The Place Where No Words Live

When my daughter was 5 months old, she was hospitalized for a week after an accident. To this day, it remains one of the most traumatic experiences of my life even though her recovery was swift and full. The days in the hospital began to run together. In the dim artificial light of that hospital room, every other person receded from the perimeter of my conscious care. A lot of my writing revolves around parents and children and how their lived realities may occupy the same linear passage of time, but are so often markedly different in experience and perception. No doubt this will be the case for me and my daughter, especially as she grows older. However, that one week in the hospital was like the nucleus of early motherhood for me: isolated, solitary, and in absolute and intentional communion with my baby. Nothing and no one else mattered. This is a poem about that time and that feeling.

Thanks to Broad! journal for publishing it in 2014.

Residue

The first time my mother was diagnosed with cancer she was only 47 years old. That same year my parents’ marriage became irrevocably damaged, and while they continued to stay married and share a love that I did not understand, the romance of the relationship vanished forever. It was a sad thing because my parents, both with sensibilities of lost poets, were absolute romantics, and I think my mother never stopped yearning for the revival of her epic love story with my father. I have written about how she sort of just faded into the ether of death — one moment she was there and the next she was disappearing. In the act of disappearance, she remembered one name alone: my father’s.

The cancer she had at 47 wasn’t quite done with her and came back with a vengeance when she was 56. She fought it for 18 months, but in the end she was very much representative of the statistics. Mean survival with a Stage IV breast cancer diagnosis is 18 months — that’s how long she lived. When I went into her room after she was buried, I could see her everywhere. There was an unfinished article she was writing on her bedside table, a half-eaten date on a saucer, her water cup, the book she was reading, a diary in which she had written the household tasks for the week, her slippers cozy and inviting in one corner, the blinds raised slightly, the dull winter sun struggling to warm up the couch.

This poem is not about her death, however. It is about her fight to live. I wrote it when she was fighting the cancer for the second time. It is about her second battle, which I saw, and about the first, which I didn’t because at that time I was in the US and she was in Pakistan. I think she got used to everything in the end, the cancer, how it ate up her body, how she had to find new ways to fight it — but she never got used to the more mundane things: passage of time, her children growing up and moving away, her love dying before her, and so these lines remain my favorite:

It shocks you

still —  the absence — when you wake up from dreams

of children when they were children yet, of love when it was love yet

Ustad (Teacher)

I have hundreds of poems and vignettes like the one I am sharing today. My writing flows from my identity which is firmly rooted in one fact: I am my father’s daughter. Everything begins at that singular reality and ripples outward into knowledge and discovery and independence and achievement. Not long ago I told my brother, “To be his child is to have the privilege and burden of his unique history. Learn to not only carry it with dignity but wield it for a powerful character.”

I am the daughter of a penniless orphan who raised four younger siblings and fought every single barrier between him and his true calling, which was only to create. Quite simply, he set out to tell stories and became one of those rare people who can sustain themselves and their families through their art. He is my enduring inspiration. “How did you fight the naysayers,” I ask him. He tells me time and again that he didn’t. I have seen him embrace his biggest critics.

“There is courage in humility.”

“The work is our worship.”

“You, my daughter, I raised you to be a dreamer but also an achiever. You make your own decisions and tell me what they are, and I will honor them,” he said with his hand on his heart when I asked him at 18 if I could just leave. I wanted to move to the US for higher education. He raised me to have sound judgment, to trust it, and act on it.

Everything I am, and I am light and dark like all people (as is he), comes from him. My father is the first of all things for me:

my first kingdom, my first wilderness

my first cognizance, my first ignorance

my first poem, my first teacher

my original nest, my only real home

Happy Father’s Day.

