Life-Stories

“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was about: Love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending  

My grandmother did not leave trunks full of banarasi clothes, copper pots and pans, books, ledgers, deeds, wills, jewelry. She owned all of those things, but gave them away several years before she died. She sold the house she birthed 11 children in, the house from which two of her daughters' and her husband's funeral biers departed, the house that held memories of the 9 other children who lived and are now grandparents themselves. My grandmother kept limited belongings in her old age, a number that continued to dwindle as dementia took hold of her and made her a different person, not a lesser person, just different...and a little helpless. My grandmother's legacy, therefore, is not tangible. It is in the life-story she shared with her grandchildren on winter evenings with the gas heater blazing, peanut shells crackling between our fingers, candles lit up around us,  the power having failed as usual. We would sit around her in a tight circle, tucked underneath heavy velvet quilts and listen to her story of crossing the border from Amritsar to Lahore with her husband and two little boys. Sometimes, she would sing us a song, a song I can't remember now, one that her own mother had sung to her. She told us about her father who died young, about her widowed mother's efforts to raise the family, about getting a scholarship to earn teaching credentials, financing her brother's foreign education, getting married, having kids, not quite understanding her husband. "I used to pray at night, you see," she'd say. "And your grandfather would call out to me over and over 'Zohra Begum! Come listen to me!' And I would just ignore him and wish for him to stop bothering me. I wonder all the time now, what it was he wanted to tell me."

Stanford

Our life-stories are our legacies, but they are in essence, our stories. For example, had my grandfather ever told us his life-story, he might never have remembered the fact that his wife didn't listen to him during her prayers. It may not have been a salient event for him at all. When we tell our life-story, we often alter and exaggerate, or at the very least dramatize, in order to engender interest, of course, but also to make the image projected by the story and the image we have of ourselves congruent. 
 
I am thinking about life-stories in the context of my own, of course. I identify as a poet, mother, and researcher, so in terms of my life-story, I will obviously focus on significant events associated with these aspects of my life. Those who know me best have often heard the dramatic telling of "How I Ended Up At Stanford" story, or "How I Edit Poetry" story, or "How I Have Raised Jahan" story. Since I no longer identify very strongly as a daughter by virtue of being an adult and having left the nest, I censor the formative years, which are rife with tragic and dramatic elements that would make for excellent narrative exposition. I do this very consciously. I have done it so often and so well that I have beguiled myself into thinking that those years simply don't matter in my life-story. Obviously, they do. The version of the story I tell myself, while being somewhat accurate, is most certainly not complete. 

 Thinking about all of this analytically, I have reached some uneasy realizations. I am a dishonest story-teller. I tell myself what I like to hear. This is all well and good until I start to think about my legacy. I can't just erase the first 18 years of my life in Pakistan. And, quite frankly, I don't want to. No one has a linearly ascending journey from point A to point B. Some people stay at point A all their lives. Others, most commonly, climb and swoop and plateau and rise and fall, all the way from Point A to B. The trouble with my journey, and therefore, my story is that I have left point A far behind and am so bewildered by the pitfalls and advances in no-man's-land on the way to Point B, that everything is a little hazy - the past and the future.

I need to start re-telling my story to myself, without self-pity and self-doubt. Before I can do that, though, I need to remember the story as accurately as possible. The more I think about the past, the more I am convinced that I need to re-examine it. I need to look at events from several different perspectives. Did he really mean it when he said XYZ, or was he trying to hurt me as I was trying to hurt him? You do hurt each other when you're angry, it's what you do to everyone you love, because you know they will forgive you. I need to reach out to the characters in my story, the characters that matter, and start a dialogue. Can we start from the beginning, please? Let's forgive each other, but let's not forget. I need you to remember. Remember with me. Let's write down our life-stories. This is how I remember it. Is this how you remember it, as well?

Your life-story is not just about you. And it certainly didn't happen the way you've been telling it to yourself. Think about it - what did you leave out and why? It's not an easy conversation to have with yourself, but it's an important one. 

(And, by the way, I highly recommend the book quoted in this blog entry, The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.)

Photos 2 and 3 by Rebecca McCue

A Poem for Peshawar

Peshawar 2013

let me show you the cost of worship:

a man, with his eyes closed, arms splayed
as if embracing the carnage around him,
another man's hand on his back,
mayhem, comfort

five rescue workers carrying a girl on a charpoy,
rubber flip-flops, one dangling from her foot,
about to fall off,
her bright yellow shalwar with a floral print,
basant, kites                                       dead? alive?
a woman sitting on the ground,
hands clasped, head bent low,
meditative, almost,
a crimson stain on her shoulder, blooming,
a full-mouthed lily, an inkblot
another woman wailing, walking toward the first,
her reaching palm, an effigy in midair,
grief immortalized in the contortion of her face,
kith? kin?
a row of five plain oak coffins,
mercifully closed,
a hand resting on the lid,
precious cargo,
78 dead, over a hundred injured,
death toll climbing, climbing, they say,
like a vine it grows,
no photos of children, yet
no children, please, god, please,
no more, no more

What we talk about when we talk about love

For the last 5 weeks, I have been teaching a poetry course through Desi Writers Lounge. It is a basic, sweeping course, titled "Elements, Themes, and Form." We have talked about things like imagery, abstraction, figurative language, and the salient themes in poetry: self-portraits and, begrudgingly, love. This is not to say that poetry is limited to these two themes. On the contrary, I feel it is the most natural form of expression for any emotion. However, when one first starts to dabble in poetry, one is, more often than not, naturally drawn towards these two themes.

