62.

Here you are again, blank page, asking me to write about bomb blasts and death and wedding errands. I don't want to, because things will keep changing and things will keep staying the same and what is left to say about any of it? All I know is that life and death keep on happening. They don't give you warnings or a friendly wave or look both ways before crossing the street. They crumple up fear, mine and yours, like failed attempts at origami and throw it in the wastebasket, and miss. They wear faded lawn prints and the kind of shoes everybody owns. Sometimes they try to be profound, but end up creating mediocrity, waiting for an artist or poet to mould them into what they should have been. That's all there is to it.

That is why, when a blast rattled my window this morning, my first thought was simply "Blast."

There is a routine for things like this. Once the panic has subsided and all family members have returned home, shared stories and have been accounted for, you can start making calls to everyone else to establish how many degrees of separation are between you and this one. Three. Two. One. None. And then you switch on the TV and see your old school with its familiar walls and windows and parking spots replaced by six foot craters and ambulances. You spot the school van driver and your face lights up and you say Hey, that's Riasat Bhai! because it is always nice to see familiar people on TV, before you stupidly realise why they are on TV. And then you think what do they mean eight people are dead, who are they? And then the calls begin again. Throughout it all is a vague sense of guilt, of knowing that if it had been a big one near the city center, or the other side of town, it would have been easy not to notice. Then you console yourself and say well, if life and death are going about barreling into your soul without giving polite road signals, there is only room for so much care.

And later, you run wedding errands, because of that habit life has of keeping on happening. And while you choose the right shade of yellow, you check your text messages to find out which of your old social studies teachers is in the hospital. Part of you thinks two years ago I would not have been out shopping for yellow linen if this had happened, but most of you thinks two years ago, this would not have happened anyway. Between meals and naps and phone calls and work and sorting out student timetables and putting your files in alphabetical order and planning the welcome party for incoming students and giving advice on studying for the SATs, you check the news. Why news websites think it is in good taste to discuss how well-known socialities "tweeted their grief today" is beyond me, but I have worked at a news website, so then again it isn't.

And you think there will be no memorials, there will be no ten-years-later services, there will be no names attached to the security guards who died, there will be no TV specials or emotional Reader's Digest features about how someone's clairvoyant puppy saved them with photographs of smiling blond children and their healthy pets. There will be no special school assemblies and tomorrow parents will drive their kids to school like masochistic but level headed adults and enquire at the half-demolished gate whether the guard is alive and if he is, send them in and go home and perhaps run wedding errands for another child, or perhaps sit and worry, or perhaps give extra sadqa. And you know they are the ones who really matter, when people say "Ha it finally happened in Defence" and when people say "Let us mourn for those in Waziristan" and when people say "We are reaping the seeds we sowed" and when people say "When America leaves it will end" and when people say "I was right there when it happened" and when people say people say people say people say people say but life and death go on either way.

61.

Hello, blank page.

You have so much potential.

Whatdoyouwantobewhenyougrowup?

I want to be a farmer dog whisperer tree planter yogi pilot detective mom cake decorator hot air balloon owner circus performer chimpanzee trainer author illustrator peter pan saint.

What do you really want to be?

A Taoist. Though I don't know very much about it. I just read an abridged guide to it, but it sounds cool.

Build me a library like the one the Beast built for Belle. I'll be my own personal librarian.

Find me an agent, I'll write for a living.

What do you mean, I'm not good enough?

Well. Prestige is overrated anyway. Maybe I'll be a hermit. Maybe I'll write, become famous and then go mad and hate people, like Tennessee Williams. Except that I can't write like him.

Anyone can have their own TV show, lawn exhibition and blog these days. Even me.

I realise that "even me" is incorrect grammar. I love and hate grammar. I love its order and hate its fascism.

I like that Urdu is arranged subject-object-verb. It forces you to hear the whole sentence. I like writing in this room. I in this room writing like.

Hello, blank page, trying to decide what to be.

Just like me.

60. (recycled from last year's writings)

Genius. It always creeps into you at night, with characteristic bad timing that makes you promise yourself that in the morning, when your bed is less warm and your room less cold, you’ll write it all down, create a masterpiece. Of course, in friendly daylight nothing seems remotely as mysterious, interesting or complicated as it does at night, and the long words and lovely sentences curl up and arrange themselves ordinarily, uninterestingly. It makes you wonder what it was about the night before that made you believe in your own promise and talent.

Darkness does that. You can fumble around in it forever, believing yourself to be feeling and touching and experiencing something novel, something special, something profound that needs to be shared with the world. It also makes you miserable. The quest for genius can be melancholy. It makes you marvel at the loop-de-loop of your own thoughts, drives you insane when you try to follow them in a straight line (out of habit), forces you to consider answers to all the world’s questions before sleep takes over and the mundane tasks of your Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday morning begin.

I like friendly daylight better though. Genius is alluring, but kindness is more forgiving. In broad daylight, you can’t be fooled into taking your own mind too seriously, because the rest of the world competes for attention. There are things to see outside of your own head, and they are kinder and happier than the things you conceive of when you are alone and in the dark. They may not create masterpieces, but I’m ready to believe that shrugging off the need to know everything, do everything and be everything is an art in itself.

I argued with someone about Taoism once, about how it’s not wrong to just be. Pooh just was, and he seemed considerably wiser than Rabbit or Owl, but without the Tao of Piglet book series these things are impossible to explain. I realize now that contentedly being is much more difficult than aspiring for genius, and it is considerably more aware of others and their happiness than the deluded nature of knowingness. I’ll go with the sunshine. Beautiful words and mysteries can wait for a darker day. My daytime universe is a friendly place and I fit happily inside it.

