the family group

I think about the family WhatsApp group a lot, how it's become a repository of our collective silences, a space where we avoid talking about the things that matter, like my cousin's divorce, or my father's illness. We post updates about our daily lives, mundane things like what we're eating for lunch, or a photo of a sunset from our travels, as if to say, I'm still here, I'm still alive. But sometimes, in the gaps between these posts, I sense a longing, a desire to connect, to talk about the things that are really going on. Like the time my aunt posted a recipe for biryani, and my cousin responded with a joke about how she always managed to burn the rice, and I thought, this is how we communicate now, through food and humor, anything to avoid the real conversations. I don't know, maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it feels like we're all just trying to find ways to be close, to be family, without actually having to do the work of being close. My mind starts to wander, I think about my childhood, about the eidgah near my house, the smell of haleem, the sound of the azaan, and I feel a pang of nostalgia, a sense of loss, like I'm mourning the death of a certain kind of intimacy. I get distracted, start thinking about other things, like the way Urdu words feel in an English sentence, like they're guests at a party, tolerated but not really welcome, and I think about how this is reflected in our family group, how we use English to communicate, but sometimes slip in Urdu phrases, like a secret handshake, a signal that we're still connected to our roots. I come back to the present, to the family group, and I think, maybe this is what it means to be a family, to be connected by these threads of language and culture, even as we're drifting apart.