The Writing on My Forehead Read Free Page B

have. I must have pouted, stomped out of the kitchen, and sulked for hours at the prospect of having to forgo the prom. I never considered going to my father. The feminine triangle of our family dynamic left my father, geometrically speaking, on a plane far off in the distance, a single point whose relation to us could not be traced in precise mathematical terms. I suppose that was natural—he was male. But I was uneasy about that rather simple explanation for his exclusion, feeling responsible in some way for not having been born a son.
    Simple explanations always made me uneasy. I suppose that’s why I became a journalist. For years, I have traveled the world, uncovering the details overlooked by others, avoiding the details of my own past.
    Those details are unavoidable now. Still, I try, seeking refuge on the couch, my hand reaching for the clicker. Images of war pour into the room. James Earl Jones announces that “This is CNN.” And I realize that I am not ready to be mesmerized by twenty-four-hour news, Darth Vader’s voice notwithstanding. The voice of Authority. The voice of the Empire. Telling neat and tidy stories, with neat and tidy morals. Like my mother’s. Stories with all the messy details removed, because they don’t serve the message. In different circumstances, I would be there, halfway around the world, working hard to uncover those details, those babies killed by bombs, those wedding parties showered with shrapnel, those soldiers scarred and wounded, killed and killing—all of the collateral damage that Darth Vader’s voice dismisses as insignificant. Details. I click off the TV.
    I wonder how this has come to be—how it is that I am back in my parents’ home, alone, my sister’s daughter asleep and in my care. I breathe in the silence and darkness of the night—and think about the details. How to separate them out of the past, which I thought I understood, and reclaim them in the present, which I cannot.

TWO
     
    N O. NO! I will not come to the wedding. Not if she is invited…that kuthi with her brood of haramzadas .” I remember walking into the room, hearing my mother’s words as she turned down the invitation to my cousin Zehra’s wedding. I had stopped short at the entrance to the kitchen. A bitch? With a brood of bastards? I was fourteen and I couldn’t recall ever hearing my mother use an obscenity before. In any language. I remember how quickly she changed her tone when she saw me staring at her, mouth hanging open in surprise. Maybe it was my shock that prompted what followed.
    “ Acha, baba, acha. All right. I’ll send the girls, teek hay ? They’ll enjoy the wedding and it’s a long time since they visited you all in Pakistan. Yes, yes of course they’ll stay with you.” She was speaking to my Lubna Khala, her younger sister. (It was amazingly easy to figure this out. Among the three sisters—Jamila, the eldest; Shabana, my mother; and Lubna—sentences began in Urdu and ended in English with liberal lingual hybridization sandwiched in between, which none of them had any trouble following. They were loud, too, something that perhaps became a habit from having spent all of their adult lives apart—Jamila Khala in London, Mummy in Los Angeles, and Lubna Khala in Karachi—connected by long-distance phone calls.)
    My thrill at the thought that Ameena and I would be traveling to Pakistan, unaccompanied by our parents, almost outweighed my curiosity about the nature of my mother’s refusal to attend the wedding. Almost. But here, Ameena proved to be typically less cooperative than I could have wished.
    “I don’t want to go to Karachi for Zehra’s wedding,” was her response to my triumphant announcement of Mummy’s decision.
    “What?! Why not?”
    “I just don’t, that’s all,” said Ameena, with the familiar stubborn twist to her lips with which she met most of my suggestions. But those suggestions usually involved breaking rules or defying Mummy. Now, I was