by Nawaaz Ahmed
“We’re not taking the threat seriously,” Seema fumes. “We need to have a rapid-response media team to kill the rumors before they start spreading. Has it occurred to the campaign this is why Obama is unable to clinch the nomination?”
But Bill is dismissive, heartened by the campaign’s recent gains: “No one really believes this junk.”
“Oh, so you’re the communications expert. People are capable of believing anything, if it’s repeated often enough.”
She spends a few weeks appealing to her campaign contacts to refer her for a job on the PR team. Her efforts again go nowhere, this time purportedly because she’s too valuable as a trainer: they would like her to continue training volunteers in states they haven’t started actively organizing in yet. Reluctantly Seema gives in and packs her bags for Pittsburgh, for the Pennsylvania primary in April.
18
It’s a gray wintry March in Pennsylvania. TV channels are saturated with videos of Reverend Wright, Obama’s Black pastor from Chicago, railing against America and Obama’s opponents: Not God bless America, but God damn America! and We have supported state terrorism against Palestinians—America’s chickens are coming home to roost! and Hillary has never had a people defined as a non-person! The right wing chants: Obama hates America, Obama is an Angry Black Man.
When not conducting training sessions, Seema drives to half-shuttered malls and neglected downtowns around Pittsburgh to register voters and check out for herself the effects of the uproar. Tensions rise perceptibly wherever she shows up with her Obama affiliation visible. Pedestrians stare with hostility, brusquely turning down her overtures. After trips to the restroom, she finds her table messed up, forms missing, placards torn up, with nobody having witnessed the vandalism. Posters circulating on the internet one day appear the next day on lampposts and shop fronts: Obama with his arm around Reverend Wright—The Audacity of Hate. Obama in an Arab headdress—Anti-Semite. Obama with horns and pitchfork—Anti-Christ.
“See what I said?” Seema rants to Bill. “They’ve no trouble believing Obama is a radical Black Christian and an Islamic jihadist at the same time. They can even believe he’s a Muslim pretending to be a Christian so he can win. They call it ‘taqiyya’—read up about it.”
Obama is to address the nation the next day, in what is publicized as his first major speech on race, to try to stem the slide in the polls resulting from his relationship with Reverend Wright. The Pittsburgh office, Seema included, gathers that morning to watch the live broadcast. Speaking at a hastily arranged assembly at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, against a backdrop of American flags, Obama begins by reciting the opening words of the Constitution, across the street from where it was drafted and signed.
The room that starts out tense, anxious—this speech could decide the campaign’s fate—is left teary-eyed, inspired. Reverend Wright is correct that the union is not perfect yet, but he is wrong that there has been no progress, that America cannot change. This campaign—the campaign of the son of a Black man from Kenya and a White woman from Kansas, building a powerful coalition of African Americans and White Americans—is proof of that. One of the organizers in the room, the youngest, openly sobs: Obama cites her story as reason for further hope in the next generation—a young White woman, who’d battled childhood poverty when her mother got sick and lost healthcare, now organizing in Black communities, seeking out allies in her fight against injustice. This is how the union grows stronger, toward perfection.
Obama is confident and authoritative, but prosaic and detached, and determined to be evenhanded: yes, Black people have been wronged in the past and continue to be wronged, but White people have their legitimate grievances too, and both sides must work together to heal the racial divide.
“Did you hear that?” Bill texts Seema even before Obama is done speaking. “This is why he deserves to be president.”
Seema agrees that the speech is masterly. Obama has delivered as they’d hoped and prayed: almost immediately the media hails it as one of the most profound speeches on race since King’s “I Have a Dream.” What she doesn’t admit to Bill is that she feels somehow disappointed, even disquieted.
