The Straight Lines of a Circle
When my son, Cyrus, was a year and a half old, I took him and his older sister, Maya, to Karachi, Pakistan, where we ended up staying for five months. It was 2003, some months after the U.S. occupied Iraq, and for a time my American life no longer felt tenable. We lived with my father in the home I grew up in, across the street from my mother and her husband. I taught part-time at the school Ammi had founded in 1975 when we first returned to Karachi from west London. In the time that I left Cyrus in Abbu’s care, and sometimes even while I was home but focused elsewhere, my toddler would pick up one of his crayons and proceed to draw circles on the walls. The living room was his preferred canvas and purple his color of choice. He’d clamber up the couch, reach a little, and get to work on his mural. One day his crayon even found its way to Abbu’s bedroom. Three feet of wall below his mirror became a scribbled mess.
I expressed my horror. Abbu’s face, however, shone with excitement.
“Samina!” he said. “Look at those perfect circles. Aren’t you amazed that he drew them without a compass? Just look!”
In the five months that we lived with Abbu, his walls were covered with circles of diverse colors and sizes, often overlapping in intricate patterns. All his life so reverential toward property and so mindful of appearances, my father didn’t care what visitors might think of his vandalized walls. His grandson’s genius remained on display long after the flesh-and-blood reality of him had returned to Massachusetts.
There’s a passage in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior that focuses on the roundness of things in the Chinese village she is describing. However many times I read the memoir, I linger over this paragraph. Sometimes I ask my students what they think of when I say the word “circle.” Their responses vary: cycles, they say; the absence of beginnings and endings; non-hierarchical structures; community; wholeness. I ask if they see themselves forming the circle hand in hand with others, as they did in elementary school, perhaps. Or are they the person around whom the ring forms? Are they enclosed, trapped, or kept safe by that circle? Or do they see themselves as the lone individual standing outside it altogether—looking in or looking away?
I have been thinking that all linearity is circularity in disguise. You have to zoom out to see the shape, and you do it through the lens of time.
We talk about geography in my Asian American literature class, and such terms as “East,” “West,” and “Middle East.” The question East of what? yields a discussion of imperial perspective and the colonial power to name the earth. But those histories aside, I’m struck by the fact that if you go far enough West, you end up East.
I can uproot myself from the land that gives me context; journey five thousand miles westward to Boston, then a further three thousand miles to Fresno, to end up about as far as I can possibly be from where I first began. But after all that dogged progression, I look up to find myself retracing parts of a circle my parents drew before me.
This fall it will be thirty years since I left Karachi—left home, parents, friends—for the privilege of studying literature at an American university. A tuition waiver, stipend, and teaching fellowship made it possible for me to leave, accompanied by an unemployed husband I had married as an undergraduate. When you leave home as a student, you’re focused on a specific educational goal, small and unremarkable in the grand scheme of things. But the pursuit of that degree shapes the entire trajectory of your life. It determines the personal choices you make—divorce, new marriage, children, divorce reprise. Whether or not you’re ready for U.S. citizenship, you need the green card to live with your American husband and build a life with him, and you need the marriage to obtain the green card. Before you know it, there are homes and mortgages and babies, even as you return to the MLA JobList every fall in search of a tenure-track position that will enable you to do more than adjunct work with that doctoral degree for which you left home in the first place.
Like all summaries, that one is unfair. And in any case, a summary presupposes linearity—a beginning, middle, and end—where there really is none.
Zoom out and you can see that, unique as I thought my situations were, my parents faced comparable choices long before I did. First, they left Patna, India—my mother as a child, to what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, and my father barely eighteen, to Karachi. The bloodbath of the 1947 Partition still fresh in collective memory, my parents crossed the border by rail into an idealistic future in newly created Pakistan, where they had no familial context for their lives. Then as a married couple with two young children, they left their teenaged country in 1966 for the former seat of empire, London. That’s the mocking irony of generations of postcolonial lives, that you fight off your colonizers only to be forced to seek them out again for the economic and political stability of which they robbed you, this time in an alien and mostly hostile landscape. If irony had a physical shape, it would be round.