59.

I've learned a lot of things about myself in the fifteen months since I graduated into the real world. For one thing, now I know why they call it "the real world." I knew college was a bubble, but that's not what people seem to mean when they said it's not "real." It's just different because it's full of safe spaces and people giving you multiple opportunities to learn. Post-college, nobody constructs safe spaces for you and nobody gives a shit what you learn. Anyway, I digress. I digress a lot these days. My own mind is like a train station. Things rattle in and rattle out. Shut up. Mind.

I used to think I'm ambitious. Dictionary.com defines "ambition" as "an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame or wealth." This confuses me. I have an earnest desire, but don't particularly want power, honor fame or wealth. I mean, they'd be nice. But I don't especially care. The desire and earnestness are in other directions.

People don't think I'm ambitious anymore. I say I work at a school and I get the Look, the quick appraisal of everything I am. Everything I am is supposed to be: unaccomplished, unexciting, unqualified, unable to find a better job, in it for the easy hours, waiting to get married. I don't blame anyone, really. That's what education has come to in this country. To care about it is to announce your credentials as a bored (soon-to-be) housewife who's doing it for the pocket money and emotional rewards. Well. Whatever. I can deal with that.

What I Want is to live my life. I don't know why it took so long for this realisation to arrive, but here it is. I want to live my life. I want to inspire and be inspired. I want to try new things and make mistakes and break my heart and learn again. I want to fly to another city on a moment's notice because I feel like seeing my grandparents, without taking leave from anybody. I want to finish reading all the history books in my room. I want to be the happiest, most educated and serenest version of myself. Excuse my language but I don't give a fuck if you think education is beneath me. You probably think being ambitious means wanting things. Well, I want Things too. The difference between me and you is that I will teach and learn on my way to getting them and you'll spend your whole life racing to an imaginary finish line.

In first grade, my teacher asked some question about plants, I don't remember it anymore. Everyone answered one way, I answered another. It was nothing important and I was wrong. My teacher took me aside and said well done, you stuck to what you believed even when everyone else was saying something else and I was as proud as a five year old can be. There's a reason I still remember that. Teachers matter. I might not stick around in a school forever, but I will never look at my highly-paid, professionally qualified friends and I wish I was a little more everything. I'll never save or defend lives, I'll never build anything you can touch and I probably won't ever be able to afford a beautiful house. My job doesn't take years to earn and impresses nobody. I admit this annoys my fat ego. But at the end of the day, no matter where I work or don't work, I'm committed to creating safe spaces and opportunities to learn because I don't believe in the real world after all.

58.

Karachi I try and write about you but you're too fast for me.

Fast like those girls called me when they learned I had a boyfriend. Fast like the warden accused me of being when I snuck out without a gate pass. Her purple lipstick was smudged in the corners.

Stop killing each other.

I wanted to be a vegetarian once. I quit meat for three months. These days I tell myself I only need meat about once a week and avoid it on other days. I won't quit because I'm anemic and vitamin deficient. That's what I say, anyway. Sometimes I'm not sure.

I think it's probably a sin to eat meat that claims to be lawfully prepared but is a product of mistreated animals. I almost never say something is a sin.

Karachi give me back my sanity. I worry about vegetarianism and cry for beheaded chickens in your rivers of blood. Karachi, screw my sanity. Someone's gotta cry for chickens too.

I hate women who are self righteous about their chastity.

I hate righteous people in general. Like the ones whose only argument for not preparing meat ethically is that religion allows us to eat it.

God, why do I have meat on the brain?

Every time I say the word "hate" I feel guilty because my mother taught me not to think like that when I was young. I wonder if I'm still young. What does that even mean? Young enough for what?

When they interview people on TV whose children have died in ethnic violence, it hurts me physically. I say I'm desensitized, because that's what everyone says in Karachi. I don't think I am. Not yet. But it's easy to switch off the news.

Karachi I'm not angry. I don't know who to blame.

Sometimes I don't feel anything because I haven't thought enough yet. I think too much. Not in a smart way. Just in an overthinking way. My father says I have slow reflexes. I think he's right.

I don't drive because a palmist told me I would have a car accident. I can drive better than I let on. What scares me is that it doesn't scare me. My slow reflexes might cause me to kill somebody. Or myself.

Karachi your traffic is crazy anyway. What would I even do if I was stuck in a riot?

I'm superstitious by nature and rational by force. I go to palmists and tarot card readers. I believe all the good stuff and tell myself they're bullshitting about the bad stuff. It amazes me how I can lie to myself.

Karachi 35,000 people dead.

I wish I was a hippie. I would wear flowers in my hair, eat organic food and talk about love. Who can afford organic food though? Rich people who dress like they're homeless and talk about how money has no value. This is mostly not true for Karachi. Nobody in Karachi dresses like they're homeless unless they are.

Karachi you make endless poverty take the back burner to basic survival.

I'm very prejudiced. I think that's okay. Some people judge others for their race or religion or whatever, though of course nobody admits it. I mostly judge people for being unintelligent. I think that's okay.

I try not to hurt anyone's feelings or use the word "hate," like my mother taught me.

Somewhere inside me is a five year old who wanted to grow up to be "a nature lover."

Karachi you make me want to plant some trees. I can barely breathe for the lack of oxygen.

