Upon returning from Islamabad

Solom has had an imaginary friend for several months now. His name is Enter.


Solom: Baba, I think Enter is still in Islamabad.
Al-Husband: Won't he get lonely there, without you or Zainoo?
Solom: No. You know, Baba, Enter has two friends in Islamabad.
Al-Husband: Really? Who?
*pause for thought*
Solom: Entry and Exit.

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.

Isloo, tussi great ho

I’ve been missing Islamabad a lot lately. Not that there’s anything wrong with Karachi *stops, reconsiders that statement* but with my friends putting up annoying FB status updates like ‘Rain in Isloo, sooo beaaauuutiful’ and ‘Clouds over mountains *sigh* <3’ and ‘Romantic n rainy… wattay morning!’ my longing for ye ol’ pind has increased tenfold. 


Going back is always a mixed bag, though. Not that there’s anything wrong with Islamabad *stops, reconsiders statement* but the fact of the matter is that now when we visit the city, we’re visiting our parents… we’re not actually ‘at home’. And with a child on either hip, it can become complicated not to be at home. You’ll recall the famous saying: Home is the where the frickin’ playpen is.

It actually hasn’t been that long since we were there last – we’d just flown up in June to celebrate my 33^rd birthday. The occasion was ominously rolling around and Azfar and I were beginning to wonder what the heck we could do in Karachi with a total of four people living within driving distance who were actually willing to meet up with us. So we thought we’d take the ostrich approach and go to Islamabad instead. I nearly changed my mind, however, after having this surreal conversation on the topic with my mother:

Amma: Aafoo, I’ve decided I’m having your birthday party.

Me: Aww. Amma, there’s no need… really.

Amma: No it’s fine, I owe people dinners anyway.

Me: Ah.

Amma (forging ahead): The guest list is coming to about fifteen people. Mashallah, there are eight of us just among the immediate family. Then I thought I hadn’t gotten my friends together for a long time, so there’s Tahira, Nina, Kaisera and Imran, Cheem and Zafri, Nazo and Bajia. Asma may not be able to make it but I’m going to ask her, of course. You never manage to meet all of them when you visit, so this will be a good time.

Me: *waiting expectantly*

Amma: If you like, you could invite one or two of your friends as well!

Me: Hmm. That could be problematic, seeing that there are more than one or two of them and, um, they’re all married with… err… children and stuff.

Amma (forging ahead): Oh, I forgot. Kaisera’s son-in-law’s birthday is also on the same day and he MAY be visiting from Dubai on a surprise visit… we don’t know yet… so I have told her that I’ll also have his name written on the cake.

Me: MY BIRTHDAY CAKE IS GOING TO SAY ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY AFIA AND ASIM’??!

Amma: Yes, I thought it’ll be a nice gesture.

Me (thinking quickly): Ma, Azfar is going to get my birthday cake.

Amma: AFIA. Don’t be SILLY. I’M hosting the birthday party. I will NOT ask your husband to buy the cake.

Me (conspiratorially): No, Ma, you don’t understand. I’m MARRIED now… it’ll look VERY weird that you’re doing everything and that my husband isn’t playing a role, you know?? What will my in-laws think? It’s just not DONE.

Amma (conspiratorially/totally-getting-it-ly): Ohhh… I see. Yes, you’re right…

And so we went to Islamabad for my birthday. Amma put a fabulous do together; so fabulous, in fact, that she was wiped out before it even started.  The food was AWESOME and Amma’s awesomer than awesome friends rocked the party like they always do. On our end, Zain spent the evening bawling for no fathomable reason. So one could say the party was being rocked on one end and wrecked on the other. But everyone agreed the food was delish. And Amma had put up these lovely balloons and streamers. And the cake said ‘WANT A PIECE OF ME.’ And I got very cool gifts, ranging from perfumes and bags to book vouchers and almanacs on Elvis Presley and Muhammad Ali (yes, you read that right). And Amma gave me a hilariously appropriate card that read:

NOT EVERYONE IN LIFE IS LUCKY TO HAVE THE MEANS TO CUT A CAKE! BUT YOU DO!!!

