85.

We were waiting, eagerly, to see how the nine year old performed in this first great ritual of adolescence and belonging. In the shadowy dreamscape of that terrifying world beyond our waking control, there were four or five of us, watching and waiting. The boy leaned forward, concentrating, and trapped the tiny yellow and green parakeet fluttering around him in a quick swipe of his child-sized hands. He was lightning fast at that bit. He then hesitated, met my eye and I wondered whether he had learned his great adult lesson yet. Then, in a sudden decisive moment, he snapped the bird’s neck, putting an end to the pitiful beating of wings against his fingers. It made a noise like a No. 2 exam pencil breaking in half. I closed my eyes and looked away when it first happened before a wave of misery washed over me-and then I wept. Not for the bird, which was doomed to vulnerability and human apathy, but for the boy, who had lived up to our expectations. He saw me weeping and started to cry softly himself, not quite understanding what we wanted. I held him and we wailed together, I for loss of innocence, he for confusion. The other dreamshadows faded away, chastising me-you do not give in to care, it destroys you.

What a memory to snooze my alarm to, to brush my teeth after, to live with.

84.

All the talk about Burka Avenger has given me a fresh dislike for the burka. In spite of a growing number of people adopting the burka on the streets, in the workplace and even in my own family, my distaste for it isn't waning. Now, with the creators of this cartoon superhero talking about reversing stereotypes associated with something that is "not necessarily oppressive," I'm seeing way more rationalization and even celebration of the garment than I'm comfortable with. On one hand, it's awesome to have a modern South Asian female superhero-one that is not a saint, goddess or ancient warrior, but an (extra)ordinary Pakistani woman. Kudos to the creators for empowering children with a positive, girl-power image, but I am curious as to why they chose the burka as her secret identity costume. Is it a playful jab at the anonymity the garment affords? Is it deliberate irony, given that one is hardly equipped to be ninja-kicking anybody in a burka? Or is it what I am afraid of-an attempt to glamourize the burka?

Let me make it clear here that I support a woman's right to choose what she wants to do with her body-whether that means wearing a catsuit or a chaadar. However, I think it is deeply problematic to suggest that either outfit has the potential to make women more appealing or powerful. The only message that comes with male superhero garb is that you have to be physically fit to save lives, fly, etcetera. The message that comes with BOTH hypersexualized, high-heel wearing superheroes and with Burka Avenger is that women's bodies are commodities for male consumers.

This is usually where defenders of the burka stop paying attention to me, but it is something I strongly believe. Encouraging women to wear burkas sends the message that it is their responsibility to prevent the lecherous male gaze; that their piety and virtue are directly linked to how they are viewed by men. To every South Asian who has argued with me that "modest" clothing (however you define that) prevents sexual harassment, all I can say is-no. Just no. That is statistically dishonest, to say the least. Sexual harassment is a huge, underreported problem in South Asia and it happens to women from all walks of life-those who cover and those who reveal, those who are Muslim and those who are not. Suggesting that our culture is superior because it encourages women to prevent their own rapes is a gross oversight of the victim-blaming that our society engages in. It is a morally empty argument. I personally prefer to dress conservatively on some days-because to do otherwise would make me uncomfortable, or out of respect for someone else's values, or simply because I like to blend in. On other days, I don't bother with a dupatta and go out wearing a kameez and tights. You know what happens when I go to certain parts of the city wearing a big, modest chaadar? I get cat-called or made kissy noises at and sometimes groped. You know what happens when I go out in my tight clothes to the same places? I get cat-called or made kissy noises at and sometimes groped. Ugly displays of male entitlement have nothing to do with how I choose to behave or what I wear.

So back to superheroes. I think what we all love about superheroes is our potential to be one. They're ordinary people living ordinary lives-heartbroken teenagers, tired insurance company employees, billionaires with secret gadgets and loyal butlers-ok maybe not always ordinary, but always something little kids can imagine themselves being one day. They fight bad guys and make the world a better place and after they are done fighting crime, their alter egos look like much more attractive versions of you and me. So Kudos to the Burka Avenger's real life persona wearing normal shalwar kameez and kicking ass like you only wish your primary school teacher did in her spare time. But it would be nice to live in a world where little girls didn't have to choose between donning a catsuit or a burka to play superheroes. It would be especially nice if they thought they could be superheroes wearing clothes that are culturally  relevant in Pakistan-which I'm sorry, but the burka is not, seeing as how it's exclusive to a small subset of only the Muslim population. In a world where daring to be a woman with opinions, choices and yes, a face, is increasingly taboo, our only solution is to fight misogyny with a stubborn refusal to give in to it. 

83.

Dear 20 year old me,

When someone told me to write a letter to you, I decided I wouldn’t because I hardly know you. I barely recognize you. This, I later realized, is a good thing. If you resembled the current you, you would probably be doing very little learning right now, so get ready for the bumps and bruises that self-help books prescribe for toughening up.

