On a Tuesday morning, the week before Amma died, I rose from bed earlier than usual, my hair lightly damp with sweat, a low simmer of dread thrumming just beneath the surface of my skin. Anxiety was a genetic trait that we shared. I found myself at the kitchen counter assembling the ingredients for a stiff cup of chai—a change from my usual sleepy button-press of the coffee grinder.
I spent most afternoons of my childhood in Amma’s kitchen, perched on the edge of my chair at the glossy, bright-blue Formica table, waiting for tea time. “Amma, chai bana deñ. (Amma, please make chai),” I would request the minute I had inhaled my last morsel of lunch. As a child, I would often mimic my father. So, instead of calling my grandmother “Daadi” as I was taught to do, I followed my father’s example, and she became my Amma too.
Amma and I would pour the sweet, milky chai into our saucers, lifting to our lips with both hands, slurping silently. As the smell of Tetley Orange Pekoe filled the air of my tiny condo’s kitchen, the tall glass windows framing the CN Tower across the lake, I felt the urge to call her.
Our relationship had become increasingly strained over the past few years, and I often avoided making this phone call.
Our relationship had become increasingly strained over the past few years, and I often avoided making this phone call. But as the dial tone hummed, I could clearly picture the black-corded phone on her nightstand, resting on a white lace tablecloth with plastic beads dangling from the corners. To the right, a stack of weekly Urdu digests, the top cover featuring a woman dressed in a shiny shalwar kameez, her face heavily made up, posing with a hand under her chin. A maroon leather phonebook lay beside them, the numbers scribbled in a multitude of handwritings by any grandchild or daughter within opportune range who had been assigned the task of pencilling in an important contact.
“Assalamu Alaikum, Amma,” I squeaked, when she picked up, overshooting my voice into a higher octave than I had aimed for. I stumbled over some of the only Arabic I recalled, my many childhood Quran lessons long forgotten.
The first few moments of our phone calls were always awkward as my colonized speech warmed to my mother tongue and I tried to make myself sound as girlish as possible.
“You’re being careful, right?” I sounded like a cartoon.
“Haan, Maañ,” she said.
The COVID Delta variant was spreading rapidly, and everyone in my family had adopted their usual attitude in times of crisis: “Bas Allah Mian ke haath meñ hai.” (Well, it’s in God’s hands.)
Our conversation went downhill quickly, as it often did when Amma remembered it was her grandmotherly duty to set me on the “right path.” I soon ended the phone call with my usual excuse. “Acha, Amma. I need to go to work now. Khuda hafiz.”
“Acha, Amma. I need to go to work now. Khuda hafiz.”
The following Monday evening, my cousin Nida cold-called me. The thick dark hairs on my arms rose accordingly.
“Suno, we’re taking her to the hospital now,” she said, her voice low. “Baat kar lo.” (Talk to her.)
By then, Amma could barely breathe. The oxygen tank they had managed to get her at home after calling around for hours to hospitals and clinics all over the city was no longer enough. Her breathing was shallow and panicked. It sounded like she was crying. I had no idea that when you were out of breath, it sounded like you were crying.
I felt increasingly numb listening to Amma’s belaboured breath.
She gasped her words to me, desperately pushing air through her lungs as if this effort would make them more likely to travel the phone line from Karachi to Toronto. “Badal jao ab. Bas badal jao. Shaadi kar lo phir jo karna hai kar laina.” (Change now. Just change. Get married, and then do whatever you want.)
“Haan, Amma,” I affirmed, as I always did.
Nida’s sage remark over the years—“In one ear, out the other”—echoed in my ears. It kept me from being in a perpetual state of rage when conversing with most members of my family.
I had a gut feeling that these words would forever be what remained between us. They would replace all the cups of chai and doodh ki coffee, the pieces of persimmon—“tomato fruit,” as she taught me to call it—lovingly placed on my plate, and the afternoons spent lying together on her stiff orthopedic mattress, listening to her stories.
“Kahani Sunao! (Tell me a story!)” I’d beg her in a sing-song voice.
I can only remember one now. It was about a never-ending bag of rice that spilled on the floor. She would repeat the sentence, “One bird came, took one grain of rice and then it flew away,” to me in her Bangalori accent until I fell asleep.
Ik chudia aayi ek dana le ko gayi
Ik chudia aayi ek dana le ko gayi
Ik chudia aayi ek dana le ko gayi
When my dad called me from the hospital the next morning, he reminded me that I was her favourite grandchild. He told me that she had asked for me by my birth name in her occasional moments of lucidity.
