Sadiya Ansari and her father outside of Mohatta Palace, Karachi, Pakistan, March 2022.COURTESY SADIYA ANSARI
Sadiya Ansari is a London-based journalist and the author of the forthcoming book In Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and My Grandmother’s Secret Life.
When I arrived at Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport six years ago, my father, Rafi, stood right outside its main entrance, excitedly waving at me. He had somehow pushed through the thick crowd of eager relations, and appeared to be dressed for the office at 4 in the morning, wearing beige slacks and a crisp button-down beneath a navy blazer.
It hit me then that we had never taken a trip together, just the two of us.
Two weeks stretched ahead of us, but I already feared we wouldn’t have time to accomplish what I’d set out to do on that trip: travel to a tiny town in Punjab called Haroonabad, 1,000 kilometres from where I landed. The purpose of the visit was even more ambitious than the daunting journey. I hoped to excavate whatever traces my paternal grandmother, Tahira – or Daadi, as I called her – left behind during the 15 years she lived there after leaving her children for a man in 1963.
My dad didn’t share my agenda. He was just there to spend time with family, with the added benefit of escaping a Canadian winter.
Daadi was a difficult subject for him – and for his whole family. She’d lived with my parents, my older sister and me for the last 10 years of her life in our small house in Markham, Ont. I was 5 when she moved in, and for the first few years, we shared a bedroom. Daadi wasn’t exactly cuddly, but it still shocked me when, at the age of 10, I learned that her decision to remarry after my grandfather’s death had severed her relationships with her seven children. The same aunts and uncles whom I saw call and visit her regularly went nearly two decades with no contact with their mother. While there was a reconciliation eventually, no one dared to ask her about this time in her life.
As a journalist, I became suspicious of the simplistic narrative that cast her as a selfish woman and horrible mother. And entering my 30s, I became more curious about her circumstances. Why did Daadi leave? Why didn’t she return when that second marriage ended? How did she survive it all? And how did her children?
I had a hunch there was more to the story beneath the shroud of shame covering Daadi’s life. And in the end, there was – enough to write a book, in fact. But when I started out, I had little to go on. My father rarely told me stories from his childhood, let alone anything revealing the impact of losing his father at 11, then losing his mother in a very different way as a teen. He had hidden away the most painful parts of his early life for decades, and never raised the issue with her, even when she lived with us.
In most families, ancestral mythology is passed down, from parent to child. In mine, this worked in reverse, requiring me to poke, prod and persuade to fill out that historical record. My father became my investigative partner, and through two trips over the course of four years, we made the progress I hoped for, in part because of my father’s courage in uncoiling the tightly wound notion that the past should be left alone. And through watching my father learn about his mother, it gave me an unexpected gift: getting to know him in a way I never imagined possible.
On our first evening in Karachi, my father and I fought through the city’s chaotic traffic to arrive at my dad’s sister’s home. My aunt Lubna was leaving the next day to visit her son in Saudi Arabia for a few months, and nearly all the furniture in her home had been covered in plastic and put on concrete blocks, bracing for flood season. Looking at the elaborate setup, I wished there was a way I could prepare to protect my family from the impact of what I might learn – and publish – about Daadi.
When I started interviewing my family members for the book, I was often met with requests to focus on the positive aspects of our family history. What good could it do, they’d ask, to dredge up what Daadi had worked so hard to bury? And despite the risk of unearthing a new way for their mother to break their heart, both my dad and my aunt extended generosity toward her. Lubna showed me tapestries she had framed that Daadi had woven, and then began telling me some familiar stories.
But then she mentioned that Daadi had surprised her with a visit outside of her school not long after she first left. And more than a decade later, she revealed, Daadi showed up at Lubna’s in-laws’ home – an appearance made even more awkward by the fact that her in-laws had been told that Daadi was dead.
My father listened in, and it was clear that this was news to him. But he took it in with curiosity, and with more grace than I could have. Even if I was in my 70s, I imagine I’d feel the sting of envy: Why’d she visit my sister and not me?
Like most of the conversations I’d have about Daadi’s disappearance, we looped back to the event that defined the rest of her life: being forced to marry a man at 14 who was two decades her senior, and who’d already had seven children. My grandfather died well before I was born, and I had only ever heard him spoken about with great reverence. But in the Uber back to where we were staying, my father revisited the circumstances of his parents’ marriage.
