In Which We Hold Very Closely To A Notion

painting by Kate Shaw

The Right/Wrong Time

by HAFSA ARAIN

1

I certainly did not know two years ago that leaving school would be just as harrowing an experience as entering it in the first place. When I started graduate school as a rather insecure 25-year-old, I found the first semester to be one of the most challenging experiences of my life. I remember a conversation with my mother a few weeks in, in which she lamented the loss of my presence at home, and in which I lamented the loss in my confidence and ability to speak my mind. Through her tears and my discomfort, I communicated what I could not say to her in person: that I wanted more than anything to come home and be comforted.

My parents, who have learned how to be supportive of me and my choice to study the humanities, sent me to California with the sense that I would relearn who I was and return to them a reformed and renewed person. This is true, although I never went back to Chicago. I relearned who I was in graduate school — rebuilt what I had deconstructed in undergrad — and now I need to relearn how to be a whole new person. One who does things instead of thinks things, one whose identity is connected intimately to whom one works for.

This is because we pretend it is a choice who we work for and why — have we not been directed through life’s strange twists and turns to end up in a place if only because chance made it so? That you met so-and-so doing something connected to what you do, or that your friend introduced you to someone who happens to have some money set aside for an intern — these are the ways we get jobs, not because we actively search for something that fulfills our identity. This is the way I have gotten jobs — only because I have proven myself to the right/wrong people at the right/wrong time.

Painting by Kate Shaw

It is a strange thing, then, that we place so much value in where someone chooses to make their living. We ask about it at parties, or assume that it must be announced like a calling card on social media. It must go after my name in every email I send out — I am inextricably connected to what I do. Even after I am much older, should I ever decide to leave what I do even though it is fulfilling, it will live on my resume as a stamp of my life as a 27-year-old. You did “x” for “x number of years” and that’s how we will define you.

The only act in connection to work that has ever proven my identity is leaving a job — ceremoniously and at a young, impressionable age. The leaving was the act of being myself. The leaving is what led to everything that came afterwards. The leaving was the key to my success. When I tell some relative much later in life how to feel alive, I will tell them to quit their job in the way I did: without any regard to the consequences. Quit when you know you can’t take it anymore, and then revel in your poverty, for it was your own choosing.

Of course, I could never imagine giving such advice now — not when I know too deeply and too recently what it feels like to see bright red numbers and an unfortunately placed “-” on my bank statement.

2

Unlike my sister, who works as an accountant, I have found that the kinds of jobs I've had expect me to envelope myself in them. In most cases, I have not minded this expectation. I am accustomed to enveloping myself in things — it is how I exist best. In college, it was maybe listening to certain kinds of music or reading certain books. In graduate school, it was my research and exploration of young Muslim women living in Pakistan.

Such a life is only worth living if you believe in what you envelope yourself in. And such was my perception of crisis in my transition from student to worker that I met with my thesis advisor at first notice to go over the potential PhD programs to which I should apply. In recent conversations with him, I have confessed my own doubt and apprehension in my work. To this he replied: what is your project?

And to that, I thought, I have too many.

painting by Kate Shaw

3

Having been raised to be creatively-focused, I find the most challenging aspect of my job is not the expectation of bringing ideas forward or challenging my bosses, but rather the expectation of hyper-productivity. I had never judged myself before on how much work I could accomplish in a day, only the quality of said work. To be judged on both now is a challenge I have never encountered before. As much as I try to welcome such a challenge with open arms, I find that I am often seeing my own flaws in a way that makes me resent what I used to do and who I used to be. That I could have spent all that time learning how to be better at what I do now and didn’t — that I had wasted so much of my life not being a good enough or fast enough worker.

I resent those who are able to work in the creative field even more than I resent myself. I recall especially a talk I attended a year ago with Zadie Smith, a much beloved author, who said that she could spend at maximum about four hours per day writing. What I actually resent is not that she requires only four hours per day to write amazing works of literature, but rather her financial ability to live her life comfortably while working however many hours she chooses to.

4

When my mother turned 50 — a few years ago now — she told me over the phone that everything she thought she knew about herself was so little compared to what she knew now in her middle age. Her role as a mother, as an immigrant, as a woman – all of these things made such little sense to her when she was my age. Even in my struggle for instant satisfaction as a millennial, I hold very closely onto this notion. That one day, I too will be a slightly wrinkled 50-year-old woman who will look back on my life with the solid understanding of where I have been and where I will be then.

Hafsa Arain is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can find her twitter here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about her childhood.

Paintings by Kate Shaw.

