1. Homecoming

When I returned, I held onto the familiar for so long that the changes were only considered slowly, carefully. My cousin, who I met last night for the first time in four years, remarked that it felt as if I had never left. I felt the same, despite knowing the changes in her own life the past few years: a marriage, a move, and a baby.

When I was away I romanticized Lahore to the point of dreaming about it. The bundles of short trees next to the roads, the feral crows on the too-low hanging phone-lines, the bright colours of women’s shalwar kameez: parrot green, mustard yellow, kashmiri chai pink. In my dreams I wasn’t the current me, but younger, looking up at my mother towering over me. And in my dreams were people who were supposed to be gone but weren’t gone for me: Nani Ama with her bony stature, and white cotton dupattas. I would bury my nose in the fabric, back when I was small enough to do so, her Madinah-imported attar leaving traces.

2. Flora

Dada has long cut down the papaya tree, in fact during the summer when we left. For four long years the house had been papaya-less, my Dado not willing to actually buy some from the market because of the new government’s inflated prices. To fulfil the absence, Dada bought seeds again, and planted them where the old tree had been cut down. The spring I came back Dada showed me the tiny seedling, surrounded by a square fence of rope so no one would step on it, accidentally.

There were some new members of his garden family: a picturesque lemon tree, bursting with colour at the corner of the plot, a spicebush to garnish curries, a tomato plant nearly hidden by the lush bush next to it.

Dada peeled back the leaves as we brought our heads closer for a look. The fruit were a dull green, shining under the intrusion of harsh, unbearable sunlight. My bare feet burned on the coarse grass.

“In a few weeks they’ll be ripe,” he said.

“But who’ll eat them? None of us like tomatoes; Baba can’t even stand the smell of them.”

Dada smiled in reply, and in a few weeks was biting into the ruby skin as if it were an apple. It was a sight to see, juice dripping and all. My Dada who grew the tomatoes just for himself.

3. Heat

Everything in the house smells of dirt. Even after we leave the windows open to let the warm breeze in, even after mopping the floors and scrubbing the walls, the faint earthy smell doesn’t leave. It’s not unpleasant exactly; everything in Pakistan has this scent, like the aftermath of a heavy monsoon rain. Even though the season is months away, the air is preparing already.

None of that mattered, though, because Mama hated the scent so we must clean, clean every day until the place smelled spotless. I was mopping the stairs, a tedious task that left me alone to my thoughts. From the large, wooden window I could see the chikoo tree from next door, the leaves gleaming like oil. On one of the branches was a crow, from the dozens that have staked their own territory in the neighbourhood. Its beak hung open with thirst, a testament to the sweltering humidity of the day.

The chikoo tree doesn’t bear fruit anymore, its limbs have grown thin like spider’s legs. But when I was younger and all the relatives would come over for summer holidays, chikoos were an indispensible part of our afternoons. An older cousin had control of the knife and would distribute the slices while everyone sat cross-legged on the carpet, watching old PTV dramas. Other times, we would drink chikoo and mango milkshakes; ice-cold cups taken to the courtyard, condensation leaving palms wet.

The chikoo tree wasn’t ours but it felt like it. It grew in the house next door, but the branches extended beyond the wall to our side, which meant that we would get most of the fruit. The neighbour-aunty didn’t mind though, maybe far from it. She’d been widowed for years and her children had moved out when the bombs first started falling, exchanging our humidity for where the snow never melts. I see her from the terrace, sometimes. When the breeze is cool she likes to leave her window open, likes to listen to recitations of Punjabi poetry that faintly float in for our outdoor conversations. She knits for her grandchildren, the ones she gets to see only once every few years.

She was an anomaly to me; alone in that big house that needed near constant music to drown out the silence. How could I have fathomed loneliness in the overflowing house of my childhood, where each moment of privacy was almost sacred, yearned for? Now, our own family has dwindled, unearthed their roots to plant elsewhere. On our family group-chat I send screenshots of the temperature in Lahore, and someone replies, how can you bear it?

4. People

In Meatless Days, Sara Suleri remarks: “Leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of women.” I thought of this in my frozen almost-home, video-calling my mother, my grandmother, my aunts, all of whom have had a part in raising me to become the woman I am today. I had forgotten how it was to live with stifling affection, with women who consider you an extension of themselves, who fill you with expectations. While I understand their way of expression, I can’t help but wish for empty dorm rooms and snowstorms, literature lectures and poetry readings in dim-lit cafes. But perhaps most importantly: a street I can walk on, a city I am allowed to take up physical space in, my presence large. Here, we have two faces: one for the comfort of the domestic sphere, and one for the fear felt in the outside. Both never truly enough.

 There is no country for women.

– Sana Mohsin

Note: This piece was previously published in Blaze: The Inner Circle Writers’ Group Flash Fiction Anthology 2019.