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A Lineage of Repetition

I am both burdened and comforted by how my body, how women’s bodies, are built to hold. My entire physicality – my ribs, my stomach, my intestines – migrate and adjust to accommodate life. My womb controls which generations continue and which cease to exist, which bloodlines last to enjoy the intricacies of life and which die off as if never having lived at all. But I’ve begun to notice the other ways my body holds. How I clutch the stories of pain that I’ve heard from women over the years and absorb them into my skin. How my organs shift and contort to make room for them while they circulate around my body as easily as my uterus might expand for a child. As if structurally made to carry both simultaneously, whether I ultimately choose to or not. And here I am, caught between the weight of generations past and the expectation of generations to come, feeling them both slip from my grasp.

I think about how many stories have built my foundations as a woman over the years. I think about how many of those stories were never mine to claim but were handed down to me like the most valuable of family heirlooms. How I would sit with my mother, my grandmother, my aunts, as they drew for me elaborate memories from their prime. Some of these with small pieces of advice littered across, like thin flecks of gold fluttering in the wind waiting to be caught. Others with cautionary tales of the woes that await women who attempt to navigate their worlds without the privilege of intergenerational family wisdom. 

The first story I remember hearing was a year after I moved to Karachi. I was seated on a couch with my Nani, watching one of those Star Plus dramas with storylines that now blur together with the dozens of others we must’ve watched since then. There was a scene where one of the female characters draped herself in jewelry as she got ready, at least 10 pounds of gold dripping down her ears. I noticed the pierced holes in my nani’s ears, stretched down from carrying similar ostentatious weight. I touched my own lobes pricked with needles only a year prior, unexposed to the decadence of both the woman behind the screen and the woman seated next to me. I remember pointing out how much I admired the earrings while Nani nodded. A woman should always have a piece of gold with her – you could get some earrings, or a broach to put in your bag.

I’m sure my 8-year-old-self assumed this was some sort of cultural norm, that a woman should be ready to adorn herself with wealth at any moment as her contribution to social ornamentation. But then Nani continued, explaining how gold is a valuable asset that provides a woman with non-threatening financial security. An asset that could be sold in case she finds herself in a position where she needs to flee. I knew so many who couldn’t leave their circumstances because they had been cut off financially. It is important to never be at the mercy of another for your livelihood – you should always be able to leave.

It wasn’t until I began earning for myself that I realized how much this conversation from 16 years ago dictated my views on the critical nature of financial independence. How the number in my bank account became the equivalent of hiding gold in my purse, empowering me with a stable exit strategy for any possible situation I could land myself in. An exit strategy consistently maintained with a certain level of discretion, regardless of the figures that entered my life at will. Maybe I’d go so far as to say it was this conversation that built my preoccupation with wealth, and the safety that comes with being a wealthy woman. 

There were many other stories that cascaded onto me after that. Spending countless days with women lying on beds of exasperation, reclining on chairs of exhaustion, seated cross-legged on marble floors in frustration. Women talking about their husbands – how they tamed them, what they would do differently. Infinite words being thrown around and absorbed by whoever cared to listen: A woman should always make more sacrifices in the beginning. Make him feel masculine, and he’ll do anything you ask. Always wait before getting pregnant – you don’t know how men change after marriage.

I took what was handed to me with gratitude, feeling like a performer going through practice rounds before her debut on stage. I rehearsed the stories of these women in my head, using them to identify misogyny in the men I began interacting with. I analyzed misogyny as an ever-changing mental structure, one possessed universally given the consistent social discrepancies between men and women. And I began to question: what types of misogyny can I deal with? Which types will only be exacerbated with time, with age, with circumstance? How do I use the knowledge from these stories to equip myself, to protect myself from a similar fate? Little by little, I built a small bubble of comfort surrounded by these cautionary tales, refusing to move outside of them. I felt like if I failed to mitigate a risk that I was told to look for, it would be unforgivable. Like the death of my rationality, an unnecessary burden that could easily have been avoided. I listened closely to the tales of women who had charged forward and experienced life for themselves, fearing the day I would have to venture out on my own and do the same.

It is difficult to strike a balance between heeding the voices of women who have lived and learnt, and allowing myself to navigate life based on my own rational judgment. I’ve been working more strenuously to find this equilibrium, which includes unpacking the true value of intergenerational storytelling. What I’ve found is that while the experiences of other women are invaluable knowledge passed from one to another, the true value of these stories is an expression of collective pain. These stories are the histories of our line of Pakistani women told through their own voices, and there is a great power to storytelling when it is passed from the mouths that experience them. It is these stories that express the same struggles and the same pain that we were unable to alleviate, passed down as if to say: our mothers suffered too, as did their mothers, and the mothers before them. What would happen if these stories were never told? What happens to the lineage of pain when it is not articulated? 

We could hold our pain close to ourselves, swallow it and internalize it until our bodies decompose. But a suffering so vast, so deep, so excruciating in nature, cannot be eradicated. It seeps into the soil and rots all that grows from it. And like poison, it lives on in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we consume. Earth, like us, is a woman. Like us, she holds pain within herself and speaks it to all who learned to listen.

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Free Fall

Every time I close my eyes, I see Afghans falling from the sky. I see them using their nails to cling onto the smooth steel skin of an airplane, begging to be let in. I see grips borne on sweaty palms from a fabric of desperation that twists and contorts and strangles like a black hole. How does one hang from an airplane long enough to be flung into the sky? 

I think about how an American’s eyes must’ve locked sight with hordes of bodies hanging from their limbs, pleading for safety. And while watching with a videogame-like voyeurism, wearing the brand of “US Air Force” like a badge of honor, this American took off – coursing through him the blood of a line of colonizers and slave traders that came before him. Blood giving him the strength to litter the ground with fragmented bodies, bodies yearning for a security that had been snatched from them by the same badge that tossed them bones like they were animals. This, is the American patriot. 

There is something about the American in my identity that often pumps my body with arsenic. I am conditioned to think of the sacrifices that my parents made to bring me to this land, to allow me to generate wealth and exploit endless opportunity that I would never have back in Pakistan. And I am appreciative of these opportunities, knowing full well that the United States allowed an entire generation of Shiite Pakistanis to create prosperity away from religious persecution. But a split identity, an identity shared amongst multiple worlds, can only scream in protest when one attacks the other. My eyes become mirrors that reflect the toxicity in the American touch – the shattered economies, destruction of empires, stolen resources snatched from decaying hands. And in those moments, I switch. I am no longer an American, I am a Pakistani. 

But there is something about the Pakistani in my identity that often fills my lungs with dirt. I am conditioned to think of the severe exploitation and depravity that brought the country to where it is today. The brutalizing forces of colonizers tearing through the Indian Subcontinent with shovels of golden entitlement, sucking dry a land and a people once rich with resource. I recognize the interplay of history and white politics in what has become of a country that was conceived upon such bright dreams of abundance. But my mirrors reflect the horrors of Pakistan’s crimes – the way they twist the word of God to manipulate those from which they’ve stolen the right to rational thought. The way they sell the women they’re meant to protect, strip from them their right to participate in a world made for their voices. The way they hold my Shia in chains tightened around their bodies, praying for the day they eradicate us all. And in those moments, I switch. I am no longer a Pakistani. My identity leaves me barren like the desert.  

How are we meant to define ourselves by conversations held behind closed doors? By conversations had by perverted politicians, religious fundamentalists, and white feminists that brand themselves with my identities to manipulate me into complicity? I weep for Afghanistan, a country that my identities fought to destroy. A country that Americans tore to shreds 20 years ago in a time when I was not cognizant, a country that Pakistanis used to promote an extremism that has left a trail of death and destruction upon whatever land it touched. There is nothing salvageable about the parts of me that associate with such bloodied hands, with hands that make mangled bodies of those born to the wrong circumstance.

And yet, privilege is persistent and pervasive the way it has embedded identity within me. It is my American education that has pushed me to criticize, to think liberally and critically about the institutions and political affiliations I hold close. It is this country that has pulled from me the survival mentality that clouded my ability to use reason and logic. And it is the survival mentalities of Pakistan that allow me to see farther than what I am told, to look for stories and human experience as a way to connect with those outside of my familiarities. American and Pakistani brands have been stamped into my skin through the privileges that have built me to question, and to reject. 

But knowing this, I feel shaken with disjoint – like the world I navigate is starkly different from those I navigate it with. That I can take the crippling feeling from watching the brutal demoralization of an entire population, and somehow philosophize it into a discussion about identity conflict. That I can morph the forced subjugation of an entire country to a state of radical terrorism, into a conversation about how I am affected by a war I will never experience. And yet, I can’t watch a plane fly above my head without seeing bodies drop.  

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Emotional Rediscovery/Irrelevant Introspection

I’ve reached many discoveries upon becoming an “adult.” For one, I’ve perfected what my 24-year-old self looks like on paper. I can list my life accomplishments, perform a spoken-word version of them with the ease of a narcissist’s heartbeat. I can sell myself to a crowd, leaving with my net worth intact and my dignity only slightly diminished. I’ve learned that empathy is a rare skill, one that generations neglected to teach their children when they tried to beat discipline into them instead. That most people work hard to change the disingenuity bred into their bones but succeed only in masking it with unassuming paint. And I’ve realized that most things in life are both meaningless and valuable at the same time, that I can migrate between the two as easily as I’d fly from coast to coast. That meaning and value depend entirely on the scale within which I choose to recognize my existence.

