The street reminded me of a storybook that Aba had given me once. European men wearing coats laid their hats and overcoats over puddles so that a lady wearing a long gown might step across without getting her feet wet. On either side of the street were impeccably maintained houses, their porches filled with flower pots, and large, tidy sidewalks. I had spent many childhood days wondering what it would be like to look out from the big windows of a tall house, especially the window in the tippy-top room where the roof comes to a point (which I would later learn is called an attic).
I breathed in the delicious clean air of that morning, looked around at the blue sky, and walked up the street that would lead me to the other side of the block and into the park, where I planned to begin my reluctant running, with a stranger no less.
That was when I caught sight of a tall young man waiting at the end of the street. Uh-oh, I thought. Is this the neighbor? I could still turn around and make an excuse, but this guy was smiling and waiting intently for me. He was very tall, with long, dark hair pulled up smartly, a long, good-looking nose, and dark sunglasses set happily on his face. I was grateful for not being able to see his eyes, as that would have been too awkward.
The idea of being alone with a man outside a professional context was foreign to me. I had had hundreds of official meetings and discussions and phone calls for Sughar, but those were always for a business purpose. Now here I was, in my traditional dress, hair back, big puffy sneakers on my feet, alone with a man for a purely social activity. I didn’t know how to act.
“Hi!” I said as brightly as I could. I must have looked like a penguin, but I was there and out of excuses.
After we introduced ourselves—he told me his name was David—I braced myself to run around this beautiful garden where people walked their dogs and mothers pushed babies in carriages. Boys were playing football in the distance. But David had noticed my lack of enthusiasm for running and suggested we walk. He told me he’d heard about me and my work, so we had something to talk about.
David was so kind and curious about Sughar that I found myself opening up to him easily. I told him about the Sughar women in the villages: their laughter, their bright eyes, the way I often felt incapable in the face of their great wisdom. He was so polite and a great listener. He kept asking me more questions, but I caught myself. I wanted to get this walk over with. I didn’t want to be intimate with this man whom I had just met.
I asked about his work and was instantly impressed with his vision for the world, his dreams for global peace building and creating effective solutions through technology. He was part of groups in Los Angeles that talked about cultural coexistence and currently worked as a tech analyst for a company working to create alternative energy solutions around the world, but he had previously run a start-up that designed innovative educational software. He had recently moved home from Boston to take care of his mother, who had Stage 4 lung cancer. I felt my heart sink. In Pakistan, a diagnosis of cancer is unfixable, terminal, the end of everything. If someone in your family has cancer, you know that their qayyamat (day of judgment) is near, and everyone strives to help the person live fully in the short time remaining. I later learned that his father had died of the same kind of cancer when David was only six years old.
I saw the fear in David’s eyes. I told him how important family is, and we began talking about our siblings, our family lives. I told him about Bili (Cat), the nickname of my youngest sister, and how she was born small and unhealthy but was now growing up quickly and climbing every wall and wardrobe in the house. I told him that all five of my sisters looked up to me, watching and learning. I sometimes feared that it was too much pressure for me and that I would fail as an elder sister.
As I spoke to David about all this, I realized I was sharing my innermost thoughts and feelings—and brought myself back. I was used to sharing those thoughts only with my diary or with my friend Faiza who lived in the neighborhood. I had to leave. As I walked back home, my heart raced—not from exercise but from something else.
“David is a very good person,” I later found myself saying to Deryn.
As she looked up at me, the puzzlement on her face slowly turned into an eyebrows-raised expression of mock horror: “Are your uncles going to come and kill him now?”
Two days later I left on a bus for Phoenix, trying to ignore that I was still thinking of David.
I HAD RECEIVED A PHONE CALL from Verde Valley School, a small International Baccalaureate boarding school known for its emphasis on global citizenship, located in a place called Sedona, Arizona. I accepted its invitation to speak, as speaking at high schools, colleges, and universities was one of my favorite things to do. I arrived in Phoenix late in the evening and was picked up by some of the school’s board members. As they took me to the founder’s graceful old Spanish-style home, where I would be staying, they told me about the school and its guiding principles, especially the value of cultural curiosity and service to others. Students came from all over the world to learn, discover one another’s cultures, explore nature, and work the red soil together of what I would later discover to be a magical place.
The next morning, my first full day in Sedona, I woke up to beautiful bright light filling the room. I climbed out from beneath the heavy duvet and walked to the window to see where I was—and behold! Pushing aside the thick, flowered curtains, I uncovered a view so exquisite it looked almost unreal: a clear blue sky, a red mountain perfectly framed in the window, dark green patches across the land, and trees near my window. The chilly January landscape reminded me of our mountains at home, and the place felt tinged with something ethereal.
I made my way downstairs to the kitchen, a big room lined with turquoise enamel cabinets, Spanish tile floors with turquoise floor mats, and a dark wooden table at the far end. A window looked out at red rocks. But I stopped in my tracks as I saw David standing there, casually drinking a cup of coffee and talking to my hosts. What’s he doing here? Is he following me?
