A massive snail!
Keeping an uncomfortable distance apart in front of the Pearl Continental Hotel.
Evil.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
In Bhurban, Pakistan
A massive snail!
Keeping an uncomfortable distance apart in front of the Pearl Continental Hotel.
Evil.
U Can't Touch This (no, you really can't -- it's a Muslim country)
The shoes are hot. You know they are.
Quick Sand
There are certain topics that I feel generally should not be blog fare. Chief among them is food -- do any of you read all those blogs dedicated to tedious descriptions of food preparation ("after my fifth spoon stroke, a nugget of hardened baking soda dispersed" or "at minute 23 in the oven, the top of my banana bread loaf darkened from tawny to toffee")? I am horrified by both the existence of these blogs and also the Betty Crocker perfect photographic documentation. If you read them, I really must know why. Other black-listed themes and items include scanned-in travel itineraries, photographs of flora (unless maybe there's a Jesus-shaped leaf that suggests the Second Coming), and, of course, the weather.
But I will make an exception (being god of the blog) for the monsoons, which are just beginning. I hear that soon the rain will be violent and dramatic, with lightening breaking the sky and heavy clouds bearing down on the verdant landscape. This has not yet happened except in my self-conscious twist of verbiage. But it did rain all day today, Seattle-style, and at 6 pm, despite some drizzle, Griff and I took the dogs for a walk. We'd been outside for about 5 minutes when Griff stepped in a mud puddle next to a highway (think something between Route 1 and I-95) and then promptly sank. He put his other foot down, and soon he was up to his knees in mud and stuck. He leaned over, onto all fours, and tried to dig himself out with cupped hands, but to no avail. For the next fifteen minutes he lurched back and forth until he emerged dripping, like a very messy candle, with several pounds of mud.
Islamabad is not, for the most part, a place where people smile or otherwise express joy very much in public -- the men's faces often look, to my Western eye, serious or guarded or stoic. The experience of being outside transformed, though, as we trudged back to the house, both laughing, and every man who passed us in a car or on a bike or on foot at least grinned. It was somehow really very lovely.
But I will make an exception (being god of the blog) for the monsoons, which are just beginning. I hear that soon the rain will be violent and dramatic, with lightening breaking the sky and heavy clouds bearing down on the verdant landscape. This has not yet happened except in my self-conscious twist of verbiage. But it did rain all day today, Seattle-style, and at 6 pm, despite some drizzle, Griff and I took the dogs for a walk. We'd been outside for about 5 minutes when Griff stepped in a mud puddle next to a highway (think something between Route 1 and I-95) and then promptly sank. He put his other foot down, and soon he was up to his knees in mud and stuck. He leaned over, onto all fours, and tried to dig himself out with cupped hands, but to no avail. For the next fifteen minutes he lurched back and forth until he emerged dripping, like a very messy candle, with several pounds of mud.
Islamabad is not, for the most part, a place where people smile or otherwise express joy very much in public -- the men's faces often look, to my Western eye, serious or guarded or stoic. The experience of being outside transformed, though, as we trudged back to the house, both laughing, and every man who passed us in a car or on a bike or on foot at least grinned. It was somehow really very lovely.
Friday, June 22, 2007
The Swimming Lesson
A few days ago I joined the gym at the Marriott, or should I say gyms: there are two fitness centers, labeled "Ladies" and "Gents" in silver cursive on glass doors. It's a good thing, too, because no man could possibly contain himself, let alone exercise, while I use the bench press thirty feet away wearing my size XL, paint-stained Riverside High School sweatpants.
The women's gym is, at most, 250 square feet. It has two elliptical trainers, one with a broken handle; two treadmills; an ancient stairmaster with a screen that looks like a dot-matrix print-out; one of those 20-exercises-in-one weight machines featured in 1980s home gym infomercials; and, in a pile on the floor, a few free weights that are often slippery from a ceiling leak. On a day when the air conditioning was not working especially well, my friend and I decided to crash the men's gym. We are, I think, technically allowed to do this, though I have yet to see another woman break the barrier.
The men's gym is, of course, in size and quality, akin to a smallish Washington Sports Club -- it has a glass wall that looks down on a pool, flat-screen televisions tuned to FashionTV (in Pakistan, this is the equivalent of soft-core porn), a ceiling tiled with Bose speakers, a balance ball, and new weight machines that, in their instructional diagrams, show pony-tailed women performing the exercises. Most men using the gym are from Western Europe or Australia, and so they appear completely unruffled by my presence.
