Burn baby, burn

Me: I love you.

Solom: I love you too.

Me: Do you really? Do you love Mama?

Solom (nodding emphatically): YES... I love everybody.

Little Mr. Manners

In the bid to raise polite children, it seems I've unfortunately made them into serial thankers. I was putting together a small botanical experiment for Solom when this exchange happened:

Solom: Thank you for putting the rubber band on the bottle, Mama.

Me: Solom, you're thanking me for all the wrong things!

Solom: Thank you for all the wrong things, Mama.

Running in full circles

I was in Karachi then too - on this very day, seven years ago. On my way back after completing a degree, I'd made a brief stopover of a few days to spend some time with a friend whose wedding I'd been unable to attend while at university. The flight home to Islamabad was scheduled on the morning of October 8th, 2005, but I changed my booking as an afterthought so I could spend the weekend in Karachi with my khala and cousin. We were at a family lunch when talk began of an earthquake in Islamabad. It had taken place early that morning, around 8 or 9 o'clock. My ears pricked up but not a whole lot - we were used to bad earthquakes in my home city and I remember many occasions on which we had to rush out of the house (sometimes in the middle of the night) and wait for it to pass. Earthquakes were normal in Islamabad.

But now they'd started talking about a building that had fallen. A block of flats. Where? I asked, expecting to hear of an overcrowded, dilapidated construction in an industrial area in Pindi. They didn't know. What was the name? they asked each other. Margalla? Margalla Towers?

"Margalla Towers??" I exclaimed. "You've got it wrong. That can't fall... that's a new building." What I meant was, That can't fall... rich people live there. We don't live in buildings that fall in earthquakes.

I rushed to call my mother but by that time all the lines were down because of the load. We knew a lot of people who lived in Margalla Towers. My friend Ambreen Mirza, my mother's friend Shahnaz Kapadia, my college junior Imran Moonis, and many other people. The first person I got through to was Azfar, who assured me that Ambreen and her family had gotten out safely. Their apartment wasn't in the tower that had fallen... it was adjacent to it. They'd rushed out in their nightclothes and then watched in horror as an entire building, home to hundreds of neighbours, had come down like a house of cards. Then I got through to Amma. "The Moonises were in that building," she said, her voice totally devoid of hope. I'd gone to Imran's apartment for a reunion a few years earlier. It was the penthouse and in my mind I kept thinking, "Then maybe they've survived. It's the top floor. Maybe they made it." They hadn't. Imran and his sister had already left their home for the day when the earthquake struck, but their parents were still there, getting an easy start to a weekend morning. Aunty's gold bangles were found a few days later, and some time after that their bodies were finally recovered.

My mother's friend Shahnaz lost her teenage son. They managed to exit the apartment in time but there were so many people stampeding down the main stairwell that he quickly directed his mother and younger brother to the fire escape. The stairs fell away under him as he led the way. The only reason why Shahnaz Aunty and her other son survived was because a big concrete block fell simultaneously on them, crushing her younger boy's legs and crippling him, but effectively holding them back from the stairs. To this day when I drive by the empty shell of the Margalla Towers complex in Islamabad, I can't drag my eyes away from the fire escape crawling its way down the side of the building and then disappearing into nothing.

For the rest of the weekend, I sat glued to the TV in my khala's house, following the news like a zombie. Repeat footage, again and again, of those familiar roads, that well-known and much-visited apartment complex, faces of friends and acquaintances floating by on the television screen. I saw Imran during the live transmission, explaining to rescuers where their apartment was and possible points of entry into it. He was calm and in control. He still believed that his parents might be alive. I remember being proud of him for being so brave, and wanting to step through the screen to stand with him.

The initial numbers were staggering. Azad Kashmir had seen the worst of the devastation. Over 70,000 people were believed to have died, scores of them children. And this was the most awful part: not just that they were children but the way they had died. Azad Kashmir has a very high literacy rate. Thousands of children were in school that Saturday morning (a weekday in government schools) so when the earthquake struck at 8.50 am, they were sitting ducks in their classrooms. But why did so many schools fall? I kept agonising. The answer wasn't that hard to figure out: poor construction. I still believe that every contractor who was assigned to build those government schools and who scrimped and saved and pilfered to make his extra bucks and who knowingly put up an unsafe structure has blood on his hands as of that day. God, I hope they pay some day. The same thing happened in Margalla Towers: the only tower that fell was the one that had been constructed the last, not because it was on the original plan but because the apartment scheme had become so wildly popular that the owners got greedy and made a construction over an unstable portion of the land that had a stream running through it. What price your extra wealth, you murderers?

