Life and Identity

Frosty Mornings

2011-11-11T12:01:00.001-06:00

To my Andrew...for the end of an era and the beginning of a fabulous new one!

Frosty mornings,

watching droplets of cold

turn into puddles of

transparent slitherings,

fleeting moments of hope and life;

watching the world as it unfolds

from above and within,

marvelling at the love around me.

Every person that comes into our lives

leaves their imprint on a mosaic

that covers our souls

and we are never the same again.

Life is a gift.

Life is love.

Life is beautiful.

Letting Go

2011-10-20T10:43:00.002-05:00

One of the most beautiful things about the changing seasons is when summer turns into fall. We can often sense it right as it starts to happen. The wind shifts and a cleaner, fresher scent pierces through the heat. Bursts of cold start to permeate the humidity and change slowly stirs all around us. Large flocks of birds fly south, squirrels scurry busily through back yards carrying large nuts in their tiny mouths and the beautiful tall trees quiver in the soft breeze that lifts off the lake. They are about to endure a massive transformation and if you look carefully, each leaf seems to tingle in anticipation of this change.

And then it starts. The leaves turn into the most breathtaking hues of yellows, oranges and reds and it truly feels as if the world was black and white and has now become colorized. I was struck by a thought this fall on one of my many walks. We know that leaves are responsible for all the metabolic processes of the tree. In winter, deciduous trees have to go dormant to survive the harsh temperatures so they lose their leaves to slow down their metabolism and conserve energy.

The metaphor that struck me was that sometimes the very thing that nurtures and protects us can seek to destroy us if we don’t know when to let go of it. Letting go. It’s hard, but necessary for all of us at some point in our lives. Perhaps we have a job that we thrived in but is now draining us of our vitality, perhaps it is an idea or dream we have held on to for a long time which is holding us back from moving forward with our lives, perhaps it is a difficult relationship that felt so good at first but is now destroying our happiness. Let go. Look at these wise old trees. They might stand bare and exposed for a few months during winter, but the leaves that sprout in spring have a freshness to them that is beautifully vibrant and new. Let go of what is to make way for something else. And Happy Fall!

The Dance of a Thousand Cats

2011-07-30T20:56:00.005-05:00

It had been an excruciating twenty two hours of pain, discomfort and a few surprises that culminated in the birth of my first son. His eyes were wide open and beautifully dark like his full head of hair. When he looked at me, he seemed to know who I was. He settled into my willing arms and pretty much lived there for the first three months of his life. I was lying in the hospital bed, exhausted but relieved that everything had ended smoothly. Giving birth is a traumatic experience, yet women are expected to absorb the trauma and move on with their lives without any further thought. I knew my mother understood what I had just been through. She was sleeping near me on a very squeaky makeshift bed exhausted from jet lag and the past twenty two hours of caring for me. I was well aware, at that moment, that even though I was now a new mom, I desperately felt the need to have my own mom near me.

I stared at my mom’s face as she slept. Her presence was so comforting in its familiarity. I wondered why human beings have such strong, everlasting bonds with their children. Most other mammals are not this way. I remembered reading, many years ago, how a mother bear would teach her cub basic survival skills and then walk away, one day, without a backward glance. I always thought there was a certain beauty in that level of detachment. I suddenly thought of our pet cat, P’ Panny and how she would routinely give birth to a large litter of kittens and then nonchalantly give them up when they were about three months old. But as I stared at my mother lovingly, I remembered something that had happened once with P’ Panny that blurred the “clean” detachment I thought animals always had for their young.

First of all I apologize for the strange name, “P’ Panny.” I honestly don’t know what I was thinking. If it’s any comfort, it sounded strange when I came up with it all those years ago and my sisters rolled their eyes when they heard the name, but it just stuck somehow.

P’ Panny wasn’t really “our” cat. She was a sleek grey and white stray tabby who decided to give birth to a beautiful litter of kittens behind an old rickety chair in our upstairs balcony. We discovered her one morning and she stared at us, looking painfully thin and walking slowly as if she had no energy to move. I gave her a saucer of milk and she lapped it up gratefully. She was not really interested in human affection. She eyed me somewhat suspiciously but let me sit near her kittens and I spent many hours playing with these feisty creatures that made little spitting noises when I tried to touch them. P’ Panny would sprawl out on the cold balcony floor and watch me intently with a look of mild amusement in her squinting eyes.

Eventually the novelty wore off. P’ Panny was pregnant almost constantly. She gave birth about four times a year to at least six kittens each time. These kittens would fend for themselves after three months and eventually disappear, presumably joining the other stray cats that lurked around the huge open garbage dump in a nearby alley. When I look back on how many kittens passed through the outside walls of our house, it is pretty remarkable that things were as uneventful as they were. That was until P’ Panny gave birth to an unusually troublesome litter of kittens.

From the very start these kittens had problems. Kittens are typically born blind but two of them never did open their eyes and were weak and didn’t survive very long. Two other kittens seemed lethargic and stayed within the outside walls of our house, long after P’ Panny had given them up. They started finding their way into the hood of our car, for what was probably a safe, sheltered place from the blinding rays of the afternoon sun. They would usually scamper out when the car door slammed shut, but my parents started making it a point to honk their car horn once or twice before starting their car, just in case.

However, one afternoon, my mother was rushing to get to the hospital to one of her patients and forgot to honk the car horn. She started the car very quickly and almost instantly, we heard the sickening yowl of a kitten and then complete silence. We all stared at each other, horrified. My mother jumped out of the car with a pained expression on her face. No one wanted to look, but my mom told us to stand back and bravely lifted up the hood. She gasped in amazement and said, “She’s okay!” There was the kitten sitting on the fan belt staring back at us, her eyes glowing slightly within the darkness of the engine. My mom gently lifted her up and that’s when we saw the poor kitten’s back legs dangling awkwardly. There was no blood or anything gory but her back legs were completely dislocated from her body. She didn’t seem to be in pain and valiantly tried to walk away but had to hop forward with her back legs dragging uselessly behind her.

We decided to adopt the approach we always had with these stray kittens. We would help her with food and water, but see if she could survive on her own. We set up a box for her outside, fed her some food and kept her water bowl filled with fresh, cool water at all times.