Yesterday, after lifting weights among the men, I decided to swim laps in the women's pool, which is tiny and bathwater warm (this seemed compelling at the time, though now I couldn't tell you why). I'd completed three pool-lengths of breast stroke and had begun to mentally restructure a chapter of my novel when a woman at the opposite end of the pool, wearing what could have been my high school's wrestling team uniform, yelled and beckoned for me to come over to her at once. I rushed over, thinking there was an emergency. "I need you to teach me how to swim," she said. "Actually, I'm thinking you could just give me a few pointers. Just some tips."
I am at my least gracious when anyone interferes with or interrupts my workout, and so my first response was to try to think of a plausible reason to cancel or delay the swimming lesson. "I'm not a very good swimmer," I said, remembering the summer I was on the swim team and came in dead-last, by a margin of several seconds, in every event.
"You are a great swimmer," she said. "It won't be difficult for you. I just need a few little tips so I can improve."
"Sure," I said finally. "Why don't you show me what you can already do."
She lunged forward and then started thrashing violently, eyes squeezed shut, until she righted herself by grabbing the top of my swimsuit and pulling it down to my waist.
"So," I said, putting my bathing suit back on. "You don't really know how to swim at all."
"Just a few pointers. Just some tips."
I spent the next hour trying unsuccessfully to teach her to blow air out of her mouth and nose while under water. "So I breathe out and then in under water?" she kept asking.
"Um, not exactly."
At the end of our session, after I'd acquired a bruise and grown light-headed from demonstrating the proper way to blow bubbles, she said, "From now on let's come to the gym at the same time."
"Hmmmm."
"Give me your phone number. Also, we could hang out on the weekends. We could hang out all the time."
"Well--"
"It will be great!" she exclaimed. "I cannot wait. It will be so much fun!"
The women's gym is, at most, 250 square feet. It has two elliptical trainers, one with a broken handle; two treadmills; an ancient stairmaster with a screen that looks like a dot-matrix print-out; one of those 20-exercises-in-one weight machines featured in 1980s home gym infomercials; and, in a pile on the floor, a few free weights that are often slippery from a ceiling leak. On a day when the air conditioning was not working especially well, my friend and I decided to crash the men's gym. We are, I think, technically allowed to do this, though I have yet to see another woman break the barrier.
The men's gym is, of course, in size and quality, akin to a smallish Washington Sports Club -- it has a glass wall that looks down on a pool, flat-screen televisions tuned to FashionTV (in Pakistan, this is the equivalent of soft-core porn), a ceiling tiled with Bose speakers, a balance ball, and new weight machines that, in their instructional diagrams, show pony-tailed women performing the exercises. Most men using the gym are from Western Europe or Australia, and so they appear completely unruffled by my presence.
Yesterday, after lifting weights among the men, I decided to swim laps in the women's pool, which is tiny and bathwater warm (this seemed compelling at the time, though now I couldn't tell you why). I'd completed three pool-lengths of breast stroke and had begun to mentally restructure a chapter of my novel when a woman at the opposite end of the pool, wearing what could have been my high school's wrestling team uniform, yelled and beckoned for me to come over to her at once. I rushed over, thinking there was an emergency. "I need you to teach me how to swim," she said. "Actually, I'm thinking you could just give me a few pointers. Just some tips."
I am at my least gracious when anyone interferes with or interrupts my workout, and so my first response was to try to think of a plausible reason to cancel or delay the swimming lesson. "I'm not a very good swimmer," I said, remembering the summer I was on the swim team and came in dead-last, by a margin of several seconds, in every event.
"You are a great swimmer," she said. "It won't be difficult for you. I just need a few little tips so I can improve."
"Sure," I said finally. "Why don't you show me what you can already do."
She lunged forward and then started thrashing violently, eyes squeezed shut, until she righted herself by grabbing the top of my swimsuit and pulling it down to my waist.
"So," I said, putting my bathing suit back on. "You don't really know how to swim at all."
"Just a few pointers. Just some tips."
I spent the next hour trying unsuccessfully to teach her to blow air out of her mouth and nose while under water. "So I breathe out and then in under water?" she kept asking.
"Um, not exactly."
At the end of our session, after I'd acquired a bruise and grown light-headed from demonstrating the proper way to blow bubbles, she said, "From now on let's come to the gym at the same time."
"Hmmmm."
"Give me your phone number. Also, we could hang out on the weekends. We could hang out all the time."
