In Memoriam

One important thing about the word “performance” we learnt in class is that it implies volition; staging an act, and being conscious of that act of staging. I didn’t know the meaning of performance back in 2nd grade, when I recited my first poem, but I think I enjoyed it. I don’t even remember feeling nervous, I don’t remember any stage-fright, I just remember The Redback, the insect the poem was for. My next performance was for a boy named Augustus, who wouldn’t drink his soup. The rules for the Elocution contest were that you couldn’t move your hands or feet or head. Just use your voice, my teachers said. I don’t know why I knew how to use my voice for a poem, but I did. In 5th grade, my teacher asked me to step outside of class. Turns out, I wasn’t in trouble. She just wanted me to show her how to recite a poem she was having difficulty with and that she had to perform herself. I realize now that I wasn’t all that great as everyone made me out to be; but my classmates always enjoyed my performance, because it was always marked by excess. Excess of voice, excess of emotion, excess of expression. There was too much going on with my face and voice and maybe that was fun to hear and watch. My voice shot across the room when I recited, “Bang! Bang! Bang! (The wolf) shot her dead.”

Sometimes I realize I still have that energy of excess but I’m not really sure how to use it. So I sing to Ammi, Shazz, Sarah or Mariam sometimes and they make that face, that face of not knowing what to do with this bout of absurdity. So I stage a performance of Hey Jude for them, and made them learn that song, so they know it now, too. Sometimes Ammi tells me to stop singing in English because it irritates her because she can’t understand anything. But she loves performing as well; I ask her a lyric, and she’s off, singing to me, to Assel Bhabi, to Shazz. Sometimes we laugh at how Ammi can make the most fun and upbeat song incredibly sad because her training for performances, of stages have been milaads when she was little. For her, part of the glory of her youth was her voice, and the recognition it received.

The nature of the stage changes, ofcourse. There are new rules for every stage; for instance, Imrana and I decided to sing for the 10th grade school milaad, and the rules for that stage were a white shirt and pink dupatta laced with a shiny silver bail, which is called “kiran”. Chiken ka kapra, aur kiran ki bail. The school employed a special instructor for the school milaad, somebody who we had to call Aapa; she provided us with the difficult lyrics we hardly knew the meaning of, but loved singing. Moray nayya paar kara jaana! Adab, ehtaraam, dheema lehja. We learnt to form our bodies, voices, volitions according to the rules laid out for us, and sang.

I think I’ve forgotten how to recite a poem now, because once I volunteered in class to read out a poem about Karachi and it came out all weird and shaky. So then I also have to address the absence of stage, of forgetting the confidence of taking a mic and speaking. Sometimes I am not in control of answering the question: what can I be? There are a limited number of stages, and the ones Ammi would like me to take me to, I don’t want to be on.  I tried to recite my own poem only once when I grew up, but that stage wasn’t meant for me. Or I wasn’t fit for that stage. No-one really listened, and even if they did, I don’t know if they liked it because Baba was at the back watching me, waiting to take me home. Lord knows, I haven’t perfected the art of writing, of writing a poem, and certainly not of charting where and how to lay importance in a poem’s structure. My poems are still learning to grow up, and I am still trying to find a language for the stages I would like to be a part of. Forgetting comes from severe places, severe moralities, but forgetting is also birthed by learning. One day I would like to write a good poem, and one day I would like to give a good performance for it. The former has to do with language, the latter has to do with access, which I am still trying to figure out and complicate my ideas about.

Once, Assel Bhabi took us to a musical called Phantom of the Opera. It was one of the best things in my life; I could follow the stories, the songs, the dance. I loved every second of it. But our going there was pure accident, and we didn’t even know we were going to a musical. I don’t know if I’ll be able to go to a musical again, but I really I hope I can. Sometimes I think I know what my excess of energy can be used for, sometimes I have a hunch that I could arrange my face, body, costumes, hair, movement into a language of theatre, and that I’d be good at it, but I don’t know beyond that. I have a hunch, but I don’t know how you can let desire grow into strength, or success, because “success” is a place of many, many fights, and risks, and dangers.

There is the character of Akbar, a classical dancer, in a drama called Angan Terha; he is my favourite, and he makes me laugh all the time. One of my favourite lines that Akbar delivers is in response to the poet who comments, enraged by Akbar’s badtameezi, “Shayad tamaddun aap kay qareeb say naheen guzra?” Akbar says bitterly, “Qareeb say guzar kay dekhay tamaddun, aisa haath marengay!” I laughed out loud at that joke, and I want to make art-work out of it. Tamadddun – a code word for Polite Balance. Like Sir William Bradshaw’s “Sense of Proportion”. Akbar is always in excess; his humour, his costume, his walk, his talk, everything. There is nothing balanced about him, and I love him. Akbar also knows how to dance – but he can’t dance, owing to the PIA Arts Academy being shut down under General Zia. But Akbar does kind of dance, whenever he gets the chance to; like in the kitchen, where he’s supposed to be working. Instead of putting rotis on the tawa, he practices kathak with them instead, and ends up pasting un-cooked rotis on the wall. He bites his tongue afterwards, realizing that this was not the best of ideas. He can’t dance, but whenever he gets the chance to, he does, even if he messes up the wall in the process. 

