73.

The tyranny of the in between is at its most oppressive at 24. So far, anyway. Not young enough to judge people for being born in the 80s, not old enough to relate to the people who judge the people born in the 90s, you're really nowhere at all. In a school, sandwiched between seventeen and seventy year olds, you feel like a student who forgot to come in uniform, or like you're forever chaperoning a younger sibling's party when your parents are still in the house. It's quite maddening, really.

"I really don't care if you bunk General class," I say to advisees, because I really don't. I know they will whether or not I threaten them with Student Handbooks and study hall. And then, remembering my conversations with teachers and in particular the terrible college essays I have read, I add "You're the ones who are screwed if you don't though, because your writing skills are awful, so do yourselves a favour and go, you'll thank us for it later, I promise." And then, remembering I am supposed to be a goddamned authority figure, I say, "You signed the Student Handbook! You have to attend all your classes! If you don't you'll get study hall!"

Defeat. Where do I belong again, the classroom or the staff room or some mythical place somewhere in the middle?

I say good morning to the principal. I call her Mrs Lastname, not by her first name, not ever. She's a teacher! Teachers don't have first names unless prefixed by a Miss or something. She tells me she is most distressed by students' use of inappropriate language. They say "awesome" when they mean "very good" and "yaar" to refer to friends and they mix their English and Urdu and they use slang and it's all quite terrible, really. Yaar, iss age pay aap retire hi kar jayen, I think. Kaafi awesome ho ga. "Yes, they should really pay more attention in General class," I pander to my audience.

One of the students wanted to know why her friend hangs out with my department, because we're so old. My ego is stung. Old, I think, is for people who have coherent memories of the time you were born! I was in kindergarten! Quite cheeky of her to say that to me, considering I'm five years...older.

24. Tyranny.

72.

The students cheered and hollered loudly today when their friends campaigned for student council. Some of the kids rode waves of popularity all the way to the ballot box, scarcely bothering to make speeches, others tried harder, but they all got cheers. Once again, on the other side of the fence, I'm sitting and checking signatures against a list of student names and thinking how much easier it was to matter back in school. The lines that make you Someone start to run into one another like colors in a magic paint-with-water book when you are removed from the context of sixteen years of formal education.
I asked someone two weeks ago if growing up means adjusting expectations when your whole life you've been fed on a diet of dreams you must chase. Why didn't that diet include gentler words of wisdom, such as defining to yourself why you have a dream at all? Why were we told to reach for the moon to land among the stars, etcetera, when we should have been reminded our brightness may or may not lie in astronomic pursuits? And why, why, didn't anyone tell us inspiration lies in the people we meet and as long as we stay human we will automatically matter? It is inspiration, not achievement, that is found in mean quantities in the supposed real world. Someone should hold seminars for 21 year olds telling them that their three-years-later selves won't care how many things are checked off a to-do-list every day. Telling them to hear and tell stories and meet people, because that is the only thing that ever changed the world for the better.
I asked a current student council member if it's a bitter feeling to see the next group come in and take their place, remembering that's how we felt six years ago, remembering that's how I feel now when my friends are still in college. That slight envy of good times still to come, coupled with I-wish-you-knew-what-was-coming. Really, I wish you knew what was coming, because life never stops being fascinating if mattering matters less.

71.

There are so many useless wars being fought. While the world fails to debate the necessity of drones and dams, burqas and birth control are once again dominating public discourse. It seems that women's bodies are the oldest battle territory, being trampled on endlessly by men who believe boots on the ground are best way to fight the war against feminism.

Rush Limbaugh thinks all women who buy birth control are whores.
The Komen Foundation thinks it can support one part of female anatomy while neglecting the rest.
Lawmakers think a fetus I grow inside me has more "personhood" than the rest of me.
Slow-moving drivers on the road want me to know the skinny jeans under my kurti are whatever filth they utter as they pass.
Judges in courts want me to know I was probably asking for it.
The technician in the X ray lab wants to know if I am married, not pregnant.
Internet trolls everywhere say that if I protest, I must protest within the boundaries of male-defined modesty. Like a lady, not a slut.

