Back to Basics

It is natural, I tell myself, to not feel particularly happy about the turn of the year. Why must I muster the enthusiasm of ten years ago, the festive evenings of foggy Lahore, the midnight trip to Data Sahib's shrine, the donation of a haleem deg to the street-dwelling citizens who counted on the generosity and ardent prayers of their middle-class counterparts for a free meal; or the celebratory visits to street vendors in the underbelly of the city, slithering with activity at all hours, food, chai, other vices; or the solemn prayer I offered every year specifically on the night that traversed two years -- make me good, make me how You want me to be, make it a good year, how You see it best. Why must I treat this as though it is any different from any other day of the year? It's not as if there is anything to celebrate or commemorate, really. 2014 was, after all, a taxing year for the world.

My heart finds comfort from the world at home. I find myself impulsively reorganizing cabinets, cleaning out the kitchen, finding expired boxes of cereal and smelly mason jars of sunflower seeds at the back of the pantry shelves and throwing them away. A new beginning of sorts. Clean shelves, a do-over for the pantry and refrigerator, and perhaps one for me at home in the kitchen. I find a salve for my restive spirit in making large meals, inviting friends and their kids for holiday lunches, taking out the nice china and then methodically washing and drying it by hand. As I write this, there is chicken curry bubbling on the stove, sautéed mushrooms ready on the side, a salad chopped and prepared. It's only us tonight and a friend we haven't seen in a while. We will gather around the table, talk about jobs and houses, about things that have nothing to do with having embarked on a new year -- the real things, the good things, the things that matter rather than the transient headiness one is prone to feeling at this time of the nascent year, the resolutions shiny and full of possibilities, that unmistakable sense of being at the verge of something significant -- an improvement, a second chance, a remedy for every mistake we have yet to commit.

And so, weary from the joy that surrounds me and without begrudging anyone their celebration, I find solace in simple things -- back to basics -- in cooking: smelling the freshly grated garlic roasting in the frying pan, watching the butter sizzle as it slides between the walls of the pan, the thickly sliced portabella whistling out a sigh as I press down with my spatula, the vegetables crisp under my practiced knife, such pleasure in the smells and sounds of a home-cooked meal; in poetry: in the books and magazines that have been piling up steadily over the last few months, collections and anthologies, books on writing, honing the craft, practicing it, owning it, and some delightful fiction, too; in writing: here; in thinking: everywhere. 

Perhaps that reads too much like a list of resolutions, but to me, it is an act of reaffirmation. Life is too short -- if there's one thing we have learned from 2014, it is that this cliche is unfortunately true. Staying true to yourself, to the things that delight you, make you you, give you lasting joy, is what you should be striving for. For me, it is coming back to the basics, to ordinary comforts, to little matters that matter.

Happy new year!

Haye, Peshawar

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

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

Haye, haye, haye...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two entries from November

For a very short part of November, I decided to write a "poem" every day. The writing turned out to be reflective, but not quite traditionally poetic. I thought I'd share two of the posts here. 

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November 2

A Typical Day

It was Sunday so I made scrambled eggs served with toast and strawberry jam from a local farm. The mason jar had a homemade sticker and a square of checkered linen tucked between the rim and the lid. It reminded me of picnics I read about in children’s books back home. Cold sandwiches and fresh fruit and milk and cheese and happy children.

It was chilly but the sun was out. We had visitors and everyone was wearing Giants sweatshirts to celebrate the World Series win. “You have to teach me enough about sports so I can at least hold a superficial conversation,” I whispered to my husband. I made tea. Children ran around the coffee table in a post-Halloween candied craze. I wished for a backyard.

My husband said, “Oh no. The BBC has an update. ‘More than 50 people were killed and at least 100 injured in a suicide bombing close to Pakistan's only border crossing with India.’” We became quiet for a moment. The children kept running, their giggles sounding manic in the silence. “Please don’t say such things in front of the children,” I said and carried the tea things to the kitchen.

For the rest of the afternoon, we talked about college funds and good school districts. I am feeling cramped in this townhouse. I want a backyard. I really want a backyard.

