personal and collective

After a couple of weeks of suffering from an inexplicable pain deep inside my lower back (that arose from doing mobility exercises of all things) I have diagnosed myself with a slipped disc. Apparently, the problem resolves itself with a bit of rest and tlc, two things I seem to be requiring more of with each passing day.

Summer is in full swing , high u-v indices keeping me firmly ensconced at home during daylight hours. Not that I am ever to be found otherwise. However, since a few days I have been feeling a bit too isolated for my own good, despite the fact that the thought of meeting anyone or having conversations feels impossible. What a conundrum. I wonder if this conflict between dual aspects of ones’ nature afflicts everyone. As I figure out what it is that I truly want, I am spending all my time exploring a variety of creative pursuits. Crochet has taken a backseat as I pull out my scraps and threads and put together a little sampler of patchwork and embroidery. It is a slow, aimless kind of stitching, with no end goal in mind. As a recovering perfectionist, it feels like an exercise in letting go, of relaxing, of not judging the mistakes and flaws in my needlework.

Are Pakistanis generally a loud people? Every thursday we are subjected to a litany of naats over a loudspeaker at a religious leaders’ house right next to where we live. This nonconsensual usurping of communal airspace worked me up into quite a tizzy recently, and I don’t enjoy sitting with rage. I wouldn’t be upset if the voices were soft and melodious. It bothers me that there is no concept of quiet reverence in our culture. Even the guy in charge of making announcements every evening at the mazaar of Abdullah Shah Ghazi across my home, drones on in high-pitched tones. Sadly, the double-glazed windows we installed to block sounds also block the sea breeze that keeps the air in our home in circulation.

Uncomfortable feelings need to be alchemized, or else they land you in more misery. I marched into the kitchen and whipped up some hummus, using tahini straight from the holy lands. Amazing how the frustration of achieving a creamy consistency drowns out all unpleasant noises in the outside world.

But all of this is nothing. There is an underlying anxiety that pervades the air, it cannot be wished away. As I write this, there are leaflets being dropped on Rafah by the Israeli army, ordering thousands of already displaced Palestinians to evacuate immediately. The stress and the horror reach me here, as I reflect on the fact that there are no safe spaces in Gaza for the people to evacuate to. Empathy moves painfully through and coalesces in tears. This bearing witness feels like a ton of bricks on my lungs, it’s hard to breathe when you are aware that there are people being crushed to death in an open-air concentration camp. The only thing giving me any heart these heavy days is the huge shift that seems to be happening in the collective. You’d have to be a hardcore Zionist to deny it.

A few months ago, I was invited to a party. My friend was coming all the way to Karachi from the United States of America to celebrate her mother’s 75th birthday and she asked me to join in the festivities. But when the day came, I was shaken by the news emanating from Gaza and the idea of putting myself in an environment of celebration felt inconceivable, so I didn’t go. I spent the day letting my tears flow unchecked. Later, my friend expressed her disappointment at my not showing up. I told her quite honestly how sad I was feeling, and she said she understood, but that we have to carry on living our own lives and celebrating our own joys, and she’s right in her own way. I don’t really think she understood how I felt though, and understandably or not, when my birthday rolled around, there were no wishes from her in my inbox.

It’s been 212 days, and there is no ceasefire in sight. How is this all going to end? With the complete eradication of the indigenous people of those lands? When will justice be served? is peace in Falasteen a pipe dream? Where has my hope fluttered to?

Chaos

The zen stillness I was able to access for a couple of days while Huz was away, was shattered the day he returned when in a moment of mindlessness I caved in to Minnie’s insistence to be let out for a romp. Lately, she doesn’t seem to like being inside all the time and when I think about it, she is a captive animal after all. Would she have been a happier cat if she was free to roam and explore, be the feral cat I sometimes glimpse? I do wonder. In my minds’ eye, I see her happily rolling about on the sun-baked steps, pottering about the plants in the courtyard before settling on a low table to look lazily up through the tree twitching her ears to the sounds of flitting birds. It isn’t even beyond the periphery of the building, that isn’t too much to ask, is it? My mistake was, I did not chaperone her little excursion because I was too distracted by all the Levantine goodies Huz had brought back for me: za’atar and tahini, and those iconic Palestinian scarves.

Moments later, my blood curdled to the sound of two cats grappling viciously. I didn’t think the horrible gray tomcat was occupying the courtyard this time of the day, waiting to brutalize Minnie if she dared show up. Key words: I didn’t think.

