You know the kins you get before exams you haven’t studied for and don’t really quite want to fail? Or before you have to (and I mean have to) jump off a 40 feet high cliff into the most beautiful clear emerald lake? Or the one that bubbles like a frothy, thick liquid in your chest when you’ve been really late coming back home from a friend’s and are imagining the talking-to you’re going to be getting from your disappointed parents? The one that’s always worse in your mind but refuses to be tamed into fitting the realistic dimensions of apprehensions?

The one that floats to the surface like helium balloons slipping out of a child’s grip,  and then sink down like helium balloons all out of helium-way, way down into the bottom of your being. That comes when something beautiful ends- like a book, a movie, an era…

The feeling of doom, of dread, of something that is going to go wrong or has gone wrong and is going to spring at you like an evil jack-in-the-box.

Yeah, that one- its just always coming up, now and then, before I have to drive back home, or go into the field, or when the thought of a monotonous future sets in, or when the sun goes down and darkness spreads…

It ruins my day- for that time and I can’t seem to fight it off. It weighs me down and makes me miserable, makes me wish I were a watermelon that can be scraped hollow of all that squishy-ness inside.

What do I do?

Any ideas?

The lights were strung all over the station- which is so much more than just a station as my friends and I had realized almost two years ago. There was a little shop with white monkeys holding bright soft hearts, and a playground that looked out at green fields that you could spin around by sitting on the merry-go-round. The mosque had a separate portion for ladies and the toilets had fans! And the shopkeeper gave Hera free aspirin.

If it can impress you in the broiling cloud-less midday heat of Lahore (in which you feel like kicking anything that comes your way- even, or maybe especially,  snowy white soft little lambs) it is indeed impressive.

On the second day of Eid the station was strumming with life and cars: a small child nearly got run over by a rickshaw, was rescued by a guard with a gun slung on his shoulder-a fountain lit green by neon lights shot up into the air, and music blared on unseen speakers.

What a funny coincidence to drive into a CNG station from one of the best road-trips I’ve had! And that too on a road that has a gas station every five feet!

I twisted around in the back seat, taking ineffectual pictures of the station as we moved out, driving away and letting the station slip back into my mind, pulling the string back into place.

Wottay Hassan Abdullah.

Slowly their eyes would blink, and open, staring at the blackness of the night still around and the silhouettes of bodies in deep slumber. The sound of the prawns’ wet tails would scrape along the dirt paths, catching at stones, and leaving a trail of salt for the girls to follow.

Their dreams would always be of the sea, floating on the crests of waves and catching the light of an invisible sun, and sometimes, entwining in seaweed and sinking deep within. The music of the prawns would awaken the eight and nine year old girls at 2:50 a.m. every morning, just before their families would. The girls would still lie in bed, their chaadars draped over their bodies like the thinnest of cocoons till they felt a mother’s soft touch on the forehead, or a sister’s harsher nudge in the back- and then they would peel off their chaadars like they would be peeling off the scales of prawns within the next hour, crouch over containers swathed in the dark sheets of the night and splash their faces. Silent rotis would be warmed over wooden choollahs and milk diluted with water poured into cold steel glasses, hair smelling forever of fish and salt would be tightly wound at the back of heads and dupattas would be draped around tiny shoulders.

A knock at the door and the girls would slip out of their homes and nod at the prawns waiting outside- except the prawns in the caps had changed into old women with wrinkled skin.

‘Come on, come on,’ they would start to shuffle forward again, the line of old and young women following their salty trails to the prawn peeling workshop near the railway tracks in the black of a very early morning.

[Note: based on an interview of a girl in Machar Colony who earned Rs. 100 to 150 on every bucket of prawns peeled in a wara near her house. She woke up at 3:00 a.m. every morning and would follow a group of workers led by two old wome to the wara. She would come back home in time for her school which started at 8 a.m. Prawn peeling is one of the more common occupations in Machar Colony, especially among the females and the children.]

When you put a sad song on repeat and wish for the solitude that half a dorm room can give, and think of the sidewalks you could sit on without anybody passing by-beneath someone`s magic tree that just looks like an Afro to you.

I can go back to the first year- room on the fourth floor, looking out at a world of orange streetlights, two fulls moons in the window, and a lavender orange sunset seen through a wire-mesh. A wall of words, and a long-lashed girl helping you take it down at the end of the year.

The gaped wonder at the first wild rainstorm and the joy of feet splashing in puddles, the scent of fog swirling into open passages, and the first stirrings of friendship, on wooden benches and over strawberry-mint smoke, across a mini-fridge with cat magnets on its mini white door.

The happiness that only tea in paper cups under trees can bring.

The luxury of freedom.

(The lemon chicken I made today was a little bland.)

The railway lines glint in the moonlight, and slowly the waves rise higher. They wash over and across the lines, slowly entering the houses of the sleeping few who live in that land.

She leaves the wooden door half open, and as the waves slip in slowly, like the inevitable visit of angels to the poor, or a secret visit of a man who leaves the scent of his love like jasmine lingering in the corners of cupboards and clothes. They lap in silently, taking forgotten sandals and lost pencils out through the door.

She sleeps on the charpoy, its four wooden feet immersed in the cold salty water of the visiting sea. The moon glimmers on the faces of her children sleeping in the courtyard on a single charpoy, huddled together like pieces of a puzzle.

The shelves are crowded tonight, blankets and cushions pushed back on the wooden planks built after the first night the sea visited her family and soaked clothes and shoes, washed off the grains of rice on pots and pans and settled permanently into the crevices of a small radio.

Even now when she wears her green dupatta around her head she hears the silence of the waves whisper into her, and the salty scent of time and sorrow weaves through her darkened tresses.

The moon moves further away, and the sky promises to lighten. The birds pierce their way through dreams.

And slowly the waves retreat, slipping out through doors and back across the railway lines, leaving the sandals and pencils in the exact forgotten and lost places where they had rested before.

[based on a true story told by a woman in Machar Colony of how the waves would visit the few houses in this land around 25 years ago on certain nights in the year]

I have annoying, tiring, vivid dreams. Sometimes I manage to fast forward the more frightening ones (those which involve men turned into mutilated babies with the help of sharp edges and being given to mortified women in acts of garish humor), trying to change endings. It works, sometimes, but only to a slightly hallucinatory effect.

I have no work right now. My supervisor will not be here till lunch.

Why do social scientists not fast?

I made a ‘basic vanilla cake’ with ‘chocolate glaze icing’. It was pretty good. I was quite proud of myself.

I wish to make cake and coffee/tea for my friends and invite them over.

I also wish to go deep sea diving. And have bigger eyes.

I like this profusion of ‘I`s’!

I think I’m confident enough to inch back my driving seat. Just a bit. I mean, I am tall enough. And its okay if I’m not sitting so high, I mean everybody seems to lay back a bit, and just like, cruise.  I’ve become adept at ignoring the beeps behind me though. I’ve come to terms with my speed (or lack of!), in time the world shall too.

I missed university yesterday. It came upon me suddenly, a tight, heavy, suffocation of the heart. It was 11:30 p.m. and I realized how impossible a walk on the sidewalk under orange streetlights was. Or a drive with the windows down and the wind whirling around your head,  singing into your ears about how beautiful it was to be so free. And even as I tried to fight it, to push away the threatening walls of bewildered, overwhelming nostalgia and find solace/distraction in the hip-hoppin` cast of  Step Up2,  it crested over me. Wound around my heart, weighing it down till it had to sink.  

And so I was left, with a gaping hole of nostalgia, and a dull, disbelief- an image of an empty hourglass lying on the floor, while Andie and her crew hip-hopped in puddles of rain.