The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Uncovering a Pakistani Grandmother's Secret Life

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

Pakistani-Canadian journalist Sadiya Ansari investigates the life of her mysterious grandmother Tahira, who leaves her children to follow a lover in post-Partition Pakistan. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In her debut book, journalist Sadia Ansari investigates the truth behind a family secret. Why did her paternal grandmother Tahira abandon her seven children in pursuit of a man? An estrangement that lasted nearly two decades. Her book is called In Exile, Rupture, Reunion, and My Grandmother's Secret Life. And we're delighted she made the time to chat with us.

Sadia, thank you so much for joining us and talking about your book. I want to talk about the main character of your book. Can you tell us a little bit about your grandmother Tahira, who you call Dadi. What was her early life like? So my Dadi, her early life, she was born in like 1920 in what was then India and she had a pretty traumatic life. She got married at 14. She lost her husband by the time she was in her mid-30s when she was pregnant with her seventh child.

And she went through a lot of tumult at that time. You know, it was just after partition. So there were a lot of political upheaval and personal upheaval in her life. After she moved from India to Pakistan, after her husband died, she ended up leaving her seven children for a period of 15 years,

and for some she didn't see them for almost 20 years after that. So that was kind of a family story that was very shameful, and we didn't talk about it when we were younger, so I decided to write a book about it now. Was she ostracized on account of leaving her family? How was that all handled in that moment?

In that moment, when she first left the family, they were living in Karachi at the time, which was post-partition where a lot of refugees had gone. So post-partition Karachi really grew from a city of like 400,000 to over a million within a decade. And my family was part of that migration. And at that time, when she first left her kids, she left them for a man essentially,

and she first stayed in the city for a little while hoping to reconcile. And when it was clear that wasn't gonna happen, she ended up moving to the place where he was from, which was a thousand kilometers away, which at that time for her children was like, you know, kind of a massive, massive distance. Can you give us an age range as to how old the kids were?

Because some were in their 20s, but some were quite young. Yeah, so the youngest, so the three youngest were daughters, and the youngest was six years old. And then the four older ones were boys, and the eldest was about 21, 22. For people who are reading this book, I feel like you tell the story of a very strong woman who was put in a pretty difficult situation. But I'm curious, let's talk gender roles. What would people's perception of Tara have been different if she was a man?

Yeah, I think if my grandmother had been a man, it would have been very expected for her to remarry, right? If it was a man who had seven children who had lost his wife, it would be the norm. So my grandfather, actually, the man that she had married her first husband, he actually had married her because his wife had died and he had seven children. And so he needed a mother for his children and then my grandmother became that mother even though she was, you know, not even a woman herself at that age. So I think in terms of gender roles, women were not really expected to remarry,

but men, it was just very normal. I wanna talk about your relationship. Your grandmother moved to Markham, Ontario to live with you. You were only five. Despite sharing a room with her, you wrote, while we were physically close enough for me to know her sleeping habits and for her to know which of my dolls

were slutty enough to need a custom chaloir as a child I knew next to nothing about Dadi's history, about why she came to Canada, why she lived with us. Walk me through your relationship with her and how did you first learn about your grandmother's story? She moved in with us when I was five. We lived in Markham. We shared a bedroom for the first five years

of her life with us until I was 10 years old. And she was quite strict. She was kind of a strict grandmother. She wasn't very nice. She wasn't very cuddly. And I didn't really understand that about her, I think, until I started researching her life and understanding kind of why she would have been that way.

But as a result, we weren't like, I loved her and I knew she loved me, but we weren't close. We weren't like how my mother is with her grandchildren now, for instance. And we didn't talk about her past. And part of that is I think we don't really ask people about their past in our families, especially women. We don't really ask our grandmothers about their histories.

And secondly, I think there was just, when I did find out about this particular history, I was about 10 years old. I was at a family party and Aunt just kind of mentioned it offhand and I was completely shocked because there was this woman who was very conservative culturally, very religious, and I couldn't imagine someone who had colored so wildly outside the lines. And it was also kind of framed to me as like it's a secret and we don't talk about it. Like I'm telling you about this but you can't actually talk about it. And in the 10 years that she lived in my family, she never spoke about it with either one of

my parents. And so even, you know, that was a big regret for my father, for instance, that he never talked to her about that time. Were you given the full story in that conversation, or were you given a little snippet to be like, oh, there's way more to dig into? I was given like a tiny snippet, which is basically like she had left her children and she'd been gone from this year to this year. You basically like she had left her children and she'd been gone from this year to this year.

