Still Writing

From time to time, I ask myself, why do I have a Twitter account? I am not good at tweeting. I seldom have anything cool or clever to say that can fit in 140 characters. I examine the meaning of life, more specifically, the meaning of my life, in long-winded sentences strung together to form essays (blog posts) that may or may not be considered relatable by the half dozen or so readers I have. What is the point, I find myself wondering. And more often than not, I reach the conclusion that this is entirely self-serving. I am a writer, so I must write, and because I have written something, I must force it down somebody's throat. Yep, that's how it goes. If I am to be completely truthful, I don't write for myself. I write to be read. And so in the midst of these crises, I am overtaken by an unkind urge to write something like this: Are you out there? Are you listening?

When I don't write -- and I can speak to this honestly and accurately today because I have not written much for the past few weeks -- I  start asking myself these questions (and more). Why do I write at all? Et cetera, et cetera. Many years ago, I attended an all-day publishing workshop at Stanford. Joyce Maynard was the keynote speaker and her book Labor Day had just come out. She said during her speech, "If you are indoors attending this workshop on this beautiful day, you're a writer." Her conviction and the resulting happiness in the crowd have stayed with me these many years. When I start to question myself, I think back to that day, how I raced past the oval to the small registration desk, the talks I attended, the things I learned. And yet, even today, my own belief wavers. What does it mean to be a real writer? Over and over we hear from celebrated authors, "Show up. Write. Do the work." And what if you don't show up, don't write, don't do the work -- are you then relegated to being the hobbyist writer? 

Even if I side-step this question of whether I am a writer, a real writer or not (or more accurately, a poet), there is another layer that must be excavated before tranquility is achieved. Why do I write? Why do I feel so strongly about this part of my identity? While I am passionate about my career, do I bring this level of intense devotion to it? I don't know. Does it give me the same level of distress, and conversely, the same degree of relief? Absolutely not. And coming back to the reason for writing -- is it simply to be read? To create something? To share? Catharsis? Is the way I look at the world so important or so unique that it must be documented and posted on the world wide web? Who even cares? And over and over, I come to this: I wake up every day wanting to be bigger than myself. I don't mean that in a self-pitying way, and moreover, it has nothing to do with my 5-foot-1.5-inch frame. I want to conquer fear and hesitation and regret, and I feel like I accomplish some of that by sitting down to write. But this still doesn't explain why I feel compelled to share what I write, why I meticulously detail the number of poems I send out to magazines, the number of rejections, the number of acceptances. Why I whisper into the empty space around my desk: Are you out there? Are you listening?

Photos by Rebecca McCue

What I Never Miss

My blog posts are often thematically linked. Nostalgia reigns supreme. I painstakingly detail the many things I miss, both the tangible and the emotional. I miss my place of birth, I miss the landmarks, and the people. But it's more than just that. I miss the feel of that city, its jaw clenched around its citizens, I miss the peeling pistachio colored paint on the south wall of my neighborhood mosque and the sound of pigeons roosting in its dome, I miss the way the faces of the people I love used to look, the way they no longer look now. Twelve years is a long time. 

But I am not here to talk about nostalgia today. I am not going to trace the edges of my grief for having lost time and people and places and my memory of all of the above. I would very much like to hack into the carcass of things I do not miss, and things I never wish to see or feel again. This is not going to be a lofty post about the misery and misfortune of other people. Instead, it will be completely and most adamantly selfish.

I do not miss the beginning of love. You are the most foolhardy, and also unimaginably sensitive, when you are just beginning to fall in love. There was a study conducted at the Stanford Pain Research Lab where I worked for 6 years titled "Love and Pain." For the study, researchers recruited couples who self-identified as having been in love (in a relationship) for less than 1 year. The subject enrolled in the study was to present the research team with a picture of his/her loved one and that of a platonic friend of the same sex as the loved one. Over the course of the study, researchers recorded the pain response of the subject (on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 = no pain, 10 = worst pain imaginable) to a heat stimulus applied to the forearm. The result of the study showed that the pain scores of subjects were significantly lower for the same temperature when they were presented with a picture of their loved one as opposed to that of the platonic friend. New love, I tell ya. Ask anyone who has been in a relationship for more than the blissful initial period of love, and they will hold your hand and vehemently explain to you, picture or no picture, pain is pain is pain is pain. And don't even ask the women who have had a child with their partner. Suffice to say, again, pain is pain is pain is pain.

