HVD!

There is something magical about the beginnings of love, the flutters, and the feeling of your heart landing inside your sandals with an almost audible 'plop,' the fierce need to be with the one you love, and the temporary insanity you undergo in that phase. Yes, it is magical.

But I never want to go back to that time. I don't want to feel that way again, imprisoned in a confusion of feelings. They were so overpowering, like being presented with a ridiculously over-seasoned dish on a completely empty stomach. You couldn't stop eating, but the spices killed your taste-buds.

What's special about love is not the mad rush of the beginning, but how it develops. Sometimes it endures for years, matures into something strong enough that it seems almost tangible, a physical entity. Other times, it tricks you, distresses you, and leaves you nursing a broken heart. There are other instances of love simply fizzling out of your life, like a bottle of perfume left open, the fragrance diffusing through your house, the scent evaporating, disappearing, carried away by the wind. 

Either way, it teaches you something about yourself. It shows you the way you love and how you survive it. It leaves you with lessons. Sometimes they are tough lessons to learn, but in the end, you are grateful you had the opportunity to learn them. 

Love fiercely and unabashedly, my friends. 

Exhibit A: Conversation over g-chat. We are not madly in love anymore. Our love is temperate - and thank God for that. 

usman:  i see

oh i forgot

hvd

me:  you too

Read about LOVE on Goll Gappay this month and relate incidents where you have witnessed or experienced it.

Love and Death, Life and Heartbreak

The most wretched thing about love is that it contradicts your expectations. You expect it to empower you; it makes you vulnerable. You expect it to give you happiness; it gives you more distress than you can bear. You expect to be able to define it; it makes you lose your ability to articulate. There is only one thing that is true about its character: It outlives people.

I saw my mother spiraling into depression after her sister died. My aunt was 26 years old. She went suddenly, without the slightest hint of a warning. My mother and her sister made plans to go shopping over the phone. The next morning I was awakened by my mother's terrifying screams. If I close my eyes and think back to that time, I can still hear her screaming, her body thrashing like a puppet, see her flinging things to the floor, breaking crystal vases, hurling books and clothes across the room, maddened, no, consumed with grief. She was not the same after that - not for a very long time. Eventually, she stopped hiding in different parts of the house. Gradually, her sobs gave way to a quiet melancholy while she listened to Lata's "Dil hoom hoom karay." Slowly, she stopped talking about her sister. But that is the only thing that has changed. She has simply stopped talking about her. The pain of losing her is still fresh. It is like a piece of missing skin that refuses to heal. There is only a thin scab on it, and sometimes without a warning, it is scraped off and blood oozes out in a shocking rivulet. 

Last summer, 22 years after my aunt's death, my mother and I were having tea in my living room. I was talking about my two younger sisters, particularly the middle one and how attached she is to my mother. My mother, being the middle of (now) three sisters could relate to it. 
"Mama, isn't it funny - I never thought of it like this, but we are three sisters and you are three sisters, too!" I said. I sipped my tea and only after a few seconds realized the mistake I had made. I froze with my cup in mid air. 
"I am so sorry," I said. "I...forgot about her."
She just looked at me for a long time. "We were four sisters. It's OK - you were only five when she died," she said and took her tea downstairs. She needed to be alone. The scab had come off.

Last week, we lost a brand new member of our family. Not even two months old, a beautiful baby girl went to heaven. I have not mustered the courage to speak to the bereaved mother yet, much younger than me, but immeasurably stronger. I have no words to comfort her. I know her love will never subside. This wound will never heal, and it will be a long time before she is able to look away from it, become cognizant of the fact she exists outside of this circle of grief. But for now, and for as long as she needs, she will stay inside a perimeter of pain, and no one can say anything that will matter. But there is another certainty, too. She will rise from her mourning, wake up slowly, and after the raw lesion scabs over, she will remember only love. When the thin brown skin rips off again, because it will many times over, she will be rescued by the love she shared with her daughter for only two months. It will get old with her, age as she ages, continue to survive and thrive long after her sweet baby girl is gone.