She'd left in 1963. My father didn't see her until the early 80s. And during that time, her children grew up, they got married, many of them moved abroad. And all I knew was that she was the woman who left her children. The sort of narrative around it was what kind of mother leaves her children, right? It was like this kind of in like the entire way she was cast. She was cast as like a villain of the story When did the idea to write the book come? So I became a journalist in like my mid-20s and I feel like that's when I started asking

More questions or learning how to ask my family questions and I just started sort of to test it out. My grandmother had been dead about a decade. And I was home from Vancouver and I was chatting with my dad and I just asked him, what was it like when you met her again? And we were sitting in the room that she used to live in because we had converted the downstairs sort of family room into a bedroom for her because she couldn't climb

the stairs and then we had kind of converted it back. And so we're sitting in that room and we're talking and he was like, it was awkward. And I was like, oh, interesting, because in South Asian cultures, as you know, we often talk about our elders with a lot of reverence and respect. And so while he wasn't being disrespectful,

I felt like it was revealing and it was kind of a thread to pull on. Were you ever concerned about, is this really a story that I should be unpacking and sort of printing? Family secrets are secrets for a reason, and I think that people prefer you don't write about them.

But I do think that if my dad didn't want to do it, then I wouldn't have done that out of respect for him. And all of his full siblings spoke with me, except for one of my uncles who passed away during the process of writing the book and I don't think he was very keen to speak with me either to be clear but six out of seven isn't bad I think and I think there was something for them where a number of their older my dad has seven half siblings and his older half siblings would kind of parented him after his mother had died he never wanted to talk about this painful thing because they never wanted to feel they

were disrespecting those older siblings or not appreciating what they did for them, right? And when those siblings passed, I think it kind of freed them a little bit to kind of explore what that time meant for them and the things that happened to them during that time, how difficult that period was for them and help them sort of talk about it. Did your perception of your grandmother change after writing this book? You used the word villain, it's sort of in the beginnings of sort of

when hearing the story, but I imagine that's changed quite a lot. You asked me, why did I want to tell this story? And I think in my 20s, I had the idea. And in my 30s, I think coming into like my own womanhood and thinking about what her life was like at that time. Like by the time I was in in my 30s, I think coming into like my own womanhood and thinking about what her life was like at that time, like, by the time I was in my mid 30s, I was like living in a condo in downtown Toronto, unmarried, no kids with a lot of

agency in my life. And I thought about her and she was like, pregnant husband just died alone in a country where she didn't have any family anymore. And I started to think about how difficult her life was and putting the lens of like, how would I have handled that? Because I think we often think our families are, you know, previous generations in particular are more resilient than we are, but they're really just people. And I think that was part of like me trying to figure out who she was and what her motivations

were. And because she obviously loved her children a lot and I saw that firsthand as she aged, I realized that there's no way she just left them because she didn't love them or she didn't care because then she would never have come back to the family. Your book, you described as part memoir, part investigative journalism, and part creative nonfiction. Why did you decide this was the best way to tell that story? There's kind of alternating chapters.

So there's one set of chapters that's kind of like, in my voice, more traditionally, kind of like how journalists would approach memoir. And it's kind of like taking the reader through the story as I'm fumbling through it. And then the other chapters are not from her perspective, but kind of written like they're happening at that time. It's not in the distance past,

it's in like the recent past is kind of the way that I imagined it. And I wanted those chapters to read more like narrative. I didn't want them to read like a feature story where we say, so and so told me this and so and so told me that. Because I was talking to all these people who had all these different thoughts, opinions, and versions of the story and I didn't want to reconcile them in the text

like that because I think that can be really distracting. And so I decided to go with creative nonfiction to be able to create more scenes around what was happening for my grandmother and I don't really make complete events up, but I just relied a lot on like historical information, research, archival photos, for instance, were super helpful. So for instance, imagining her at the dock in what was then known as Bombay, taking a steamer to Karachi. There are photos of that from the year that she did that.

There's photos of the steamer she would have taken. That's how I tried to bring it to life and also bring the reader closer to her. As you mentioned, you interviewed countless family members for this book. Were you ever worried that you didn't go far enough or went too far? Yeah, 100%. Both, both.

