The Musings of Cold Marble and Dancing Candles

While having conversations about New Year’s resolutions in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been putting much thought into the type of life I want to be building for myself. Usually, this thought process begins with establishing some sort of metric for measuring what a high quality of life is. Financial security falls into this metric of course, automatically providing access to basic necessities like food, water, shelter, electricity. A strong support system for both emotional well-being and economic fallback, an enjoyable job, a good social circle, stimulating surroundings. All quite straightforward, all quite universal, all things I feel I have obtained. And yet, I don’t feel like I am entirely satisfied with the life I live. There is something lacking that I can’t pinpoint just yet, something abstract in nature but immeasurable in intensity. I assume this is what makes the ‘quality of life’ metric significantly more complex because contrary to popular belief, it is not universal. It is a metric that requires clear contemplation in order to build with any accuracy. And to build mine, I’ve been looking back at some of the events that sculpted the happiest moments of my childhood. Events that established the more positive foundations of my being, whose pieces I can continuously incorporate into my future selves. 

I think back to life in Karachi, back when my family and I occupied one room at my grandparents’ house. In the summer monsoon months, torrential downpours were often accompanied by power outages that sometimes lasted days. And in the boiling summer heat paired with a satanic humidity, we’d sit under the ceiling fan in the living room and watch it swirl round and round until the sun set and the UPS died. We’d light candles and place them in strategic positions around the living room to illuminate ourselves in sparse light.

I had a favorite candle that I’d take with me if I needed to roam the house alone. It was a woman painted in black and white, with one hand on her hip to act as a handle and the other hand up as if serving something at a restaurant. The wax candle rested on that second hand in an almost obliging way. Sometimes I’d take her to a pitch-black room and place her in the center so that I could see her shadow on the wall. The flickering flame would make her shadow dance, and I was both mesmerized and terrified of how that shadow looked when it danced with movements so unnatural. After a few minutes, I’d pick her up and take her back to her original position of utility in the living room, where she could once again be among others like her.

In those days, we’d open the doors and windows with a grandiose hospitality to welcome any breeze that chose to bless our household. My grandparents would drag plastic chairs to the center of the room while the rest of us – my parents, my aunt and uncle, my sisters and I, lay on the floor pressing our faces to the cool marble with hopes of extracting hidden ice trapped beneath the surface. Exhausted by the heat and dizzy by thick, humid air, we’d laugh and laugh from what must have been delirium. We’d reminisce about small and simple things that only close family could ever know. And we’d spend hours with each other in what I’ve always considered to be the purest form of intimacy.

We’d then collectively decide that it was time to sleep off our sweat and disorientation till the next morning. We’d migrate upstairs and from the back room, the adults would bring out charpais. We’d set them up under a covering on the far end of the balcony, and close to stars tinted with a polluted sky, we’d sleep. Our bodies covered with white namaz ki chaadars to protect against the threat of mosquitos and dengue, heavy rain splashing on the floor and sprinkling us with cool, light drops to dispel the heat in our bones. I don’t remember the last time I slept so peacefully.

In the morning, we’d fill water in large buckets so as not to use excess. We’d use smaller buckets to pour the water on ourselves as we washed remnants of the night off our hair and bodies. I’d always hear pre-1947 music flowing from the chowkidar’s phone, through the tiny bathroom window and into my receptive ears as I bathed. And once I was done, I came out of the bathroom and noticed that the house had bathed with me, in sunlight rather than water. From there, I’d begin my day.

I think back to this now as I ponder past memories in a new place where power outages are an anomaly, and sleeping outside for those with homes is a purely recreational activity. Where sitting on the floor is met with disgust, disdain, and indefinite confusion, and candles are for scent rather than light. I can’t help but feel like something is missing – that what made my childhood home the strongest it could have been was that slight lack of resources. That even now, when I visit Karachi and the generator no longer works during a power outage, I’ll drag the same plastic chairs outside to the area where I used to play cricket as a child and sit with Daulat Bhai. I sit with him under the same sky that I slept below all those years ago and listen to him spin stories and recount memories of his childhood in Peshawar. 

He’ll tell me how once in a while, someone in his village would be lucky enough to get a letter, but they wouldn’t be able to read it. They’d send their children with a bag of eggs to the house of the one person in the village who has the privilege of literacy, who would read the letter to the entire village in exchange for the eggs. A simple barter of services. “Does it not bother you,” I’d say, “to have the entire village listen to your private letters?” “We don’t think the way you do,” he responds. As if to say, privacy is a privilege. But that the privilege of privacy sometimes makes you shut yourself to the beauty of community. 

And as I find myself living now in what would be considered a “high quality of life,” I couldn’t agree more.