Free The Lost Pearl (2012) by Lara Zuberi Page B

could not still be friends. I had perhaps always been overly judgmental with Jennifer, not realizing that I was subconsciously terrified of outside influences swaying me from who I was. By then I was older and past my unsure teenage years. My vision had become sharper, and I realized that differences between our religion, culture, and upbringing would not cease to exist or stop coloring the disparate decisions we made in our lives. But rather than perceiving these differences as barriers, I started looking at them as photographs of the same building taken from different angles, each capturing a unique beauty and, when put side by side, each complementing the other, adding a third dimension to an otherwise two-dimensional composition.

Chapter 7

    My father had been taken from me because of his death. My mother and brother had been taken from me because of my mother’s marriage, which I still had not accepted. Sahir would come to visit during holidays, and I would go in the summers, but there was still a cold war between my stepfather and me, partly to be blamed on his ego, and perhaps equally to be blamed on my obstinacy. Ammi tried to be part of my life, but I did not make much of an effort to include her. I had not been able to forgive her yet. I could not attach any blame to my brother, and whenever I looked at him, I wondered how wonderful it would have been to share my life with my only full sibling. At every visit, I felt the gap between us becoming more and more substantial. The separation between my family and I, as well as my country and I.
    I felt my motherland’s embrace loosen from around me, as I had my mother’s nine years earlier. When I visited, I became less tolerant of the power outages and mosquito bites that I had grown up with. It saddened me deeply to see young children begging on the streets or being used for cheap labor. The large, extravagant weddings in a country riddled with poverty seemed surreal. Distance had given me perspective, the ability to judge as an outsider, but it had robbed me of the unconditional element of the love I had previously felt.
    In Karachi, when I was in the car, I felt as if the trucks and buses were within millimeters of me and I marveled at the courage of all the drivers who managed to reach their destination without incident. I coughed each time I breathed in the smoke escapingthe yellow mini buses, as if my lungs had lost the strength to inhale this previously familiar air. I enjoyed the fragrance carried by the evening breeze, of the fresh roses and the white
chamelis
being sold at the roadside, yet I would brace myself for the stench of fish emanating from the trucks that followed. I never stopped enjoying the tasty meals, yet I would always get ill with gastroenteritis, as if the same food and water I had consumed for years had become alien to me, less forgiving because I had left. I had changed from player to spectator, from actor to an inattentive member of the audience, from a tree of the soil to a plant that was growing in another garden and no longer belonged to that same part of the Earth. Like the immune system rejecting a donated organ or an expression of poetry lost in translation: this was my redefined relationship with my homeland as well as with my family.
    During one of my visits, Sara sat down next to me after we had all finished taking down the decorations for her eighth birthday party. “What was your father like?” she asked. It was a simple, straightforward question, but it was completely unexpected. The answer could have been given in volumes. What my father was like was the thought that had consumed my life—what he had been like and what he would have been like had fate not snatched him away from me. My father had been a personification of honesty and integrity. He had been a symbol of humility. He had been the foundation on which our family had stood, the glue that had kept us all together. He had been funny and lively and forever putting