So you have taken my health, my breasts, my not-pregnant period, the way I walk, the way I talk, how I move and what I say and I will regulate my behaviour so as not to shock your tiny mind, so as to safeguard your virtue. I will. I will because I can walk down the street wearing the tightest jeans or a shapeless bag and you will never understand it is all relative and you will never look away (or even smile). But you will curl your lip and smirk when I demand to know why I am different, because one should have balance in life yaar, one shouldn't be a feminist. I will let you believe you are inherently more reasonable, more practical, less flooded with hormones, more entitled to success and respect and the streets and justice and even God. I know this is your war, not mine, because mine is fought in my head and that-that is something you will never control.

And every day, I will thank god for every man who put down his arms (or who never took them up to begin with), for every woman who holds onto her thoughts and for every undefined binary-rejecting friend who ignores it altogether. Old conservative men are welcome to be an authority on menstruation, pregnancy, modesty and women's delicate emotions, they are welcome to their war, they are welcome to have us laugh at them, but their battlegrounds know this is another great game that will never be won.

70.

The upside down card reader outside my dorm, its magnetic stripe unexpectedly running down the right and not left side. The beep-beep of my door when I hurriedly swiped backward when returning from the shower. My glittery turquoise flip flops, squelching and wet, kicked off into my closet to dry with my yellow bathrobe. The yellow bathrobe I lost when an inebriated girl stumbled into my room nude and needed to be covered up. The Swiffer, wet wipes, dusters, laundry freshener and disinfectant neatly lined in my closet so I could clean my life back into order every time I had a paper to write. Three thousand pages of readings, printed, colour-coordinated and labeled in my transparent plastic drawers. I dropped them in the recycling bin when I finished my thesis. They fell inside with a thud I felt in my stomach and I missed them immediately. The soft pile of my rug which I felt against my face when I laughed so hard I cried and cried so hard I laughed, when there was nothing to do but lie on the floor with my face against the blue. My friend’s obnoxious black boots, which I nudged away with my toe while lazing on the floor eating pizza with her, telling her to leave her shoes outside like a good Asian and laughing about how we weren’t the clean kind of Asians. The PVTA schedule in my drawer, memorized backwards and forwards (except for the weekend B43 route, with too many stops to keep track of). People on the PVTA. Judging people on the PVTA. That one definitely goes to Hampshire. She is barefoot, not dirty but kind of dusty looking, wearing a shapeless knee length cotton dress and a nose ring. I marvel at how tiny her bones are, how pretty her cheeks and how filthy the soles of her feet from cultivating calluses in preparation for winter. The Amherst guy looks like a stereotype. Popped collar and everything. My red Mount Holyoke sweatshirt, with its Pegasus and class pride that means nothing to anyone but us. My lack of class pride. I am yellow and red, I am orange, I would say, because I am a fake senior, but on convocation I wore only red, unwilling to explain. Feeling fake at J show on senior night and feeling like a double senior while I wrote my thesis and worked three jobs. Walking into my Tuesday job at Ortega House on a Monday night and getting a bright smile from the Latina who thought I was there because I felt at home and not because my body clock was off by 24 hours. Taking naps between classes and forgoing sleep at night because there were too many amazing conversations to be had right outside my door. Amazing conversations, amazing conversations. Saying hey, let’s Do Something and registering it as a whole organization over a pizza dinner. Conversations always meant something, except when they didn’t. Saying hi, how are you, what can I get you today, would you like that with soy milk, cream cheese on your bagel, should I slice that for you, can I get the little one an orange juice, do you want that in a bag, should I leave space for half and half, no we don’t take debit, we’re out of Oolong tea and sometimes meeting great people and sometimes not. Cutting my hair and coming in for my shift and having my coworker come very close and look me in the eye and say, you cut your hair, did you? And trying to explain I am actually straight, but I like short hair. Pulling the belt on my black sweater tight around my waist and my gay friend told me I was almost attractive that day, but not usually because I look like the kind of girl a guy would be into and feeling oddly let down. My boyfriend, I would say, my boyfriend is waiting for me to call and thinking about all the girls whose boyfriends weren’t a million miles away and wondering what it would be like, what heady freedom would actually mean if I could really use it with a boy I loved. Not really thinking about boys much and realizing how little I missed them, but eventually not realizing at all. The smell of winter-coming, the smell of winter here, the beautiful silence of snowfall. The cookies and kindergarten smell of Kendade-Cleveland-Carr-who knew the difference anyway-the preparing lunch sandwiches for grab and go smell in my 11am class. The boy in my history class-it took me all semester to realize he was a boy, I have never seen a boy so thin-he had a British accent, but he didn’t speak much. The professor who always said “Good morning Miss Elahi,” enunciating it correctly even though he had seventy two students and he never forgot a name. He said it was okay the day I fell asleep in my seat and actually slid off my chair, because everyone is exhausted sometimes and I clearly was. I excused myself to wash my face and dry it with woody-smelling paper towels and came back and wished I was awake enough to be as inspired as usual. Inspiration, inspiration. I don’t remember when it left exactly, but it wasn’t long ago. The Stimson room in the library had tea and cookies on Wednesdays at 4pm, but I always remembered too late. The room was full of poetry books and the fireplace was perfect. The feeling of my heart bursting the first time I saw spring, of my jaw dropping when the cherry tree blossomed and scattered pink flowers across the path to where I lived and thinking how ungrateful are these girls who are laughing at my incredulity. YouTube videos on the big screen in Cleveland L2 at night, when we were supposed to be studying biology. I still can’t explain how mitosis happens, but the girl I spent the night with was a third culture kid from a dozen different countries and that was altogether more informative. The biology professor had a nice butt and the kind of face you had to imagine with straw hanging out of his mouth-a nice face, but an Anglo-Saxon farm face which asked me too many stupid questions about my culture. All the girls watched his behind and sometimes they noticed Fifi’s legs, because she only wore shorts and she had the longest legs of any girl I had seen. She didn’t like the professor because he made fun of her town. Towns, outside train windows and wondering what it was like to grow up in a town and be proud of it and caring about it more than other towns. If there was ever a DHA versus Saddar cricket match, I would not care who won, but these kids went nuts at the mention of sporting victories for their suburban homes. Nationalism, my professor scoffed. Ha. Nationalism. Imagined communities. Using those words and taking it for granted everyone would have read the book, or at least the recommended extracts. Coming home and realizing nobody had, but there was so much I had missed learning too. The past is a different country. My two year reunion invitation is in the mail. How far away. How long ago.

