A Train Journey
I don’t think I could tell you where it all started. Perhaps it was in that moment when a hand attempted to swat the fly off my eighteen month old navel, and in the process, fell upon something else causing a rush of blood through my body. Of course, I don’t remember this, I was told. But I do remember when I had to stay in boarding school over the summer because war had broken out at the border. Just me and all the other boys. I’m certain that was the summer that puberty hit. It could have been much later, like the time I kissed and recoiled from Claire Waters at my first flat party in Cambridge. Perhaps it really began in Paddington, at Saint Mary’s hospital, when I saw a tiny, wrinkled creature covered in blood and vernix exit my wife’s womb and enter my world. There he was, half of me connected by a thin cord to half of her, and still in that instant, I knew that I would love the sickly little thing more than I could love my wife or any other woman. Except my mother.
In fact it was my mother who introduced me to my wife. I was twenty one. A fresh graduate, a barrister at law. As long as I could maintain some semblance of normalcy and posh-sounding English, my prospects for life were set at birth. I was not too dark, thanks to my mother’s prayers and all the time she spent looking at Cary Grant while I was in utero. By the standard of those around me I was fairly tall and well groomed. By all accounts, I was good looking. None of that mattered as much as my last name though, which in it, held the weight of my father’s lands, my inheritance and the dubious fact that my family was well respected by the Muslim community in India. Hussain or as they’d say in England; hOO-sane. So when my mother told me she had set up a meeting between myself and the daughter of a wealthy Muslim trader from Assam, I had no qualms. Mother always chose well. Still, when I saw her in a saree, I realised she was something else entirely.
The saree was from Kashmir. My mother had gifted it to her. Every thread looked like it was sacred. The silk came from the Antheraea silkworm, native to Assam. I imagined how each thread had been placed delicately, side by side; weft threads crossing under and over warp threads; a criss cross of days in the fly pit. And then finally, days later, it was transformed into Muga silk so exquisite that only the beautiful fingers belonging to children less than eight years of age, could have woven those threads together without punching holes in the material— and that would be too much to bare! Their fate was one of interlocking; absorption into the flat dimension of a carefully woven fabric until the silk got too old, or too blemished by carelessness, or too disfigured by the hungry appetite of cloth-eating moths despite every endeavour to fortify it in mothballs. Then it was likely to be transformed— cut by heavy silver, scissor fingers— and priced together to form some other flat object, like upholstery, or changed in form and dimension entirely, or simply discarded as waste, but until then the threads would stay together.
So there she was in the silk from Assam, that my mother had purchased in Kashmir; swathed over her left shoulder and loosely around her waist. It looked like a second skin of ivory, supremely innocent and so delicate, like she had been born in it, like her body belonged in it. I knew then, that woman was not like the rest of us, she was ethereal.
“George, do you remember her like that?” I asked the man seated near the window.
He did not turn and look at me but he smiled a handsome smile as he gazed out into the emptiness outside.
As the train chugged past Hyderabad, a white mist started spreading across the landscape outside. Though we moved through one of the most populated areas in the province, all I could see was land occupied by four legged water- tankers for irrigation and stubby shrubbery. At that time of year, moments took liberty. They came around twice a day, every day, once at dawn and once at dusk. The double- glazed glass of the window of the train’s compartment tainted everything, turning the landscape outside into sepia. It seemed like every part of the landscape that the moment touched was alive, usually dressed in the same colour, smell and temperature. The only difference between the moments of the morning and the evening, was that morning fog dissipated and evening fog stayed. Nevertheless, I felt like I knew the landscape well enough to look through the glass, and to see life as it really was; coloured.
Even though George was seated and hunched over slightly, with one leg slung over another, one could tell he was tall. It was the first time he had spoken all evening.
“Sal, I remember. I was just a boy then but I must say, she’s made from the stuff of up above... the stuff I think we’ve all been endowed with, but seem to use in bursts of clarity; spent very quickly and requiring hard labour for replenishing. She came down full of that stuff and it never diminished.” George responded, turning to me.
