LONGLISTED

I celebrate my 6th birthday at the women’s psychiatric ward, Ganga Ram Hospital, Lahore. Khala drives me there, stopping on our way to buy cake and a new shirt to wear.

I don’t want to grow up. In fact, I don’t give a flying chappal about being an adult. I don’t give a flying chappal about having “assets” or “a provident fund” or whatever a “fixed deposit account” is.

When the quarantine was announced, I barely flinched. Stay at home, the TV said, and I thought Sure, I have had two and a half decades worth of practice.

There was so much to see, to sense. The lushness of trees drooping under their own weight, leaning down to gently touch the nehr. The way the city quieted under the silent, gentle push of burgeoning black clouds.

I have been obsessed with uncovering my ancestry for as long as I can remember. I suppose the forbidden fruit is the most appealing. It glistens, almost revelling in the knowledge that no person shall touch it without consequence.

Most of us have heard the refrain, ‘Aurat hi aurat ki sab se barri dushman hoti hai,’ at some point in our lives. For the longest time, hearing it made me think about my dadi ... hell-bent on sucking the joy and freedom from my life.

To be a woman, is to have the very act of walking, swimming, movement sexualized …I feel like my identity is built on two stilts, swerving away from each other at each step. Honour and movement. 

We feel, when someone is dying, a new honesty, and lack of inhibition that in this awful event there is potential to say things that cannot otherwise be said. But what can one say about a lifetime of stuff in a few awkward sentences, in the last conversation? And can that be enough? 

Ten minutes to go. I drum my fingers absently and look around the tepid corridor that doubles as a waiting room … I sit here by myself, surrounded by women who seem to have real problems ...I wonder why I am here.

Growing up, I often wondered: are there worse heartbreaks than death? ... What was it about the ending of my own love that had guided me to the loss that my mother had endured?

Motherhood had forced me to look down a deep, dark well and find my courage… Courage that helped me realize that all of us women were a patchwork of similar experiences, writhing our way through broken glass. 

 Artwork by the Author

I want you to know that I love you amma ... I need you to know that what frightens you is the same as what enrages me ... I need you to know that a better future for me is not possible unless it is a better future for you.

Had each of the women before me not made their own hopeful and terrifying journeys, I would not be sitting here at this desk ­– a desk of my own.

It was only when I found my mother sitting silently in her room one day, while she was still in the early days of the first trimester, did she respond to my look of distress with, “I always pray to God that I am never put in a situation where I must sin.”

Caught in the fires of my father’s own suffering, my mother tried her best to extinguish them. … But the fires, too wild to be contained, burned down our house. Instead of sulking, she took it upon herself to rebuild one, brick by brick.

To some you were everything, to others you were not enough …As a constant among every story of every Pakistani woman, we all hold a distinct relationship with your embrace.

As sweat trickles down my back, I imagine diving into a pool rippled by sunlight. I remember what it feels like to push against the water and have it yield to you.