The journey begins pre-dawn, when the sky is a dark blue and the moon is high in the heavens. The tiny lights that shimmered and danced in abundance only a few hours ago are now veiled in the moon’s radiant glow. I wake to a knock on the door and there stands a porter with a cup of sweet, hot, milky tea. Grateful that my father arranged room service, I down the tea, run to the concrete bathroom and start to get ready for the voyage. Although I have not really slept, and the jet lag is catching up, the giddiness of going home is too much to bear. I rush to put on some clean clothes and brush my teeth, not bothering to shower. I cannot wait to meet the rest of my family by the jeep. Of course I am the first to arrive. The jeep is being packed with our luggage by our always-trusty help. The ones who will go anywhere and everywhere if you ask them, not because they have to but because they feel it is their duty. Seeing Nadir by the jeep smoking a cigarette, carefully placing our luggage in the back comforts me. His smile even that early in the morning is wonderful and I am truly happy.
Cheerfully, I go looking for the rest of the gang, urging them to hurry. Of course we are no longer on Western time and I have to wait for everyone else while they drink their tea. I can hardly contain myself to the annoyance of my younger brother. A few moments later everyone is ready, packed tightly together in the jeep. I am in the very back by myself with our luggage all around me. This, I love…I can see the scenery and think without having to talk. But I enjoy the musings of my family, as their voices carry in the early morning air. Soon we embark on our long journey. This is the best way to get to Chitral. Sure you can fly and be there in an hour, but I love this trip by jeep. We leave the old city of Peshawar in the dark, a few lights just blinking on and with that the beautiful calls for prayer echoing beautifully from the numerous mosques throughout this ancient city. A city which was once the gateway of all things we now take for granted.
We pass the great Mogul ruins, and spy lone men wrapped in their khaki shawls, some on their bicycles decorated as though it is their most prized possession. Soon, the glow of the sun lights the horizon and we can see a glimmer of the hills that will lead the winding way into the mighty Hindu Kush. But not before we pass the sugarcane fields, laid beautifully and stretching for miles. The fatigue and jet lag catch up to me and the jeep ride starts to make me sleepy, but the anticipation of our first stop for breakfast keeps me awake. A few hours later we arrive at the PTDC [Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation] rest stop which is situated along one of the most beautiful riversides on Earth. Breakfast is definitely the first priority and I wait impatiently for the Naan, omelette and chai to arrive. Of course, my father and I have two orders of the most delicious omelettes, along with piping hot chai and naan. The others laugh heartily at my appetite and knowing I will whine like a kid if they ask me to share.
Once full, we take a moment by the river and breathe in the exquisite beauty of the land. Sometimes, if you are lucky, you will see a caravan of gypsies leading their camels – a wonderful and exotic sight. After a short rest, we pack ourselves in the jeep once again for the next leg of our journey. The hills are not far now and soon the jeep winds its way up. As we climb in altitude the scenery changes from the flat lands to the beautiful green hills of the Malakand. No matter how tired you might be, you cannot keep your eyes closed. The landscape forces you awake and demands that you see her in all her glory. For those not used to it, this journey seems dangerous and it can be. By the time you get to your next rest stop, your insides feel mangled from the bumpy roads and your kidneys have had a severe workout. But I would not trade anything for this experience. As a child, we waited all year for this moment, this journey in our big, huge white Land Rover. I did not enjoy the trip then as much as I do now, for the roads were longer and more treacherous when I was a child. I suffered terrible car sickness, much to the annoyance of my fellow passengers and I would inevitably lose my breakfast in the jeep. Times have not changed the surroundings that much and even though I like this, it can be hard to bear, which leaves me feeling melancholic.
As the landscape changes, so do we. Soon we will be in a place completely shut off from the rest of the world. The mountains hold ancient secrets. The road that leads you there, to that place, is as special as the place itself. Hidden away, so far from everywhere; the feeling of being completely cut off can be very lonely at times. But knowing you are home, in the birth place of your ancient family is also exhilarating. And for the month I am visiting, I will very rarely communicate with the outside world. It comes very easily, the donning of your own culture, like a suit of comfortable clothes. You tend to forget what you left behind and immerse yourself in your other self. The language, the sense of humour and even the way you walk. You just go back and there is no turning from it.
We approach our second rest stop in the beautiful mountains of Dir, a tribal territory and somewhat dangerous. We escape the jeep to another PDTC, this time a beautiful hotel overlooking the mountains. Here we rest, wash up and have lunch. At this point, my long dark hair is caked in dust and I can only imagine how my pores have suffered. It will be a relief to feel clean and sit down to a hearty delicious lunch while perched among the mountains and her cascading waterfalls. Beautiful evergreens surrounding us with the sweet smell of pine. My kidneys are hurting and I can’t wait to stretch my legs. I get out of the jeep and almost fall over as the clean mountain air overwhelms me. It takes a moment to get my legs back. Though a little wobbly, I follow my family inside and we go to our respective rooms.
