a painful march

I’m moving to Oxford in less than a week. It’s very hard to say goodbye to London. This city has been my longest home after Islamabad and has seen me grow, fail, despair, come alive again and again.

In central Oxford, my partner (husband) and I found a beautiful well-lit little apartment that’s to be our new home. It seems as though life’s painful march must always just carry on.

When two years ago, we moved in together, it was two different people who turned a 3 bedroom apartment facing G-11 into a dusty, plant-filled, hot as blazes, beautiful home with a constant stream of people, friends and family walking in and out, an abundance of food and love and heat and other things too – anger and disappointment.

I’ve moved 5 times in the last two years – and owned little, given up a lot, room to room, dinner plate to dinner plate. I used to have a dining table. Hard now to think of having a home.

These feelings could not be captured in a photo or video – so they are captured here. In a short piece of vague writing.

Hi, Barbie!

I have no items of pink clothing in my closet.

At one time, I would’ve been proud to tell people, I don’t wear pink. This was followed by all kinds of other justifications for my existence, things like, I’m not like other girls, I don’t care for fashion, I don’t care for shopping, I don’t care for cooking. I said all these things whilst putting on make-up, straightening my hair, wearing the right type of serious, monochromatic, frill-free clothes to work, learning to cook excellent meals and also devoting myself in romantic relationships. Still, I held onto independence, I held onto career, I held onto the stubborn choice of refusing to enter into an arranged marriage.

I’m a feminist, I’d say. But only to the people that weren’t going to lampoon me for believing in women’s rights. When men spoke, I fell silent. I let them have the last word, or at least think they had. As a teenager I had raged against the unfair and unequal rights and privileges heaped on me by family and society: boys could wear what they want, do what they want, boys could go out at night. Meanwhile I was forbidden from horse riding after my body grew too womanly, couldn’t go to restaurants with my friends without a driver tailing me, and of course, had to get prior permission to wear jeans.

As a teen, I scrawled angrily in my diary, I hate myself. I cursed my thighs, my hips, my breasts that refused to be exactly the right shape, my body growing up lopsided but still a source of unending shame that needed to be hidden and controlled. I slapped, pulled, starved my body into submission. Into servitude. Throughout my twenties, I mostly succeeded at taming myself. I was nice. Traditional. I had a job abroad and had gotten a serious solo travel bug, but could still be contained. People commented on what a good girl I was, and what a great wife I would make. But apparently not good enough. On one visit home, my aunt said, literally, don’t grow such big wings. I laughed. But she meant it.

The last few years in my thirties, I’ve gone through a serious personality transformation. A kind of waking up. My angry teenage self reappeared, so did my hurt girl-child self. I started to give myself permission to be myself. It was painful, but I started to say goodbye to the ideal woman I had tried so hard to be.

Then, I watched the Barbie movie. Suddenly, it’s okay to wear pink. It’s empowering even. I began to take my appearance more light-heartedly, wearing floral prints, dresses with slits, chunky gold jewellery, lavender lehengas, baby pink sequinned saris, studded my eyebrows with diamantes and painted clouds on my eyelids. Being feminine wasn’t bad, being pretty didn’t mean I wasn’t serious and intelligent and educated. Men didn’t like those outfits. But women did. In nightclub bathrooms, at coffee shops, libraries, parks, women showed me only love and acceptance.

My friend and I were crying in the theatre over Barbie’s struggles. It wasn’t just nostalgia over a much-loved doll I had given up my in pre-teens, and still somehow longed for, but a story about girlhood, womanhood, patriarchy, misogyny and a very human, existential pain. It put into words the cognitive dissonance of being a woman, you must be pretty, but not too pretty, smart, but not smart enough to lead or talk back, patient but still stand up for your rights, emotional but never angry, hating yourself, hating other women, hating our cruel mothers, but being grateful to them for birthing us, until we became mothers ourselves, and only then realised that our mothers were simply doing their best in a world that wasn’t made for them. Sitting in the theatre, watching dolls interact in a world that was plastic and absurd and beautiful and sometimes all too real in its uncomfortable truths, I saw a kaleidoscope of my own life up to this moment and finally understood why I had felt insane this whole time. I wasn’t insane, I was just living in a world that told me to be a million different things, and it was never ever enough! For anyone!

I’m tired of carrying the weight of all this feminism on my back. I’m tired of having to cook, clean, love, and pay the bills, of propping up the men in my life in a way they would never be able to do for me because they weren’t raised with the weight of all the womanly expectations in the world. I’m tired of gender wars too, of having to argue at every forum that I am worthy, that I am valuable and competing against other women just to be liked. The truth is, man or woman, we are all in pain. And humour, compassion, kindness and understanding is the only way we are going to ever be able to look past the pain and trauma of simply existing here on this earth.

I’m not sure the impact the Barbie movie is going to have. I’m sure it’s going to make some people very angry. But sitting in the darkened cinema, pink hues on the screen blurring through a veil of tears, my friend’s hand clasped in mine, I had one thought: if I had been able to see this film as a little girl, it would have absolutely changed my life.

Busy

Yesterday, an emptiness that stretched for a few hours, most of them spent in bed, a few hours alone when I could think. I watched an interview with Victoria Pedretti and cried, so much of what she said resonated with me. That she feels so much, that growing up, all she wanted was to have friends. She spoke about the rejection she feels when someone does not hold emotional space for her, emotional abandonment rather than physical.

I started to think later that night, why I didn’t feel much anymore. Most of the time I felt content, sometimes bored, sometimes sad. But only a little sad. Nothing like the deep troughs of sadness I’d find myself in for days and then had to pull myself out. Now, a little cry and then I feel happy.

