Khwab: Dreams of My Dad
Unsinkable Storyteller: Afreina Noor
A piece on grief that has been living in me for more than three decades but has found its way in weaving my memories, and pain through time, and dreams: Khwab.
A congratulatory letter carried the news of my birth, from Pakistan to Botswana, angering my father when he received it. The story goes that he called my uncle in Pakistan, fuming: “I got the news by letter? It’s 1984!”
The story also goes that he loved me the most out of all of us three siblings. The grown-ups would quip, “Where is Noor? Wherever Afreina is. Where’s Afreina? Wherever Noor must be!”
And the story also goes that many warned him that he was spoiling me. What nobody, including him, knew was that he was pouring a lifetime of love into seven short years.
Days before he passed, I began having a recurring dream.
//
Khwab
The sun is pouring through the windows of my parent's room. The rays so thick you can count them.
I am looking down at the room from a bird's eye view and I see myself sleeping peacefully on the royal blue bedspread with pastel-colored flowers and leaves stitched in applique.
I am wearing a white dress. My best white dress with frills and lace. A dress I would never be allowed to sleep in.
The second time was after Abbu had fallen ill.
And the third and last time was … after Abbu had passed away.
At the funeral, I saw his body wrapped in two white sheets. That’s when I learned that white is the colour of death.
A deep sadness filled me, as I, a child, understood at last - what the dream had meant.
//
The first time he visited me in my dreams was days after he’d passed.
//
Khwab
He wears his woven burnt orange jacket, brown pants with a white shirt, and his slim, dark brown tie with jagged lines on it.
The tie, I held onto and I still have. The jacket, I had once worn when I was five and it dropped down past my feet mopping the floor. I walked all over the house saying "Look, I'm Abbu" while everyone laughed.
In the dream, he happily converses with me but I can't hear a word he says. It is like there’s a glass partition between us, where I can see him looking and talking to me but I can’t hear him. As if … as if he’s inside a Charlie Chaplin movie. I try so desperately to hear him that I startle myself awake.
//
After 40 days of mourning, Ammie started going around the house with a calculator and roll of stickers, writing numbers and sticking them on objects. I didn’t understand at first until I realized that these were price tags. She was selling our stuff.
Ammie hung Abbu’s clothes in the living room. His shirts, his coats, his shoes, his jackets, and his ties. I couldn’t bare look at people coming and taking away what had belonged to him. Things I would never get to hold and touch again. In the end, there were a few of his golf socks and ties that were left behind. I got to keep them.
The packers came and wrapped up what was left of our house in one giant swoop.
We were moved back to Pakistan.
//
Khwab
The first time I visited Abbu in my dreams, was days before leaving Botswana.
I am climbing the tall minaret of the mosque in my madressah with my sister. We are wearing our headscarves. It's so high with a gazillion stairs and it keeps getting darker and darker the higher we go.
We open the door to a tiny, gray room. We try waking him up. He doesn't move. It's like he's drugged. My sister gives up but I don't.
She turns to leave, "It's getting late, we should go".
“We've come to say goodbye,” I say tugging his arm hoping he’d hold my hand. He doesn't respond.
I don't want to go. I want to stay. I want to wait for him to wake. I want to say goodbye.
My sister starts going down the dark stairs. I can hear her footsteps fading.
"Abbu, we're going"
"Wake up, I have to go"
"Khuda Hafiz, Abbu" I whisper one last time
I leave. Dejected. Disappointed. He didn't even stir.
//
All our friends came to the airport to see us off.
As the airplane took off, I thought to myself “Goodbye Abbu, I will miss you so much.”
Deep down I knew I would never return.
//
Years passed without any more visits. I didn’t go to him in my dreams, and neither did he come to me.
//
The years became a decade.
I was convinced that I had forgotten him. That I had buried my memories and grief. But then, out of nowhere, he asked me to visit him.
//
Khwab
I visit him in Barzakh, the temporary space between this world and the eternal one. Where all parted souls in transition live.
He is married. He has grown-up daughters and a small infant son.
I look up to catch his wife and daughters stealing glances at me from the balcony. They’re curious to know what's so amazing about me. After all, he has other daughters and a son, and yet, he still favors me.
One of them points to a door on the first floor.
I knock on it before letting myself in. To find him asleep.
“It’s me, I got your message and I've come to meet you,” I say.
