Your Kids Are Okay

(I started teaching at LUMS in 2014 and needless to say dealing with people and public speaking has never been my comfort zone, it still isn't but practice has made it bearable. I threw up twice on my first day of classes, once before each Writing and Communication class. However, towards the end of my first semester, I penned this poem for my students. I recently came upon it when sorting through my old folders and thought I would share ... )

So, one of your kids

… And, yes, you call them ‘your kids’ now

Because there are just so many of them 

and you don’t have any other word for it yet 

and it makes you feel oddly invested 

Perversely paternal, even.

Anyway, so one of your kids asks you to sit in on them SLAMming poetry,

And you agree because you haven’t yet learned how to disagree 

But you dread it

You’ve read their work and it usually involves a host of acronyms you don’t understand 

OMG'S, LOLs, Y.O.L.Os & Whatevs 

It makes you feel irrelevant, decrepit and not quite ‘with it’ 

you’ve never really been ‘with it’ but this just leaves you without…

You go anyway.

There they are, working with words

Real words…

in complete, incomplete, inchoate,

 off-key, hackneyed, ugly, pretty, petty and everything-in-between sentences

And it reminds of you of Cohen yelling at a studio hand “Yeah but there are no dirty words…ever”

And you are pleasantly surprised, and it is surprisingly pleasant

You find yourself justified in all those silly, lofty ideals you keep constructing around them

The unknown pressure of giving you purpose

Of justifying your time spent pouring over papers

Of dreaming up interesting misnomers and thought exercises

Of wanting them to stay silly rather than self-effacing 

Of hoping they stay awake during your class

And suddenly it doesn’t matter that these kids aren’t yours

They’re the same, gaffing and riffing their way through 

Extemporizing, elasticizing, euhemerizing 

They remind you of the one who never stops talking 

That other one who pontificates 

The one who can’t help but dramatize everything

That other one who never speaks but pens the most beautiful opening sentences

The ones who always sit in corners and hang on your every word without ever adding their own 

…no matter how hard you beg them to

The one who reminds you of yourself at 19 

and you think ‘oh you poor, poor thing’,

The one who judges you and you always fall short

That one who loves to improvise

The other one who tries to get you to listen to Pantera 

The obsessive one who forced you to watch countless videos on Particle physics so you could hope to understand his paper,

The girl who needs to discuss every paper three times before she pens a paragraph

That one always waiting outside your office before you even get there

The one who never spoke in class but suddenly launches into a soliloquy that validates your entire existence

The one you will never reach 

The one who says ‘But Ma’am your uninterpretating me’ 

And you say Trust me kid, I couldn’t even if I tried. 

The one who shuts your office door behind them and cries 

The one you shut the office door behind and cry for

And you know you’re being especially sentimental because term is ending 

And they are the first people you’ve ever been paid to talk to

And yet it doesn’t feel like it

… At least not always

And you don’t know how to thank them for giving you hope 

and purpose and all those gooey, toe-tingly things 

that a person like you needed without knowing it

And you don’t know how to punish them for occasionally pushing you around 

And you don’t know what appropriate teacher protocol is 

Or appropriate student protocol

Or appropriate

Or protocol 

So you just say, ‘let’s talk’ 

And you soon realize how much there is to say

And how badly someone needs to listen to them 

And, sometimes, how badly they need to listen to each other 

So you bluff your way in and out of it all 

thinking you are capable of teaching them anything

And they are kind enough to let you 

And you hope you can teach them to make the most of this

This odd moratorium on both life and reality

this place where learning is contagious 

and there is no warranty on the watershed of ideas

That this is the only time in life that they will get to do this

Have big ideas and not have the world shoot them down

Think big thoughts and believe them to be big enough

Make friends and mayhaps keep them

And you hope they will remember you

As that nutty lady who 

for a tiny moment 

was the one who told them 

exactly what they needed to hear on a bad day

that it will all be okay 

That they will all be okay

Tomorrow

I watch it all 

It's the least I can do

I let myself be 

Bombarded with images

Bombarded with feelings;

Tears coupled with Rage

All marked by helplessness

I find myself here again 

weeks later

Still watching ...

Still Bombarded with the 

Stale, polaroid aftertaste of Death

Charred bodies and the severed feet of children 

Still drowning in bitter waves of Rage

All while somewhere 

on a tiny strip of land 

they die.

