Farewell thee pardner

Back in 2002 when we were in our 9th grade my dear cousiness very bravely hacked into our Physics teacher’s email account and sent herself this email:

sallam r****,

i am really sorry for treating u harshly i promise, i will always be kind to u and would try my level best to give u the hightest marks in class.yep i mean it!!

and give my love to ur heart.

Rizwana

Even though the subject matter is really short and to the point and I remember the whole thing by heart, I can’t help laughing out loud whenever I read it. “Give my love to your heart” hahah! - priceless.

 Man, I’ll miss you!

Updating

So life’s slowly becoming slow these days.

 

My friend left for UK yesterday and suddenly it seems like I’m so farigh, I have nothing left to do. It’s funny how you can make your life revolve around certain people and when, for some reason, they are absent, you feel so…lost. My Arabic and stitching classes have temporarily been stalled on account of us four students (my two cousins, my friend and myself) being either absent or busy with various tasks.

 

Yesterday we had a get-together at my place so that all the friends could meet my cousin before she left. I informed 12 people of the plan and only 2 showed up. Everyone was either busy, out of station, had exams, or simply unwilling to reply. I guess people who really care make the time and effort at the end. But it’s sad how people just fall out once they leave skool and go to different colleges. Though that’s not necessary, sometimes people have a falling out for no reason at all, like Zaineb. I have no idea what went wrong with our friendship. Suddenly she stopped all contact with me for reasons she would never explain. It saddens me sometimes when I think about her, she helped me a lot in my bad days. As far as I have understood I just disappointed her in some way, I did to her what everyone does to her and she did not expect it from me. Maybe someday I can know what that thing really was…

 

In other news, internet has become a pretty boring place. It’s been ages since I went online cuz I don’t feel like it at all. There’s no one I would really wanna talk to. Read it Live is slow these days, and I have myself to blame for that too cuz I haven’t written anything in ages. Facebook is so boring, nothing ever happens there. Thus I’ve started re-reading my blog. I know I sound self-obsessed, but it’s really entertaining (for me that is.) I’ve read it over and over like a million times but it’s still fun.

 

It’s amazing how when you really want to do it, you can put a cap and seal tight all the things you don’t feel like thinking about at the moment.

My come back?

Its been a long time since I blogged, almost four and a half months. I was reading Noor’s blog a while ago and it struck me how nice and cathartic blogging could be. People have been asking me WHY I stopped blogging, well, if any of you ever visit here, this post is for you!

 

A lot has happened since I last posted in February. My bestest cousiness got married on April 13^th and by now has her UK settlement visa and is about to fly to her hubby on the 27^th of this month (Insha’Allah.) What happens after she leaves, how I’ll live without her, who will I talk to about ever random nonsense thing? Those are questions I choose not to think about these days. I have a feeling I’ll be whining and blogging a lot in the days to come.

 

My cousin and I, along with our families, took a vacation up north, in Changlagali, from 16th-24th June. It is probably our last trip together as both my Khala’s daughters will be leaving Pakistan to join their respective husbands in UK and USA. It was a fun time, relaxing and memorable and I didn’t feel like coming back cuz I have no idea if I will ever be able to go there again.

 

To top that off my best friend, who I spend half the day with, everyday, is leaving for a vacation on the 16^th too. So August will be majorly boring! It’s amazing how humans can adapt to their circumstances (which has been a recurrent theme on my blog) I’ve lived through a lot, I guess I’ll live through this too :S

 

Other than that skool’s fine, family is fine. I’ll Insha’Allah be having a niece or nephew in October so that’s exciting. Generally I’m not a fan of children. They’re really cute, I agree, but after a while they get on the nerves with all the racket, then I feel like slapping them :S hopefully I’ll be more gentle towards my own niece/nephew or else my bhai and bhabi might just kick me outta the house.

 

I’ve been meaning to write something for RIL for a while but ever since skool ended it feels like my writing skills have jammed, thus I’m blogging. Maybe one of these days, if I do get time, I’ll write something. Right now life revolves around learning stitching, Arabic, spending time with my favorite cousin and favorite friend!