Who cares about nature when people are dying? Am I too old to care about trees or something? Too old for what? What does that even mean?

Karachi I could write all night but you're too fast for me.

57.

One year, two jobs and a lot of experience ago, I started a blog. My goal was to write one hundred essays in one hundred days. For days on end, my life revolved around this personal project, which I had invented in an attempt to keep my creative juices flowing and give myself something to do in my lonely free time, since my working hours left no time for socialising back then. I didn't realise what this project would turn into, or what it would come to mean to me, or how many hours I would spend throwing around potential topics in my head the first few weeks.

I didn't meet my goal.

Once I realised I couldn't keep skipping days and thinking I'll make up for it one especially prolific weekend, I changed the name of my blog to simply "one hundred essays" and decided to see how long it took for me to get there. It's been a year and three days now and I am on essay 57. Not so prolific after all. Somehow, I'm not quite as let down by this failure than I may have imagined when I first set my goal. There have been good essays and bad essays, but every essay has a story behind it and I use the 365 days of published blogs, comments, drafts and discarded pieces as introspective tools. I never realised how much I had to teach myself until I started forcing myself to write-something I haven't been doing lately for lack of inspiration. Someone told me today to stop making excuses and "go find it again," so here I am. Finding it.

Last August, I wrote a letter to my country on the eve of independence day, wondering what could have gone so wrong in its history that I was writing it borderline abusive letters rather than celebrating it. Last August, I wrote about the dark humour that seems to belong to my generation alone, because it is easier to laugh at the twisted world than cry about it. Last August, I wrote about rain and the grief it brings my city. Last August, everything was the same and everything was different.

It is independence day again and I spent it looking forward to another new job-exactly what I was doing a year ago today, except perhaps my excitement at this new beginning has waned. I've tried on two potential careers and am embarking on a third and a part of me is ashamed and wondering why I tend to flit from one place to another. Most of me is lost. A few months ago, I would have passionately defended what I want to do in life and shouted down anyone who challenged me. Now, I'm okay with being lost. I trust myself to shrug my shoulders and let my way find itself for a while. As for 14th August, I am no longer in a position to write letters to my grief-ridden country, because I'm part of it and you can't write a letter to yourself. A year ago, I thought I knew Pakistan and was ready to announce how my degree in history qualified me to identify its problems. A few dozen books later, I've realised a true historian is always a little lost, because truth doesn't come in a three year diploma. This independence day, I sang the national anthem at midnight at the top of my lungs, said fuck you to the electricity and water shortage and stared at the flag decorating my house with muddled feelings. I read 500 pages of speeches given by politicians for and against Pakistan and received an email from an accidental Indian friend congratulating my country on its independence. I didn't write anything about it because I had nothing to say. And of course, it rained again this August. I let myself get wet and didn't switch on the news about deaths by electrocution and houses collapsing, because a year in my city has taught me not to watch the news too often. I shared dirty jokes with dark humour about our failing government and didn't pretend I know that this country will last only five or ten or a hundred years, because really, who knows? If I had known anything at all a year ago, this blog would never have happened. In 2011, confusion reigns supreme and for once, that's just fine.

Here's to new beginnings...and knowing nothing at all.

56.

Comrade ML Khan was not the kind of man anybody noticed. He spent his days drinking chai under a whirring ceiling fan in a dark and almost defunct government office. His face was ordinary and he could have been of any ethnicity really, with his brown face, average nose and straggly moustache. He wasn’t a real communist, but he had read a bit of this and a bit of that and had briefly joined a Railway Workers’ Union because several of his friends had, before it was banned and communism died a quick death in the country. The “Comrade” bit stuck, at least in his mind, though nobody in the office actually referred to him as such-had he ever said it out loud, he would have been met with confused stares by the two other men who whiled away their time in there.

This particular government office was built on the same pattern as all official structures (Were there guidelines somewhere, in a dusty book of law?) It had a grand façade, complete with minarets and useless, once-beautiful balconies littered with pigeon shit and separated from the rest of the building by heavy, rusted grills. The same grills-geometrically patterned and painted sky blue (the favorite color of governments everywhere, it appeared)- guarded the windows along long corridors. Post-colonial, post -Communist, post-Islamic, post-bomb blast, post-concern, the entire structure had a confused air about it. Or a story to tell. Comrade ML Khan, having done one thing or another in the office for upwards of two decades, was part of the furniture, old enough to tell the tale of the building’s glory days but young enough to remember his own, though he was never actually called upon to do so.

He had not always been an old, graying sort of man. There was a time in his life when he had done more than sip milky tea under a slow fan and napped in his plastic chair between officious bursts of ordering around the peon. There was a time in his life when he had cherished notions of being a true comrade, of making fiery speeches about the bourgeoisie and reviving the Progressive Writers’ Movement, of moving audiences to tears in street theatre performances and publishing radical literature.

At seventy two, Comrade ML Khan sat in the decaying remains of an establishment office, lighting candles during the frequent power outages, plaintively bleating at the peon about the dust in the office in front of guests and obsequiously deferring to the wishes of the equally archaic Head of Department for his office. His official title was Editor for a publication nobody read anymore, although he enjoyed the comfort of knowing that although he had been serving a government institution since late middle age, at least it was in a literary capacity. One of the few things he did every week was to write the magazine editorial. From time to time, his pet topics coincided with urban intellectual fads and received a bit of attention here or there-wisps which he cherished as deeply as his past which nobody cared about. His last article on Faiz Ahmed Faiz, in particular, garnered attention from one or two visiting professors and was subsequently quoted by young, English-medium reporters who had not bothered to read it themselves. The irony of Faiz being championed by the uppermost echelons of society in discussion forums and conferences which cost thousands of rupees to attend was not lost on him, but he chose to ignore it. Comrade ML Khan had become very talented at ignoring things that made him uncomfortable.

