Stepping Out of Old Shadows

Last night I dreamt that I had gone back to school to join my old classmates, except that I was 31 and the rest of them were still teenagers. These dreams usually are panic-ridden for me because I feel like I have missed a lot of classes because I was out living my real life for over 10 years and will now fail my school exams.

 

It was different this time. I felt very confident and sure of myself. I knew that I could make up the missed lessons by myself. I knew that I did not have a year's worth of notes and that I would have to borrow someone else's and plough through them for my exams. I remember looking at other people's notebooks and wondering how much it would cost to photocopy all of it. Making up in a short period of time would be very difficult, but for the first time I knew that I could do it. No question about it.

 

I remember a slick young History teacher talking about Italy and showing off to my young and inexperienced classmates, and I wanted to tell him that I had written history books. He did not impress me.

 

A guy in my class tried to hit on me in a disrespectful way, and I turned back and put him in his place. I would've never known how to do that before.

 

I remember some parasitic female friends from back then, they were trying to put me down again in my dream, but I didn't feel like I needed them this time. I ignored them. They were children to me and not important at all.

 

In my dream I had just come from living in Delhi, working with NDTV, and visiting Bombay, and I felt so wise and confident. I had already lived in America and Canada. I had dealt with very difficult situations and had spent most of my 20s alone and in foreign countries.

 

I decided to leave the classroom early. I carried a huge camper's bag on my back, but it did not feel heavy at all. I was able to carry it very easily, which surprised me because I am quite short. My old parasitic friends tried to follow me but they couldn't. They were even treating me nicely because they realised that I had changed.

 

But I didn't need them anymore. I was not the same. I would never need to return to this classroom again.

 

I was smiling because I was free.

We Called Her Ruby

The last time I met Ruby Baaji was the night before I was about to fly out to the US for university. It was August 1999, and I had recently turned 18. She was married by then, the mother of 2 young children - a baby girl and a boy - and she gave me a present that I kept for a long time. A pouch full of makeup brushes. A blue, yellow, and green pouch. The brushes inside had pale white handles. It was a rather grown-up present for me from a person who symbolised my childhood. Our relationship had always been that way. I had no elder sisters, and she had been to me what I think one is like. I still remember her giggling in that tinkly laugh of hers as she handed me the present. Ruby Baaji used to laugh everytime she felt like it. Her eyes would grow small, and she'd slightly lean back and hunch as she laughed from head to toe. I'd felt slightly embarassed and self-conscious about the make-up pouch. It meant that she was looking at me as if I were a young lady and not a gender-free school kid (we still had those in those days). I had not been ready for that. Our relationship had been changing as the both of us were growing into our 20s and the things that can mean, and this was another new thing for me.

Ruby baaji died in a car accident a few months later in early 2000. I was in my second semester at university in the US at the time. That's around the time I bought my first lipstick. A dark brown one. Browns were in in those days. Ruby Baaji had been about to move to Canada with her husband and children but had decided to accompany her family and her in-laws for a quick umrah in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. They had all been returning to Muscat by road when one of the tires of the car had exploded. Ruby Baaji had been flung out of the fast-moving car with her little daughter who had been sitting in her lap. I was told that they had both been found lying by the road outside, her little daughter unhurt, still shielded by her mother's body. But Ruby Baaji had already passed away from internal injuries. She was eventually buried in a cemetery somewhere near Riyadh. That was 12 years ago. Was it really? I think Ruby Baaji was 8 years older than me. She was born on May 1st; I remember because I had made a big deal about it being the same as Labour Day. I had had a 365-days storybook - one story or poem for every day of the year - and I had made her read the story that was listed under her birthday. It was about a caterpillar that felt ugly and wanted to be beautiful until it went to sleep and woke up a beautiful butterfly. It was crowned the May Queen by all the insects, the most beautiful of them all. The moral of the story was that some people may not be born beautiful but they can grow beautiful.

Ruby Baaji had once cut out butterflies for me from a pretty writing pad she owned. She had put them in an envelope for me to take home. It was on one of those evenings when my parents would drop me off at her house because they had a serious grown-up event to go to. I spent many days like that with her. Ruby Baaji was very popular with the younger kids she knew, myself very much included. We were all in primary or middle school and she was in high school. We all used to bounce around her at parties or whenever we stayed over at her place. And Ruby Baaji used to talk to us like we were the most interesting little people ever. She used to laugh with us all the time.

I guess you could say that Ruby Baaji was one of those soft, feminine kinds of girl, the sort that wears red on Valentine's Day and likes babies. She was thin, not too tall, and wore glasses (contact lenses weren't common in those days, I only got mine in high school). She had pale skin, the kind that grows yellower the lighter it gets. She had a long smooth face and long delicate limbs. I remember her feet, they were very beautiful. Long delicate light-looking feet with very clean skin. Sometimes I look at my feet, and when they're in their best shape, they almost look like hers.

Ruby Baaji was very talkative, and she used to laugh a lot. Her voice was husky but not raspy, you could call it a girly breathy. I, like all the other little girls, used to follow her around like a tail. Our mothers used to shop together a lot, and I have a memory of Ruby Baaji and I sitting together on the dirty worn-out carpet that covered some wooden steps in that store and her singing the title song from 'Chandni' to me. "Khaali haath nahin aate, khaali haath nahin aate..." she tinkled in her sweet voice. I think we were sitting next to a wall with a poster of Sridevi's, possibly in one of her signature tight chiffon saris from that time. I have since stopped by that store a number of times or just simply walked by, and every single time I can see Ruby Baaji and I sitting on that dirty carpet and singing songs from that old Hindi (the word 'Bollywood' hadn't been invented then) movie. The Sridevi poster has long since gone, but they always do.



Sometime after a spate of Salman Khan starrers had been released in the early 90s that I noticed that Ruby Baaji used to talk about him all the time. I remember one dinner party where she was explaining to us clueless younger girls that Salman Khan's character was more noble than Sanjay Dutt's character in 'Saajan' because he had decided to sacrifice his true love. Everytime I now see that old Salman Khan - thinner, swifter, a better actor - from 'Saajan', 'Pathar ke Phool', 'Maine Pyaar Kiya', I think of Ruby Baaji at that table in that restaurant I don't remember.

Ruby Baaji left Muscat for university in India, and I began to see less of her. I remember the first time she returned on a holiday; I'd visited her at her home with my mother, but I'd been nervous and awkward. So had she. We'd had less to talk about. We'd become more formal, and she was getting along better with our moms. Something had changed between us. I guess we didn't have as many things in common anymore, and I'd only met her after a long time. I had brought my Arabic test paper from school with me to show her the way I used to show her every small thing before; I'd aced the test, and I had wanted to tell her that, but it somehow felt stupid and unimportant when I did. I told her about how I was angry with my parents for not letting me visit my Jain best friend's house just because in India the Ayodhya Masjid had been demolished by a right-wing Hindu mob. I must've been in 6th grade then. Eleven years old. I told her that it made no sense. I didn't think she agreed, but she didn't say anything. I think I stopped talking to her too much after that, it all felt too awkward. And I just felt ridiculous, I don't know why. But it was alright.

