When her oldest daughter first married and moved from Karachi to California, back when phone calls were a dollar a minute and occurred only on Friday mornings, mother and daughter sent endless letters back and forth. This was in 1986 and the letters, inked in curling nastaliq script on thin, blue-lined paper, crisscrossed the Pacific, leapt over China, swept through India, before landing in eagerly awaiting hands.
The daughter’s letters detailed her new marriage, her new daughter, and her everlasting studies for her USMLE’s (now on their third year—the length of her marriage). The mother’s letters spoke of cousins (her cousins and her daughter’s cousins), friends from Karachi, Kabul, and Dhaka, and her work as the head physician of a family planning clinic on Karachi’s sandy outskirts (in Urdu, the mother wrote: “When I can convince the women to pursue family planning, the husbands resist. If the husbands don’t resist, the parents resist. If the parents don’t resist, the brother resists and meanwhile, these women keep having child after child.”)
The mother’s name was Shireen and she had three children. The youngest child was also a daughter, and although her given name was Nabila, she was called Baby and would be so-called as long as anyone older than her lived. The middle child was a son, Rizwan, pet-named Bobby. The eldest was the California daughter, Huma, and she had no nickname. Each of the three children moved from Pakistan to the United States and in time, had two children apiece. The oldest of the new generation was Huma’s daughter, Ayla. By dint of longevity of acquaintance, Ayla was Shireen’s favorite, the third woman in an uninterrupted mitochondrial line: grandmother (married at 20), mother (married at 24), daughter (29, unmarried).
Many years had passed since the days of those letters, bringing a rapid onslaught of technology. First, there was MSN Messenger, which Shireen did not try to understand. But the advent of Viber, Facebook, Skype, WhatsApp, and FaceTime rendered handwritten letters obsolete. When her grandchildren visited her Karachi home, Shireen insisted on lessons on Facebook or Skype, which she promptly forgot as soon as her grandchildren walked out her bedroom door. Still, Shireen enjoyed scrolling through her grandchildren’s Facebook photos and commenting: “looking very nice dear” or “nani misses you very much.” From across 8,000 miles of land and sea, her grandchildren would “like” her comments or write back, “Miss you too, Nani jaan!!”
Of the one hundred kilograms of loneliness in her body, these interactions managed to keep perhaps half a kilo at bay.
The air conditioner blasting above her bed, Shireen scrolled on her iPad through Facebook photos of her American grandchildren as she waited for Ayla’s weekly call, a conversation that, no matter how brief, illuminated the surrounding days.
Shireen paused at a photo of Ayla in a sleeveless, white dress. She would speak to Huma about that (even though she, Shireen, had worn sari blouses with straps thin as vermicelli when they had lived in Bangladesh—then East Pakistan—in the 1960s). A photo of her youngest granddaughter, Nyla, proudly holding a grade school achievement certificate, appeared next. (When Bobby’s wife had named her daughter Nyla, she and Huma did not speak for three months.)
Shireen scrolled back to the photograph of Ayla, captioned “Newport, Rhode Island.” Shireen had never visited. Ayla was grinning at the person behind the camera in front of an azure ocean. Twenty-nine and unmarried. Too pretty to be unmarried. And a doctor—from a Caribbean school, Saint-something—but a doctor was a doctor.
Since her husband, Qasim, had passed away two years before, Shireen was almost always alone, entombed in the white marble, white-painted house. So many of her nieces and nephews now lived in North America or the Gulf, and so many of her own cousins were deceased or senile. Shireen thought of her sister, Soraya, the riding-her-bike in-a-sari schoolmistress, now so disappeared in Alzheimer’s that she didn’t recognize her own daughters let alone Shireen’s disembodied voice on the phone.
