I really like the theatre, and as a parting gift a friend presented me with tickets to the Hot New Show on Broadway. I mean Hedwig and The Angry Inch, of course. The play has won every award out there and is based on a cult movie/one-man play, which you should watch if you can. Just so you know, Harris used to be Doogie Houser MD on TV and played the blond guy on ‘How I met Your Mother’, so I was quite starstruck to be in his presence. The show was done like an actual comedy act: he is talking to the audience throughout and at some point comes down into the crowd and thrusts onto people, which is I how I found myself in that unusual position. (Wasn’t my first time getting star action at Broadway; I got discount tickets to a play where Jessica Lange spit on me, something I appreciate much more after I saw ‘American Horror Story’). The reason I recommend the play is that despite the camp and the ceremony, it’s in essence about a country that is unraveling from the inside out and the many ways people are trying to move out of it.
Moving away from Pakistan is something I have been entertaining as a reality only for the last six months or so. I never wanted to live in one place the whole year round anyway (be it Pakistan or Nairobi or New York) and I am fortunate because my vocation requires that I don’t. When I left the West for Lahore, it was after many years of the grind and I was Sick of Life.
[quote]"They just don't get us, na, these Amreekans"[/quote]
It was only this summer, when I went back to the US, that I had a sense of the haste with which I had left it when I moved away. My former roommate had stayed in the apartment we were sharing those many years ago, and used it as an Air BnB rental (you know Air Bnb, it’s like craigslist for couch surfing). By renting out my old room to out-of-towners, he was able to earn a little extra income and always keep a revolving door of interesting people in the flat. So well did he do in his little venture that he has taken on four more flats around NY and just rents them out constantly. Bitten by the capitalist bug, he has given up his dayjob as a sculptor, left all his Air BnB places in the charge of Burota, a Polish mastermind/manager, moved to L.A. and now makes designer 3D-printed earphones. But I digress.
I vaguely recalled I had left some books and pictures in the flat, confident at the time that I would be back in a few months to reclaim them. This, as we know, did not happen, and so I arranged to meet Burota at the flat to ransack it. As I made my way up Montrose Avenue in Brooklyn it seemed to be the only road in Brooklyn that time hadn’t gentrified. (If anything, there are even more prostitutes here now than there were in 2011.) When I walked into the flat it was like the opening scene of ‘Titanic’. I had entered a creepy-as-hell time capsule, which looked exactly – but I mean exactly! –as I had left it; there were my photos on the shelves, my books on the shelves, my pictures on the walls and my clothes in the closet. I had to sit down for a bit, overwhelmed by the enormous weight of memory. This is what grandmothers must feel like when cleaning out their storerooms.
I could recall every anxiety, every paranoid breakdown and every morning meltdown I had had in that apartment. I had been robbed, dumped, fired and then robbed again there. But despite the stress of those things, despite how far it is from home and how “they just don’t get us, na, these Amreekans”, I asked myself a simple question: would I rather build a life in Pakistan or here?
I asked myself this without the burden of logistics. Where would I stay? What would I earn? What would I do??
Notice how I said “build a life.” Enough of you are going to vomit back with emails crying “why don’t you just **** off then you privileged little douche!” But let me just say that I’m not twiddling the keys to some foreign flat as I ponder these questions. Moving away wouldn’t be easier for me than it would for most. I’d have to figure out immigration, funding, living, jobs. I’d have to hustle like everyone, more than most in fact. I just happen to believe that if you boil down life problems to their essentials (“would you move?” rather than “how would you move?”) you can figure out the logistics once you’ve decided on the destination.
The difference is I actively came back to give this place a shot. You guys have been with me for most of that journey. Now, when I look at my life back home, it’s happy and good. I have my own place, I have my family and friends and pets, and have carved out a space as close to independent as I think is possible in West Punjab. I thought once I’d done that it would hush the inner voice that asks that question: “Where do I want to live?”
But that question is with me still. And so I’ve decided that I (and therefore you) will have a definite answer to this before my 30th birthday in December. Sometimes it takes a lap dance from a drag queen on Broadway to get you to think.
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