i am now officially there.

 

which means i will most officially not be here.

 

 

Ramadhan Mubarak everyone and one should pray that we all utilize this blessed month in the right way :)

 

the new class-timings this Ramadhan are literally going to kill me. can you even try getting up after sehri (4.20am) for a 7.30am class? i mean hello, getting to the normal 8.30am classes was just about all i could handle....today wasnt that bad, hop skipped and jumped around classes, the library, labs, etc. my socio class was a joke - Dr.B actually walked out for a full 40 mins coz half the class hadnt done the readings... if i was a freshie, that would probably encourage me not to do any further readings but they're actually quite a docile bunch.

 

today's iftari was absolute bliss - first i had to drag myself to the dorms 15 mins before the azan and dread the prospect of attempting to fry something edible (altho we have decided in the greater interest of everyone's health, that i should be in charge of washing the dishes) and lo and behold, razia's beloved (actually everyone's beloved) shalim uncle had actually sent over an entire iftari-buffet! may Allah bless his soul, this man received many heart-felt duas today thats for sure :)

 

and paper plates! dude that is just too cool.

 

we couldnt buy bread today. AGAIN. is something wrong with the giant Dawn company? why are we not getting our sliced bread?!

regardless of the fact that there was no medicine to go down, i still need sugar intake! its crazy how the last few days my craving for ice cream has reached new heights and the burden of a runny nose and sore throat still hang in the balance. [ insert sneeze # 235 ] gesundheit? dankashun :D

 

ahem. so yes, not the best weekend to fall sick and worse yet, not the best time for both myself and mimi to contaminate room 206 fully full. its funny becoz i have a feeling i passed it on to the poor girl a day later, so the symptoms that affect me one day are clearly visible the next day with mimi. since i'm feeling a world better now, thus according to my calculations, tomorrow both of us will be healed to a great extent inshAllah.

 

i certainly hope so, i mean hello? how can you have fun at a rock concert with a blocked nose? EP, MHB, Noori and Call...should be a worthwhile event (i sound like i'm actually paying for the ticket, muhaha) the advantages of having event-managing-freaks for friends definitely makes my life easier. i hope i get a nice shiny badge for backstage...hm, on second thoughts i might want hall management. chalo, we'll decide on the spot tommorrow :)

 

Dr. B has left lums for a week which means a) no 8.30am classes b) no TA evening classes either. yay! this should give me ample time to dig into the overload of reading i've been putting off plus i have to come up with a quiz for the socio class. oh yea have to start working on the topic for the documentary that we have to make for culture&media....with junaid, azee and hamza in my group, i think this will be the first project i'm not willing to take charge of! lol, those boys are film-editing-genuises, again - life made easy :)

just NOT the way you said it would be

 

and i think i'm okay with it. maybe even more than okay (*insert the sound of music..not the sound of music, i mean the sound sound of music*) !

 

junior year has finally kicked off with the evergreen miseries of course registration. altho i have to say, the unexpected rain in the beginning set the most wonderful weather in motion which has sadly disappeared on this very warm day. but alas weather is secondary to the woes of enrollment and that too shall come to an urgent end next week.

 

highlight of the quarter: i got the TAship for intro to socio! yea baby! thats MISS TA to you! muahaha, the power of marking class participation has finally fallen in my evil hands and i shall rule the class with not only an iron pen but a merciless seating arrangement. the sweetness is just too much. Dr. B. is an extremely nice instructor transferring from the USofA and surprisingly enough, not only am i his TA but his student in another course - Comparitive Monotheism: Judaism, Christianity & Islam. class timings could have been better (8-frikkin-30 in the AM) but the course is interesting enough to keep me awake.

 

will finally attend Religious Fundamentalism this evening. i wonder if my family heritage would help me in the course...hmmm.

 

the new room is very much to the new roomie and my own liking. can we spell B-I-G? lol at first i thought i didn't have enough stuff to fill the place! but then the ridiculous trips to the F3 storage room decided that i had more than enough ''materialness'' to go around. the mirror is such niceness. it makes up for the terrible washrooms and absolute LACK of decent washing machines. phooey.

 

we actually managed to watch rockstar supernova last night and i have been humming the best song for a major part of the day, whose deep and profound lyrics have made passerbyers question the intactness of my judgement: oh oh oh oh oh-oh-oh :)

i've lost count of how many times this movie has been dissected down to every detail, but i will always be able to watch the last scene of Dirty Dancing with the volume way up there, getting the lyrics wrong, swishing my own imaginary full skirt, and wishing wishing wishing the patrick swayze of my life would whisk me away too...

