“Why are you stepping on me?” I hollered at my sister, realizing quite well she didn’t do it purposely. It had been one month since the beginning of load shedding in Islamabad. Everyday at eight o’clock in the evening the electricity went away and darkness enveloped the city like a cozy blanket. Oddly enough, people came out when the lights went out. “To catch some fresh air,” was the disguised way some humans lived to catch some part of “their” share. With crime rate soaring and the recent assassination of Benazir Bhutto I could sense the growing concern of my parents over getting the visas to USA. Although our visas were nonimmigrant G-1 visas that had nothing to do with the current happenings, my father, who we call Abu, had engraved in our minds that getting the visas certainly depended on the current state of our country. Abu, who had worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan for twenty-five years, was much observant when it came to foreign relations. It wasn’t only my parents who were desperate to leave behind the fear and impoverished life, but all my siblings and I were as equally eager as my parents to come to New York City.
The long wait for the visas ended on December 29, 2007 when a call from the American Consulate informed us that four passports among the eight were ready for pickup. It wasn’t too long before we received the remaining passports with everyone in our family immediately flipping the crisp pages to see the visa. From then on most of the time was spent sorting out the things we would drag to the airport.
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Both my parents are from Karak, a poor District with almost every house made from mud.
We all went to my parents’ hometown, Karak, before our eighteen-hour long journey to New York. After saying good-byes to people, many of whom I didn’t know as they were my parents old friends, it hit me that my family was in fact moving. The week stay ended with much departing cries and hugs from my grandmothers, who never having travelled to far-flung cities in other countries were always questioning what it was that the land of Pakistan lacked. I couldn’t ward off what my grandma had said, “We reap the best crops, we have cultivated a rich culture, and after discovering much of the world outside, I hope you will appreciate this land with pride.”
Pakistan and its neighboring countries.
Everyone was lethargic from the stiff bus-ride from Karak to Islamabad, and the preparation for the departing day was pressing on. The final day, January 27, 2008, arrived and at two in the morning we left home to get to the airport in Rawalpindi. The six o’clock flight to Karachi was quick and soon we were off to New York. The plane ride itself was nothing much than sitting on a chair for hours and playing video games. Like everything else in life, the plane ride ended. When we came out of the terminal, I was surprised that it was still January 27 and we had actually gained 9 hours. That was my first and only encounter of what you might call travelling back in time. Some officials from the Permanent Mission of Pakistan to the UN were there to pick us, and after gathering our luggage we were dropped at our new home.
I attended W.C. Bryant High School in Queens.
Unlike many school-going kids, my sibling and I didn’t have the initial anxiety of fitting into a new school, a new city, and a new country. This was partly because it was not the first time as we had moved to Colombo, Peshawar, and Moscow before. Nevertheless, life did became different as school hours were longer; water tasted saltier despite how many times my know-it-all sister insisted that it was the cleanest in the world and food lacked the taste we once had known. New York City with its diverse population soon made me realize that the world can exist without setting boundaries between nations.
Photos courtesy of Google
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