Savor, p.9
Savor, page 9
“Break it how?” I asked, furrowing my small brow at the viscous contents of the bowl…wondering how a thick glob could break.
“Breaking a sauce means it will change back into a liquid from the thickened solid you’ve created,” she explained.
It seemed impossible that all that oil—a full cup for every egg yolk—could disappear into the growing jiggle of mayonnaise. Surely another drop of oil will break it, I thought. But Nano knew the measurements by heart. She knew the limits and she knew that she could make more than a cup of fluffy mayonnaise before it would break, and she always stopped right before this point and added a few more drops of water “to set it.” I wanted that confidence and told myself that it would someday be mine.
I remember thinking it was such an amazing thing, that I could actually make something with my own hands. Nano taught me to make buns in the shape of bears with peppercorns for eyes and cloves for buttons that we wrapped in red cellophane and I gave as gifts to mystified friends. I worshipped her for sharing her secrets with me, for teaching me the language of the kitchen.
After dinner, Nano often put us to bed, telling us biblical legends as bedtime stories. The tale of Musa (Moses) with his miraculous infancy, his splitting of the sea, and his time in the wilderness; the tales of Isa (Jesus), Nuh (Noah), Ibrahim (Abraham), of Muhammad, of Ali (Muhammad’s nephew)—these epic stories were our fairy tales, replete with fantasy, miracles, drama, and, of course, some sort of moral messaging. We plied her with questions afterward—But why did he need to put his hand under his armpit to make it glow?—and fell asleep imagining children with extraordinary powers.
I couldn’t help but wonder why Nano never married again despite the many eligible suitors who waited the appropriate amount of time to make their intentions known. I idolized and adored her and wanted her to be admired and cared for, and so I asked her why she never accepted another proposal. She fussed with the edge of my sheet quietly, and after a minute she began to speak.
“You know that wonderful record that I sometimes play for you by Mehdi Hassan, Fatima?”
“Yes, Nano,” I said, with the sense that something important might be coming.
“Well, he was a friend of your grandfather’s and mine, and on our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, he sang in this very house. He sang ‘Zindagi Mein To Sabhi’ at your grandfather’s request. Can you translate that?”
I hesitated. My Urdu was still quite rusty after our two years in the States.
“It means ‘Everyone loves in their lifetime, but I will love you even after I die,’ ” Nano said with tears in her lovely eyes. She shrugged her shoulders slowly and shook her wispy white head. “He was the love of my life.”
And to that, how could I respond? I hadn’t known my grandfather, and I was just a little kid who hadn’t known a love like that. The closest thing I could imagine was how much I loved my brother. Upon consideration I realized that no one could replace him—no one could ever take his spot in my heart, so, in a way, I understood Nano’s point.
chapter 10
HUNGER AT THE MARKET
Fatima
We often accompanied our mother to the market to go grocery shopping, which I already understood as the first phase of every meal. We sat in the back of our rickety, dinged second-hand white Suzuki Khyber and drove to Khadda Market with my mother playing a Stevie Nicks tape, singing along loudly to “The Edge of Seventeen.”
As soon as we pulled up to park, I heard a sharp rap on the window and my head snapped up. Large brown eyes, the same size as mine or Mo’s but seeming larger because of the sunken cheeks beneath them, appeared framed in our windows. A million miles between a centimeter of polished glass. The children put their hands out for money and then motioned to their mouths. The universal sign of hunger.
“Hello, hello,” my mother greeted them good-naturedly, as she and Mohammad helped my seven-year-old self out of the back seat of the car. “How many of you are there?”
“Well, us two and our cousins,” a child said sheepishly.
“Go round them up,” my mother told them, and off they ran, disappearing into the jigsaw of parked cars and crowds and child-size crevices between overflowing shops. Sometimes they whistled to get each other’s attention from afar, and suddenly there were eight, twelve, fourteen little and not-so-little people around us, shabbily dressed, hair uncombed, faces unwashed and thin.
My mother looked around her for the closest dhaba, a simple little local eatery serving big vats of food, where cabbies and market purveyors all buy cheap, good meals.