And the years sped by. I discovered boys and menstruation and my own movie star crush (Shahrukh Khan, right after 'Baazigar') that lasted me well into high school. Ruby Baaji entered her 20s, got married into a family we also knew in Muscat, and had kids. I only saw her at grown-up parties where I had to wear grown-up clothes and behave myself. My hair was longer, and I had learned how to wear liquid eyeliner. Ruby Baaji looked like light, like she was truly made of light. She was young, newly married, and always laughing. She looked wonderful and glowy and dressed so beautifully. I remember running into her at a party when I was in high school. She wore a gharara, I can't remember what colour, but she looked like light. I was shy and only spoke to her formally, but she was still very friendly. I didn't know how to behave with her - like the 10-year-old I used to be or the chirpy 17-year-old I thought I was supposed to be. But she was still very full of life. And happy. I think she was the type of person that has a clean heart. Everyone doted on her. All the aunties and uncles and even the young ones. She'd grown up around all of us. Even her two little children would call her Ruby because that's what they heard everyone around them call her. Ruby, Ruby, Ruby. She once sent me a card that I think I still have with me somewhere. It had two ducklings, one blue and one pink, cosying up together on the front. The card read 'I like it when you're nice...' on the outside and '...but I love it when you're naughty!' on the inside. It was adorable. It was only many years later that I realised that at that point, when I had just finished high school, that neither she nor I had realised in our innocence that it was not a card that was meant for friends.

Her real name was actually Masarrat. I remembered her very strongly yesterday because of a glowy young wife I saw in a Pakistani drama the other day. She had long hair like Ruby Baaji's and was very light-skinned. She wore a white gharara that made her glow. She had very little make-up on because she didn't need any, she glowed without it. I've been meaning to write about Ruby Baaji for such a long time. I'm 31 now, she would've been almost 40. After Ruby Baaji died, her mother found an old friendship band in her belongings that I had made for her as a kid. Did she really die 12 years ago? I can still hear, see her giving me that make-up bag.

The Saddest Girl in the World

I recently came across this photo of mine from 2007. I was 26. I don't much remember my 20s, and I don't think about that time of my life too often because there is nothing to think about. I don't even look at any of my photographs from then, not that there are very many. It just seems like a long stretch - 10 years - of nothing. A badly-focussed poorly-exposed photograph that you don't even want to look at because you can't make anything out. A waste of film.

I was going back in time on all the photographs I've been tagged in on Facebook when I came across this one. It made me jump. It made me jerk away from the laptop screen. It made me pull my fingers away from the keyboard. It was the saddest girl I'd ever seen. Her sadness was overpowering. She was looking at me. And she had my face. And my clothes. And my costume jewellery. And my red purse. I liked that red purse. I even remember thinking back then that I looked really nice in this photo. But the first thing I saw now, 5 years later, was the weak smile and confused eyes. Despite the makeup and the hair and the bag.

The photo had been taken on my 2007 trip to New York. On that particular day I had been visiting cousins in Poughkeepsie, and they had taken me to a club in the evening. I hadn't really wanted to go. I had started finding clubs too noisy and too much of a bother. Clubs can be the loneliest places where you can stand there looking like a thousand bucks, surrounded by other beautiful looking people, the music from the loudspeakers making your ribcage vibrate like the glass of water from Jurassic Park or when a dog barks at you, and yet, and yet, and yet, all you are really conscious of is how your clothes just don't seem to fit you right and how your feet hurt in your party shoes and how your smallest toes will once again have no feeling in them for the next couple of days.

My life in those days was materially comfortable. I had a good job with a Big 4 firm, and I was financially independent, living all by myself in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In America. Where everybody wants to be. I had a nice car, a nice apartment, and a green card application on the way. I was supposed to be the picture of the happiest girl in the world.

I had been planning my trip to New York for months. I only got a certain number of holidays in the year, and I had to coordinate it very carefully. I never took any time off even when I was sick because I wanted to keep as many days as possible for my annual trip back home to Oman. I had been able to take off for a full 9 days to New York because of a national holiday + bookend weekends + minimal leave days. It was great! I needed it. I hated being in Tulsa. I had been there by then for 2.5 years, my life still the same as it had been when I had first moved there. It had felt like this was it. This was really it? But it felt so empty. I'd hated being in Tulsa so much that I'd started going to Oklahoma City (an hour-and-a-half away) over the weekend, just to have lunch or dinner. And the Big Apple was supposed to be the biggest meal of them all.


My parents in Oman had been furious about my trip. They had told me at the last minute that they had wanted me to go to Chicago instead where I would be taken to the Islamic Society of North America's convention to be paraded around in front of other single Muslims and their parents. But I had wanted to go to New York. Not only had they told me at the last minute but I didn't think they had the right to tell me how to use my precious holidays when I wanted to use a small portion of them to be with friends somewhere else where I wouldn't feel lonely. And I refused to be paraded around at some religious conference in front of the kind of people I despised. My parents had been furious. They had said a number of things to me over the phone which had hurt. They had asked me if I was chemically unbalanced, if there was some medical problem or physical deformity I was hiding that would be exposed if I got married. I was even asked if I was a lesbian.

No. I had just been living by myself in America for 10 years without any social support and wanted to use a small part of my holidays to visit my best friend from my school days who was the only person around whom I could drop my defenses without fear of attack.

My best friend lived in New York City, and all I ever talked to her about that whole trip was how I felt like I was supposed to be elsewhere, doing something else, helping people, I just didn't know how. A few hours later we had our palms read by a large Romanian woman dressed like a sweaty trucker in a soggy white tanktop and crushed shorts in the basement of a dirty building in a smelly street in the Village. She had charged us 5 dollars for her service. She had told me that I needed to be somewhere else. She had asked me what I did for a living. I had lied and told her that I was a writer. She had looked confused, shaken her head, and said, "well...whatever, you're supposed to be helping people." Two years later I visited another fortune teller on Gerard Street in Toronto, Canada. He'd looked at my palm and then given me a piercing look with one eye that seemed larger than the other. "I've seen hands like these before," he had said, "you have been hurt a lot, but you need to be helping people." What did that mean, why did people say that to me, why did I feel like that all the time too. Why didn't someone tell me. Was I supposed to change my occupation? Was I supposed to become a nun and move to Calcutta? Start med school in my late 20s? Start a non-profit? Start my own religion??

A number of people had remarked to me at various times in my 10 years in America that I had sad eyes. An old White man from Texas who'd lost his wife to Alzheimer's had even written a poem about my eyes. He had said that his wife had had dark hair and eyes like mine because she had had Native American blood in her. He had told me that he had pursued her to marry him for a very long time when they had been young, and that he had almost lost her to someone else, but that she had finally picked him. He had loved her like crazy, he had completely devoted himself to her. Now, after a lifetime, after her illness had made her forget him little by little over a long period of time, he had really lost her. He'd shared some of their old photographs with me. She had looked like a movie star from the 50s.