Everyone else refuses Akbar’s dance, in one way or another, but in the end, he starts participating in that refusal himself. He kind of gives up, he recognizes that he cannot find those spaces, on radio, on television to perform. He doesn’t really want to go with the delegation who offers to take him abroad, away from Pakistan. And then he is removed from the script; his story ends.

I don’t know how or when refusals of desire start becoming our own refusals. I don’t know if we are complicit in our own failings, all the things we don’t have the courage to be. I don’t know all the things we internalize, I can’t begin to pick them apart. I know I should, but it can be so exhausting, imagining futures which we don’t know will materialize or not, even if it’s just going to see a musical.

There are some literal tools, like make-up, like money, like clothes, like voice, like stage! All these things; I need them to perform. But given the chance, what we will we say and who will we say it to? Who will be audience to our unpracticed poems? Who will be audience to decayed knowledges about how to use a tool like voice, who will be audience to unknowledge, because it never reached us, who will be audience to loss? Who will be audience to failure? Then we will remember all the libraries that were locked, then we will remember all the books taken from our hands, then we will remember the things we forgot, then we will remember how we partook in our own erasures, maybe. 

Okay, maybe that’s too dramatic. But drama is a mode of story-telling, after all. So I will let that paragraph be. 

I don’t shut up around Shazz; I really don’t. We stage a performance for ourselves; we sing many songs, we affect many accents half-way into the songs, we make up props out of random objects, like Aleeza’s toy arrows, and we pretend to play all the instruments, or we adjust our voices to make variation between flute, piano, drum, guitar. My favourite thing to do is air-drum, at the end of a song. You know what? I would be a great drummer.

I wrote so many drafts of this entry, because I honestly don’t know how to frame you in language. None of those drafts was enough. So I’ll make a list instead: 

1.      I didn’t even know I had the guts to drive a car until you handed me the wheel like it was the best idea in the world. “You’re doing fine!” You said as I drove around in circles in the empty parking lot and begged you to tell me how to stop. (My hands learning an outside world that I’ve never experienced as I experience it with you.) 

2.      Thanks for sitting on the floor and extending your hand from outside into the bathroom stall when I hid inside. I’m truly grateful even though I said upon seeing your hand appear in the bathroom, “What are you doing?” 

3.      I appreciate your connection with Budh Bazaar, and that you bring back socks for everyone, even for people you’re never going to give them to. Thank you, especially, for my very own Moza Lisa. (This is why I wrote on your birthday card, “I learn from you everyday.”)

4.      I am still of the opinion that I was NOT romanticizing the sky, because it literally looked like popcorn so I said popcorn-sky. But thanks for letting that go on bad days and saying, “It’s okay, I will let you romanticize the sky today.” (Disagreement is okay, as long as it isn’t rooted in someone’s pain.)

5.      One of my favourite things about the beginning was the songs you sent me over Whatsapp. I memorized most of them, and I love The Librarian the most. (Prickly-heat powder!) 

6.      There are so many things I learnt about pain; that it is important, immediate but also everywhere. There are so many things I learnt about asking, “What’s wrong?” And that the question should come from an empathy that recognizes its own capacities and limits, and that we can’t erase burdens, and that we can’t think of our own abilities to effect comfort or happiness as the most important thing, but instead recognize that somebody’s comfort or happiness is more important than us. So we try, and when we fail, we move along.

7.      Once, we thought drowning our sorrows in Pepsi was a good idea so we both bought Pepsi and it was terrible and amazing. And then you proceeded to barbecue a Lays chip with a lighter and gave it to me and I said, “Not bad.” (Sharing with you, all things, whether feelings or food is the best.)

8.      Sitting with someone on a bus-trip makes me worried about not boring the other person to death. But you take on silence like a pro, manage it so well, let it sprawl because it is also meaning. (We can make jokes about the languages we don’t know how to use.)

9.      I know we pine over impossible people, but sometimes I’m so relieved when I see you somewhere and you are talking, and there could be a hundred absences, there could be a million pains, there could be five hundred different heart-aches, and there could be thousands of impossible people, but there would still be you. 

10.  I have accepted and can live with death-stares as response to displays of affection.

Love,

Me.