                                                                  The fire within - Jalal Hameed


I flew back into Islamabad the following Monday. The injured were being flown in in the thousands from Kashmir. Everyone was volunteering for something. Offices didn't care if people didn't come in to work. Roads to Azad Kashmir were jammed because of the number of private vehicles going up to deliver relief goods. It was crazy, it was amazing, it was the only thing we could do. In the middle of all this, I volunteered in the children's surgical ward at Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS). Not being a medical professional, my job was to spend time with the children and help keep them cheerful. In the morning I'd be at an injured child's bedside, talking to her or reading to her, and the next morning I'd find her unconscious, recovering from an amputation surgery. It was horrible to see a child in pain but there was nothing quite like a child who'd be maimed for life. 

It's impossible to describe the atmosphere in that ward. It was a mix of extreme suffering and unimaginable mundanity, and in the middle of it all - these children. Everything seemed so much more fragile because of the children. I'd rolled a girl down to surgery one day when a man in hospital gear stopped me and enthusiastically asked how I was. Not quite able to place him, I played along and we talked while I was waiting for my charge's turn to be wheeled into OT. He was mid-sentence when someone came rushing in with a boy on a gurney... another volunteer like me who probably had no idea what he was doing or where he ought to be going. "I've been told that someone needs to see this boy!" he half screamed, half panted. The man I was talking to turned and took one look at the patient (a boy of about 8 or 9) and called out matter of factly, "You better hurry up. That one isn't going to make it." I still remember the boy's face: the eyes rolling up and that particular expression that tells you that the body's now giving up, it's letting go. I remember being shocked that my companion turned around and continued talking as if nothing had happened, and in that second of shock I suddenly placed him. He was my dentist's office assistant. Today when I recall that moment, these are the two things that stand out: the boy's eyes rolling up and the relief at finally connecting that this was Dr. Abid's assistant.

When I would go home in those days there would be a fixed routine. I'd lock my door, put on a song and start pacing the room. The song was a new one by Strings that had become popular because it made it to the soundtrack for the new Spiderman film, but it took on a completely different significance for me during those harrowing afternoons. I'd listen to it on repeat and I'd keep walking up and down, up and down, up and down... 

Na Jaane Kyoon - Strings (OST Spiderman)

75,000 people dead, 75,000. Seventy-five thousand. Why? Why? There was no answer to that. So I'd keep walking and then go through the motions of meals and sleep and be back at the hospital the next day to find another child without an arm or a leg. I tried to make up for it by telling them jokes. And because they were children, they laughed.

If only I could explain adequately the greatness of heart in these children. I remember walking a girl through the corridors one day for a change of scene. She'd lost a limb a short while earlier. Limping along, leaning on me, she kept giving me duas for the entire duration of the walk. "Baaji, Allah aap ko bohat khushiyan de. Allah aap ko lambi zindagi de. Baaji, Allah aap ko MERI zindagi de de!" At that point we crossed a doctor who heard her. He smiled at her and said, "Agar aap ne apni zindagi in ko de di to phir aap kya karo gi, haan? Aap ne theek hona hai, okay?" And then back to the same, all along the corridor: May Allah take care of you. May Allah keep you happy. May you live long.

The next day when I went to see her, she was gone. They weren't keeping patients for too long in the days after the earthquake. There weren't enough beds. Some months later, I came home to get a message from my mother. She said a man had called, asking for me. He'd sounded unsure and awkward. When she enquired who he was, he said his daughter had been admitted in PIMS and that they were back in Azad Kashmir now but the girl kept insisting on talking to Baaji again. I knew who it was immediately; there was only one girl I'd given my number to. "Did you take down their number?" I asked my mother. She hadn't. I knew I wouldn't hear from them again. It had already taken a lot for her father to have made that call. Amma said that he kept apologising for having disturbed her and for having been so forward as to have called. But the important thing was, life was already moving on.

Some days ago Solom and I were on our way to his school when he asked the driver to put on song # 3. It was a new CD that Azfar had put in (mainly to end the unbearable tedium of listening to the previous one repeatedly). The melancholic notes of the same song by Strings came drifting out of the speakers. "Mama? I think this song is so beauuutiful," Solom sighed. "This is my faaavourite song." I couldn't believe it. Not that he liked the song, but how far my own life had come in so short a period. Just seven years ago Azfar and I had gone around the children's ward on Eid with a hospital trolley laden with rubrri doodh from Nirala Sweets and seen the kids' eyes open so wide with excitement that everyone seemed to forget momentarily the hell they'd been through, were going through and the hell that lay ahead. And now we were married with two children of our own - may God never, never show them that kind of suffering - and our own son was listening to the song that had come to represent the greatest tragedy I'd ever witnessed in my 34 years. And so it comes around.