“Why are you speaking like she’s no longer here? She can hear us old Sal” he said.
George had a habit of taking names at the beginning and end of his sentences. His speech was always fluid. It floated about in a crisp British accent that moved neither too fast, nor too slow, depending on what was being discussed.His words were always carefully measured revelations, that would divulge just enough information to be articulate and to remain relevant. And if he was ever caught off-guard by an insult, or a question, or a remark that outwitted his gentle wryness, he let an old-boy smile slip and dimple into a gentleman’s laugh. A gentleman’s laugh is always deep enough to sound authentic, but soft enough to hear the music in the background, and it does not linger.
When George told a story, it had consequences for both the converser and any amount of listeners who were gathered around him. It usually meant that the middle-aged, broad-shouldered, salt-and-pepper-haired man who resembled Roger Moore, could hold the attention of a whole room’s audience if he willed. Sometimes it vexed me.
“Oh you know what I mean, silly boy,” I said, turning my head away from George and towards the short-haired lady beside him. After calling George a ‘silly boy’, I realised I was talking to a man who was just a little over a decade younger than me. Not much of a boy, but what does age matter anyway?
“Kiran, look at you,” I said in an effort to change the topic of conversation.
“You’re just a child. You must not be foolish and underestimate time. Life is nothing but a short moment between good morning and good night! Speaking of time, did you drink your tea? I feel like it’s been lying here since the moment we boarded this train,” I asked, pointing at a half empty cup of tea.
I was fond of young Kiran. She had been an excellent caretaker for my wife.
“Yes sir, I did, thank you,” she responded in accented Urdu that was distinct to Northern Pakistan.
“I am old, young lady, but not blind. I can see that you’ve barely touched your tea!” I said over the rim of my half-moon glasses.
“I am only asking you because I was considering having a cup, but if this fool has made a bad batch of tea then I won’t have any... unless you all want to be at the mercy of an old man’s bowels,” I let out the short-lived chuckle that my wife couldn’t stand, mostly because it always metamorphosed into an unruly cough that usually lasted a good five minutes.
“Sir, it’s the tea you asked Faizan to make in the thermos before we left. It isn’t bad. Shall I pour you some? It will help you with your cough” she said, nodding at the man seated in the berth opposite her.
“No, I’m alright,” I said, shaking my head, reminded of how my wife held my head up and rubbed the top of my chest every time I fell into that awful fit.
“It’s the same thing you drink every day Sir, it’s just too sweet for me. I usually add salt to my tea,” she said shyly, looking at George from the corner of her eye, and then down at the dirty blue floor.
Kiran shared a berth with me, seated opposite George and Faizan but I could tell the young girl would have preferred being seated beside George.
“Silly girl, why didn’t you tell Faizan to make a pot without any sugar then? Then I could add as much sugar as I like! Faizan, you’re always stirring up things in pots, anyway” I said partly vexed and partly amused as I looked over at the man they were calling Faizan.
Faizan was my attendant, helping me to mundane tasks that my body had given up on, like my morning excretion. After the third time I involuntarily had a bowel evacuation on a chair that was most certainly not in my lavatory, I think I lost all my shame about Faizan’s role in my life. And so I no longer cared that Faizan helped me empty my bowels in the morning. He offered no entertainment either. In fact, I don’t think I cared for him much at all, the man was as boring as watching paint dry.
“Sorry sir,” he said flatly.
By this point, I wasn’t paying him any attention. I was thinking about the salt in Kiran’s tea.
“Ah, salt... you add salt because that’s how they drink tea in Neelum Valley... isn’t it?” I asked, already aware of the answer. My mind was moving further and further away from the train we were on.
“You know, I grew up in a place not so far away. I went to boarding school on the other side of the border, in Srinagar, before I moved to England. There was no border then though.”