"Actually" - Rozi Plain (mp3)

"Best Team" - Rozi Plain (mp3)

 

In Which No One Looks Or Even Cares

Run or Hide

by HAFSA ARAIN

1

I left a ten-day long stay in Turkey almost as soon as the protests had begun there. I traveled with a group of fellow graduate students and our Turkish-American hosts who had set up a series of informational meetings and tourist activities so that we could learn more about the country. On our boat ride on the Bosphorus, we saw bright red flares reach the sky. The morning earlier, on a bus ride to a mosque for the dawn prayers, we saw about a hundred young men chanting and waving the red Turkish flag. I saw no gun-toting men, no real indication that danger was ahead.

And yet, I told the others on the bus, “The Pakistani instinct in me is telling me to run and hide. To get away from protests – this is how people get killed.”

According to my parents, a large gathering of people for political demonstration will inevitably turn out violent. They have told me this on the phone as I made my way to Occupy Chicago demonstrations, as I rallied to save the job of a professor in college, even as we watched Obama’s election on television witnessing strangers hug one another in Grant Park.

It is something my parents always say with a little bit of shame in their voices. That we should come from a place like Pakistan – with all its corrupt politicians, bomb blasts, and rivalry with the bigger, richer India – and not from somewhere else. They have only ever wanted us to feel proud of where we came from.

2

My flight from Istanbul to Karachi was shorter than I had imagined it would feel. Out the window, I watched the blinking lights of Iranian cities flash as the sun set behind us. I left California a month and a half ago, eagerly making my way farther and farther east. Karachi is my last stop before I go back. It is the farthest east I have ever been.

It is also the city in which I was born. When we came back to visit Pakistan as children – with our full American accents – my parents drove us past our old apartment building in Gulshan-e-Iqbal. I saw from the car a shattered window pane on the top floor. I drove past it again, more recently. My cousin Sara, who is years older than me, pointed out the building to me from the road – the brown earth and the brown buildings sometimes blend into one. I looked at it but did not recognize anything. It has been nearly 23 years since we lived there.

“This one?” I pointed at the building next to it.

“Yeah, it was one of these. I think that one over there,” she said, “I remember when you guys used to live there. Your taya and taijan [uncle and aunt] lived just upstairs.”

I told her I wanted to take a picture the next time we drove past.

3

A computerized image of a drone flashes on the television as we flip through channels. We never rest on the bad news – we almost reel past it. I sometimes will myself to forget that it exists. I will myself in the way I did when I lived in Chicago – when I heard of dozens of murders happening just miles away from me, I would will myself to think of something else. My first week back in Pakistan, I thought of myself as cruel for attempting to forget the innocent lives lost. By my second week I had decided it was the only way to keep going.

4

Occasionally, I will see an advertisement on television for USAID’s educational facilities in Pakistan. I have not seen any public mention of programs like this in Pakistan any other time I have visited, even though they have existed for a long time. In the commercial, a brown man dressed in shalwar kameez escorts a young girl wearing a school uniform into a brightly lit classroom. The entire ad is in Urdu, emphasizing that the curriculum is all Pakistani. I have seen this advertisement appear on the news networks mostly, after mentions of drone attacks in the north or when a news anchor reports on Taliban activities.

5

I spend my days studying languages – Arabic and Urdu – with private tutors, and my evenings accompanying Sara to the various bazaars to buy fabric and appliques for her clothing business. She is often telling me to avoid the puddles of brown spit on the ground – stains from paan, sweet chewing tobacco – and placing brightly colored fabric against my skin to see how it would look on me. My sister is getting married in autumn, and Sara is making nearly all of my outfits. We travel from one bazaar to another, meeting with tailors and the men who will sew all of the beads by hand onto my outfits. In their little shops, I fan myself as I am measured. As a reward for our hard work, we eat street food in the car with the air conditioning on full blast.

As we wind through traffic on the streets, I look closely at the Urdu script on the buildings and medians. Since the reason I am in Pakistan to begin with is to learn to read and write Urdu, I attempt to take some pictures of the graffiti so that I can read it as practice later. I mostly end up with snapshots of the political signs that line the medians on the roads. Benazir Bhutto’s face is still everywhere. I saw a particularly large poster of her, her eyes glinting with a faraway look and her white dupatta draped loosely over her head. The last time I was in Pakistan, in December of 2007, she had been assassinated brutally during a political parade in Rawalpindi.

6

When a bomb goes off in Boston, the world is shaken up. I had stared at my laptop all day when it happened, asked all of my friends in the area if they were okay. The days that they had shut down the entire city, I was glued to my twitter feed, unable to accomplish any of the tasks I had meant to do that day.

When a bomb goes off in Quetta, a city on the border with Iran in Pakistan, and 12 young women on their way to university die tragically, no one looks, notices, or even cares.

“We are used to it,” we tell each other as much as we tell ourselves. What else are we to expect of the rest of the world?

Hafsa Arain is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can find an archive of her writing for This Recording here.