Your college experience is still brand spanking new in many ways. You’re still flushed with gratitude for the financial aid you’re getting, the opportunities to take amazing classes, your meetings with exciting new people. Hold on to that. There will be a day when you sit on a parking lot curb and cry your eyes out because you think you are dropping out of school, you’re exhausted trying to juggle work and classes, you can’t believe the unfairness of a system that would give you hope one year and crush it the next and above all, you feel stupid for not being more prepared and wiser about managing finances. You’re going to realize it’s okay to ask for (and accept) help. Your gratitude will come back when you learn how beautifully people and even institutions can come through for you. You will work even harder next year to make sure you deserve the wonderful things the universe keeps giving you and you will never make the mistake of mixing up your debit and credit cards, or miscalculating your phone bill, or leaving your paycheck in the laundry room, or signing off on unsubsidized loans, or agreeing to work for less than 8 dollars an hour again. You will spend every six months after graduation converting rupees to dollars to figure out how much you can afford to donate to the financial aid fund as a marker of your gratitude. Sometimes, you will have to say no thank you to friends who want to go to bars and restaurants and Mexico and save money to pay back your One Card debt at the bookstore and feel shitty about it. Don’t feel shitty about it. When you buy yourself a winter jacket, a new laundry hamper, groceries for spring break and the books you really just want to own and not rent, you will feel really, really good. By the time you’re done, you’ll have saved up a few hundred dollars; enough to get a ticket to New York to pick up your parents from the airport when they come for graduation, enough to treat your siblings to pizza and ice cream for a few days, even enough to buy a pretty dress and heels and lipstick for commencement. You’ll feel like a millionaire and don’t worry, you won’t realize how delusional you are until you get your first loan repayment notice, which is far away yet.

You will learn that heartbreak happens when people are right about the world being as broken and cruel as it really is. You know who you want to marry and you think you’re over heartache, but you haven’t considered the possibility of being hurt by random things you learn about the world rather than by another person. Consider that possibility. Consider that right now, you are filled with a sense of anythingcanhappen, a sense of wanting to change the world (In a year! In a month! IN A DAY!) and snottily feel sorry for those who claim they are “realists.” In two years time, you will passionately defend your choices in life and angrily explain to people that what you are doing is, in fact, changing the world, a little a time. In three years time, you will be disillusioned by the people who the world applauds for making a difference and start questioning everything about why you chose your field at all. You’ll spend at least a year trying to figure out if it’s worth making a difference, occasionally admitting the realists were right and then making plans to leave (later you’ll call it running away) so you can start over in a shiny new place where you can make a different difference. At some point, you will look around and be inspired by people who don’t set out to win the Nobel Prize, people who transform everything around them by doing what they love and you will want to be one of them. 

You will almost go to graduate school and then struggle when you realize that the things you want to accomplish require Being Here, getting your hands dirty and dealing with many more years of dirty bureaucracy and irritating hurdles. You will decide you’re not brave enough to stick around for a vague plan you haven’t shared with anyone but your partner and then you will decide you are. I don’t know how it goes from there, but it will be hard and you will hope it is worth it.

You will fight with your parents a lot. Don’t. In a couple of years you’ll be embarrassed to admit to yourself that they, especially your mother, are Always Right. You will find yourself calling your parents to ask how to make the perfect salad and whether to renew your employment contract because after four years of independence, suddenly you can’t function without their advice. You will eventually quit being such a baby, but you’ll never get rid of the tiny mom-voice in your head that shouts “Bismillah!” whenever somebody drives too fast and reproachfully tells you that if you had bothered trying on that churidar pyjama when it was first stitched you wouldn’t be sitting here with polythene bags on your feet, grunting to pull it on.  

You will go from being unsure of yourself to bouncing with confidence. You will be commencement speaker. You will be proud of yourself. When you are handed your degree, you will sit back down in your seat and laugh and cry at the same time because you worked so hard to get it. Other people will look at you like so what, we all eventually graduate, but you won’t care. You’ll feel wounded in a couple of years when people ask why you don’t get “more education” and why you’re satisfied with “just a BA” because you’ll never forget how far you came to get the first degree.

You will be obsessed with your thesis. You will take classes which blow your mind. Four years later, you will write to professors about how you are using those classes to plan your own classes and they’ll say you made their day. Don’t skip class.

Your thesis defense will be canceled the day before it is supposed to happen due to a series of unfortunate events that the department will apologize for one month after you graduate. You will curl up on your rug and cry like a baby and feel as if you have lost everything you have thrown your entire self into for two years. You will pick yourself off the rug and go to work because you need the $20 and one of the kids there will give you a flower and a goodbye card and they will all hug you and make you promise to be a teacher again in Pakistan. You’ll cry for the second time, but this time in a good way and tell your friend over dinner that you see the bigger picture. You don’t really see it, but it helps to say it. Later, you’ll see the bigger picture and realize you can’t unlearn your thesis and not defending it doesn’t make it any less important to you.

You will be disgusted by people and disappointed by people and driven mad by people. You will beat yourself up about being a bad person when you decide to distance people who haven’t deliberately hurt you, but who you don’t want to be around for reasons you won’t want to articulate. You will make and lose friends and make friends again and when something terrible happens and you find yourself dialing one number and not another, suddenly realize who it is you can really count on. You’ll waste a lot of tears and a perfectly good Nokia 1100 which you hurl at the wall, but it’ll get better.

