiliar floor under my feet, my utter ineptitude in the kitchen because the counters are taller than what I am used to and I don't know my way around the place yet, most remarkably whilst the pressure cooker is whistling away on the stove, and the way my voice echoes across the house. First I thought it was only because the place is bigger, the ceilings higher, but then I noticed the same echo when I cleaned out my old house, a place I had loved for over 5 years. Suddenly, my voice began to bounce back against the walls and magnify. When I went to clean the house out, my daughter who ordinarily never falls asleep in the car, was snoring comfortably in her car seat. I didn't wake her, so while I was able to silently bid farewell to the staircase that welcomed us when I first brought her home from the hospital, she soundly slept much like she had done in those early days. 

Physical places hold a lot of meaning for me. It must have something to do with my vigilant practice of nurturing memories of Lahore. I try so hard to remember not only landmarks, but the feel of the epoxy floor beneath my feet, and the slatted bars in my grandmother's house through which I saw schoolchildren chanting their lessons in the room below, and the cold rush of water erupting from the spigot of the tube-well accompanied by the momentary shortness of breath -- the impact knocking all air out of me, and especially perhaps the unsteadiness of rickety old benches and metal chairs all over the city next to hawkers selling the best street food I have ever tasted.

It has become a challenge now after 12 years of being away to hold on to these sensations, to re-imagine them, to live a few transient moments of the past over and over just to keep them alive. I am not sure anymore if I really remember Lahore, or just some diluted version of Lahore. I also don't feel quite the same pull I used to for the city. When I think about going home now, I make a mental checklist -- surprisingly, it includes mostly dead people -- paying my respects to my grandparents and a cousin who will always be a little boy in my memory even though he passed away in his thirties. The places that still have a hold over my senses are ones I didn't associate very fondly with as a child. The neighborhood of Old Lahore where my father's ancestral home stands with its peeling paint and creaking wooden shutters -- I never liked going there as a child. Our extended family members pulled my cheeks (with affection) and commented on how tall I had grown (lies) and generally were quite loud and overbearing. And now, I feel the pull of the place. The old world charm, the narrow alleys, the scent of roses heavy in the air around the florist's stand, a row of curbside businesses, the paan-walla with betel juice staining his hands, the healer who might put a palm over a patient's abdomen and diagnose him with anything from appendicitis to black magic and have a potion or powder ready to cure the ailment, a makeshift bookshop that stapled and assembled loose papers, manuscripts, or fixed the fragile spines of old books, a cobbler who repaired heels and boots... I am almost certain they are no longer there. Even back then, that old neighborhood felt like a time capsule, a different world. That's what calls me home now. I am compelled to see what's become of the place. Do people still fly kites there and raise white pigeons with indelible pride? If I were to mention this to my parents, they would nod their heads with a look of complete comprehension and understanding on their faces and make a remark like, "It's the weight of family, you see. It's your ancestors calling to you. It's the pull of blood," which is precisely why I don't say anything about what I feel -- I would laugh at their reaction, and they'd refuse to see the humor in our exchange. 

I push myself into the mire of intricate memories, none of them having weight or significance, simply because I am trying to reconstruct a solid picture of what I left behind from this mosaic. I hear from friends, "You have to go back at least once. Can you imagine the writing that will come out of it?" More than anything else however, I am possessed by a sense of foreboding when I imagine the 30-plus-hour trip back, and more than that, the unfamiliarity I will feel once I am there. What if I don't go back at all and continue to write vignettes about the Lahore of my memory, and as my memory becomes unreliable, which it will if it hasn't already, how will the city change for me? Maybe I will imagine a raging Ravi instead of a receding one, or something more outlandish. It might be an interesting experiment. But truth be told, I have started to feel like a fraud. Some readers have mentioned that my work resonates with them because of my strong connection with Lahore -- and here's the thing -- I don't know if that connection is strong anymore. A more accurate description would be that I am extending a spindly thread back in time and tugging at the past constantly, fraying it in the process. With each pull, Lahore goes farther away from me rather than coming closer -- and I don't even regret that anymore. And so, writing over and over about my childhood in that city of love and food and magic feels like a lie, a grand illusion, an escape fantasy. The hold my city used to have on me is slowly (but surely) dissolving away...

Maybe that's because there are so many other memories crowding the snapshots of Lahore now. I try hard to conserve some other feelings too, you see -- the house on the hill in San Jose, the house that was good, and for the most part, happy. The tiny kitchen  with marble floors, a nick in one tile, the cold welcome it provided in the dawn hours as I walked those ten paces over and over with a newborn in the crook of one arm, bleary-eyed, exhausted, sometimes crying. That same kitchen cocooned many a poem as a teabag leaked its contents into a cup of hot water and the city came alive. Already I have trouble moving from room to room -- my senses trap me in that kitchen, which I loved with all my heart, where I learned how to overcome my fear of baking and eventually love it, where I gathered every Thanksgiving with people I love, where I gave some of the best dinner and birthday parties (and I still have the planning spreadsheets to prove it). I am so committed to remembering certain details about that house -- what the winding drive felt like as I came up the hill every day, the way the trees blossomed every spring, the rosemary hedges all around the community -- that something else, the distant past perhaps, must be pushed out, overshadowed.

