Where Else Would We Be?
I took the day off of work to drive to Houston. Or rather, sit in the backseat to Houston — my Baba wouldn’t give me the keys. I felt like a teenager again. The initial transition back home during my last two months of college was bizarre to say the least. I went from having my own place on a boisterous campus full of friends to attending convocation via Zoom from my Cars-themed childhood bedroom. The move wasn’t all negative; it brought me back to living upstairs from the best biryani kitchen in Tulsa. But then again, my first job “interview” was conducted on the phone while I sorted through old toys to donate. Five months into this new normal, my Mama informed me of her plans to bring her mother to Oklahoma so that we could spend time with her. I vehemently opposed that proposal. I argued that it was safer for Nani to remain in Pakistan, that our state was a hotbed for COVID cases, and that the vaccine was only a few weeks away. The flight alone is too risky for a woman in her 80s, I insisted. A month later I was on my way to IAH in Houston to pick her up.
In many ways, my life has been an inverted image of Nani’s. I was only three years old when my parents migrated from Karachi to small-town Alabama. Nani was born in colonized British India but moved across the yet-to-be-formed Punjab border during the Partition in 1947. I have only visited Pakistan a couple of times — the same number as Nani’s trips abroad. In the backseat, I try to recollect my memories with Nani and I can only think of three. There was one trip to Pakistan in elementary school wherein my Mama feared that I got tetanus, my sister’s wedding in Tulsa which was such an astir affair that we barely had time to sleep, and a week-long, bedridden excursion in Karachi after a terrible allergic reaction. I have never seen grass in Pakistan. Nani grew up in its fields. She shook ripe mangoes down from trees, rode buffalos back from her pastures, and slept under the stars. Once every few months, my Mama would pass me the phone while she was on a call with Nani, but I never heard any of these stories. There was very little that we could communicate to one another as we did not even speak the same language. She spoke Punjabi and I had grown up with Urdu. They were similar enough to get through how I was feeling and what the weather looked like that week, but any discussions more complex than that would have required an interpreter. She would end our conversation with a prayer and my Mama would take back her phone. I left every call wondering what we would talk about if we could.
I look out of the window and see Mama guiding Nani by her walker towards our car. She has a pink scarf over her head, it matches the rest of her salwar kameez. As they approach, I step outside to help Nani slowly climb into the car. “How was flying,” my Mama asks her loudly so that we can all hear.
“It was very long,” Nani responds, “Islamabad is too far from Karachi.”
“You’re not in Islamabad,” Mama informs her. “You’re not in Pakistan at all, you’re here in America with me.”
Nani takes a long, silent look out of the window and then turns to smile at me.
***
Nani has diabetes. She also has a particular proclivity towards eating what she enjoys and a strong aversion to the advice of doctors. Long story short, Nani has no teeth and needs two shots of insulin a day, every day. And if you forget to give her the medicines she needs to take, she will not remind you because she does not want to take them. They’re “too sour.” She will curl her lips onto her gums and look at you deeply with her caring brown eyes and assure you that you have already given her the necessary dosage for the day despite the fact that the pills are still in your hand. However, Nani has a love for good conversation. In broken Punjabi, I ask Nani about her hair to distract her while I administer a shot. She explains that she didn’t like that her hair turned white so a few years ago she put henna in it to turn it red. It suits you, I tell her. She giggles.
Over the next several weeks, I learn enough Punjabi to hold a conversation with Nani. We discuss our favorite birds over breakfast, jokingly argue over whether or not she should learn English, and share more stories about childhood shenanigans. Within a few months I’ve learned enough words and she’s picked up enough of my mannerisms that we can watch Pakistani serial dramas and scrutinize our least favorite characters together. Some nights, I sneak home fries for us to secretly share and in the sweltering heat, we devour snow cones. We watch all of the Jurassic Park movies until one morning she confesses that she has been having nightmares of “one of the large lizards” chasing her down the street. I laugh and console her, there will be no more “lizard” movies for us. We spend each morning and each night together as I administer her shot and we eat, discussing either politics or the quality of sleep we had the night before. One day, the idea of war comes up. Nani looks unsettled.
I have known for a long time that she has seen her fair share of violence. After all, she lived near the border of India and Pakistan during two wars and was, herself, a migrant in one of the bloodiest independence moments in history. I sit at the dinner table while she orates from the recliner. “It was raining very hard,” she begins, “and all of our belongings were tied to a truck. There were three of us sisters and four brothers. My brother, Saleem, was in charge of us as we could not find our father.” She tells me all of it, all of our Partition story. In detail, she describes the calamities of displaced relatives in the massive crowds, of illnesses spreading through the camps, and of robberies, assaults, and murders witnessed along the way. I sit in horror at her recount but also in awe of my Nani who somehow made it through to the other side. She doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, so we quickly change topics. I try to bring up my mother and her childhood stories to lighten the mood. Nani’s eyes fill up with excitement again. As our conversation unfolds we reach the part of the story where my mother has children and in a moment of honesty, I admit that I have no real recollection of Pakistan.
“Do you have any stories about us, Nani? From when I was young,” I cheerfully ask.
Her eyes are affixed on me as she smiles softly, but then she glances down towards the kitchen tiles. She’s embarrassed. She doesn’t remember me either.
The garage door opens and Mama asks for my help bringing in the groceries. I use the moment to allow Nani an escape from any awkwardness. “You never told me you had a sister named Saleema,” I question my mother.
Mama empties a bag of tomatoes into the sink and pulls me to the side away from Nani. “What she told you isn’t accurate,” Mama frowns and holds my arm. “Nani gets confused. Saleema was her sister. She died during the Partition.”
