Squaw Valley Poetry Workshop - Day 3

I am going to let you in on a little secret: I am done with the poem for tomorrow! Yay! I found some quiet time this afternoon while Jahanara reportedly pranced around the village with her father and godmother. The poem is done, and once again, it was not what I was expecting.

This morning during workshop, I read the poem I wrote last night titled Jahanara, Age 2, Squaw Valley, June 2014. The workshop staff poet was Matthew Zapruder, whose style of leading the discussion was awesome. I was so amazed by a comment he made about my poem - I am going to paraphrase now, but he said, "This poet has a great understanding of language." I think my grin has never been wider. A lot of good and helpful things were said and I had the pleasure to hear 12 other poets read their work, including Matthew. An amazing thing happens when so many people are writing and forming a community over an extended period of time - there is inevitably a degree of resonance, for instance, one other poet and I used the word "salve" in our poems today.

In the afternoon, there was a craft talk by C.D. Wright. She took questions at the end and in response to one of them said, "Accessibility is not a high priority in poetry," a statement I have wrestled with all evening.

Tomorrow's poem is titled Cooked Until Golden Brown.

Just want to send off a quick thank you to my tribe - the people who have read my poems and given me input before each workshop - Afia, Sana, Hera, and of course, Rebecca.

I should mention that I have been exceptionally happy here - the kind of happiness that shows on my face when I am having an ordinary conversation with my sister via FaceTime. The kind of happiness that sends me into moments of extreme gratitude and reflection during which I remind myself how lucky I am. I feel full with this happiness. I am in the mountains with my family and in the company of poets. The weather is lovely, nippy at night and sunny during the day. I am here to write a poem every day. Doesn't it sound a little miraculous? This is the kind of happiness that makes me contract inward and pray, offer thanks.

Also, I made daal chawal in our studio tonight. It was yummy. 

I think I will finally get a good night's rest. Until tomorrow.

Photos by Rebecca McCue

Squaw Valley Poetry Workshop - Day 2

This is going to be a short one because today was a very full and very fulfilling day.



Jahan and Rebecca

I had my first workshop with Haryette Mullen in the morning. I read a poem titled A Poem for my Sister on the Eve of her Wedding, which was written just hours before. I got great feedback, met some really awesome poets, and in general had a very rewarding session. Afterwards, we went to the pool, where I lounged around lazily under an umbrella while Rebecca attempted to give Jahan a swimming lesson. Later in the afternoon, I attended a craft talk given by Matthew Zapruder during which he talked about overcoming the blank page. One of the things he said that I was a little surprised by was that poems should have variations in lines. If each line sounds the same, then the poem becomes boring. I am not sure if I have paid attention to this important detail in my poetry before - in fact, I am certain that I haven't. I rely very heavily on evocative imagery and string visual depictions, so often a poem has very similar lines. I have my workshop with him tomorrow, so I am nervous about writing my poem for tonight. How will I change it around? 


After the craft talk, all the poets had dinner on the deck of Olympic House. I had the pleasure of Ms. Mullen's company again and connected with two other workshop participants, as well as with Mr. Zapruder briefly towards the end of the meal. From dinner, I rushed to another dinner - my family had gone to a pizza place and I met them there and was rewarded with lots of kisses and hugs from Jahan.

It's almost 10PM now, and we are all exhausted. I got almost no sleep last night, so tonight's poem is going to be a difficult assignment.



View from the Squaw Valley Village

I thought it was apt to have a moment of reflection towards the end of the day and reaffirm that all the poems written at Squaw will be honoring the memory of Mrs. Khan, my English teacher who is no longer with us - and the world is a darker place without her.

Now, the big question is, what will I write tonight?

