These Impossible Things by Salma El-Wardany

Author:Salma El-Wardany [EL-WARDANY, SALMA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

BILQUIS

The problem with family is that you can love them completely while despising their every move.

Kees has always believed family was code for excusing the mistakes and actions of people you could keep close without having to interrogate your own moral code. Like when Mamo Imran brought home a blond-haired toddler and called him son, everyone had spoken about blood and how their collective blood now ran in the veins of a little boy who didn’t speak Punjabi but that it wasn’t his fault and he shouldn’t be punished. Her mother had hated her brother then but loved his son more than anyone else, and when Mamo had asked them all to arrange a match with their fourth cousin twice removed from the same village as Grandma back in Pakistan, they had loved him for being traditional and adhering to his parents’ wishes. Then, they spoke about what a good son he was and how Islamic the arrangements had been. While peeling okra one evening, Kees had casually remarked that surely it was a little too late for him to be respecting anyone’s wishes since he’d got a woman pregnant, refused to marry her, and then had the luxury of someone else sorting out his marriage for him without having to lift a finger, all while expecting his new wife, who was significantly younger than he was, to take on the role of stepmother to his fair-skinned child who would finally have to learn Punjabi if he ever wanted to talk to her.

Her mother had snatched the basket of okra off her, not before landing a slap across her arm, telling her that blood mattered and just because Kees had started going to the debating club at school, it did not mean she could talk to her parents, or about her elders, like they were her friends, and how she was too young to understand everything that was going on.

Blood matters. Blood matters. Blood matters.

Blood doesn’t matter anymore.

No one mentions the importance of family. Childhood nostalgia evaporates.

In a tiny council house, the silence widens the spaces between them until they are all standing on separate islands, thousands of miles apart, and as no one speaks, it forms a hard shell that gets more difficult to break. Everyone stands frozen for an hour, rooted to their places as if playing a game of sleeping lions that no one wants to lose. Later, when Kees tells the story, she always emphasizes this point; how no one moved for an hour and how they had done the impossible and managed to stop time. In reality, it is a minute, maybe two, which proves to her that it doesn’t take that long for hearts to break.

Eventually, Aunty Bushra displays a tact that no one thought her capable of—absolving her in Kees’s eyes of every past sin she has committed—and says she will take Hakim up to bed because it’s getting late.

Hakim, who at the age of fifteen doesn’t need to be taken to bed,

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