A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

What is the use of all this living if we don’t stop once in a while to notice what is actually happening—our

She pictures those cartoon cottages in shows her daughters watch, where a woman inside the cottage throws open the shutters and appears at the window singing. That is how it feels today to wake up and see his face, like a window in the room of her heart is being thrust open. Rafiq

She realizes that her life has grown, and what she can now do with ease has expanded.

Where did they come from, her children? And how did they arrive already themselves, and unlike anyone else?

How many times has she stood, as she is standing now, and looked at her children as she is watching them now? A way of seeing that magnifies her attention, deepens her love at the sight of them, and she notices them in a way she otherwise might not, the way the sunlight goldens the profile of their faces, the way Hadia scratches at her nose, adjusts her scarf that always looks a little big on her. Perhaps a hundred times, just in a single week.

It was a specific kind of regret—not wishing he had acted differently, but a helpless sadness at the situation as it was, a sense that it could not have been another way. He could not call his father Baba, nor could he think of him as Baba. Other women he did not know saw his father’s face in his, but his own father could not see it.

Because when the glass cracked, his father did not even raise an arm to resist him. His father who was already becoming an old man, who already worried Amar when he spotted him on his walks outside, his hair turning a stark white, walking slowly and sitting down slowly as if it hurt his knees. The last time they looked at each other, while Mumma knelt on the carpet, Amar caught a look in his father’s eyes that he could only interpret as a look of loyalty, a look that tried to convey: I am with you, I am on your side, I will keep your secret. If his father had just hit him back, cursed at him, said to Mumma, look how despicable our son is, how batamiz, anything—then maybe he could have gone home again. A punishment was a mercy. It marked the end of a sentence. Without one, he could not imagine recovering from his shame.

I had gone away for work trips for so long and so often that I feared my absence was as unnoticed as my presence, or worse. All this work done to provide for a family that could go on

effortlessly without me.

And if what we have been taught is true, I will not enter without you. I will wait by the gate until I see your face. I have waited a decade, haven’t I, in this limited life? Waiting in the endless one would be no sacrifice. And Inshallah one day, I know I will see you approaching. You will look just as you did at twenty, that year you first left us, and I will also be as I was in my youth. We will look like brothers on that day. We will walk together, as equals.