The Reluctant Immigrant
Is it possible for one place to evoke two entirely different feelings? To think of a place and feel right at home. To then think of the exact same place and feel so utterly alone. Kincardine is a place of intense beauty. Kincardine is also a place of stifling silence.
Jehan, my two-year-old, stands on the kitchen table, looking out of one of the large kitchen windows of our old townhouse. She wears her shocking-pink fleece onesie, the one with the donuts on it. The fleece onesies came in a pack of three. They’ve become her uniform in this lockdown life where we go nowhere, and no one comes over. Her light golden hair is parted into two pigtails. As usual she is waiting, pointing at every car saying, “Look Mama, Baba car.” My husband works ten hours a day, six days a week. I am currently a stay-at-home-mom. My daughter is a daddy’s girl and waiting for dad is a part of her daily routine. We are cat-sitting my cousin’s charcoal grey Scottish fold, and he too is standing straight with her in solidarity, paws on the sill. I look out the window and wonder if I should brave the cold and take Jehan for a walk to distract her. Her scooter is on the front porch, almost entirely drowned in the snow. Only the pink handles are visible. It’s too cold for a walk.
*
I miss my summer walks; I could never get enough of the old Victorian cottages in Kincardine. The one with the bright turquoise door with a porch bench to match, another one painted a pretty powder-blue which was contrasted with large red tulips in the spring. There was one with a stone façade and triangular lime-green bargeboard of an intricate design, arched windows and a tree next to it which was taller than the cottage. I walked daily down Lovers’ Lane, a beach-side trail overlooking the deep blue of the vast Lake Huron. The trail was lined with old beach cottages and modern mansions. The older cottages looked straight out of a fairytale; log cabins with colorful doors, wildflowers, and hand-painted stones. These cottages all had names to go with their façades: Dewdrop Inn, The Dragonfly, The Lighthouse. referring to the actual lighthouse which was the most prominent landmark in Kincardine.
Winter, however, was another story. When my mother asked me on the phone how my day was, I always wanted to answer how Chitra Banarjee Divakaruni would have answered in her short story, ‘Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter’: “It’s been a good day, as good as it can be in a country where you might stare out of a window for hours and not see one living soul.”
I open the window to check the temperature and a cold breeze rushes into the centrally-heated kitchen. Nostalgia is the strangest thing; it creeps up on you when you least expect it. A cold evening breeze in Canada can transport you to another kind of winter, a Pakistani winter. It transports you to your grandmother’s immaculate dining table on a winter evening, where you are seated before her special mulligatawny soup with croutons. The chill makes you think of sitting around a wretched gas heater with your cousins, talking late into the night, munching on dry fruit.
The winter sun makes you think of succulent red oranges which you have outdoors in the garden sitting on a village charpoi. The family dinners which ended up in singing and dancing with very loud relatives. Winter in Pakistan is wedding season where one can attend up to ten weddings a month. Each wedding has four events and this can mean that you are going to a lunch or dinner party every single day; people call it Decemberistan. We are used to what we call wedding-hopping, going from someone’s mehndi event to someone else’s barat, from someone’s engagement to another’s dolkhi. Calendars are out of control, and one spends their days in and out of salons and fitting rooms. Going from one extravagant and many times over-the-top event to the next. The girls wear carefully selected and designed outfits, sip on pink Kashmiri chai with painted lips. The mouthwatering aroma of barbeque, fried fish and perfectly swollen purris. Youngsters performing their wedding dances prepared months in advance. I miss the strings of bright orange genday kay phool used for décor in winter weddings. Pakistan, where fruits and flowers grow even in the winter.
The chill reminds me of Grandfather’s tweed golfing cap, of shorter days and long cozy nights. The short days ending with endless cups of green tea and sleeping under thick velveteen blankets. Blankets which were heavy enough to immobilize you the entire night, our version of the weighted blanket.