(inside)

Chalo Shabaash Cake Khareedo Aur Kaato! It’s your Birthday!!! :p

The last present was an anonymous-looking box wrapped in generic, totally forgettable, silver paper. “Who’s this from?” I wondered, opening the card. There was a pair of scissors made on the front with a smiley face on either blade.

With you being my other half, life seems so complete and better in every way

(inside)

 Happy birthday to my perfect match. To my wife!

I blinked. Then I rushed to the adjoining room, where Azfar was playing with the kids. “Thank you for the card,” I barely managed to whisper in his ear. “It was WHOLLY undeserved.” And with that, yours truly promptly started crying.

“It’s the best card ever,” I gurgled, tearing the wrapping on the gift open. “This is better than ANY present you could EVER give me. OHMYGODANiPHONEANDAKINDLE??!!!! WHOOOOOHOOOO!!!!! WHOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! *galloping off back to the next room* AMMAAAAAA… LOOK WHAT AZFAR GOT MEEEEEEE!!!!!”

Once the excitement had worn off, I got suspicious about the card. My peers will understand what I mean when I say that it was a little too perfect. Something was fishy in the State of Denmark. Later that night:

Me: You picked the first card you saw, didn’t you.

Azfar (sagely shaking his head): Nnnopes.

Me: Second?

A: Nnnopes.

Me: Third.

A: Maybe.

(thinks hard)

A: It was bright yellow…

Me: I don’t want to know!!!

Anyway, so in that incredibly rushed trip I remembered why it’s so goshdarned brilliant to have a home town to go to. In four days, I got more done than I’d been able to get done in six months of being in a new city. Got the tailor over to stitch my quota of summer clothes; got my bank issues sorted out; reconnected with most of our incredible friends (including two of my closest girlfriends, one of whom just had a baby a few months ago); had a birthday party; watched our parents enjoying their grandchildren; and sat on Amma’s roof.

Don’t underestimate that last point. Because when you’re from Islamabad and you move to Karachi (or Houston, for that matter) it’s almost a shock to return to that environment. You feel like a starving plant that’s suddenly been hooked up to an IV with chlorophyll. I sat on Amma’s roof, and I drank in that view and I feasted my eyes on those green-as-green-can-be hills, on the flowering plants and bushes in Nani’s lawn, the stretch of park just beyond – nearly choked with trees – and yes, feasted my eyes too on the clouds rolling over those hills, the sky so blue after the rain of the previous day. You see, I know what my friends are on about when they post those FB status updates. I know.

View from Amma's house - this one before the rain

And now I can’t wait for Eid!

Love in the Time of Heat Stroke

Ah, summer. Think summer, think holidays. Think barbecues, travel, monsoons. Think cousins, love songs, roof-top smokes. Ice lollies, air conditioning, movies, mosquitoes. Long afternoons, burning car seats, badminton in the garden. Everyone’s got an association with summer.

For me, the thought of summer brings back memories of nights spent in Islamabad as a teenager, living in my mother’s house. It was universally known that my room was the hottest in that house. It was a Southwest-facing room on the upper storey, which meant that it got the full beating of the post-noon sun in those never-ending days. To aid the baking process, my grandparents had put in massive ceiling-to-floor windows that put to rest any thoughts of insulation. And my mother, not to be left behind, had installed the oldest, loudest, most inefficient air conditioner on Earth, which threw out lukewarm air and made the giant windows rattle like there was a shuttle launch in progress. Mosquitoes were right in their element in those temperatures and I remember perfecting a macchar-killing technique that employed the concept of the sonic boom (you wait ‘till the mosquito gets close enough to your ear and then you clap your hand on your ear. The pressure kills it. Worked every time for me. No really, it did. IT DID. Just TRY IT.)

Minor inconveniences aside, the view from that room was great (as my grandmother never tired of reminding me from the confines of her cool, lower storey, Northeast-facing room) and in my teen years I was ready to brave practically anything for the privilege and complete joy of having My Own Space and My Own Bed. It’s something great to have your privacy at that age, especially if it comes with a phone. It was here that hours were spent talking to one’s best friend about nothing and everything, and the Nothings that seemed like Everything at that time in one's life.

