On matchbooks and on the back cover of magazines in those days, an organization called The Famous Writers School advertised for students to enroll in a correspondence program operating out of New York City. Some pretty well-known names were attached to the school: Bennett Cerf, who’d founded Random House, along with Faith Baldwin, Rod Serling, Bruce Catton, and others. My mother sent away for an application and a test to see if she had the right stuff. I still remember her sitting at the kitchen table in her bathrobe, a cup of coffee at hand, along with an ashtray and a Salem cigarette from which a snake of smoke curled upward, while she worked on the test, which was a series of questions such as “Complete this sentence: Noisy as .”
Fifty-seven years later, I can still remember my mother’s response: “Noisy as a loose shutter in a storm.” Which I admired then and even now think wasn’t a bad response.
As I recall, she never sent the application.
Deprived of what sustains it, the spirit shrivels and eventually dies. I remember watching as the spark of life inside my mother grew fainter and fainter in that isolated farmhouse, the vacant look more and more pervasive, her talk more and more just ramblings, frightening because of their incoherence. A few days before Thanksgiving, after we’d caught the school bus, my father took my mother to a sanitarium outside Columbus for her second institutionalization.
Although my father visited her every week, sometimes several times in a week, her children didn’t see her again until Christmas. She wasn’t allowed to come home, but a kind couple who lived near the sanitarium and who planned to be gone during the holidays offered their house for our gathering. I still remember my fear and lingering anger as we made the long drive to Columbus to pick up my mother. Fear because my last recollections of her were so disconcerting and anger because she’d broken an important promise she’d made to me before she succumbed completely to her illness. We were alone together one afternoon in our farmhouse kitchen, when I’d caught her staring out the window at nothing but the bleak, bare fields, and she’d turned and seen me watching. She’d knelt and taken my face in her hands and said, “I love you, and I’ll be better. I promise I won’t hurt you again.”
But she had hurt me. She’d abandoned me—abandoned us all.
When she came out to greet us for that Christmas visit, in a red dress with a white angel pinned to her lapel, the others ran to her, but not me. After she’d hugged them all, she came to me. As she had in the farmhouse kitchen, she knelt and took my face in her hands.
“I know,” she said. “I know. But I’m back now. I’m really back. And I promise I won’t leave you again.”
I remember seeing that lovely spirit once more animating her blue eyes, and her hands so gentle as they cupped my face, and I fell in love with her all over again and believed what she told me.
But she did leave us again, another institutionalization only four years later. And another a few years after that.
So my memories of my mother have always been balled up with fear and anger and resentment, recollections of abandonment and promises unkept.
My mother had been dead several years before the story that eventually became Ordinary Grace began to take shape in my imagination. I’d been looking for an idea that would allow me to go back and remember a particularly poignant summer in my life, the summer I was thirteen. I wanted to use all my recollections to create the story, to write it in such a way that pieces of my own experience would help to shape its course and the tone of its telling. Without realizing it, I was embarking on a journey that would help me understand not only my mother but also myself and the reason that fabrications—stories, lies, however you want to characterize them—are an important part of who I am.
By the time I’d finished the manuscript, I felt a deep sympathy for my mother that I’d never experienced before. In immersing myself in the imagining of the story, as good storytellers must, I began to see with a more open heart the challenges she faced. I saw that the life she’d dreamed for herself as a young woman, a life she’d believed would include music and theater and an audience for her talents, had never materialized. I felt her burning resentment, which I came to believe had kept her from embracing the reality of her marriage and her family and which, I’m certain, often left her feeling terribly isolated. What a lonely existence that must have been.
But it was also a lonely existence being her child. In writing Ordinary Grace, as I looked back for truths that had eluded me, I began to see why this child of hers might have been prone to fabrications. When her frequent periods of emotional distance or her long hospitalizations took my mother away, I created my own realities in her absence, stories in which the world was not all chaos, where one thing led rationally to another, a world where I had some control and where, in the end, everyone had the hope of living happily ever after. Is it any wonder that I write in a genre in which mysteries are solved and what was wrong is set right? The truth, I understand now, is that stories have always been my refuge. My mother dealt with the disappointments of her life in one way. I’ve dealt with the disappointments of mine in another.
A good story, I believe, should be a journey, not just for the characters involved but also for the readers and, maybe most important, for the storyteller. At the end of that journey, everyone should be in a different place in their understanding of the world and of themselves. The conclusion of Ordinary Grace is one of my favorites in all the stories I’ve written because the place most of the characters have come to is one of understanding and forgiveness. I get mail every week from readers who tell me how much their journey in reading that novel has meant to them. For me, writing it was one of the most wondrous journeys of my whole life, and one that brought me at last to a place of understanding and of forgiveness.