How can one person remember so much after all? Old memories must make room for new ones, and so Lahore diminishes each year, the Lahore I love, the Lahore of my childhood is slipping away from me, because even if I go back now, I will arrive in a strange city, not the one I have held on to for so long. And as time passes, there will be still more that is lost (and gained). In this new house where my voice still carries and smashes against the walls, and a breeze wafts in from the northeast every evening, I have much to learn. As I memorize the ridges in the hardwood floorboards and start to acquaint myself with the sounds of the housing settling each night, I will forget more details about the past. Perhaps I will not be able to conjure the exact glow of golden light in the school chapel anymore, or the bitterness of cold winter mornings as we stood outside the great hall for morning assembly. Maybe the exact feel of heavy monsoon rain as it hit my palms and splattered on the cement roof will be forgotten, or the cloying scent of ripe mangoes being unwrapped from their newspaper packaging in a wooden crate will be erased. And as I write this, I can't help but wonder if there is so much still left to forget, so much that still might be salvaged. 

Photos by Rebecca McCue

Packing Up Some Memories

I am reminded today, while packing up my books for an impending move, of an evening during my senior year of college when Haena, my roommate and close friend, drove us down I-80 to a theater in Sacramento that was playing The Namesake. 

My memory of the afternoon is that it was overcast and breezy. I had been away from Lahore for four very long years by this time. Those first four years were longer than the eight years that have followed. I ached for the city. In Davis, on my home from classes every evening, I walked by a house on 5th street that had a planter of gardenias outside, which reminded me of jasmines, a poor substitute, but so pleasant. Back then, I was still talking about graduating and going home. Every time I bought a book, I thought about my options -- how would I take all my books back? There was no FaceTime back then, and I was lucky if I could catch pixelated glimpses of my family on Skype from time to time. They were still using dial-up.

And here I was -- seated to watch the movie adaptation of a book, which had so beautifully captured the immigrant experience that I had been moved to tears while reading it. The movie opens with a view of a busy street in India, the buzz of conversation, the makeshift marketplace, people, faces, activity, color. It could be any street. It could be streets I had seen and passed each day of the first 18 years of my life. Nostalgia crashed into me and I was caught in its ripples and the surf. I was pinned under its weight. For the first several minutes of the movie, and at many moments after, I cried and shredded a packet of Kleenex to pieces. 

I close my eyes now trying to conjure the emotion that rattled me so on that long ago day. The yearning to go home is gone. The idea of home is gone. My home, physically, is gone. My parents have sold my childhood home and are now located in a completely different part of Lahore. My home, moreover, is here  -- I remind myself, shake myself out of the reverie, stretch my shoulders and brace my back against the chair that knows me so well. It is interesting how malleable the idea of home becomes over time, how the sense of belonging inches away from one reality and towards another so imperceptibly, like land sinking. 

Ashima Ganguli in The Namesake, lives most of her adult life in America, looking forward to the brief trips she makes with her family to her hometown in India. She is a different person there, not the quiet volunteer at the library, not a scared woman driving a car, not a mother trying to understand her very American children, but alive in a different way, vivacious, happy. Which is her true self, I wonder now. The self she embraces only in the company of her relatives and in the comfort of her country where everyone speaks the language she thinks in, where native faces from long ago days surround her, where her favorite street-snack is available on every hawker's cart, or in her clean picket-fence home in America, in the silence so crisp that the hum of the air conditioner can be heard, in the waves crashing against rocks on the beach where she goes clad in her sari and hand-knitted cardigan? 

And obviously, the real question here is not where Ashima feels at home, but where I do. Is the city where you grew up still your home if you can truly only remember broken memories pieced together in a mosaic? Is it still your home if the streets you remember have different names now? Is it still your home if the river you romanticized in your poems is all but dried up? And more importantly, are you brave enough to find out?

The Storyteller's Daughter

Isn't it strange how certain actions or habits start to mean so much to you despite the unlikeliest of origins? For instance, I started to drink coffee back in college because it made me feel grown-up. Gradually, I came to depend on it on the eve of a big test. Now, I am unabashedly addicted. How odd that something so natural to my everyday existence as daily cup(s) of joe originated from a desire to feel older, more mature, experienced. 

I wonder sometimes why I started to write. Do I honestly believe, as my parents insist, that it's in my blood, it's something I inherited? Or do I believe the other reason that I often give to myself and others: I write because it's a defense mechanism. I process everything by writing: hurts, slights, grief, joy, wonder, aches and pains even. But what if the real reason is neither of the two? What if the real reason is hidden so far into the crevasses of memory that there is no way to tell what it is? 