Once I started documenting myself on paper, I felt like I became more clinical, more sterile the way I assessed others. It was like their emotional state gained a certain transparency that I could build an internal monologue around – stream-of-consciousness style. I met someone who seemed like he picked certain people to join his world not because of who they were, but because he saw them as objects to embellish his life with. As if hanging ornaments from a tree to show whatever stranger cared to see – look what I’ve acquired. I met someone whose insecurities impede her ability to feel joy for any other woman’s success, despite her attempts to convince us otherwise. Constantly shifting and diminishing her accomplishments based on her resentment towards another’s. I met someone whose obsession with physical relationships stems from an internal yearning for intimacy, a loneliness that masculinity would rather stifle under the stench of half-used condoms than confess to. Worsening with each dull new sexual conquest polished shiny for temporary relief, taken like an Advil for period cramps. The negative aspects of personality have a way of making themselves known. Their stench is pungent – hangs in the air like a gargantuan cloud and adds thickness to the walls, easily identifiable for anyone paying enough attention.

Negative qualities carry weight the way they flood a room. But once the weight lifts, I can spot positives lingering in cracks and crevices with a humble subtlety. Small and inconsequential, they stack and stack until I can see their true value. Like when I’m standing in line at the bookstore holding The Runaways by Fatima Bhutto and a woman behind me tells me that the crow on the cover reminds her of a crow that used to live in the tree by her house back home. Reminds her of how she’d go outside with crumbled pieces of stale bread in a clay dish that she’d place at the foot of the tree, how she’d watch from her window as the crow ate each piece with an unseen fragility. Like when I delve into how the Shiite system of scholarship informs an Islamic school of thought that forever evolves with the acquisition of knowledge. And the man sitting next to me at the coffee shop nods his head, his face confused but his eyes shining as if reflecting my excitement. Like when the guy leaning against the subway pole with his skateboard wedged between his arm and torso, builds for me with his hands the topography of mountains he biked through on his trip to the Northern areas of Pakistan. Shows me with his arms how large the tent was in which he revived his spiritual and intellectual self, in which he reformed the biases and prejudiced preoccupations that he once had about a region so diverse. Or like when I’m sitting at a doctor’s office that I’ve never been to but it still feels familiar the way doctor’s offices normally do, and a nurse in blue scrubs asks me to pronounce my name for her and when I do, she smiles and says, “that sounds so pretty coming out of your mouth.”

Negative qualities are isolationist in their very nature – like throwing a drop of oil in a cup of water, easy and quick to identify the way they force themselves to be noticed. My negative qualities – selfishness, narcissism, ego – isolate me like white paint isolates a bold stroke. These qualities are individual in their obsession with the self, only able to view the vast cornucopia of events around them in relation to the self. But I find that the positives of character are most present in my need to connect and form relationships with those I meet, in my compulsion to listen and to communicate. What I’ve realized is that the goal and byproduct of genuine human connectivity is emotional unison – feelings from one reflected back at the other until they form an equilibrium. Like watercolor, two drops of paint dripping distinctly down a page until they touch, merge, flow into each other and produce something entirely new. Positive qualities are created by a constant influx of human interaction, blooming out of the self to be shared with others.

As I age, as I add to the arsenal of experiences that sculpt and shape my personality, I begin to acquire space. I stretch and expand until I find more of myself reflected in those I meet. While sitting in the park recently, I rooted myself into the rotating ground and watched people walk past, thinking about how they all were expanding every day just like I was. I thought about how when I sit still and watch people swarm around me, it’s so easy to feel like the world was made for me to observe. I thought about how many times in my interactions with these ever-growing people had I lost and rediscovered the same parts of myself over and over and over again.

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As the World Crumbles

As time goes on, we become numb. We become desensitized to the suffering that envelops and caresses the people of our external world. We watch the news. We read the articles and Whatsapp stories forwarded to us from nameless aunties and faceless families. We post on Instagram to spread awareness, to educate those that we are connected to across a vast expanse of mechanically generated space. We take the time to spread knowledge amongst the people that we’ve hand-picked for ourselves, people who we’ve chosen because of how their beliefs align with ours. We crave to identify, to show and share – look what is happening, what is being done to my people, to my roots, to my identity. A constant cycle of regurgitated information into and out of hands pre-acquainted. Through time, I’ve noticed that my personal brand of desensitization comes in oscillations – in tsunami-like waves that cascade through my body. Suffering has a way of knowing with definite precision, the months in which I consume and share and feel absolutely nothing at all. In those moments, she whispers in my ear and sends me reminders in those bodies where my love grows like a forest. And I begin to drown as I watch them grieve. 

There are two griefs that I have been acquainted with in my tenure on this patch of sadistic and stolen land. The first is what I think of as direct grief – the mourning of a personal loss. The physical or emotional loss of a person, of an era, of a version of the self, all things that are grieved with a pervasive quality. It is a grief active in the way it is remembered, but the loss may dull as time breeds a new normalcy and erases the specificity of surrounding memories. I often used to wonder why I was immune to life’s direct griefs. I would listen to my parents speak with humble tongues of memories now faded by past eras, eras treacherous in the way they littered their worlds with tragedy. And I’d think, how was it that I had sauntered through life unscathed by circumstance? How much grief awaits me, biding time in the cracks and crevices of open and closed doors, multiplying to make up for lost time?

Almost as if to substitute the volumes of direct grief hidden in the folds of my future selves, the second of the two griefs is the residue that never fades – a grief that comes from watching loved ones mourn a direct loss. Residual because it is the remnants of that which is already being grieved. A loss that is removed and detached and that is only suffered through watching a loved one agonize over what they cannot control. And an inherent guilt in watching with an obsessive compulsion, but in not being able to alleviate the pain. I have never suffocated from anything the way I have from residual grief. But there is no guidance, no manual to deal with suffocation abstract. So when my lungs close, I am reminded that my pain is nothing but the remainder of a pain gargantuan and unbearable, a pain that shakes the ground and cracks the earth where it treads. A pain that was never meant for my body, but that my body takes on in a desperate attempt to provide some semblance of comfort. I think of what it means to be so deeply crippled by second hand pain, knowing well that the river flowing through subjects of tragedy would swallow me whole.

I am overwhelmed by a hatred for the privileges that serve me comfort with a callous ease, comforts from a genetic lottery with tickets embedded within the intricacies of my body. Embedded so deep that I cannot forcefully shred myself, rip them out and sew them into another more deserving. I am ridiculed by the grief that I was numb to when it plagued lives seen solely through my various screens. Lessons learnt have turned me into a broken record, a helpless bystander of anguish suspended in a vacuum of self-hatred. Please tell me what I can do.

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Brown Intimacy Pt. 2: The Other

I found a New York Times article this morning called Love and Marriage, South Asian American Style. Written by an Indian man raised in the depths of Ohio, the article describes what contemporary arranged marriages look like for many “South Asian” Americans using specific channels to find a partner. It was a familiar read, mainly because a variety of my friends and cousins have found their partners through the same channels – partners to build lives with, much like any other culture. These were all things that I had grown up knowing and understanding with a certain level of intricacy, which is what made reading the article a slightly uncomfortable experience. You could tell that the writer had written this article with a white audience in mind – a natural compulsion for a man born and raised in Ohio I’m sure – but it was the first time I had read someone describing practices that I am so intimately familiar with in such a foreign way. As if some extraterrestrial being floated onto Earth to document the mothers of two Pakistanis in their mid 20s exchange bio data over a meal. How odd, must be a cultural anomaly. 

The article did make me think, though likely not in a manner intended by the diluted depictions of brown love that our author spun up for white digestibility’s sake. It made me think about the way our love and relationships are represented – how we represent them to ourselves, and how we represent them to others. Sometimes these two representations coincide, and sometimes they’re spread across the physical and cultural distance between South Asia and North America. Because love can be influenced by personal attributes – ethnic background and culture, family relationships, upbringing. But it is also influenced by the direct and immediate environment – by watching and listening to others experience it in day-to-day life. Conceptions of love when raised in the United States, often look different than conceptions of love when raised in a drastically different culture. Of course, globalization and travel introduce a significant amount of overlap, but I’ve always found it interesting how white love has such a pervasive quality. How with other conceptions of white superiority, white love takes its place as the ultimate form of bliss.  

I read about a new e-publishing venture that aims to publish books which “provide romance for the South Asian soul.” This venture functions under the notion that our souls are devoid of representation, are starved for love and for the ability to connect to love in fiction. It is true to an extent – books about brown bodies in love are far fewer in number than our white counterparts. But I wonder how much of that is because we’re looking for brown bodies within a specific type of love, and not the love most suited to our brown bodies. How many of us are looking for a Nicholas Sparks-esque romantic drama where we have Ali and Ayesha falling into a deeply passionate and obsessively sexual love that melts away their individuality. A love that is reckless, where pragmatism has no bearing and where the lack of pragmatism is somehow acceptable to wider society. A love that is uncontrollable, one that begs for a lack of discipline, that conquers all it comes in contact with. Are our souls starved by the lack of representation in general, or the lack of representation in ideal tales of white love? 