Occasionally there were unforeseen challenges, but they were dealt with.

Best friend: “And then what did he say?”

Me: “Why are you breathing so hard?”

Best friend: “Who me? I thought that was you.”

Me: “Oh crap! Sssshhhh…”

*heavy breathing on line*

Me: “NANI WILL YOU PLEASE PUT THE PHONE DOWN?!”

Grandmother: “WHY ARE YOU ON THE PHONE AT THIS TIME OF NIGHT???”

Me: “Oh my Goddddd… NANI!!!! Put – the – phone – down!!!!”

Grandmother: “THIS IS NO TIME TO BE ON THE PHONE! ANNIE SHOULD KNOW THAT TOO!!!”

*extension receiver slams*

Me: “Where were we.”

*best friend snorting with laughter*

Yes, those nights in that oven of a room saw many heart-to-hearts against a backdrop of ballads groaned out by a National tape recorder (‘stereo’ would not be an appropriate word to use for that contraption, which would suddenly start playing the tape really fast or really slow and had to be kicked back on speed). For years, these soundtracked conversations were presided over by my friend Michael Jackson, whose image graced the bathroom door, my boyfriend Tom Cruise, whose face filled up the walls, and the perfunctory plump house lizard, frozen in some corner of the ceiling.

Summer was Richard Marx in those days. It was also Def Leppard, Bon Jovi and Madonna. It was perfect.

                                                                   ***

The biggest casualty of growing older isn’t your knees – it’s your sense of wonder. There was an intense romance to those days that cannot be recreated now – a feeling that the world existed only for you. A lightning storm lashing around outside used to be exciting and inspiring – now it could wake up the kids. And Def Leppard sort of doesn’t make the cut anymore (in fact, one has to wonder why guys their age were singing those songs even then). And I think if I were to call my best friend in the middle of the night to say, “Wassuuuup” she may... um... not want to be friends anymore.

I was thinking about all this incessantly over the past few weeks. Call it an early-30s crisis. I even gave my husband an unsolicited lecture on the topic while we were sitting on the roof, having our evening tea. “I miss those years,” I said finally. “Me too,” he said, “Things were so much simpler; the economy was better, conditions were safer, people had hope.” “Huh? That’s not what I mean,” I said, “I mean… my outlook on life was different. Everything meant something. Like, if I were to look up at these clouds moving across the sky when I was fifteen, they would signify something deeper. Now they’re just clouds. Do you know what I mean?” “Uh… hmm,” said my husband, burying his nose in his mug.

And then my grandmother’s sister called. They’d had a sudden crop of mangoes from the tree in their lawn and they were distributing them to the whole family. She was sending ten mangoes over.

I hadn’t had a Pakistani aam for over two years. When the fruit arrived from Nanni Nani’s place, I had it washed and refrigerated. The next afternoon, with the kids miraculously asleep and the maid busy in her room, I thought it would be nice to have a chilled mango while relaxing in the TV room. Didn't happen that way. The dense aroma of the mango and the unbearable heat of the kitchen went straight to my head. Suddenly, I remembered with enormous clarity being back at the dining table in Islamabad in the middle of June, waiting expectantly for the plate of mangoes to magically appear after every meal… not a care in the world, no diapers to change, no toddler salivating over my shoulder or infant trying to bite my knee, no plans other than to enjoy a mango (or two) and then retreat to my beautiful, hot-as-hell room – the room that was Just Mine.

I breathed in deep, sliced the mango and, without bothering to leave the kitchen or even pull up a chair, literally wolfed it down. Every bite was heaven, just as it used to be in a previous chapter of my life – a chapter in which responsibility was optional and I could more or less choose my burdens. Life had moved on but this, right here, was exactly the same. The sweet pulp; the runny, sticky juice; the joyful abandon of consuming a mango; the feeling of being free. This would never change.

And so, summer was perfect again.