"Well--"
"It will be great!" she exclaimed. "I cannot wait. It will be so much fun!"
Islamabad: Teaming Petri Dish
Last night I got acutely ill with my fifth microbial visitor in as many weeks; I have been sick so much that, after a normal digestive proceeding, I exit the bathroom with a warm sense of self-congratulation and, no doubt, a piece of giardia-contaminated toilet paper stuck to the heel of my shoe. (Expats here talk about blighted bodily functions with the frequency and compulsion of big time investors discussing stock market fluctuations -- it is even an appropriate topic to discuss over dinner).
At the urging of several friends who insist they've never heard of anyone with the same sick to healthy ratio of days, I called the doctor, a wonderful woman who works for the Canadian High Commission. She did not buy my theory that I have a rare disease that exhibits itself in frequent and seemingly isolated bouts of communion with the toilet, and I thought this was good news until she told me that instead I have the exact profile of a sub-sub-set of expats who are extremely, as she euphemistically put it, "sensitive" to the microbial world of Pakistan. In other words, I am Modern Medicine's captured spoils in its ceaseless war with Natural Selection. I was supposed to be the chaff, the unselected, the termination point for whatever heritable lines of constitutional weakness I am, thanks to Cipro and Flagyl and bleach, perpetuating. This sounds almost criminal, doesn't it? I feel a little like a character in a Jane Austen book, one of those timid, bonnet-headed ladies who has afternoon spells and a frequent need for Mr. Darcy's dampened handkerchief. Or like one of the women, laid up with "brain fever," that Sherlock Holmes saves from that diabolical Professor Moriarty.
At the urging of several friends who insist they've never heard of anyone with the same sick to healthy ratio of days, I called the doctor, a wonderful woman who works for the Canadian High Commission. She did not buy my theory that I have a rare disease that exhibits itself in frequent and seemingly isolated bouts of communion with the toilet, and I thought this was good news until she told me that instead I have the exact profile of a sub-sub-set of expats who are extremely, as she euphemistically put it, "sensitive" to the microbial world of Pakistan. In other words, I am Modern Medicine's captured spoils in its ceaseless war with Natural Selection. I was supposed to be the chaff, the unselected, the termination point for whatever heritable lines of constitutional weakness I am, thanks to Cipro and Flagyl and bleach, perpetuating. This sounds almost criminal, doesn't it? I feel a little like a character in a Jane Austen book, one of those timid, bonnet-headed ladies who has afternoon spells and a frequent need for Mr. Darcy's dampened handkerchief. Or like one of the women, laid up with "brain fever," that Sherlock Holmes saves from that diabolical Professor Moriarty.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
She's viscious
I have been inundated with requests for me to take pictures of myself pretending to do karate in my Pakistani clothing in front of a mirror.
On Cultural Sensitivity
There are a lot things I could do here that are are not unsafe, per se, but are culturally insensitive.
Take, for example, clothes. Wearing shorts is the equivalent of going topless in the States. A sleeveless shirt equals the two inches of sequined thong that sprout from ultra-low riding jeans. The entire stomach seems absorbed under the heading of cleavage, which one might argue does not exist here, as its very definition hinges on the tease of partial exposure.
There are expats who flout the rules, but I don't. The clothes are comfortable, they seem less unflattering in context, and I am a visitor here; dressing appropriately seems an easy and essential gesture of respect. Looking more deeply, it is true that clothing restrictions, which apply disproportionately to women, make getting dressed a daily reminder of the grim status of women here. But clothes seem an inconsequential concern -- at least, when they are not imbued with metaphor -- compared to the widely held contention that women should not leave the house. At all. And if, for some reason, that need arises, a man from their family must accompany them.
This is where I begin to encounter a deep and irreconcilable tension between Me and Pakistan. The idea that I can't or shouldn't go out by myself is, provided I'm not endangering myself, a rule I'm increasingly unwilling to follow. On one level, my defiance is selfish. Depending on someone else to exit these four walls has a soul-destroying, spirit-shattering quality. After 24 hours, I am inflamed with rage, and after 48 hours, I'm in full meltdown mode. The problem is not so much being in the house as it is not being able to leave.
But beyond my own paltry coping mechanisms, I am just beginning, as I grasp the cultural lay of the land, to feel comfortable saying out loud, in this public forum, that the rule that women should stay confined to the house is one that does not merit my cultural sensitivity. I find the rule morally abhorrent, and I gasp at its inhumanity and its implications for society as a whole the more I observe its practice. I am feeling uneasy, writing this paragraph, as I am doing everything I'm not supposed to do -- imposing my Western framework on Pakistan, judging a culture I don't yet understand, isolating one aspect of a social structure and analyzing it out of context, and just generally being righteous, which is unbecoming. And yet, to delete this would be to lie.
