Sadiya Ansari spent six years investigating a period in which her paternal grandmother left her seven children in Karachi, Pakistan, to move 1,000 kilometres away to be with a man.
Daadi, as Sadiya called her, returned to the family fifteen years later, living with her family in Markham, Ontario, for the last decade of her life. As a child, Ansari knew nothing about this period in her family’s history until a chatty aunt mentioned it in passing when she was ten years old. A decade after her grandmother died, Sadiya first broached the topic with her family, but it took another decade to delve into the investigation that would turn into her memoir, In Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and My Grandmother’s Secret Life.
On a quiet afternoon, I sat with my parents in the room Daadi used to live in on the ground floor of our home that we had since turned back into a family room. I was twenty-five years old, home for the holidays from journalism school, pulsing with an obnoxious desire to practise my interviewing skills.
Squished on the couch between my parents, I asked my dad what it was like to see Daadi after eighteen years of separation. “Awkward,” he responded. I was so used to elders being spoken about with the utmost reverence that this single word felt like a revelation to me. I asked my mother what it was like to meet her during that visit to Karachi. She smiled wryly and told me the first thing my grandmother said to her was that my father was supposed to marry someone else. He looked up at her, surprised. “You never told me that.”
Perhaps the most vital element of growing up is becoming aware that the stories you are told and the stories you tell yourself have primarily been shaped by your parents’ world view. The realization that history isn’t simply recorded but also invented. It’s arriving at the understanding that your parents don’t know everything, and in passing down what they do know, they can be unreliable narrators.
The latter can be motivated by many things: faulty memory, protecting the next generation from a painful past, or intentional myth making. But I started to realize that the gaps I was coming up against in our family history were as important as the mythology. When thinking about the impenetrable silence over Daadi leaving, I wondered about the source of this silence: Was it shame over what happened or regret over what didn’t?
All of this prompted another question: What else could I uncover if I had the courage to ask?
Author Elif Shafak has talked about families like mine—those who have been forced to migrate, collecting and carrying various kinds of trauma with them—and who is most likely in those families to investigate their history. The first generation are those like Daadi who experience the brunt of hardship, and they often don’t have the language to talk about what’s happened. The second generation is trying to make a new life for themselves, or, as Shafak explained in a 2021 podcast interview on Monocle Radio’s Meet the Writers: “You just need to find your feet and you can’t look back.” It’s the youngest in these families who tend to ask the most difficult questions about their grandparents’ stories. “I have met young people with old memories,” Shafak said.
There was so much distance between my life and my grandmother’s—between the choices I was able to make versus the choices made for her—I didn’t feel as though her story would unravel me. For my dad, the few choices she made for herself ended up being incredibly painful for him—losing his mother for nearly two decades. And as my dad and his siblings aged, I realized his generation would become my ancestors one day; honouring their memory hinged on learning about their past.
In my thirties, I decided to interview my dad more formally. It was a lazy Sunday in late February when my dad and I sat down for our first official conversation, feeling momentous even though we were just at home in our pyjamas. I was staying over for the weekend, having made my bimonthly pilgrimage to the suburbs from Toronto, where, much to my parents’ chagrin, I lived on my own.
It was well below zero degrees outside, so my dad’s insistence on wearing a kurta necessitated a sweater vest over the flimsy cotton. He sat on the couch, armed with chai, his hair and beard completely white, heavy black frames sitting on his curiously unwrinkled face. My dad and I began by looking through old photo albums, the kind most families have shoved to the back of a closet somewhere, full of mostly five-by-seven photos and a few four-by-six photos with rounded edges from the 1960s and ’70s. I had seen most of the images dozens of times but always flipped past people I didn’t recognize—pictures from India and Pakistan from long before I was born. This time, I asked my dad to tell me about the mysterious figures. There were so many people I had never heard of before: his aunt who left her husband after he took a second wife, his uncle who married a British woman, another aunt who never married at all.
I was confused about the stories I was hearing. They didn’t fit the narrative his family told about themselves. That they were a “good” family: devout, educated, traditional.
That included Daadi. Behind her pious persona, I recognized a fierce independence and wondered how she managed to maintain that part of her during a lifetime that saw the emancipation of the Indian subcontinent without the emancipation of Indian women from the heavy expectations of religion, culture, men, and, well, other women.
She often employed a strategy many women before her, and unfortunately after her, have used: placating expectations outwardly while covertly doing what she really wanted. She dressed up her demands as religious duty, softened her harsh words by offering sweets. And visually, she cultivated an image that made her almost disappear into the background: a dupatta loosely fixed to her head, donning colours a widow wears—white, ecru, slate grey. But this performance wasn’t what I was interested in. It was the ellipsis in her story that was driving me: Why did she leave? What was her exile like? Did she feel cast out? Did she feel free? Why did she return?
I wasn’t sure who had the answers to these questions, but I thought I may as well start with my dad. While almost everyone in his family is a good storyteller, that doesn’t mean they have sharp memories or care about accuracy. My dad, in particular, doles out well-rehearsed anecdotes at parties, knows when to pause for laughter, recites poetry as punchline. So I found it strange in those early interviews about his childhood when he mostly gave me facts, rattling off names, years, locations, and asked me to verify what he couldn’t quite remember with more “senior people” (he was seventy at the time, so I’m not sure whom he was referring to). I didn’t expect single-sentence responses or long pauses where he squinted, looking past me, either genuinely excavating long-buried memories or searching for some he thought were acceptable to share.