69.

In my second year of college, I took a history class on Muslim politics in modern South Asia. It was the first step to what would become my major and independent research. There were nine or ten of us in class, of which seven (including myself) were South Asian Muslim, one was West Indian Muslim and two were white Americans. This is important. I later took history classes on China, ancient Greece and Latin America and I was conscious of the way I engaged with the material differently because of my race and religion and nationality.
This interested me when I studied the philosophy of history (a class with concerns that are supposedly universal), in a room full of people a great deal more colourful than the classrooms teaching regional histories. "Positivism," I scrawled in the margin of my notes, thinking but not really thinking about how there can be no such thing. I tried to take my Pakistani-Muslim-Woman-Sufi parents-Urdu speaking-Punjabi speaking-pro Partition-anti Partition-upper class-American citizen-Pakistan resident goggles off for class, but I never could entirely. I could only sink into the consciousness of the way my person seeped into my readings and interpretations.
One of the girls in my South Asian history class was specialising in ancient Rome. She was from Alaska and needed the class to fulfill her "multicultural" requirement. On my way out of a different class one day, I overheard her telling her friend about our class. "So NOW I can totally talk about how Bangladesh was a product of the oppression of West Packistan's economic exploitation, who knew?" Earlier in class, she had remarked "Whoa! Interesting little country." I disliked her generally. Briefly, our eyes met. She lowered hers in the embarrassment that I had overheard her, neither of us sure why she was embarrassed. I realised I was feeling hurt. My major, my research, my home and my country had suddenly, in my own eyes, appeared as a multicultural requirement. My own history was obscure.
I forced myself to go beyond my comfort zone a lot through Intergroup Dialogues and classes about things I knew nothing about because I was determined not to tokenize any experience or see my own as the norm. I am what I am and you are what you are, you know?
Someone I knew in college boycotted Snapple because of its exoticisation of mangosteen (and therefore Asia). That was beyond my understanding. Mangosteen had nothing to do with my otherness.

