Sisters Lost and Found.
In 2016, journalist Arifa Akbar’s older sister, Fauzia, mentally ill, died of Tuberculosis ( TB). This March my sister, Julie, died of Covid. Eleven years older than me, she too was mentally ill. In the aftermath, I am awash with guilt, sorrow, regrets and inchoate ire. A disquieting, unanswerable question often catches me by the throat: Why did one sister survive and thrive and the other one crack and crash? Akbar recognises my turmoil. She is still haunted by those same thoughts: ‘You can’t quite understand why. I felt guilty that I could not save her, that our experiences in the same home were so different, that we turned out so different. Guilt too, that I had done something gravely wrong. Guilt about everything I have achieved’. Our sisters were forsaken by the medical profession and disconnected from their inherited cultures.
After Fauzia was buried, Arifa saw her apparition on the street and at home. At times ‘the flowery smell of her skin’ rose off the furniture. Her mother saw weird markings on the wall and heard sobs in the room where her sick daughter had lain. I’m envious of them. I’ve had no ghostly, peripheral sightings. Julie left the earth without a backward glance.
Akbar has now written a searching book Consumed, to make sense of what happened. Vivid, truthful and lyrical, she relives family psychodramas, probes her own tangled, tortuous relationship with Fauzia, interrogates experts who misrepresent and fail fragile females, and curves imaginatively into depictions of sisters in art and literature. Readers will be emotionally overcome and intellectually exhilarated by this tour de force. I was.
Akbar started off as a reporter, became The Independent’s arts correspondent, and then book editor. She is currently the Guardian’s theatre critic. Unobtrusively and impressively, she’s become an unlikely member of the magic circle of mostly white, Oxbridge, privileged keepers of culture.
We met nineteen years ago in the offices of the Independent. She was young, had tousled black hair, a slender, sculpted face and hypnotic, dark eyes. The newspaper industry back then was taking its first, baby steps towards diversity. I told her I was delighted to see another brown face in that room. She became my brilliant friend.
We have very different back stories, personalities and passions: I‘m into politics, she is immersed in the arts; I am an extrovert, she is introspective, contemplative. During our many entertaining, gossipy or serious conversations, we sometimes mentioned our families, wispy words that came and went. Consumed made me realise that you can know someone and hold them dear, yet not know them at all. There are startling parallels between our sisters, our lives and our inner selves. At times, I felt ventriloquised. (Just as striking are the divergences. More of those later.)
Arifa is from Pakistan, I’m from Uganda. We are both of Muslim Asian heritage, both migrants who grew up in troubled and insecure families. Her father, Muhammad, and mine, Kassam, were far older than their wives. The marriages were rancorous, doomed. Arifa remembers ‘hearing their suddenly raised voices’, feeling rising dread and ‘baleful silences [that] hung between them.’ Me too. In the early sixties, Muhammad lived in London with his then wife, Lise, an older German woman he loved deeply. Relatives tricked him into returning to Pakistan and got him hitched to Bela, a woman he would never love. Kassam often deserted us and spent months in Poole, Dorset. Did a woman there have his heart? English is Arifa’s second language, my fourth.
We South Asians are programmed to protect in-group interests. Unguarded talk about domestic strife, abuse, self harm, cruelty, unhappiness, suicide, alcohol and drug addictions, bring shame to the clan and community. ‘Silence is golden’, shouted one, now deceased, uncle as he tore up my autobiography, Nowhere to Belong. Close relatives cut me off after The Settler’s Cookbook, my second memoir, was published in 2008. Arifa may well be vilified by insular moralists, but, vitally, her mother is supportive and wants the truth to be told. My late, fearsomely honest mother, Jena, was also a staunch ally. When a Muslim neighbour told her to control her ‘crazy, shameless’ daughter, Jena replied: ‘She tells the truth, you sleep on a bed of lies. Your husband keeps a mistress. Shame on you for keeping dirty secrets.’. Our mums did not teach us to cook or run the household. Domesticity was a cage. They wanted us to be free and fly high.