I asked him the same questions over and over. Finally, out of exasperation: How can you just not remember?
I realized the answer to that very question a week later, when, in therapy, I was asked something similar: “What was your childhood like?” I had just started working with someone new, and it was our second session. Other than being surprised by such an obvious question, I drew a blank. So I gave her the basics: my parents worked a lot, I had an older sister, and my grandmother lived with us when I was young. I told her that I read a lot and found ways to entertain myself. Then she asked: “Were you lonely?”
Tears sprung to my eyes, and I wasn’t sure why. I spent a lot of time alone as a kid—reading, watching television, scribbling in journals. I had some after-school activities, like choir and drama club, and my mom took us to the library as much as she could, but there wasn’t a lot of money for anything else since my parents poured their income into living in a middle-class neighbourhood. As realtors, they often worked when their clients didn’t—evenings and weekends were for ferrying prospective buyers from house to house. My sister was a bit too old to be my playmate, and my parents didn’t like me going to friends’ homes.
This day-to-day isolation was in sharp contrast to my father’s siblings and their children coming over on weekends for dinner parties and horror-movie marathons or making organized trips to Niagara Falls or Canada’s Wonderland. As more cousins immigrated to Canada, the reasons to get together multiplied—birthdays, weddings, celebrating a cousin finishing the Quran, or observing their first fast during Ramzan. Daadi was at the centre of these events. She was the reason we often had guests over, why our house was always full on Eid. And while it seemed like there was so much love around us, it was conditional on feeding the “good” family narrative.
When my sister had a boyfriend at fourteen, a cousin who went to the same high school spread the news like wildfire. My sister was lectured by aunts, ostracized by uncles, labelled troublesome. There was so much concern about her “reputation” and how that reflected on the family. But there didn’t seem to be concern about the fact that her boyfriend was nineteen, five years older than her, already out of high school as she entered it. Her actual safety wasn’t at the core of the concern, nor was the boyfriend’s responsibility in pursuing her questioned.
When my parents became increasingly concerned about her very normal teen behaviour—wanting to go to the movies, being on the phone at all hours, talking to boys—they sent us to an Islamic summer school an hour away from our house. While that summer ended up being not as tragic as I had predicted, it wasn’t lost on me that my parents wielded religion as punishment. God was a figure you feared, not loved. And to earn God’s love, you had to be good.
I was ten years old when that crash course in Islam ended. But I was still haunted by the idea I was “bad”—that I should pray more, control my urge to gossip, lie less. Daadi enforced these feelings with her watchful eye over what we wore, when we left the house, and which friends came over.
Despite vocally denouncing her own experience as a young bride, Daadi glows with pride in a photo of my cousin’s engagement party, when she was engaged at seventeen to a man ten years her senior.
I knew my parents would never want me to get married before I finished my education, but the trajectory of my life seemed at odds with the shows I watched on TGIF. The middle-school dating dilemmas of Boy Meets World and Kelly and Zack’s never-ending drama on Saved by the Bell seemed like another world to me.
In my thirties, being single became like a rash on my face I had to explain. At every family wedding I attended, I fielded three to thirty queries about why I wasn’t married. “You can’t find anyone?” one aunt asked. (This was the same aunt who often asked me how much I weighed.)
As I looked at the marriages around me, especially in my family, I wondered why women, so often hobbled by their rings, were particularly keen to push the idea onto me. “I don’t really see great examples of partnership around me,” I answered honestly to the weight-asking-aunty at yet another wedding. She acted surprised, while her son—going through a divorce himself—snorted with laughter beside her.
The South Asian obsession with marriage is as clichéd and cringeworthy a topic to write about as the expectation to become a doctor or engineer. But the way it can terrorize a woman in particular—no matter how feminist, educated, or aware of her worth—cannot be understated.
The unremarkable fact of being a single woman in her thirties who lived on her own made me feel like an alien in my family. I could see the looks of pity from aunts and uncles. What they couldn’t, or didn’t want to, understand was that perhaps I had evaded marriage. And after all, I wasn’t the pioneer of living alone as an unmarried woman: part of the pull I felt toward my grandmother’s story was that I had a hunch she was an alien too. Years after being asked about my childhood by that therapist, I still resist thinking about it. My memories of childhood seem like photographs growing sepia at the edges, darkening as I see how lonely I was, how small I felt, how small some people wanted my life to be.
For my father, revisiting his childhood meant reaching back half a century to access pain he hoped he had left behind. And it’s unsurprising that, at first, he could only remember bits and pieces—it’s literally how memory works. “Remembering something isn’t like playing back a movie; it’s more like pulling in scraps from different parts of the brain,” explains the host of the podcast Every Little Thing, distilling the work of memory researcher Charan Ranganath.
When we access long-buried memories, it can resurface the trauma those events caused. At the same time, the emotional tone of a memory can change, become more dull, because of accessing them with a new lens. The only way out is through, but it’s not exactly an appealing process. I later realized my dad may well have been doing the same thing I was: avoiding discomfort by refusing to dive in all at once.
Revisiting that first audio recording, I cringe at my impatience with him. I was frustrated when what he told me contradicted what I thought I already knew.
Only at the very end, when I stopped recording, did my dad speak about his mother. And finally, I heard a familiar story. “I think the real trouble started for Daadi when she got married at such a tender age,” he told me. “That was very unjust.”
Excerpted from In Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and My Grandmother’s Secret Life by Sadiya Ansari, 2024, published by House of Anansi. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.
