I was holding the belt and we were lowering her down. Mum was in her coffin. There were two pairs of hands holding on to each of the four grey straps. We were her pall bearers: me, my elder brother, her nephews through marriage, and her cousin – her maternal uncle’s son. We slid the straps through the faux-metal handles on the oak coffin. I can’t remember if it was veneer or solid, but we began moving the wooden slats the casket had been sitting on. Mum was suspended now.
I was worried. I had recently hurt my shoulder, but had been doing exercises routinely, so when the time came my grip would be steady. She came to rest on a mixture of wet clay and pebbled stones. The sides of the chamber had been poured with concrete. There are two types of graves on offer in England. An earthen dug grave we describe as a katchi kabar, and the other, a solid lined grave described as pakhi. Our preferred choice was the pakhi, a Hindustani/Urdu word that crept into colonial speak.
I come from a caste of tribal carpenters and builders who make the homes of the Muslim dead in Pakistan. It is our gratis commitment to our community. Those graves are different: brick-lined, with a sealed inner chamber that would act as a coffin to hold the shrouded body. Here, in England, the concrete sides protect the coffin from shattering under the weight of the tumbling earth. This is our preferred choice for the dead. The grave diggers from the cemetery sealed the vault with concrete slabs and a rainproof membrane. Mum was in darkness now.
You might have said her whole life had been spent in darkness. She never left her local streets, in Birmingham; unable to walk down the local high street, she was always in purdah. The seclusion and division of genders has always been my norm. I grew up watching women and men occupy separate spaces. A curtain divided our inner-city Victorian terrace. Men in sober hues in the front room; women, covered head to toe in kaleidoscopic colour, occupied the back. When Mum was buried, the demarcation of the mourning process had been the same: women congregated in one part of the mosque, men in another.
When my mother died, women I had grown up with and knew well could only pass on messages of condolences through my sisters. The solace I sought from those women came via my female siblings, or occasionally from women I bumped into while opening Mum’s front door, before they disappeared into the back room. It wasn’t right or customary for me to be sitting among them. I had been ejected from that space a long time ago. When my body began to change at puberty, I had become a sexualised being and I could no longer intermingle between the sexes.
As I grew older, the divide became stronger. For someone who had self-appointed themselves the keeper of our people’s stories, I often grappled with a community that didn’t want to be documented. While in mourning, I yearned to hear these women’s nuanced memories of Mum, of the times they had together, before they were forgotten. And yet…
For Mum, the four walls of her home provided her space, sanctuary and only a limited understanding of the world beyond. She and my dad couldn’t read or write, in English or their mother tongue. A friend of Mum’s once revealed to me that she wished she could read a novel or the paper and momentarily get lost in another world, to forget her own worries. Mum didn’t watch television – she thought the people on the screen were watching her, too. Yet it was to this new Orwellian world that migrants like my parents arrived from rural Pakistan – my father in the 60s, my mother in the 70s – to urban England, where the skinheads were waiting for them. The matriarchal strength and spirit that emanated from inside those houses in the 80s – into a sea of control and patriarchy – lit the neighbourhood.
These migrant women created a parallel world for themselves. Their strength could be seen in their food, their ways of making, the shops they opened in their spare rooms, the local saving committees they formed. Mum discovered an ingenious ability to make upholstered footstools from milk crates, along with bedspreads and other embroideries – it was women’s work that created focal points for the local community. Many of these non-consanguineous aunts, along with their daughters,
surrounded Mum’s coffin as it lay open in the segregated substructure of our mosque.
For the past three years I had travelled from London, where I live, to Birmingham, where I grew up. First it was Dad. A growth on his pancreas along with dementia had diminished the invincible man we knew. He died in 2019. I had got used to staying the weekends in Birmingham. Now Mum was by herself, I began staying longer – three or four nights a week. When the pandemic started she was admitted to hospital with breathing problems. We thought it was her time. The hospital was in full lockdown and the conversations with the doctors in hazmat suits still haunt me. It was surreal, more Hollywood than the cosy British National Health Service.
But Mum survived. I brought her home. My siblings had Covid and my eldest sister was hooked up to a ventilator in ICU. It felt like the world was ending. There were seven deaths from Covid on adjacent streets – some were relatively young, others had lived longer lives, but they were all from our marginalised community. Communal mothers and fathers that had brought us up, mothers who had bathed us and whose kebabs and cooking were talked about. Now there were only stories filled with grief. The mosque was shut, so we prayed at home. When someone died, how could you choose just 10 mourners among these large multi-generational households? Who do you say no to?
I stayed in Birmingham then. For over a month I helped Mum in and out of bed, waited for her calls in the middle of the night, ran to put her on the commode. I made sure her oxygen machine was working. I was enjoying feeding her, combing her hair, caring for someone who had let me grow inside her. It was time to honour that source. I became her carer. Work and the rest of the world stopped. Eventually, she regained some strength and with the help of her Zimmer frame we got her back to sitting on the sofa. I started going back to London during the week as my siblings took over, returning at the weekends.
