This story begins and ends in a place that no longer exists, and was even then disappearing. In Lahore, the Punjab, India. In the late thirties, the events were already in motion that would slice the Muslims off the west and east sides of India like dangling limbs, and rename our divided territory Pakistan. The year after I was born, my brother was born. A couple of years after that, my sisters were born, in quick succession, during the war. My father was a young medic; he worked for the Indian Air Force, and claimed much later in his after-dinner anecdotes that he had very little to do during this illustrious part of his career, as few people came back injured. They either came back whole, or didn’t come back at all; their bodies burning to crisps in the air, or falling through the skies to feed the wild animals and the earth.
My mother was two people; comically girlish, or tragically severe. She watched all the movies that were imported, read magazines in private, and the Qur’an in public, and played with her babies. My sisters were born less than eighteen months apart, and the wet nurse that had been hired ßfed them both together, weaning her own objecting little brat, whom she left with her sister in her village. Our mother dressed the girls like dolls, put ribbons in their surprisingly thick fluff of hair, and praised their honey-cream complexions, although she still powdered them pale for public outings. For my brother and me, she changed her mask, frowned at us with silent disapproval, and then hit us with a ruler, a hairbrush, and even with a pair of scissors, if we did anything other than study. Or if we weren’t studying hard enough.
Study. Study harder.