Squaw Valley Poetry Workshop - Day 1

My gratitude for being here is repetitive. It reminds me of feverish prayers, the quick telling of beads, the round weighty stones slipping through my fingers as I recited a particular name of Allah as an offering of thanks or as a request to make my wishes come true. Ya Raheemo, The Merciful. Ya Lateefo, The Gentle. Alhumdulillah, thanks and praise be to God, I would say a hundred times, the prayer beads jangling. I would close my eyes and give myself completely to the prayer, to the act of worship. I have been impelled to voice my happiness in a similar way here. I am thankful for being here, I have said and thought so many times.

It's a beautiful place to write. All around us are mountains. I am in the company of people who are here to practice their art. Robert Hass, the director of the program said in his introductory speech today, "We want you to write poetry. Others don't mind that you write poetry, but they don't want you to write poetry. We want you to write poetry." That's heartening. And intimidating. He also said during the same speech, "You are here because someone really loved your work. For every one person that got in, four or five people were turned away." That's a wonderful thing to hear when you are expected to write a poem and read it in front of complete strangers for workshop in a little over twelve hours. 


I find myself thinking over and over that I am grateful for having my daughter and my husband near me. I am grateful for having my best friend with me. I am grateful that friends and family are texting and emailing and getting excited for me. "How is it?" "You'll rock it!" "Just write! You can do it!" I am grateful for the opportunity to walk in the village with my daughter, who ran around excitedly, was an amazing little traveler, and is now humming a song as she dozes off to sleep. I couldn't have come here without them. I couldn't have written a word without them because this is my writing process. This is how I write, finding time around Jahan's requests for attention. 

I am grateful that I will not only generate work here, but also have an audience - that is an important part of the creative process - to get input, to improve, that is the real goal, always. I met some really interesting people today. There is a sense of bonding within this group of sixty odd people - we are all here for the same reason. And it's a good reason. It's a damn good reason. 

And with that, I must go and write a poem - in less than 12 hours, I will be reading it to an audience. I am afraid of that, but it was mollifying to know that others feel the same way. We are all in the same proverbial boat. Fortitude, my friends, I found myself thinking as I was leaving the reception dinner tonight. 

OK, writing time. I will try to update this space as often as possible mainly because this enriching experience should be shared with others. 

Good night!

I Can Only Be My Best Self

These days I find myself wishing to be the woman who writes this blog, not just when I sit in front of my computer but all the time. Her life is pretty good. She is a poet and a clinical researcher. She has an adorable toddler. She has a lovely house on a hill and the ability to watch sunrise caressing the winding trails and roads sprawled below her. She has the luxury to write about things lost and forgotten from a safe distance. There are a few people who like what she writes. Every day, she is able to get at least two uninterrupted hours of listening to audiobooks. She is poised to do bigger and better things. She is so positive in her writing. She talks about seizing the day and bottling up happiness and loving her naughty toddler. She talks about cooking and loving. Her life is pretty good from this vantage point. Pretty damn good. And I want to have her life all the time rather than  during the single hour it takes me to write and proofread a blog post. 


 Yesterday, in a small group of smart and sensitive women that constitute the Desi Writers' Lounge Bay Area Readers' Club, we talked about The Goldfinch. I insisted that several characters in the book probably had personality disorders. Sahar Ghazi, an extremely perceptive member of the group and a dear friend, challenged me on this notion. "Why do you think they have personality disorders," Sahar asked. "We are learning about them only through the main character's perspective. Maybe they are completely normal and going through life on a pretense. Maybe they are not opening up their true selves in front of him. People live their life pretending sometimes," I am paraphrasing, but that is the general arc of Sahar's view. I think I presented a different  and opposing argument, something feeble and completely petulant like, "But I don't pretend. And who pretends? How can they do that?" Puerile - to say the least. 

The fact is, everyone pretends to some degree. Yes, this is the space where I come to be honest with myself, call myself on things that I did wrong, and talk about how wronged I have felt in the past due to other people's insensitivity. But honesty has degrees, too. It has layers and components. Often people reveal part of a fact and it is up to the reader to brush off the sand occluding their vision from this partial truth, and like an archeologist, try to determine what the whole story is. Think about it. We do it all the time. The missing pieces are sometimes inherently present in what is revealed - the tone of voice, the choice of words, the tangent of the neck, the slope of shoulders, the audible sighs, the wistful eyes. The bright smile that is plastered on one's face as a confirmation of happiness has nothing on all these other overbearing signs, and some poor folks are just completely transparent - I am beginning to think I may be one of them. 