Cooked Until Golden Brown

My father comes from the depths of the old walled city of Lahore. My mother is buried there, in the graveyard surrounding the tomb of our ancestor. Some of the best moments of my childhood were spent walking alongside my parents on the rough cobbled alleys of that neighborhood, trucks and tongas laden with wares, pushing pedestrians and bicyclists aside, the narrow spillways dug along the street gushing monsoon runoff, street food for every hour of the day, and the heady scent of rose petals outside the mosque — spiritual and scandalous at once.

All this to say that my father is a “real” Lahori from the “real” Lahore, the Lahore that is (and isn’t) in our history books, not the Lahore we know today with its metros and malls. He is (and by extension I am) from the city of gardens, not the concrete jungle it has become today. And he looks like he is from the heart of Punjab, his skin is the color of plowed earth, his eyes the shade of Rosewood bark. My mother’s family are Kashmiris. My maternal grandfather, an army accountant, with his stiff Nehru cap and ruddy complexion, moved with his family from city to city all across Pakistan. My mother felt that home was a lot of places, but mostly it was with my father.

Now, I really must tell you about this poem — because I look so much like my father (and nothing like my mother), various members of my family always commented on how dark I was all my life. My Nani, who was very loving and very lovely in all things except this, used to remark that I looked as if I had been “overcooked.” “Color-oriented casual cruelty” is what I call it now. There are many names for it and a lot of discourse now, so many people who read this poem will know exactly where it comes from. I wrote it when I was attending the Community if Writers Poetry Workshop at Squaw Valley in 2014 — sitting by the pool with my daughter and at war with all the childhood conditioning.

Bilingual Speech Therapy

My daughter spoke only a few words until she was three years old. It worried me endlessly, but more concerning was the exhaustion that came with the futile attempts to talk with my toddler. My father used to say, “The children who speak later are conserving their speech to focus on their intellect. They are the great thinkers and observers of the world.” My father with his own command over language and storytelling was little comfort to my heart.

This poem is about the time we started speech therapy for my daughter, which catalyzed her ability to speak. She could always communicate with me — she spoke volumes with her eyes and each cry was different — but when she spoke in her sweet, musical voice, many doors opened between us, many walls were demolished. There were only open fields and fertile river beds and our words bubbling into brooks and streams of our combined imagination.

It was a kind of magic. It was also a small heartbreak. In those early years, we were instructed to focus on one language, and we chose English because she was already in school. We had to let go of the little Urdu we spoke with her. Of course, now that she is 8, she understands and speaks Urdu, but at that time I felt conflicted because it was like packing away a big part of my identity and roots into a trunk and locking it. I imagined giving her that trunk one day, telling her, “Here, this is our language and it holds my childhood and that of my parents before me. It holds the essence of our past. Take it, learn it, save it.” Of course it didn’t happen so dramatically. She just picked it up over time. But this poem is about that struggle — about the conscious decision to let a part of your identity go.

Thanks to Santa Clara Review for publishing it.

Standstill

This is another unpublished poem that I wrote years ago about death after a long illness. Ironically, the poem is short. It was hard to write — how do you encapsulate the months of battle that precede the "hospice bed?" So often, I am tempted to write about the struggle to buy time and the bravery inherent in it, because the inevitability of losing always looms large. We forget, however, that there is courage, too, in choosing to walk away and enumerate the finite breaths one has left on one's own terms.

In my other life, which often feels more real than the musings of a "Sometimes Poet," I am a clinical researcher working on early cancer detection. Cancer treatment saves lives — there is no doubt about that — but really what does "saving" mean? We are always just bargaining for more time to fight the fight we want to fight.

I chose to work in diagnostics, because I believe in a day when we will be able to detect this disease earlier than we can imagine today, and that early detection could lead to a cure, it could save us from having to fight so brutally. If we were living in that world today, my mother wouldn't have collapsed at 58 and stopped breathing six days after the twenty-third chemotherapy treatment. She wouldn't have been in this battle at all. She would have grown really, really old. She would have played with her grandchildren. She would have written more poems. She would have died of something else eventually, but not of something that killed her because she chose to treat it aggressively.

