"The Shoes My Father Wore"

I was 12 when I first saw my father cry.

Not the kind of crying you see in movies—no sobbing, no tears running down his face. It was a quiet cry. His back was turned to me, sitting on the edge of a thin mattress in our small room in Karachi, clutching a photo of a plane. I didn’t say anything. I just stood there, silently, realizing that grown-ups could break too.

That was the day he was denied a visa—for the fourth time. He had dreams, big ones. Not for himself, but for us. He wanted to go to Europe, work as a cleaner, save enough to send money back, maybe someday bring us along.

He had worn the same pair of shoes to every embassy visit—black, cracked at the heels, with a stitched-up toe. “These are lucky,” he’d say with a crooked smile.

But luck didn’t come.

Three years later, my father finally made it. Not legally—he crossed borders hidden in a truck, survived cold nights, hunger, and fear. But he got there. Germany.

And he kept his promise. Two years after that, I landed at Frankfurt Airport with my mother and younger brother. It was winter, colder than anything I’d ever known. My jacket was too thin, my shoes too small. But I was here.

A new country, a new life, and a new burden: learning how to fit in.

School was brutal. I couldn’t speak German. Kids laughed at my accent, at my clothes, even at the lunch I brought from home. I missed my friends, my language, the sound of the azaan at dusk, the chai on the corner shop.

But my father—he never let me quit.

He’d come home from cleaning offices at 2 a.m., his hands cracked from chemicals, his back bent. Yet every morning, he’d wake me up at 6, hand me a lunchbox, and say,

"We didn’t come here to survive. We came to rise."

I studied. I worked. I translated my mother’s hospital forms, I taught my brother how to ask for water in German, I cried silently in bed when I couldn’t understand my math homework.

But slowly, I learned.

I made one friend, then two.

I started helping other immigrant kids in class.

By 17, I was tutoring German to refugees who had just arrived—kids like I once was.

At 19, I got a scholarship to study engineering.

The night I got my acceptance letter, I came home to find my father asleep in his chair, still in his work uniform.

I knelt beside him and said, “Baba, I got in.”

He opened his eyes slowly, smiled, and said just one thing:

“Then every step I took was worth it.”

A few months later, he gave me a pair of shoes—polished, sturdy, new. He looked at them and said,

“These are yours now. You’ll walk farther than I ever could.”

And I will.

For him.

For us.

For every immigrant chasing the impossible, with cracked heels and unbreakable hearts.

moral.

Sometimes, the longest journeys start with a broken pair of shoes and a dream that refuses to die.