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.