Twenty eight years before his induction into the ranks of civil servants, Comrade had worked at one NGO after another, championing various causes along the way. After his failed tenure as an almost-communist, he tried his hand at many different things which satisfied his youthful desires. His first job was as a guide with an organization that sought to promote cultural tourism. His zeal for the protection of architecture, local art and handicrafts did not die, but his energy for showcasing them soon did. Several unsatisfactory years were spent showing around field trips of pubescent students flirting during field trips, large families who all talked at once, parents of small children whose main interest was locating a restroom and people who would pose for photographs and leave without actually taking the tour. Occasionally, there would be a foreigner or two. He liked foreigners-they were nearly always chatty, tipped well and made him feel both well-informed and exotic. When war, sanctions and a bad reputation began to ruin his industry, friendly foreign faces thinned out and eventually disappeared, leaving Comrade ML Khan with little option but to find a new career to feed himself with.

The second in the long line of NGOs that littered Comrade’s resume was a street theatre troupe for which he wrote contrived, one-dimensional plays about a plethora of social ills. Inevitably, his male characters would die noble deaths after standing up for the cause they believed in.  Meanwhile, the women in his stories would steadfastly support their greater counterparts, rarely joining the action and almost never dying, unless they were somebody’s mother, in which case they would die of grief. The truth was that Comrade ML Khan knew very little of women beyond his purely carnal encounters here and there and he penned their roles doubtfully, sexism not being an ism he was at war with yet. This job was one that he loved, in spite of his lack of genius. The people his troupe performed for, starved for entertainment in a country where all outlets for it were rapidly closing down, appreciated their clumsy efforts at educating the public. The applause at the end of each act was not only heartening, it also remained a memory that he did not consciously try to forget as an old man and often returned to him in moments when he relived his imagined past glories.

Later, as Comrade ML Khan flitted from one cause to another, he learned a great deal about the world he worked in. By the time he was twenty seven, he was privately cynical about his own or anyone’s ability to effect change through art, so disinterested was the general population in his work. By the time he was in his thirties, he was all too familiar with the arrogance and insincerity of those who publicly championed the ideals he worked for. In his late forties, suffering from tuberculosis from years of smoking cheap cigarettes and determinedly trying to avoid a midlife crisis, he decided it would do him no harm to turn towards God, just in case there was one and he should die young. And that was how, at seventy two, Comrade ML Khan was not really a communist at all, or even a socialist, but simply an old man who had read a bit of this and a bit of that and possessed a good number of badly thought out ideas.

It was an oppressively humid day when the graying man in the dying government office decided to lose his mind. The presses in the back room were rolling out new copies of the magazine with no readership, with freshly written editorials about issues nobody cared much about anymore. When the pregnant sky finally broke, the force of the monsoon rain wrecked the fragile press room and water dripped into the rusty machinery, causing the painstakingly typed Urdu words to blur and the paper to become soggy. In a burst of literary inspiration, Comrade ML Khan saw the entire episode as a metaphor for his life, romantically giving it more meaning even as he forced himself to be honest. Everybody knew he lost his mind that day, but nobody noticed the spectacle of the old man floating up to the ceiling, being sucked through its cracks and coming back to down to earth as fat tears and acid rain.

55.

I love and hate discussion threads under news pieces. They are fascinating, infuriating and so addictive that I once started writing my term paper for anthropology based entirely on YouTube debates, but changed the topic because it wasn't worth it to ingest that much stupidity for one paper. Take for example any music video from the subcontinent and glance at the comments below. Within ten or fifteen of them, someone will have raised the vital question of whether the musician/song/lyrics are derived from Hindu, Muslim or Sikh tradition. Within another five, there will be a lively discussion about people's mothers and sisters, with plenty of caste-conscious epithetsthrown in for good measure. I think YouTube comments are where I learned most about  penny-pinching banias, sewer-cleaning chamars, homosexual Pathans, sand nigger Musalmans and "d1rty guRlzz"-though the latter are of course ubiquitous on the internet.

But back to my original point, which is not asinine remarks about whether Bulleh Shah would have been Indian or Pakistani, but burger babies such as myself and their comments on the daily news. I say "their" and not "our" because burger though I may be by virtue of my residence, I try to not fall into the trap of acting exactly as mummydaddy as Karachi might expect me to act. And here we come to today's news article: 40 people mugged at T2F. Comments? 67. Content? Along the lines of, "I am furious...We must organize a protest...Let's show these worthless robbers what we're made of...I am enraged that someone is targeting a space for artists...How dare they rob an intellectual space?!" Just add a lot more exclamation marks, pseudonyms and spelling mistakes and you get the picture.

