For my thirteenth birthday, my aunt sent me a copy of Little Women. It was thick, hardcover, with a dark purple spine and her elegant cursive script on the first page wishing me a happy birthday.
As much as I loved to read, I felt disappointed in this gift. It sounded like a very girly book, and at that point in my life it was important for me not to feel girly. But I read it. And I loved it. And then I lost it.
I lost it through no fault of my own. One day in early May, I left my room neat and clean, with Little Women right where it belonged, on the shelf of my nightstand with my other books and the little teddy bear my parents gave me when I was a baby, the one with the pink and white T-shirt that said, “I [insert red heart] Jessica.”
I hugged our fluffy white dog Sparkey goodbye, tried not to cry, and then got in the car with just my backpack for luggage. We drove to the Islamabad airport and then flew to America.
America was our version of Disney World, a rare taste of magical experiences like clean, smoothly paved streets and public restrooms with luxuries like toilet paper and soap and toilets you didn’t have to squat over. It was full of fattening food and other wonderful things like my grandparents and friends I had made the last time we were there and the aunt who had sent me my copy of Little Women.
And believe it or not, we were vacationing in America for the whole summer. Never had anything sounded so absolutely wonderful except for one nagging little thing.
Before we left, my mother had told us to clean our rooms well just in case we didn’t come back. It’s a very odd thing to go on vacation with the vague threat of never coming back. I had checked my closets one last time before leaving, making sure everything I might want for the next three months was in my backpack. A birthday card I had bought for my brother many months early because it was so perfect lay on one shelf in its brown paper bag. I wondered if I should take it, but his birthday wasn’t until October and I knew we’d be back by then. We were supposed to return in August, or maybe September. So I closed the closet door and left it.
Summer in America was great. We lived with my grandparents on the old family farm in Indiana with their dog and host of cats. We picnicked on pork products we couldn’t get in Pakistan. I ran around in shorts, free to expose my adolescent legs in public. It was never too hot to breathe.
It was all carefree bliss until the Fourth of July when my parents sat us down and explained that we wouldn’t be going home at the end of the summer, that we needed to stay in America for at least a year but maybe forever.
I listened to this news while staring at a freckle on my bare leg, surprised it didn’t burst into flames from the intensity of my burning eyes. In the aftermath, I fled the room, curled up in a ball on the bathroom floor, and sank into my tears.
We spent the next year living in limbo. I went to eighth grade at a school I didn’t want to be at. We lived in a rented house and drove a borrowed car. We bought new clothes and made new ornaments for the tree at Christmas because everything we had was still at home in Pakistan.
The months dragged on as my parents visited doctors and went on retreats and tried to fix their bodies and their minds and their marriage. One day in April, they gathered us at our borrowed dining room table and told us their doctors had recommended not returning to Pakistan. We would have to live in America forever.
The news was hardly a surprise but a slap in the face nonetheless. Up until that point, Pakistan was still there ready and waiting for us. My clothes in the closet, my stuffed animals in the corner, my books on their shelf. But now the door was slammed in my face, and I was shut out of my own home.
With our fate decided, my dad took a solo trip back to Pakistan to pack up our lives there. My mom mentally sorted through the house deciding what she wanted him to ship to Indiana and what could be sold or given away. She spared us three kids the same agony and made sure my dad knew to bring back everything in our bedrooms. She promised we would get it all back.
It was months before we saw our things again. By the time the boxes arrived, we were living in a new house, a permanent one. Like a bittersweet Christmas, we dug into the boxes and pulled out our childhood – precious stuffed animals, nearly forgotten about toys, treasured baby blankets. And books.
In the midst of the reunion with all my inanimate friends and precious memories, I didn’t notice what was missing. When I eventually realized my copy of Little Women had been left behind, it didn’t seem to matter that I had everything else. My parents had promised that everything in our rooms would come back. Everything meant everything. But they had failed. How did all the books on my nightstand come back to me but not Little Women? How did I get back the teddy bear that promised me that my parents loved me but not Little Women?
I felt so betrayed that I punished them by privately swearing never to read Little Women again unless it was my own book, lost now somewhere in Pakistan.
At 36 years old, I still haven’t reread Little Women. Sometimes I see a copy of it in a bookstore and long for those words that brought me such joy as a 13-year old. But I always hold strong to my promise to myself, to the private hurt I’m still hanging on to deep down in the depths of me. Somewhere in this silly stubbornness lies my loyalty to Pakistan, my pride in where I come from, my memory of lost things.
I’m just glad I never promised myself not to watch the movie.
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