She gets along with her uncle well enough but she has also always feared him and what could happen to her and her sisters if the truth of their living situation was ever discovered. She is attracted to a boy in her high school who uses her pretty cruelly, and she also discovers that she feels fluid in her gender and in her sexual preferences. He can be generous but he is mostly neglectful of his nieces and seems to be spending the money they would have received as an inheritance for himself.Īs Kausar becomes a teenager, she grapples with not only rage and grief but also matters of her own sexuality.
As the girls grow up, their uncle becomes more and more of an unwelcome presence, and it is clear that he has a lot going on in his private life that he prefers to keep secret.
They receive no grief counseling (the story begins in the 1990s, when such a thing would have been new, I think, anyway), and Kausar throughout her childhood grapples with her grief and rage over what has happened to her family. But the three girls are pretty much left to their own devices. Uncle checks in on them and for a while a young Muslim couple in the building act as surrogate parents to the girls. He moves them from Pennsylvania to New Jersey and sets them up in a rundown apartment. Uncle’s wife wants nothing to do with the girls but Uncle (his name is always blacked out) feels some responsibility for them. The only family that Noreen, Aisha and Kausar have in the US is an uncle, her mother’s brother, who is married to (and separated from) a white woman and has two sons. Kausar’s mother has already been dead several years. Kausar, who is the narrator, is the youngest of three sisters and she is about 5 or six when her father is murdered on the street. It is a story about childhood grief and its long-term repercussions for the main character Kausar and her two older sisters. While similar events occur in When We Were Sisters, this is a work of fiction it is safe to say that Asghar’s personal history may have influenced or inspired their writing but this is not an autobiographical story.
Asghar’s parents died when Asghar was a child. Asghar’s parents experienced the chaos and violence of the partition of India and Pakistan and emigrated to the US, where Asghar was born. They have published poetry and a previous novel, If They Come For Us. Marvel series on Disney+ as well as creator of the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls. Fatimah Asghar (they/them) is a writer and co-producer of the Ms.
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