"O love is the crooked thing,

There is nobody wise enough To find out all that is in it, For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon."

W. B. YEATS, "Brown Penny"

    

Read about LOVE on Goll Gappay this month and relate incidents where you have witnessed or experienced it. 

Love to be reckoned with: Mothers & Daughters

Jahan at 7 months with her Nani

I tried to think who, among all the people I love, do I love most? Who is, in the spirit of this month, my Valentine? My thought conjured up the face of my daughter, her smooth curly hair in a raised mess of ringlets at the nape of her neck, her wide toothy smile, her small dark eyes crinkled at the edges, shockingly like her father's. There is no greater love I feel than this love. I experience the sensation of something swelling in my chest, a weight spreading through me, like a tight fist at my heart slowly loosening, the fingers lazily raising from the palm, pushing this way and that. She is, quite simply, the love of my life. 

At the coattails of this overwhelming surge of emotion, another thought emerges. And who loves me this way, so fiercely, with forgiveness and understanding readily available for real and imagined offenses? Who feels the weight of their love for me so ferociously that it crushes them, makes them vulnerable? I am only now convinced, after having Jahan, that no one on god's green earth loves me as powerfully as my mother. No one else has the capacity to do so. Only a mother's heart is vast enough and tender enough to hold, nourish, and impart such love.

A poem I wrote back in 2008 is below. 

My Mother's Voice

My mother's voice is like her belly – 

four times pregnant and cut open,

loose now and soft – injured, healed, scarred.

I see you old mother,

young daughter,

in an embrace that is meant to cure 

pains and aches that run deeper than skin,

run deeper even than body.

You, old mother,

tighten your arms around that young thing

to erase all sorrow with the strength of years

of worry and prayer.

I see you two and think of my mother.

My mother's voice is aged with cancer –

the quiet, tricksy beast that ate her breast –

cracked, guarded, uncertain.

She says she is half the woman she used to be

with one breast gone.

I say to this warrior who birthed me,

your scars are battle wounds,

the one across your belly

and the one on your chest

make you twice the woman,

and to me,

twice the mother.

My mother's voice is like jasmine scent in my dreams.

She speaks and sings to heal my hurts,

because her voice can travel farther than her body.

Her voice can embrace me when she cannot. 

Read about LOVE on Goll Gappay this month and relate incidents where you have witnessed or experienced it.  

The Season To Celebrate Love

February. The Season of Love's Celebration. Thinking back to my perception of this month years ago, I am in awe of myself. Only teenagers have such blind faith in eternal love and its powers, and only at that age was I able to associate this month particularly with romantic love and all secondary emotions it fosters. 

It's fascinating, really. Winter still grips most of the world with force in February, yet roses surface miraculously on every street corner. Full, bloody, their mouths open, stems thorny, enticing and dangerous. Everyday since February 1, my email has been flooded with special offers for Valentine's Day. Now, more than ever before, I am drawn to the break room at work, the glass candy jar full of tiny brick red Dove chocolates, with their shiny gold-tinged wrappers glowing under the horrid white light of that room. Ah, the temptations of February.

I look at love differently now (Joni Mitchell whispers to me "I've looked at love/from both sides now"). 

This month, inspired by Farheen Zehra's Love and Literature series, I will be blogging about love...everywhere and in everything...books and poetry, yes, but also in other things that are sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious. 

Read about LOVE on Goll Gappay this month and relate incidents where you have witnessed or experienced it.  

Words That Matter - Part 1

The other day my coworker, Sara, and I were taking a walk. I was ranting about the lack of compassion, empathy, respect - everything human - in the human race. Sara said something that has stayed with me.

Sara: "Years from now -"
Noor: "When the human race has successfully eradicated itself?"
Sara: "Well, that has been under consideration for millennia, but years from now when people look back at this time, our time, they will recognize it as one of profound change, like we look at the Renaissance."   

