American Writer

It’s 3 am and I am reading a piece by a Pakistani-born American writer. She has become my favorite writer nowadays. I don't know how to explain, but her words have the power of healing zakhms that aren't there in the first place. Her prose sprinkled with Urdu words makes you nostalgic about a place where you have never been. In the early 2000s, she shifted to the states to do post-graduation, but like every desi post-graduate aspirant in the US, she didn’t intend to come back either. Sometimes I wonder what it is in America that nobody wants to come back. Is it really the money? I doubt.

Anyway, she did her postgraduate, got married, has kids now, and is probably happy. I don’t know about the ‘happy’ part though. I am guessing this only because I have stalked her profile on Instagram and she seems happy, but like everyone else, she too could be lying. However, for some reason, she doesn’t seem like a person who would lie. Especially about happiness. Frankly, it feels like she doesn’t care much about Instagram. She uses it only to post her baby’s videos so that her folks back at home can see her baby growing up. Most of the comments under her videos are ‘Mashallah’ and ‘Tickets bann gi?’ As I am writing this, I am feeling a little ashamed. Maybe I shouldn't stalk her so much. Is it a crime though? It feels like one.

I don’t know if she has booked her tickets or if she is planning a visit to Pakistan soon. I don’t know if she even has a good relationship with her parents. I wish Facebook came with the feature that would make it mandatory for people to update their relationship with every single person they know. It would help stalkers like me a lot. Also, maybe then, we would start caring about relationships? After all, it’s the label that we wanna maintain. In relationship with my mother on a daily phone call basis, in relationship with this school friend on sharing a meme occasionally basis, or in relationship with my brother on festival to festival meetup basis. The last one would embarrass us, no? Maybe we would try to do something about it. Or maybe we would hide it. Who knows! She is a good person though. Anybody who loves poetry is a good person, I think. She would get along with anybody, let alone her mother. Is her mother even alive? I don’t know.

Those who know me know that I have a weird obsession with literature. Till I was 25, I’d read all kinds of books. Thriller, comedy, tragedy, autobiography, Hindi, English, give me anything and I’d find a reason to love it. I rarely hated anything. How can you hate words? Words are like dogs. They are small and musical and they make you feel happy on most days. Literature is beautiful. Or so I think. What excites me is not just that I love the prose, I do, but it’s also the fact that I can transport myself to the place where the stories are taking place. It’s like traveling all over the world without visa.

And it’s not like it’s a great thing to be a reader. It’s just a… thing. Like most other things. Some people watch movies, some read books and some do gardening. In fact, I can’t sit through most movies, and that makes me respect cinephiles even more. Whenever I meet my cinema-loving friends and see them discussing movies so passionately, I feel jealous. I wish I could dissect shit like how they do. But everyone’s made differently and you gotta live with that.

There was this particular essay I remember, where she talked about shifting back to her pind (village) for a few years. But she was in a dilemma. She felt she would lose her independence there. South Asian families can be conservative sometimes. That’s one of the major reasons young people move out, I think. They crave independence. But much later in life, they realize the cost of that independence: relationships. And when they realize it, they wanna come back to their homes and live in that cage once again. They know it’s not possible. It’s too late now. So instead they try to find happiness whenever they spot a fellow urdu/hindi speaking stranger. “Does it smell the same?” The stranger doesn’t know how to reply. Can your home ever be a cage?

I imagine her to be the kind of person who would teach her husband Urdu so that she would have someone to talk to in her native language. I imagine how she would sometimes play Nusrat for him only to inform him that this guy has also played with the lead singer of Pearl Jam. I imagine her beaming with pride about Nusrat sahab.  I imagine her husband to be this sweet white gentleman who, on her birthdays, would learn a couplet by Ghalib and recite it to her after all the guests from the party have left. He knows that this gesture would make her knees weak and their bond even stronger.

I imagine a lot of things. I imagine them walking in the bazaar, where she spots a thing that reminds her of her home and she notes it down in her phone so that she could use it later in one of her essays. She hasn’t written a book yet, but I know she will. She is born to write a book. Sometimes, you know a person will be successful by just seeing them go about their daily life. I want to meet her. It’s 3:45 am and I am now searching how much the flight will cost from Mumbai to New York. It’s manageable. Should I book it? I decide against it. I don’t even know her address. Muneer Niazi comes to my mind:

Kuch sheher de log vi zaalim san,
Kuch saanu maran da shoq vi si.

I unfollow her and go back to sleep.



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