Hana Khan Carries On

by Uzma Jalaluddin

  Three Sisters Biryani Poutine was located in a commercial strip surrounded by a dozen storefronts, all owned by first- and second-generation immigrant business owners. Luxmi Aunty ran the Tamil bakery next door, where she sold fresh-baked flatbread and fried savory snacks such as samosas, chaat, and bhel puri, as well as Indian sweets. Sulaiman Uncle owned the halal butcher a few doors down. A florist shop that specialized in the elaborate garlands used in South Asian weddings and other celebrations stood beside a hair and nail salon that had curtains over the windows to accommodate hijab-wearing women looking for a blowout with some privacy. There was a convenience store that sold lottery tickets and henna cones, and a dry cleaner that knew how to get turmeric and oil stains out of clothes and offered an on-site seamstress.

  The street was bookended by a Tim Hortons coffee shop at the north end, run by our business elder, Mr. Lewis, and at the south end by the hollowed-out shell of an abandoned storefront that had long ago been home to another restaurant. A tiny grocery stood directly across the street from Three Sisters, owned by my best friend Yusuf’s Syrian family. Beside it was a computer and electronics repair shop that also offered wire money transfers around the world, and a South Asian bridal shop that specialized in bespoke lehngas and saris. The stores fronted the residential neighborhood known as Golden Crescent, named after its main street. According to local lore, the subdivision also formed the shape of a crescent on Google Maps.

  I set off to check on Baba before my shift at the radio station, ducking around the back of the restaurant, through the parking lot, and deeper inside Golden Crescent. There the homes were built close together, semidetached units and blocks of town houses interspersed with two-story houses with tiny front lawns. Driveways held two or three cars, usually minivans and older sedans. Extended families lived together, and basement tenants were common.

  I turned onto my street, a cul-de-sac that backed onto a ravine. Our home was a split-level detached unit, and I ran up the half-dozen stairs to the front door, eyes resting briefly on the peeling paint that surrounded our large bay window. If Baba was having a good day, he would be dressed and seated in the living room, perhaps reading or working on a jigsaw puzzle. He would greet me with a smile and make a joke about how we worried unnecessarily, and I could text Mom with enough assurances to wipe the strain from her face.

  But my father wasn’t sitting in the neat living room on his favorite chair. A quick look revealed that he wasn’t in the kitchen either, and there was no empty chai mug on the counter. I took the steps two at a time to the room my parents shared at the end of the hall. I knocked once and entered. He was still in bed.

  “I tried to get up,” Baba said, greeting me with an apologetic smile. “I’m feeling shaky today, and I didn’t want to fall again.”

  Ijaz Khan was a diminutive man, and he seemed even more shrunken under the duvet. His face looked as if it had been assembled from mismatched Mr. Potato Head parts: dark slash of unibrow, large, bulbous nose, full lips, receding hairline—all on a beloved face. He wore oversize reading glasses that magnified his dark eyes. Mom had been right to send me; it was obvious he was in pain.

  “Should I get your pills?” I asked gently. He nodded, and I went to the bathroom for his medication. I hated seeing him this way.

  Two years ago my father’s car had been struck by an SUV making a left turn, and his compact sedan had been pushed into oncoming traffic. His legs pinned by the wreckage. For a few weeks afterward we hadn’t been sure if he would ever walk again. Most of the insurance settlement went to paying for extra therapy, medicine, and help after the accident, and he hadn’t worked regularly since. Before the accident my father had counted most of the businesses on Golden Crescent among his bookkeeping clients. Now he managed only a handful of storeowners loyal to him. Our family’s ability to pay bills in a timely manner rested largely on the success of Three Sisters Biryani Poutine.

  While we waited for his medicine to kick in, I switched on the radio he kept on the night table, tuned to the CBC. We listened to the last ten minutes of a tech program until he felt steady enough to grasp the handles of the walker I had moved near.