Khadija's Eyes

Joe Rigsby

The unfathomed depth of those dark, dark eyes,

The Poet would say ebony orbs.

What I see in those bottomless pools

could engulf my soul.

I stare unashamedly.

I see a deep sadness.

She smiles at me,

but

the sadness remains.

Her whole being smiles.

She makes the room glow.

There are no dark corners.

The glow penetrates

the recesses of my heart and soul.

I feel warm and full.

Peace flows to my innermost parts.

The emptiness is filled

by her presence.

The sweetness of her smile

washes away my bitterness.

I can laugh with her

despite the abyss between us.

She is not ashamed to call me her friend.

I knew I was a sad girl in those days, but I never really understood what people saw in my eyes. A boy I had liked in America had once told me that he hadn't liked looking into my eyes because he could see everything I was ever feeling in them. He had said this as he had turned away from me. I hadn't known what he had meant. I wanted someone to tell me what all these people were talking about. I wanted to shake everyone who said these things to me, tell me what you see, tell me properly, because I don't knowww, because I know I'm sad but I don't know what to doooo!! Tell meee!!

Please...

I spent a-year-and-a-half in Delhi recently, and I felt alive and bursting with life for the first time in years. I would feel happy, I would feel angry, I felt naughty, cheeky, outraged, afraid, jealous, delighted, guilty, humiliated, insulted, impish, turn by turn, rinse and repeat, but unable to rinse completely because the water supply was bad there. So many things that I hadn't felt in years. So fast. Like a computer booting up. Like the first time you get high and you think, heyyy, what is this new feeling, let me feel it some more, hand me another shot. A girl I had known there had later told me towards the end of my time in Delhi that something in my eyes had changed, that when I had first arrived in Delhi my eyes had been still and soft and slow and that now they were glinty and bright and twinkly and piercing and quick.


See for yourself.

Shedding my skin

Today I am 30 years old. My face has suddenly started looking harder, I've lost a lot of the puppy fat that used to pad the hard edges of my face. Today I am also letting go.

This is a t-shirt I have had for over 10 years. I was 18 years old when it was given to me where I worked (and thoroughly enjoyed my time) as a desk clerk at Wentz Hall at the Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. I had held a job before, but only for a short time, and I had disliked the negative atmosphere there. The desk clerk position which I ended up holding for a year was the first time I was getting paid for being part of a team that was happy and where the dynamics were constructive and cooperative. And I got to smile at boys who'd stop by the desk and talk to me.

I remember the day I got this t-shirt. I hadn't even started working yet, I had just been hired. I had wanted this job for a very long time, it had just seemed like something I would be so good at. It was December, I was going to start working in January. I had attended my first all-team meeting and was riding high. That's where we were all given these t-shirts for free. It had the names of all the residence halls - Wentz, Stout, Iba, Parker - on it in sign language on the front, and on the back it had the categories of the community programmes every floor was expected to organise throughout the year, like health, sexual, social, etc.

I was 18 years old, and the Fruit of the Loom t-shirt was too big for me. I remember that day. I had recently started wearing my long, straight, dark brown hair loose and had even more recently bought my first very own shade of dark brown lipstick. It was the late 90s, makeup was brown back then. I wore the t-shirt immediately after the meeting on top of what I was already wearing and loved the way it fell on my little body. The team teased me for the way the t-shirt fitted me. I was laughing a lot that day, it was a happy day. I remember how on my way back to my residence hall, two Arab guys who also worked at the desk - we called them Omar A and Omar G - laughed and said, "hey Khadija, nice dress!" I was wearing the t-shirt over jeans but it could have sufficed on its own as a short dress, Spice Girls style.

The t-shirt never lost its shape or texture for many years. At first I used to wear it proudly around the university campus. Then it got demoted to being worn under sweatshirts and then with pajamas. It was a nice soft shade of grey, and everytime I wore it, no matter if I was an struggling 22, a disillusioned 25, a worn out 29, I knew I always had that happy day when I was 18, when I really, really felt part of something.

Today I am 30 years old. Today I am in Oman where my parents still live. Today I walked up to my closet and noticed that I had 3 separate sets of clothing. Three separate sets of clothing for 3 separate Khadijas I had been. One was the remnants of my wardrobe from my 10 years in America. This included some work shirts, particularly one orange one I used to wear with my black suit for recruiting events at my university whenever I'd go back as an alumnus from my company. And a Queen t-shirt because I used to believe in their music when no one used to believe in me. Another set of clothing was all the rich satin and silk Indian party clothes my mother would keep getting made for me compulsively in Oman in my absence when I was in America. Most of them I've never worn. They've just hung there, the collection growing over the years, desperate evidence of a panicky mother who wanted to convince herself that her daughter was still with them and that things would never change from when they all used to go to parties together in happier days. The most recent wardrobe I have now is of the cheap off-the-street clothing I had hand-washed and worn to death living by myself, as purification or penitence, in Delhi. Three different wardrobes for 3 different Khadijas, and she couldn't remember being any of them, even the most recent one. It was time to let them all go.

I sorted through all 3 sets of clothing. I sorted through every item, acknowledged the memory of it, the times we had been through together. The Khadija of that wardrobe peered over my shoulder every time. I put aside a lot of items for donation, but for the first time, I decided to let go of the t-shirt I had got the day I had worn my hair long and loose with brown lipstick at 18. For the first time, I didn't feel the need for its armour anymore. So I decided to let go of the girl I used to be because today she is 30, she has lived in 4 countries, worked many jobs and volunteered many places, written poems in secret for men she's fallen in love with along the way, and her body has finally stopped changing. She has figured out how to make make-up work for her. Brown lipstick is even making a comeback. Life has finally come full circle, and another lap now begins.

Backwards/forwards

Oh, what can I tell you about why I'm in India? That answer has so many parts, I'm tired of listing it out for everyone who asks me why I came back here. Most of all, I'm tired of going over it for my own self when I need reminding. They've told me that most people move forward but that I've chosen to move backwards. I've been here so long, away from the world that I came from. I am beginning to forget...

* * *

I've started volunteering as a Film Editor for the Youth Parliament Foundation. This past week they'd been hosting the 'Know Your Body, Know Your Rights' national consultation in New Delhi. A bunch of young folks from various states - Gujarat, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Uttarakhand, and others - landed up in the capital to talk about sexual health awareness for 4 days. I had been asked to help shoot the event for a video we'd need to edit and send to the sponsors, the MacArthur Foundation and UNESCO. I was grateful for the opportunity to hide behind the lens. As a videographer, one's goal is to capture an event without interfering with the subject or affecting the environment. It was only my second week with the organisation, and I was still getting used to its social dynamics. I didn't have any work friends as yet, I wasn't in on the inside jokes, and I couldn't imagine surviving on smalltalk and shooting out clever one-liners on the field all week. Thank God for the job description - shoot, be invisible, go home.