Last year, Baby had told Shireen a story about her friend’s husband’s father, who lived with just one servant in North Nazmabad in Karachi. While the servant had gone to his village in Sindh for the week, two burglars had climbed over the wall surrounding the small bungalow, risking the broken glass embedded at the wall’s top. They had stolen the few thousand rupees the old man kept in his house (for tips, beggars, and bored grandchildren brought by their parents to pay their respects) and the gold and garnet bangles his wife had worn at their wedding that the old man would shake between his fingers to summon her back. Worse still, the thieves had bound and gagged him in a chair and abandoned him to the Karachi summer. He had remained in that chair, weeping and soiled, until the servant finally returned, three days later.
After this, Huma and Baby had restarted their refrain that Shireen shift to the States, clamoring that she was no longer safe in the home she had raised her children in. After his mother had refused to leave, Bobby paid for a chowkidar hut to be built at the gate of Shireen’s house and the children found a suitable guard to fill it, his salary drawn from Ayla and her older brother’s pockets even though Shireen had insisted she could pay from her savings or her husband’s bank pension. Despite these measures, Huma and Baby continued to badger Shireen to leave.
But she had lived here for forty years. This was the home Huma and Baby had been wed from, their mendhis celebrated in the front garden still kept parrot green through constant watering. Sometimes, Shireen looked out at the lawn and memory—of dark hedges festooned with twinkle lights, glittering girls with bell-shaped jhumke swinging from their ears, glass churiyan jingling at their wrists as they clapped their hennaed hands—would squeeze its fingers tightly around Shireen’s heart.
But that era was long over. The last mendhi hosted in the garden had been her niece, Seema’s, Soraya’s oldest daughter, in 1999—Seema, who had married a man working in Doha, and never returned. Shireen remembered Ayla at the mendhi, eleven and bony, in a shiny yellow shalwar kameez, unflattering to her sallow preteen complexion, which she had picked and Shireen had paid for.
With her crepe-skinned index finger, Shireen typed into the Facebook Search bar: J-A-M-I-L [space] H-A-S-A-N. The letters on her iPad clicked loudly.
Years ago, she had sent J-A-M-I-L [space] H-A-S-A-N, the grand-nephew of Shireen’s best friend from medical school, to Ayla for her approval. Upon seeing the picture of Jamil in dark sunglasses, his black hair generously gelled back, Ayla had responded, in her colonial memsahib-tinged Urdu, “Nani, he looks like he can’t spell.”
“What do you mean? He can spell. He has an MBA from New Zealand University.”
“What does he do?”
“He sells computer software.”
But this was not to Ayla’s liking and since Ayla was twenty-three, Shireen was unbothered. New Zealand was so far from America, after all. Jamil had long since married and his profile picture displayed a fat-cheeked baby, just a year old. Shireen felt her heart pinch at the thought that this baby, this husband, this life could have been Ayla’s.
When Ayla was twenty-four, Shireen had proposed another rishta: a Harvard MBA who was a professor of some sort in Iowa or Indianapolis or Illinois—something like that. Ayla and her family had been visiting Shireen that summer. Shireen had given his name to Ayla (S-A-L-M-A-N [space] M-A-L-I-K) and on their late 90s PC, with a deftness that astonished Shireen, Ayla had pulled up a university photo of a chubby bespectacled man.
Ayla had laughed. “I would destroy him, Nani.”
Although Shireen had protested, privately, she agreed. Salman Malik was no hero and Ayla, slim, smart, and in her second year of medical school, deserved a hero, a Khan with Bollywood wattage. While both of her daughters had married promptly at twenty-four, Shireen knew American girls were different and in this zamana, even middle class Pakistani girls waited. Marriage at twenty-five, twenty-six, even twenty-seven was now acceptable in a way it hadn’t been for those girls’ mothers and certainly not for their grandmothers.
Twenty-nine was another thing altogether.
When Qasim had been alive and she had fretted to him about Ayla, he would reply, “We are praying. What else can we do?” But Ayla had been twenty-seven then and Shireen had been sleeping alone for two years now. Sometimes, Shireen thought it was better for Ayla to never marry, to never experience the vast emptiness left by the death of a spouse, an ache in her chest that awakened Shireen in the middle of the night, in the middle of her empty bed.
