THE STORIES THAT PASS THROUGH US ROWNAK TABBASUM
O
ur parents’ stories are not our own. The path they took to the place they stand today is not our path to take for granted. Their success — their failure, what part of it can we call our own? The stories — ones filled with pain, told so causally at the dinner table or shortly before bed — when did we start to brush it off as simple chatter. As children perhaps, we wondered about these stories, knowing that they were real, but misunderstanding their impact. When did we start to roll our eyes, and sigh, believing that such words were meant only to manipulate us and so we decided they were not real.
Our parents’ stories are not our own, but they are the prelude to ours. The immigration officer who interviewed us was a pale white woman whose English was so foreign. Of course my parents knew the language — just her accent made it so hard to understand words they already knew. She was the decider of fate — the woman who would let us into the West if she wanted. I was a little over a year old, and was squirming around in my mother’s lap. My mother doesn’t recall if what they said had made any sense — I had been so distracting. What she does remember is at the end, the lady smiled at her and said “What a cute baby.” My mother now laughs and tells me, “By Allah, I think perhaps you are the only reason we passed.” Certainly this could not be my victory. Certainly I did nothing…I do not recall sacrifice, or valour, or struggle. It was my parents struggle, their uncertainty, their fear, their prayers — answered in the form of a baby. Our first year in Canada, we shared a tiny apartment with two other families and their children. This land, so foreign, so strange, so uninviting, did not seem to hold up to the pomp and glamour they’d been promised. My educated parents, who’d worked in universities, their ancestors who’d doctors and lawyers, now they struggled in late night shifts washing toilets of fast food chains. I complained only about the expensive shoes I could not buy, the art supplies I could not have, the horses I could not ride. I complained about the tiny apartment, the food we ate, the camps I could not go to — yet in my heart I always knew … I never doubted that they did not give me their everything, but I still complained because the white kids did, even when they had more.
My sister was born a Canadian, she died in the bath when she was two. My father was just going to the other room to grab a towel. I was too young to cry, but old enough to know that this feeling was pain. “You know ma, this pain, it’s a burden” I was in third grade and I had just learned the word burden. My mother tells me that it is not my burden, it is hers. My brother was born a Canadian as well. He grew up with me. He took to drugs when he was in high school. When he got older, he ran off with some girl and didn’t graduate from university. The last we heard was that she’d left him and he was looking for work. I used to tell my mother that it wasn’t her fault, but she never stopped believing it was. My father would only scoff and say, “There must be something in the soil here, the kids all grow wild.” He was my annoying little brother. He was my parents’ tragedy. I remember I cried to my guidance counsellor in middle school once, telling her that my parents had been yelling at each other. I didn’t realize that the fight about being late was trivial, that the fight about spilled milk was easily forgot, that in the bigger scheme of things, spilled milk didn’t amount to anything. She stayed with my father even after my sister died. My father stayed with her when she grieved my brother. In reality, that
XXV | NOVEMBER 2019 | THE MUSLIM VOICE | 5
