To the Child I Could Not Help
It’s not often that a glass smashes. But it happens. At home, in a restaurant, at a party. And when it does, whether in a gay bar in New York’s West Village or in the kitchen of a family home in a Lahore suburb, it is followed immediately by a momentary silence. A collective intake of breath. Within a blink, like thunder follows lightning, the normalcy returns—an exhale. Where do we go in that moment? Looking for the source of danger? On the hunt for a culprit? Searching for an explanation to the shattering? I go to you. To my aunt’s house in Lahore when I was 12. When you were 13.
Growing up, we couldn’t afford holidays. Going from London to Pakistan that summer wasn’t a holiday, my father said. It is our home. A home I knew only from still images until then. A new place where my cousins mocked my Urdu, and my uncles laughed at my reaction to the spice in our food. Where the language felt too cold coming out of my mouth, the food too hot going in. Where my father abandoned his western attire in favor of shalwar kameez. Where, to find acceptance, I was expected to do the same. But where no amount of masquerading could hide my apprehension of the ceiling lizards, nor my sweat from the permeating heat, nor my cough from city dust. Nevertheless, my aunt’s home was, according to my father, my home, too. And it was yours. The small hut on the roof, at least. But my aunt’s house by the canal in Faisal Town was also a workplace for you. When the morning call to prayer tannoyed across the city, it called you not to the mosque but to the kitchen. Each morning, you’d descend the rusty iron spiral staircase in the darkness, preparing for another day of feeding the guests from England, while they lay dreaming of the day’s escapades: the arcades of Joyland, Liberty Market’s mango milkshake, the nighttime view of the bustling city from the top of the Ferris wheel by Fortress Stadium.
The morning we arrived, when you asked me what I wanted for breakfast, I didn’t know what to say. Your dark brown skin, the way you wore your hair in a loose bun, your tightly held assuredness beyond its years—it all reminded me of a girl I sat next to in class. What was she doing here? So I told you I wasn’t hungry. It was the first time I’d experienced losing my appetite because it was the first time I’d been treated like a grown-up by someone older than me. The Pakistani way of things upended. Already I sensed that I was a child being awarded an unearned power. The power I held over you simply by being born into the family rather than into a street tent near the family home.
My cousin Adnan, who lived not far away from me in London, had not lost his appetite. He was around the same age as us, do you remember? Did that make having to serve him (and me) worse or better? Did it feel more like playtime than when you had to fetch breakfast for the grown-ups? Could we three pretend it was a play kitchen with plastic fried eggs and that you were a fake servant? That this wasn’t real. Unreal like the feigned smiles I shared with you, as if rendering you hyper visible with my overdone gesture would negate the invisibility with which you were expected to move through my aunt’s house, move through us. Smiling soon became hollow—it did nothing but make me feel better about myself. I began helping you clear the table after meals (after the family had dispersed, of course). Your stunned face the first time I did made me wonder why it had taken me so long to do something that was instinctive in London. That I’d get in trouble for not doing. You tried to shoo me away with a napkin and so I threw one at your face and kept clearing. You laughed and surprised yourself with the sound you made. That sound was the birth of our bond.
“And my patience with all the demands made of you was a price I did not want to pay for acceptance.”
Later, the puzzlement on my face over the power cuts also made you giggle. “What do you mean the electricity has gone? Where has it gone?” I asked you. Your amusement at my naivety, at the idea that electricity was like water from a well, was a glimpse into the ways the world had robbed you of your own. You had that gentle, high-pitched laugh of a child. A laugh you stifled with your hands each time it rose up. As if to set it free might further imprison you. It was the only time you seemed purely yourself, an involuntary and fleeting removal of the invisibility cloak. When it came, your laugh was a moment to behold, like an eclipse.
At night time, when the light disappeared from its bulbs, disappeared from the entire block, it left only groans from the adults, followed quickly by shouts of your name. As if you were up in your hut with some comically oversized red lever, playfully interrupting their evening ritual of singing folk songs and snacking on samosas. I wish you had been up there with that lever. It would have made it more bearable to think about the staircase rattling as your little feet rushed down hunting for candles that sat closer to any of us than to you. I was scared of the dark. I suppose that was a luxury you couldn’t afford. I went to the kitchen to help, but all I did was get in your way. Bumping into everything, including you, and then almost burning my finger off. I don’t know if I’d ever used a match before. You were so patient with me. The dignity in your patience with a child when you were only one yourself was a demand we should not have made of you. And my patience with all the demands made of you was a price I did not want to pay for acceptance.
Perhaps Adnan knew better than to question the order of things. He treated you like another toy of a child with too many. Like a robot he’d been gifted. One to which he could give commands that would have to be obeyed. One night, you were crouched in the corner of the living room with a clasp of coconut leaf sticks. We lay on sofas watching the X-Men defeat evil, daydreaming of becoming superheroes while you swept the floor around us, pausing to steal looks at the screen when you thought nobody was watching you.
