My dad never told me that it wasn’t possible. He was my buddy, and we made model planes and ant terrariums, and went hiking in the hills and swimming in Lake Lagunita, which in those days was sometimes dry and sometimes not. We fed butterflies sugar water and watched them unfurl what we called their tongues and drink.
My mom drove to work every weekday morning in our secondhand blue Datsun and drove back every evening in time to make us dinner. She brought home the bacon, in my mind. (Of the non-pork variety, I ought to add, given that we were a Muslim family, though I’m not sure I was aware that there was such a thing as religious identity, back then.)
Once, my mother’s younger brother visited from Pakistan. “Where’s your wife?” I probed. “I’m not married,” he told me. “Then who makes the money?” I asked.
My mother told me that my uncle thought it was odd that I called my parents by their first names.
My earliest best friend was a Dutch kid whose dad was a geologist and whose mom was part Indonesian. My subsequent best friend was an American kid whose father was an African-American poet and whose mother was what I suppose should be called European-American and I think was originally from Texas. The thing I remember most about them was that they had almost the same first name, his mother and his father, different by just one letter.
But I guess my real best friend was my dad. It’s funny to think that, as I write this, I’m twice the age he was when I was born. He was a young dad, and it felt as if he had all the time in the world.
When I was nine, he finished his Ph.D. and we moved back to Lahore, and that part of my life came to an end. He got a job as a university professor, so he wasn’t at home anymore, and, after my sister arrived, my mom worked for another year or two, then stopped, and I grew older, and things changed, as things do.
It’s been the better part of four decades since we first moved back to Pakistan, and in that time I’ve lived all over the place and worn a suit to work in Manhattan and ridden the tube to work in London and lost my hair like my dad and married and had two kids, and now I live next door to my parents in Lahore, and when my kids come home from school I’m the one who sits with them and watches cartoons on TV.
My wife works and I write, so my days are spent in the house, and I get to go hunting for butterflies with my kids and watch the kites build and rebuild their nest in a tree on the back lawn and preen on the water-overflow pipe on our roof like the symbols adorning some proud nation’s currency.
On the weekend, my wife joins us on our outings, and so do my parents, or, rather, we all join my dad, because he has the patience to find the nest of a tailorbird or the slyly dancing form of a praying mantis, which takes some doing, for we don’t live in the countryside; we live in a city of eleven million people.
At times, I miss having a regular job and a place to be during the day with people my age. I miss it a lot. I can be resentful of my wife. I can complain, even as she tells me that I’m doing exactly what I told her I always wanted to do.
But then there are times such as when, a few months ago, my five-year-old son looked at me while we were playing and said, “Baba, when I grow up, I be your brother?”
And I looked at him with wonder and said, “Yes. When you grow up, you be my brother.”»
in The New Yorker, 30 de Maio
in The New Yorker, 30 de Maio