  I helped Baba make his way down the steps, then busied myself in the kitchen, boiling water and heating milk for chai. He hated when I hovered. I buttered toast and brought his meal to the white plastic kitchen table.

  “Play one of your podcast episodes, Hana, beta,” he said after taking a restorative sip of scalding-hot chai. I had made a mug of the strong, milky tea for myself as well, and we settled down to listen. Baba was the only one in my family who had thought my podcast was a good idea. I scrolled to an episode I thought he would like and pressed Play.

  [Transcript]

  Welcome to Ana’s Brown Girl Rambles, an anonymous podcast about life as a twentysomething Muslim woman in Canada.

  I come from a long line of storytellers. My father loved to tell stories about his family and growing up in India. My sister and I never grew tired of hearing those tales. One of our favorite stories was about my father’s oldest brother, who loved to play tricks on his siblings. One day their youngest sister and her friends were playacting a wedding between their dolls, and my uncle insisted on participating. He would play the part of the imam and marry the dolls. He dressed up in a long robe and prayer cap, and when the time came for the wedding feast, my sister and her friends provided snacks: cakes, and sweet sherbet to drink. Naturally, the minute the nikah was over, my uncle had his friends swoop in and steal all the food, while he kidnapped the newly married dolls and held them for ransom in his hideout on the roof. He didn’t let them go until his little sister and her friends agreed to hand over the bride’s dowry—three bottles of cola, a toy car, and a handful of rupees.

  Baba laughed aloud at my retelling of his mischievous brother’s long-ago antics. While he listened to the rest of the podcast, I skimmed the comments.

  COMMENTS

  StanleyP

  I’d like to meet your uncle.

  AnaBGR

  I haven’t seen him in years, but he’s a joker even as an adult.

  StanleyP

  All my relatives are boring.

  AnaBGR

  Do bots have family?

  StanleyP

  Only the cool ones, like me. It helps us appear more realistic. How’s work going?

  AnaBGR

  Busy, occasionally soul-sucking, scattered with moments of awesome. You?

  StanleyP

  I tried pitching my idea the way you suggested. It didn’t go over well.

  AnaBGR

  You need to make your slide deck pop. I told you to add a catchy playlist.

  StanleyP

  You’ve never worked in an office before, have you.

  AnaBGR

  Fine, don’t listen to my excellent advice.

  StanleyP

  Nobody should, actually.

  AnaBGR

  And yet my listener count is up again. I didn’t think anyone would be interested.

  StanleyP

  Yes, you did. Or you wouldn’t have bothered.

  AnaBGR

  How do you know that?

  StanleyP

  You got me hooked.

  My stomach knotted as I reread StanleyP’s words from only a few months ago. This casual flirtation was starting to feel dangerous. What were we doing?

  As my podcast self signed off, I looked for Baba’s reaction. His wide grin wiped away the lines deeply etched around his mouth, so that he looked almost like the person he had been before the accident. My heart clenched at the sight of his fleeting joy.

  Baba had been so happy when I decided to pursue a master’s in broadcast journalism, so proud of my internship. He spent so much time at home now, listening to the radio or to podcasts online, that he had become convinced I would soon be given
my own show. So far all I had done at my internship was sort archives and research stories. I had graduated the previous June and was still waiting to figure out my next move.

  I deposited his empty plate and mug in the sink. “I’ll be back late,” I said. “I’m at the radio station and then closing the restaurant afterward.”

  Baba nodded, hesitating. “How many customers today?” he asked.

  I kept my face averted when I answered. “A slow day. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Things will get better,” he said. “Inshallah.”

  I squeezed his shoulder, then pulled out the tray that held his latest jigsaw puzzle: a Scottish castle, five thousand pieces. I set it up on the coffee table before letting myself out the front door.