Storytellers’ best tales often rise out of their own lived experiences. Although an experience may offer only the seed of an idea, what grows from that seed can be truly extraordinary, even great. Think about Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird or John Steinbeck and his wonderful stories of the Salinas Valley. F. Scott Fitzgerald mined both his childhood in Saint Paul and his difficult relationship with Zelda to create some of the most memorable stories in American fiction. The clay of our own existence, of our own lives, of our own thoughts and dreams, of the people we’ve known and the places we’ve lived, is the clay that as storytellers we so often use to create our offerings. They may begin as shapeless masses, but as we allow ourselves to do the hard work of remembering, and the harder work of understanding and maybe even forgiving, that formless clay takes on shape and purpose and meaning. And isn’t that one of the blessings of art, that it can offer some hope of meaning in a world that too often seems filled with nothing but chaos?
ORIGINS AND DESTINATIONS
– Ausma Zehanat Khan –
ORIGINS
I WAS THIRTEEN THE FIRST TIME I SAW THE REFUGEE CAMPS on the outskirts of Peshawar, but it was a long time before I understood what the camps represented. I asked my father who the inhabitants of the camps were. He answered, “Your brothers and sisters.” When I asked why they were living as refugees, he mused, “Because of lines drawn on maps that mean nothing to the people of these lands.”
Children can be blithely uncaring about their parents’ past, and it was only as an adult that I became eager to learn where my parents were from and why, during the course of their lives, they ventured so far from home. Because of the journeys my parents undertook, my own life has consisted of periods of stability mixed with uprootings and migrations. I’ve often wondered how my family’s origins, and my parents’ quest for new frontiers, have shaped the journeys I’ve taken in both my life and my writing. To answer that question, I’ve tried to unravel a mystery: where my family is from, where I might belong as a result—and why I feel a sense of belonging to so many different places.
My parents are ethnic Pashtuns. (Urdu-speaking Pashtuns such as my family call themselves Pathans, but the Pashto-language identifier “Pashtun” is more widel
y known.) They were born in northern India during a turbulent period in the subcontinent’s history: its drive for independence from the British.
In 1947, the British departed from India after a period of rule that lasted nearly two hundred years and partitioned the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. Drawing these borders was accompanied by cataclysmic bloodshed that left between one and two million dead and also by mass migration on an unparalleled scale, with an estimated fifteen million people uprooted and displaced.
My parents migrated to Pakistan under the shadow of Partition. My mother came as a child, her family settling in the Punjab; my father, an adolescent, traveled alone to what is now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. My parents believe that somewhere in their family histories was another migration, from Afghanistan to northern India, that led to their families settling in Shahjahanpur. They suspect that their tribal roots lie in Jalalabad or Kandahar, as episodes of Pashtun migration from Afghanistan to northern India were not infrequent. But there are no family records of these journeys, no mention of when they may have taken place or in what context—as merchants or as raiders, perhaps? Beyond the names of my great-grandparents, our history is silent. What I do know is that my parents have been Indian, Pakistani, British, and Canadian, with untraceable Afghan roots. To their bones they are Pashtun Muslims. I have been Pakistani, British, Canadian, and now American, but I have kindled that flame of Pashtun Muslim identity inside me from my earliest memories, undiminished by the mystery of my family’s origin.
The gap between then and now seems immense, impossible to fathom, even harder to retrace. In this process of searching to overcome it, I have written several novels that follow my family’s history, excavating the lost past to better understand how it shapes my view of the world and why I write the stories I do—a mystery series in which the main character, Esa Khattak, is a Canadian Pashtun detective with a deep sense of connection to his family’s roots, and a fantasy series set along the Silk Road, recalling the lost glories of the civilization of Islam and touching upon cities my parents journeyed through to brush against this history. I wanted to know this history, a history that passed me by despite the many summers I have spent in Pakistan. To that end, my parents told me stories, and more than a decade ago, I recorded some of my father’s memories.
SHAHJAHANPUR LOST
My father was born in Shahjahanpur, close to the border with Nepal. He has spoken of places where he traveled with my grandfather, who was the administrator of a school and whose own father was a judge. He remembers, as a boy, a dog that was cared for in the courtyard of the local mosque and how he would look for opportunities to slip out to the mosque for a chance to play with that dog. Hearing his stories, I wanted to roam the streets of Shahjahanpur, look at the house that had been signed over to squatters in the aftermath of Partition, retrace the path my father took on his bicycle when he was chased by a gang of monkeys, and see the place where his pigeons were set free by his older brother because he wasn’t applying himself to his studies.
My mother was also born in Shahjahanpur, and she still hopes for the chance to visit India, though her longing is tied to other mysteries. She doesn’t know exactly when she was born. Like many of those displaced by Partition, she was assigned an arbitrary date of birth; new documents established her identity, and now she often says that Pakistan gave her everything she has.
KHYBER PAST
When I asked my father about his origins and what he would consider his hometown, he named the city of Peshawar, where he attended Khyber Medical College and where I spent some time in my childhood. This is another gap in the family history where I thought to ask questions too late. Now I wonder about my father’s connection to Peshawar and about his work during the early days of his training. He taught pharmacology at the college in the 1960s. During the summers, he would take his students to administer vaccinations in the tribal areas. Where did he go? What were conditions like in those Pashtun villages in the north? Was he able to treat women? How were his efforts received? Are there any descendants of those families who might remember him or have stories to share about his early life and work? Maybe because I look so much like him, one day I’ll run into someone who knew him in the streets of Peshawar, and they’ll tell me, “Your father took the bus from his college, and then he trekked into our village.” His is a journey I long to uncover and retrace.