“I want some water,” Adnan said, his eyes still locked on the TV. I looked at you, but you knew better than to look back. You stood, dutifully, as you always did. The militaristic attentiveness of it mobilized something in me. I wanted to cut the invisible strings that pulled you upward toward the kitchen. “No,” I shouted. You froze. I was reminded then that my words were commands to you as well. “Get it yourself. She’s not your slave.” But isn’t the definition of servitude to be completely subject to someone more powerful? What choice did you have? Adnan screamed for his father in the next room. My uncle told me I didn’t understand Pakistan and I told him I didn’t want to. What I should have said was that I didn’t need to. This wasn’t about Pakistan, or at least it wasn’t just about Pakistan. He barked at you to go and get the water, and the way your shoulders jumped to your neck when he did was my fault. He sent me to my father.
“You are not from here, betah, you have to respect how things work,” my father said.
“I thought you said this was our home? If it is, shouldn’t we be doing things for ourselves?”
“It is. And it’s my fault you don’t know yourself.”
I didn’t understand what he meant then, but I do now. He wanted his son’s story to be a Pakistani one, but he raised an outsider, perched on the edge of one culture, looking west over his shoulder at another.
I asked him why you weren’t in school like me. I was on holiday. I loved not having to go to school. Had you ever been inside a classroom? Did you even know what a holiday was? He told me your mother and father had no money. I thought we had no money but this was different. You were the eldest of seven and my aunty was paying for your little brother to go to school. He was a boy, and you were a girl. You spent your childhood cleaning shelves so that he could learn to read the books sat upon them. Maybe then, in 20 years’ time, he could get a job that paid more than the $80 a month household servants made.
“Her parents can’t afford to keep her. If she doesn’t work here, her brother doesn’t go to school. She’d sleep on the street. She’d starve. Is that what you want?” my father asked. It is not what I wanted. I wanted you to watch cartoons with me. I wanted you to come on the Ferris wheel. I wanted you to serve yourself water and no one else. But after that conversation with my father, I thought I was wrong to want those things. That I should want you to be safe, fed, and housed. It wasn’t a zero-sum game, but I didn’t understand that then. And so I tried to stop wanting anything for you because it seemed only to make things worse.
“But by now I blamed him for a helplessness I did not know how to hold.”
On our last day, as they did every night, the family gathered in the living room around samosas, kebabs and a Dholki drum. Adnan was thirsty. He told you so. I should have stayed out of it. But by now I blamed him for a helplessness I did not know how to hold. So I rose to my feet decidedly, even as my father’s eyes instructed me to sit down. “I’ll get it!” You already had the glass of water in your hand. I grabbed it from you and, as you handed it to me, it slipped. It wasn’t your fault. None of it was. The glass fell to the floor. The smashing brought with it that collective momentary silence. You froze again. I looked at you and the fear in your eyes brought fear to mine. And then my uncle began shouting. Violent shouting, like glass smashing against our ears. But even though it was me he felt frustrated by, it wasn’t me he was shouting at. Two barefoot children, surrounded by shattered danger, one treated as though any sudden move would kill him, the other treated as though, if she didn’t move fast enough, she’d be responsible for murder.
The room rushed to protect my gentle, fairer skin from being pierced open. At best, it seemed indifferent to your darker tone, as if they knew it had grown calloused from the life you led. As if they knew you were used to surviving the cuts you were subjected to. My father stood and I held my breath for the reprimand I expected you to receive. He ushered you out of the way and cleared the broken pieces himself, looking up at me with a knowing smile as he did.
Later that night, we said goodbye. You made me promise to come back next summer, and I said I would. Yet, when I left you behind, I knew you couldn’t make me keep that promise, and I knew that I wouldn’t.
And now, a glass breaks in a bar in New York. In that silence, once the glass hits the floor, in the moment between lightning and the thunder that follows, I go back to you and me. I sit in the richest city in the world, where tonight’s bar tab will be more than what you likely make in a month. I think of my British passport. Of the childhood poverty I usually write about. Of the opulence of my free school meals, of my public housing, of a national health service. Do you think it absurd of me to speak of deprivation? Where are you now? Do you need help? Can you hear the guilt in my voice? It comes not from dropping the glass that night. Not even from my silence in the aftermath. But from the relief I feel for not having to clear up the broken shards left behind.
About the Author
Mohsin Zaidi is a New York based, award-winning author, commentator and speaker. His critically acclaimed memoir, A Dutiful Boy (Penguin, 2020) won the American Lambda Literary Award and the British Polari First Book Prize. It was also named a Guardian, GQ, New Statesman and Attitude Book of the Year. An advocate for LGBT rights, racial justice and social mobility, Mohsin sat on the board of Europe’s largest LGBT+ rights charity Stonewall and before that was on the board of London Pride. He is listed by The Financial Times as a top future LGBT leader. A regular commentator on Sky News, he also writes for The New York Times, the Guardian, GQ, CNN Style, The i Newspaper, Bustle, Mr Porter and Newsweek. He was also listed in The Lawyer Magazine Hot 100 and Attitude magazine named him a trailblazer changing the world.
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Edited by Aube Rey Lescure.
Header photo by Steven Thompson.
