change

Today at dinner I told my friends I don't understand atheism. I don't mind it, and I don't hold it against anyone, but I do not comprehend it. For a bit someone thought I was expressing my disdain for those who don't believe in any higher power, because in this place a lack of comprehension can be translated into intolerance. We like having our politically correct lines ready, just in case we may have to jump to the defense. So I explained, told her that's not what I was implying. Not an instance of boutique multiculturalism, merely a genuine inability to understand.
Somehow even my statements seem to come out as attacks these days, and I know I should probably learn not to cause offense. Cause offense to yourself if you must, trample all over your soul and sensibilities, but never those belonging to someone else. Those aren't yours to walk on.I try to stick fastidiously by those rules, and it's easier here where others play the same game.  Easier to listen, easier to appreciate, easier to learn. The power of dialogue and the importance of words.
But there's nothing more difficult than realizing that this place that I have treated for the past two years as a distant (but dear) love, partly out of my longing for home and partly because of the inevitably temporary nature of my time here, is slowly becoming the place I'm terrified of leaving and losing. We talk more about our bubble now that the bubble has completed half its life. Somehow, once this is gone I can see nothing but a looming disappointment in my interactions with people.
The ugly politics of privilege, the false convictions of being better, their world and then mine on peripheries, choosing love or choosing principles, the growing panic that the restlessness didn't stop when I had promised myself it would, the disgust with someone's illusions of self-importance, the shocks of reality.

"You cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all of the time.."
Sylvia Plath obviously knew a thing or two.

strange

That you can only tell all on the basis of fiercely protected anonymity, because God forbid if anyone knew/found out/realized, you'd be home/dead/no longer able to show your face in public. Funny how their lives seem to be one continuous party right out of the pages of Moth Smoke, but even funnier that Mohsin Hamid had a kind of anonymity lingering in the pages too- it was, after all, creation and not the self. They're self-destructive in the strange way where they know exactly where to stop short of actual annihilation.
I'm surprised when I think about it. You know it's alright, but you won't do it. You know it's absolutely one-hundred-and-fifty-percent-prohibited, and you'll jump on it faster than the time it takes to sneeze. Inspiring even. But the best part is the stories that come out of it.
I sit here in my small town and read about adventures on rickshaws, wild drunken nights, the funniest, the most heart wrenching of stories shared over plates of biryani. It's ridiculous to be jealous, but I am, a tiny bit. The world used to be a little more colorful when I was shrouded by anonymity.
This self-imposed censorship, the PG sensibility, this firangi air that makes you think so what. What's the big deal? Except that, it is. It's a huge fucking deal. You forgot because you ran away from it. And now I read their words with the curious eyes of a spectator waiting for the next scene, wondering how it's going to end. Wondering if I'd have done it differently. Or would I be part of the confirmists who turn their noses up in the air and run away with their tails between their legs, haw-haye-ing, but doing the prohibited in their own secretly anonymous way. The story-writers call them hypocrites. But look at us, we all are.
How does it all change? How do we become?