David was overjoyed to see me. He had attended the school many years earlier and now sat on the board. As he and I talked, I sipped my water compulsively. The presence of this interesting man was making my heart come out of my chest.
Over the course of three days in Sedona, he and I talked about everything in our hearts and minds. We talked about the presence of God in our lives, the importance of faith, and the importance of a life dedicated to serving others. We didn’t have enough time to say all the things we had to say. But when we parted, I decided to stay as far away from him as possible. Even if our hearts and minds matched, our religious and cultural differences were too much. I couldn’t bring even more trouble to my family.
* * *
—
AFTER SEDONA, MY NEW MENTOR Megan Smith asked me to join her in Vietnam for an event. I had told my heart to stop thinking about David, and by that time it wasn’t hard to do. Just before I boarded my flight for Vietnam, my brother Ali called to tell me I’d been selfish. From the day I left for America, my father’s health had gone downhill, rapidly. Now Aba was struggling with diabetes and high blood pressure. The guilt sliced my heart to pieces. I hadn’t done right by my family. If Aba really was distressed because of me, I had to go fix it.
Five days later I was back in Pakistan. My mother and sisters held me and cried. After everything that had happened the past year, they had been sure they would never see me again. About half an hour later my father came to see me. Silence spread over the house as Fauzia (my middle sister) opened the door for him. A thin figure resembling my father walked in. I burst into tears. What have I done? I had given sadness to the man who made me who I was, who stood up for me when nobody else would. When I was asked for in marriage, he had refused; when his friends told him not to send me to expensive schools, he had done it anyway; when I started coloring, he told me I could be an artist; when I started writing, he told me I could be an author. Th
is man had made me into the strong and independent woman I had become. And here he was, extremely saddened and ill. I promised myself that I would do whatever it took to make him happy. Weeping silently, I told him, “I’m back, and I’m not going away.”
I had caused enough grief for my family, I decided. In order to make things right, I was going to live the way my father wanted me to, at least on a personal level. If my professional life was hard on him, I would live by my parents’ wishes regarding my responsibilities as a daughter. For the next ten months, I poured all my attention into my family. I took the children out, and went to the park with my father every morning to get him moving.
At the same time, I continued planning new projects for Sughar, including the construction of concrete building centers with solar panels for electricity and bathrooms with large windows for good lighting and air. All the Sughar training would take place in these centers, which we decided to call Sughar Hubs. We would invite organizations that dealt with other issues, such as climate change and land rights, to use these centers as meeting spaces as well. This would be in line with Sughar’s focus on personal and economic growth in the lives of women. We were thinking bigger now.
During my time in the United States, I had recruited many donors, including TripAdvisor and Women in the World, who generously supported our launch of two Sughar Hubs. We planned new activities, prepared documents that would help us be efficient, listed the names of organizations to pursue, and hired new people. I was so busy with my father and with Sughar that I was able to put Sedona out of my mind.
Just as I was busy trying to be a good daughter, I met Rehman, who came from a respected family of Sindhi background. He was a branch manager for a life insurance company in Karachi. He was charismatic, well-mannered, and good-looking, someone my father would have chosen for me to marry. And so as he charmed his way into my heart, I began to think a relationship with him made sense.
Rehman and I spoke mostly about our values, our culture, and the need to promote and preserve it. It’s often difficult to find men in Pakistan’s larger cities who still maintain any love for their tribal heritage. Many fully disconnect themselves, believing that traditional systems are for ignorant men and women. But Rehman loved and respected my work and wanted me to keep moving forward with it. The more I thought about him, the more ideal he looked. We decided to marry as soon as possible so we both could start a life with unified goals.
Things were falling into place—my family was happy with me, Aba and I had resumed our good relationship, and Sughar was more successful every day.
Then one day Amina came back. I was shocked and thrilled to see her alive and happy. I had thought I would never see her beaming face again. It was as if the sun opened our door and walked in, blazing the whole space in radiance and warmth.
“Adi, Adi, Adi,” she chanted joyfully, calling me Sister and giving me the biggest hug.
Then she asked, “What’s happened to you, Adi? Is something stressing you out?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Look at me, Adi,” she said. “When I left this office, I took some of your magic with me to face my new life and survive, and I used that magic in the house. I put love, leadership, and power where they belonged. I showed my power and decision making in the house, and soon my husband started respecting me, and the women in the neighborhood started coming to me to receive advice and to seek help. I even started teaching at a nearby school. And now I’m expecting!” Her small eyes got round and big with happiness.
But she wasn’t finished. “Adi,” she continued, “did I take all of you with me? You look close to accepting defeat.”
I was suddenly ashamed. Amina showed me something important that day: that we cannot, in any way, decide what will create another person’s happiness. I had worked to unleash potential in women by giving them opportunities and developing their skills as leaders, and like many women activists, I had been forceful in deciding what personal happiness should look like for them, and what their freedom would mean for them. Amina taught me otherwise, and it was a lesson that would serve me well in the next stages of my life and career. I tried to put out of my mind that Amina seemed to think I was not happy.