In five years, you’ll realize you are at your happiest ever. You will be sitting in Pigeon or Mermaid pose on your yoga mat and it will hit you that you absolutely love where you are and what you are doing and who you are with. You should give credit to your husband and family in that moment, but you won’t. You’ll think it’s a product of your disciplined asana practice and be cocky for a few days, but the happiness won’t fade.

Soon, you will be unrecognizable in many ways. You will be 20 pounds heavier and people will be cruel about it. You’ll briefly consider being anorexic or something and then choose a more sensible option and lose some (but not all) of it. You’ll wish you had joined the positive body image club in college just for practice. You’ll come home from random gatherings with a cryingish feeling in your throat because three people were rude enough to ask if your thyroid condition is to blame for making your heavier and how their friend’s sister’s daughter was also on thyroxine and she dropped her excess weight like a hot potato and when do you plan on doing the same? For a while, you will tie your worth to a number on a scale, the way you promise yourself now you never will. You’ll wonder why you care so much and then you will stop caring. Don’t freak out too much. In five years you will be able to run faster, train harder, lift heavier and stretch further than you ever imagined possible and feel smug in front of skinny minnies struggling at the gym.

You will be bored by regular employment and think all employers are insane until you find the right job (and you will) and then you will actively look forward to Mondays. That day will come. Meanwhile, gear up for some of the world’s most psychotic bosses. They will make some funny stories later on, so deal with them as they come and use them to learn about what you don’t want to become.

Gear up for a lot of things. In five years you’ll go from anxiously awaiting your first flight to college, to supporting yourself, changing your entire belief system about three times, reading hundreds of books, meeting fascinating people, graduating, getting married, making all your important decisions about career and grad school and having kids and working your way through four jobs. And you will feel stupider at the end of it for having been cocky at 20, but don’t worry. Your cockiness is about to be destroyed. Enjoy the ride.

Love,

Me.

82.

I’m a yogini. Technically, anyway. I have two and a half students and don’t own, or work at, a studio. I have a 200 hour teacher training certification, but not from the prestigious Yoga Alliance, because my teacher believes their membership fees would make his training program unaffordable. I don’t have beautiful photographs of myself doing Wild Thing or Lord Dancer Pose against the setting sun on a beach and nobody ever asks me to perform asanas in meadows while they click their DSLR. I don’t eat meat, but I do eat fish (and no, I don’t “feel bad for them as sentient beings,” before you ask). I don’t remind everybody that sugar is poison because I have a crazy sweet tooth. I have no desire to ever do a wheatgrass shot, because it has the word “grass” and I’m sure it tastes awful. I can do splits, handstands and dropbacks to Wheel pose, but I usually don’t unless I’m in my room, sometimes with the cat watching. I know the Sanskrit words for poses, but never use them in class because English works just as well. I don’t own a single item of clothing from Lululemon; I wear my husband’s t shirts and track pants from my college days. I am not skinny and never will be, no matter how much I focus on healthy eating and vinyasa yoga. When yoga teachers talk about feeling the light of the universe in your hamstrings and gently awakening your heart chakra to absorb the wisdom of Pattanjali, I feel pretentious just hearing it. I love my hamstrings and heart chakra and even Pattanjali, but sometimes I worry my low threshold for hearing about all these things in the same sentence makes me a bit of a fraud.

This is bad marketing. I should tell you about waking every day with a sunbeam on my face and a prayer in my heart. I should talk about the joys of clean living and how energetic I feel because I don’t eat meat. I should do 108 Sun Salutations in a row, in a public park or beside the sea, preferably at dawn. I should not tell you that every time I balance in Scorpion against the wall, or manage a backbend while I’m in a split, I shout to my husband “Woohoo, are you APPRECIATING THIS YET?”

You don’t need to know that I have cotton pants four sizes too big for me in colours which happen to be flattering because I think it makes me look like I’m naturally thin, cool and unconcerned, the way a yogini should be. Nobody wants to know that pranayama was the last thing I chose to focus on when developing my own practice (I do it now, I promise!), or that I won’t use a neti pot to clear my perennially clogged respiratory system just because that episode on House where the guy dies from brain-eating bacteria freaked me out. I love Ayurvedic remedies, herbal tea and eating right for my dosha, but I won’t try any ancient remedies that sound like they taste bad (like chewing on six black peppers to cure an allergy attack). I’m immature. I have no patience, except with children, because I think they are cute. I’m the prototype for a 20 something urban-dweller and you are welcome to disparage me for not being a real yogini.

But as Dr Suess says…UNLESS…

Unless you know how many things yoga can be, don’t knock it till you try it. I am not a jet-setting instructor with a book deal and advertisements for Nike yoga shoes (which are as ridiculous as they sound), but I will never judge you. I won’t judge you for thinking yoga is boring, “nothing but stretching,” not intense enough, but I might challenge you to see otherwise. I won’t live up to your expectations of what a yoga teacher should be like, but I will practice for an hour every day on my mat and if you really want me to, even teach you what “breathing into your psoas” actually means. I promise never to write blogs about finding the goddess within me and I will never lecture you on what yoga is REALLY about-because, you know, that's kind of what yoga's all about.