The first night after the accident was particularly hot and humid and I was having trouble sleeping. As soon as I heard the early morning call for prayers breaking the nighttime silence, I ran outside to check on the injured kitten. I looked inside the box and was relieved to see her sleeping peacefully. Then a sudden movement caught my eye. I looked up at the box. To my great surprise, P’ Panny was sleeping on top of the box, as if she was protecting her long forgotten kitten. She looked at me questioningly as if to say, “I am her mom. What did you expect?” I was shocked. P’ Panny had detached herself from this kitten at least two months ago. She barely acknowledged her older kittens’ existence and in her quest for independence, never stayed near our house except to drink her daily saucer of milk. And here she was, perched on top of the box looking quite maternal and subdued unlike her usual energetic self.

And thus began the most touching display of maternal affection I have ever seen from an animal. P’ Panny hovered around this injured kitten without ever directly interacting but always protecting and watching over her. I saw her arch her back and hiss furiously when a stray cat tried to get too close. I didn’t even realize P’ Panny was there but she jumped out of a tree and stood in front of her kitten until the uninvited stray ran away. And the most touching thing of all, she slept on top of that box every night. She would appear late in the evening and silently disappear early in the morning.

Eventually, after a few negative experiences we realized the injured kitten was not going to thrive in the harsh environment of Karachi and we took her to the vet who decided to put her to sleep. That night, I had tears in my eyes as I stared at the kitten’s empty box. A rustling sound in the still night air made me look up. I saw P’ Panny’s eyes glowing at me in the darkness. She seemed to realize her kitten wasn’t there anymore and abruptly turned around and ran away. She appeared the next day for her usual saucer of milk as if nothing had ever happened.

I felt a little like that injured kitten while I lay in the hospital bed, gently cradling my newborn. All I needed was my mother’s comforting presence. I didn’t need her to do anything for me that night. I just needed her near me. She was there for the birth of my second son too. And she has been there through every huge milestone in my life, always steady with her love and wisdom even though we live thousands of miles away. She encourages us to be independent but she is ready to step in when we need her.

I always viewed P’ Panny differently after that whole experience. She was no longer “just” a cat. She was a dedicated mother. She knew when to detach from her kittens, but most importantly, she knew when to re-attach. It made me rethink the “clean” detachment I thought many mammals have. It also made me realize that nothing is black and white. There are always shades of grey and that is where one truly sees the beauty and resilience of Mother Nature. If I close my eyes now, I can vividly imagine P’ Panny lying on that balcony floor while her kittens climb all over her playfully. She gently nudges them with her nose if they get too rough, but her watchful eye and strong mothering instincts ensure that they will all learn to thrive in this world.

These Tall Trees of Wisconsin

2011-05-26T16:14:00.001-05:00

It is the end of May and many of these tall trees of Wisconsin are still outstretching their bare limbs to the sky in silent prayer, waiting to receive. Maybe it always takes this long for the leaves to return but, this spring, we are not distracted by the euphoric joy of spring fever. There is no spring fever. The skies have been dark, cold and rainy for weeks and weeks. Dare I say that Mother Nature seems schizophrenic, grappling with her identity, hesitating about what she wants to be? Wind, rain, falling leaves, bare trees and wilting flower buds that have bloomed to their death. It tricks our eyes. Is it Spring or is it really Fall? We hold onto to the promise of summer, fervently aching for those occasional days that come upon us suddenly, glowing with optimistic sunshine and a strange sensation we have forgotten: warmth.

Spring and Fall are both transitions, preparing us for what’s to come and letting go of what was. They set the stage, so to speak, for new expectations. As much as we complain, there is nothing we can do to make these transitions easier. We shiver through them, curse and bundle up only to strip away the layers when it suddenly gets too warm.

It was raining recently, steadily all day, and we were leaving the local grocery store when we ran into a friend. My husband commented on how crappy the weather was, and his friend replied, smilingly, “It’s perfect, for a rainy day!” I stopped for a moment, reveling in the wisdom of those words. It was a perfect rainy day. What a wonderful way of looking at the world, especially if you live in Wisconsin!

Driving in the Jungle

2011-03-09T13:13:00.004-06:00

Every culture prepares its youth for a rite of passage, a process of initiation to celebrate a new phase of growth. In Pakistan, there are many such rituals embedded in religion with deep historical roots. However, I like to focus on the rites of passage that are not identified as such but are just as poignant. Learning how to drive a car, for instance, is one such rite of passage. It’s not just learning how to drive. One learns to navigate the “jungle” so to speak and how to work around crazy drivers (i.e. predators). One learns how to follow the rules of the “jungle” and when to break those rules.

I was 16 years old when I first expressed an interest in learning how to drive in Karachi. Paperwork was irrelevant in the 1980s. If you wanted to drive, you just drove. My father took some sticky red tape and shaped it into an “L” for “learner” and placed it on the front windshield and the back window, just to warn other drivers that there was a new driver at the wheels. He had successfully taught my older sister to drive and felt a certain sense of pride in being our teacher.

We started out in the back alley. He patiently explained what would happen next. I would have to press the clutch down as I started the car and then gently release it as I pressed down on the accelerator. I was determined not to let the car stall. I had seen my sister stall many, many times and I had promised myself I would master this fine art in the very first go. The car started and we moved forward slowly but without stalling! However, I was so pleased with myself that I stopped paying attention and before I knew it, my father was shouting “careful, careful!” as we drove into a large open garbage dump. To make matters worse, instead of pressing the brake, I quickly put both my feet up on the driver’s seat, covered my eyes with my hands and let out a very sudden, loud scream. Luckily we weren’t going very fast and a large cardboard box helped us roll to a complete stop.

I casually looked over at my father and was surprised to see him sweating profusely. He wiped his forehead with one of his many plaid handkerchiefs and muttered something to himself. I thought I heard him say “I am too old for this” but I dared not ask. He got out of the car and motioned for me to get back into the passenger seat. He reversed out of the garbage dump without saying a word and we headed back home. Later that evening, my parents asked me if I would like to enroll in a driving school. I was a little shocked, “are you saying my driving is so scary that my own father can’t teach me how to drive?” I asked. They assured me that the driving school would do a much better job than my father could do and that I could always practice my driving with him on the side.