Bombarded. 

Bombarded, 

with rockets, missiles, and fire

Sulphur and gas 

raining down on them 

from orange, apocalyptic skies...

Bombarded with 

flying, white arrows of apathy

Targeted pellets of PR venom

Bombarded 

and Classified: 

'Terrorist.'

'Towel Head.' 

'Human Animal' dying.

Not even worthy of being killed. 

Just dying...

There I go again

Using Their words 

Because those are the only words I was given 

to talk about

 Bombardment.

Words, 

fed to me in a language 

made to kill me

Crafted to leave us all dead

Even before they kill us:

'Both Sides.' 

'Humanitarian Pause.'

'Self Defense.'

'Conflict.'

Tomorrow will come 

with the Sun

Just like it always does

Tomorrow I will go to work 

I will order a burger and fries

Tomorrow I will make sure 

I don't order McDonalds

That would be insensitive 

And despite all these Bombardments

I still have enough feeling left

in me 

to feel that.

Another Tomorrow

And I will teach a class

on how to make sense of a massacre

I will use words like:

'Decolonization.'

'Radical Empathy.'

'Resistance.'

'Apartheid.'

All words in Their language

Because me and mine 

Don't belong to ours anymore

Not for this

Not for what They do to us

We never had time to make our own words

while we were Bombarded with Theirs

Tomorrow I will say that 

History will remember Today

That I will remember

That we must remember 

But my Tomorrow 

will already be their Yesterday

And that is why 

None of my words 

will matter 

in the face of Their word

'Bombardment.'

A Letter to My Rapist

****Trigger Warning**** 

(This is a recounting of sexual assault, please do not read it if you think you may find it distressing)

I’m not sure how one begins such correspondence. 

Am I expected to be polite during this exchange? 

Do I say ‘Hello’? 

After all, you didn’t exactly introduce yourself, as you clamped your hand over my mouth and dragged me behind a dumpster while I was waiting for my bus home a little over a year ago. I am willing to admit that in retrospect, I am somewhat relieved that I didn’t see your face. Then again, not seeing your face also means that you could be anyone, anywhere, and that notion is particularly terrifying in how unavoidably real it is and has been this past year. 

Now you are everyone. Now you are everywhere. 

I am still unsure why I am choosing to finish writing this letter today, after I began writing it a year ago. Perhaps, because I feel that writing the words and acknowledging to myself and others what happened will finally release me from carrying it and having to relive and deconstruct it in silence every single day. Is this what they call catharsis? I don’t know, because I don’t feel lighter or clean. What I do feel is rage, a sense of rage that I can finally admit and openly acknowledge to myself. A rage that I can quietly store at the center of who I am and feel alive with as it replaces decades of fear. Perhaps I am seeking solace with all my #MeToo sisters who have the same story - regardless of how it happened, where it happened, when it happened and who did it to them. The thing we all share is that someone took something from us that they had no right to. Someone thought that our body belonged to them when it didn’t. Or perhaps, it’s because your side is winning now as it always has and I just want to be with those of us who are feeling overwhelmed, scared, and enraged. 

I honestly don’t know why I am writing this today or whether I will share it. 

I only know that I can’t carry it alone any longer. 

Perhaps the reason I am writing this today is purely pragmatic, because today the United States Supreme Court overturned RoevWade. You will be surprised to know that this matters to me at all. After all, why should it, really? I am not American and in a little over a month my visa will expire, and I will leave this country after five years of having lived here and studied here and yes… despite you, having felt safe here. It matters because I am from Pakistan, where my body was never mine in the first place, even the idea that it could be was an aberration that was shredded in real time for me every single day - either as a child with blows and gropes that I didn’t know how to name or recognize; as a teenager with the stripping gaze of hundreds of men staring through car windows, leering in markets or stalking me in the short walk it took to get from my car to the gated safety of my school. Growing up and working only compounded that reality, where my body became a free zone for perverts masturbating publicly in the street while staring at me sat utterly horrified in my car or old men lazing behind large, imposing desks deluding themselves that their young female employees found their dirty jokes and sexual innuendo appealing. The constant fear that took root in my skin back home was shed somewhat in the United States and I am embarrassed about admitting that. Profoundly embarrassed, because I know better than most, that people like you exist everywhere - that rape happens everywhere, to anyone, at any time and in any place. It happened to me here, even though my body had been primed for the insecurity that accompanied it since childhood. Still, despite you, I can walk here, out in the open. I take up space without shame. And after months of being paralyzed I still take the bus. Perhaps, the reason this RoevWade thing is so jarring is because it affirms that you and those like you will always be protected at my expense, no matter where I am in the world or what I am doing. Perhaps it is because, after that night, numb and disoriented as I was, my first thought the following day was to run to the pharmacy and take a morning-after pill because I was terrified of getting pregnant and having to seek an abortion. Perhaps, it is because I now know that thousands of women in that position will no longer be able to do that. 

