A Summer in Pakistan

Recently, I dreamt of Islamabad. It was a view of Faisal Masjid at night and as I looked at it, a shudder of recognition went through me as if it was a place I had forgotten but still knew on a chemical level. Since then, memories of Pakistan have been catching me in unexpected moments—at the sound of the athan from my phone, the smell of burning wood, or the taste of a guava. And I am carried back to the last time I was there, so long ago now, that every memory is a teaser clip with no beginning and an abrupt end.

~

It was after taraweeh. The city wouldn’t slumber completely on a Ramadan night, but it was settling down enough that the stars were starting to appear in the black sky. I was standing on the balcony on the roof of my grandparents’ home, looking out to the horizon. Where the sky met earth, the dark outline of Margalla Hills was visible at the footpath of the Himalayan Mountains, somehow a different black from the black of the sky. A patch of lights twinkled in a hollow of one of the hills—Monal Village— and then abruptly blinked out; routine load-shedding to reduce the strain on the power plants. Moments later, scant dots of lights twinkled back on in places where there were generators. The road winding down from it was lit sparsely and although I couldn’t see it, somewhere a few miles down, was Daman-e-Koh, the hilltop where the monkeys begged for snacks at the pakora stall.

Pools of darkness stretched down from there until suddenly, the triangle of Faisal Masjid rose out of the clouds, glowing white stone and light from the four minarets. All night the mosque would be filled with the recitation of Quran by representatives from every region of the country and televised, nationally.

And then, the rest of the city, under the cover of the night, sparkling showers of open shops draped in celebratory strings of light, and naked light bulbs over street stalls, the homes of the residents of this city, the streak of red and gold as cars and taxis went by.

Under my own balcony, the street was quiet, the houses dark except for the street lamps. The occasional sound of the crackle of radio in a car driving past, the smell of its fumes, the footsteps of two people walking side by side, sometimes one mass, sometimes two as they came together then apart, distinguishable as a man and a woman when they came under the beam of the lamp, by his flat rolled brim hat and her dupatta.

It was August and the heat of the summer still lay heavy but the air moved, stirring my white, cotton dupatta, freeing a strand of my hair from under it’s confines, rustling the pink bougainvillea creeping over the railing and from behind the house, I could hear the patter of jamun fruit as they fell, bursting on the brick of the driveway below.

On the other side of the screen door, I could hear my grandfather’s TV and the voices of my cousins, rising and falling, rising and falling.

Tonight, was one of the last ten nights of Ramadan, some of the most blessed nights of the month and I was outside to be closer to the heavens, so that maybe peace would find me sooner as it fell on earth.

~

We went Eid shopping. Crowded inside a men’s clothing store, picking out Eid clothes for the boys, it was a while before we noticed that Noor, one of my youngest cousins was missing. In a panic, we rushed out and pulled up short, to find her sitting on the curb next to a little boy.

At home in the US, the English word for someone who asks for money in the streets is “panhandler”. But for a little Pakistani boy who roams Jinnah Super, the English word is “beggar”. He was wearing the uniform of street children in Pakistan, a brown shalwar kameez and cheap plastic slippers on his grey, dusty feet. He had brown spots and streaks against his cheeks from sun exposure and vitamin deficiency and his hair was brittle, an unnatural copper color, heavily bleached by the sun. His eyes were green, the violent stamp of Alexander the Great’s army or a British colonist, which perhaps was the beginning of his descent to the streets.

Noor, bored with the shopping, had noticed the boy passing by outside with a bag of chips and had wandered out to ask him for some. In sharp contrast to the boy, she was well-fed and well-dressed, headband in her shiny curls, gold in her ears, but she didn’t know that she shouldn’t be asking him for his food. He did know though, despite looking the same age as her and this unprecedented reversal of roles in which someone was asking him for food had him puffed up with importance. She was sitting a few respectful inches away from the goods, holding out her hand as he deliberated over which chip to give her. They munched side by side, swinging their legs until her mother snatched her up, scolding and the kid vanished, one last backwards glance at my strange cousin.

