root vegetables

see how they choke?

My father looked like an oak tree. He straightened his brown tweed jacket and his dark moustache moved with the words, “insha’Allah.” Those words were like what a bedside table was for normal people - holding what is essential to him in place, hope, desperation, strength, lifting him from bed and setting him to sleep.

He tended to his garden, pointing at his carrots, potatoes, onions. “Root vegetables. See how they choke?”

I nodded, not knowing what he meant and still not really knowing. To this day, I sort of envy him for his ability to speak unencumbered by rhetorics or the hygiene of well-mannered speech.

Theres food in the fridge still, a washing machine that needs emptying, a drying rack that needs filling, a untied thread that needs to be knotted, an envelope to seal and the TV to turn off, and yet I look to you, asking you when the monotony of it all ends, and you say, “insha’Allah.”

English, when tasked with certain words, becomes stiff and sore. It’s monophonic, a means to an end and tastes bland on my tongue in comparison to the orchestral إن شاء الله. Any ear that grew up with Arabic as the backdrop of their home knows that these three syllables are dismissal, pain, love, acknowledgement, hope, all of the things I fail to condense in a series of words. The mind outlines better than it shades.

The outline of childhood, when home was nothing more than walls to sleep and eat, when “insha’allah” felt less honest than stock condolences, frozen samosas and brown salad on our doorstep. Sometimes there would be the unmistakable timbre of grief in his voice.

I remember one night when the air was thick in the space between my father and I. It hung low and heavy, reeking of tobacco mixed with oily takeaway from the one of many halal chicken shops across the street. In the darkness of the evening, after a long day of Saturday school where I tripped over the words of my own mother tongue, in the void of north London’s skyline, made of corner stores and apartment complexes, a few stars floated above us. I compared the stars to the cheerio’s from this morning’s breakfast and he, against all odds, laughed briefly. There was the hardness of his smile line, the softness in the folds by his dark eyes. I achieved everything in this world and beyond. It was as though I had thrown flour on a ghost. I felt like I had found home in the sound that filled the space and that was enough to feel like I was made of dreams.

Now, though, there is an unbridgeable distance. There’s a fraudulence to my reminiscing, feeding on stray crumbs of what I remember and what I like to think happened. The story of my life - of my dad’s life - of your life - does not exist. There is no centre to it, no path, no line. There are great, wide spaces where we pretend we used to be someone. Nowadays, writing feels like nothing at all, other than a void quest for vanity. My dad asks me if I will continue writing, his back stooping lower, his hands shaking more, and I say إن شاء الله.