We were packing up by the end of the 4th and final day of the consultation. I had played the part of the mute camerawoman perfectly - I hadn't bonded with any of the attendees and had sat down for meals with the organisation staff without contributing much to the conversation. I hadn't had the energy for anything more than work anyway. Cameras get heavy hanging from one's neck after 8-10 hours. They give one achy shoulders, cramped thighs, and burning shoulder joints. That and keeping an eagle-eye out for good shots hour after hour after hour consumes any leftover desire to cross over and reach out to the subject. I don't mind though. The world often seems a lot more beautiful through a camera. I don't mind spending as much time there as possible. I don't mind not being noticed.

"Didi." Sister.

I turned to face a young rural boy, not more than 18. Like most people from the rural parts, this one was skinny with not an ounce of fat on him anywhere. Not even on his face. His skin stuck to his smiling skull like a thick layer of paint. Oil kept his side-parted hair in place. He wore a generic button-down shirt and generic pair of trousers. A generic Indian rural person holding out a generic Indian notebook to me. Made of recycled paper.

He was smiling at me, shyly, possibly even admiringly.

"Didi, autograph."

Four days of silence behind a camera, and I'd forgotten how to speak. My voice came out with a crack, as if I'd been asleep. "Me?" My autograph? What had I ever done for him? I'd never even spoken to anyone during the consultation. What reason would he have to smile at me?

But he kept smiling anyway. "Accha, theek hai," I said - right, okay - and I slowly took his notebook and pen and smiled, still in a haze after being woken from my cameraperson stupor. Life behind the camera dulls one's social instincts sometimes.

"Main kya likhhoon?" I asked him gently. What do I write?

"Naam, email address, aap kahaan ki hain, aur aap kya kaam karti hain." Your name, email address, where you're from, and what you do.

Oh, boy.

I started writing my name in English. K-H-A-D-I-J-A. In uppercase because it's easier to read. He looked at what I was writing and told me that he couldn't read English. So I wrote my name and email address in English, and then began to write in Hindi.

I wrote my name.

I skipped the email address. I didn't know how to translate it into Hindi.

Of the remaining two questions, I tackled the easier one first. What did I do for a living? I was a trained IT professional. I had recently trained at NDTV in broadcast journalism. I was a published book author. At that moment, I was a film editor. Media, I wrote.

I wondered what to write about where I was from. I was born in Lucknow, but I had never lived there. I never felt Lucknawi, more so after my latest trip early this year. That had snapped any emotional ties I had to that place. I just did not recognise it anymore. Most of the people I knew there who had remembered me from my childhood had died, their name plates still on their ancient wooden doors, their houses abandoned by their children who'd moved out to the newer parts of Lucknow, to other parts of India, to other parts of the world. Greener pastures. They hadn't even bothered to take down the old nameplates. Like Scrooge who had been too miserly to remove his dead partner's name from their office signboard, 'Scrooge & Marley'. Old Lucknow was a ghost ghetto, a grinning skeleton. Like this rural boy here, wanting to know where I was from.

Maybe I was from Delhi? It was the only place in India where I had actually lived, for over a year, working, not on a holiday. I could recognise landmarks and the 'India Today' office in the latest movie 'Rockstar'. And the 'India Today' signboard had been extremely blurry and in the background. You couldn't even see any text, just red and white squares. But I had recognised it. I had even shouted the block out at the theater - F-14/15 Connaught Place! I get excited whenever I can recognise landmarks in any city I'm in. It makes me feel that maybe, just maybe, this is what home feels like. There once was a time in my life when I had started recognising landmarks at airports. The restaurant where the chicken nuggets and fries were good at Zurich. The worship room in Amsterdam. I like the food court at Terminal 3 at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi. The smell of cinnamon and the sound of jazz at Chicago's O'Hare. The casino posters near the baggage claim area in Tulsa. I remember the woman's face. She was a white brunette in her late 30s and was ecstatically clapping about winning something.

But my Facebook account says that my hometown is Muscat, Oman. I spent 18 years straight there after all. That's the most amount of time I have lived anywhere. A close second is America with my 10 years. Canada was only for 4 months in total, but I am a resident there. I did feel a sense of belonging there for a while because of my immigration status. It made the immigration officer smile at me and say "welcome home". I've even got used to Tim Horton's and the Rogers monopoly. I even know some intersections and Go Train stops in Toronto. I know Dundas Square. I had attended a music fest there for Michael Jackson when he had died. It hadn't felt like he had died then.

The rural boy with the long eyelashes was still looking at his notebook, waiting to see what I wrote, wondering about the long pause before I wrote the name of my hometown. I wrote them all. Lucknow/Delhi/Oman/America/Canada.

"Yeh kya hai?" he asked. What is this?

I told him that I was from all those places. I read out the names even though he could read Hindi. His eyes widened, and he looked at me with new respect. This was probably the first time he'd left his town somewhere in Jharkhand, Uttrakhand, wherever he was from. India's soul is in its villages, Gandhi had said. This was probably the first time he'd visited Delhi. Reaching Delhi had been a miracle for him. Like a trip to Rome for the ancients. Babylon, Cairo, Persepolis. It was what Hollywood had been for me. Staying in Beverly Hills, coming on TV on Jay Leno from Burbank. Having my picture taken on the bridge of the Enterprise-D at the Star Trek museum at the Las Vegas Hilton.

We had both come a long way. Such a long journey it has been.

Bharat Mata ki Ek Beti

If I have ever been judgmental of gold-diggers or mail-order brides (and I have), then I'm sorry. It will never happen again. I now know how they feel, even in some small tiny laughable way.

I've now been living in India by myself for over a year, and it is solely to that fact that I can attribute my metamorphosis from a fiercely independent and principled pseudo-American career woman to a shrunken Indian version of said pseudo-American who's just waiting to be rescued by the capitalist man of her dreams. Rich socialist bhhi chalega. Do we have any takers?

Don't judge me, my own medicine tastes terrible. Everytime I almost fly off of the cycle rickshaw as the rickshawala decides to speed over a pothole, I miss the shock absorbers of the cars I've ridden in in America (and Canada. You too, Oman). I curse the elements everytime I have to devastate a good hair day by savagely pulling my do back in a behenji ponytail just because it's too damn hot/sticky/windy. Over the past year, I've only ever shopped off of the street because clothes, like people, just seem to fall apart faster in this part of the world. It would hurt too much to have that happen to anything I paid more than 100 rupees for (what is that, like 2 dollars?). I never seem to want to dress nice or comb my hair here anyway. I don't even wear makeup anymore. What's the point? Two minutes on the outside, and either the wind from the autorickshaw ride will ravage the curls that usually set beautifully on their own in a controlled environment, or the monsoon mud will artistically splatter itself all along my calves and precious toes. I now scowl or even fling a dirty look at every car that screams its neverending banshee of a horn into my poor ear. I wonder if the smog and traffic exhaust has formed a permanent layer of hopelessness on my once 20-something-year-old skin. I think of all these things and then fondly remember my vanilla-and-cinnamon-scented sparsely populated existence of the West. What's a pretty girl to do when the shadow of socialism falls upon her?

