A Bit About Me

Just Me

There’s not much more you can say about me than you can about the average teenager attending college and living with his family on the outskirts of New York bordering New Jersey.  I was born in a small Pakistani city, where I stayed until I was about two.  We moved to the country’s capital afterwards, stayed there for three years, only to settle back in my birth city.  It was then that we immigrated to the United States, a transition that, as a student, proved fairly easy.  Having studied in a school based on Canadian standards back in Pakistan, grasping the English language didn’t prove difficult.  Also, those same schools were rigorous and had given me enough of a standing that education did not prove to be a challenge for nearly four years.  It was then that I found algebra, the most difficult and exciting subject for me, even today.  At the end of the day, all other classes took second seat to math, which still doesn’t come easy to me.
Sometimes, however, life goes beyond just liking mathematics.  A brilliant literature professor of mine had once said that only when we grow to the highest levels of our being do our lives become tragedies; on the lower levels, they are just comedies.  The transition in academics may have proven easy but adaptation to a culture so utterly different from what I had grown up in was quite the opposite.  Many times, this clash proved to be a simple skid along the edge, one that tends to tickle more than hurt.  When I would accidentally start speaking in urdu in the middle of sentences, when I would refer to cursing as “abusing,” when I would be shocked by how easily young couples kissed in public and avoid an awkward moment with my parents by thoroughly pretending that I had just, magically, managed to miss what was right in front of all of us.  All those times could easily be defined as the comedy moments of my life.  Yet, there was a tragedy there because I realized that these things weren’t comedies for my parents.  I knew that every time they heard a curse, every time they saw young couples kissing on the street, every time they heard me speak English, there was a fear in their hearts that I would become part of that culture which they could never be a part of and would thus be torn from them.  I grew up seeing that fear in their eyes and, to this day, I do everything I can to assure them nothing like that will happen, to prove that I can forget urdu and speak only English but I will not forget that I am not allowed to curse, no matter what the language I use, and I am not allowed to have a girlfriend, no matter what the country I reside in.  My comedy is my parents’ tragedy, and that as why I really can’t laugh at these things because I know behind them lies the grim truth my parents have to face right around the corner every day.