“They served salty tea and bakarkhani in the mornings leading up to our winter break. It was never sweet enough for me. I always added an extra cube of gurh. Then the warm, milky liquid turned into pasty pink magic, warming us down to the pits of our stomach as God lay His blanket across the mountain tops of Kashmir.“
Kiran suddenly looked up and her face was clouded by the shadow of a wooden box on the berth opposite hers, above the heads of George and Faizan. The length of the berth was fully occupied by the unpolished box.
“We call it noon chai in my hometown, sir” Kiran said abruptly, in a more authoritative voice than the one I heard minutes ago.
“And God seems to have deserted Kashmir,” Kiran said darkly.
“Snow has been falling at strange times over the last few years. It destroyed my father’s corn crops three years in a row, and left my family destitute. That’s why my sister and I came to Karachi. It was the only place to practice our nursing while earning a living. There was no good work for nurses in the villages and now we’re in deep water. My parents are growing old and there is nobody there to look after them but we have got to earn a living. And now India rains fire upon our valley. My parents have found mortar shells embedded in our roof. May God rain fire upon those across the border, who are trying to take our identity away.”
I sensed pain in her voice. George turned his head to look at her with too, but with varying degrees of surprise. As did Faizan, but he looked at Kiran with a different expression. It held hints of admiration.
“I used to be able to identify with India, it was my home.” I said quietly, reminded of myself at her age, over half a century ago.
“As a child I thought I would live there forever. It was easy to imagine and to do so with confidence because when you’re a child, even your bedroom is vast and unknown. It can become a rocket to Jupiter, a voyager to Atlantis, an airplane to South America. Your room can become the whole universe. To think of borders and countries and airplanes, those were other-worldly thoughts to my Srinagar world. They were not necessary at all.”
I looked out of the window, unable to discern anything in the darkness outside.
“In the summer, the valleys in the area around Srinagar used to be magical, carpeted by halyciones, tulips, scillas and saffron flowers. Sometimes we’d spend the summer in Assam but it was nothing like Srinagar. Srinagar was God’s own garden. Then came 1947 and with it, came the war. We were forced to leave Srinagar, and move to Lahore. My parents were waiting for us there. So I left my identity as a young Indian boy behind, because I was told that being Muslim came before being anything else, except male perhaps.”
“It was easy because I was young enough to become this new character; a Pakistani and as I grew into a young man, I realised there was no room to be Indian again. Ever. ”
Now I felt far away, like I was reaching out, searching for something that was easy to visualise but hard to remember.
“A few years after becoming Pakistani, I moved to England because higher education just wasn’t good enough in Pakistan. Not for aristocratic young bachelors. As the son of a wealthy merchant who had lived and worked in British India, becoming English wasn’t difficult either. There were no language barriers, and I acquired a British accent in boarding school. Yet when I arrived at Cambridge Law School, it was clear to me that becoming English was very different from being an Englishman. So I surrounded myself with Englishmen and other subcontinental men who were being groomed to be something in between.”
“When I returned to Pakistan eight years later, the country was completely different. It was depressing. The Baloch argued for separation, the Kashmiris wanted their own state, East Pakistan or Bangladesh felt shortchanged and the Punjabis- well- they were happy. They were landlords, they were rich and most of them were in politics. I was a professional. I did not inherit land or politics. My father had passed away, and most of his wealth had been spent, so we had no capital to build up factories or mills.”
Suddenly I felt my throat dry up. As I broke into a cough, Faizan handed me a bottle of Nestle water to stave off a fit. As I cleared my throat, I noticed that all three of the other passengers were listening to me intently. It had been a long time since I had held a whole room’s attention.
Just as I formed the words in my mouth, George interrupted.
“Ah Sal... it takes a lifetime to remember but we don’t come into this world as Indian, Kashmiri or Pakistani, and we certainly don’t end up leaving as them either. If we’re lucky, we end up leaving as who we really are,” he said.