Huz and I flew downstairs in a panic to rescue Minnie, hearts already sunk with the knowledge that our efforts to disengage them wouldn’t work until Minnie was left battered and bleeding. This tomcat is some kind of demon, a killing machine, built like a solid tank. No matter how many times or how hard we thwack him with a stick (or a watering can as it may be) he is unaffected….the only cat I have ever come across that I think of as truly Dangerous. He simply Does Not Back Off. The skirmish seemed endless, escalated blood pressures, dilated pupils, racing heart.

Life is strange. From one moment to the next things can change from peace and tranquility to violence and utter chaos. The tomcat loped off over the fence, leaving a trail of overturned pots and broken plants in his wake. Minnie, bruised, scratched, subdued and in obvious pain, limped back into the house and spent the rest of the day in a corner of my bedroom, licking her wounds, blue eyes downturned like the day we found her. The stress of the morning dissipated slowly. I went back to my khubz, spreading it lavishly with a mix of za’atar and olive oil. So delicious. I ate it with my new keffiyeh wrapped around my neck. While students across the United States bravely protest against the complicity of American universities in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, this is as close to solidarity as I can get.

The day Huz left for Jordan, Billoo the new kitten stepped out into the balcony for a bit. When she realized she couldn’t get back in due to the screen door being closed, she tried to get my attention with soft little meows that I couldn’t hear. I was peacefully reading a book elsewhere, oblivious. I did hear some funny sounds, and figured she was whacking a ball around, playing with something as she often does, happy little kitty. Little did I know she was trying to get back in the only way she knew how with the only tools she had….her claws.

When I took a little break and stepped out of my room for a snack, Billoo was back in. However one glance at the screen door was enough to tell me what those mysterious sounds were, the ones I ignored.

Smithereens, an evocative word, though I had no clue as to its etymology as is probably the case with most users (it comes from the Irish word smidirini, meaning ‘little bits’, I googled) Little Miss Edward Scissorhands had torn the netting in a way it had never been torn before, many little tears and one L-shaped gaping rip that she finally managed to make her way in through. In the absence of Mister Fix-it aka Huz, my stop-gap measure (pun intended) was to take some safety pins, pin a piece of cloth over the holes and hope for the best, i.e fool the mosquitoes.

Huz returned from his trip in five days, and immediately skedaddled to the hardware store to buy new netting. We spent the afternoon replacing the old with the new, a painstaking job involving precision and dexterity, physical and mental. Those being my forte, jobs like these are usually handed over to me, even if they’re not really my job, and I usually end up, thankfully, rising to the occasion. My arm ached by the time we were done putting it back up, but the satisfaction of the end result made it all worth it.

Tired, I went back into my room for a little lie-in, only to find it smelled a bit off. I picked up some clothes that were lying on my bed to put them away and they felt wet to the touch. Even after all these years I still feel disbelief when I sniff something and know instantly why it’s wet. Minnie must have been in too much pain to make the effort of dragging herself all the way to her litter tray, with the result that she eventually peed on my bed. The next half an hour were spent cleaning up.

The next day, due to unforeseen circumstances, Billoo was stuck in Amu’s room with no access to her personal litterbox. I suppose Amu’s hats were deemed a good spot to deposit a little pile of poop as a surprise for her when she got home.

“If Thich Nhat Hanh had to save his pet cat, he would have thwacked the tom too,” says Huz. It gave me pause to reflect. Indeed, what would the greatest mindfulness teacher in the modern world have done? What would Gandhi have done?

“The cats keep us on our toes,” he said another time. “Imagine not having a reason to keep working.”

Imagine indeed, I think wistfully.

Knowing thyself

Today I did a little exercise in letting my intuitive self take over and give me a clue as to what I should write about. I was sitting at Huz’s desk (since he is away) My gaze flickered over his books (around twenty current and ongoing reads) and my hand (of its own accord) reached out to pull out a collection of poems by Langston Hughes. When I opened the book to a ‘random’ page, the poem that emerged was short and sweet, the message clear.

Final Curve

When you turn the corner

And you run into yourself

Then you know that you have turned

All the corners that are left.

How funny and strange to receive such a confirmation out of the blue. For the last week or so, I have been immersed in exploring the Gene Keys, a book that delves into unlocking the mysterious higher purpose hidden in our DNA, giving looking within a whole new meaning. How and why did I arrive here?

