We got the plane tickets and travel visas in order, a process which spanned over four months. I could've gotten liposuction at a celebrity spa clinic for the money we spent.
Then, the border firings in Waziristan started. Unfazed, we kept to our plans. I mean what's a little gunfire between shaky allies? In fact, we were so unfazed that we booked additional tickets to go to Saudi where Tariq's family currently lives.
I jokingly started calling our travel plans the "Department of Homeland Security Terror Tour."
A week later, a bomb exploded in the Marriott Hotel in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad. I watched the flames pouring out of the windows of that hotel and the sinking realization came to me that the danger was real. Followed by the sinking feeling that everything had changed.
Again.
Last time I felt that way was after 9/11. Obviously, I'm not equating the Marriott Hotel bombing with the Twin Towers, I'm just saying that the way I felt was the same.
Before 9/11, I had a very specific construction of who I was and how I fit into the world. I knew that construction would be dramatically challenged and irrevocably changed when the identity of those terrorists became public knowledge. Same thought, everything has changed.
I'm aware that a lot has happened in Pakistan before and even since that bombing. But, for some inexplicable reason, all this nonsense started feeling real for me on that day. My family and I still didn't cancel our tickets, though. We talked, and talked, and talked about canceling, but we couldn't do it.
I know now that the root cause of our indecision was based wholly on denial.
We wanted to believe that we could go to Pakistan and be safe this time, too. We desperately clung to the hope that we would travel to Pakistan during this time of unrest and find, as we had in the past, that the media had blown things way out of proportion. We'd get off the plane and find that everyone was carrying on business as usual.
But, this time, everything was shaking us. The question was, should we act on these doubts or not?
I remember being at a dinner party last Saturday and talking to a friend's mother, who is visiting from Pakistan, about the situation. I asked her what I should do, what did she think?
She couldn't give me a straight answer. We live with this, we're used to it. It's harder for you, you're not used to these things, she said.
She's right. If we went through with our plans, we would be in a constant state of fear. Every moment would be spent looking out for suspicious cars, suspicious packages and shifty characters.
I called my cousin in Pakistan at 3a.m. on Monday morning and asked him what he thought. I expected him to laugh at me. He would say I was acting paranoid, and to get a grip and just calm down. He ended up confirming the worst of my suspicions. We're always looking over our shoulders these days. And we're used to this.
How sad. To have to live in a country where you become used to bombings. I felt sorry for them.
Then, I felt sorry for me. I was done being in denial and I knew I had to cancel those tickets.
Last year, I canceled my trip because of Benazir Bhutto's assassination. So, in December, it will have been four years since I last set foot in Pakistan. I'm starting to forget about that place that has always been so important to me.
I always visited in the summer, and the nights in Lahore were and, I imagine still are, amazing.
My favorite place to be was a garden designed by my grandfather who had died years before I was born. Jasmine, guava, roses, mangoes and fruits that I don't even know the English names of perfumed the air. My cousins and I would lay on the grass and breathe in that sweet air as we listened to my grandmother tell us stories about our grandfather and our parents when they were children. As the night slowly passed, my grandmother would go to bed, but we would stay there, laying on the grass and quietly staring at the stars.
I saw so many shooting stars during those summers in Pakistan. More than I had ever seen in America in all of my life. Probably because I never really look at the stars here.
One of my cousins told me that whenever the devil tried to sneak back into heaven, the angels threw stars at him. And that's why there were shooting stars. I guess even the devil, though he chose the place he calls home, sometimes misses the place where he came from.
I have opinions on the politics of Pakistan and its relationship with America. But, today, I don't care about them.
Today, four days after I canceled my tickets, I mourn, no, I weep, for the memories I have not touched with my hands for four long years. Another year will pass and I won't touch the guava trees that my grandfather planted in his garden over fifty years ago. Touching those trees was the closest I have ever come to touching him, and, in many ways, to knowing that he was a real person.
I just want my daughter to touch those guava trees, too. I want her to touch our past and know that it is real. That it is part of her. I want so badly for that to happen, and I'm so afraid that canceling these tickets means that she will never experience that.
Because it will become easier and easier to slip into fear, to rationalize the distance, the time away... until a few years will become decades and my daughter will file Pakistan away in her mind with places like Wonderland and stories of my grandfather with people like Aladdin.
Fictional people and fictional places that exist only in the imagination.
That same mother of a friend said something else that has been echoing in my ears for the past week. What a shame, she said, what a shame that we worked so hard to build a country that our children are afraid to come home to.
From the outside, I just look like a paranoid American who canceled a ticket. On the inside, I feel like the child that's afraid to go home. Or maybe, I've just become someone whose gotten tired of dodging stars just so I can see the place that I came from.
Labels: I Do SO Leave the House Every Now and Then, My Passport Is Just Another Label
This photo of my dad's family (I wrote about them in the last post) predates the partition of India and was taken in Malerkotla, a Punjabi state that my family, ahem, er, this is awkward, ruled for about three centuries.