Perhaps, I am just tired, and this is all I can do to finally exorcise you. 

I don’t really know how to speak to you. But I guess I will choose to be polite. It’s something I’m known for, not that it has ever protected me from the impoliteness of others. All it really allowed me was a faux sense of superiority in the face of bullies. That I was somehow better than them because I had not reduced myself to their level. Then again, that’s also something those that get bullied must tell themselves. I have spent my life surrounded by bullies, and the knowledge that I didn’t stoop to their level afforded me a semblance of self-respect, even if that has never served as a real form of protection. Politeness has its place, but it doesn’t have power. Also, in the days following what you took from me, I don’t want to give away any more pieces of myself than the ones I lost in those eight minutes and 39 seconds.

 I know that it took exactly eight minutes and 39 seconds for you to take a person waiting alone at a bus stop and make them something else. I know it took you that long to bring my very fragile and meticulously constructed world down around me in the dark, near a dumpster that smelled of sickeningly ripe bananas and sour milk cartons because I somehow still managed to catch my bus home after it had all happened. You pulled apart my body, in slightly over a dozen angry thrusts and I couldn’t scream through the clamped tightness of your hand on my mouth or fight in the face of your enormous size, so I froze. I continue to tell myself that freezing was my ‘choice’ but no reaction born of desperation is ever a choice. A reflex is not a choice. I remember you licked the side of my face before running away and I didn’t even have it left in me to scream at that point, so I just waited for it to be over. After you scurried away in the dark, I was numb and too scared to turn around and confirm that I was finally alone. When I finally was able to turn around, I waited. I waited patiently for the bus and then I swiped my bus pass, found a seat in a well-lit middle section, all the while wondering if anyone could tell what had happened to me. I wondered if my rumpled clothes gave me away or my scratched face or my knotted hair. But no one really looks at other people directly here. It’s considered rude, impolite – I can’t quite decide whether that is a blessing or a curse. I got to my stop and then walked the last nine-minute stretch home in silence. One breath before the next, one step before the next. It must have been the first time I’ve exited the bus in three years without yelling a "Thank you! Have a good one" back over my shoulder at the driver and for some ridiculous reason, that’s what I chose to fixate on during that walk home. I was worried the bus driver must have thought me rude. I’m pretty sure most bus drivers don’t even register those greetings in their days punctuated by the miserable consistency of a rotating roster of strange faces but still, it’s the smallest courtesy extended to someone whose life is considerably harder than mine. 

It still bothers me that I forgot to do that. 

Like I said, I’m polite. 

Here’s the thing though, I know what this is supposed to be. I’ve made a career out of teaching young women about surviving abuse and pain. I study and teach feminism as a discipline. I spent several years speaking on a near daily basis to survivors of abuse – gang rape victims, acid attack survivors, women shunned for the crime of not bearing sons … all the multitudes of women who have survived the multitudes of men who devise multitudes of ways to punish us for the offense of existing and having bodies that they consider perpetual provocation. I’ve heard countless stories and I’ve shared some of my own but somehow the ability to know, recognize and catalogue all the signs of what I felt at that moment did not help. If anything, my need to rationalize my rage only fueled it further. I asked myself all the questions that I knew never to ask a woman – Why was I there when it was dark? Why didn’t I leave campus earlier? Why was I wearing a sleeveless blouse with a shrug over it and not a t-shirt that hid my neckline? Why was I humming a song under my breath? A song you would never have understood both because it’s in Urdu and because if you could understand it, you wouldn’t be who you are. It's based on a Faiz poem called ‘Aaj Bazaar Mein’ sung by Nayyara Noor. The irony that this was what I was listening to when you grabbed me from behind will never be lost on me. Needless to say, I can’t listen to that song anymore not that I’ve tried. I’m still too scared to try. I asked myself all the questions a female body is trained to ask when it is violated even though I know those questions are wrong and that they have no place being asked. EVER. 