Life’s not bad at all, eh?

Farwell, Good February 2007 :)

It’s funny how I don’t feel the need to blog when I don’t have anything to whine about. It’s true, there could not have been a better name for my blog. I’ve been meaning to update for a while but neither got the time, nor the content. It is only out of ghairat that I’m updating coz Esh tee asked me today if I had left my blog for good. And now I’m proving that my loyalties lie with my blog, and I don’t want it to think otherwise

 So life’s the usual, yet it’s very happening. I don’t really find things to write about now, no specific events. I’ve been busy with Allah knows what coz the days seem to fly past. Last weekend we had a get-together cum dholki at my place for my Royal Cousiness who will be getting married in a few weeks Insha’Allah. It turned out to be so much fun and the amazing part being that nearly all the people invited showed up. It was a great way to meet old friends. The best thing with friends from skool is that no matter how long it has been since you met them last, and whether you’ve kept in touch on a regular basis or not, when you meet em again, you just blend in, like you’ve started off exactly where you left last time. And now that we’ve got people in every possible university in Lahore, get-togethers are so much more interesting coz everyone has new spicy stories After the party a couple of them stayed over for the night and it was so much fun. It was like one of those times when you go crazy laughing and you want to remember it forever!

As people close to me, slowly get married one by one, it makes me think how close marriage seems and how I’ve always been in favour of marrying but never really thought of getting married to  some guy out there. It’s scary in so many more ways than one. It confuses the hell out of me sometimes. It makes me think about change, how I will leave things from this life behind and start a new one, how I won’t be sitting with my friends and giggling the night away without a care in the world or sleeping at night knowing that whatever needs to be done, will be taken care of by my mom. I think these are the best days of my life, of anyone’s life. These days, when you’re in a university that doesn’t overload you with work, when you have the time and resources to maintain two websites, when you spend half of your day with friends everyday having a good time. And even though I know it was impossible to spend my A’Level days any other way than how I did, I regret wasting so much time, emotion and effort.

May all the days to come be blessed by Allah for me and for you!

Alhumdullilah!

Hmm…I’m seeing updating is becoming a Sunday thing only, which is bad. I should be updating more often, like I used to. But this was inevitable. Once life moves away from home and computers, it becomes so busy and random that you stop putting everything into words and categories I guess.

 

There’s nothing big worth mentioning. Skool’s going good coz BNU is the easiest place to be. They keep their students happy by not making them work too often. Thought the second semester would be different, gladly it’s not. The workload is just right, not too much to make you sick of it, neither too little to make you look for other things to do. I’m amazed at how much my attitude towards studies has changed. As far back as I can remember, I always thought my studies were my world. That it was the only thing I had to do so I felt completely justified in staying home all the time, excusing myself of all household chores, not visiting relatives, not going out with friends too often just on the excuse that ‘I had to study’. Now that a non-studying environment at BNU has opened my eyes, I realize there is so much more to life than just studying. Real life things.

And one of those things includes maintaining my new website, which by the way, not many of you have visited *shakes head disapprovingly* It actually takes quite a lot of effort to keep something running, but it’s fun. I’m liking it

Prayers are always answered, that’s what time tells you. Every few months or years I get to sit down and look back and see how with time, and not too much of it, my prayers were answered in one form or another. I sit and look back and realize something that I really wanted to happen a few years back, did not happen, and though I whined about it non-stop, wanted to kill the entire world to get what I wanted, that thing not happening was what was best for me. It didn’t seem that way at that particular time, but a few years down the lane, you can sit back and make connections.

 

Sometimes there come people in your life who heal and heal without letting you know. Who aren’t always laying you down with ‘I love yous’ or ‘I miss yous’ (meant or not meant, either way) but you know they care right from the core of their hearts. They are people you don’t want to lose by messing things up, people you wanna keep it straight and simple with. They are people you hope would understand that you care, without always saying so, and that you wanna hold on to, without making it crazy or suffocating. Those people are the answer to your prayers, ones you may have made long ago.

