My father froze when he saw his professor washing cars.It was 1962, and Zafar Nomani was a visiting teacher at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., newly arrived from India on a fellowship.One day, riding past a church car wash, he spotted his professor among the people scrubbing down cars beside his students.For the rest of his life, my father treasured that moment."I saw the dignity of labor," he would tell us.More than six decades later, on this Labor Day weekend, my family is mourning my father, who died in early August at the age of 93 in our adopted hometown of Morgantown, W.V.
And as I negotiate new relationships with his power washer, his weed trimmer, his tools and the daily chores that he quietly managed, pushing a cart at our local Kroger on Patterson Avenue, I find myself reliving – and rewriting – the story of my life with him.For most of my life, I thought I was challenging the patriarchy.Now I realize I grew and became the investigative journalist that I am because of the patriarch in my life.Asra Nomani celebrates her birthday with her parents, Zafar and Sajida Nomani, and her brother, Mustafa, and their friends in Piscataway, N.J., in the early 1970s.
(Nomani Family)I arrived in America from India in the summer of 1969 as a four-year-old girl and I grew up in the 1970s with feminism, women’s rights and Gloria Steinem, who died this week at 92, just a year younger than my father.I learned to interrogate male power, religious authority and the restrictions that societies imposed on women.I still believe in the work of empowering women and girls.But in my father's absence, I have come to understand something I failed to fully appreciate while he was alive: the quiet and largely invisible power of a good patriarch.I spent much of my life believing my strength came from resisting my father’s authority; after his death, as I grieve his absence from this world, I recognize that much of my strength, intellect and purpose came from the invi...