He stirs but doesn't wake.
I stay for a few more minutes. When he doesn't wake, I get up to go.
“You should have been awake, even if it’s nighttime,” I say as I part.
//
I thought about it for a few days before sharing the dream with Ammie. I thought she might be shaken. Instead, she smiled and said, “I also had a dream that he had gotten married”.
She was so at peace with the idea. When she saw my surprised countenance she said calmly: “You can’t judge a dead man”.
And just like that, one dream undid everything I thought I had buried. The memories came pouring in. The fountain of emotions that had taken decades to dry now streamed with new fervor. Old and new feelings, all equally unwanted. None ready to be locked in a kooza again.
//
In 2008 I was invited by the U.S. State Department as an international visitor to observe the national election. It was a great big deal.
When I got back home and told tales of my trip, Ammie insisted that I apply for a Masters degree and continue my education. I told her I couldn’t possibly get an Ivy League education, now that I knew how hard it was to access.
//
Khwab
Weeks later I visited him again.
I think he will tell me how proud he is of me.
Quite the contrary.
My father who had never been angry with me in life or death is now fuming.
"So, you think you're a big deal now?”
I stand there, surprised. I have no words. I don’t think I’m a big deal.
“You only visited America. It's not like you studied there!” he continues.
Again, I am quiet. I’ve never had to deal with an angry dad before. And it scalds. His words are like little embers on my face. Tears stream down my cheeks. He continues, without seeing or hearing me.
“You don't even have a master's degree. What is a person with just a bachelor's?"
I turn around in silence, hiding my tear-stained face. I leave.
//
The next day I told Ammie about the dream. How furious he was with me. She lovingly teased me, taking all the sting out of his words. “Ah, so you wouldn’t listen to your mom who is alive. But now you will listen to your father who is dead."
And I did.
Two years later, I left for the US once again, this time on a Fulbright scholarship to an Ivy League school.
//
In 2013, I returned to Pakistan and turned 30 thereafter. In keeping with South Asian societal norms, where marriages are arranged, proposals are a family affair.
I have always loved my mom but now I loved her much more for establishing a “proposal filter” that allowed us to flatly reject certain suitors.
Until one proposal set itself apart from the rest. Not only did the two of us find a lot of things in common, but his sister was the same age as me and had attended Harvard in the same discipline. It wasn’t about the labels. It was about the mindsets that encourage women in the family to pursue excellence and have support in doing so.
I couldn’t fully make up my mind, but I was quite positive about this suitor
//
Khwab
He has written a poem for me.
He handwrote it. He framed it. He hands it to me.
A poem traditionally recited at weddings but written by someone from the groom’s family. My father has written mine. With humor and grace. It is how I learned to write my husband-to-be’s name in Urdu.
“I just came to give this to you,” he says as he turns and leaves.
His hair has thinned and silvered. He’s gained the weight of aging, he walks slowly, in his plain black leather khussas.
//
I said yes to the proposal. Without a shred of doubt.
My father has given his blessing. There was nothing left to ask or say.
//
I got married and moved to Montreal in 2018.
I began to think of things I hadn’t thought of before. Did Abbu ever walk on snow? Did he ever experience the childish joy of stomping out a snow rock by stepping on it? Did he ever kick snow pebbles? I wished I could’ve shared the crunchiness of the icy top layer with him. Experienced the singular crack of a lake when you go ice fishing.
So much of life had been missed and I felt like I needed to do the living for the both of us.
I often wondered how the man whose number I never got to save on my phone - how would he have liked Montreal?
How I would have loved to meet him and have a conversation.
//
Khwab
I am meeting him for dinner.
He stands at the top of a glass staircase waiting for me. The only thing I have ever asked for is to meet him and have a meal with him, just one time. To talk to him like an adult. To know him as a person.
We sit to eat and as expected we order steaks. “Bhai told me how well you knew and loved meat!” I exclaim.
He laughs his hearty laugh. A laugh full of force, of life.
It fills the room. It fills the dream. It fills my heart.
He laughs in waves. Ripples that shower you in their golden warmth.
He finally says, “I never really knew what I was doing when I cooked. I’d just wing it.”
And in that moment, even in my dream, my dad becomes mortal. He becomes just another man who has lived life, like the rest of us.
And not fully knowing the way, but paving one in the dark anyway. He didn’t know it all.
And it made me feel so much better.