I bend my neck and look towards Nani, sitting on the recliner in the living room with her eyes closed. I thank Mama for telling me and I grab a banana before I walk back towards Nani.
“You’re making me jealous, you know?”
I turn back towards her, confused. “Me?”
“Yes, you,” Mama laughs, “every time she’s on the phone with anyone, she always brings you up.”
***
Colorful photographs scatter across the Persian rug in our living room, covering it in a mess of inherited memories. My baba sorts through the decades with a cup of chai in hand, his white salwar kameez has also had the pleasure of tasting tonight’s tea. Sitting squarely to his right is a cardboard box that can barely fit a pillow and in it are stories of our family, frozen in time. There’s my parents’ wedding (my Mama looks like a model), my sister’s high school graduation (because she’s the eldest all three of our living grandparents came for her- no one came to mine, I’ll bring that up bitterly every chance I get), my first Easter egg hunt (jury’s still out on how halal that is), and an extended family and friends trip to a zoo in St. Louis. The oldest I get in these photos is 7, that’s when my parents saved up enough to buy a digital camera. Nani chuckles from her recliner while watching my baba’s inept take on scrapbooking. It’s more interesting than the 24-hour Pakistani news channel repeating the same stories it told us at 6 and noon. Baba grabs a handful of loose photos and attempts to set them in an album — a chore he has been trying to complete also since I was 7. Tonight I’ve decided to look through the memories as well. Baba silently smiles when I sit down to signify that his attention is solely focused on the task at hand. I flip through a random stack of photos but quickly come to the realization that I recognize none of these faces or places. Yet a sentiment of familiarity still overcomes me. Nani sheepishly glances towards the photos in my lap. I take another handful from the cardboard box and sit next to her on the sofa. “Do you know who this is,” I inquire. She smiles and nods. Rolling thunder shakes the kitchen window. Nani gently grasps a memory.
As we go through the “who’s” and “what’s” of family genealogy and history, I decipher that forming in front of me is, in its own right, a complete saga. There’s the uncle who married his childhood sweetheart, the great aunt who refused to leave her village, a cousin who took in her deceased brother’s children. The pictures, though primarily taken inside our traditional multigenerational home, showcase a myriad of locations I’ve heard of before. The beaches of Clifton where my sisters and cousins pushed their battery-dead car to a gas station, fields of Punjab where my mother picked cotton in the late summer, monuments of Lahore overrun with tourists on my parents’ honeymoon. Nani giggles again, she points to the gate of her house in Karachi and tells me of the night she fought off four robbers on her own. My mama interrupts from the kitchen, chiming in her contribution to the scuffle. Nani dismisses her claims and looks towards me with a determined expression, “Your mama is too young to remember,” she whispers. But she is bad at whispering. Mama hears her and asserts that she played a crucial role in securing the house. They both laugh. “Karachi is much more dangerous than Islamabad,” she instructs me.
“Nani, where do you think we are?”
“Islamabad. Where else would we be?”
“We are in America. Remember, you flew on the plane?”
“Oh yes, America.” She does not look convinced.
We flip through more photos, one by one, and each time Nani says the name of a person or location, I commit it to memory. “So and so” used to own two massive dogs, “such and such” is where the most beautiful seasides are. She’s repeating much of what I have already heard from my parents but I do not interject. I sit there and ask for more, attempting to squeeze out any additional details she could add to those memories, perhaps an extra line of dialogue or backstory, an unknown interpersonal tension or the fate of one of the characters beyond this specific tale. Because for me they are characters. For her they are a family that lived under one roof. I have never met any of these people nor have I ever been to any of these places, yet I intimately know them through stories. Stories that I have not, am not, and can never be in because the moments have passed and I am too far removed from the elements that generate the plot. I feel within and without. Nani offers me grapes. I politely decline. I feel like a character who was first drafted as part of the saga but whose developmental chapters were subsequently removed and is now out of place within this narrative as well as the one he presently finds himself in. I wonder if all immigrants feel this internal schism. I wonder what my life would look like if it had fit within these photos. Nani hands me another memory and laughs. “That sister of yours was always fighting with this cousin,” her eyes widen as she continues, “they would pounce on each other like demons had possessed them.” I smirk and assert that my sister still gets angry like that. Nani chuckles and insists on passing the grapes to me again. I eat them.
***
In the summer, my Mama overcomes a health scare and people come and leave our house for a number of weeks. I find Nani in tears one day, she confesses how worried she has been for her daughter. I embrace her. From around the world we receive phone calls, WhatsApp messages, and Facebook alerts asking for updates and offering support. Nani keeps solace in talking to her children and cousins.
Four generations of my family sit on the front porch and listen to the cicadas sing. They’re passing around a tupperware container of watermelon. My aunt came from Toronto to help take care of Nani while Mama recovers from surgery. She’s melting in this weather. My sister, in a shameless attempt to secure additional childcare, brought her 2 month old from Denver. She’s soaking it all in. I catch Mama in the kitchen preparing lemonade for them so I lend a hand and follow her out the front door. It is unconscionably hot. My nephew begins to wail but is quickly silenced, entranced and in a daze by Mama’s fast talking. Nani sits quietly and listens while watching two birds chase each other in the trees above my car. I look at everyone and feel as though I am sitting in one of those family photos from Pakistan that I have so desperately wanted to find myself in. Nani looks at me as if she can read my thoughts. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it,” I ask.
“Yes, the birds are lovely today but it is too hot in Karachi,” she responds.
“Nani, do you think we are in Karachi?”
“Where else would we be? Islamabad?”
Mama begins to correct her but I interrupt. As we sit on our front porch in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I take Nani’s hand and concede. “Of course. Where else would we be?”