“At a very young age,” a report claiming us would write, “the kids were gifted with words they didn’t know the meaning of.” At a very young age -- let me clarify the meaning of young and age and very. There is a school ground somewhere behind the curtain shops at Nursery, apparently called a “quadrangle”, so there is a school quadrangle, that is occupied by grey, uniformed bodies on mornings on weekdays when the school term is on-going. On the backs of their notebooks, especially printed for them by the school, is a poem written by Faiz Ahmed Faiz. We did not know the Significance of Faiz, of course, but there was a mosaic painting of him hung at the entrance of the library, which is also incidentally named after him. So we encountered him, unknown man of mosaic, vague name on our tongues, poem at the back of our notebooks. It is not exactly ‘poem’; it is ‘taraana’, that is the title preceding the verses. So, for instance, the beginning is, “Yey dar-ul-ilm sadd-e-rahe-aseb-e-zaman hoga.”

To this date, I only know the meaning of the beginning and the end of that phrase, the middle is a mix of many things, clear your throat, things, you know? So all these words and things crammed in our mouths on mornings and in ceremonies and in prize distributions, and ofcourse it was wonderful, our mouths and tongues champions of difficult language, look at the greatness that we bear, that we hardly understand ourselves. Not that our sense of wonder was ever spoken, or discussed, just orchestrated in sleepy mornings, and everyone’s sleepy voices would eventually pick up the enthusiasm required to sing the last verse, “Jahan main chaar soo ilm-o-amal ki hay amal-daaaaaa-aaaaa-aaaa-ri.” Surge of greatness, then snuffed out. Then we all headed to our classes.

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Music class slowly turned into a site of practical jokes. By the time we reached 10th grade, we were more interested in singing Aloo Mian than the Sa-Ray-Ga-Ma our music instructors tried so hard to teach us. For one, we were completely off-tune, and secondly, since it was our last year of school, everyone wanted to have fun. So there were made up chipkalis to scare everyone in the room; there were silly rhymes we requested, and the music instructor, sick of our juvenility, resorted to play the tune of Aloo Mian on his harmonium. But sometimes, we’d get to sing Bhar Day Jholi; we didn’t admit it, but we loved singing it, and everyone joined in. We’d be serious enough for five minutes to rise to that occasion.

Before we had turned into a joke, though, we learnt beautiful songs, but in Urdu. Sometimes we would all not manage to sound like screaming banshees when the instructor asked us to sing “Aa-aa-aaaa” in the tune of Sa-Ray-Ga-Ma. Over time, we learnt to correct our lyrics; it was not infact, “Ley Jaa Muddin Kay Darwazay Par”. It was “Nijammuddin kay darwazay par.” Njiammuddin Aulia, Nijammuddin Aulia, follows right after, so it makes sense. 

Baba only recently explained me the meaning of, “Hum...taba abad sayy-o-taghayyur kay wali hain.” It’s so much fun to sing and remember, but....okay, I think I should just say it: extremely problematic. Nation crammed into our mouths. 

Somebody in the school insisted we needed an English music class as well. The syllabus for that class was extremely strange. Every rhyme seemed to contain sun, moon, stars and mountains, with a momentary appearance of Margalla islands, because it matched the rhyme scheme. “This land was made for you and me!” Mr. Music Instructor Sir, what land? Who is you and me? What are their languages, and how do they intersect? Why is it important to speak this belonging in English? What would you translate this in Urdu as? Who would belong then? Will we learn songs in Sindhi as well? (No, we won’t.)

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There is a system of classification of poetry, a canonization and organization, a careful curation of verses only known to Intermediate Urdu (Normal) students. This happens in the form of notes. All poets, all male poets incidentally, lined up on our tongues and notebooks, and we can pull out verses from our mouths about three distinct themes, quite literally organized in headings in black pointer: Ishq, Dunya ki Bey-sabaati and Insaaniyat. Sir Muneer, as part of examination prep, made me recite all the shairs for Meer-Dard-Ghalib, the trio we could rely on, because we could memorize them and them alone, leave the other poets and their verses alone, because everyone knew that if you knew Meer-Dard-Ghalib, you would easily pass the exam. Ms. Qamar dictated us tashreehs in quiet classrooms, and we wrote down, “Aadmi khata ka putlaa hay.” Once, Ms. Qamar asked us to write down a mumaasil shair, a shair you write down as part of the tashreeh because that gives you more marks because the examiner recognizes that you’ve done a lot more memorizing than they expected, so Ms. Qamar dictated to us the first half of a shair, “Kon kehta hay kay tu pyaar na kar…” Quiet classroom, taking down dictation. Ushna took advantage of the silence and said, “Pappu yaar tang na kar.”

Edit: Sir Muneer and Sir Wahid both thought I was some sort of genius, but I was only good at memorizing things. So I remember studying about Angaray, I remember the name Rasheed Jahan, I remember memorizing it as part of a history of the Urdu Afsana, which I have now forgotten. Some days ago, I heard a person talk about Rasheed Jahan as a poet who was a woman; I don’t ever remember memorizing that.

