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A gentle madness5/29/2023 ![]() We live in Lahore but have driven north across the plains, through arid tribal terrain, to my father’s ancestral village, Babri Banda, in the Northwest Frontier. From high above, somewhere in the darkening sky, East Pakistan is about to bomb us – the country is at war with itself. I have an ear infection, am burning up with a fever. There is one memory that shoots through the aperture, into the present, with particular ferocity.ġ971: Mother, Father, Ayah and I are driving to the Kohat Military Hospital. Past and present skim close, brushing arms like almost-lovers strolling in a desert park. We feed our memories as if they are guests at tea, pay homage to them. The sounds are family lore, stories I’ve heard so many times that I can’t free my memory from their telling, nor can I simply live in a present that isn’t sieved through their mythology. No matter where I’ve lived since – Dubai, Dallas, Minneapolis, Jeddah or New York – fragments from those years merge and dissolve into the now so that walking down a street, or waiting underground for the subway to screech to a halt, I often feel as if I’ve accidentally slipped inside a video installation layered with disjunctive sound and imagery. ![]() The country came with me: it moved in, set up home, breathing inside me a stream of remembrances that, for twenty-eight years, have inflected the most minute details of my present life. ![]() My heart, I thought, would never recover. ![]() When I was twelve, my parents decided to leave Pakistan and move our family to Abu Dhabi. ![]()
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