Oh, to be in England

Now that April’s there,

And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf

Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

In England—now!

-Robert Browning

It was a strange angle for my head to be tilted at, cocked severely to the right and resting uneasily against the cabin window.  I woke up because I smelled eggs.  The passenger to my left was still asleep.  She was a designer for a major retailer.  She said you could put Hello Kitty on a pink garbage bag and it would sell. She’s right.

She fell asleep immediately after the flight took off.  It was 2am Dubai time, and by my hasty calculations, I had to stay awake for only two and a half more hours before it would be time for Fajr, and then I could sleep. Boy was I wrong. And now I’m surrounded by old ladies.

They’re in varying degrees of old and in need of wheelchair assistance, and we’re all waiting in the special assistance lounge of Heathrow Airport.  The western women, invariably, have short white hair, glasses, and cardigans.  The Asian ladies have their little old heads covered.  The African ladies are seated together in a sparkly, vibrantly-colored group.  And then there’s me- a 33 year old “white” woman in a black abaya and a flowery purple scarf.  They’re eyeing me curiously.

My calculations were totally off.  I did wudu and took a seat, waiting for my two and a half hours to pass before I could pray and get some sleep.  I turned on my tiny TV and watched Monsters University.  The movie finished and I looked out the window.  It was still dark, and in the cloudless sky somewhere over the Arabian peninsula, the big-dipper sparkled.  Bright, close, and undimmed by light pollution, it was a beautifully clear reminder of nights outside of my grandmother’s remote house in southern Indiana.

She’s eighty-eight now, and 115 pounds.  She is afraid of climbing stairs because the last time she lost her balance she fractured her hip.  I haven’t seen her for six years, and it’s frustrating to me that I should be coming so close- all the way to Chicago- only to still be so far.  She’s living in the warm, safe care of my aunt in Arizona, hundreds of miles and dollars out of my budget.

My health insurance doesn’t cover the US, so this visit to Chicago to see a neurology specialist will be thousands of dollars out of pocket.  Allah is the Best of Providers.

He is also the Best of Planners.  Right when my hands starting shaking, and my head started feeling heavier than usual, and HF and I started wondering where the money to fly out and see a doctor would come from- it came.  Allah caused an old, nearly forgotten debt to be repaid, and that’s where this trip is from: Allah.

There are a few old men here too, but most of them are just accompanying their  wives.   There’s even a wheelchair assistant- an employee of Heathrow Airport- that looks like he should be the one being pushed.  I wonder how old he is, and if he’s the one who pushes me to the terminal, will he wonder why someone half his age isn’t just walking there?

I catch people looking at me curiously, and the 2.0 in me smiles back, encouraging them to approach.  No one has so far, and my guess is that they think I’m an Arab.  So the white women keep a distance, the Pakistani women don’t include me in the polite small-talk, and the one real Arab here asked me a question in Arabic earlier that I couldn’t respond to.  Sorry, I’m a fake.

Well, I’m not actually.  I’m a genuinely tired, shaky, and mobility-challenged person, but I tend to be in denial sometimes, and it doesn’t help that I still look pretty good.

I assume I look pretty good, but my eyes are tired, my scarf feels sideways, and I only managed to sleep for an hour before I was woken by the smell of food and the clatter of the air-crew preparing breakfast in the airplane’s galley.  I opened my eyes and turned my severely cocked head to see that the black, star-strewn sky was bordered with a bright-red glow that hinted at a sharp golden line at the very edge of the horizon.  It was finally Fajr, six hours into the flight and four hours later than I had planned for.

I did wudu four times for that one prayer. After the first movie finished I stretched, waited, stared out of the window, my sleep-deprived brain searching for a reason why it was still dark.  It came up with the original Xcom UFO, where your job was the save the world from an alien invasion.  The same world turned before you in VGA-glorious rotation on its axis, turning from night to day and night again.  I knew I was flying from the right side of the world to the left, but I couldn’t remember whether I would be flying with the light or flying against it.

I turned on another cartoon.  Epic.  It wasn’t Epic.  It was a mis-labeled attempt to pass 104 more minutes waiting and wondering why it was still dark.  I got up for a stretch.  I used the bathroom.  I did wudu again.

The sink was tiny.  The taps were tiny.  But the water pressure was tremendous- and the tiny stream of water was blasted into a spray that wet everything in the bathroom except my hands.  I did wudu as best as I could, washing my hands, mouth, face, arms, abaya, purse and shoes.  Then I did my best to paper-towel things dry before going back to my seat to wait again for Fajr.