A Learner’s Permit was obtained for me miraculously from somewhere. I never went inside a DMV and don’t even know what such a place would be called in Karachi. I attended an “informational” class where a very animated man explained how cars worked. None of us listened. We were all teenagers. Who wanted to learn how a car worked? We just wanted to drive! Some of us doodled, some played tic-tac-toe with friends and others closed their eyes for a much needed nap in the sweltering afternoon heat of Karachi. The hour went by remarkably fast.

And then I started my first day of driving. A lady came to pick me up in a small, red Suzuki car with the name of the driving school printed importantly on one of the doors. She got out of her car and asked me if I was “Anjum.” She said my name very slowly and deliberately. I nodded. She told me to call her “Aunty Shazia” and got into the passenger seat. I quickly got into the driver’s side and looked at Aunty Shazia expectantly. She was busy putting on very bright, red lipstick using the rearview mirror for help. “First lesson, “ she said “Adjust the rearview mirror and your seat, look off your shoulder and be off!” I quickly realized English was not her first language.

She showed me how she had a clutch and brake on the passenger side too and that she would only use them for “imera-jency.” It took me a minute to realize that she meant “emergency” and then I started the car and proceeded to drive, narrowly missing a pedestrian who thought I would stop for her when she tried to cross the street. I hadn’t quite mastered the brakes yet. That pedestrian shouted something angrily at me, but Aunty Shazia rolled down her window and let out the most wonderful string of curse words in Urdu as she gesticulated wildly and made an awful face. I realized she was well practiced in cursing. She had obviously done this before, many times. She rolled her window back up again and said, matter of factly, “she is stoopid fool!”

On our very first lesson, she took me out to a busy part of the city and we promptly got stuck in a traffic jam. People just sat in their cars, waiting in the awful heat for something to happen and then suddenly the traffic started to move forward even though the light was still red. I didn’t move. It was clear to me that a red light meant “stop.” Cars started to honk angrily at me and Aunty Shazia screamed “what are you doing? Move it!” I looked over at her, “but the light is red,” I said adamantly. “No, you stoopid girl, you move when the traffic moves. Now MOVE!” and I suddenly shot forward with all the other crazy, rule-breaking drivers. Aunty Shazia explained to me “in Karachi, rules are only there for fun. If others break rules, you break them too or you will get into accident.” I stared at her, dumbfounded. Unfortunately she was right. It was the law of this jungle and one had to abide by it.

And thus began my driving initiation. In the 1980s in Karachi, the roads were not as congested as they are today. They were also not built very well so negotiating sudden bumps and dips was commonplace. Japanese cars of all sizes dominated the traffic, accompanied by scooters, motorcycles and rickshaws. I loved how a tiny motorcycle would often seat an entire family of five, complete with mom sitting side saddle behind her husband, cradling a newborn baby. Buses were vibrant with bright colors and designs. And then there were the nasty yellow passenger vans that we called “yellow devils” because they drove with little care for safety. Every now and then a Victorian style horse cart would be trotting along delicately in traffic, a remnant of British colonial times, and donkey carts carrying laundry or building supplies would slouch through with their heavy loads. Rickshaw drivers were amazingly talented at squeezing into the tightest spaces and sometimes they were so close to the cars that you couldn’t even open your car door while stuck in traffic.

Aunty Shazia would pick me up from my home every morning for two weeks and we’d drive for two hours. She was a short woman with untidy dark hair and big sunglasses that she always wore, even indoors. She would swing her one arm really wide when she walked while her other arm protected her shiny fake leather handbag. She liked to pick her teeth with a toothpick and then flick the food debris out of the car window. She especially loved to scream at other drivers if they dared to honk at our car. She would say “you have to show them who is boss” as she ate piping hot chanas (roasted chick peas) she had purchased from a street vendor. She would eat with her mouth open and then demand that we stop and get a cold drink from a nearby shop. She sometimes bought me a small bottle of 7-up. As we noisily slurped our drinks, she told me “the sugar will make you more powerful and you will drive fast.”

And that’s how I spent my time driving with Aunty Shazia. I started to feel more like a chauffeur than a student. She would have a whole route planned out for us that might, for instance, involve stopping at the tailor’s shop so that she could pick up her new shalwar kameez, stopping at a friend’s house to drop off some spicy kebabs she had made the night before and then always picking up something small to eat from a street vendor. But she included me in her activities so I never felt like I was being used, even though essentially I was. When she delivered the kebabs, she would pop a whole kebab into my mouth before I could say anything and smile when the spiciness brought tears to my eyes. “Good, na?” she would say. I would nod, my mouth too full to speak. When she picked up new clothes from the tailor, she would ask me if I liked the fabric and would always say “be honest, Anjum. Be honest.” I didn’t dare tell her that I found her color choices to be very loud and gaudy. That’s how she dressed. It was who she was. And all the while, I was driving her around, feeling very grown up and important.

Finally, the lessons ended. Aunty Shazia said “you are good driver. Just be more bold in traffic” which I considered to be high praise. I was excited to show off my new driving skills to my father and one weekend morning, he kindly suggested I drive him to a hotel where we would have our favorite French Onion soup and then could head back home. I confidently started the car and it immediately stalled. He looked at me, puzzled. I tried again. No luck. I was surprised. Stalling had never been one of my problems. Finally after three tries, I took off feeling happy with myself again.

After a few minutes, I looked over at my dad. His dark skin was very pale and he was holding onto the door handle for dear life. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with one of his handkerchiefs and said in a remarkably calm voice, “please don’t drive so fast.” I tried to slow down but couldn’t change the gears quickly enough and the car rumbled slightly and started to stall. “Pull over, pull over” he shouted. I pulled over to the side and tried to start the car back up and stalled again. Finally I was able to get back into traffic and a few minutes into my driving, my father exclaimed impatiently, “you’re going too fast again.” Once again I tried to slow down and the same thing started to happen. It became painfully obvious to him and me that I simply didn’t know how to drive slowly. Aunty Shazia had always enjoyed driving fast and being “powerful” as she put it.

My father patiently worked with me so that we could get to a point where I was driving at a reasonable speed. Finally, we got to the hotel where I accidentally locked the keys in the car. I thought my father was going to have a heart attack. My father looked around the hotel parking lot and pointed to a man standing nearby watching us and said, “he looks like a car thief. Come over here, sir!” and he beckoned the man over. Sure enough, the man was suspiciously good at prying the door open with a long wire he pulled out of nowhere. My father was an unusually good judge of character.

