🩸 Don’t You Know Your Daughter Is Mentally Ill?

My mother came to me like she always does—

Soft words.
A warning tucked into her voice.
A plea disguised as concern:

“Don’t upset your father.”

And I smiled.
Not out of peace.
Not out of understanding.
But out of something colder.
Something earned.

“I understand now,” I told her.
“We’re traitors. We’re cowards.
And here I was—thinking we were descended from heroes and assassins.
What a dumbass I was.”

She looked at me like I had lost my mind.
But I had never seen more clearly.

Everything they ever told me about Ismailis—
About our dignity, our courage, our legacy—
Lies.

Not because brave individuals didn’t exist.
But because the spirit they romanticize is dead.

We are not the stuff of legends.
We are the stuff of whispers.
Of locked jaws and diverted eyes.
Of don’t make trouble.
Of keep your head down.
Of what will the Jamaat think?

We are the silence that follows every injustice.
We are passivity dressed up as peace.
Survival instinct parading as wisdom.

My mother told me my mistake was grouping people together.
That time changes things.
That you act differently depending on the era you're in.

But I shook my head.

Time doesn’t change your spine.
It only reveals whether you had one to begin with.

Yes—you do what you can.
Yes—in different ways.
But you do something.
And if I don’t see it?
It’s because it isn’t there.

Later that evening, she looked at the image I created—
The one with fire and shadow.
The one that bled truth.

She paused.
Then said:

“It’s powerful.”

I didn’t thank her.
I didn’t soften.
I just smiled—that same cold smile—and said:

“Don’t you know your daughter is mentally ill?”

A reference, of course,
To what my father called me—
When I asked him to write a letter.
To take a stand.
To remember where he came from.

He called me unstable.
Emotional.
Radical.

But they always call it illness
When they no longer recognize the sound of courage.
They call it instability
Because to them, stability means silence.

And that’s fine.
Let them believe it.
Let them repeat it.

It’s easier than admitting the truth:

I stood.
And they didn’t.

And now?

Now you tell me I am not your kind.
That I am not Ismaili.
That I don’t belong to you.

Even after I converted to Zoroastrianism,
I was still proud to be from an Ismaili family.
Even then, I held on.
I thought I could honor both—faith and blood.

But tonight, through your actions,
You pulled the wool from my eyes.

And I see it now—so clearly.

I am not the descendant of heroes.
I am not the descendant of assassins.

I am the descendant of cowards and liars.

And that ends with me.

I may not come from heroic lineage—
But my children will.

I will build the courage they never had—
From ash and fire.

Because now I realize:

There was no honour in Ismailism to protect.
Only silence to inherit.
And I refuse.