For the course, I have re-read some of my favorite poems and have had the pleasure of composing discussion questions based on the weekly reading. Last week we were exploring the theme of Love and Desire, and it corresponded with the highest number of assigned readings for the entire course. We read the following poems, which I highly encourage everyone to get their hands on, like, right now.

- Li-young Lee, “This Room and Everything in It”
- Joy Harjo, “The Real Revolution is Love”
- Sandra M. Gilbert, “Anniversary Waltz”
- Richard Ronan, “Soe”
- A. Loudermilk, “Daring Love”
- Chitra Divakaruni, “Sudha’s Story”
- Sheila Zamora, “In Return”
- Nhan Trinh, “Country Love”

All three of the course participants were also given homework, which was to write an original poem on the theme of love and desire. It was an open prompt and they were told to use the week's reading as inspiration.

I got three very different poems.

Waqas A. Qazi wrote a jaded poem titled "On Love." He was also not a fan of the readings - a curious response as he has appreciated all the assigned poems in the past. "I don’t quite know what to make of this week’s readings. I think one needs to be in a specific kind of mood to read and appreciate romantic poetry. This has not been one of those weeks. Hence my interpretation of these poems may be quite subjective. I don’t think there is a poem here which has really impressed me yet," wrote Waqas. I am not going to lie - the bitter honesty in his words crushed me! Lee's "This Room and Everything in It" is one of my favorite poems and I have used it as a motif to write a poem myself, which in my opinion, is some of my more polished work.

The response from the other two course participants was encouraging. Hafsa Malik wrote, "Okay, so love is a hackneyed theme, I agree, but to sound like a bit of a cliché myself, I am a hopeless, hopeless romantic. So I really love good love poems! You should have totally included Brown Penny in this [by the way], Noor. A gem, that poem is." I agree. I should have included "Brown Penny" by Yeats, a poem that remained my signature on the Desi Writers Lounge forums for a few years. Hafsa wrote a poem about love and longing, beautifully evocative, titled "You and I."

Raiya Masroor also said something after my own heart. "The poems in this selection deal with this clichéd theme in a realistic way. Most of the poems are about real love, loss, and desire instead of focusing on the beloved, his/her characteristics, and the waiting/pining for a lover. They deal with the concept of love in real lives." Raiya really hit the nail on the head, I think. It's the simple and frightening reality of love in these poems that makes them so compelling to read, in my opinion. Raiya's own poem, a remarkably well-written piece about finding bliss in a relationship, seeing love in the simplest of acts once you discover and possess it (like the snores of your partner), was absolutely brilliant and a testament to the fact that not all thematic poems on love have to be long, torturous, drawn-out cliches. She intriguingly titled her poem "Mythbuster."

Excerpts from poems written by my talented course participants. Click to expand.

Reading through the work of these three poets, each with a very different approach towards and perspective of love and its perils, I thought about the poems I have written on the subject. They have been few and far between, but they have definitely portrayed more of the weary frustration reminiscent of Waqas's "On Love" rather than Hafsa's longing in "You and I," and they have certainly never been as obviously blissful as Raiya's "Mythbuster."

Last week we read about love, we talked about love, but I have come to believe that all poetry ever written has barely just scratched the surface of this compelling theme. In the pleasant deluge of poetry on love and desire that I immersed myself in last week, I kept circling back to the two lines of wisdom that (to me) represent a universal truth about this reckless emotion, penned by the great W.B. Yeats:

"Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny
One cannot begin it too soon."

So, in talking about love, I did not discover anything more than I already knew. And I was reminded of the fact that I really don't know much about love at all.

Looking through my work from years ago, my very first poetry workshop to be exact, circa 2006, I found two short poems in an old chapbook. They must have been written in response to a similar prompt, a prompt related to love, which is why the poems are so succinct and, quite frankly, stiff-necked, opinionated, rigid, but at the same time, they are fascinating specimens that bring to light the state of mind of the 21-year-old Noor.

I am going to leave you with these specimens now. Not my best work by any stretch of the imagination, but here it is for what it's worth. Two poems from October 2006.