There are so many things I don't miss about that early period of love, so many wasteful aspects. Endless hours of rumination. This is true. In the beginning, your thoughts converge on this one person, and maybe more particularly, some inane detail that does not even matter, the stuff of old ghazals and Bollywood love songs. I am afraid to even give examples of said inane details for fear of being judged! It's a waste of time and mental energy. Another thing is attributing significance to the actions or reactions of the subject of your affection (subject rather than object, because this particular brand of affection can be suffocating). In most cases, there could be a perfectly good reason why she passed you by in the hallway without saying hello (maybe she was late for a class, maybe her father was waiting to pick her up in the parking lot, maybe she really needed to rush to an appointment at her dentist's office and was so stressed out about said appointment that saying hello to you was the least of her worries). There is also no sinister reason behind the fact that he didn't hold the door open for you (essentially identical reasons as detailed above).

There is no need to be livid about perceiving you're ignored, and certainly no reason to feel slighted. People are different. Sometimes they feel what you feel and sometimes you feel what you feel alone. And that brings me to the last reason for waging this textual war against the beginning of love (or, let's face it, infatuation, ladies and gentlemen -- that's what we are really talking about here). You are going through it alone. No one in the world understands how you feel. It is impossible and unimaginable to detail all the ways in which you have an emotional and a physiological response to a person who, in the grand scheme of your life, really should not matter. It is devastatingly embarrassing to be so acutely aware of your pulse doing jumping jacks for no apparent reason other than being in the general vicinity of an individual who, again, should not matter at all. It is such a lonely place to be in, such a lonely journey to make. There are so many hurdles, every day is littered with landmines that could be triggered at the slightest provocation. So much pointless, unacknowledged hurt. And there is absolutely no one in the world who can understand or appreciate the sheer depth of your misery. All the while, life must go on as usual, you must put on a brave face and brave the current of each day as it continues to enfold and stretch before your eyes like an ocean. What can you say to your closest friends after all? All manner of speaking about this questionable emotional state is simply out of the question. You realize over and over that you are alone in this limbo until you are recovered...or reciprocated. 

But what do I know? It was all so long ago, I can barely remember any of it. Be that as it may, I never want to be alone in that dark place again. 

Photos by Rebecca McCue

The Dead Teach Us Lessons

I have a very distinct memory of my cousin playing a metal harmonica as a boy. My cousin who died as a nearly 35-year-old father of two is forever preserved for me as that hazel-eyed child, playing an almost-melody on his harmonica. The trouble is, I cannot figure out if that memory is real or constructed. Maybe I heard from someone that he played the instrument and imagined the melody. Maybe it was someone else who played the harmonica and I conjured my dead cousin in his place. Or maybe he really did carry a small silver harmonica with a green trim in his pocket to play it from time to time. I have not asked my sisters if they remember him with the instrument, because I am afraid to shatter this image of him -- healthy, slightly brooding, slouching in a corner of the room, playing a tune.

I have another memory of him, too -- returning from an afternoon expedition across the neighborhood having collected small, unripe mangoes in a makeshift bundle created out of a t-shirt. We sliced the mangoes, a few of us kids together in the cool kitchen with the ceiling fan whirring, and sprinkled chaat masala on them. Then we ate each piece and scrunched up our faces as the tartness of the fruit hit our tongues. I am unsure about this memory also. Maybe it was another cousin who went stealing fruit from our neighbors' gardens that year -- the one who is alive and well. 