"Family is fate, but it is also a choice" - Part 3

"Family is fate, but it is also a choice" - Attica Locke in The Cutting Season

"May you live in interesting times" - Chinese Curse

Living in interesting times as we do, it seems inconsequential and downright selfish to talk about my personal heartbreaks. It seems wrong - criminally wrong even. But these mundanities are what allow us to deal with the restlessness of the age we live in. Without the ordinary, we would not stop reeling from the force of Real Life all around us. It would drive us to the edge of madness. 

I am living in the here and now. And this is a lonely place. I have struggled with my identity for years. I feel like I have a right and duty to identify with my roots, but I no longer feel their pull. I feel like a flower drooping at the edge of a stalk, in the home stretch of wilting and disintegrating into a mess of petals, no longer feeling the hold of its roots, not belonging to the plant that birthed and reared it anymore. It is a sad moment in the trajectory of your life where you are loosely bound to your origins by lukewarm guilt and nothing more.

This is why you need anchors. 

Your family, a part of your fate, destiny, kismet, what have you, is an anchor. They hold you in place with all the strength in their bodies. They protect you in storms strong enough to wash away every last reminder of your existence. They enable you to hold your ground, be your own person, they let you go so you can find your own way home, knowing full well that you may never choose to walk that road again. 

And then there is the other family. The family you choose. The family you have the power to assemble around you. Friends. Kind friends that stand behind you like pillars, emerge like expansive islands when you are floundering to stay alive, struggling to stay afloat in an ocean ravaged by tides that have turned against you. They come to you not like hope, because hope is dangerous, it can elude and delude you. They come to you in the shape of a solemn promise, an oath that won't be broken. They protect you when you are most vulnerable. They let you cry without argument or reason. They let you grieve. They let you vent. And they let you celebrate your happiness. They are simply...present.

I don't know what I did to deserve such friends, but they have saved me in more ways than I can describe. They are my chosen family, and for reasons I cannot fathom, they chose me as theirs.  

"Family is fate, but it is also a choice" - Part 2

"Family is fate, but it is also a choice" - Attica Locke in The Cutting Season

At a perilously young age, I met a boy. Eight years later, I married him. Even before I got a piece of paper declaring him to be my family, he had stealthily turned my blood the same shade of red as his. Long before I signed my name on a paper the color of desert sands, carefully, deliberately, taking special care to dot the "i" in Noorulain, he had become my foundation, my sense of being home. And so, thousands of miles away from my real family, but near him, my homesickness abated until my sense of belonging only rested with him. Clever man - he played his cards well. 

He was and remains my chosen family, not a substitute for those I love best – my parents and siblings – but an addition to them. I inherited a whole other family, too – his. It feels strange to say that – “his family,” because they don’t feel like they belong to him. If anything, I feel like they are more mine than his. 

When my father-in-law first met me in that capacity – as an in-law, I mean – he treated me with a reserved affection. Over the course of a few weeks, that affection changed into a peculiar kind of friendship, the kind in which you say very little, but are comforted by just being in the presence of each other. It was a parent-son reunion after 7 years and the parents' first meeting with their daughter-in-law. My father-in-law, Uncle as I call him, is a quiet man by habit. Diabetic and scrupulous about his health, he eats mindfully. Even after we were all done with our dinner, he would sit at the table, slowly swallowing his small portion of homemade roti and thin gravy. The mother and son being inseparable would sometimes wander off for an evening walk or a trip to the grocery store. I sat with Uncle on those autumn evenings while he ate. We didn’t talk much. Sometimes he spoke of the weather and asked me about my day, but mostly we just sat together, perfectly satisfied with each other’s company. Gradually, this evolved into a ritual that spanned all meals, especially tea-time during which we both enjoyed large mugs of chai with thick cake rusks. I guarded this ritual religiously – it was our “thing.” Sometimes on the phone, he tells me “When I come, we will again have tea with cake rusks.” 