  My phone pinged with a new e-mail as I stepped onto the sidewalk. It was from the public radio broadcaster—the dream job StanleyP had asked me about earlier. Please, Allah, I prayed fervently. My fingers fumbled as I opened the e-mail app. Please, please, let this be good news. I read quickly, eyes skimming, heart pounding.

  Dear Ms. Khan,

  Thank you for your interest in the position of junior producer. We regret to inform you the position has been filled. We thank you for participating in our interview process, as we encourage diverse voices to continue to apply and make a difference in the Canadian media landscape . . .

  I deleted the message before reading the rest, and my fingers automatically moved to the messaging app. I didn’t get the job, I typed to StanleyP, but then my fingers stilled.

  Maybe this rejection was a sign that I should focus on what was happening right now and not worry about dream jobs, or future relationships, that were out of my reach. I erased the message and walked to the bus stop. My dreams could wait a little while longer.

  [Transcript]

  Welcome to Ana’s Brown Girl Rambles, a podcast about the life of a twentysomething Muslim woman in Toronto.

  One of the questions I posed in my first episode was about family. What do we owe the people who grew us up, who first made up our entire world?

  It’s complicated for the kids of immigrants. I’m not talking about the usual my parents don’t understand thing. My parents believe in the power of choice, and they never asked me to sacrifice my dreams for theirs. Yet I feel like I should anyway. Where does that feeling come from? Is it just loyalty and strong family ties? Is it because, as part of a marginalized community, we all had to stick together to survive, and that sort of experience tends to become habit? Maybe it’s about guilt. We are kids who benefited from the sacrifices our parents made when they decided to move to a richer, safer country. If we then grow up to grow apart, have we become ungrateful villains?

  My parents would say I’m being dramatic. Maybe I am. Then again, the beauty of running an anonymous podcast is that I can be as dramatic as I like.

  I do know that, for all the benefits of being the daughter of immigrants, the one drawback is I’ve had to establish my own sense of place. All my extended family live elsewhere, on a different continent, and we don’t visit often enough to form real ties. There’s a lot of freedom in being a pioneer of your family’s history in a new place, of course. But there’s a lot of loneliness too. I’ve had to find my own family, to make the sort of friendships that are family. Yet that lack of history means my roots here are shallow, my stories only a few years old.

  Maybe that’s why I’m feeling so restless today, a little bit stuck. I’m waiting for something, only I’m not sure what. This is when I imagine a different sort of restlessness—the kind my parents felt, the kind that drove them to get on a plane decades ago and leave behind their own world, full of stories and history, for something new.

  In so many ways the choices they made have limited mine. No doubt the choices I make will do the same for the generation that follows. I guess we all make peace with that in the end.

  Thanks for listening, friends. Let me know if you have similar stories and how you’ve navigated your own road.

  COMMENTS

  StanleyP

  Great second episode!

  AnaBGR

  The bot returns.

  StanleyP

  I subscribed. I guess I’m a fan. My fam isn’t as understanding as yours, but I feel you about the loyalty, and the guilt. Can’t wait to hear what you come up with next. You should do this for a living.

  AnaBGR

  Inshallah.

  StanleyP

  God willing.

  AnaBGR

  Are you Muslim too?

  StanleyP

  Anony-Ana, if I answer that question, will you answer some of mine?

  AnaBGR

  Nope. Withdrawn.

  StanleyP

  Until next time.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Radio Toronto was a popular indie station that aired a little of everything. We played local artists as well as Top 40 hits, reported on serious news as well as Toronto street culture. I had beaten hundreds of other applicants to secure my internship position, alongside fellow intern Thomas Matthews. Now that I had lost out on the only other job I really wanted, I was determined to get hired on permanently at the station once my internship ended. To do that, I needed to become indispensable to the station’s general manager. Marisa Lake was a sophisticated white woman in her late thirties, tall and willowy, with sleek honey brown hair pulled into a chignon and a silk scarf draped just so around her neck. Thomas thought she was sensitive about her neck.

