How does Eid just sneak up on you like that? Didn’t we just have one? More importantly, can someone divine why it is still a mystery as to when the exact date will be? We can predict planetary movements down to milliseconds (right?), yet the dates for Eid are still a part of the great Unknown. In any case, it’s back, for our sins. In the morning you heard the cries of innocents as the streets ran red with the blood of would-be lunches. The rest of the wildlife will inevitably end up in the freezer to keep that “Just Killed” meat smell fresh before it’s given in passive-aggressive parcels to the neighbors.
You may have surmised that the frighteningly named Big Eid is not my favorite time of the year, and so a part of me is happy that I am outside Pakistan for this. I usually go to my parents’ house for lunch, but on the drive over even my arctic heart melts at the kids and families all dressed to the nines, happy and sparkly. I am always grateful for seeing happy people in Pakistan. I was talking to a psychologist friend the other day and the thought occurred to me (not for the first time) that if entire countries can get diagnosed for emotional and mental health problems, Pakistan is depressed. D to the P to the D depressed. To mitigate this national sense of doom and foreclosure, I think we need as many public celebrations and overt displays of happiness we can muster.
And drugs.
Pakistan has joined the modern world in that pharmacies will now ask for prescriptions before selling things like antidepressants and mood stabilisers, which, although lovely, are also generally addictive and quickly habit-forming if not taken under the careful supervision of a doctor. I’ve never thought of myself as a pharmaceutical self-medicator, personally. The first month I was in college I fell ill and began, as we do, a course of antibiotics that my mother had packed as an emergency supply in my suitcase. My roommate (he was raised by a pharmacist) went into a cold shock when he saw the box by my bedside and asked, “You know they use this stuff to cure anthrax, right?” to which my reply was, “Oh how wonderful! It must kill everything else too!”
Not just an American phenomenon
You may have surmised that the frighteningly named Big Eid is not my favorite time of the year
I was right, but not in a good way. He explained that the moment we develop a resistance to antibiotics by taking them too often, that’s when the horrifically named, drug-resistant “Superbugs” are most likely to come our way. Since then I have had a mild mistrust of anything but Advil PM (lovely wonderful PM) and so haven’t explored the pill-based “upper” and “downer” culture that had blossomed in the late nineties around the world. But I digress. My point is that the only reason I know pills are now prescription-only is because of the sudden host of positively (depressive) outraged rants I’ve read on social media bemoaning this change in Pakistan. After a quick scroll through the posts and comments to make myself a list of who I know is medicated on what (always useful to have info), I did feel a twinge of sympathy.
The holiday season is tough on families. Everyone gets together and prepares to wage war on each other. If you’re on some kind of anxiety medication or antidepressant, this is probably the worst time of the year to run out of it, especially when you’re surrounded with knives and have easy access to body disposal.
There is increased attention globally to the problem of germs which are increasingly resistant to our most potent antibiotics
My last Eid in Lahore featured - aside from a racist rapper and a narcoleptic octogenarian - a marked increased in people taking selfies for Eid postings. I get it. What’s the point of spending so much time and effort climbing into that new outfit if no one’s going to see it? Well, actually, there is a point, which you crossed when you decided to embellish your neckline with so many rhinestones it looks like the Titanic hit you and sank. But that’s not something you say to someone who was kind enough to bring you cake. So I grinned and bore the onslaught of what can only be called Eid-ul-Filter Instagram shots, and will even be grateful for them this year when I am so very far away from home and family.
I’ll be almost as grateful as I imagine all the school kids are at the marvelous coincidence that allows them to go back to school for a day before taking off the week again for Eid. Enjoy this time, little children. In the words of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street: You are young, life has been kind to you; you will learn. But in the interest of their continued educational progress, I will leave you with my adaptation of the world’s greatest nursery rhyme:
Mary had a little lamb. Now she doesn’t. Eid Mubarak.
