Tasalsul

It is late afternoon, and I’m sitting on the floor of a room which I had once described as my little piece of heaven. It has gone from being a peaceful, zen space where I did my daily yoga and contemplated life over a mug of tea in the mornings and evenings, to becoming a kind of home studio/workshop. Gone are the rugs and comfy sofas, to be replaced by worktables and art/craft supplies, stacks of boards and canvases and rolls of paper.

Today I’m working on a self-created project, wearing work gloves, surrounded by a sharp chisel, a hammer, a saw and pieces of sandpaper. The object I’m working on is a tree branch, from which I have been systematically stripping bark and knocking off knobby bits, smoothing them down with sandpaper.

The branch (along with several others I’ve been saving since at least a year) came from a tree that used to tower over my little courtyard once. It was a conocarpus that I planted ten or more years ago, when it had not yet acquired the terrible reputation that it has now. The tree served us well as a windbreaker, as shade in hot months, and as a perch for many a sparrow, crow, mynah, bulbul and koel. Yet, it had its problematic aspects, like growing way too tall and obstructing views and wires, filling the courtyard with falling debris from its abundant flowers and heaven only knows what it was wreaking below the surface. It is a wonderful tree to plant near the sea as it is salt and drought tolerant, not so much in urban landscapes where it can clog underground pipes and break water tanks with its strong and tenacious roots. Karachi is overflowing with these trees, as it was planted willy nilly under city government instructions before the full scale of its destructive powers could be known, Slowly, they’re being phased out and better trees are being planted in their place, which is a good thing.

Nevertheless, chopping down the one in my courtyard felt like murder, a deep betrayal of a dear friend. This was the tree Minnie and Mowgli often climbed and escaped from, only to confront belligerent tomcats, and sometimes get terribly stuck. There were such conflicting feelings. I missed the dappled play of light and shadow through the leaves, but I welcomed the expanse of sky made visible because they were gone. I missed the birds, but the abundant sunlight made the tomato plants flourish. The cats were safer now, but they lost their playground. Kuch paanay ke liye kuch khona parta hai.

So I saved some of the long, sturdy branches as well as a huge section from the trunk. The solidity of the wood became known to me now that the tree was dead. I had an inkling I’d use it in some way or other but it took many months for the wood to season and a plan to form in my head. In the meantime, our chowkidar advised us to cover the stumps with a thick layer of salt and earth to kill them off completely…. like chhirking namak on zakhms, but it had to be done. Isn’t it crazy how cold-hearted we can be?

Enough time has gone by and the branches have been soaked in many a rainfall and much sun. They leaned against a courtyard wall, leaking tannins and rich brown dye on the cement tiles. The bark turned gray and started to separate from the inner wood, so my chiselling job was made easier. It was very satisfying work, prising the bark away to reveal the lovely shaded wood underneath, and I worked on them steadily till it was all off. Now what remains is to make them relatively smoother so that they can be used for the purpose I have in mind.

Our courtyard feels like a well-kept secret. It is full of plants that have been gathered, nurtured, multiplied over the years and I have a relationship with each one of them. They keep teaching me new things, even the weeds, maybe most especially the weeds. I had thrown in some seeds I had collected from pods in various parks, and one of them grew into a large mysterious tree with beautiful yellow flowers. I used to hang my laundry there before, but the space is now so overgrown that it is no longer possible to do so, I don’t mind. I pretend it is my private woodland, accessible via a back staircase that leads down from my kitchen. Part of the concrete wall that served as a handrest while going up or down had been broken down and that wasn’t such an issue before. But now that I’m older and wobblier, in crept a fear that I’d lose my balance and fall off the edge, especially when it rains and the steps are wet and slippery. A rustic wooden banister would be just the thing to solve this problem in the most cost-effective way possible. All I needed to do was prepare the wood and figure out what hardware I’d need to install it artistically, mulling it over for weeks before having the bright idea of asking a carpenter to advise the best way to do it.

So this is what I did today, as the late afternoon sun streamed in through the door, working with the wood, chiseling and sanding down the knobby bits, wiping off the dust with my gloved hands. I rolled the branch as I worked and it landed on my thumb, the ensuing pain reminding me of the time when a branch had fallen on Amu’s head long ago when we were trying to get a stuck Mowgli off the tree. I felt her hurt as if it was my own, worried about the swelling and possible concussion (thankfully there wasn’t any serious damage) Now Mowgli is gone, buried in the courtyard she so enjoyed, amongst the roots of the tree she loved climbing and escaping from.

