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Nov 15, 2023

The Flat Places of Pakistan: Solving the Riddle of Childhood

Posted June 6, 2023

Posted June 6, 2023 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

Part One of Two

From Pakistan, two flat landscapes stay with me. One outside our house, one inside it.

Outside: The green misted fields glimpsed from the car window, stretching out wide and far away, on my way to school.

And inside: the flat stone floors of the house. I can still feel them against my cheek, under my hands. Caramel-coloured marble blocks, each just under a metre square. They were embedded with grey and white and pale blue pebbles, and sheared perfectly smooth: joined together with dark grey frosted glass. In the heat of the day, every day, I lay on that cold floor, moving my hands over it slowly, in small circles and in large ones.

When I stare at any flat landscape now, I get the same feeling of coolness: in my throat, in my hands, and at the back of my neck. My gaze loops over and over the stark surface. It feels like rubbing my hands over a smooth table, or a cold sheet of ice. But very few things in nature are truly, perfectly flat. As my eye roves, I know I’m seeking something. Will there be a flaw, a knot, a gnarl, to break the surface? Half of me hopes I’ll never find one. Half of me goes on searching, uneasily.

Something went wrong in my life, years ago. A knot or a gnarl, embedded somewhere, which must have sent everything strange. But I can't seem to find it.

The memory theorist Douwe Draaisma argues that we only remember things that are aberrations from the normal. I can't remember what happened to me because it was the substance of my normal. But one of my clearest memories is of lying on that stone floor. Ants crawled across it, just as lizards crawled up the walls and cockroaches roamed the bathroom, and frogs sheltered in the kitchen cupboards. I put my hands flat on the ground, index fingers and thumbs forming the shape of an ace of spades, trapping an ant. It blundered around this new wall, trying to find a way out until eventually it gave up and climbed up onto my hand. I lifted my hand and watched the ant crawling down my arm, round and round. My hair prickles at the memory of it biting, again and again.

It's important to say that my life in Pakistan was unusual. It was an odd life compared to British lives, but for Pakistan, too, it was an unusual life. My father put his two big hands on the ground around us, and we crawled around inside. If I remember the floor more clearly than anything, it's because for thirteen years that was my world. The cold marble; the fluorescent lights; the dusty smell of the chicken wire over the windows. In the summers, when there was no school, months could go past without us leaving the two rooms on the upper floor of our house. My mother, my three sisters, and me: Rabbit, Spot, and Forget-Me-Not. Those aren't their real names, but I think you could have guessed that.

No one else I knew lived like this. Many, many Muslim and Pakistani women have rich, juicy, vital lives, integrated with other people, fulfilling their ambitions. But also, many don't, because Pakistani society lets things go both ways. In particular, it turns a blind eye to anything that happens between fathers and daughters.

My father was a doctor, and the eldest son in his family: in charge at work and at home. He specialized in diabetes, which afflicts nearly a fifth of the Pakistani population. By all accounts, he did it very, very well. ‘Oh, you’re Dr. Anwar's daughter!’ my teachers would exclaim. I squirmed. His intelligence was impatient, fitful, and indifferent to rules; he skirted and tore through the tedious twists of bureaucracy which colonization had left hanging around our country like cobwebs. He became known as a genius, a maverick, doing what he thought best and never asking for permission, in the way that men are allowed to do all over the world. Anyone who disagreed with him, he thought, was stupid and ignorant. And he had a specific disdain for Pakistan: what he saw as its inefficiency, slowness, and superstition.

‘I don't worship Allah,’ he used to say, smiling. ‘I worship my god, Apollo.’

My father was an Anglophile who despised most other Pakistanis. It became part of his mythology. ‘Dr. Anwar is so rude,’ his patients would say lovingly, ‘but such a great man.’ He wore very fine Western suits, and leather shoes which he would have me fetch and polish and slide onto his feet. He shaved his beard and trimmed his mustache; he took the top off a water cooler and used it to brew illegal cider in our bathtub. He made us taste the results. The alcohol ran warm down my throat and pooled in my stomach.

The great man was a megalomaniac and a fantasist. He’d done work for the president, he told us. For the army. When you’re as good as I am, he said, you can do whatever you want. And ironically, despite my father's Westernization, only Pakistan would handle him deferentially enough for his tastes. Only its glitching, dropping rhythms—lurching from crisis to crisis—would let him dodge through the system without answering to anybody.

Other people don't understand, my father told us. Stay away from them. He loathed the weddings, the visits, and the community relationships that formed the glue of Pakistani society. If we spoke to the neighbours, or went to our friends’ houses, they’d only start asking for favours and taking up his time. So that wasn't allowed.

To his credit, he never complained about having four girls and no boys. ‘My girls are my boys,’ he used to tell people who hinted delicately at our family's tragedy. We would be every bit as good, he decided. We’d be doctors and engineers and mathematicians. Our hair was cut short, straight across our heads, and we were kept away from other children. Instead, shut inside, we were tested. Maths. Physics. Lateral thinking. And more abstract things: Can you identify your sisters by the scent of their pillows? Can you solve this riddle? If I put you up high, so high that you freeze with fear, can you work out how to climb down?

I always failed.