I'll tell you what she's to do. Visit the parlour regularly, dress the best she can in her budget wardrobe, flash a carnivorous smile or bat a virginal eyelash (both if she's talented), and pray to the gods of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll that Prince Charming (age never a bar) will whisk her away to a capitalist country far, far away. Or at least to the nearest suburb in a nice air-conditioned apartment and car and never let her pretty soles scrape the soil of the motherland again. Inhein zameen pe mat rakhhiyega, mailay ho jaaeinge.

Beyond forever

There is a small grassy hill in the tiny park behind my uncle's house in Toronto, Canada. People walk dogs around it, and Little Leaguers play football in its shadow. No one ever climbs it though, I noticed on that breezy late summer afternoon. Everyday the world walks past it like it isn't there.

I stood at the foot of that hill looking up at its peak. There seemed no reason to climb the hill. There was nothing up there. I looked around, expecting passerbys to look at me funny as they saw a young woman standing in front of a hill, her head slightly bent to one side, looking up at its peak with a curious expression. But no one was looking at me at all.

I took a few steps towards the hill. I could feel the ground beginning to rise to meet the slope of the hill. A few white birch trees rose from the earth like eternal witnesses staring up at some invisible phenomenon. I stood under one of those trees, my eyes still looking at some unseen soundless something at the top of the hill. I placed my hand on the rough bark of the tree. I inhaled sharply, and a tear came to my eye. I'd been here before. Twenty years ago, I had seen this hill, these trees. Except this time I was alone.

I was nine years old when I dreamt that I was standing at the foot of a hill, facing its steep slope. The hill looked big as its slope spread out into the light grey sky. A lot of people were climbing the hill, walking all the way from the bottom to the top, taking slow careful steps as they strained against the force of gravity. They all seemed to be dressed in robes similar to the garbs of a Hajj pilgrim. I could just see the backs of these people who looked like the elderly waddling up the hill, many of them securing the hems of their robes so that they wouldn't trip and fall. I don't recall anyone looking back. They'd keep walking even after reaching the top of the hill so that they'd go to the other side and disappear from my line of sight. The hill wasn't crowded, people kept lots of space between each other, like the players on a football field. Everyone was climbing the hill, and so was I. I was following directly behind my maternal grandfather and grandmother, both of whom had passed away over the past few years.

There were a few trees scattered at the bottom of the slope. The top of the hill was completely bare and looked to be covered with short grass that had begun to lose its green colour. I was following my grandparents until I got stuck in the exposed roots of a tree and couldn't go further. I began to cry out to my grandparents, my hands shooting out to reach out to them. I was bleating like an orphaned lamb that had fallen into a hunter's trap, terrified at my fate of being left behind. My eyes were brimming with tears.

My grandmother turned back and began to cry because I was crying out for her, because she couldn't come back to get me or make me stop crying. She stopped walking and raised a shaky hand to me before drowning in sobs. She brought her shawl close to her trembling mouth as her eyes filled with tears at the helplessness that was both hers and mine. My grandfather turned to put his hand on her shoulder and laughed his usual clucking laugh, his eyes twinkling, his small cheeks shiny and round. He kept chuckling as he helped his wife get back on the course they were on, the one that took them up the hill and over it to the other side. The twinkle in his eye said that there was nothing to cry about. Their backs turned to me, my grandmother's small bent one as her sobs shook her frame, and my grandfather's tall strong one as he helped his wife up the hill, leaving me behind, stuck in the roots of the tree.

I looked at the birch tree next to me. I felt like I'd met that tree once before in another lifetime. I looked up at the top of the hill which grazed the bright blue Canadian sky. What was on the other side? I took my hand off of the tree. My feet were rooted to the ground that was beginning to rise to meet the hill. My stomach was in knots. I took my first few steps towards the peak, away from the trees at the bottom of the hill. I stopped and turned to look back. The trees hadn't held me back this time. I faced the peak once more and took slow but certain steps until I had reached the top where the breeze was fast and the world fell away and I knew what was true.

While googling for an appropriate image to accompany this post, I clicked on one that seemed perfect. Turned out to be a painting by a Canadian artist who likes to display her work on her blog, the - get this - 'Gallery of Dreams'. Of all the...

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings

We were paying our respects to my aunt's mother in the cemetery in Windsor, Canada. I had just finished silently dedicating a faateha to a woman I'd never met. I'd looked her square in the face in pictures at my aunt's house, the gentle old woman looking right through me, as if I were the one that wasn't there, two people destined to meet only through ink on paper. My aunt and her brother stood at their mother's old grave with their children a bit longer while I stood a little away from them, my arms clasped behind my back, giving them the privacy that I felt they needed. I didn't want to intrude on their circle. My gaze wandered to the other gravestones around us. The summer sun was helping the grass and the trees grow. The cemetery was really quite beautiful. The sky was blue and the breeze assuring.

"We know a lot of the people buried here," my aunt's brother said as he walked up to me. He was looking down at the graves around us somewhat apologetically. "I've already reserved a plot next to my mother's." I suddenly felt uncomfortable as I always do in cemeteries, wondering if I'm accidentally walking over buried people. He pointed at three graves in front of me. I noticed that the stones were almost identical in design. Down to the last names. And the date of passing.

"A family we knew. A young man, his father, and grandfather had a car accident. The young man and his grandfather passed away on the spot but the father lingered in a coma for a few days before he too died."

We looked on at the three graves, the both of us standing with our heads slightly cocked to one side. "Three generations gone." My aunt's brother went back to his sister who was sitting by her mother's grave, quietly reading Quranic verses from a small prayer book.

It was then that I saw it clearly. My name in print, what I adoringly gaze at each time I am published or mentioned someplace important. "Khadija Ejaz". I live for that visual. It is pure selfish love, it makes me feel important in a deliciously thrilling way. But it was here that I realised what would be the last time I would have my name in print. On my gravestone. The final lonely dedication to the arrogance of anonymous dust.

People who've waited with me at government offices

It was business as usual at the Canadian Health Registration office. At least I think it was the usual. I'm not very sure what unusual business at a government office should look like. Probably perky employees and enthusiastic customers? I wondered about that as I sat, watching the digital number display boards for my number and waiting my turn. Two bored Chinese-Canadian college students lay slumped in the chairs two rows in front of me. I think they were college kids because of their wrinkly Abercrombie & Fitch tshirts (whatever happened to Old Navy?), bedheads, and ubiquitous white earphones. An old Chinese lady sat with them in a dull but thick purple dress and sensible shoes with her hair in a neat bun. Her posture was perfect, well-disciplined with nary a quiver. Maybe the grandmother?

A big beefy white man sat down between me and the objects of my attention. He was wearing a tired white tshirt and faded blue jeans, probably ripped at the knees if I could've seen them. He had tattoos, lots of tattoos, new ones and faded ones, peeping out of his neckline and the hems of his short sleeves. But the only one I really paid attention to was the one on the back of his sturdy shaved head. I giggled as the large Roman calligraphy style letters proudly announced to the world, "FUCK OFF".

I couldn't help it. I reached out and tapped the edge of his broad shoulders. "I like your tattoo, " I blushed, as the man who was for sure a roadhog turned his thick neck and bull shoulders to look back at me.

