Pakistan to me was beautiful rainy summers, spicy bhutta on the way to the hustling bazaars, and the endless chaotic dawatein....
opinion
Almost 3 years ago, I packed up two suitcases that contained my entire 20-year life in another country; amidst the pandemic. The only thing I could think was that my life is going to perpetually change forever.
Moving is difficult on its own, add a 20 something-year-old who (as most 20 something-year-olds are) was going through a quarter life crisis. Although I was moving ‘back’ home, I had never lived here, in Pakistan. I had spent my childhood and teenage years abroad which I had called home. A home that had never truly accepted me, I would always be an expat in there; no amount of time would erase that. But when I moved to my motherland, where I was born, my nation, my actual literal home, I was considered a foreigner here as well.
So along with my quarter life crisis, an identity crisis was added to the mix. I had become an angst-y, brooding teenager once again, who was moping and sulking. Who hated how ‘inconvenient’ it was here, how the roads weren’t clean, the water motor didn’t turn off on its own and how there were dogs on the streets just roaming around. I was comparing every single aspect of Pakistan to the place where I had lived before.
Pakistan to me was beautiful rainy summers, spicy bhutta on the way to the hustling bazaars, and the endless chaotic dawatein. Think of a beach, you like it for a couple of hours but after a while the sand starts to agitate you, the sound of the waves begins to cloud your thoughts and the sun starts to burn your skin instead of just warming you up enough. That’s how I felt. I did not understand how a place I had loved so much, had incredible, joyful, and absolutely delightful memories attached to; had become a source of immense pain and agony to me. Rainy summers had become a hassle when the streets would flood with water. The spicy bhutta had become sickening and the endless dawatein were irksome. Everything had changed. I had become an outcast among my own people.
I couldn’t seem to connect with my people, people who spoke the same language as I did, who wore the same clothes as I did, ate the same food, who I shared a culture with. I felt like an alien in between all these people. I was thrown into a different life. It wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t my fault either. I had developed my own identity in the 20 something-years I had lived abroad.
An identity that was neither fully Pakistani nor was it of where I lived. I was a medley of all the things that I had learned there, their culture, their beliefs and their values and all that my parents had tried to instil in me, their roots, their values and their culture. Who was I in the middle of all of this?
So, I did what I could do at the time, I stopped thinking of the place I had moved from as my home. It did not accept me when I needed it to accept me the most. It did not give me what I needed the most. It did not give me a true identity; it left me in a place of perplexity and uncertainty. I tried to stop looking through the rose-coloured glasses to actually see what was it there that I missed the most. Was it the jaw-dropping skylines? Was it the feeling of walking on the street without feeling scared for my life? Was it the humongous, brightly lit malls? What was it that I missed so desperately? What was it that I could not find it here in my actual home?
When I refer to the place I lived in before, I like to refer it to as my ‘other life’. My other life and my new life are separate. They have two different of versions of me. The pre-move Ayesha and the post-move Ayesha. The pre-move Ayesha (although the same age) was a child. She threw tantrums when she didn’t get what she wanted, she was so worried about what high-end purse she was carrying, and changed her accent to something that was not hers.
Post-move Ayesha gets things done on her own, she’s independent. She cares more about keeping herself safe on the street and owns her T’s. The new Ayesha isn’t as soft or as kind like the previous one. Neither version of me is particularly bad or wrong. They’re just different from each other.
Moving to Pakistan has taught me so much. It taught me to be the brown girl I was so afraid of becoming. It taught me that my mother tongue was beautiful and elegant and sophisticated, something that I should’ve never been ashamed of. It taught me to be proud of my shalwar kameez, taught me to think on my feet but, most importantly it taught me that the stunning skylines and the astounding malls will not fulfill me but my family and my heritage will.
I stopped thinking of Pakistan as a country that I did not fit in. But a place where I could find myself, discover who I am now. With all that I know now. With my old life behind me and with a new Ayesha beside me. I could truly invent, create, and develop who I am without the fear of being too ‘Pakistani’. Because at the end of the day I am a Pakistani and that is a huge part of me that I cannot change, or remove and now I don’t want to.