But that did not stop Shireen from telling Ayla on at least a bimonthly basis, “Your wedding will be the last happiness I see before I die.” In part, Shireen felt this to be true, and in part, this was dialogue Shireen had picked up from a drama and thought very good. But Ayla would laugh and reply, “Then, I guess I’ll never marry, so you’ll never die.”
The next rishta Shireen found for Ayla was Walid, the son of the sister of a wife of the son of a fourth cousin who had remained in India after Partition. Six foot three, Walid was a graduate of Aligarh Muslim University in Lucknow, and worked as an engineer in North Carolina.
From the photos sent by his mother, Huma decreed Walid “very cute.” Shireen did not think Ayla would find anything to refuse, but when she called, Ayla said, “Nani, he’s a cousin. And not even from the right country. What’s the point of marrying a cousin from the motherland if they’re not even from your motherland?”
“But he’s not a cousin, beta—there’s no blood relation.” But Ayla wouldn’t hear any more on the matter.
At this type of silly stubbornness, Shireen sometimes wondered and sometimes hoped that Ayla had an American boyfriend squirreled away. A lot of western-raised Pakistani kids did this— dipped and dodged rishtein and set-ups until an invitation came for the wedding of “Asad and Mandy.” At the wedding, Mandy, looked somehow both florid and washed out in a red too bright and eyeliner too dark and around the wedding hall sat unmarried Pakistani girls whom Asad had ignored.
As an unmarried girl, Shireen had run no such chakkar. In her time, boys and girls weren’t like that, although she did remember finding some of her friends’ older brothers good-looking from a decorous distance. One Eid, when she was sixteen, one of those brothers had wordlessly slipped Shireen a set of cellophane-wrapped green glass bangles that she had smuggled back home tied in her dupatta. She had closed the door to her room to unwrap the churiyan and pull them over her wrist. Flipping her hand up and down so they chimed, she imagined they were gold, not glass. For the next few days, Shireen had floated in the certainty that her friend’s family would arrive with a rishta. But the Eid holidays passed, the brother went back to college in Lahore, and Shireen forgot him shortly thereafter.
Shireen checked the digital clock with its blaring red numbers, large enough for her to see without her glasses. 6:14 PM or 8:14 AM New York time. Her hand hovered over the white cordless phone and then retreated. Perhaps Ayla had an emergency at the hospital. Perhaps she was snatching a few extra moments of sleep. Perhaps she had forgotten her call with her grandmother and had been happy to be free of the burden.
In Facebook’s blue and white search bar, Shireen queried her latest quarry: J-U-N-A-I D [space] M-U-K-H-T-A-R. She tapped the magnifying glass, producing an endless parade of Junaid Mukhtar’s. Flicking her finger up the iPad screen, Shireen found the one. The boy in the photo stood on a verdant lawn in a black suit, flashing a white-toothed smile. His profile said that he had graduated from New York University and listed his hometown as Staten Island, NY. Shireen was certain that, at last, fussy Ayla could find no objection.
When Ayla was born, Shireen had flown halfway across the Earth, from Karachi to Tokyo to San Francisco, a week after her first daughter’s first due date. At the end of the flight was a tired Huma, a mother ready for her mother. Shireen had taken a sobbing Ayla, still liquid-boned days after being born, from Huma’s aching arms. Shireen had patted Ayla’s back until she quieted just as Shireen had soothed Huma, Bobby, and Baby when she was still young and had worn vermicelli-strapped blouses. Ayla had opened her eyes, dark as dates, and Shireen had been starstruck by her daughter’s daughter, two children, both hers.
The phone rang, making Shireen start. The screen lit lime green: AHMED, AYLA — NEW YORK, NY.
“Assalamualaikum?” Shireen answered.
“Assalamualaikum, Nani jaan! How are you?”
Ayla always asked the question and Shireen, as was her habit, responded lachrymosely. “Everything is the same. I watch dramas alone in the day and your mom and aunt call in the morning. My hip still hurts after my fall, so I have not left the house in weeks.”
There was a pause.
“But your hip is getting better? You’re taking your Celebrex?”