And so yesterday, around hour 36 of captivity, I went for a walk with only the accompaniment of three dogs (no, I did not adopt another dog -- we're dogsitting). Yes, yes, yes, it was completely safe. Please do not worry. But everyone stared at me for what I suspect was an array of reasons ranging from benign curiosity to lechery (there is a widespread perception that Western women are very promiscuous, and walking by myself basically sends the message I am a prostitute) to offended disapproval. None of it was threatening, and so, for the first time since I've been here, I just really didn't fucking care what anyone else thought. I cared less, maybe, about what anyone else thought than I ever have in my life.
I sense this must mean something, finding these internal trip wires, these limits. I felt like I was commiting an initial act of self-assertion in a place I have felt, to varying degrees, unsettled and disoriented.
Take, for example, clothes. Wearing shorts is the equivalent of going topless in the States. A sleeveless shirt equals the two inches of sequined thong that sprout from ultra-low riding jeans. The entire stomach seems absorbed under the heading of cleavage, which one might argue does not exist here, as its very definition hinges on the tease of partial exposure.
There are expats who flout the rules, but I don't. The clothes are comfortable, they seem less unflattering in context, and I am a visitor here; dressing appropriately seems an easy and essential gesture of respect. Looking more deeply, it is true that clothing restrictions, which apply disproportionately to women, make getting dressed a daily reminder of the grim status of women here. But clothes seem an inconsequential concern -- at least, when they are not imbued with metaphor -- compared to the widely held contention that women should not leave the house. At all. And if, for some reason, that need arises, a man from their family must accompany them.
This is where I begin to encounter a deep and irreconcilable tension between Me and Pakistan. The idea that I can't or shouldn't go out by myself is, provided I'm not endangering myself, a rule I'm increasingly unwilling to follow. On one level, my defiance is selfish. Depending on someone else to exit these four walls has a soul-destroying, spirit-shattering quality. After 24 hours, I am inflamed with rage, and after 48 hours, I'm in full meltdown mode. The problem is not so much being in the house as it is not being able to leave.
But beyond my own paltry coping mechanisms, I am just beginning, as I grasp the cultural lay of the land, to feel comfortable saying out loud, in this public forum, that the rule that women should stay confined to the house is one that does not merit my cultural sensitivity. I find the rule morally abhorrent, and I gasp at its inhumanity and its implications for society as a whole the more I observe its practice. I am feeling uneasy, writing this paragraph, as I am doing everything I'm not supposed to do -- imposing my Western framework on Pakistan, judging a culture I don't yet understand, isolating one aspect of a social structure and analyzing it out of context, and just generally being righteous, which is unbecoming. And yet, to delete this would be to lie.
And so yesterday, around hour 36 of captivity, I went for a walk with only the accompaniment of three dogs (no, I did not adopt another dog -- we're dogsitting). Yes, yes, yes, it was completely safe. Please do not worry. But everyone stared at me for what I suspect was an array of reasons ranging from benign curiosity to lechery (there is a widespread perception that Western women are very promiscuous, and walking by myself basically sends the message I am a prostitute) to offended disapproval. None of it was threatening, and so, for the first time since I've been here, I just really didn't fucking care what anyone else thought. I cared less, maybe, about what anyone else thought than I ever have in my life.
I sense this must mean something, finding these internal trip wires, these limits. I felt like I was commiting an initial act of self-assertion in a place I have felt, to varying degrees, unsettled and disoriented.
Friday, June 8, 2007
This is not the Capitol Hill Prom Court
In D.C., political and policy discussions often occur at 8:30 p.m. in low-lit restaurants that serve bland but elegantly plated fusion tapas and $12 appletinis. Here the acne-cheeked high school debate team captain, the Economist-reading winner of the science fair, the four-time United States representative on the Model UN Security Council, and the tapered jeans-wearing newspaper editor suit themselves in Ann Taylor and Brooks Brothers. And they analyze, fiddling with their trademark dark-framed glasses, the staggering implications of the assistant deputy treasury secretary's decision to step down in the context of a recent amendment to a fiscal policy bill.
