A Turtle on Stilts.

Summer dust had the habit of getting everywhere. 

It gathered in the cracked wood of our tired furniture and on the fragrant blades of the old Neem tree in our backyard. Near the back hedge, I crouched over a tilled patch with a spade that was more rust than metal. 

Overhead, two lumps of almost-cotton clouds huddled behind a sturdy pair of Shisham. A sudden wind had drained the one on the left to a nub in the shape of a head poking out of the right. The Shisham towered underneath the two as if carrying a turtle on stilts.

Slumped in an egg-shell colored pajama set, Dado sat a foot away on a lawn chair. Beneath the sun, she ‘flickered’ with each turn of watching me clear out a swarm of chickweed. It was warmer than usual, and Dado preferred sustenance over anything but. Even our drying rack was knotted with swirls of Pumpkin and Cucumber, staining our lighter clothes and bleaching our darks with each rot.

Dado’s favorite metaphor? That her hair didn’t gray from the sun but from the chronic fade of wisdom. She considered even a pot of Marigold, a hoarder of mulch and devotion. Often, when gathering an overripe bunch of red tomatoes, I couldn’t help but pluck an open bud of yellow, yet to mature.

I kept this waste of seed in the chest pocket of a white button-up. Over the years, it had frayed into a ruddy mix of tan and beige. The laundry suffered from it. 

Dado and I lived in a three-bedroom apartment in a pension house colony since the year of my birth: 2001. One of the many homecoming residences for army retirees in Lahore. I was her first grandchild and gradually became her daughter, after a string of three sons. I was considered an unorthodox miracle. 

My Dada, a frightening man with a heart of gold, had received an anonymous call soon traced to a rundown apartment complex that I was never told the whereabouts of. The landlady found me hiccupping with hunger, alone in an abandoned unit. Without even a look at the swaddle of pink in his arms, Dado turned me away at first. I never held it against her.

My father, her eldest, was a mediocre rebel with a dream that was, unfortunately, American. He spent his teenage years parodying a heavy metal groupie, Guns N’ Roses inspired, he was a skinny dil phenk with a taste for studded leather. 

An old album, now a termite nest, has an image of him lying on a low oak branch with long hair, in a sleek leather jacket and hipster shades. It’s one of my favorite pictures. I never had anything of my mother’s except a brittle wood-and-print portrait. There wasn’t much to it, just a woman in a black pair of shalwar kameez with her head down. 

You could hardly see her face. She could have been anyone, but she was my mother.

It was a tale as old as time: A pseudo-American groupie and a Jordanian debutante crossed paths in college where they could afford infatuation and risk. One stork descent and a parentally-enforced shotgun wedding later, the enormity of their youth overwhelmed them. 

My father was the first to turn away, and my mother soon after. Much like turtles, their parental contribution was limited to nesting and abandonment. Even after he deserted both lover and kin, my father often visited us. At age seven, on a particularly cold December day, I recall asking him for help to zip up my puffer, but he wordlessly turned away. That’s how I imagined him then, as well.

(The italicized statement is a fabrication I made up in my first draft. In reality, he was annoyed by my request and hastily pushed the zipper upwards with such force that the skin of my neck got caught and got nicked. I wanted to imagine him with some form of civility while he offered me none. That is how we differed.)

Dado was suddenly widowed one year in March. Much of what came after was in the form of a drought. All that was abundant would emaciate her. Neighbor’s visits and family receptions became a practice in deprivation; bare-faced, she wore faint pastel colors and went unadorned. Even now, the top shelf of her reach-in has a tin of expired makeup.

For the first few years, my uncle, her youngest, took care of us. Bhai witnessed her age into a child. He endured her tantrums, starvation, and her resentment of his patience. Dado barred herself from both comfort and joy. She needed to assure others of her grief. 