I have a theory. When I was a little girl, my greatest accomplishment as I saw it was being my father's daughter -- it was no accomplishment, I know that now. It was pure chance or pure fate. But that is how I saw it then. I was so infallibly proud to be his child, to be his firstborn, to belong to him that it began to feel like an achievement. I would look at the thick binders of scripts he wrote long-hand and marvel at them. My father writes stories, I would think. What a wonderful thing to be -- a writer -- whose stories will live on and on. When I am grown, these binders will still be here, neatly placed on the mahogany shelves in his study, and I will come in casually carrying a handbag and wearing makeup and breezily pick up a binder, settle in his armchair, and begin to read. And I will find my father and his words on these pages. I will forever find him here. That's what I would think as a child. For some reason, I didn't associate the act of searching with finding him. Why would I be trying to search for him? Why would I be drawn to his work? But such sophistication was beyond me at that time. 

Every year until fourth grade, I won the class prize in "Urdu Reading." Oral recitation prizes were discontinued after fourth grade, or I am sure I would have continued to win. I don't speak from arrogance -- this is the simple truth and it has its roots in my reading habits. Even at that young age, I would creep into our drawing room where my father liked to write in those early days. I would pick up stacks of pages as he finished writing on them and I would read his neat penmanship, tight loops, slanting accents. If I didn't understand a word, I would catalog it to ask my mother later. I never disturbed my father during his fertile spells of writing. It never occurred to me to do so. Even back then, I recognized the act of creating stories on paper as sacred, like a form of worship. I miss those days with the clarity of retrospection -- it is a time capsule -- that man by the window, one leg crossed over the other, a sheaf of papers in front of him, a Uniball pen flying across the page, and that little girl next to him, silent but occupied, hanging on to the rise and fall of his Urdu script. In a moment, he will look up, he will stretch, he will ask, "Do you want to go get barbecue for dinner?" She will leap from the sofa. They will gather the rest of the family and drive off. And soon after, she will grow up, there will be vast distances between them, some surmountable, some not. I want to tap that girl on the shoulder with this new insight of adulthood. I want to beg her to know how special that time really is because of its sheer simplicity. She loves her father. He loves his child. In this instant, there is nothing between them but a few pages of a much longer story. I want to whisper into the man's ear, too, who is much closer to my age now than the little girl's. It won't remain so simple forever, I want to say. Time and people will slip from your grasp, hold on tight for as long as you can. He will shirk me away. He will tell me I am mad. How is it possible, he will say, for his family to scatter. Why, that's insane. Here's his little girl. His smart little girl who will go places, and her Papa will always be with her. 

I digress as usual -- like my father, I am partial to story-telling. Back to my theory. What if I wasn't born with this strong inclination to write? What if this became a defense mechanism out of a strong wish rather than natural aptitude? My theory goes like this: Remember that little girl who would retreat into the drawing room with her father and admire his work? Maybe that girl loved her father so deeply and admired his vocation so strongly that she molded herself to be like him. She told herself, I must be like my father who is the very best father in the world. I look like him, everyone says as much. I may as well be like him. And so one day, she picked up a pen and paper and went to her father and said, Papa, I want to write something. Tell me what I should write. And the man said, my darling girl, you could write anything and you would do it marvelously. But Papa, she said, what should I write? And the man said, my darling girl, your smile is like the sun, write about the sun then. And so the little girl sat next to her father, and started to write in English instead of Urdu:


Sun
I am eating a bun
under the sun.
The sun shines brightly 
I can't sit quietly. 
After some hours
the sun is very large. 
The sun is very hot, 
I touch it not. 
-From the archives of Noorulain Noor


And how the man laughed and laughed with joy and pride when the girl read out the poem to him. He ran to his wife with the piece of paper in his hand and read it to her. She looked at her daughter with wide eyes and a huge smile. Frame the poem, the man boomed to his wife. We shall frame it and put it in the drawing room. That same afternoon, the man drove his three girls to a bookstore and bought them as many books as they wanted. He bought a special notebook for his elder daughter. For the writer, he said, as he presented it to her. The poet, his wife corrected him. And that is how she came to be known forever after. 

Photos by Rebecca McCue

Who are you? Where have you come from?

Who are you? Where have you come form? We spend our whole lives crafting answers to these questions. We spend day after day after day defining who we are, we try to stay true to ourselves, we attempt to be mindful of our values when we conduct ourselves in society, in polite company. Who are you, we are trying to figure out. Some of us spend years laying down roots. Others expend time and effort to distance ourselves from our roots, rise above our origins, overcome circumstances, elevate our situation in life. 

I am reading Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread these days and there is a scene in the book where we hear these questions as a character's internal musing. "Who are you? Where have you come from?" It made me think. What answer do I have for these questions. The answer I have is very different from what my father must have or what my child will have in the future. I come from a father who crafted a place for himself in the world, who rose above his origins, who fought against the status quo, who gave to his children more than he ever had. I come from writers, from dreamers, from parents who are brilliant and creative and flawed and sentimental. I, too, have risen above my own roots. I have done my fair share of challenging the norms. And there is so much work still left to do. What will my daughter say to these questions, I wonder. Will she know what it took for us to get here, her and me together? Will she know the depth of longing that had to be overcome? Will she appreciate the force with which I cleaved myself to reality and shunned sentimentalism to get here, to be me, to make her? 