I guess what I am trying to get at in a very roundabout way is that we often think our best self is our happiest self. That is not necessarily true. I am a poet - my writing is dependent upon being miserable. The poems I write when I am happy do not resonate with me and probably not with my readers. I need superficial tragedies, arguments, disagreements, hurt feelings, a sense of being wronged in order to create work that has even a whisper of being placed at a lit mag. And though most of the time I bring my cheerful positive self to this blog (and I will not be surprised if you all stand up and say, "But Noor, you are a morose writer and you don't bring your cheerful self to this blog"), that is not my "normal" self. When I write in this space, I emulate the woman I want to be - the one who stands in her balcony every morning watching the sun bleed into the sky, the one who feels a sense of utter and profound contentment, the one who writes about life's little matters because, after all, those are the matters that matter. I wouldn't say that it is an entirely inaccurate depiction of myself, but it is certainly an extension of my character. 

You'll forgive me, of course, for this pretense, won't you? I am a poet who likes to experiment with identity and belonging. This is a natural result of that, you see. In any case, I wrote very honestly just now, and so I must extend my hand towards you in salutation. Hi! Good to meet you today!

Photos by Rebecca McCue

Lessons My Toddler Teaches Me

Before Jahanara turned two, I decided I was not going to ever roll my eyes at one of her tantrums and say resignedly, "Terrible twos!" Instead, I coined the term "Terrific twos," because it's all about how you see it, right? Wrong! I witnessed a spectacular melt-down today all because I spilled some water on the table and followed this unbelievably clumsy act with more serious crimes, like giving my daughter the wrong bowl and the wrong snack and saying all the wrong things, "No, I will not give you such-and-such until you say 'please'!" What I observed after she had calmed down and was happily singing along one of the songs of The Fresh Beat Band and eating her dinner is that toddlers have immense stores of will-power. If I were still as angry as I was this afternoon during the tantrum, I would have said that toddlers are amazingly stubborn. However, we have reached a mutual truce, I have been given lots of conciliatory kisses and have also been rewarded with finished dinner and dessert, so I am feeling generous. My daughter has great, indefatigable will-power with strong lungs to support her in all her quests allowing her to be heard and understood, loud and clear. She knows what she wants and she knows she wants it NOW! 

Conceivably, I also had bottomless treasure troves of will-power when I was two (and probably for a long time after that when it came to a certain book I wanted, or a midnight meal, et cetera). What happened to all that determination? Why is it that now when I make plans, I am not always able to see them through? Exhaustion is one excuse - I possibly have too much going on and cannot focus all my will-power solely on achieving a particular goal, but if I had half the tenacity that my daughter possesses, I would post here more often, I would walk around the neighborhood every day, I would eat well, sleep well, and generally live well - essentially, I would do everything I claim to want.

Incidentally, I was talking to a writer friend of mine about the importance of having a writing group. It is absolutely essential for me to have people in my life who can hold me accountable to the things I want to do - so clearly, I don't have enough determination to write every day. Often, I wait until Rebecca says in a mock-annoyed voice, "You know, I have been waiting for a blog post" to let myself realize, "Oh, right, it's been how many days since the last post?" Writers certainly need their tribe, people they trust and who are invested in their success to keep them moving forward, plugging away at their stories, their poems. At the same time, we love self-flagellation. We love to count the number of ways in which we fail. Our nerve often wanes before our will-power does, and then the latter, too, fizzles out like an a flame extinguished unceremoniously. This is something toddlers never do. They are tenacious little humans, demanding what they want with all the might in their small bodies - and they use their bodies creatively to display their demands: they shake themselves, thrash on the floor, roll around, hang on to anything - a parent's arm, the refrigerator door - very creative even in the midst of a complete emotional catastrophe. Then, they either get what they want if the parent admits defeat, or they get distracted if the parent has enough energy to tap into sources of diversion (Look, baby! Elmo!), or they tire themselves out and decide to get on with their lives (or, more accurately, they decide to conserve their energy for an admirable battle later in the day so that the parent's nerves are fried to perfection - golden brown and caramelized). In any case, they move on and are perfectly happy to do so. There is no sense of failure. There is most certainly no self-loathing. The outcome of the toddler's willful behavior regardless of whether she achieved her desired results or not is always the same: She moves on.