She was my gardening companion, endorsing all my digging and transplanting and composting with her one eye and faithful presence. I imagine her now sitting somewhere close, paws neatly tucked, approving all this woodwork. Instead there is a new little kitten by my side, inspecting my chiselling,  frolicking with bits of bark. Her name is Juni and she is Amu’s baby/emotional support animal, taking to us and the house as if she has always belonged.

Miraculously, despite the assault and the salt, the conocarpus survived. A few months after being chopped down, the stumps sent up some fresh new shoots, which I am determined to keep trimmed to stay a hedge rather than grow tall into a tree again. It shall stay manageable and alive. I confess I am not unhappy to see it again. And the patch of earth where Mowgli lies has sent up bushes of Tulsi with beautiful purple flowers, leaving a lingering scent every time I brush past.

work-life(balanced)

I may have mentioned in a whimsical post of yesteryear, that I consider myself to be a serial hobbyist. But did I ever mention what a dogged, focused individual I am? Anything I put my mind to gets done with utmost devotion, because time and tide wait for no woman, and let the chips fall where they may, unless of course they’re the edible kind in which case they’re better crunched.

I may have also mentioned in an erstwhile post that I had become an avid crocheter and churned out many a thing until I had the very bright idea last year of monetizing my skills. My mind (and fingers) settled on bags, because bags are so useful and fun, don’t you feel? I had made some rudimentary ones as I practiced and given them away as gifts, but then I figured I could make good and proper ones with a firm conviction that they would sell like the proverbial hot cakes. So I set about making some more, and started posting them on instagram (@GulmoharGirls) using the ‘good’ camera and the offspring as a model. What I enjoyed most wasn’t just making the bags, but also styling outfits that complimented them, and it seemed my followers looked forward to that very thing!

I never imagined my cozy crochet biz would take off the way it did, leaving my solar plexus rather strengthened in its wake. Each bag turned out unique, woven with mindfulness and imbued with great care, and my greatest hope was that it brought the wearer as much joy as went into the creation of it.

Nine months have gone by since I began, selling almost everything I made, working on quite a few custom orders too, and now I’ve slowed down just a tad as other activities have come into play.

Around the beginning of this year, I began some freelancing work as a proofreader/translator. It involves converting English text into Urdu in a way that reads true and with a certain flow. Sometimes I’m struck by the (pleasant) irony of this turn of events, if you remember what I wrote about my relationship with Urdu, long ago.

It’s really good, cerebral work and I absolutely love it. It makes my mind work in a way that feels very different from my frame of mind while crocheting. What I truly wish to develop though is the ability to think in Urdu, so I’m not automatically translating everything into English in my head. That would really change my reading experience. For now, the impostor syndrome continues to creep in, but I’m getting better at keeping it at arm’s length.

All this to say, life has been very interesting and busy in a wholesome way. Wholesome hermit, c’est moi. Work like this means I get to happily stay home and never ever get bored. A few weeks ago I encouraged aforementioned offspring to jump with both feet into teaching book-binding (one of her passions) in her tiny home studio, a task I helped facilitate in ways only I can, generator that I am. While helping set up the space, moving furniture to accommodate tables and chairs for groups of four each time, arranging simple snacks and making chilled juices and lemonades to serve the attendees, I had a thought. This is the kind of hosting I can manage really well: minimal, no fuss. The focus is on working with your hands and being engaged. I love that kind of quiet energy (yes I know I must not use that singularly chatgpt adjective anymore, even though it’s part of my blurb. except i wrote that blurb before chatgpt ever came into being. It’s ruined everything) It’s the opposite of all the other hostessing I’ve done, where I’d stress over the menu for a week before the event, start meal-prepping two days before, and go a little crazy with over-planning and over-thinking.

I realize I really enjoy facilitating the other beings that live in my house, it’s quite possible this is My Purpose. One of them anyway.

‘Tis the season to chop off sleeves and turn pants into shorts if one is to survive the intense heat and humidity that is Karachi these days. In a frenzy of decluttering, I gave away a lot of last years summer clothes that I thought I didn’t need (why do I do this?) and never really replaced, and the motivation to go shopping has dwindled at the same rate as my estrogen levels.

Floating

Life will go on, no matter what.

My mother marveled at the depth of grief her four daughters experienced, and the extent to which we missed and remembered our father when he passed. She wondered if we would feel the same way when her time would come. ‘You will remember me for a while and then get busy in your lives, and soon you’ll forget all about me. Life will simply go on.”