In the same book, there is a scene later on in which the family's two daughters are packing up the house and their belongings, a home with two generations of history. It is one of those brilliantly written scenes that will resonate with every audience. A few months ago, my parents sold the house I grew up in. 404, we called the house, referring to the number. In my dreams, I still walk in that kitchen, I still splash water on the epoxy floor of the garage and glide a squeegee across the wet surface, I still sit at the rickety old dining table and demand lunch impatiently, with the entitlement of a first-born. In the book, the two women talk about picture frames and pieces of furniture and china and old clothes. I wonder what I would have taken from 404 if I had had the opportunity. Maybe the plaque my father installed in the drawing room that said "A daughter is love." Maybe I would have taken a chair, an end table, and maybe in the end, nothing at all, only memories of all the years we spent there. Sometimes I wonder how my mother feels about leaving that house. Does she dream of the pitter-patter of little girls' feet running up to her, does she think of the roof-top that saw so many summer monsoons lash across its concrete floor and just as many winter chills? "Why do we accumulate so much when we leave it all behind," one character muses in the book. And I nod my head in agreement with her. We accumulate so much, maybe as a protest against the very fact that we will leave it all behind, an act of defiance. 

In the end, when I come back to the original question, I think of my roots. The roots my parents laid in that small house, 404, all those years ago. The roots that traveled with them to their new house without me. I can't not think of that house and those years when I try to compose an answer to these questions. Who are you? Where have you come from? I have come from the city of dreams, I think. From a small house in the mediocre part of town. From people who defied boundaries and limitations and showed their children how to dream. But I taught myself to make them real. 

Photos by Rebecca McCue

Dear Lahore

Dear Lahore, 

I come to you again after all poetry has dried up. I come to you empty-handed like I often appear on the prayer mat, pleading for something,I want desperately, wanting, wanting. I come to you because memory is crippled now, drowned out by the present and the vices that afflict me -- caffeine, Splenda. I have not seen you these many years and so much of life has filled these furlongs of time. 

I come to you because I don't really want to come to you anymore, and that is a mourning in and of itself. I come to you because you still hold so much of me. Somewhere in the past, your streets still feel my tread. I am walking alongside my father. We are buying street food, seekh kebab and cucumber salad, mint chutney and watered down yogurt from a vendor in Lakshmi Chowk. Now he's perched me on the bonnet of the car. Such pleasure it gives me to say "bonnet of the car." No one would understand it here, but you do. Now he tells me about his childhood, about honesty and struggle and passion and creativity. He tells me I am a brave girl. He tells me I can be anything or anyone when I grow up. He tells me I am already smarter than him. Such a rueful smile. Such truth in his eyes. 

Somewhere on your streets, my uncle walks late at night, the sky lit up with a shock of stars. His signature black boots make clickity clack noises. He enters the house I lived in. I hear his shoes, I see his face. He calls out to me. "Let's eat! I've brought you garam garam chargha!" (hot chicken roast) I prance off my bed. We take out plates and napkins but no silverware. We eat with our hands. He talks about his plans, his future uncertain but possibility knocking at his doorstep. Back then, we thought we could each be anything or anyone we wanted to be. 

Somewhere on your streets, three girls sit in the backseat of a lurid blue van. Backstreet Boys screech on the cassette player. They sit side by side engrossed in their own thoughts. They break the silence for an observation and then fall again into the comfort of their quiet companionship. At this moment, their thoughts are enough, but the sisters don't know that truly, each of them is quite enough to sustain the others. They will not know this for a long time and not until they have learned the meaning of distances. 

Dear Lahore, you hold so much of those days I am beginning to lose, the moments that didn't seem to matter, but actually were the ones that mattered most, the time capsules that held the essence of happiness without drama or action. Life happened outside of these moments, but resided inside the simplicities of such times. This time, this happiness, that girl, she lives on inside these glimpses of a different world, she exists on your street corners, and in the kitchen of an old house, and in the back of a van that was sold many years ago. 

I suppose I do not know what I am really afraid of -- finding her there when I return, or never finding her again. 

Life Lessons for Jahanara

A few months ago, I started a notebook with random things I wanted to tell my daughter. I was consumed with this need to write lessons and instructions down for her in case something happens to me. I suppose this need also arose from the knowledge that I was privy to my mother's journals when I was living at home. Years ago, I read the entries she wrote just before my birth in which she detailed her anxieties and fears. She had learned she was going to have a C-section. It was her first pregnancy and my father had gone to England for work. I had heard the stories of what happened after my birth. My father came home with suitcases full of toys and clothes and little baby booties in every color. But my mother had never told me about the days preceding my birth, during which she felt utterly alone and paranoid. What astounded me was how much she loved her child before she even came into this world, and that's how she referred to me - my child - because there was no way for her to know back then in Lahore, Pakistan, whether her baby was a girl or boy.

I felt no such affection towards my unborn child. We bonded after she was born, after a long, hard labor, after I saw both harshness and gentleness in nurses, after I went several days without sleep, crying quietly in the bathroom for my own mother. And so, I was not impelled to write love notes to my child before she came into this world. When I wrote this particular letter to my daughter, the only one so far in this notebook, I probably didn't intend it to be a list of lessons and instructions. In retrospect, it reads like a litany of entreaties, do this, do that, things I have and haven't done in my own life that I would like my daughter to do. I am posting it here now, because I have distanced myself from it enough. It can go out in the world. She will find it eventually - but first she will hear all of this from me directly (I hope). Plus, the letter begins with a cliche that makes me cringe, but there is no other way of encompassing this feeling.