At once, I sensed my wife’s presence in the cabin. I looked over at George, whose words sounded like something she would say. I remembered how he gave up the beginning of an identity long ago; the son of Pakistan’s first and only Diplomat at Large, with aspirations to travel the world and study architecture. His mother was a Lebanese lady. When his father passed away in a car accident in Byblos, that involved an old Mercedes wrapping itself around a tree, George was summoned back to Pakistan from Beirut, discarding a life of celebration and adolescence, a life that he was naturalised in, for one involving the oversight of assets for himself, his mother and his sisters. He never left after moving back to Pakistan.
“It does take a lifetime to remember,” I said, avoiding looking directly at George, wondering how much this man and I had in common. I wanted to resume my thought before being sidetracked further.
“As I was saying... upon my return to Pakistan, I remained in a state of confusion for some time. It was frustrating, but I didn’t know why I was so frustrated until much later in life. I didn’t know who I was. I had taken on this identity of this new class of in between; never fully comfortable in brown skin and never confident of my British accent. And now, I am an old man and I am still in between but I don’t think I care anymore, there is no brown or white it seems, there is only in between.”
I thought about my grand-daughters and continued.
“There were plenty of us then and plenty more now... in-betweens... take a look at my grandchildren... except it’s a new kind of class now. It’s not bourgeoise the way it was. The in-betweens are powerful and raw. Young folk are opinionated and seem empowered... they don’t seem to know who they are but they seem informed about who they are not. For them, brown skin means brown skin, not a darker shade of white and not lighter kind of black.”
“I’m getting side-tracked. My child, Kiran, my point was this: it must be difficult to live so close to the border. I understand you are worried for your parents and times are tough but we have looked after you, have we not? We will continue to do so. Do not fret over what it means to be Kashmiri right now. You are coming into your own person. You are a good nurse and to be a good nurse is more useful for this world than to be Indian or Pakistani or Kashmiri. Madame always— “
Half way through my sentence, the train tracks must have curved because the whole cabin swivelled to the left. Before the living contents in the cabin could recover orientation, there was a loud empty thump. A dark brown satchel had come loose from the berth above our heads. The thump was obviously voluminous enough to send vibrations through the surface of the cabin, sending out an alert for a dozen baby cockroaches to come out of darkness. The passengers, however, remained unmoved.
The cockroaches scurried out from under the cabin seats and made their way across the battlefield of light, back towards the nearest dark spots. Kiran and Faizan looked over the cockroaches once and then turned to face George, who looked mildly uncomfortable but did a decent job at concealing it.
“Do they bother you?” Kiran asked George, holding her gaze below his eyes.
“Mildly. I’ve had a few unpleasant experiences with cockroaches on trains but your Madame always took care of it,” George said softly, in what one could call British Urdu, if there was such a thing.
“I can kill them if you want,” Faizan piped up.
This was the first time my aide’s voice had been heard voluntarily on the journey. His tone was beefy, coming from some place that seemed to be deeper than the throat. Faizan looked over at Kiran, who was still ogling George. He gave her a toothy smile. Kiran glanced in Faizan’s direction and returned half a smile. It was the kind that comes from worn-out apathy.
Just then, the cabin door flung open and a little boy’s shrill voice cut through the space in the previous conversation, bringing it to an abrupt conclusion.
“Dada, help! We are at war... We are at war! My sisters are at wa— oh God— there are cockroaches in your cabin!” Little Zed squealed, fixing his gaze on the floor but remaining at the door.
“Come, help me Dada!”
The cabin seemed to have regained a sense of jocularity.
“Son, cockroaches are geared to survive atom bombs, don’t go to war with them.
But your cousins... that sounds dangerous on a train. Come, I’ll bring in the cavalry,” I said, lifting myself off the seat.
*
There were a sum total of nine bodies and some baggage; spread across two cabins and a large cargo hold at the back of Zakaria Express. Most of us were connected extraneously by blood or through service. In most languages, we would be called a family, except my children were already at our destination. The rest of us were on a train journey to Bahawalpur, our destination, a city located at the edge of Southern Punjab. Each compartment had thirteen hours remaining, but time was bent and spent differently across the two cabins, as you will see.