Inside my room, the curtains are closed and the duskiness makes my heart drop. Suddenly I feel terribly empty inside and need a glass of water to fill me up. I crumble to my knees. The tears start and I am overcome with sadness. Maybe it’s the fatigue and jet lag, I don’t know. But it hits me hard.
I have felt this way before and yet I am going home. Home, to where my childhood feet carved the map of my house and gardens and where I still know every stone on the footpath leading in and out of the house. Where, as a child I ran barefoot up and down the surrounding mountains, my friends and I covered in dust and dirt by the end of the day. Those days of innocence seem long gone, buried in the recesses of my mind.
Those childhood friends will be there to greet me when I finally arrive. I am glad we will arrive late into the night, my reasons for this is impossible to put into words. At this moment, I am glad I am alone and nobody has to see me like this. I hate any attention when feeling this way. It just makes it all worse because you don’t have an explanation for it.
Rest does not come easily, but when it does I am lost in a world of dreams, even those are weary. I am woken by my mother’s gentle hand on my shoulder. It’s time to go; I have slept for an hour and didn’t even get a chance to bathe. Groggy, I splash some water on my face. A look in the mirror tells me I need sleep. I have aged and not in a good way. All of a sudden I can’t wait to get back in the jeep and continue. The mountains beckon and soon we will be at the top of Lowari Pass, the pass that enters the valley of Chitral. The top of the pass is just over 10,000 feet above sea level. Not the highest pass, but the easiest and most direct way to get home. Treacherous in winters, this pass becomes inaccessible by road.
As we move, I start to feel much better. Perhaps I needed that cry to relieve whatever anxiety or fatigue (had been) haunting me at the moment. The butterflies start in my tummy as we approach the summit. We are high in the mountains. The narrow curvy road is flanked by magnificent cliffs dropping away to hundreds of feet below. Across the river, waterfalls cascade into beautiful pools of green and then flow swiftly into the Chitral River. I am getting farther and farther away from my Western world. Away from all that is familiar and maybe going into something even more memorable.
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The smell hits me first. The smell of the gardens, the river and yes, the people. It’s so powerful that I gasp as if in pain. I am at once tortured and joyful, unable to grasp either emotion. We arrive late in the evening and it is dark. The sky is full of stars and the Milky Way is clearly visible. There is no electricity; this is common as the generator only runs until 8 or 9 in the evening. There are people with lanterns and I know who they are. Standing, waiting, hoping. I watch as my family steps one by one into the dark familiar night. Cries of joy followed by deep embraces. I feel shy and timid. I don’t know why, I shouldn’t. These are my people and I have nothing to fear. I am forever caught between two worlds, East and West. How can I explain this to them? Slowly I get out of the jeep.
At once, surrounded by familiar faces, although some I am not entirely sure I know. There are children, too many of them. My uncle clutches me, holds my face in his hands and tearfully asks “where have you been, where have you been?” I am unable to answer, I feel stunned and overwhelmed. My father takes my arm and leads me out of the mêlée. My uncles, aunts and cousins follow. I am pulled into embraces, my hands taken and kissed by faceless people. Children are being passed to me for kisses and recognition.
I am being whisked through the heavy wooden gate into the interior of our house. It hasn’t changed. In the dark, by lantern light, I can see the stone path leading towards the kitchen on this side of the house. The path continues on the other side of the house outside the main living room. The stone path of my childhood is still here. “Thank God”, I think and under my breath I say “hello path, it’s been so long”. My father is giving orders for tea, telling some of the people to go home and come back in the morning. “They will still be here and you can stare at them then to your heart’s content”, he says. My father then catches my eye and gives me a smile and a wink. I can’t fully describe how that one wink makes me feel. It’s as though I am the most special person on earth and I carry his smile and that wink with me to this day. At that moment the burden of all that has happened in my life is lifted and I am grateful that I have a father once again. My father, the father I have loved all of my life and the man I no longer know. The thread that once bonded us to each other is broken. The choices made by my parents left chaos and despair in their wake, my brothers and I the casualties of their anguish. I have questions I will never ask, not because I am afraid, but because so much has happened and I won’t bring more sadness to my family. The questions I have are simple but will take a lifetime to answer and the time will never be right. I am however afraid of the questions that might be asked of me. Questions as to why I did not choose him, choose them, if not them why didn’t I choose this place? Why did I leave? I am not sure I had a choice. How does a twelve year old make the choice to abandon one parent for another? But I did make a choice, one that left me without a father and without an older brother.
I have carried that burning guilt all of my young life, guilt that helped shape me into the person that I am. There are times I resent them for that. Resent them, my mother and father, because I don’t deserve to be a person I don’t want to be and resent them because they made mistakes that shattered my brothers and I. In truth, we all suffered in our own way, most of all my brother David. My light haired, blue-eyed brother, 13 months and 1 day older than I, the one who looks the least like me. David has the high cheekbones and fine small features of the Himalayas. He looks the true Arian of the North, with deep penetrating blue eyes. The decision he made left him abandoned at boarding school. When school was over for the holidays, our father would send a car to pick him up and David would spend his summers abandoned yet again. Our father, lost in his grief, could not live in our home and, maybe, could not face my brother either. These are stories I have heard through cousins, aunts and uncles. How my brother was abandoned for choosing my father, for staying behind so my father would not be alone. How sad that my father could not see past his own pain and to the son, who at thirteen, did not abandon him and in the process sacrificed his need for a mother. How brave and selfless of him. Aside from my own pain, when I think of his, it cuts me deep. I know those scars will never heal. Oddly, my siblings and I never discussed our pain, never shared our suffering with each other. Our job, I think, was to protect each other from it. I know my elder brother suffered, more than I did and he has never said so, never made me feel sorry for him and most of all he has never made me feel guilty. We will never talk about that, at least I don’t think we ever will.
