The Circle Expands, the Circle Contracts
I know the difference between a meaningful life and one that is not, and I’ll take meaningful over most anything else. Every time.
When I was a child, our schools got out at half past one and by two in the afternoon, already changed out of our school uniforms, we all—myself, my brother, my parents, and my maternal grandparents—were having lunch. Every day. I can remember, so vividly, sitting at the dining table together. Those memories are filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of growing up in a traditional but relatively liberal family in Karachi. Conversations in two different languages, my maternal grandmother reading in Urdu and entertaining us with literary jokes—a way to pique our interest into diving deeper into the language. Gentle admonishments on how to ask for things as hands moved to pass dishes of steaming rice, curries, daals, and, in the summer, mangoes of all sizes for dessert. The smell of cloves, black pepper, and garlic made the air so aromatic that it felt heady.
My father was a naval officer, my mother was a teacher. My maternal grandparents stayed with us when they landed in Pakistan from their travels abroad. Along with my brother and I, we were a very close family of six for the longest time. In addition to this core unit, we lived in a large family compound—a series of apartments that stacked one on top of the other. My paternal grandmother, my father’s sister and family resided in the compound as well. The matriarch of the family, my paternal grandmother, lived on the second floor which was accessible by a column of stairs that cut the buildings down the middle. Our family lived in a ground-floor apartment on the right and my father's sister and their family on the left. There was ample space to fit everyone, including my father’s two other living siblings who would visit periodically from the US and Iran and our cousins who came and went in the hot Karachi summers.
Our family house had two large gardens flanking both sides of the house. Hedges that my paternal grandmother trimmed every morning without fail framed the outer boundaries and chumpa trees we all climbed as children lined the peripheries. We had all manner of fruit trees too; mango, chiku, almond and even a small lemon-lime tree bearing perfect tiny wedges that were too sour to actually consume. In the corner on one side of the garden was a white metal swing around which we played games. The rest of the garden, on both sides, was a wide expanse of closely cut grass. In the evenings, in a large circle made of folding chairs in primary colors, we would have tea together. Every evening. Without fail. Well, barring monsoon season when, for two months, the evening ritual was held inside to escape the curtain of rain that blanketed the city.
Evening tea time began when hints of cardamom would waft through the air. Close to five, a tray with a large teapot would follow the aroma of the special type of tea my aunt used. The teapot was always covered in a cosy to keep it warm. There was no excuse for being served cold tea even in the height of summer. There was also a jewel-green ceramic dish of condensed milk and something sweet and salty to eat housed on the many-tiered display of the rolling cart. It was a setup that was constantly and diligently replenished.
During the course of the evening, people often stopped by unannounced. It was a time and place where that was totally acceptable. You didn't need to call ahead of time. You came for a visit or picked up the phone when you thought of someone. You caught up when and where people were available, often while in the middle of multiple other conversations. Your aunt would be speaking to you, then she would speak to the cook, give the driver rapid-fire instructions, complain about the gardener being late, yell very loudly at the children, and come right back to you without skipping a beat. And without an apology of any sort. Yes, a different time and place.
As family, friends, acquaintances and their children stopped by, folding chairs were added to the ever-expanding circle—a circle that also included the cats that my paternal grandmother liked to feed. Tea would continue late into the evening—only beginning to wrap up when the orange halo of the sun began to set through the mango trees and the crows started cawing. Those who prayed broke off first. Soon after the official Azan, the call to prayer coming from a nearby mosque was heard, the rest of the circle would disperse to reconvene the next evening.
This was the Hashim family house. We stayed there for years at a time between stints in Islamabad where my father would be stationed periodically. It was a peculiar situation where a naval officer was stationed in a landlocked city, but it is the capital and was the order of things. Shuttling from one end of the country to another, our belongings were driven across in a large container every four years or so. It was meticulously packed by my father, an expert in the art of packing things so they remained intact through the long journey.
The one exception to this back-and-forth between capital and seaport city was a stint in Manora, a peninsula off the coast. While there, my brother and I attended a well-known school that we had to take a boat to everyday. I was eleven and yes, it really was an eleven-year-old’s dream come true in every way. One of the few coeducational institutions in the city, my mother and her brother had gone there a generation before. Established in the British educational system, the school clung stubbornly to certain vestiges of time, like sorting students into houses named after caucasian British gentlemen such as Napier, Streeton, and so on. I was a Napier as was my mother and her brother before me.
Looking back, I am aware that these more quiet memories are gifts of a very cared for, privileged childhood in a starkly divided country. Even to this day, post-partition, Pakistan remains divided politically, economically, religiously, and in many other ways. And there was, of course, all the expected tumult of that in the background.
