Diaspora fiction: Three generations of women are connected by a tapestry

Amla’s memories of Karachi will always be tinged with sentimentality, an irreplaceability, so mine are, too. I describe Karachi to you with my eyes closed, as if I were not me but her. Let Amla tell you about how much she loves this place, how much it feels like home. How unaffected she is by change here; so young, she hadn’t believed the voices outside might lead to a fundamental shift in her own life. She has never before had to worry about such things. What can Amla understand of separation, of nation-states and religious difference, of Hindustan, when she is surrounded by Hindus who eat halal and Muslims who light fireworks with her on Diwali? When she lives in a place that textbooks will acknowledge as almost peaceful during the coming summer of Partition, even if that peace is only relative, it doesn’t last – eventually succumbing to the bloody history you and I have heard about our entire lives.

Her comforts are in their means: the sweet shops her father owns, one inherited from his father and then grown into three locations. Their spacious apartment, the neighbouring aunties and Meenafai, who serve as a second tier of guardians whenever needed. Years before she was born, Bapu had spent a summer apprenticing in the princely state called Porbandar, had considered settling along that coastline. But Meenafai had written many letters to convince him otherwise: She found the port in Sindh more beautiful every day; she saw more opportunity for him here; their people are Sindhi, and why would a Sindhi ever want to leave Sindh?

In the end, when Bapu was not yet Bapu, just a teenager named Anurag, he mostly considered staying in Gujarat for a girl who lived on the very outskirts of the city, so far it might as well have been the start of the next village. He had taken a job clerking for an uncle who was slowly losing money, all just to linger in those extended months. He wanted time to make this happen.

Chandini, the young girl who walked into the uncle’s shop those afternoons, trajva at the base of her throat and along the backs of her hands – she dreamt of a life with Anurag, too. But when Anurag visited her home in an attempt to win over her parents, that dream seemed to fall apart. Though Anurag promised that he came from a moneyed and respectable Sindhi family; tried to translate Sindhi castes into more rigid Gujarati ones; tried to incorporate local slang into his Gujarati; brought chocolates, the expensive kind – still, Chandini’s father looked at her, gesturing to their obviously Kutchi home, the embroidery adorning every cot and seat. He asked her quietly, tersely, “Have you no pride?”

That night, Chandini made a choice. In the bedroom she shared with her sister, that familiar tapestry draped on her cot like any other blanket, Chandini drew herself in Karachi with Anurag, charcoal staining her fingertips. As she drew, her hands began to move of their own accord. She was no longer alone in her body. In this dreamlike state, she drew a pathway to the man she was convinced was the love of her life. The next morning, when she saw the drawing, she couldn’t remember making it.

This was how she knew it would come true.

The next day, on a midday walk along the chowpatty, when Bapubefore-he-was-Bapu asked Ba- before-she-was-Ba if she really wanted him to leave for Karachi without her, she said no. She described to the route they would take: a quick ceremony, a journey by steamboat to Karachi, Meena there to meet them and help them settle into their own apartment. She had seen the drawing. She had faith.

“Wait,” you say, the bowl of takeout still uneaten in your hands. “What do you mean, she painted it and knew it would come true?”

I try to find the right words. “I’ll get there, I promise.” You sigh. “Look,” you say, setting the bowl down on the coffee table. It clatters, the steel chopsticks rolling away. “I know I said you could tell it to me like a story, and I appreciate everything you have shared so far, but… Can’t you just tell me? Do you have to start so far back?”

“This matters,” I say.

You grimace. “Don’t be facetious.”

“I’m not.” I pinch my throat. “I swear.”

Stay with me, Nadya.

“What could be so important you have to go back generations?”

I shift in my seat. For the first time in years, I am being completely honest with you. It’s a relief; it’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. “Everything has to do with these generations,” I say. “It all goes this far back. It goes even further—before Amla, before Chandini.”

“What all?” you ask. “What everything?” I think of a hundred ways to phrase it – the heaviness I carry, the generations on my back. “Please, if you can bear with me, Nadya,” I say instead, “I promise I will not let you down.”

Excerpted with permission from A Thousand Times Before, Asha Thanki, The Bombay Circle Press.