On second thought, perhaps that’s why I am writing this, because I still carried the guilt of existing loudly and largely enough to be raped by you. I was too comfortable in my confidence that I was finally safe and I lost sight of all the invaluable knowledge my skin had harvested over decades – to shrink itself, to contract when others were near, to constantly be on alert. 

I have always hated my body – which is easy enough to do when all the stimulus surrounding me confirms that it is wrong. Television tells me it’s not white enough, magazines tell me it’s not thin enough, tik tok videos tell me my eye color is all wrong. For what was left, well Pakistan was kind enough to cover all those bases. I have large breasts and hips, always have had. There is no bigger curse than having a voluptuous body in a land where even three-year-old girls and corpses are blatantly sexualized. Also, having been poked, prodded, and subsequently pounded to a pulp during my childhood helped establish with absolute, unwavering certainty for me that for men (I reject the qualifier ‘most men’), women are bodies first and the people occupying them second. If ever. Some men are capable of aligning the two, others can only focus on the former. I am therefore completely conditioned and resigned to the default state of thinking the worst of ALL men until proven otherwise. This is the less stressful alternative to hoping to find the good ones and being consistently proven wrong. It is just more practical and efficient to be pleasantly surprised by a genuinely kind and thoughtful man who doesn’t have an ulterior motive than expecting kindness from most men and living with the constant disappointment, fear and trauma that accompanies being terribly, dangerously, fatally wrong. 

It took me decades to begin to learn to occupy my body somewhat comfortably, to view it as a tool that carries my brain and my person from point A to point B. Learning to focus on the things my body could do – climb, run, walk and dance rather than how it looked doing them has been a lifelong struggle that you reversed in eight minutes and 39 seconds. I have spent the past year seeing a therapist, occasionally, and when my insurance can cover it. I’m not sure it has helped as half the time I have to contextualize my brown-ness for a very white, very sensitive and very well-meaning woman who is very bad at hiding how traumatized she is by my traumas. The process of assuring someone literally being paid to make you feel better is exhausting and it ultimately leaves me feeling more resentful than relieved. 

Instead, I have found solace in female friends online who share the same or similar struggles and it is impossible to quantify how desperately women need to be each other’s support systems. How grateful I am to these voices on the internet belonging to bodies I have never encountered that have helped heal me in ways I cannot even begin to fathom. I’ve taught this notion of sisterhood for years but experiencing it and healing with it has been something that makes me think there is a place where you don’t and won't matter. That’s probably why you and yours are so terrified of us when we speak about the things we have survived at your hands. When we are together in our pain and in our healing and in calling you out. 

In the last year, you sent me hurtling back to when I was fourteen years old - hiding in closets and behind locked doors from pounding fists and the sound of screams – some mine, some theirs. Things that I had spent decades, deconstructing, compartmentalizing, and overcoming came flooding through my pores and were reincarnated as terrifying, familiar phantoms in my lonely Buffalo apartment. You, were easy enough to forget because I never knew you and I’m grateful for how inconsequential you are in retrospect. What you unleashed within me; however, I don’t know if you can ever be forgiven for that. Not by me, at least. People, systems, laws, and twitter, of course, will most definitely forgive you. They will even advocate for your mental health, your problems and your circumstances at the expense of mine. In my country, a woman ‘gets herself raped’, so the idea of holding men accountable is rather farfetched. But here, there is at least the acknowledgement of the fact that you raped me and it wasn’t my fault. That the hemorrhaging of self occurring in the wake of what you did is all on you. Still, there are many, ever rising in number, that believe at the core of their being (enough to scream it from tv screens and social media scrolls) that you shouldn’t have to pay or suffer for your actions. That what you did to me was a ‘mistake’, an 'accident' even. That men are allowed their mistakes when women aren't even permitted their experience. I now carry a pepper spray that a friend, who lives in a different state, bought me as New York State doesn’t allow them. This makes me angry. It doesn’t allow tasers either, that makes me angrier. 

So many protections for you. 

So many loopholes… all for you. 

None for me. 

