Chapter 7 Salma #2
There it is thick with the scent of home, as familiar as cousins.
There the cumin is sizzling and releasing its salty, sharp odor.
There is cardamom blossoming in the air, promising a treat.
The day is bright and sunny. I am welcomed to a new day of childhood where my only responsibilities are to find pleasure.
Asma and I ride bikes downhill. She is close enough to touch.
Even in my dream, I am conscious of the fact that I don’t want to be left behind.
My jaw grinds tight with fear of the steep hill.
I must keep up. Asma turns to me and asks me what I’m saying, and only then do I realize that I am talking.
Saying the same thing over and over. I jar myself awake, but I am still there.
I feel summer. Humidity on my skin, the smell of green in my nose, and the respite of shade.
I do not want to wake up. I do not want to confront what is waiting for me.
To realize, yet again, that I am in the after part of my life.
To face my role in all that happened. To make the decision on whether I should meet my father or not.
To tell Mamoo that he has called. To find out what happened to my mother.
To see Marlene and Poppy again. To tell Mamoo that I have seen Ruby.
I was worried about Asma and wanted desperately to check on her, to tell her about our parents’ return, but she didn’t respond to my nightly callback attempts.
I hated that Abu had started invoking me as the model child or the one whose innocence needed to be protected.
I did not want to be the person against whom he set an example.
At the same time, I was growing resentful of how her actions somehow resulted in me being punished.
Did she hold me responsible for what happened?
Had she lumped me in with Ami and Abu, leaving me stranded on the them side of the invisible line?
Did she think I should have stopped Abu? Could I have?
Until that point, we had experienced almost every milestone at the same time.
We were only allowed to do the same extracurricular activities, which met at the same time, such as Brownies and math club.
We even started our periods on the same day.
The day before it had happened, Ami had whispered, “You might be a woman soon” with a panicked expression.
We were used to her saying things that made no sense.
The next day at recess, I went to the nurse’s office because I found blood in my underwear and discovered Asma there for the same reason.
We came home early from school and suffered through Ami’s halting explanation of where the maxi pads were kept, how we were to throw away used pads wrapped in pieces of newspaper, and that we should never, ever, discuss this subject around Abu because men didn’t know about periods.
The whole time she spoke, she looked at the wall behind our head, like we weren’t there.
She never explained how to use a pad, what cramps were, that we may need deodorant, or anything else about growing up.
Everything we learned came from that pamphlet the school nurse gave us and each other.
Mamoo booked a flight for my parents midweek. I think they had always believed they would return to Pakistan, if only for a visit.
For a long time, when I was little, I thought we lived in America for just right now and was surprised to hear my mother tell a teacher at my fifth-grade parent-teacher conference that we had immigrated to the US.
It was the first time I’d heard that word to describe us.
I thought immigrants were people who had come to Ellis Island.
Immigration is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of event, an extraordinary extraction requiring as much energy as escaping the gravitational pull of earth.
Leaving everything you know behind in the blind and foolish hope of a better life in a place unseen is difficult enough the first time and virtually impossible to repeat.
“When we go home” was said with the same reverence as some people said, “When our ship comes in,” more of an incantation of hope than an actual belief.
I stopped trying to call Asma. She deserved to know that they were playing chess with her life, but I couldn’t tell her if she refused to talk.
Even though it had been less than a week since the play, the list of things I needed to tell her about was growing quickly.
The more time that passed, the more ground there was to cover and, increasingly, the more daunting that conversation felt.
One day I returned from school to competing, cloying smells.
Ami stood at the dining room table lost in thought, making little noises under her breath.
The table was covered with a random assortment of cheap goods and freebie items Ami normally stored in the closet under the stairs: a cloth shopping bag, a boxy baseball hat, gaudy notebooks and small notepads, and the culprits responsible for the olfactory assault—small bottles of cheap cologne and perfume, their fragrances swirling together.
She didn’t hear me, and so I cleared my throat as a warning. She didn’t turn and kept making small little sounds, not quite rising to the level of muttering.
I walked into her field of vision and lightly touched a folded T-shirt with a logo for our local baseball team emblazoned on the front. “What is all this crap?”
She startled and immediately stopped her sounds.
“Just presents, for people at home,” she said distractedly, picking at her hairline.
Over the course of the prior few days, she had managed to lose one eyebrow, and her fingers were now looking for the next front line.
She picked up a snow globe with a dolphin improbably swimming inside, walked around the table, and put it down on the other end.
“I’m so glad I’ve been setting things aside for this day. ”
I tore my eyes away from the iridescent snow, hypnotically fluttering and descending slowly down to the water. “These are gifts?” I lifted a notepad with a slightly puffy rose decorating the plastic cover. I couldn’t keep the disbelief out of my voice.
She muttered, like she was conferring with herself. Then she said, “Oh, that’s one of those sniff things you and Asma love. But don’t itch it. I want it to be new for your cousins.”
Usually, I would have felt that unique combination of pity, guilt, responsibility, and sadness that I associated with my parents, wanting to save them.
I understood how much hope and expectation they had built up over the years around a homecoming.
They wanted to return home as a success story, the mythical émigré made good.
The reality was that they couldn’t afford to go out and buy new gifts, and these knickknacks, long hoped for and acquired over many years from sales bins at the dollar store or regifted items, were a way of taking gifts for everyone, no matter how distant a relative, and thereby promoting the idea of largesse and having made it.
“It’s called ‘scratch and sniff,’ not ‘itch and sniff,’ and we loved it when we were nine years old. This is all junk.”
“Oh no! They think Khala Mamouda will love it. Don’t you think? Or maybe Rabia?” She pulled the notebook away from me and rubbed its cover with her hand.
I attributed her weird pronoun usage to tiredness and feeling overwhelmed.
“I have no idea who these people are. And besides, you’re going back for a death, Ami. Not a party.”
There are norms I equate with my culture: the avoidance of conversations around emotions and the acceptability of artifice and pretense in the service of making yourself or your family look better, richer, or more devout.
That day, I wasn’t willing to engage in things like expressing grief for a dying grandfather I had no memory of and never heard stories of or pretending that I knew the preferences of an aunt or cousin I had never known.
Callous impatience was a small rebellion, but the only type I was capable of.