It was accepted wisdom that like many girls and women of her era, his mother didn’t have any agency in her first marriage. But I watched as my dad questioned his father’s decision – the first time I’d heard anyone in our family consider it out loud.
“Why did he marry her?”
That first trip to Karachi in 2018 was a start, and while my father supported my efforts, there were limits to how far I could push. Later on during our visit, in the spot where his childhood home once stood, he shut down when I asked him to tell me more about those years: “I don’t have too many happy memories,” he said. And he refused to go to Haroonabad, declaring it was impossible to visit the place that his mother disappeared into.
But in 2022, I found myself at the Karachi airport again – this time with an itinerary for Haroonabad.
On that first trip, despite knowing I was the one pushing the agenda, part of me still expected my father to lead – it was more his country than mine, and he was the parent, after all. This time, I acknowledged that, in this project, I was going to have to be in charge. I was the one who knew how to dig up names and addresses and make travel arrangements into a remote part of Pakistan.
What’s more, the pandemic had created a feeling of urgency in both of us to complete this project – and it also seemed to have accelerated the rate at which my dad aged. I had moved to Berlin during the pandemic, and living in a different country only magnified this. Waving me down outside the airport, he was just as enthusiastic as he was four years earlier, this time standing next to my mother, who’d joined us – but I could see he had shrunk, the excess fabric of his half-sleeved button-down billowing in the wind.
Sadiya Ansari's father looking up at the low-rise apartment building in Nazimabad, Karachi where his childhood home once stood in March 2018.COURTESY SADIYA ANSARI
From Karachi, we took a 1.5-hour flight on a 48-seat propeller plane to Pakistan’s eastern edge in Punjab. I thought my dad would be eager to get to our first interview when we arrived in the city of Bahawalpur, but he was worn out from the trip and needed to rest. When I returned, I hoped to get my parents out to see the city’s famous palaces – but my father wasn’t up for it.
So I was worried about how he’d fare on a three-hour drive to Haroonabad with a packed schedule. I was also nervous about how he might react to meeting our host, Wajahat – the son of Daadi’s closest friend in Haroonabad, and a man Daadi helped raise after she left my father and his siblings. But my dad was thrilled to meet him.
Wajahat’s wife served us chai while her husband recounted everything he knew about Daadi’s time in the small town. He was eager to hear from my father about what happened to her after she left, too. The woman who provided a bridge between these two men had been dead for more than 20 years, and yet an honest, emotional exchange unfolded between them.
After I stopped recording the interview, Wajahat looked at my dad directly and asked: “Why didn’t you ever visit your mother?” I jumped in, worried my dad might get upset. But my father explained sheepishly that his older half-siblings, who supported their younger lot when Daadi left, were dead against them having a relationship with their mother. Wajahat didn’t press further.
We went on to visit the home where Daadi had lived and the school she taught in, and met others who knew and loved her. It felt like a pilgrimage.
At the end of our day in Haroonabad, my father shared a regret with me – that he wished he had visited his mother while she was living there. I reassured him, telling him that at least he’d made the trip now, something no one else in his family had done. And then he looked at me and said: “I could have never done this without you.”
As any immigrant kid can tell you, the gratitude for what your parents did for you runs so deep it can barely be excavated, let alone expressed. So much could have gone wrong in my attempt to know Daadi better, and to hear gratitude from my father – that I helped him close what had felt like an impossible gap – felt like just one tiny way I could give back to him.
I was grateful, too, not only for what we learned about Daadi, but what I got to learn about my father through our project: that his curiosity could trump his pride, that he could genuinely change his mind about long-held beliefs, and, most of all, that he was an optimist – still hoping that his mother didn’t choose to leave him.
But what I’m most grateful for is that, through researching our family history, we both realized that it’s never too late to know your parent as a whole person.
Despite the role reversal in our project, sometimes I still need my dad to hold my hand. Earlier this year, I submitted the final manuscript of my memoir, and then took my first proper vacation in years – but I found myself anxious and awake at dawn, staring at my MacBook in the lobby of a boutique hotel on the Spanish island of Tenerife. The panic I’d somehow quelled while writing the book was surfacing: What if the rest of my family reacts poorly to what I’ve written?
I called my dad, who was back in Karachi, and spilled my fears to him. And that morning, my dad was the parent again, reassuring me in his signature style, both flippant and wise: “If they don’t like it, they can write their own book.”