Seeing myself in a novel like this would feel as uncomfortable to me as reading a NYT article about South Asian love genetically tailored for the white man. The conception of love I was bred with always took on a very different representation. The love I learned stems from pragmatism, represented by both good intentions and rational choices. It is not blinding, or all-encompassing, and it definitely does not conquer the questionable parts of human character. It is a small fraction of the ocean of emotions felt towards an individual at a particular point in time. Love does not change people, nor do people change for love – on its own it is negligible if not paired with qualities like respect, curiosity, discipline, qualities that shape the strength of a relationship. I learned that opening the mind, heart, body, and soul so wholly to another carries weight only when it is consistent and permanent. It is a feeling best grown over time, bound by contract before emotion. 

I may not have learned love from white poets and screenplays, but I learned from papers on Islamic mysticism that taught me how love is not a rarity only found within another. I learned from Quranic passages that speak of how soulmates are not two halves of a whole but rather two wholes in unison. I learned from Shia history that recalls moments of humility and mutual sacrifice. And I learned from people in my life who showed me that flaws in character exist with or without love, that love does not make certain flaws worth the experience. 

I cannot control what type of love feels natural to me, and I cannot control how my version of love is represented and interpreted by those I interact with. But I can control how critically I think about why certain forms of love are considered “ideal” over others. I can control which influences inject themselves into my conceptions. And I can accept that authentic love looks different for us all – for those of us raised here, there, or a bit of everywhere. 

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Brown Intimacy Pt. 1: The Self

Yesterday I found myself thinking about the moment I realized I was brown. The moment that established a disjoint between the person who didn’t know the meaning of color, and the person who could no longer see anything outside of it. I always knew of course, that my ethnic roots sprouted from a region where people emerged in the shade of the earth from which they grew. I knew what we looked like, with our dark hair and sharp features, and eyes with an intensity hidden between layers of bronze. I had grown up close to my own kind and had maintained a social bubble of uniformity within my community. But as a child, I was never cognizant of the difference between my community and my lighter-skinned peers. It wasn’t until my teenage years when a friend from Belgium placed her arm next to mine. I looked down at our arms resting comfortably next to each other and saw a shocking contrast. I remember thinking: what the fuck, was I always this brown? 

I didn’t understand my alarm at the time. I knew what I looked like – I was aware of the tone that enrobed and enveloped my body since birth. I had seen brown children stand next to their white peers, I had intersected and interacted with white skin for most of my life. So why did this physical attribute never fully resonate till that very moment? How had I only recently discovered the extent of my brown body?

It was after that moment when I became hyper aware of what my skin looked like – how it darkened so easily in the sun and how it glowed under the light. How my lips looked a little more purple than pink to match my coloring, how I could never unearth a concealer for undertones that were warm with the sun and cool with the coming of winter. And I began to set myself next to others to see what I could find – which people I could stand next to and look like a bold stroke on a plain canvas, and which I could merge with as if we were born from the same patch of earth. I was doing something that I had never done in childhood – I was defining my color in comparison to others. Features that had previously been stark and separate in their isolation now lay bare, exposed in their side-by-side representations. I had never looked at myself through the skin of another and as I aged, I inadvertently formed a habit. 

So much of my current identity is defined by contrasting myself to whiteness. So much of my foundations are built on the “otherness” of my identity. I see myself, define myself, describe myself, through the distances between brown and white and as I do this, I embed myself further into the whiteness that I aspire to escape from. I embed myself within systems built around the comparison, separation, and marginalization of color. And it makes me wonder – how much of me has formed only in an effort to distance myself from my colonizer? What will be left of me when I remove myself from under the white lens? 

Colonized mentalities run through our veins in inconspicuous ways, forming distinctions and building social structures that cannot be foundationally strong when divided so intricately. I’ve come to realize that it is important to recognize color, to understand how color interacts with its surroundings. But it is equally as important to establish an identity devoid of color, to recognize qualities in the self that bring beauty and value outside of a colored experience. I see these identities in those I love, flowing through them and out of them and binding them to others in ways more intimate than just a comparison of skin. I know someone who speaks wisdom with such ease that I imagine he doesn’t even realize the weight of depth that flows through him. I know someone whose eyes brighten whenever she opens them to the world, someone who feels the pain of her loved ones as if it is her own, who weeps with the world’s suffering and rejoices with the light. I know someone whose curiosity spans continents, whose desire to learn the complexities and intricacies of people can bring past and present generations together. I know someone whose very presence in a room can extract the best of the people that surround them. And as I discover more of these attributes in those around me, I look forward to getting to know myself just as distinctly, just as intimately. 

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In Jest, with Love

In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace describes one of the ancillary characters as a man “whose fixed smile has the impermanent quality of something stamped into uncooperative material.” First, a stagnant feature – a smile screwed-in with sheer will and a desire for social uniformity, only to be screwed back out upon a change in circumstance. Second, uncooperative material – like trying to pleat silk with the intention of permanence but without the knowledge of attaining permanence. I re-discovered this description after having grown bored of watching the snow make its way into piles on surfaces both equipped and unequipped to handle the volume. Wedged in the book was also an overdue bill from a 2016 walk-in therapy session at the NYU Student Health center. A bill that I had used to blot maroon lipstick a number of times before sticking it back into the book as if representing a continuation of Wallace’s jest. I don’t remember if I ever paid that bill, and a part of me finds that ironic. Maybe because in that moment, the ‘infinite’ in Infinite Jest extended far past the heads and bodies on the page, reaching and migrating into my life as if to ridicule that one representation of my personal world. I think if Wallace were still alive, he’d find that ironic too. 

In The Crazed, Ha Jin writes about a female character who “like a man, drank black tea and smoked cheap cigarettes.” I wonder what kind of man he’d describe me as, knowing that there was a point in life when I too smoked cheap cigarettes and drank black coffee stronger and more bitter than the darkest of teas. I wonder if he had respect for women like us, or if he found us coarse and crude and unlovable. It’s interesting to think about how authors allow their perceptions of the world to bleed onto the page with an overwhelming transparency. I’m sure Ha Jin knew what he felt about the state of callous female behavior, but I wonder if he regretted reading the words he so readily painted onto paper after watching male tolerance weaken with collective age. It makes me think about how much of what we communicate stays relevant as the world shifts into new eras, eras where momentary trends carry more weight than the burdens of our historical perceptions. 

In The Fall (2006), the main character narrates a story with an “Indian who whenever anxious stroked his brow.” A give-away, a nervous tick, a subconscious compulsion, picked up by an omnipresent and almost voyeuristic narrator. It makes me think about how my body plays out its inner anxieties like a movie for others to consume, those with an eye for detail and a keen yet misplaced interest. Habits that exist in reflexive shadows until they’re snatched and tossed into an exhibition displaying the quirks of human nature. Mine with a plain silver plaque and a strikingly straightforward description, “Pakistani who whenever anxious runs her fingers over her fingernails,” or “moves a singular foot in small circles until a bystander asks what she’s doing.” Or maybe “crosses her right leg over her left leg and tucks her right foot behind her left calve – the tighter the bind, the higher the anxiety.” I like to think that I’m identified by the largest and most obvious sections of my identity, but generalizations tend to grow ancient with haste. What’s left of a human is the debris, the little actions and reactions that set us apart. Though I’m unsure how my leg-binding finger-fumbling foot-circling qualities would represent me if I were to ever make an appearance in a similarly niche film. 

There is an ocean of variation in how human characteristics are described in storytelling, all informed by endless perceptions and experiences and mechanisms that shape how receptive we are to details. Details that draw out distinctions and offer them a spotlight under which they grow and develop. Details that bring us together as we read and delve into their abundance, and separate us as we choose which ones to stand with in inconsistent solitude. I often feel like we only know ourselves through the stories we read, the stories we tell, and the stories we hear. In that way, stories while accessible to all are really only meant for a handful. And after what could solely be described as a spiritual journey through Infinite Jest, I think David Foster Wallace would agree.

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Love, Outside of Capitalism

I went to get a manicure at this small nail salon last week. I picked maroon like I usually do – in the spirit of winter colors and February festivities – and sat in front of a man who I could barely hear through the masks and plexiglass between us. Even though we were in the same space, it felt as though we were seated on two different continents separated by a sea of unspoken words. He asked me if I was Indian and I said I was Pakistani. I wonder how he could guess while I was wearing a mask – maybe because we both knew how many South Asians had taken over Central Jersey. Or maybe because I hadn’t done my eyebrows in over two weeks and he knew that only desi parents could birth a child with eyebrows so unrestrained. I asked him where he was from and he said the Philippines. Then I asked him if he missed home and he said yes, naturally. And I thought, of course, especially when it’s snowing like a bitch outside. We didn’t talk much the rest of the time; he’d paint another layer of maroon and I’d let the color harden under LED light until we were three coats solid. He surveyed my hands to ensure perfection, and then extended his arm and placed it next to mine. I could see his eyes smile under his N95 as he pointed to my arm and he pointed to his. “Same color,” he said. As if to say, we might be from different places, providing and consuming different services, on different sides of the plexiglass, but we are one in the same. In a desire to connect for the briefest of minutes, he shattered every boundary and barrier separating us as human beings for a moment of commonality. To me, that was the purest expression of love – a simple desire to connect. 

