MARIUM MARIUM

Noor Qureishy

We were born an hour apart in the middle of August.

We were born an hour apart in the middle of August. My parents’ voices crackled over the phone, somehow communicating pure joy, wonder, and fear to Gurya Khala – my aunt, her mother – who was staying in a hospital in Karachi. My parents had only been living in America for a year up to that point; a few short months ago, my mother had boarded the plane to New Jersey already pregnant with me, though she didn’t know it at the time. My parents had come without even an inflatable mattress for my mother to sleep on within the bare walls of their new, closet-like apartment. For a few days before their furniture made the journey over the ocean, my mother slept on the ground with comforters wedged underneath her aching back.

She raised me on carpeted floors and in parks with clouds of ducks that we fed with the ends of the bread loaves we’d been hoarding all week. In Pakistan, my cousin grew up with dusty concrete floors, sweet mangos, and the scent of jasmine draped like an afghan over the house.

My cousin and I spoke over the phone twice a year for as far back as I can remember, always the same greeting – “Asalamalaikum,” followed by a rushed “Happy Birthday” or “Eid Mubarak” before we dutifully passed the phone back to our mothers, who immediately launched into loud, raucous chatter. The low quality connection didn’t seem to bother them; their voices just got louder in response, my mom’s head nodding and hands gesticulating wildly, her voice so saturated with emotion that somehow, she was able to communicate for hours despite all odds.

I didn’t understand the kind of love, the kind of connection that would motivate them to push and struggle through hours of forced interpretation, with only the broken, distorted fragments of sentences they got from each other to go off of. My memories of Pakistan came in jumbled, vague forms: the smell of gasoline and sweat, the sun making our skin glow as we tried to make straw baskets on the roof, the rush of gutter water on a day over a decade ago when the streets of Karachi flooded and made it impossible to walk outside.

I remember watching my mother on days when her phone conversation dragged on longer than usual and noticing all the things we had in com- mon: noses, stubbornness, height, manner of speaking. No one would mistake us for anything but mother and daughter. But as I watched her speak over the phone to her relatives in Pakistan, she seemed to be oceans away. This feeling of disconnection isn’t uncommon among children with Pakistani parents; within Pakistani culture, parents are expected to behave more like authority figures than friends. At a very young age, we are told that Heaven lies under the feet of our mothers. Consequently, getting into arguments with my mother always felt like a betrayal, a violation of respect and trust, like I was fighting with a part of myself instead of with her.

A weak phone connection separated my mother and her family, and even that didn’t stand in her way most of the time. I, however, had to contend with oceans of awkward silences, a language barrier, and cultural misconceptions when I tried to communicate with my cousins.

The summer

I turned twelve, my parents decided it was time to visit Pakistan again; it had been seven years since our last visit. We arrived at the airport in the middle of the night, my mother and aunts embracing for a full five minutes before my cousins helped us load everything into two cars, cramming our suitcases into the back seat when the trunk got too full. When we reached the house where my oldest aunt, Bari Khala, lived, the two cousins closest in age to me, Marium (Gurya Khala’s daughter) and Rimsha (Bari Khala’s daughter), were awake and waiting to meet me.

They stood together, hands clasped loosely and sides touching, with an easy comfort that came with years of friendship. I thought that I would know my cousins immediately, that a part of me would recognize them somehow – Marium in particular – because we were born an hour apart, because we were family, and even though I didn’t know what that was supposed to feel like, I still saw the way my mother smiled at her sisters and I wanted that for myself. But all I got were empty stares and polite questions for the first two weeks. mildly mannered children. As neither Marium nor I fit that category, it is safe to say that our relationships with our parents were complicated at best, troubled at worst.

That day, we had planned to visit Gurya Khala’s house, but once the driver dropped me and my brothers at the front gate, a prickly feeling set in at the back of my neck, like a swarm of mosquitoes had settled underneath my scarf.

By then, I had resorted to reading an older cousin’s copy of Les Miserables, lying on the bed at Bari Khala’s house with a glass of ruavza and a cup of steaming tea, flipping through the pages of the book out of sheer boredom and a desire to avoid another awkward conversation with one of my cousins.

Whenever my cousins did attempt to find topics of conversation that we could bond over, the discussion inevitably turned to our parents. The children of Pakistani parents carry with them the knowledge that their parents and their grandparents before them struggled and fought to be able to offer them the opportunities that they have today. The adults in my family all belong to a generation that has either lived through the Bangladesh Independence War, through its aftermath, or both. The expectations born out of a history of hardship often lead to contentious parent-child relationships, even among the most

Ali, Marium’s older brother, wasn’t smiling crookedly and ushering my brothers upstairs like he normally did, and even though I strained my ears for the sounds of Marium getting ready last-minute, swiping her hair into a ponytail and stubbing her toes on the books she always had on the floor of her bedroom, I couldn’t hear anything except the whirring of the overhead fan. When I realized that Gurya Khala had only insisted we eat once before giving up, I knew something was wrong.

The quiet occupied the corners of the house like a real, tangible being. It caught my breath and made the muscles in my legs and stomach shake as I moved slowly and carefully, stepping around the rug that had sent me sprawling the last time I visited, up the stairs that were made of slick stone that stuck to the bottoms of my feet. As I approached Marium’s room, I heard the faint noises of someone moving around, and my posture reverted back to its usual slouch immediately, the tension leaving my body.

To my relief, the door of Marium’s room opened to reveal her bright smile and typically messy room. It wasn’t until fifteen minutes after I had started talking to her that I noticed how her hands trembled slightly under the blanket we had spread over our legs. She saw the alarm on my face a second later and we both looked away at the same time, and I smiled uncertainly, my own hands shaking as I patted her on the back, as awkward and overly-formal as it is possible for someone to be. I wondered what could possibly be wrong –had a tragedy occurred in the family? As I struggled to put the pieces together, I studied the expression on her face. She looked unsettled, a little sad, a little guilty and ashamed. She looked like I always did after I’d been arguing with my mother, who always seemed to know what to say to cut the deepest.

I retracted my hand, wincing as I felt the distance between us widen even more, readying myself for another awkward silence or sharp look. But she must have seen the understanding on my face, because she reached up to take my hand instead, returning my smile with one of her own, warmth spreading from our intertwined fingers as we sat in silence, thinking of our mothers.

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