Crossroads                                                              Synonyms

We are at the place                                                      He calls me,

where it is easier to hate                                             I answer,

than to love each other.                                              as much out of duty

                                                                                         as out of love.

And after the sheer humiliation that comes with posting the two poems above, I am compelled to post something recent that is more representative of my present poetic voice, loosely related to the theme under discussion.

Hand in Hand

we are on our travels with
undercurrents of conversation,
promises cracked through the middle,
wrapped in the cloth that blinds us

there are so many realities of us,
a decade full of crests and troughs,
a steady progression of waves and bodies,
flesh loosening,
aging,
the crow’s feet around my eyes,
the subtle lethargy in my breasts,
and you look new still

you have come and gone
like a song that disappears
as a car with the radio blaring
passes us by on the open road

now, after sheltering my body
in the fetal position,
broken wholly in some places
and incompletely in others,
I wonder if dignity,
(the price of this compromise)
is to be eaten for dinner
to fill up my stomach
that knows no sin,
and if the measure of my affection
is how much I have cried

let’s take a diverging walk now -
some furlongs on foot
and you will meet a small gap in the asphalt,
we can fall through it and come out
on the other side -
one lurch and a blink,
and we will cross oceans and icebergs
to be reborn -
ourselves again
in the native land,
our eyes feasting
on cotton crops and sugar cane and
tilled fields

you say nothing –
it’s just as well,
here, on our journey,
language has no power
and we haven’t crossed over yet

two thousand ears of corn,
two thousand ears
scattered in the ocean
their tympanic membranes
vibrating still,
and voices taking shape,
murmuring like ghosts lazing on the waves

the darkest place I have been to
is this ocean at night, with you,
we are on our travels still,
we are on our travels


Disclaimer: The title is stolen from Raymond Carver's excellent short story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. I highly recommend it!

Notes
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Shallow Mistakes

A friend of mine is planning on launching a lifestyle/fashion page/blog. I was looking at her "About Me" statement today in which she talked about her life-long love affair with fashion (it has really been life-long - I have been privy to all the naughty details). It got me thinking about all the fashion faux pas that I have committed in the past. The stories I remember are really, really cringe worthy. I am just glad to have reached a point where I have some semblance of normalcy in my sense of style. It's basic and conservative, but it's a far cry from the precocious and embarrassing fashion escapades of my childhood. 

Whenever I recall all the weddings I attended in my childhood for which I wore dark lipsticks and bold eye-shadows, I keep thinking, "But where was my mother?! Why didn't she tell me to wash my face? Why didn't she tell me I was not allowed to wear that much makeup?" The truth is she probably did, and I probably threw huge tantrums and drove her to the point of giving her exhausted assent for me to do whatever I wanted. My oft-employed obstinate responses, as far as I remember, used to be, "It's my face! I will do what I want with it." My poor mom. 

My husband and I have known each other all our lives, but we reconnected as adolescents at a wedding after a long hiatus during the in-between years (also known as The Unfortunate Years or The Dark Years or The Ugly Duckling Years in my personal journals). We started dating shortly after that wedding, but he still remembers how I had done up my face for one of those events. He likens me to classic icons, like The Circus Clown, or ones that he's made up, like A Cross-Dressing Alien. I really needed an intervention back then. 

Tonight, thinking about those horrible days of shocking pink lipstick and rust-golden eye shadow or dark brown lipstick (seriously - it made me look like I was lacking a vital organ, like a heart) and bright silver eye-liner, I am so full of dread and regret that I am sitting here at 12:40AM writing this instead of sleeping! 

I have decided, however, just in the short amount of time it has taken me to write all this, that I am going to simply accept those fashion/make-up mishaps. They were in the past (yes, including the time when I wore a lehenga to a friend's birthday party, where to my horror, no one else was wearing a lehenga!), and I actually have really nice clothes now with a reasonable sense of the kind of make-up I should wear (or I just go to MAC or Sephora and ask them to sell me the things that look good on me). And maybe in ten years I will look back and think, "Damn, I really shouldn't have worn the MAC Russian Red lipstick so often when I was twenty-eight." But, you know what? I love wearing that red lipstick, and I think it looks pretty damn good. And there's something to be said about feeling pretty, OK? All those years ago, in those funny outfits and that horrid make-up, I felt pretty. So, from now on, I will acknowledge that my choices at that time were unfortunate and highly questionable, but I made them and felt happy. That's what really matters, doesn't it? So, really, what is the point of harboring resent for the-young-and-stupid-me? 

I should just let it go and enjoy my present Russian Red era. Letting it go, now, letting it go. Sorry, though, no photos from that time. I don't have any. You get three pictures from The Cute Years instead circa 1987ish.