I am an optimistic researcher, but I remain a wistful poet.

Thank you for stopping by and reading.

A Representation of Itself

A draft of a poem shared on Instagram today.

After I lost my mother in 2017, there were moments in which her death would suddenly hit me square in the chest as though I had forgotten about it and only just remembered. The enormity of the loss would come crashing down on me and momentarily stun me into a deep, painful, and long period of silence and withdrawal from my surroundings. The remembrance of my grief was terrible, yes, but it made me think about the moments of oblivion. How long was my forgetfulness? How long did I become unaware of the brutal and final truth that my mother was gone forever? In reality, I think it must have only been a few moments when I became so engrossed in something that I tuned out the world completely and blocked everything except my working memory, focusing only on the task at hand. But in my imagination, that time stretched on and on like the ocean or the horizon. In those moments, my mother was alive and well. In those moments, there was no grief. This is a poem about forgetting and remembering — the cycle of amnesia and pain.

A Representation of Itself

Jibillat

Urdu: Jibillat

Meaning: Instinct, Connature

Where does one begin again? I suppose one begins at the beginning, a circuitous path back to the place where it all started, a retracing of steps, a reliving of memory, an unlearning and relearning coupled together.

-x-

My father and I. Circa 1993 or thereabouts.

My father steeped me in his image. He showed me I came from him and his people and some of those people I learned about from his stories and fables. We have more than blood binding us, he taught me. Some of his connatural craft flowed through time and knotted itself somewhere inside my ribs. That’s where I feel it. That’s where it claws and keens.

-x-

Almost ten years ago now, I sat in a house on a hill and saw dawn breaking over a city suspended in dreams. The house is not mine anymore, but the story still belongs to me. A city asleep, or just escaping the maw of night, and me, in a golden hour of my own choosing, back again at the beginning of things, unspooling one strand of thought at a time, examining it, cataloging it, putting it away — some to be shared now, some to be kept safe for later.

-x-

The unraveling takes time and care. Dust motes have settled inside me to make a colony so robust and strident that it feels like carrying extra weight. There is rust in some parts, too, ideas frozen, their russet patina taunting and tantalizing at once. It can all be rescued, of course — that’s what my father always taught me — but one has to do the work, one has to show up.

-x-

So I showed up today, carrying little more than a desperation that comes from that ancient instinct that my father has, the one he passed to me. I suspect we are both the same, but for me there has decidedly been a dilution in this inherited instinct. Regardless, I am of the people for whom the dust motes and rust could mean a death sentence. We are the people who must show up and do the work. And so, here I am.

The Aftermath - Part 4

I forget sometimes. I am always thinking of her, of course, but sometimes realization hits me like a wall of bricks at the most inopportune moments. I am cooking, or sitting in a very important meeting, or playing with my daughter, and I am reminded very suddenly — jarringly — that she is not here anymore. It's a momentary disorientation, an inadvertent pause in the swiftness of the day. And then I begrudge this knowledge, this rediscovered truth of my mother's gaping absence in my life. How long did the forgetfulness last, I wonder. How long was I able to trick myself into believing that her voice is waiting for me at the other end of the phone? Was it seconds, minutes, hours? It couldn't be hours. And so I think back to the time I had hit this wall of bricks the last time. In the morning while making coffee, last night, the week before, and so on. 

I feel forever trapped in the vortex of that night, and I remember most clearly only the warmth of clothes just out of the dryer, the smell of the fabric softener, the softness of each fabric and the neat piles I made while my daughter slept. I remember being suspended in a state of numb acceptance and impending action: she’s gone, now what? I often feel this way now — the time to come stretches vastly and uncertainly, while the time past remains unmoving, unforgiving. I still don’t talk about it — there is not much to say and yet there is so much to experience, to feel, to go through. Two years elapsed between the first and second paragraphs of this post, but I am still right there, in the eye of the storm, teetering.