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November 1

Old Novembers

How did November come to pass in those years, in that city?

It was such an in-between month. The monsoons were gone, but the winter hadn’t quite arrived.

Mid-month we would celebrate my mother’s birthday with magic-markered messages on sheets of recycled newsprint and a dinner at Mei-Kong where we got toasted almonds on warm stoneware saucers before the meal. The residue of salt on fingertips is still so vivid in my memory that I find myself tracing thumb over index finger in circles, trying to find the abrasive particles, to lick them off.

But what about all other days? The rest of November? When did the fog start rolling in? When did the street vendors set up tea stalls? When did mother bring down suitcases of winter clothes and boxes of chenille comforters from the attic? Was November the harbinger of seasonal change?

No crisp memories. No concrete answers.

Time is lost in time.
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Photo by Rebecca McCue  

The State of Not Writing

Goll Gappay turned two while I was absent from its pages. Many times, I opened this page and thought, I've nothing much to say right now. Instead, I read and felt sorry for not writing, for not having inspiration enough to write even a single line. I complained to friends, I can't write anymore. The response was always a familiar roll of the eyes, here she goes again, and a frustrated, "Yes you can. Did you even try?" They are all right, of course. And yet, I drove through the much needed Northern California rain, thought about the rise and fall of life, ruminated on journeys and their transience, and all the while I sensed a poem hovering under the realm of my consciousness. I had several dreams about my father, about seeing him after 12 years, about holding on to things that cannot be named, and letting go of those that can. I experienced restlessness over not producing anything, not even ideas, not even a phrase that could be written, let alone celebrated. 

There are so many reasons for not writing, you see. I am busy at work. My toddler is, well, a toddler. I was briefly traveling. It's the holidays. I have to buy Christmas gifts. Potty training is a looming monster. I am tired. I am not truly "present." And yet, there is only one reason to write that overshadows all of these arguments with the tenacity of its truth -- "because I must."

So, here I am again. No poem in sight, but an image from Joan Didion's Play it as it lays whirlpooling in my thoughts, "The sun glazing over the Pacific..." Nothing extraordinary about this particular image when you look at how exceptional Didion's work is. "The sun glazing over the Pacific." And yet there is poetry in it, the loneliness, the longing...or is that me trying to find all of this, identify, memorize, craft it all -- but how?

Does a poet relearn the rules of the game every time she emerges from self-imposed hiding? Take a pen. Open notebook. Start doodling. Write anything. Write, dammit, write for god's sake write, just write. It is so daunting, this wait, this gloom, the mounting anxiety in this time of silence and loneliness where there is neither comfort nor words. Sure, writers understand each other's woes when one complains, "I can't do it anymore. It doesn't give me any pleasure. It is torture." In fact, this is the exact conversation a talented writer-friend had with me a week or so ago. To which my immediate response is, yes, of course, it is torture, but for most of us there is no alternative. We must write. There is not even a "yes, but." We must simply do it. It's a double-edged sword -- equal parts injury and relief.

And so I am here, to get an infusion of relief. To relearn this art that gives me so much joy and just as much misery, but let's face it, mostly joy. "The sun glazing over the Pacific," not the sun's warmth, not the hot sun, not the yellow sun, or the orange sun, or the burnt sun, simply the sun. And the glaze...how fascinating, this phrase, the sensory reaction it invokes. For now, maybe it's enough to soak this in. Then, maybe, a poem, or a few verses. Another blog. That's how it starts again. And maybe it will start tonight. If not, I must keep clawing my way there.

Photos by Rebecca McCue

Being a Working Mom is TOUGH! I love it anyway.

I started working full-time when my daughter was 3 months old. I would cry during the commute each way, cursing the traffic, thinking desperately that those precious minutes could have been spent with my baby. The baby in question is 3 years old now. I am still a full-time working mother while also serving as the Associate Editor of a literary publication. I do not cry in traffic now, but I still curse. Loudly. Unabashedly. It's good for the soul. And the moment after a curse word rebounds from the car's interior and disappears into the air is so....well, zen.

