There is both carnage and calm before and after a monsoon shower.
The aftermath of a downpour opens you to refuge and relief. A natural phenomenon I looked forward to if only to indulge in kulfi by the roadside, from the rusted steel buckets with dry ice to freeze the unboiled kewra essence milk pops on bamboo sticks - my chappal slippers sliding in the monsoon street ocean made by clogged drainage gutters and overflowing manholes. I made my way toward the man with the wooden cart that sold them. The flies were long gone, downed by relentless storms. The kulfi that tasted like no hygienic version made at home, was finally safe, or so I told myself. Perhaps the forbidden nature of the treat itself was delicious, flies and all.
Monsoons meant more than the sweets they bought. There was quietness amidst the thunder, rattling windows and battering of heavy showers against the tin shelters of the nearby shanty towns and my own, privileged concrete flat roofs of Karachi. The disparity was not as blatant to me then as it is now over time and with the distance of four thousand miles separating the life that once was. I was always told that I lived a freer life, but it was in these moments that I felt I was the caged one - behind wrought iron grills on windows and a boundary wall high enough to keep the rouges away.
I was a princess in a palace of bougainvillaea and desi rose bushes.
Now, a million years from those days I have been seeking answers to my strangely broken ideas of what life should be. What a woman like me should want and be ok with wanting. I still don’t know what it is that is acceptable for me to desire and for me to accept. I loved my childhood of protective exploration and bewildering expectations — but I am no longer bound by any of it.
To want all that I wanted, what felt out of reach then. Now though it is all within reach — I don’t know how to accept it, it feels like an expensive undeserving gift.
At fifty, I decided to go back to university to study the art of creative writing - not learn but rather open my heart to the freedom I have always known words offered me. Do I feel I have permission to share the almost invisible nature of growing up as a woman in Pakistan? I think I can now find the words I could not then.
It’s a strange thing to grow up privileged in a country like Pakistan. It’s hard to put into words sometimes. Maybe it’s why I feel now I want to express it through each essay here in The Other Side of Monsoon — that other side of me. The one I still don’t fully understand.
This is a place for my essays, which I hope you will indulge in.
Because there is another face in the mirror, the other side of the reflection in a monsoon ocean.
much love,
p.s. This publication is now called The Other Side of Monsoon and will be a collection of life essays.
If you want to learn more about my online writing courses and one-on-one mentoring then please subscribe to my newsletter The Intuition Seeker below.
Oof, stunning. Love the new name too x