But in a world that was becoming increasingly split into silos based on religion, race and ethnicity, I felt a pull to understand why a white woman would see something worth saving in brown immigrants from a world apart. I tried to take the Landlady's generosity at face value. Even as I comforted my children, I was at war with myself, suddenly questioning the motivations of the woman my family considered a fairy godmother. (Shaheen Pasha)īut the Landlady's legend no longer satisfied me. The author in the living room of the apartment her family rented from the Landlady. On those days, the Landlady's hazy visage became the balm that gave me strength to reassure my children that we still mattered. I sought to console my children, even as I withdrew into myself, tired of having to prove that I belonged in the country where I was born. My daughter began to suffer the adolescent taunts of class bullies who praised President Donald Trump's views on Muslims and declared us outsiders.
Chatterbox portage pa skin#
My son began to pay close attention to the brownness of his skin and how his white classmates' experiences were so far from his own. So, when they saw the angry faces on television, people brandishing Tiki torches, proclaiming loudly that immigrants were to be feared and Muslims were to be banned, they suddenly had new questions about their place in white America. Their parents were children of the West, born and bred in the U.S.
I remember the swish of housecoats as she walked by in slippers, and the distinct smell of beer mixed with tobacco.īut my children never really experienced that otherness. We knew her simply as "the Landlady." She had light hair and a round face split with wrinkles, but was otherwise featureless in my memory, a low rumbling voice that said little but was always kind. And it created a legend in our family about the woman who opened her home to us.Īs decades passed, her name disappeared from our collective memories. That offer was a turning point in our lives, saving us from homeless shelters and destitution.
In the hours before school let out, the stranger offered her spare bedroom, rent-free, to a homeless Pakistani woman and her three children. A friendly neighbor alerted her to my mother's presence. It was there on that stoop in 1984 that the elderly white lady with the raspy voice, who owned an apartment building a few doors down, found my mother. It was the worst feeling as a mother." The author, second from right, her mom and siblings as new immigrants to the U.S. We were going to have to go into a homeless shelter. And I realized that I didn't have a home to bring my children to. "The young Hasidic mothers with their children and all of the kind, Hispanic women in the neighborhood would walk past me and go into their homes. "I sat there watching the other families walking down the street," my mother recalled 33 years later, as we sat together drinking tea in the living room of my large Massachusetts colonial.
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