strawberry daiquiris and my dirty laundrette

There is so much to blog about, yet I have not had the time or the best sense for topic.  America's largess surrounds me, and each town replicates itself every few miles.  Its hard to distinguish between the midwest and jersey.  Shops emerge around every corner. Miles and miles of aisles and shelves boast of sales even the toughest anti consumer would succumb to.  You could recycle your wardrobe every week.  You could start using mascara.  Even Sam's Club sells organic salad in boxes that are two feet long, leaving the snob without an excuse.  The excesses are exciting.   People lost jobs and libraries close at 5 on Thursdays due to budget cuts; yet angry white men still commute from wall street. Dialectics.

Ultimately, I am happier with a lighter carbon foot print, fretting and sweating in the third world. 

We visit the turtle back zoo and every other car in the parking lot is an SUV.  I explain to M that big cars are bad for the environment and eat up fuel that is scarce.  She is more excited about being on the polar bear on the merry go round.  We feed little canaries seed stuck to wooden sticks.  After the birds have pecked off a few on the top, and the children stimulated enough by the proximity to birds, the seed sticks are tossed.  Children are instantly unreflective about waste; they prefer convenience and comfort and glossy stuff so much more.  So do adults.

The pizza slices are bigger.  More Parmesan, more garlic.  Funnily, any pizza that is not Dominoes is seeming gourmet. The napkins are on the other side of the counter where buyers can take a whole bunch without being watched and judged.  You can acquire red wine and tequila.  You can see fire engines and ladders, tower cranes and barbies that makes the story book toy world of my kids come alive.  Toy Story is replete with homophobia and sexism, but so clever.

Make money.  Consume.  Make more money.  Take loans.  Find finds.  Create brilliant serials, that leave people scratching heads in time travel.

Much to choose from and consume, but there is no choice, and you can not get off the carousel unless some burly porter pulls you off and snaps one of your wheels.  You don't want to because nothing outside is worth looking at.  The highway is fast paced, and I have almost forgotten how I managed to get on and take exits and get tickets from fat cops.

I find joy in a new york deli where you can for $7.99 a pound pile your plastic with sesame seed chicken, sushi, portobello, and steamed crab.  So sick I am of watery niharis and vegetables that had had the life squished out of them by Sharif.  M devours strawberries while A naps.  S makes a video of new york city as very tired new yorkers go home after a long day.  They are liking the summer, but their faces seem vacant and their expressions, I do not get.  Perhaps they are dreaming of real estate.  The empty lust for floorspace and air-conditioning.

What happens to new yorkers when they are no longer young and hip?  What happens when the strapless dresses don't fall so well?  Do they march with less confidence on delicious streets that surprise you with body shops and historic diners?

I see a sign, JP Morgan Private Customer, in a building that looks like a Madison boutique, one where Julia Roberts got ejected from in Pretty Woman.  Old money.  Howard Zinn lists the respected criminals. JP Morgan bought 5,000 rifles for $3.50 each and sold them $22, and made his money.  Rockefeller had $200 million in 1899 when he sold oil shares.

The old whore with the poison red apple uses and discards these young bodies, crushing their spirits in 12 feet wide hallways.  Driving some to the hell of suburbs.  I once witnessed a suicide near east 93rd where I lived.  Thank god for the tall ambulance that shielded the broken remains of the jumping man on the canopy of the high rise.  I wonder about Randy;  did she ever become an actor after then scrapped her role in Start Trek.  She could talk backwards real fast  She must be older in the village now.  Sixty.  In her tiny denim shorts, still?  Or perhaps, she was killed with Neil on that clear day.

I seek refuge in the public library.  Ah, the smell of old books and the goodness of virgin librarians.  But ultimately, I find refuge in Hanif.  Sammy and Rosie got Laid.  Auntie were gins, and uncles tonic.  At NYU, years ago, when he launched Black Album I asked him a question, which was probably so silly I felt J.Ann cringe and dissociate herself from me with that little tilt.  He signed my copy.  I told him my name was Mariam, and he wrote Maria.

Double humiliation.

After years of boozing and drugging and sexing, this man oozes an intelligence that I cherish, and his words, the revelations of a clairvoyant or a prophet.  His old age vulnerability is delectable.  His sentences filled with hot, honest cruelty.  His protagonist is a psychoanalyst.  Of course he has been a leftist and a liberal because he has lived through the sixties through the author's life.  And of course, he is justified in his disdain and irreverence for all commies, the ladies of Greenham Commons.  People express sexual desires in different ways and normality is indeed the gentrification of ordinary madness.   People do not want to be fixed by analysts because they are addicted to their illnesses and it is ultimately who they are.  Elderly men who are obstinate when they are caught naked - in their right to demand that their perversion be seen as the perversion of others.  No perversion is as perverse as celibacy.  And I agree.

An Englishman in new york.  My three year old nephew drinks a hot cup of tea with his breakfast and that is endearing as are his blue eyes.

At the end of the day, there is too much to love and loathe about america.  But there is so much to love.