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In 8th grade, we attempted to stage a play in school for Northanger Abbey. Hira and I had to learn to dance together as girl and boy. We replicated the dance from the Northanger Abbey movie, and it was strange and stiff, but we had to do what we had to do. So me, Catherine, and Hira, Mr. Henry Tinley, with our sloppy Englishes, we learnt to strangely hold hands and manouvre stiffly through our classmates arranged in rank and file like armies. Apparently that is what dance looked like. Everyone hated studying Northanger Abbey, and they were also a little bit frustrated with me for scoring well on the exam for it. During our English exam, we debated the meaning of the word ‘protagonist’ and ‘antagonist’. We had no idea.

Most of the time, our English teachers had difficulty with English as well. By 10th grade, we were just teaching ourselves. In an undergrad Linguistics class, a teacher pulled up our 10th grade English syllabus as specimen, as something cray and funny. The joke was our exam paper that asked about a poem, which was about a man going on the top of a mountain to meet God, “Where did the man go to meet God?” Ash and I almost cried with laughter, and embarrassment, and later we were overwhelmed with the thought of escaping an education that many people don’t get to escape. 

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Ammi said innocently about Donald Trump’s election, “The whole world become shake.” We have come to respect the fallibilities of our language and the context in which this failing happens; but still, I caught Hassan Bhai’s eye and we started giggling, and ofcourse he made the strawberry or chocolate shake? joke.

Neither of us has perfect English but that doesn’t mean we don’t get to make fun of each other. Once, my sister said about somebody coming from upstairs, “She’s coming down from above.” Hassan Bhai never lets her forget that.

Baba handles work in emails, and handles emails in English. His signature move is pausing in between eating, walking, or talking, asking me for a translation divorced of all context. But, as is evident, the story can grin from between those words anyway. So one day, he stopped in the TV lounge and asked me, “Is it invincible or invisible?” When you don’t feel seen. I said the latter. He nodded and kept on walking. On another occasion, he said, “Is it hurt or hurted? When I pair it with heart-broken.” Just recently, he asked me, “Can I say I would like to offer you thanks?” I nod in between eating my salad at the dinner table, and don’t need to ask for context because the invisible, hurting issue has apparently been resolved.

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Aleeza corrects my English now. I was trying to teach her something from her workbook; I roll my ‘r’ when I say Verb, but she looks at me indignantly and says, “Verb? (It’s) Ve--b!” I’m a little surprised, but I just shrug and say okay. Ammi thinks the kids should learn Urdu, but we’re too exhausted; they can just learn what they learn, and we’ll work with what we have. 

You can hear the heartbeat of Makkah from miles away, and I mean that quite literally. Well, maybe the word ‘heartbeat’ needs reframing, but let me explain: as you approach Masjid-e-Haram, everything will start thudding, in police sirens, loudspeakers, the pschpschpsch of officials conversing on walkie-talkies (I don’t know what else to call them). Hassan Bhai tries hard to assure us that his plan is according to schedule, that we will reach on time, before the police put the barricades up and we might have to wait for hours outside the Masjid, until the Taraweeh ends. But it’s honestly just pure luck, it’s all just a constant enunciation of “Hamdulilah!” in Hassan Bhai’s affected Arbi accent. We “Hamdulilah!” our way into the city, out of luck, and sometimes out of the split-second mercy of a police officer, because the driver points to Baba’s greying hair and weary eyes. “Abee zaee’f!” So then they let us in.

For the past few years, Ammi and I have given up on trying to pray inside the Masjid during Ramzan. This is because the women’s allotted sections inside the masjid  are usually very limited, so we have to make our way at-least 3 hours before prayer time to get a chance to pray inside. The biggest battle in Ramzan is for space; I’m always freaking out when we haven’t left for the masjid an hour before iftaar, but Ammi is as calm as ever. Until we actually get to the masjid, and have to head back to a safer place. A “safer” place means somewhere we can breathe, somewhere we can sit with all four limbs intact. So we clamber onto stalled escalators, dive into hotel lobbies, navigating between sitting, sleeping, snoring bodies, carving out space from somewhere, somewhere that remotely looks like floor and is not sealed with red tape, somewhere the police officers will not shoo us away from. It might sound stupid, but I almost got into a fight with a police officer in Medina, because Ammi couldn’t breathe and I had to take her out of the Masjid ASAP, and I wanted to take the shortest route but the Shurti wouldn’t let me, and I was trying to explain to her, broken Arabic, English, Urdu, and she put down a forceful hand on my arm, and I felt it so much, I felt it even after we had got to our room safely. It might sound stupid, but it made me cry, and it mattered so much to me, although I am still trying to figure out why. I think it’s because you hear fables of love about a city, and you want to experience it, but you experience a hurt instead. 

Anyway, the battle for space is real. It is truly the survival of the fittest, and then you have to let people and kids spill into the space you carve out for yourself, and sometimes it makes me angry when someone asks me to give up some part of my space that Ammi and I worked hard to find, but then I try to make myself understand that the struggle is real for all of us. So I try to move over and not be selfish. And we all pray in awkward positions.

