Sad about Arifa aunty’s passing. She was Arifa aunty to me as a child although she didn’t really remain friends with my mother after she got posted away from Lahore College as Principal of Gulberg College. I remember it feeling incongruous to me as a grown up when I suddenly started seeing her at Faiz Ghar and Alhamra and places like that since few other of my mother’s friends had ambitions beyond doing what was required at their jobs and then hurrying home - even the single ones.
Maybe I deliberately found my way to spaces my parents were never part of in their youth (my mother because of lack of interest or perhaps internalized gender-based social expectations, my father because of his right leaning), so it was strange to see someone from my bachpan at LLF and Faiz Mela and other places we naturally gravitated to because of our angrezi schools upbringing.
The first time I saw her at one such place and she barely acknowledged me beyond a nod, perhaps asking after my father once but never about my mother, I felt strange, because I didn’t remember any active falling out; but as I aged I understood that can be more than enough.
It’s impossible, really, for us to understand the dynamics of our parents’s lives and friendships. All I remember are these amazing pictures from an event at Lahore College where Arifa Aunty is clowning around in front of my mother and half a dozen of her colleagues, all dressed to the nines (perhaps a convocation?), her arms in the air fingers joined, legs bent, holding what looks like a dance pose while my mother and her other colleagues are laughing wildly. I don’t have that picture, so I will make do with this more austere one, although even this evokes so much nostalgia: the Lahore College auditorium, the tea, the sweaters, the glasses, my mother and Arifa aunty, youthful and how I remember them from back then.