At Blue Stockings today, young leftie women, sweet in their piercings, tell me they are all volunteers.  Parks that will let you boat for free and let on even 2 year olds if you sign a waiver, as friends persist.  Friends that cook Goan shrimp curry and give your kids strawberries and cheerios for breakfast, and recognize you become more amiable after red.  And a new jersey park where endless stories are woven by M, and A, made to pretend he is a hungry orphan, outside the beautifully constructed slide structure.

America is really the Best (Buy.)  I should suffer nosebleeds as I have been on this island before.

mera sacha saeen

You can only live in Karachi to know Karachi.  R is killing me this morning.  She is a Hindu, rajput woman who watches the kids and cleans the house.  I asked her why she was an hour late this morning.  She told me her three year niece fell on the tava which was red hot and got some bad burns.  She then tells me her sister burned to death  two years ago, and this is a very emotional matter for her.  At ten in the morning, this is too much to absorb from a woman I have known for six months. She told me as her sister was burning, she pulled her husband in with her.  He died too.  Both the father and mother-in-law were at home when this happened.  She lived for four days in the burns ward.  During this time she stated that "thinner" fell from the top shelf.  She was standing near the stove.  The police promptly dropped the criminal case against the parents in law.  She and her husband left behind a two year old and a new born infant.  R was in London at the time -- apparently with her ex employers.

Geo reported it.  The mother in law claimed that it was a gas canister that had burst.

Now R's mother is a wreck.  In their caste no one gets married in June or July.  They did.  And the pundit warned her sister and her husband that they should wait a few days to marry or they would both die.  Seven years and seven days into their marriage, this happened.  Now her three year old niece got burned as the house prepares for another marriage in June.  The girl is an outside, a Gujrati hindu, and doesn't pay heed to the omens.

The promised positive post may never arrive.

How gently we must guide our children through the cruelties they must absorb, the negative magics they must unravel.  A friend once said why send your kids to a top notch school.  As activists it behooves us to emulate Humza Alavi and send our kids to government schools in Soldier Bazaar.

You only have to live and experience what this gargantuan test means for your children - that they must suffer for the unresolvable guilt you feel for the inequities of class - compromise any chance they have of emotional growth.  How much will I be fighting with the teachers.  How much will their spirits be crushed.  Can little people rationalize deprivation.

On the flip, I am aware that the elite institution will destroy their natural humility, enhance their notions of self entitlement, normalize for them, injustice.

Ishq Samundar

I was actually going to write about the religious diversity and religious integration of Sindh.  This was going to be my positive post.

S traveled to Sukkur recently and was brimming with tales about the pluralistic traditions of Sindh.  At Sachal Sarmast's shrine there is a grave of someone called "Sarita Kanya Lala."  The grave is draped in a qul ki chador.  This is the kind of unity and oneness that the Sufi saint inspires.  That a Hindu devotee should choose to be buried.  That the keepers of the shrine should adorn the grave in Muslim qalmas.  It really is a slap in the face of bigots who can not stand that Ahmedis should say salaam, and have made it a crime for them to pose as Muslims.

My mother, from Aligarh, says in her home town Muslims often called their children by Hindu names;  the person buried must be a Muslim.  We dissuaded her because we so badly needed the good news.

I am not going sufi on you.  But we need to invoke those sufi saints lest religious intolerance goes out of hand.  (Wait, maybe that already happened.)  I am trying to read Dr. Fehmida Hussain's book on the depiction of the women in Shah Bhitai's poetry.

But then what do you do when superstition clashes with the good in sufism.  People going to mazaars with ill relatives, hoping cancers will be knocked out by the divine power of saints.  People convicted that it was the shrine of Abdullaha Shah Ghazi that protected the city from a cyclone.  I do find graves utterly charming.  Devotional paraphernalia is pretty cool;  but the irrational stuff just gets to me.

transport costs

I complained to my labor party friend, the feminist, about the cost of petrol  I said I spend about Rs.3,000 every two weeks.  He told me wanted to save Rs. 24 on bus fare so he took a short cut from Rehri Goth to Landhi.  RG is a predominantly Sindhi fisherfolk slum; Landhi is Pashtun.  In between there are two mountains. Much like some tale in Alif-laila, feminist, ended up in a forgotten marshland and found himself surrounded by rabid dogs in a place called Geedarr Colony.  Perhaps escaping the bullets of DHA canine killers, these dogs had formed a secret community in the forest.  Feminist was able to escape a vicious attack because he found a sugar cane stalk.  He hit he dogs; and they were scared.  One particular mean one would race ahead and attack him from the sides.

I am looking at the feminist.  "You know you are crazy, and I am going to put this on my blog."  He said another friend of his would turn it into a story.  We are a nation of poets and afsana nigars, and bloggers.

conclusion


My major thought for the day is - all of you students living away from Pakistan, bleeding hearts and patriots.  If you are contemplating a move back, do it.  Don't sit in Starbucks too long; you know, the blended ice drinks will kill you. There is plenty to do out here.  Its a dog eat dog out here.  I think I am going to prepare an activist manual for people (the political and social minded) contemplatung a move back.  But there is one rule.  You add to it as you make new contacts.