Hand in hand, Zed and I made our way towards the cabin that the rest of my grandchildren were in, steadying myself against the vestibule every time I felt a slight turn in the tracks. Upon entering the children’s compartment, I noticed how unpleasant the cabins on Zakaria Express really were. The walls were fully permeable to a blue hue, emanating from a solitary tube light that hung from a low roof. Part of that wall, above the top berth, held the shadowy mark of red wiring- naked, plastic and semi-attached to the tube light. It was distracting, like something perverted, that had been built to remain concealed while it was still useful.
As I opened the door, all I could hear were the sounds of a whipping, rural wind constantly overpowered by the old machine’s lashes on rusted tracks. Mia’s face was visibly distraught, while Oma’s held a grave expression. As soon as she registered my presence, she regained an air of nonchalance that was characteristic of her.
The sisters sat opposite one another, both of them settled upon two layers of sleeping bags, spread on top of one another, shrouding all their clothing from the fabric of the berth. Any frequent traveller of Zakaria Express would have called them thin-skinned or bizarre, but my offspring simply were not in possession of the kind of steel that one acquires from falling asleep on betel-leaf stained sleeper trains. Immediately, I was reminded of their mother.
Though Oma and Mia were sisters, most people couldn’t tell. Oma was a head shorter than her younger sister, her curly hair added a few extra inches to her height. She was dark enough to be called a mulatto in South America, which meant that most South Asian mothers wouldn’t have considered her for their sons. At least not as a first-choice, much to her satisfaction. She had pearly teeth, a dimpled left cheek, and a smile that was held in place by soft, large, almond-shaped eyes. It was a smile that had an echo, lingering for a few minutes after her hearty laugh had escaped her. It was the kind of smile that could wrap velvet around the most biting insults, like the ones that came from Oma’s jarring ability to see things for the way they really were- always and immediately.
Her sister, on the other hand, looked like she belonged on a clay court in the Davis Cup. Not because she was a great tennis player, but because she looked like she was made to be in front of the TV cameras. The girl was long-legged, slim and slightly wide shouldered, with a long brown pony-tail and an olive-grove tan, that would make most fair-skinned European envious and shake the shaky confidence of most Instagram-browsing millennials. Still, Mia’s tan diminished her almost-perfect profile for an essential group of females: South Asian mothers. Every other facet on her body made her a South Asian mother’s top pick. She was a reflection of her grandmother in many ways. Like her, Mia was an outlier in the normal distribution of ethnic endowments in most countries, making her seem exotic almost everywhere.
The sisters didn’t just look different, they were unlike each other in the way they spoke, in their behaviour, and in their decision-making abilities. Though Mia had grown up in Pakistan, she had spent the last six years out of Pakistan. First, as a student of politics and history in New York City and then in Ireland. She had just returned from a two-year stint at a technology company, much to her family’s surprise. She said she it was because her European work visa had run out, but her sister was convinced that there was more to it. Oma was different. She had cultivated a sharp mind that fed the heart when necessary. She knew her interests lay in Pakistan and as difficult as her own home could be, she maintained her allegiance to that truth. Oma was a reader; always able to read between the lines of culture, ethics and rules, and she liked to live at the edge of these lines.
Yet, for all the differences between Cancer and Capricorn, a deeper look at the two in moments of vulnerability, and one could discern that Mia and Oma really were sisters, affected by the same forces of history.
“You know Mia, some decisions make sense later... I’m glad I moved back here when I did.” I overheard Oma say with consolation the night before our trip.
“There is a strange emptiness when it comes to close community,” she continued. “Distance wears heavy, it prevents you from fulfilling a connection to those in your network who you are closest to... who you want to be physically close to, despite all the other ways there are to connect. And then time runs out and you realise there just aren’t enough moments to be made together. I don’t know— the feeling doesn’t always make sense but sometimes, it brings meaning to the deepest parts of your identity... and really, I’m glad you’re here right now. The timing was right.”