I let my father drive us home. I figured I had given him enough stress for the day. That evening I called Aunty Shazia and explained to her that the car kept stalling when I drove with my dad. She paused for a minute and then said “please don’t mind, but I wanted you to be strong driver so I helped you with the clutch.” She explained how she always controlled the clutch when I was driving, unbeknownst to me. So much for my driving lessons, I thought with a sigh.

Years later, I met my future husband and he asked me if I knew how to drive. I thought of Aunty Shazia. I thought of my dad’s pale face on that difficult drive to the hotel and I simply shook my head, “I never learnt,” I said. And that was that.

And so I go back to the rites of passage and the laws of the jungle. One learns how to survive in the jungle but sometimes our worst predators are the ones we trust. They reel us in, unsuspectingly, but in the end all they want is to feel good about themselves. So be careful out there, dear friends. The jungle isn’t always exactly the way it appears…

The Hermit

2011-01-24T15:56:00.001-06:00

I lived in a wonderfully vibrant neighborhood, growing up in Karachi. My house was one in a row of six houses. Across the street from these houses was a huge mass of land we referred to as the “ground.” It had concrete pitches where boys would play cricket, a rickety, rusty playground where everything squeaked threateningly when moved, and a huge stretch of grassless land where people and children walked, biked, played, ran, etc.

Down the street from my home was what we called the “store” which wasn’t really one store, but many shops mingled together. There was the chemist shop where the kindly uncle behind the counter (we always call adults “uncle” or “aunty”) would hand you whatever you needed, silently, with a slight look of boredom on his face. There was the “coke shop” which lined a long corner of the street where stacks of crates filled with glass bottles of coke, pepsi, fanta, bubble-up and seven-up were waiting to be sold. Mr. Ghani, the storeowner was a young man with a ready smile and a generous heart always willing to give us a free, icy cold bottle of coca cola, if we asked nicely.

Next to the “coke shop” was Abu Bhai’s shop, a constantly evolving store front where Abu Bhai was always adapting to what he perceived were changing market trends. My earliest memory of that shop was it being a general store where you could find notebooks, crayons, markers, stickers, all kinds of candy especially tamarind candy and a strangely named Japanese bubble gum that was amazingly soft to chew. Abu Bhai would carefully weigh everything on old fashioned weighing scales and somehow figure out the price from some arbitrary measurement he had in his head. That shop saw many permeations. The most exciting one was when it was transformed into a video game arcade! Abu Bhai—he was a man beyond his times.

There were many more shops tucked away in side streets: a bakery, tailor shops, butchers, a café where they made the best tandori naan, locksmiths, cobblers, etc. As with any public place in Karachi, this area was flooded with people. And it wasn’t just people. There were stray cats who kept a watchful eye on scraps of food thrown out by the fishmonger, stray dogs who knew just where to hide to get bony bits of meat thrown out by the butcher, occasionally a donkey cart pushing a load of freshly laundered clothes to be delivered somewhere, and little herds of goats being led by young goatherds who kept their herds together with long sticks. It was a beautiful coexistence of humans with animals and as long as every living creature was focused on his or her own survival, things remained harmonious.

One day, I was outside the coke shop with my older sister when I noticed a strange man across the street, just standing quietly and staring ahead. He had long dreadlocks that had been bleached to a light brown, by the sun. His mustache and beard hadn’t seen trimmers for a very long time and blended, completely, into his scraggly hair. He wore a long maxi which was probably black once but now a faded dark grey. Around his neck were layers of colorful beaded necklaces. What struck me the most about him, aside from his quiet demeanor, was his feet. He stood barefoot and his feet were large and amazingly flat. I am reminded of the Mountain pose in Yoga where my Yoga instructor says “plant your feet firmly on the ground as if you are putting down roots.” This man’s feet were firmly placed on the ground, and they seemed deeply, deeply rooted almost as if they were a part of the ground itself. His soles were thick and could obviously walk on dirt or asphalt effortlessly. I didn’t think feet like that would ever be able to fit into a pair of shoes.

I started seeing him everywhere or perhaps he had always been everywhere but now I noticed him all the time. I sometimes saw him miles and miles away from my house. What was strange about him, though, is that he never said anything at all. He was often standing and staring gently ahead. He was obviously homeless like the throngs of beggars around him, but he stood above them all with a certain dignity and quietness that made him seem very different, somehow.

I started calling him “the hermit” and excitedly pointed him out to my parents and sisters. They thought I was crazy to get so excited about a silly homeless man who had nothing to say for himself and they told me he was probably crazy. Every now and then I saw him sitting at the “coke shop” drinking an icy cold coca-cola slowly. When he looked at me (I was often staring at him), I would feel a strange sense of peace come over me. Then eventually time moved forward, I left Karachi to go to college in the States and I only saw him when I was back on my summer breaks but there was never much time to even think about him. I was just always aware of his quiet existence.

It was years later, one day, when my mom was visiting me that we started to wonder about "the hermit” again. My mom said she still saw him every now and then and that he looked exactly the same. By now we had read a lot about spiritual mystics and enlightenment and we both suddenly wondered if he was actually someone who had voluntarily shed all his worldly possessions and just wandered the earth with no attachments to anything. It all made sense…he never begged for money, he had a certain sense of peace about him, he never seemed to need anything at all. My mom said, in her determined voice “next time I see him I am going to ask him!”

Apparently she did run into him again one day when he was walking and she rolled down her car window and asked “who are you?” He stopped, looked carefully at her for a moment and then continued walking down the street. That was about five years ago. No one has ever seen that hermit again. When I was in Karachi last summer, I asked the shopkeepers about him but no one seemed to know who I was referring to.

I was secretly happy he never responded to my mother’s question. What could he possibly have said that would explain who he was? Maybe he was a crazy man who had been shunned from society or maybe he was a highly enlightened man who had voluntarily given up everything including his attachment to his ego. In the end, did it really matter? In either case you are freed from your thoughts. You are either too crazy to care about them anymore or you are so enlightened that you have removed yourself from being held by them. In both cases you live outside of society, not really concerned about how you are perceived.