People's anger is legitimate, but it is lop-sided. Another news story from today: "Peshawar blast kills three, wounds ten." Comments? 0. Along the lines of, "Another bomb story from the Taliban province." One might say the disproportionately angry reaction to the T2F robbery is because it is a new kind of violent incident, one that we're not used to-after all, a few bombs go off every day and all terrorism news is old news. But it's not a new incident-it is the oldest of them all. So many people in Karachi get shot, mugged, robbed and generally terrorised every day that when I worked for the crime page of a newspaper, we had to choose the top 15 incidents every day to save space (which brings me to the next question of why the paper gave two columns to this story when they don't even run other mugging stories). There is nothing novel about armed men walking into a crowded public space and stealing cash and mobile phones, except that they are more likely to hit gold if they are in Defence than in say, Gulshan-e-Maymar, or some other place off the radar for DHA bubbleheads.

I completely sympathise with those who are feeling wounded by the violation of a place they hold sacred, simply because T2F is one of those rare places where intellectual growth is encouraged. But if we are to be intelligent, we must first be honest. Pakistan wouldn't desperately need places like T2F if the people who patronise it weren't so quick to polarise themselves from the rest of the country and blow their own tragedies out of proportion. Are you really going to attend the Facebook and Twitter protests for this? Are you going to spend an hour, or maybe even two, whining to your friends about how your own neighborhood is under attack now? Please consider volunteering at a low-income school, teaching a child who can't read or patronising local booksellers instead. Honestly, if we are ever to combat intellectual poverty, we can't do it alone on the second floor, crying about how the "other" Pakistanis are coming to get us in the comments section of the Express Tribune.

54.

"Rabbit's clever," said Pooh thoughtfully.
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit's clever."
"And he has Brain."
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit has Brain."
There was a long silence. "I suppose," said Pooh, "that that's why he never understands anything.




I know a lot of Rabbits, a lot of stupid people and a lot of people trying to be Rabbits.  Now, no offense to aspiring scholars anywhere. I personally think Brain is the best thing you can have and I don't at all mind that Rabbit is very clever. The problem begins when you notice that most intelligent people you meet are so enamored by their own intelligence they can barely see through their haze of self-congratulation. This is especially true in Pakistan, where so many people who have everything seem to believe that success needs to come with a great deal of condescension.


Don't get me wrong-I'm all for a healthy dose of being critical of society, especially in a country where being thoughtful is a crime against patriotism. But when we seethe with anger at everyone else's stupidity, complacency or ignorance, when we laugh at the crazy theories spawned by paranoid hyper-nationalists, when we shake our heads at others' misfortune and think they probably deserved it, we are as useless as a Rabbit preaching to a silly old bear.


There is a great deal of intellectual poverty in Pakistan. What is difficult to understand is why so many who pledge to combat it think they can do it top-down, without engaging the very people they are trying so hard to change. Activists have the country's best interests at heart when they speak of economic inequality and will speak about it to one another at one-thousand-rupees-entry-fee events. Self-proclaimed liberals will propagate sexual freedom and liberation, will refer to their servants as "these people" and fire them for having affairs with one another. Society aunties will romanticise the past when people mingled freely in public parks and shudder at the thought of mixing with the awaam. Celebrities will defend their right to choose their genders and be accepted as queer and  forget to mention the eunuchs that still dance on the streets for a living. Students everywhere will talk about undoing the mistakes of the previous generation and run their family factories and farmlands without knowing their workers' rights. The meek shall inherit the earth one day, they say, the meek will inherit the earth. They feel good saying it, thinking it. They oppose the right to vote because "the people" know no better. The people are never the people, the people are always those people.


You Rabbits want a Revolution. A revolution for whom, a revolution for what?


There is a lot of Brain in our upper classes. That is why we don't understand anything.

53.

I had Chacha called from the kitchen because I wanted to interview him.
"Interview me? Nothing to interview me about! I'm just a cook," he protested. I needed to know about the 1971 war, I explained. About what happened to him. He must remember something?
"Remember nothing."
"Remember something? You couldn't have been that young,"
"Only seven or eight. Remember nothing," he insisted.
I gave up. Maybe he really did remember nothing.
Ten minutes later, while I was still seated at the dining table with the rest of the dinner guests, Chacha came back in, offering dessert.
"I remember one thing only. My father was in the army."
"The Pakistan Army?"
"Yes, he was a fauji. But they killed him." I was served a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
"Who killed him?"
"The army. I don't remember why. I think because he didn't speak Urdu."
I asked him again for an interview.
"Remember nothing!" The kitchen door swung behind him as he left. I followed him out, abandoning my dessert bowl on the table and pleaded my case for more information. Chacha smiled apologetically into his off-white apron and wiped his hands on it. All he remembered, he said, was that his father was an army officer who was killed for not speaking Urdu and his brother was a Mukti and became estranged from them and ran away to India and he's not sure what happened but now he's in Pakistan and he remembers nothing. Nothing. Of no use to Baji and her project. Just a cook.
Perhaps Bua could tell me more, I ventured? Chacha scowled. Of course she could. The useless aged woman had probably been old even back then. She must remember everything. From the corner of the kitchen, Bua smiled serenely back at us, not having heard or understood what we were talking about.
I repeated my questions for her.
"What happened in 1971, Bua?"
"War. Fighting."
"Who was fighting?"
"The army...and the other people," She followed me back out to the dining room, still smiling, still slightly confused.
"What did the army do?"
Silence.
"Was the army good or bad?"
She looked across the room at Dada, who was absorbed in thought. A once-fauji, now-Dada.
"I think maybe they were good."
Uncomfortably, I moved my spoon around in the bowl of melted ice cream.
"My brothers were shot dead when we ran, though," Bua added.
"Where did you run?"
"I don't know. Far. Very far. Maybe India. Maybe not. I had only one pair of shoes and they killed my brothers. We walked for a long time,"
Dada spilled ice cream on his shirt. Two people scrambled to find a tissue.
"What part of Bangladesh were you from?" he asked, unbothered by the spill. She told him. He cleared his throat.
Chacha stood behind my chair. I turned around and saw him scowling at his kitchen nemesis. He told us that Bua was senile anyway.
"Life was very difficult," Bua continued. I waited for the story. Instead, she sighed, then gave a bright unexpected smile and shuffled out of the room back into the kitchen.

