Neurodivergent (Headcanon) Alley: Saira (We Are Lady Parts)

 

*Saira-related spoilers.*

I love seeing wildly different autistic-coded characters just click onscreen. Aziraphale & Crowley, Ted & Beard, Elphaba & Galinda. On paper, they seem like they’d drive each other bonkers, but you see them together, and somehow, it just works. That’s what Saira and Amina are like on We Are Lady Parts.

I’ve already talked about Amina, my dorky, anxious, fluttery beloved. One of the show’s chief joys is watching her address her struggles and fight through them to become radically, beautifully herself. Through that, she gets a lot of help from Saira, who’s also deeply flawed and struggling but in almost entirely opposite ways.

If Amina is nervous and indecisive, Saira is intense and driven. She eats, sleeps, and dreams Lady Parts—not just the band itself, but her vision of what the band represents. She’s penned a manifesto about what they stand for, and even as she wrestles to achieve her various ambitions for the band, she doesn’t want to deviate from her ideals. Whether it’s preparing for a big audition or trying to earn enough cash to pay for studio time, her bandmates are sometimes unable to reach her through her single-minded focus. It’s always the band. Everything else comes second.

That intensity extends to her decision at the start of the series that their sound is missing a lead guitarist. Regardless of what Bisma, Ayesha, or Momtaz think of that, Saira has made her mind up: she needs a lead guitarist. The guitarist auditions are a wash? She’s undeterred. Reconnecting with Amina makes Saira decide that she’s the one, even though she hasn’t heard Amina play since primary school. Amina doesn’t want to be in the band because she has crippling stage fright and gets violently ill if she tries to perform in public? Doesn’t matter—Saira’s sure she can find a way around that.

Saira reminds me a little of the Twelfth Doctor in that she does the caring thing more often than she says the caring thing. She’s prickly and guarded, and her cold fury isn’t something to be messed with. She’s not all that good with touchy-feely stuff or vulnerability, and that can come back to bite her—a big part of why her relationship with Abdullah falls apart is because she simply can’t admit how much she likes him and wants to have him in her life. Yes, she frequently puts the band before him, and that’s a factor, but when he tries to get close to her, she goes cold or freezes instead of opening up. We’re talking about a woman who flicks her casual guy’s nose as a way of declaring them an “official” couple.

But despite her spiky demeanor, Saira is actually very loving. She has a difficult relationship with her mother and has never recovered after losing her sister to cancer, but her bandmates are her family. It’s something she builds for them. In season 1, she never stops trying to help Amina overcome her stage fright—not just because she wants Amina in the band, but because she knows the band is good for Amina and Amina deserves to let herself be heard. She supports her band sisters and wants them to be the best versions of themselves, whatever that might look like. It’d be easy to look at Saira and think she’s just bad with people, like her completely awkward exchanges with her superfan Taifa in season 2, but really, the circle of people she’s comfortable with is just very small. Even if she isn’t a soft person and being vulnerable is hard for her, she badly wants to show up for the people she cares about.