81.

My relationship with history is a messy one. Born more than forty years after Partition, surrounded by those who remembered it, the event trickled into the deepest shadows of my imagination, populated by mind-elves in saris and kurta pajamas, squabbling about the Muslim League, Unionists and Congress in muddled, half-understood Urdu and Punjabi. When I was asked to summon my thoughts about it as a college student, archivist or interviewer, the elves clambered out, noisily, to the background sound of yellowing pages rustling against a thumb with paper cuts.

My first awakening, the first time these ghosts with their UP accents and starched cotton saris were asked to organize themselves and explain to my post-everything self what 1947 stood for, was in college. Until then, Partition was a badly understood idea at best, confused by school-sanctioned patriotism and tacky “Love the soil of Pakistan” bumper stickers. Then came Ayesha Jalal, with her dry prose cutting through the nonsense of national idiom and setting my mind on fire. She was followed by historians, political scientists and dozens of interviewees who exhausted my capacity to comprehend Partition. I fantasized about crawling into my grandmother’s closet, scented with mothballs, and not coming out until my thesis wrote itself. I alternated between frenzied bouts of reading and writing and running from all things Partition-related. The process was so all-consuming that my idealistic motivations about educating children fell by the wayside. How, how, how would I transmit my half-baked ideas to anybody? The weight of August 1947, its sticky heat and oppressive ennui, made my mind sag like plants in an Amritsar home that a young woman and her mother had expected to return to, but didn’t.

There was the Jinnah movie in fifth grade, of which I remembered only a pregnant woman’s belly being pierced with a spear while an angry Junoon tune played in the background and the Stanley Wolpert quote about Jinnah which has been reproduced so many times in so many school assemblies and 14^th August demonstrations. There were vague ideas about Muslim rights and the image of sadness-tinged, upright forefathers refusing to sing Vande Mataram and something to do with Hindu supremacy. There was the story of my grandmother and the death trains-the image seared into our ten year old brains was the one of her beautiful hair being chopped off after being exposed to filth and fleas on the two-month journey to Pakistan. There were the stories of my other grandmother and her home with its important visits by important people who we studied about in history books and the sense that we must live up to their expectations (don’t decry nationalism or their ghosts will look down on you reproachfully, don’t joke about them or Allah Mian will hear you). There was all this, no doubt, along with a heaviness, a pregnant-but-not-ready encyclopedia of images and ideas, in the minds of my students. They were me. I was twenty-two. Where does one even begin to commit to this moment in history, to this colossal undertaking of simultaneously understanding and explaining Partition? So I organized the things I could not and would not teach and how I could not and would not teach them. I went to class and fiddled with pedestal fans, dusted chalk off my kameez, passed around photocopies about inoffensive things like the geography of Pakistan (the borders already drawn for me by 1947). I talked about refugees and the Muslim League and the Congress and overthrowing colonialism, making all the political characters sound Equally Good and On The Same Side. I expended huge amounts of energy on not noticing that it was forty seven degrees Celsius and there was no electricity and how it just didn’t matter what I taught anybody in that context. In return, they taught me about their colonies and picnics at Benazir Bhutto park and playtime and loss. We became friends and I grew increasingly bitter with the idea of an objective history.

I started hating the questionnaire we used to interview oral history candidates, with its quiet assumptions about class and nationalism. Do you remember seeing the Pakistan flag unfurled for the first time? Were you proud to fly PIA the first time? I’m so sorry to steer you back to our topic, but can you describe Karachi’s nightlife in the 1950s? It made me sick. Meanwhile, Pakistan moved on, never allowing us a moment to catch our collective breath, not caring that I was scanning decaying newspaper articles about Mujib-ur-Rehman’s Six Points and vintage advertisements for Kashmiri Beauty long-lasting matchsticks. I would transcribe interviews, my heart breaking over and over for the man whose wife called him a coward and burned him with her disappointment when he ran for his life during a Dhaka riot in 1971; applauding the lady whose excellent matchmaking services and record of finding Very Suitable Boys saw her through bombing raids in 1965 after she was widowed. In between, I would check Facebook and Twitter for updates on the situation outside our window. Zulfikar Mirza drunkenly poked fun of Muhajirs. Rehman Malik came into power and a joke about calling apples bananas made the rounds. We lost students’ family members at summer camp to communal violence and missed a few days of school. Osama was killed. Drone strikes escalated. Polio vaccine campaigns came under threat. Damned if we do and damned if we don’t, we said. Pakistan was reappropriated as “Af-Pak.” All that history we were digging up that made us part of India, we joked, was becoming obsolete, as if such a thing were possible. We saw ourselves morph into a Taliban state, a Global Threat, citizens of the world’s Most Dangerous City. People told us we were brave and we felt uncomfortable. On most days, Partition and its stories made no sense.