You are so small, and the world is so big

"Maybe that's the only way mothers can hold on to things - in echoes, through generations. It's not enough. But it will have to do."- Katherine Center in Things to Remember not to Forget from the book Because I Love Her - 34 Women Writers Reflect on the Mother-Daughter Bond, edited by Andrea N. Richesin

 “How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way tiny ghosts of your living children haunted your heart; they could never know, and would hate it if they did, how their growing was a constant bereavement.”
― J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy 

Jahan is one month shy of being two years old. 

Despite the excellent sleep habits I instilled in her since birth, and as if to prove my mother right ("She is a baby, Noorulain, not a robot"), she wakes up at a different time every night and grunts a few times with her eyes closed and her arms outstretched so I can bring her to our bed where she happily cuddles next to me, kicks my blanket off, and immediately goes to sleep. 

At almost two, Jahan has a full head of soft ringlets. In the bath, the hair sticks to her forehead and fans over her back, straightened by the water. She pushes it out of her eyes and slaps the water in the tub delightfully with both hands. Sometimes, she runs her fingers across her mouth, pinky to index finder, all the while mumbling "Ma ma ma ma ma." 

When her hair is drying and she is dressed in her pajamas, lotion slathered all over her body, her legs shiny after the massage I have given her, a tight ringlet sits daintily on her forehead. It's my favorite thing to look at before we say good-night, this tiny curl perched on top of her head, swaying this way and that as she moves, running around the room, laughing, and trying to escape the inevitable bedtime.

I am eager for Jahanara to talk to me. In my dreams, I see her smiling face and hear a voice-over "Mummy, let's go get our nails done," or "Will you buy me ice-cream, Mummy?" She says "Mama" these days, and utters a jumble of sounds that I struggle to translate to a language. When I hand her a bowl of crushed ice, I say, "Say, thank you, Mummy." Today she responded with something that sounded like "Tha." I think she is trying to say thank you, I told my sister. "Of course she is," she said and laughed, obviously humoring me.

It won't be long before she talks now. And when she does, I will probably look back at these days and reflect on the defiant desperation in Jahan's eyes when she is trying to tell me something and I am not understanding it, the crying that ensues only when I have taken something away from her, the way she slaps her thighs in anger instead of verbalizing her discontent in a litany of "No, no, no, no." Maybe I will even wish for the simplicity of responding to her needs without ever hearing a request, because we have developed our own way of communication. Trial and error. Whine and smile. When I hand her the sippy-cup and she whines in annoyance, I realize I have absent-mindedly opened it for her and she likes to do that herself. So I take it back, close it, and give it to her again. "Say, thank you, Mummy." A grin.

When Jahan and I have reading-time over the weekend, I lie down on the sofa with a paperback, and she spreads her board books all around us, inspecting each one, mumbling to herself as she turns the pages. Every few minutes, she comes to the sofa and climbs into my lap. She rests her head on my shoulder and brings her face close to me for a kiss. She does this several times and clings to me. Then she is off again, playing with her books, or running all over the house.

She has mastered all handheld devices in this house and wants to graduate to laptops, which she is not (yet) allowed to touch. She navigates her way expertly to her beloved games and apps on the Kindle Fire, the iPad, and iPhone. Once, she got her hands on her aunt's Blackberry and was perplexed when she touched the screen and nothing happened. Then she discovered the buttons. The tactile feedback kept her occupied for several minutes.

I am listing all the things she is doing at this age, things that amuse me, things I wish to remember, things we have pictures and videos of, but somehow I feel like all these reminders will not be enough because there is a sense of time slipping away. I go back and forth. Sometimes I want Jahan to be 5 tomorrow, so we can go shopping, get our nails done, pick a Disney movie to watch together, read books, visit libraries, write silly poems. And sometimes, I want to stop right here and watch her just as she is now. I want to preserve these days with her in a jar like jams and pickles. I want to always remember that in this moment, when I put my baby's palm against mine, her hand stretches from my wrist to the soft hillocks underneath my fingers. She was such a tiny thing, you know. I used to wrap her up in a pink blanket and swing her easily in my arms. She used to look like a small folded blanket in her big crib. Now, she is a little person, opening cabinets and trying to smuggle contraband (lotion) to her toy box before someone catches her. When she is caught, she has the decency to look embarrassed, and closes the cabinet immediately, puts the safety lock back in place (clearly these things don't work), grins, and claps, appreciating herself. 

She's a big girl now, but she is still so, so small. She is cautious by nature. She closes doors carefully, positioning her hands and feet out of the way. She doesn't try to go downstairs when she finds the safety door open by chance. When she thinks no one is watching, she climbs chairs and tables gingerly, checking her balance, holding on to things for support so she doesn't fall. If she does hurt herself, she whines softly and pats where it hurts, then she runs to me, sometimes crying, sometimes not, expecting to be soothed. "You're OK," I say. "Mummy's right here." And she understands, I think. We are at home and I can say this with certainty here. It's just a scratch or a bump. But outside of this small house, the world is so big. And very soon, my baby girl will be out there in the world, while I am also out there in the world. First, it will be Montessori (in about a month), then school, then college, then...life, and I may not always be there to comfort her.