For even as she accepts that it was perhaps the only strategy Obama could have adopted to blunt the Wright controversy, she can’t help but wish that Obama had shown some emotion, some anger, while speaking about the wrongs suffered by his people. What if the Obama who’d given the speech today is the real Obama—passionate perhaps, but not angry, as Bill maintains, and therefore unprepared to fight back as a partisan, as would be needed, perhaps even reluctant to appear as one? What if Obama were not the fiery crusader she’d convinced herself of, but merely a cautious technocrat who prided himself on being perceived as objective, impartial, methodical? He’d promised progress as a gradual evolution for the benefit of some future generation.
In the workshops she conducts over the next days, she finds herself curiously disengaged. She’s listless, too, in her interactions with her colleagues and companions. She continues to canvass and register voters but no longer outside the city. She manages to score a seat onstage with Obama for the kickoff rally on his Pennsylvania tour, to Bill’s envy, but instead of excitement—this is maybe the closest she’ll ever get to Obama!—all she feels is a nameless dread, as if awaiting further disillusionment.
Long lines snake outside the stately facade of the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial before the rally, despite the drizzle and gray chill of that morning. The hall is packed, center and sides, mostly students from the two neighboring universities. Mostly young, and White, and earnest but clueless, Seema thinks. She is seated with the audience onstage, on tiered risers arranged behind the lectern, in the third row. In the row in front of her sits a trio of enthusiastic older Black women, eager for Obama to appear on stage. Above her, a banner in red, white, and blue: Change We Can Believe In.
During the introduction, Obama stands with his arms crossed and his head bowed pensively, as if oblivious to the extravagant praise the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania uses to endorse him: the promise of the nation. What could be tracking through Obama’s mind as he listens? So too would her father hold himself, to hide his gratification, at the events he’d been invited to preside over. Obama’s stance of modesty vanishes as soon as he gains the lectern and launches into his speech. The transformation to an easy charm and affable authority is immediate, and familiar—she’s struck again by the similarities to her father. Her senses quicken, as if alive to his slightest movement, even to the expressions on his face, though only imagined, since she’s presented only his back and profile as he speaks.
But what had she hoped for in coming today? This is no more than Obama’s stump speech: the invocation of Dr. King, a laundry list of the nation’s problems, inspiring stories of individuals achieving their goals despite all odds, a laundry list of proposed solutions and campaign promises, ending with the appeal to hope. Obama has continued to tweak the speech—addressing issues of the day, interjecting humorous asides, sharpening well-received lines—but many passages remain unchanged. She can repeat these word for word, as if she’d memorized them for some elocution competition.
The crowd, too, must have heard some version of the speech before, though it appears not to care. It cheers frenetically at all the appropriate places, rising frequently in standing ovation. Being on stage, Seema feels pressured to rise with the others. She submits, but more and more reluctantly as the speech progresses, for even the delivery is disappointing: Obama is less fluent today, tentative at times, fumbling for words at others, defensive in the face of polls showing him trailing Clinton in Pennsylvania. He struggles to hit the highs of some of his previous speeches, his usual assurance flagging. His promises sound hollow to her ears today, for even he doesn’t seem to believe them. She can imagine her father shaking his head, tut-tutting, as during one of their elocution practice sessions. If she’d come hoping for renewal, reinvigoration, she’s not going to find it her
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Bill would have given anything to be here. She feels guilty for paying so little regard to Obama, mere feet away, while she is wrapped up in herself, only aware of the thunderous moments of applause, automatically joining in with the rest, standing up and sitting down in ritualized unison, like the times she’d prayed namaz in Chennai, usually during Eid, forced to by Halima Aunty—
They’d pray together, the womenfolk at home, the two girls, she and Tahera, and the two women, Halima Aunty and her mother, while their men were away at the mosque for the Eid namaz. She’d protest: Why isn’t she allowed into the mosque? Why pray to a god that denies the world to her?