“We’ve got fourteen kids,” my mother told the proprietor. “What are you going to give them and what is it going to cost?”
The proprietor made up big plates of daal, curries, and fresh naan for the kids, one plate for each, and named a price for my mom, usually around thirty or fifty rupees, which included Cokes for everyone. She paid and waited for all the children to be served their food, while my brother and I watched the kids our age laughing, poking each other in the ribs, playful and relaxed for a moment now that they knew their next meal was coming soon and that it was to be a fresh one and not foraged from a trash heap. I watched as this band of beggars’ mouths watered, and instead of getting hungry myself, I felt my small throat go dry.
Certainly, I was not immune to the seductive scents of Pakistani comfort food being readied for consumption. My mouth watered as I smelled fluffy biryani warming on the stovetop or shami kebabs for dinner at home, but seeing these hollow-cheeked kids so giddy and ravenous, I realized I’d never truly known hunger. Though I knew that money was hard earned, not only could my mother always feed us, but she had enough to feed this small army of street kids. Fifty rupees is all it took, and every Sunday we were fifty rupees lighter and those little boys and girls had full bellies for once.
Not knowing how or when, I made a promise to myself that I would feed people.
chapter 11
THE CHORUS
Farezeh
My career was bearing fruit and, with the funding in place, I was looking to expand my learning support center. At the suggestion of a friend, I reached out to a real estate broker to help me find the right place, and when the owner of the realty business showed up for our meeting, I was pleasantly surprised by the man standing opposite me: tall and handsome with salt-and-pepper hair, a gentleman named Imtiaz. In the weeks to come, we found excuses to meet. He appraised the Tanzeem house for a potential sale for Mummy, offering to help without charging commission, somehow making an emotionally daunting situation feel more secure. He invited me to a party, and though I didn’t feel ready for romance, I found myself leaning on him for support more and more. He, too, was a divorced single parent. Years before, he’d even read the article I’d written about the stigma of divorce, and praised me for having written it. Our connection blossomed.
Finally, in August while my kids were staying with Eram and Yasmin in Lahore and spending some time with their dad, Imtiaz and I went on our first official date. He was only the second person I’d felt strongly about since my marriage ended. Unaccustomed to the freedom of living on my own and not having the children at home with me, one date became two; two became ten. Imtiaz was very sure about what he wanted: he wanted me. In late August, after just two romantic weeks together, Imtiaz asked me to marry him and, almost reflexively, I said yes. No sooner had I agreed than he began to push me to set a date.
I’d fought so hard for my freedom, for my independence, for my sense of self. I’d broke all the stereotypes that had been drilled into me and I had become someone—someone who could stand on her own two feet. Why, then, did I wander willingly but without deep consideration back into the marriage pact? Was I trying to re-create the idea of a love-based union that I’d observed in my parents? Or were the childhood warnings and cultural dogmas of a woman being incomplete without a man controlling me once more? When had I again begun listening to the negative voices telling me I wasn’t enough, that I needed protection and that I needed a man to keep up appearances? It’s extraordinary how the message of self-doubt is transmitted: At first it’s a passing thought, a tickle of hesitancy that one brushes aside like a stray hair. Then, bit by bit, the small voice becomes chatter, a radio on in the background, constant but ignorable. Then one day the buzz, the babble, has become a chorus, a many-throated monster that controls you with its endless bleating, its vile voice: I AM NOT ENOUGH. I AM NOT ENOUGH. I AM NOT ENOUGH.
The truth is that in our Pakistani society, for many women, marriage is license. Marriage, in some perverse way, is permission. It is so well understood and widely accepted as some sort of means to a more free and fuller life for a woman. A husband offers a life untethered to your parents, protection from slander, from being destitute, from prying eyes and hungry mouths. A husband makes a home, brings stability and safety, and takes charge and ownership of his brood. I suppose this is what patriarchy does when it is drilled in from every angle, from the chatter at chai time with the ladies, to the relentless advertising: soap, Coke, tea, milk, butter, biscuits, real estate! Every ad pumps out the same images and ideals: the happy little nuclear family, with the man at the center, the anchor for the house, the provider, the protector. I was blinded to what I was capable of and could only zero in on what I didn’t have.
