I helped my mother stand up. She glanced towards my father in the coffin. There was nothing in her eyes. Stone-cold, an aunt whispered, shock another said. I didn’t think of anything at the time. I got the phone call from my brother ten days before my father’s death. Dad’s not going to make it through the night, he said. On the train to London I cried quietly, looking away from the other passengers as I flitted through the chapters of his life with us.
The year is 1984 and we’re in Pakistan. My mother enrols me and my brother in private schools, rebuilds my grandparents’ house, replacing the two-room house with a double storey house. My mother spends her mornings cooking and cleaning, and afternoons with her relatives and newly found friends from our neighbourhood. Six months later my father says to my mother, How do you expect me to stay if I can’t find a decent job here?
As if living with the mosquitoes and heat is not a big enough challenge. I’m hoping my mother says we are all going back but she expresses no such desire.
Every month we’re waiting for my father’s money order and each month the money sent is a little less than before. At times, my mother says she can hardly make it through the month with the money she has. She slowly begins to move away from her friends and the many relatives she’s keen to be with. She feels they’re no longer there for friendship but to destroy her and her children. She stops wearing colourful outfits, stops listening to Bollywood music she’s so fond of. The tantrik she goes to says she’s under the influence of black magic, that it’s family that’s incanting evil on her. I wish I could check myself into hospital, she says. Not really understanding what she’s going through I have nothing to say to her. I just listen, hoping it’s a temporary phase and she’ll recover. She goes from one tantrik to another believing the cure is there and it’s just a matter of finding the right person. And it’s not that she doesn’t feel better because after the first visit it’s like I’m seeing my mother the way she used to be. I’m feeling better, she says, believing the money problems as well as her health will improve. But this only lasts a couple of days. Whether it’s the prayers she’s told to read, or any other ritual to drive the evil spirits away, nothing seems to work.
My father comes to visit every year, bringing gifts for us and clothes for my mother that she never wears. I like it when she smiles. I want my father to stay because she has this sudden kick of energy when he arrives. But a day or so later she’s back to her own quiet self. The summer after my matriculation exam we’re here in London to visit my father. He stays in a rented two-room flat above a launderette. The place has no kitchen and no furniture. My father is making his meals on a small stove next to his mattress, washing his dirty dishes in the bathroom sink. My mother cries, Is that why you called us here? What more way are you going to punish us? She says, grabbing his bottle of whisky from underneath his mattress and throwing it out of the back window into the overgrown yard below.
The week that we stay with him my parents hardly talk. We end up spending the rest of the holiday with relatives. Before leaving I say, Daddy, can you give me a couple of pounds every week? He smiles. When we come back to London after visiting relatives in Manchester I see the neatly stacked four pound coins on the microwave, that he’s been leaving me every Sunday morning after his Saturday night shift working as a taxi driver. I take back home a blazer, a pair of shoes, a bag and a lipstick.
During the first year of my Masters in English Literature he has no idea where to find the reference books I ask him to send me. He asks an English professor to accompany him to the bookshop. After that, from time to time, he talks affectionately of Mr Khan like he knows him really well. He cries the day I’m getting married. No one notices until we play my marriage video and see him sitting in the corner, tears streaking down his face, as I’m signing my marriage certificate.
It feels like yesterday, the rhythm of his life, our life, the space between us. I think of my father a lot these days. How it would have been for my mother if we’d stayed together. Maybe her silences wouldn’t have been so prolonged or maybe the sudden bursts of anger less intense. After my brother and I left home, my parents stayed together for some years, though it was never the same between them. I imagine my father sitting on the sofa, wearing his signature cap, waiting for me to arrive from Glasgow, cooking smells wafting from the kitchen, him waiting impatiently for my mother to serve his dinner and my mother telling him to stop this now. My father thinking she’s talking about his work and saying back to her, The day I stop that will be me. But it was not so much about his work. A couple of weeks after quitting his job he went missing. My mother had said something to him about his drinking. They had an argument. He walked out of the house, not coming back until the next day.When he returned he was shaking, smelling of vomit and drink. He couldn’t stand up but wouldn’t let my mother call the ambulance. In the evening when my brother took him to hospital he had no blood pressure, and after he was administered an Epinephrine he didn’t wake up.