On the first evening of their arrival my mother-in-law and I sat in the living room formally, saying very little to each other. Her feet were swollen from the long journey. I asked her to put her legs up and brought her a stool. Then, I put the kettle on for tea. When I sat down next to her again, she said “I don’t like to make long professions of affection. I will be honest. I will observe you. I will see how you are, how you really are.” It was a candid statement. It was also unnerving. “That’s completely fair,” I said. “I will not disappoint you.” All mothers-in-law of the world “observe” the woman their son brings home. They not only observe, but also openly critique them (and that’s putting it very mildly). I was struck by this woman sitting poised on the sofa. Even after a long journey, she sat gracefully, her back straight, hands folded in her lap, and I was amazed at her honesty. It turned out that her observation didn’t last very long. Before the end of the week, she began to show her love with vigor. She labored for hours with me in the kitchen, teaching me everything from the correct way of peeling an onion to the fool-proof method of making the best homemade yogurt. She slaved on the tiniest details so I could learn how to be a good cook: is it ½ teaspoon or ¼? How fine is finely chopped? What do you mean by golden brown? She taught me everything without judgment or frustration and with the utmost care – she instilled in me a love for cooking. Nothing makes two women become good friends like a stove and a dozen tried and tested recipes. These days, she prefers to introduce me as her favorite daughter.

I also gained two sisters in this marriage. Having been the elder sister for almost all of my life, this role should have been the easiest one. On the contrary, I met some serious challenges on this front. For a very long time, there was an unspoken but acknowledged level of abrasion between me and my sisters-in-law. Then something magical happened in 2011. They saw me after 8 years. And we came undone. All those years of our shared childhoods resurfaced. It was easy to love each other fiercely, protectively, and without question after that – after all, we had done it once before as little girls. 

I miss my family, the one that I belong to by fate: My sweet-faced mother and her poetry, my handsome father who talks in riddles and metaphors, my beautiful sisters, one roaming the streets of Tokyo with her husband, and the other in Lahore, my brother who is no longer the chubby-cheeked boy I left behind, but a young man taller than our dad; and I miss the family I chose, the four of them who made me believe that we belong together. We are all stitched seamlessly into the tapestry of each other’s lives. There is no thought more comforting than that.

"Family is fate, but it is also a choice" - Part 1

“Family is fate, but it is also a choice” – Attica Locke in The Cutting Season

Sometimes, in rare instances, life gives you a do-over. Like the morning sun that peeks through laden monsoon clouds in Lahore, the air still damp, nursing a hangover from the rain that fell through the night, a second chance emerges in your life. It comes so naturally that for a few moments, you don’t even recognize it. Slowly, you begin to see it. As the sky lightens on those mornings after rain, the sun seeping into the horizon fluidly, one smooth stroke of an artist, you begin to feel your mood lifting. You are excited for the possibilities a new day brings.

The sun rises. That is set in stone – you have no choice in the matter. Depending on your belief system, some things are just decided for you by a higher power, or happened to you by sheer random chance. Your family for instance – you did not choose where you’d be born and to whom. That just…happened. You were dealt a set of cards and you simply had to play the game. I was blessed with an amazing family. Sisters who looked up to me, a brother completely devoted to his eldest sister, and parents who did not tire of singing praises of their first-born. I was a star of my father's house.

When I grew up enough to understand, really understand my family, I started to recognize cracks, unnoticeable at first like those thin lines that show up on cheap stoneware dinner plates after you use your steak knife on them too many times. Gradually, they became more prominent like a slightly jagged line running from the rim to the bottom of a coffee mug. Stark. Jarring. Unnerving. You don’t stop loving the people you love just because it requires more effort. Instead, you dive deep within yourself, unpack the hidden reserves of tolerance and forgiveness and kindness and give it your all. You try to love fiercely, obstinately, unapologetically. But sometimes you fail. And when you fail, you run away, like I did. I came away from home slathered in an adolescent’s anger. I didn’t just leave home; I left my father. “There. That will show him,” I thought. I ran away from the cracks in the china and let someone else put it back together.

