For as long as I can remember, I've been trying to figure out my place in a family that I've had to piece together in my imagination.
I never knew my grandparents. I grew up looking at them through faded and yellowing photographs. There they were, forever frozen in time for me. While my other cousins, and even my brothers, have real memories of them, I have only these photos and stories to go by. I still search the maps of their faces---the gentle slope of a nose, the curve of a mouth, the depth of a gaze---for my own face. I listen to my relatives tell stories about them and wait for them to mention idiosyncrasies that I may share with them. Which one of them chewed their bottom lip when deep in thought, the way I do? Like me, did they find solace between the pages of a book? Were they animated talkers like I am?
My Dhadha (paternal grandfather) was an engineer; he was a stern man who rarely smiled but loved his family fiercely. He fathered 15 children but didn’t actually hold a baby until years later, when my oldest brother was born. Moreover, he had a love for learning. Raised by a widowed mother, dhadha dreamt of being more than just a landowner like his own father, who died when dhadha was five years old. I can see him in my mind’s eye, a little boy reading by the light of an oil lamp, late into the night. In the photos I have of him, he cuts an impressive figure: he is a rock of a man, tall, dark and broad, and he stares at me from the past with small, piercing eyes. My parents, brothers and I were still in Libya when he died. I was only a few months old and he never got a chance to see me.
Mommy---my nahni (maternal grandmother)---was a wisp of a woman, known for her beauty. With her pale complexion and reddish-brown hair, she was constantly mistaken for a foreigner. A bride at 13, she had her first child a year later. She would have eleven more, four of whom would die in infancy. In my photos of mommy, she wears a sari, her long wavy hair tied away from her glowing face. In every photo I’ve seen of her, a ghost of a smile seems to have just settled on her lips. She is a woman of dignity, a woman who commands respect in spite of her slight stature. Mommy, too, passed away when I was a newborn, without having seen me.
And, finally, there is my pappa---my nahna (maternal grandfather). As tall and gangly as a teenager, pappa’s frame belied his brilliance. He was a respected physician and a poet. Of his children, only my mother shared with him his passion for poetry and, so, everyday after he returned home from the hospital and before dinner, he would call for her. He would lie in bed, his eyes closed, and ask her to read her poems to him. After she was done reciting the poems, he’d ask her to sing them for him and she would do so happily. I met him when I was a toddler and, even though I hadn’t learned to verbalize more than a few grunts of hunger or sadness at the time, I carry imagined memories of that summer with him close to my heart. My first, albeit forgotten, sights of Pakistan were taken in from the perch of his arms, from the eagle-eyed vantage point of a tall man. However, I had forgotten him by the time he died, when I was 6 years old. I cried upon his passing, not for him, but because I’d never seen my mother cry before.
I suppose, my quest to find my grandparents is a quest to find myself, to define myself in a larger context of history. Questions about them haunt me: did they ever think about me, their granddaughter who was born in a far away land and being raised in a land even farther away? Did my pappa, who had promised my cousin that he would live long enough to see her turn seven and died the day after her birthday, have the briefest thought of me when he passed? Did he love me as much as he loved her or was I just a fading memory for him, the way he was for me? Would my grandfathers, both avid hunters, recognize themselves in me, an animal rights activist and vegetarian? And what about my nahni? She was a conservative woman of her time, a wife and mother who took pride in her place in the family. What would she say of me, the first working-woman in her family? Would she approve?
I have nothing to go by when I try to determine the answers to these questions. I often thought that growing up in Pakistan might have helped me in my quest to know my grandparents. I believed that—had I walked the same paths they walked, touched the books they touched, the clothes they wore, or simply been in the spaces they occupied—I would be able to pick up residual memories and experiences, feelings and thoughts that they’d left behind. These would have been dropped along their lives like stones in a dense forest, leading me back to them.
Sometimes, especially now that the years separating us multiply in leaps and bounds, and my life seems so far away from what their lives were, my grandparents threaten to slip away into the realm of fiction and unreality for me. It is at these moments, that I savor looking at their photographs. It is at these moments that I think of my dhadha’s love for learning, my mommy’s dignity and beauty, and my pappa’s passion for poetry and I know that I don’t need to have all of the answers. I exist because they existed. I am who I am because they are in me. And no matter what happens, I’ll carry them inside me for the remainder of my life.