Some nights, when sleep is maliciously lurking somewhere out of reach, I have these low-grade panic attacks. What about skinned knees in the playground, I think. Or kids pushing each other on the see-saw. Or...there is so much fear that surfaces suddenly from some rarely-trodden part of my heart that I have to take a few deep breaths and move closer to Jahan's crib. I just watch her breathing peacefully, sprawled over her blanket, her curls framing her little round face, one foot hanging off the edge having made it out of the narrow slats. The world is so big, I think, and you are so small. It's OK, it's OK, it's OK, I tell myself. Next to my baby's face, I whisper, "It's OK. Mummy's right here."

Photos by Rebecca McCue

Waning Friendships

I have written a few times about how shocking it is to be in the company of people you love only to realize what a fundamentally different person you have become compared to what you used to be, say, ten years ago. 

Even though you are not confronted every day by the implicit knowledge that you will undergo some degree of change over the course of a considerably large chunk of time, like a decade, you recognize this idea very quickly upon encountering a situation that demonstrates it for you. But, sometimes, variations of monumental proportions occur between two (or more) people within a relatively short increment of time, like weeks or months. While the gradual metamorphosis that you go through individually over a long period of time permits you to have compassion for both your past and the people bound to it, this new transformation is a different beast. It is rigid; when you push against it, there is absolutely no give. It is an alteration of the relationship itself. Something broke within it and it was neglected by both parties involved, you and the person sitting across from you at the other end of this damaged metaphorical relationship-bridge. All that's left between you is a vague sense of something lost, something that was once beloved.

For example, you find yourself in the company of people you loved completely not too long ago, and now they seem so detached from the qualities and quirks that you remember best about them that you are tempted to call them strangers. You go through the motions. You smile and nod, but essentially, your shared past is locked away somewhere, out of reach.

When it comes to relationships of any nature, I have very severe weaknesses, which I am quick to acknowledge. I love fiercely, but if my love is not reciprocated, I retreat with remarkable alacrity. I become silent, withdrawn, and sullen. I stop all contact with the person or persons who intentionally or unintentionally hurt me. I am unforgiving. This is a terrible and insufferable character flaw, and I am in constant conflict with myself over it. Is this attitude selfish and/or narcissistic? Or is it self-preservation? I suspect it is a strange amalgamation of these elements and maybe others that I have not been able to identify.

So what do you do, then, when you are in the company of people you once loved (and are afraid to admit that some remnants of this love may still thrive inside you, or why would you be compelled to think this way)? Do you behave like a cordial stranger, ignoring the dearth of feelings and conversations between both of you now, which contrasts starkly with the understanding you once shared? Do you tell yourself this new measured and feigned affability doesn't affect you? Do you remind yourself that you have a fulfilling life, you are loved and cared for, and you don't need the burden of languishing relationships? 

No matter which way you act, you tell yourself a little lie. Something happened that had a deleterious effect on the relationship. Maybe it was not as much your fault as the other persons', and maybe this is exactly what the other persons tell themselves. But if you were not still at least slightly regretful or nostalgic or wishful for the past, would you be sitting indoors on a fine California morning with a cup of coffee becoming cold, writing this, working through the entangled cobwebs of thoughts that you've ignored for too damn long?

Comfort Food

Weekends used to be sacred in my mother's household when I was a little girl. My sisters and I were too young to have plans of our own, and we were allowed to sleep in.  My parents were in the "steady" stage of their careers; they were satisfied, but had not yet reached the point of working long days, having a demanding schedule, and occupied weekends. That time still remains one of the happiest of my life. 

Some weekends we used to wake up to my father clanging pots and pans in the kitchen. He would plan to cook for all of us to give my mother a break and to remind us of a very important detail. "I taught your mother how to cook, after all," he'd say, surrounded by mason jars of spices, jars of lentils and Basmati rice, flour rising in plumes from a stainless steel bowl as he banged spatulas and ladles on the counter. After many hours in the kitchen, my mother hovering on the edges, the maid's nerves overwrought with the anxiety of getting my father everything he needed while not getting in his way, my father would call out our (nick)names, "Ainee, Renu, Munnuuuuuuu!" We'd rush downstairs, starving, only to be greeted by a giant serving bowl of daal (lentils) on the table with a side of plain white rice, mint and cilantro chutney, and a chopped cucumber and red onion salad. "Daal!" We would crumple our little noses and roll our eyes at the food. "Don't you make faces now," my father would wag a finger at us. "You'll love it."

