Another year turns

Myself and my adopted country share a birthday, a fact that was not known to my mother until relatively late in life. Her knowledge of global geography was a bit hazy at the best of times and she never quite lost the notion that Pakistan was still “a sort-of India”. She remained deeply puzzled to the end of her days as to why her eldest son had chosen to live there. Me too.

It was at one of those receptions that I sometimes get invited to that The Question got asked yet again. Dozens of people mingling, exchanging cards and frantically networking whilst juggling drinks and canapes –– and asking a standard set of questions from one another. At some point in this lobster quadrille somebody, but invariably a person of Pakistan origin, comments on my longevity here and finishes up with the question-cum-comment –– “Oh, you must love it here”.



“You must love it here”, Depending on my frame of mind, there is either a sharp intake of breath or a non-committal nod and a “hmmm”, swiftly followed by drifting off to find somebody else to talk to.

It is one of those questions that is almost impossible to answer and gets more difficult by the year. In 1993, having ridden a bicycle from Karachi to Khunjerab, I would have answered if asked that yes, I really do love it here. I had found a country that I was comfortable with, was warm and welcoming, had a magical diversity and, or so I thought at the time, was a place where I could both live and offer something of myself to.

Perhaps, all tourists fall in love like that. The same way I have fallen in love over the years with the island of Levkas, Damascus and Beirut. We fall in love with these far off places because we never have to live in them, and those who do go for their holidays to the very places that we come from in order to get away from the travails of their own lives in a country we experience only on the surface. Somebody else’s hill is always greener than your own.

Making the transition in 1995 from tourist to resident, married to just the one wife but seemingly umbilically attached to countless impoverished relatives all looking on me to ward off imminent starvation, my perspectives quickly shifted.

Re-reading my daily diaries from the first few years of my time here is something of an onion experience –– peeling away the layers to get to a hard reality at the same time as trying not to weep too obviously. The country I visited and fell in love with was not the country I had chosen to live in, and there were times when flight rather than the daily fight –– sometimes for physical survival –– was the preferred option.

But I stayed. There were two children. We bought a house. Had many cats and several parrots. Went through bad times and good. And I settled.

Perhaps, settling is a function of advancing years, of having achieved a degree of comfort that with just a little effort can be maintained at a satisfactory level; but a part of it is to do with being content –– not in any complacent or self-satisfied way, but in the sense of having found a balance, the ability to take the rough with the smooth and at the end of the day, for the smooth to outweigh the rough.

So it is nothing so simple as falling in love, or feeling love for a country that is visceral and deep, but it is a lot to do with falling in like rather than love. Those things that we like, we like at different levels, and we can fall out of like as we fall out of love. There is an ebb and flow to liking, and there are definite points of love within the wider corpus of “like”.

This is where I live. There are people and places that I like and love. Explaining that in a reception sprinkled with the great and not-so-good usually defeats me, but Pakistan can lay claim to a large slice of my affections.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 27^th, 2014.

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