The following year, as a teacher, I quietly struck “South Asia; the partition of the subcontinent and the subsequent history of the Indian and Pakistani states” off the world history syllabus for my O level students. It’s because I didn’t want to confuse them by offering them “real” history the same year they learned the mutilated Partition history of Pakistan Studies, I said to school administration. It’s because I would much rather teach China, a topic that is so relevant today, I told students. It’s because our syllabus is so lengthy, I told colleagues. I couldn’t decide which answer was best. It could be because Mrs. J left her home in Amritsar unlatched because she was going to return soon, but she, like her neighbor Sadat Hasan Manto, never did. It could be because Mr. I was an Urdu-speaking man from Calcutta who migrated to Punjab, didn’t fit in, migrated to Dhaka, didn’t fit in, migrated to Karachi and still doesn’t fit in. It could be because a million silent rapes have been replaced by louder ones. It could be that I am exhausted, and twenty five, and no smarter than three years ago, and there is noise in my head, a rustlerustlerustle of pages of books and interviews which leap out and eat me alive. It could be that the thought of going to graduate school for history lost its charm when the idea of writing papers about Objective History appeared to be a monstrous irrelevancy before the fifteen year olds I have not yet taught. It could be, that in another forty years, a granddaughter may beat her head against the boulders left to her by my generation…and by then, I will have grown to understand, by then I will have something to teach.

---

[1] 

80.

The “having it all” debate seems to surround me lately by that strange phenomenon when you consider something once and then see it explode all around you. Professors and commencement speakers in college addressed the idea, but at twenty one “having it all” seemed to be a debate inconveniently dragged into our time by those who came and fought before us. Now, it bombards me repeatedly. A well-known journalist and feminist, speaking at our graduation, talked of all the victories our grandmothers had earned us, leaving us to answer the relatively new question of how to have it all.

Women can have it all! Women can’t have it all! Women can’t ignore biology! Women should ignore biology! Women should practice attachment parenting! Women should avoid helicoptering their children! Women, women, women. Where are the men in this debate? Surely, leaving them out of the battle and in the living room watching TV defeats the entire purpose, doesn’t it?

The neat dichotomy between love and success and family and career is a presupposition that these elements are mutually exclusive. I’m not referring to baby-wearing to work or flexible working hours, I mean the very idea that having it “all” means hanging on to many things you hold dear all by yourself. Men may not birth babies, or breastfeed or race against as strict a reproductive clock, but they do, in strictly biological terms, form half the equation in creating babies. If it is assumed that the debate about whether it is possible to juggle job and family doesn’t concern them, the position is inherently sexist. It may not concern all men, but no woman in a committed relationship should be questioning whether she can achieve feminist utopia alone. Whatever your expectations are from life, whether it  is to have twelve children and stay at home with them, earn three advanced degrees, start your own company, simply make ends meet or all the above, you should be able to know that havingitall is not a lonely enterprise. It is not the straightforward one discussed so often in the media, with its images of snappily-dressed career women arriving home at 5pm to feed the children (alone), or the one of Supermom preparing breakfast for ten (alone) before scheduling the day for her kids (alone) and having a June Cleaveresque relationship with her husband, who is a well-intentioned but bumbling, clueless mutt.

And if it is a lonely enterprise, or a single one, or a same-sex one, you will notice there are not many voices decrying the desire to be perfect, traditional wives and mothers while also being perfect and high-powered everythingelse. Perhaps they already realize the individual-ness of major life decisions, perhaps they watch less television, perhaps they expect less of men, perhaps they expect more of men-as we should. Whether men decide to be stay-at-home dads or whether they choose to be the sole breadwinners, the choice cannot be left to be made by women alone and forever.

The world is a mess of choices six years after my first induction into the cheerful belief that havingitall is something the modern woman does and messes are not meant to be swept by women alone. Time to stop asking if women can do it all and pass the broom around for a much tidier state of mind.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/lisaquast/2012/09/10/women-can-have-it-all-just-not-all-at-the-same-time/

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/9567198/Christine-Lagarde-Women-cant-have-it-all.html

79.

Will you be applying for graduate financial aid?

Um. No? Never again.

Indicate yes if you wish to be considered for scholarships, fellowships, student employment or any other form of university sponsored financial assistance.

Ok. Yes.

My financial services ostrich pulls its head out of the sand for a moment. Ostrich suggests I get in touch with the Department of Education and check the status of my student loans before my bad decisions of 2007 take a bite out of my rear end, seeing as how it’s aimed at the sky anyway.

The new Federal Direct Loan website is meant to look cheerful. Friendly. Accessible. It asks me to name the person I first kissed to access my forgotten password. The combination of baby blue and teal sans serif font and memories of the first romantically exciting moment of my adolescence mollify me for a moment. Who knew Direct Loan people were so soppy? I silently salute the underpaid, fresh out of college web designer who created the new forms. Well done, comrade. Were you in debt too? Did you think this would help?

Loading, loading, loading.

