The things I want to remember

I fly back home next week. To my second home, that is. Home in Karachi, on the other hand, has been quite an experience and a lesson of sorts.

I don't remember if I wrote about this before (I probably did) but before I left, I met one of my assistant professors, this lovely Iranian lady, who I've spoken to about being Muslim and feminist on more than one occasion. She told me of how important it is to go to the place you come from and gauge the situation there yourself. When we live alone in a strange land away from our motherland, we indelibly get disconnected from not just the customs there but the knowledge and background of those customs too. This does not, in any way, mean that we need to go back to re-programme our brains to follow some old set of rules but it helps greatly in understanding people back home and the reasoning behind their behaviour and the decisions they make.

I thought about the words of my teacher a lot this summer and it has been both eye-opening and difficult for me.

I have also been reading Sara Ahmed's Living a Feminist Life on a dear friend's suggestion and would like to recommend it to all feminists of colour, queer feminists, and male feminist allies. I don't read non-fiction often — it's difficult for me to get hooked on to — but this book is an exception, to say the least.

About Karachi, I want to remember the familiarity, the sound of the azaan, the neighbours singing hymns out loud in the evenings and my sister-in-law's smile when she finds a joke to be particularly funny.

I want to remember, in the words of my therapist, that I am not, in fact, living a dual life but that both these lives are as much a part of me as the other.