When I see the little human I brought into this world, that unruly hair, the ubiquitous smile, those shining almond eyes, I feel love, sure, supposedly the purest form of it as all mothers will readily tell you, but more than that, I feel pride. I feel proud of my little human. We have come a long way, you and me, I tell her. You were a tiny thing, and now look at you. You are assertive. You are strong. You are beautiful. You know what you want and how to get it. You have such a strong belief in yourself. Such spirit. Such will. I hope it never diminishes. When I drop her off at school, she gives me a kiss and says, "Bye, Mummy," so eager to start the day with her friends and teachers, where Mummy just doesn't fit. And then, when I pick her up, she comes running to me, saying, "Mummy! Mummy! Mummy!" My well-adjusted little human. A lot of tears were shed while we got here. A lot of doubts were aired. And even today, on those rare days when we encounter tummy troubles, or a sore throat, or a waxing fever, I put everything else aside. My sole focus becomes this little wonderful person who needs no one else in the world except her Mummy. It's hard to even sign on to email on such days, to answer a simple question about a work issue. Work becomes a burden. Why am I doing this? What is the point? I should only be with my little human, this sweet girl with her curls and cuddles. And then, she gets up and goes to the kitchen. She reaches for her play-doh basket and begins to play, or goes to her drums and starts making some music.

It's tough to be a working mom. Yet I do it day after day. We wake up, we start our day together, experience rewards and setbacks during the day, and we meet again in the evening, coming together, sharing, loving, a full circle so to speak. It would be wrong for me to say that in this wholesome picture, nothing is lost. There is always an opportunity cost. Something is lost when something is gained. In this case, my daughter and I end up spending 6 meaningful hours together during the day -- hours in which we are soaking up each other's presence, playing, reading, cuddling, talking -- not counting bedtime and sleep hours. 6 hours each weekday. But they are really good hours. Happy. Rewarding. Rejuvenating.

Choosing to work is a very important decision for me. I consciously make the choice to go to work every day. It is not something that happened to me. It is something I chose to do because having a career is absolutely necessary, not only for my sanity and well-being, but also to set an example for my girl. I get positive reinforcement for my decision every day by witnessing how well-adjusted she is, and I get it from the past, too. I think of my mother who has worked long hours for most of her adult life and is still gainfully employed, and yet she always managed to remain her daughters' best friend. And I think of how I left home at 18 and made my own life, a career, another home. I would want my daughter to make her own life too, find love and independence and success on her own terms. And she undoubtedly will one day. If this time of mine, these key years of youth and energy and vitality are invested solely in the very noble and very rewarding service of my daughter and I do not craft a place for myself out there in the world in the process, not hone my skills in the workplace, not discover my true potential as an individual, as a contributor to my industry, not make an impact in the field of clinical research, which I am passionate about, where does that leave me? This is a very personal fear and will probably not resonate at all with many women who have extremely fulfilling lives without being in the workforce.

I love my daughter, but I love my career, too. And I think I would be an unhappy mother and an unhappy person if I wait for her to be off and discover love and life until I can do both of those things myself. For me, motherhood and my career do not just work in parallel, they define each other. I am very good at my job because I want to be a present, attentive, and loving mother in my hours away from the office. I am a good mother because I have a rewarding professional life. This is exactly what I would wish for my daughter with one tiny amendment -- a longer maternity leave.


Photos by Rebecca McCue

A Celebration of Growth

When I was a teenager, I was convinced that I knew everything. I had no uncertainties. I was invincible. I knew what was right and what was wrong and what was right for me. I knew wholly what I wanted and how I was going to get it. When I was a teenager, I knew everything about myself and about the world. I was practically an adult. 

I am 3 months away from turning 30. The big three-oh. The life-changing event. The age that used to sound "so old" all those years ago. The age that has a whole episode of Friends devoted to it with Rachel Green lamenting her "plan" and being very poor company for her friends. The birthday that, more often than not, invokes sadness and fear. The age that brands you: "There you have it. You are an adult now whether you like it or not." I don't feel any of those things right now. Instead, I look at my teenage self and shake my head at her, "Foolish girl." The truth is, I am on the verge of turning 30 and I am still clueless. There is so much growing up to do yet.

