Dispatches from the margins of white imperial terrains

WINTER 2021

I tend to scoff at signs, but when it turned out our grandfathers—his abuelito, my abbajee—were both mango farmers, in Mexico and Pakistan, respectively—literal opposite ends of the world—I became, temporarily, a believer. It was on our second date, I think. New York winter: outside, snowfall; inside, hot drinks and giddy serendipity. So many things had to happen, or not happen, for our paths to cross this way. He grew up in rural Jalisco and California; I was a Karachi girl through and through—una florecita del asfalto, an asphalt flower, you might say. We didn’t know where we’d end up, or whether we’d end up there together. And yet. The table where we sat, sticky with coffee rings, was mez in Urdu, mesa in Spanish. It felt like a private miracle. 

Love has a way of ensconcing even the most curmudgeonly, but escaping the outside world was difficult that year. Trump floated down escalators, railing against bad Mexican hombres, slapping blanket bans on Muslim visitors. “Do you feel safe here?” white American friends would ask. “We’re so sorry,” they’d say—well-intentioned, I’m sure, but it always rubbed me the wrong way. Our romance was a source of great delight and, I think, solace. “You are literally Trump’s worst nightmare!” they’d exult, and we’d smile sweetly—a happy anomaly, a two-headed mascot for multiculturalism against a backdrop of bubbling hate. Unease puckered inside me each time; I could never quite articulate why.

If, in New York, we were a triumph of the possibilities of America, elsewhere we inhabited a different story, one just as marked with America’s imprint. “Terrorism?” murmured his mother, when he told her he intended to marry a Pakistani woman. “Cartels…” whispered my father when he found out I’d be traveling to Mexico. You couldn’t really fault this word association; everything they knew about each other’s countries was filtered through the gaze of a third.

So, instead, we brandished the mango: how it made its way to the West—it travelled east, actually, from Manila to Acapulco on Spanish galleons in the eighteenth century, where it was exchanged for silver. When he came to Pakistan, my family, pouncing upon this connective thread, paraded every possible local variety before him. They’re better than yours, right, they asked brightly, while I cringed in a corner. It’s a much-derided trope in South Asian literature: the mango as a symbol of immigrant angst, Eastern exotica. Truth be told, I didn’t want to invoke it here at all. But this is an essay about a different sort of longing.

Read the rest of the essay in Adi Magazine