I went too far and I didn't go far enough. So first, I think with my dad, because we started the interviews in 2017 and I'd be visiting my parents, we'd be in our pajamas, and I'd be like, parents, we'd be in our pajamas and I was like, okay, let's go through family photos and see what you remember. And I would ask him about his childhood

because he never really used to talk about his childhood. And he was like, I don't really remember a lot. It was over 50 years ago. And that would be his answer to a lot of questions. And my dad is like a storyteller. He likes to tell stories, he likes to tell jokes, you know? And I was like, how do you not remember anything? And I would never talk to a source that way.

I would never say like, you really don't remember anything about your childhood. And I had to take a step back to be like, I can't speak to him like I'm talking to my dad in the conversation. I have to kind of like take a bit of distance and be a bit respectful for like everything he's gone through. Because at that point, I didn't actually really know

everything he'd gone through. And I feel like the more I found out, the more it helped me be more and more sensitive to the situation. And I do think with family, there are certain things where you don't want to go, some places you don't want to go where you would kind of go with a stranger because you feel like there's a red line even if they haven't told you there's a red line. The awareness that you need when you are interviewing people who are retelling traumatic experience.

How did you navigate that? Were there any moments where it was like, or someone's pulled out of the interview, just being like, I can't do this? No one pulled out of the interviews. I mean, I do have to say that when I started, I did not have like a deep awareness of trauma informed interviewing and journalism. It wasn't really something we were talking about. When I started, I did not have like a deep awareness of trauma-informed interviewing in journalism. It wasn't really something we were talking about. I think in the last five years, we've been talking about it way more. So as I learned more about those methods, it really helped

me apply that to the interviews themselves. So a small example is letting someone start the story where they want to start rather than being like, let's go back to the beginning. Because maybe that makes them feel panicked if their childhood was like unpleasant, which is where I started with my dad, for instance. Versus when you're in a conversation where things come up, then like, they're more likely to tell you things, and then they're more likely to feel more comfortable going back into the moments that are tougher for them.

Your dad's read the book, what was his reaction? He called me after he read a draft. I gave him a draft that I was like, if you have huge problems with that something, I can still change it, but I'm far enough along that you can see where the story is. So I got a call from him, and I was in Vancouver at that time, and he was like, first of all, there

are a few mistakes in the book. And I was like, oh my gosh. But they were like the tiniest things. He was like, we called the river this and not this. It's called this now, but we used to call it this. And like really small, small things. And I was like, that was not the headline of what I needed. And then he was like, but like, you know, he was so sweet about it. He's like, I'm so impressed with you and I'm

so proud of you. And there are parts in the book that I'm quite critical of him. I'm critical of culture and I'm critical of, you know, some of the things in my family in my own voice. And he really didn't bring any of that up, which I was pretty impressed with, to be honest. All right, I want to talk about you, particularly identity. You were born in Pakistan, but raised in Canada. Did you change your perception of either country throughout this process?

In Pakistan, for sure. Part of it was, even though I was born in Karachi, I didn't feel, and I certainly grew up in a Pakistani household. So I grew up in Canada, but I grew up in a Pakistani household. And I think for a lot of people in the diaspora, they relate to this, which is, you know,

when your parents come from somewhere else, they're trying to really instill the values of that culture in you. And sometimes that culture is frozen in the moment that they arrived, and it doesn't actually reflect how the culture is evolving, and how people like my age, for instance,

what kind of music they're listening to, or art they're accessing, or activism they're engaged in. And so I feel like going back to Pakistan with these trips exposed me to that so much more, and made me feel so much more part of the culture. Because a big part of this book is like, exploring what does it mean to be a wife and a mother in South Asian culture, because that is so primary in your role as a woman across so

many cultures and I would say North American culture also. And when you are not those things, you feel like what is my entry point into my culture. And I feel like those trips helped me find different entry points and feel much more rooted. Even though my family's not necessarily historically from Pakistan because there were refugees. But on the other hand, in Canada, it really also changed my view of Canada in the sense that one, I kind of assumed that a lot of conservatism came from my upbringing as a

South Asian, my upbringing as a Muslim woman. But I also realized living here, it's like a very similar expectation of this escalator sort of life. You go to school, you get a good job, you get married and you have kids. And then if you're not doing that, especially in your 30s, like people kind of don't know what to do with you.