Sitting amidst these conversations in my Burlington Coat Factory skirt and my Target shirt, I felt exactly as I did the summer I was 11 and played on a softball team. The only thing worse than the humiliation of going up to bat (I did not make contact with the ball even once) was the abject terror of standing in the outfield in tight white pants and a too-long-and-skinny emerald green T-shirt praying the ball would never come to me. I understood my isolated function as an outfielder, I understood the main objective of the game, and I understood the rules as they might appear in a textbook. (After that summer, I promptly forgot the rules, in the way one blocks out trauma, until I married into a family of baseball fanatics.) But what I could never understand was the real-time strategy I might employ during a play. I knew that after a pop fly bounced off my glove, after I tripped as I lunged for it, after I failed to cut the angle to intercept it, and after I had finally secured the ball as the runner rounded third base, that I needed to quickly offload the ball to another player who might get the runner out. But I was never sure which player that would be; I could never anticipate the sequence of events that would follow my throw, and I could neither conceptualize the larger meaning of that moment in the game nor my role in it.
Here, during every dinner party, every high-school-style parents-are-away romp, every hike through the Margalla Hills, the conversation makes a one-way trip into the terrain of Kashmir, of Musharraf's hold on power, and on the rule of law (a phrase everyone uses here and that I will pretend to understand beyond my literal interpretation). And to these conversations, I bring the twin baggage, masked by smiling and nodding but never speaking, of cynicism and ineptitude. At one such dinner two nights ago, mid-way through one of these discussions, I managed to position myself so I could chat with one other person, a Pakistani woman who worked for a human rights NGO. After I had talked to her for a while about her youth rights and women's rights work, she asked me what I thought so far of Islamabad. And I said, candidly, that I felt somewhat frustrated that I had moved from one town that fixates on politics to another that fixates on politics.
She told me, then, that the perpetual discussions about current events had not started until recently, when Pakistan got its first non-government-run news channels. Suddenly, she said, people who had never been informed because they only had access to State-run news media were protesting, participating in current events call-in shows, discussing incessantly the fate of the country. And I realized, then, with a quick, red-faced shame, that I was dense -- even disrespectful -- to equate the role of political discussions in DC and Islamabad only because my experience of the conversations in both places is the same. That's my problem, my infacility, my deafness; it is upon me, as the Pakistanis say, to somehow convince Griff and Spencer that helping me understand what the hell is really going on is not a futile exercise. But here, in living rooms and walled backyards, these are not DC-esque sparring matches between renovated high school nerds desperate for a spot on the Capitol Hill prom court. These conversations are about what will actually happen to a people: will they retain or lose an independent media, is their country growing into a democracy or tumbling into a totalitarian dictatorship, how will they live a month from now or a year from now, what will happen to their children.
Sitting amidst these conversations in my Burlington Coat Factory skirt and my Target shirt, I felt exactly as I did the summer I was 11 and played on a softball team. The only thing worse than the humiliation of going up to bat (I did not make contact with the ball even once) was the abject terror of standing in the outfield in tight white pants and a too-long-and-skinny emerald green T-shirt praying the ball would never come to me. I understood my isolated function as an outfielder, I understood the main objective of the game, and I understood the rules as they might appear in a textbook. (After that summer, I promptly forgot the rules, in the way one blocks out trauma, until I married into a family of baseball fanatics.) But what I could never understand was the real-time strategy I might employ during a play. I knew that after a pop fly bounced off my glove, after I tripped as I lunged for it, after I failed to cut the angle to intercept it, and after I had finally secured the ball as the runner rounded third base, that I needed to quickly offload the ball to another player who might get the runner out. But I was never sure which player that would be; I could never anticipate the sequence of events that would follow my throw, and I could neither conceptualize the larger meaning of that moment in the game nor my role in it.
Here, during every dinner party, every high-school-style parents-are-away romp, every hike through the Margalla Hills, the conversation makes a one-way trip into the terrain of Kashmir, of Musharraf's hold on power, and on the rule of law (a phrase everyone uses here and that I will pretend to understand beyond my literal interpretation). And to these conversations, I bring the twin baggage, masked by smiling and nodding but never speaking, of cynicism and ineptitude. At one such dinner two nights ago, mid-way through one of these discussions, I managed to position myself so I could chat with one other person, a Pakistani woman who worked for a human rights NGO. After I had talked to her for a while about her youth rights and women's rights work, she asked me what I thought so far of Islamabad. And I said, candidly, that I felt somewhat frustrated that I had moved from one town that fixates on politics to another that fixates on politics.