I looked around at my life, and the pieces were coming together nicely: I had my own house. I had an open and beautiful relationship with my children. I had a meaningful career that showed new promise every day.
But I was missing a partner in a society that saw only that deficiency and disregarded everything else. A husband was the missing ingredient that no one was letting me forget.
And then, as if on cue, a tall, handsome man—one who physically resembled that archetype that had been so ingrained in me—entered the picture and told me that I was lovely, that I was beautiful, that I was smart, that I was a good mom. The things we need to hear because we’ve been taught we need to hear them. The little girl inside me who was told to say please and thank you and to chew with her mouth closed and to keep her eyes lowered and to cover her shoulders, the little girl inside was suddenly thankful, because there was a reward, a reasoning for all the rules. And it was a relief.
That relief was only strengthened by how Imtiaz was with his children. He had taken the sole responsibility to raise his daughters—a rare phenomenon among single fathers in Pakistan, even more unusual in that he proactively wanted custody of his girls.
When the kids learned that I had met someone special and was going to remarry, they couldn’t have been happier for me. Both Mohammad and Fatima repeated again and again as the October wedding date drew near: “Mom, we are so happy for you. You deserve to be loved, Mom.”
The narcotic of convention still haunted me, and I let its familiar haze envelop me—my naïve idealism seemed to push me into this next phase with blinders on. I figured that it made perfect sense: two homes, Imtiaz’s kids without a mom and mine without a dad, both wanting what the others have, the missing puzzle pieces finding their home together. I was so taken with the fumes that even when I saw the smoke, I chose to believe there was no fire.
Imtiaz had two daughters, Saadia, thirteen (Mohammad’s age), and Sarah, eleven. Fatima was nine. I asked Imtiaz, “Are your girls okay with this?” and I believed him when he said yes. It’s not difficult to see why he said that in hindsight. At that time, his daughters never spoke openly in front of him or shared how they truly felt. They had their own private battles to contend with. They were, or had learned to be, different people with their dad.
By October, I was remarried and I began to fold my family into the three-bedroom apartment in Sea View that Imtiaz shared with his two girls. I was determined to pick up the pieces of two broken families, to glue them together however I could to build a unit. It was going to be everyone’s reward for all the pain we had undergone. It was going to give our suffering meaning. And I placed this responsibility on myself and began shoring up all my energy to carry that weight. I figured, we just need a chance, a little time to readjust and calibrate to our new and better lives. Very quickly, however, I was completely overwhelmed.
Mohammad, newly a teenager and the only boy—a distinction that knows no limits—got his own room and began to drift toward independence. Fatima, who had always been his shadow and mimic, was cordoned off with the other girls, her new sisters. Saadia and Sarah, who formerly each had their own room, were put together with Fatima—a source of great indignation for them. Imtiaz forbade his girls to wear Western clothes in favor of our traditional garment, the shalwar kameez, so Fatima was abruptly not allowed to wear the tomboy clothes that had become her second skin and that echoed her brother’s style. Fatima started to recognize a new normal creeping in: that privileges afforded to her brother were off-limits to her.
Both my children quietly protested these new rules—Mohammad on behalf of his sister—but we had made a deal to integrate ourselves as best as we could, reasoning it would give us the best shot at shaping ourselves into the family we had always wanted. I soon realized that I had married an extremely conservative man, the antithesis of my ever more open-minded identity. Sensing his preferences, I voluntarily discarded all of the clothes I felt showed too much skin. My shirts and jeans became extinct, along with my sleeveless kameez.