I like to believe there are many people like him who walk this earth. Maybe we tend to dismiss them because we don’t understand them or maybe they are so much a fabric of our everyday lives that we don’t even notice them. To just walk through life, needing nothing at all…exuding peace…always calm…maybe they are wiser than any of us could ever aspire to be.

Dense Fog Advisory...in the Fall

2010-10-12T10:54:00.000-05:00

To my friend Missy who loves Autumn

more than anyone I know,

To my friend Maureen who personifies Fall

with her red hair that shines brighter than the brightest tree

and

To my friend Lisa who looks for elongated shadows during these vibrant days of color…

A walk to the lake yesterday held a beautiful sight, lingering in its Fall splendor. A dense fog lifted off the bluff slowly revealing each tree as a burst of unexpected color. Who knew green had so many permeations, incantations and variations? The leaves this autumn have been illuminated by a brilliantly bright sun. Golden leaves fall in silent unison to a willing death, lingering with life for a few moments more, after falling, as if to contemplate, one last time, their existence. They still give us pleasure long after they have withered for there can be no better sound than walking through their scrunchy-ness, soothing and jarring at the same time.

And how to describe those bursts of burgundy-pink-orange that some trees proudly display?! I always look at them and feel amazed that nature can create something so stunning out of unsuspecting greenness. At the bluff, as if there wasn’t enough color already, there were little sprigs of Asters interspersed between the trees that just added a new dimension to a palette already filled with abundance.

Fall always brings with it, though, a feeling of melancholy because it signals the impending arrival of a long winter. These bright trees will stand uselessly for at least four if not six months, dull and tired waiting, as we are, for warmth again. But right now it is hard to imagine the persistent cold and short, dark days.

The wind is gently cool. The sand on the shore is laden with tiny shells and misshapen rocks. The lake looks majestic as it always does. And the autumn leaves on the bluff sparkle with a final burst of life and color, reminding us not to forget them for they will be back…some day.

The Swing of Life

2010-08-28T15:02:00.000-05:00

I’ve been spending a lot of time, this summer, sitting on a swing at the playground while my sons bike up and down a little hill there with a vengeance as if someone is going to be really mad at them if they stop. I close my eyes and swing gently and it instantly transports me to a soothing world where I am floating in beautiful rhythm, in predictable smoothness. It took a few times to realize why the swinging motion seemed so familiar to me. And then it came to me in a flash. My grandfather!

Let me explain….

During my childhood in Karachi, we lived one street away from my grandparents’ house. They lived in a large house with three of their grownup sons and their sons’ families; a very traditional extended family. We visited them every evening and often had dinner there before heading back home.

My grandparents’ house was always abuzz with activity. The daughters-in-law spent half their lives in the kitchen preparing food, cleaning rice and lentils, cutting volumes of unripe green mangoes for pickling, churning tamarind in large pots for deliciously sweet and sour chutney. Everything was made from scratch and was made laboriously and lovingly. Every time we walked into the house, someone was cooking or preparing something in the kitchen that smelled delicious.

The sons came home from work in the late evening, right around the time we often visited. They would deposit their empty silver tiffin (lunch) boxes on the kitchen counter and go straight into the family area to see my grandfather.

My grandfather had a commanding presence in the house. No one dared to enter the house without first going up to him and greeting him. He ruled the house from his swing. Yes, his swing. He spent much of his time sitting or lying down on a wooden swing, the size of a twin bed. It had a tight fitting, soft pad and cylindrical cushions and was right in the middle of the main hallway of the house. It was attached to the ceiling with thick, braided iron chains. When it was empty, it looked absurd. When my grandfather sat on it, it looked like a glorified command post and checkpoint all in one.

All the grandchildren started their lives in his arms, swinging gently for their daily naps. When they grew older, he would grab them as they walked by and demand that they push his swing so that he could take his nap. They would all try to avoid him and the tiresome swing, but it was right in the middle of the house and there was no way to go in or out of the house without going by the darn swing.

He held vehement political discussions with friends while sitting on that swing. Sometimes he would argue with his children and the swing would reflect his temper, going higher and higher as he got angrier and angrier! No one ever questioned his authority and more importantly, no one ever questioned the swing.

Food was one of his greatest passions. He would demand that we try new things and we all did because we dared not disobey him. I fondly remember his love for mangoes in the summertime and how he’d suck on the mango pit, mango juice spilling out of his mouth onto his lap. He looked so happy while he was doing it that it didn’t even seem gross at the time!

Most of the grandchildren were terrified of him, but I loved him especially because his eyes always softened when he saw me. He would grab me and call me a “princess poppity poppet” – he loved to rhyme things in a silly way - and give me a huge hug and kiss. He always told me that I was really a princess and some day my true identity would be revealed and everyone would be sorry for treating me like an ordinary person. I believed him. I try telling my husband that sometimes and he rolls his eyes at me and says, “Sure. Are you going to weed the flower beds now?”

On the rare occasions when he left town to travel for his work, the grandchildren would all pile onto the swing and pretend it was a school bus. I remember those swing rides so vividly. One of the older grandchildren would push it as high as possible and then with the final push, jump onto the swing with a well practiced leap. We would all close our eyes, six or seven of us crammed onto the swing and giggle hysterically until one of the daughters-in-law couldn’t stand the noise anymore and then she’d beg us to get off and threaten to lock us all up in the store room where the “jinn” lived, if we didn’t listen.

In the early part of 1987, my grandfather became ill suddenly and within one week he had passed away in the hospital. We were in shock. How could someone who had always been so alive now be dead? It seemed unreal. The swing lay empty for the longest time. It was painful to even look at it. Then one day, we came over and my grandmother was quietly sitting on it, carefully on one side as if she was scared to take up too much room. Eventually they took the swing down and all that was left were the four stubs from the chains that used to hold it to the ceiling.

The house was never the same after he died. His absence could be felt everywhere, and without his commanding presence, the extended family structure slowly collapsed and the brothers each moved into their own, separate homes. The house itself had to be destroyed because the foundation was slowly sinking into the ground. It was as if it couldn’t even stand in place without my grandfather.

When I think of my grandfather, I always think of mangoes bursting with ripeness. I think of his loud voice and his gentle smile. But most of all, I think of the swing and how he conducted his life from there. Sometimes, I wish I could get rid of the sofa in our family room and replace it with a giant swing…I wonder if it changes one’s perspective in some way? How would it feel to ride through all that life offers, in gentle motion? I close my eyes, sit on the playground swing and dream….