She told me, then, that the perpetual discussions about current events had not started until recently, when Pakistan got its first non-government-run news channels. Suddenly, she said, people who had never been informed because they only had access to State-run news media were protesting, participating in current events call-in shows, discussing incessantly the fate of the country. And I realized, then, with a quick, red-faced shame, that I was dense -- even disrespectful -- to equate the role of political discussions in DC and Islamabad only because my experience of the conversations in both places is the same. That's my problem, my infacility, my deafness; it is upon me, as the Pakistanis say, to somehow convince Griff and Spencer that helping me understand what the hell is really going on is not a futile exercise. But here, in living rooms and walled backyards, these are not DC-esque sparring matches between renovated high school nerds desperate for a spot on the Capitol Hill prom court. These conversations are about what will actually happen to a people: will they retain or lose an independent media, is their country growing into a democracy or tumbling into a totalitarian dictatorship, how will they live a month from now or a year from now, what will happen to their children.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Fast Times at Islamabad High
I woke up yesterday craving alcohol. It was an odd thirst, given that anything more than two drinks – or one drink, two nights in a row – promises a 48-hour bout of migraines and cold-sweat shivering, followed by a week of low-grade melancholy. I hate beer, and I only tolerate wine. I did not drink in high school, and in college I had a tepid interest in scoring a buzz once every three or four months. And yet, here I was, pre-coffee and horizontal, salivating over the idea of forbidden, illegal liquor. Whiskey Sours with omelets! Manhattans with hash browns! Tom Collinses with pancakes! Wild Turkey with a protein smoothie! How can you say no?
Deliverance came ten hours later at a U.S. embassy event that entailed waiters circulating with tequila sunrises. Until yesterday, thanks to the marathon hangover that followed my bachelorette party, the drink’s odor alone had turned my stomach. Yet I drank half of it greedily, in about 20 seconds, before I realized I was calling attention to myself.
I am also having the urge to dress like I’m a ridiculous high school sophomore. This morning I surveyed my closet of kurtas (long, loose shirts) and wrinkled linen pants, and then I stood still for a long time, unable to will myself to put on a tent. I wanted to wear a sequined spaghetti-strapped halter top and a mini skirt – two clothing items I have never even owned – even if it would mean getting kicked off the cheer leading squad or going home to change, as per the principal's instructions.
I seem to be having the high school experience I never had, and given how boring and trite all my rebellious inclinations have been so far, maybe I'll at least be popular this time around.
Sunday, June 3, 2007
Big in Haripur
Maybe you've fantasized about fame: your plastic grin tiled as computer screen wall paper; your testimonial headlining the latest Proactiv infomercial; your latest bout of pink eye fodder for a flurry of Us Weekly headlines about your tearful lunch with Angelina Jolie; and your propensity to attract swarms and swarms of people encircling your limo, trailing you, craning to detect every quiver of your bottom lip, every flutter of your eye lashes, every particle of foie gras wedged between your piano key teeth.
The problem is that no one has noticed yet that you can sing. Or act. Or write. Or model. And now you are getting desperate. No worries. Put on some loose-fitting Gap linen pants, American Podiatric Association-approved Dansko sandals, sunglasses, and the embroidered shirt you bought in Damascus as a tourist. Learn the American's go-get-'em-tiger gait. Cultivate a lack of facility with keeping a headscarf in place. And then have a Pakistani drive you in a Toyota Corolla to Haripur, Pakistan!
On the way you will pass through brown fields dotted with clusters of thatched-roof huts. You will wend through an orange grove, though you won't remember to roll down the windows until the light, sweet scent has tinged the cool air blasting through the vents and the groves are far behind you. And then you will come to a stretch lined with barber shops, tailor's stalls, and food markets with caged chickens out front. On the street, you will see men, and only men, all of them wearing tan or robin's egg blue shalwar kamizes. When the driver pulls over for your Haripur debut, you will get out of the car in one deliberate, go-get-'em-tiger motion. And that's when the men will all come over to you, 30 or 40 of them and counting, forming in a circle, staring. At first you will think they are hostile -- you will feel strange, like an animal at the zoo, and you will wonder what, exactly, you were thinking when you agreed to this trip. But slowly you realize that when you smile, they will smile back. Then they will offer you bottled water, but will not accept payment. When you try to buy a honey dew melon from a cart, the vendor will insist on giving it to you because you are their guest. And because you are big in Haripur.
