Sashan
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I ended up in India, oddly, because I could not get to Pakistan. I had lived half my life in Pakistan. Both of my parents are Pakistani, with family roots in and around the city of Lahore as far as either one could see. But I am a citizen of America. I was born in the United States and had spent the other half of my life living in this country. I was a few hours’ drive from New York when the planes struck in September 2001.
Months later, I saw on a college notice board that the American Fulbright program was inviting American applicants to travel and study in countries with large Muslim populations. And so I immediately decided to apply. But I quickly found that there wasn’t an opportunity to go to Pakistan — it was deemed too dangerous.
One day as I looked at a map, pondering where to go, my eyes settled on the mammoth country along Pakistan’s eastern border. It was so opaque to me that it might as well have been a blank space on the map. I did know that in that country of a billion people there were nearly as many Muslims as there were in Pakistan. And so I sent in my application listing the city 300 miles east of Lahore, as my preferred location: Delhi.
I arrived in India in the fall of 2004, at a time when relations between the two South Asian nuclear powers had never been warmer. Pakistan and India had fought four wars, one in nearly every decade since the two countries became independent in 1947, but in the months before my arrival, Pakistan and India inaugurated a bus and a train line connecting Lahore and Delhi. Islamabad and Delhi opened up a nuclear hotline, to expedite the exchange of quick and frank information in case of any misunderstanding regarding the countries’ nuclear weapons. Most important, the two countries had started playing cricket against each other for the first time since the tit-for-tat nuclear weapons tests of 1998.
Still, it was virtually unheard of for a Pakistani civilian to be living in India, or vice versa. A tiny fraction of people from either country would ever get a visa to travel across the border, and even those who did could stay for only a few days at a time. For both Pakistanis and Indians, the neighbor was always like an itch in a phantom limb that could never be scratched.
The technicality of my being an American enabled me to spend a full year in India. Here was an opportunity like none other, and I could not wait to plunge right into it. Looking back, it was that attitude that probably got me in trouble in the first place.
It took me only three days to find an apartment. It was a small studio in the leafy neighborhood of Vasant Vihar, near a block of foreign embassies, and I signed a lease on the spot. My landlord was a towering but jovial Punjabi Sikh man with gray eyes who wore a magnificent blue turban. He didn’t budge much on the price, but he insisted that he had given me a good deal because his grandfather, like mine, was from Lahore.
Early the next morning, I left my apartment to meet a group of local outdoor adventurers for a rock-climbing trip. I had picked up rock climbing years ago, exploring the wilderness of the American Southwest. If passion for cricket was my Pakistani badge, this thrilling and deeply personal adventure sport was my American one. I thought I was going out for the day and so I packed a banana and a water bottle. Little did I know that morning that I would not return to my apartment for almost two weeks.
It was just before noon when I fell off a tall rock face and came crashing to the ground. Caa-rrrack. It sounded like a thick branch snapping off a tree. At first, it didn’t seem like a noise that could have possibly come from a human body. It did not hurt either. But as soon as I tried to stand up, my left leg gave way, and I collapsed to the ground. That’s when I saw that my leg was dangling at a right angle halfway up the shin. Then I saw the rhythmic spurts of blood sprouting through my track pants. The bone had torn right through the skin.
I felt a numbing current run up my body and I began to scream, very loudly. My memories from the next several hours register only in flashes. The horrified faces of the people I had met only hours before crowded into my vision as I lay on my back. I panicked when I realized that I had not learned the name of a single person yet.
Someone wrapped my leg in a dirty insulation pad and I was hauled to and laid out in the backseat of a van. The smell of sweaty climbing shoes stuffed my nostrils and mixed with the metallic taste in my mouth. A woman wearing a parka peered over my face and apologized for the traffic we were apparently stuck in. It was the beginning of Diwali, the most important annual Hindu religious holiday, she explained. Delhi was experiencing some of its worst traffic jams of the year.
When I came to, it was very dark and quiet. My mouth felt like it was lined with thick paper and I had barely enough strength to open my eyes. I saw my left leg suspended in the air, wrapped up in white bandages, lifted off a hospital bed by a wire. “Paani,” I called out for water, using the word common to Urdu and Hindi.
A nurse briskly approached my bedside in the dark and poured water into my mouth with a pipette. “Is it over?” I asked in Urdu. “You need to rest, go back to sleep,” the young female voice instructed me in strongly Indian-accented English.
