In Exile by Sadiya Ansari

Author:Sadiya Ansari [Ansari, Sadiya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2024-07-23T15:39:05+00:00

A year and a half after I boarded that eerily empty plane at Pearson International Airport, I started to question every bit of freedom I had taken for myself. Was I a bad daughter for refusing to pretend to be interested in religion? For rolling my eyes at every cultural norm that put women in the backseat? For moving continents during a pandemic? For insisting that I be loved as I was rather than creating a shadow life of acceptable behaviour, like so many other brown kids do to cope? Or did all those impulses lead to this moment? I had spent a lifetime cultivating skills and gathering courage to learn about a woman who also tried to carve out her own way. Could that lead to a revelation, to seeing and loving Daadi for who she really was? These questions were on my mind as my parents and I packed into a taxi in Karachi and drove toward the airport at the rare hour streets were dark and quiet to catch an early flight to Bahawalpur.

The flight was one of two weekly flights to and from Karachi—the only commercial flights out of the airport of the city of 762,000. We boarded the forty-eight-seat propeller plane for the hour-long flight, soaring past Sindhi farmland, the Cholistan desert, and then into the former territory of nawabs and nizams, who, even throughout the chokehold of British colonization, held on to their territories.

From the airport, we drove into the Pakistani army’s cantonment, where we were staying in an army guest house. As a journalist, it felt uncomfortable to rely on the military for anything, but a Pakistani journalist told me the army guest house is the safest place to stay and set me up with two rooms there.

Inside, the grounds shocked me. The roads were nearly empty, and unlike the dust-covered streets we traversed from the airport, these were spotless thanks to the many sweepers at work each morning. We turned into the driveway of a building called Pelican Hall, where tables were set up in the pristine garden for us to unwind while waiting for breakfast. The meal was served in the mess hall and would be the exact same menu for the next four days: a desi-style omelette spiced with red chili powder with a smattering of diced tomatoes and coriander, cholay in more oil than I thought was necessary before noon, fresh parathay, and chai so hot you could finish your meal before touching it and still be blowing on it before taking your first sip.

Given the unstable childhood my dad and his siblings had, it surprised me that none of them ended up in the military—seemingly the only Pakistani institution with job stability. But even the tiny slice of exposure over a few days revealed that the army was yet another expression of the extreme inequity present throughout the country. For those with power, it opens up new outlets for comfort and influence. The army owned royal palaces in Bahawalpur, and only one was open to the public.

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