Periodic protests in the streets, military rule, then democratic rule that was quickly overturned by military rule. At times, military rule was almost preferred as it inferred a certain order and stability. Although, it had other troublesome repercussions on the wheels of democracy—mostly to flatten them. At eleven, I escaped my first bomb blast, narrowly, by seconds. I most remember the smell, bodies and blood. There were two more blasts I missed not as narrowly in the coming years. This is not an unusual story. My generation of friends all have these experiences.
July and August monsoon rains would wipe away poorly prepared infrastructure, stopping cars with water up to the bonnet. The only way out was to have a friend who had a jeep that could make it through all manner of roads. They would rescue you from work and deliver you safely home where you would enjoy pakoras, parathas and tea as you watched the rain come down. Summer also meant load shedding—hours of no electricity meant to shed the load on the electric grid. We spent those evenings on the rooftops of the Hashim family house grateful for the sea air that blew across the city through swaying palm trees.
In our circle, there were sobering moments that too left a mark over the years. When my father was five, my paternal grandfather died of tuberculosis, leaving my grandmother the task of bringing up three boys and two girls. She did so in short order. She wore only white—a white linen gharara, a white tunic top, and a muslin scarf to cover her head if needed—as a sign of mourning for the rest of her life. My paternal grandmother was a slim, petite, tall woman (I imagine) when she was younger. From the earliest time I can remember, she was hunched over somewhat. She had an elegance about her that was striking. And sometimes she had a very dirty sailor's mouth. It was a perplexing contrast that, to this day, I have not been able to firmly reconcile in my head.
When I was 16, my father got very sick with renal cancer, a disease that took his life less than two years later. It was a casual moment where the body betrayed itself. As a family, we staggered through years of treatments that were destined to fail. I was too young to understand the consequences of what was going on in the beginning and too old to escape it at the end.
While my father was sick, my maternal grandmother called from Chicago one day where she was with my uncle and her voice sounded slurry. She came back to Karachi for medical care where a tumor in her brain was discovered. Despite surgery and medical intervention, it killed her a few weeks later. After her death, my maternal grandfather had a heart attack that unearthed heart disease, keeping him in a deep depression until he died a few years later. My mother lost her husband and both her parents within a span of seven years. We lost half our core family. We moved houses, we gathered with each other in homes and hospitals, we bathed those who were sick, we buried those we loved. My mother would never be the same. My brother was quiet. I sat by the graves in disbelief.
But this is not the whole story. Even amidst all the personal and civic turmoil, we gathered. We had large meals together. We sat in the drawing room and laughed even when things were hard. Inside jokes that only those who carry profound grief understand, tiny essential sparks amidst overwhelming darkness as we moved from funeral to funeral.
While my father was sick, we played a game called caram which he won. He stole bites from our favorite desserts by asking to see them for a second, a request we always complied with while grumbling loudly but good-naturedly. We celebrated my 18th birthday nine days before he died. He came home from the hospital that day, donned a striking blue shalwar kameez, and enjoyed a bite of chicken after having been in a hospital for a month. After it was all over, when we wondered how the world could ever be the same, we were embraced by our large family and friend circles. They encamped at our house, cars lining a 3-block radius. They brought us food, reminisced, and pulled out memories, memories that keep those we love alive. We loved our people for being human but refused to put them on pedestals despite every attempt to immortalize them in death, blurring the edges of their actual being.
My mother did not give up on our future, putting my brother and I through the rest of our schooling, eventually sending us to colleges and graduate schools by taking on more work. She built a house on a plot of land my father had set aside for our family, an unusual thing for a woman to do on her own in a society where men were treated more respectfully when taking on a construction project of this kind. But she found a kind, very talented, well-known architect who guided the construction with such care that we think of him as part of our house in Karachi even now.
My mother refused to become a traditional widow even though she was, at the same time, so incredibly sad she felt unrecognizable to us. I now realize my paternal grandmother had also defied the strict expectations of widowhood half a century earlier.
Through all of this my brother and I were deeply loved. We were protected as something precious. We were given every opportunity to succeed. And when we left to study abroad and build our lives, our success as human beings is due in part to the care that was poured into us, the structure we had growing up, and the investment of life savings into our education. It was ensured we would be allowed a debt-free post-degree life with opportunities to live in a country with less turmoil—if we so chose. Our success is due to this history.
Our family house; the newer house, is still a place where people gather. We sit in the entrance, we overflow onto the stairs, we bring tea and samosas out. We drape across my mother’s bed and look back nostalgically as we form new memories with our subsequent school graduations, engagements, and weddings. We come together to celebrate thresholds we walk through. Our house is filled with flowers, the scent of tuberoses and motia flowers lingering for days. We hold hot mugs of tea as talks and visits begin at midnight. We take walks encircling the new Hashim residence. I take these walks when I visit. Every time.
Our family of six contracted unimaginably and expanded again as we brought those we loved into it. If you have the profound privilege of growing older, this cycle of contraction and expansion of our circles continues. That is what the arc of time is. And this is the circle I come from. If you strip away one aspect of this story from any other, you lose everything.