Then again, that was the day before. The day of our journey was a different day.
“What’s all this about? I leave you girls for a little while and you fall apart. We aren’t on this journey to be sad... we’re here for something bigger.” I said, trying to make humour of the situation, noticing Mia’s tear-stained cheeks under the dim lighting. Oma was still impassive.
“Why are you so quiet? Come on, tell Dada what you were saying about Dadi!” Zed piped in.
“Zed... shut up!” Oma sneered.
“What about her?” I asked, intrigued.
“Nothing Dada... we were just joking around and it turned into an argument... you know,” Oma said warily.
“No, no they didn’t! They said George is in love with Dadi! How could that be? It sounds ridiculous, Dada— he’s her nephew!” Zed babbled, visibly disturbed.
“Zed! Get the heck out of this cabin before I kill you!” Oma was infuriated. She shot her brother a deadly look. It was time to intervene.
“Son, don’t worry... your sisters are just being silly. Go to my cabin and I’ll come and get you in a few moments,” I said as gently as I could, giving way to an unexpected memory.
I was reminded of the time I first noticed how comfortable my wife was around George. It was on a picnic to celebrate my birthday. We packed up and put up tent in the Thar desert, almost seated on the border with India, except there was no much of a border out there. It had been a rough year for our marriage. Our son had been diagnosed with leukaemia the year before, so we ended up spending most of our time apart. My wife was busy getting him treated in England, while I had my to continue with my law practice in Pakistan. A few days before the picnic, my wife and eight year old son returned home, relieved that the cancer was in remission, and that our son was likely to make full recovery. On the day before our picnic, I saw my wife break down for the first time since our son’s diagnosis.
“Sal, I feel like I’m just one in this marriage. All this time, I’ve been alone… There are not two,” she said. bearing an incredibly heavy weight in her voice. As she spoke, it broke softly.
“How can you say that?” I responded, feeling assaulted. “I’ve been as worried for our child as you have! Have I not worked hard to get him the best treatment this world has to offer?”
“That’s not what I mean… I am so grateful for all the good things. I could not ask for more— but— you know what I mean— I feel like a marriage must feel like more than— than— this!” She was pointing to the empty space between us.
“Am I insufficient for you? Do we not have a strong friendship?” I said, feigning oblivion, but unable to feign anger. I knew what she meant.
“No Sal, I cherish our friendship… it’s about more than friendship… I just—.” Her voice broke momentarily.
“—I just feel like I’m forgetting what it’s like to laugh… to laugh with my whole heart, Sal. That’s all.” She completed her sentence.
“You’re just tired, darling,” I said, wiping her cheek, and brushing off her emotions as I often and so stupidly did.
“Tomorrow there will be plenty of laughs.”
Then tomorrow came. Several of us set out in the morning, arriving at our destination in the early afternoon. While speaking to a lawyer friend, I noticed my wife settled on a rilli quilt under the warm winter sun. She was sitting next to George, amongst a circle of family and friends, nibbling on freshly cut paneer and cucumbers, in the midst of a conversation I wasn’t privy to. As I watched her from behind my sunglasses, I saw my wife laugh at something George said. Her whole body convulsed, brightening up her face in a way I’d never even noticed before. In that moment, the two of them seemed oblivious to everyone around them. That’s when I realised that George could offer my wife a kind of companionship that I could not, and so I resolved to facilitate it as best as I could.
“O-o-okay. Sorry Apa,” Zed said quietly, interrupting my thoughts and bringing me back to the hazy cabin that hurtled forward, through dried up shrubbery, towards our final destination.
As the little boy made his way out the door, wavering with the movement of the train, I watched him exit. For a few seconds, there was pin drop silence. Then Mia broke in, wiping her nose with the back of her sleeve.
