Best thing of this week

Spring is slowly peeking its way back into Kabul. I don’t know where it comes from. It was snowing a week ago. Then the weather peaked, without force, its amazing – I see birds fluttering, one chasing the other, and the other chasing the smell of life somewhere else. The bustle of life is getting to me. Last week I started washing our carpets. Shoaib returns from the mosque and sees me squatted down in the bathroom, using his shoe cleaner as a scrub. And the carpet smells of Nivea soap and Fructis hair conditioner! Then I make him hold it up to wash the soap down. It gets really heavy and I urge him on “Take it as an exercise. Make sport!!” He entertains the thought until it gets too heavy. I beam in delight. The shower tub is not awashed with dirt-water. I have merely made a clean carpet cleaner!

Last Friday the Sabris took a trip over a mountain into the countryside. It is endless flatland, dotted with mud-houses, and the further you wander in, there are barricades of mud-walls, and a small ruin that once belonged to the Mujadidi family. I love this place. The lower mountains surfaces are charred with glimpses of white marble. Some cracks still hold the pristine snow-fall, like solid rivers finding its way downwards before disappearing into natural slits. Then the higher mountains…they are the foreboding gates that so much represent this country’s apt contradictions. The terror, the grace, the pride, the descent…

C and I took long walks round and round the perimeters of Sabri-land. It felt so good to breathe clean air, to feel the mix of sun and cool breeze. We ended the day sitting cross-legged on the soil, breaking fresh hard-boiled eggs with our elbows, streaming through good conversations of how we all met, of where we want to be…a question mark looms ahead, like mountains, so much richness, so much to guess, so much to desire, so terrifying to ponder.

Am I excited? Yes, sometimes I am. A lot of the times I am scared. But there is a feeling one gets…after laying out a dry carpet, combing its frills outwards, touching with pride and smelling the faded fragrance….it is one of many carpets I’ll have to scrub on a Friday morning. I smile as I think of it. This is my home. Its a little one in a very large heart. I’ll happily scrubs those carpets. They are pieces of my home.

Love,

By one of my favourite authors, Jhumpa Lahiri

My love of writing led me to theft at an early age. The diamonds in the museum, what I schemed and broke the rules to obtain, were the blank notebooks in my teacher’s supply cabinet, stacked in neat rows, distributed for us to write out sentences or practice math. The notebooks were slim, stapled together, featureless, either light blue or a brownish-yellow shade. The pages were lined, their dimensions neither too small nor too large. Wanting them for my stories, I worked up the nerve to request one or two from the teacher. Then, on learning that the cabinet was not always locked or monitored, I began helping myself to a furtive supply.

In the fifth grade, I won a small prize for a story called “The Adventures of a Weighing Scale,” in which the eponymous narrator describes an assortment of people and other creatures who visit it. Eventually the weight of the world is too much, the scale breaks, and it is abandoned at the dump. I illustrated the story—all my stories were illustrated back then—and bound it together with bits of orange yarn. The book was displayed briefly in the school library, fitted with an actual card and pocket. No one took it out, but that didn’t matter. The validation of the card and pocket was enough. The prize also came with a gift certificate for a local bookstore. As much as I wanted to own books, I was beset by indecision. For hours, it seemed, I wandered the shelves of the store. In the end, I chose a book I’d never heard of, Carl Sandburg’s “Rootabaga Stories.” I wanted to love those stories, but their old-fashioned wit eluded me. And yet I kept the book as a talisman, perhaps, of that first recognition. Like the labels on the cakes and bottles that Alice discovers underground, the essential gift of my award was that it spoke to me in the imperative; for the first time, a voice in my head said, “Do this.”

