scrap metal queen.

It's countdown time again, three and a half months and then I'll be in my mother's car on the forty minute drive to our house, and I'll feel the rush that comes from being exhausted and ecstatic at the same time, make the customary joke about Bilawal house and Zardari's inconvenient blocking of the main road, and settle into life at home like I never really left again.

That car, which is more like a pile of scrap metal, is one of the many mechanisms I've somehow learned to use in order to screen people and decide whether they're worth the trouble of keeping or not. One of my friends jokingly referred to my mum as the scrap metal queen once, and we both laughed. I find it hard to be offended by it still, simply by virtue of the fact that she came over one day in her fancy car, with the driver and the works, and accepted those facts of our different lives with an ease that very few people have stomach to digest. She sat on the tiny stool in the kitchen while I poured chai out for her and myself, and told her how my prospects in life were probably better than her's since I can make some damn good chai,and that's what you need to find a great husband. The irony of our shared feminism lingered in the air, a kind of camaraderie that comes from knowing you're sailing in the same boat on a level that most people can't fathom. But most of all, I'm grateful to her and to my friends for making me feel comfortable in my own skin. It's not easy to be poor amongst the rich, and it's not easy to start telling your story from square one. Besides, I never want to tell anyone who feels the need to ask. How are you worth anything if you can't wait?

I have another anecdote about that car. It breaks down nearly every day, by the way. Flat tires, dead battery, something or the other. Sometimes I like watching people's reactions when I step out of that car with my sisters. We don't look like the sort of girls who'd step out of something that dilapidated, but in this case appearances become that hilarious inside joke that makes you laugh out loud at the world repeatedly. Everything is relative, especially appearances, but I digress. That car. When I finally saw him again, it wasn't a face to face encounter, but me staring down from the balcony watching him walk across the parking lot towards my mother's pile of scrap metal (which had a flat tire), and ask her if she needed help with it. And that's when my mother accidentally met him. I suppose that's when I thought he was a keeper too. Different worlds, and he didn't miss a beat there, nor did he ask questions. I guess I can forgive him for not being a chai connoisseur. 

As for that car, I have a feeling that long after these struggles are over, my mother will keep it just for sentimental value. It's a member of the family, 15 years is a long time to have anything. She can swear it listens to her, and isn't just an inanimate object. I don't know the details of their conversations, but I hope they like talking to each other.

I'll keep the people who've made me accept the way things are, and that I don't have to be ashamed.