Sometimes fluid would accumulate in her hands, her face, and we would administer doses of the diuretic Furosemide by tablet – when that wasn’t enough, she went to hospital in the hope of a fast-acting intravenous hit. A few months later, she briefly fell into a coma. Her features were unrecognisable with oedema. On that occasion, the doctor gathered all of us together, telling us she had days left. “I can’t do anything,” he said. “If I give her more diuretics her liver will give up.” So we discharged her and brought her home. A few days later, mum was sitting up and pushing herself to use her Zimmer to get to the bathroom. Our local GP visited. He said: “I think it’s weeks, not months at this stage of congested heart failure.” And then: “She should have gone by now, but the love around her is what is keeping her here.”
By October 2021, Mum was bed-bound. The strength had gone from her legs. We had support for her care from community nurses and care workers. I was continuing to split myself between London and Birmingham. I would go to work every Monday morning. Each time I left, I would walk into her room, stroke her hair and kiss her head. Mum had her eyes closed; her words now slurred regularly. She had been saying, “When will they kill me and what time will they bury me?” She had already put aside the money for her funeral and told us to send her belongings to her sister in Pakistan. She declared the house was to be mine and she rid her arms of the bangles of gold in preparation, distributing them among her daughters. There were attempts to marry me off – she had already found a girl. That morning as I said goodbye, she looked up. “You say you’re going for the day, then you don’t come back.” I sometimes had to lie.
It was Wednesday, when I was in London, my sister called and shouted down the phone, “Get back here, Mum is unconscious.” Everything stopped and I walked out of a meeting and headed to the station. That day was the first of 21 that she spent in a coma – no food or drink would pass her lips. We just waited, watching the rhythms of her breath. Words of solace and wisdom came from my aunt in Pakistan. She said Mum was between two worlds, that the battle between the body and soul had begun. “The body can’t accept that it needs to let the soul go,” she said. I learned new understandings of our ways: how we don’t contemplate death or mortality, it just happens. It is sanitised and tucked away, and then we must try to bounce back. I remember being taken aback watching a colleague burst into tears. Her father had died and she had come back to work after a month’s leave. I thought, this is England with its stiff upper lip. It didn’t cry.
My aunt consoled me. She said the world was for the living and that I needed to be strong. The dead leave empty spaces – they return to the elements; are gobbled up, interred into the earth, leaving us with ritualised spots where we honour their memory. The Muslim cemeteries are busy in Handsworth, in Birmingham. I had once taken Mum to visit Dad’s grave. She would say that on Eid days he was waiting for us, looking out for us, as his neighbouring graves received visitors. On this occasion, Mum popped by to pay respects to a recently departed friend. She pushed her way forward, calling out, “Sister, congratulations on your new home.”
It was these rituals, these divergent ways of thinking, that kept me marvelling – how a grave is also a home, and needed to be decorated. Mum was preparing to move into her new home.
It was 21 days now. That day I lay in bed upstairs, listening to the women huddled in Mum’s room, praying, gossiping, sitting on her two double beds. That morning the chatter was particularly loud. I thought how my mum had always been there, mostly in the background, though lately very much in the foreground of our lives. She led, she guided. When she was conscious she was in control even from her bed, telling whoever was in the kitchen to feed her guests, to offer them fruit, mango Rubicon or guava juice, to cook them a chai on the stove. We knew she was leaving, but we were content with this set-up: the continuous visitors to her room, the way they sat with her in vigil, the incense burning, women reciting prayers and reading chapters from the Qur’an.
Just then the chatter stopped, and when I ran downstairs everyone was around her. Her chest had stopped heaving. I had heard of laboured breath – that, towards the end of life, the breath could stop and start again. This time the breath didn’t start again. It was New Year’s Day. Mum was gone. I closed her open mouth and tied a gauze bandage under her chin. I had seen death come close to Mum several times, then turn its back, but it had taken her now. Nothing prepares you for that moment.
It’s been a year now. Sometimes I catch myself feeling jealous of people who haven’t experienced this kind of loss yet, that their most important relationships remain intact. I catch myself thinking, “I should phone her now” – then realise I can’t. When I am struggling with a recipe, I think, “Mum would know how to cook this, let me ask her…” I still haven’t cancelled her mobile phone contract; £20 a month with unlimited calls. I don’t know what’s stopping me. She would call everyone, even for a minute, asking how they were, counting through the members of their household, from eldest to youngest.
As Covid restrictions relaxed, she would ask everyone to visit: “The disease has gone, why aren’t you coming? Come for my heart.” I can’t look at her picture. The iPhone pops up memories of her and I have to look away. They appear out of nowhere – the algorithm is in sync with my fears and grief. I feel her with me sometimes, when the bus arrives just as I turn up at the stop. I think she has sent it so I get to an appointment on time. On those occasions she is guiding all the harmony of the universe towards me. I smile and feel blessed.
The Go-Between: A Portrait of Growing Up Between Different Worlds by Osman Yousefzada (Canongate, £10.99) is out now in paperback. Buy it for £9.56 from guardianbookshop.com