Your fans at the barber shop:
The problem is that no one has noticed yet that you can sing. Or act. Or write. Or model. And now you are getting desperate. No worries. Put on some loose-fitting Gap linen pants, American Podiatric Association-approved Dansko sandals, sunglasses, and the embroidered shirt you bought in Damascus as a tourist. Learn the American's go-get-'em-tiger gait. Cultivate a lack of facility with keeping a headscarf in place. And then have a Pakistani drive you in a Toyota Corolla to Haripur, Pakistan!
On the way you will pass through brown fields dotted with clusters of thatched-roof huts. You will wend through an orange grove, though you won't remember to roll down the windows until the light, sweet scent has tinged the cool air blasting through the vents and the groves are far behind you. And then you will come to a stretch lined with barber shops, tailor's stalls, and food markets with caged chickens out front. On the street, you will see men, and only men, all of them wearing tan or robin's egg blue shalwar kamizes. When the driver pulls over for your Haripur debut, you will get out of the car in one deliberate, go-get-'em-tiger motion. And that's when the men will all come over to you, 30 or 40 of them and counting, forming in a circle, staring. At first you will think they are hostile -- you will feel strange, like an animal at the zoo, and you will wonder what, exactly, you were thinking when you agreed to this trip. But slowly you realize that when you smile, they will smile back. Then they will offer you bottled water, but will not accept payment. When you try to buy a honey dew melon from a cart, the vendor will insist on giving it to you because you are their guest. And because you are big in Haripur.
Your fans at the barber shop:
Friday, June 1, 2007
More cats and angst
You'll never come back to my blog if I write only about cats and angst, and this entry is about both -- maybe sit this one out if it could cost me you as a reader.
Around 3 a.m. on Wednesday, during my habitual insomniac's rounds, I noticed that Grover -- the brain-damaged, squirrel-tailed, 11-year-old cat we got from an animal shelter in Broward County, Florida -- seemed not to be feeling well. Over the next 48 hours, his condition deteriorated, and I began to panic. I consulted with our kind and brilliant vet in DC via telephone. I made several visits to the chemist, who supplied me with bags of medications available only with prescriptions in the States. I tried, at any cost, to avoid a trip to the vet here; expat cocktail party conversations often veer into the sorry state of veterinary care in Islamabad, and I've already, in just over two weeks, heard enough to know that entrusting a cat or dog to a veterinarian here is a dangerous act.
Late last night, I suspected that if he stayed at home he would die. And so this morning, I took him to the vet. When we left he was able to walk and purr. He died swiftly, within an hour of our arrival. I don't know why he died or what happened or what I should have done instead (aside, of course, from the nagging question of whether I was negligent or wrong to bring him here at all).
The loss is a difficult overlay to the otherwise very normal sense that I have not yet found a comfortable space to inhabit here: our house's interior has that depressing, hollow tenor of a cheap motel (though not for long!); we've made friends, but unless you're on a camping trip or a reality TV show, it's hard to achieve a satisfying level of intimacy with anyone in two weeks; I'm far away from all of you; and I am acclimating to being a woman in a conservative, Muslim country.
There has been a raw, startling quality to this experience. On a superficial level, Islamabad is America Plus. We live in a McMansion. We have a driver, guards, and a housekeeper. We go to DC-esque parties with journalists and State Department employees. And yet, perhaps it's presumptuous and problematic to impose American meaning and American identity symbols on the scenery.
The vet told us he had seen several very sick cats who had been eating the same food Grover was eating, but there is no recall here. Why? Functionally, there is no FDA or USDA. No amount of money can buy you even a mediocre veterinarian (fortunately, thanks to the embassies, this is not true of physicians). The onus is on us to create limits, to weave safety nets, to do our research, to investigate behind the scenes; no agency is performing this service. And while I intellectually knew this before, I didn't really know it until now, when I watched a completely unqualified vet in a dirty office try to save my cat who had possibly eaten commercial food containing poison. In a job interview two days ago a professor told me she observes a strange innocence in Americans, and perhaps that is exactly what I am confronting in myself, though innocent seems too polite. Naive, perhaps.
This speaks, maybe, to the ways the progress narrative might be inextricably woven into American identity. When people tell us terrible things in the U.S., we empathize and then search for happy endings, for progress, for ways to improve and overcome. And yet here, people have told me terrible things, and there is little more to do but just agree that whatever it is is truly terrible. And that is all. There is no insistence here that things will work out, that there is a recourse, that there is some official entity to ensure justice, that there are limits and checks and balances. In the U.S., we often believe the cat won't die because someone highly skilled and certified will swoop in and perform a miracle. And so we live almost cavalierly with this knowledge. But here, unless you keep your house very clean and buy imported food and watch your cat vigilantly, you put your cat at a very real risk.