We always ended up loving the simple meal of lentils and white rice, eating expertly with our fingers, laughing at jokes my father told us as my mother admonished him for this or that with the overbearing task of cleaning the kitchen looming large. I can't eat as deftly with my fingers anymore. I have to use silverware now, but daal chawal is a dish that still looks great on the dining table and is satisfying despite its simplicity. I probably don't make daal as good as my father used to, but it's my go-to meal on busy days when I can't be bothered to plan a menu or cook an elaborate meal. I pair it with chappali kebabs to appease the meat-eaters in my household. It is a well-loved combination now - the light, creamy texture of daal with the rich, smoky flavor of kebabs.


Photos by Rebecca McCue

Epiphanies in the Night

The trees in the Peninsula and South Bay are turning russet. It wasn't too long ago that for a few weeks of Spring, whenever I drove up the hill to my house, the shock of pale pink blossoms sprouting from lush stalks stunned me. Now, the nights are becoming crisp, the early post-dawn hours of the morning harbor a heavy chill - these are the harbingers of Fall.

We leave our windows open at night. The curtains billow and ballet in the breeze. As I drift off to sleep in the soft yellow light seeping in from the street, I often marvel at how the air smells of the coming Fall, readying to absorb the cold before it descends upon us. During the night, I wake up to cover Jahan with a blanket. She is over curled up, sleeping crouched on all fours. It's the cold air that makes her close in on herself like that, I say to myself. Sometimes, I leave the room and go outside for a drink of water. In the kitchen, the grey-green marble tiles send a chill up my spine. I shiver as I look outside the kitchen window, past the orchids and the basil and the rose on the window sill, at the shining city. On clear nights such as these, sometimes I can see past the city all the way to the hills. During the day, they seem closer to the house, greenish-brown and overbearing, but in a protective sort of way. But at night, the hills are only dark shadows, brooding and distant. I am warm inside my kitchen, despite the cold floor. This house with toys that squeak in their baskets, over-sized cushions in the living room, fleece throws on the sofa, a gleaming kettle sitting silently on the stove, is like a chicken roosting. 



On these nights, standing in my kitchen, sipping water and watching this city I have come to love in spite of my firm notion that I would never again love a city after Lahore, I am filled with a sense of awe and wonder. It is a strangely uplifting kind of feeling, having an almost exhilarating effect. Maybe it is the beauty of the half-asleep city, lit up like someone sprawled strings of Christmas lights haphazardly all over it. Maybe it is the solitude in the middle of the night, no sound but the low hum of appliances barely discernible, a full day gone, and a full day ahead, but this moment all mine, away from humdrum tasks, removed from noises and distractions and people, with only the profound sense of being alive and on a path of self-actualization, which many are not destined to have. It is a sacred moment of acceptance and recognition and wonder and gratefulness. 

When Winter comes, this moment will morph into something different. The city will still shine, but under a thick blanket of fog. When I stare outside the window, I will see clumps of cottony fog drifting against it. There will be rain and the Italian Cypress might collide with the window because of the fierce winds. The silence might be broken by the dull, blunt noise of the tree hitting the house. But the moment will still be sacred, all mine, celebrated. I will watch the city - a large single-layer cake frosted liberally with fog, the steaming chimney of my neighbor's house, the tree swaying dangerously in the wind, and I will marvel at all of this with nothing around me but a meditative silence. Give thanks, I will tell myself. And, uncharacteristically, I will listen.

It's a Free Country

My sisters and I walked to the small corner store at the end of our lane on a sweltering August afternoon. We purchased a medium sized fabric flag, and three packets of small flags printed on cheap paper strung together with a length of twine. We came home and wedged the medium sized flag made with a polyester blend fabric between the curves in the wrought-iron fence circling our rooftop terrace. We tied the makeshift paper banner of flags across the fence, too, end to end. That night it rained and in the morning there was only twine left, the paper flags had dissolved away in the downpour. The one printed on fabric swayed on its flagpole for a few weeks, fading away under the relentless sun, until 15-year-old Javaid, an orphaned immigrant from Kabul who had shown up at our house one day asking for help and eventually moved in to help with household chores, took it down and taped it to the wall above his bed.

We didn't really understand the meaning of Independence Day. To us, it was a good day because it was a holiday. It wasn't until I actually moved to America that I started to celebrate the day of Pakistan's creation, 14th of August, in my own quiet way. I wore green and white, changed the desktop picture on my computer to one of the Pakistani flag, wrote about Lahore. One year, I went to the azaadi mela in San Francisco, which was disappointing. Women sized each other up, the food at all the little stalls was underwhelming and overpriced, an unremarkable musical band played Mehdi Hassan songs lazily.

When you are living away from Pakistan, sometimes the realization of being Pakistani, no matter how long it has been since you've been away, creeps upon you and suddenly pounces. It takes your breath away. Other times, it descends upon you fluidly, serves as an anchor. There are other times still, when your origin makes for a damn good story.

When I traveled with my green passport prior to getting my California ID, I knew I'd be pulled out of line randomly for secondary checking. The realization steadied me, prepared me. It became perfectly acceptable, familiar even. Just routine.