The doctor who had operated on me walked in the next morning and introduced himself pleasantly as Dr. Dey. I fired all the questions I had been pondering in the hours I had lain there awake and alone. “Will I walk again? Will I walk with a limp? How long will I have to stay in bed?” He told me that I was bedridden for at least eight weeks. It was a long surgery, six hours in total. I had lost many ounces of blood in the hour I was stuck in traffic. I had lost a small piece of my tibia and now had a pound of metal rods and screws inside my leg holding it together. I would have to stay in the hospital for about 10 days.
He didn’t answer my other questions. “You’re very weak right now and you need time to recover,” he said in English. Then scanning the empty room he asked, “Don’t you have anyone coming for you?” I did not tell him that my family was in Pakistan.
I grew weaker with every passing day. I had noticed that the doctors had started to whisper outside the door to my private room. On day five, Dr. Dey burst in, dressed in a white coat, studying a clipboard of notes, and without missing a beat declared, “We need to get blood in you.” He explained that my hemoglobin had dipped below the point where my system could lift it up again on its own. I had hit a slippery slope. “I don’t need it, Dr. Dey,” I lied. “I feel better today.”
He repeated himself, this time looking straight at me. Within minutes, a tall rickety rack was carted over by my bedside and a needle was inserted into my forearm. I traced with my flailing eyeball the stream of ruby-colored blood up to a plump plastic pouch. It sat there, resolutely dripping, one drop at a time, and I felt a chill crawl over me. It was the first time someone else’s blood had run through my body.
I began to shiver and a nurse walked over and placed a blanket over my chest. It was normal to feel cold, she whispered. I didn’t respond. My heart did not even have the energy to race, and I closed my eyes.
In that moment I began imagining, like a movie, a story my mother had told me about her life as a young teenager in Lahore: It was the war of 1965 between India and Pakistan. The fighting on the border was intense. Hundreds were being killed every day, and my mother, only 16 years old at the time, had snuck out to the Mayo Hospital without telling her parents. She wanted to donate blood for the soldiers, but the nurse on duty told her that to do so, she had to be at least 18 years old.
But my mother pleaded with her, begging to take her blood. It was needed badly on the battlefield and so, eventually, the nurse gave in. My mother had watched with satisfaction as the soft plastic pouch full of her deep purple blood was carted off to another room to be spilled elsewhere on the land. I opened my eyes now, to see myself in India receiving the blood of an Indian.
This essay has been excerpted from “The Faithful Scribe: A Story of Islam, Pakistan, Family and War,” Shahan Mufti’s memoir of Pakistan. Mr. Mufti has written for Harper’s magazine, Grantland, Bloomberg Businessweek and The New York Times Magazine.
http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013...ed-a-young-pakistani-in-delhi/?ref=world&_r=0
Months later, I saw on a college notice board that the American Fulbright program was inviting American applicants to travel and study in countries with large Muslim populations. And so I immediately decided to apply. But I quickly found that there wasn’t an opportunity to go to Pakistan — it was deemed too dangerous.
One day as I looked at a map, pondering where to go, my eyes settled on the mammoth country along Pakistan’s eastern border. It was so opaque to me that it might as well have been a blank space on the map. I did know that in that country of a billion people there were nearly as many Muslims as there were in Pakistan. And so I sent in my application listing the city 300 miles east of Lahore, as my preferred location: Delhi.
I arrived in India in the fall of 2004, at a time when relations between the two South Asian nuclear powers had never been warmer. Pakistan and India had fought four wars, one in nearly every decade since the two countries became independent in 1947, but in the months before my arrival, Pakistan and India inaugurated a bus and a train line connecting Lahore and Delhi. Islamabad and Delhi opened up a nuclear hotline, to expedite the exchange of quick and frank information in case of any misunderstanding regarding the countries’ nuclear weapons. Most important, the two countries had started playing cricket against each other for the first time since the tit-for-tat nuclear weapons tests of 1998.
Still, it was virtually unheard of for a Pakistani civilian to be living in India, or vice versa. A tiny fraction of people from either country would ever get a visa to travel across the border, and even those who did could stay for only a few days at a time. For both Pakistanis and Indians, the neighbor was always like an itch in a phantom limb that could never be scratched.
The technicality of my being an American enabled me to spend a full year in India. Here was an opportunity like none other, and I could not wait to plunge right into it. Looking back, it was that attitude that probably got me in trouble in the first place.
It took me only three days to find an apartment. It was a small studio in the leafy neighborhood of Vasant Vihar, near a block of foreign embassies, and I signed a lease on the spot. My landlord was a towering but jovial Punjabi Sikh man with gray eyes who wore a magnificent blue turban. He didn’t budge much on the price, but he insisted that he had given me a good deal because his grandfather, like mine, was from Lahore.