 

 

 

i need salsa lessons. and salsa shoes. and a salsa skirt.

 

 

"Its not on the one,

 its not the mambo,

 its a feeling - a heartbeat"

 

saturday 26th august, 2006 - Nawab Akbar Bugti was killed in a military operation and President General Pervez Musharraf considers this death as a victory on his personal agenda. he accordingly congratulated the secret service chief who carried out this operation while hundreds of students of the Balochistan University started rioting in protest.

as i watched the news unfold on television with my naana, i tried to decide if i should feel sorrow for a man i had never heard about until a randomly-selected topic was assigned to my group for the SS 122 Communication Skills presentation. two years ago, i remember speaking about this warlord and his loyal tribe in front of a classroom and emphatically stating that the military operations must cease, 'lest the seeds of hatred sown by our government today, prick us in the near tomorrow in ways we had never imagined' (a little corny i know, but hey this was frikkin comm skills, you were supposed to be trite)

was Bugti truly the venerated hero, fighting for his people's rights, aptly named the Tiger of Balochistan? or was he the feared feudal lord, an enemy of the state terrorist? it seems almost silly, really to compare this man to a fictional female character that i read about in my summer course-Contemporary Short Narrative, but i can't help it. Big Mama is the creation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a writer known for endorsing magical realism. in his short story Big Mama's Funeral, Marquez describes Big Mama as a legendary figure, a woman feared and respected during her lifetime but that respect withered away sooner than her dead body. her funeral brought about the turn of a new era, an era that was notable because it was Big Mama-less. it took less than a day for her people to forget about her, to sweep away the funeral processions alongside her memory.

while i'm merely drawing comparisions for the sake of drawing comparisions, isn't that also the inevitable outcome of real-life leaders? how long will it take for the BLA to turn a new leaf following the death of their mentor? according to today's newspaper;

"the true nature of the legacy left behind by Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti will become clearer only with a change in the establishment ruling Pakistan. Will he be remembered as a villian or a hero? A terrorist or a saviour? A warlord leading an insurrection or a political leader fighting a regime led by a dictator? Perhaps somewhere in between the two extremes. Nevertheless the present establishment may have to do a little more than imposing curfews over half the country for people to forget him."

um. not really :p

more like, the citibank management was so pleased with having a monday off that they gave out kilos of mithai to all their employees (and interns, lets not forget those important nobodys) oh and the fact that it was recently 14th August, so the shiny wrapping paper did not indicate the eye color of hina's veryfarinthefuture baby boy, but rather our green national flag.

 

this last week has been a flurry of activity, the last family wedding of the season came to a close the other night (i mean seriously, who has a valima on the 14th?) hopped around visiting relatives as in the karachi norm, got some shopping done, work has been hectic but boss-maam has gone for a week-long umrah so the citi is chilling with a C! oh and how can i forget the disaster on sunday?

 

going all the way to defence from our place (hillpark? i think) takes a considerate amount of planning..."acha toh daada key ghar per rukhtay huwey, laundry ke kaprey cleaner ke paas drop kartey huwey, uzma ko indus sey pick kartey huwey, daddy ko phuppo key ghar chortey huwey, tum log sunday bazaar chaley jaana. theek hai?"

 

we finally reached the muchbelovedbazaar and witnessing the aftereffects of the previous day's rain was something like stepping into the run down streets of rural philippine! or maybe malaysia. those parts of the city they don't show in the travel brochures. there were wooden crates serving as stepping stones in the murky stagnant water which was everywhere and the fresh mud was squishing very chippaktey-huwey under my new chappals which was, at first very icky, but noticing all the other new shoes waiting to be haggled over was considerable consolement.

 

the afternoon heat was as red as a herring gets (i never understood that phrase but someone's gotta use it) you know how they say, expect the unexpected? well we never did expect. it RAINED like rained rained, and i swear by all things chanel, i have never seen the kind of panic that i saw in that surge of bodies trying to get out of the bazaar last sunday. it was pure mayhem and peeping through the tent gaps, the ominous black clouds were i suppose the main elements of fear-inducement. i was laughing so much i thought i would topple into the fast rising brown river that was seeping into the rickety crates i was jumping across. it was funny because when we arrived we were tiptoeing around with our shalwars raised gharara-style and grimacing with every schplunk of a chappal being stuck in the mud. but when the rain finally came down, we were running (make that galloping) through the crowds, trying to find the car. and even then, uzma was still trying to lower the prices! lol, funny day.

