گم شدہ- Gumshuda (Lost, Missing)
There’s a window on the kitchen door that opens into Mother’s soul.
Sundays in Lahore are a lazy business. I roll out of bed by 1 pm; the heat has already baked my exposed skin. The cup of tea and a piece of fried naan, both warmed perfectly, are already on my table. How does she know, I wonder, when exactly to bring my breakfast up? But these days my malaise is more predictable than I would like to admit. A pile of college rejection emails weighs heavy on my mind, and whispers of a gap year have already started making their way through the house. Baba started them, of course. He has surprisingly little faith in anything, least of all his daughter. I sip the tea. There’s no sugar in it.
The Zuhr adhaan is echoing through the air by the time I manage to pull myself out of my room and make my way downstairs. The house has too many windows and not enough light. Baba planted peepal trees right outside when we first moved ten years ago, and now they hang over the house like weeping curtains, home to entire ecosystems of birds that chatter endlessly in the summers. “This way,” Baba says cheerfully, “the neighbors won’t be able to see inside.” What he doesn’t say, and what Mother always points out, is that the trees give him cover for when he spies on our front-door neighbor. She is the principal at a nearby school, where Baba once sent his CV and got rejected. So now Baba keeps an eye out for this insidious woman who dared such a feat.
After the rejection, Mother started teaching at a local school, so Sundays are the only days she has off. Before this, Mother used to make special breakfasts for us on the weekends. Sweet parathas dripping in butter, fresh naan made from whole wheat. Once, she surprised us with pancakes that some American woman had made on TV. On those days, Mother and I would huddle in front of the television and watch trashy Pakistani soap operas. Baba would always insist we change the channel to the news station, but he would end up remembering the plots better than we did.
Now, Mother just cleans and cooks on her day off, so there are no more soap opera weekends for us. Baba took on more teaching jobs since I’ll have to go to university soon; all he does is grade papers and plan lectures. And the college rejections keep rolling in, and I have no backup plan.
I lay my head gently on the windowpane and gaze into the kitchen.
Mother is kneading bread, and feather-like red hairs have escaped her bun. Her hands make fast work of the flour, moving precisely and quickly with no room for mistakes. She pauses, looks up at me. She always used to know instantly when I was at the door, but it has started taking her a few seconds in recent years. The age hasn’t hit her face, but it’s crawling in. I can see it. It holds her hair back, wraps its fingers around her eyes, making them cloud over. But the few seconds age has taken from her let me look, really look.
When I was five, Mother lost me in a crowded market. She called her brother in a panic, made him contact the news and go around the city on his bike to look for me. My uncle looked everywhere he could. And suddenly, as he came back home through a particularly run-down area, he caught a glimpse of a child that reminded him of me. When he stepped closer, he found me curled up on a chair in a corner store sleeping soundly in a sunny spot. The shopkeeper hadn’t even noticed me. No one had.
Mother tells this story fondly every time. You were so small, so indistinct. No one could possibly have seen you. She smiles through the window when she sees me and goes back to kneading the dough like nothing has changed. Like I am still five.
Baba has left his papers and is peeking through the foliage that hides us from the world. “She’s bought the same flowerpots as us!” He reports to no one in particular. The sunlight has managed to fight its way into the house. “Can you take the clothes out for me?” Mother asks softly through the door. Before I can answer, my phone chimes with the sound of an email. Another rejection letter, probably. I take the laundry basket out and start hanging the clothes to dry. Most of them are Baba’s, who needs two closets for all his outfits.
I drag a chair to a sunny spot and sink into it. I close my eyes. A shopkeeper argues with a man in Punjabi about the price of cigarettes going up. Some boys are having a loud fistfight because one broke the other’s bike. The sun burns into my skin. The smell of petrol, cigarettes, and fear grips me. I remember the feeling even after thirteen years.
It’s a trick I learned when I was a kid: Mother would find me already sleeping in her bed, so she would sleep with me instead of making me sleep alone in my room, where the shadows would creep around and claw at me. Where they would warn me to stay quiet.
I pretend to sleep far more than usual these days.
Finally, when Baba comes out for his tenth smoke of the day, I drag myself back to the kitchen window. On the way, I check my phone.
Not a rejection, but a rare acceptance abroad. A way out.
I want to click on it to read more, but a shadow flits across my vision towards the kitchen door. I follow it. I suddenly feel tired from all the pretending. When I get to the door and look in, Mother’s gone. Baba says something about trimming the trees to let the light in.
Umaima Munir (@UmaimaMunirKhan) is a 20-year-old writer and poet from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously been published in Jellyfish Review, Rainbow Poems, and Best Small Fictions 2020. She is currently studying political science in Istanbul.