I’ve never thought of love as something that has multiple variants – romantic vs. platonic, platonic vs. familial, and so on. Love is governed by certain basic principles, and from there the emotion can vary in intensity depending on who this emotion is directed towards. Some loves in my life are strong enough to transcend temporality and, in their transcendence, these loves take their place as an overarching theme for my experiences. And other loves in my life are in their own personal vacuums of situation and circumstance, beautiful in their representation but confined to a space and time – temporary and temporal in their very being. The latter can be small moments with people – like the man in the salon or a fleeting romantic interest. Small moments that bring joy in remembrance and make living a little brighter. The former is dictated by personal choice – taking a temporal love and making a conscious decision to grow and nurture it. And from there, it builds and builds until it bleeds into future experiences and changes the way we perceive our realities. It is no longer time-bound, because it is a part of us.

It is a myth, that the act of loving means giving a piece of yourself to another. I always felt that love was not the act of losing because it is not selfish in nature. Love is the act of sharing – sharing parts of the self, of the mind and sometimes the body, of understanding and being. To the point where I am not giving and taking pieces of people, I grow because I have developed shared parts of myself that make my existence more communal in nature. I expand as I connect, I do not lose myself because I am in every part of this shared experience. And the other person expands with me in a process of constant addition. Addition that is fostered through trust and the purest of intentions, that allows them to share more of themselves. This is why loving another – be it friends, family, romantic partners – is an active choice. It is a choice to share, to watch someone grow over the years with the same curiosity and appreciation for how their personality morphs and shifts with time. It is a deliberate process birthed from true interest and an utmost respect, and in this manner it is consistent. What changes from person to person is how this love is received, how it is perceived, and how it is expressed. 

To me, love is trying my hand at domesticity and failing miserably, and then trying again. It is debating whether deep space is more terrifying than deep sea, and making Thai Terminal ours because we love the authenticity of white lights. It is tea and cappuccinos on stressful days and making me late for class while picking up rose water chai lattes from Cup of Brooklyn. It is finance tips and cold showers and feigned interest in Amazon’s security glitches. It is hot Cheetos and Burger King Impossible Whoppers and putting ice on feet injured from sheer stupidity. It is of course, excruciating Twilight marathons in Redmond basements. It is grape mint shisha with Frank Ocean and Corbin and some Turkish dessert that doesn’t have a name. It is Chagall and Kline. Oysters at Zadie’s. Marlboro reds on fire escapes. Siamese twins on Waverly. 3am dorm room fries deep fried with chili sauce just like they do back home. Love is diners with obese kids ordering chocolate milkshakes from menus twice their size, and fire pits on the back porch in weather too freezing for outdoor activity. My heart expands for these infinite moments shared with people that mean everything to me. And my love is never-ending.

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A Guide to Self-Fetishization: “South Asian” Edition

I always thought of my body as a canvas for identity. The black body hair growing out of my stark brown skin as an ode to my roots. Skin stretching over fat and muscle forming curves and flat planes, sprinkled with stretchmarks to remind me how seamlessly I’ve grown. Skin that the sun greets like an old love, glowing bronze with gentle strokes of light and wrapping around almond-shaped eyes in the darkest of brown. Eyes under brows stubborn and erratic when ungroomed like the mind behind them. I look at my body and see an inseverable connection to a culture I was once so wholly immersed in. A connection to a country where no one had to guess where I came from, where I fit into the homogeneity with an almost addictive ease. And now that I am away, my body is my most intimate connection to an identity that was, once upon a time, all of who I was. 

I often turn to this physical representation in the United States, where identity is not as straightforward as ethnicity. Immigrants migrate into the US from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and build lives for their children on soil foreign to them. Their children are Americans – most of them Americans that know no life in depth outside of the United States. But their features are different from those around them. They eat other food at home, speak another language with their parents. And these additions to the basic American identity create a feeling of otherness, established in qualities that are tangible enough to be noticed with frequency. Otherness that is isolating, that develops a need to be a part of another identity focused on defining a collective and disjointed cultural experience. Hence, the birth of the “South Asian” – an identity focusing on the similarities of people from countries built and birthed within arm’s reach of each other. This “South Asian” collective identity does not exist within the region that is defined as South Asia. For the countries that make up South Asia, there are clear cultural and political divides that allow each individual identity within the region to remain distinct. Cultural nuances are more prominent here because they are lived experiences. The focus is on differences that bring out unique qualities of the lives lived in each region. This contrasts to being “South Asian” in the United States, where there is a larger focus on foundational similarity between immigrants from different countries in the region.  

“South Asian” people have built their own unique and distinct identity within the United States. There are Instagram accounts dedicated to South Asian pop art, fashion and clothing pages that promote brown attire, writing and literature expressing the difficulties of being “South Asian” in the US, the list goes on. The “South Asian” identity has become its own micro-culture within the larger immigrant culture of the United States, and there is significant power in this. Power in brown bodies laying the groundwork for their own representation in historically homogenous white spaces. But it is important to consider the type of platform being built, and how that platform may represent cultures in a region that we, as “South Asian” Americans, may not be familiar enough with to represent. 

Since “South Asian” culture in the United States is the result of a diaspora of gargantuan proportions, this identity exists in a vacuum. The identity is not self-explanatory and is difficult to carry outside of the United States. While a Pakistani born and raised in Pakistan may feel more comfortable carrying their identity around with them, the same cannot be said for a “South Asian” American. A “South Asian” American does not represent South Asian culture on the whole, because this geographic region does not have a collective culture. And as an American, there is very little understanding of the nuances that individualize each culture within the region. Therefore, building platforms for “South Asians” to act as representatives for the region of South Asia is a cause for concern. Because these regions are being explored by individuals who have not experienced enough to represent them accurately. More often than not, children of “South Asian” immigrants turn to their roots in an attempt to identify with something more, to draw themselves out of the discomfort that comes from diversity. But this identification does not give them enough insight to portray themselves as an accurate representation of the “South Asian” region identity.  

These are the children of immigrants who have never lived in the culture of their ethnicity. Whose experiences have been entirely distinct, who cannot speak to their ethnicity’s past and present using the eloquence woven into their mother-tongues. The children who wear saris and lehengas on TikTok and Instagram to sport their patriotism, who speak of brown skin and thick eyebrows as if these are cultural highlights rather than just a simplistic representation of identity. By only focusing on the tangible components of what makes them “South Asian,” they suggest that it is solely the physical qualities of a brown person that defines them. By diminishing everything but the physical, their representation of their own bodies results in a sexualized representation of brown bodies on the whole. In other words, a fetishization of who we are as people in the United States.

There is nothing wrong with showing and appreciating physical features – on the contrary, there is an empowerment in the normalization of the brown body. The problem here, stems from when the depiction of physical features is tagged as a “cultural representation” in isolation, without any deeper depiction of what the culture is in a non-physical sense. The ethnic body is not powerful in isolation – it is powerful because of what it represents underneath. By focusing solely on the body, they eliminate the value and significance of cultural traditions that are ever-changing, and that build our foundations as dynamic people outside of static qualities like skin color. As such, we lose our ability and our right to participate in the larger cultural experience. 

Identifying with a culture means more than parading around in traditional clothing and owning physicality. Identifying with a culture requires self-education – it requires us to recognize the interplay between history and politics in the countries of our ethnic origin. It requires us to dive into new and emerging musical trends and artistic movements. To support causes from the regions we identify with, and to bring those causes into public purview using the platforms that we have built for ourselves. Embracing a culture physically and not at all mentally contributes to the fetishization of that culture – a modern oppression of regions that have long been exploited by the white eye. When the physicality is not a representation of something deeper and more meaningful, there is nothing left but brown features used as a sexual asset rather than a cultural expression. And there is a stark difference between the two – because as a “South Asian,” I’d like to be known for more than my big eyebrows and my body in a sari.

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In an Effort to Describe

I’ve become significantly more reclusive as of late. Maybe because now I don’t find myself in a city surrounded by people, or because I no longer feel the need to interact so frequently. And in this state of reclusion, I’ve begun to ruminate in my thoughts. I search in an almost cyclical way – plunging into a vague and abstract part of myself that I have never been acquainted with before, surfacing only to see if the exploration has made any concrete difference. Realizing with every dive that nothing is more truly and frustratingly foreign to me than myself, but knowing that there is no one else I’d rather be discovering so intimately. I feel like I am unearthing new layers, and as I go deeper, I move farther from the tangible world.   

This is a strange mental space to be in. A purgatory state, like the moment after I make a drastic decision that I haven’t had time to process. When I’m coming down from the high that marries itself to reckless decisions and have not yet familiarized myself with the repercussions. That space of quiet apathy between hedonistic bliss and crippling regret, where the memories are raw and clear like a film in a movie theater. Clear enough to relive with a blatant accuracy, but could also be nothing more than a figment of an overzealous imagination. A purgatory state, like the precursor of an action. Like the moment after a decision is made to act, but right before the action is actually performed. A moment of meaningless suspension where time ceases to exist and I am trapped between mind and body, somehow disconnected from both.

And in this disconnection, my body moves and interacts with the physical without my consent. There is no decision to act, and yet there is action. I watch my form contort itself in ways that are familiar but distant to me, I watch with the irrelevance of a mind torn from its body and plunged into the throngs of abstraction. And the body, without a guide, treads through the motions with nothing more than the muscle memory of a life barely lived. I monitor myself like an experiment. I’ve locked myself in a house in the middle of the New Jersey suburbs and have prodded and probed inexhaustibly, waiting for some reaction or response to make me feel. I’ve picked and poked through volume after volume of thoughts, opinions, memories, to find nothing in particular. And in this process, I’ve stripped myself of the excitement of autonomy leaving nothing but pure indifference.  

