The Costs of Dreaming
The streets of Los Angeles first steamed, puddled and then overflowed with the debris and rage of the Interstate 110, the historic Arroyo Seco Parkway. In central Pasadena, life was absurdly normal, the residents being mainly tired Caltech students and retired rich people. On the other side of the freeway, the first of its kind in the United States, a cesspool swirled into chaos. The State of California, proclaiming insanity, stood in the witness box in the trials against humanity, alternately threatening to be burnt to a crisp or to be permanently under water before its newborns turned sixteen. In that same year, the year that it rained like that in Los Angeles, Abdullah, the great-grandson of a jute-mill-owner, became a card-carrying Marxist.
Also over on that side of the freeway, Abdullah and his comrades made promises to Margo, who was evicted from her home with a sudden notice of an impossible rent increase. A single mother and provider for an extended family who lived across the border, Margo was undocumented. So her already meager pay could be further slashed to a underground rate by shrewd strawberry conglomerations, maybe the same ones that sent their produce to us here in Edmonton, in clamshell boxes covered with loving messages about family and tradition. Putting people in chains so they can’t move one way or another, is perhaps the world’s oldest tradition.
While I kept phoning him to ask how his Ph.D. was going, Abdullah was going door to door collecting signatures to put Measure H on the ballot, preventing landlords like Margo’s, from being able to jack up rents like that. Ditching his slow-brewing viruses at the Shapiro lab, he and his friends collected over fifteen thousand signatures, often getting physically thrown out of condo buildings and off grocery store parking lots.
Abdullah was born on June 6th, 1996 at St. Paul’s hospital in Saskatoon. My husband, Farooq, paused as he filled out the date-of-birth box on the Vital Statistics form: 6-6-96. He looked up at me through his square wire frames, purchased in Karachi before he flew here, along with a small number of other frugal purchases: a Jafferji wallet, a reversible leather belt, the stethoscope his father gifted him, three cardboard boxes of moong and masoor lentils, and a suitcase filled with photocopied medical textbooks.
“What is it?”
“Did you see this date?”
“Obviously, it’s my son’s date of birth, it’s basically carved into my head now.” I rubbed my temples and took another sip of the Diet Coke on my tray. The caffeine was supposed to help plug up the subdural puncture I had suffered during labour.
“Yes, but you know what people are going to think when they see this date?” He started talking faster, “And even more if we told them he was born at six in the morning?” My husband grew up in Pakistan. I grew up in Alberta. I was raised by terrified immigrant parents, for whom even going to the washroom had to be consciously intended as a very important deliberate political act. Farooq was raised by fun-loving, glamorous parents who supplied him with a steady diet of Bollywood mixed with occasional sprinklings of Hollywood. Films like the Exorcist had left him with strange cultural image-hooks made of four-poster beds and Biblically referenced numbers that he saw everywhere.
“Uff, you don’t believe stupid things like that.” I grabbed the application form from his hands, signed it and stuffed it back into the preaddressed envelope. Throwing it on the bed tray, I lay back on the bed, fully dressed to go home and pulled the blanket up to my nose.
“Of course, I don’t, I’m Muslim, that’s what I was going to say to you, if you had just let me tell you what I was thinking.” He leaned forward in the leather hospital chair, his unjustly long eyelashes scraping heavily against the thick lenses of his spectacles. He looked at me intensely and said in an exuberant voice, “Mariam, it’s amazing, I just stopped to reflect a moment on this magnificent opportunity.” That’s how he was, even at that time, everything was a grand paranormal sign, a text message from a Universal Writer letting him in on which way the plot was heading. “My son is going to break the chains of superstition.” He smiled at me and pulled me up to go home.
We wanted to be the kind of parents that we wished we had, even though, on the scale of things, we had amazing parents. But we wanted to be different and we certainly didn’t know in what way that would be. Farooq went to a military boarding school in Islamabad called Cadet College Hasan Abdal, an establishment known for educating the “cream of the crop, ready to rule” Pakistanis since 1952. I went to public school in Ponoka, no cream to speak of, except for the stuff the town teenagers used to rub all over our basement windows every Halloween. Between the two of us, we had enough school-related learning irregularities to propel us straight into a fifteen-year long homeschooling experiment with our five wildly different children. I don’t think we thought about it too much, it sounded like an interesting idea. When we first started, our family friends were repulsed by the decision and felt that it was a devastating step backwards. Collectively, Pakistani-Canadians were supposed to aspire to be something great, to be the model minority, to embody those beautiful success stories that made Immigration Canada Customs Officers smile expectantly at future newcomers as they stumbled into Pearson. Homeschooling, according to our well-wishers, would prove to be a tire-slasher for our children’s worldly prospects.
