Runa Qureshi - Unlikely Kin

 

 

I was in America. I'd gone there for a girl, a girl probably being the only reason one would spend three months of their world traveling sabbatical adventure in Baltimore. [audience laughter] 

I was in Baltimore, and my mother called me. In her usual desperately attempting to be light and cheerful way, she asked me how I was doing and she said, “Oh, Baltimore? Yes, I have an uncle there.” 

 

Now, for context, my mother was being light and friendly, but was whispering, because she was either at the very end of her garden or some far corner of her bathroom talking to me as quietly as possible, so that her husband, my father, wouldn't overhear her talking to their gay, ostracized waste of a child, direct quote, “me.” And so, again, trying to be light and pretending everything's fine, she says, “Oh, yes. Uncle Rafi. Yes, he's my father's brother. He lives very near Baltimore. You should go see him. His wife has just died.” 

 

Now, Asian family isn't really something I identify as having what with the ostracized black sheep deleted off the family tree thing. So, when my mother says this, my immediate response is a very quick, “No thanks.” Now, things were going quite badly with Baltimore girl at this point. And eventually, it got to the stage where hanging out with an 88-year-old Asian man grieving the loss of his wife of 66 years [audience laughter] was definitely better than another afternoon of lesbian drama. [audience laughter] So, off I went. 

 

Now, I was expecting your standard Muslim Pakistani uncle. For those of you who aren't familiar, this is the sort of man who has a beer belly from the other golden liquid, ghee, [audience laughter] who would sport simultaneously furrowed brows of concern and wide eyes of horror that I was still unmarried, someone who would offer holier than thou proclamations about white people, and their alcohol, and their miniskirts, and their divorce and their care homes for the elderly. 

 

The sort of man who would hold court in his house while a wife scurried backwards and forwards laying out a spread of every dish, every snack, every drink imaginable. Basically, I was expecting the entrenching of childhood trauma, judgment, cruelty, but off I went. 

 

The first clue that he might not be quite what I thought was his address, a care home, a fancy one at that. I remember walking into these wide carpeted hallways with big oak paneled walls behind which white face after white face after further old white face passed until I came to the one brown face in the building. 

 

Some dusty sentimentality sprung up in me. I scoured his face for resemblance, for connection. He looked absolutely nothing like me, but he took me to lunch and he ordered a ghee-free meal and a glass of wine. He spent the entire lunch entirely uninterested in my marital status, because he was so devastated that his own had just changed. He told me about Ellen, a white, German woman who had found herself in 1940s Lahore, Pakistan, surrounded by mosques and minarets, visiting her brother-in-law, my Uncle Rafi's neighbor. He told me about falling in love with her. 

 

He used that word, love, a word that had been a dirty word in my house growing up. Definitely not the proper basis for a marriage. He told me how falling in love with her, he wanted to marry her. But he was an army doctor in post-independence Pakistan and absolutely forbidden from marrying a foreign national. The family was outraged, hot with anger that he was seeking to break with tradition. 

 

So, he went to America for a girl. As he told me about Ellen, perhaps, some dusty sentimentality rose up in him. Maybe he sensed I needed to hear it, or maybe he had noticed who dropped me off. But he told me that whatever body Ellen had been born in, male or female, he would have loved her just the same. And then, me being the only relative he'd seen for decades, he started telling me about our family. 

 

Now, things were continuing to go terribly with Baltimore girl, but I had promised I would stick with her through the summer. But instead of actually working on the relationship, I just went and saw Uncle Rafi a lot. [audience laughter] We got this huge blue sketchbook from one of his classes at this care home, and we started sketching out a family tree. Huge thing. 

 

He transported me into India of the 1700s, and 1800s and 1900s, and he told me about a great, great, great uncle whose job was to be the lion protector of the village. He'd have to climb up into this tree, and look out for lions and presumably do something about them if he saw them. [audience laughter] 

 

He told me about another great, great, great uncle who was responsible for the first Persian to Urdu dictionary, which he wrote by candlelight. He told me about another great, great uncle who'd had four big strapping sons, all of whom had died in cricket accidents. [audience laughter] 

 

I got completely lost in all these magical stories, these connections to family that I'd never known about before. Somewhere towards the end of the summer, I sat back and I looked at this big family tree, and I remembered that every time Uncle Rafi had not quite remembered a name or not quite remembered a person, we just left a blank. I'd said, “Oh, that's fine. We'll leave a blank. Maybe you'll remember later.” 

 

When looking at this family tree, I suddenly realized something. All of the blanks were women. All of them reduced to a line connecting them to a man, someone's wife, someone's mother, someone's sister. I guess 1700s, and 1800s and the 1900s weren't a time where women had the adventures that people recalled, and celebrated, and told stories about and passed down through the generations. I guess the stories and adventures they could have had were limited. The breadth of the life they could have lived was limited. 

 

Uncle Rafi remembered two women, in particular. Not their names, but their stories. His mother's sisters. He remembered them, because they were quite unusual. Neither one of them had gotten married, at the time a completely scandalous thing to do. Now, the first one, the older one, he said, “Well, she'd had polio, and that had left her quite disfigured and not very attractive.” So, that explained that. [audience laughter] 

 

The second one, and he remembered this very clearly, “She had chosen not to marry, despite how awful that would have made her life, how difficult that would have been.” Something about that made me suddenly realize something that I'd never thought about before. It can't be in this huge family tree, this huge list of faces and people, that I'm the only woman that didn't want to marry a man, and I can't be the only one who didn't want to marry a man, because she wanted to marry a woman, but I must be the first one who's been able to do it. 

 

Thinking about these rainbow ancestors of mine with their untold stories, their faces lost, their struggles, their wishes, reckoning with themselves brought this deep, deep grief into me. I suddenly felt connected to a heritage that I had lost. I thought of them incessantly. 

 

Though I'm agnostic, some part of me hopes that they know I'm here, that they can see me, or feel me or know somehow that I am living, that I exist with my wife, with my children, that I'm free, that I'm safe, that my friends and my loved ones will remember us and celebrate us, and that I stand here a little bit prouder, because thanks to my fellow black sheep Uncle Rafi, I discovered them one summer.