All points on a circle are always the same distance from the center.
My parents lived their immigrant lives in London as others have before and after them: leaning on the support of family who had preceded them there, two growing families in my aunt and uncle’s two-and-a-half bedroom home in the suburb of Greenford; the tireless factory hours, the clerical jobs, the pursuit of English, the building of their professional profiles. All with a view to returning to Karachi on a sounder footing, the dream of a home of their own deferred because this was London, an aberration, a detour, not where they were meant to be, but a point on the arduous path of becoming. Land of “opportunity,” neither the first nor the last. And return to Karachi they did, eventually, as did my aunt and uncle’s family. My parents’ first attempt, just after my seventh birthday in June 1970, failed. Two years later, financial worries compelled them to head back to London for another couple of years before they returned to Karachi “permanently.” In that time, my father acquired his M.Phil. in physics but had to forego the Ph.D. to support his family and return to teach physics at Urdu Science College, where he went on to serve as principal for fourteen years before he retired. While in London, my mother went from assembly line coffee-packing to discovering her gifts as an elementary school teacher. Chalk Hill Primary School tried to keep her, but Ammi gave it up to return to Pakistan and, as it happened, began her own preschool in the living room of our two-bedroom Karachi home. English Playhouse grew with my younger sister, year by year, until one day it stood, preschool through high school, as Meadow Secondary School, on “real” school grounds. My own teaching career can be traced back to Meadow. You see what I mean by the circularity of things.
So it’s true that my parents had remarkable careers as educators in Karachi. Also true that somewhere along the way they lost sight of each other, and their 23-year-old marriage ended in divorce—a scandal in the Karachi of the eighties. Ammi left our neighborhood, but she moved back to our lane within two years to be closer to my fourteen- year-old sister. It was in 1985, when her niece, Rubina, took her own life, the summer she was bound for Smith College in Massachusetts. Thirty-three years before my daughter Maya leaves home for college.
Ammi left without leaving. She remained either next-door to Abbu or across from him for twelve years.
Now a sophomore on the STEM pathway at Edison High School in Fresno, California, Cyrus no longer draws circles on walls. But he is immediately interested in the geometry of my thoughts on circularity.
“There’s a lot you can do with that,” he says encouragingly. “For instance. . .” He grabs a scrap of paper and draws a small circle with a line touching it. “That line is tangent to the circle.” He hopes he has handed me a metaphor, and of course he has. A tangent touches fleetingly at a certain point without intersecting, without altering the shape of anything, and both the line and the circle go on as if that brief point of connection never happened.
Too many of those to make sense of. It’s easier to wrap my head around a chord, that line that connects one point of a circle with another. The segment it creates is not the whole circle but contained within it, an integral part of the whole. My relationship of twenty-three years with Maya and Cyrus’s father, for instance—yes, precisely the same number of years that my parents were together—or friends and places that form us at specific moments in time.
There’s nothing like being the middle generation to make the whole circle visible.
Abbu died five years ago in Karachi, the shape of his one, individual life complete. His three children were eight thousand miles away, each having obtained the Ph.D. that had remained beyond his grasp, and stayed on to have American children. He lived to see me move my young family from Boston to Fresno for the tenure-track job, lived to see me achieve that tenure, come home to Karachi one last time on my sabbatical in the spring of 2012. Abbu lived to see my first forays as a memoirist, offering up the prequels to my own memories in long-distance phone calls. And in the last weeks of his life, he had his granddaughter Maya’s novella published so she would see herself as a writer.
Did my father, the son of a poet, and a memoirist himself, see writing as our inheritance—a family tradition we held on to across time, space, and language?
