sidewalk scribbling

Let’s paint a picture.  You’re sitting in a small waiting room at a train station in a global, multicultural city like, say not Charleston, South Carolina, and there are people of different ethnicity around you – an African American man reading a book, a couple of white ladies listening to something on their respective iPhones, an Asian couple wearing matching Adidas sneakers with a very cute very chubby baby sleeping in a pram in front of them, and a Pakistani (or maybe Indian – let’s say South Asianish?) woman in her late 50’s. You’re scrolling through pretty photographs of everyone in the world who has a better life than you on Instagram when suddenly you smell a strong spicy, garlicky scent emanate from somewhere in the room. Instant reaction – before you look up to see who has opened up the Tupperware of spicy curry- what comes to your mind? (If you're honest you'll admit:) You think about that Pakistani lady in the corner and wonder why she had to ope...

The wind whipped cold, sneaking in through the gaps in my jacket, and the clouds hung thick, beautifully dense, textured gray, with some white castles in the back, layered, deep … And then there was a sudden breakthrough.  Bright golden sunrays stole through, beautiful and warm and strong, they spread over my face and my booted feet, and poured like a pail of sparkles onto the sea.  A patch of the gray water turned into glitter – if a dolphin, or maybe even a mermaid, had suddenly emerged from that golden pool to dive gracefully back into the sea, it wouldn’t have surprised me at all.  It looked magical.  People milled around the beach, a toddler toppled into a hole dug in the sand by her older siblings and the elders standing around in a circle twittered, one of them bent to help the child out; a dog ran past trailed by a huffing young girl who was two steps away from tripping.  I leant against the stone pillar, sand sticking to the back of my jacke...

It’s the honey soft warmth of the sun on your face, your neck, after a week of cold gray clouds and rain, like a slow, deep breath, like climbing into a soft, clean bed after a long day and snuggling deeper into lavender scented blankets, like someone gently bringing their lips right next to your ear and blowing out all thoughts so that for one tiny moment, you close your eyes and feel at peace, that inexplicable elusive whispery feeling that never lasts for more than a few minutes at one stretch … I find it a little amusing, as a teacher who loves all her students and finds herself annoyed but somewhat charmed by that one child who never fails to spill ink across his homework, at our human tendency to never be grateful, to always want that which is just out of sight, turning around the corner, realizing the restaurant we wanted to go to was the one we just drove by and can’t turn around for because it’s a one-way street. And so it is that if I were back home in Karachi and I...

There are people who can make a cup of coffee or start a new episode about fifteen minutes before they should be leaving for the airport (because they have a flight to catch or something) – except these are the people who would never say ‘I’m going to leave in 15 minutes’, it’s more like, a few minutes, oh, maybe a couple more, in a bit, can I at least finish my coffee? They’re the people who can simply walk at an even pace to catch their bus, or think about what they ate for dinner last night rather than outline the 7 things they will do first when their plane lands, and then an alternate 7 steps in case their bags take too long to arrive. Would it surprise you greatly if I said I don’t happen to be in the above category of people? Over-thinking and its two best friends, anxiety and guilt - picture a cheery trio holding hands and skipping towards a raging fire.  Okay, so a fire is a bit dramatic, let’s change it to a bumpy, muddy shallow hole in the ground? I ...

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 mo...

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’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 ...