Winter Pakistanis

When the desert cools and some reptiles go underground, winter cleanses the plains of the stale summer air. Temperatures drop, but heart rates rise and schedules intensify at the onset of the ‘wedding season’. When you were college-going and of visiting status, Karachi was the best place to winter. All your friends descended upon the city in the desert. You were no longer a school-kid, but an adult in society. Karachi wasn’t all that bad.

After you graduated and moved back, the winters felt even better, even though you missed your past life. Still, you were a real person, with a real job — not a student. You were full of confidence (a variation of the cock-sure attitude of school-goers in their final year), as you had not felt the hard knocks of the real world. You looked down upon the 30-somethings as has-beens. Then, as each year passed, you noticed the influx of new faces on the scene; fresh grads and students on holiday. As time suddenly started to move faster and the passage of a year began to feel like three months, you lost track. There were always a handful of 40-somethings who continued to hang out with the 20 and 30-somethings, refusing to accept that it was time to move on, let go and focus on a passion. You knew they weren’t serious about their jobs no matter how much they lied. They were like Wooderson from Dazed and Confused, minus his genuineness and insight.

There came a time when you started wondering how your peers continued to participate in social events and weddings — even if being ‘totally off the scene’ meant attending two a week, when all it made you want to do was puke.

Your gut feeling, which was more a part of you than any socially-ingrained attitude and which you tried to repress because you were greedy for other things, orchestrated a pattern of trial-and-error through which it re-emerged with a striking ferocity. The artist reigned supreme. You considered yourself very lucky.

The winter Pakistanis came and went. The conversations with them never went beyond a superficial level, because they were never here long enough. They were critical of this place, yet they enjoyed the attention. The lips moved but there was no sound because the music was too loud. Mannequin smiles. All this while, the desert watched silently. The reptiles waited patiently. Their peristaltic movements were a prototype for the basic movements in life; such as those in my gut, the pumping of blood by arteries, the process of childbirth, contraction and relaxation, cause and effect, action and reaction. There is a skin that must be shed with the passage of each winter.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 15^th, 2016.