Sofia Ali-Khan - A Good Country: My Life in Twelve Towns and the Devastating Battle for a White America

History is not the past; it is the present.

Viola Davis

I used to imagine myself enormous, stretched into the sky, one foot planted in suburban Pennsylvania and another planted in the low cityscape of Hyderabad, Pakistan, somewhere between my grandmothers houses. From on high, I could see both places in their entirety, and know them intimately. I could belong in both places without being constrained by either one; neither my sun-blackened knees nor my American accent would draw attention. Other times, I imagined ways to reverse the migration of my parents to America, thinking I could somehow fold myself back into the language and the culture in which I was named and from which my family came.

I was born in Tampa, Florida, and grew up speaking to my parents in English so that they could practice theirs. As a child, I was always navigating between a once-removed Pakistani identity and an America ostensibly built of many cultures in one. Much of my family still lived in Hyderabad, Pakistan, a city in the lower Indus Valley. So thats where we went every couple of summers while our neighbors and friends went to the Jersey Shore and Delaware beaches. My earliest memories are cut with passages beginning and ending with twenty-hour plane rides to the separate reality of my paternal grandparents home. They lived, together with one of my aunts and one of my uncles and his wife and son, in a crumbling red clay house. It had three sheltered rooms, a tiny kitchen with a row of three simple metal grates used to hold small fuel canisters, like camp stoves lined up on the floor, and a spacious courtyard where we all slept on jute cots. In the evenings, when the intense heat abated, my older brother and I would put out our hands, circling around to my father and his several siblings gathered in the courtyard to visit. We were mimicking the beggars who trailed us, speaking in Sindhi, whenever we stepped into the street, Aay, Allah, mukhay peysa day. Oh, dear God, give me some change.

I wanted to know why the children we saw on the streets often had missing limbs. When I was told that children were purposefully disfigured by adults, who then forced them to beg and then stole the proceeds, that knowledge was too brutal for me to fully integrate. So I carefully buried it in my young imagination, where it would drive my commitments and all of the work I would choose to do as an adult.

I could not yet see that the middle class to which our extended family in Pakistan belonged was small and precarious, not to be taken for granted. And the beggars, for their part, saw only that we were something other than themselves: people who ate regularly and wore clean clothes. Never mind that we were children without money of our own. Their hands reached out as much for the wealth we represented as for actual cash.

We took it all in, as children do. Neighborhood children in rags, a full tier of wealth above the beggars, squatted over open gutters to relieve themselves. Currency of coins light as paper, made of tin, and of no value at all compared to our dollars. Food heavily spiced or pickled to keep without refrigeration. Electricity that came and went throughout the day, powering small industrial steel ceiling fans in each room and bare fluorescent bulbs on the walls. One of my uncles, with his wife and eight children, lived in the smaller house next door, which shared a wall with my grandparents home, so there was always a tribe of cousins nearby. There was no television, but we played endless card games and had piles of books from the free library back home. There were goats tied up outside in the alley and occasional chickens in the courtyard, which my cousins sometimes corralled to make room for a game of cricket. Rickety wooden ladders leaned against the courtyard wall so we could move between houses without stepping into the street and one auntie could pass a pot of milk or a plate of rice to another over it.

My father was the second son of his parents thirteen children, born in 1942, five years before the British relinquished colonial domination of the Indian subcontinent and it split violently into India and Pakistan. (East Pakistan would win independence and become Bangladesh in 1971.) Hyderabad and nearby Karachi were all my father had known when he arrived in British Columbia in August of 1963 with a spare suit and some toiletries as a scholarship student. His ideas about Canadian culture were based entirely on old Readers Digest magazines. One of two Pakistani graduate students enrolled at the university at the time, he arrived at the start of what would come to be known as the brain drain. Over the next several decades, tens of thousands of Asian students just like him would be recruited to science and mathematics graduate programs in Canada.

Later, after he became a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, my father sent a pale blue aerogram home, asking that his parents arrange and plan his wedding to a woman of their choosing. He had bucked tradition in leaving home for school, but he intended to marry as his family had always done. Besides, he would likely know, or know of, whomever they chose. My family has inhabited Hyderabad for as long as anyone remembers, and the web of extended family and friends stretches far.

It would take at least a month for his message to arrive. He planned to travel home for two weeks at Christmas for the first time in five years in order to marry his bride and take her back with him to Toronto. When he applied for graduate student housing, the registrar, no doubt a Canadian of European descent and unfamiliar with how much of the rest of the world still got married, asked that my dad write his fiances name on the requisite form. Without knowing who his bride would be, and for no particular reason, he wrote the name Shahnaz.

When he arrived in Hyderabad a couple of months later, he expected to walk in a procession the very next day to the home of the woman his parents had chosen, where he would formally become engaged. No surprise, Shahnaz was not the young womans name, and he wasnt sure how hed square that with the registrar. Before he could give it much thought, a messenger arrived early in the day to cancel the procession. A rumor had spread that my dad was already married in Canada. Because the young womans family could neither confirm nor disprove it, they had decided to call the whole thing off.