There are days when the people around me here terrify me with their drive and with their focus. I wonder if it is just the way of life in this country to set a goal, fix your eyes on it and just plod on come what may - and that is perhaps why this country is where it is today - or if there is something inherently lacking in me. I wonder if their days are somehow longer than mine, if they can simply force time to flow more slowly around them so they can get more done. I wonder if they ever have time to wonder.

Footprints

It would be the epitome of ungratefulness to say that I had a rough childhood, because it was anything but that. I was well-fed, well-clothed and went to a great school. I was surrounded affectionate family members and teachers.

One does not have to live long, however, to realize that nothing really is ever perfect.

As a child, I had a phase where I was convinced that I was all but invisible, convinced that while people could see and hear me, I could not affect them in any way. Perhaps that was why, even from my an early age, I began putting a lot of my energy into academics as a I burnt myself to show the world that I was around.

As with all phases, this one was shrugged off as I grew.

Old fears tend to creep up now and then, though, reminders reaching out from the past. Some nights I find myself staring at the ceiling of my dorm room wondering if I am still a human-shaped void, a holograph that cavorts into people's lives but lacks the mass to affect change in them. Here, especially, so far from home, among people so different from mine, it is much easier to fall prey to such feelings.

I do end up falling asleep every such night, though, for it only takes a little observation to see the footprints I am leaving behind in the lives of my new friends. They are subtle yet not insignificant. I see them in how my devout Christian roommate asked me to I teach him how to pray; in how, at one point, many on my floor were obsessed with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; in the looks of effort they would assume as they'd try to utter the guttural "kh" sound in order to correctly pronounce the name of said artist; in how, after a screening of Khuda Kay Liye, I could tell that some preconceived notions had been shattered; and in how someone said to me, "Knowing you has single-handedly given me an appreciation for Pakistan."

Most of the audience had scurried to the cafe upstairs before the lights had been flicked on, the credits had begun rolling and the half-hour break between the films being played at the film festival had properly begun. By the time we had climbed the flight of stairs leading to the small cafe, there was no space left for us there. We tried awkwardly loitering by a small table laden with board games and little odds and ends for a little while.

Aware of how odd we were looking just standing around like that, we decided to look for somewhere else to sit. He picked up the guitar with a broken string, available for anyone to just grab and play, and headed for the small balcony that functions as the smoking area of the cafe.

I steeled myself. Allergic to cigarette smoke, I usually start coughing rather violently if someone smokes a few yards away. However, this time the choice was between exposure to carcinogens and being left to stand awkwardly by myself with nothing to do other than poking at the dice that lay next to a game of Snakes and Ladders. Obviously, I chose the former, taking a deep breath and letting peer pressure force me into the smoking area.

It wasn't so bad, initially, probably because the balcony was open and fresh air kept wafting in. He began strumming on the guitar. My feet began tapping in time with the rhythm while my hands busied themselves in sending a few dozen texts. It took me a while to realize we had company.

I cannot recall if they'd been sitting there when we walked in, or if they had arrived when I wasn't paying attention, but there were two others with us, a man and a woman.

He was tall and broad and bearded, and wore a very creased pale green kurta. He was standing, leaning on the wall. She was dark and deathly thin and sat with her elbows on the table. A bright red phone lay near her right hand, which was currently occupied.

She was smoking.

I forcibly turned my head away from her and began staring into the depths of a pedestal fan beside me, partly to save the glowing end of her cigarette from one of my death-glares, and partly in an attempt to minimize the smoke that reached my lungs.

The whirring of the fan, the twangs from my companion's guitar, and my own deliberately minimal breathing left my mind in a sort of trance, one where it becomes easy to pay attention to conversations - so easy, in fact, that they become embedded into your memory.

He had missed the film about the Afghani girls who had formed a football team after the Taliban has been forced out of Kabul. She had seen it more than once. She had even worked with the organization that had made the film; she was a freelancer. He was interested and pressed her for information. She gladly gave it. He ran out of questions and the conversation became trivial.

"That's Arabic? What does it say?" he asked. I turned to face the two in time to see him point at a shiny metallic bracelet she wore on her left wrist.

She gave the slightest of shrugs. "Oh, it's just the four Quls."

"So you're religious?"

"I'm an atheist," she replied almost callously, shrugging again.

For a split second, something horribly like seething rage washed over me. Then, as suddenly as it had come, it evaporated, only to be replaced by shame and bewilderment. I was confused about what had just happened to me. Quickly, I reassessed everything that had taken place in the past minute or so to figure out what had enraged me so before asking myself a few questions. Did I have a problem with atheism? No, I replied to myself, I did not. People have the right to believe in or not believe in whatever they like. And yet, something about the woman's callousness had upset me.

It was in that split second that I understood the foundation of all the religious intolerance around us, from the strict, scarily ridiculous Blasphemy laws, to minority discrimination. With something as personal as religion, differences in beliefs can feel a lot like a personal attack.

In the same split second, I also realized the true meaning of religious tolerance. It is not 'religious indifference' which is what, I now understand, most of my non-religious 'secular' friends practice. No, tolerance means accepting that people may do, say, or believe in things that might upset you and also accept that they have the right to do so - unless of course, it's a personal attack, but we're not getting into that - and that while you also have the right to be upset about it, talk about it, or even write a blog post about it, you do not have the right to harm them for their views or force your views on them.

