Death in the Family

A father's death brings a family together

When Mohammed Ahmad Ally dies, his family gathers for the religious rites and burial and recall the troubled relationship they had with him. He had lived by tradition and by his deeply held Islamic views, and his children, as he always said, were there to make him proud. A dominant and domineering figure in their lives, he had arranged the marriage of his elder daughter, Maryam, to the son of a good friend; had sent his only boy, Khalil, off to New York to study law; and had disowned his younger daughter, Dee, for marrying a Hindu. Even as friends and business colleagues remember Ally as kind and generous, his children and sister-in-law Hamida, his late wife's youngest sister, remember a different man, a man who had been authoritarian and bigoted. As the family open up to each other, his death becomes a transformative event for all of them.