Cloistered Memories

"You must be Afshan," the Dominican sister squinted at me in recognition.  "I took care of your brother, Kashif. Such a sweet baby. And your mother? Does she still teach English?"

I wanted to correct her and let her know that I'm the youngest sister, not Afshan, but breathless after the steep climb, I just smiled. 

I had left the mountain rest-house in Khairagali, Northern Pakistan, for an early morning walk, but even at 6:00 in the morning, I was sweating.  The summer heat from the plains of the Punjab that I had tried to escape had pursued me to the hill station six thousand feet above sea level.  A thirty forty year old memory of Sacred Heart High school, Lyallpur, had also caught up with me.

Pulling myself up the steep rest house driveway, I saw a familiar site from my school days in an unfamiliar setting.   A few steps ahead of me a Dominican nun in a black sweater with black prayer beads appearing through the folds of her habit walked calmly in front of me, as if from the convent next to my old school. 

The hill stations in Northern Pakistan are known for the beautiful churches built by missionaries who came over a hundred fifty years ago to the smoldering sub-continent, India, bringing Christianity as a respite for the untouchables and other lost souls.  They had also built many schools in the area, so even though I wasn't completely surprised to see the nun, my rest house was far from schools and the church we were supposed to visit later that day was an hour's drive from our rest house, a remnant of a Raj summer cantonment.

My heavy breathing must have given me away; she turned around quickly, "Good morning".  My unexpected delight might have been nostalgia of returning to Pakistan after having settled in the US for nearly a quarter century, or merely the pleasure of seeing another lone walker so early in the morning.  I quickened my pace to catch up with her.

I responded with a smile and a nod, and even though I didn't recognize her, I asked her where she was from, hoping she would respond as she did, "Faisalabad". 

Naming a city to anyone from the subcontinent is followed by an exercise validating six degrees of separation.   Lyallpur, in an attempt to erase its colonial history, was named Faisalabad in 1977, when I was in the eighth grade in Sacred Heart High School and Teacher Ghulam Masi was my class mistress.  Her name, translated to “the slave of Christ”, belied her somewhat belligerent and always animated personality.  The title “teacher” revealed nothing of her marital status and she made sure we focused only on the Enlightenment of the Buddah or the invasion of India by the Mughals, and never on personal matters. 

Apart from History, she also had the unfortunate challenge of teaching the eighth graders English. My clearest memory is of her making us break the word “enthusiasm" into four clearly defined syllables and repeating after her “en” “thoo” “zee” “aah” “zum”.  I knew we weren’t pronouncing it correctly, but it sounded more fun than the correct pronunciation.

Teacher Ghulam Masih’s classroom was on the top left hand wing of the double storied building, which centered on a huge wax model of Christ in a glass box with hands raised delicately to reveal a drizzle of blood representing his attempt to save humanity.  For the majority of us, this symbolism meant nothing and the sisters never explained it.  In the fifties, we were told, students would sing hymns, but by the seventies the sisters avoided any mention of Christianity.  What happened in those twenty years is unclear, but even though the students had always been Muslims, the parents of the seventies were quick to remind the sisters that they were not paying tuition to convert their daughters to Christianity.  In the school next door, however, the school for the Christian children, Christianity was kosher.

Sister Sosan, brought me back to the present by introducing herself and beginning to name a list of people from my childhood, confident that we could reduce the degrees of separation and find a connection. 

"Mother Imelda is in Rome," we made eye contact searching for shared memories. "Still very active. but Sister Gabriel passed away two years ago in Italy. She worked till the end. Remember her?" without a pause, she continued, “Sister Angela is in Warispura..."

"Of course I remember Sister Angela." I interrupted. “She was my sixth grade teacher."

Sister Sosan continued walking, hands in the pockets of her white Dominican habit. She was so confident, I dared not admit that, after thirty years, I didn't remember her.

But I remembered all the others.  Sister Gabriel had come to Italy from Poland after the second world war.  She never talked about her arrival in Pakistan; most of the class time was spent on Botany and Zoology.  A nearly transparent, willowy sister, with frail hands that fluttered as she taught us about the frog’s reproductive system, she touched her steel rimmed glasses as she read from the text.  We dissected aestheticized frogs to confirm what we had studied in class and then spent hours copying the diagrams of all the frog’s systems to our notebooks while Sister Gabriel looked on kindly, “ah ah ing” in encouragement.