While being patted down by the TSA seemed entirely ordinary, conversely, a visit to the Pakistani Consulate in Los Angeles staggered me. Seven months pregnant, I showed up at the Pakistani Consulate with my husband at 8:30 in the morning to get my passport renewed. A middle-aged man unlocked the office doors at 9AM and we were allowed to go in and retrieve a ticket with a number on it. We were the first clients of the morning. The double doors of the office opened up into a narrow rectangular room with uncomfortable metal chairs on one side, a desktop computer and camera equipment set up in a corner, and a set of three windows directly in front of the door. There was nobody behind the windows. There were two beautiful prints on the wall, a photograph of a grassy knoll somewhere in Pakistan and one of its snow-capped mountains. On the opposite wall was a poster-sized sketch of the Quaid-e-Azam next to an 11x17 framed portrait of President Asif Ali Zardari.

Gradually, the room began to fill in. Women in chaddars came in and took their seats. One man walked in with his wife and two daughters. There was a bone-tired couple who had driven all the way from Texas. They all took their numbers and waited in their seats. A man in a suit, who looked like he took himself way too seriously, emerged from the back door of the office and started tinkering with the camera equipment. His jaw was clenched. He did not make eye contact with the waiting crowd of people. By this time, we had been waiting for almost two hours. My feet were beginning to swell and form a hillock of flesh around the band of my flip-flops. Some more consulate officers began to make appearances behind the windows. It looked like they were shuffling through papers, opening mail. Someone asked how long it would be before they started to call out numbers. There was a vague answer from one of the officers that I did not hear.

Around this time, a family of four walked in: middle-aged parents, a young college-age daughter, a school-age son. There was no room to sit so they huddled next to the door. The father walked up to the man in the suit who was still working with the camera. Since the room was so small, everyone could hear the conversation that took place. The new arrival introduced himself. The man in the suit said, "Oh yes, we've been expecting you for your passports. I will take you back directly." With this, they disappeared behind the back doors of the office and emerged twenty minutes later. The man in the suit led the family outside, all the way to the elevator, saying his goodbyes. I sat in my chair, stunned, feeling bereft of words and fiercely betrayed, the pain in my back radiating towards my knee, my feet already out of my slippers. I stared daggers at Jinnah's sketch and then scowled at the man in the suit. I had been waiting for almost three hours.

Without a warning, my husband got out of his chair and in two strides he was towering over the man in the suit. "Look, I have been waiting for three hours. We were the first ones here. What is going on? Why are other people being helped before us?" The man in the suit told my husband to take a seat. He said we'd be seen when the staff members were ready. "See, here's the thing," boomed my husband so the whole room would hear him. "My wife is seven months pregnant and she is not feeling well. Unfortunately for you, we are not actually in Pakistan. If someone doesn't help us in the next ten minutes, I am calling an ambulance to take her to the ER and asking your inefficient office to pocket the bill. Am I making myself clear?" The man in the suit told my husband to take a seat again and scurried away. The woman who had driven from Texas with her husband whispered in my ear, "Congratulations!" I never got a chance to ask her what she was congratulating me for - for the baby, or for the fact that my husband got the Pakistani Consulate staff to attend to the citizens of their country who had been waiting in line all morning. We were out of there in the next ten minutes.

We carry our country with us wherever we go. The family that arrived after us and were shepherded to the back office carried a sense of entitlement with them. It must have traveled here from the old country with the father, confident in his handshake with the consulate officer, a tight smile indicating he meant business. The man in the suit - what did he carry? Self-importance? Resentment? Apathy? My husband brought out the bully he held inside him, because no one was following the rules in that small office. The rules had been left at the threshold. Even though my husband had threatened the officer to achieve our goal, he had erroneously invoked our physical location - Los Angeles - to do so, because within the confines of that poorly designed, stuffy room, we were on Pakistani soil. And I... I was carrying a baby who would be Pakistani and American, who maybe wouldn't understand the nuances of this precariously guarded identity.

I carry that incident with me now. The shock. The disappointment. The yearning to run out of that room.

But I also remember that August morning years ago on which I walked to the corner store with my sisters to buy flags for the simple reason that we were celebrating our freedom. Even if I didn't understand the meaning of what it was to be the citizen of a free country, I knew it was something to be celebrated. How free my country is today is up for debate, and the Internet is aflame with memes and commentaries on this subject. 

Despite everything, however, the most heartening image I carry within me is of 15-year-old Javaid, orphaned in Afghanistan, but humming the national anthem of Pakistan while drifting off to sleep in a small room in Lahore, the Pakistani flag taped on his wall flapping, undulating, in time with the rotation of a creaking pedestal fan.