It is disconcerting to realize that all of the most important decisions of my life, with the exception of choosing to have a child, were made while I was a teenager -- heady, opinionated, filled to the point of bursting with this sense of being true, being right, that damned righteousness that still trickles out of my mouth in unguarded moments. Surprisingly, those decisions have been fruitful, but that is likely just dumb luck rather than a testament to my foresight or wisdom. Exactly 2.5 weeks ago, I started a new job. After 6 years, I left Stanford and took a management position with a start-up. It was time to move on, and I love my new job -- this is called growing up. Earlier this year, I took on a bigger role at Papercuts. I transitioned to the role of Associate Editor from Poetry Editor -- an experience that has been challenging and enlightening -- so this is how much work and planning and work and planning and work and planning it takes to bring out a magazine -- this is also called growing up. I am in the midst of concluding a 10-week poetry course I was co-teaching for Desi Writers' Lounge. During the last few weeks, I had the privilege of witnessing the course participants stretch their wings, take chances, push themselves to produce impressive poems. I learned as I taught -- this is also called growing up. My girl is beginning to talk to me. In the morning, I wake her up, and she says, "Lie down, please! Sleepy time, please!" A scene reminiscent of my own childhood. I get ready for work and she says, "Pretty!" She wants to change several outfits a day because her clothes are "wet" or "yucky" or something else. My daughter is turning into a real person -- this is also called growing up. Today, I joined a gym -- dare I say it -- this is also, in fact, called growing up.

And all this is just the beginning. I feel I am at the cusp of something far greater than I realize. I am not fully able to absorb or observe this, but it is a truth I am beginning to live by:  Life is so fluid. Learning is on a spectrum that is infinite. How does one ever satiate one's appetite for learning? How does one ever reach the point of satisfaction where one finally feels grown up, accomplished, done? With all the uncertainties I am thriving under, at least I know the answer to this one question is never. The recipe for a fulfilled life is in continuing to find delight in small developments, in observing and experiencing personal growth constantly. 

So, I look back at my insolent fifteen-year-old self who believes she knows everything and say just to push her buttons, "I'll ask you again 15 years!"

Photos by Rebecca McCue

Examining Happiness

Lately, I have been thinking of happiness and letting go, and the opposite of letting go as well -- having a choke-hold on the past, hanging on to it for sustenance, but the wrong kind of dependency, you see, one that poisons you from the inside out. I have also been making an effort to parse out what happiness stands for -- is it the same as contentment? Is it a sense of giddy excitement, or one of calm acceptance? I am certain it is safe to say that it is an individual phenomenon -- I enjoy bookstores and coffee and knitting and Downton Abbey; you may not. Et cetera. However, there is one very strong quality of happiness that I have come to understand even though I have not been able to implement that understanding in my daily life consistently so far. Happiness is a state of mind, not a milestone. What do I mean by this? Let's examine.

The way I have seen happiness my entire life is thus: It is a reactive emotion. I will do something good, I will meet a milestone, I will be rewarded, therefore I will be happy. As children, my sisters and I chalked out an elaborate plan to raise enough money so our parents could buy us a bigger house. We sketched floor plans of our imaginary living space, designed furniture layouts for rooms, started collecting decorative accents for the cozy home library in our new house. This went on for months. We got the idea of starting a neighborhood car wash -- it was either from Archie comics or Sweet Valley Kids books. This would never happen -- three girls running a car wash service in Pakistan? Such shame. Besides, no one would trust their vehicle to schoolgirls who were so spoilt they couldn't even braid their own hair. We thought about selling our collection of books at the Old Books bookstore to raise some money, and we did, after which I cried for weeks at the meager sum and the loss of my beloved books. All this for the idea of a new home, more space, our own rooms, because surely then we'd be so much happier, we'd fight less, we'd feel grown up, we'd have a library and a playroom, and our own little kitchenette, and that would make us happy. New house = milestone = happiness. It took our parents weeks to realize what kind of plotting and planning was going on right underneath their noses. We were taken out to dinner, we were told books don't buy houses, and are like dear friends -- you never sell them, and a car wash or lemonade stand was most certainly out of the question. My father commissioned new desks from a carpenter complete with locking drawers for each of us. New books were purchased to quell our broken hearts. I was given the adjoining room to branch out. We spread ourselves in the space we already had. We felt happy -- reasonably so -- in the same circumstances as before.

