Heritage

By Huma Farid

My lineage is a black hole, adrift from the reality of my present. I stand alone, an alien amongst those who have casually, thoroughly laid claim to a land that could not be claimed. I wonder: what must it feel like for your ancestors’ memories to shape your history? What must it feel like to be draped in the deep certainty of belonging? 

I am the first in my family to claim this country by dint of being born on its soil in New York City, but my existence in America represents only a grudging, reluctant acceptance to tolerate a dark haired, olive-skinned foreign element in a country forged for the white gaze. Although my children, now the second generation to be born and raised here, solidified that claim, I feel the same questions simmering beneath the surface. “But where are you really from?” begs the explanation of my family’s fifty-year history in this country. Belonging remains elusive; transmitting it to my children becomes my quest. I hunt for stories and mementoes to ground my children and give them roots that are not as ephemeral as the ones with which I grew up.

New York City is where my story begins, but it is not where I want it to begin. I hunger to experience kinship, to know who came before me, what my paternal grandfather’s name was, who my great grandparents were, so that I can complete the family tree my children question me about. Instead, I am greeted with silence. My parents, lost in the cacophony of New York, uprooted from their native country, belittled for their native tongue, never spoke of their existence prior to immigrating to America. Perhaps the constant presence of feeling unmoored is the price of emigration. 

We used to return to Pakistan every summer since I was born, but in many ways, this wasn’t a return to my roots, but rather a return to the aftermath of disruption. My mother’s childhood home in Karachi did not exist anymore; likely, it had been razed to make room for a shopping mall, or maybe it had been silently absorbed into the slums that mushroomed at the edges of the city. I will never know, because my mother herself no longer remembers where the house had been.

My nana, my mother’s father, expressed no sorrow over his demolished home. It had been the home where his wife died, leaving him to raise eight children alone while he worked as a police officer in a city renowned for corruption that was still healing from the rift of Partition. He never discussed my grandmother, his job, or his role during Partition, except to emphasize how terrible that time had been and implore us never to ask him again about it. He would then revert to his customary silence. 

My father’s family still lives in the village in northern Pakistan where he was born, but returning to his home didn’t feel so much as a triumph as a testament to my people’s resilience, grit and tenacity, and their determination for survival. His family lived as they had for decades, in houses constructed of mud and cement. They had no running water; a terrifyingly deep well squatted in the middle of the dirt courtyard that became a squelching pool of mud during monsoon season. My soft American arms, plump with years of plenty, could barely lift one bucket of water from its depths, while my aunt, thin cords of muscle roping along arms that lifted babies, bushels of vegetables, rocks and bricks, drew bucket after bucket with ease. 

For my dadi, my father’s mother, the past reminded her only of the hardships of life. A widow who raised five children by feeding them from the family farm and sewing clothes for other villagers, the past served only to remind her of the poverty that necessitated her sending her youngest son–my father–over 800 miles away to Karachi to fend for himself at the age of 14. 

No pictures exist of my grandparents or my father’s grandparents. There are no tokens or mementos from my father’s childhood. When you have nothing, everything is reused, repurposed. The struggle for survival carries no space for sentimentality. Instead, each individual is a testimony of resilience; the fact that my widowed grandmother’s children survived into adulthood, and then their children survived into adulthood, as did her great-grandchildren, revealed the love and care this matriarch had bestowed on her family day after day.

Two decades have passed since I last trekked to my father’s village. In that time, my father’s family have become like strangers to me. My dadi died over twenty years ago, and the life of my aunts and uncles is so vastly different than mine that we can only exchange a few minutes of pleasantries before an awkward silence, tainted by the burden of my father’s good luck and his children’s prosperity, descends upon us. A gulf divides the two branches of my father’s family, splitting us into the Pakistani Farids and the American Farids. 

These memories of my heritage are lost, in part because of me–because I did not build the relationships that would preserve them. I drifted from my family, separated by geography, culture, and life experiences. I became unrecognizable to them, save for some of the same physical traits we share. 

This, too, I feel in my bones: the irreparable distance between myself and my heritage.

It becomes even more urgent to offer my children what I can, to pass down what I have gleaned from my family and from my own memories, treasured as carefully as the worn sea glass my children collect from the Atlantic, an ocean that the Pakistani Farids will never see.

I tell my children stories of my childhood: my fat black cat named Peeto; the road we used to barricade so we could play street hockey in the summer; the smell of the magnolia petals from the tree in my front yard that I crushed in my fist while watching the fireflies twinkle. I paint a life for them; I grant them a history. When we return to my childhood home in New Jersey, they ask if this was the street I played on until dusk each summer night. I show them my old elementary school and take them to the convenience store where my cousins and I pooled nickels and dimes to buy Airheads and Mary Jane’s and Hershey’s Cookies ‘N Creme bars. We eat at my favorite pizzeria, sitting at the same booths I sat on as a child. 

This is their inheritance, my precious gift to them. My memories pave their road to belonging in a country where we are still viewed as foreign. The promise and the premise of America–the promise that lured my parents from their static existence in Pakistan to the cold, bright lights of America, the premise that keeps me grounded here–hum in my bones. If I could, I would crush them to build a foundation, a fort for my children. My bones would speak to them: here, you belong.

Instead, my memories alone will have to suffice, and they are a wealth far more than what my parents gave to me.

Huma Farid is an obstetrician gynecologist who lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts. She has written extensively for blogs (Doximity, KevinMD, Harvard Health Blog, Cognoscenti) and has had perspective pieces accepted into renowned medical journals such as JAMA.