The Charm of Routine

“Not that she didn’t enjoy the holidays: but she always felt—and it was, perhaps, the measure of her peculiar happiness—a little relieved when they were over. Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half afraid to step out of its frame in case one day she should find herself unable to get back."
- Jan Struther, Mrs. Miniver

Monday morning madness. I arrive at work later than usual, because I have some meetings that will continue into the early hours of the evening. I begin to type furiously even before I am comfortably settled in my chair. Hours pass. I answer questions. Write emails. Before I know it, I am on my third cup of coffee and fourth meeting of the day. I have worked through lunch, which I like to do, but the meal has been disappointing. Tasteless beef with stiff brown rice, under-seasoned vegetables, and limp pasta in an unappetizing yellow sauce. Coffee is better. Much better. I am back at work after two days off followed by the weekend. Four days of nothing but Eid celebrations. The holidays have been good to me. Now I am back at my desk, with my "crap-to-do" pad filling up. I check off one item and add three more in its place. I take my empty coffee cup to the Keurig. I pop in a K-cup - Newman's Own Special Blend - my favorite. As the coffee brews I lean on the counter with my elbows resting on the cool metal surface, my head in my hands, and I breathe in the steam. But back to work now. Chop, chop. And would you believe it? I love every minute of it. 

I resent Monday mornings, not because I have to go back to work, but because up until the midday epiphany I always get at the beginning of the work-week ("I love doing this."), I have the false feeling of not wanting to be there. It is nothing but a spillover effect from the weekend, but it's real on Monday mornings. The break in routine, the interruption of my weekday breakfast of badly poached eggs and creamy-sweet coffee while I check my email by two lazy mornings of getting pinched and slapped by a cute baby until I clamber out of bed to make her pancakes, disorients me. Every Monday, I have to relearn the motions. A teaspoon of water in the egg-poacher, 35 seconds for each egg in the microwave, Newman's Own, cream, Splenda, with a side of emails.

Let me tell you a short and interesting story. When I had Jahan, I devoured parenting books. I did not even have a background in vicarious learning when it came to raising babies. I went to the birthing class with my husband to gain some wisdom, but we walked out halfway through, because on the slide titled "How Dads Can Support Moms During Labor," one of the bullet points read, "Say encouraging things like 'I am so proud of you,' and 'I love you for doing this.'" For some odd reason, my husband thought that was absolutely hilarious and dissolved into badly concealed laughter. We left the class. On my first night home with Jahan, I almost took her to the ER because she wouldn't stop crying. I felt completely useless as a mother. "This is a big mistake," I thought. "I am not fit to raise this baby." Thankfully, Usman's cousin who was visiting us from Reno, took her from me, wrapped her up really tight in a blanket and swayed her in his arms until she went to sleep. She just needed to be swaddled. Simple. "OK," I thought. "If there is a logical set of steps I can follow, then this is doable." Baby 411 became my bible. I had Harvey Karp on my Kindle, Baby 411 on my nightstand, and they all said the same thing. Routine, routine, routine. You need to give your baby a dependable schedule, so she knows what to expect, so she can learn what's coming next. I marveled at this. How can a baby recognize routines, patterns? But, she did. By 6 weeks, her sleep cycle had corrected itself. By 4 months, she was sleeping through the night. And by 6 months, she was fully sleep-trained, falling asleep on her own, following a perfect schedule. 

Even babies, or perhaps especially babies, are creatures of habit. I don't think this instinct of following a routine, having a pattern or a predictable "normal life" ever goes away. This is why it's hard to form a habit, but harder to break one. This is why despite the Monday morning crisis, I always bounce back. This is also why it was strange not to be cooking on Wednesday nights for the blog after doing it for so many weeks and why for a long while after I discontinued my daily walks at work due to schedule constraints, I felt wretched. This week's Monday morning got me thinking about the importance of routine a lot. I exercised such control over my baby's routine in the first year of her life that we all simply take her good habits for granted now. They are cultivated - practically since birth. And if I do buy into this belief of routine having a lot of significance in daily life, then why do I short-change myself? Why don't I exercise the same control over my routine and guard it with the same vigilance? 

The city waking up during one of my walks

The answer is simple. I would rather make my routine malleable to fit everything I need to do in my day than adversely impact someone else. And that is simply not fair. I find happiness in predictability, in eggs and coffee on weekday mornings. I used to find it in my early morning walks with the cloud thickets in the sky, dew palpable on my fingertips, the city awake, yawning, gearing up for the day. I find it in my audiobooks on the way to work and on the way back. I find it in the game I play with my baby every day at 4:30 when I get home from work - "Mommy's gonnaaaa  geeetttt youuuu," and her squeals of delight dissolving into laughter as she throws herself on the bed resigning herself to the tickle monster. I find it in writing this. Here. As I used to twice a week at one point. My normal life does indeed please me well. Maybe it's time to make it charming again. Maybe it's time to prioritize and cross off and add to it until I have the comfort of predictability, until I am like the woman in the quote above - "Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half afraid to step out of its frame in case one day she should find herself unable to get back."

Photos by Rebecca McCue