68.

My wedding present to myself arrived today.

The new bookshelf we ordered is wide enough to hold it for sure. I think the little cubbyholes in the wall unit are meant for decoration, so I bought decor I can read and dream on and sleep with.

For three thousand one hundred and sixty eight rupees, I have twelve new volumes which I will one day stamp with a custom-made stamp saying "From the library of Sarah and Emaad." One day, I will donate one or more of these treasures and someone will flip to the first stamped page and say here is someone who loved very much and the beauty will multiply like caterpillars building cocoons in a bicycle basket. Twelve to add to a few dozen more which I will take with me, twelve to subtract from the few dozen I leave behind. On hot, brooding afternoons in July, I will take them out of the growing-older shelf, dust off the less-loved ones and arrange them by author, by subject, by title.

And when the first rush of newness-of the books, of my life, of everything-has passed, I will have old friends and new ideas waiting to be held. I will dream with Marquez, imagine with Roy and pontificate on politics with Said and Ahmed. On a rainy afternoon, I will cry about war, celebrate humanity and perfect my Urdu with Faiz and Manto. Perhaps on a bad tutoring day I will fall back on the Elements of Grammar and after a long one, retire with Pattanjali and his yoga sutras.

I am not getting married because I don't want to be alone. I have too much to read to worry about that.

I am getting married because I am excited to share my books and my love and my life with my best friend in the world.

Until then, my new present is waiting to be opened.

67.

I wish I had some aptitude for physics. I think an understanding of the physical universe outside of the stupidities and banalities of human existence would be both fascinating and therapeutic.

I don't really mean to call all of human existence stupid and banal, but much of it is. Or at least its interpretation is. It drives me crazy thinking about how many people don't think at all. Because one of my goals is to channel yoga practice into daily life, I try and remind myself that wise people are the ones who know they know nothing and that I don't know anything about anybody until I've walked a mile in their shoes, but I confess that I don't practice what I preach to myself.

I watch women a lot and wonder what they are really like and what they think about when they are alone or making tea or in the shower or in bed. Always women. I tend to gloss over the men I see in daily life, but women interest me. I will wait for them, impatiently, as I stand in line at the tailor's shop and wonder if they love their husbands or if they are unhappy with their lives. Sometimes I eavesdrop on conversations in public places and sometimes-too many times-wonder if people think at all. About anything. Or whether they just float from one thing to another, making stupid comments and loving their children and being normal citizens and being hypocrites and sipping chai. Again and again, I cruelly think, you don't think at all, and I remind myself they are mothers and sisters and friends and human beings and must think about something, but I fall short of that yogi-like love for humanity. All in all, Pakistani society drives me mad. Not just my own social class, but all of them. I've been lucky to have worked with people from all walks of life and although wonderful people are to be found everywhere, so are the stupid and ignorant.

People are cruel that way. They fascinate you and then stomp on your interest in derision and laugh in your face at the expectation that they will be as beautiful as you want them to be. I want to see them and their stories of love and passion and disappointment and hurt and sins and redemption, but so often all you get is what seems like emptiness and slumped out giving upness. I'm left to my own self-centered disillusionment, thinking I wish I understood physics better to take me away from the world of people and into something bigger and forever expanding.

66.

