In Exile, by Sadiya Ansari

I just finished reading the book “In Exile” by Sadiya Ansari.

It was a birthday present from my kids. The writer is a Canadian Pakistani, a journalist by profession, perhaps a bit older than my older son.

It is a quick read, less than 200 pages. It is her debut book. It tells the story of her paternal grandmother, with whom she shared her room until she was ten. In the process she tells, in a way, her own story also.

Growing up, she thought of her daadi and not any different from any other desi elders,” two dimensional” (her words), nothing exciting about her. It was only later that she found, overheard, from a “chatty auntie” that the grandma, at one time had left her seven children for a man. It was a family secret kept away from the grandkids. She was intrigued that a person of that time and place may have chalked out her own decisions, much her the author herself. Ansari is drawn to seek the truth and readers get to know a bit about the author along the way.

It was ten years after her death, that the author embarked on an investigative journey to find the story. Much had passed and people were a bit eager to talk about it, still reluctant to go in details. It was her persistence and personal desire to fill in the large gaps that it unfolds to her what really happened. And she finds more than she had embarked upon. A lot of family history, as told to her or perceived by her growing up, was based on selective remembrances of her elders.  

What follows is a commendable task.

It is the story of Ansaris of Hyderabad. Daadi is married of at a tender age of 14 to her recently deceased aunt’s (phuphu’s) widower, as her own daadi, a matriarch, did not want someone else to take that place. She is taken away from home by her father with the make belief that she is going to Aligarh for higher education. Along the way she is detoured to the widower’s house. Overnight she becomes step mother to her own cousins; and never gets formal education she was promised. Her own mother is not aware of this ‘scheme’ until her father returns home to Hyderabad without her.

Daadi’s husband is a learned man, son of a poet and a government official in British India. He has built a haveli in his name, Ehsan Manzil moving up the social ladder. Economics starts to change even before Partition and he has to move out of the mansion to live in a rented house and rent out the haveli for to make up for the expenses. Her own children, seven of them, are raised in a different socio-economic condition than her seven step children, (cousins). Usually, it is the other way around, younger siblings grow up in a better financial condition.

Then there is Partition, and she eventually moves to Karachi. In those porous times, she makes four trips to Karachi, first with her husband, and then they move back to India, Ehsan does not want to live in Pakistan. He dies in India and Tahira (daadi) moves with her children to Karachi and lives in a very compromised packed flat in Nazimabad, a far cry from Ehsan Manzil. She makes two trips to India after that, in an attempt to sell the Manzil.

That mostly elective migration is in sharp contrast to the onetime movements many in Punjab had to make and lost much of the property and many lives in the bloodshed with followed.

Living in Karachi under compromised condition, trying to raise her children, mostly dependent on her extended family members and her step children, still at a tender age, she finds a man and falls for him.

Family stands in her way, including her own older children, and she makes a choice; or is she asked to make a choice?

We find her moving to Haroonabad in Southern Punjab, where she spends close to two decades, having no connection with her our children and very minimal contact with her extended family. In the later part of her stay, we see her living there alone, after her relationship with the man is over. She charts a life for herself and starts a new career, a primary school teacher.

How it all ends that she was living the last years of her life with her son in Toronto, where a large section of family had already moved; and her grandkids are oblivious of her previous life.

How she survived, and her children survived? How the author discovered her story and, in the process, discovered a lot about her family’s background; the part of the world her parents came from, and how different, and not so different were the circumstances than those of her own, is all for the reader to discover and enjoy in the book

Sadiya Ansari has a powerful writing skill and a deep insight. Some of her observations amaze you.  Some examples:

Talking about her aunt, phupo trying to convince Daadi’s stepchild from the second husband for a meeting, “She seemed to be employing the secret Pakistani strategy of persuasion- a combination of small talk and misdirection that I will never understand, let alone master.”

About her father, now getting more excited and impatient than her in moving ahead in finding the missing parts of the story, “I was doubting my abilities enough as it was, and I did not need his running commentary on my methods. But I also know in may ways this was a team effort: the Western notions of owning a story and telling it the way you want to tell it simply didn’t, couldn’t apply here”.

And about her relationship with her grandkids. “Although she could never have a truly fresh start with her children, it was these grandchildren you gave her the gift of a new beginning. Her children didn’t forget her past, but they kept her secrets.”