Me

Words. They're good for description, for describing a character. A character like me. I am male and slightly shorter than average. The eyes behind my glasses, which have rectangular lenses, are brown. Although my ears are finally proportional to my head - which had a lot of catching up to do in terms of growth not too long ago - they still earn me the occasional snide comment or two. I guess they're just different, despite the fact that I cannot exactly say how. I like my teeth. It would be sad to be dissatisfied with your teeth after having them caged in metal braces for almost two years. I dislike my voice. At least it doesn't normally sound as bad as it sounds over the phone. And through a microphone. And in video recordings.

Words. You can paint pretty pictures of people with them but that is all you end up with - an image, two dimensional and lifeless. Words cannot define people. The fingers of our experiences and the actions we consequently take shape the wet clay that we are. They mold us as they brush over us, leaving the eternal proof of their passage behind for all to see, etched in our character.

I am defined by the sound of a camera shutter as it opens and closes and by the time that stretches between the two clicks, time that is both not more than a heartbeat and longer than several deep breaths. I am defined by the reassuring feeling of the pen in my hand and by the ecstasy it brings when cruising along a sheet of paper. I am defined by overcast days when the trees look greener against the granite grey sky and when a single breeze can be both warm and cool at the same time. I am defined by the smell of rain, of freshly brewed coffee, and of bookshops, pine trees and toast. I am defined by crisp winter mornings with dust motes dancing in the sunlight. I am defined by chocolate and ice cream, how they melt in my mouth, and by cheesecake - only during the time between when I cut myself another slice and when I scold myself for eating it. I am defined by the happiness that comes from getting the amounts of ginger, soy sauce and wasabi just right while eating sushi. I am defined by the manic passion that grips me when I find an interesting book, by how it causes me to cease existing in this realm for a time as it pushes me to read on and by how it suddenly gets replaced by overwhelming emptiness as soon as I turn the last page.

I love standing by the large window in my room after sehri with my ear pressing again its slightly damp jaali as I try to separate the sounds from the kitchen and the fan whining about the fluctuating voltage from those coming from outside. Are those the first sounds of the azaan? No, you idiot, that's just a plane.

I love the deep, intoxicating sleep that embraces you once you've stuffed your face at 4 in the morning. I hate waking up from such a sleep to go to school. It is the hardest part of fasting for me. 

Dates are overrated. The eating kind, I mean.

Small Things

During our first few days here in Boston, we went to a place called Quincy Market. While browsing through some of the stalls, we bumped into a young woman wearing a headscarf. She gave my mother one of the sunniest smiles I have ever seen. “That,” my mother informed me, grinning, “was the smile of familiarity.”

The weather here is really unpredictable. I have seen more rain that I usually do all year back at home, experienced temperatures I would call cold and still managed to get a tan.

It has been really cloudy the past couple of days. I enjoy staring at the swirls of white and grey drifting dreamily through the sky. I was doing that one day while on the bus, when the clouds parted slightly and warm sunlight fell straight on my face. Just my face. The fact that hundreds of tons of gases reacted in the Sun, creating light and heat which travelled for over eight minutes through the nothingness of space just to fall on my face makes me feel quite special.

Extremely crowded trains can be awkward. With so many human bodies forced into a tin can (of sorts) it is not possible to find a direction to look in without making someone feel that you might be staring at them. Looking up and down aren’t exactly solutions either. With the former, you may end up staring up the armpit of the tall guy who decided to wear a sleeveless vest that day. With the latter, you might get distracted by someone’s bright green nail polish or worse, miss your stop because you weren’t paying attention.

McDonald’s fruit smoothies are divine.

It is okay to wear your pants low if you want to. It is not okay to wear your pants low if you’re not wearing underwear and insist on standing in the bus and holding on to the rubber loops which makes your t-shirt ride up. Nobody wants to see the moon during the day.

It amazes me how freely people can talk in public spaces such as on a train or in the bus. Or perhaps I am the kind of person who doesn’t talk freely enough. Either way, I have overheard some rather interesting conversations such as the argument between a couple where the woman refused to take a shower until the man did something about the mould growing there. Weirder still was when a man told his friend how he liked women who weren’t ‘girly girls’ and admitted that he often attracted lesbians (though that bit didn’t make much sense to me).

I am compiling a list of things I’d like to do this week before I leave for home. I think a visit to Cheesecake Factory tops the list.

During the long bus ride from where I live to the subway station, I pass through a street called Myopia Street. I always wonder if Retinal Detachment Avenue or Cataract Road are nearby.

Emergence

So yeah, I started a blog. Here it is. I've been meaning to start one for a long time but I never really came around to doing it. I guess I never really needed one; I have blogged for as long as I can remember, not in digital form, and most certainly not on paper, oh no - my perfectionist self would maim too many sheets of precious paper before I'd be able to produce an 'acceptable' amalgam of my thoughts. I've always done it in my head, etching each vague, amorphous idea into the inside of my skull in sentences complete with parentheses and semi-colons.

Lately, however, I haven't been able to treat every single stray thought in this way. The unlucky ones saturate my brain, randomly materialising every now and then, screaming at me to chronicle them so that they may rest in peace. I'm ashamed to say, 'There is just too much going on,' because there is not. I have probably made myself permeable to the screams of these thoughts so I may divert myself from the haunting calls that resonate from the pile of textbooks making my desk groan at this very moment.

I am letting trivial things grab my attention so I don't have to face the important ones glaring right at me. Important is such an objective word. Important for me? Important for my future? Probably, but only as long as I am part of the system.

But now that the ugly monster has come so close, ignoring it would be sheer stupidity. Only the fit and the well-prepared survive in this world. I must stop my rambling and take the bull by the horns.

Perhaps this will be where the moaning phantoms that endlessly haunt the passages of my mind will be put down to rest.