My dearest Jahanara,

I love you so much that it hurts. Since you have come into my life, my heart has grown so big. You are such a beautiful child with your fluffy ringlets and your chubby cheeks.

You will always be beautiful. Believe that.

Be honest even if it scares you. If you are honest, you have nothing to hide. Hiding from the world is very difficult, so stay honest.

Read a lot. Books will teach you many things about the world, but they will also teach you a lot about yourself.

Be kind. It is very easy to be cruel, but resist the temptation. Be kind to people and be generous with money, compliments, and possessions.

Be respectful of your elders.

Study hard even if you don't feel like it. I know learning can be boring, but do it anyway. You will be at a huge advantage if you do and a much bigger disadvantage if you don't.

Drink milk!

Take your vitamins!

Do what YOU want to do, do what will make you happy.

Fall in love. It is the most wonderful and the most ephemeral feeling you will experience. Do it whole-heartedly.

Your best colors are pink, yellow, and white, but wear what you love.

Eat healthy foods and pick up an activity: running, hiking, yoga, dance, anything.

Listen to music.

Be wise with money.

Read Harry Potter.

Learn how to swim.

If someone hurts you, try to distance yourself from them without wishing them ill.

Go to college!

Don't ever smoke.

Never do something because others are doing it. You are smart, confident, beautiful, and beloved. You don't need anyone's approval but your own.

Know that your Baba and I love you and you can share anything you want with us - our family is your safe space. 

You will make mistakes. We all do. Own them. Apologize sincerely. Learn from them.

Think a lot. Generate ideas. Execute them to perfection - perfection as you see it, not some prescribed idea of it.

Bake. It's good for the soul.

Think about Mummy from time to time and when you do, believe that you are the dearest thing to me.

Make your marriage a platform of partnership, not one of control or competition.

If possible, go to Lahore in the summer and the winter. I remember it as a beautiful city.

Travel.

Learn another language.

Love fiercely and without reservation or expectation.

Be firm about your beliefs, needs, and demands.

Always stand your ground and stand up for your truth and for what you believe in.

 Photo by Rebecca McCue

Carpe Diem

Why is it that certain memories anchor you to your reality, and there are others that wash away seemingly without reason? I have forgotten people and time periods of my life. My sisters ask me sometimes, "Do you remember Bilal Uncle?" And my first reaction is, "Who?" And gradually they help me piece an image together. A young man, my father's friend. Peacocks in the vast garden of the hotel where they used to meet for afternoon tea, scones for the adults, ice cream for us girls. Is this memory real or invented or salvaged, I wonder. Do I really remember him, or is he like the character of a movie, and my sisters the screenplay writers who have brought him to life? Yet, there are the briefest of moments that have stayed so fresh in my memory that I remember the tiniest details: the single blade of sunlight falling over a sleeping baby's eyes, the rippling of my grandmother's chenille duvet between my fingers, the silhouette of my aunt when I last saw her alive - I was just 5 years old, and she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen - that last time I saw her opening the heavy wooden kitchen door, wearing an orange kurta, her curly hair pinned back at the nape of her neck - just this image of her, and then - my mother's ragged shrieks waking me up from a deep sleep, our drive through wild monsoon rain to Sialkot, people gathered outside my grandparents' home, adults dissolving into screams of shock and grief, and my aunt's sallow face absent of life, the white shroud, the cotton balls tucked into her nostrils, my mother nowhere to be found, my mother, my mother, my mother, the panic, until I saw her collapsing near her dead sister's charpoy... 

Children should not be allowed to witness bereavement.

And why do I speak of memory now, so soon after remembering the darling Mrs. Khan who is with us no more? Many people reached out to me via the blog and Facebook to tell me how much the entry meant to them. They told me it made them remember the magic of Mrs. Khan. Some said it was like I was telling their story. She saw them when no one else did. Some told me that I have a very good memory - to which my immediate response is, "But I don't." And yet, there she stands, a pillar in my memory, strong, hilarious, full of happiness and compassion. You couldn't help but smile in her presence. I have established already that I had my bouts of introspection in school. My mind would wander off in the middle of classes. My closest friends dubbed me "Dreamy Noor," but Mrs. Khan had a way of snapping me out of my best reveries. She commanded attention, often with a joke, but sometimes simply with her presence. What a miraculous woman!

And my memory keeps bringing my beloved teacher back to me now in the wake of her death - in my dreams, in my thoughts, in my midday reveries that no one snaps me out of. From the outpouring of grief, but also that of wonderful, beautiful, happy memories that her students are sharing on the Facebook page in her memory, I can tell that she lives on in our collective memories. Every single student says the same thing - something along the lines of, "She made me who I am." Many insist they were her favorite. Can we even begin to articulate such a person's generosity and kindness who made so many people feel special at the same time? It's maddening if you think about it - I worry with 5 guests in my house that 4 of them will probably go home feeling unappreciated and ignored. Can you imagine making so many young people feel like they matter? Like what they've got to say is important? Making them realize that they can do anything? Be anything? This woman had super powers! She would have liked this compliment - I am smiling right now as I think about how she might have reacted to this.