We never expected our parents to die when they did. My Mom followed my Dad after four years, when we all caught the dreaded virus. For months on end we avoided meeting each other, but it was January 2021, and it was her 81st birthday, and we simply had to be together to celebrate. So we gathered, bringing gifts, for a delicious tea party with Mummy’s favorite food…..chaat. Eldest Sis baked a cake for her in the shape of a sewing machine, to honour her lifelong devotion to stitching all our clothes. It was wonderful to be in each other’s presence after so long, though I was a bit doubtful about the funny cough I suddenly developed while driving to the birthday get-together.

One by one, we all fell sick, including Mummy, who suffered the most. Oh, how she suffered. A month later, after caring for her diligently at home, Eldest Sis felt the worst to be over, that Mom was on her way to recovery, and she began to plan delicious, nourishing meals she would make for her. She made her soft scrambled eggs for breakfast early one morning, and felt so happy to see her finally eat something peacefully. Little did she know that was to be my mother’s last meal.

It was a devastating, disorienting time for us all, though there was a greater sense of acceptance than when my father died. His death felt too sudden, our minds and hearts refused to take it in. Even my mother, while in her period of seclusion, would sometimes muse out loud at the idea of him being simply….gone? How could that be. He was so…here, always.

I remember I was on the rooftop, tending to my tomato plants in the soft morning sunshine, when Huz came to tell me. My brother-in-law wrote the message on our extended family group, announcing our mother’s passing. It felt unreal, like it couldn’t be happening, and yet it was. That was my mother, the deceased. How could this be? She was so…here, always. I sat holding my mother’s beautiful hands for a long time, those creative hands, her familiar fingers, always busy with something, finally lifeless. I wanted to imprint the feel of her hands in mine.

The strangest thing that happened was how little I cried then. I felt as if I had a howl trapped inside my chest, my sobs were dry. Grief felt like a huge wave that refused to come crashing down. I looked at my sisters and I saw my mother in each one of them. I looked in the mirror, and I saw her in me. It was as if her spirit flew into us all and there was no separation. We were all one.

It is the 1st of June., 2025. Since the last two weeks, I have been coming to terms with a very different sort of death, one that I felt I should write about since it affects me so much. But the story that spilled out is of an older grief. I was watching a video about the loss of animal family members, and what I heard was, ‘when we grieve, we don’t experience one loss, we experience them all.’

This is an obituary for Mowgli, my dear beloved soul-cat. My companion for the last eight years. She was plonked into my life a week before my father died, and I couldn’t help feeling that these two events were somehow linked. My father had often lectured me about my propensity to rescue kittens and keep them in my house forever, his logic being the more time I spend with cats, the less time I’d spend with him. “You’ll regret not visiting us more often one day!”

When I spotted this tiny creature huddled along the side of a road in June 2017, I slammed on the brakes and hopped out of the car to go pick it up. The poor kitten was a dreadful sight…skin and bones, sweating from every pore under a hot sun, dehydrated, one eye bulging out of its socket, mouth open in a silent scream. I often think that at that moment, it was as if the me that was I had moved aside and Spirit took over. I didn’t think …I just knew that if I didn’t stop she’d be dead very soon. It was the month of Ramadan, I was in the midst of a spiritual crisis, but turning a blind eye was not an option. So Amu and I took her home and proceeded to shower her with love and care and protection. In retrospect, my own healing lay in her healing.

We named her Mowgli, I don’t know why the name just fit. Her bulging, infected eye healed and went back into its socket, but stayed hazy and unseeing. It was a magical eye, and Mowgli was a magical cat, a beautifully spotted calico. Not a fur-baby, a person. She was crazy, playful, curious, feisty, intelligent. She got herself into so much trouble so often. We had to rescue her so many more times from all sorts of dangers. The years went by with these three cats of mine, Fuzzy, Minnie and Mowgli, wreaking havoc on our hearts, our nerves and our furniture.

I don’t feel like talking about what happened to her before she died. I don’t even want to talk about the way she died, or all the trauma she had to go through during her treatment. Amu wrote about the whole saga so poignantly on her substack, beautifully embedded with photographs from her life. It’s too painful for me to regurgitate, so I’ll let her be in peace. It goes without saying, we loved her too much, and couldn’t accept her death, it feels like too soon. She was woven into the very fabric of this home. All was well with the world as long as Mowgli was in it. I wanted many more years of her curling up like a loaf on my lap, or perched on my hip. Many more years of seeing her beautiful body, basking in the sun. I can picture her now, happily rolling around in the dust on the courtyard floor.