Our next-door neighbor and one of her closest friends, was widowed nineteen years after Dado. The stark contrast in how they each dealt with loss made me wonder if grief is a choice. Our neighbor embraced her widowhood as a beginning. She wore the most ornate Banarsi sarees to every wedding she attended and even chose the exhaustion of a weekly trip to Icchra for new bedsheets. 

Dado, on the other hand, allowed herself the familiar slip of her wedding ring well into her sixties and never drove out of fear.

We love tomatoes in our household. Their seeds grow like teeth held upright in a dent of pulp around a white-mouthed placenta. Dado adores the sight of their shoots and clears a chunk of the yard for them every summer.  One of her summer rituals was to freeze a few tomatoes and spoon out the seeds for the next batch. Her hands had learned to tame sustenance and its teeth without letting it gnaw at abundance. She never kept more than a week’s food for us and gave the rest away to the house help or the neighborhood guards. Widows were to prefer altruism over fulfillment. For women here, a life not given away was a life wasted.

Dada passed away from Tuberculosis—regarded as a disease of desire by Sontag. The Romantics considered it symptomatic of both impatience and passion. Like any man taught only through example, Dada was fierce and chose to love without knowing how.

On one occasion a week before his death, I hid his reading glasses with the slapstick wit of a five-year-old. When they were found scratched in a basket of toys, he reached for a lesson and backhanded me across the cheek. Tear-streaked and like any child that lost a friend, I hid in a corner of the house. A severe talking-to by Dado made him confess the lesson that had become his faith.

“I just want her to remember me.”

And there it was. A portrait of fear done terribly.

Dada taught me earlier than most, that memory and time are proportional. Each receives and withholds from the other. However, his near-death intuition didn’t work in his favor. I hardly remember anything from our years together. 

Much of my love for him is thoughtless; a sort of assumption made of memories told by Dado. Once again, more faith than love if you could tell them apart. Dado had her fair share of his warmth and his harm. He taught her how to cook and the subtleties of love. Every morning, he’d wake earlier than her to iron my middle uncle’s uniform and polish his shoes. 

Dado witnessed his quiet affections. He never told them to anyone. 

We have, unfortunately, bred fathers through distance. Dada’s instances of care were often careless. He had the kind of tongue that could empty a house for good. His paternal vernacular ranged from curses to swears without a single word of fondness, not even for his youngest, whom he loved the most, according to Dado. 

None of his three sons had the heart to visit when he was admitted for his disease. He died alone in a hospital room.

Turtles are solitary creatures; they prefer seclusion. My family resembles them in many ways apart from abandoning offspring. Each of us nestled in a shell of apathy, retracting at the first sight of anything beyond us. Of anything bigger than us. This was owed to our fathers and their fathers. However, there are always other ways and different ways of becoming. 

My first true act of love was to write. A gradual revelation that began with a short story about a journey to Thar that two friends had embarked on and where one of them had to die. I was rarely sentimental when it came to writing or perhaps even in reality. 

I was incredibly somber both as a child and a teenager. I still didn’t know how people talked to each other at 14. Dado only ever spoke in instruction.

Goat liver is good for your anemia.

You always hug a man from the side, never the front.

Don’t tell anyone about your parents, whether they ask or not. 

She wanted to prepare me for a world and people that had no kindness and no intention to talk nor to listen. You might find this absurd, but this is the isolating ideology that widows were expected to embody. Whereas Chase Robbins, a Belmont scholar, referred to Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of power as the human phenomenon to connect amid varying pluralities–as the characteristic strength of the first suffragist parade. 

The lyrics of the Hall and Oates 1982 song, Maneater applied not only to the ferocity and sexual appetite of Western women but also to our South Asian widows. The death of a husband was always the fault of a wife. Disease, deprivation, a tragic fate were all symptomatic of a bad wife. 

In Hinduism, a widow is not permitted to remarry as a punishment for being incapable of protecting her husband’s soul. For four months and ten days, Muslim widows follow a period of Iddah in which they must refrain from any forms of adornment: scent, cosmetics, and color. Hence, Dado’s expired make-up tins. Religion can direct grief for women, but not men, since male widows have no such prohibitions. 