I have been living in this space for an eternity. And as I plunge deeper, I dissociate more permanently from the physical world around me – as if my mind has become violently inhospitable to the experiences my body fights for. Maybe because my thoughts and choices are all half-baked and over-easy and too incomplete to be anything more impactful, substantial, significant. I watch myself slowly unraveling as time goes on. Maybe once I fall apart like a ball of yarn, I’ll be able to build myself again – this time with a little more emotion. And a lot more lust for life.

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Hollow Voices at Long Tables

A few people that I have been acquainted with over the years have turned into motivational Instagram influencers. In an articulate and empathetic fashion, they bring together affirmations and human psychology to represent the confidence that they hold within themselves. They then attempt to instill that confidence into their viewership – they reach out of their screens and hand over a piece of this spirit to viewers now enraptured by much needed encouragement and support. I was browsing my Instagram discover page and found one of these motivational videos discussing our right to claim space. In true influencer fashion and also exceedingly aware of the demographics those who view motivational content, this person began by expressing how unique our voices are. Unique voices dictated by different perceptions and experiences that have shaped our opinions as people. He mentioned that because of this, our voices deserve to be heard and we should no longer wait for permission to take space at tables where we deserve to sit. I thought his video was beautifully put, but I realized that I could never identify with this experience of being shunned from a space based solely on my identity.

I was never raised to think of myself within categories – categories of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. Maybe because once I became old enough to understand the nuances of human categorization, I had moved into the comfortable homogeneity of Pakistan life. I had my identities and as I grew, I knew that those identities played a critical role in my experiences. But I always felt that despite my categorical restrictions, I deserved to take space for the basic premise that ever since I was born, I was physically occupying space. I was birthed into the world without choosing so. And based on that, the world had been handed to me so that I may be a part of it. I was never uncomfortable in male dominant classes because I felt I had earned it by virtue of bringing myself into that space. I never found it difficult to speak up in meetings and conferences where I am the only woman present. Not because I think my experience as a woman is diverse enough to be spoken from, but because my opinions stem from an intelligence that I have had the privilege to foster. I have never been spoken over, or ignored, in an academic and professional setting. I have felt included and valued in every dialogue, every interview, for the words that I chose to speak. But I do not deny that these feelings of self-doubt and isolation are very valid experiences that women and minority communities reckon with on a daily basis. Because regardless of my experience, homogenous spaces function like communities and as a result, are always tailored to exclude.

An acquaintance of mine told me that she was once in a car with her boyfriend and his friends, and every time she spoke someone cut her off. That in that moment, she had never felt so invisible, so negligible, because they did that only to her and never to each other. A very close family member of mine once told me that after 7 years of exhibiting success in a male dominated industry, she has finally begun to recognize the value that she brings to a space plagued by monotony. A value that her male coworkers claim to have mastered upon first entering their spaces. I’ve seen my coworkers in meetings get interrupted incessantly because they do not speak as quickly as native English speakers do. Or because they have accents from other regions that seem so magically “foreign” to people claiming to be from societies so heterogeneous. I’ve seen people of color being called-on only to provide a “minority perspective” rather than a professional, company perspective. Or being asked to speak as the representative of their community, to generalize generations of experiences that they may not even be aware of.

It is luck, that I have never felt like I had to reclaim space. It is luck that I always felt like there was a seat for me at any table I chose to approach. Maybe it is a deep-rooted entitlement that brought me here, that gave me comfort in a room full of white men to speak my mind. Maybe because I always felt like within homogeneity, it is only when the diverse enters that evolution occurs. And I think that these spaces were always meant to be ours, that they’ve been placed on hold so that we may grab them once we’re ready. Because if we already occupy physical space, why should it be a challenge to migrate that space elsewhere? Who decides what belongs in a particular space when we’re all born on communal land?

I do believe with every fiber of my being, that diverse opinions make tables more inventive and expansive. But it is also important to consider which voices – not which people – are being sought after. That just because our identities are diverse, does not mean our thoughts and perspectives extend past the general norm. 

Our communities often get stuck in the narratives that have been tacked onto them, so much so that when we speak, our thoughts are made dull by the burden of uniformity. We discuss our colorful cornucopia of ideas, but we water them down for the white man in front of us. We make them softer for him, more digestible. And in this process, our thoughts lose their meaning. We become the hollow voices that talk about “de-colonizing the mind” when we don’t know how to de-colonize our own minds. The hollow voices that uses buzz words to draw people into ideas that sound “ethnic” and “fresh” but are just heavily academicized thoughts about nothing tangible enough to be acted on. In those moments, our plethora of diverse experiences are lost. We’ve stepped onto a euphemism treadmill of gargantuan proportions, trapping ourselves within our own desires to belong in a space where we are innately different, rather than celebrating the difference that will propel us forward.

We do deserve to take space. We deserve to sit on powerful tables and we deserve to be heard on platforms spanning continents. But the question was never whether we deserved to be there, the question is whether once we get there, we’ll be willing to speak our truths with a veracity that shows how valuable we really are.

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Plagued by Expression

I started writing in October last year, for reasons triggered by a series of events irrelevant enough to be forgotten. Most likely in an attempt to express my own significance. Or to watch my thoughts grow outside of myself for a change, watch them shift and contort into something with a little more perspective than what my mind could offer. And once I began, my words flowed with an ease that I anticipated having had so many experiences that I felt needed to be expressed. Thoughts emerged naturally. Words scrambled out of a mind jumbled and overflowing with stories woven into abstract concepts, words that neatly arranged themselves onto the document in front of me. For the first time, I could visually see what it looked like in the upper confines of my mind. I could see what it meant to navigate the art of living with the craft that I had constructed through years of existing in my brown skin. I could see myself with an authenticity, a simplicity that gave me no pressure to be thought of as profound or magnificent. I was comfortable with the normalcy of my own experience. And from there, I continued.  

Writing became my mechanism for processing emotions – emotions that I reveled in neglecting, that I always struggled to accept in their entirety. I had no trouble speaking about my feelings because it always felt like words once spoken, were lost. The spoken word becomes reliant on memory, and memory is too fickle to be a consequential foundation of truth. Writing however, sets experiences in stone. Writing solidifies how I feel about a specific event at a specific moment in time, and those feelings become impossible to ignore. The evidence for them is stubborn, rampant, and demands recognition. The evidence forces me to process an endless gulf of emotional disruption immediately upon expression. Sometimes, I feel a release. As if they’ve served their purpose and now saunter out of my body to wrap themselves around the words on my page – outside of me but forever preserved. And sometimes, they stick to my bones and cling to my skin as if too raw to part. 

In this process, I struggle to strike a balance – a balance between saying what I can, what I want, and what is relevant. With each word comes paragraphs meant to explore more context, with every page comes volumes venturing to explain. But there are some reflections that I do not want to share, reflections that I enjoy holding tightly in a place hidden from the naked eye and the wandering mind. I give enough to get my point across, enough to compose the essence of complex thought. But also enough to know that the thought is somehow incomplete. Never enough to boast knowledge, and understanding that certain things are too close to the self to be stated with ease.

Such is the process of sharing – finding a middle ground to express without giving information that not all have the privilege to know. But what I do choose to share welcomes people into my mind. As if in a museum, they can roam and select what they enjoy and what they find abhorrent. They can probe ideas that they disagree with, can prod situations they find amusing. They can take their interpretations of my world and attach their own experiences, their own thoughts and emotions, and use their lenses to decipher. With every piece of information, their lenses magnify, multiply, until they swallow me whole. My experiences are now their assumptions, my memories and opinions theirs to twist and taint and tarnish. They build their own version of my words to somehow explore with me. We walk through the same folds of my pounding brain, and we see different minds splattered on the page. The clarity with which I knew myself becomes clouded under the shadow of lenses too large to boast of actual knowledge. And I find my ideas slipping, as I share less and less and less. 

What happens, if I lose the vast arsenal of content that injects my negligible voice into the open? What happens if I fade into the folds of monotony, if my ideas repeat their way into the constant drum of immortality? What happens if I can no longer see myself under the weight of assumptions that I’ve invited to my doorstep?

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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.  

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It Really is the Simple Things

The majority of my life falls within two major buckets – personal fulfillment and human connection. Personal fulfillment meaning work and the work life balance, hobbies and activities I enjoy, travel, writing, dancing, and so on. Human connection meaning the things I do to connect with others – the types of people I choose to connect with, and the information I choose to share to bolster that connectivity. While looking back at the human connectivity piece, I’ve noticed that my metric of connection has changed over the years. That when bringing people into my world in the past, an indicator of relationship depth was how much trauma we managed to share with each other from our own personal experiences. That was once the height of my human connection – to be able to clearly express and share my most negative life experiences with another person, to bring them into a space so vulnerable. But the more I talked about it and the more I processed those negative feelings, the more I realized that my trauma is no longer a metric of depth – simply because I never had a problem expressing those traumatic moments to others. What I did struggle with however, was bringing people into the brightest and most positive moments of my life, the intimate moments that bring me joy when I think back to them. The moments that are small and simple and undramatic, that another person could tarnish by not understanding why they mean so much to me. 

These moments are scattered throughout my life, starting from my earliest memories and sprinkled throughout my experiences till the present. Some with people I still know and love, some with those I no longer speak to, and some in complete solitude – all of them large in number and all just as meaningful. 