Shireen noted how Ayla hesitated at even the slightest revelation of Shireen’s sadness, the unshakeable loneliness, the feel of time running too slow and too fast all at once. How could Ayla understand? And how could Shireen burden her with it? She and her friends all knew, complaining too much only stopped people from listening.
Shireen did not think she had been like this with her own parents or grandparents. Before her hands had creaked with arthritis, she had spent hours at the foot of her grandmother’s hard bed, the fan’s metal blades buzzing above, massaging her grandmother’s feet and listening to her complaints of aching knees and headaches from eye strain. But that had been a different time, when a family’s generations still lived together in one house, layered on top of each other like living archaeology.
“Yes, beta, of course. How’s residency?”
As Shireen had known, the question set Ayla on a path of animated chatter. Although Shireen could not follow half of what Ayla was saying, because Ayla’s tongue carried that characteristic Karachiite speed, if not the Karachiite accent, Shireen enjoyed hearing her breezy young voice and her breezy young problems.
When Ayla paused for breath, Shireen took her chance. “Ayla jaan. You know, I was speaking to my school friend Kawsar—” (Kawsar, who, before she met her husband-to-be misheard a report that he had a “bari laal gaari” [big red car] as “bari laal daari” [big red beard] and approached her wedding day with untold trepidation) “—her son is a doctor in New York and he has a patient who has a son who works in finance. At a bank. Gold Sachs. Have you heard of it?”
“Sure, Nani. Goldman Sachs is a big bank.”
“Shall I give Kawsar your information? The boy’s name is Junaid Mukhtar. He is a five foot ten, went to New York University, his father is a doctor, his mother is a homemaker, and he is the youngest son.”
“Momma’s boy. You know I’m only interested in orphans.”
“What am I going to do with you?” Shireen sighed with frustration. “That way of talking to boys that they like—other girls have it, but your mother never did and neither do you.”
Shireen thought of those sweet-smiling girls four, five, six years younger than Ayla who were getting engaged and married. In their wedding photos, bedecked in spangled scarlet and gleaming gold, these new brides looked more and more like girls playing dress up. But she glanced at the wedding photo, framed in glass on her dresser, and saw a little girl in a veil that had been tea pink and a ghagra that had been maroon, all flattened into greyscale. Qasim stood beside her, a sharp figure in a sharp grey suit, broad at the shoulders, narrow at the waist. His salary had been good, his sharp tongue famous, and Shireen had always liked his rangy build and thick, flopping hair. Her parents had suggested the match to her cousin, Shireen had known she would have to marry someday, and like that, she made her choice. Happiness had been that easy. Shireen could not comprehend what Ayla continued to look for.
Shireen heard typing on Ayla’s end, followed by clicking and a long pause. Then: “Send him my info, Nani. Let’s see.”
Shireen thought she heard a smile in Ayla’s voice. While Ayla continued speaking, Shireen’s attention drifted, warmth spreading through her.
This was the beginning of something. The boy would like Ayla, Ayla would like the boy, and in some time—maybe three months, or four, if they wanted to take it slow, they would get engaged. The boy’s family would arrive at Ayla’s family home to settle the matter and the wedding would be scheduled for within the year. Ayla would look like a pari in the wedding garments that Shireen was seeing on the dramas these days—a sheer, embroidered veil, a long silver gown, with gold-and-emerald jewelry stardusted with diamonds. And yes, she could convince Ayla to hold her wedding in Karachi and they could host the mendhi on the lawn—Ayla had always loved this house and the hot, tropical city. And family, from the Gulf, from the States, from England, would converge on the light-draped bridal home, Shireen’s home, and fill it once again with song and laughter and the crisp scent of new wedding clothes.
Nimra Azmi is a writer and lawyer based in Washington, D.C. Her work focuses on the stories and histories of the South Asian and Muslim diaspora and has previously been featured in Slate, The Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, The Normal School, and forthcoming in the Briar Cliff Review. She is currently pitching her first novel to agents.
NEED IMAGE & CRED