She could resist Ammi’s bidding but not Halima Aunty’s cajoling. She’d go through the prayers impatiently, mindlessly following Halima Aunty, standing up, sitting down, and then she’d wait for the men to return, restless, for everything pleasurable about Eid came afterward—Ammi’s biryani, the visits of friends and relatives, the sweets, the gift of eidi that supplemented her pocket money, the chance to model her new Eid clothes. She hasn’t celebrated Eid in almost two decades. The last time was before she went to England, before everything went wrong.
Obama finishes his speech to prolonged applause. He turns to shake hands with the people behind him on the risers. From Seema’s vantage point, he seems less commanding now than when his face fills the TV screen. His handshakes are perfunctory—he is tired, only flitting a smile to a Black woman behind him, in response to the woman’s beaming face. But that doesn’t stop the thicket of hands thrust out toward him—hands thrust out as if seeking sanctification, a blessing.
Simultaneously, a recollection: At the airport in Chennai, preparing to board the flight to London that first time, they’d all come to see her off—Tahera sobbing uncontrollably, Halima Aunty consoling her, her mother discreetly wiping her eyes with her pallu, even her father cloaking distress in an exuberance of speech and laughter.
She’s checked her luggage, and stands with them one last time, clutching her passport tightly like a talisman. As she turns to pass through immigration and finally onward to the long-awaited boarding gate, something unexpected comes over her.
For this is the other part of Eid she used to chafe against, when all the waiting womenfolk, including her mother, in the custom of touching their elders’ feet on special occasions, bend down to touch her father’s feet and receive his blessings, a gesture of almost veneration, which Tahera waited for eagerly every time, throwing herself at Abba’s feet as soon as he returned from the mosque, and which Seema dreaded. But some obscure instinct prompts her to avail herself of that gesture now, to stoop before Abba in the airport, till her fingers and passport lightly brush his shoes. Bowed in front of him, his looming figure casting a shadow over her, she holds her breath until he gives his blessing: Jeeti raho, Beti. He raises her to standing, kissing her forehead, whispering: I know you’ll make me proud.
His voice cracks, that one time, despite his efforts to control himself, and sudden relief, grief, gratitude washes through her.
Then, a recognition: She doesn’t need to add to all the worshipful hands held out to Obama. Obama himself has little power to grant anything—he is here after all to seek the blessing of the White people in the crowd, a blessing that would be given only conditionally, like her father’s, to be revoked any time they were displeased with him, as he himself knows well from the deference he gave them in his speech on race.
Yes, Obama could win the nomination, and perhaps even the election, but what would that change? Obama claims hope, but there is always a reality that won’t budge.
Change you can believe in. What if you didn’t—couldn’t—believe in change? Change as something that took you someplace new, and lasting, not something that brought you back to where you’ve already been: three continents, three countries, six cities, multiple homes, myriad loves, the ceaseless struggle, but still the same inescapable tragedy of her self: still seeking approval, still seeking some way to make her father proud of her again.
19
My mother Seema as a thirteen-year-old: Sitting up in the gulmohar tree in their compound in Chennai, hiding from the world amid its fiery blossoms. It’s a Saturday, the month is July, the tree is on fire, the canopy of green bipinnate leaves overshadowed by a blaze of scarlet flames. Not for nothing is the tree also called the Flame of the Forest. Seema hides here, cradled in a nook the tree has carved out for her, her back against the trunk, legs supported on branches running fused together before they separate and disappear into the kaleidoscope of red and yellow, green and brown.
She reaches to pluck the largest unopened bud from the cluster hanging beside her head, she runs a fingernail along the pale yellow ridges of the calyx, she peels the still clinging sepals to reveal the petals—the outermost, large and white and blotched with red and yellow, and curled up inside it are the others, red and wrinkled like a baby’s fingers. Within them, the coiled stamens—the filaments, curved necks so fragile it is a wonder they can support the weight of the heads, the anthers mossed with soft golden-yellow pollen. And somewhere, oh here it is, is the pistil—a hairy ovule, and a long and slender style, so completely unremarkable.