My failure to make payments over the unpaid summer, provide additional paperwork about my income and various other stupid decisions have put me, I think, in a pretty bad place. My ostrich desperately contemplates the head-in-ground position again, but distant hopes of further education prevent it from acting on the impulse. I take down the phone number on the website and dial, trying not to think about my phone bill for international calls.

A recorded message asks me to enter my account details. It plays and replays a sentence about how anything I say can and will be used against me in the collection of my debt. I feel like a criminal. My palms get clammy as I imagine begging and pleading, desperately explaining my work at nonprofit, effort to educate the underprivileged, troubles with the exchange rate and so on, when someone finally answers the phone and puts me out of my misery. He doesn’t care about my story. I answer ten minutes of questions. I don’t own a car. I do not own a home. My husband does not earn in dollars. He asks if I would like to pay all my student loans in full to be out of default status. I panic. I thought I had ten years to pay the full amount! He gives a reassuring laugh. I like his voice.

No, Ma’am, I understand that. It’s just that it’s illegal for me not to give you this option.

Damn this obsession with the law. Sometimes it’s so counterproductive.

I’m connected to another representative, who informs me I am eligible for a reasonable monthly payment plan. I almost laugh with relief. Thank you so much, I say. The woman on the other end is surprised by my gratitude. No problem, she says. You have to hand it to Americans for being polite. Two minutes later, my happiness evaporates when I am informed that my debit card isn’t working because the bank in Pakistan won’t authorize it. I apologize, hoping against hope they don’t think I’m one of those sad people who simply have no money in their bank account and don’t even know it, simultaneously wondering why I care about their opinion. I call the local bank, determined to give them a piece of my mind.

The irritable representative from my own city doesn’t win any points for good manners, but he is-like all Pakistanis-determined to give me “good advices” about how I should go about my private business.

Phone banking very risky. Better you not do it, ma’am. Anyway, not my business how your card doesn’t work. Un ki apni business hai jin ka system cheques allow nahin karta. Un say jaa kar behess karain.

Five minutes of fruitless shouting about wasted international call minutes, demands to leave the Stone Age behind and other exhortations later, I give up. 

Larry or Harry or someone from somewhere in the midwestern United States calls me back, asking for an update on my situation. I spend approximately one hundred rupees on phone minutes, setting up alternate payment arrangements. I pray for the god of student loans-William D. Ford, namesake of the Direct Loan system, I’m thinking of you-to grant me extra points for making this month’s payment without ripping anyone’s head off. Until next month, Department of Education, my ostrich awaits.

78.

For as long as I can remember, Nano’s place has been around to serve as my happy place. Every summer and every winter for the past seventeen years (and for eight years before that, in another place), I have returned here. It is a predictable, unchanging, comforting fact of life that Nano’s apartment seems to hold the key to healing every hurt, childish, adolescent or adult, and reminding us, year after year, that the best things in life tend to stick around. Decades of photographs in family albums document the same five rooms, reflecting occasional changes in upholstery, haircuts, height and the addition of family members, but the background remains the same. When we were twelve, my cousins and I realized and discussed at length how our family and 29-A Askari Flats are not magical, but simply normal-and the thought repulsed us. The framed photographs of smiling, braces-wearing grandchildren, the ayat-ul-kursi above the sideboard, even the faithful green swingset were suddenly things that everybody had in their homes. We were not special. For a few days, we were depressed, feeling as if we had lost some of the magic of our childhood. The following summer, however, we had forgotten and the joy of being reunited trumped any realizations we had made about the ordinariness of our existence.

Twelve years since that discussion, I find myself back at 29-A, after being separated from it for an entire year-a first for me. There are many firsts this year, not all of them welcome. For the first time, I haven’t spent the summer at Nano’s. For the first time, Zoya and I are both married and spending our first summers with our husbands and not seeing each other at all. For the first time, I have bought my own airline ticket, for the first time, my trip is unplanned, for the first time, I have willingly booked only a four-day stay and for the first time, I am not here for myself. I am irrationally anxious on the flight to Lahore (another first, I suppose), although I have always considered Lahore my real home (a secret I try my best to keep around my Karachiite family and friends). I also sleep through the first glimpse of the greenery of the city before landing and take it as a sign. This time is supposed to be different.

I’m not sure how I feel about trying to care for the people who grew me up. I’m not sure if I entirely agree with this life plan in which the people and places I have always needed might just need me (a narcissistic thought, but one that floated in regardless). I’m not sure what to say when the cook admires my wedding photographs and says look at how fast you grew up. I’m not sure I can view 29-A through my newly critical eyes, searching for imperfections or discomforts my husband might notice on our trip next winter. I’m not sure I can deal with being 24 at all this week. My anxiety rests on the premise that being here as a grownup, full and proper, is going to be too different to bear.