Small Town Pennsylvania

2010-07-21T15:39:00.000-05:00

Farmlands peak to grassy-high hills
speckled with grazing cows.
Horsey tails zig, zig-zag-zig
swatting rhythmic perfection.
Spotty asphalt...mounding slopes...
heart jumping dips and turns,
strangers wave -- the proper thing
for countryside decorum.
A tavern on the left
a church on the right,
tired storefronts in between,
the signs now point to the
outskirts of town, away from history.
A retail strip mine
dug out of the ground
where goods can be found on the cheap,
exploding at the sides,
absurdly wide,
downtown is WalMart blue!

Ode to the Northern Cardinal

2010-04-25T08:34:00.000-05:00

O black veiled creature of

stark vermillion,

perched high amongst
intertwining limbs
bursting infant leaves of spring!

Your majestic crest rises above
the dull sparrow,
as you sing a repetitive reverie of
love and protection
from a timeless land
of enchanted beauty.

Beaded eyes locked together
in tranquil nourishment,
one seed at a time into her
waiting beak,
you nurture as you sing
a duet
with your
forever companion.

Huddling together in a feathery mass
within the depths of winter,
you sing only on the brightest days.
Catching sight of your redness
within tired, snowy white banks
is to catch sight of hope
when color has faded.

This poem came about from my love and awe for the northern Cardinal bird. The male sings to protect its territory from other male birds. Imagine a world where humans sang to protect their territories! During courtship, the male sings with his mate, feeds her and mates with her for life. Northern cardinals typically do not migrate for the winter. They stay put and only sing on days when the sun is very bright. Cardinals are everywhere here in Wisconsin but catching sight of one is always a beautiful surprise.

Haunting Wind

2010-03-25T19:35:00.000-05:00

There is a haunting-ness to the wind that is blowing around the streets of Milwaukee today. It reminds me of a stately old mansion I once visited that stands eerily in the midst of trees in northwestern Pennsylvania. It is fully furnished with treasures from the past, but empty and silent. No one wants it anymore. If a house could be alive, this one surely would be. It seems to be pleading for life. When the wind blows outside its doors, it sounds like a crazy woman shrieking for help. Its endless windows seem to have faces in them, begging to be let out. When darkness unfolds in the late evening hours, the house echoes the sounds of wild animals outside. Bats fly by the unadorned windows. Everything in the house is silent as if it is waiting for something to happen: the grand piano that once hosted decadent parties, the huge stone fireplaces that crackled with firewood for days on end, the inner kitchen where maids and butlers tirelessly worked. Stillness prevails. Spooky stillness.

Leaves scurry today in Milwaukee as if they have somewhere to go. The trees speak softly to each other. It feels like a world in which we are not welcome. We are not meant to be outside today. There are things going on that we cannot understand. Mother Nature, with all her windy glory, reigns supreme.

Mismatched Mongrels

2010-03-04T10:13:00.001-06:00

Finally in Karachi! The airport was a maze of people. Suffocating heat greeted us as we got out of the airport and I immediately felt hot and sticky. My children looked around with amazement. They had never seen so many people before. People just stood outside the airport, presumably waiting for someone. But it always seemed like there were more people there than there needed to be. I loved it. I spent much of my time alone in my home in the States. And this felt so amazing. So alive! And so familiar.

My childhood home was in a noisy neighborhood with three mosques within close proximity. Every day, five times a day, the mullahs would do the azan (call for prayers) so it would become especially loud at times when one mosque‘s sounds were almost drowning out another‘s. One could constantly hear children outside playing, cars honking, rickshaws churning, vendors selling their wares. Loneliness was not an option.

I didn’t sleep at all my first night back home. I stayed awake listening to every sound with great relish and hunger. These are the sounds I dreamt about every night in my home in Wisconsin. I heard the age old sound of the night watchman’s whistle. He walked through the streets at night blowing on a jarring whistle to warn us that he was guarding our streets. You could hear him slowly come closer and closer and then fade away into the night.

I heard the sound of a baby goat’s high pitched bleating in the street behind our house. One of our neighbors had purchased a baby goat who lived on his front sidewalk. He had also purchased a rooster and some chickens that lived in a small cage, next to the baby goat. Why, in the middle of a busy city, were there farm animals? Because this was Pakistan. That was the beauty of Pakistan. You never knew what you would find next. And that was also the most disconcerting thing about Pakistan.

There was a pack of stray dogs in the recreational ground in front of our house. I had forgotten about them. They would stand in the middle of the grounds and howl at the moon. They stayed out of sight during the day, but you could clearly see them at night. They would take turns howling and then congregate together importantly. A pack of mismatched mongrels, holding a private meeting in the moonlight.

And then I heard the azan. It is hard to describe how beautiful it sounds in the early morning. A sound from far away entering into the depth of our sleepy consciousness. I remembered the walks I used to take with my father at this time of the morning. He would wake me up before sunrise, back in the day when Karachi was a safe place, when we could not have imagined suicide bombings and unprovoked violence. He would make me tea and I still remember it was the only time I ever had tea on an empty stomach. The caffeine would wake me up instantly and I would quickly get ready and take his hand and walk up to the hills near my house. We would walk to the highest peak of the hills and my father would always say how the time before dawn was the most magical time of the day and people believed if you breathed this air, you would always remain healthy and pure. We would see a Chinese couple doing exercises that I now know to be tai chi.

The world would be stirring gently and in slow motion. My father and I would breathe deeply and stretch our arms high above our heads, feeling free and weightless. Then when we heard the morning azan signaling to us that the sun had risen, we would watch the sun slowly appear in a blaze of red and orange, and then head back home. Within an hour the sun would have taken over the sky and there was nothing more to feel but sticky, sticky heat.

I lay in bed remembering those days. The bliss of childhood. My beautiful father for teaching me how to savor those moments that only he and I shared. I finally fell asleep, exhausted with the range of emotions I had experienced over the past two days of travel. I was finally home!

