sidewalk scribbling

You slip into the comfort of your own country so seamlessly you don’t even notice it.   It’s like wearing your favourite sneakers – you don’t realise how important they are till you buy new shoes and have to break them in.     We landed at the shoddy little Islamabad airport – Daewoo bus stations are better than the Islamabad airport, as my uncle put it – and I walked out into the crisp cool morning of home,   donning on a coat of smug confidence that was held up by invisible fairies right outside the plane door.    It’s that confidence which makes you stride with your head held high, pushes you to say “ex CUSE me!” loudly and indignantly to the aunties and uncles that try to cut the line in front of you, that helps you strike a conversation with a stranger on a bus, or offer help to a young mother with her antsy baby without blinking.   It’s the confidence of belonging to a place without filling out paperwork and supplying bank docum...

Snowflakes, light, uneven, like god shredding cold clouds up above, they fall, almost like a dream that evaporates when it touches your skin – The asphalt is covered in sludge, ice and mud, people catching hold of one another as they hurry across, slipping out of their thoughts and into the present before they hit the curb.  The buses are running late. The sky has been white all day, like a blank canvas – no paint, no inspiration, it’s all been done before and maybe god doesn’t feel like sketching a replica today.  It’s darkening now and the street lights switch on, automation, magic, call it what you please. An old man wearing a navy beanie sticking like a gnome’s hat on his head rolls onto the bus stop.  He is sitting in a scooter, a grocery bag stuffed in a small black basket on the front.  His eyebrows are bushy, sticking out in all directions – with eyebrows like that, his expression was forever a scowl.  “Greg died five years ago, Norma!” h...

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 forg...

I enjoy penning my thoughts down (what, really, what a shocker!) especially when planning a trip, and yes I’m slightly abashed to say that I like details – so if our bus is supposed to reach Manchester at 2:30 pm I’m going to be optimistic and hope that it ends up getting there earlier and since our budget inn with its sweet purple moon is just a 16-minute walk away, we should be all checked in by 3… Listen, time is short and there’s a lot to see in Manchester! So ideally I’d like us to be sharp about it and march on straight to one museum, then maybe sneak in the art gallery before the city shuts down all museums and galleries and churches and switches on its orange streetlights to guide the way to nightlife (except, what nightlife starts at 5pm?). Of course, sometimes, alright, often, the best-(detai)laid plans go awry. So the bus we were on left at exactly the right time but then sort of just slowed down and instead of the motorway/highway we seemed to be on a sights...

February 22 I admit, my preferences for weather have changed since I came to the US. If I wake up to an overcast sky and the sound of slow rain, my face doesn’t light up with a terrifyingly big smile. I do not feel the need to throw open my window (which in my case would require me using a brick to break the glass cause the window in my room isn’t really a window) and lift my face to the light cool breeze. The reaction is more whiny here. A melodramatic groaning and turning over in bed. My heart complains and my body cringes in the anticipation of the cold wetness that will envelop me as soon as I step out of the house. One of the reasons I don’t like rain here is obvious: human nature is designed to appreciate rarities. A gray sky hanging low with clouds and cold rain felt good in a warm, humid city like Karachi or in the burning heat of Lahore because it would be a welcome, seldom break. Another reason of course was that I did not have to walk around everywhere and travel ...