As I grew into adolescence and beyond, however, my writing shrank in what seemed to be an inverse proportion to my years. Though the compulsion to invent stories remained, self-doubt began to undermine it, so that I spent the second half of my childhood being gradually stripped of the one comfort I’d known, that formerly instinctive activity turning thorny to the touch. I convinced myself that creative writers were other people, not me, so that what I loved at seven became, by seventeen, the form of self-expression that most intimidated me. I preferred practicing music and performing in plays, learning the notes of a composition or memorizing the lines of a script. I continued working with words, but channelled my energy into essays and articles, wanting to be a journalist. In college, where I studied literature, I decided that I would become an English professor. At twenty-one, the writer in me was like a fly in the room—alive but insignificant, aimless, something that unsettled me whenever I grew aware of it, and which, for the most part, left me alone. I was not at a stage where I needed to worry about rejection from others. My insecurity was systemic, and preëmptive, insuring that, before anyone else had the opportunity, I had already rejected myself

For much of my life, I wanted to be other people; here was the central dilemma, the reason, I believe, for my creative stasis. I was always falling short of people’s expectations: my immigrant parents’, my Indian relatives’, my American peers’, above all my own. The writer in me wanted to edit myself. If only there was a little more this, a little less that, depending on the circumstances: then the asterisk that accompanied me would be removed. My upbringing, an amalgam of two hemispheres, was heterodox and complicated; I wanted it to be conventional and contained. I wanted to be anonymous and ordinary, to look like other people, to behave as others did. To anticipate an alternate future, having sprung from a different past. This had been the lure of acting—the comfort of erasing my identity and adopting another. How could I want to be a writer, to articulate what was within me, when I did not wish to be myself?

It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to others for guidance, for influence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, “Listen to me.”

This was where I faltered. I preferred to listen rather than speak, to see instead of be seen. I was afraid of listening to myself, and of looking at my life.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/13/110613fa_fact_lahiri#ixzz1pfaz1IhM

It was a little more than 7 years ago, jet-lagged and pyjama clad, that I floated into this sepia-world I now call home. I remember peeking through the slits of my sleepy eyes, my talkative mind garishly beckoning me to realize what I was seeing. Afghanistan had arrived, long before I could spell it. 

The city today is less intimate to me than it was before. Then, narrow lanes between mud-bricked houses were a game of maze. At each bend I was always eager to find another child, or family; “tell me a story,” I would whisper. There was always giggles over a cup of tea. Girls played with my hair. I painted their nails and designed henna on their ruffled hands.

But the world around me has hardened. I have hardened, caught in the paranoia of foreign-ness. “But you are just like us,” my Afghan friend tell me. “Am I really?” There is no time now to hold little hands, to walk the edge of Masood hill and braid each other’s hair. I don’t want to be this person. 

Frustrated, I wrote once “I am sitting here in my castle, writing about human rights.”

Shoaib and I had a long conversation a few nights ago. We met a beggar along Darlaman Road. Her name was Maryam. Shoaib lovingly called her Modar Jan……no one should be standing out there so late in the cold. I thought from this large car, I cannot recognize her humanity. We just drive by them most of the time. 

After our conversation, I heaved my frustrations, my part-relief, my gratitude. One for my super-star man who stood for the same principles and who identified with my frustrations. Another for a new commitment.

When night fell, I went back to “writing about human rights”. 

———

One of my biggest fear is to write. I remember once being too fastidious for words, as if the objective of “love” was, to write of it. Gullible, I was completely bought by literary fashion and models of construction. When I fell in love, I was a woman of words, and they needn’t be true. A sentence of many words, conjunctions, or new vocabulary would throw me into an unusual high. I cannot read without wanting to write. Experiment was my excuse to pardon grammatical errors. I was caught in the mess of ingratiating myself; I was pleasing words for the love of words. Then when I fell in love with Shoaib, I had to drop my pen. I wanted to experience our love outside my words. Anyway, he did not always understand what I wrote!

This year I wrote little. But in this time I realize how I miss writing stories of Afghanistan. Writing gave me a lens to view life with more clarity. Writing allowed me to explore even disturbing personalities with a little more sympathy. The lives of women and children would rest appropriately in its nuances, in all its identifications. Spoken, not instructed. There would be no need for judgement. Just observation.

Writing would explore my weaknesses for me, allow me to sit with it, experience it and let go when I it needed to go. As it did now, as it always will

Love,

xx Natasha