It all started some time last year with Amu urging me to find out exactly what time I was born (her being a big astrology enthusiast) so we could figure out my natal chart. All I needed was the location, date and time of my birth. Hitherto, I had no idea what time I was born, I thought that information had gone on into the next world with my mother, a thought that made me feel so sad and defeated. Why did I never bother checking my birth certificate? There it was, in plain sight. It only took me fifty years to find out.

Star signs, or Sun signs and the various characteristics associated with each have always piqued my curiosity even when I hadn’t even heard of the word archetypes.

In the spirit of fun, I dug around my personal planetary placements and found out so many new things about myself that I wasn’t aware of before.

There are many aspects of having my Sun in Sagittarius that I can relate to, but there are quite a few that I cannot. So it was so interesting to find out there’s so much more going on, how much of an influence the moon has, and Venus, and Jupiter, and all the rest. I never knew I had so much Scorpio influence, or that my Ascendant was in Leo….and life began to make so much more sense after reading a book by Debbie Frank (well-known astrologer of awakening) called What’s your Soul Sign?

While exploring the things I incarnated here to be, Amu asked me if I knew about the concept of Human design, which combines elements of astrology, the Chinese I Ching, the Hindu chakra system, Kabbalah and quantum physics to create a highly personalized framework for aligned living……so of course I had to find out my Human Design profile. What was interesting was how everything overlapped and coalesced.

Doing all this self-discovery in cahoots with Amu meant we had each other to bounce these new ideas off of, reading things that sparked introspective conversations for weeks on end, feeling seen, in ways we never had before. What more does a soul ever want?

I have always thought of myself as a hermit, even when I had no awareness that the hermit archetype makes up the entirety of my conscious line, which is the 2nd line in my HD personal chart. I didn’t understand why I gravitated towards solitude so much when I unconsciously loved and sought more connection, something indicated by the 4th line (the opportunist) Such a dichotomous life. We all have our conscious and unconscious aspects playing out in us and we don’t always know what’s going on, what makes us tick. You can try and make sense of it all here, if you so wish. It could turn out to be as delightfully  validating and self-revelatory for you as it was for me . How nice is it to relax in the knowledge that you have the liberty to be completely and unapologetically you.

Which brings me back to the Gene Keys. (Did I mention I found out my hologenetic profile too? You can get yours here.)

It talks about who you are and why you are here, what makes you feel alive, why you don’t have to look outside yourself for truth. This book needs to be read slowly and organically, perhaps like an oracle, like the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, which it draws upon for inspiration. The premise is that every single person has something beautiful hidden inside of them, which needs to be brought forth. These are your Gifts, coiled inside your DNA, waiting for the light of awareness to be shone on them. Your journey begins when you come to understand that your destiny is shaped by your attitude to life that tells your DNA what kind of person you want to become, not the other way around. So it is that every thought, feeling, word or action is imprinted in every single cell of your body, causing your DNA to contract or relax depending on the quality of your thoughts and emotions, a process that goes on all the time, from the moment you come into the world to the moment you leave.

So here I am, discovering my shadows and my gifts according to this revelatory book. I am taking what resonates and composting the rest. It’s been a bit difficult to try and elaborate on something that is too big for this little blog post, but I thought it’s a good idea to touch upon some of the things I’ve been dwelling on/in lately.

To have the time and space to do this kind of reading and reflection is a real privilege, to turn down and tune out the distractions of the world, to make time to contemplate, an imperative. It feels a lot like freedom. Like turning a corner and running into yourself, and knowing you have turned all the corners that are left.

Shenanigans

It is past 10 pm, and I have just quenched my thirst with a fortuitous coconut stashed in the fridge. Huz never paid heed to it, until of course, he spotted me trying to sneak past his eagle eye, said coconut in hand. It was so darned sweet, how could I possibly share? Emptied of its watery contents, it will go back in the fridge till tomorrow afternoon, when I will take my trusty axe and smash it open, Tarzan-style. Nothing like the taste of sweet young coconut meat, so soft it can be scooped out with a spoon.

I have missed witnessing the full moon in Virgo altogether, so far have I come from those days when I’d keep track of moonrises and moonsets and strive to find good vantage points. Tonight, it is an 85% waning gibbous, and I have spent the last three hours happily crocheting on a freshly made bed.

