“Something I’ve learned through my life is that community is beautiful and transcendent. They wrote the novel out of a place of pain and isolation, but the finished work pays homage to makeshift families and alternative communities. When We Were Sisters is their first novel, but they know orphanhood intimately, having lost both parents before they turned 5 (their mother fled Jammu and Kashmir following Partition violence). Under the inconsistent guardianship of their frequently cruel but occasionally warm uncle, the siblings raise each other as painful and imperfect “sister-mothers.”Īsghar is a poet and screenwriter best known for their poetry collection If They Come for Us (about the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan), co-creating Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls, and recently serving as a writer and co-producer for Ms. He steals their father’s inheritance and their government checks, funneling it all to his two half-white sons in a wealthy suburb. The three are taken in by an uncle so terrifying that his name is redacted. His “coven” of children - the eldest, Noreen, followed by Kausar and Aisha - is plummeted into orphanhood and watches his funeral on VHS. In the opening pages of Fatimah Asghar’s When We Were Sisters, an immigrant father leaves home to get bunk beds for his three children and is murdered in the street. Photo-Illustration: The Cut Photos: Mercedes Zapata, One World at Penguin Random House
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