There was one oscillating fan in our apartment in Karachi in the summers. It pointed at my father. My mother cooked at the gas range eight feet from it, eight inches from the open flame, in 95° heat, in cotton kameez that was wet through by the time the rice was done. I was nine when I noticed. I asked her, in English so my father would not understand, why the fan was for him. She said: "He works." Then she said: "He works outside."
My father was a civil engineer. He sat in a Toyota with the AC on for the forty minutes to his office and the forty minutes back. The office had central air. My mother taught at a school that had a single ceiling fan in the headmistress’s office. My mother’s body, by all available measures, was working harder. The fan was for him because the fan was always for him. The fan had no relationship to who was hotter.
I went to college in Boston in 2003. The first time I lived alone in an apartment in summer I bought a window unit on day three. I bought it before I bought a couch. My roommate, a white American woman from Wisconsin, said: "You really like to be cold." I said: "I really like to choose where the air goes." She did not understand. The script she had grown up with did not include a memory of a mother in a kitchen in cotton kameez with a fan pointed at someone else. Mine did.
My father is 72. He is still cold. He still gets the fan. My mother is 68 and has been retired for three years and she keeps the thermostat at 79 because, she says, anything cooler is wasteful. I have asked her why she does not turn it down when he is not home. She does not have an answer. I think the answer is that the calibration of what is normal in that house was set in 1981 and she has not had a reason to recalibrate.
I have a four-year-old son. The fan in his room is for him. The fan in my bedroom is for me. The fan in my husband’s office is for him. We have three fans. I bought all of them. The labor of being the household climate manager is not a phrase that exists in Urdu, as far as I know, but it is what my mother did her entire adult life. She did it well. She did it alone. She is the reason there was a fan at all, and the reason it was always pointed away from her, and the reason I noticed at nine, and the reason I will not.
My son is too young to understand the politics of fans. He thinks the fan in his room is his because he is small and small things get fans. When he is older I will tell him about the fan in Karachi. I will tell him what the air in a room means, who points it, who pays for the unit, who decides what counts as comfortable. I will tell him because his sister, who will be born in November, is going to ask why one room is cooler than another. I would like her to have an answer that is not "your father is cold."
My mother called yesterday. It is May and Karachi is already 102°. She has put a fan in her own kitchen. She says it is small and not very good. She says she bought it for herself and she keeps it pointed at herself when she is alone in the room. She is 68. She has been waiting to deserve that fan since 1981. I cried after the call. I am crying writing this. The fan in her kitchen is everything.