I remember for example, when I moved to Karachi back in 2004 and I accepted the change in environment as easily as only a child can, with no ties to the life I lived back in New Jersey. We used to have a Chowkidar named Ghani who couldn’t have been older than 26. He lived in a separate part of the house and would be in the main outdoor area every morning just in case we needed him for something. And every morning, I would run out in my little cargo pants and t-shirt and Ghani would teach me how to play cricket. I would stand close to the house with a long plank of wood the length of a cricket bat and a tenth of the weight, and Ghani would throw a tennis ball that I’d hit with all my might. The ball would fly up and over the gate onto the street. “Wow, isko dekho bhai, aadmi jaisi taakat,” he’d beam and run outside to find the tiny tennis ball on the crowded streets of Badr Commercial. Then he’d run back inside and we’d do it again, an endless loop of Ghani’s patience, his stamina, and his joy at my success. Outside my family, I’ve never had such a patient teacher. And as a woman, I’ve never been made to feel as physically strong as I did when I was a tiny 7-year-old being taught cricket with a plank of wood and a tennis ball. 

I remember for example, my summer in Seattle this year before I moved back to the East Coast. A couple of close friends invited me to their building rooftop for a small barbecue. You could see the most beautiful parts of the city from that rooftop – the buildings, the markets, the water. It was slightly cold; there was a light breeze painted with a quintessential Seattle drizzle and we sat under large umbrellas as we ate and talked about nothing in particular. We began to talk about music, mainly the different types of music from our individual cultures. One of my friends played an old Mexican song paired with a style of dance I had never heard of before, and as the wind carried the song over to other areas of the rooftop, strangers scattered all across beamed. “Play it on the Bluetooth speaker,” they said. And he did, and as the song continued to play, he asked me to dance. His movements swift and graceful and mine as if I had two left feet, and yet I enjoyed learning and he enjoyed watching me learn. And when the song ended, we heard a burst of applause from the newly discovered audience that had been there all along, that I had forgotten in the breeze and the music. Never had I so seamlessly forgotten my surroundings for the enjoyment of something so new. 

I remember for example, back in high school around 2014 when I used to go to hot yoga every evening after school. I’d change into my workout clothes, grab my mat, and enter a 105-degree room with 40% humidity for the next hour and a half. The heat of the room is in itself, a physical release. With each of the 26 postures I’d feel my body groan and ache and change. I’d feel the impact of daily life as I went into one posture after another, breathing into each stretch to exhale the stress trapped within my muscles. Sweat poured out of my body onto the towel on my mat and as we hit the 90-minute mark, we heard the sweet melody of relaxation. I’d lay on my back, my body tingling and fatigued, and in that moment I felt like I had been reborn. Never had I been so aware of my body’s abilities. And never had I been so aware of its constraints. 

I remember for example, when I studied abroad in Shanghai in 2017 and took a formal dance class for the first time. We had a movement for our final show that took up the bulk of our class, and then we had units to expose us to other types of dance forms. There was one day in particular when our professor brought another woman in who told us that we were going to build our own movements with a partner. I paired up with the professor of ballet and then we were given our next instruction. Once the music started, my partner and I would have to close our eyes and dance, but one part of my body – any part throughout the movement – had to be in contact with one part of her body the entire time. An exercise in physical contact and moving in unison. The music started, I closed my eyes, and we began to move. I lost myself in our movement, no longer focused on anything but maintaining contact, doing what the music asked me to do. It was over as quickly as it began and when I opened my eyes, I became overwhelmed by so many emotions, so many memories, that I began to cry. With everything I had held inside for years, everything that had been pent up so aggressively and so unkindly, I allowed myself to release. The woman who had initiated the exercise sat next to me as I gathered myself, and I told her that this was the first time in a long time that I had been touched so intimately and so consensually. That with the experiences I had, physical touch was toxic to me, abhorrent, malicious, and that for the first time I felt myself release the poison that had been trapped in my body for so many years. Building a movement so physically driven and yet so pure intentioned, so light and untainted, gave me a part of the human experience that I feared had been snatched from me. Never in my life had I produced such a beautiful movement. And never had I so easily let go of something that carried so much weight.

I wonder if human connectivity would be different if we shared those beautiful moments that mean the most to us, that are small in nature but exceedingly vast in value. Maybe the true indicator of depth is when the other person can appreciate those experiences, simply because they recognize the value of you sharing them. Or maybe they can connect to the purity and simplicity of smaller moments that build up the bulk of our lives.

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The Trials of Financial Stability and Womanhood

Very recently, I spoke with a good friend of mine about financial stability. We had an interesting conversation about how much money we make vs how much we want to make, investments, inheritance – things that I had never thought about in such detail before he brought attention to them. On the way back home, I took a hard look at where I currently am in my life and became cognizant of the fact that I could technically stay in this position forever. That I could easily continue working for the same company and take advantage of the 401k, the medical coverage (dental and vision included of course), and the generous compensation package. That I could get promotion after promotion and watch my compensation swell. Buy a house for myself, a couple more for investment purposes. Maybe settle down with one person, pop out a few kids and live the rest of my life watching them grow – nurturing them, rejoicing in their success. 

It’s a beautiful image, organic to think about, but one that makes me feel inherently stifled. At 23, I’m lucky enough to have that strong foundation where I could very easily build a modern traditional life. But I currently have no interest in settling down with one person, and I’ve never had an interest in raising children. I can pinpoint exactly what I don’t want, but I’m finding it more and more difficult to recognize what I’m looking for in each realm of my life – work, education, relationship(s), money. Maybe because as a woman, questions about my life post-grad have long revolved around my marital status, or my plans to have children. 

I remember when someone close to me living in the US asked me what I do for work. I walked her through it, throwing out a keyword or two to make it easier to latch onto the concept. I could see her eyes gloss over, as if the work that I dedicated the majority of my day to wasn’t worth discussing. “Get married soon,” she said, “so then you won’t have to work as hard.” It reminded me of when I go back to Pakistan. Of course, I have those key people in my extended family that love to hear about what I’m doing. But then there’s the sheer number that barely remember my name, and yet will ask for updates on my marital status without fail. Which activates an automatic line of questioning about when I’m planning on getting married, and why I’m not looking, and how I can get a PhD later in life, and what’s the purpose of a PhD anyhow? How time is running out for me because my biological clock is ticking, and how could I not want kids? And I’ll change my mind about kids when I get older, when I meet someone, when I’m 27 and my friends start having babies. How finding a man will somehow ease parental concerns about my safety, and how it’s my duty to give my parents some grandkids, and don’t I recognize what my responsibility to my family is, and how could I be so selfish?

I never put stock into it, but as I age and move farther away from desiring a traditional type of life, I can’t help but take these questions as a personal attack. An attack on my identity as a woman. As if not wanting a relationship and marriage or not wanting children makes me any less of a woman. As if my identity is defined by everyone other than myself and the choices that I make solely for myself. It got me thinking about how many people who approach me to ask about my marriage timeline are in unhappy marriages. How many people who want me to have kids are completely unfit to raise their own children. Or how so many of the mothers I see look like having children was something they had to do rather than something they wanted to do. And finally, how women perpetuate this mentality within each other. How they feed it to their girls with a spoon disguised as love, and how they inject it into their boys with the needle of expectation. It got me thinking about the time I told this man I was seeing that I had no interest in birthing and raising children. And how in subsequent arguments about the future, he blatantly said that he was waiting for me to “change my mind” about having kids with him. As if what I wanted was invalid, as if he knew me enough to know that my desires would ultimately change. Because how could a woman not want children? And more importantly, how could a man respect the desires of a woman who doesn’t want children?

I wonder why we would continue to force young women into these endless cycles of what they “should do,” rather than encouraging them to think critically about who they are and what they want. Why we wouldn’t allow or want women in our communities to sculpt lives suited for their own personalities. I wonder what it would mean to be a woman once we extend our narrow understandings of how women must behave. 

We women can do what men cannot. We can grow life inside ourselves, we can shape the foundation of an entire generation and birth it into the world. We can raise that life, nurture it, and sculpt it into its own being. But we are builders by nature. Like we build life within ourselves, we build life outside simultaneously – and with just as much precision. We can erect businesses just as easily as we can work our way to the top of institutions hostile towards us. We can educate ourselves, grasping knowledge that captivates crowds and inspires movements. And in the end, our physiology only adds to the capabilities that make us unique, multi-faceted, and powerful.

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The Parallels of Human Connectivity

I met a good friend of mine on the West Coast. The type of person who listens as if craving to satisfy an undying curiosity, as if exploring a hidden thirst for the very words you happen to be speaking. We connected quickly, starting with the basic “where are you from” and then diving into the “do you think you deserve the life you have” type topics. During that first conversation, he said something that struck me. That while we were in our respective countries – he in Mexico and I in Pakistan, and while we were speaking different languages, practicing different religions, and socializing with different people, the core of our personalities was running parallel. He said that we are similar in essence, as if we are the same people only born in different circumstances.