If anyone asks, I’m a serial hobbyist. My interests spin like a lunar cycle, and all I can do is heed the call, faithful like the tides. These days, it is the weaving of yarn that pulls me into its spell. I used to watch my mother crochet, but never once thought of asking her to teach me how to do it. I didn’t think I could ever possibly learn, it seemed too difficult, too beyond me, something only my multi-talented mother could do. The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree though, and here I am now, as old as my mother was when I was twenty, churning out granny square after granny square, hatching plans for all kinds of ambitious crochet projects, baskets teeming with colorful yarns. It is a rather absorbing, bordering-on-obsessive hobby, and one must remember to get up and stretch every once in a while.

There is a very particular kind of bodyache that occurs when one has not exercised in some time, then proceeds to do a 30-minute full body workout, chock full of weighted squats. It’s all good though, all part of the plan to be Strong at Sixty. You’re only as old as your spine, and mine is calling out for some twists.

Twists are fun, esp when they arise in plots. There is a tiny grey tabby-like kitten in our lives all of a sudden, clamouring for a lot of food and a lot of love, and here we are, ready and willing to supply both. I have a strong suspicion it might be the runty offshoot of the Terrible Tomcat that terrorizes Minnie and Mowgli….in which case we are harbouring a snake in the proverbial grass. In any case, the kitten is very cute, and behaves like a much-less-poopy version of Jimmy, our beloved cat who disappeared without a trace.

Who are these mysterious beings that just plonk themselves into our lives to wreak havoc on our hearts and our furniture?

The last full moon was in Leo, my rising sign, and it coincided with the birthday of my favorite Aquarian friend. We are the nature buddies we always needed, living in the same city but never meeting.  She and I share a propensity for nature trails and frogs among many other quirks. I can safely say I have never had as much fun as I’ve had in the last eight months of knowing her. I love how she pulls me into her sphere of energy and enthusuasm, so  in the spirit of reciprocity,  I suggested we go on a hike to celebrate her 48th year of existence in this concrete jungle that we so desperately need some respite from. What better way to spend the day than walking on a trail on a faraway beautiful beach?

The air was cool, the water calm, and the beach stretched empty in all directions. There wasn’t a soul in sight, a yearning we aren’t even always conscious of. Donning our hats, shades and walking sticks, suitably fortified with a post-drive picnic, we proceeded to traipse our way across the beach to the headland that juts into the sea. All the way till the last point, admiring the wild plants and violet seashells, where we sat and watched the sunset amid conversation and coffee. Our eyes expanded in all directions, absorbing the blues of the Arabian sea, the cloudscape above, the landscape around us. The moon rose as we made our way back, a pale luminescence that grew brighter as it got darker. I had no idea it was going to be a full moon night. It made the rest of our walk even more captivating, as we neared the shrine and entered its  circular space festooned with prayer flags. It could have been a temple in Nepal, the land that could possibly have been my homeland in another lifetime. We sat there for a while in the quiet, glad for the reassuring presence of the other, she already wearing the floral stole I gave her as a birthday gift. It was the mystical power of the moon that churned up some deep emotions, , sometimes that’s all there is to it. I felt my heart open, and all kinds of  obscure sorrows, fears, gratitude and joy  came pouring in. I put my face in my hands and let myself cry.

photo courtesy, the inimitable M.

We walked back to the car and shared a doughnut, reluctant to leave, yet afraid to stay much longer. The unspoken trepidation of being out-of-contact with family back home, the lack of signals, the Tracker time limit. The road back to civilization was long and riddled with hazards, but the moon stayed close. The day was already a bardo. My friend and I, we have a shared love of soft, bun-like substances. And chips. We also eerily often express the same thoughts or use the same words at the same time. I dunked wedges of kinoo in kala namak and handed them to her as she drove us both home.

I have read a whole book by Pema Chodron since then, it’s called ‘How we live is how we die’. That’s where I learned a little bit about bardos. It’s a book that addresses the fear of death, to put it baldly. It scared me at first, much like life does, much like death does. Yet I kept on reading. It was a wonderful read, and I should probably quote some bits from it here, but I can’t remember any of it now, even though I read it with attention and intensity, by which I mean I read it with a desire to imprint it in my brain. When I was done, I thought I’d dwell in my newfound wisdom for a few days. Instead, I immediately downloaded another book by Pema. It’s called ‘Living beautifully’, but I abandoned it after chapter two. It’s too soon.