My mother the essayist and my aunt the poet are preceded by their father, the railway doctor who wrote poetry. Balkhi is the clan name they share with 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, who, as a boy, fled with his family from Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan, when the Mongols invaded. Their caravan traveled west until they found a home in Anatolia. The Sufi poet-teacher’s name pinned him to place and political geographies: he was both Balkhi, “of Balkh,” and Rumi, “of Rome,” a subject of the eastern Roman empire. But through eight centuries and across the globe, his words have translated, legible to the human heart.
My mother, aunt, and I have a more immediate literary ancestor in their mother, my grandmother Kaneez Fatima, the lifelong invalid who was also a memoirist. Amma’s hand penned family history in her notebook over the course of twenty years, never to be published in her lifetime. Truth-telling like Abbu, and a gifted storyteller to boot, Amma told vivid tales of people and places she had loved, then lost to death or displacement. People and places she had gone on loving for the rest of her life.
We are a family in which too many died young—in Patna, Chittagong, and Karachi, on land and in the skies. In bedrooms, mental asylums, and shelters for the homeless. Buried far from where we began, too far from our parents and siblings, our children and grandchildren. We are a family that has sought its moment in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. In the Northeast, the South, the Southwest, and West Coast of the United States. We are a family anchored on the page, in Urdu, in English, in poetry, and in prose. Words we have written for no one but ourselves. To read us is to read of homes that eluded us, and of homes we denied to others. To take heart and break heart.
In the last phone conversation I had with my father, six days before he died, he was focused on the writerly possibilities that had opened up for his daughter and granddaughter. Abbu’s voice was aglow with the knowledge that Maya and I had both just held our very first literary readings in faraway Fresno. I read in the Spectrum Gallery at the annual Rogue Festival, under the auspices of Fresno State’s Chicanx Writers and Artists Association, at exactly the same time that twelve-year-old Maya was reading her winning entry in the Wild About Books contest at A Book Barn. I like to think that Abbu found a pleasing symmetry in the image, assurance of our family’s roots in paper.
Ammi was about the age that I am now when rheumatoid arthritis first began to contort her life and eventually forced her to give up the school she had founded three decades prior. I see her treading the earth with precarious step, her toes at grotesque angles formed by the auto-immune disorder. In her seventies, she has made what is likely to be her final migration, from Karachi to San Diego, from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, to live with my sister and her family. Ammi takes psychology courses at San Diego City College, volunteers among senior citizens with dementia, and cherishes the addition of a new granddaughter. The arc of her life has followed her children’s, to California.
This fall, my firstborn will leave home, too.
When Maya was little, her life and mine formed concentric circles, had different radiuses but the same center—a bodily reality while I carried her in my womb. But what mother would want to contain her daughter’s life within her own, even if she could? The concentric quickly gives way to the overlapping and intersecting patterns of so-called Apollonian circles—magnificently complex and beautiful to the eye. I don’t have the mathematical grasp that Apollonius of Perga had over two thousand years ago. But I do understand the geometric beauty of overlapping and intersecting lives, especially those of mother and daughter. And those “pencils of circles,” as they are so picturesquely called, become more visible the further you zoom out through the lens of time.
In Urdu the word, kal means “yesterday.” And we use the same word for “tomorrow.”
Maya will be leaving for college just as I mark the thirtieth anniversary of the day I left Karachi. I know that she is impatient to experience the world beyond home, as I was. All the second-guessing that is a parent’s inevitable lot—what I did right, what I might have done better, what I wish had been mine to give her—is subsumed by a single question: Did I love her enough?
Enough to let her go.
Like Ammi and Abbu before me.
Samina Najmi is a professor of multiethnic U.S. literature at California State University, Fresno. A Hedgebrook alumna, Samina’s essays have appeared in World Literature Today, The Massachusetts Review, The Rumpus, Entropy, and other publications. Her literary address may be found on the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center’s website. A published scholar, Samina began writing personal essays after taking a CSU Summer Arts workshop in 2011. An early essay, “Abdul,” won Map Literary’s 2012 nonfiction prize. Daughter of multigenerational migrations, Samina grew up in Pakistan and England and lived in Massachusetts before moving to California with her then-young family.