But when I walk in, faithfully, Nano’s place has not changed for me after all. After throwing my bags on a dining chair, I walk around making sure everything is exactly the same. I take unexpected amounts of pleasure in opening the door of the store room (without entering the password for our secret hiding place, but there is nobody here to ask for it) and smelling the musty mothball smell of the linen piled up on the shelf. I notice the upholstery hasn’t changed on the princess sofa in the dining room and appreciate the predictably well-stocked medicine cabinet with the extra toothbrush I am counting on. The books in the shelves have increased in number, but all the old favorites, including the ones I passed on to cousins ten or fifteen years ago, are wedged into the same place as before. All is well with the world. The view outside has changed a bit. The lawn has shrunk over the years, or perhaps I and my expectations have grown. The swings seem lower. Past it, I can see all of us outside, with Chloe the dog and the champa tree which is in bloom again and the shadow of the man in black, an apparition of many years ago. The emptiness I expect from the absence of Nano watching TV in her room and Ashi masi singing in hers is here, but it seems to be sitting inside me rather than in 29-A.

I stay awake all night, as per custom at Nano’s place, but I am alone. I make myself buttered toast in the kitchen, a job I usually leave to Zoya and flick through TV channels with no Nana or Nano or cousins to sing along to Bollywood songs or offer commentary on the news. I stick to my rituals anyway. At sunrise, when the perfect “blue morning” dawns, I slip out the kitchen door into the rain-washed lawn and onto the street behind the building. There is nobody with me, but it’s okay. The muddy grass squelches into my flip flops the way it always has and there are pieces of blue tile lying on the ground as usual (neighbors with years-long renovations? Who knows?) These things used to excite me and I try to remember the feeling of collecting tiles and stones because they are interesting, wading through puddles because it’s fun and sitting on the swing even though it’s so low my legs fold neatly under me and my head grazes the clothes line when I go up. 

Ordinary is perfect again, just like it was before I decided it wasn’t.

77.

The shopping bags I'm carrying are weighing down my wrists and I'm shifting my weight impatiently from one foot to another, waiting for the car to pull up. The girl next to me rolls her eyes. She says her driver is so slow, but that part would be fine if he wasn't so obviously obsessed with his fiance back home whom he talks to on the phone at night. It's disgusting, she says, the way he obviously thinks about this woman. 

Some combination of heat and nausea course through me like a wave and I have an urge to smack her with my groceries. Instead, I open my mouth, always ready with an unsolicited opinion-"You do realise the lower classes also have sex, don't you? They don't make babies by wishing for them-" but shut my mouth in time to catch the horrified expressions around me. I'm not sure if it's because I said the word "sex" out loud or flouted an unwanted hippie opinion, but I'm sufficiently irritated not to want to continue. The car pulls up and we pile inside. My friend continues, giving a fluttery laugh as if her airy lightheartedness could dispel everyone's discomfort. She continues, saying it would be perfectly all right if they didn't go around believing they can be like us now, just because they own cell phones and speak a bit of English. She briefly digresses to say it's kind of sweet and funny, though. I firmly press my head against the windowpane and ignore the conversation around me until the disgust begins to quell. I can't wait to be home.

Later, as the maid emerges from the bathroom at my house, a guest turns to me, wide-eyed. "I didn't know that was the servant bathroom," she says. I tell her it's not, it's the bathroom, where else is someone supposed to go pee? Again, my tongue is running away with its propensity to mention toilet and bedroom activities with no concern for the alarm produced in my audience. I shrug and shake my head to signal the conversation is over. Someone tells me my mother must be very progressive to allow these things, or perhaps our servants are extraordinarily clean. Most people are clean, I say, when they have access to nice bathroom facilities. I can sense the disapproval and am vaguely embarrassed, but not sure why. I seem to be ensconced in an environment of gentle, well-bred condescension. It is enveloping me, rocking me in its air conditioned, fragrant embrace, willing me to give up friendly conversations with drivers ("overfamiliar behaviour") and take my proper place in society, amidst servant-free toilets and a haze of patronizing beliefs. We give them homes, we give them sanitation, we give them three meals a day--the old echo that never echoed around my mother--fading into nausea and disgust again. 

76.

I'm stretching myself out on a lazy summer afternoon, willing myself to stick to my daily asana practice in spite of the heat and ferocious sunlight my drawn blinds can't keep out. The instructional online yoga video (labeled Not For Newbies, which is both gratifying and strange) is telling me to focus on my breath and relax the root of my tongue, connecting my feet to the earth.
This irks me. My feet, I think, will be connected to the earth whether or not I think about my alignment, because gravity will keep them there. I move up into a standing split, ruminating on gravity and the earth and the smallness of things, wobble on my standing foot and press my palms into my mat to steady myself. My ego pricked by the earlier imbalance, I kick up into a handstand, letting my heels thud dully against the door while I consider the world from a topsy turvy perspective. For a while, I thoughtlessly move through inversions and twists, deliberately staying longer in the deepest stretches, frustrated with not reaching new places. For someone who is supposed to be teaching yoga in a few months, I find myself remarkably uninspiring sometimes. Remarkably eager to go places. Remarkably ready to try something else.
There is something about this place, I tell my friends, which makes you desperate to escape. I know I'm talking nonsense and it has less to do with the place than my sense of something burning out, something burning up, which I blame on the heat outside. I stare at myself in the mirror, standing on my mat, half-expecting my hair to come alive and crackle and close my eyelids. I can't help but open them now and then, watching the lines of my body with eyes that look out train windows-curious, exploratory. I think about train windows. I think about how many times a week people comment on or look at my body as though I was a view from a train, reminding me about roundness and fullness that wasn't always there. I try to care, but my frustration melts away as I bend backward into wheel pose, lift one leg towards the sky and fail to give a damn. All of my heart is open and pointing upward and feeling like I am going somewhere, going to go somewhere.
Later, I can't decide if it was the video voiceover, the rush of blood to my head or my attempt at quieting the crackle in my brain that leaves me feeling like this is where I need to be, right now. I am hopelessly aware that I am not in that place where inspiring experiences follow me everywhere I go. I also promised myself that before I turn 25, I will achieve milestones which will be terrifying and beautiful. When I made the promise, I think I saw myself literally leaving, going to geographical locations that blow my mind. Now, I anticipate staying right here, experimenting with the thousands of ways I can terrify and conquer myself-physically yes, on my mat, but also going places in my head I never knew how to go to before. Milestone one achieved, I think.