"Come On" - Alpine (mp3)

"Foolish" - Alpine (mp3)

In Which We Become A Completely Non-Threatening Friend

Like Me Back

by HAFSA ARAIN

In Pakistan, they don’t let girls make mistakes. We are kept from any type of wrongdoing – for if we do wrong, then we shall never be married. It is almost a sin to be an unmarried female adult. In many ways, my insistence on being alone has been a reaction to that injustice. I am alone in order to prove my independence to the world. I had those thoughts on many occasions: signing apartment leases or job offers, completing college admission packets and receiving fellowships. Girls like me didn’t use to do these things! I thought with a sort of desperation. I am a trailblazer! I had those thoughts when I moved out of my parents' home at 18, when I traveled the world at 19, at 21, at 22, at 23. I am a trailblazer.

Somewhere along the line, it came to be that this was not enough. Being alone was not enough. Even for just one gloriously short time in your life, you need someone who has loved you and who you have loved. They try to tell you this in movies, and you scoff at it. And then it hits you: they say this in movies, because it is true.

I have been alone always. I have never been attached to someone; I have never been part of a couple. A boy in high school once asked me out, and I refused, citing my religion as an impetus for singlehood. Boys in high school never asked me out, for they never noticed me. And beyond this being a point of pain for me, it was a type of twisted success. I attempted to be as invisible a teenager as I could be – standing out was asking for trouble. Being single was part of blending into the grey, blank walls. I stood by my locker when he asked me. He was nervous and jittery. I responded with broken sentences. Getting asked almost felt like a series of increasing pressures. I would not have known what to wear, what to say, how to act around him. Saying no was a relief. But for some reason, I cried on the way home on the bus.

In college, I asked a boy out once, though I was never fully sure why I did it. I knew he wouldn’t like me as I liked him. He was nice to me, so we went out for tea one time. But he had no intention of carrying on. It was as though I asked him out as a dare to myself, something with which I could test my own courage. It was an experiment in how American I could be: how much I could resemble the other girls in my classes. They had all had pasts; they had all had baggage. (“I just have all this baggage,” they would say, “you know, from past relationships.” Or, “I just find it so hard to trust someone again after what he did while I was studying abroad.”)

It was easier for them, I used to think. Their parents didn’t mind that they dated people, with some parents even encouraging it. My parents were afraid of dating, they were afraid of the whole concept of “the opposite sex." My parents were not American – they were and are the opposite of American. They were afraid of us being American, because if we were American then they wouldn’t understand us anymore. If we were American, then we were lost to them.

I disregarded the pain of having lost love (a common story among women my age), because I have never been in the position to fall in love in the first place. I had crushes on boys, a solidly unpleasant state when the feelings are unrequited. Though however unnatural the crush feels in the moment, it is probably the most natural feeling in the world.

I chose not to think of the question: who would I have to be for them to like me back? The image of the American woman is so different from the image I project. I am not white; I am not thin. I do not drink alcohol, and I cannot pull off a pencil skirt. I have never been able to relate to any women I have seen on television, in magazines, or even read about in books. Absolutely none of those women were Muslim women, and very, very few were South Asian. Women like me were never part of anyone’s consciousness – it is almost as though no one had ever even considered us.

That, and the fact that I am a woman’s woman. For as long as I can remember, women have found me to be a wonderful and completely non-threatening friend. In junior high, a girl named Sarah told me I had been a “girl crush” of hers for a long time. Everyone wanted to be my friend: for me to read them my lousy poetry in high school, to nod along with my radical thoughts in college, to hear me gripe about my life in my early twenties. Being a side character in someone else’s story became my comfort zone. When we hung out, I was the friend with whom they could always share the cab ride home. Women almost counted on me never having a boyfriend, never wearing a sexier outfit than them when going out, never being flirtatious with their beaux.

So many women, and thusly, men, have reduced me to being completely non-sexual; I am good for homo-social relationships only. I find it so hard to blame them for that assumption. Muslim women are seldom seen as anything other than oppressed. My friendships have become strained on the issue of my singleness: women will sympathetically extoll my virtues in an effort to prove me wrong. “You’ll see,” they’ll say, “There’s someone out there for everyone.” To me, that only sounds naïve.

I have to face the truth: I might never be with someone. I might never have a boyfriend, and I might never get married. I have never met a man who wanted to be with me. I am alone. I have to learn to be okay with being alone – no, with being single. Loneliness is okay once in a while, but being single is never okay. Because being single is not a value you have, but the net worth you own. And my net worth is only myself. No one has ever seen me as sexy: only as a capable, good-humored and worthwhile friend. In the end, I will add it onto my list of failures: I did not get into that Ivy League school I applied to, I did not write that book I meant to write, and I did not find someone to love me back. Not even for just a little while.

Hafsa Arain is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in California. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Paintings by Gertrude Abercrombie.

"Ruckus in B Minor" - Wu-Tang Clan (mp3)

"Felt" - Wu-Tang Clan (mp3)