 

daddy left for home an hour ago. al-ain will always be home, just as karachi will always be the 'other' home. and i've blogged about this 'true home' controversy before so i won't dwell on it again. on a similar note, the soundtrack for the cartoon 'cars' has this song called life is a highway.....and if i think about all the miles covered, and all the rest stops stopped at, i think i've finally started to recognize the road signs.

really. the rain must stop!

 

what with karachi's wonderfully planned roads and modern drainage techniques, the entire city comes to a standstill with a downpour. yes its pretty to begin with, but too much of a good thing makes you wonder why irony doles itself out so inconveniently at times.

 

while rain is the perfect excuse to not work, i am alas, only an internee and i'm pretty sure citibank-waaley wouldn't take too kindly to any upstages from my part. its fun, standing around, looking dumb when you dont want to take the task, frantically searching through files when you dont want to tell the becharey uncle who's been there for an hour that his chequebook is still on its way to the desk, and of course collapsing into a few moments of peace while waiting for the superior-superiors to sign that last dreaded form.

 

hina is my new favorite citi-person, she actually hid under the desk to avoid an oddly-obsessed customer but trust omair, the departing intern, to give her away. he's nice but canadian, so thats expected. samira is the one person i can transfer any question/customer/form/weirdlookingpapers to and she's really sweet about taking a lot of the load. havent met the famous tahir yet, but i suppose my boss mavish is enough caution to be on my toes. "no haha-heehee behind the counter, and if anyone steps outside that area, heads are gonna roll!"

 

 

i wish i had a miranda priestly for a boss. who cares if she's the devil, she wears prada and she chucks it away the next day! still waiting to read the book, but the movie made up for the visual bliss of all those gorgeous shoes, bags and clothes. hai hai. on an altogether different note, my malo has her mp3 constantly tuned into 96FM, so the 12-yr-old does nothing much but quote from it.

 

quote of the day: "if love is a drug, i guess i'm still sober"

 

wata wata. now i have to go speed-iron my dawat-waaley-kaprey before the bijlee decides to play hide and seek again. frankly there's not much seeking, just yearning. speaking of dawats, sharah's brother's valima is this tuesday and uzma's friend's dholki is the same night, and i have a feeling we have some more long lost relatives to meet, so i think we shall be hop-skip-a-jumping around pretty much the whole city. yay!

"ayeshaaaa uth jao betaa"
*confused yawn*
"why?"

 

i mean really. why should i get up? yes, the sun is burning, yes the crow outside is cawing, yes the theley-waala is drowning the neighbourhood with his beysoora calling but why, tell me WHY should i get up?

 

i suppose food should be a major motivation. but with an upset tummy, even that basic survival instinct is at a low. such despair. twas unknown to me before.

 

BAH. i'm going to watch a movie. and eat ice cream.

its that time of the quarter. again.

with only 8 days left, i'm learning to cope with 2 years of memories, a lifetime of moments and what seems like so-much-longer of a wait for them to return.

 

having fari stick around for summer qrtr made it feel as if shazzy's still coming back for autumn. neither of them are, and to think that i probably wont see them for the next 2 years isnt as wrenching as i initially thought. of course, i always count my chickens before they hatch, as well as counting the chickens those chickens will eventually bring about so yea. probably not a good idea to predict my own emotions at this point in time.

 

 

its funny how shazzy's departure has actually made saying goodbye to fari a lot easier. recalling the farewell morning last time, i still promise waterworks.

those are a must :)

 

"some body gonna getta hurt real  bad"

 

hahaha. i cant believe i always confuse this quote by Russell Peters (the stand-up comedian) with Bertrand Russell! the poor philosopher must be turning in his grave.

 

kher. the above quote applies to none other than sameer anwar. ufff i think i shall dedicate this post to him, the brother i never had :) the number of times he has made me want to give him a good whackonthehead! the following snippets have some code names - not to protect their identities but moreso for my own reservations.

 

(sitting in the pdc)

"did you see the way horse ran the other day?"

(with horse's ENTIRE group of friends sitting behind us! i could have died, especially since sameer is too smart to use code names and places special emphasis on the real names)

 

(watching the match in the rec room)

"oh ayesha, what were you saying about daddy bakr?"

(with daddy beloved sitting NEXT to us!! sameer, your ignorance will turn my hair white before rehan's rash driving will)

 

(at shanghai resteraunt with fari's aunty)

"jee i think i'll have this, no.42  black mushrooms with bamboo shoots"

"uh sameer, are you sure you want the bamboo shoots?" (i happened to notice that no.42 is above rs.800)

"yup.. i like black mushrooms"

"sameer, ahem, bamboo shoots?!"

