Wings on Her Ankles: Remembering Sonnu Rahman

Heer Cheema Heer writes a poignant memorial for her grandmother Sonnu Rahman, who had wings on her ankles and taught countless young people to fly.

From some distant corner in the drawing room, a loud voice:

“Heero Peero! Come give me puppa.”

Soft curls on her head. The rings on her fingers, chinking. That smile. I am Sonnu Rahman’s youngest grandchild—if only by two minutes. By the time my twin brother, Hussain, and I appeared on the scene, my Nani had lived lifetimes. It would take me years, and still I’m piecing together who she was. Her childhood in Government College where her father, G.D. Sondhi, was the first Indian principal before the Subcontinent was divided; her deep love for Lahore, which she only left for the love of her life, my Nana, Abdul Rahman Khan, with whom she built a home in Mardan; the loss of her beloved Abdul, her sister, her mother. She lived through all this, and at 60 years old she would begin her life anew. Teaching. She returned to Lahore, and settled into her new home, Bamboo Lodge (named so, for her parents’ home in Subathu, India). And when we were just two months old, still red and small, she accompanied my brother and me, from Cambridge, the city of our birth, to her home, in the city she loved.

There was always a restlessness about her—when I was little I suspected that if I lifted the ends of her shalwar, I would find wings on her ankles. She spent her youth riding, golfing, swimming, running, and then later, driving around Lahore fearlessly well into her eighties. Of course, her fondness for nicknaming wasn’t reserved for people alone; at one point she would zoom through the city in her beloved car, christened Lovey Silver. And even when she shifted to Mardan, with its tight web of unfamiliar customs, she introduced all sorts of mischief. She would play badminton and table tennis with the children, take walks with my grandfather, and soon these forms of play trickled into the houses of family all around. She sewed, taught others to sew and knit, learnt Pashto fluently, and she read and read some more. That same restlessness—a refusal to sit still, a love of movement and growth—carried into her vocation.

She spent nearly thirty years teaching History, during which she taught at Bloomfield, Aitchison, LGS JT Boys, and longest of all at LACAS, where she taught for twenty-eight years. I never witnessed her in the classroom, never saw her as a teacher in that setting. But at home, history came alive in her vivid retellings of the Tudors—especially Henry VIII—and in the particular fascination she reserved for the Mughal Emperor, Jahangir, whose mausoleum, near the Ravi, she loved to visit. She made the past feel lived-in and close. And it feels fitting that, though I was never her student, I have been taught by several of hers—a testament to the legacy she has left behind.

As I continue to piece together the vastness of her life—all that she endured and embraced—in order to find my footing in this sweep of history, I find myself returning to those small moments, where she was just my Nani.

As I’ve already suggested, she had a real sense of play. At the age of six, when I was prone to withdrawing into myself, and sidling into a dark corner, she would tease: “Oho! Tipusski aa gya hai! Darling, you have to expel the Tipusski!” It was like a magic trick: weaving a spell, gathering just a touch of laughter and a dash of well-deserved teasing, and suddenly she had transformed something dark into something light. Looking back on the legend of the Tipusski, a darkling who would possess children, I see what a gift it was: she gave me a language to encounter myself, to overcome myself, when I had none.

And, as it turns out, she gave me the words to face much bigger things. When I was only a little bit older, on a family trip to Nathia Gali, my penchant for eavesdropping got me into trouble. I was jarred to discover that hell existed—and that I might be headed there. She was patient. She listened. She offered me no certainties, only her own faith: that surely God was merciful, the universe kinder, and that all we can do is be gentle with each other.

There was always a restlessness about her—when I was little I suspected that if I lifted the ends of her shalwar, I would find wings on her ankles.

She was light itself, something warm and golden, a fire around which stories are shared, a light where everything near grows and flourishes. Hussain and I would run around Bamboo Lodge, spying the countless cheese toasts and cold coffees cycled through her dining room, where her students gathered with their notebooks open, pens ready, eyes fixed on her. At twelve, when I began writing, I wrote for her. She would read all my poems, and then urge me to write more. I shared them all with her.

In 2016, when we knew she had dementia, I wrote a poem, that I could not share with her, but which I return to now, almost ten years later, to remind myself:

“…though I do not know all the women that dance before the fire—

Limbs heavy with life, unraveling time as they go round and round together—

They are all her

And I will know them when gardens are arid wastelands

I will know them like the soil beneath my feet, ever present

Ever present.”

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Heer Cheema 

Heer Cheema is a Rhodes Scholar and MPhil student at the University of Oxford, where she researches 20th-century Urdu print cultures and girlhood. She previously studied History at LUMS and also writes poetry, which deepens her engagement with histories of women’s writing. *Note: I want to thank everyone for being so generous in sharing their memories of Nani, and a special thank you to my aunt, Maryam Khan, for painting such a vivid picture of what it meant to grow up with her in Mardan. All these shared memories have returned some of my Nani to me.

If you would like to share stories of your own, the family invite you to share them on this memorial website, in remembrance of her life:

https://www.forevermissed.com/sonnu-rahman/about All photographs in this article are used with permission. Special thanks to: Hussain Irshad Cheema.