My cousin and I were standing on the balcony of her house in Lahore, smoking cigarettes in the breezeless night. It was my second trip to Pakistan that year. The first time, I hadn’t visited home in four years and needed to buy wedding clothes. The second time, just two months later, I bought my ticket on impulse. Relatives needled me, shocked at the expense of flying twice from Toronto.
The heat in Lahore was wet and smothering. I spent hours in an airless room in my father’s house, sweat sliding down my back.
My cousin and I were talking about our first marriages, hers broken when her husband left, mine ending eight years after I married at 20. After telling her that I had gone ahead with the marriage even though it felt wrong, she said, “Your mother once called you stupid.”
I hadn’t been thinking about my mother, who had been gone for 23 years. I was 7 when she died, but she was gone long before, more in the hospital than with my sister and me. As I stood on the threshold of another marriage, unable to trust myself, my cousin’s words opened a path through my tangled thoughts.
It was the eve of the Gulf War in 1990, and my family was living in Saudi Arabia. The trunk of our car held gas masks and a travel bag of clothes so my sister and I could be dropped off quickly at a family friend’s home whenever my mother had to be hospitalized.
My memories of my mother are incomplete and more troubling than comforting. On Eid, my sister and I, then 3 and 6, were dressed in matching silk lehengas and taken to the hospital to see my mother. We weren’t allowed in her room, so we sat on a wooden bench outside, and she came to the window to wave at us. My father pointed her out, but all I could see was the sun’s glare on the glass.
In my clearest memory of Ammi, she is standing at the stove as I play on the floor. She hums and the room is filled with a warm light, but when I look up, her face is a blur.
I was an excruciatingly shy child, so anxious that I used to wind myself into my mother’s dupatta at social gatherings. Even before she got sick, I never knew what she thought or felt about me. Pictures offered few clues. In one, we sit on a small armchair, but her body is angled away from mine, her mouth a thin line.
When the Gulf War reached our oil-processing town in Saudi Arabia, my father took my mother to London for a bone-marrow transplant and sent my sister and me to stay with our grandparents in Pakistan. He called us once a week from London, ending his calls with an “I love you” that felt like a plea. I never spoke to my mother.
When she died, my father flew her body back to Pakistan. My sister and I went with our extended family to the village where she would be buried, but we didn’t attend the funeral or even know, then, that she had died. While she was being lowered into the ground, we were running through dirt alleys a quarter mile away.
My father would tell us about her death later, along with another piece of news: To get us back from our grandparents, who blamed him for their daughter’s death, he had to marry a cousin of my mother’s. Their wedding was another event we didn’t attend.
My father told me my mother was gone while I stood stiffly against a wall in a relative’s house, refusing to sit on the bed with him. He pressed a card from her into my hand. Inside, in neat lettering, my mother had written, “I will have you with me very soon. Take care of your little sister.”
She had hoped that the bone-marrow transplant would succeed, and that we would go see her in London.
After she died, my grades became erratic, and I struggled to fit in at school. My father was spending a month at a time on an offshore oil drilling rig, trying to repay medical debts. When I turned 11, I found a book about puberty on my desk. I got my period soon after, my stepmother fitting me into bulky pads. She was unequipped to help when I started crying.
I searched for my mother without knowing what I was looking for, finding her in fragments. In our storeroom, I found a white box with her dark hair inside. My father told me the only time she cried during her illness was when her hair fell out. On a trip to Pakistan, a cousin played an audiotape of her voice, startlingly young, laughing and speaking with my cousins.
“You were there, too,” my cousin told me.
I didn’t tell him what I was thinking: Why didn’t she speak to me?
I veered between hating her for being such an enigma and longing for her. When I was 12, we moved to Canada, first to Toronto and then to Calgary, where we trudged through the snow in bulky boots carrying grocery bags because we couldn’t afford a car. At yet another new school, where my accent and clothing set me apart, I coped by retreating into memories of my mother. I wondered constantly why she had not written more.
“She was so brave,” my father told us. “She refused to give in to despair.”
As I grew older, I looked for her in men, my intense longing becoming a recipe for disastrous relationships. When I was raped in college at 19, the experience taught me that men could harm me but also give me something I needed. With them, I could be desired so much that they would transgress reason and restraint — the opposite of my mother’s distance.
That same year, my father, stepmother and sister moved back to the Middle East, and I stayed in Canada to continue attending college. By 20, I was married. In a room alone before the wedding ceremony, I clawed at myself, but went through with it.
I divorced at 28, but my pain drove me into relationships with men I didn’t want or even like. My mother’s name became a prayer reverberating in my head when I was sexually assaulted again. When I stayed with a man who hit me regularly, I survived by going back to that memory of Ammi in the kitchen of our house in Saudi Arabia. I still couldn’t see her face, but the warmth of being near her made me feel like I could overcome this. In the dozens of places I lived, I carried her card with me, opening it again and again, trying to read guidance in her words.
The storm that engulfed me did finally end — when I held my son for the first time. I had internalized the belief that people would only leave me, that love was not something I deserved, that affection, for me, was always accompanied by indifference or violence. At 33, I held my baby, and my cousin’s words from a few years earlier came back to me.
“I have been so stupid,” I whispered to my son.
I will never know what my mother truly felt about me. She was young and vivacious. The only life open to her as an expat wife in a dusty town in Saudi Arabia was as a mother, and that, too, was taken away. Her comment about my stupidity might have flown out during a moment of anger, driven by pain.
I have learned to forgive her for not leaving more for me. I, too, hold multitudes of silence with my children. And maybe she left so little because she knew I held on so tightly and she wanted to help me let go.
I went back to Pakistan recently, this time after eight years. Lahore had changed. The storeroom that once held so many of my mother’s things was now filled with suitcases and blankets. The tape of her voice is lost, the box with her hair long gone. Saris, dishes and decorations she left behind were taken by relatives.
In my uncle’s house, I saw a set of embroideries made by my mother hanging on the wall. My aunt and uncle apologized for taking them by saying, “The cloth is dirty, you see.”
And it is. On the ivory cloth, which is more than 40 years old, I can see traces of dirt from Ammi’s hands.
I brought the embroideries back with me, packed in layers of Bubble Wrap and cloth, and now they hang on my living room wall. There she is, my mother. Her fingerprints mar the otherwise perfect embroidery, a comforting imperfection.
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