Say you’ll Wait for Me, A Memoir

Being the owner of vast stretches of land in certain areas of Pakistan meant you could marry the most beautiful girl of any nearby village, a devout Muslim woman from an affluent family born of a traditional Hindu caste and the eldest daughter of a neighboring landlord. Looking back in writing this now, I think about all the people who were supposed to care about me who had bad intentions related to why they claimed to welcome me as an American, never bothering to fill me in as to the reasons why I traveled to Pakistan. I found myself in a strange new land left to raise Sameer and Asad without a father. Thrust into a world of strangers disguised as well-meaning relatives extending a hand to greet me as a foreigner from the United States, I found myself standing in the middle of a deserted field trying not to see Daniyal in new relatives offering flowers and Muslim prayers of protection in Urdu. I was no longer called by my birth name Samantha but morphed into a Pakistani woman known only by my Muslim name, Kasra Say You’ll Wait for Me is my first book based on a true- to life experience of meeting and marrying an immigrant from a rural village area of Ganish, Pakistan. As I struggle to fit in with a large, eccentric joint family as a foreigner from Louisiana who knows next to nothing about Pakistani customs, haphazard attempts at blending in with my Muslim family turn into a series of cultural blunders and missteps. Secretive in-laws appear as well-meaning family members offering Muslim prayers, revealing a series of family betrayals and secrets surrounding an ongoing legal case in Karachi, Pakistan involving the acquisition of ancestral property. A territorial dispute in Karachi, Pakistan spirals out of control in the form of an ongoing family feud. What remains of my time in a rural village area of Ganish is a true story comprised of people who lied to me, and a broken promise of a happy life in a foreign country that existed in a past memory. The beginning of our financial issues began more than five years ago over a valuable piece of property in Karachi. The most tragic part of my real-life experience about marrying a Pakistani wasn’t that years later I had come to find out my immigrant husband’s ancestral land had been stolen from him and he could no longer return to his birth country. I prayed for the land to be returned to its rightful owner. Say You’ll Wait for Me