75.

Karachi, for a year I wrote you love letters, swearing my undying love with the devotion of a spaniel, determined not to be the lone resident of this city who lacks the instinct to defend you. Love and defensiveness are one and the same here, you have made it so. Sometimes I think all we learn living here is how to seek out beauty in the saddest places, or how to look away. Do you see then, like all fickle lovers, how your people watch life through poetry, camera lenses and lies? How every part of their anatomy is obediently, subserviently, trained to appreciate you in all your cruelty and ugliness? From the eyes that anxiously seek out the sunsets made wild and unique with smog and dust and the sea below, to the noses that anticipate salt and petrol and garbage and dying fish in an attempt to soothe nostalgia, to the feet that hurry up in crowded bazaars and the hips that deftly avoid strangers' hands in public places. All the time repeating to themselves mantras and tributes and metaphors about melting pots and stepmothers, without daring to leave the parameters of their safe spaces.

And daring to leave, the feeling of daring to leave, is what unites your many lovers who see each other feel but how can we leave everything we know and where would we go? Because to leave would be to let our eyes and mouths seek out more straightforward things and we are used to not understanding so easily. The path to loving this city is never a straight line, it is winding roads and broken homes, fear and comfort, familiarity and strangeness, the joy and panic at the first drop of rain, a love-hate relationship with water. How, then, could we go someplace where beauty is right there, carefully cultivated, cherished and protected, not sought out or understood over years? How would we belong? 

You have really only enslaved us all, like the most manipulative of lovers and we can never be free because to choose freedom would be to belong nowhere. The children who shrugged off dead siblings in conversations with me last summer, the doe-eyed girl in purdah to whom you gave such big dreams, the seventeen year old teacher who lived by the railway tracks, the chain-smoking social worker who stubbed her cigarette in a dirty chai mug and said it's best to leave this fucked up place but never left herself, the delicate-skinned lady at the museum whose eyes widened when she learned what kind of children I taught, the free-thinking driver who told me he didn't believe in god, the flag-waving students who loved Salman Khan and boy scout lessons, the eunuch who was more graceful than all her patrons, the butcher whose skull was broken for opening his shop the day of a strike, what do they care for romantic notions of home? In conversations with Lahoris they will all sigh longingly at descriptions of smooth roads and traffic control, scheduled power cuts and homogenous neighborhoods with fewer guns, but they will all say we come from the big city and we have the sea and they will memorise the way the gray foam of that sea carries away slippers and long days and its stench will become part of who they are. 

74.

I can see the way your eyes widen and you pull away from me. I can feel the panic rising. Both of us can sense fear and defeat. Eleven years ago. A thirsty stray dog in a park and me, swinging halfheartedly and watching the canine collapse resignedly under a tree that provided one branch of shade. Fifteen minutes later, I found a disposable bowl and bottle of cold water, the dog was drinking in grateful surprise-grateful the way only a dog can be, really-and I was back on the swing. Eleven years. I can sense fear and thirst and longing far more often now-in more than just the canine species, but I don't think I have bothered with disposable bowls in a long time.

How often does anyone see adults actively cultivating tenderness? Towards their own, always, but beyond that, it is difficult, so difficult, to make room for both concern and action. Beyond the realm of animal welfare or human rights, ideals which we were passionately prepared to defend at twelve seem to lose shape and eventually meaning. The world fascinates me, because to be alive is to care-about the things you loved, the things you wanted and the person you think you can become.

How do I explain this at the dinner table when I am asked why I have become a vegetarian? I can't give a straightforward defense of animal rights. I'm not a vegan and I don't even believe eating meat is wrong in itself. I'm not particularly health conscious and I haven't given up on anything else. I can say it's better for the environment, but beyond recycling and trying to conserve water, I'm not especially kind to Mother Earth myself. Then what?

I eat more plants because every time I do, I make a conscious decision to be the person I thought I was. I remind myself that the things I care about can mean more than the things I want. I remember what it was like to feel despair on behalf of something else and try to bring it back, because to hang on to care is to stay alive.

I'm just trying to be me again, I promise.

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.