From Pakistan to Scotland: The many homes of my mother

My mother has this fire, the urge to make everything new, the ability to burn boats like Tariq bin Ziyad and call a new continent home. She is her own universe.

“It was a cold evening in the late 80s,” my father’s stories often begin. Or then; “I had joined the service, I was merely a lowly officer when …” Or then; “Maan hurein vi yaad ay, jadon mein Pindi aya on.” (I still remember, when I came to Pindi …) My father is narrative, neatly tied together. My mother is not.

Sometimes, this bifurcation, between those who self-mythologise and those who do not, seems gendered. Women’s lives do not lend well to mythology, because much of what we do is aggressively quotidian. Sewing the dangling button on a school uniform. Correcting homework. The vigil over the crib. It is all maintenance, and maintenance is not the stuff of myths.

And yet, scratch that. I know a lot of women who have wrought myth around themselves. As mothers, or writers or travellers. As chefs, as leaders. So perhaps it is simpler than that. Some people self-mythologise, and some people don’t. Then, there is also the distinction that James Baldwin made, pronouncing the world divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Being a madman who remembers is what writing is about, and so, here goes. My mother refuses to make a myth of herself. Let me try.