Lost in Flight

2010-03-02T10:18:00.000-06:00

Last summer, I went back to Karachi, Pakistan after nine years. The only reason I went is because my mother was very sick. I felt massively nauseous for two weeks after I heard about my mother’s illness and then, once the nausea cleared, I realized I had to head back home which led to a new wave of nausea on my part. Nausea is my body’s way of coping with extreme stress and anxiety. Doesn’t bode well for me if we all still lived in the jungle with real predators, “oh look, there’s a predator coming towards me to kill me. I’ll just sit here for a while and feel nauseous!"

I packed up my two little sons and my husband took us to the airport in Chicago. I hate goodbyes so it was especially aggravating to me, that on that particular day, my husband decided we would be ticketed if we went even slightly over 65 mph because of all the new, jazzy signs saying “radar enforced” on I-94, designed exactly to scare the living daylights out of people like my husband. It was a long, slow ride to the airport with many impatient drivers giving us unfriendly hand gestures. Thankfully my sons didn’t notice. My dear husband. He is a very patient man.

Our flight to London was fairly uneventful and just exhausting. That’s all really to be said about that. We spent two days there with my wonderful sister and then headed off to Karachi. And that’s when the “fun” began.

We stood in line for an hour before my brilliant sister realized there was a separate, much shorter line for people who had already checked in online. There were some people rudely laughing in the line. I didn’t pay attention to them at first and then realized they were laughing and telling everyone that the flight had been delayed five hours. I felt irritated by them….troublemakers…and then realized they weren’t joking. We were told the flight was delayed and were given “vouchers” for meals. No further explanations were given.

It was a long five hours with my two sons. Thankfully Heathrow’s terminal 3 is filled with shops and my sons spent the better part of their time playing with the toys in Hamleys while I sat outside the shop with all our luggage, feeling nauseous.

Finally, we got onto the airplane. It was a HUGE airbus with over 500 people on board. People were grateful to get into their seats and we all settled in for our six hour flight to Dubai. After about an hour of nothing happening except a baby crying pitifully behind us, the pilot announced that one of the passengers had decided he didn’t want to fly with this airline anymore and was getting off the airplane. As a result, they were going to have to open the cargo hold and take out his luggage which would take a while. And after that they were going to have to account for everyone’s hand luggage on board as a security precaution.

I felt like crying, but it was one of those awful moments when I realized I was the mom and couldn’t break down crying. I looked at my two sons sitting peacefully next to me playing with their Leapsters. There were so beautiful and innocent and didn’t complain at all about anything. I felt massively sick to my stomach and quickly went to the bathroom that was right by our seats. In the bathroom, I had two very sudden thoughts. First, I realized I was experiencing my very first panic attack. Second, I realized the baby was still crying and it was adding to my anxiety. WHY WOULDN’T SHE STOP CRYING?

I sat for a few minutes in the bathroom and tried to breathe deeply because I felt strangely strangulated. I realized I could not give in to this panic attack. I hadn’t eaten and slept for days and I think my body was starting to break down. I got up with great resolve, burst out of the bathroom surprising a stern looking man who was reading a newspaper upside down, and went to find that crying baby.

I walked up to the mother and guessed that she was Pakistani. I asked her, in Urdu, if everything was okay. She looked so tired. Her baby was just crying and crying and crying. I think she had tried everything and had now given up. I realized they must have had to wait for five hours at Heathrow too. She looked up at me and said in Urdu, “she just won’t stop crying. I don’t know what to do.” I asked her if I could hold her baby. She gratefully gave her to me. I took this little strange baby girl, held her close to me and started walking up and down the aisle gently patting her back and making shoosh-shoosh noises. Good thing my little boys used to be so fussy and gassy back in their baby days. I knew exactly what to do. And miracle of all miracles, the little baby stopped crying. I felt like we were helping each other, somehow. She needed me as much as I needed her. It took the attention away from my nausea and I instantly felt stronger. The poor mother got up and asked if she could go to the bathroom while I held her baby. I felt so sorry for her. She had needed help but couldn’t speak any English and didn’t know how to ask for help.

A couple of passengers looked up at me and smiled gratefully. My sons looked at me in surprise and my oldest asked where I got “that” from. I explained she was a baby girl and not a “that” and he seemed satisfied with the answer and thankfully didn’t ask any more questions.

I returned to my seat after the baby had fallen asleep and gone back into her mother‘s tired arms. We finally took off, eight hours behind schedule. I thought I could now rest and get mentally ready for Pakistan. But it was not to be.

About an hour into the flight a man sitting two rows in front of us suddenly started crying. I thought jokingly, he is crazy. He’s probably a suicide bomber and is going to detonate an explosive device on all of us. I was still wondering what on earth made me think of the word “detonate,” when the man started screaming as if he was in pain. My children were blissfully unaware of the disturbance, thanks to their headphones. A few stewardesses came over and spoke to him in Arabic. I had no idea what was going on. I grabbed a steward’s sleeve as he walked by and asked him what was happening. He told me the man had had too much to drink and wouldn’t accept no for an answer when they refused to give him more alcohol.

I realized that, he, too had been waiting at Heathrow like the rest of us. He probably started out drinking. And then he drank some more. And then a friend might have called him over and asked him to share a drink. And then, he might have walked over to one of many pubs in the terminal and had a few more….you got it…drinks! All this while I was watching my boys playing with a talking monkey in Hamleys!

They managed to calm the drunk man down. He then promptly passed out for the rest of the flight and that was the end of that. So here we were in the middle of--okay I had no idea where we where. We were in the middle of London and Dubai. I felt totally trapped. I guess I was trapped. I took a few deep breaths again (thank goodness for yogic breathing exercises) and I helped my sons eat their dinner and then we all settled down to sleep. I thought to myself, things have to calm down now. Right? What else could possibly happen? Famous last words.

A woman two rows behind us suddenly screamed “Help! We need help!” and even though more than half the people in the cabin immediately woke up, she felt compelled to let out a shrill whistle. For a moment I marveled at the shrill-ness of the whistle--I have never been able to whistle with my fingers in my mouth like that-- and then watched as five stewards/stewardesses crowded around her almost instantly. I think her companion had suddenly fainted. This very tall, good looking steward gently slapped the companion’s face and told everyone to back away and give her some air, with a little more fanfare than was necessary. We all stared in silence. It took a few moments or perhaps it was less than that, but the woman came to. She looked a little shocked and a little sick. But she settled down and things were finally quiet.