The Aftermath - Part 3

It feels odd to discover at this age and this stage in my life what it is like to share the ordinary details of my domestic life with my father. There was never a need to do this when my mother was alive. We had a WhatsApp group, “Noor Ladies Only,” that documented the everyday travails of three young women navigating their lives and kitchens in different parts of the world, peppered by their beautiful mother’s selfies. When I look back through that group chat, I feel very strongly that it is a powerful time capsule, capable of taking me back to her, the Urdu script of her messages showing her hope, her resolve to fight the disease that was slowly colonizing her body, her devotion to her family. The group is silent now. We are trying to fill the silence with noise in “Noor Siblings Only,” “Noor Sisters Only,” and “The Noors – Papa & Kids.” It’s the last group that surprises me most often because of the obvious need for its existence and the fact that this need was felt most acutely only after my mother’s death.

It never occurred to us to have a space just with our father when our mother was with us. When Mama was alive, we had a whole-family WhatsApp group, too, but no one ever used it. Once a year, someone would send a message for Eid, and then we would all forget about it. Strangely, sometimes I feel that in dying, our mother propelled us towards our father. Perhaps the force of love she always held tight to her chest was set free upon her children, and we, drowning in our despair came up for air and held on to our father. Our father, in his particular way, allowed himself to be pulled by the current while holding our heads above water. He, being the father that he is, saved his children from drowning without making a sound.

I don’t know what we gave back to him – perhaps something that should have been his for years already. An openness. An acceptance. A love that does not have qualifiers, complaints, or expectations – the kind of love my mother gave to him (and us). It is strange to love my father so fiercely again at 32, like the way I used to love him at 12 – with a single-minded devotion, with unquestioning respect, with a grateful sense of pride for all he had achieved in his life, with admiration for his life-long struggle to rise above his circumstances, to give his family a secure future, to fight fate, to pour himself into his art. How fascinating this man is – I realize – something my mother always said, but I never saw. “I find him admirable,” she would say. “He fascinates me. There isn’t a man I have met in my life who is quite like him.” I shrugged off her comments. Sometimes I rolled my eyes at her. “You’re hopeless, Mama."

But I see it now – it descends upon me like an epiphany, the meaning of my mother’s words. He inspires fascination and admiration in me, too. I see why I am the way I am – hungry for more, for lofty goals, for new avenues to prove myself, to make a difference and a positive impact. I have always been his daughter, but now I see how alike we really are. It took me a long time to purposefully forget this fact, and its resurfaced knowledge crashes upon me with a blunt indifferent pain. Who is my father and why was my mother so devoted to him until her last breath? Isn’t is utterly fascinating, the story of this young orphan, who fought abject poverty and his slated fate to be completely mediocre and forgettable, and instead achieved fame, fortune, and the highest civilian honor of his nation -- all because he dared to believe that he could do something extraordinary in life and then went on to demonstrate this belief in his art. My parents are those rare people who fed their family from their art. They loved what they did for a living, and for a while, they did it together. I, like my father, have always run towards what I love, tried to find contentment in my work, but have always been riddled with this certainty that there is more I could be doing, there is a lot more work to do. And so, like him, I keep searching.

My father, now 66, rises early, does not believe in vacation, and works constantly. When he is not working on his projects, he is working around the house. He likes to work with his hands on everything from assembling furniture to cooking. In our WhatApp group, “The Noors – Papa & Kids,” he sent pictures of turnip curry he cooked one afternoon in response to the culinary creations of his three girls and the street food adventures of his son. The frame was artistically composed in his signature style: the food presented in a clear serving dish, a pomegranate, an apple, and a grapefruit in a bowl next to it, a small box of milk, two rotis. The caption reads: “Made shaljam for my Rukhsana today and said a prayer for her. I hope the aroma of this effort reaches her. Ameen.”

This is how we live every day after her – a little high, a little low. Always we find each other, these five wandering souls – the Noor Papa and his kids.