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.

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.