By Maha Syeda
FOUR YEARS OLD:
I started washing dishes when I was 4 years old to make my mother happy.
Real happy. Not “happy” where she would smile so pretending-ly, that the makeup around her mouth would crease and, traitorously, her red lipstick would smudge itself on her left tooth. The“happiness” I still recognise when my dad brings home friends late into the night, audaciously; with no warning, still expecting to be served a three course meal.
I did not want the unsettling happiness which I only witnessed (and make no mistake, still witness) when my mother plays a game called If I Wasn’t A Mother. Usually, this game involves spending my father’s money copiously and without consequence, because he is too busy in one
place or the other, with one woman or another. Usually, this game is a form of self soothing after my father’s backhand slap makes the whole house shiver.
Once, when the trolley became too full of shopping bags poking our knees and our noses, a security guard took pity on me and my brother. He let us sit on a spare platform trolley used by the store to haul bright pink boxes of shoes. My brother fell asleep in my lap. I don’t know how long I sat there, the cold edges of the trolley pressed into the back of knees, but it was long enough that my mother felt indebted to the guard for his services. She handed him money as thanks when she came back to collect us. So I needed to make my mum happy. I needed her to know I could be useful and out of her way. I did that by standing on a grey stool I dragged from the bathroom, which was supposed to help me and my brother look into the mirror while we brushed our teeth. But it all went wrong, because I always went wrong and I smashed the sponge into a cup full of water, and there was a gross squelching sound before my face, shirt and hair were dotted by clouds of white soap-suds. My mum found me like that, sud-covered, spongeless and a bigger mess than she needed. First she screamed. Then she sighed. Then she brought a shirt from my room and changed me into a clean one. She took the stool away and put me down, back on to the kitchen floor, and left.
SEVEN YEARS OLD:
The day my brother started kindergarten, he fell out of our second-storey bedroom window.
I remember his scream at first, but not knowing why it was happening. I remember a thump, but not knowing what caused it. And then I fucked up: I stuck my head out of the bare window. I didn’t realise the fly screen crashed with him until I saw the black netting framing his body. His bleeding brain and broken teeth. I thought: my brother will die. He lived. Still lives. But then, I didn’t know he was still breathing until a week after his accident.
My mother was almost never home anymore. Between days in the ICU and the constant stream of friends/neighbours/reporters and prayers/home-cooked dinners/consolations. I almost never saw my mother anymore. Except when she slept. When I was seven, my mother’s friend called me mature. We were standing in the kitchen when she said this. I was equally elated but also filled with shame at my secret, and at the believability
of my flimsy facade: I was not mature. I was not mature when I saw the online articles of my brother’s almost death published by the ABC and The Guardian. I was not mature when my teacher asked my class to pray for me and my family, and they all turned around to look at me, the new girl? what a fucking freak. I am still not not mature; when I look at my brother for too long, his head splits open and his teeth fall out and he starts screaming into my face. I hate him sometimes because he had the mercy of forgetting – forgetting almost our entire childhood and
that day.
I was writing this I asked him (my brother), Muhammad, what do you remember?
He said, “We used to play, I spy. And we used to watch Thumbelina (Barbie’s version) a lot and... that’s it?”.
That’s it.
SOME AGE THAT DOESN’T END:
My mother leaves again. This happens so often, I could tell you any age right now and I would be right.
Every few months, the realisation comes hurling down on our house: my dad will never change. I try to follow my mother into the car because it’s a school night, and this is disruptive to the kids and also, we’re exhausted. And we deserve to leave with her too. But my dad pushes me out of
the way and gets into the car with her instead.
My brother and my two little sisters look at me.
I turn my back to them and go into the kitchen and make fries. I heat the oil my mum abandoned and watch it simmer; I contemplate drinking it, or dunking my face into it, so I can look like someone else, be treated like anyone else. Maybe like my brother after his accident. I finish straining the oil out of the fries and serve them on a plastic plate with sauce on the side. No one is hungry. My mum comes back after everyone is asleep, but my dad doesn’t. She looks at the fries left on the plate and scolds me, “these are undercooked”.
18 YEARS OLD:
In Urdu, I called my uncle what roughly translates to ‘big-dad' in English, because he was more of my dad than my biological dad, and also, he was much taller and older than my actual dad, so it made sense to call him ‘big’.
I still call him my dad when I talk about him. When I prayed over his grave in Pakistan, I thought “God, please, please bring my Dad back”. When I talked to his daughters (my cousins) about our last phone call, I called him Dad, and then I looked at their faces and I said, “Sorry. Sorry. I know
he’s not my dad”. And when my Aunty (his wife, or now, his widow) hugged me goodbye, I felt her wedding ring catch in my hair, and I cried all over again, “I wish my dad could’ve been here”. I even want his goodbyes.
I was freshly 18 when he died, not by fate but by accident, in a shooting.
One by one, friends found out, because we have no family in Australia. They streamed in through the front door while my dad packed a suitcase and flew almost 24 hours away to Pakistan. Before he left, he hugged me, for the first time in almost 11 years, like he remembered I was his daughter and that we are allowed to do things, like hug. My mum’s friend made me breakfast, soggy weetbix in cold milk. I sat on the kitchen floor with the bowl in my lap. I took a bite and then I threw it up.