And so, motherhood teaches me yet another important lesson - to take a page from Jahan's proverbial book. Exercise more will-power. Try to be consumed by a singular focus - writing, for example, or eating healthy meals - and go after it with a kind of possessed madness. And if by chance or by design, I am unsuccessful on a given day, I should simply take a deep breath and move on. Tomorrow is another day after all, a brand new morning for terrific tenaciousness.

Photos by Rebecca McCue

Publications, etc.

As per tradition, I want to share my recent publications with the Goll Gappay family.

3 poems published in aaduna - Holiday House, Atonement, and Weatherman.

3 poems published in Apeiron Review - Father (Page 53), The Other Woman (Page 61), and Dispossession (Page 62). 

1 poem published in Blue Lake Review - Nostalgia. 

Also re-plugging my poetry and interview publication in ARDOR Literary Magazine earlier this year before the new issue is released. 

Speaking of new issues, the next issue of Papercuts will be released soon. We are in the process of wrapping up poetry and prose editing for Volume 13: Metropolis. We received some wonderful poems exploring the complicated relationships city inhabitants, natives, drifters, visitors, and travelers form with places, some of which I could relate to completely as I saw images similar to those I have nurtured of my own hometown unfolding on the pages before me, and others, which displayed beautiful exotic imagery that I was completely enamored with. We have a remarkable selection lined up for the next issue, but now is your chance to read the strong selection of poetry and prose featured in Volume 12: Dog Eat Dog, which was also our inaugural print issue.

An important and exciting announcement that I have been accepted to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Poetry Workshop, which will be held from June 21 to 28. During the workshop, I will be writing at least one poem per day and will be dedicating everything penned at the workshop to my English teacher, Mrs. Khan, who inspired me to pursue and polish my writing.

I am also working through some Goll Gappay posts for you all. Rebecca's photos continue to inspire (and taunt) me to write.

Back with a real post soon.

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.

Two Old Poems on Mother's Day

A poem written 6 or 7 years ago. Posting it here to celebrate my mother on Mother's Day.

My Mother's Voice
 
My mother's voice
is like her belly,
four times pregnant,
loose now and soft,
injured, healed, scarred.

My mother's voice
is aged with cancer,
the quiet, tricksy beast
that ate her breast,
cracked, guarded, uncertain.

She says
she is half the woman
she used to be
with one breast gone.
I say
to this warrior who birthed me,
your scars are proud battle wounds,
the one across your belly
and the one that is left of your breast
make you twice the woman,
and to me,
twice the mother.

My mother's voice
is like jasmine scent in my dreams.
she speaks and sings to heal my hurts,
because her voice can travel
farther than her body.

Her voice can embrace me
when she cannot.

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A poem written roughly two years ago in the depths of guilt and writer's block. 

Remorse

My daughter looks at me
as though I am a wonderful thing.
I come home from work,
exhausted from physical aches
and those that can't be isolated and named.
I hold her, she coos in my arms,
everything else melts into a myriad of colors,
dissolving into insignificance.

My mother sits on the sofa,
and looks at me: I am her wonderful thing, too.
She has shed clandestine tears
these past many days.
We say little to each other -
she takes care of the baby, cooks, cleans,
I bury my face in my daughter's neck,
breathe in her clean baby smell.

It's been a hard summer for two mothers:
one new and one old.