No lesson was learned back then, unfortunately. Until recently, I thought of happiness in this very negative and reward-driven way: "I will be happy when I write a poem -- then, when I publish the poem -- then, when the poem wins an award. I will be happy when I am successful -- success, undefined, an amalgam of lofty plans and unrealistic goals. I will be happy when the baby starts sleeping through the night -- then, when the baby is sleep-trained -- then, when the baby starts talking." And so on -- one milestone after another. All the while, I didn't realize that happiness is something deeper. Like sadness, happiness, too, is pervasive. It is a state of mind. It is there, or it isn't. And if it is not, then one must go looking for it, because it is rather pliant, it gives at the slightest push, at the most cursory of investigations. How I have started to think about happiness very consciously is thus: "I am happy when I read and write poetry, therefore I should make an effort to do so. I am happy because I have a rewarding career. My baby makes me so happy, period." I have started to remind myself to recognize the various parts of happiness, this state of mind, and it has thrived under this attention. Of course, I devolve, I become morose due to years of habit, I start to go down the spiral of "If only X happens, I will be happy," but I try to correct myself. It was harder in the beginning and it is still rather difficult, but it gets easier each time. If I find happiness in something, I just go and do it, without preamble, without explanation, without feeling guilt over it, without trying to justify it to myself -- I simply allow myself to be. It is absolutely more arduous than giving myself up to melancholy, but it is so worth the effort.

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. 

Time passes differently for you and me

"There was seldom anything addressed to her. Only an occasional letter from Manash. She resisted reading them, given what they reminded her of. Manash and Udayan, studying together in her grandparents' flat, and Udayan and Gauri getting to know one another as a result. A time she'd crushed between her fingertips, leaving no substance, only a protective residue on the skin."
- Jhumpa Lahiri in The Lowland

I felt this way once before when I took another journey with Jhumpa Lahiri. It was a different book, The Namesake, but I remember the landscape of this author's creativity, the topography of sentences, the valleys and deltas, the mountains and forests. This is a fertile place. Lahiri takes me back to my home -- so different from the home of Ashima in The Namesake, and certainly nowhere near The Lowland of Gauri's past -- and yet, I find myself reaching back into time, recognizing moments that were lost for so long that I had forgotten I even experienced them. This is what great writing does. 


The Lowland is not for the faint-hearted reader. It is not a kind book, but it is an important one. For a novel, it packs an expansive history lesson, a history that I, being on the other side of the border from India, never learned in textbooks and lectures. But more importantly, at its core, the novel was about time, particularly the past, a slice of time crystallized and settled into the realities of individuals affected by it. Time taking hold of lives and just not letting go. My father used to say to me, "The words that leave your tongue and the time that leaves your hand will never return." And he wouldn't warn me further than that. He wouldn't instruct me to use the time I had wisely or to hold my tongue. He would simply state a fact and leave the action up to me. I thought back to this statement of my father's that fell short of the technical definition of an advice, but governed so many of my decisions as an adult -- a life lesson, I call it still -- and I thought of it often while I read The Lowland. 

How much of our lives do we forget? How much do we remember? Two people who share a moment remember it differently, the quality of the moment changes for each individual, the feel of sun on skin, the sound of a heart beating loud enough to drown out all sound for one person and the same rhythm not even audible to another, the truth and its tributaries running different courses to irrigate the two lives -- it's all relative. And sometimes one person simply forgets or knows only half of the truth or a different version of it altogether. Then what? Who do you share your reality with then? You simply guard it within you. 

The Lowland compelled me to reach into the crevasses of memory and examine some caged realities that exist only for me now because they've been forgotten by everyone else. They are not so easily crushed for me, they roll between my fingertips like cool marble, grave, unyielding, ever present.

Photos by Rebecca McCue

Things My Parents Don't Say

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

Vintage Noor circa 1987

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

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

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

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

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