 

(in the rec room after ordering pizza)

me and fari discreetly notice that the mba-student who was expecting last year had her baby daughter with her and we were quietly discussing the possibility of her belonging to azerbaijan to which sameer says in his extremely loud voice:

"i think azerbaijan is a shiia country, right?"

 

(at hotspot)

"baji, i have to go to the bathroom"

sameeer!!!

ahahah i will never forget fari's expression :)

 

(at the football field)

"ayesha if you get married to a guy called hamza, you can call him hamoozeh"

"eww, no way!"

"ok fine, you can call him horse-oozeh"

(with people who know the horse VERY well, walking right next to us!!) *sigh* sameer, fetch me my hammer.

 

(everyday, anywhere, anytime)

" i'm hungry "

hai, mera bacha :) *MSA-style-hug*

 

i'm pretty sure i'm going to have to keep this post updated until summer qrtr is over and done with...i can never truly tell when sameer will burst out of the blue with the wrong comment at the wrong time! i love this kid, i will always always look back at this summer and smile.

 

How would you describe yellow

to he who has never seen the sun

but can feel the butter rays, melting into his skin?

 

Could you count the myriad colors of a waterfall

and point them out to him

he, who can only feel the coolness of their spray?

 

Describe to him if you can

the ruby-redness of a budding rose

what would its fragrance bring to your mind

if not the crimson curls of the flower?

 

Can you show him the blameless blue

of the sky up above

or is it left to the shrieks of seagulls

to engulf him in the vastness of the day?

 

Will you let the foam of the ocean

whisper through his toes,

retelling the fisherman's tale

of the mermaid's glittering fins

 

Would you listen to him with an open heart

as he rests at the end of the rainbow, and describes to you

what darkness truly is?

 

And we laugh till we cry
Always so hard to say goodbye

And we all sit round here in our home town
It's so good like this, these are times we'll miss
The memories, I hope they'll never fade
Glowing embers lie across the sky

~ Last Summer - Lost Prophets

i never thought i'd take it.

and if i did, i NEVER thought it would turn out this way!

 

summer quarter 2006 started off on a terrible note, with mimi falling prey to jaundice, being admitted in the hospital, and having to be transported back to abu dhabi by her mom, all within 4 days of the first week! having fari as my sole and constant hostel companion is not so horrific as i initially thought and summer qrtr itself has not shown its true boiling weather yet :)

 

lets see, i havent blogged for quite a while....typing about shazzy's goodbye would be too painful (read: boring) lol nooo i'm kidding, its something i've talked about for so long, i dont think the blogging world even requires i repeat it here. and even while this space acts as a censored-diary, i have those moments imprinted in memory anyway.

 

going home was much-awaited after a 6-month separation. 'twas wonderrrrful. i ate. i slept. i shopped. and oh yea, i stole a laptop! is it still stealing if its within the family? hm, lets toss our dormant conscience aside and indulge in the splendor of a spanking new laptop w/dvd-burner and a tiny remote control! yippy ya yay.

 

the first day back in lums was oh so depressing and then the first few days were ahem oh so interesting (excluding the hospital trips) sigh. there's nothing like coming out of confusion and having a clear head...only to be thrown right back in, bada bing bada boom.

 

got enrolled in two SS courses, which should translate into a lot of reading in the library but so far i have only witnessed sameer climbing the Khalid Ishaque Wing walls! uff this kid puts the C in crazy. so happy he joined us for the summer. we are truly mu'qaabila-possesed-87s! hehehe.

 

lunches, dinners, and FIFA 2006!!! how could i forget footie matches in the rec room?! bilal doesnt know but i've borrowed his theory on supporting only the developing nations throughout the world cup....and on that note, i'm gonna go support iran (is mexico less developed?)

thursday 4th: furiously typed away at the dreaded-but-finally-here 3,500 word research paper for Community Based Learning. the deadline for online submission was 12am and i am oh so proud of my swooping attempt to beat time by attaching the file at 11.50pm and then of course the net slowed down in those last crucial minutes but my sent items folder has a timestamp of 11.58pm so yea, i'm good :)