“She named you, you know,” he said, his voice quivering. The name that I had shed in so many spaces and from most of my legal identification. It remained in me—occasionally emerging in fits of imposter syndrome and misgendering. Sometimes, I even felt proud of it. She had named me after Sumayyah bint Khayyat, the first woman to fight and die for Islam. She was a warrior—a symbol of resistance against oppression.
I felt the tears I wanted to cry, deeply embedded in my bones. But I couldn’t reach them. They couldn’t reach me. A few hours later, my mother, my siblings and I got the news. The ding-ding of the family WhatsApp chat disrupting the routine hum of Teams calls, university lectures, and bubbling pots of salan in kitchens across North America. I sank into the leather couch in my parents’ living room for a few moments, the nausea overwhelming.
Amma had gotten COVID from the nurse who had been coming by daily to deliver her medications. The nurse had had symptoms but had come to work anyway. My mother, who had resented her mother-in-law for most of her married life, hurried me out of the living room, banishing me to hide my appearance and my grief upstairs. She had some visitors coming soon to give her their condolences.
Later that evening, we gathered in my cousins’ backyard in Mississauga… the other Pakistan. Our tears mixed with evaporated milk as we drank cup after cup of chai. Someone dropped off a tray of chicken biryani. We remembered how much Amma had fed us; how, even when we were filled to bursting, she would exclaim in horror, “Kyuñ? Accha nahiñ laga? Kyuñ kuch kha nahiñ rahe haiñ?” (Why? You didn’t like it? Why aren’t you eating anything?) How my dad had to pry the spoon from her hand to prevent her from emptying a heaping mound of butter into his morning omelette. How we all sat on the floor for Sunday nihari parties, our fingers licked clean, drops of grease splattered on the white dastarkhān spread out on the floor of the living room.
I faded in and out. I felt a distance from the childhood memories and stories being shared. My soul felt forever torn between my identity as her favourite grandchild and the person she wanted so desperately to change.
Was I responsible? Had there been times I wished she was gone so I no longer had to hide my life?
My father had told me that his only wish was that Amma would die without ever having seen me “in this condition.”
My father had told me that his only wish was that Amma would die without ever having seen me “in this condition.” So I would shave and slather on thick coats of makeup to hide the stubble on my face before I saw her.
She knew, of course she did, but she didn’t have the language for it. All she had were the words of gossiping Phuppos and troublesome cousins, saying things she simply could not understand. So, I would do my part. I would fulfill my duty. I would make sure she would never see proof of my transness in her lifetime. I would shoulder the weight of her dying wish, for me to change back into her granddaughter.
I gripped my cup of chai tighter as if this could push the tears out, but still they did not come.
When my phone rang, I stepped into the front yard to take the call. It was my friend Oleanne again—I had shared the news with them earlier. They were slightly breathless. “Hey, listen, does a deer mean anything to you?”
“Umm… no. I mean, I don’t think so. Why?” I replied, my mind feeling foggy.
“I was on a walk just now on the trail behind my place, and I walked into a deer. But it didn’t run away, you know, like a deer normally would. It just stared straight into my eyes.”
“Like it was going to attack you?” I asked, trying to focus.
“No, like it was calm. It was accepting my presence, of me just being there, just existing.”
“And then?”
“It sort of bowed its head. I don’t know, I guess because of our talk earlier about your Amma’s passing, it felt so much like a message for you.”
“Wow, yeah, that’s so weird. I have no idea.” I wasn’t listening anymore—I had zoned out again.
I returned to the patio table where the stories continued. My youngest cousin Kamil piped up, “Oh, yaar, remember that china cabinet. No one was ever allowed to touch anything.”
Everyone around the table laughed at this silly quirk—the universal, untouchable china cabinet that all grandmothers in the world seem to share.
And then suddenly, I remembered.
I remembered standing on my tiptoes to peek into the polished teak display with spotless glass doors that you had to push inwards to open with a click. It acted as the wall between the drawing room and the dining room where all twelve of my cousins and their parents would drag in extra plastic kitchen chairs and cram together for Eid lunch.
I had never told the rest of my cousins that sometimes in the afternoons, when we were alone, Amma would take down some of the figurines from the cabinet and lay them on the carpeted floor of the drawing room for me to play with.
I remembered the three porcelain figurines.
Pink and white prayer hands holding a Quran.
A silver tiger.
And a deer.
Finally, the tears came.
