Syed Muhammad Hur Jaffri — The Open Manuscript

One — The First Thing I Remember

The first thing I remember about my father is his back.

Not his face. Not his voice. His back — the specific geography of it, the way it presented itself to a room, the way it could fill a doorway and make the doorway feel like a verdict. He was a tall man. He carried his height the way certain men carry authority: without effort, without awareness, as if the world had always arranged itself at a respectful distance from his shoulders and he had simply grown accustomed to the arrangement.

I was four, perhaps five. I had done something I was proud of. I cannot remember what it was — drawn something, built something, completed some small task that felt, to a child of four or five, like a genuine achievement, the kind that deserves to be brought to someone and shown. I brought it to him. He was standing at the window with his tea, looking at something in the street below. I said his name — Baba — and held out the thing.

He turned partially. Not fully. Enough to register my presence without committing to it. He looked at the thing I was holding. He looked for perhaps two seconds. Then he turned back to the window.

He said: good.

One word. The most efficient possible acknowledgment. The word that costs nothing and gives nothing and closes the transaction so completely that there is no room left to push against it. Good. Go away now. I have seen it. It has been categorized. It was not nothing. But it was so close to nothing that the distance between them was not measurable by any instrument I had at four or five.

I went away. I held the thing for the rest of the day and did not show it to anyone else because it had already been shown and the showing had produced its result and the result was: good.

I learned something that afternoon. I learned it without knowing I was learning it, the way children learn the most important things — not through instruction but through the accumulation of small, repeated experiences that eventually calcify into belief. What I learned was this: the things I make will be seen but not witnessed. There is a difference. Seeing is the eye moving across the surface. Witnessing is the person behind the eye actually arriving at what they are looking at. My father could see. He had never learned, or had decided not to practice, witnessing.

I spent years trying to produce something worth witnessing. This was the error. The problem was never the quality of the thing I was holding out.

My mother was a quiet woman. Quiet in the way of people who have been given no other available mode — who have learned that speech in the wrong moment produces consequences, and so have mapped the wrong moments with cartographic precision and navigate around them the way experienced sailors navigate reefs: without drama, without complaint, with the focused efficiency of someone who has accepted that the sea contains things that will sink you and the only question is how well you know where they are.

She loved me. I want to say this clearly because the rest of what follows could create a misimpression. She loved me with the full, unglamorous, daily love of a woman who understood that her child needed something she could only partially provide. She gave what she could. The rest — the part that only a father can give, the specific recognition that flows from a man to his son like water flows in only one direction — that part she could not give on his behalf. She tried, sometimes, to relay it. These attempts were the saddest things I have ever witnessed.

"Your father is proud of you," she would say. In the voice of someone reading a translation of a document whose original they have not been permitted to see. The translation was kind. The kindness was the saddest part. It meant the original existed somewhere. It meant he was capable of the feeling and had simply decided not to deliver it in person. The feeling existed and I was not permitted to receive it directly. I could only receive it filtered, secondhand, through a woman who loved me enough to carry it for him but not enough power to make him carry it himself.

A compliment delivered by a third party is not a compliment. It is evidence that a compliment exists somewhere, inaccessible, locked in a room whose key your father has pocketed.