He had the smile of a baby, and I don't mean he was missing teeth. What a child-man he seemed; I'll always remember the simple innocence on his Jesse Ventura face.

He made me an offer I couldn't accept

I was trudging along to the library around the corner from my uncle's house where I was staying in Toronto, Canada. I felt right in my well-worn black t-shirt and jeans, my sports shoes keeping my feet comfortable on the hard pavement. It was a bright and breezy late afternoon, the summer was giving way to the fall, and I was having a good-hair-day. My long dark layers were freshly shampooed and bouncing with each carefree step all the way to the middle of my back. My bookbag was heavy with the weight of the books I was going to return to the library.

The suburban lakeside neighbourhood that had been uncharacteristically sleepy all summer was once again scattered with young people - it had been the first day of the new school year. Teenagers were hanging around the neighbourhood video store and meeting up with their friends at the pizza shop around the bend. Life was back in business.

The parking lot in front of the library sprawled alongside a major intersection, and people were strolling beside it on the concrete sidewalk. As I made my way across the parking lot, I heard someone call out to me from somewhere behind me.

"Excuse me? Excuse me!"

I slowed down and looked over my shoulder to see a young Indian-looking man in his 20s waving at me. He was wearing a typical Abercrombie-and-Fitch style green t-shirt and faded blue jeans. He looked like he was coming from the strip mall I had just cut across. Was he following me? What did he want? I stopped so he could catch up. As he shuffled up to me, I eyed his grin suspiciously. "Yes?" I demanded in a slightly hostile tone.

His grin didn't budge. His eyes made me feel slimey.

"So...where are you going?" he asked casually.

I snapped back. I didn't know why I felt like I needed to.

"Did you need something?"

I didn't like his expression.

He started slightly but then regained his composure. He ignored my question and smiled some more.

"So...do you go to school around here?"

He thinks I'm a schoolgirl?

Something made me feel more defensive.

"I'm sorry, did you need something?" I locked a stern gaze on his face.

His sweaty eyes that had been focused on me suddenly broke away. He looked around, his eyes blinking, and he began to stammer. He was trying to look everywhere except at me. The rehearsed confidence in his voice, gone.

"Um, wow, you are really direct. Are you, is that what you're like, I mean, um, is that what you, you know, like? I mean, I could be stopping to ask you for directions and you, um, you just ask me what I want like that."

My gaze remained fixed on the beads of sweat on his face.

"Yes, so what is it that you need?"

His grin waned as he looked around at the ground. I adjusted the weight of the heavy bag on my back.

"See, I've got someplace I need to be so if you don't need help with something, then I'm gonna have to get going." I began to move towards the library in front of me. He suddenly looked up at me and his body tensed up with desperation.

"No, wait!"

I shot him an impatient look. He began to stammer again but faster.

"No, I mean, do you live around here?"

I lied. "No, I'm visiting from the US."

"Okay, so can I have your number and...and call you to...to...so we can talk? Hang out??"

He didn't give me a chance to respond.

"We can meet up and...and...and..." I turned my head away from him and began to walk towards the library. I turned to look at him over my shoulder, following me.

"...and you can have a good time before you go back to America! Don't you want a good time in Canada??"

I turned my head back towards the library and began to pick up speed. He gave up his pursuit. I waved my hand up in the air as I left him behind. "No thanks," I called out without looking back,"I appreciate the offer though!"

Pondering over what better parting comment I could've come up with, I entered the sanctuary of the library and decided to stay an hour longer than I'd originally intended so as to throw off the initiator of one of the stranger encounters I'd had in a while. I wonder what he would've done if I'd informed him that I wasn't a naive schoolgoing teenager but a 28-year-old firebrand who'd been having a bad decade. I mean, there are other ways of giving a girl a compliment...aren't there?

The Circle of Life

Toronto, Canada

2009

I was taking Shaheen Chachi for a check-up at her doctor's. Her cataract surgery had only been a week ago and her right eye had a patch on. We stood at the zebra crossing at the busy intersection, waiting for the light to turn green. The red hand gave way to the green walking man, and we began to cross the wide street. I saw Shaheen Chachi tremble, nervously eyeing the traffic with her one free eye, trying to compensate for the peripheral vision on her right. Her shoulders had a slight hunch, and she was chewing her lower lip. I gently took a hold of her hand. She seemed grateful and relieved that she hadn't had to ask. We slowly crossed the street, a short young lady leading an older tall one.

Muscat, Oman

1988

Amma and I had just made it out of the airport. Abbu met us at the entrance and took us to his car. I trailed behind the two adults, holding the hem of Amma's qurta as we made our way to the parking lot. Abbu and Amma were busy talking, and I was too short and uninterested in what adults had to say to each other. I wobbled along behind them in my summer frock and sandals. I suddenly saw Gul Chachu standing by our car, and wings sprouted from my ankles. I was about to squeal at my young uncle when I noticed a tall lady standing with him. I froze and retreated behind the safe heights of my parents. This woman was unlike anyone in my family. She was tall, had strong square features, and big curly hair. My mother and aunts were shorter and rounder with straight hair. This woman was wearing a party sari and makeup in the middle of the day. I eyed her suspiciously and wondered why she was standing with my favourite uncle. The adults began to talk over my head, and Abbu introduced Amma to the tall woman. I looked up at all their faces like a tourist surveying the towers of a new city. Amma nudged me towards the tall woman. "This is Shaheen Chachi," she said. I stood next to her, uncomfortable with this new person standing between me and my uncle. The cloth of her blue sari was soft against the side of my face. She took my hand in a strong grip and held it for a long time, a small child with a tall woman.

I am Kaali

The lake was calm but the storm was within. I sat by the water with my best friend that cool summer evening. The sun was out; it only set by ten 'o clock at that time of the year in Toronto. The Sunday breeze had brought out a picture-book neighbourhood of families, children, bikers, dogwalkers, and joggers. My friend busied herself with her new camera, taking pictures of the crispy sky and my toes. A tempest was gathering within my chest.

About half an hour earlier, my friend and I had walked out to lake Ontario, a short walk from where I was staying with relatives. We climbed onto the narrow rocks that bordered the perimeter of the lake along a busy walking trail. A group of boys, in their late teens and early twenties, hollered at us from a boat from the left side of the cliff we were on, but we couldn't understand what they were saying. We knew they were calling out to us by calling my friend 'the purple one' and me, 'the blue one', because of the colour of our shirts and jeans.

Then we noticed another group of boys on the right end of the cliff, a few feet away from us. They were standing under the sunshade overlooking the lake, and they began to holler back at the boys in the water. My friend and I tried to mind our own business even as the boys near the cliff started talking about us loudly, referring to us by the colour of our clothes. We tried to ignore them as two of the young men flung bottles of water over our heads at their friends in the boat. It looked like friendly fire to me.

My muscles tightened as one of the boys, an Indian fellow in a blue shirt that read 'India '07', slithered behind my friend and I on the narrow rock and whispered, "hello aunties, goodbye aunties" as he passed us by. I glared at him through my sunglasses.

