Return to Spring
ANNUM SHAH
A week after I leave, Nani forgets who I am.
I can hear my uncle’s voice behind her over the phone, the way he whispers no, no she’s not married yet. Hanifa’s daughter, remember? Despite him trying to nudge her memory, I can tell she’s confused about who she’s speaking to. She keeps asking how my kids are, where I am, who I’m staying with. It’s a huge blow, felt somewhere in my throat and solar plexus. I didn’t expect Nani to forget so soon— I had just spent two months with her and hoped that the memory of her own home would keep the trip fresh in her mind.
Life carries on in the rustic cafe where I sit, the quiet buzz of voices and steam of the espresso machine filling the space. They’ve gone for a homey vibe, all oak wood and battered bench seating. The air conditioning is on full and I feel clammy coming in from the heat. My chair is hard and uncomfortable, the condensation from my drink has stained the wood of the table. I rub at it, but it doesn’t disappear.
I’m alone in an unfamiliar city and I want nothing more than to rest my head on Nani’s lap, to let the comfort of her gentle voice wash over me. Nani doesn’t end the call, just drifts away, her mind already elsewhere. I listen to her speak to my uncle for a bit before hanging up. The world around me pauses for a moment, the reality that my grandmother doesn’t remember me settling in. I text K about it, but how do you come to terms with the fact that someone you love doesn’t remember you? It feels selfish to think about my own feelings in the face of Nani’s dementia, given she’s suffering more than I am. But grief is grief and so I let the sadness come and go as I sweat through my clothes in the humidity and rush of Bangkok.
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Stepping into the house for the first time in twelve years is like stepping into a memory. Nothing’s changed, only decayed. In our absence, the house has fallen into disrepair. The swing that hangs in the back courtyard is still there, but its chains are heavy with green rust; the wooden seat rough and cracked. The gas heater in Nani’s room still terrifies me, the pictures that line the walls are still there, as are the tapestries. The front sitting room feels like a museum, Urdu poetry hung in banners next to gas lamps and—Japanese artwork—an eclectic mix of family history. As the days go by, the feeling of being in a memory becomes cyclical. I am every age I’ve experienced my grandparents home in, all at once. As a baby, aged one, a trip I only know through photographs. The frenetic energy of a six year old. The classic, angsty thirteen year old, not knowing that would be the last time I see my grandfather. Eighteen and so unsure of myself, depressed out of my skull. The reality of being the child of immigrants is that there’s a whole history and family you barely get to experience. Tickets for four people across the world isn’t an easy thing to scrape together, but my mom tried to do it as often as she could. That I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve met my Nani and Nana doesn’t diminish the love, but it removes a degree of shared personal history, the kind you only get from growing up with someone. What wisdom did I miss out on?
“They endure in ways that others don’t, and maybe that the biggest testament to love there is.”
The store room has two massive steel containers that haven’t been disturbed in years. My uncle breaks open the locks and hires people to help clean them out. Inside, we find a time capsule of my family in fragments. Old photographs and letters, my uncle’s fraying license from the 80s. A battered Quran that’s been eaten through by bugs, my grandfather’s notebooks, a pair of Wellington boots. There have been times that the material memory of my family’s history has been lost. Here too, we find evidence of that in water-damaged photos and journal pages that are ripped and yellowing. I don’t know how to read Urdu, so some of it is lost on me in different ways. I feel that loss of language now more than ever, despite being verbally fluent.
My last trip here, at eighteen, we had no idea Nani would develop dementia. That time too, we opened the house after my grandfather’s passing, only to find the albums stored in wooden drawers were damaged with water and mold. I remember watching Nani cry as she tried to salvage those memories from her life. At that time, I didn’t understand the scale of grief she felt, but now that story feels more relevant. My family’s history is one of displacement, both forcible and willing. As I’ve thought more about home, about the landscapes that shape us, I feel a pressure to document and collect as much as I can. I tuck small mementos from the house in my luggage as though they’re little treasures: pocket Qurans, Nana’s journals, small decorations. Maybe it’s an exercise in futility to collect these things, but the material memory of them feels important.