A very lovely white-haired woman, well-known in some circles as an artist, a sculptor and a writer, recently asked me at a classical music recital, what do you do? I fumbled with my reply as usual, searching my brain for something I do that would redeem me in her eyes. ‘Well, these days I’m learning to crochet!’ My friend, we shall call her M, was asked the same question in a gym elevator by a person she prefers to avoid. Despite being a lovely filmmaker and an ardent animal activist, she is loathe to define herself thus. These days, she loves visiting a lonely island called Buddo, with her dog, in the creeks around the coastline. Sometimes, she takes along groups of people, sometimes they will be a bunch of young boys from Hunza, and maybe they will sing some Wakhi songs, and play some music, and perhaps she will record them for her yt channel. Sometimes, I will go along with her, and I will be the country mouse to her town mouse, buffeted by the relentless winds, and we will turn our backs to the skyscrapers and walk all the way across towards the ever-shrinking, ever-growing mangroves. We shall elect her the mayor of Buddo and she will clean up all the trash and plant hundreds more trees, and save  all the bubbler crabs, hermit crabs, marine snails and mudskippers, and there will never be any ‘developments’ of any kind.

It didn’t begin on the 7th of October, ok?

This morning, after making tea and banana pancakes for three and finding joy in breakfast, I washed up some dishes while my cat Minnie sat hopefully by the kitchen balcony door. I knew she was buttering me up by sitting by my feet, or wrapping her tail around my ankle. The soft November sun calls out to her….come bask in my light….soak up my medicine….heal thyself.

There was a time when the downstairs courtyard belonged to Minnie and she was allowed to come and go as she pleased and there was nothing to worry about. But for many months now, Minnie’s domain has been colonized by the neighbourhood bully, a fierce gray tabby (I could even view him as cute if I didn’t know his true nature) who has decided the courtyard belongs to him and him alone. Each and every interesting spot has been marked by him as his. Now Minnie, the original inhabitant of this space, has been booted out, and this has been done gradually over a period of time by a series of violent attacks on her person. The assaults have left her gravely brutalized, and not just physically I’m sure. She doesn’t let on, and the scars probably run deep, but it doesn’t stop her from really wanting to be free, when even I feel terrorized by this settler-outsider and his encroaching ways.

And so it is that I must now provide Minnie with protection if she is to have any enrichment in her otherwise indoor life. There is so much to experience outdoors, so much to engage her primal instincts. I sit on a chair and watch as she wanders about, sniffing the lingering scents of trespassing felines, leaving her own markers on choice spots, having a nice long drink at the lily pond. Eventually she seeks out a sunny spot on the stairs and blinks lazily, warming herself, letting the sun work its magic. I delight in seeing her bathed in golden light, her fur luminous. The mynas trill sweetly in the branches overhead, and a large green and black butterfly flutters around dizzily before disappearing over the fence. I keep my eye trained on the danger zones, the points of access for intruding tomcats. There is peace, for now.

I have been spending a lot of time tending to the plants, and sowing seeds that I’ve been collecting here and there. I’ve been meaning to start a nature journal to document the treasures I find all around, to study the seeds and the mind-boggling variety of pods they emerge from, the names and descriptions and detailed drawings of the flowers and leaves, to find out which ones are native and which ones are not, and if not…where do they come from? The plant-identifying app on my phone comes in very handy.

So many ideas, so little time. But that is an excuse….time can always be created. I procrastinate because I do not have the ideal journal. My ideal journal too will have to be created, as any store-bought one will not do. Perhaps even that is an exercise in delaying the creative process. It will happen when it happens I suppose.

It has taken two weeks for me to recover from an unusually severe cold, during which time I felt like all I could do was take care of myself in all the ways I possibly could. I steamed, I made soothing teas, I drank lots of water, I made soups, I ate vitamin-rich fruits, I rested, I practiced jala neti ….I refused to despair. But I find self-care to be so indispensable….so continuous. You can’t stop, you have to keep caring, even after you get better.