"What!" I said. He turned and gave me a dirty grin. He passed us by three more times on that cliff, keeping a distance of a few inches from us each time, circling us like prey. There wasn't much room on that rock my friend and I felt imprisoned on. I looked at the water below and remembered that my friend couldn't swim.

One of the boys, a black guy, yelled at us to ignore his Indian friend, but we couldn't. My friend mumbled a "goodbye, fool" the last time he slid behind us, saying, "hello aunties, goodbye aunties". The group of boys under the sunshade laughed and hooted at us the whole time.

My friend and I felt afraid and decided to leave. We walked down the rocks away from the boys as they howled at us like apes in heat. My cheeks burned with shame and outrage as they called out to us, singing, "aunty, don't break my heart!". Men and women of all colours witnessed the bullying but did nothing. My friend wanted to curse back at the boys but was conscious of the little children playing around us. She showed them the finger but the gesture got drowned in the sound of catcalls. The world turned a blind eye to two young women being bullied by a group of even younger men triumphantly high-fiving each other and celebrating their budding manhoods. As we walked away, trying to hold on to our dignities with our heads buried into our shoulders, the world silently witnessed our humilation. Every victorius laugh and hoot shot me in the back like arrows dipped in Scylla's venomous blood.

I stopped a little way off to complain to two elderly Indian couples, but the men just tittered. One of the women asked my friend and I for more details, and then smiled at us in a silly way. "Teenage boys," she said, her head trembling slightly. "It's okay, you are probably finding it odd because you haven't seen it happen often." It happens, she meant to say, isn't life funny sometimes?

I couldn't believe her.

"Actually," I shot back, "where I come from, this happens a lot, but I didn't think it would happen here." I walked off with my friend in disgust, the silly woman still smiling a smile that lasted too long.

I sat by the water with my friend, my mind replaying memories of a life filled with older men harassing and molesting little girls in public and in private. Long-forgotten old shame that lay buried under layers of tears curdled once again inside my belly.

"It never ends, does it?" I asked my friend. "You grow up with older men making you feel dirty, and if you survive to make it to adulthood, a new batch of younger men takes their place. No matter what a woman achieves and lives through, she never gets respect? Does it never end? Is she never spared?" I couldn't believe it. I had little cousins as old as those boys who all treated me like a big sister.

"We weren't dressed slutty or were even sticking out," I continued. "There were plenty of females around in all kinds of clothing, but they picked us. Why? Is it because we're desi girls that they know won't retaliate because we're conditioned to be docile?"

"And that Indian lady didn't help either," my friend said. "Look at her, enabling the boys' behaviour."

"She actually said we weren't used to it!" I said. "I'm sorry, but why should I have to get used to this??"

Something thick was boiling inside me. We hadn't done anything wrong, but they had misbehaved with us and taken control of us...again. The faces had changed, but the story was still the same. They had controlled us again, and we had had to leave because they had made us feel dirty and scared and ashamed.

My friend and I decided to go home, but that meant walking past where the boys had been under the sunshade again. All of them, black and brown. I felt like blinders were growing by my head. A phantom gush of air hit my face as I felt like I was entering a tunnel.

We had just started walking past the sunshade when the boys, all twenty of them, noticed us and started hollering at us again. We were several meters away from them with a lot of families and single people all around us, but that didn't stop them. They began to call out again, "aunties, aunties, helloooo!" They laughed at us. My friend flipped them the bird, and they found it funny again.

I was in the tunnel and couldn't see anything around me anymore. I stopped and turned towards them laughing at my face and my body and my naked breasts under my clothes. "WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR PROBLEM???" I screamed. The laughter stopped. A few of the young men shouted back some quick apologies. "Sorry," a lot of them hurriedly said. A snigger made its way from the corner of the group, and someone called me "aunty" again. A nervous laugh circulated through the group as they remembered that there were twenty of them in a group, and then there was just me. My heart contracted in fear as I also suddenly realised that I was posed like a single hawk against a mob of scavenger vultures. One single woman headbutting against twenty young men in the prime of their lives. A small voice from somewhere in the corner of the group called me a cunt. They began to laugh at me again in front of the world that was still turning a blind eye.

What name have I not been called before, most by the very people who were supposed to have loved and protected me? Slut, whore, bitch, cunt, dyke - it was so easy to shut a female up. A male could do whatever he liked, right or wrong, but if a female ever confronted him, he'd demolish her femininity with one word. And the world would never question it. It was so easy. Did these boys think that calling me a name in front of the whole world would devastate me into silence?

It didn't this time. It energised me instead in the most primal way, like a mad she-wolf sinking her claws into the earth and baying at the moon. A rabid growl that has only come out of my throat once before barked out at the young men laughing at me. I don't remember what I said, but it blanched all of their faces, wiping away all of their smiles, physically jerking them into immobility.

One of the guys in the group roared at the Indian guy, "what the FUCK did I tell you??" The Indian guy lashed back out at him incoherently, "what the FUCK what the FUCK I'll FUCK her up I'll FUCK you up!" Etcetera etcetera. He was waiting for his friends to hold him back, but they had all lost their enthusiasm and stood there nervously, suddenly aware of the world watching them, a crazy woman clinging to them with her nails. I was bolted to the ground, facing them in an immobile posture, like a bloodhound that's detected the trace of prey. My body was hard. I noticed my friend standing beside me.

The infighting continued. Egos had been hurt and they noisily tried to defend their dignity by turning on each other. Whatever had possessed me was now gone, but the boys were still trying to be men. "SHUT UP!" I roared. I turned to my friend and we walked away. The sounds of boys trying to rescue their egos soon fell away into the past. Minutes later, we were screaming in delight as we rode the swings in the children's play area behind the house I was staying in.

Razia

My dadi's name was Razia Begum, and we didn't know too much about her. There were many myths about her that nobody was really sure of. Some said she was a Pashtun Pathan but we weren't sure how she ended up in Meerut and married my dada. To our knowledge, she never had any family in India, so to most of us, her life before she got married to my dada seemed like a blank piece of paper.

Apparently most of her extended family and their extended families and so on are Pakistani but now mostly live in Toronto. I left the US permanently a month ago and was literally chilling in T-Town until a couple of days ago when I got the chance to do a bit of chilling at the house of a relative of my dadi's. The only relatives of my dadi's that I've ever met were in Lahore 20 years ago at an aunt's wedding, but I was about 7 years old and remember more about the games I played with my cousins than the various adults I was introduced to.

The uncle I visited happened to be my father's first cousin, the son of my dadi's eldest brother. This cousin had never even seen a picture of my father but had heard of him. I got the chance to ask him a lot of questions about my dadi's family. Finally my dadi had a history. She was from Meerut and used to live there with her entire family until the Partition of 1947 when Pakistan was born in the east and west limbs of India. She was a very social child and they used to call her Chhanno. She had so many brothers and sisters, and she mostly spent her days drowning in laughter while playing with her cousins who were all the friends she ever needed. She got married to my dada who was also from Meerut and had a family of her own.