I met one of the most important people in my life on the East Coast. The type of person whose very presence can add value to a substance-less room, can add a sense of grounding and stability that the room felt it did not need until he so willingly presented it. When I think back to lives running parallel, I think about how we went to a coffee shop the second time we met and discussed our college personal statements. How we realized that while one of us sat in Hong Kong and the other in Saudi Arabia, we had managed to write the same personal statement – same topic, same inspiration, same conclusion. I think about all our agreements that day. How we agreed on charity not being a moral obligation but a moral choice, on the dominance of contemporary and performance art over renaissance, on the ease with which we enjoy the finer and more delicate things in life. And I remember thinking that it was as if a part of me had been placed on the other side of the world. A part of me that grew and blossomed in isolation until I reunited with it in the coffee shop that day.

But with the similarities came a plethora of disparities. Mainly, it was the way we expressed our thoughts that was different – expressions inspired by the books we read for school and pleasure, the metaphors our parents used on one too many occasions, the words we stumbled upon to explain how we were feeling. It was in that space where we could live, discovering the things that made us different. The nuances that shaped us as individuals, and the parallels that bound us together. Each step in our lives brought us to a moment when we were in the same place at the same time. In this way, our paths collided, and we discovered pieces of ourselves in the other.

That reminds me of the time my best friend and I sat on the fire escape the day before we moved out of our apartment. We sat in silence, my legs swinging and hers solid like statues, taking long drags of Marlboro reds and looking at nothing in particular. There was so much depth, so much wisdom in the silence we built together. The same depth that drove her to write works of art, works of raw emotion sculpted on a page with an honesty that only few are endowed with. We were similar in our silence, but I found love that I had never seen before in the way she expressed her silence on the page. I found knowledge in the sea that she carries within her. 

How many other parallels must be out there that circumstance blocks me from meeting? How many other fragments of myself have been scattered, waiting to be discovered? The people that I have met, the personalities that make up my life, share a piece of me. And in their desire to connect, these pieces brought us to where we are now. It is these people with their many parts that I live my life for, that I build myself with, and that I find my solace within. And it is these parts that I will look for in the individuals I encounter for the rest of my life – an endless search for my many soulmates sprinkled across the world. 

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Zameen w Zamaan – A Muslim Guide to Self-Actualization

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how various theological and philosophical traditions overlap when it comes to self-actualization. Mainly, what it means to become self-actualized and what must be done to attain that state of being. The main consistency across all of these traditions is that achieving a higher state of self is by no means a passive process. It is a process that must first be learned, and must then be steered until the desired state is achieved. Whether an individual has ever been able to achieve this higher sense of self without some kind of divine providence is largely unknown and to a certain extent, insignificant. What is important here is that self-actualization is synonymous with peace – peace that there is no further knowledge to be attained, that everything is clear, understandable, and unobstructed. There are no longer any constraints and as a result, the physical world unravels.  

This is discussed in detail in both Sufi philosophy and Shia tradition. In these two areas, there is a strong emphasis on the concept of nafs. An individual’s nafs is the equivalent of the Freudian “ego” or in other words, the inner self. The Quran speaks of nafs many times – not as something with good or bad qualities on its own, but as something that must be regulated and nurtured in order to be constructive to the individual’s personal development. 

Sufi philosophy splits the nafs into three separate stages: al-ammarah, al-luwwamah, and al-mutma’innah. 

An-nafs al-ammarah is the most primitive and animalistic stage of the nafs, the lowest version of the inner self. This stage is limited to the base instincts of the human being that are hedonistic in nature – that seek to hoard for survival, that chase material possession, and that pursue overt physical pleasure over spirituality. An-nafs al-luwwamah is accusatory in nature and is characterized by inner guilt. In this stage, the acquisition of knowledge and self-reflection develops aql or intellect and awakens the conscience. The individual becomes highly self-critical – they begin to uncover their weaknesses and attempt to abolish those weaknesses to achieve perfection. An-nafs al-mutma’innah is the final stage, where the individual experiences peace, self-actualization, and a dispersion of all material obsessions. They become content with themselves and ultimately, with their spiritual experience. 

This Sufi discussion of nafs goes deeper into each stage, establishing transitions to get from one stage to the next and providing a clear list of the characteristics that must be eliminated to achieve nafs luwwamah. Shia tradition takes this a step further and dives into the notion of Irfan, or Islamic gnosis. 

Irfan represents knowledge and wisdom of the self. It is the philosophical idea that an understanding of the self is a process that brings one closer to understanding the divine. By understanding the self, we understand human nature and what binds us and as a result, we uncover a component of the divine that is collectively within us. What is noteworthy is that Irfan focuses on releasing the individual from all earthly constraints, not just material preoccupations like wealth and comfort. Earthly constraints can be expanded to include even the physical form of a person – a body that limits the ability to experience connectivity with the divine. Therefore, Irfan is not just an acquisition of knowledge or achieving a level of understanding – it is a constant process of releasing oneself from constraints both mental and physical, until a final release of the nafs from the body in death. Only in death is there peace, and only in death the possibility for divine exploration. 

Within this conversation around nafs and Irfan, I think about the roadmap drawn by Sufi mystics and Shia philosophers to achieve self-actualization. How this roadmap focuses on practicing self-awareness, exercising self-restraint, and ultimately unearthing the divine. More so, how self-actualization is uncovering an element of the divine within the self. And therefore, by theological principle, how self-actualization can never truly be achieved. Our bodies are too constricted and our minds too shallow to comprehend the magnanimity of what we share our inner existence with. We are too limited in nature to grasp something so vast.  

It reminds me of a phrase I heard a scholar use once about the state of human intellect: Na zameen ka ilm hai, na zamaan ka. We have neither knowledge of the earth nor knowledge of what comes after the earth. To live is to acquire knowledge. And to seek knowledge is to know that no amount of comprehension will ever be enough to attain self-actualization. 

At least not in this life. 

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Brown and White: A Tale of Exclusion

Racial politics are woven into the fabric of every social structure. The main distinction between varying racial interactions is the chain of historical events that build particular racial dynamics. In more homogenous societies like Karachi for example, racial politics are a constant undertone rather than an overt conversation – an undertone established by years of colonization, and a culture of elitism built with pride around that colonization. 

The interesting interaction here is how these racial politics play out in the children of immigrants – immigrants from countries once colonized, giving birth in the country of their colonizers. In this case, how the “colonized mentality” manifests itself once lifted out of Pakistan and dropped into the United States.

I remember speaking to an acquaintance of mine once – one with an identity similar to mine yet fully raised in the United States. I remember her telling me about her sexual escapades with a variety of different men from all over the racial and ethnic spectrum. As the conversation moved into topics of permanence, she told me quite innocently that she wanted to find a light skinned man to compliment her fair genes and ultimately, bring out her future child’s fair skin. I paused, slightly taken aback. How is it that you can fuck dark men but be averse to a dark-skinned child? That you can be attracted to a dark-skinned man, but think that dark children are less physically desirable? 

As two brown women, I noticed our arms laying side by side during this conversation and couldn’t help but think about our two shades of brown – one more caramel and one slightly more bronze. I think about what would happen if we mixed our two shades together. If we threw in the color of milk chocolate, added a sprinkle of the way desert sand looks during sunset. I pictured the merging of browns from every corner of the world and noticed that it would do little to change aesthetic categorization. Regardless of how dark or light, we end exactly where we started: with the color brown.

But the same cannot be said for white. White does not absorb color, it repels it. With the pure white, even the smallest dots of pigment would change the basic physical properties of the color. If we were to mix the lightest of desert sand with A4 paper white, the white would get lost in a depth of brown – almost inconceivable, and barely living. Any splash of inclusivity is a stain on a white canvas, because white by nature is tailored to be exclusionary.  

These properties of the color white are not unknown. Quite the opposite. They’re the foundations upon which many of the colonized attempt to find partners and ultimately reproduce. They’re the distinction between a good proposal and an unsuitable partner, of a desirable person and an unwelcome suitor. Parents and children alike will go out of their way to find light-skinned partners to wash out the “stain” of brown skin, to drown out the centuries of history in our pigment. And these mentalities filter down from generation to generation, from country to country, first settling in minds too closed to question, and then unconsciously guiding life decisions. This makes me wonder – if we were somehow able to genetically engineer the appearance of our own children, how many brown babies would our world have? Has our oppressor settled so deep within us that we would wipe ourselves out to feel more at ease?

Shades of brown, no matter how light, stand stark on a backdrop of white. No matter how hard the colonized fight to be like the colonizer, no matter how light-skinned our partners are, our children will have bronze painted on their skin and coursing through their veins. And that to me, is the overwhelming resilience of our identity. 

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Liberation Long in the Making

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about ease, the ease with which people can direct their worlds. The ease with which many of us were awarded our flashy educations and our excessive lifestyles, our periodic vacations and our seasonal clothing. The comfort and security with which we choose to exist in our worlds. And I’ve been thinking about how the definition of ease changes as we get older – it morphs and contorts and complexifies to the point of being impossible to direct in one course. I like to think I’ve lived a life of significant ease. That is, until I began to navigate my world as a young woman. 

I remember clearly, the comfort of my life before a bookseller felt me up in some rancid corner of a Karachi market on Chaand raat, while my 7-year-old cousin browsed his books a few feet away. His hands piercing my body like infected needles, his heavy breathing like poison dripping down the side of my face. Keep quiet, I remember thinking, don’t let the child see. I remember when, by some miracle of god, it was over. When I readjusted my dupatta, walked to my cousin, and helped her pick out a Junie B Jones book to devour in the car on our way home. When I handed him 100 rupees and he smirked and told me “for you, 75”, and I went home and threw up my insides. And I remember the time when I realized, years later, that it was only fitting for me to hope to slice off every part of his body that touched mine. So that another woman doesn’t feel like she has to rip off her skin to cleanse herself of him.