 Mother Imelda a short staid Italian nun was no longer the Headmistress of the school but showed up when important guests visited during special assemblies.  Hands hidden behind the front section of her habit, greying hair escaping her wimple, she acknowledged girls whose parents had been students when she was headmistress.

She was replaced by Sister Angela, a local nun who had taught me in the sixth grade. Her smiles for students turned quickly to reprimand for the janitor constantly mopping the corridors with a muddy sack on a stick, “Mainga, Mainga...Clean that nukkar (corner)”.  Clapping her hands at Mainga, the janitor, who kept mopping, hypnotized by his mystical whirling for cleanliness.

Sister Angela combined English and Urdu in a distinct style endearing her further to her students. When and where she went to school and learned English was a mystery.  She might have graduated from the same school, but if she did, she never talked about her past.  Neither did she mention her future. But she made sure she knew everything about her students.

The year my brother was born.  She congratulated me on his birth in class recognizing my parent's need for a son. She knew how a son would secure their future.  Having left her own parents to become a nun, she might wander who would care for them.  Pulling my cheeks till they hurt, she congratulated me, "You have brother now.  You must be very happy." and I was. 

His birth might make life easier for my mother who was always trying to wear the right clothes, say the right things at the right time, and follow the traditions of birth, marriage, and death according to the Punjabi tradition.  His birth would end the constant need to prove that my father had chosen well even if she wasn’t Punjabi. She had converted to Islam before she had married my father.  The first of many dramatic changes she would make to adjust to her new life in Pakistan.  But that was before she came to Pakistan in 1959. 

By 1973, she had returned to London twice for yearlong visits with her four daughters.  And it was the year she returned that my brother was born.  He was only a year old when she decided to return to her passion of teaching having taken breaks every time she gave birth to her four daughters. This time she chose to teach English to the novices who would one day either teach in the school or work at the local hospital.

And that’s when my mother met sister Sosan in Warispura.  Sister Sosan was just a teenager not the confident woman explaining the progress of her colleagues.  My mother had always thought they her students were more naïve than their contemporaries. 

“…younger than other teenagers, detached from reality,” observed my mother, herself a woman in her early thirties, struggling to keep her life in order. 

Just as my mother was fascinated to see these teenagers adjust to their new lives as the brides of Christ, the sisters were astounded that my mother had chosen to leave London to live in a city like Lyallpur.  So my mother taught them English and they gave her the space to be her true self. 

Despite the varieties of English spoken in school, English was what all of us had in common.  The Italian sisters spoke their version of “bellisimo” English, talking about the “seetee” as if it were a whistle in Urdu rather than the the center of town.  The local nuns and teachers spoke a strongly accented English “ wery vell”. And the students, who spent their evenings watching American TV shows like “Here’s Lucy” and “McMillian and Wife” created their own version of “Convent English”.

Dressed in white frocks and shalwars as if replicating the nun’s habits, their students, muslim girls from affluent families talked about the tall dark and handsome men in Mills and Boons and amused each other by describing explicit scenes in books by Harold Robins, all the time, glancing over their shoulders whenever they heard leather sandals slapping on the slippery cement floors dampened by Mainga’s mop. 

Sister Sosan’s comfortable walking shoes brought me back to the present.

“St. Joseph’s, the school next door was denationalized and we were able to build a brand new building.  Completely renovated.  We were all so glad.”

I was too.  The school next door, the Christian school, where the students wore red sweaters not blue needed repairs in the seventies.

“And we’ve made a home for children with special needs, Christian and Muslim.  You can donate whatever you like...you must come and meet the sisters in the rest house.  The wall collapsed last year and we came here to fix it.  The rest house belongs to the church.”

Sister Sosan and I had walked past the other rest houses to the market and had turned around. I had taken a journey thirty years back and felt the same mystery of the lives of these women as I had done back then. 

I followed her through the gate and as we turned right, I saw a group of ten sisters sitting, some on benches and others on chairs.  Sister Sosan introduced me one at a time and I shook hands, unsure even now of how to greet a nun. 

“Her mother taught us English.” Some of them nodded their heads and then one of them opened the bible to begin their morning prayer. 

I covered my head and looked down on my dusty joggers as I listened in silence till amen.

Looking up and watching them in meditation, I realized it was time to leave. 

“Thank you sisters”, I murmured as I closed the gate behind me.