It’s been two weeks, and the intensity of the ache has softened. I cried nonstop for three days, and on the fourth I finally smiled at the memories, the photos, the videos. After the initial shock wore off, there was the void. Grief for an animal companion is usually of the disenfranchised kind, meaning it isn’t ‘openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly mourned’. But my sisters offered so much support, so much empathy, such concern for our loss. They knew what this cat meant to us. They had been witnesses to her short life. And my fellow cat-loving neighbour dropped by yesterday with a box of cake and a big hug. She knew too.

I see Mowgli everywhere, and I long to see her again. I don’t want her to be gone. The house doesn’t feel so familiar anymore. I’m trying to find solace in Minnie and Billoo….but neither of them is Mowgli. And life….what can I say. It is full of endings.

But our love will live forever ❤️

Chitral diaries: this land is your land, this land is my land 🎵

At first glance, you might not think that the bespectacled man in khakis and a shirt, pottering about on the premises of Ayun Fort Inn with a trowel in hand, was Chitrali royalty. It was his idea, he said, to take down the thick, high walls that protected his ancestral home in bygone days, stone by stone. It was a bold, but brilliant move, as now the edge of the royal garden falls away revealing a panoramic view of the majestic mountains all around.

I climbed the stone steps and made my way over to a rustic bench to sit down and look around. From the pictures on Instagram, I knew it would be a beautiful place. What I didn’t expect was the way my heart would feel squeezed by happiness and gratitude for the exquisiteness of it all. I wiped away my tears before anyone would notice.

Expert gardeners bring out the shy fangirl in me. After all, my favorite Youtuber is a 65 yr old Celtic woman who grew her own woodland on three acres of marshy land in Ireland. I approached Maqsood ul Mulk as he strode around with his help the next day, to talk about his work. He divides his time between Islamabad and Ayun, coming here every so often to make sure everything is blooming. He spares no expense procuring seeds from Europe, and he plants with excitement and enthusiasm to see if he can succeed in growing non-native flowers in the soil here.

“Chitral and Karachi are connected,” he remarked when he got to know where we were from. “They are on opposite ends of the country, and both are equally neglected by the government.”

It was kind of nice to hear him say that because of the forlorn feeling that crept into my heart as I stood at the far end of the garden gazing at the landscape all around me. I wasn’t ‘from here’, I thought, so none of this was mine. I was just a visitor from a harsh, ugly city far away. The forlornness was banished when another thought immediately followed the first one. Here I was, a soul on planet Earth, beholding mountains that had been around for millions of years. There were no humans around at the end of the Palaeocene…. therefore this land was as much mine as anyone else’s, and I could keep coming back here as often as I liked.

We were urged to go visit the fruit orchard just below the garden, and so we did. That was where we first met Bruno, the prince’s gigantic dog with tiny ears and a huge smile, who immediately took it upon himself to show us around. The orchard was full of tall mulberry trees, the source of the delicious jam we ate with our parathas and cream for breakfast. I had never before seen or eaten sweet shehtoots in such light shades of pink and purple, straight off the trees, while Bruno munched on the ones that had fallen to the ground. How very surreal for a tree-starved Karachiite to be strolling about in all this abundant greenery….where a hundred year old gargantuan Chinar guards the edge of the orchard, overlooking the river and surrounding wheat fields far below. I spotted bright yellow birds flying over the fields, later learning they were called Mayun in the Khowar language, or the Eurasian golden Oriole. Bruno flopped heavily to the ground next to my feet, while I sat on a bench and breathed it all in. Then he got up and accompanied us back to the orchard gate when it was time to walk back up, vanishing the same way he had materialized. Such a gentle giant, I thought. I had no foreshadowing of what he would do to me later that night.

Being in the mountains is a good opportunity to stargaze, since the amount of light pollution is far less than what I’d find back home. So I stepped out of my room around 11 pm, all set to spend some time just looking up. No one was around and all was quiet, except for the sound of the weeping willow rustling in the breeze. I walked out towards the middle of the garden, annoyed with the bright light on the porch, wishing it could be switched off. Turning my face away from it, I looked up and around, waiting for my eyes to adjust, and for the stars to reveal themselves. To shield my eyes from the porch light even more, I held up my shawl around my head. That was better, but somehow, I was beginning to feel very uneasy. More than awe, I felt a sense of fear take over. At first, it was only because I’m not used to being out in the open all by myself. This was soon followed by a more visceral sense of terror at my absolute aloneness in the entire universe, deepened by the presence of the looming, ancient mountains around me.

I heard the sound of panting just a split second before I felt something heavy land on my back, followed by a rumbling growl. I stumbled and turned around to see Bruno. He jumped on me as I faced him, tugging at my clothes, my shawl, and I thought, oh my God, he thinks I’m an intruder. How stupid of me to be standing here in a shroud.