I guess that’s where I am right now, studying how people - some who I don’t know, some who I do and some who I care about - shape the discussions around abuse and their sympathy and excuses for those who commit it. How people talk about #MeToo and women’s bodies. I am used to hearing despicable things from strangers on the internet and in life; I am wary of hearing them from people I know; and I am both scarred and scared to hear them from those I care about. But I’ve decided it isn’t worth arguing with any of them over or trying to convince them otherwise. It's just too exhausting, and I am so tired of constantly seeking allies who will refuse to defend my destruction at your hands. I have arrived at the point where every time someone I care about refuses to recognize what happens to women at the hands of men because they are too busy trying to protect them, or each other or too guilty to confront their own pasts or whatever - a door in my mind slams in their face. I close a chapter on them. I still smile and speak politely but they are no longer someone that I can afford to ‘care about’. 

Of all the things you have taken from me, I will admit, you gave me clarity. 

But even I am not polite enough to thank you for that. 

When I got home that night, I locked my door and walked straight into the tub and turned on the shower. I didn’t even have it in me to take off my clothes. I just needed to wash you off me. I spent over an hour under the spray of water trying to process what to do NEXT - the next minute, the next hour, the next year and next in my life. To have a ‘list’ of survival tips that would keep me away from that other ‘list’ of reasons for not wanting to that I reflexively used to turn to when I was much younger and stupider. A lifetime later, I swapped the shower for my sheets and I slept until I woke in terror the next morning to run to the pharmacy for a pill that would ensure, that my body at least, could expunge you completely and fully. 

But there is such a thing as skin memory and it is both eidetic as well as photographic. 

It is also permanent. 

Skin remembers.

I know this from experience, and it took me over a week before I could make my way to the police to report what happened. Lucky for you, I really had nothing to give them. I hadn’t seen your face, there was no DNA evidence left and I could only describe how you smelled and what you said. I told the cops that you said, “Just keep your mouth shut and it will be over” and in recounting those words, I was mortified that you and I had shared the exact same thought during that terrible moment. 

How could that be? 

What did that mean? 

That I told myself to 'keep quiet and let it be over' to save myself and my sanity in the same moment you told me to 'keep quiet and let it be over' as you were violating my sense of self and breaking my sanity?

I am finally realizing that this is the reason why I am writing this today. 

To let myself know that I am not ashamed of what you did. That what people think or say or how they will now view me is all on them or perhaps on you but it’s not on me. 

It is not mine to carry anymore. 

It never was. 

So, No. 

I won’t 'keep quiet and let it be over' for your benefit.

The Bureaucracy of Hope

For My Abbi Ji

* These are my impressions and thoughts about my grandfather and our love story. If anyone has problems with any of it, feel free to skip over.

a) This is not about you. b) Fundamentally, I do not care.

I suppose it is customary after someone dies to try and make sense of how they lived.

I have been trying to do so this past week in the wake of my grandfather’s death, who in every way that counts was a kindred spirit and guide. I am bogged by the fact that I couldn’t be there to tell him so in person during his last days and some part of the displacement I now feel is a byproduct of not really knowing how to mourn him. Mourning is difficult when death is wrought by old age, disease and pain and where a huge part of your love for someone warrants that you seek relief on their behalf. Mourning is further complicated when one doesn’t ascribe to a framework that helps articulate it. I refer here, to religion, or lack thereof. Ironically, this is something I feel only he ever really understood my opinions on. In some ways, I feel like I lost my Abbi a couple of years ago when his memories began to fade in a fundamental way and we could no longer converse with each other. Not that we ever conversed much with words but there was always a silent understanding in those odd hours where we sat side by side, each buried in a book. We were always surrounded by words, my Abbi and I, and so there was little need to ever actually word anything. But before I left Pakistan, those silences became crippling and far too quiet for comfort. Being alone, away and reading, they are proving to be even more so. Still, there is a finality and emptiness that comes with death, no matter how prepared one feels for it. Death always prompts a conversation about what life means.

I suppose, that’s why religion exists in the first place.