There are a few memories of him that I am sure of, most of them, I'd rather forget. We argued over something and didn't talk to each other for years. If we saw each other in our old neighborhood or in the home of a relative, I looked away, I stayed silent, I changed the course of my walk to avoid him. We didn't even fight over anything significant. It was absurd, really, and yet we kept hanging on to the silence for so many long years. I kept hanging on to it. Perhaps I would have broken the silence when I saw him last, over a dozen years ago, if I knew I would never have the chance to say another word to him. I don't even remember the last time I saw him -- it was so completely ordinary. It was probably one of those many occasions when I did my routine of seeing him and averting my eyes, not acknowledging his presence. I get so angry with myself when I think about this. How selfish. How immature. How absolutely frustrating. 

I am overcome with regret when I think of him -- and yet to this day, my solution to end complication is to walk away from it and never look back. I have learned on many occasions that this is a highly unhealthy way of dealing with unsavory emotions. It is extremely hard, however, to break this defense mechanism. 

There are certain realities that no one can argue with. Realities that afford no uncertainties, no what-ifs. He is dead. I am alive. We didn't speak for many years. I didn't get a chance to reconcile, see him as a father, meet his family in his presence. He couldn't do the same for me either. It is comforting to remind myself of the starkness of these realities, so I learn to value the people around me while they are still alive and not douse myself with regret after they are gone forever. It is humbling. 

There is one memory of him that swims to the surface without any effort at all. It is one I am certain of. For a year, I attended the girls' section of the same school that he went to. I was five years old. He was nearly ten. On two occasions while I was attending that school, he came to me to see how I was doing, concerned, brotherly, but reserved in his manner, speaking little, listening more. And one time, on this bright Spring afternoon, as I was about to sit in the car after school, I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to see his grinning face. My uncle, also his uncle, who was there to pick me up wrapped him in a hug, ruffled his curly hair. I don't remember what he said, what any of us said. I just remember the three of us standing on the side of the road, smiling, just happy to see each other. What a lark! How wonderful! What a marvelous co-incidence! That's what you think when such meetings happen -- that is why you get so happy when something like this occurs unexpectedly. You feel elated. And a little awed. And I miss that moment. I miss him as a boy with that disarming grin. I miss myself encompassed by that small happiness. I miss my uncle, loving us, his nephew and niece. 

Grief and regret are so similar -- they never truly leave you alone. They dull and deepen, dull and deepen, on and on. And they are selfish. You hang on to them possessively, because they make you remember yourself as you were with the person who is no longer here. They are as much about you as the one who is absent. 


It would serve me well to remember this. 

Photos by Rebecca McCue

A Celebration of Growth

When I was a teenager, I was convinced that I knew everything. I had no uncertainties. I was invincible. I knew what was right and what was wrong and what was right for me. I knew wholly what I wanted and how I was going to get it. When I was a teenager, I knew everything about myself and about the world. I was practically an adult. 

I am 3 months away from turning 30. The big three-oh. The life-changing event. The age that used to sound "so old" all those years ago. The age that has a whole episode of Friends devoted to it with Rachel Green lamenting her "plan" and being very poor company for her friends. The birthday that, more often than not, invokes sadness and fear. The age that brands you: "There you have it. You are an adult now whether you like it or not." I don't feel any of those things right now. Instead, I look at my teenage self and shake my head at her, "Foolish girl." The truth is, I am on the verge of turning 30 and I am still clueless. There is so much growing up to do yet.

It is disconcerting to realize that all of the most important decisions of my life, with the exception of choosing to have a child, were made while I was a teenager -- heady, opinionated, filled to the point of bursting with this sense of being true, being right, that damned righteousness that still trickles out of my mouth in unguarded moments. Surprisingly, those decisions have been fruitful, but that is likely just dumb luck rather than a testament to my foresight or wisdom. Exactly 2.5 weeks ago, I started a new job. After 6 years, I left Stanford and took a management position with a start-up. It was time to move on, and I love my new job -- this is called growing up. Earlier this year, I took on a bigger role at Papercuts. I transitioned to the role of Associate Editor from Poetry Editor -- an experience that has been challenging and enlightening -- so this is how much work and planning and work and planning and work and planning it takes to bring out a magazine -- this is also called growing up. I am in the midst of concluding a 10-week poetry course I was co-teaching for Desi Writers' Lounge. During the last few weeks, I had the privilege of witnessing the course participants stretch their wings, take chances, push themselves to produce impressive poems. I learned as I taught -- this is also called growing up. My girl is beginning to talk to me. In the morning, I wake her up, and she says, "Lie down, please! Sleepy time, please!" A scene reminiscent of my own childhood. I get ready for work and she says, "Pretty!" She wants to change several outfits a day because her clothes are "wet" or "yucky" or something else. My daughter is turning into a real person -- this is also called growing up. Today, I joined a gym -- dare I say it -- this is also, in fact, called growing up.

