Red Birds: A lament to love, a rant against war and an ode to pacifists

15 Jan Red Birds: A lament to love, a rant against war and an ode to pacifists

I was a married woman now. Things sank in. I was married with children and Lahore was my home. I had inherited everything that was my husband’s – his seven dogs, his weird pheasants and his senseless chickens, all crammed into the backyard. I had inherited his mother along with her possessions – the tea sieve and the dresser. His father, too, had been bequeathed to me and became my own. This part was rather nice. Nonetheless, there were issues there as well.

I called Yasser’s dad Abu just as I did my own father. However, this Abu smoked and drove expensive cars and he didn’t handle evenings well. I had also come into possession of Yasser’s books, but I wasn’t allowed to touch them. I ended up also falling heir to the way Yasser fitted into his family – except Yasser was the only child. This was a mother like no mother I knew. This was a father like no father I knew. Yasser had no siblings. There was this concentrated syrup of attention, intense, sharp and pungent, that was only offered to Yasser. Yasser’s room. Yasser’s TV. Yasser’s books. Yasser’s published articles in newspaper cuttings. The fact was everything Yasser loved was tended to by his mom and, to some extent, his dad. And now, here I was, the latest of Yasser’s acquisitions.

I felt like I had stepped into an open prison, armed only with goodwill and the hope that if I ignored everything long enough, maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t feel like I was part of a strange new cult. Probably anybody in my shoes would have felt as I did. I felt alien because, during the first year of wedded bliss, marriages are meant to make one feel a bit alien. The more the alienness the better, in fact. The more ambushed I felt and the further I was from my own family, the better my chances of survival. I was taught that clinging on to your past family was going to squander your chances of winning over the new family. The how-to-be-married manual had the word “survival” stamped on every page. Everything in my new house felt removed.

Yasser’s mottled brown pheasant looked really odd. It was invariably placed on the kitchen counter before the house was locked up for the evening. I found their lockdown routine so dumb because of how utterly ceremonial it was. At the end of the day, the doors were padlocked. I found it weird that the house keys didn’t have a keychain. A chunk of keys, naked and on their own was ugly and disrespectful to the ceremony of safety. “Why are there padlocks on everything? Locks on the kitchen doors, both the outer and the inner ones, not to mention the locks on the front gate leading to the porch, the front door and even the doors to the rooms?” I asked. “I’ve heard that thieves lurk everywhere.”

“Robbers have been known to jump over low gates, break padlocks and take whatever they want.” When I said this, I was ridiculed.

“This is not America,” they scoffed. The dogs, Tommy and his family of Russian pups, were adorable, albeit rather highly strung. But what I found really strange was that when the dogs barked in unison, the people inside the house barked back in Punjabi slurs. This would go on for a while until one party relented. It was usually the dogs who were the bigger people. Over time, I started to dread Tommy and Co’s barking. I grew paranoid about intruders breaking into our home and taking away something precious. Desi weddings come with gold. My mother-in-law had decided to take over as the custodian of my gold jewellery and had packed all my valuables in a small suitcase, burying them in a metal tijori which also served as a linen closet and was, therefore, full of cotton duvets. The closet was secured with two large padlocks. I had never seen so many padlocks in all my life. Was I the one who had brought the potential danger of burglary into this household?

Not having had the opportunity to see what life had been like in Yasser’s home before our wedding, everything bad was personalised and me-centric. Cups, plates and spoons were washed twice, thrice even, because there was a possibility that an animal may have licked it. Animals? What kind of animals? Lizards, silly. Lahore had a thriving gecko population that terrorised everyone. These house lizards could poison food by sneaking into the fridge in the night, like cheeky monsters, to lick the refrigerated food which could culminate in your dying a painful death. I was aware that the world was different in this part of the universe, and I also knew that I was the one meant to do the adapting into this environment. I hated the idea of my being a brat, disdaining the “natives”.

I suppressed my feeling of alienation, my need for a sense of belonging and did my best to absorb the new shocks in my integration adventures. This was me doing my part to save the world from division with one broad stroke called a marriage. We settled into a routine soon enough.

I headed off to work at a Silicon Valley start-up almost instantly. In the evenings, I helped my mother-in-law with the cooking. Although Yasser taught economics at a high school, his rage tantrums were exclusive to the Chowk website and he vented his spleen on the Internet. No, of course I had no time for Chowk, so naturally I felt resentful that Yasser spent endless hours online, publishing articles and being livid with Indians who dared to challenge him. He didn’t give a damn about my resentment.

Yasser was nervous about our new life. He wanted me to like his pheasant and his mom’s tea sieve, but he wanted me to keep in mind that it was my duty to like them. Sometimes he was indifferent to me, and at others, eager to show me Lahore, to take me places and prove to me that Pakistan was modern and up-and-coming; that the economic future of Pakistan was bright; that our history is extraordinary; that the Mughals and British left us with something to build upon. He took me on road trips around the neher, the irrigation canals built in the colonial era. He took me to Sheesh Mehal where the famous film Mughale-Azam had been shot. He sent me old Bollywood songs from a bygone era like Chalte-Chalte. He took me to Jinnah’s mausoleum in Karachi.

With Yasser, I got to see Mayo Hospital’s historic, redbrick building and take the bus to Punjab University, passing by Charing Cross and Kim’s Gun – local attractions I had only read about and now was seeing in real life. But I was unmoved. I felt as I had done in Karachi, standing on my chacha’s balcony. I didn’t want to impose. I wanted to be a good guest. I would politely go along with all the fanfare because I could feel the excitement with which it was brought to me. I would almost always come home from these trips and throw up in the loo. Thank you, heat exhaustion. Lahore was hot and humid, harsh and unforgiving. When Yasser was alone with me, I got to see the same youthful boy from San Jose, the boy from a year ago. Things may have been strange, but they weren’t straight from hell either.