17th July, 2007 - A day in the life of

8:40 a.m: Two beeps and I wake up with a smile that widens as I prop myself up on my elbows and go beyond the surface of the phone's screen covered in greasy fingerprints and fall back into the bed into a place where night is just beginning I swirl between sleep and wakefulness and bliss.

9:00 a.m: I swing out of bed floating into the day, to the toothbrush, the breakfast and morning news and Ammi and Papa. There's a giveaway expression on my face that Ammi tries unsuccessfully to ignore and there is no need but I blush and concentrate on the toast.

11:00 a.m: I am handling a crisis tea-situation in the kitchen, freshly showered wet hair getting in the way. New maid as usual and Bilal Malik bhai's dad in the drawing room, and as soon as that's sorted I speed to Yumna's school where I am sat in a waiting room and Yumna is prancing around in chappals swinging a bag full of DVDs Apya's sent. We stand there and goof off, cracking jokes and I look around furtively to check for any angry teachers, with my yellow and red clothes too bright in the sun and I tune out as Yumna rattles on, trying to draw a map of some sort in the air with her fingers I'm noticing that we're both wearing our glasses and watching her nostrils flare as she gets more animated and I kiss her sweaty forehead a number of times before I leave.

3:00 p.m: Still in a trance, bounding up and down the stairs in spite of the post-lunch drowsiness, having bitter double tea-bagged tea after ages. It doesn't worry me that I am still stuck on the first damn paragraph of the introduction and I am searching for youtubing downloading wonderful 90s music of summer afternoons in B-9 spent watching MTV Alternative, Julie Tearjerky on the phone, and googling the lyrics singing along and feeling a foolish sense of accomplishment.

6:00 p.m: Filling out the voter list form poking fun at Faiqa's Urdu spellings and tightly-pressed script with Ammi and Papa and stapling the photocopied shanakhti card and laughing at Faiqa's interpretation of baikhwaabi with tea and biscuits in the heat and the TV in the background and I'm already thinking wow this is a good moment, Bhayya comes back from namaaz and I'm writing my maiden name on the forms in Urdu and signing in English and I'm thinking there's something different about today.

8:00 p.m: I come into the pink-walled room to use her computer and against my better judgement end up reading the 20 or so items on her list, 'the final countdown' and I'm thinking no no no and open my Introduction but the blurry image that comes to my mind is of Faiqa dressed in green, bending her knees to look into my eyes and squeezing my hand so tight her fingernails dig into my palm and she looks a little terrified but smiles and whispers 'Teri shaadi hoti' to me and in spite of the tears and the makeup and the sheer inappropriateness of it all I break into a laugh. I tell myself NO but I'm sobbing uncontrollably anyway, stupid thoughts flooding my head: no more fights over where all our white shalwars disappear, no more asking for permission before using her bathroom, no more bowls of icecream getting shoved under my face when I am refusing to speak to everyone but her, asking her what the eff was I doing, Faiqa. I think of us ducking back into my room when a curse word escapes from her lips in full hearing range of the parents, I think of arguing over whose feet get propped over the table, I think of restless evenings when she is away at LUMUN I'm thinking of 'why isn't the istree working' and 'what you doing? whose house? is it fun?' sms-es while I'm in Karachi and my wet eyelashes sprinkle droplets of tears on the inside of my glasses, and she wasn't supposed to leave first, I've been trying to delay this and I have to start dealing with empty rooms and unspoken rants too soon.

And then the maid comes into the room with a plate of chawal in her hand looking at me funny and asks 'yeh gall gaye hain?'. When she's gone I burst into laughter at the image of myself to Irum, she must be thinking I'm nuts, and I'm laughing, wiping tears and looking for a tissue paper for my nose and this is me aged 6, 10, 12, 18, laughing and crying at the same time.

10:00 p.m: I'm wasting all my time, I'm panicking, and I give up everything and take my puffy eyes down to the basement to watch TV with Faiqa, feeling stupid. We watch the coverage of the blast in F-8, turn the TV off, sickened, and watch a movie instead.

1:00 a.m: We eat ice cream and get yelled at for being too loud, get pissed off and troop into her room to discuss when things will ever change, then go to bed.

Dear Cheesoo

...I have not had access to your blog for the past 5 months. Fix this, please?

Love,
Azka

10th July 2007

(The things that we're afraid of
are gonna show us what we're made of
in the end)

If Ammi had a superpower, it would be killing lizards with uncanny speed and precision. In addition to the loving/healing/forgiving superpowers all mothers possess, of course.

So the Lal Masjid drama keeps us at home, always within hearing range of the TV. Not because of fear but a need to know what's going on. There's the usual traffic on the roads as we do our grocery shopping on the second day, on the fourth day as I try reluctantly to get my stuff together and ready for the darzi, a very un-bride-to-be mindset as I sit and vegetate at home, packing on the pounds with cheerful, reckless abandon :) And the one time I feel up to meeting friends I can't be arsed to straighten my hair or wear makeup, but getting out is worth it - I have to clear my throat often because we're speaking so loudly and laughing so much that my voice box protests. Hamza and Ali play with the stem glasses, oblivious to the looks we're getting from the goras around us and Afza is greeted with a silver plastic-flower garland. The food is good and confusing and entertaining and at the end we all become a little broke. And at Hotspot afterwards I stop mid-sentence and my eyes go wide as I see a Chinese girl in teeny tiny ... shorts?! Do the Jamia Hafsa horrors mean nothing to her, I wonder, and they're all laughing at my face and I tell them to move out of the way so I can stare properly. Nothing happens at all when I hear the gunshots over the music outside Gelato, all the usual beggars are there, as are the weekend-cruising pre-pubescent Islamabad boys and the kohl-laden O/A levels aunties.

But Ammi tells me about the SSG jawan's delirium, 'mein acha sipahi hoon', and I crack good and proper. I don't know if it's all of the last seven days, the five hundred or so people who've been killed already, or the children in the underground bunkers who don't have a fucking clue what's going on. Maybe it's just the inability to tell who's right and who's wrong.

Being a khala is knowing instinctively which wrist-watches your niece and nephew had chosen for themselves in a shop in your absence.

I talk to Apya. On the phone, at home, in the car, as we try to kill time in F-6 waiting for the JJ store's lunch break to end. For the first time in my life we speak the same language and we have in-jokes and we turn against Ammi as she gets into her besharam humour mode just because I'm getting married and for some reason am allowed to enter the realm of married women already. So we pile into the bathroom and giggle into our palms when we can't fight Ammi's determined-to-corrupt-me comments. Apya wants to show me how she makes her chicken and I'm running upstairs, online, and she still holds my hand as we sit on Ammi's bed watching TV, and squeezes it.

A jalebi is a beautiful thing.

I can't wrap my brain around the concept of leaving, still. Breakfast after breakfast as I sit at the table groggy-eyed with Ammi and Papa, eggs and toast and tea, and then e-mail. Days fall into patterns for weeks, time whizzes by and yet brings us no closer, it seems. Time with Faiqa is filtered through different sleeping routines and the friction that persists despite the knowledge that this is the end. And there's two ways of looking at it everyday, as Tariq makes me smile more and more often, I think waiting is not always a bad feeling.