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Sometimes, the only way to calm Nani’s anxiety is to ask her about her life. It’s a mild afternoon in March. The orchid tree is in full bloom, its branches heavy with white flowers. Later, we’ll harvest the buds to make curry in clay pots my uncle buys specifically for the occasion. Nani is quietly reciting prayers, looking out at the courtyard garden. I’m feeling mischievous, so I ask her what she thought of my grandfather when they first got married, expecting her to be shy or laugh it off. But she surprises me instead. Your grandfather? she says, our time together was full of love. She begins to open up, tells me about how it was difficult for her to get used to her husband’s home, to their different ways of living. How she didn’t know how to make roti or care for the house in the ways her in-laws expected, but that Nana always took care of her, was gentle with her, and helped her adapt. How she slowly connected with the family. She repeats this story often, it seems my grandfather’s memories are strongest in her mind. They endure in ways that others don’t, and maybe that’s the biggest testament to love there is.
The garden in the front courtyard is smaller, but has endless rows of plants and flowers that I’ve been meticulously cataloguing. In the corner stands a tall pine tree, one of a kind in this arid landscape. Nani says my grandfather specifically brought it here from their home village in the mountains, determined to bring back a piece of what they lost. We sit out here often, drinking chai with cake rusk. The garden is a focal point for the family, lovingly planted by my grandfather. As a child, I remember the fruit trees especially, mulberry and guava, fat yellow mangoes, so sweet they were like candy. Rows and rows of roses, which were my grandfather’s favourites. He’s a formidable figure in my mind, always in a crisp white shalwar kamees, even when he became sick and frail. A true connoisseur of all things beautiful, he had a locked closet in his room full of sweets and fancy dinnerware— one that we would beg him to open. Nana would line us all up and with a shaking hand, give us a spoonful of gulkand, a sweet preserve made from rose petals. The flavour was unlike anything else I’d experienced as a child, one that I still covet. Now, that same closet is falling apart, the wood hollowed out and creaking. I sit in his room and think about him, wishing more than anything I’d had a chance to meet him as an adult. But it helps, to hear about him from the person who knew him the most, to know that he really was the best of the best.
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A few years ago, I couldn’t understand why my mom’s family didn’t just sell the house. We had been renting it out for years and people told us it was falling apart. At that time, though memorable, it simply felt like a place we visited a few times as kids. I didn’t feel an attachment to it, especially since I didn’t feel any attachment to Pakistan or Pakistani culture, often struggling with my identity as a third culture kid. I was a classic case, rejecting my identity as much as possible, growing up around white kids that called me a Paki at best and a terrorist at worst. It took years to pull myself out of that and feel any semblance of connection with a culture I still pick and choose elements to identify with. But this trip changed my relationship to that feeling. Not to the culture, which is still a struggle, but to the physical space of my grandparents’ home. There’s history in the wicker sofas and the flowers planted in the garden, of finding home after hardship. The generation of my cousins raised in the house, the people who have come and gone, the meals had at that oval dinner table. There’s an interconnectedness there, an affinity to my grandparents and the places that shaped my mom. I spent so much of my life wanting to run away that the idea of a stable home feels foreign at times, but I can now recognize why my family wants to hold onto this house.
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A few days before we’re all due to leave, I lay out things I’ve amassed on the bed, wondering how it’ll all fit into my suitcase. Already, this trip has a dreamlike feeling to it, an interlude in a year spent away from home. Here, the tiny slivers of a country I still feel conflicted about, bits of my family I’ll pack away to rediscover later. This isn’t home, it never will be, but its people and memories have still shaped me in some fundamental way. What Nani remembers without fail boils down to a few simple things: her father-in-law, his gentle soul and kindness, the socks she knit for him. The guests they’ve had in their home, her reputation as someone who shared the thin rotis made from a specific cornflour from their village, so delicious we’d fight over them as kids. Small snippets of poetry, from books she still reads. And most of all, my grandfather and the great, enduring love of their lives. If I ever have a legacy, I want it to be the easy love and kindness my grandparents have taught me.
At dinner, we make promises to return to this home sooner than last time. Nani knows we’re leaving, herself included, but the memory of it comes and goes. Sat next to her, I can see the way she’s looking down, rubbing the pads of her fingers together in a nervous habit I share. Her mug of cardamom tea, sweetened with a comical amount of honey, sits cooling in front of her. It’s the end of April now, the heat beginning to feel oppressive and muggy. In the garden, birds sing a chorus alongside the clinking of our plates. I heard we’re leaving in two days, she says. I thought we had a week longer to go. Her voice trembles around the thought. Quietly, she starts to recite a poem, the stanza untouched by the weakening repertoire of her memory. My mom and aunt fill in the parts she’s missed.
