Searching for the Woman Who Saved My Immigrant Family from Homelessness

We all have family legends and lore, and one of our favorite types of stories at Narratively is when a writer sets out to uncover the truth behind them. This poignant Narratively Classic from Shaheen Pasha feels even more relevant today than when it first ran. As you head into what we hope is a restful weekend, we’re re-featuring this story and making it free to all.

Exhausted, my mother sat on the stoop of one of the many four-story brick buildings that dotted our old neighborhood of Borough Park, Brooklyn. It was cold, but she was too tired to care. She had dropped my siblings and me off at school and, in the few hours that remained before our return, she had to weigh her options carefully. Her present circumstances were bleak – jobless, penniless, with three children, and homeless after being turned away by all of her community acquaintances who didn’t have the room, money, or patience to put up with the charity case that our family had become.

“I sat there watching the other families walking down the street,” my mother recalled 33 years later, as we sat together drinking tea in the living room of my large Massachusetts colonial. “The young Hasidic mothers with their children and all of the kind, Hispanic women in the neighborhood would walk past me and go into their homes. And I realized that I didn’t have a home to bring my children to. We were going to have to go into a homeless shelter. It was the worst feeling as a mother.”

It was there on that stoop in 1984 that the elderly white lady with the raspy voice, who owned an apartment building a few doors down, found her. She had been alerted to my mother’s presence by a friendly neighbor who remembered my mother from better days. In the hours before school let out, the stranger offered her spare bedroom, rent-free, to a homeless Pakistani woman and her three children. That offer was a turning point in our lives, saving us from homeless shelters and destitution. And it created a folklore-like legend in our family about the kindly woman who opened her home to us.

But as decades passed, her name disappeared from our collective memories. We knew her simply as “the Landlady.” She had light hair and a