52.

"I'm afraid that sometimes you'll play lonely games too. Games you can't win cause you'll play against you." Dr Suess said that. Ever since I read "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" to my younger brother, I can't get over how this master of rhymes and proponent of eating verdant eggs has charted out my life in a twenty page book. Read it. He's probably charted out yours, too.
Seems like I'm always playing against me these days.
This week brought on carpal tunnel syndrome, allergies and the flu. Somewhere around Wednesday (which is neither here nor there, a quality of Wednesday I can't decide if I love or hate), I walked out of the office to take a phone call and give my injured arm a rest. I had been uncomfortable at my desk because of the stiff splint on my left wrist, growing pain in my right and the irritation at knowing my antihistamine was wearing off. I hate being sick. Once I walked out though, I was almost immediately drenched in sweat, since it is late May in Karachi after all. Maybe it was Wednesday, maybe it was the series of physical ills that have bothered me for the entire nine months since I started working, but I just felt like kicking something. This can't be what life is about. And this is where I clarify-to myself and to my audience-that I actually like my job. I like collecting oral histories, I like teaching, I like researching, I like the rush of working towards exhibitions and events, I like having a routine, I like having my own money and knowing my days of scrimping on shampoo to buy a textbook are over. But parts don't equal whole and whole is exactly what I am not.
It was after kicking the wrought iron chair outside, stubbing my toe and having this realisation that I went inside and wondered what it would be like to be free. I know myself well enough to know that my definition of free involves work and a lot of it. It sounds like a paradox, but it's not. I love work, but the moment any of it begins to lose meaning for me, the moment I feel that I am not putting my heart one hundred and ten per cent into what I am doing, I feel trapped. I am selfish. I will not leave my job because I enjoy the work, the people and the financial freedom. But I'm playing this game against myself. I'm swimming against the tide. The tide wants me to slow down, type less, read more, assume less, learn more and worry less about whether typing with one hand means I won't finish making this lesson plan by 6pm. The tide wants to leave me broke.
If this blog was a self-help book, a romantic comedy, an inspirational talk or a novel written by a woman going through a mid-life crisis, my next sentence would tell you that I am quitting my job, moving to an island with clean air and plenty of fruit (and wise, brown natives to complete the picture) and becoming a yoga master. But it's not. It's a blog typed with one hand by someone breathing through one nostril and lying in bed trying not to compromise but knowing for now, I'll probably have to. Maybe when I am thirty five-or even twenty five-I will have all this figured out. Maybe I won't. Maybe I will write a blog about all the solutions I have devised in my head. Or maybe I won't, because as much as I trust the people I meet every day, I know it's not a good idea to lay all my cards on the table.
Dr Suess says that if I learn that Life's a Great Balancing Act, I will succeed (98 and three quarter percent guaranteed!).
May I balance gracefully on one arm, a blocked nostril, a swollen lymph node, too many questions and a lot of heart.

51.

Every day that I wake up to the broken world, I am not unhappy.
On some days, I am full of beautiful thoughts and compassionate feelings.
On some days, I am irritated by my lack of sleep.
On most days, I am preoccupied by my morning to-do list.
But every day, I am in a war state of mind. In my mind, this war began in 2009, when my consciousness absorbed the brokenness of its surroundings completely, like a baby ingesting food properly the first time.

Burning buses and TV buzz. Rape and arson and twitter updates. Newspapers, checkpoints, gunpoints. The miscellany of our lives being swallowed, but not whole. It travels down my tongue, into my throat, is pushed down my esophagus. It would be poetic to say I can't stomach it, but I can. I do.
Now that I have integrated our ugliest ogres, digested them with my breakfast, I am no longer embarrassed by them. People talk (wail, howl, cry) about how the images that we swallow have come to define us and how this definition shames us. I feel no shame. I look on, curiously, at what is unfolding. National embarrassment has no meaning for me. Neither does national pride. Neither does national. Or nation.
Dirty flavors can be found in every bag of jellybeans. Perhaps we have far too many, but you can only be shamed by what is your own. Rationally speaking, it is impossible to be embarrassed by the actions of your milkman, unless you believe the milkman represents some aspect of yourself. By extension, he can only represent some aspect of yourself if you allow him this representation.
That is why I can not be proud of the Pakistanis who I love and admire, I can only love and admire them as human beings. I can not be ashamed of Pakistanis who murder, I can only despise them as human beings. I can not be ashamed of Pakistan, I can only love it for the value we attach to the motherland. I can not be proud of Pakistan, I can only point out the truth in what I see.
I have no nation.
I have a country.
The only question left to be answered is how far my personal imagined community stretches and how much it is affected by borders, if at all. I'll get there some day.
For now, I am striving to be good and unbreak what is damaged. I want to create a place with a less exhausting state of mind. Not because it is mine, but because it is worth it.

50.