With all the wonderful memories of Mrs. Khan being shared on social media, there is also this underlying wrinkle of regret getting fractured by the hour, expanding, swelling, "I should have stayed in touch with her." "I should have called her." "I should have given her a hug." I said to a friend that visiting her was on my Lahore Bucket List. I was planning to meet her when I visit my family in Lahore this winter after 12 years of being in California. I see this corollary of celebrating Mrs. Khan's life and her spirit along with harboring so much regret for not telling her what she meant to us (her students) engulfing every grieved heart, and it resonates very strongly with me.

Perhaps we should learn - Mrs. Khan may be teaching us an important lesson, still. Seize the day! I am in California and have been for over a decade, but what kind of excuse is that? I could have tracked down her email address with minimal effort, and I should have. But I never factored either of us dying into the equation of me eventually getting in touch with her. We never factor in death, do we? Tell the people who matter to you that they matter to you. That they matter. Like she told us every single time not in so many words maybe, but by listening, by giving, by laughing, by loving. Go give your teacher a hug. Tell your sister you're sorry, the fight you had really was completely stupid. Mend your differences with your parents. Tell your best friend you're sorry you don't call often, but you love her. Tell your husband, your wife, your child. Tell them because they matter and you never know when you may no longer have the privilege to do so.

Photos by Rebecca McCue

Until We Meet Again, Mrs. Khan!

Something happened before I reached Mrs. Khan's 7C class on the "senior side" of the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Lahore, with classrooms situated on the third floor of the school overlooking the front facing hallways and parking areas, one set of doors opening into the vast porticos and verandas. All I remember is that by the time I reached Mrs. Khan's class, I had mastered a dichotomous personality. In school, I was shy - some may have gone to the extent of calling me diffident. At home, I was a boisterous older sister - belligerent even.

I missed the first day of seventh grade. When I arrived on the second day, a dark Fall morning of 1995 with ominous gray clouds completely hiding the sun and dense droplets of rain battering my small umbrella, the classroom was swathed in sepia, a combination of the white overhead lights, the pale yellow walls, the polished wooden desks and the dusky sky outside. I took a seat quietly towards the front of the room. I was one of the shortest girls in the class, and by the time I reached seventh grade, I knew how seating charts worked at the Convent, how line formations were arranged during morning assembly and after lunch break, how we were supposed to file out of and into the classroom - shortest girl in the front, tallest in the back. I was usually in the first or second row.

On this day, I was anxious. There were some new faces in the class. Some of my closest friends had been shuffled to a different section. My thoughts had a singular focus: How strict was this new teacher going to be? I remember giving myself a pep talk, "Just raise your hand. Answer questions. Speak up." Over the last two years, as I had become progressively quiet in classes to the point of being laconic, I had also noticed a change in how I was perceived. The widespread impression used to be  that if a student didn't participate in class, she was not studious or intelligent. This opinion flowed freely among teachers and distilled down to students. There was no place for introspection at the Convent in those years. Cliques formed based on popularity. Little girls were ruthless in the playground and in school activities. Comparison and competition were handy tools in every parent's conversational toolkit. 

Sitting among my classmates in those few minutes before meeting my new teacher, I thought about the project I worked on in the previous school year. The class was divided into 6 groups. Each student group leader was supposed to select five or six members from the class. I was among the last few to be selected. With each leader calling out a name and the girl bounding happily towards her group, I felt anxiety and humiliation rising inside me. "Just because I am quiet," I scolded myself. "They don't want me in their group because they think I am stupid." What other reason could there be? If they had seen my report cards, they would  have known how good my marks were. Finally, mercifully, one of the group leaders called my name. She looked at me doubtfully, one perfect eyebrow arched, her smooth forehead furrowed in a frown. After the selection was over, three girls from my group cornered me and said, "We have chosen you, but you better work hard."

Rain continued to splatter all over the concrete hallways outside Mrs. Khan's classroom as I waited for her to arrive and pleaded with myself to come out of my cocoon. Mrs. Khan walked in the door, smoothing her curly shoulder length hair behind her ears, wearing maroon lipstick, belting out a cheerful "Good morning," in her soothing contralto voice. We shot up from our seats and sang out "Good morning, Miss." She proceeded to call out the names of her students to record attendance. When she got to my name, I said in my shy school voice, "Present, Miss." "There you are," she said looking at me and smiling. "You're finally here. Noor-ul-Ain Noor," she read from her register (that's how I spelled my name back then). "Noor-ul-Ain Noor," she repeated. "N, A, N. NAN! You're NAN! I love naan!" From that day forward, to Mrs. Khan, I was NAN, and to me, she was the woman who changed the way I saw myself and made me realize that I should probably care less about how others perceived me. This doesn't mean that I didn't continue to encounter negative experiences that most schoolgirls do, but I knew how to recover from the really bad ones. You just keep moving on, because you know that there are people like Mrs. Khan who believe in you.