We passed by a jewelry stall where bell shaped jhumkas caught my eye. They are completely out of fashion now, but I love them because my mom wore them when we were small, and I thought they were beautiful. These little stalls hold a mishmash of cheap and expensive jewelry. The inexpensive ones are made of cheap metals and plastic gems and the expensive ones are made from semi-precious stones and minerals, mined locally. In the States, they would sell for tens of dollars, but these men sell them for pennies.

As I searched through the jewelry for what I wanted, my uncle chatted with the stall owner, an Afghan refugee. He’d been a professor of Physics in Afghanistan, but his documents had been lost in the war. He told the story without any self-pity. This was his fate, Allah ki marzi, God’s will.

This astonishing tale coming from this nondescript uncle in his white shalwar kameez and black vest, drooping mustache, hair neatly parted on the side, looking as if he’d dropped out of the 80’s, was nothing new. Everyone here had an astonishing story—the jewelry stall uncle, that boy who had shared his chips with Noor and that other boy crooning a cover of a Nur Jahan song at the street corner. Everyone here was astonishing and no one was special.

~

On Eid, the cousins gathered their gifts of Eid money and headed out to spend it, traveling in a mob for safety and for fun. The old shopkeeper in the convenience store behind the house, muttered a prayer into his white beard as we descended upon his store for chips in masala flavors, ice cream cones, and fizzy drinks. Noor, three feet off the floor, earnestly laid out her case to him for receiving one of the packets of chips for free—the case consisting mostly of the fact that she didn’t have the money.

Hamza flushed in embarrassment and sent Noor outside with her loot including the extra chips. I looked at my kid cousin fondly as he paid for Noor’s snacks and my ice cream as well, over my protests that unlike Noor, I did have the money. He is a respectable engineer now, recently married, but I always remember him as he was back then; a shy, lanky university student, handsome in his chivalry and his Eid best.

We, American-born and Pakistani-born cousins, had a contentious relationship. There is a total of thirty of us and most of the Americans are on the older end of the spectrum. Culturally, that makes us senior in rank. But anyone with a childhood knows that some cousins that came from America once a year, speaking the language of the colonizer and Urdu with an accent and bad grammar, had better not pretend seniority over anything. But we also knew how to quickly erase drawn lines and unite against common adversary.

The summer I was thirteen, my aunt was getting engaged and one fine afternoon, her fiancée’s family came for tea. There was a lovely spread of samosas, tea sandwiches, cookies, chaat, dhai baray, kabobs—strictly forbidden to the kids although we were promised the leftovers once the guests were gone. It isn’t as if they weren’t feeding us, but naturally all other food lost its appeal when there was forbidden food to be had.

It’s a wonder the guests didn’t choke on the sandwiches we’d resentfully cut the crusts from that morning. And because waste not, want not, we’d eaten those crusts dipped in egg sandwich filling, which by the way, I loathed then and can barely tolerate, now.

We were then processed into being neither seen nor heard, mostly achieved by shoving us all in a room upstairs. We weren’t at full capacity that day with only twenty of us, but it was still a full house.

Before I was sent upstairs, I was instructed that I was in charge and to tell my aunt to come down to greet the guests. My aunt twenty-eight at the time, was only fifteen years older than me. She was emerging from the shower, wearing yellow, hair in a towel when I passed on the message, but she didn’t hear me and ever so slowly reached for the hair dryer and brush.

I watched her for a bit then repeated my message a little louder and more slowly. Perhaps it was the bad Urdu.

“OK!”

“GOD!”

“I HEARD YOU THE FIRST TIME!”

I stomped out, offended.

Now that I’m of the same age, I understand. How many times have I wanted to wipe the knowing smirk from a niece or nephew’s face as they check out my makeup, my clothes, excited by the romantic image of me about to meet some potential’s family?

I went off to join more sympathetic company. Out came the contraband. In our case, this was packs of playing cards and Uno cards, completely forbidden in my grandmother’s house because it smacked of gambling. Unsurprisingly, this meant we spent hours squatting behind trees or sheds, playing games of Uno and War, shuffling cards expertly, like hardened gamblers.