And all this is just the beginning. I feel I am at the cusp of something far greater than I realize. I am not fully able to absorb or observe this, but it is a truth I am beginning to live by:  Life is so fluid. Learning is on a spectrum that is infinite. How does one ever satiate one's appetite for learning? How does one ever reach the point of satisfaction where one finally feels grown up, accomplished, done? With all the uncertainties I am thriving under, at least I know the answer to this one question is never. The recipe for a fulfilled life is in continuing to find delight in small developments, in observing and experiencing personal growth constantly. 

So, I look back at my insolent fifteen-year-old self who believes she knows everything and say just to push her buttons, "I'll ask you again 15 years!"

Photos by Rebecca McCue

Dear Lahore

Dear Lahore, 

I come to you again after all poetry has dried up. I come to you empty-handed like I often appear on the prayer mat, pleading for something,I want desperately, wanting, wanting. I come to you because memory is crippled now, drowned out by the present and the vices that afflict me -- caffeine, Splenda. I have not seen you these many years and so much of life has filled these furlongs of time. 

I come to you because I don't really want to come to you anymore, and that is a mourning in and of itself. I come to you because you still hold so much of me. Somewhere in the past, your streets still feel my tread. I am walking alongside my father. We are buying street food, seekh kebab and cucumber salad, mint chutney and watered down yogurt from a vendor in Lakshmi Chowk. Now he's perched me on the bonnet of the car. Such pleasure it gives me to say "bonnet of the car." No one would understand it here, but you do. Now he tells me about his childhood, about honesty and struggle and passion and creativity. He tells me I am a brave girl. He tells me I can be anything or anyone when I grow up. He tells me I am already smarter than him. Such a rueful smile. Such truth in his eyes. 

Somewhere on your streets, my uncle walks late at night, the sky lit up with a shock of stars. His signature black boots make clickity clack noises. He enters the house I lived in. I hear his shoes, I see his face. He calls out to me. "Let's eat! I've brought you garam garam chargha!" (hot chicken roast) I prance off my bed. We take out plates and napkins but no silverware. We eat with our hands. He talks about his plans, his future uncertain but possibility knocking at his doorstep. Back then, we thought we could each be anything or anyone we wanted to be. 

Somewhere on your streets, three girls sit in the backseat of a lurid blue van. Backstreet Boys screech on the cassette player. They sit side by side engrossed in their own thoughts. They break the silence for an observation and then fall again into the comfort of their quiet companionship. At this moment, their thoughts are enough, but the sisters don't know that truly, each of them is quite enough to sustain the others. They will not know this for a long time and not until they have learned the meaning of distances. 

Dear Lahore, you hold so much of those days I am beginning to lose, the moments that didn't seem to matter, but actually were the ones that mattered most, the time capsules that held the essence of happiness without drama or action. Life happened outside of these moments, but resided inside the simplicities of such times. This time, this happiness, that girl, she lives on inside these glimpses of a different world, she exists on your street corners, and in the kitchen of an old house, and in the back of a van that was sold many years ago. 

I suppose I do not know what I am really afraid of -- finding her there when I return, or never finding her again. 