Osama is dead.
Good riddance.
Then again, I don't care one way or another if he's dead or alive. Not because of any moral or political convictions, but because the game is far from over. Osama or no Osama, the stage has been set for Level 2 and as usual, ordinary people with ordinary lives and ordinary concerns will die in ways that have become ordinary. Reaching Level 2 is so exciting because the first part is over-and then you realise there's still a long way to go. I speak from my limited experience with Sega games in the 1990s. I assume the principles of video games, like those of power struggles, have not fundamentally changed in the last couple of decades.
Now that we have killed Osama, on to our other demons.

Let us target dictators who sell their countries for money and power.
Let us throw out democratic presidents who do the same for oil.
Let us condemn the educated who use their intellect to cloud their humanity.
Let us take action against the well-fed feudals who let their farmers go hungry.
Let us not believe what double speaking, power-hungry politicians tell us.
Let us question everything we believe to be true.
Let us not allow semantics to muddy true dialogue.
Let us cry out against the systems that indoctrinate impressionable children.
Let us never complicate what is simple.
Let us remember there are two sides to every story and we'll probably never like one of them.
Let us spend more time getting to know people and less time assuming we know what they are like.
Let us remind people that it is possible to end world hunger.
Let us retain our compassion when the hungry commit crimes.
Let us scrutinise our own decisions and know that they are biased.
Let us remain innocent enough to be surprised.
Let us not forget that we are not as intelligent as we think we are.
Let us not wallow in our apathy.
Let us not congratulate ourselves for being better than our neighbors.
Let us invest in children's futures.
Let us educate.
Let us hope.
Let us give meaning to our hopes.

We already know that one person's choices can bring the world crashing down. By the same logic, it takes one person's choices to change the world. Or, if you're less ambitious, it takes as much to change someone else's world.

The second part of the game might be starting, but only if you believe in the game. After all, if you don't believe in it, it doesn't exist.

49.

The problem with being asked to describe two hours with the greatest man in Pakistan is that it is a bit impossible to do justice to. I was initially excited about the prospect of writing about my interview with Abdul Sattar Edhi. During our session, I made mental notes of all his inspiring quotes and decided I would focus on those alone. About ten minutes in I realized that picking just a few inspiring things he said would be even more difficult than describing him. So here is my sloppy attempt to explain what happened today.

We just walked into the Edhi office in Mithadar. We had no precise address and no phone number we could reach easily, but this didn’t turn out to be a problem at all. Every single person we stopped in the congested streets knew where Edhi sahib’s office was and they were able to direct us so accurately we arrived twenty minutes early. Nobody asked us why we were early or how long we planned to stay. We were ushered into a room decorated with posters from campaigns for a drug free Pakistan, a tolerant Pakistan, a compassionate Pakistan. Several honorary degrees were displayed under the glass top of a table we sat on (a table we learned was “older than this country”). A large red sticker was on the door behind me. “LOVE HUMANITY,” it proclaimed in gaudy yellow lettering. I wondered at the man who had stuffed honorary PhDs under a glass top and chosen to frame and display a sticker like that. That’s all you can do with Edhi. Wonder.

I was nervous about meeting him. I’ve wanted to meet him since I was eight years old. I doubt there is a single man alive who commands as much respect, trust and gratitude as Abdul Sattar Edhi. Beggars, dacoits, philanthropists and society aunties alike feel safe depositing their zakat, their sadqas, their khairat, their earnings, their bread into his fund, knowing that it will reach whoever needs it most. Personally, I am not an especially spiritual person, but when I think of prayer I recall being nine years old and trying very hard to send blessings to the mysterious Edhi who seems to be keeping our country afloat singlehandedly. I don’t know what I expected of him today, but I did not expect him to walk into the room while we were all setting up our equipment and hearing him say “Assalam Alaikum” unassumingly, as if he wasn’t Edhi himself but simply a random person strolling into the room.

Once I had recovered from being tongue tied and begun the interview, I learned many things I didn’t know about Edhi, but many more I hadn’t realized about society. I learned that he describes himself as a Sheikh Chilli who never dreams small. I learned that he despises maulanas who choose Islamism over humanity, but equally disparages those who despise criminals without understanding their motives. I learned that his inspiration for placing a cradle outside every welfare center was his experience of picking maggot-ridden babies out of the trash and seeing an illegitimate infant stoned outside a mosque. I learned that he deeply loves his wife, doesn’t understand why people don’t choose to adopt daughters and employs mostly women because he believes they do God’s work better than men. I learned that he has met Gandhi and befriended Bacha Khan in his youth. More than anything, I learned that nothing disgusts him more than people who see humans as anything but humans. “Insaniyat” is the only religion, he told us. I asked him what inspired him to start working for all of us the way he does. “I am a Muslim and I do what God has asked me to do. The only message of religion is that humanity is one. Nowadays, the world has become so big that we find ways to divide it up, but that’s what destroys us-divisions, divisions, divisions.”

I don’t think any of us knew that Edhi has worked for humane causes in no less than 73 countries. I don’t think any of us expected him to well up with sadness when he told us that India, the country of his birth, is one of the only two countries in the world that has denied him a visa for his work. That alone speaks volumes about who and what we are today. A world which denies the champion of transcending divisions a visa to cross the border.

I’m not sure what exactly it was that Edhi radiated in that room as we all sat and listened to him spellbound (until he woke me up with “Ask me more questions, are you tired already?”). It was something like a sense of boundless possibility. If a man of almost ninety who started with nothing can start and run the world’s largest volunteer ambulance organization, rescue 36,000 abandoned babies, feed the hungry every day, give every unclaimed body a decent burial, convince the most bloodthirsty amongst us to choose love over arms and build shelters where injured animals and birds are cared for, he can probably do anything. His humanity doesn’t know any bounds and in the face of all he has done, the photograph of a rather pompous ex-prime minister handing Edhi a little medal made me want to laugh. It was so grotesquely inadequate.