In July, after four months of our communication, I told Aba about Rehman and asked that he meet him. The day they were to meet, I was excited. Finally, I thought, I will not have to face the many challenges that society throws at unmarried women. The evening after their meeting, my father came home with a frown and pursed lips. He ate his dinner in silence, telling me he would talk about the meeting the next day.
The next morning, as we strolled along the gravel track in the park where I accompanied him on his walks, he took slow, deep breaths, as the doctors had instructed him.
“Aba, what did you think?” I tried to make my voice sound authoritative and mature, but it came out as a squeak. He took a few more deep breaths, opened his mouth, then closed it again, frowning. I could hear our footsteps as they hit the small pebbles on the track.
“Khali.” He tried to sound calm. “I didn’t like him.”
My father is known to be a great diplomat. People often joked that he could restart a friendship between nations that had been apart for centuries. But in that moment, he showed no signs of diplomacy and got straight to the point. “I just didn’t like him.”
My heart sank. “Why? What happened?”
“I think,” Aba said, looking at his feet as he walked, “I think he will steal your light.”
What!? I thought. Is this you, Aba? You are saying this? You actually believe I have a light? “What do you mean?” I asked, a little frustrated.
“Khali,” he said, “one of the things you’ve had from when you were a child is blind optimism. Even though this has made me worry about you many times, and I have even disliked it and told you to stop trusting the world, I never, ever wanted it to leave you. This man does not have the slightest optimism. His heart is full of anger, as if the country has taken a big debt from him because of the slight pain he has seen.”
Anger flooded my chest, and tears of frustration surfaced in my eyes. My father had often told us that life is a battlefield and everyone is out to get you. He told us that if you are poor, you have to fight to claim what is yours, because it will never be given freely to you. If you are uneducated, you must spend every waking hour learning and face the world as a fighter. And now he disapproved of a man who believed all these same things! How could he tell me all my life that I should not trust men, that I should find a husband who was a respectable Pakistani Muslim from a good family, and then when all these criteria were met, tell me he didn’t like him?
But then, as if to save me from this confusion, Aba confessed to something that changed our relationship forever.
“I WAS LITTLE WHEN THIS happened,” Aba started. “It was when I first started going to a school, in a village far from ours. I would wake up early in the morning, get ready, and leave as early as four A.M. Many times there were no buses that I could cling to the side of to take me to school. So I often walked for two hours every day, passing a town, a few small villages, and nomadic huts before reaching this place that had become the dearest thing to me. My school. My rope to a better future.”
That morning, my father continued, was mild and dewy as he walked to school. He took a shortcut from the main road where the wet dirt sucked at his rubber shoes, which were torn and mended in many places. Sometimes he slipped, and his feet would be covered with yellow and gray dirt.
He slung his stack of books from one shoulder to the other as he walked. He had carefully covered them in old newspapers taped to the inside flaps to keep them fresh for the year, then tied them together with a jute string that he could hold on to and walk more quickly.
The clouds broke, and rays of sun quickly enveloped everything: the mud houses, the neem and babul trees, the tractors standing ou
tside homes, and the kitchen chimneys that were letting out breakfast smoke as the world came alive.
He passed a village full of friendly but conservative people who spoke Sindhi. (My father spoke Brahui as well as Sindhi.) There were no doors on the houses, just the rilis hanging in the entranceways for privacy. Cows were being taken out to graze. Other kids too were clutching books to their chests as they walked to the school.
As was often the case, my father’s mind was somewhere else, preoccupied with thoughts and dreams. But on that day, he was jarred from his reverie when he saw dust churned up on the dirt road ahead, as if a herd of cattle had just passed through. He quickened his pace, dragging his broken shoe, and saw others hurrying toward a group of people huddled at the side of the road, staring down at something.
When he reached the crowd, with boyish curiosity he pushed people aside so he could see what everyone was looking at. A woman’s limp dead body was lying on top of a dead man’s bruised and bloodied body. Flies hovered over both of them. My father did not understand. He had not seen death so close before. As harsh as life could be in a village like his, he had not seen blood gushing out of someone’s head, soaking their clothes. The same sun rays that he had been admiring a moment earlier, that hugged the trees and made the leaves shine, were now adding to the horror. He slowly pulled himself out of the crowd.
Not comprehending, my father walked slowly away. His arms were unable to hold the books, and his breathing felt tight and forced. When he reached his school, he rinsed off his hair and feet and entered the room. The teacher had not yet arrived. After ten minutes, the teacher was still not there. By this time, the other boys had become restless. They made paper balls and threw them at one another. Some shoved one another and shouted playful dares. Others laughed, sharing jokes. But my father’s thoughts couldn’t stop churning. He sat on his bench and stared blankly ahead, deaf to the sounds around him.
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