The Extra in Ordinary

You can tell by the sideways look your two-year-old nephew is giving the little girl playing with his up until-a-minute-ago-uninteresting plastic truck that there is a storm brewing.  “My truck,” he says loudly.  He lets go off the blocks he was playing with and looks you in the eye. “My truck.”

Toddlers, you may have noticed, have more important things to do than bother about extra adjectives or verbs (let alone something as useless as prepositions).  “MY TRUCK!!!”

(It was also a toddler who created the wise saying about persistence being the key to success).    

“Come on, you can share,” you may try but then thunder lightning rain and tears are upon you so you cave in to the fury of a tiny being and sheepishly cajole the little girl into giving you the truck in return for,  I don’t know, say five bucks or maybe a Barbie with shorn hair.

“Here you go,” your reproachful look slides off the nephew’s adorable head like the skates of a new skater from beneath his torso. 

Not even a minute later and the sideways look is back. “My Barbie,” he says, tossing the plastic truck aside. “My Barbie!”

I’m 31 (WHAT THE F ... man that statement doesn’t flow off my tongue or my fingers as easily as truth should ...) but in some ways I feel that even as adults, we really aren’t that different from our persistently wanting toddlers.

Too often we don’t appreciate what we have till it’s gone.  Probably because at any point in time something is bound to be missing, and so instead of concentrating on things like proper sidewalks to walk on and clean buses, I pine for the chaotic traffic and the mesh of black electricity wires crisscrossing across a blue sky in Karachi.

The interesting thing about nostalgia is that too often we miss the ordinary, routine things that used to form the backdrop of our life rather than the occasional highlights that even at that time we recognized as special. 

So when I miss LUMS, I don’t usually think of the incredible trek to Rakaposhi base camp or my graduation day – I mostly miss the simplest of things: texting monosyllabic messages to locate a friend on campus and then having chai in a small paper cup, the rough feel of the brick walls outside PDC when I leaned back against them, the awkward heaviness of a spiral-bound reading pack, the ease with which I’d slip into a friend’s room across the hall to borrow the soft gray shirt that I probably wore more than she ever did, the happiness of a buttered toast and kaali daal with chawal, and of course the most coveted potato wedges that appeared every now and then at the dining hall and that only true friends would message to tell you about.

It’s the same with Karachi. Nostalgia whirls around the most mundane day-to-day activities, the act of recollection so sharp and sensory that I can feel my foot lift off the accelerator as my car approaches the speed breaker near the juice shop on the slip road parallel to Main Ittehad, my way home from work.  I can see the palm trees sway in the breeze and the bright pink of bougainvillea running amok on the walls of our neighbour’s house.  I miss driving on roads that are so familiar I know where each pothole is (yet never manage to avoid due to terrible spatial skills), and I miss the fresh empanadas of Pie in the Sky. 

I can close my eyes and walk down the staircase in my house, through the kitchen door and along the forever dusty corridor by the garden, start to open the gate till the security guard in the street takes over, get into the car and reverse out into the street that has more people under its dusty green trees and seated in its driveways than the whole of Beeston town on any given evening after 5 PM.  Let’s say I drive to a friend’s house by Seaview – I can continue to keep my eyes closed still, except perhaps at the four turns I need to make before I slowly inch over the three speedbreakers in her complex and pull up over the pavement in front of her block of apartments.  It takes a few years for you to be good enough friends to walk into their house and head straight to their room and plop down on their bed, to know where the teabags are and have a favourite mug, to only look at the watch when its half an hour later than you had thought you would stay till and then decide to go to the bookshop together before saying bye.

I’m not going to dive any further into the litany of things I miss about home but I do wonder why our brain is wired to always look back and why the familiarity of a particular routine is only missed when it’s over.  It’s like realizing you had a beautiful painting hanging on the wall all this time but you never noticed it much, except now it’s gone and try as you might, you cannot ignore the mismatched rectangle on the wall.

I mean obviously, I have a routine now, and it’s quite pleasant and if I take the time and attention I do enjoy the individual activities – reading in bed on a Friday with a cloudy sky framed by the window advising me to stay indoors, a bus on time, the bright yellow chairs and warm soft sweetness of a croissant balanced with the bitterness of a freshly roasted cup of coffee in the bakery near my office in the city –

But I guess you need to spend a few years doing something for it to become part of your very being, something you’ve done so many times you can do it in your dreams, something that drops deep down into the well of your mind so that even years later you can close your eyes and smell the coffee and taste the cinnamon.        

Not to mention nostalgia is the key ingredient here.  It adds romance to things that in reality might have been tiresome (traffic in Karachi, the humid summers, rude aunties) and blurs out the unpleasant, leaving only the blue skies dotted with clouds, the balmy breeze, the plastic chairs and truck-art painted tables of a dhabba and the perfect companionship of friends who have been through many, many such routine days together.

And there is a certain beauty in nostalgia – if you take it right (with a cup of tea, of course), it can remind you that you have a lot to be grateful about.  So maybe I’m less like a two-year-old than I thought – I may miss having my plastic truck but the memory of playing with it is pretty special.  And I guess I know this Barbie isn’t that bad either ... might as well make the most of it while it lasts so that years later, I can reminisce about how quiet the neighbourhood was and how sometimes daffodils would grow in my backyard without me having planted any.