Early the next morning, I left my apartment to meet a group of local outdoor adventurers for a rock-climbing trip. I had picked up rock climbing years ago, exploring the wilderness of the American Southwest. If passion for cricket was my Pakistani badge, this thrilling and deeply personal adventure sport was my American one. I thought I was going out for the day and so I packed a banana and a water bottle. Little did I know that morning that I would not return to my apartment for almost two weeks.
It was just before noon when I fell off a tall rock face and came crashing to the ground. Caa-rrrack. It sounded like a thick branch snapping off a tree. At first, it didn’t seem like a noise that could have possibly come from a human body. It did not hurt either. But as soon as I tried to stand up, my left leg gave way, and I collapsed to the ground. That’s when I saw that my leg was dangling at a right angle halfway up the shin. Then I saw the rhythmic spurts of blood sprouting through my track pants. The bone had torn right through the skin.
I felt a numbing current run up my body and I began to scream, very loudly. My memories from the next several hours register only in flashes. The horrified faces of the people I had met only hours before crowded into my vision as I lay on my back. I panicked when I realized that I had not learned the name of a single person yet.
Someone wrapped my leg in a dirty insulation pad and I was hauled to and laid out in the backseat of a van. The smell of sweaty climbing shoes stuffed my nostrils and mixed with the metallic taste in my mouth. A woman wearing a parka peered over my face and apologized for the traffic we were apparently stuck in. It was the beginning of Diwali, the most important annual Hindu religious holiday, she explained. Delhi was experiencing some of its worst traffic jams of the year.
When I came to, it was very dark and quiet. My mouth felt like it was lined with thick paper and I had barely enough strength to open my eyes. I saw my left leg suspended in the air, wrapped up in white bandages, lifted off a hospital bed by a wire. “Paani,” I called out for water, using the word common to Urdu and Hindi.
A nurse briskly approached my bedside in the dark and poured water into my mouth with a pipette. “Is it over?” I asked in Urdu. “You need to rest, go back to sleep,” the young female voice instructed me in strongly Indian-accented English.
The doctor who had operated on me walked in the next morning and introduced himself pleasantly as Dr. Dey. I fired all the questions I had been pondering in the hours I had lain there awake and alone. “Will I walk again? Will I walk with a limp? How long will I have to stay in bed?” He told me that I was bedridden for at least eight weeks. It was a long surgery, six hours in total. I had lost many ounces of blood in the hour I was stuck in traffic. I had lost a small piece of my tibia and now had a pound of metal rods and screws inside my leg holding it together. I would have to stay in the hospital for about 10 days.
He didn’t answer my other questions. “You’re very weak right now and you need time to recover,” he said in English. Then scanning the empty room he asked, “Don’t you have anyone coming for you?” I did not tell him that my family was in Pakistan.
I grew weaker with every passing day. I had noticed that the doctors had started to whisper outside the door to my private room. On day five, Dr. Dey burst in, dressed in a white coat, studying a clipboard of notes, and without missing a beat declared, “We need to get blood in you.” He explained that my hemoglobin had dipped below the point where my system could lift it up again on its own. I had hit a slippery slope. “I don’t need it, Dr. Dey,” I lied. “I feel better today.”
He repeated himself, this time looking straight at me. Within minutes, a tall rickety rack was carted over by my bedside and a needle was inserted into my forearm. I traced with my flailing eyeball the stream of ruby-colored blood up to a plump plastic pouch. It sat there, resolutely dripping, one drop at a time, and I felt a chill crawl over me. It was the first time someone else’s blood had run through my body.
I began to shiver and a nurse walked over and placed a blanket over my chest. It was normal to feel cold, she whispered. I didn’t respond. My heart did not even have the energy to race, and I closed my eyes.
In that moment I began imagining, like a movie, a story my mother had told me about her life as a young teenager in Lahore: It was the war of 1965 between India and Pakistan. The fighting on the border was intense. Hundreds were being killed every day, and my mother, only 16 years old at the time, had snuck out to the Mayo Hospital without telling her parents. She wanted to donate blood for the soldiers, but the nurse on duty told her that to do so, she had to be at least 18 years old.
But my mother pleaded with her, begging to take her blood. It was needed badly on the battlefield and so, eventually, the nurse gave in. My mother had watched with satisfaction as the soft plastic pouch full of her deep purple blood was carted off to another room to be spilled elsewhere on the land. I opened my eyes now, to see myself in India receiving the blood of an Indian.
This essay has been excerpted from “The Faithful Scribe: A Story of Islam, Pakistan, Family and War,” Shahan Mufti’s memoir of Pakistan. Mr. Mufti has written for Harper’s magazine, Grantland, Bloomberg Businessweek and The New York Times Magazine.
http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013...ed-a-young-pakistani-in-delhi/?ref=world&_r=0
