By Umme Kulsoom Arif, Esq.
I first attended a Sahiyo Activists’ Retreat in 2022, when virtual meetings were still the norm. Since then, I have been a member of the Activists’ Retreat planning committee, working on programming and logistics for in-person and virtual retreats alike. The 2025 Activists’ Retreat was my second in-person retreat. I’m not a retreat veteran by any means, but I truly thought I knew what I was getting myself into.
I did not expect the retreat to break me.
And to remake me.
Here’s the thing — I’m not much of a crier. Not out of some misguided sense of machismo, mind you, but because I’m very aware of my inability to stop. Crying makes me a snotty mess for a good while, even after I’ve recovered and calmed down — all swollen sinuses and long, desperate sniffles to get some air — and no one wants to be a snotty mess in public. And that’s not including the eyeliner — which, while fully capable of staining my eyelids, is very much not waterproof.
Reader, I cried.
The problem with loneliness — besides the obvious — is how, sometimes, you don’t realize how lonely you are until you aren’t. Like many survivors, my relationship with the Dawoodi Bohra community is… different. Sometimes full of resentment. A liminal space between fury and wanting better for the community that — ostensibly — helped raise me up.
After all, my parents are still card-carrying Bohras. My aunts and uncles, my cousins, my grandparents are too. For all my fury, my grief, my resentment, they are the home I turn to and the roots that lift me.
The more difficult it became to keep quiet, the harder it became to attend functions. The fewer functions I agreed to go to, the less my parents tried to make me. Eventually, I stopped going outright — no longer Dawoodi Bohra, except for my dad still paying my dues.
For a while, that was okay.
I’m not a loner. I have a community. A roommate who keeps me sane. Friends who empower me. Not being a part of the jamaat didn’t matter, because I’d built my own family of people who didn’t just accept me for who I am — they encouraged my chaos.
And yet, as I sat on that couch and connected with other Bohri activists about our unique food culture, on eating sweets as the first course of any meals eaten at a thaal, on the ways our parents convinced us to clean our plates, I found myself dreading Sunday.
Between deep discussions about toolkits and timelines, guest speakers bringing new developments in reconstructive resources, and button-making projects, there was joy. There was companionship, community, and authenticity.
The 2025 in-person Retreat was meant to bring Dawoodi Bohra activists together, but this one was — to me — special in its many intersections. From a pre-Retreat visit to the Carter Center and Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park to learn about human rights activism in politics and protest, to visits from community partners working to uplift survivors and prevent further violence, it suddenly felt like the Sahiyo community was growing — and was becoming more connected than ever.
A visit from a local OB/GYN helped to connect survivors to reconstructive resources, and brought new knowledge and hope about the accessibility of those reconstructive resources outside of Georgia. A discussion about inter-generational conversations — led by myself and two additional members of the planning committee — led to us learning about how older activists broke the cycle and encouraged our aunties and appas to listen and learn from younger voices.
So yeah, as Sunday approached, I was kind of dreading it.
More than a few of us cried that Sunday, as we reflected on the Retreat and the hopes we had for it. Amidst constant political turmoil and fears for the future of our work, the Retreat was just that: a step back, to rest and recover for the work that would always need to be done. And in that rawness, holding onto the community I found in a living room in Georgia, I started dreading the return to ‘normalcy.’
You don’t know how lonely you are until you aren’t.
It’s a good bruise to press on, is the thing. A pain worth undertaking, the way healing so often hurts. A space to come together and be authentically ourselves, to be us, not shards of a person pretending to be whole.
And so, at the end of the day, as we parted and returned to our families, jobs, and other responsibilities, we parted with plans to meet again and with full hearts, minds, and cups, ready for the work ahead.
Also with full suitcases.
I still wear my swag with pride.