Time passes differently for you and me

"There was seldom anything addressed to her. Only an occasional letter from Manash. She resisted reading them, given what they reminded her of. Manash and Udayan, studying together in her grandparents' flat, and Udayan and Gauri getting to know one another as a result. A time she'd crushed between her fingertips, leaving no substance, only a protective residue on the skin."
- Jhumpa Lahiri in The Lowland

I felt this way once before when I took another journey with Jhumpa Lahiri. It was a different book, The Namesake, but I remember the landscape of this author's creativity, the topography of sentences, the valleys and deltas, the mountains and forests. This is a fertile place. Lahiri takes me back to my home -- so different from the home of Ashima in The Namesake, and certainly nowhere near The Lowland of Gauri's past -- and yet, I find myself reaching back into time, recognizing moments that were lost for so long that I had forgotten I even experienced them. This is what great writing does. 


The Lowland is not for the faint-hearted reader. It is not a kind book, but it is an important one. For a novel, it packs an expansive history lesson, a history that I, being on the other side of the border from India, never learned in textbooks and lectures. But more importantly, at its core, the novel was about time, particularly the past, a slice of time crystallized and settled into the realities of individuals affected by it. Time taking hold of lives and just not letting go. My father used to say to me, "The words that leave your tongue and the time that leaves your hand will never return." And he wouldn't warn me further than that. He wouldn't instruct me to use the time I had wisely or to hold my tongue. He would simply state a fact and leave the action up to me. I thought back to this statement of my father's that fell short of the technical definition of an advice, but governed so many of my decisions as an adult -- a life lesson, I call it still -- and I thought of it often while I read The Lowland. 

How much of our lives do we forget? How much do we remember? Two people who share a moment remember it differently, the quality of the moment changes for each individual, the feel of sun on skin, the sound of a heart beating loud enough to drown out all sound for one person and the same rhythm not even audible to another, the truth and its tributaries running different courses to irrigate the two lives -- it's all relative. And sometimes one person simply forgets or knows only half of the truth or a different version of it altogether. Then what? Who do you share your reality with then? You simply guard it within you. 

The Lowland compelled me to reach into the crevasses of memory and examine some caged realities that exist only for me now because they've been forgotten by everyone else. They are not so easily crushed for me, they roll between my fingertips like cool marble, grave, unyielding, ever present.

Photos by Rebecca McCue

I Can Only Be My Best Self

These days I find myself wishing to be the woman who writes this blog, not just when I sit in front of my computer but all the time. Her life is pretty good. She is a poet and a clinical researcher. She has an adorable toddler. She has a lovely house on a hill and the ability to watch sunrise caressing the winding trails and roads sprawled below her. She has the luxury to write about things lost and forgotten from a safe distance. There are a few people who like what she writes. Every day, she is able to get at least two uninterrupted hours of listening to audiobooks. She is poised to do bigger and better things. She is so positive in her writing. She talks about seizing the day and bottling up happiness and loving her naughty toddler. She talks about cooking and loving. Her life is pretty good from this vantage point. Pretty damn good. And I want to have her life all the time rather than  during the single hour it takes me to write and proofread a blog post. 


 Yesterday, in a small group of smart and sensitive women that constitute the Desi Writers' Lounge Bay Area Readers' Club, we talked about The Goldfinch. I insisted that several characters in the book probably had personality disorders. Sahar Ghazi, an extremely perceptive member of the group and a dear friend, challenged me on this notion. "Why do you think they have personality disorders," Sahar asked. "We are learning about them only through the main character's perspective. Maybe they are completely normal and going through life on a pretense. Maybe they are not opening up their true selves in front of him. People live their life pretending sometimes," I am paraphrasing, but that is the general arc of Sahar's view. I think I presented a different  and opposing argument, something feeble and completely petulant like, "But I don't pretend. And who pretends? How can they do that?" Puerile - to say the least. 

The fact is, everyone pretends to some degree. Yes, this is the space where I come to be honest with myself, call myself on things that I did wrong, and talk about how wronged I have felt in the past due to other people's insensitivity. But honesty has degrees, too. It has layers and components. Often people reveal part of a fact and it is up to the reader to brush off the sand occluding their vision from this partial truth, and like an archeologist, try to determine what the whole story is. Think about it. We do it all the time. The missing pieces are sometimes inherently present in what is revealed - the tone of voice, the choice of words, the tangent of the neck, the slope of shoulders, the audible sighs, the wistful eyes. The bright smile that is plastered on one's face as a confirmation of happiness has nothing on all these other overbearing signs, and some poor folks are just completely transparent - I am beginning to think I may be one of them. 