Fatima and Mohammad hatched a plan soon into the new marriage: They would call Imtiaz “Dad”—to elevate his status, give him a sense of ownership, and to proclaim and make public their acceptance and commitment to our new family on a daily basis. It was a subtle but powerful play, and I told them how proud I was that they could be so mature and thoughtful. Mohammad shared with me later how for Fatima, at her young age, it was a confusing and conflicting maneuver. She did not understand what it would mean for her real dad, her Baba, whom she longed to spend more time with, the only one she associated with occupying that esteemed position in her family tree. For Fatima, this dilemma and challenge so early into this new configuration was just the beginning of far tougher battles to come.
While my children were delighted for me and to have a new father figure in their lives, my new husband had a side to him that I was dumbstruck by. His anger and rage would send his tongue lashing out some of the most cruel and degrading language I had ever heard. His dark side was noxious and corrosive, a poison for our new and still very fragile family.
Imtiaz’s two daughters also had emotional outbursts. They were perpetually upset—temper tantrums, tears, violence, and aggression; they lashed out daily. I was beginning to understand where this all was coming from, and instead of my limbic system compelling me to “fight or flight,” it had me in a nearly catatonic “fright” state. My actions and reactions became automated, and the crescendo of alarm signaling impending doom became background noise. We had to make this work; this was meant to be the happily ever after.
I saw only the two girls struggling with their new circumstances, and I leaned in to my tendency to fix things by going into overdrive to take care of Saadia and Sarah. I wasn’t merely going to break the archetype of the evil stepmother; I was going to mother them like they were my own. I tried constantly to please them. My kids will be fine, I told myself. They’ve received so much of my love and are better equipped to survive without my attention, I reassured myself when I worried that I wasn’t giving my own kids enough. I could barely stay afloat, and every wave of my newfound problems threatened to take me and this entire thing under. Perhaps they sensed this, because Fatima dared not complain to me about anything, and Mohammad chose to be as nonexistent as possible.
Whatever I tried with Saadia and Sarah didn’t work. If anything, it frustrated them even more. I loved my new husband, and despite his rages, I knew he loved me as well. I felt certain that we wanted the same things for our children and for each other, so I fought for us. I buried my reservations, doubts, and fears and doubled down on my commitment to make it work. It’s my duty to solve this, I told myself, as any mother instinctively tries to when their children are suffering. And I truly saw Saadia and Sarah as my own daughters. I could not stand to see what was happening and was hyperaware of how this could lead to yet another broken home. I was not going to let my family suffer that again.
Cruelty was normalized in Saadia and Sarah’s family, internalized by them and exhibited only in painful fits that they kept hidden from their father. And when it had nowhere to go, the youngest of our unit was the perfect scapegoat. I knew that little Fatima was getting less of me, but even at only nine years old, she bristled at my concern. “Don’t worry about me, Mom,” she told me. “The girls need you more; they’re having a hard time.” She never wanted to be any trouble. Fatima was being shortchanged, pushed into the periphery and deprioritized as a dubious reward for just how together and remarkable she was.
Fatima never once told on her new siblings or complained. Instead, she became withdrawn and quiet. An avid reader, Fatima spent hours alone frolicking in the fantasy and adventure of her books. I thought she was fine. After all, what young child has such mastery of her emotions that even her own mom can’t see what’s happening?
It wasn’t until I stumbled upon Fatima’s journal that I learned of her sisters’ taunts. It flooded me, to see how rejected she felt. How small she was being made to feel. How little she had in this new world that my decisions had landed her in. Every word of her anguish gutted me like a knife.
The girls called little Fatima cruel names, like so many children do on the playground every day. They didn’t include her and locked her out in the sweltering heat after school. Perhaps Fatima was the symbol and embodiment of their newly imposed oppression. I’d return from work at five p.m. and would find Fatima dehydrated and in sweat-soaked clothes in the lounge off their room where there was no air conditioning. Yet I didn’t confront them because I was too afraid of upsetting the applecart. I rationalized that I would be more present for Fatima, and that would help make her feel more supported. If I took this to Saadia and Sarah and squared up with them, their mother would pounce on this as her gotcha moment, finally having evidence that I was in fact the evil stepmother, the one who was only interested in her own daughter’s interests and not theirs. I could handle this, I told myself.