MY THOUGHTS MOVE TO AFGHANISTAN. I WONDER ABOUT migrations whose paths I can’t follow. Do I have family in Jalalabad and Kandahar that, through a strange genetic coincidence, I might resemble? Someone took a picture of my younger brother during a visit to Peshawar. He was wearing shalwar kameez—for men and women both, the traditional attire of a long tunic worn over loose pants—in the midst of a group of our cousins and second cousins, all similarly dressed, all ruggedly fierce and handsome, half of them green-eyed, and it was as if my brother had risen from the mountains himself, always part of that history, as if oceans and migrations had never divided us or separated us from our family. Perhaps my ancestors fought the British; perhaps that Pashtun blood coursing through my veins is why I was impelled to set one of my novels in Afghanistan, reimagining cities such as Kandahar and Herat into places I renamed Candour and Hira without leaving their history behind.
In my writing, I have returned to what my father said about “the imaginary lines drawn by empire” that slashed through the Pashtun heartland. My main character says something like this to a French Interpol agent, a woman who has seen a resemblance between my Pashtun detective and the Afghan refugee children who populate the refugee camp at Moria on the Greek island of Lesvos in my novel A Dangerous Crossing. She asks if she’s imagining the resemblance, and he answers, “Do you remember the imaginary line the British drew to delimit their sphere of influence—the Durand Line? Sometimes it’s hard to know on which side of it you belong.” A reflection of my father’s words, a reflection of what it means to be Pashtun.
MY JOURNEY HOME
When we visited Peshawar, I became enamored with it, wandering around the university with my family and then through the bazaar, where everyone seemed to be carrying a Kalashnikov. Wrapped in a white chador, I accompanied my father and his friend on an evening walk. The friend commented on the soft summer weather, and, not understanding that this was a conservative culture where girls didn’t say such things, I replied in Urdu, quoting one of my parents’ favorite songs. Mausam hai ashiqana… this is the weather for falling in love.
We stayed at the home of another family in Peshawar, and my teenaged eyes were dazzled by the introduction of one dashing Pashtun relative after another. Late at night, on an upstairs terrace, jasmine was in bloom, and we sat around a beautiful handwoven Pakistani carpet as tea was served with oranges and sweets, and film songs drifted up from radios playing on the street. I’ve forgotten who was with us in that company—who our host’s children were, whether there were other girls there—but the rest I remember in such vivid detail, including that feeling of nostalgia, that I made it a pivotal scene in Among the Ruins, where Esa Khattak waits for a woman who might be able to help him solve a murder. He is on a rooftop terrace in Esfahan that reminds him achingly of his grandfather’s home in Peshawar. Every journey forward is a step into something bright and welcoming, but every separation from the past is a loss.
These hidden connections must exist for every writer. I still feel that haunting desire to return to Peshawar in my father’s company, to see it through my own lens, a lens that has become clearer with time.
DESTINATIONS
My parents must have felt the same longing. After they migrated to England, there was a long gap before they were able to return to what they still considered their home in Pakistan. My mother had borne three children during this period away; she was a young woman who was just learning English, without the extended network of family support that she was used to, and she was eager to return to her hometown. My father persuaded her that the most affordable way for them to travel to Pakis
tan would be to drive from England through most of continental Europe and then through Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan before crossing the Khyber Pass. They had three young children in tow. As faithful Muslims, they wanted to travel through Turkey and Iran. As Pashtuns, they had Afghanistan in their blood. I was a child on this journey, and my parents’ memories of the trip have faded. My siblings and I have patiently tried to retrace their route on a map, with only my mother’s recollections to guide us.
One of my mother’s favorite memories of this trip is a story about the attempted crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan, a journey too dangerous to undertake now without a military escort. Back then, my father warned my outspoken twenty-something mother that if they were stopped by police or the toll-takers known as chaukis anywhere along the road, she shouldn’t attempt to speak or to ask any questions. In his words, “Pashtuns don’t expect women to speak.” He also told my mother to cover her head. My mother had been wearing a pantsuit during this drive through Afghanistan and had intended to change into her shalwar kameez only after we had driven through the Khyber Pass. She didn’t have anything with which to cover her head, so my father advised her to keep her head down and not to look at any man who might approach the car.
But my mother is not one to remain silent, nor is my father one to insist on silencing her, so she didn’t obey this restriction when the moment came. It was late evening, and somewhere outside Ghazni, our car was stopped at a checkpoint. The man who stopped us wore a plain shalwar kameez, and he didn’t speak to my mother, didn’t look at her, per Pashtun custom, addressing only my father. He advised that the border was closed and that the customs check would have to be completed in the morning. My mother wanted to push through to Peshawar, so strong was her desire to reach home. Angrily, she muttered to my father in English, “These border guards are lazy. They don’t want to work; that’s why they’ve shut the border early.”
Private Investigations Page 9