To Lahore
Dear City, you have remained a constant.
You have changed — you have changed a lot. Your skies are less colorful in spring now, your canal is less cool now than I remember in 5th grade — a time when I didn’t even understand your horizontal expansionary inclinations — and your flyovers and underpasses may not even recognize my college-days Corolla 86 anymore. Dull gold with a 2-digit license plate.
Recently you made breathing pretty tricky for me. Blue skies — who would have thought of you to be so alien to them?
But your embrace has stayed. Your warmth has only grown. Grown to be a bit sticky, yes, but it still reaches out to one through the winter fog. And your wisdom — in traditions centuries old, in footprints of rulers of every color, and in shrines that bring spirituality within every man’s reach — that wisdom hasn’t stopped giving. You will be home like no other place can ever be.
But 21 years later, I have departed.
You might not even remember my first few months with you. I was still astonished, in 4th grade at the time, that I will not be able to ride a bicycle in front of my house because of the frantic insomniac traffic. You had to teach this one a lot.
I remember friends — good honest friends who still have nothing but the best at heart for me wherever they are in the world — asking my elder brother if he can make me a bit more ‘badmaash’. They knew what I needed in life way before I knew it myself. And you observed. You knew your years will bring sense to my years too, in good time.
I have often wondered if I would have been a different man, with a different life, had I left you for college. One stands guilty of being tempted, spending freshman year here applying to colleges with fancy names in countries with names abbreviated, only to be rejected one after the other. As Ami says, ‘aiday vich wi koi behtri hoye gi’ — there must be something good in all of this. But I wasn’t looking for something good, I was looking for an out. I had to prove to the world — which essentially meant proving to myself — that I was as good as my friends attending colleges abroad. Insecurities and late teens don’t go well together. I stayed, but reluctantly — you ceased, for some time, being home. But you refused to give up on me, in a way that only blood relations do. I haven’t thanked the latter properly either.
There is little that can encourage one to explore the nooks and crannies of a city, the long winding thoroughfares and narrow cramped alleys, for a drive or a stroll, like the opposite gender and a healthy dose of testosteronic ambition. You opened up to my fancies, and were little less than a full-blooded wingman. While your fog provided this preteen schoolboy illusions of wonderland and oft-punished escapes from classroom, the same fog later opened up a realm of possibilities for the early-20s male that you had nourished.
I left you for two finite periods. When I got the news for the first stint, even though it was just for an exchange program in undergraduate, it seemed that I had unlocked some key. I was awarded the exchange program with a stipend for one whole academic year. I decided to come back after the first semester.
It’s not that I didn’t want the adventure to go on: a semester spent exploring Europe on a shoestring budget, spending nights in freezing railway stations at times. But I had to spend the last semester of my undergraduate in my own college in Lahore. That logic was evident to me. Ever since then, whenever I have come back to you after a hiatus, you have surprised me with your ability to induce nostalgia for the days I haven’t even spent with you.
My second stay away from you, in Boston for 2 years of graduate school, felt somewhat more stable. By stable I guess I mean mature. I was starting to get comfortable with my independence, homes in different countries felt like a possibility, and it seemed like I had arrived. But you had managed to enamor me completely by then.
I remember sitting in Shah Jamal — in the shrine, next to a grave, engulfed in smoke and sweat of various origins, listening to Gunga sayein beat away the dhol — about a month after coming back from Boston that I finally realized I am back. I am home.
A 3-week experiment with friends became a passion that would span 6 years of my life. Rabtt gave me direction, friends, and experiences that have defined me. We wanted to connect. You humored me — you knew that making connections is probably one of the most difficult endeavors for me. You pushed me along, petting my ego, and I started thinking I was someone. I am afraid I still do.
You nurtured a relation that seemed almost too good to be true. Maira and I joked, just a few days into knowing each other, that this should work ‘on paper’. That alone should have diffused any romantic notions, but it didn’t. You also feature significantly in our wedding photoshoot. I can also tell you the exact spots where we have parked our car, on way to somewhere, to cool our nerves on an argument first. By argument I may mean occasional shouting matches. We haven’t found a lot of solutions yet, but for the time being we are OK with that — it’s not the ideal baggage to take to a new city, but in a lot of ways it defines us.
And now, for the first time, I have left you without a return date. I have left my parents without a return date.
Two moments that stay. Autumn of 2013; I had just returned from Boston and was sitting with Abu in the CMH room, where he was undergoing blood transfusion due to Hepatitis C treatment. Up until then Abu had suggested — like a father suggests when he’s not sure whether the son will pay heed or not — that I should look for some full-time job and should continue Rabtt as a voluntary project. He had a few friends visiting in the hospital that day. Upon hearing that I had just returned from graduate school but was stuck running some NGO his friends started making calls to their friends in Karachi and Islamabad who might have had some jobs to offer me. Abu stopped them midway and explained the idea behind Rabtt, as well as why I did the work that I did. I have never been able to articulate it better.
Earlier this year, sitting in our car waiting for samosay, I told Ami something I had been thinking for some months — all my work, especially the fascination with empathy, derives from her. The silence that ensued was precious, primarily for what it helped both of us understand. In case it’s not clear yet, I am not very good, or frequent, in some communications.
I wrote about you 4 years ago as well, calling our relationship a ‘love that is imperfect, yet complete’. I realize now that no love is ever complete. It is not only always a work in progress, it is also taxing, disappointing, and frustrating. But perhaps most importantly, it is forgiving. I have just started learning how to forgive myself.
This piece had been in the works for about 2 months now — as if the moment I finished it my departure would be certified. What I didn’t realize was that the moment I finished it I would have also accepted my arrival. I can’t tell you what Karachi soil smells like when it rains after a scorching day — it hasn’t rained here yet — but the streets and faces are new, the languages of the city are aplenty, and their casual disregard of me is actually liberating. The stubborn energy and hope of the city might give birth to something new — a new love perhaps.
Warmly,
Imran