It was a remarkable school year for me. Mrs. Khan taught us English language and literature. I poured myself into the texts we were studying. I read Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess in the first two weeks of school. I raised my hand whenever Mrs. Khan asked a question in class. Most weekends, I accompanied my family to our farmhouse. I remember lounging in a makeshift hammock under an ancient banyan tree, and working on an assignment for Mrs. Khan. It was to summarize a few chapters of A Little Princess. When I got my notebook back, I opened it to find compliments from her in the margins, "Excellent! Good! What an improvement!" I worked harder than ever before, and under her praise and guidance, I blossomed.

In the middle of the school year, Mrs. Khan announced an English language test. The test would include an essay and some grammar exercises. By this time, I had received plenty of praise for my writing from Mrs. Khan. She had given me meaningful comments on the work I had submitted. She had noticed my sentence structure, my story-telling. She had told me it was "very good." For the first time, I began to feel that what I had to say was important, what I had to say may resonate with someone. This was not like other subjects. This was not like an A in Biology, for which I had studied for hours and memorized the process of photosynthesis just as it was written in the textbook. This was something I was creating. I was putting myself into those essays, formulating a voice, an opinion, a style - and it was being read and appreciated.

That year, Mrs. Khan was single-handedly responsible for altering my perception of myself. I was still quiet in my classes, but I was learning to hold my pen confidently and tell a story with it. When I started working on the English language test, I was a different person - I was the character in the story I was writing. The topic was "A Fire." Those days, we were hearing about violence in Karachi, just as we hear about it now. Fires breaking out, bombs in marketplaces, scores dead in sectarian violence, or in poorly contained battles between warring political parties. In my story, I was not NAN. I was a girl in Karachi who went shopping before Eid festivities with her cousin and best friend, Saliha. In the marketplace, there was a blast followed by a fire, and Saliha perished in the flames. The conclusion of the story portrayed the grief of this child, the scorched clothes that would never be worn on Eid day, broken bangles littering the street - rather morbid for an 11-year-old to write, but it was the reality I saw every day in the news.

When Mrs. Khan passed the test papers back to us, I saw something that heartened me. "28/30 EXCELLENT!" She told us how well we had all done in the test, and followed this with an account of the story that had touched her deeply, made her cry. It was the best submission in the class, written by NAN. By me. I was best in class. I felt rather than saw curious and shocked faces of my classmates staring at me. I remember not knowing what to do with my own face. Should I smile? Should I remain serious? I settled for looking right at my teacher, the teacher who had inspired me to actually write that story to begin with. She beamed at me. "Well done!" Immediately, girls started asking me to pass my story to them so they could read it. I obliged - stunned, humbled, excited, happy, but most of all, grateful to this miracle of a woman, who probably never knew what a monumental positive force she had been in my life during that year.

Today, 18 years later, I still have that essay in my book of memories. Next to it I have a certificate recognizing my excellence in English Literature awarded to me by Mrs. Khan. These items have traveled with me from Lahore all the way to California. I have looked at them before every major academic event in my life. In my senior year of college, after pulling an all-nighter to study for the upcoming final of Eukaryotic Genetics, I opened up my book of memories and found that the story, written in fountain pen, had washed away, but Mrs. Khan's writing in red ball-point ink was still present. I breathed in looking at the essay, remembering that difficult time, the girl I was. I can take this final, no problem, I thought. Back then, my scornful classmates used to roll their eyes and warn me that I "better work hard." Now, my college friends playfully called me "the bitch who kills the curve with a 100% every time." I had come a long way from that lonely place, but my journey had begun with Mrs. Khan, with her kindness and her warmth, her compassionate eyes, her wide easy grin, her perfectly clipped nails, her fingers poised over notebooks with a red pen, and her comments on my work that elevated me in my own eyes.

Mrs. Khan passed away suddenly a few hours ago. I found out through the Facebook page for the Association of Ex Convent Students. From the shock and sorrow expressed by many young women on Facebook, I can tell that I was just one girl, one insignificant link in Mrs. Khan's epic story. There are hundreds of girls like me. There are more of us who don't fit inside a traditional mold than ones that do. We carry within us a plethora of stories. We may be shy or introverted. We may have witnessed our parents worrying about money. We may be the way we are because of other, more serious or sinister reasons. Abuse. Low self-esteem. Learning disabilities. Broken families. Mrs. Khan was among those rare educators who implicitly and readily recognize that there is diversity among their students. One size does not fit all. She knew it, and it came naturally to her. She listened to what her girls were saying to her. I could see it in the way she cocked her head to one side upon hearing a question, in the way she smoothed her hand over her hair, tucked a stray lock behind her ear, and said in that deep honey-dipped voice, "Now...", carefully weighing each word, looking right at the small face with the small voice, letting her know that her question was important, valuable, meaningful. Mrs. Khan will live on in the countless lives she touched and changed for the better.