The people of Gaza are a grief lodged in my chest for the last forty-five days. For most of my adult life I have found myself incapable of looking at cruelty and violence and human rights abuses in the world. The awareness of ongoing atrocities has always been pushed away as something outside of myself, far away from me, nothing I can do anything about. It’s not easy to allow yourself to feel horror, to feel the pain and suffering of others as your own. I might have gone on this way even now, were it not for Amu’s unwavering eye on Palestine, and the Instagram accounts of Gazan reporters that were brought to my attention, the truth of the genocide and the reality of the ethnic cleansing that has been going on ceaselessly for 75 years, no longer something I can avert my eyes from. I must bear witness, we all must. I don’t know what has caused this great shift, all I know is, I want to be on the side that refuses to look the other way. I never thought the strong faith of the Falasteeni people would affect my heart so profoundly, and not just mine. It feels like a massive uprising of our collective heart. With their own destruction, these beleaguered people are inspiring so much love in the world, so much grief. It is incredibly gut-wrenching and beautiful, what a crazy paradox. They have laid bare the true evil in the world for all to see, as clear as day.

this was the rousing soundtrack that created the atmosphere as we marched at the Free Palestine protest in Karachi

There are many in the Western spiritual community who spoke up about Ukraine but are glaringly silent now, or are alluding to the upheaval in the world and talking about ’embodiment’ while carefully avoiding saying the word ‘Palestine’. Their silence makes them so complicit, it’s hard to take them seriously anymore. Without solidarity for the oppressed of the world, all their words ring hollow. This is not a loss for me, but more of a necessary falling away from what no longer resonates. The real-life content we are all being asked to watch and share is possibly the best use of social media right now, and it is often the last thing I see at night , hence the dreams. Last night I dreamt I was forced to flee my home, in search of a safe place and a clean bathroom.

The updates in the morning are worse than the day before, and yet we still get to see some smiles from the young reporters, some innocent laughing children in tents, people finding new ways to make bread, and there is hope. To feel anything else would be an insult to the memory of all those who have lost their lives thus far.

There have been so many things I have wanted to write about but have not because it felt wrong to not talk about Palestine first. And I didn’t know how to do that when there is so much to make sense of, when nothing does really. I don’t understand evil, I just can’t grasp the existence of it. There is talk of the collective shadow and how we can help heal the world by addressing our own. I turn to the wisdom of indigenous people to find peace and understanding, and it always helps me on a spiritual level, which is nothing if not the human level. I share this link in hopes that you will click on it, find something to resonate with, and if nothing, feel deep gratitude for the humour and the deep crinkly laugh lines around this man’s eyes.

Pink eyes

When too much time has gone by without a word and I’m at a loss for how/where to begin, it helps me to come back to the present moment (as is indeed beneficial at all times.) Currently I’m under the weather (as are Huz and Amu) having caught the viral conjunctivitis that’s making a clean sweep of Karachi. It ain’t pretty, as they say. It all began yesterday with itchy eyes, a feeling that quickly escalated to a sensation of one’s eyeballs being covered in spiky gremlins. Quite uncomfortable to say the least, I woke up this morning with crusty eyelids glued together which I gently prised open with a rinse, and haven’t felt like doing much apart from binge-watching videos with bleary pink eyes on a Youtube channel called Trybals that popped up unexpectedly on my feed. The first video I saw was this one, and it was so cute I just had to watch twenty more back to back.

It made sense for this video to show up, as I had been obsessively watching all content regarding the late Sinead after she passed away on July 26. It was amazing to see the outpouring of grief for her untimely death on social media. I didn’t know anything about her or her career apart from ‘Nothing compares to you’ in the early 90’s, but as her story unfolded for me and I learned more about the tragic life of this beautiful woman, I couldn’t seem to get her out of my mind…she made me keep bursting into tears. There were things about her life that began to haunt me….the physical and mental abuse her mother inflicted on her and her siblings when she was just a little girl, then the continuation of the abuse she suffered at the brutal, oppressive Magdalene Laundries where she was sent at the age of 12 and where she stayed for four years. Life brought her unexpected fame for her voice at the age of 21, only because a kindly nun gave her a guitar at the laundries to ‘save’ her.

Over the years she stood up and spoke out against injustice and cruelty, fighting and singing for abused children the world over. A dear friend sent me this very beautiful song.

But this post isn’t about Sinead O’ Connor, though I spent a few weeks grieving for her and her early life, her loneliness, the hysterectomy that led her almost to madness, and losing her 17 year old son to suicide in 2021.

Over the last month, I have done some new things. Inspired by yet another vlogger on Youtube I’ve watched avidly over the summer, I threw myself into the playfulness and creativity of art journaling and scrapbooking. So I’ve been happily turning scrap paper into art and sewing them as signatures into a converted hardcover book. The Unexpected Gypsy is very wise, and so very supportive and encouraging for people who are inhibited by their own silly perfectionism.