“Bruno, it’s me, remember me? Stop it Bruno, staaawp!” I tried keeping the panic out of my voice as I tried keeping him at bay with my arms, but he was too excited to recognize me, or indeed stop mauling me. How could such a sweet dog turn on me like this? I refused to believe he would actually hurt me, while at the same time my already fearful inner voice was saying , “you’re toast.”

Still inching my way towards the porch, it seemed so far away. Any minute, I’d feel his teeth sink into a body part. Heart in my mouth, I started to call out for help, feeling so weird and dramatic as I did so, while continuing to fend him off and keep moving. Finally, I called out Qasim’s name, the manager at the fort.

Suddenly, Bruno stepped away and stood still, looking towards the door, as if he was waiting for Qasim to appear. Heart hammering, barely able to breathe, controlling the urge to run, I started to make my way towards my room, the door of which was on the left side of the porch. Surprisingly, Bruno’s exuberance calmed down completely and he accompanied me, almost sheepishly, all the way to my door.

I got away with some scratches on my arms and a shawl that smelt of doggy drool. No one heard anything. It took about an hour for my shakiness to dissipate as I narrated what just happened to a concerned Huz. But it took Qasim’s sincere apologies, his assurance that Bruno was just playing, and the trip to Bumburet the next day for all my wariness and misgivings to vanish and my equanimity to be restored.

Bruno

Chitral diaries: the road to Bumburet

The road to Bumburet is not an easy one, not that I expected it to be, nor did I want it to be. Even so, I felt my determination waver a bit when we met some fellow guests at our hotel in Ayun the day after their day trip. One of the ladies described it as the most terrifying and torturous road she had ever experienced. Not only that, but she found the village of Bumburet to be a more unkempt version of the village of Ayun. There was nothing remarkable about it, nothing to see, and overall she was very disappointed.

Wait…what?

We knew we wanted to head somewhere up north in June. Numbed out from months of witnessing the gruesomeness in the world, I felt half dead myself, reluctant to leave the safety of home, even though I was bone-weary of Karachi. Added to that is the ever-present hesitation about leaving the cats alone in the house, esp now with the addition of little Billoo, the grey tabby-cat. All three of them had terrible parasite infestations that needed to be treated before we left, a camera had to be installed to keep a remote eye on their shenanigans, and a kind neighbour agreed to drop by every day and give them a little love so no one would get depressed. I put a lot of thought into packing, despite the lack of enthusiasm. The only thing enticing me were Instagram posts of an enchanting garden somewhere in the valleys of lower Chitral, deep within the Hindukush, the place we picked to spend a week.

Once we were out of the house, checked in at the airport, sitting in a cafe ordering coffee, I put down my backpack and let myself relax. We were off…and it felt good.

It takes between eight to nine hours of driving from Islamabad, past places you usually only hear mentioned in the news in the context of floods or intense rain/snowfall or fatal road accidents…..and as our chatty 30 year old driver Izatullah pointed out multiple times, Afghanistan was just over the mountains on our left. We stopped to buy some cherries, filled up our bottles with natural spring water along the way, and sampled the namkeen chai drunk by most mountain people for breakfast, that tasted like seawater mixed with milk.

The mountains had already begun to work their magic by the time we stopped at a glacial stream in Upper Dir, where Izatullah challenged me to immerse my feet for 10 seconds. I managed six. We bought fresh apricots from a man with a roadside stall in Dir, and his daughter gave them to us in a plastic bag filled with the same ice cold water. By now, we were well and truly in a different land, where all faces made me do a double take.

The Lowari tunnels in the Hindukush are collectively a 10.4 km dark, cold passage that you enter in Dir and exit in Chitral. It seemed interminable and otherworldly to be so deep in the bowels of a mountain, like being suspended in a bardo, feeling the speed and urgency to get out of there as fast as possible. But this was a routine passage for him now, and according to our driver, the people of Chitral would always love and respect Pervez Musharraf for it, no matter his ignominous end. The political views in the north have their own pragmatism and logic, we were beginning to learn. At the end of the week, even Izatullah’s devotion to Imran Khan and PTI made sense.

By the time we reached our destination in Ayun, he felt like a brother. We already knew he’d be the one to take us to Bumburet….a place that I didn’t even know was pulling me towards it since years, somewhere that seemed always just beyond reach…like a place with a culture so distinct, so vastly removed from mine, that I had no right to visit.