I see Karachi through a car window all the time. I wish I could walk out of my house anytime I like and go as far as I want, but the farthest I have walked around here is down the street to buy milk or cat food and even that feels heady and exciting just because I am on my own two legs. I love walking. I would deliberately miss the bus to the supermarket in college so I had an excuse to walk there and back, especially when it was snowing. In Karachi, girls like me walk around on walking tracks. That drives me crazy. Walking around an ugly track, with exactly one square kilometer of grass in the middle, which you are not allowed to step on. Round and round like a hamster on a wheel, just to get the kind of exercise human beings are meant to get just living their ordinary lives.
When you walk, you're forced to pay attention to the world and you see things that car windows don't allow at 80mph. The other day I was walking back to the car down a congested road and an old woman tugged at my kameez. She was squatting on the floor, begging from a dark corner behind a paan shop, in front of a staircase that looked like it might collapse. One of the men there turned to her and told her to go away, but not harshly. She laughed and waved him away and I thought what crazy eyes and I wanted to stop right there and ask her about the city and that staircase and if she has children and how she pays for her paan, but of course I didn't. I smiled though, because she startled me and she almost looked like she wouldn't mind having a conversation right there, but she and I were worlds apart already and I got into the car and shut myself off again.
We don't really see each other, do we? I write this blog without my real name on it because I want to walk around this city and stare at you and ask about your life, but invisibly. Invisibly I watch you and quietly I scream and I scream and I scream because I want to be heard and not seen. Recently, people have started telling me they like my blog, which makes me realise my initials are not a very good pseudonym and it terrifies me a bit, because they have all seen me naked and shouting and no longer faceless. My two month hiatus from writing wasn't because I was walking around and learning about you, but because I wasn't. I was afraid to do it all knowing people know who I am, but here I am stepping out of my car and saying hello, I'll still write. My name is Sarah Elahi, I wasn't very good at annonymity and here I am for real.

Blogger stats has informed me I have readers in France, Netherlands, Ukraine, Romania and South Africa! I'm sure whoever you are, you stumbled on this blog by mistake, because I don't know anybody in these countries-but if you're reading this, say hello in the comments! I'd love to know what brought you here :)

I would also love to know why my blog is linked to an LA weight loss site and a business selling Ajwa dates, but that's for a different day. The internet is a mysterious place.

65.

I woke up today knowing its November 2nd and didn’t want to bother getting out of bed. The second day of November. This was supposed to be my day. This was the day I chose for the exhibition that would showcase my year of painstaking research on the 1971 war. I wanted to throw myself a pity party with my pillows and not go to work, but I did because it’s crunch time for college applications and I had promised to help someone with a personal statement. Waking up was the saintliest thing I did today. I’ve been completely petty otherwise.

You know how sometimes on your birthday you’ll be in Physics class or at the grocery store and nobody will know it’s your birthday and you’ll feel like you know something everyone else doesn’t? You’ll feel like there’s something you should be sharing with people. In a good way. I have that same feeling today, but the sad version of it. All day, I’ve been thinking CAP, CAP, CAP and nobody here knows why I left. I feel like a liar. Nobody ever asks me about my last job, so I haven’t had to lie-yet. I’m feeling heavy with my secret. It’s not something I want to share, but it’s weighing down my hair and eyebrows and mouth. Somebody mentioned the exhibition in the staff room today and asked me if it’s the same organization I worked at that’s putting it up. She said my ex-boss is a brilliant woman who achieved so much in life. “I don’t want to talk about this!!” was what I thought, but “Yes” was all I said. Again, that lying feeling. It’s staff room talk to you, it was a whole nine months of excitement to me.

I want to hug my friends who actually put up the exhibition. I know they’ve been worked to the bone. I know it so well. I want to congratulate them and tell them how amazing they are. I want to meet the artists whose portfolios I studied a few months ago. I want to buy my former colleagues dinner and tell them I love them. I want to see the exhibition. I’m not sure if I can do it. Not today, anyway. Tomorrow, day after, sure. Any day but November 2nd, please. I know I’ve been specially acknowledged in their exhibition thank yous and I think it would make me cry. Not because I’m touched-though I am-but because then I will have to think about why I left and I am so good at not thinking about it.

I left so pigheadedly and I don’t regret it. I think there’s a timeline for everything and mine was nine months. A good gestation period to make me a grown-up. I know the real reason I would have loved to put up this exhibition myself, besides of course the satisfaction of finishing what you started, is that I crave some credit. It makes me cringe to admit it to myself. After a year of hard work, seeing a finished product, seeing it all come together, having something that’s tangible and admire-able, that’s what I want. I want the pat on the back and sigh of relief. It makes me think that the path I have chosen for myself now, in a school, is so different from the one I was on. What will I ever have to show for my work now which will get me a pat on the back? A line of students whose activities were successfully coordinated? Neatly stamped report cards? A file full of internship information I compiled?