*
Standing in my sterile and deadly-silent Canadian kitchen, I am suddenly transported to a winter evening in my street back home in Islamabad. The old vendor hunched over his rickety cart in his brown khaddar shawl and white Chitrali winter hat. The smell of roasted chickpeas filling the entire street as he tosses the chickpeas up in the metal bowl and uses a scythe-like knife to roast them. The old newspaper he shapes into neat cone-shaped packages, ensconcing the nuts in the warm embrace of Urdu text. The hungry, cold groups huddling around the chicken-corn soup vendor, whose cart reads ‘chicken kaarn soup’. A young boy, about ten years of age, in shalwar kameez, carries a portable metal moss-green tea caddy and flask, pours hot tea for his customers; another boy sits on the curb and polishes shoes. Yet another yells out his massage services, his various deep-colored and questionable essential oil glass bottles clinking against each other as he walks towards the tired shoulders of potential customers. The cacophony of endless honking from impatient drivers. The brief lull as the Imam recites the Maghrib azaan through the neighborhood mosque loudspeaker. Everyone stops in their tracks, faces turned towards the mosque or the sky in an inward prayer to God. The child polishing shoes stops, bringing his blackened, grubby hands together in prayer, before returning to his task with renewed enthusiasm. A man suddenly empties out all the change in his pocket and gives it to the beggar in the multicolored chador. So much sound, so much movement, so much poverty, yet so much life and so many smiles–so much warmth in a cold evening on my street.
*
Back in my kitchen looking out at the street, it can be hours before I see someone pass by. But I do know that at exactly 3pm the elderly neighbor will take his golden labradoodle, Jewel, out for a walk. I know that at 2pm my tired neighbor’s triplet toddlers will all run out to greet their grandparents, who wear COVID masks to take them for a daily walk in their buggy. The corner house belongs to Jack and Deborah, a retired couple, who are the reporters of any street-related gossip. In the summer months, they sit out in their front yard chairs the entire day. They have a plethora of mismatched garden chairs to choose from. Jack is my personal ‘ok Google’ to check the weather. On hot days he sits topless in his pair of jeans. If he has his shirt on, I know it isn’t a very warm day.
Jehan is now fogging up the window and drawing hearts on it. For hours and days on end, it is just me and her. If life as a stay-at-home mom in the West was uneventful, the endless lockdowns made the cabin fever even worse. We found ourselves in a literal snow globe. Where I come from, we were always surrounded by family and friends. During the first lockdown, we were visiting Pakistan. Quarantining in Pakistan still meant we were in the same house as my in-laws, my brother-in-law and his family, and the neighbors were relatives too. We took precautions to isolate but we were never alone. When my daughter hangs up now on a video call with all those loving faces–grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins and babies trying to fit their faces into the confines of a cell phone video screen–I feel the silence. I feel the sudden hush after the high of incessant chatting with so many people, a sudden deflation, no movement save for the dust particles, no sound except the ticking clock. All is quiet enough to be dead.
Like Mrs. Dutta from Banarjee’s short story, my mother tells me, “Every single one of your relatives would give an arm and leg to be in your place, you know that.” To be here, in the West, to give our children a “better life”, to give them a “better” education. But in the end, in the very ultimate end, what is it all for? This business of education? This better life? Is it better for them to be highly educated and have no relationship with their grandparents and cousins? To be so highly educated and not be able to speak their mother tongue? How do I make up for depriving my children of all the love that could have been a part of their daily life? Here we have hot water for our showers and power which never goes out. It is a good life, but is it a rich life? The decisions I make for my children, I make with the best intentions – but are they the best decisions?
*
I remember the first day we landed in Canada. We left the cozy cocoons of our parents’ homes with seven-month-old Jehan to start a new life from scratch. I remember the immigration office after landing. How quick we were to produce two large clear files containing all the important documents of our existence. The immigration officers asked for nothing and said, “Welcome to Canada.”
The loud laugh of my neighbor’s son who is being strolled home by his mother breaks my train of thought. In that moment, I envy her. I envy the fact that she will always stay in one mind, that she will never know another life to yearn for. She will never compare – this life will be it for her. She will never miss the colors of Pakistani weddings, the crunch of a well-made Jalebi or the strings of bright orange genday.
Ultimately, everything we do is an ode to home. Of recreating it, of holding on to it. The hours we spend in the kitchen replicating our mothers’ and grandmothers’ recipes. Trying to make Eid special just like we do it back home. Making it special for the children but Eid in the West and in lockdown meant that a tripod took our Eid family picture. After evidence of having dressed up was collected, we changed back into our pajamas. Today, I made the most perfect version of my grandmother’s bhurani dish, but who am I serving this meal to? You can recreate the recipes, but never the people, never the warmth of home.
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– Shehrbano Minallah (she/her) is an educationist in Pakistan/Canada. She has a master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Chicago which she attended as a Fulbright scholar. She is also a graduate of the Humber School for Writers where she was awarded a distinction. In her free time she enjoys reading (preferably South Asian literature) and writing. She also loves reading children’s books with her three children. She runs an outdoor book club for young ones in Islamabad @forestreadingclub. She can be reached at sminallah@uchicago.edu.
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