“Look Dada, Oma’s upset because... because... I told her she’s intolerant.” Mia said softly.
“Oh come on, Mia that’s not true... Dada, I’m just upset. It’s been a long week and I’m starting to feel claustrophobic.” Oma said avoiding her sister’s gaze.
“It has been a long week and you’re tired. Go get some air, Oma. And whatever it is, you girls will feel much better once we arrive at our stop. It will free you of all this anger.” I said, reminded of the fights I mediated between my children when they were young.
“I don’t know, Dada. I don’t think Oma doesn’t know what freedom means,” Mia sister said. Their argument was far from over.
She thinks everything in life is binary... She goes off on these anti-capitalist tangents about technology and ethics data and yet she can’t even connect to the basics of being human! You know, not what turns humans into 1’s and 0’s, but the stuff on spectrums... beyond yes or no, beyond black or white. She just can’t get her head out of the sand, sister!” Mia said, making a concerted effort to direct her words at me and not at her sister.
I sensed that we were in perilous territory and I had just handed the girl a baton. “That’s rich coming from you!” Oma nearly shouted, crimson in the face.
“Freedom comes in different forms, sure, but you’re so locked in... drawn into your Western life that you believe you’re free to make decisions... to express yourself, but you’re just so consumed with yourself that you’ve forgotten who you are! You’re too occupied to realise that you aren’t really choosing anything— your choosing to walk away from God— and that your choices are being designed by what is socially acceptable in the West right now, but not what is right... or free as you call it! You’ve forgotten who you are!”
It was clear that my presence had been completely disregarded by my granddaughters and things were now fast moving, out of control. Their argument felt familiar in a strange way, even though what they spoke about was well ahead of my years. I had a feeling I knew where it was going, so I decided not to interrupt, eager to hear the end- if it ever was to end.
“What the hell does this have to do with the West? My God Oma, why are you skirting around the issue so much. Since you’re too afraid to say it how it is, I will! ” Mia said, throwing down the gauntlet.
“I am bisexual! Yes, I am attracted to women— and it’s just too bad that you heard it from someone else! It’s true, I met someone last summer and I didn’t tell you all— big bloody deal! And maybe you’re right, maybe there was more to me moving back here than my visa expiry. If you had the openness to explore possibilities a bit more— to accept that not everything fits your worldview— to take that stick out of your ass— maybe I would have told you myself!”
Within a split second, Oma had jumped off her seat and stormed out of the cabin, slamming the door behind her.
“Jesus Christ Mia, there are gentler ways to do that,” I said slowly, feeling shaky. “I know Dada, I’m sorry but I couldn’t help it. Are you okay?” Mia said timidly.
“I hope you’re not embarrassed of me,” she added.
“No child, not at all.” I said, feeling slightly torn inside.
“Most women here haven’t had the liberty to choose who they want to be. They don’t get to explore themselves beyond what is prescribed to them by virtue of their gender. I can’t fault you for choosing to explore yourself.”
“Really? The timing is all off, but I had a feeling you’d understand better than anyone else,” she said with pain in her voice, like she had just lifted an unbearable weight off her chest.
“I hope Oma comes around,” she said quietly.
“Ah, I have a few years on me. Life works on its own timing,” I said, pulling my granddaughter into an embrace, thinking about her grandmother.
“Don’t worry jaan, everyone comes around eventually.” I said and I meant it, even though deep inside, I wasn’t sure I believed it myself.
“Just one more thing, Dada. Do you think she’s right--- that God will abandon me for this?” Mia said, reminding me of the little baby boy who changed my world many years ago.
“No, I don’t think so. The God I believe in just waits for us to stop abandoning ourselves” I said, recycling an answer I had received many years ago.
“Now try and get some sleep. We have to get your grandmother out of this train and to her resting place in the morning. You know, you will have to hold it together for your mother tomorrow.” I squeezed her hand.
“I’m going to check on your siblings.”