Eventually, we got bored, so we got out Waaris’ tired old set of Jackie Chan bootleg DVDs and hooked up his DVD player that he’d actually brought with him in his suitcase from Florida to the ancient TV in the room. We had become quite good at connecting American and Pakistani incompatible devices by cobbling together our collective supply of converters and adapters and amazingly, we only set a computer on fire once. We watched a lot of Jackie Chan that summer. I can still quote Rush Hour to you, 20 years later. (“Wipe yourself off, man. You dead.”)

By this time, we were getting restless. Then someone had a brilliant idea. If we sneaked onto the terrace of the roof, we could watch the proceedings in the garden down below. I thought it was brilliant too—until belatedly, I remembered I was in charge.

I voiced a half-hearted objection.

Twenty pairs of sullen eyes turned on me. They’d listen if I insisted but I knew I’d be ostracized, and the rest of my trip would be miserable.

I weighed the decision briefly then shrugged and got out of the way as a horde of kids stampeded to the door and army crawled across the terrace to peer through the bougainvillea growing along the railing. It was obscuring the view though, so one by one, we popped our heads over the fencing.

“I think the samosas are finished,” I heard a disappointed whisper.

“What’s the guy’s name?”

“Baqar.”

“What? Like a goat?”

“That’s bakrah, stupid.”

We snickered.

One of the tinier specimens of our clan was still having difficulty seeing and had hooked himself by his ankles and knees over the railing. Unfortunately, he was now also dangling nearly upside down over the garden. The movement caught someone’s eye down below and an adult looked up, jaw dropping as she saw the twenty of us silhouetted against the sky. Prudently, her eyes snapped down again. Two of us quickly hauled up the suspended child while the rest dropped back down to the ground and crawled hastily back inside. When someone came to check in on us next, we were innocently watching Rush Hour 2.

~

The day after Eid, we took a bus to Lahore, where my paternal grandmother lives. It was a four hour drive and by the time we passed Jhelum, it was starting to rain. At first it fell slowly and then so heavily, I was afraid that the mountain roads were going to be flooded out. The bus slowed and began to crawl. We were getting closer to the Chenab River, where millions of tons of Basmati rice are produced annually and we were surrounded by rice fields, waterlogged normally, but now flooded. We passed by a house at the edge of a rice field and two boys burst out, clad only in shalwars. Even as they ran, they were already soaked, their brown legs showing through the wet, white cotton. They stopped at the edge of the fields, kicked off their slippers and dove in, two graceful arcs. Even from a distance, I could see the white of their teeth as they laughed and splashed.

That is one of the last memories I have of Pakistan. We drove past them slowly and I could see them for a long time and it looked like something out of a storybook; the emerald fields shimmering around that old farmhouse, the boys swimming in the square pool of water and rainbows shooting through the clouds of mist rising up as rain evaporated as soon as it hit the hot ground.

~

It has been eight years now since I have visited Pakistan. As I was leaving, my grandmother faltered over to me, put her hands on my shoulders and asked me to stay another week. That grandmother is gone now, taken in the pandemic. The youngest cousins will not recognize me and some of the older ones have children now that I have never met. There is a different shopkeeper in the convenience store behind my grandparents’ home and I do not even remember how to get there anymore. I have been busy, too busy to miss it.

But as I get older and the world gets more complicated my thoughts turn to older, simpler times. I feel the desire to once more stand on my grandparents’ terrace and hear the rustle of the jamun tree as the call of the athan floats over the city and echoes back from the Himalayan Mountains. If I close my eyes, maybe I will hear the echo of the laughter of the children of my family, the creak of the basket swing on the porch, and the mewls of the stray cats asking for scraps at the kitchen door. And maybe, for one moment I will once more be back in my childhood, in a summer in Pakistan. 

Mariam Ashraf is a scientist by day and a writer by night. In her free time, she likes to garden and hike. Currently, she resides in Maryland.