My lack of touristy entitlement makes me shy away from being just another gawker, trespassing in someone else’s home. The last thing I’d like to do is make someone feel like a spectacle. Because the truth is, the people of Kalash, living in tune with the seasons and nature, are animists, and their famous festivals full of song and dance draw hordes of unruly people from the plains, people who often behave in cringe-worthy ways.

Ayun is the gateway to the Kalasha valleys, Bumburet, Rumbur and Birir. And the road to get there is narrow and rocky, carved as it is on the side of the mountains. Nevertheless, it is spectacular, and Izatullah took us there in around two and a half hours with the good instincts of an expert mountain driver. It’s difficult to describe how surreal it felt to finally reach the place I had only seen described by others.

a hand….looking for God…

The change of vibe over here is tangible. Spotting colorful Kalash women walking about here and there is delightful, because there is nothing furtive about them. I wouldn’t romanticize it or say there is no patriarchy here, but I certainly sensed a Divine feminine presence.

so very fragrant

People love growing flowers here and every home seemed to have a rose garden and fruit trees. There were wheat fields in varying stages of green and gold, walnut trees, apricot trees, cherry trees, shehtoot trees pomegranate trees and huge Chinars just like everywhere else in the Chitral valley. Hemp grows wild, and the air feels fresh and fragrant with the scent of native wild plants. Time feels slowed down, very peaceful, and Bumburet is every bit the surreal, magical place I knew it would be. I want to stay forever. But alas, we are only here for a day.

(to be continued…but I leave you here with a song)

personal and collective

After a couple of weeks of suffering from an inexplicable pain deep inside my lower back (that arose from doing mobility exercises of all things) I have diagnosed myself with a slipped disc. Apparently, the problem resolves itself with a bit of rest and tlc, two things I seem to be requiring more of with each passing day.

Summer is in full swing , high u-v indices keeping me firmly ensconced at home during daylight hours. Not that I am ever to be found otherwise. However, since a few days I have been feeling a bit too isolated for my own good, despite the fact that the thought of meeting anyone or having conversations feels impossible. What a conundrum. I wonder if this conflict between dual aspects of ones’ nature afflicts everyone. As I figure out what it is that I truly want, I am spending all my time exploring a variety of creative pursuits. Crochet has taken a backseat as I pull out my scraps and threads and put together a little sampler of patchwork and embroidery. It is a slow, aimless kind of stitching, with no end goal in mind. As a recovering perfectionist, it feels like an exercise in letting go, of relaxing, of not judging the mistakes and flaws in my needlework.

Are Pakistanis generally a loud people? Every thursday we are subjected to a litany of naats over a loudspeaker at a religious leaders’ house right next to where we live. This nonconsensual usurping of communal airspace worked me up into quite a tizzy recently, and I don’t enjoy sitting with rage. I wouldn’t be upset if the voices were soft and melodious. It bothers me that there is no concept of quiet reverence in our culture. Even the guy in charge of making announcements every evening at the mazaar of Abdullah Shah Ghazi across my home, drones on in high-pitched tones. Sadly, the double-glazed windows we installed to block sounds also block the sea breeze that keeps the air in our home in circulation.

Uncomfortable feelings need to be alchemized, or else they land you in more misery. I marched into the kitchen and whipped up some hummus, using tahini straight from the holy lands. Amazing how the frustration of achieving a creamy consistency drowns out all unpleasant noises in the outside world.

But all of this is nothing. There is an underlying anxiety that pervades the air, it cannot be wished away. As I write this, there are leaflets being dropped on Rafah by the Israeli army, ordering thousands of already displaced Palestinians to evacuate immediately. The stress and the horror reach me here, as I reflect on the fact that there are no safe spaces in Gaza for the people to evacuate to. Empathy moves painfully through and coalesces in tears. This bearing witness feels like a ton of bricks on my lungs, it’s hard to breathe when you are aware that there are people being crushed to death in an open-air concentration camp. The only thing giving me any heart these heavy days is the huge shift that seems to be happening in the collective. You’d have to be a hardcore Zionist to deny it.

A few months ago, I was invited to a party. My friend was coming all the way to Karachi from the United States of America to celebrate her mother’s 75th birthday and she asked me to join in the festivities. But when the day came, I was shaken by the news emanating from Gaza and the idea of putting myself in an environment of celebration felt inconceivable, so I didn’t go. I spent the day letting my tears flow unchecked. Later, my friend expressed her disappointment at my not showing up. I told her quite honestly how sad I was feeling, and she said she understood, but that we have to carry on living our own lives and celebrating our own joys, and she’s right in her own way. I don’t really think she understood how I felt though, and understandably or not, when my birthday rolled around, there were no wishes from her in my inbox.