When you’re villainized for the simple human need to connect with another, you are truly powerless.

As a child developing in an environment of disconnect, my first writing lesson was to learn to talk. I became my first guinea pig and began having conversations in my head. I learned the mannerisms of the people I met and forged an imaginary panel to talk to when I was alone.

It was made up of friends, lovers, enemies, absolute strangers, and the writers I read—somehow never their characters. Apart from hypothesized scenarios, I re-enacted actual conversations, rumors, and romance. They always ended differently. 

I had read writers suffocated by consciousness. Rimbaud and Droet were two such poets who refused poetry altogether well into their careers. Prodigies who turned away from wanting to talk to others. Writing was only ever a conversation. It could be had with anyone. 

Often, I think of all the poetry that didn’t survive, and I think of Dado the same way. 

Her widowhood wasn’t poetic. It steered clear of grand analogies and metonymy. It denied new furniture and conversation with a man that took more than a minute or even a garden hose long enough to reach her sprouts without getting detached from the tap. 

Widowhood wasn’t deserving of connection or convenience. South Asian widowhood was a meditation in loneliness. The goal was to perfect it in a lifetime. Fortunately, much of folklore reminds us that turtles have never been known for their speed.  

Dado refused to stay in her shell when it came to love. For her, life began again when I started first grade. Everything felt new and uncomfortable: the starchy uniform, children I hadn’t even seen during the admissions test, and of course a teacher who smiled a little too much for my 7-year-old self. 

I spent the entire morning sobbing and clinging to Dado. She stayed until it was time for our weekly school assembly. I kept sniffling and wanting to be left alone but wasn’t because the entire class went to the school grounds for assembly. An unsupervised crier is the last thing my class teacher needed on the first day of school. 

Halfway through the announcements, prayers, and a ‘speech of the day’, I began to look around to see if anyone else felt like I did. And what did I feel? More nervous than sad. When I realized this, I looked up to the assembly podium. A fifth-grader read a speech about our national poet, Allama Iqbal. She ended it with a verse from his poem titled Do Sitaare or Two Stars. 

Hai Khawab Sabat-e-Ashnayi

Aaeen Jahan Ka Hai Judai

We dream of an infinite togetherness, 

But our world has made parting our end. 

I thought this verse summed up my life and teetered on the edge of existentialism. That is until the national anthem started to play. All the students in the assembly joined the choir at the back in song. Once the podium was removed, I saw it. Or her. 

It was Dado. All this time, she sat on a bench obscured by the podium. Standing up for the national anthem near the security guards. Standing alongside men. Hand on her heart. And my own. I didn’t know the words to the anthem yet, but I knew there was a crack in her shell. 

All this time I’ve referred to her as Dado, my paternal grandmother, for your convenience. By now, you know her. I’ve never called her ’Dado’ in my life. She was my mother, always has been.  

Ma, who ironically, never expected kindness, showed me how to be kind regardless. Our little world of two was enough to keep me from the path of existentialism. Try imagining a seven-year-old existentialist and then thank my mother. 

After twenty difficult years, Dado now allows herself joy. She argues with men older than her, in a voice that sends chills down the spines of Sadar’s fruit vendors. Her highest achievement? Wanting.

Today, she sits on a lawn chair with a gift from her grandson. She twirls a Rubik’s cube without rotating any of the sides. She has no idea why these exist, but somehow she finds fidget spinners ‘cool’. 

Above, the turtle on stilts passed over in the wind. Dado and I watch the sky clear together.  

Works Cited

Iqbal, Allama Muhammad. “Do Sitaare.” بانگ درا, Sang-e-Meel Publications, 2011.

Robbins, Chase. “The Ideology of Isolation.” SPARK Symposium Presentations, 2025. https://repository.belmont.edu/spark_presentations/82.

Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. Vintage Books, 1979. Accessed 2 June 2026.