While even the most well-meaning of us execute our vision for humanity cynically-by crying ourselves hoarse about misgovernance, angrily criticizing the idiots who don’t do a better job and howling with fury at the corruption and crime we face daily, there are others in Pakistan who achieve greatness with complete trust that people will choose to do the right thing.

Edhi recounted a time when he was accosted by bandits on his way to Quetta. They recognized him for who he was, safely escorted him to his destination and on his arrival, presented him with two crore rupees. Other hardened criminals have been known to put down their guns in the middle of street battles when the Edhi ambulance arrived on the scene. Beggars who spend their days collecting ten rupees at a time have dropped five hundred rupee notes into Edhi collection boxes. What is it about his personality that makes us want to keep on giving? “You call these people bandits, dacoits, thieves. But think about the society that has produced a system where some remain wealthy forever while others have to shoot for bread and then tell me who is wrong. If you’re letting this happen, tell me who the thief is.”

I suppose that’s the answer to my question. Here is a man who will give us everything-who has already given us everything-simply because we are all human, whether we are criminals of one kind or another. It would be a challenge to find a single person in Pakistan who hasn’t been connected with the Edhi Foundation in some way. Everybody knows someone who has donated their money, called an ambulance, adopted a baby or had their Eid meat distributed by Edhi. There is a reason his number is pre-saved in the most basic models of cell phones under “Emergency contacts.” The truth is that the only emergency threatening to destroy us is that we can’t distinguish this common thread of humanity-and need-that runs in all of us. We all give to and take from the Edhi Foundation. We all need his services and yet our principal activity is pointing fingers at who landed us in this mess. Divisions, divisions, divisions.

48 (posted one day too late)

There's a woman who left her home in her early twenties to run a school. She didn't want to be someone's daughter-in-law when there was work to be done and children to be educated. So for sixty years, she has worked. Worked and worked and worked till her bones could no longer carry the weight of her burden and her real name was forgotten in favour of respectful titles her awestruck employees bestowed on her. Her bedroom-which is on campus, directly across the computer lab that offers free technological training to young women-is furnished like the room of any other octogenarian. A walking stick, a few cushions, a framed photograph of someone's daughter and son-in-law. A television set and a locked box full of newspaper clippings about educational programs. A menthol smell and a gaudy blanket. A stash of books under her pillow. She told me she wrote them. I am sure she did.
There's a woman who left formal education hanging like a question mark when she decided to start a family. She raised several children and taught hundreds more, picking up wisdom and experience along the way. She marks school books with generous tick marks and smiley faces, leaves notes in loopy cursive for the parents of wayward students. Listens admiringly when others talk about accomplished women, women with real jobs, women who balance children with full-time careers, women who complete PhDs. She reminds herself that she has done no less, but sometimes forgets. Sometimes she questions and sometimes she believes them when they say she never achieved much.
There's a woman who lives in her own world of books and authors, in an intellectual utopia of her own making. She is constantly surprised to find that others don't know the things she does, or that the trivia she considers terribly important is considered less so by others. People look down on trivial trivia. They laugh at it, laugh at her bewilderment that the world is not more learned. Her horror at their ignorance is never condescension. She always thinks that people who don't swallow encyclopedias are in a minority and her faith in humanity never truly wavers.
There's an angry woman who is happiest when protesting the injustices of the world. She quotes revolutionary poetry, saves trees from being bulldozed and supports grassroots campaigns for the oppressed. She is as disgusted by drawing room debaters as she is sympathetic to the underprivileged. Her twinge of guilt at avoiding her family to spend time with fellow activists is defensively explained away for the greater good.
There's a nanny who loves other people's children to support her own. She left her country soon after her husband proved to be an alcoholic and chose to make the most of her homeland's reputation for grooming excellent caregivers. So she gives care, for a small price. She bathes and rocks and feeds for the money, but counsels and fiercely loves because she can't help it. Her own children grow into strangers as she keeps telling herself she'll go back one day, but she finds herself weeping at the idea of being separated from her wards, who will never love her back quite the same way.
There's a woman who works as a nurse because her parents asked her to. She was never inclined to study much and would have preferred to have married into a comfortable life, but she knows her education has afforded her something her mother and grandmother did not have. Kind, well-meaning people tell her it's important to learn, to be different, to know her rights. Less kind people taunt her on buses, stand a little too close in crowded public spaces and occasionally seriously frighten her. She considers it part of the package, part of being a modern woman. She remembers her married sister is not much happier, anyway.
There's a woman who loves to dress up. She loves jewelry, loves makeup, loves feeling beautiful. She scoffs at people who say women buy into brand-sponsored ideals of beauty, because she knows people always turn around to look at her. She also knows she is more than that, because back in her day, girls were taught how to speak and when to argue, how to cook and entertain. The idea of looking ungroomed-or worse, undignified-repulses her. She doesn't wear tacky clothes or switch to ugly shoes as she grows old. She moves into it with unexpected grace, retaining her diva-esque charm long until the day she dies, knowing she will be remembered as beautiful forever.
They will be remembered, if only once a year, if only by some, if only by us.
Happy Women's Day everyone.