I wish I knew where that girl was... how things turned out for her. She may have liked to know that Baaji has two sons of her own now, that Baaji married a tall, nice guy, that Allah took care of Baaji after all. Even while rebuilding her life and her fate brick by brick, memory by memory, she may have liked to know.

Guest post: "Knowing Jahanara" by Noorulain Noor

Knowing Jahanara - or how I fell in love with sunrises, learned the meanings of priority and compromise, redefined happiness, and came to be known as a hermit - and how I came to know myself in the process

Jahanara means “happiness of the world.” She certainly is the happiness of my world, tottering on her chubby, unsteady legs around the living room of our small townhouse, turning around with her fountain-like ponytail and smiling at me with all of five teeth over the mess of scattered DVDs that she’s made - again! At 11 months, she understands the meaning of “no” and smiles in rebellion every time her parents utter that word across the room. She also has a killer stink-eye! If I take something away from her, a favorite toy for instance, which just happens to be the remote control, she narrows her cat-like upturned eyes, scrunches her forehead, commands her full lips to create a smile-scowl and grunts deeply in her throat. “How dare you, Mama?” she seems to be saying.

I am not a naturally affectionate person. I feel uncomfortable with showing too much love - unnecessary hugs, kisses, or words of love, which is why my emails to close friends and family often overcompensate. “Lots of love,” “xox,” “hugs and kisses” are my frequent sign-offs. It all changes when I am with Jahan, of course. It is a strange switch in personality and demeanor - I suddenly become more vulnerable, both willing to give and able to receive love and its representations. It was a rapid change for me, too. When I was pregnant with her, I made tall claims, which I am embarrassed about now. “I will continue my life as I want. Just because I am having a baby, doesn’t mean I must be completely and solely devoted to her.” Unlike many other women, I did not feel a kinship with the baby in-utero. I felt uncomfortable and tired and resentful. I remember when I saw her for the first time. I wanted to feel a rush of emotion and cry or laugh or scream or something. Instead, I just felt a sense of semi-relief - the ordeal was over. I did it! Elation. And foreboding - what comes next?

It was odd to feel responsible for this little person at first. Within a day or two, something so monumental changed in me that I cannot contain it in words. It was as if I existed solely for the purpose of nurturing and protecting Jahan. Everything I did was because of her - I ate because the baby needed nourishment, I slept because the baby needed her mother to be rested and attentive, and that was the extent of my existence. It was as though I didn’t want anything or anyone else. I was fully content in providing for this little being with a small wrinkle between her eyes. 

As Jahan grew, I learned more about my parenting style. I would call it rule and result oriented. I wanted certain results and so I set up appropriate rules. No one was to engage Jahanara in play or activity after 9PM. Her room was only lit enough to change diapers and feed her during the night so she would learn it was night time, not play time. Her feeding patterns, number of wet/dirty diapers, and sleep periods were diligently recorded in a journal for the first month. By the second month of Jahan’s life, I had created a somewhat predictable routine for her. By month 6, she was sleeping through the night (6 hours at a stretch) and 12 hours total at night, waking up only for a feeding and diaper change.

It wasn’t as easy and smooth as I have made it sound. I raised more than a few pair of eyebrows with my methods. If some family or social gathering interfered with Jahan’s bedtime or naptime, I begged off and didn’t attend. My social activities were limited to an infrequent run to the grocery store and work every day. All of my household supplies were delivered by the box with a smile - Amazon. Between work and Jahan (I started work when Jahan was 3 months old), my social life vanished. This was my personal choice because I wanted to have a rewarding career. I didn’t want to walk into work exhausted from a night with a sleepless baby. I also have a 1.5 hour commute to work each way so I could not risk getting tired to the point of falling asleep at the wheel. The slightest interruption to Jahan’s sleep schedule set me off like a rocket. “Pocket-rocket” my husband began to call me, referring to my small frame and extra-large temper.