Daddy's Girl.

I got a do-over. Last Christmas, I got a frightening phone call. My father was in the hospital after a stroke. Something in my perspective shifted that night while I held a ten-hour vigil next to the phone with my two-month-old daughter in my arms, waiting to hear news of my father. This whole time away from home had just been one long overcast night in the season of monsoons. The air had been heavy with rain, drunk on the humidity, thick and suffocating.  But it had passed. The sun was coming up, turning the far end of my horizon a murky orange-gray.

Nothing mattered. The only thing that had any meaning in my life was my father. I prayed for a second chance with him. I prayed for an opportunity to make things right. And I got it. This time, I did not just end up as my father’s daughter by fate. I chose to be his daughter.

And I make that choice consciously every day. Sometimes I resent my choice, but most of the time I am grateful that I had the privilege of making it. 

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue

When we were little girls, Mayna and I used to sit on wrought-iron garden furniture in her Aunt's sunny front porch in Lahore and talk about Life. They were grand ideas about success, fame, and then rather reluctantly as if we were above such frivolity - about love. In the beginning, this love centered around Barbie dolls (more for her than me - I just played along. I think Barbie dolls are creepy). We would take used up batteries from remote controls and break them with large bricks. A black powder used to emerge from their slim metallic bellies. "Magic wishing powder," she used to say. With our eyes wide, we wished upon the powder, gave it the most heartfelt desires of our girlhood, and blew on it....I am sorry, Mayna, but in retrospect that's just WACKO! 

Soul sisters - 13 years ago.

Such was our childhood. We took ordinary things and tried to make them extraordinary, special, grand, beautiful, something more than they were. I know one day we will do something remarkable. Apart we are both creative and resourceful; together we possess the Midas touch. When we were in our early teens, we came up with a business idea - homemade candles in decorated clay pots. "Moods and Magic" we called it. We even sold a few of them, but gave away the rest as gifts to friends and family. In school, for multi-cultural day, we set up a small booth for body art. I advertised and Mayna painted intricate patterns with body-paint on our customers' hands, arms, and for the adventurous few, even faces. Our little business venture raised the most money for a charity that the school supported. Cliches like "we are better together than we are apart" and "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" just seem to fit us like a glove.

Soul-sisters, we called each other. Sisters for life. Sisters in spirit. When we grew up, we became sisters by marriage, and what a lottery that has been!

My soul-sister becomes a bride on Saturday. Across an ocean, when the sun rises in my sky and sets in hers, she will walk down the aisle. I will try to tell myself it is not important. "It's about Life, not weddings," I will say to myself. "We are sisters. We have our whole lives to celebrate. We will celebrate birthdays and anniversaries and joys and sorrows. It's just a wedding. It's just a wedding!" Truth is, it's not! It's not just a wedding. It is the grand finale of a thousand summer afternoons we spent huddled together in shady corners, talking about weddings - clothes, music, food, dances, venues, themes, colors. What happened to those two little girls? And how did we end up like this - on opposite corners of God's green earth, thinking that weddings are just weddings, what's the big deal, we'll be together soon enough? It is a big deal. It is a big deal that I am not there to hold my sister's hand. It is a big deal that I will not be there with her, shooing unruly kids away from the dais, fixing her jewelry, teasing the groom, dancing the night away, seeing, believing, knowing they are happy. It is a big damn deal, so let's just call it what it is. 

It wasn't supposed to happen this way. 

Such is life. 

