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.

When I was 17 I met this woman. I decide she was one of the most amazing human beings I had ever encountered in my life, and I was right because she changed my life. When I look back at it, her time here probably changed her into the person I met. And then she changed me.
It's so strange because sometimes we forget what success means, and we start defining it in terms of how much we have. But then there are people who remind us that success is the number of people whose lives we touch and change, like magic that they had never anticipated but were grateful for nonetheless. She was the one person, apart from my mother, who taught me the meaning of strength.

We forget how many people we have to thank for the blessings we have everyday.
May each and every one of you find all the happiness in the world, because all of you certainly contributed to mine.

There's a guy sitting on a bench outside the creperie. He's been playing his guitar and singing for the past hour. I can't hear him, but he's performing with a lot of passion. I'm a little envious.

"Think about it rationally, practically. And with your head, always with your head. Think about what's best for you, and stop being fooled by your heart into stupidity that you will always regret."

"Then it's not love, is it?"

"Love dies. We'll end up replacing it with something else anyway. Companionship, or something like it."

"Then did you lie to me before, or are you lying to me now?"

If she was thinking with her head, she would probably walk away and never look back. But alas.

If being broken is so easy, then why do we not treasure the hearts entrusted to us like we do the baubles in our possession?

I need to get my story straight.

Is this my battle to fight? Is it yours? Who gets to decide what's important and what isn't, or for that matter, what is entirely inconsequential? You hand me my priorities, you ask me to abide by them, and you want me to make you proud. You want a good daughter, wife, mother, sister, woman. You want me to free my thought, but only enough so I can give my unborn children a "good" upbringing, but you warn me not to go astray.
You define my rules, you tell me at the end of it all that I belong to a place and, because I have to return, I mustn't become too much of a stranger. Wisdom comes with age, they tell me every time. They tell me I don't know enough, I haven't seen enough. Here you are, they say, here is you in black and white. You will be nothing more, and nothing less, and we will love you for it.
Then there's them. They told me I could sleep with whoever I want, because it's my body. That I could parade around naked if I wanted to. That I could get fucked up and fucked and wake up in the morning and not regret it in the least. That you can discover your sexual identity if you step out of your heteronormative prisons. That we are social constructs, that nothing exists beyond our perceptions and the limits that define us. That I owe so much to this world, but not to the people who told me I had to be this or that, so I could flip them off and go on. Free giant fuck yous, and then some for the road. All the while I listened, bemused, interested, never entirely sure. Case studies, all of us to each other.
I get emails from the Feminist Collective, and wonder if I'll ever end up going, if I'll ever fight for the rights they think I should have, but probably don't.
I don't know where to begin that conversation, because I already have another set of rights, from another place and another time.

At the end of it, there's nothing but guilt. A little bit of disgust about my strange existential crisis, which fuels another one. Cycle away dear mind, you have nothing to lose.

I find myself experiencing simultaneously two things which one wouldn't expect to feel at the same time. I lose more and more faith in humanity every single day, and I am hopelessly and shamelessly in love with a human being who I find to be nothing less than perfect.

Oh paradoxes.

Ayah

There used to sit outside the ladies' changing room at the Sind Club an Ayah. She was a sweet middle-aged Hindu woman who was in charge of cleaning up the changing room and making sure extra towels were always available. She would sit on a white plastic chair, smiling at the aunties, the young mothers and their toddlers, the teenage girls in their bathing suits. She knew about the distance between herself and the patrons of the Club and so did we. She referred to the women as Memsahiba (Madam), respecting them on the basis of what they had and what she did not, and nothing more than that. She would always say hello to me, and ask about my mother and sisters if they weren't there. When they were, she would smile at all of us, and call my two year old sister guriya (doll).
I wonder how she felt about the difference in her own life and the lives of Sind Club members. Only the richest, only the best families, the elite of the elite. Did she ever think about it? Outside the Club there were no women tanning by pools, no interactions between men and women of the nature she would see at the club. Her day began and ended with a bus ride back home, for which she would don a black burqa over her modest white sari, even though she wasn't even Muslim. She probably just didn't want to be teased or pinched by some man on the bus who would get a moment's cheap thrill from this contact with female flesh.
I saw her this summer when I went back home. Her hair had turned white as the locks of the memsahibas became various hues of honey, indicating that the it-shade of the season had hit Karachi. She sat there, watching quietly, still smiling at everyone. It struck me that I knew this woman from as far as my memory went into childhood, but I still didn't know her name. She knew mine though. "Sanaa baby, kaisee hain aap? Ammi theek hain?"

I thought of the Ayah when I saw the new Sana Safinaz lawn campaign. Probably a strange association to make, but nonetheless.

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?

"You were a wreck back then."

Excuse me while I try to decode realities in my little coffee shop bubble. And not just any coffee shop, a Starbucks- doesn't get better than that. As the days draw closer to the seven years it's been, I find myself dwelling on the way things played out, with a friend's words echoing in my head. Funny I can even refer to him as a friend now, because somewhere in there I remember immense pain, and then another realization- did it matter how it felt then? Does it always matter to feel when you're young, or is there a defined line between when whatever happens in your heart becomes consequential and before that, when everything is as raw as the blacks and the whites of your existence?
What does it mean to get to a place where you look back not only at yourself and your own trainwrecks, but also those of others and think oh, but if only we'd listened, if only she'd listen and save herself the sorrow. Because the tumultuous back and forth between reality and melodrama aside, what always stands out is the immense strength of raw pain that disregards completely how much it matters or whether it even will five years down the road. What makes sense is the indignation when someone informs you that this is all deja vu, and you swear it's different.
It is, and it isn't. Neither here nor there, uncontrollable and just how it is.
So is there an answer to the happiness question? Maybe not, and strangely enough, the more you learn, the murkier it gets. But there might be a certain pride to be taken in pulling yourself together from the worst of times. I think perspective and the acquisition of it is the biggest gray area I know.

You learn to block it out. You learn to like... not like, like would be the wrong word to use. You learn to accept the silence, and live with how much quieter life seems to become every year. It becomes a habit to the point that when you look around yourself without feeling this or that, it doesn't strike you as strange that things do not ignite curiosity, that they no longer beg you to be looking for something else.
This is all you ever aspired to be, and it's funny because now you have to figure out where to go from here onwards, and that seems to be the most difficult part. To be able to decide whether it's not knowing what you want, or being hesitant about wanting for fear of not getting it; which one of these prevents you from saying, from imagining?

You were are special. Now it takes convincing, validation, allowing the outside into your own separate self. This would be sacrilege before, but now it's just life. Sometimes you wonder if this slow dying has something to do with home, and how home fades away a little more everyday, loses some more blood. But then it makes you smirk at yourself, because this is pretentious and who has time for an existential crisis anyway? It doesn't even mean anything. You can't touch what's in your head, and if you can't touch it, how are you feeling it?

You ask yourself if you're happy. You convince yourself that you are.

I wonder if realizing the world is a lot bigger than us and what we think of it stops us from trying to think about it altogether. Is being ungrateful sometimes a good thing?