It became evident very quickly, for Farooq and I, that even those parents who sent their children to Tempo, or Old Scona or New Horizons were having trouble. There was just a general odor of trouble with kids in a community desperate to have their children succeed at everything and at the same time, retain their traditions and family values. Raising children is a dilemma for any sane human being. For diasporic South Asian-background parents, raising children is a little like getting a daily blood test, with the faxed report being an immediate reflection of the value of your existence, checking carefully for how much tradition you allowed to filter through to the child, how much you screened out, constantly monitoring the level of a variety of godless agendas, checking for signs of infection where that secular western spirit had entered the child’s psyche, robbing them of their spiritual nature. The continuously uneasy feeling among parents was: simple inertia was enough to send your child rolling down the Hill of Disaster and had to be fought with a microscopic parental gaze because it just might be that one day your child would buy a simple coffee that was too expensive and the next day, they would ditch classes and end up in a bar somewhere on Whyte Ave and then that was it, that poor soul would be forever lost, a bumbling agent of the state because democratic societies (not being able to rely on force) counted on docility and that wily state apparatus would very early on, just like Macaulay in British-ruled India, control their minds through innocent-looking math lessons, and so of course, math lessons must also be checked daily to make sure your child did better than everyone else, if only to control the level of docility that was being bred, sum by sum.
We tried not to live like that. For us, life became a patchwork of educational techniques, quite un-Macaulay-esque, grabbed hastily from a kind neighbour, a visiting scholar, a pet shop owner or from the shelves of Teacher’s Book Depository. We put on a variety of parenting robes. Sometimes we were what we imagined hippy parents would be, subscribing to a unique form of unschooling that involved the children helping us do our taxes or sitting by the lake reading aloud from Ralph Moody. Other times, we were the Islamicized version of an evangelical Christian parent from the American Midwest, teaching the children symbolic logic, getting them to memorize Quran, requiring them to parse their sentences and recite from Shakespeare at the dinner table.
On February 15, 2003, when Abdullah was six and a half, we joined nearly eighteen thousand people in Edmonton and nearly 150 000 across Canada to protest Canadian support of a pending US-led war on Iraq. On that day, infamously called, “the day we almost stopped a war,” I put hot potatoes in the children’s mittens as we walked together with a drumbeat: strollers, snacks, friends, family and strangers. Farooq and I were both amused and saddened when the children marched around the house for the rest of the week shouting, “Bush Bush, we know you, Daddy was a killer too.”
When we look back, it feels like a failure. The Iraq war took an uncountable and unaccountable number of lives, with estimates ranging anywhere from 200 000 to upwards of a million. Counting becomes simply a question of where to turn the lens. I think about what Abdullah might have understood over these years about the world of grownups in those formative years. It must have been bewildering. It is for me. What rubrics can I possibly use to assess what we did?
At home, Abdullah became known as a mousy little Bill Nye. We became proud parents, science being the premier league for the Muslim community. Unsurprisingly, our homeschooling experiment became rather glamorous in our small community, once our eldest went off to do an MPH at Harvard and the second to Berkeley and each child started demonstrating those outward signallers of worldly success. Abdullah applied to Caltech secretly the same year he was accepted to medical school. Farooq was heartbroken when Abdullah dropped out of medical school to head off to feel Didion’s Santa Ana breezes on his face, to court a love affair with viruses, a few months ahead of the spiky, crown-wearing ball that would become the most recognized microbe in the world.
It's hard to describe what happens when we discover that we are not what we thought we were or thought we would ever be. Like Adam falling from heaven, it’s only when after we have crashed that we find out that we were responsible for something that we didn’t know even existed.
You’re a landlord.
But Abdullah, you realize that your great-grandfather escaped to Pakistan with only the clothes on his back.
He had a jute mill.
He lost it.
What happened to his workers’ backs?
Your grandparents were part of a hardworking generation.