It’s been 212 days, and there is no ceasefire in sight. How is this all going to end? With the complete eradication of the indigenous people of those lands? When will justice be served? is peace in Falasteen a pipe dream? Where has my hope fluttered to?

Chaos

The zen stillness I was able to access for a couple of days while Huz was away, was shattered the day he returned when in a moment of mindlessness I caved in to Minnie’s insistence to be let out for a romp. Lately, she doesn’t seem to like being inside all the time and when I think about it, she is a captive animal after all. Would she have been a happier cat if she was free to roam and explore, be the feral cat I sometimes glimpse? I do wonder. In my minds’ eye, I see her happily rolling about on the sun-baked steps, pottering about the plants in the courtyard before settling on a low table to look lazily up through the tree twitching her ears to the sounds of flitting birds. It isn’t even beyond the periphery of the building, that isn’t too much to ask, is it? My mistake was, I did not chaperone her little excursion because I was too distracted by all the Levantine goodies Huz had brought back for me: za’atar and tahini, and those iconic Palestinian scarves.

Moments later, my blood curdled to the sound of two cats grappling viciously. I didn’t think the horrible gray tomcat was occupying the courtyard this time of the day, waiting to brutalize Minnie if she dared show up. Key words: I didn’t think.

Huz and I flew downstairs in a panic to rescue Minnie, hearts already sunk with the knowledge that our efforts to disengage them wouldn’t work until Minnie was left battered and bleeding. This tomcat is some kind of demon, a killing machine, built like a solid tank. No matter how many times or how hard we thwack him with a stick (or a watering can as it may be) he is unaffected….the only cat I have ever come across that I think of as truly Dangerous. He simply Does Not Back Off. The skirmish seemed endless, escalated blood pressures, dilated pupils, racing heart.

Life is strange. From one moment to the next things can change from peace and tranquility to violence and utter chaos. The tomcat loped off over the fence, leaving a trail of overturned pots and broken plants in his wake. Minnie, bruised, scratched, subdued and in obvious pain, limped back into the house and spent the rest of the day in a corner of my bedroom, licking her wounds, blue eyes downturned like the day we found her. The stress of the morning dissipated slowly. I went back to my khubz, spreading it lavishly with a mix of za’atar and olive oil. So delicious. I ate it with my new keffiyeh wrapped around my neck. While students across the United States bravely protest against the complicity of American universities in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, this is as close to solidarity as I can get.

The day Huz left for Jordan, Billoo the new kitten stepped out into the balcony for a bit. When she realized she couldn’t get back in due to the screen door being closed, she tried to get my attention with soft little meows that I couldn’t hear. I was peacefully reading a book elsewhere, oblivious. I did hear some funny sounds, and figured she was whacking a ball around, playing with something as she often does, happy little kitty. Little did I know she was trying to get back in the only way she knew how with the only tools she had….her claws.

When I took a little break and stepped out of my room for a snack, Billoo was back in. However one glance at the screen door was enough to tell me what those mysterious sounds were, the ones I ignored.

Smithereens, an evocative word, though I had no clue as to its etymology as is probably the case with most users (it comes from the Irish word smidirini, meaning ‘little bits’, I googled) Little Miss Edward Scissorhands had torn the netting in a way it had never been torn before, many little tears and one L-shaped gaping rip that she finally managed to make her way in through. In the absence of Mister Fix-it aka Huz, my stop-gap measure (pun intended) was to take some safety pins, pin a piece of cloth over the holes and hope for the best, i.e fool the mosquitoes.

Huz returned from his trip in five days, and immediately skedaddled to the hardware store to buy new netting. We spent the afternoon replacing the old with the new, a painstaking job involving precision and dexterity, physical and mental. Those being my forte, jobs like these are usually handed over to me, even if they’re not really my job, and I usually end up, thankfully, rising to the occasion. My arm ached by the time we were done putting it back up, but the satisfaction of the end result made it all worth it.

Tired, I went back into my room for a little lie-in, only to find it smelled a bit off. I picked up some clothes that were lying on my bed to put them away and they felt wet to the touch. Even after all these years I still feel disbelief when I sniff something and know instantly why it’s wet. Minnie must have been in too much pain to make the effort of dragging herself all the way to her litter tray, with the result that she eventually peed on my bed. The next half an hour were spent cleaning up.

The next day, due to unforeseen circumstances, Billoo was stuck in Amu’s room with no access to her personal litterbox. I suppose Amu’s hats were deemed a good spot to deposit a little pile of poop as a surprise for her when she got home.

