Who Will You Be?

A Daughter, a Father, and a Life Claimed Late

The father leaned back at dinner, watching his daughter carefully. His eyes didn’t stray from her face.

“Congratulations on getting into medical school,” he said.

“Medical school? But I didn’t apply to medical school, father.”

“I know. I applied for you, and you got in. Cairo Medical School. You start in three weeks.”

“But I don’t want to go to medical school, father.”

The father stood up forcefully and placed his large hands on the table.

“You got into medical school. You’ll go to medical school.”

His eyes never strayed from her face.

She looked down.

“Yes, father.”

And she went for two weeks, and then came home.

“I can’t, father. I just can’t.”

Her father stared at her sharply.

“Then you’ll become an engineer.”

She looked down again.

“Yes, father.”

And she became an engineer, an electrical engineer with a master’s degree.

And twenty years passed, one divorce, and two children later she called her father.

“I can’t, father. I just can’t.”

Her father couldn’t stare at her across an ocean over the phone.

“I want to become a cook, father.”

“What? And sell sandwiches,” he exclaimed. “What am I supposed to tell people?”

“I don’t care what you tell people,” she answered, surprised by her own words as they came out of her mouth.

“Then I disown you,” he declared as he hung up.

And become a cook she did, and a restaurateur, and a maker of the best hummus and homemade pita bread in that old resort town.

A few years later they talked.

Her father listened.

He smiled.

He told people. He told everyone what his daughter did.

He told so many people, they often told him to go away.

And despite it all, she became who she was always meant to be.

And he became the father he should have always been.

A story by Pemba Umoja