I guess what I am trying to get at in a very roundabout way is that we often think our best self is our happiest self. That is not necessarily true. I am a poet - my writing is dependent upon being miserable. The poems I write when I am happy do not resonate with me and probably not with my readers. I need superficial tragedies, arguments, disagreements, hurt feelings, a sense of being wronged in order to create work that has even a whisper of being placed at a lit mag. And though most of the time I bring my cheerful positive self to this blog (and I will not be surprised if you all stand up and say, "But Noor, you are a morose writer and you don't bring your cheerful self to this blog"), that is not my "normal" self. When I write in this space, I emulate the woman I want to be - the one who stands in her balcony every morning watching the sun bleed into the sky, the one who feels a sense of utter and profound contentment, the one who writes about life's little matters because, after all, those are the matters that matter. I wouldn't say that it is an entirely inaccurate depiction of myself, but it is certainly an extension of my character. 

You'll forgive me, of course, for this pretense, won't you? I am a poet who likes to experiment with identity and belonging. This is a natural result of that, you see. In any case, I wrote very honestly just now, and so I must extend my hand towards you in salutation. Hi! Good to meet you today!

Photos by Rebecca McCue

If it comes back to you, it's yours

A few months ago, I packed up two boxes of books that were gathering dust on my shelves. I made a smaller box of some paperbacks and brought them to a makeshift library in one of the hallways of the building that houses my office. I set them on the shelves of this small bookcase and forgot about them.

Last week, I was heading out from work to get a pedicure and didn't have a book to read, so I grabbed one of my old paperbacks from the makeshift library. Once I was seated comfortably on the massage chair at my neighborhood nail studio, my feet soaking in the comforting warm bath, I leaned back and reached for the book in my bag. When I opened it, a card fell into my lap. It was dated April 2006, written just over 8 years ago - the last time I had seen my sisters. It was a farewell note they had written for me and left in my bedroom while I was in my classes, having chickened out of taking them to the airport because I knew I would cry. In the upper left corner of the card was a giant scrawl made by my then 8-year-old brother, whom I have had the good fortune to meet twice in the last eight years. That sweet little boy became a young man while I wasn't looking, and apparently, based on reports from my sisters, his penmanship really hasn't improved at all. My siblings and mother had just spent 9 months with me and were going home when that card was written. At the time, my sisters and I didn't know that we would not see each other again for 8 years (and counting), that we would miss each other's weddings, birthdays, graduations, that the absence of one stamp on a green passport, dependent so heavily on the diluted and withdrawn perception of the immigration official behind bullet-proof glass windows at the American Embassy in Pakistan, would have the power to keep us apart so long - without any other tangible reason.

How was this a coincidence? On roughly the eighth anniversary of our goodbye, the farewell card my sisters had written had found its way back to me. I am trying to describe what it was like to find this card, hold it in my hands, know that when it was penned and left to me, we were still just girls, barely able to understand the nuances of separation and the dynamics of staying connected distantly. We couldn't have imagined that we would not be present at each other's weddings. I would have laughed if a fortune-teller had told me that I would have a daughter who would not be held by her aunts for at least the first 3 years of her life. We didn't know this back then - when my sisters poured their love into a piece of card-stock, and I found comfort in it on lonely evenings while I read a book and used it as a bookmark. We didn't know that after that April, our lives and the map of our family would change. We didn't know that we would all unravel on our own because of nasty surprises, disappointments, and betrayals just a month after that card was written. We didn't know that our mother would be diagnosed with breast cancer that summer, and words like "mastectomy," "lymph nodes," "chemotherapy," and "bone scan" would quietly creep into our conversations. How could we have known any of this, the oldest of us being only 21 and the youngest barely 18? We were...just girls, three sisters who loved to get their nails done together every two weeks - how fitting, then, for me to find this exquisite reminder of that carefree time while I was getting a pedicure.