Sometimes on Masjid floors, we are sitting with people who come from completely different lives. Sometimes they smirk when we narrate our “struggles”, because we still get to book a hotel room that’s near the masjid, we still get to go back to our room in between prayers, we still get to eat food in between those breaks and don’t have to wait for too long. We don’t have to walk for hours to reach our hotel rooms because part of the “worth” of a hotel in Makkah, Madinah is how near it is to the Masjid. You pay more, you get to be nearer. Some people say Masjid floors are equalizers; maybe in front of Allah ta’la they are, but not in terms of circumstance. There is no equality of living when we speak, when we sit, when we walk. Sometimes when I don’t have to pray or fast, and I am sitting somewhere on the sidelines, and it is iftaar time and everyone is handing out food for eating, I try to say no so that somebody else can have my share. But the aunties who hand them out look at me like I’m cray, and laugh, and force food into my hands because they think I’m being silly. Nothing goes to waste; you can give somebody bread or yoghurt and they will take it as a matter-of-fact, in ofcourse-ness.

We have to seriously revise our concepts of charity in Makkah, Madinah. We have to revise them as the four-wheel car we rent moves through a mass of bodies; their eyes meet us for a moment, but they pass over us, like we are not of consequence, like we are just another car trying to move through them. And we are; we are not of much consequence at all. Sometimes when we buy food, people take it out of our hands; we cannot ever be ‘heroes’, and thinking of ourselves as such is disgusting. “Charity” implies we are in positions to be thanked; but we are not to be thanked. That’s not the point, it can’t ever be. The things we buy are taken from our hands, and everyone moves along. 

One of our favourite moments is at Maghrib time. There is a split second after the azaan begins after which the millions and millions of people all go quiet – mostly because they have a date in their mouths to open their fasts. Imam Sudais is usally assigned to lead the Maghrib prayers; one of my strongest memories is sky going pink, us in the basement of the Masjid, the relief of breaking fast after a long, long day and a struggle for place, and standing up in prayer afterwards, and the Imam reciting, “Allahu noor-us-samaati wal arz.” There are funny things, too, like somebody taking a liking to us, and producing a packet of Dorritos from their bag furtively at iftaar time so we may take them, but not anybody else. One time, a girl was trying to talk to me in Arabic and some time passed before I realized I actually knew how to speak a little Arabic and I tried to tell her I was studying at a university; she looked at me in surprise, took a moment to gather some words in English to make herself understood, “Ant’i? Al-Jamiya? So small!” Once, two women met us outside the hotel restaurants; they were extremely skeptical of the empty space outside the restaurant doors, because the space was carpeted, AND it had loud speakers in place, so apparently it was a place to pray, but it was empty! They asked me four times to make sure Taraweeh was actually going to happen here, and they were mind-blown because one hour before prayer, there was no one here. Ofcourse the down-side to this empty, carpeted space was that it was extremely hot and there were no fans, so breath was hard to come by.

Every year, I learn Makkah, Madina in new ways. Every year, we work so hard with our hearts, but they also break. They are cities, after all, sites of construction, capital, consumption (I totally did that for alliteration. Some of it. Okay, I didn’t). For instance, I tried so hard to convince myself that the hand I felt in the crowd was just an accident, it was just an accident, it was -- it was not an accident. I blinked back tears, and was surprised at how ashamed I felt. I don’t know why I felt shame, even knowing that I had every right to be angry at this violation of body. 

There is also an image of me from last Ramzan; I am breathless and red, about to collapse, because I can’t keep up with the boys wheeling Ammi and Baba during Tawaaf. Hassan Bhai asks me if I need anything, but I’m stupid and I keep going, and I know I can’t for long, but in stupid hope I keep going. Hassan Bhai knows I will collapse horribly, so he gets me a wheel-chair and I’m so ashamed, because I want to walk with everyone else. I really do. But I keep saying my duas, and I can’t get up for the Sa’ee part either, so Hassan Bhai wheels me through the passages between Saffah and Marwah. 

In the last round, I beg him to let me get off, please let me do this last lap. He asks me if I’m sure, I’m not, but I still say yes, and take of my slippers and start running. This is not a good idea, but I keep running, I keep running, in desperation. Bodies shifting, straining in memory, knocking against my frames of knowledge: do you hear us?

“Ya Rab.”

At 21:

Somebody dragged us to the beach, Ammi and I. The sea and my hands met like acquaintances, after many, many years, the Karachi beach. It hasn’t seen me in so long, so it pools around my feet, fixes its sunlight gaze at my body, paces up and down while I wash some sea-shells. We both look at other questioningly, excavating identity, who are you, and look, we have met. I wash my shoes, hands and sea-shells in the water, let my hands attempt a friendship, and the sea is so wide and everywhere. Both the sea and I resign to incomplete images of each other, a quick glance in intimacy, and then we leave.