It's very, very similar. And actually I left Toronto and I moved to Berlin four years ago. And just to kind of get my mind out of that, to go somewhere where there were no cultural expectations of me, which was super interesting. All right, I want to talk another question. This one, I got to admit, I think a lot of people,

a lot of immigrants, a lot of first generation, a lot of South Asian people can relate to this. You write, with fellow immigrants or recent descendants, I have the tendency to be much more open. With a certain type of white person, can relate to this. You write, Inevitably, I'm worn down to giving them what they want. Even the way Pakistan rolls off my tongue gives them the thrill of discovering some sort of Eastern creature hiding behind my Canadian accent. Is there a fine line between people asking someone where they're from out of curiosity versus asking them out of suspicion, especially now, just in the world that we're in that's so polarized?

Yeah, I think that sometimes it's just good-natured and people are just curious. And in Canada, I just sometimes want to be from Canada. And especially moving abroad, people ask me where I'm from and I always say Canada first, unless I feel like they also have multiple identities and we can talk about that. Sometimes people would say, but you have an Oriental name, and I'd be like, I can't deal with this, you know? And they do wear you down, because what can you say? Like, no, I don't have any other background.

It does feel invasive, this like, where are you from question that a lot of us deal with, but it's also an important question. And I think for me, it's very important. I am very willing to say, I'm Pakistani, I don't have any shame in it, but it's because I don't feel like a sense of nationalism because of some of the reasons I talk about in the book.

My family does not have deep roots in that country. So it's like, I say I'm Pakistani, but this is a country that was created in 1947. So these things are just very complicated. And I think sometimes people just wanna like pin your face on a map to understand you. And it just doesn't work like that. Well let's talk about that. Partition left as many as two million people dead and displaced 15 million, including your

grandparents. You've done a lot of research around this topic. What's the most surprising thing that you learned about partition? Partition is such a massive historical event that we don't really learn about in the mainstream. You don't learn about it like you do the world wars or a lot of different things. And we certainly, I didn't learn about it in school in Ontario, for instance, and maybe the curriculum is better now, I hope it is. But it's kind of this major historical event that people liken to, you know, for instance, journalists that saw the massacres during partition

likened it to some of the death camps that they saw that were run by the Nazis years before, like the same journalists who had gone to both. And that's like horrifying that these events were happening and then they were sort of happening in a different way, again, in the subcontinent. So I think one thing, you know, the scale of it, I knew, and I think sometimes when we talk about death

and displacement, even now, like let's say we're talking about Gaza or Sudan or Ukraine, or we're talking about the massive displacement in Venezuela, for instance, which we only kind of talk about around election time, like you can't really imagine it. It's like numbers, you know, you get the headlines. And I think that most important thing for me was going into history a little bit of a different way

and looking at how did this impact ordinary people? Like what were they hearing on the news? What were the letters their family was sending them? What were they worried about? Women were jumping into wells because their families were like, we'd rather you die in a well than be raped. Those kinds of details that are just,

make you stop in your tracks. And the one thing that I really wanted to paint a picture of was this happened to millions of people who didn't wanna talk about it afterwards because if it also happened to your neighbor, it, like, you can't really relate. This was difficult for everybody and like, why are we gonna keep talking about it?

And that's why often I think the third generation is more ready to talk about it and more ready to explore it because that pain is not so close to us. Finally, if your grandmother were alive, what do you think she would have made of your book? It's a really interesting question. I mean, part of me, she might have been like, keep my name out of your mouth. But like, part of me, I think, you know, because of the culture she was steeped in,

I think she would have been apprehensive or not approving of it all being out there. But on the other side, I think there's so much of my motivation was recognition. I wanted to recognize her life. I wanted to recognize the hardship she had went recognition. I wanted to recognize her life. I wanted to recognize the hardship she had went through. I wanted to recognize that she was a complicated person

who did love her children, but made some choices that were really harmful, not just for them, but for her. I would hope that she would appreciate that sort of complexity and recognition and empathy that I tried to bring to the book to kind of untangle that simple story of what kind of a mother leaves her children. There was this little passage at the back

of one of the photos of her. Do you remember what it said? It was an inscription Urdu, and I think the translation was, you know, when my body turns to dust, may my memories bloom from this photo. Oh, that was beautiful. Sadia, thank you so much.

Really appreciate you sharing this story, and I think it will resonate with a lot of people and get them to dig a little deeper into their family roots. Thanks so much for having me.