Author Sadiya Ansari.sadiya ansari
In most families, the story of a widowed matriarch abandoning her seven children to chase a man, estranging her from much of her family for almost two decades, is one that would remain a secret for generations.
In Sadiya Ansari’s family, it almost did. But after Ansari discovered that her daadi (grandmother) had done just that – in Pakistan, years before she migrated to Canada and moved into Ansari’s family home in Toronto – she needed to know more.
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That propulsive urge took Ansari, an award-winning Pakistani-Canadian journalist, to Pakistan, the U.S. and Britain, where she interviewed two dozen people – including family she had never met – over a period of six years. The result of that work is In Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and My Grandmother’s Secret Life (Anansi), an astounding book, out now, which seeks to understand Ansari’s daadi and her choices.
Ansari began research on her book in her 20s, and completed it in her 30s. By that same age, her daadi – who was married at 14 – had already begun her own family. Needless to say, the difference in their circumstances was vast. After Partition, her daadi’s choices became limited, and the dream of something more would have felt painfully hopeless.
“We have this notion that previous generations were hardier than us, and we write things off like, ‘That’s just what it was like back then,’ ” Ansari says. “When I was younger, that was the end of the conversation around her. I started to reflect on what that meant for her and it was interesting to put my lens on it: What if this happened to me or someone in my generation, who grew up like I did?”
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As the story goes – spoiler alert – the romance to which Ansari’s daadi had tied her fate eventually turned sour, and so seven years after she abandoned her children, she made her return to the family, piece by piece. The first to welcome her back was her siblings, then her daughters, and then her sons, with her oldest sponsoring her immigration to Canada. Finally, she would land at her son’s suburban Toronto home, cared for by her him and sharing a room with her young granddaughter who would one day piece this story together – although not until much after her death, at the age of 79, in 2001.
Now based in London, Ansari serves as the LGBTQ+ commissioning editor for Context, a Thomson Reuters Foundation publication, where she focusses specifically on Africa and Asia. Prior to that, she was an editor for Global News and Chatelaine, and reported for the Toronto Star. For someone who has traded mainly in verified facts, for Ansari it was at times a jarring shift to work on a book (part memoir, part investigation) for which she sometimes had to fill in the blank of what might have been said or a detail that might have happened. In this sense, it reads like a mystery novel that must be devoured in a single sitting.
The difficulty of the project made some people ask Ansari why she doesn’t just fictionalize daadi’s story. But to her, that wasn’t the point. She wanted to have a record of her family’s past – and so she set rules for herself to still be faithful to the truth. “I didn’t make up any quotes, for example,” she explains. “Everything was something someone told me or something someone heard.”
In some households, particularly South Asian ones where the grapevines never stop growing, the truth can be tricky to find. While some in Ansari’s family saw daadi as a villain, others saw her as a hero for chasing her own happiness and freedom, even if it was damaging and ill-fated. The rumour mill and South Asian fear of “log kya kahenge” – what will people think? – led Ansari’s chachu (uncle) to insist she not share every detail of her daadi’s life, or that she make certain things sound better or more positive than they actually were. But for Ansari, whose research and discoveries sometimes drove her to tears, it was also important to examine how individual and familial shame played a role when it came to her daadi’s path.
“In South Asian cultures, shame is such a big part of being a woman,” she says. “I wanted to look at what happens if you did something that you know was very ‘shameful,’ but then you were allowed back into your family. Because that actually happens all the time, and I feel like we don’t talk about it.”
She adds, smiling, “By the end, I felt like I understood her better – she was a fiercely independent person; you could not tell her what to do. What was it like to have that kind of personality and grow up in an era where you had few choices?”
In Exile, Ansari also addresses her own pain of not having an ancestral home, a place to go where she can feel an inherent belonging, and stake her claim as a Pakistani woman. Although her daadi’s house – the centre of many happy family tales – was painted as a place Ansari could return to, on a trip to Pakistan she discovered that her daadi had sold the home after her first husband’s death, and it was no longer in the hands of her descendants.
But Ansari says having done her most challenging professional work in Pakistan has helped her feel more connected to the region. “You grow up with an idea of culture as whatever your family tells you it is, and then you get to see it for yourself one day and realize it’s vast, and there is a place where you fit in,” she says.
In many ways, Ansari’s book is just one version of her family’s history. There are other versions, surely, in some of her relatives’ minds, and other written records, largely focused on the men in the family. In venturing through the past to honour her daadi’s memory, then, and connecting with so much of her family, perhaps this document is Ansari’s ancestral home. And maybe, sometimes, our stories can be inheritance enough.