I don’t know when we will see (sea!) each other again.

At 21:

Assel Bhabi took me to the Mamzaar beach on a quiet day. We took off our abayas, and we just walked along the shore, my skin meeting sea in new intimacy. Bubbz was so scared of the water, and she kept crying, so we headed out earlier than we had planned to, even though we were doing nothing except walking and momentarily talking. 

The sand clung to Bubbz skin, and while Assel Bhabi cleaned up, I held Bubbz and she had stopped crying. We just sat together in the sun, with sand-skins, sharing day, sharing open space, little Bubbz and I. 

--

At 20:

There have been some new developments around the Mamzar corniche; the part of the corniche we used to take walks on is partly useless, according to Hassan Bhai, because the view is gone since the construction has taken the sea away. I make some pretentious connection in my head about my own growth and Dubai’s construction, but my metaphor falls apart; it’s only because my Whatsapp picture has been for some time now me and Shazra Baji back in the early 2000s walking on the red platform along the Mamzar corniche. It is my own sentimentality conflating Mamzar with how we’ve changed; I recognize that they are two different processes involved.

Anyway, it’s cold in Dubai and Sabeeta Baji zips up the jackets for the kids and we venture outside. We stay for barely 10 minutes because it’s cold and everyone is sick. But even then, I manage to clamber onto the red platform, steady myself on it and walk on it alone, as an adult, without Shazra Baji. Haadi approaches me from the other side and he’s balancing himself too. There’s a moon and the coastline has receded, there is more distance from the sea, it is true. I cross my legs, hold my head upto the wind, and feel a rush of winter.

--

At 19:

The foil of laughter --

a shadow falling through bridges into

sea, floor, feet.

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At 18:

Once, Hassan Bhai parked the car at the Mamzar corniche. I pushed myself from the back of the car to the front and onto the sidewalk. The Sun still had a few minutes for us and everything was quiet and the breeze was silent and strong. My family walked ahead of me and I followed. There are some places you can mark your life with.

The green silk of my dress lapped around my growing limbs. My ageing father climbed with some difficulty onto the marble steps and let his legs hang loose over the sea, just like old times. My brother stood behind him, young and old both, the tips of his hair playing piano keys with the wind and him looking on contemplatively. My mother was walking ahead of us, my sister had her hands in her coat pockets and reached for a camera. The Sun set in orange, and I almost reached out a hand to help it dive. Here was an end to an era.

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At 17:

Shazz’s long awaited adventure materialized in the form of renting a Jet Skii motorboat. Hassan Bhai asked if I wanted to it. To genuine surprise from everybody, I said yes. So he marched off to get three life jackets. I asked Shazz if I could go first and she said I could. So with the motorboat wobbling in the sea, I pushed myself up onto the boat. Hassan Bhai sat upfront to drive the boat, and I held onto the straps of his life jacket. The engine roared to life, and we were off.

I whooped out of joy and held on to my brother for dear life. The sea spread out right, left, centre and my brother called over the roaring engine for me to hold on tight. I did - and we were zooming into the blueness faster than ever. I was leaving behind the waves, the buoys, the safety of the shore and the sea opened up to me all around me. I even sung my Heroes song and I was a fast-forwarded blur in someone’s view from the shore.

The first time Abdul Hadi came to Pakistan, he was in that liminal linguistic space – he knew the outlines and borders of words, but somebody had to teach him, drill words into him repeatedly, and test him with questions so he could finally learn some language. This sounds simple enough, but when you add two young khalas to the mix – who knows what he would learn to say! Who knows what his first words would be. So when Hadi arrived in Karachi, we were one of his first teachers, Shazz and I. Obviously, I took advantage of this and helped him learn very useless phrases, like “Patta, patta, boota, boota”, the first half of our favourite rote-learnt shair. We moved onto other important things too, like, Billi kaisay bolti hay, Lion kaisay bolta hay, Chirya kaisay bolti hay, the routine, the gift of sound patterns that he will learn later on are extremely false representations of reality.

There is also a prayer rooted in Pakistan that Hadi learnt. He learnt to pray that he could go back to England, where his Baba was, and that the visas and passports be sorted out. Because he rote-learnt that prayer, he still prayed it when he went back to England. This was because over a five-month period, he had heard this prayer multiple times, repeated in multiple ways, his first prayer rooted in borders, his first sense of heartache measured in space and time, and in some combinations of both, his places, homes shifting from this to that. But we became the best of friends; on my 20th birthday, he spent two hours in the birthday hat Ash got me, screaming happy birthday, and insisted he cut the cake with me. Two months into his being here, in Karachi, he was an expert at selfies and taking candid shots of me. Sometimes I look through my photos and I’m so surprised he thought to take a photo of that; there is a photo of me holding Fama, she is so small in my arms and we are just sitting there, being together.