Photos by Rebecca McCue

If it comes back to you, it's yours

A few months ago, I packed up two boxes of books that were gathering dust on my shelves. I made a smaller box of some paperbacks and brought them to a makeshift library in one of the hallways of the building that houses my office. I set them on the shelves of this small bookcase and forgot about them.

Last week, I was heading out from work to get a pedicure and didn't have a book to read, so I grabbed one of my old paperbacks from the makeshift library. Once I was seated comfortably on the massage chair at my neighborhood nail studio, my feet soaking in the comforting warm bath, I leaned back and reached for the book in my bag. When I opened it, a card fell into my lap. It was dated April 2006, written just over 8 years ago - the last time I had seen my sisters. It was a farewell note they had written for me and left in my bedroom while I was in my classes, having chickened out of taking them to the airport because I knew I would cry. In the upper left corner of the card was a giant scrawl made by my then 8-year-old brother, whom I have had the good fortune to meet twice in the last eight years. That sweet little boy became a young man while I wasn't looking, and apparently, based on reports from my sisters, his penmanship really hasn't improved at all. My siblings and mother had just spent 9 months with me and were going home when that card was written. At the time, my sisters and I didn't know that we would not see each other again for 8 years (and counting), that we would miss each other's weddings, birthdays, graduations, that the absence of one stamp on a green passport, dependent so heavily on the diluted and withdrawn perception of the immigration official behind bullet-proof glass windows at the American Embassy in Pakistan, would have the power to keep us apart so long - without any other tangible reason.

How was this a coincidence? On roughly the eighth anniversary of our goodbye, the farewell card my sisters had written had found its way back to me. I am trying to describe what it was like to find this card, hold it in my hands, know that when it was penned and left to me, we were still just girls, barely able to understand the nuances of separation and the dynamics of staying connected distantly. We couldn't have imagined that we would not be present at each other's weddings. I would have laughed if a fortune-teller had told me that I would have a daughter who would not be held by her aunts for at least the first 3 years of her life. We didn't know this back then - when my sisters poured their love into a piece of card-stock, and I found comfort in it on lonely evenings while I read a book and used it as a bookmark. We didn't know that after that April, our lives and the map of our family would change. We didn't know that we would all unravel on our own because of nasty surprises, disappointments, and betrayals just a month after that card was written. We didn't know that our mother would be diagnosed with breast cancer that summer, and words like "mastectomy," "lymph nodes," "chemotherapy," and "bone scan" would quietly creep into our conversations. How could we have known any of this, the oldest of us being only 21 and the youngest barely 18? We were...just girls, three sisters who loved to get their nails done together every two weeks - how fitting, then, for me to find this exquisite reminder of that carefree time while I was getting a pedicure.

I miss my sisters. I don't feel it most of the time. I have my life, they have theirs - we try to make time for each other, we share our triumphs and losses, we share silly stories, we show each other our new purchases on Whatsapp or FaceTime, but I miss them. I want to be able to take certain things for granted again - like the three of us being able to sit in bed and watch Friends reruns all night, or making sauteed mushrooms and knowing that my sisters will enjoy them and not look at me like I have lost my mind for eating fungi (that's what my husband calls mushrooms), or talking about Prisoner of Azkaban and the Time-Turner for hours because something doesn't make sense to the middle sister (it's always the middle sister), or just dropping everything we're doing and going to get our nails done, picking out colors for each other, sitting side by side, talking about what to do for dinner, or whose birthday is coming up, or the new books we want to read - you know, the simple, seemingly inconsequential things, the details of daily life, completely ordinary, but so wholesome.

This card with their words that found its way back to me, is a memory of just such a time that came to a close in April 2006. What would we have done differently if we had known our separation would be so long and monumental? Would I have gathered the courage to take them to the airport, to hug them more, to apologize for being the short-tempered big sister all the time? Would I have written them a note like this, too, a time capsule to find them by surprise one pleasant afternoon? There is no way to know, but I am so grateful to the universe for bringing those happy memories of my sisters back to me in the shape of this card.