After the creation of Pakistan, however, her entire clan upped and moved to the new country. Her husband decided to stay in India. In the bloody partition aftermath and wars that followed for many years, she got completely cut off from her family. These were the days without phones and obviously email. The borders were sealed off during wartime. She visited a few times but travel was difficult. Mail wasn't allowed to cross the border even, and news from the other side was hard to come by. My dada moved from city to city until they finally moved to Lucknow, but my dadi had been uprooted the day her last relative had left Meerut. She had become lonely, quiet, and none of her children knew her side of the family very much. In Pakistan, her family was vibrant, and it was like life had been in Meerut except they had left behind one of their women. No one of hers was in India anymore. Even her mother, and all her siblings and their families had left. My Pakistani relative told me that growing up they had all heard of an aunt and her children that had stayed behind in India, but they were mostly names without faces. After 1947, Chhanno had ceased to exist.

I felt very unhappy for this quiet grandmother of mine who died in 1992. She used to play with me and buy me roasted peanuts and Dussehri mangoes. Suddenly hearing the human story of the old woman with hair as white as snow made her so relatable to me, I could hardly bear the emotions that came flooding at me after the dam of her anonymity suddenly flew open. I understand what being cutoff and lonely feels like, and how horrible it feels to know that while you're stuck in the middle of nowhere that the rest of your family and friends move on without you. My dadi gave birth to 10 children which probably means 20 constant years of being pregnant and going through those hormonal motions somewhere in India all by herself as she moved from place to place, unable to share her joys and sorrows with her mother, sister, brothers, nieces and nephews. The men hardly involved themselves in such family matters in those days, and I know my grandfather was a man of his times. My dadi had to rely on the women in whatever neighbourhood she lived in at the time because she had no women friends to share her small victories and worries with. I've heard that she was very attached to my father who was her firstborn and relied on him for emotional support, but that she barely had it in her to invest her emotions into the rest of her children. Sometime during middle age she had developed mood swings and would often get overwhelmed. At times like these, she would become extremely cranky and go to a lady friend's across the street for several hours if not for a few days to cool-off. After a certain age, she began to talk less but began to quietly smile more from where she usually sat on her bed. Maybe she'd made peace with her sorrows?

Climbing every mountain

Dear Diary,

I watched Duran Duran live in concert at the Air Canada Center Tuesday this past week, almost a year to the date of when I'd watched the Spice Girls on their reunion tour at the MGM Arena in Las Vegas. Both events were remarkably surreal.

I have dusty memories of watching Duran Duran with my two much older brothers on our squeaky Beltek TV in Lucknow, India. My world was different in those days. I was five years old, had pigtails and knobbly knees. I used to wear frocks then. I didn't know a lot of difficult words in either Urdu or English then, so I'd asked my brother what 'reflex' meant. I also learned other cool words from Duran Duran like 'clover' and 'Rio'. That made me feel quite smart compared to the other five-year-olds. My grandmother didn't know English but seemed to enjoy my song and dance renditions of the Duran Duran videos I'd gobbled up. She thought I was a riot and a complete genius. I also took it upon myself to expose the poor village girls who used to work in our house in India to Duran Duran's music. My three-feet-tall world was our gali in Lucknow and my parent's house in Muscat, Oman. Watching Simon Le Bon sing his heart out while straddling a yacht, bravely sailing against the wind, his hair ruffled, his white suit flapping about, seemed about as real and reachable as My Little Pony - the most incredible thing I'd ever seen. But like the cartoon, Duran Duran felt like they existed far away somewhere, like some kind of fantasy, like a vague promise of paradise. Fantastic but unreal. Nobody rides yachts like that.


Seeing Simon Le Bon singing in front of my eyes over 20 years later made me feel all sorts of introspective. A lot of thoughts were swirling about my mind, dear Diary. These kind of before-after situations always have that effect on me. Life has hardly been like it was in those innocent Indian summers. My grandmother hasn't been around in over a decade to banish my self-doubt away. The village girls who used to believe everything I said as if I were a miniature empress had long gone, some married, some tired, all older. After climbing the craggy mountain of my life so far, I took a break to look around and see how far I'd come, with all my energy gone. So, dear Diary, in the same way that mountaineers feel renewed by the sight they see once they conquer their peak, I felt renewed seeing Duran Duran live. After reaching the top of my mountain and seeing the dreamy figments of a past life suddenly alive before my very eyes, I realised that nothing is unattainable, that everything can become real. I inhaled sharply, amazed at how far I'd come from the tiny skippy child with impossible sources of inspiration. Then I turned to look ahead. What had felt unreal and unattainable before had become real today. So what about anything that I find unrealistic to achieve today? I am not willing to wait another 20 years to find out I was wrong about that as well.

It's time for Ram to return to Ayodhya

I'm leaving the US. After almost 10 years. Wow.

I'm going to visit Canada for a bit before taking off for an indefinite break in Oman. I have no specific plans. I don't know what I'll be doing or where. I don't care either.

But why?

I don't know. No one specific reason, just one huge amorphous mass of compulsions that snowballed very slowly over time since I came to the US after high school. My memory of the past 10 years is sort of blurry, and on the inside I somewhat feel like life stopped at the age of 17. It feels like I'd been in a coma since then and I recently woke up to find that I was 27 but felt like I was 100.

In reality, of course, there was no coma. There was just me who one fine day looked in the mirror and found this haggard and unattractive female sighing back at me. Wasn't I a skippy pixie just yesterday? What had happened to my eyes? They looked tired and apologetic, didn't they use to be brilliant supernovas? I know they were there, I had seen them. I know I used to hardly be able to contain myself. I remember my mind used to be quick, always spitting out a smart comment and bringing the roof down. It used to be so easy. I could hardly speak now. I had nothing to say, and words just felt too heavy to juggle around into brilliant combinations. When did I run out of things to say?

The things that were me - ferocious creativity, unbridled laughter, fiery passion, stubborn optimism, and limitless energy - were gone. The whirlwind that had always made me feel like I would never die now was still like the air inside a tomb. It was quiet now and I already felt dead. But somehow I was still walking around, doing what I had to, doing what everyone else was doing. My soul, which I could still feel in echoes, felt like a dead planet mindlessly orbitting and rotating around a long dead star, like a ghost condemned to its haunting place for all eternity, like a stuck record scratching the same old notes when the listeners have long since left.

I don't remember much of anything over the past 10 years except for suffocating under overwhelming isolation and desperately trying to grab onto anything so I could breathe. I remember daily crying spells when the quiet got too deafening. I remember trying but failing. I remember being told 'no' and having my hands held down. I remember being hungry, tired, and wanting the tightening of my scalp muscles to go away.

I dunno. I think I didn't want to hear 'no' anymore. Last year I felt something erupt within me. I didn't want to be walked over anymore by anybody. I don't know. I felt like I had just woken up and was horrified at what I saw. All I knew is that I had to go back to a time before this to remember who I was. I don't know. I just have to go. What you see today isn't me. I have to go find the people who remember who I used to be. I can't be here anymore. I dunno.