  “You’re lucky, you cover all the time,” he said now, gesturing at my hijab. We were sitting in our small office, surrounded by boxes of archives we had been ordered to sort and catalog, which hadn’t been touched in decades. After two hours we were both bored.

  Thomas’s family were Orthodox Christians from south India. He assumed that, as fellow desis, we shared a special connection. He also thought he should be the one offered the permanent job at Radio Toronto at the end of our internship. He was wrong on both counts.

  “My neck is fine, thanks,” I said.

  “Women have all these hang-ups. If it’s not their necks or toes, it’s their eyebrows.”

  I peered inside a filing box and tried to tune him out.

  “I know what your hang-up is,” he said, voice sly. Thomas had dark brown skin and enormous eyes hidden behind circular wire-frame glasses. He favored slim-fit cardigans and sweater vests, which he thought made him look like a brown hipster. I knew better; desi Harry Potter would only ever look out for his own interests.

  I also knew he wasn’t going to let up until I reacted. Next to coming up with strange theories about the people in our office, Thomas loved to tease me.

  “Okay, fine. What’s my hang-up?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Your hair. That’s why you wear that thing on your head.”

  “Hijab. Say it with me: he-jab.”

  “The fact that you’re so sensitive only proves me right. Tell me the truth. Are you one of those weirdos who can’t stop chewing their hair?”

  I slammed a file folder onto the desk. “I’m shocked you’re still single. What’s wrong, Mommy hasn’t found you a wife yet?”

  “Nobody does the arranged-marriage thing anymore, Hana,” Thomas said placidly, and I instantly regretted my bout of temper. “Except for crazy conservatives.” His eyes lingered on my hijab. “Besides, I have a girlfriend,” he said, pulling another folder toward him.

  “Virtual girlfriends don’t count.”

  “You would know all about virtual friends,” he shot back, gaze resting on the phone in my hand.

  I flushed and closed my messaging app. I hadn’t been texting StanleyP at work, only checking whether he had texted me. He hadn’t.

  “What are you two talking about?” Marisa had wandered into the office. She grabbed a file at random, flicked through it, and put it do
wn on the wrong pile. Today she was wearing light pink lipstick that matched her pale pink scarf, a shade I could never pull off. Marisa dressed more elegantly than her current job demanded. Thomas said it was because she was a woman on the climb.

  I wanted to move up too, like Marisa. I even had a scarf collection, though I wore mine on my head instead of around my neck. We weren’t so different.

  “I’m making great progress with the files, Marisa,” Thomas said. “I’ve got plenty of ideas to keep them organized from now on. I’d love to share them with you later.”

  I rolled my eyes, but Marisa only smiled faintly in our direction. She was no dummy.

  “Thomas was just telling me about his girlfriend,” I said, answering her question.

  “Oh,” Marisa said, a note of disappointment in her voice. “I was hoping to set the two of you up.”

  Thomas and I looked at each other in dismay as she left us to it.

  Marisa called me into her office a few hours later. “I hope you weren’t offended, sweetie,” she said, indicating that I should take a seat. Her office was cramped, but she did have a window that faced the parking lot. “I thought you and Thomas looked cute together.”

  I stifled my sigh. Marisa meant well—as much as someone who wanted to match up people by their skin tone could mean well. She didn’t get that although our parents were born in the same country, it didn’t follow that we were destined to fall in love. I liked Marisa, so my tone was gentle when I replied. “We don’t see each other like that. Also, he has a girlfriend.”

  “And do you have a boyfriend?” she asked.

  My boss was trying to be friendly, but I suspected she also had a bit of a savior complex, which I could use to my advantage. I thought quickly. “I just dumped him. I’m very committed to my job here at Radio Toronto.” I tried to look earnest and deserving of opportunity.

  Marisa fingered the scarf at her throat and smiled faintly. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “Though it’s probably for the best. I’m sure your parents wouldn’t approve of you dating before marriage.”