I wish my kids were here.  When the plane began to descend over London, there was no one for me to share the wonder with.  We were preparing to land over a solid terrain composed entirely of clouds, except for where clusters of tall building had broken through, their lights glittering and flashing above a grey ocean. It was the famous London fog, and when the plane began slowing to hit the runway, it was doing so in zero visibility.  The sky above the fog was crystal-clear, but within the fog it was non-existent.  We had no sky.  From where I sat, the plane barely even had wings.

I want to remember these things so I can tell Khalid, Iman and Musfira about them.  There were stars- distant white diamonds in a perfectly black sky- no clouds, no lights, no other planes. Then there were the cities, their densely packed lights looking like embers on the dark background of Iraq.  I checked the map, that was Iraq.

I was so grateful to be awake.  I was afraid that I would miss Fajr, and while I have missed hundreds of Fajr prayers before, most of them were before my hands started to shake.  Once laziness made my eyelids heavy, but urgency has made them light and quick to open for prayers now.  I was so relieved to have been woken up that I was actually happy to get up and do wudu again- fourth time the charm.

I happily prayed and then turned to watch the horizon glow, just waiting to watch the sun rise.

Except it didn’t rise, becase we were flying away from the dawn and if we had been going any faster it would never have caught up.  We would have flown endlessly around the world being chased by day, hiding in perpetual dark, sharing aisles and armrests but refusing each other identities or eye contact until the fuel ran out and the plane crashed and we all died and went back to Allah where we came from.

Iman and I have made a pact- that if she cannot find me, she will come looking for me in Jannah.  But if I cannot find her, I will come looking for her in Jannah.  It’s a deal.  Khalid and I have a deal as well, but it involves him making sure that the hamster has food and water, and he gets dinosaur and train pajamas from the US.  Also, Iman wants a Chinese parasol.

I’m now going to be moved from the wheelchair lounge to the boarding gate, and the staff member who came looking for his “disabled” passenger looked at me and said, “Oh, Miss Abez? We have a young lady here.  Practically a girl… your limousine is here.”

So it’s time for me to go now.  But here I am, sitting halfway across the world, looking forward to returning home before arriving at my destination.

And Allah is the Best of Planners.

And after April, when May follows,

And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!

Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge

Leans to the field and scatters on the clover

Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge—

That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,

Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture!

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,

All will be gay when noontide wakes anew

The buttercups, the little children’s dower

—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

How shall I update? Let me count the ways.

I shall update about the man in the white paper hat, a butcher. Oh how he sternly, how resolutely he worked, jaw firmly set, eyes focused straight ahead upon the task at hand, until the side of lamb he was weighing dropped wetly onto the floor and went -splat- Shall I speak of how his face changed, and how he quickly dropped down to pick the skinless lamb up and return it to its place on the meat hook? Shall I mention the hurried glance left, then right, to see if he had been seen? And is it possible to describe the nervous, amusing, lopsided smile he greeted me with when he realized I had been watching him, and laughing? Ah, the grocery store.

Or shall I update about Litho, the gas station attendant, who knew not what flavors his slurpees were. Truth be told, it was midnight, and in the haze of sleep deprivation and late-night hours, the light blue slurpee looks alot like the dark blue slurpee, and the both of them look like close cousins of the teal slurpee. HF and I asked him what they were. He wasn’t sure. He went into the back to ask someone else and returned without an answer. He looked at the machine. Then he took out three cups and poured an inch of each blue into each of them respectively. He offered them to us. The teal one tasted like lemon-scented handsoap. The light blue one was an unknown, and it tasted like lemon-scented conditioner. The dark blue one tasted like lemon scented blue berries that had been left overnight in the radioactive core of a nuclear power plant, so we ordered one glass with two straws. My tongue was blue for a day and a half.

Four years ago, when Owlie and I lived with our uncle in Karachi while the rest of the family till lived in Chicago, I hoped that the phone was ringing for us from the US, and the home I missed was in Chicago. Four years later, I languish in Chicago and hope that it’s Pakistan calling. It’s an interesting reversal, and proof positive that home is not a location, it’s a feeling. Or, as the ten-year old calendar on my grandma’s kitchen wall used to say, “Home is where the heart is.” Although my heart is still safely lodged in my chest cavity, my ribs don’t feel quite at home.

I miss waking up in a happy sprawl with my pillows on the floor and my blanket under my head.

I miss reading the newspaper in the morning and then hopping into my pop can (car) and zooming off to work on the LEFT side of the road.

I miss the little row of zinnias outside of our front door and the two jasmine bushes that smell sweet at night.

I miss the dog, I miss her slobbery, unconditional love and the adoring look that she will give to absolutely anyone.

I miss the daily soccer game played in the field behind our house and find television to be a poor substitute.