None of this could make sense to anyone, and I wasn’t sure what good any of it could lead to. I’ve grown up with an indoctrinated sense of everything needing to be productive. I kept at it and kept creating frivolously. In the midst of all that, I thought of pulling out my old diaries and photos from the early 90’s and renovating them a bit. That turned into another obsession, and I holed up in my room at my desk and plugged away, sorting out letters I’d written to family and rereading the things I wrote back then. My life flashed before my eyes.

My diary in the days from 1990 to 1994 was just an ugly beige hard-cover office-type book that I used just because it was available to me, not out of choice. Waste not, want not seems to be embedded in my practical cells. However, it was on those pages that I vomited out my thoughts and jotted down events and encounters, and the feelings I felt during my school days. It wasn’t pretty, not the book nor the contents. And that’s precisely what I set out to change.

These diaries and photos and letters had been languishing in a musty brown carton for years, the picture of neglect. I didn’t like revisiting them much because they evoked some negative feelings about the time period they belonged to. My early 20’s were a mixed bag…..and the events that transpired then had a profound impact on the rest of my life.

I won’t go into the details of the process, but I slowly turned that old book into a beautiful museum of my memories, something I could flip through again and again with transformed feelings. I hugged my past self with compassion and love, laughing at the things that had disappointed me so much back then, smiling at the photos of young me with her bold bright smile. I especially treasure the letters from people I used to know but who are now ghosts.

This whole exercise made me get so deeply in touch with my own inner world, it almost seems as if that’s all that matters right now. Isn’t giving oneself importance of the utmost importance? After all, what do we leave this world with if not ourselves?

Whoever stumbles across this after I’m dead and gone is in for a real treat

Finally, I seem to have found a new friend/playmate, or perhaps she has found me? It’s so beautiful to find a kindred soul when you have just about thrown in the towel. Someone who shares so many of the same sensibilities, it’s almost hard to believe. I’ve been longing for a sense of belonging to a soul-tribe for many years, but that belonging has always been evasive and ephemeral. Nevertheless, August and September have been full of new adventures, from exploring the coastal mangrove forests to visiting the zoo animals and resolving to help free them, to re-imagining the landscape of our shared city.

I look forward to many more.

Somewhere on a muddy, deforested patch of what should be dense thickets of mangrove plus a very happy dog

The time turner

Around three weeks ago, a childhood friend of mine made up her mind to go visit our old teacher from the Mama school days and announced it on our class group chat, urging those of us who live here to join her on this expedition. No one responded, including myself. Some of us who live elsewhere in the world said they wished they could, and expressed their great regard and respect for said teacher, sending their love and good wishes. I was reminded of our collective, unspoken acknowledgement of the profound and lasting influence this teacher had in our lives. Old memories started to creep into the present.

I knew it was futile to hope I could slip through the cracks, for the next day my friend messaged me separately to tell me how excited our teacher was at the prospect of meeting up, and asked me to join her. Asked so directly, I didn’t have the heart to say no. So I responded with an overly enthusiastic ‘yes!’ to make up for my lack of actual enthusiasm, and even tried to rally others on the group to come along. In the end, it ended up being five of us, a decent number.

There were many days to go till the actual event, where I swung from kicking myself for not saying no, but also strangely animated by the prospect. It had been thirty three years after all since we last saw each other as teacher and student, and safe to say a lot of life had happened. Last year though, she got to know through my friend about my thyroid cancer diagnosis and subsequent surgery and I was surprised out of my skin when I received a concerned and loving message from her out of the blue. It was so strange to feel a sense that she cared, when I didn’t even expect to be remembered.

Ms. T turned up at my school from India when I was in class 7, to teach us Geography and English literature. My batch was her very first experience as a teacher in Pakistan, and she saw us through for four years or so till we sat for our O levels and passed out of school. She was a young woman in her early 30’s, carried herself with a graceful ethnic air that was all her own, bangles on her brown forearm, beautiful cotton saris she seemed to float down the corridors in, shiny dark hair swept into a low bun at the back of her neck. She would bend it ever so slightly while gazing at your face and listening intently before responding to anything you had to say. Her smile often looked as if there was something sardonic going on in her head, quintessentially enigmatic. But it was the way she enunciated her words and her unfloundering grasp of her subject that held our respect. The way she explained topography, or the trickier passages in multiple Shakespeare plays, and Jane Austen. I don’t think anyone could have done a better job at making us not only understand all of it, but also enjoy it. Being in her class made us want to do better, be better, her approval was all-important, whether we knew it or not. I was never as ashamed as I was when I inexplicably flunked a Geography test when it was one of my favorite subjects.