I miss my sisters. I don't feel it most of the time. I have my life, they have theirs - we try to make time for each other, we share our triumphs and losses, we share silly stories, we show each other our new purchases on Whatsapp or FaceTime, but I miss them. I want to be able to take certain things for granted again - like the three of us being able to sit in bed and watch Friends reruns all night, or making sauteed mushrooms and knowing that my sisters will enjoy them and not look at me like I have lost my mind for eating fungi (that's what my husband calls mushrooms), or talking about Prisoner of Azkaban and the Time-Turner for hours because something doesn't make sense to the middle sister (it's always the middle sister), or just dropping everything we're doing and going to get our nails done, picking out colors for each other, sitting side by side, talking about what to do for dinner, or whose birthday is coming up, or the new books we want to read - you know, the simple, seemingly inconsequential things, the details of daily life, completely ordinary, but so wholesome.

This card with their words that found its way back to me, is a memory of just such a time that came to a close in April 2006. What would we have done differently if we had known our separation would be so long and monumental? Would I have gathered the courage to take them to the airport, to hug them more, to apologize for being the short-tempered big sister all the time? Would I have written them a note like this, too, a time capsule to find them by surprise one pleasant afternoon? There is no way to know, but I am so grateful to the universe for bringing those happy memories of my sisters back to me in the shape of this card.

What I forget, what I remember

Sometimes I am astounded by the depth of time that stretches between now and the morning I boarded a plane from Lahore International Airport. Eleven years. I sound it out to myself. I enjoy the music in the three syllables that make up the number 11. I roll it around in my mind, I roll it off my tongue. I pretend to cup time in my hands, like bringing them together in prayer, in supplication. I bring my palm to my heart - how many times has it beaten since I left home? Home - because there is no other word for it. It is not really home. I have made my home here in California. I have built it painstakingly, carefully, each piece of furniture, each book, each light-bulb represents an intention, a preference. But there is something I left behind, too. Not home - something deeper and intangible, something that can be felt but not heard or seen. What was it that I left behind - people obviously, but something undefinable and unquantifiable, too. I don't know what it is, but it has the power to take me back one day, and it will. 


There is a certain richness in being an immigrant, in having your origins rooted in a place that is geographically distant from you, in the bravery of the decision to pluck yourself from your land and your people and travel in search of knowledge and success, in the cowardice of the decision to not go back unless you have to, in the fear encompassed by the fluidity of belonging or not belonging, in the taxing change dictated by years when you pass through them in a new place, in learning new ways and giving in to the natural transition of accenting your English differently so that you are caught off-guard when you hear yourself saying something in the old way without intending to, suddenly, without a warning - your tongue having a memory of its own, but your voice sounding strange because of this inadvertent regression to the past. Yes, there is metaphorical wealth in the immigrant experience, something that my American daughter born in California will be lacking, who in all likelihood will be raised in the United States exclusively with annual visits to her parents' home country. In some ways, I feel a little sad about that. I will probably never be able to make her understand how magical it was to lounge in a makeshift hammock constructed with long bolts of cotton fabric by my father and erected between two trees on a hot May afternoon, small beads of sweat forming all over my face so that when I licked my lips I tasted salt and earth, while I read A Little Princess and watched the sun go down on the other side of the sugarcane fields at our farmhouse, and then became enchanted by fireflies lighting up the night all around us. The farmhouse came alive in a different way at night. The cicadas started their sonorous hum, a soft breeze began to sway the grasses that tickled our feet, the tube-well was turned off and it groaned until it stopped, a fire lit up in the hearth, someone put an age-blackened wok on it, the smell of caramelized onion and roasted garlic permeated the garden so that our stomachs began to grumble and we stopped noticing how fragrant the jasmines were. That was our perfect vacation. I would never be able to make my daughter understand the simple perfection of such a time because even the farmhouse doesn't exist anymore. It has been replaced by a brick house with a proper kitchen, running water, and wooden four-poster beds with imported mattresses. Or so I've been told. The call of the cicadas is drowned out by the drone of a power generator, and I don't expect one can see fireflies when the house has plenty of artificial light. I don't think I can wrap my memories in shiny paper and tie them with a ribbon. I don't think I can take them to my daughter and say, "This is the past, this is your mother's history. It's important. Keep it safe so it is not forgotten."