Sabeeta Baji feared she might not be able to go back; vacations turn stale when they become indeterminate and when it is upto visa offices to demarcate times and distances between different family members. When she woke up to a rejection by the visa office, I don’t remember what happened. But I remember the days that followed, in which she tried to think about the future in new ways. She thought of schools for Hadi, and I felt the most love for Hadi when someone brought up schools. I loved him so much and insisted that he go to a good school, where he could learn to be great in every language, English and Urdu. I was very suprised that it mattered to me so much that he learn good English, but I really love him. I really do. And I wouldn’t want harm to touch him through an absence of language.

Hadi learnt me in many ways. Like his best friend, but also best friend collapsing in exhaustion. As the youngest khala, I was the obvious choice of baby-sitter, get up and do things, run and hop and slide, feed and care, and care and love. But I also remember being extremely frustrated and angry, because all I wanted to do was sleep, all I wanted to do was sit somewhere and stare in space. I did take him to the swings, I did feed him, and loved him, and cared for him, and took the most pictures with him; but I was also not ready or had the mental ability to love him as much as I could, as much as everyone expected of me. We loved each other anyway, though. Once, we tied a little blanket around his neck and he proceeded to shout, “Super-maaan!” “Nai, super-munna.” “Supermunna nai, SUPERMAAAAN!” “Nai, super-munna.” That went on for a while.

The visa did come through, though, and he went back to England. It was relieving because he wouldn’t have to pray that prayer, but now we mostly see each other through Skype screens and conversations seldom move beyond, “Aap kab ayengay?” “Main Insha’Allah aoonga.” On repeat, everytime we talk over the phone. I don’t want it to hurt or worry me when my sister jokingly says that he is behind on his English as compared to other kids, but it does. It really does. Funny videos of him surface every now and again, though, like one in which his Chacha Baba is telling him how to say, “Baa Dil-e-Naakhwasta!” And he is repeating after him in innocence.

 There is a joy very particular to Airport Days, when my sisters return to Pakistan for a little while; on those days, there is a piercing wait we can feel that begins in the morning, until the door bursts open, and some kid comes running in. 

[…] and it was quite the feeling, you know, because:

a)     There was an image of a wrist, coupled with hair, punching me in the stomach. Later, I sat in a pose of collapse against a desk, trying to register the image. There was also a fly on a hand, and my own hands froze because I wanted to shoo it away, and because I wanted so much to shoo it away, my hands froze.

b)     There was a question of distance. Once it mitigated and it turned so less that I stopped thinking about distance and focused on myself, but produced confusion instead. The thread pooled in closure, distance closing, and then snap! Before I knew it, the thread had straightened out and broken away (and walked out the door)

c)      There is an image of flowers and sometimes I want nothing more than to hold flowers of give-age, as long as there is also a success of giving.

d)     There is a terror, of forbidden language and pronouns.

e)     There was a dream, and there was the terror of being able to dream the dream.

f)       There was a revelation, acceptance, recognition, what have you: just because a love is strange does not mean it will not deliver the same punches, turn the same back, (and walk out the door)

g)     I learnt from a poet that just because you can see and hear somebody’s ache, doesn’t mean that they live in an unliveable difference. So somebody, somewhere (who did not walk out the door, but stayed, a little bit in shock) can be in pain, and it will not be hidden, and that’s okay.

h)    Somebody, somewhere will also recover. On a Friday, particularly, when they find common ground with family, friends, and the morning is not so fateful, and the day is sprouting in mediocrity, and there will be no punches to the stomach; there will be a ride home, and food, and sleep.

A few days after Barrippo passed away, we were sitting on a janamaz together after having prayed. I think our hands were in dua, or half-in-dua, hidden in our laps, but we were together. Because of the last couple of days, transitions were heavy in our minds, so I was very aware of our arms and prayers being side-by-side; I went back to my diary and found that I had imagined a mirror in front of us, imagined a “joint reflection of self”. Sarah hadn’t moved to Bahrain yet, but since her Nikkah, there was a ticking-bomb called time we constantly kept referring to and didn’t know how to deal with. Last summer she entered our drawing room as bride, and I didn’t know what to do, so I took pictures of her hands so I could Instagram them. Later, I put up an Instagram post, juxtaposing bangles, mehendi, and gajra with our picture from thirteen or fourteen years ago, the one in which we’re holding onto each other (clearly posed), before Sarah had to leave for Cyprus as a child.

Maybe compare and contrast has been our friendship strategy. And ‘friendship’ is a complicated word too, because it implies a beginning, a formation period, and maintenance; so sometimes I just say “best friend and cousin” but that still doesn’t capture the fact that we were born three months apart, were photographed together at weddings and family beach outings, were mean to each other as children, but also wrote our first poems for each other (she-eats-rice-she-hates-mice), then formed alliances as teenagers, then became soulmates, then she got married, then she moved, now we are becoming completely different people but there are still moments in which – so it’s complicated.