My Abbi and I spent long hours debating the Occam’s Razor-edge that might explain why he always agreed with me on the futility of divinity and its accompanying strictures but still never missed a single prayer. There never really was much of an explanation for it but he used to put it along these lines ‘Ohho Beta, ki pata. Kuch nahin he. Lekin agar hoya, te fir meri tarfon koi kasar nahi rahi’ (Ohho, Beta. Who knows? There’s nothing in the end. But if there is, then I’ve done my part.) My Abbi brought me to Urdu, in fact his exact words on the subject were ‘Tu mere ghar ich reh ke Urdu parhna vi nahin jandi? Te mein te fir fail.’ (You’re living under my roof and you can’t even read Urdu properly? Then I’ve failed.) In part because I really wanted to be able to understand him and in part because I couldn’t let him fail, I let Abbi bring Urdu back to my life. He would sit back somewhat patiently, flinching, as I read him the paper at an excruciatingly broken and glacial pace and then over verse that flowed a bit easier until it finally began to sink in and take root. It was poetry that offered him solace and comfort in seeking out all those pesky questions that plagued us both and I am drowning myself in his poem these days while I cocoon myself among his favourites - Faiz and Ghalib. We never did manage to agree on Iqbal.

On some deeply discomforting level, I know that I take after my grandfather in very fundamental ways. That is not necessarily a good thing but I always sought pride in it anyway. My poor Nani often bemoaned how ‘tussi dono bilqul ik jese o, kamreyan te kitaaban vich band’ (You both are just the same. Locked in rooms, buried in books) and while I wished I could offer her the companionship she craved and deserved from me, a part of me secretly relished being likened to my Abbi. But I also recognize the pitfalls of being inherently uncomfortable in one’s own skin and navigating the world simultaneously crippled by an inferiority and superiority complex. Not wanting to ever be upstaged by anyone but also loathing the tedious conversation offered by most company because far better company lay in quiet corners buried amid frayed bindings. It sounds romantic and Lord knows we tried to make it seem so, but in truth it’s probably much closer in scope to narcissism. I know why we preferred our rooms, it wasn’t because they were comfortable...it was because they were safe and because we were scared.

I have also been trying to make sense of what my Abbi’s life means, not just for myself but in the larger scope of ‘things’. He was a lifelong bureaucrat and he knew what it meant to ‘serve’, as few of us today do. He rose, an orphan from a small village steeped in poverty and carved out a future by teaching himself and those around him in schools shaded by trees and little else. He realised very early on that his only real asset was his mind. He scored a series of scholarships and ended up at Government College and then in the Civil Service. He was a historian, poet, jurist and philosopher. He wrote two books - one public ‘An Agrarian History of Pakistan’ and the other private ‘Fard e Hayat’ and all I have ever heard said of him and about him is that he was unflinchingly honest in his work and in his dealings. I have heard that he ‘never compromised on his principles’. And I am trying to contextualise what this means now beyond casual epithets we throw around like we do words such as ‘khaandaani’ and ‘izzat’ that mean so little owing to their ubiquity.

What does it mean to be ‘honest’ beyond sense and saving grace and what does it mean to not compromise on one’s principles, ever? It meant that he was transferred from pretty much every posting he ever held because he was impossible for his seniors to contend with; it meant that he didn’t toe lines that were designed to be ‘toe-ed’ and those that most of us toe simply to survive and succeed at pretty much anything. It meant that he did not make friends easily because he lacked the skill to praise people, be pliable or stroke egos that desperately needed stroking. It meant that even though by his own measure he lived a life of integrity, it was never a life of plenty. It meant that he was, by definition, not a practical man. It meant that he was always aware of the success he could have achieved, had he been willing to toady up (or down, depending on how one looks at it) to his superiors but settled for the success he could account for having earned on his own. It meant he loathed all pomp and circumstance.

I’ve been sitting here, all the way in Buffalo, trying to be ‘honest’ with myself about how I would fare against such a standard and it doesn’t look good. One would like to blame it on a generational default designed to cater to self-gratification over duty and ‘individuality’ over service but I think it goes beyond that. After all, self-interest isn’t specific to any generation. I keep trying to reconcile an image of self where I don’t constantly need validation from something or someone: from likes and shares on Instagram photos or pats on the back for ‘thinking’ and ‘communicating’ grand ideas and/or ideals online or at conferences rather than having to ‘act’ and ‘live’ them day in and day out. On some level, our generation is stifled by saturation – of information, of ideology, of self-gratification and of self-righteous rage. I wouldn’t even know where to begin being content with learning for learning’s sake or reading for reading’s sake or having lived and struggled without due acknowledgement or rewards for doing one’s ‘duty’.

I don’t understand how he did that.

I know with unflinching certainty that I couldn’t do it.