 

friday 5th: fun friday! The Enshe invited us all over for a specially cooked lunch (menu decided the previous day by a bunch of very farigh and very ghar-ke-khaaney-ke-bhookey bachey, plus this was specifically for the leaving girls, shaz & fari) but can that woman cook! i was very much the impressed. after rolling our stuffed-selves back to lums, shauki discovered that Mcdonalds has finally brought the McFlurry to lahore!! woo hoo, that was reason in itself to celebrate and so we headed over to defence market where the local mickey D was having a ball with the dozen orders of McFlurrys coming in every minute or so. anyway, i realized this would be a good time to buy new contact lenses so we head over to The Vision, very swishy place, but very VERY tharki eye specialist! good grief!! i think the poor doctor had been cut off from society in that downstairs clinic of his and was starving for socialization. peecha nahin chor raha tha! bechari shazzy had to undergo most of that fake-smiling-procedure but what was she to know, that events later in the day would prove more traumatizing, lol! so we get back to lums again, and this time zaeena whisks me and the roomie off for a haircut. except roomie darling decides she wants to get her hair cut at a parlor a street away from where we were originally going. at the time of dropping shazzy off, her and i both get phone calls from respective parents and in the bizzyness of trying to catch the right signals and repeating "jee? awaaz nahin aarahi !" i realized i forgot to deposit shazzy inside the parlor (standard procedure) anyway me and zaeena get to the other parlor and just when the snip-snipping was about to start, shazzy calls and informs us that her parlor is shutting down! so there's no car, and no time as OUR parlor was going to close in 15 mins so we shake our wet hair and scramble out, in the process zaeena slips on the stairs and lands on her ankle! hahah

(its really no laughing matter, but nothing was broken so yea the whole scene was quite giggly)

anyway we speedwalk over to shazzy's parlor (and details of shazo's trauma should be found on her own blog) speedwalk all the way back while discussing her trauma, and of course, on the way up the same stairs, shazzy falls down! uffff i had to literally run into the parlor so i wouldnt laugh like a maniac on the street. ANYWAY, zaeena and shazzy get their hair cut and just when its my turn, the lovely parlor ladies decide to close for the day!! sacre bleau! i think at that point, i could have pulled my own hair out and saved money!

 

saturday 6th: funiness EXTREME. so zaeena feels guilty that i couldnt get my hair cut last night and beeps her car outside the hostel at noon (very groggy time on a saturday but i oblige) so we're back in that same parlor and too-chatty-for-parlor-standards-aunty had cut the hair on the back of my head while the front half is still uncut when zaeena decides we should meet the rest of the gang for lunch at pizza hut which is located behind this particular parlor. while i agreed that a stuffed crust would be very welcome, i would have preferred to wait until all my hair was cut. but why would we, of all ppl, follow normal conduct? no sir, we paid the parlor for half the haircut, i wrapped my sheila back on my head and laughing like idiots we landed ourselves in pizza hut where we told everyone how great my hair looks underneath the hijab. why we ordered 4 large pizza's was beyond me but after a lot of huffing and puffing, most of it was finished. i decided it was high time to finish an incomplete job so we stroll back into the parlor and FINALLY get my hair cut! lol....

 

saturday night was even better than the morning, BLACK FISH was in lums! for details, please visit www.blackfish.com.pk .... an amazingly talented comedy troupe, these guys hailed from karachi (two of them were from indus valley and looked like it) but one of them..ahem, one of them, was the answer to my every morning-dream, my every noon-dream, my every "within-history-of-decolonization-class-day-dream" (this is begining to sound just a tad bit sad) but hai. what a guy. wata wata wata. good looking, tall, decent, and a great sense of HUMOR. damn all hot karachi girls (excluding my own female relatives) i'm sure a 'fish' like that is already hooked.... but a girl can dream, right?

 

sunday 7th:  bizzy bees! radia is taking us girlies out to gymkhana for lunch. the little pathan got engaged a while back and the realization that when we demanded a treat, we really were serious, has finally hit her :) still have to iron my clothes (gaaah its so bloody hot, clothes should just absorb the baking atmosphere and straighten their own wrinkles out) anyway tonight is shazzy's farewell party at hamza's place, so have to come up with something to wear for that too.

 

 sigh. i love weekends.

A scowl there

A smile here

You think I can’t see you

You think I don’t dare

 

To confront your arrogance

To challenge your air

You think it’s so easy

Looking down from up there

 

Let me tell you this much, at least for now

The respect I once had for you

is ebbing away

You’re not the same person, I won’t ask you to stay

 

I’ll cherish the memories

However few

You can throw away what we once had

To show the world the new you

 

Live life the way you want to

That’s what you always said

I thought I’d be there to help you

I’ve been shoved aside instead

 

Well shove all you want

Patronize me too

The world can say what it wants

Because I don’t need you

 

 

:)  it actually feels good. i should let go more often.

oh.

    my.

          God.

 

what a weekend! i am back in lums, freshly bruised, blackened, and battered but fully exhilirated!!

the trip to Khanpur was one i will nevereverever forget.