 

Life’s good Alhumdullilah, after many months I can sit back and say that even an ungrateful person like me feels satisfied. That hollow feeling that persists right at the centre of your soul when you know you’re at the wrong path is not there anymore. It hasn’t vanished completely, but I know the answers now, I know that no peace in life, no happiness, no sakoon can come without following Deen completely, and even though I’m much too new on the path that I must tread, I can see something of a ray of hope straight ahead. I can’t thank Allah enough for sending me to a family that understands and supports and that makes practicing Islam so easy for me. There are a few out there as lucky as me…

Updates

Well, the sin of ignoring my blog has been committed for far too long so here I am to make amends. The absence of comments on my last post indicates that my readers have no sense of humour, thus my blog having no category for jokes is justified. I changed the blog template coz I was bored, I’m not a big fan of change so I’m not liking it too much. One of these days when I’m bored again, I’ll change it back to my black beauty!

 

The past couple of days have been nice and busy. During the long weekend, that included

The Muharram holidays we had a three day Jamaat over at our place, Alhumdullilah. I wanted all my friends to visit atleast once, unfortunately not many did. The experience was simply awesome. The people, the atmosphere, the Imaan that is revived; it’s so much more than can be explained in words. It’s to be experienced to be understood.

Other than that my brother and I have started a new project, a website for writers. It’s a place for amateur writers like myself to put up their work for others to read, to get feedback and accordingly know how we can improve. I have a handful of writers contributing right now, if you’re interested in submitting your writings there, let me know. You can submit short stories and poetry and please do visit www.readitlive.com and let us know what you think.

Yesterday I came to find out something about this one person who I had always looked upto and thought of as being above average , who did not follow these conventional ideas the society imposed. That person has been very special to me for the past several years. You know how sometimes you think about a person so much you start feeling like he’s the epitome of perfection? In your mind you make him so much more than a normal human with flaws? Perhaps it’s my fault anyway, exalting anyone to that status. But I was disappointed to find out that all the things I had thought that person to be above, turns he’s just like all the other guys out there. It’s a disappointing world out there, shakes your faith in yourself.

 

Life’s on a roll, everything’s changing. The constants of my life are changing, people I have always had there, and always mean always and those I’ve never thought of living without are changing. As excited I am about it, I also fear what is to come.

When Insults had Class!

I’m not one to post forwarded mails usually but this one just cracked me up. Some of the stuff in there is hilarious!  

“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” Winston Churchill  

“A modest little person, with much to be modest about.” Winston Churchill

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” Clarence Darrow 

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?” Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner) 

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.” Moses Hadas 

“He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.” Abraham Lincoln 

“I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.” Mark Twain 

“He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.” Oscar Wilde 

“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play, bring a friend… if you have one.” George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

“Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second…if there is one.” Winston Churchill, in response. 

“I feel so miserable without you, it’s almost like having you here.” Stephen Bishop 

“He is a self-made man and worships his creator.” John Bright 

“I’ve just learned about his illness. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.” Irvin S. Cobb 

“He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others.” Samuel Johnson 

“He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.” Paul Keating 

“He had delusions of adequacy.” Walter Kerr 

“There’s nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won’t cure.” Jack E. Leonard 

“He has the attention span of a lightning bolt.” Robert Redford 

“They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.” Thomas Brackett Reed 

“He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them.” James Reston (about Richard Nixon) 

“In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily.” Charles, Count Talleyrand 

“He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.” Forrest Tucker 

“Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?” Mark Twain 

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” Oscar Wilde 

“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts…for support rather than illumination.” Andrew Lang

To the Happiest Day in the Life of…

…my cousin of nineteen years, my best friend of eight years, my laughing partner, my whine board, my tuition buddy, my gheebat partner, my bus company, my advisor, my voice of wisdom, my support system, my Math student, my unorganized double.

