Posts

Showing posts from March, 2017

Happy Mother’s Day

Image
It was the day I was moving into the LUMS hostel.  Ami was there, of course.  She helped me put on the red checkered bed sheet over the single bed in that tiny cubbyhole I was to share with another girl, we set out the lamp she had helped me choose and then we opened up my suitcase.  Ami found out where the ironing table was and took it upon herself to iron my kameezs and dupattas, coming back with the clothes hung neatly on plastic hangers, with the burning August heat of Lahore drawing rivulets of perspiration down the sides of her face and back.  I didn’t know anyone in that strange, foreign university then and having my mother next to me was a comfort.  Also she had just ironed a week’s worth of outfits just so I wouldn’t have to! I also remember exactly an year from then, at the start of my sophomore year when Ami came to drop me off to the dorms again, and I left her in the new cubbyhole, distracted by calls from friends I hadn’t seen in two months, stories to share,

Look for the Daffodils

Image
It felt really good to step outside and not freeze. And it was even more liberating to be able to take off my coat and sit under the open sky – I realized I hadn’t been able to do that in around five months.  I turned my face up towards the sun and felt a strange, almost foreign sensation … warmth, almost heat, really, almost enough to want to turn my face away but I didn’t because it had been SO LONG since I felt that! It was truly a beautiful day – a whopping 16 °C.  Pretty much the same temperature I would whine about in September when we initially arrived in England.  How we adapt and forget and then remember again… the mystery of the human brain. Memory can be quite erratic, faulty, like a sieve really, things slipping through and disappearing.  Images stick much better than sensations like pain.  That’s why women have more than one baby – (I read that or saw that somewhere – can’t remember exactly … see what I did there?), because they forget the excruciating pain

Invisible Connections

Image
I’ve always found it interesting how human nature skirts around logic sometimes, simply striding past without so much as a glance at it – like the motes of dust that swirl around us, that we brush off our cheeks and inhale into our bodies, invisible to us except when a stray ray of light falls across them at an angle, and suddenly there they are, slow, hypnotic, afloat, little specks of dust. Maybe it’s not logic- maybe the idea I’m looking for is empathy.  I don’t think empathy is as innate in humans as we would hope it to be.  Which is why women who internally rage at their husbands for never pitching in with the housework always ask their daughters or daughters in law – never their sons - to bring the forgotten water bottle from the kitchen; which is why when we’re crossing the road and a car honks at us, we shake our fists at them and think ‘people in cars are such schmucks’ and when we’re the ones in the car and somebody takes too long to move from one end of the road to t