I don't intend to pass judgment in this assessment. I don't even know what that judgment would be. I do not mean to be authorative, or to claim these thoughts for anyone else. What I am saying is probably not true, by any absolute definition. I am just trying to begin to work through these ideas, to understand the larger implications of what happened, to understand who I am as an American and what that means. And all this, of course, in an unreliable, overwrought state.
Around 3 a.m. on Wednesday, during my habitual insomniac's rounds, I noticed that Grover -- the brain-damaged, squirrel-tailed, 11-year-old cat we got from an animal shelter in Broward County, Florida -- seemed not to be feeling well. Over the next 48 hours, his condition deteriorated, and I began to panic. I consulted with our kind and brilliant vet in DC via telephone. I made several visits to the chemist, who supplied me with bags of medications available only with prescriptions in the States. I tried, at any cost, to avoid a trip to the vet here; expat cocktail party conversations often veer into the sorry state of veterinary care in Islamabad, and I've already, in just over two weeks, heard enough to know that entrusting a cat or dog to a veterinarian here is a dangerous act.
Late last night, I suspected that if he stayed at home he would die. And so this morning, I took him to the vet. When we left he was able to walk and purr. He died swiftly, within an hour of our arrival. I don't know why he died or what happened or what I should have done instead (aside, of course, from the nagging question of whether I was negligent or wrong to bring him here at all).
The loss is a difficult overlay to the otherwise very normal sense that I have not yet found a comfortable space to inhabit here: our house's interior has that depressing, hollow tenor of a cheap motel (though not for long!); we've made friends, but unless you're on a camping trip or a reality TV show, it's hard to achieve a satisfying level of intimacy with anyone in two weeks; I'm far away from all of you; and I am acclimating to being a woman in a conservative, Muslim country.
There has been a raw, startling quality to this experience. On a superficial level, Islamabad is America Plus. We live in a McMansion. We have a driver, guards, and a housekeeper. We go to DC-esque parties with journalists and State Department employees. And yet, perhaps it's presumptuous and problematic to impose American meaning and American identity symbols on the scenery.
The vet told us he had seen several very sick cats who had been eating the same food Grover was eating, but there is no recall here. Why? Functionally, there is no FDA or USDA. No amount of money can buy you even a mediocre veterinarian (fortunately, thanks to the embassies, this is not true of physicians). The onus is on us to create limits, to weave safety nets, to do our research, to investigate behind the scenes; no agency is performing this service. And while I intellectually knew this before, I didn't really know it until now, when I watched a completely unqualified vet in a dirty office try to save my cat who had possibly eaten commercial food containing poison. In a job interview two days ago a professor told me she observes a strange innocence in Americans, and perhaps that is exactly what I am confronting in myself, though innocent seems too polite. Naive, perhaps.
This speaks, maybe, to the ways the progress narrative might be inextricably woven into American identity. When people tell us terrible things in the U.S., we empathize and then search for happy endings, for progress, for ways to improve and overcome. And yet here, people have told me terrible things, and there is little more to do but just agree that whatever it is is truly terrible. And that is all. There is no insistence here that things will work out, that there is a recourse, that there is some official entity to ensure justice, that there are limits and checks and balances. In the U.S., we often believe the cat won't die because someone highly skilled and certified will swoop in and perform a miracle. And so we live almost cavalierly with this knowledge. But here, unless you keep your house very clean and buy imported food and watch your cat vigilantly, you put your cat at a very real risk.
I don't intend to pass judgment in this assessment. I don't even know what that judgment would be. I do not mean to be authorative, or to claim these thoughts for anyone else. What I am saying is probably not true, by any absolute definition. I am just trying to begin to work through these ideas, to understand the larger implications of what happened, to understand who I am as an American and what that means. And all this, of course, in an unreliable, overwrought state.
Grover
On the Death of a Cat
In life death
was nothing
to you: I am
willing to wager
my soul that it
simply never occurred
to your nightmareless
mind, while sleep
was everything
(see it raised
to an infinite
power and perfection)--no death
in you then, so now
how even less. Dear stealth
of innocence
licked polished
to an evil
lustre, little
milk fang, whiskered
night
friend--
go.
-- Franz Wright
From The New Yorker, 2003
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