Soul sisters - 2012

There is no grand gesture of love that I can present here. Nothing will circumvent my absence from her big day. But I was thinking about this European wedding tradition of "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" and I decided to put a Pakistani spin on it. I have created a collection of 10 secret family recipes for Mayna. Each one comes with its own story - it mentions how we came to try the dish, when we cooked it, how it was perfected. Some recipes are from a long time ago, some are new that we created when she visited me in 2011, some we borrowed from other people and added our own little touches. This will be her something old, something new, and something borrowed. 

We will be her something blue. 

A work in progress: Something old, something new, and something borrowed.

  

Mayna's "something blue."

   

Grand Gestures of Love

Even before I learned about Maggie Mason's Mighty Life List, I was a big proponent of grand gestures of love. I threw lavish dinner parties in college for close friends even if I didn't have enough money. I have planned elaborate parties for Usman right down to an expansive menu and an impressive cake for three birthdays in a row. For Jahan's first birthday, I spent weeks working on home-made decorations, center-pieces, and party favors. I love throwing baby and bridal showers for my girl friends. For me, there is a thrill in planning, and an unmatched satisfaction in Pulling It Off - in other words, executing a grand gesture of love with finesse and perfection.

More often than not, after the high of Pulling It Off has waned and I am sitting slumped on the sofa, the mighty task of picking up remnants of good fun from furniture, wiping it from the carpet, putting it in plastic lunchboxes, over and done with, I think: "Why the hell did I just do this?" I have to be honest. I am seldom rewarded for my grand gestures of love. In fact, the people I have showered this love on in the past, have often decided to simply walk off into the sunset and not even send a thank you note. That makes me crabby, because 
1. I can't revel in the afterglow of my accomplishment, self-aggrandizing thoughts, etc., you see, and 
2. My family members collect themselves and become a snarly mouth that keeps saying "I told you so" with its tongue sticking out. "Stop expending your energies on people who don't deserve your attention." Blah!

So...late last year I decided to curb my enthusiasm for grand gestures of love. I will collect all my energy and creativity and bring it forth in a burst of excellence for the one or two people who truly deserve to be awarded with a Signature Noor Grand Gesture of Love. The opportunity presented itself on Rebecca's 30th birthday. How can I do justice to what Rebecca has been for me? How do you collect all the love that a person has given you and your family and bottle it up in a beautiful jar and present it back? Here, this is all the love you've given us. I have added a little more for good measure so I can tell you how important you are to our family. Happy birthday. If only there was a magic way to do that. So, I thought and thought and thought some more. She has been a sister to me on every occasion that made me wish for one. She has been a constant support, an honest voice, a reliable presence in our lives. She has taken most of the pictures I have of our family. She took the first picture of Jahan in the hospital and held her for hours so I could take a nap right after she she was born. She gave Jahan her first lovey, a small pink blanket with an elephant head rattling on one end. She bought Jahan her first set of poetry books. She opened and is presently the only contributor to Jahan's college fund. There is so much more, which I can't possibly list here. So, how do you create a grand gesture of love for a person whose kindness and affection you can always count on?

30 Gifts for Rebecca's 30th

The idea struck me with the resounding clarity of a bell chime. 30 Gifts for Rebecca's 30th. That's what I called the project, and began systematically, obsessively, carefully shopping for the items that would be on this list. On the day of the her birthday, she arrived just before lunch as planned. The dining table held a heap of presents - 30 to be exact. I served two appetizers: curried potatoes and carrots with sour cream and spicy corn salsa with tortilla chips. This was followed by the entree, which was a new recipe: Dhaaba Chicken Karahi made with ghee and lots of tomatoes. Dessert was a chocolate mousse cake and chamomile tea. We ended the afternoon with a screening of The King's Speech. All in all, a great day, a Grand Gesture of Love well-deserved by Rebecca and happily executed by yours truly. 
 

The first appetizer: curried potatoes and carrots with sour cream.

Appetizer Two: Spicy corn salsa and chips

Lunch: Saffron rice with butter

Lunch: Dhaaba Chicken Karahi

The lunch table!

Side salad with lunch