The Stories that Pass Through Us

THE STORIES THAT

PASS THROUGH US

Our 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. ROWNAK TABBASUM

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

“We did not leave the friends we knew, the parents who loved us, the familiar air back home, for this place so that — so you could sit all day watching TV or go out and party and pretend to call that freedom.” I looked away.

“We came to this place to prove ourselves. We send money back home to people who can not support themselves. You know their poverty. Your father and I could not be here, if we did not transcend all their expectations of us. Why cannot you do the same?

spilled milk was never going to end them, if my sister hadn’t. If those menial jobs hadn’t. If my brother hadn’t. If Canada hadn’t.

Canada stretched them, pulled them apart; they were laughed at, given dirty looks for not understanding some custom, some rule they weren’t aware of. Yet somehow — somehow, down the line, whatever it was that held them together, brought them to better jobs, a bigger house, a place where they couldn’t be laughed at so easily anymore. My mother told me about how my father cried to her some nights when they first came to Canada, telling her he wanted to go home, leave it all behind. My father never cries…

“That’s because your dad throws all his pain on top of me.” There was a lull. I do not know why she had brought this up in the first place.

“Does crying help?” I couldn’t stop myself. “Does it make things better?”

“Pain doesn’t like to just sit, it moves about…and then I can’t help but cry”

“Where does the pain go?”

“Allah - he takes that pain away. You can’t put it in other people. People can’t handle it. They can’t understand it like He can.”

My mother yelled at me for not wanting to wear hijab when I was in highschool. Back then, I was convinced she didn’t understand me. “You’re forgetting who you really are!”she boomed. “I want to be my own person, ma!” “No you don’t, you want to be like them!You’ll lose yourself.” When she said wear the hijab, she meant don’t lose faith in Allah, because she ended with, “At the end of the day, Allah is all you’ll have left.

Back then too, I complained I didn’t want to go to university. I remember I didn’t want to get married. I didn’t want children. I wanted to be free, I thought.

Transcend my expectations, go to school, get a PhD, have a brilliant job, have a family, do it all.”

“Do you know how difficult it is? To do all — any of that!”

“Do not explain difficult to me. You do not understand difficult.” I wanted to respond, but the more I thought I understood difficult, the more I could not say I did.

“You’re saying that I owe you, aren’t you ma?”

“You would be nothing without me. You can’t even make your lunch yourself now,” She took a pause before starting again, sounding agitated. “If you want to repay me, it’s a lost cause anyway. What parent doesn’t have dreams about their children’s future? After your sister passed away, after your brother… the dreams I saw in them, now you are the only one who can fulfill them. That is unfair too, I know” I did know this. I felt this everyday. I said nothing. Anything I could have said somehow sounded cheap, immature.

“Success is doing something amazing and still having people to share it with.”

That’s when I realized it. I realized then…why my mother never left my father. Why he never left her. Why even when hope seemed lost, they held onto Allah. Why when everything seemed to drown them, this is what kept them afloat. I understood their valour, their sacrifice, their struggle.

After I got accepted to my doctorate, my mother took me home. She had prepared a meal I loved in my childhood. My father was upstairs with my spouse and child. I looked at my mother, old and wrinkled, but without any loss of spirit. “I am sharing it with you.” “What?” she said looking confused.

“Did I say that?”

“Yes.” She laughed, and didn’t say anything for a while.

“I am also sharing my success tonight.”

“And what’s your success, ma?”

“You.”