She dissects the bud and chews each detached part methodically before swallowing.
Who’s she hiding from?
First, her mother. Seema knows she’ll be reprimanded if Nafeesa catches her up in the tree. She’s on her fifth-ever menstrual period, which arrived unexpectedly today, two months after the last one, bloodier and stronger than any previous time, so unstanchable that Seema had been scared. She’d spent the morning locked up with her mother, sobbing in her lap, drenching Nafeesa’s saree with her tears.
Never had she felt so betrayed by her body before, not even that first time. Now a few hours later, secured with a pad, flouting her mother’s admonitions to remain in bed, she’s perched high in the gulmohar tree, chewing on crimped buds. Their pungent tartness is addictive and satisfying.
Next, she’s hiding from her sister, who had stood outside their parents’ room bawling as though it were her body bleeding. Tahera had pounded on the door, begging to be let in, then continued banging her head against wood until their mother opened the door. She’d refused to be sent away, lying on the floor clutching at Nafeesa’s ankles, screaming as their father finally managed to lead her away: “Is she going to die? Let me go, let me go to Seema.”
And last, Seema is hiding from her father.
Previously whenever Naeemullah has tended to her, it’s her father she’s always seen, his loving eyes, his soothing voice, not the trained professional who held office in his clinic downstairs. And always in her own room. But today, for the first time, she was summoned to his consulting room.
When she knocks, he tells her to take a seat in the tone he uses with his patients, public, practiced. She’d wanted him to hold her, to comfort her, to kiss her forehead. Instead, she has to sit down across from him, in a chair his patients use, her hands in her lap, waiting for him to look up from a book.
After a long minute, he says, eyes still on the book, “Your mother tells me you’re suffering from some disorder.”
It’s that word disorder that gets to her, before anything else. Is it a disorder what’s happening to her? Is she somehow abnormal? He’s talking about the human body—her body—and tripping effortlessly from his lips are words, only some she’s learned in biology: ovary, uterus, uterine wall, placenta, endometrium, menarche, menorrhagia, dysmenorrhea. He reads aloud passages from the book, explaining as he goes along, in his familiar lecturing manner that has until today been thrilling.
“Do you understand?” he asks.
No, she does not understand.
“I want it to stop,” Seema cries. “Make it go away.”
She wants to be told that nothing has changed, that she’s still his daughter, that she’s still the same person she was before, that they will continue on as they’ve always done, father and daughter, friends, confidants.
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“It may just be temporary. It may correct itself eventually. It can always be contained,” her father says. He continues reading to her from the book, elaborating on tests, procedures, treatments. Does she understand?
What she understands is that her body isn’t hers anymore. She doesn’t control it, it controls her. What she understands is that, overwhelmed by her disorder, her father has chosen to hide his paternal self behind his clinical self. In his voice she senses doctorly frustration masking fatherly disappointment, even distaste. She has become a problem to be fixed. What she begins to understand is that they are on different sides of a fissure that will only grow wider.
Her father closes the book and sets it aside. “Come. Your mother will be waiting for us. Lunch will be getting cold.”
She doesn’t want lunch. Her mother urges her to eat something but lets her go to her room.
Instead, Seema slips back downstairs and into the garden and climbs up the gulmohar tree, her pad an inconvenience to be ignored. She doesn’t stop at her usual perch but continues climbing farther. She is determined to climb higher than ever before, determined to ignore the ache in her limbs, but she is forced to stop when the cramps in her abdomen become unbearable. But, although she hasn’t beaten her own record, she has managed to get far enough up that she’s completely hidden from view, tucked away in a fork in the trunk, cloaked by scarlet blossoms.
As she plucks petals and drops them one by one, as she plucks buds to dissect and consume, she promises herself for the first time what she’ll later promise herself over and over again, in clearer and more direct terms: not to let her body decide for her what she should do, not to let her life be dictated by forces she doesn’t understand or accept.