And I’m not saying his life was in any way small because it was lacking in pomp and circumstance. If anything, it was all the grander for not needing it. I think of my Abbi, and it brings me back to why Don Quixote has always been one of my favourite books. He never read it and yet it feels like he lived it in so many spaces:“If Chrysostom's impatience and violent passion killed him, why should my modest behaviour and circumspection be blamed? If I preserve my purity in the society of the trees, why should he who would have me preserve it among men, seek to rob me of it? I have, as you know, wealth of my own, and I covet not that of others; my taste is for freedom, and I have no relish for constraint; I neither love nor hate anyone; I do not deceive this one or court that, or trifle with one or play with another. The modest converse of the shepherd girls of these hamlets and the care of my goats are my recreations; my desires are bounded by these mountains, and if they ever wander hence it is to contemplate the beauty of the heavens, steps by which the soul travels to its primeval abode.”

For now, I am just sad. I am sad for endless debates over the evening news where he would ask me every night as I returned home from hours of editing hopelessness in newsrooms “Batao aaj koi achi khabar thi?” (tell me, was there any good news today) and I never understood how a lifetime of serving could still leave one with such resilient hope for a country that I often found to be hopeless, even though I hadn’t put in the time to earn any right to such an opinion. I watched on in frustration and despair as he drowned himself in the evening news and panel pontification of self-proclaimed ‘experts’ that I always knew would come to nothing because those of us who work as journalists know how journalism dies each day as we try and cover something real over the pantomime that entertains millions for money no amount of honest reporting could match. I always marveled at how someone who stood up to military dictatorships and lost family in blood-soaked trains during partition could see something good come out of all this death and despair but he did. His entire generation still waits each day for ours to give them a spark of that ‘achi khabar’ that might be delivered by some beleaguered Messiah they still insist on waiting on. My Nani always asks me ‘Beta, phir humain kaun bachaye ga?’ (Beta, then who will save us) and how do you tell someone who earned that question after a lifetime of service that no one saves those who don’t save themselves and very few of us are interested in saving anything anymore? I don’t know how one can have served the time and still die having hope where so many of us have barely begun serving ours but already consider hope to be nothing short of naiveté – burdensome at best, broken at worst.

I have been reading Abbi’s poem each morning since he passed on and every time it brings me back to the realization of why he and I are kindred. In his life of honesty, honour and duty, it was my own father who shamed him brutally and so publicly that it forced him into hiding, in his room and behind his desk and it is this verse that speaks of our parting. I believe, from the bottom of my heart that I was meant to return to my Abbi, and that is why I am grateful for our final decade together. I am grateful to have known him and to have found in him a quiet, shrouded integrity that I hope I can live up to someday. I am grateful for random moments before his early morning walks where he would come up to my room and say ‘Tu huni tikar jaag rahi e? Chal hun meri jaagan di baari aa gayi e, te tu hun saun ja.’ (You’re still awake? Well now I’m up so it’s your turn to go to sleep) and I would see him out before I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and made my way to bed at 6 am. I remember him pausing over my bookshelves and randomly pulling out volumes and putting them back asking me to recommend a book as he did the same from his shelves. I remember him and my Nani waiting up for me each night as I made my way home from putting the paper to bed no matter how often I told them to go to sleep because I could let myself in. I remember him recounting over and over again my childhood stories, told while perched on his shoulders in the Monkey Forests of Bali where I kept telling him ‘Dekho Abbi, aik haur kamaal’ or asking him in lieu of my best Tanhaaiyan recollections ‘Abbi, Kya aap vaaqi samjeeda hein?’. I remember him guarding my bookshelves as if they were his own when I left for England. I remember him always restlessly double and triple checking if our main gate and front door was locked. I remember him cheating at cards, so heartily and happily, because it was the only place he ever allowed himself to cheat. I remember him and I sneaking in spicy food when my Nani was asleep and us agreeing to keep it our secret. I remember him, on very rare occasions, singing in an unfathomably beautiful baritone. I remember him jumping up and down buzzing with excitement reading out my Oxford acceptance letter before I even knew I had gotten in.

And now I remember to remind myself that I must learn from him to have hope in the face of all this hopelessness.

‘Chalo Abbi Ji, hun meri jaagan di baari aa gayi e, te hun tussi saun jao’

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And now, Abbi Ji, it’s my turn to wake up and it’s your turn to go to sleep.