Ribbons of Duty and Devotion

My grandmother had small hands and long, black thick hair. She wore a ribbon in her hair and bangles on her arms and once upon a time she was seemingly content, but worried. Always worried. Worry lay silently in her veins and sometimes shone in her eyes during the afternoon. And then she became really pale and exhausted. Her stomach swelled and she wouldn’t eat. 

My grandfather was in Sharjah at the time. He had gentle eyes and a mysterious quietness surrounded him. He stood tall with shoulders broad like the horizon, carved by purpose and responsibility. 

They would write letters to each other, because the holidays when he would visit were too short. The letters were long and the paper was thin. There was poetry and private jokes and love.

Always love. Well, it slowly turned into love.

He would end the letters with lyrics from Lata Mangeshkars and Noor Jehans songs, and when he would return from Sharjah he would bring back old newspapers he’d bought there, neatly folded and wrapped in a ribbon, with short notes and commentary scribbled in the corners. They built connections in the margins. 

She had never heard of the village where my grandfather lived. She was thirteen when she lost her own father. She would speak of the final scene like she had permanently etched it into her memory. She’d called out to her father as he was being carried away to the graveyard, yelled for him to not leave her, screamed with anguish that she wouldn’t be able to live without him with tears rolling down her cheeks and her tiny heart shattered into smithereens. Her thirteen-year-old self collapsed in devastation.

And then a decade later she found herself married, moving into a new family in a new village amongst people who claimed she was a foreigner. The outsider. Never liked nor accepted—something that happens often in our South Asian households, which is so bizarre because we bring in this outsider with our own hands, right?

It was a strange set of situations that stirred misunderstandings and confusions and she would find herself often walking the endless miles back home on late afternoons with angry hurried footsteps to find comfort and solace in her mother’s arms, in a home that was no longer hers. But which home could she truly call her own?

And we all know how the scenes play out when a daughter-in-law leaves the house of her husband in fury and confusion from being mistreated or mistaken or misunderstood and what follows is the orchestra of how will she return or who shall bring her back? And most of the time egos are sky high so she is told to return “home” the exact way she left. 

So she would silently and quietly return. 

But sometimes my grandfather would follow her after a few days. He waited for the storm of her anger to defuse and then he would gift her a small box of ribbons or nail polishes and convince her to come home with him. 

Then after four daughters, her womb became public discussion. “Not fit enough” and “Not worthy enough to give us a son.” These words and similar ones would leave a burning pain in her heart, and yet no one said, Her womb, her choice or Daughters are enough or It’s okay.

The lack of a son slowly ate her up inside—that and witnessing the constant miseries of the women around her, women shaming women and women tearing down women, like it was their sole purpose in life to do so. She constantly worried about her four daughters and wondered if shame would follow them into the deep forests of their futures, like it did hers?

But times were different then and a lot simpler—but also restricted. Some things you just didn’t know about and some things you just weren’t allowed to know about. 

Out of desperation and pressure from his family, my grandfather took a trip to Makkah. The only solution he could come up with was to visit the house of Allah and plead to Him to grant him a son, a son that would put an end to endless talk and quieten the whispers, to shield his wife. If it’s not written for me, You make it written for, O Lord of all the worlds, for You it’s not difficult, he begged in the courtyard of the Haram. 

And so it happened. 

With a head full of jet black hair and grey eyes, their son looked up at his mother for the first time, with apprehension and wonder and then his eyes closed. Forever. The ribbon tying him to his mother was cut. The women in the village wailed and rubbed their hands with disbelief.

Devastation settled in my grandmother’s heart as she tried to bear this loss and my grandfather held her and her grief with a strength he didn’t know he had, comforting her as much as he could before he had to leave, yet again, to Sharjah. 

As the days of heartache and anguish slowly weeped by, my grandmother’s health started to deteriorate. On a three minute call one afternoon, my grandfather was told that she was very unwell and in the hospital.  He booked a flight to Pakistan, his heart heavy. When he arrived that night, he entered an empty house. 

He knew her condition wasn’t good. The doctors couldn’t explain it either. So when he saw the empty home, he assumed the worst. Duty and devotion battled one another inside him. He started shifting the furniture. He moved aside sofas and beds. And with shaking fingers he opened up an old dusty suitcase in the tiny storeroom and reached for the two cotton sheets which lay waiting and alone. The white sheets—the last outfit.  

He left them on top of the suitcase, not wanting to hold them or look at them. He was preparing himself for what was going to happen.

But can one ever be prepared enough?

He took out a photo of her from their wedding album and put it inside his breast pocket against his heart, wanting to gather her up and hide her away in his chest, away from harm. And he waited. Until minutes turned to hours, his sense of duty wavering with every second.

But little did he know, the doctors declared my grandmother’s illness had subsided and said she was okay to go. She walked into the house and saw the chairs stacked in one corner and the furniture swept away and she turned to my grandfather.  

“Where is everything? Why is everything moved?” she asked. 

He didn’t know what to say. He told me many years later that his throat was tight as ever. So he lied. “The girls were just cleaning up.”  

But when she looked at his face, she knew.

“You thought I was going to…” but the words wouldn’t come out. Her face crumbled. Tears silently fell down my grandfather’s cheeks. “You thought…how could you..?”

He pulled her into his arms, her face against his chest, her tears soaking the front of his kameez, the sound of her sobbing echoing in the empty rooms. She pushed at his chest with her small fists, but with each hit, he held her tighter, his tears falling into her hair, on her ribbon. And they held each other for a long time, their hearts beating fiercely with love and anguish, my grandmother’s silently failing liver and swollen tummy between them.  

She got deceivingly better. It was all okay, for a week. And then two weeks slid past, followed by a few months. My grandfather went back to Sharjah, back to work and their letter writing. 

Three months went past and then one afternoon while everything was normal and quiet, he got another phone call. A three minute booked call but it was 30 seconds long. This time, the doctors had declared the unthinkable, and that it would happen soon.  

He hung up and left work and raced to the travel agents. He got a flight for that evening. He didn’t know what to think. He wanted to run away from his mind, hoping it was yet another false alarm, and this time he would choose devotion over duty, his love over what needed to be done. 

When he made it to the airport, he was told his flight was nine hours late. His flight had never been delayed in the past and that day, out of all days, it chose to be late.  He sat there in the airport surrounded by passengers, his heartbeat loud and crazy. He wanted to reach out and stretch his fingers and gather up the miles and make them disappear, suck them up and swallow them whole, squeeze them in the palms of his hands and make them melt away. If only he could. He sat and waited. Hours went past. His stomach growled with hunger and unease. And then exhaustion crawled towards him and his eyes closed. 

He told me he had a dream. He had a dream that it was his wedding day, again. He was getting married to my grandmother, again. She was frail, but so beautiful; her wedding dress was exactly how it was all those years ago because he had never forgotten it. Never forgot how she looked in it. 

Meanwhile back in Pakistan, my grandmother lay in a hospital bed, surrounded by her children. No one except her brother stood by her bedside.  

“He’s going to be late, isn’t he?” Somehow she knew.  

“He’ll be here soon, don’t worry,” her brother clasped her hand in his and squeezed tight. 

She would close her eyes for a little while and then open them, her eyelids heavy with exhaustion. Every time the door opened she would quickly turn to see who it was, but it was never the person she expected. The person who she wanted to see the most.  

At the airport my grandfather jolted awake. And right there, sitting in the uncomfortable seat in the lounge, he knew. He didn’t make it in time. 

He arrived after the final breaths, after the white sheets and after the furniture was moved aside.  

After her ribbon was untied.