And they had servants to braid their hair.
The servants wouldn’t have been able to eat if they didn’t braid hair.
Do you see how you keep protecting the ones who keep everything for themselves?
We worked hard to buy this property.
Then let someone thrive in it.
My parents left Pakistan when my mother was sixteen and my father was twenty-five. They both came from families in business and industry. Their families would be considered traditional and conservative, with strict gender roles and generational hierarchies of power. When my parents moved to a small Mennonite community in Saskatchewan, they tried to establish life on the prairies as if they were in Chiniot. We learned Urdu poetry, respectfully said salaams to elders and learned the canonical prayers. We loved getting letters from our grandfather, that Mummy had to read to us because our Urdu reading was still weak. Somewhere in my basement, I have binders filled with decades of letters documenting the new businesses bought: paper mills, textile mills, warehouses, toffee factories and spinning plants. My grandfather also wrote about: the price of bread, the riots in Karachi, the family feuds over property, the changing face of Pakistan. For each letter, my sister and I were required to write a polite reply telling him about our lives: the field trip to Pine Lake, the snake path down to the outdoor swimming pool, the time we cross-country skied to the hospital with Daddy. As we grew older, the letters coming west were increasingly agitated: when would we visit next, would Mommy be able to get her share of the inheritance from her brothers when my grandfather passed away, would this next generation be able to hold on to tradition?
I find myself constantly reworking the formulations of tradition, if only for my own understanding. The term is used mostly as a pejorative now, although the Trad Wife is making its way on social media, if only to sell cast iron pans and mommy calendars. Tradition is also a cover for nostalgia, taking out those dusty trophies that are proof that we did something and proof that it might have been meaningless. I realize that I am quick to discard tradition, almost embarrassed by it when I’m having a discussion with my children, especially when Abdullah, with his razor-sharp questions, uncovers an unexamined aspect of tradition. But there are things about tradition that are life-giving. For my mother, who grew up in Post-Partition Karachi, tradition would have meant that she had a duty to think of the collective good, instead of just herself. Tradition demanded effort. It exacted hard, sweaty thinking about current problems. Maybe it was easier, back then, for people like Mummy and her people, to identify what their “current” problems were while they were trying to build a country from scratch, a country whose borders had been crudely scribbled out, so that on the day after Independence, residents had to figure out how to eat breakfast in Pakistan and go for a shit in India. Tradition for them at that time meant housing unhoused people like Margo. Mummy’s family and extended family took in some of the millions of people displaced. Their houses were never just theirs: their bedrooms, already shared by several siblings or even aunts and uncles, offered up again without asking for one or another new arrival from the other side of the border.
The coalition Abdullah and his friends put together won a place on the ballot. He sent me a note from Margo,
“Dear Abdullah, God bless your parents, who raised you to care.”
On our What’s App group chat, he sent a clip of a song called, “Because Dreaming Costs Money, My Dear.” My heart bends easily to this. After all, he’s my son. So these days, I engage myself in feeding him and his socialist friends, watching them discuss their next campaign, listening to the phone calls planning out the next move. It’s heartbreaking too, as they sit at the ports, long-haired and whole-heartedly earnest, talking to mariners, trying to convince them to take a stand against sending weapons to Israel. It’s also heartbreaking to realize that most of the Muslim community is so busy with proving their capitalist worth, with their rankings on the top schools lists and distinct status symbols that they would consider Abdullah’s work to be rather useless. Even those spiritually-minded Muslims who would theoretically agree with his egalitarian impulses, would much prefer to regally share a meditation mat at a spiritual retreat in the mountains of Andalusia than actually share an apartment with a struggling student, as Abdullah does, rent-free of course.
There is an awkward gap now between us and our precious son. I try not to be defensive about my lifestyle, but in the middle of a wedding function as I’m getting my picture taken in front of a wall of fragrant rose-heads pinned to a giant, standing foamboard, I suddenly think of Abdullah. “Mom, do you know the Amazon vans have air conditioning for the stuff in the back and none in the driver’s cabin, just to increase Amazon profits?” profit?” This, as I stand in front of an ice sculpture, the initials of the bride and groom, and wonder where the bridges are. I can sense he’s looking for them too.
Mitski, Mitski. “Because Dreaming Costs Money, My Dear.” 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpAQJYh3ljI