I forgave my parents long ago and decided living in the past does us no good. The truth of all those years have hurt us, left us all slightly damaged and sometimes the memories will grip me, good and bad ones, happy and sad ones. I realize I am not ready to look into my father’s deep ocean-blue eyes. Eyes so like David’s. The understanding of that leaves me anxious and I feel terribly exhausted.
Finally, I am in my room. My childhood room now transformed into an adult room with my very own private bath, which my father installed just for my arrival. My aunt Fatima and the woman who helped raise me, Nuhran, are the only ones with me. I can see they are both as tired as I am. None of us is really able to speak. We sit on my bed holding hands. I can’t remember if it was for a moment or several minutes, it all seems like a dream. Nuhran is crying and there is nothing I can say to her. When I was a child she carried me in her arms and consoled me when I was sad. She fed me, clothed me, cleaned my room and told me bedtime stories. Just as much as my mother was my constant, so was she. I know why she is crying. She is crying for the brevity of my time with her, she is crying for all those people who are no longer with us and to whom I could not say goodbye. People, like her own daughter who died of typhoid just a year previously and my aunt who passed 6 months ago from breast cancer. She is crying because life changes and we have no control over it. She is crying because she didn’t get to see me grow, and I am no longer a child; but a young woman she can no longer carry in her arms, and she is crying for all those years in between. I want to cry with her but I don’t have the strength and sleeplessness has left me feeling drugged, everything feels surreal.
I look around the room and see old books, my old books. My Hans Christian Anderson book of fairy tales that I read and reread so often it was in tatters well before I left. My most favourite book of all, Black Beauty, a book that I treasured so much that it travelled with me to school and back, along with my Famous Five collection. Collected and ordered at the great British Library in Peshawar, a relic of the British Empire. A beautiful old library in whose caverns I used to lose myself and read until my mother or our driver had to carry me out. I can’t believe my father kept them. The diaries I wrote line one wall along with old photographs my father had framed. Photos of a childhood that I can barely remember and photos at all different stages that my mother sent of us once we were gone, a distant memory of this place. Me at my teenage fat stage, my younger brother at his dorkiest when his ears were bigger that his whole head. And then of us as young people seemingly put together, but hardly put together. Just faces in photographs that smile back at you, not really there. I don’t recognize myself.
Before I know it, Nuhran has already taken out my pajamas and my clothes are tucked into drawers with love and care. My toiletries are already in the bathroom. My aunt and Nuhran instruct me to get ready for bed; they will see me in the morning. But if I should need them they will be next door. My mother and the rest are now in their own quarters and I will see them for breakfast.
The next morning, I awake to a storm of Myna birds flooding the trees around my room and for a split second I don’t know where I am. It is early but not early enough for me to get to the outside kitchen for the first baked bread and tea. The custom in my home is to get showered and ready for breakfast before you leave your room and so I take in the luxury of my en-suite bath. With the exception of a few additions here and there, the house is still the same, nestled in the mountains surrounded by gardens, painstakingly formed and babied by my father. The trees and flowers he planted and cherished over the years with his own hands are now mature and it is almost like being in a garden paradise. I know I want to memorize this, each moment I am here. Once I leave, I don’t know when I will be able to come back. I can’t think about that, not now and not ever if I can help it. At the thought of leaving, my heart sinks deep into the pit of my stomach. I try to push the feeling away.
As I am getting ready and have these few moments to myself, I realize that there is no such thing as closure. There is no end until the day you die. Life is more like a book. You turn a page and turn another and every so often, you start a new chapter. There is nothing to put closure to. I want the love that I felt, that I feel and I want to continue. To start a new chapter. That is what this is, a continuation. I look around now at my home, at the trees, the flowers, the sweet scent of morning air and fragrant flowers tantalizing my senses. I get it for now. I understand and I accept it all. I accept that my parents are human, they made mistakes. They also did a lot that was right. They loved us with a fierceness every good parent must feel for their children and we were just a part of their humanness. We are a part of each other and I start to feel a sense of pride. With a renewed sense of myself and an understanding I cannot completely put into words, I get into the clean shalwar and kameez that I purchased in Toronto. I try to look as pretty as I can to make first impression. I run to the outside kitchen where I know our hard working cook will be. The outside kitchen, with open fire and bread baking and tea boiling. With a big hug and lots of kisses to our cook, I sit down and can’t wait to have the fresh bread with cream and tea. Delicious and wonderful. I am home at last. The place where my childhood dreams were born.
The end
Life Stories 