![]() I love the openness of the Bay area, the fact that I can wear what I want without fear of appraisal or judgment. I dislike, too, the anxious obsession with “showing a positive side of Pakistan in the West.” As in India-under the grip of a new authoritarian populism-critiquing Pakistan now amounts to a kind of treachery.īut I viscerally understand Baldwin’s point: to disavow home-the simultaneous charm and frustration of it-is to live in denial about a very fruitful tension between love and freedom. I dislike, for example, the growing dogmatism of Pakistani society the polluted air the patriarchal norms that provide cover for and justify all kinds of violence against women. There isn’t any other place to go-you don’t pull up your roots and put them down someplace else.” I love his use of “spiritual disaster.” You can’t-you shouldn’t-teach yourself to fall out of love with a place. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it. ![]() In an interview with the Paris Review in 1984, James Baldwin said: “I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country. “I can’t just give it all up and start again. “Why can’t you just go to San Francisco- such a pretty city-and be with him like a normal person?” It means having formal, polite conversations with people I don’t know in the way that he knows them speaking relentlessly in English, communicating the clutter of my inner life in a language that houses my intellect more than my heart.Īfter I got married, an aunt got wind of my ambitious plan to split time between Karachi and San Francisco. But it also means parachuting into my husband’s community, his life, his friends. It means huffing in Urdu as I climb a steep hill in San Francisco eating slow-cooked beef shank from the Pakistani restaurant down the road on a cold misty day. It means being able to transition, emotionally, from Pakistan to the U.S. Having a “non-Pakistani Pakistani” by my side helps. I wish I could say that moving to the Bay-where I now spend half the year-has been easy. A minute ago, extolling my husband’s qualities, a friend had described him as “the most non-Pakistani Pakistani man Mira has ever met.” Friends hooted. In the row behind her, a friend from Burning Man-a woman with a soft corner for polyamory, MDMA, and electro-funk-clutched a faux-fur wrap. As I looked out at the flushed, beaming faces of the guests, I saw my mother in the front row, resplendent in a purple shalwar kameez and traditional gold jewelry. My friends and family had flown in from Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad. In the fall of 2019 I got married under a giant redwood tree in Marin, California. We rush to reassure her: she’s as glamorous and beautiful as ever. A senior actress says she’s put on too much weight. Someone talks of the fight they had with their spouse the night before. ![]() ![]() Somebody borrows somebody else’s aloe vera eye patch. Our parents are long dead I am determined to have my way, to arrange my siblings’ marriages, loves, lives. I’m playing the meddling, micromanaging older sister of a family of four siblings. While Tahir works on my face, I read the script. My hair is blown-out, hair extensions clipped on. Slowly, my eyes are made bigger by a combination of brown eye-shadow, black eye-liner, and fake lashes. “I’m going to wash my hands, don’t worry,” he says, flinging his cigarette over the neighbor’s wall. ![]()
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