“Neither am I a eunuch type nor am I a family type. So who am I? You know any other person as alone as me?”
Mona Ahmed to Mr Walter
My love for my grandmother made me a teacher.
Till the end of her days, my grandmother took tutorials for young students to earn her daily bread. I spent one-sixth of my salary from my first job at the university in 2011 to buy Dayanita’s book on Mona Ahmed. My grandmother died later that year. The loss of my grandmother undid my mother. So when something tugged at the weak threads of our relation (like my insistent gender non-conformity), it broke. Both my mother and I had to decide between the “family type” and “eunuch type”. We chose different things. I moved out of my mother’s house a year later. She became the loneliest person I know. It has taken everything and more to repair this relation. I had to learn to offer my mother the very world I asked for myself. I saw in my mother’s sadness Mona’s loneliness. I learnt from Mona’s gumption that the family type and eunuch type needn’t be irreconcilable.
In Dayanita’s book, Mona tells us that when she was born her father threw a lavish party. Mona grew up to fall in love, have her heart broken, be abandoned by her family. She decides to adopt Ayesha and raise her as her daughter. To read this simply as her longing for family is to lay aside the complexity of maternal desire. Mona had given up on herself. Maternal desire offered her another self, one that allowed an untethering from the past. To love a child means to make a world possible for her, to not accept its terrifying condemnation to disaster or let mere longing become a home. It is an invitation to make, build, protect, shelter, risk, tear down, and build again.
Mona decides to raise Ayesha in a makeshift, preposterous family. This family of eunuchs isn’t a parody or an imitation or a lack. Mona seeks to suture with love where there might be betrayal and frustration. But Ayesha is a child. She chooses the comfort of Chaman’s home over Mona’s cemetery. Even then, Mona doesn’t make her daughter a possession. Mona’s freedom imagines her young daughter as equally free—to be persuaded, cajoled, but capable of choosing how she needs to be loved. When Chaman invites Mona home, Dayanita photographs the distance Mona keeps between herself and her child. Even when Mona touches Ayesha, it is only a soft graze of the calf, not a clichéd smothering. Perhaps this is the freedom that comes with not birthing our daughters and from separating gender from mother, reproductive autonomy from biological destiny. What is attached to the capacity of one gender—for women to be mothers—becomes with Mona a practice of freedom. Dayanita once told me that Mona to her was sometimes sister, at others a friend, brother, mother. Mona is many things at once because she refused to be what gender said she could be.
Mona’s maternal desire is endless. She offers shelter to homeless women, animals, even the dead. Against a radical insistence that some desires are more queer than others, it is the same love for Ayesha that desires a swimming pool for Muslim girls of the neighbourhood in her compound. Mona wants an abundant world for everyone but she offers it first to the abandoned who chose to be around her. She builds worlds refusing its facts: trans people cannot legally adopt, the dead are to lie austerely, a house should have a door that can be locked. Mona insists on love while refusing its rules; she is convinced of her own lovability and that of the destitute around her. She begins on her whims and insists on her dreams.
Yet Mona’s isn’t a simply replicable mode of being. When my mother had her first epileptic seizure after contracting Covid-19 last year, she went back to the day ten years ago when her mother died. Then, she had to overcome this loss and return to work and the stuff of living. Now, all grief broke loose. As I became child-mother to her, I found myself unable to wade through the thick blood of history. I insisted that she get better, inhabit the proper ways of the undying. As a year of my mother’s sickness comes to a close, I am learning to surrender to her disability as another freedom. But mostly I fail. It is too much. Dreamwork is too much work. And it is lonely work. I do not have Mona’s heart or imagination, or Dayanita’s surrender, to reveal these. Mona is alone, but she is also singular. And it is as testament to Mona’s singularity that Dayanita’s book is so precious.