Travellers struggle over tilting bridges.

I have never cried once in my life.

Today I shed a torrent of tears

— Hyecho

Pilgrims go to Mecca

I wish to go to Takht Hazara

— Bulleh Shah

In 712, a young Korean Buddhist monk, Hyecho, travelled to China and other parts of Central Asia. He encountered a world drastically different from the familiar one. While exploring local customs and recording his experiences, Hyecho often broke down, not only for homesickness but from the novelty of customs and peoples he encountered.

I suspect that Hyecho’s ‘torrent of tears’ was caused more by differences than distances.

Cities are like people. They have personalities. And like Hyecho we’re all travellers chasing familiarity. I found that commonness between Lahore and Los Angeles. If Lahore were a person, she’d be audacious and eccentric; just like Los Angeles. For two cities that have nothing else in common, they are remarkably similar in their temperaments.

Humans are curiously attached to places they grow up in. This embryonic connection lasts forever, constantly pulling us to places we ever called home. For people from developing nations, moving to industrialised countries for economic prospects comes with immense baggage. “At least you have the choice to leave.” This sentence was uttered by friends in Lahore when I was moving to Los Angeles in 2011.

Choice is an interesting word, I thought. How do we choose when we only have so much to choose from? How do we choose when the possibilities are immense? Migration is as old as history. Looks like we’ve always been moving around, sometimes settling in new regions and sometimes plundering and moving on. Either way, we move around because we choose to change our lives. When we don’t, we feel stranded. Abandoned.

My decision to move back to Lahore was met with raised eyebrows. I began to doubt myself confronting questions raised by family and friends. The admission that it was not a well-thought-out decision didn’t help either. A message read, “At this time it’s rare for anybody to want to move to Pakistan. No electricity… the worst part is load shedding of gas.” I thought it was interesting that the worst part was a disruption in service delivery. My choice was simply unacceptable. I had to offer a logical explanation. I had none.

When I moved to LA, I felt like Hyecho’s traveller struggling on a tilted bridge. It was a strange new world of freedom in a city idealised by many around the world. LA owned me like millions of newcomers who call it their home. But home was somewhere else. It wasn’t physical, but the idea of a place that’s familiar. Nothing is ever more familiar than Lahore. I found my Lahore in my pursuit of the Punjab’s history and culture. I found Lahore in glaring similarities between myself and my Punjabi teachers and friends from both sides of the Punjab.

Pakistan emerged on the world map nearly 80 years ago. Lahore’s character has developed over centuries. Lahore was Lahore before there was Pakistan. She has seen glorious empires and colonial violence. A drive from Old Lahore to villas in DHA gives you a city of resilience and culture. That was the case before elite housing societies made inner-city life a nightmare, and way before property tycoons began remapping cities’ fault lines, walling (literally) labour outside the city and selling environmentally-deadly planning as progressive. For many outsiders, LA and Lahore’s decadence might be revolting. For those living there, it’s a constant reminder of how unjust and unequal the world is.

“The ache for home lives in all of us,” Maya Angelou famously remarked. There is no one way for it to live in us. It lives in us through our language, our foods, our cultural preferences. It lives in us like marks of pride when strangers ask where you’re from. So, when Diljit Dosanjh performs the uncouth bhangra on one of America’s biggest late-night shows, the ache eases with sounds that bring Lahore to LA.

Sarah Sikandar is a freelance writer. She can be reached at sikandar.sarah@gmail.com