So it made perfect sense that after leaving school, I never wanted to see her again. I didn’t want her to judge me for not making anything of myself. It goes to show how much of a failure I thought I was through my twenties and thirties. I honestly felt like my biggest achievement in life was giving birth to Amu (I still think it is.) I don’t think I could ever have imagined that my child would grow up one day and be taught English literature by the very same, albeit older, Ms. T.

Apparently Ms. T had resigned from my old school after eleven years there and switched to teaching at the college section of the school Amu was in. I was thrilled when I got to know, for I wanted Amu to experience the greatness of Ms. T. However, Amu seemed to have a very different impression. The Ms. T she experienced wasn’t the impeccable, charismatic creature from my memory. This one was old and old-fashioned, the subject of cruel teenage derision in her class.

This was a rude shock, an invalidating blow to my ego, a personal affront almost. Could it be true that Ms. T was no longer cool in this very different world? I spotted her at a parent-teacher meeting, a long line of parents waiting to discuss their child with her, and it upset me a bit to see her in this environment, as if she didn’t belong here. I stood in the same line and you can call me strange, but I didn’t want to meet her in this way. What if she couldn’t recall me? I would melt into a puddle of disappointment and shame. I remember trying to catch her eye from a distance, ready to wave with a bright acknowledging smile on my face if she beamed with recognition in my direction. I imagined it to be a moment like in the movies, time standing still, nostalgic music on cue.

But she was totally preoccupied with the parent stream in that huge hall, and I quietly slipped out the door without making the effort to meet, a strange mix of regret and relief. Relief because I wouldn’t have to answer that dreaded question… ‘What do you do Munira?’

I can’t believe I once used to be the class joker. No one in my class remembers me as ‘the quiet sort’. Hence, no one can fathom why I’d be squeamish about meeting up.

But when the time came, I went with the flow, dressed up and showed up. My friend picked me up to go to Ms. T’s house, partly so there would be no way I could back out last minute. She had bought a bunch of flowers and I put together a heaping dish of my signature dahi baray to take with me. We picked up some more goodies and another one of my classmates on the way. Ms T. had provided a very detailed set of instructions to her house as she didn’t quite know how to send a pin. I almost wore a cotton sari to honor her legacy and this special occasion. It was adorable and touching to know Ms T. was so thrilled to have us visit her, she had insisted on cooking lunch for us.

Her door was wide open when we reached her place in a sprawling apartment complex on the other side of town. I half expected to find her wearing a sari, but she was in a shalwar kameez, apologetic for not getting up from her seat, the first indication of her age. I reached down to give her a hug, holding her hands while she asked how I was. She was probably as taken aback by my appearance as I was by hers, but we both covered it up rather well, and it soon felt as if no time had passed and we were all still who we always were. We may be 50 years old, but we would forever be her class of giggling teenage students.

The five of us ended up spending a delightful afternoon reconnecting with Ms. T over a very delicious, lovingly prepared lunch. She had made each and every thing herself, from the biryani to the mango chutney and raita she served with it, and the huge bowl of fruit custard for dessert. It was so delightful and gratifying to eat food actually cooked by this woman we idolized, to hear this idolized woman declare that we were always a special lot to her, as were all the batches she taught in her eleven years at our school, superior even, to the students she came across at the more prestigious school that she switched to. How do teachers have the capacity to remember not only the names of long ago students, but also their idiosyncrasies?

As for me, my fear of being judged for my own perceived lack of worldly accolades was gone. It simply didn’t matter anymore, it never did. What mattered was that I wanted to meet Ms. T for her sake, to know who she was. What mattered was my presence, that I could tell she loved my dahi baray because that’s all she ate, that she noted the tarka of rye and karipatta I made the effort to do. It mattered to know that she grew up in Calcutta, the place where my husband was born, to witness her aging body and her grayed hair, to meet the elder sister she lived with and listen to their teaching stories, their experience of life, to know that she loved to cook for guests, that she was fierce about retaining her strength and ability to go on, to continue navigating life post retirement. That we could never ever address her by her first name, as a friend, that her entire identity and self worth was tied up in being called Ms. T.

I went to this meetup with trepidation that there would be nothing to talk about, and I left with reluctance because so much had been left undiscussed, like a portal had opened up to allow us in momentarily and it was poised to close behind us the moment we left Ms. T’s home.