May Allah bless you with Iman, Aafiyat, happiness, contentment, health, wealth, 49 children and all that you have ever wished for and more! May you’re happiness be eternal, ever lasting in this world and the Hereafter.

Here is to nineteen years of my life that I have spent with you, and here’s to the last eigth years that I simply could not have made through without you! *Raises the glass of Malee Grape Juice*

Smile…

I open a window to a cold Monday morning, the bell rings at 9 a.m. sharp. The narrow school corridor is filled with girls immediately, those swarming out of classes and those filing in. I stand near the entry/exit door and amidst the throng see a skinny girl, pushing the black metal frame up her nose, her waist length hair tied in a tight braid, carrying a black shoulder bag that is about to tear at the seams with the weight of books inside, exiting room 3 after getting done with a business class. A smile spreading across her face like sunshine, slowly spreading across the ocean.

I wanna know why she smiles, that beautiful innocent smile. And I see her looking at another girl, entering the corridor in a shy, calculated manner, with a shoulder bag and a black file clutched like a precious possession close to her chest, avoiding bumping into people but oblivious of the activity around. All I can see is her eyes, she covers the rest but I know she’s smiling. Smiling in that shy innocent way that comes only when you’re at a loss of words.

‘Please class bunk kar lo!’

‘Nahi yaar, mujhe darr lagta hai, mainay kabhi class bunk nahi kee.’

The Urdu teacher walks into the corridor while they’re standing outside class. All hopes of bunking fall apart, she sees them!

‘Can’t bunk now, abb to miss nay bhee daikh liya hai’

‘Ok I’ll attend class with you!’

‘But you don’t take Urdu’

‘I know, but it’ll be fun!’

I see the girl with the braided hair asking the teacher for special permission to attend that one class. I see the two girls walking across the classroom and sitting at the end of the second row near the windows. Everyone opens a copy of Umrao Jaan Ada and the teacher tells them to read, turn-wise.

I see the girl with the braided hair take out a piece of paper and write on it:

‘17^th January, 2005

So I must be the craziest person alive to be taking this class right now. I just got done with business and none of my friends are gonna be free so I decided to attend Urdu class with S****…Now that I am sitting here amidst 30 students I realize that I definitely am very STUPID! Some of them give me weird looks if I so much as look in their direction, others give me the ‘DAMN, she is stupid to miss a free lesson’- but hey! This is the only time I’ll get to spend with my friend 2day and yea, I’m willing to do that…’

And she scribbles on with a black pointer and I see S**** fleetingly glancing at the white sheet. She steals a look ever so often but doesn’t want to make it apparent. She secretly wishes that whatever is being written on the paper is for her, then immediately checks herself, not wanting to expect too much. I see how she stares hard at the Urdu textbook, looking but not reading a word, with a smile that never leaves her face, a smile of anticipation, a smile of feeling special, a smile that plays itself only on your lips when you are out of words of gratitude…

I see those girls sitting there, as excited as kids when they become friends on the first day of school. I see them and I wonder do they know what the year ahead holds for them? Are they aware of the warmth of love and happiness that they will bask in? Do they have any idea of the heart ache that would follow? Are they aware of the life changing effect they’ll have on each other? I look at them and wonder if they realize that long after they are out of each others’ lives, they will still remember everything like it was yesterday.

Probably not. How would they know?

I stand there, for two years with tears in my eyes and smile at those smiling girls. January 17^th 2007. I smile again, closing the window to that cold Monday morning, the cover of my blue file.

Everything is funny.

Funny thing, I slept early yesterday night so couldn’t fall back to sleep after Fajr. Skool reopened which was a major bummer. Not that the courses this semester aren’t awesome, it’s just that I don’t wanna be in that place anymore, and I don’t know where else to go.

So anyways, I was saying, I couldn’t fall back to sleep after Fajr. Sometimes I think about stuff that I wish was being written down right when I am thinking it. Not that it’s special or anything, its just that I know when I actually sit to write it down, I wouldn’t be able to word it as nicely as I am doing at that particular moment in my head. 