I miss my brother, his brain full of interesting nonsense, his heart full of good intentions and his mouth full of amiable argument that he likes passing the time with. (Ten squirrels with machetes versus a bear with a machine gun. Who’d win?)

I miss my father, I miss him and his silly jokes and his cheating at Scrabble and his psychic ice-cream vibes and his motorcycle rides and the way that he sighs ‘Allaaaaaaaaahhh…” to himself when he’s tired.

I miss my mother, I miss hanging out in her waterbed with a bottle of nailpolish and a lap full of chocolates. I miss how she’s the only person I can hug without feeling self-conscious, how she will dance with me around the dining table and let me talk at her without telling me I’m nuts.

I don’t want to complain, because I am enjoying myself, and we have been hosted and received with kindness and love. We’re kept busy from morning till night with friends, camp meetings, summer parties and sight-seeing nostalgia, but when the Isha prayers have been said and I have again lain down in a borrowed room, my mind goes back to home, to the people in it and the four more weeks until I see any of them again. I toss and poke at a strange pillow.

I roll over.

I miss my bed.

I seem to have the most interesting luck with cab drivers. I always get the ones who don’t speak either language that I do, or sometimes, I get the ones with ‘stiff neck syndrome,’ a terminal condition that prevents you from turning your head either way as you zoom out into an intersection. (I usually drive, but the car was otherwise booked)

I walked out of the house today and hailed a cab as it passed the house. The cab pulled up and I bent over and looked inside the window. Today’s cabbie was sporting those HUGE tinted shades with gold rims, the kind you would expect on a cheap cop show from the 70’s. He has the mustache to go with them, a tad too large for the typical Punjabi villager moustache, but no problem.

So I tell the guy where I’m going and how much I’m willing to pay him (this is Pakistan, that’s how it works) and instead of bargaining, he just kind of tilts his head sideways, which is the Pakistani gesture that means both yes and no, as well as maybe and whatever. It’s an all-purpose gesture, and I assumed it meant yes so I jumped into the cab and we were off.

As soon as we started driving past the first turn, I piped up and said, “Yahan left turn lena hay.” (take a left turn here.) And he made a sudden left turn and said, “Kahan turn karna tha?” (where was I supposed to turn?) “Yahan, left.” I said, trying to reassure him.

“Left?” he said, “Now is that badda (sp?) or gadda (sp?)?”

Now people, I can say left and right in three different ways because Pakistan has a lot of local languages, (whose speakers have nothing better to do than invent ways of confusing me.) but I have never, ever heard of badda or gadda. I still don’t know whether that’s what he was really saying. (bogga?) The moustache was causing some sound distortion.

“Ulta or seedha?” he asked, turning and looking at me like I was from outer Mongolia. Or space.

“Ulta,” I said, “Left is Ulta.”

“So now where do I go?” he asked.

Here I paused. See, in Urdu, the word for ‘straight’ and ‘right’ are the same. Seedha. I’ve had many moments with cab drivers that could pass as skits in some comedy (whose sole focus would be ridiculing white-washed Pakistanis) where I’ve said seedha as in straight, only to have the cab driver turn right, and where I’ve said seedha as in right, and the cabdriver has driven past my turn. I had to choose my words carefully.

“Aagay,” I said, “Ahead.”

So we drove ahead, and I used hand-signals as visual aides to the directions I called out from the back seat. When we got onto the main road that we were supposed to follow straight for about five kilometers, I relaxed in the back seat and started taking in the scenery. (on a clear day the Margalla hills are beautiful) After a couple minutes the cabdriver cleared his throat and nervously said, “You haven’t told me where to turn yet.”

“I know,” I said, “That because we’re going straight.”

At a certain point I realized that the guy had no idea where he was and no idea where he was going. The farther we went, the more nervous he got. Several times, as we drove straight through the major intersections that mark sector limits in Islamabad, I saw him sigh and make a frustrated gesture with his hand. (are we there yet?)

When we were about five minutes from the destination, and he had nearly passed two of the landmarks I had given him, driven uncertainly through red lights (which I think he didn’t know were there) and tried to turn down the wrong side of a street, I finally asked. “So,” I said, “How long have you been working in Islamabad?”

He actually turned around in his seat (while still driving!) and looked at me forlornly and said, “Two days. I’m from Karachi.”

Actually, I should’ve realized he was a Sindhi, because once his local language failed to work with me (badda? gadda? gobba? ???) he went to Urdu. The Punjabi cab drivers first try to use khabba and sajja, and when they realize I’m confused by it, they switch to English. (layft, raeet.)

Well folks, as long as this story is, I haven’t reached the end. We reached my destination and as I was getting the fare from my purse, he smiled sadly and said, “Baji, before you leave, can you tell me how to get back…?”

The End.