I spent the rest of the flight, wide awake, unable to do anything but somehow getting fixated on a movie the guy in the seat right in front of me was watching. It was sub titled and I ended up watching the whole thing from his screen. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to put my own movie on. I even got a little impatient at him when he blocked my view to take off his shoe! It was a horribly disturbing, Hindi movie about a serial killer. Just what I needed.

We got to Dubai and it was wonderful to get out at this shopping mall they call an airport. It was glowing with lights and duty free shops. They had luggage carts one could use. Imagine that, Heathrow! And free strollers for kids. Heathrow, are you listening? I still couldn’t eat. Still felt nauseous. But it was good to stretch our legs and get my exhausted kids some food.

Luckily our final flight to Karachi left Dubai on time. It was going to be a shorter flight, thank goodness. We were almost home. We all fell asleep. I woke up when the pilot was announcing that we were about to land in Karachi. I stared out the window onto the rapidly approaching ground and saw those familiarly ugly prickles of dessert grass scattered on the rugged landscape and burst into tears. We were home. Home! After nine years! And the prickles of grass! They were so amazingly beautiful!

Thankfully my children were still sleeping. I am not one of those people who can cry gently with a single tear trickling down my cheek. I cry loud and hard with my body shaking uncontrollably. And I don’t cry very often. I was grateful to be sitting at the very back of the airplane. A little girl who had been watching me with her mouth hanging open now began to throw up into a bag her astute mother had produced out of nowhere in the nick of time, and with the gross sounds of her gagging, and the pathetic sprigs of grass staring at me from the landscape below, we landed in Karachi.

If you haven’t found all this to be deathly boring, stay tuned for more of my trip to Karachi and how this all leads to my identity crisis which is the reason why I started this blog in the first place.
And one more thing, may your travels be less eventful than mine!

Winters in Wisconsin

2010-02-22T13:52:00.000-06:00

It is good for our spirits to sometimes fall to the lowest point and then to rise from there to a better place. For it has been said before that only from suffering can there be true happiness. Wisconsin winters are long and dreary. Life in the dark months becomes all about waiting for those cloudless bursts of reluctant sunshine to peek through, mocking us with light but no warmth.

The banks of muddy snow lie silent and sinister everywhere one looks. They remind us of better days ahead, but make us feel despondent and isolated in the meantime. It is not your mind playing tricks on you. Winters here are depressing. The cold that chills us so suddenly and fearlessly leaves us uncomfortable in our own skins.

Ghosts of the past parade proudly in this weather. Unresolved thoughts and ideas live on the frozen panes of our windows, peering in shamelessly. The sullen faces of people walking their dogs--even the dogs wince in pain--make us feel that the world has turned into an endless blizzard of lost hope and sadness.

And then it happens. The sun majestically shines in the sky and one feels like falling to the ground and praying to it with grateful reverence. The spirit shifts from barely holding on to itself to reverberating with joy and love. Springtime! It makes one dizzy. It makes one feel that winter was a dream! The birds, the tulips, the sun, the glorious sun!
To my dear friends reading this who might be drowning in winter blues, remember the wise words of the poet Shelley “When winter comes, can spring be far behind?”

Wishing you all warmth and endless love!

Pakistani Valentines Day?

2010-02-12T12:57:00.000-06:00

My family has spent the last week getting ready for Valentines Day. Both my sons received a list of all the children in their classrooms with specific instructions about what needs to happen, such as “if you are going to give Valentines cards out, every child in the class needs to get one” and “please address them by first name and put them in alphabetical order and then place them in the bags that your children have decorated anytime between now and Friday.” Very specific, very serious, very intense. We purchased cards, followed the appropriate instructions and had to help our sons in various ways to be ready by Friday. It was definitely a family affair and not without gentle urging on our part to get all the cards ready.

My mind went back to Valentines Day in Karachi, Pakistan where I grew up. Until we were, say, fourteen or fifteen years old we were not even aware of Valentines Day. It is, historically, a Western tradition with no basis in our Pakistani heritage or history. But Pakistan, of course, is a post colonial country where the upper middle classes and upper classes are dominated by many Western influences. By the time we were seventeen or eighteen and more of us were forming close connections with boys, we would secretly hope to get a Valentines card on Valentine’s day. I don’t quite remember how we knew about it in the first place. It was probably from the few English TV shows we used to watch and books (this was before cable TV).

On Valentines Day, girls would get small red heart-shaped cards from boys. They were always handmade cards cut out of red paper or on white paper painted red. They would say something not too terribly creative like “Be my Valentine.” Some of them would be stuffed into our bags when we weren’t looking, some would be shyly given to us in person and some boys would actually walk around with a stack of home made Valentines cards and write the name of each girl they met and hand her a card right there and then. One year we pinned the cards onto our school uniform and there was a silent competition going on in our heads “she has 5 on her uniform and I have 6, yay!” and then a very popular girl would walk by with Valentines pinned on her uniform practically from head to toe! A girl in a more serious relationship might get a bouquet of pink or red roses. But there were no specific expectations. It was not “politically” correct at all. The popular girls got more Valentines cards, the shy girls might just get one or two cards and some girls got none whatsoever.

I look back on those days and smile. I don’t quite understand why you are expected to give everyone in your class a Valentines card. And I especially don‘t understand why my son in kindergarten was expected to participate at all. Aren’t you just supposed to give a Valentine’s card to someone with whom you feel a special connection? But as always, political correctness takes a hold and creates a situation that might be fair to all but lacks spontaneity and creativity. It becomes a chore where the original essence is lost completely.

Happy Valentines Day To You!

My First Blog Entry

2010-02-09T09:30:00.000-06:00

Hello to you, whoever you are! I started this blog to help explore my fascination, or should I say obsession with identity. Perhaps it's because I feel I am perpetually stuck between two worlds that I think a lot about identity. I think about who I am and who we all are. How do we feel connected to others? How, when we live within two different cultures, do we find a way to belong in each without feeling isolated within both? How do we identify with our national heritage when the boundaries are blurry for each?

Moving beyond our cultures and nationality, I also wonder about our very personal identities. What happens when we find a fulfilling job, for instance? How does our identity change then? When we become parents, how do we grapple with who we are and who we feel a connection with?

These are the issues I want to explore in this blog. Thank you for listening/reading!