So I was trying to go back to sleep and this line kept playing itself in my head ‘Everything is funny.’Like, I remember, when I was in skool, O’Levels, I seldom had five rupees for that Hico Apple Ice lolly. It used to be a major issue, I used to like that Ice lolly a lot! And funny thing being I can’t figure out, to date, why I didn’t have it everyday. I know I wasn’t that poor that I couldn’t afford five rupees. Then I also remember, sitting on the side-walk (actually a rain drain) outside skool, waiting in the heat for the van to come to pick us up. Some days it used to take absurdly long and my cousin and I used to walk home. Other days it would be packed with so many kids that you’d wanna tear your way out of it through that thick cloth. Transport used to be an issue back then. Now the whole thing seems nothing but funny.

Then in A’Levels, who would’ve thought crows would ever occupy such a special place in our lives? You’re sitting on a white bench having a nice time, chatting with friends, having lunch and suddenly a crow shits on your head, or your lap, or your bag. So I remember us always watching out for them, having our eyes on the tree branches above for any signs. When spotted we’d spend a lot of time throwing empty juice boxes at them. If unavailable, we would just jump in the air waving our hands ‘shoo-ing’ them away.

And now, someone steals the sign outside the prayer room. We write ‘PRAYER ROOM, GIRLS. KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING’ and paste it outside on the glass. Every week someone steals it. It’s so funny, why would anyone want to steal that sign?

Everything’s funny, life’s so funny, even marriage is funny. Not the act in itself, that’s mighty scary, just the way we go about it, it’s so funny. Everything, every relationship, every friendship, every heart-break episode, everyone who left, everything that didn’t work out. It’s funny.

And the funniest part is, at 50 we’ll all look back and laugh at it, our lives.  But we never appreciate the humor whilst we’re living it.

That’s funny!

There is no pause button in life

But there are days when instead of playing itself in the usual 2x or 4x speed that it does, life slows itself down to 0.5 or perhaps .75x. These physically slow times usually occur in breaks, winters and summers when you’re off from skool, have no pending assignments or public relations to deal with and can sit back and think about things that you usually push to the furthest nook of your mind. The physical slowness is very well made up by the mental fast-ness (which is not even a word.) 

So my brain’s a mush these days and I need to figure things out before skool starts-that’s exactly seven days. I’ve always been someone who lives in fear of things going wrong or maybe not even fear but awaiting things to go wrong. For the past five years I’ve thought, this is not it, there has to be a time when things start to fall apart coz that’s the way it’s been. Harmony doesn’t last too long with me. If I’m happy I wait for the ‘phase’ to wear off and the time to come when I’ll be sad again. That’s the normal state I live in, I feel more comfortable when I’m depressed or have problems that I need to deal with (even if I just sit back and do nothing about them.) That’s normality for me. When things start going smooth I know it’s a transitional period.

Anyways, that’s what’s happening. I’m changing and I’m resisting (for which Allah might be very angry coz He’s finally given-no no, dropped into my very lap-a chance to move on.) But inertia works well for me, once I stop it’s the hardest thing to start, once I start it’s the most painful to stop. I’m too used to being in the dark and maybe I’ve adapted to it or have started liking it-I dunno, but coming out really isn’t as easy as it seems.

Life’s changing and I’m resisting, and I’m fighting and I will fight. There’s no way I’m allowing anyone to make my life as hell as it was from 1999-2004. I’m looking for employment, anyone willing to hire me?

2007

Four days into the new year and I still don’t have a post, isn’t that sad?

The blogging world is slow these days, perhaps due to the holiday season. None of the blogs I read regularly are being updated. I, for that matter, haven’t been too keen on posting stuff either cozza non-commenty visitors. I don’t like visitors who don’t comment

The wedding’s over, so is Eid and all the dinners and parties that were to follow. Life’s back to normal. That’s the thing about life, everything ends. If we are insaan kay puttar, that one realization, and that alone should be enough to make us change how we live.

Mortality: everything ends. One day life will too and what will we do after that?

It’s about time we turned some serious brain wheels on this…