All the same, I find myself aching for the past - for the places that don't exist anymore, for people who have aged and changed and in some cases, died. The "back home" I wish to go to sometimes, in moments of extreme awareness, or conversely, those of weakness, is only present in pictures. When I go back to that house in the pictures I keep in a box under my bed, it won't be the home I grew up in. My sisters whose voices and footsteps I can trace on each wall of that house in my imagination will be gone - one to her new home in Tokyo, the other to hers in London. The baby brother I held on to is 6 feet tall now and can lift me up and twirl me in circles just to make me scream, "Put me down right now!" My mother's perfume, still the same one she used to wear years ago, will still linger in some of the rooms of the house. I will walk through them, touching the familiar and unfamiliar things. "When did you get this?" I will hold something and ask her. Her answer will surprise me. "Years ago," she'll probably say. And I will feel betrayed - unrealistically and unfairly. Maybe, my mother will feel betrayed, too, because of my brooding silences, my lack of participation in the routine she is so used to and one that I used to be a part of, and my divided attention among my daughter, in-laws, and the family I left behind. 

The past is the past is the past, I tell myself, but it's a slippery understanding, it escapes my fingers before I can examine it fully and memorize it, its grooves, its character, its lack of pliability. And as I am telling myself this, absorbed in my thoughts, I see someone coming towards me from the corner of my eye. I perceive this person to be someone I love - a family member or friend I have not seen for 11 years, and I experience a lurch in my heartbeat, a moment that has no rational thinking associated with it. I look up and it's a stranger. They smile at me, and I smile back. That could be such-and-such ten years ago, I think to myself. Something about the stranger's gait, or their arm swinging by their side, or their hair waving in the wind, reminds me of another person, a dearer person, changed now. The eleven years have happened to all of us, or more aptly, we have all lived through these last eleven years. The past is the past is the past, I tell myself, and the fickle thing, it slips away.

Photos by Rebecca McCue

Wishful Thinking

I am moved deeply by weather, which is why living in Northern California is such a beautiful thing. We get one or two heat waves over the summer, but living only an hour's drive away from the coastline and within viewing distance of the gorgeous mountainside has a calming effect. When I first moved to California, I was completely unnerved by the winter rains. I was used to the fierce monsoons, the temperamental storms of humid summers that caused power outages and floods. But here, the rain was different. It raged from time to time, goaded on by one cold front or warm front or something of the sort, but usually it just fell at a steady pace, often for several days in a row. Even the rain in California was temperate.

We are in a drought this year. There has been almost no rain, and water conservation efforts have taken on a new importance and urgency. The winter has been uncharacteristically warm and dry. I wonder if the lack of rain somehow caused a drought in my writing, too. I have felt disconnected from it. While this is ordinarily a cause for alarm, this time I have just been apathetic. This morning, though, the clouds shivered ever so slightly and we got a tiny bit of rain. The roads were slick in the morning as I pulled out of the driveway later than usual. In the office, I was quickly swept into meetings and discussions, having very little time to appreciate the view from my window - the overcast sky, the juxtaposition of vibrant and muted colors, the brief rain making everything sharper while the haze in the air and the coverlet over the sun making it all distant, almost sepia colored. But now, I have a momentary reprieve, and I find myself getting drawn to this blank page (no longer blank), some odd compelling force swelling inside me, willing me to write - anything. And so, I do. 

I find myself wishing for a real winter storm, for the clouds to erupt and end this drought, end this state of unease and disuse in me. I am wishing for winds and heavy rain and thunder and the sound of all of it, the whistle of the wind, and the prattle of the rain, and the deep cough-like hum of the thunder. And as I wish for this I close my eyes and imagine the smell of such weather wafting with the wind through the kitchen window, a pine-scented candle burning on the counter, a steaming mug of cardamom chai, my baby playing with her books, the Food Channel playing in the background, and the death-grip suffocating my writing finally loosened because of the sudden release of winter rain.

Photo by Rebecca McCue