She was quick to learn many things before I did, and we gave each other different aches. For instance, at thirteen or fourteen, our hands were competing in housework; she would maintain distance through assuming work, rolling perfect perays, heaved through eyes like she had more important things to do because my own hands were clumsy and dangerous in the kitchen. On the other hand, I insisted we played drawing games, just so I could beat her by perfectly sketching out the room and have the satisfaction of my drawing being better than hers. She insisted on breaking rules, and not caring about the consequences; I insisted on ‘goodness’. She became my guilt, and I became her guilt, in different ways.

However, we always wore the same uniforms, and followed each other from school to college, separated by one academic year. So on her first day of college, I sneaked up behind her and she was glad to see me. My friends quickly became her friends; my Intermediate tutor quickly became her tutor; my room quickly became her room, because it was more convenient for her to stay over instead of going home – it saved time, and it was fun. We spent so much time around each other during our Intermediate years that our brains were perfectly in sync. It happened in the weirdest of ways; we’d sit up in the morning at 7 AM at the exact same time. We would spill the same sentences, the same puns, the same jokes. One time, entirely unconsciously, we put our arms around each other, and uttered the exact same phrase with the exact same hand motion – our arms around each other, our hands moving through air and us saying, “The whole world!” We looked at each other, then ran in opposite directions because, quite frankly, that was very spooky.

So around that time we identified through sameness; same girls, same struggling bodies, negotiating girlhood, asking questions, then back and forth – what are we going to be? How can we love the people we love? Why are we not allowed these things? We are not allowed this. How can we fight? First loves haphazardly managed and hidden. Intense, naïve hopes for the 2013 elections. The morning after Shazra Baji’s engagement and both of us falling over each in the break-time because of a lack of sleep, because we were running around the house the night before and wanted in on the after-event gossip stored in rooms where people are talking. She left me notes on my cupboards and notebooks. We wrote each other letters and attempted to intervene in each other’s pains; we thought through moralities together, inhabiting multiple domains of shame and guilt, no longer separated by them, adjudicating what’s right, don’t talk to this person, please don’t think about this person too much, God is watching, Here, let me show you how to have adequate hands. Why are we like this? What can we be?

I think we found different answers to this last question.

Last summer, we sneaked in Asim Bhai – her husband -- into the house; it was rather chaotic because both Ammi and Baba were asleep and the electricity was out, but she really wanted to meet him, so we sneaked him in (and they both drank tea in the dark – Sarah doesn’t drink tea). She is trying to figure out life, just like I am, but she has different factors to navigate. Sometimes she says something about the world being scary, like an aunty, and everyone calls her out for it, for sounding too grown-up, beyond her body, but she just rolls her eyes. Sometimes I don’t realize the kinds of things she has to grapple with, but when we are alone, she talks about things like moving homes, from this country to that, and still the question persists, for her and for me: who am I going to be? Sometimes she is sitting next to me, and I am struck by the realization that there is another life between her and me, there is a life breathing inside her body. Sarah announced this to Tuba, Tehreem and Zinn by not announcing it, by asking with fake surprise, “What news?” So everyone knew. She makes everyone laugh; she is as happy as one can be about where she is in life. She wouldn’t change most things.

But it is hard to have a different set of answers about ‘what can we be?’ Sometimes Sarah listens to my rants, she is careful about our budding differences; she lets me be, and she listens as best as she can.

Sometimes Mariam and I, we try to imagine our lives through our sisters’ bodies. We say we don’t want these parts of life, can we do away with them? Our sisters try to tell us on phone calls and over Skype what the architecture of the future looks like; they also remind us that these architectures are always unstable, and prone to change. Our sisters raise their voices with us when we talk about our choices; most of the time, they would like us to live a difference.

Now this is the field of sudden difference in which we meet each other. We come up in antagonisms, sometimes Sarah stares at me in disbelief, sometimes I stare at her. There are strong wedges in between our voices, I almost shout at Mariam and she almost shouts at me, “How can you say that?’ The future is open and wide and coming, and although Tabi Khala identifies us at the same “khaip”, the metaphor of long crops when we walk into a room together, Mariam, Sarah and I, I think my diary is wrong in telling me that the image of Sarah and I in a mirror is a “joint reflection of self”; there are building splits between us. I don’t know how to adjudicate which imaginings are right, which imaginings are wrong.

But I know there are multiple choices and trajectories of being, so maybe we can only hope for listening ears, please listen to how much I want this. Sarah does listen to me, and I listen to her. We still Instagram childhood pictures of each other, joined in time and in memory, but maybe separated by how we imagine futures, the things we hope for.

A few days ago, she said, “All this time, we were undergrads, under-age…now everything is…” “Over?” “Over. I will miss the underworld.” It was one of the last times we were meeting before she left for Bahrain again, and we don’t know when we will see each other again. We went out for dinner and held hands, took a selfie and loved it, and we both put it up online.