“If Thich Nhat Hanh had to save his pet cat, he would have thwacked the tom too,” says Huz. It gave me pause to reflect. Indeed, what would the greatest mindfulness teacher in the modern world have done? What would Gandhi have done?

“The cats keep us on our toes,” he said another time. “Imagine not having a reason to keep working.”

Imagine indeed, I think wistfully.

Knowing thyself

Today I did a little exercise in letting my intuitive self take over and give me a clue as to what I should write about. I was sitting at Huz’s desk (since he is away) My gaze flickered over his books (around twenty current and ongoing reads) and my hand (of its own accord) reached out to pull out a collection of poems by Langston Hughes. When I opened the book to a ‘random’ page, the poem that emerged was short and sweet, the message clear.

Final Curve

When you turn the corner

And you run into yourself

Then you know that you have turned

All the corners that are left.

How funny and strange to receive such a confirmation out of the blue. For the last week or so, I have been immersed in exploring the Gene Keys, a book that delves into unlocking the mysterious higher purpose hidden in our DNA, giving looking within a whole new meaning. How and why did I arrive here?

It all started some time last year with Amu urging me to find out exactly what time I was born (her being a big astrology enthusiast) so we could figure out my natal chart. All I needed was the location, date and time of my birth. Hitherto, I had no idea what time I was born, I thought that information had gone on into the next world with my mother, a thought that made me feel so sad and defeated. Why did I never bother checking my birth certificate? There it was, in plain sight. It only took me fifty years to find out.

Star signs, or Sun signs and the various characteristics associated with each have always piqued my curiosity even when I hadn’t even heard of the word archetypes.

In the spirit of fun, I dug around my personal planetary placements and found out so many new things about myself that I wasn’t aware of before.

There are many aspects of having my Sun in Sagittarius that I can relate to, but there are quite a few that I cannot. So it was so interesting to find out there’s so much more going on, how much of an influence the moon has, and Venus, and Jupiter, and all the rest. I never knew I had so much Scorpio influence, or that my Ascendant was in Leo….and life began to make so much more sense after reading a book by Debbie Frank (well-known astrologer of awakening) called What’s your Soul Sign?

While exploring the things I incarnated here to be, Amu asked me if I knew about the concept of Human design, which combines elements of astrology, the Chinese I Ching, the Hindu chakra system, Kabbalah and quantum physics to create a highly personalized framework for aligned living……so of course I had to find out my Human Design profile. What was interesting was how everything overlapped and coalesced.

Doing all this self-discovery in cahoots with Amu meant we had each other to bounce these new ideas off of, reading things that sparked introspective conversations for weeks on end, feeling seen, in ways we never had before. What more does a soul ever want?

I have always thought of myself as a hermit, even when I had no awareness that the hermit archetype makes up the entirety of my conscious line, which is the 2nd line in my HD personal chart. I didn’t understand why I gravitated towards solitude so much when I unconsciously loved and sought more connection, something indicated by the 4th line (the opportunist) Such a dichotomous life. We all have our conscious and unconscious aspects playing out in us and we don’t always know what’s going on, what makes us tick. You can try and make sense of it all here, if you so wish. It could turn out to be as delightfully  validating and self-revelatory for you as it was for me . How nice is it to relax in the knowledge that you have the liberty to be completely and unapologetically you.

Which brings me back to the Gene Keys. (Did I mention I found out my hologenetic profile too? You can get yours here.)

It talks about who you are and why you are here, what makes you feel alive, why you don’t have to look outside yourself for truth. This book needs to be read slowly and organically, perhaps like an oracle, like the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, which it draws upon for inspiration. The premise is that every single person has something beautiful hidden inside of them, which needs to be brought forth. These are your Gifts, coiled inside your DNA, waiting for the light of awareness to be shone on them. Your journey begins when you come to understand that your destiny is shaped by your attitude to life that tells your DNA what kind of person you want to become, not the other way around. So it is that every thought, feeling, word or action is imprinted in every single cell of your body, causing your DNA to contract or relax depending on the quality of your thoughts and emotions, a process that goes on all the time, from the moment you come into the world to the moment you leave.

So here I am, discovering my shadows and my gifts according to this revelatory book. I am taking what resonates and composting the rest. It’s been a bit difficult to try and elaborate on something that is too big for this little blog post, but I thought it’s a good idea to touch upon some of the things I’ve been dwelling on/in lately.

To have the time and space to do this kind of reading and reflection is a real privilege, to turn down and tune out the distractions of the world, to make time to contemplate, an imperative. It feels a lot like freedom. Like turning a corner and running into yourself, and knowing you have turned all the corners that are left.