I want to live a soft, slow little life. I want to eat noodles and cookies, take naps during the day, walk along the river that is just a few minutes down my road, eat home cooked meals that we share, drink tea, watch a show and fall asleep. Despite all these indulgences, I sometimes wake up with abs, thanks to the gym sessions and the protein-rich meals he insists on. But me always on the sweets and noodles. Lately, this obsession with noodles, white rice, chicken-chilli oil, jerk chicken, frozen dumplings that when steamed in a colander covered with a lid, turn translucent, glistening, ready to be cloven in half to reveal the fully cooked meat inside. After dinner, chai-fee, a candy bar, a tunnock’s caramel wafer candy bar. For lunch, a wilted spinach salad with tuna or beans, cherry tomatoes, cucumber chunks, sesame oil, soy sauce, salt and pepper.

Sometimes, a happiness that stretches all afternoon. Once the dishes are washed, making a cup of tea in the now-clean kitchen becomes beautiful. The fry pan from breakfast warming itself up in the windowsill, the sunlight and breeze stealing in, the bushes and trees outside. The whung whung whung of the washing machine and afterwards, the smell of fresh laundry stealing its way through the flat. Though my life is more happening than ever, I feel the need always to go home, crawl into bed, as though my body is finally slowing down, winding down. Saying, let’s sit here a while. Let’s think a while. Here, in this little shared room, not much space, but a lot of quiet. Outside, the busy world churning on, waiting for me to take part again when I am ready.

How much does it cost to live in London?

London is an amazing city to live in, maybe one of the best cities in the world.

But all this culture, beauty, architecture, nightlife and gastronomy comes with a price. And a rather hefty one at that. London is now the fourth most expensive city in the world, beat only by Hong Kong, Geneva and New York.

So how much does it really cost to eke out an existence in this multicultural hotspot? The short answer: a lot!

To give you a long answer, I’m going to tell you exactly how much I spent in one week in chilly February while in London. I was lucky enough to spend most of the start of the year in two much cheaper cities – Dhaka and Islamabad.

As soon as I arrived at Heathrow on a Saturday, I took the Elizabeth line, a fast train connecting east and west London. This cost me £14.10. It’s usually only about £7 to travel on the fast and luxurious Elizabeth line, but apparently there is a £7 premium for travelling to and from Heathrow. Because I was (technically) returning from a work trip, I was able to write this off as a company expense.

I slept a lot on my flights and so had enough energy to go to the grocery shop right next to my house. Groceries in my area tend to be expensive, especially when they are conveniently at your doorstep. But since I’d been away for over a month, I needed some essentials. I bought eggs, bread, bananas, sausages and a pack of instant noodles. £10.81. Sunday was a no-spend day. I relaxed, went for a walk and cooked lentil soup, potato wedges and a quinoa and broccoli salad using what I had in my pantry and freezer already. On Monday, I travelled to my office which cost me £5.80, round trip. For lunch I had leftovers.

Later in the week, I topped up my groceries with more sausages, and a vegan magnum, £4.69.

On Friday, I travelled to the office again. I had a leaving-do for my colleague in the evening and we went to a pub for dinner and drinks. I spent £14.50 on a Thai salmon curry, very delicious. Colleagues bought my drinks that evening, even when we went to the next bar. We then hopped on the tube to Dalston. I bought a round for a friend and myself, £18. Later that night I took the tube home, bringing the grand total for transport on a night out to £7.70.

The next day, a Saturday, I met a friend for coffee, with the tube journey costing me the standard off-peak £5.20.

I bought a coffee for myself and a bottle of water for my friend, £5.10.

After I met my friend, I wandered around and feeling peckish, bought a chicken burger, fries and coke at a local chicken shop for £5.49. A very cheap eat.

I then kept wandering around and ended up at a thrift store where I bought a pair of cargo pants, a dress and a light jacket for the grand total of £25. The jacket was £15 and the dress and trousers were both £5 each in a sale.

I live with a flatmate and had already paid rent for February, which comes to around £165 a week.

I’m also going on a trip to Amsterdam with friends soon. The Eurostar train cost £153 while the accommodation cost £233 for two nights.

So to break it down:

Rent – £165

Transport – £32.8

Groceries – £15.5

Eating out/entertainment – £37.99

Shopping – £25

Trip with friends – £386

Total – £662.29

Day Two: Writing every day until the end of 2022

Today I’m thinking about memory.

There’s a line from a poem I often return to: “Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves, / Memory by memory the mind.”

There is a movie called ‘Waltz with Bashir’, by Ari Folman, an Israeli soldier trying to recover lost memories from his time fighting in the 1982 Lebanon War. I watch that film often, and one scene in particular always sticks out. A study mentioned in the movie found that memory was highly suggestible. When people were presented with fabricated childhood photos of themselves at a fairground, they began to recall this event, with details like the smell of popcorn. The movie also covers how trauma makes you forget, produces the blanks that are a defence mechanism against painful and unspeakable experiences.

My own memory is full of holes. The more I try to trace memories, linearly or at random, the more they become coloured, revised, morphing into something else. Many events in my life, once brought back, go from neutral to negative. Over years and years, my childhood has twisted back onto itself, becoming something I don’t quite recognise. And some dark tunnels go deeper than I ever imagined. I often also recall an event as happy and nostalgic but when I go to read a diary entry, I see how truly miserable I was that day.

The brain chooses to essentially break itself and also to paint over the broken parts with happier colours. It’s only now, in adulthood, when I take the time to understand and clarify the past, that it becomes something closer to truth. Though I still struggle with this idea of truth, as all memory, just like history, is perspective-driven. The past is the only part of life that can be constantly rewritten as it is the only thing that has already happened. In that sense it is far more static than the present or future, which are happening in real-time or have not-yet-happened.