I remember clearly the next day, when a distant family member put my hand on his dick at an Eid gathering because he knew that he’d get away with it. When the men sitting next to us looked at me and then looked away to comment on the hall decorations. When the women saw his hand piercing mine and continued to whisper about how Maria was wearing Sana Safinaz’s collection from last year. And how I also wished that in that moment, I could be just as vacant as they were – maybe then I could drown out the feeling of ants crawling their way into my veins and chewing my insides. I remember the time when I realized, years later, that it was only fitting for me to hope to chop his hands off. So that another woman doesn’t feel like she has to burn her hands over an open flame to erase the memory of his. 

Is it really immoral to want to inflict violence upon those who are so carelessly brutal? 

These are men. Men who took so much from their mothers in the womb that they made them complicit in the oppression they raged against their kind. These are the men who are handed comfort and ease on a platinum platter, who toss the crumbs to women and expect them to be satisfied. The same men who butcher intellect to maintain their positions of authority, and massacre generations of free will to make themselves feel powerful. The men who impale the bodies of women with their unwanted touch, leaving remnants of violence trapped in muscle memory. The men who look at themselves in the mirror and feel power in their violence, who feel masculinity in their aggression, who have grown used to walking a world sculpted perfectly for them. 

But we are women. Women who do not need to silence others to be known. We are the women who do not need to oppress to feel strong, or violate to feel superior. Without us, these men have no source from which to draw their power. Even when they take advantage of us, they are a derivative of us – because they depend upon our exploitation to exist, to feel masculine and strong, to feel at ease. And imagine if we were fully cognizant of the power we possessed – imagine how it would feel to crush these men, to subject upon them the beauty of accountability. Imagine how we’d conquer the world. 

I recognize that my very existence as a woman is threatening to men who believe I should stay indoors, men who believe they should be able to control what I say and what I wear, where I go, who I interact with, what I take interest in. The men who crave to take from me by force the right to my own mind and body. And even after my dealings with men, or rather as a result of them, I savor every minute of my choices. I find joy in speaking my mind with men who wish they could sew my mouth shut. I find gratification in using my intellect to make them feel small. We share a common understanding, an understanding that if I made it this far with the shackles of misogyny around my ankles, I would’ve built heaven on earth with the privileges that they’ve been fed. 

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The Cardinality of Grief

How are we meant to quantify grief? 

I think about how we all sat in silence at dadi’s house after dada’s burial – silence heavy with the magnanimity that can only come from pondering death. A permanent loss in countless ways – loss of presence, of soul, of existence. A loss of conversation awkward and pleasant, of interest feigned and genuine, of a memory sharp and a mind astute. A loss of love for food consumption. And overly sweet chai. And clothing perfectly pressed. And dentures meticulously clean. And a loss of hellos and goodbyes, of bending down for a kiss on both cheeks, of “jite raho, salamat raho”-type routines.  

But even though we were brought together under the umbrella of grief from dada’s passing, that was not the only type of death heavy in the air. Death is a permanent loss but is not purely defined by someone being deceased. Substantial death is a loss of love, and it was the loss of love that struck me in that room. In one corner, resentment from a sickness destroying a unifying love between two people. In another, pieces of a broken marriage left stagnant for so long that the heart outgrew them. In the third, the possibility of love kept alive by will but desecrated by the cool edge of rationalism. And in the fourth, an endless search for a love non-existent. We were brought together by one grief, and we stayed for a multitude. 

I realized then that such silence can’t be pregnant with only one kind of loss, because lives are never limited to a singular loss. The quantity of loss is plentiful, and the grief from it compounding. And when there is so much compounded loss in one room, with it comes the silence from thousands of unspoken words, from unexpressed emotions, from griefs shoved aside in hopes of one day being less jarring. 

Maybe that’s why we come together in collective grief, as if our presence as a unit can somehow ease burdens and alleviate individual suffering. For a moment, I can allow the losses littering my existence that are so substantial in their isolation, to become negligible within the larger context of dada’s passing. I can let go of the pains that we drag around heavily in our veins, and I can allow myself to mourn for the departed – for my grandfather, and for others that are alive but that I continue to yearn for.   

In death, there is loss. But in death, there is also unity – a comforting legacy to leave behind for a life so wholly lived.     

To Conceive of a Rationalizing Machine

I was reading about how researchers have been attempting to create intelligent machines by modeling them around human learning systems. How initially, they created systems solely driven by maximizing rewards and reducing negative consequence, then attempted to place these systems into various simulated game environments where they could earn points for moving to the next level. Unexpectedly, the systems stagnated. To act drastically meant to risk punishment, and the odds of obtaining a reward for moving to the next level were far lower than this risk of a negative outcome. The systems, now exceedingly risk averse, failed to act at all – finding themselves infinitely locked in a game they had no desire to play.

With a conclusion too existential for the human predicament they expected to simulate, researchers went back to the psychological drawing board. They discovered that outside of basic principles like reward and punishment, the trait most critical to the evolution of human learning was actually curiosity. That by creating an inquisitive system to play the game – to open doors, jump down pipes, walk through dark spaces – they could create a system that would prioritize moving forward out of nothing more than the desire to obtain knowledge of what lay ahead. It would be this curiosity that provided a new layer of intrinsic reward, propelling the system forward. Ultimately, they were correct. “Curious” systems were able to pass every level in the game and maximize their rewards in the process – a win win situation. 

It is fascinating to study efforts around creating rationalizing machines – how humans pioneer this effort based on the ever-growing understanding of their own minds. But the more I delve into recent research around artificial intelligence and machine learning, the more I realize how much we can truly learn about ourselves through the simulated game environments we create for our machines. That by watching how systems act when coded with the most basic governing principles of the human mind, I can somehow bolster my philosophical understanding of how I make – or don’t make – decisions in my own built environment. 

My upbringing, much like a new simulation, had no shortage of stimulation: of knowledge, of secrets to be unearthed and stories to be uncovered in passing conversation. My earliest memories of Karachi always begin with a constant influx of new people, people who may have been homogenous in skin and feature but who in actuality could not have been more varied. People who introduced me to what became my preoccupations with responsibility and loyalty and privacy (or lack thereof). With connections, prestige, status. With what it meant to rebel in ways that seemed insignificant to the naked eye and yet felt like a whirlwind of liberation in a society so scrutinizing. Karachi life introduced me to a level of careless self-indulgence that never lost its spontaneity, an everchanging gift wrapped in luminescent paper that enticed but was impossible to open in its entirety. And as I settled into new schools, new homes, new friendships and foes that dragged my heart to my knees, I switched. Overnight, I found myself transported into the intoxicating confines of decadence itself, realizing almost instantly that Karachi fell only within the margins of what stimulation meant to the expatriate children of Riyadh.

Riyadh, to me, represented the metaphorical switch between childhood and adulthood. Between scarcity and abundance. Between intimate frustration and fully developed rebellion. Too risk averse, too removed to participate, I watched as cigarettes in the hands of 13-year-olds mutated into hash, shrooms, molly. As large houses morphed into estates with gold carvings on walls and staff flown in from the Philippines, as parties transformed into soirees with chefs brought from Japan and alcohol smuggled from bathtubs in Russia. I watched ease, comfort, luxury graze my fingertips in a way that was both exhilarating and nauseating, feelings that I could only make sense of upon my migration to New York for university. It was in New York where I discovered the psychological depth of people, the vast cornucopia of experiences that made up those I had the privilege to know. Where my mind expanded with subjects and classes that taught me more about how to interpret the world within which I lived so recklessly. 

I had never before thought about the importance of this consistent stimulation, of an environment that fostered a sense of curiosity and interest in the mechanics of the created world. It wasn’t until recently when I took an intimate look at my existence over the past three years and noticed how drastically my outlook had changed. How I once craved to meet people, to learn more, to draw patterns and distinctions and parallels in an attempt to make sense of a world that felt complex and unseen. How I now felt like my brain had been replaced by a vacuum of mindless muscle memory, like I was – very literally – stuck in a game that I no longer had a desire to play. Much like a system caught in the punishment/reward dilemma, I had indefinitely stagnated.

Like many other afflictions of the mind, stagnation is difficult to address as it relates to the direct environment. I found myself at a point in time where I was privileged enough to discover stability, and I had become so comfortable in this stability that I allowed myself to be consumed by monotony. Too concerned that any level of change would risk negative consequence, I focused heavily on the complexities of human existence – on the idea of long-term success, on socially defined metrics and goals for contentment, on being an active and contributing member within political, economic, and social spheres. And in this process, I failed to acknowledge the basic qualities that pushed human beings to innovate. I failed to acknowledge the new environments that we built to stimulate us enough to trigger a curiosity response, propelling us into the next stage of knowledge acquisition. 

I realize that as I continue to migrate through life, my mind acquires more experiences that push the threshold for mental stimulation higher and higher. That to accommodate this, to continue emotional, intellectual, and spiritual growth, I have to build an environment that will allow for constant exploration. I have to give myself the opportunity to be more attentive – to read, to interact, to write about my experiences, to challenge my conceptions of what I think I know. I have to allow myself to break out of simulated environments made for systems and machines bound by basic principles rather than those meant to be elastic and everchanging.