Friendships suffered. Relationships, too. At one point, my husband accused me of making the baby “anti-social,” because I refused to go out during those early months. Relatives and friends criticized me “Make the baby stay up an extra hour or two - it’s not the end of the world.” “Who’s the one suffering? You - because you are missing out on everything.” “You are such an obsessive, by-the-book mom. If the baby book says to put her down at 8PM, god forbid we make you stay anywhere a minute past that!”

The philosophy was simple - Jahan was my priority, everything else, a compromise. It was difficult for me to implement this to say the least. I felt alone, questioned and criticized by people, especially other women, who did not agree with the way I was raising my baby, but who were not living my life. They were not leaving at the butt crack of dawn for a full day of work in a different city just so they could come back at a decent hour of the afternoon to spend quality time with their newborn. They were not trying to manage the demands of a career and family that had just acquired another very demanding member. This led me to become defensive and actively and loudly voice my choices as a mother and justify them. To say that it caused strain in relationships would be an understatement. I was looking for support and respect in a time that was most difficult for me, but somehow I had to listen to other people’s offended complaints about how I was being unreasonable and insensitive with no regard to the hormonal, physical, and emotional changes I was going through. 

In retrospect, I am proud of myself for sticking to my principles and plans during those early months. I am happy that despite everything, my periodic episodes of despair and depression, my restlessness and anxiety, I was still able to maintain a rather wholesome home environment by giving my baby the love and attention she needed, giving her a predictable routine she could rely on so she would eat, sleep, play, thrive, and having a hot tasty meal ready for my family at least a few times a week if not every day.

I learned to draw support from people who gave it much more readily than others. Strangers, strangely, were so appreciative of my life when they saw it from a distance. Store clerks, people in the park, work acquaintances marveled at the way my days began and ended smooth as a machine. There were challenges of course, teething, aches and pains, and bad nights in general, but the establishment of a routine helped us fall back into a pattern readily. My best friends, Rebecca and Rachel, gave me the most love and support in addition to my immediate family. “If someone thinks you are not a good mother,” Rebecca said one day when I was particularly distressed, “they don’t know you - and you shouldn’t care about them.” They took me out for walks, massages, food and were satisfied to stay in and watch movies at home when I said I didn’t feel like leaving the baby. In addition, my sisters stood up for me like a wall “Mama knows best,” and fended all the criticism away from me. In the last 11 months, I could not have remained myself if it weren’t for these amazing women.

We are in a happy place now, Jahan and I. I need to be happy and satisfied to give the most positive upbringing to my child. Absolutely nothing and no one else matters in this equation. Secondary to this, I have to be a good partner to my husband whose support has given me the confidence to create and implement the rules of parenting I want. And together we have created a home that we want to come back to every night. I am focusing on little things that make me happy these days. I try to hug my husband more to make up for the cold anger that he is sometimes subjected to - spillover effects, nothing more. Jahan loves to go shopping, loves to play with other babies, and absolutely adores Elmo! She has mastered her social smile and gives it indiscriminately - in the process she wins the heart of everyone she comes across. She wakes up well-rested every morning with the most cheerful cackle you can imagine after 12 hours of sleep. We have a lovely bedtime routine for her. We go to the park as a family after dinner, Jahan gets her bath at 7:30, watches Elmo while drinking her bottle, gets her tiny teeth brushed with Daddy’s help, hears her favorite lullaby and I put her down at 8PM. She is asleep on her own by 8:15 on most nights. My favorite part of the day is between 6 and 6:30 in the morning while Jahan nurses still asleep and I look outside my bedroom window as the sky becomes lighter. She is a warm comforting weight in my arms, nestling close to me, happily asleep. We cuddle this way after she nurses for some time. With the sun rising steadily, I put her down in her crib and get ready for work. My days are usually beautiful because of this blissful beginning.

Noorulain Noor is a medical researcher and a writer. To read more by her, visit her blog.

Making up is hard to do

Me: Solom, I'm sorry I shouted at you. I shouldn't have lost my temper, betay.
Solom (helpfully): Where did you put your telper, Mama?

Games teachers play

Me: This whole Show and Tell thing at Solom's school is driving me crazy.

Al-Husband: Why?

Me: Because many times they can't remember if he actually did his Show and Tell and when I ask him he'll tell me he did it and then they'll say no he didn't and we'll get him to do it next time and last time they postponed it and then forgot that they rescheduled and wouldn't give me a straight answer as to whether it was happening again on the normal day in that week and I had no idea whether to send the same item again or a new one and... argh.

Al-Husband: Maybe they're saying Show and Tell but they're playing Hide and Seek.