My mum’s friend dragged a chair from the dining table set to the kitchen and she maneuvered me on to it. She took the spoon out of the bowl and fed it to me herself. I looked at the spiderwebs branching out in her hands, green-blue, open, pulsing. I can’t remember seeing my mother’s hand this close, this tender. I wondered if my uncle’s hand was already grey.
A few days later, I tried drinking water. But as the cup filled up, I dropped it into the sink and cried. First it was crying, then it was heaving, then it was throat splitting, screaming. My brother ran into the kitchen and took my hands. He stuck them under the cold water, kept twisting the tap so it came out colder. He said: breathe ... and breathe ... and breathe ... My nail beds became blue. He finally shut it off.
I slid on to the floor, my brother sat down with me. When I was 7, I cried for my brother, something just like this, in an empty kitchen held together by shitty carpentry and splinters. My brother kept hugging me and I couldn’t believe how long his arms had gotten. He and my uncle
share the same birthday. I remember that now sometimes and keep crying; a birthday eclipsed by death.
I wish all the time I could have my brother back.
17 YEARS OLD:
Even when I hate her, I remember her as a gold rush.
That is the only way I can remember her, maybe idealistically, maybe fondly, but she was wanted by everyone. A gold rush. At sixteen, I kept looking for the next thing. Because I thought, “If I stand still, everything will catch up to me and I will burn alive under the weight of all the lives
I’m supposed to be living, not this one; remnants of a girl who skips class and skips meals and skips out on the mosque for a blonde girl with tinted windows and a cross delicately placedwhere her collarbones meet.
I heard her laugh, wide and unapologetic, a sunshine sort of laugh which comes from deep in the ribs, and I thought: I have to have her.
Standing in my kitchen, I finally did. It was one afternoon, still early in November, when I put a pot of water on the stove and asked her if she had ever had mi goreng. No, she had not. She had not even heard of it. I’m not sure why I thought we were compatible.
I tore open the packet and emptied the yellow-gold noodles into the water. I threw it in the binand turned back to her, catalogued the entire thing because I was delirious, and I thought I will remember her looking like this, when I am lawyer-ing and she is journalist-ing, and we have
matching cars and big windows to make it less lonely. But when I was looking at her, the bow of her lips and the breadth of her shoulders, my eyes stopped at the badge pinned to her collar. Gold engraved letters: school captain.
I wanted to unclip it and toss it away, with the emptied packet of mi goreng. I desperately wanted to know if she would be angry at me for it, or if she would be grateful. I wanted to know what she would choose, and a few months later I did find out; on the crowded dancefloor at our school
formal, when she asked me to step back, away from her. And I found out a hundred times between that, when she didn’t notice my haircut or when she gave me silver jewelry when I only wear gold or when she looked at my list of names for babies (that I’ll never have) and called them “weird”.
The water boiled, the white simmered to the top. I turned down the heat and stirred it.
She looked at me again: don’t make me disappoint you.
I unscrewed the lid on the sunflower oil, poured it into the frying pan. Our socked feet touched on the tiles, and she knocked her hip into mine. What’s next?
Two months later in that kitchen, I broke up with her over the phone. It was “mutual”. It was “amicable”. Sometimes, I felt like she belonged to everyone, and I only got what was left over. Sometimes, I think she loved me, just not in a way which mattered to me.
ALL WRONG:
This place does not change enough.
The posters on the white wall backing the sink - those posters - they’re the only things which change. Sometimes they’re posters which support our local footy team. Sometimes it's breast cancer awareness. Domestic violence prevention. Happy father's day! Kmart achievers (invite only) brunch.
Today, it is a suicide AWARENESS poster. It’s R U OK day. I fill up my water bottle and it weighs down my hand. I look down at the smudge of my reflection in the sink. I realise I’m just looking at a pit of grievances all the way down.
I look back up at the poster. I keep thinking about the statistic: approximately 8 people each day die by suicide in Australia. I keep looking at the service line numbers. The numbers which I have
known since I was 10, forced to memorise them in the principal's office, where she asked, “How could you even think about doing something like this?”
I could never explain it. Even now, I can’t begin to understand it. How am I supposed to live when God gave me the shovel to dig my grave? How can anyone love me when my palms can never be white again? They’re soiled. They’re dirtied by my sin. I can’t wash it off. Not even when I’m scrubbing dishes in the kitchen sink.
Hello, my name is Maha Syeda and I am a student at the University of Technology Sydney. I can be found at maha.syeda2@gmail.com or m.ahasyeda on Instagram. This is the first time I have been published online. I’ve only recently taken up writing creative non-fiction, because denial is OUT in 2024. It can be hard to know yourself if you are always trying to hide. I don’t want to hide anymore and I think the easiest way to do that is to air my silence out. I hope to publish more creative non-fiction pieces in magazines and commit to telling the truth. I hope you will come along with me.