Syed Muhammad Hur Jaffri — The Open Manuscript

Five — Small Victories, Smaller Silences

I was twelve when I won the inter-school recitation competition. I want to describe this carefully because the details matter and because I have told myself the story many times and each time the details shift slightly and I am trying, here, to hold the original.

There were fourteen schools. I was not expected to place. I was entered because my Urdu teacher, a woman named Mrs. Abbasi who had the specific kindness of a person who sees children clearly without the distortions of expectation, told me I had a voice that deserved to be heard and that deserving was sufficient reason to try. I trusted her assessment more than I trusted my own. This was not humility. It was the natural consequence of growing up with a father whose assessments were the primary data I had about my own capacity, and his assessments were not generous.

I won. First place. The certificate was large, cream-colored, with my name printed in a font that took up more space than my name had ever taken up on anything before. They called my name twice — once to come forward and once to confirm, as if the first calling might have been an error. It was not an error. It was my name. It was the first time my name had been called in a room full of people for a reason that was only good.

I carried the certificate home with the specific care of someone carrying something irreplaceable. I was going to show him. I had been composing the showing for the entire bus ride home — how I would put it on the table, what I would say, what his face would do. I had not allowed myself to complete the imagining of his face because the imagining was too hopeful and hope, in my experience, was expensive.

He was in the living room. I said: "Baba." I put the certificate on the table.

He looked at it. He picked it up. He read the name — my name, in the large font, in the center of the cream paper. He put it down.

He said: "Recitation is good. But it will not get you a job."

He said it without cruelty. This is the part I need to emphasize, because the cruel version would be easier to carry. He said it the way he said everything — factually, efficiently, with the tone of a man who is offering practical information that the recipient has not thought to acquire on their own. He was helping. He believed he was helping. The help arrived in the specific form of the counterweight, located and deployed with the usual precision: the achievement on one side of the scale, the uselessness of the achievement in the economy of real life on the other, and the scale tipping, reliably, toward the uselessness.

My mother, who was in the kitchen doorway and had heard everything, said: "It is a first place, jaan. All the schools."

He said: "I know what first place means."

He picked up the newspaper.

My mother looked at me with the expression she reserved for these moments — a look that contained an apology she could not make in his presence and a love that could not substitute for the thing she was apologizing for the absence of. She went back into the kitchen. I picked up the certificate and went to my room and put it in the drawer where I kept the things that had been seen but not witnessed.

The drawer filled up over the years. I never threw anything away. I am not sure why. Perhaps because throwing things away would have been a form of agreeing with him. The things in the drawer were evidence. Evidence of what, I was not always certain. Evidence that the things had happened. That they had been real. That they had deserved something other than what they received.

I kept the evidence. The verdict remained unchanged.

There was a period — I was perhaps fourteen, fifteen — when I stopped showing him things. Not dramatically, not in an act of decision I can point to and say: here, this was the moment I stopped. Gradually. The way rivers gradually change course, not through any single event but through the accumulated pressure of terrain.

I stopped showing him things and I started showing other people instead. Teachers. Mrs. Abbasi remained a consistent audience. A neighbor, an older man who had traveled widely and read deeply and seemed to find my questions genuinely interesting, became someone I brought things to in the way I had once brought things to my father. These substitutions worked, partially. They produced the experience of being received, which was what I needed. They did not produce the specific thing I needed, which was not reception in general but reception from him.

Nobody else's approval fills the exact shape of the approval you needed from your father. This is one of the more inconvenient facts of the human interior. The substitutions work for the surface. Underneath, the shape remains unfilled. The shape is very specific. It is made from years of waiting. It fits only one person.

He never came to fill it. I waited a long time to stop waiting.