the inheritance of loss

March 2020

I have been thinking about who she was and what she did. There is the ordinary way of looking at people, that skims the surface: she was an 86 year old woman, she died of old age, she had 4 children, she was from Pakistan, but lived most of her life in England. In the ordinary way of looking at things, the people who don’t know us, offer me condolences and hug me. They expect me to feel a great sense of loss, they expect me to cry.

I am not immediately sad. She remained disconnected from my life for most parts of it but what I know is that even while disconnected, who she was and what she did, tinged the entire fabric of our lives.

My father was five when she left him and my grandfather. We don’t really know whether she left him or he left her. The only two people who might have known, (and they too most likely had their own versions of the truth) are now dead. My Dada, left almost 30 years ago and now her.

What we know is that my grandfather returned back to Pakistan with my father and they were never together again. We know that she secretly tried to meet my father many times when he was younger. What is left unsaid is how hard that was.

I didn’t like her when I was younger. She didn’t meet my expectations of what a grandmother would be like. She was too distant- geographically, physically and emotionally. She wasn’t cuddly like my other Dado, but she also wasn’t interested in molding us like my Nano. She was a selfish bordering on evil woman, I was scared of her. Whenever they met, my father and her would fight. I knew she had left him as a child and I knew how broken he was for it.

When Papa would speak about his childhood, as he often did, about standing on the terrace of his house waiting for his father to return home at night and wondering what would happen if he didn’t- I felt his sense of abandonment, his pain as acutely as if it was my own.

As an adult I question the wisdom of his sharing such traumatic stories with children, as young as 6 or 7. This passing along of pain, embedding his own childhood trauma into our own.

He was not an easy parent but it took age and experience for me to stop making excuses for him. To hold him accountable for his behavior. To confront the idea that at some point as adults we have to stop blaming everything on our childhood.

There are days I believe this and many days when I don’t. Most days I know that there is little we control about who we are, holding him accountable is just a way for me to protect myself from drowning in his never-ending anguish. Its just self-preservation.

Along with protecting myself, with time I also began to see other things differently. The evil mother who abandoned her little boy began to transform in my imagination. When I realized that in life there are parts laid out for us to play, and choosing to ignore them isn’t easy. When I began to see the ways in which we are cornered into complying. Only then did I see how hard it must have been to be an evil mother who abandons her little boy.

Only then could I learn to empathize with who she was and what she did. This girl from Kasur, who wanted more. Maybe I underestimate her, but I don’t think she knew clearly what she wanted. My sense is she knew at each step that it was a little more than what she had.

First she wanted the man, her brothers friend. I wonder why she chose him, was he the only real city man she came across, someone who could take her out of Kasur. Did she see a window in him to something more?

To want a child or not was a not even an option. To not want a child back then would have meant opting for abstinence. So drastic a choice, I’m not sure it can even be considered a choice.

She marries him, for some years there must have been peace, the child must have kept her busy. In the pictures and from the stories, we know she enjoys the affluence, she dresses up, they travel. There are pictures of her in beautiful saris, big sunglasses, they pose before the Taj Mahal. She’s a young woman with a grand idea of herself.

She always was and remained enamored by cinema. We hear stories of her getting clothes designed based on the latest movies. There is also a story about a dinner where she performs a dance for her guests holding little diyas in the palm of her hands. When we were younger my mother had a black gharara, with gold kaam on it. They said it was real gold thread; it was hers.

A few years in there is some restlessness, there is a decision to move to England. Her brother is there now. They travel across the world. The three of them. In the 50s/60s air travel is not continuous, journeys are split across a series of small flights. There are pictures in front of the Eiffel Tower, there is my father, five years old, still a whole, happy boy, on a horse before the Pyramids.

In England, my Dada is unable to settle down. He misses his friends, the languid lifestyle of Lahore, comfort, recognition. He doesn’t want to stay in London. Some months pass, what we know is that he wanted to return and she refused.

We know that instead of the three of them, only Papa and Dada return. The journey hangs heavy on our lives.

Years pass, the story on the other side is never clear. She doesn’t speak about it. When they meet again properly, she has three other children, the youngest as old as my own sister. My father too has three children now.

We are weary of her, because we don’t understand her.

The things I remember and through them I piece her together. Her home, from when I first saw it at 3 or 4 years old. She lived in Manchester then, its stone bungalow, with a little garden upfront and big yard at the back. There is a homeliness and loveliness to it. There’s a fire, there are two dogs, the evenings are an event, there is music, there are pre-dinner drinks and snacks, the food is home-cooked and delicious, there’s always pulao and little kebabs. My two uncles and aunt, are warm, funny and interesting. They aren’t like our others mamos and chacha, for one thing they are younger. There is Khalla, her sister, her constant aide and companion. She is and always will be there till the end

As a teenager I judge her for being contrived. My father adds to this by undermining the stories she tells of her childhood, he accuses her of glamourizing her childhood, the Kasur she ran away from.

It takes me many more years to understand the burden of likability we place on women. Before I understand that when she seems fake to me, she is trying, trying to be the affectionate, maternal figure she is supposed to be. Had she expressed an honest disinterest in us, it would have been shocking, it would have been unacceptable. She probably knows these things, what she is doing is reining it in. She’s smiling because people prefer women who are sweet and smile. People don’t like women who down their whiskey and swear, which is what she does when she stops the act.

She is perhaps the first older Pakistani woman I know who drinks. Since I encounter this at a young age, I don’t realize how unusual this is, till much later.

In the years of absence, she remarried, we hear not once but actually twice. She doesn’t talk about the third marriage, two is bad enough, she doesn’t need the third publicized. We never know clearly what happens in those years in between. What does a young woman with little higher education, few skills but lots of grit, do in 1960’s England? How does she survive?

What we know is, her third husband is also from Kasur. It always surprises me that after those efforts to escape, she ends up with someone from her childhood, from the same town. He is handsome, you can see the appeal, he has also done well. He is a pilot. I imagine a romance, he is younger than her. People paint it as a seduction and a manipulation.

He is also an alcoholic. I hear them say, she turned him into one. She ruined his life. She used him and his money.

I have never met him. What I see is three well raised children, a meticulously kept house. Years later when someone accuses me of causing my ex-husbands problems with addiction, I know too well that we don’t turn men into addicts. I also learn that you can’t help them, unless they want to help themselves. I learn that addictions can destroy you and you have the right to protect yourself. I learn that we say all kinds of things about women who don’t conform to our ways.

It’s a pity she remains elusive to me. I never get to know her well enough to deconstruct her, to know what her motivations were, her fears, her dreams. There are still more questions than answers. All I can do is manage to sift through the clutter of things people said about her. I only know her when I see myself do the things she did.

In her last years my father and her seemed to have reached some reconciliation. They are more gentle with each other. She tells him she thinks and dreams of him more than her other children- the little boy she lost. But I don’t think they ever truly speak about what they had endured.

When she passes away I sit with my father as he grieves. I can’t cry for her, but I do cry, later, for the things that were left unsaid.

I didn’t hope for a different story all together. I know it doesn’t work that way. I just hoped for a moment where they could have let those walls down. I hoped they could have had the chance to once acknowledge to each other, what that great defining loss of their lives did to them.