This is why, for the first time today, I truly believe there was a reason I had to leave CAP. I’ve been telling myself there must have been a reason, but now I can see it. If I am going to work in education, awareness or social work, I need to give for the sake of giving. My friends at CAP, the ones who stayed, the ones who have worked day and night on today’s exhibition, can already do that. They’re amazing people. Me? I try not to be selfish or egotistical, but of course, I can be. Learning to perform service because I love it and truly want to do it is my challenge. The past five years have thrown things at me that have forced me to learn hard work, but this year has thrown things at me that’s forced me to learn hard work for rewards that aren’t always gratifying. I feel thankful for realizing this. I’m still sad, because it will always hurt to know that things that mean a lot to you can be always be taken away. But I’m bigger than that, because it’s November 2nd and I’ve come a long, long way since this time last year.

64.

Being here makes me think about fear a lot. I tried putting it on a scale to see which is the worst kind. The time we were teaching at summer camp and heard gunshots but didn't get hurt? Didn't really care. The time your students didn't show up to class because so many kids were shot dead in their neighbourhood? Gut-wrenching, but not frightening. The time you saw your old school half blown to pieces on TV? Soul-crushing, but it happens. The time, every single day, when you call someone you love to check if they're at work yet, left work yet, home yet, stuck in a riot yet, safe yet? That is terror, every day, twice a day. The bogeymen who no longer occupy my nightmares are out to plague waking life and their imaginative strength seems to feed on my fear like a parasite. Hear a door slam and you think "bomb blast." See two guys on a motorcycle stopping for a cigarette and you think "shit, we're getting mugged."

You can call me a bourgeoisie pig, but in the past year I have spent enough time venturing into Karachi's seedy underbelly and the schools it houses for it to haunt me forever. I feel like a coward for even thinking it, let alone writing it, but I don't ever want to make an "Are you okay?" call again. It's made me fast forward to thinking about kids, and how I don't want to have any if it means sending them out to a warzone every morning, or raising them with a psyche as insanely messed up as mine seems to have become.

63.

The news bores me to death sometimes. Not because the content is boring, but because every likely comment, debate, opinion, conclusion and recommendation that comes out of it has been beaten to death, resurrected a few months later and beaten again. Hell, if it wasn't for this blog I would have forgotten half the bad news I've heard in the past year or so. What is frustrating is when even feelings become redundant. "Oh wait, I've already felt that before," is the worst possible reaction to news-unless of course it is the kind of good news we have been hungering for for so many months.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter at all who is behind anything, or whether we win or lose. What matters is how many people defend the disturbing minutiae of injustice in defense of a greater good. I've heard a new world is coming and that her arrival will be punctuated by minor skirmishes. I've heard apologetic statements about bomb blasts and blasphemy laws and getting worked up over an Ahmaddi calling his mosque a mosque and not "place of worship." I've heard that all countries go through hiccups and burps and teething and various other infant-related analogies, and that Pakistan will develop kneecaps and stumble into toddlerhood soon enough. Oh well. Oh well. Oh well. Life goes on.
I used to analyse everything, but now I don't bother. At traffic signals and on street corners, I look at people and perhaps instinctively like them, but second-guess myself and wonder what filth may be found if I peel away the layers of normality. Hello, I love what you're wearing, are you a closet racist, classist, homophobe, Nazi apologist, imperialism-lover or Blackwater spy? I rather like the way your spectacles make your face look, I've always wanted frames like that. But I worry I won't like you once you start talking. You see, I am a bit bored of hearing cliched opinions, including my own, regarding the news. Because the news is all we will talk about, if I roll down my car window and make friendly conversation. Oh, you won't roll it down? Well, neither will I, because I am afraid of getting mugged, as are you. God, it happens all the time.
Allthetime.
It amazes me that I can write when there is nothing left to be said, or thought, or felt.

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.