My last meeting with Mrs. Khan was in August 2000, on the day I received my O-level result, which was absolutely average. My studying habits had lapsed considerably in my last year of school, and that was reflected in my meager 3 As. I don't know what came over me, but I went straight from school to Mrs. Khan's house and turned up unannounced at her doorstep. She opened the door and looked at me with concern in her eyes. "I have it," I said. "I have the result. It's not good. Only 3 As." She paused and took this in. "An A in English?" she asked me. "Yes," I said incredulously like she had insulted me. "Yes, of course I have an A in English." Her face broke into a grin. "Come here, NAN!" And she wrapped me into her arms.

Mrs. Khan's photograph copied from the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Lahore blog.

Photos of the school campus copied from the CJM ACES Facebook Group.

In Love We Trust

For a long time, I was drifting. I had everything that traditionally gives people a sense of being rooted and whole. I had a beautiful home, a great career, a pretty good husband who was a decidedly better friend, but I had this unwavering sense of being removed from the world, from reality, and a feeling of being dispersed, scattered, and sometimes, invisible. Flowers arrived every year on my birthday from my mother, and at the stroke of midnight, my parents-in-law called. My sisters (both of blood and marriage) filled my Facebook with displays of grand affection. And then we all went on with our lives, which were decidedly and categorically separate, not entirely because we couldn't talk about how full the moon was at the same time of the day.

And then something changed. I think it was the birth of my daughter that was the harbinger of this change. I found a singular focus - Jahan and her upbringing. I thought about my own childhood in a small house in a typical middle-class neighborhood in Lahore, always bustling with activity: Neighbors coming by to borrow sugar or eggs, or to drop off a plate of biryani, relatives dropping in unannounced, because there was no expectation to call first, my aunt and her children staying with us every summer, my mother waking me up every Saturday morning by announcing, "There's halwa poori for breakfast," going to Sunday bazaar or a sabzi mandi with my father to buy fresh produce. There was so much to do. Here, now, rooted as I was finally, thanks to motherhood, I didn't know how to provide a sense of family for my daughter. It is not right for everyone - this sense of being surrounded by people who love you, which also means that you are surrounded by many individuals who want things their way. It was certainly not something I was used to after living alone for almost a decade. And still, I found myself wondering. Will Jahan ever have what I had as a child - the absolute certainty that I was loved and treasured, not just by my parents, but by a close circle of relatives, too? Was it important? To what extent did all that love and attention in my formative years make me the person I am today?

For the last 11 months, I didn't have to wonder because my sister-in-law and her husband were staying with us. We were among family - the longest stretch in the past 11 years. This meant that I didn't have to plan my shower around Jahan's nap-time or wait for my husband to get home from work before I could do something around the house. It meant also that most days I came home to vacuumed carpets and a hot meal. Most nights, Jahan was delivered to me, bathed, dressed in her pajamas, ready for bed. If something came up at work, all I had to do was text my sister-in-law, "Can you please give Jahan dinner - I will be late." But these are superficial details. The most meaningful thing was that if there was bad news, any kind of bad news, we all carried a bit of it inside us and eased each other's burden of that knowledge. And if there was good news, any kind of good news, we all carried that inside us, too, and made it bigger, happier, better.

Two days ago, this period of having family with us ended when my sister-in-law and brother-in-law moved to a gorgeous new apartment just a few miles from our house. Emotional things were said. Gratitude was given. Love was shared. Promises were made. Traditions were initiated. "You are more than my sister," wrote my sister-in-law in a farewell card (even though we were going to see each other again that same evening). "Don't forget me now," said my brother-in-law. The mood was bittersweet all around, leaning heavily toward the "sweet." The couple was excited about setting up house. I was excited about relearning the long-forgotten dynamic of having my house to the three of us.

Then came the matter of the last meal in our house, which was a challenge for me to prepare, because I had run out of meat and this is a family of carnivores. The move was hectic and hard on the young couple. They were frazzled and extremely busy. And what did I decide to do as their good sister? Well, to trick them, of course. I bought two packets of extra firm tofu and prepared tofu tikka masala. I marketed this as paneer tikka masala to the family. While my husband was immediately able to tell it was tofu, he agreed to keep my secret. My gullible sister and brother not only ate the meal, but called me the next day from their new apartment to tell me how good it was. Then, I revealed my secret. "NO WAY!" They both cried simultaneously. "That was very sneaky! I HATE tofu!" "Apparently not," I said. But they were willing to forgive me and conceded that they had thought it was a strange kind of paneer, but it still tasted good. They trusted in me and my love for them so completely that they never even imagined I would subject them to the atrocity of eating tofu!

That's what love is in the end. The trust that someone is there, watching out for us. What I felt in my childhood home surrounded by aunts and uncles was not a brimming love, but a placid sense of trust that nothing bad could happen to me as long as they were all there. What is 11 months in the grand scheme of a lifetime? Nothing. What happens in that time-frame, however, is everything. The things you learn about each other and respect, the things you love to hate about each other, the things you hate to love, the small things, and the big things - it all matters. When they left, they took a part of our home with them, not in material things, but in memories, in habits, in thoughts, and left a bit of themselves behind. Now, this family, with its strengths and its weaknesses, exists in both homes.

Photos by Rebecca McCue - Rebecca took these photos on the eve of the move and inspired this blog post!