Her sister’s death in June 2016, left Arifa suspended ‘between shock and disbelief.’ Fauzia had been in and out of hospitals for years. The family expected her to be back. But the TB, a terrible ( and curable) disease, was diagnosed too late. On that tragic day, at London’s Royal Free hospital, as ‘blood had started to pour into Fauzia’s brain and collect in a fatal haemorrhage’, she’d had ‘no one to hold her hand or comfort her on outward journey from life’. Julie was tubed up in a Covid ward as her life ebbed away, surrounded only by strangers. One defensive doc said Fauzia had been ‘unreliable’. I got a reputable psychiatrist to see Julie in 2005. He said she was beyond help. After being on medication for years, she was emotionally ‘calcified’. It was as if he was talking about a car that could not be repaired.
Our sisters could have been saved. In her last years Julie was in a wheelchair, vacant eyes, fag in hand, her memory fading. Once upon a time, she was beautiful, glamorous, part of the hip set in Notting Hill, into Trotskyism, books and art. Arifa says her sister loved books too and ‘ …followed fashion, dyed her hair, had swanky Saturday jobs in Hampstead’.
Arifa and I are wordsmiths, our sisters were bold artists. How, I asked Arifa, did our raggedy, dysfunctional households yield creative daughters? She thinks ‘ …art become more important when you live in desolate homes. People assume that art does not matter to people on the margins. But the imagination offers an escape, enrichment.’
Sadly, art could not save our sisters from inner torment and collapse. Additionally, in our cultures, the mentally ill are thought to be cursed or disruptive. Most are feared not tended. Their complex needs are not met.
Fauzia got the attention she craved when she was physically unwell; Julie became totally dependent, maybe that too was a test of love. Fauzia got into top art colleges, made exquisite painted and embroidered artworks but still fell into repetitive crises. As my sister’s mental health deteriorated, there was no more art. I once sent her a paint set. She did one still life of vividly coloured fruit. Then retreated into an unreachable place. Is that darkness, what Prince Harry calls, ‘genetic pain’ in me and Arifa?
Our two families had their own, very particular tragedies. Fauzia, the firstborn, was spurned and abused by her father. When she was little, he made her mouth bleed, shook her, pulled her hair, tore up a much praised school painting. His sustained persecution broke her. To Arifa, his favourite, he gave her limitless love and encouragement: ‘I sensed what was going on, wallowed in the favouritism. Seeing her reacting in such a destructive way was hard. I so wanted her to be my big sister. She made me her enemy when I tried to be a friend’. They were periods of real closeness, and also, some disturbing reflective behaviours. Arifa intermittently suffers from eating disorders, disorders which had ravaged Fauzia. ‘Is this because I don’t want to let go of my sister? The book has helped settle some anxieties.’
.
Julie was my father’s favourite. When one business gamble succeeded- a rare thing- He impulsively sent her to study in England. The money ran out and she was thrown out of school. She was captivated by the the swinging sixties and he became bitter, unforgiving. Her photographs were taken off the walls. Born eleven years after Julie, I was unexpected and unwanted. We never bonded. As I grew up, Papa got intolerably puritanical, constantly carping about my clothes, pop music, my friends, even my teachers. Sisters, observes Arifa wryly, ‘carry the burden of family dysfunctionality.?’
Unlike Arifa and Fauzia, Julie and I have few shared memories. We had to rebuild our relationship after I migrated to the UK, in 1972. At first this reunification was full of the joys of discovery. She took me to galleries, taught me about French existentialists. Joan Baez and European cinema. It was exhilarating.
Julie began to show signs of instability in the mid eighties, just as my career was taking off. Sometimes she sent viperish letters accusing me of not caring about her. I did, too often, get caught up in my London whirl. That was selfish, but I loved and deeply cared about my sis. Arifa consoles me; ‘ When I started uni in Edinburgh, I went off, left her, to live my own life. That felt to Fauzia like a betrayal ’. Interestingly, later Fauzia went off to live in Edinburgh for a while. Fauzia at times was vicious and angry with her sister- in one part of the book Arifa describes how she was looking through some … pictures of her with message full of praise and pride and hen DEMON Julie never asked me about my work, but repeatedly said I was pretty or beautiful. This was what she had over me- when we were young everyone said she was the pretty one I the brainy one. She lost that and lost almost all of herself.
So what do we What do we do with those feelings now? Be there for each other, fill the sis shaped holes in our hearts.
I newspaper 10th June 2021