I never had it easy.
From watching my parents succumb to the horrors of a car accident to craving the healing presence of the man I love-my entire life-I had navigated through this messy maze I call my life with a shard of hope in my heart.
Every da...
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Dear Mubaraka,
Right now, I'm in the living room with Mehek sitting opposite me snickering and unable to control her laughter. Even though she's working on her calculus questions that take up too much of her time and leave her mind in the confines of a mental asylum, she still has it in her to cast curious glances at me, wondering what it is about the prospect of writing a handwritten letter in the 21st century.
When we have email, fax, text messages, countless and innumerable other applications at the ready to forward our greetings and well wishes to loved ones, why sprain your wrist while spewing ink on a piece of paper? When Mehek worded the question for me, I smiled and shook my head, pinching her cheek.
She slapped my hand away and let me tell you, it wasn't an ordinary slap.
My hand is still hued red from where hers made the contact, and it stings like a wasp. That girl doesn't just want to look like the male gender; she wants to be as tough as one. She doesn't cry when I eat her food from the fridge and neither does she plead me to take her places. Instead, she throws a dupatta on over her regular attire and slaps the car keys in my hands. Just these four words from her are enough to make me follow her to the car and chauffeur the princess wherever her heart desires-'You have five minutes.'
However, the answer my mind had concocted for her question never went beyond my tongue. I've discovered a certain... intimacy in the act of writing a letter. Of choosing to make the effort of conveying your emotions by hand, leaving the imprint of both your hand and heart on a blank piece of paper-a sheet that is nothing beyond hollowness. But the second your mind takes form in it, that hollow holds the importance of the world and far beyond it for your loved one.
That's what I hope, Mubaraka.
That when this letter reaches you, you hold it over your heart and promise to cherish this raggedy paper, simply because of the mundane guy who wrote it. Maybe that's too much to expect. Maybe I'm making this-us-to be out what we're not. Maybe we'll always be what we are right now-strangers who know each other too well to be just strangers.
I'm leaving for Islamabad tonight. I can count on the postal service in Pakistan to deliver this khatt to you by the time I'm getting off the plane in my destination, or perhaps even later. You never know the wild turn the events of your life are going to take. And with the road I've chosen to tread on, it is almost set in stone that nothing will be the same anymore. I won't lie to either you or myself-catching just a glimpse of the saddened smiles adorning Mama's and Baba's faces, the child in me wished to run to them and cling onto their clothes, torn apart at the thought of leaving them behind.
But that's life. You leave everyone behind. Sometimes you move onto better things, and sometimes you wallow in your despair of what could have been.
