smiling hooks

2.

02.03.1984.
Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

         The winter-summer transitions of the second decade of my life are smudged together, for the most part, in my memory, like pencil scribblings inside a heavy book; the pages of which have been turned too many times, have endured too much friction, for the graphite not to melt together into a blurry mesh of grey – and the focus having shifted inevitably from the message of the words to the fact that they were all now one, connected, inseparable. You could call it spring but in Rawalpindi we never used that word. Spring we knew from picture books – English landscapes of white, snowy cherry trees, flower arrangements and colour-spilled bushels in the Park, wide smiles and white-skinned girls in floral dresses. Sure we had flowers too, they bloomed like they did anywhere else, but they were never in focus, and never around. If you looked in the immaculate tiny tended front yards of the middle class, you'd see spring. Bahaar. Primavera. The alternative was the picture books.

         But what I remember about that time of the year is a very distinct colour – the rains and the meetings. The meetings took place in the drawing room, which was the prettiest room in the house, all with its glass tables and foreign souvenirs and the tiny Eiffel tower on the coffee table, and it was always polished to a sheen, except for the summer, when the meetings died down a bit, and then a thin coat of powdery dust would be allowed to settle like a blanket over the ceremonious pristineness of the room. It was the only room in the house that was carpeted, a rich brown colour, and a great red Hoover was run over it with not meticulous regularity – for the colour was disguising – but it never looked unclean.

          The meetings were mostly just as frequent as they were the rest of the winter. And the rains, well, there were thunderstorms in January, too, but in January most things were frosted over with a thin layer of cold, that kept everything intact, like varnish – and my breath still fluoresced white in the sharp cold air. But at this time of the year, the early, blossoming days of March, that layer began to thaw, slowly. The rains were less ferocious, and without lightening, and the warmer weather allowed for a gentle sort of humidity. I have moments, bits and pieces of translucent memory, smoothed over with the friction of time so the edges have been blurred and the tape has taken on a dreamy, almost fairytale-like quality of intimidating perfection (and that metaphor holds for a lot of what is related to this particular phenomenon). If I play back this certain clip, it looks like this: fat drops of rain chasing each other frantically down the glass of the large window, the world outside hazed and misty in a fog of laden moisture; a scratchy gramophone record, and Nahid Akhtar's voice filling the room in a low-volume, thickly sweet soundtrack. And in a single sofa, Seema Khatoon, smoking a cigarette, staring off at some fixed point, one knee crossed upon the other, and the other foot tapping synchronously along with the Nahid ghazal (it was her who bought my mother the gramophone, insisted they keep it in the room for the meetings). Seema with her henna-crimson hair and her big almond eyes. Wearing some majestic suit in a macaw colour and the satiny fabric of her kameez that reflected twinkles of light a little when she stirred. A slight grey smoke, silhouette against the rain – her couch was right in front of the window. Sometimes when I am visiting the memory, I am stirred back to the present only to find myself trying not to cough.

          You see how these little clippings of my past are glorified and augmented in my memory. It is part of why I don't trust them.

          How can I trust them, when all of those events and phenomena and that waterfalling timeline has washed away my own core, and most of the time I can hardly stand to look back, and yet these glamorous, beautiful little clippings, these glorious preserved artifacts from an almost-dreamed before-life, can come back to me at any given moment and envelop me in a kind of longing I have never known anywhere else? How can I trust something I know to be half fickle and yet possesses such tremendous power over me?