8th May, 1998

I found this piece of paper in the drawer as Azhaan was methodically emptying the contents but throwing things outside randomly. I was about to ignore it and let the maid sweep it away when I picked it up and looked at it to see what it was. Some things are too precious to be lost, particularly memories. And when they’ve been put down on paper, it’s simply amazing to read them nearly eleven years later.

I wanted to scan it and put it up here but the writing is too light and my scanner isn’t working properly for some reason. So i’m just typing it out here.

“The whole of this month, I had been feeling funny. I had weird aches in my legs and I wasn’t feeling myself. Come the end of the month, I realised my periods weren’t coming. Either they were coming late or not at all. I was supposed to get them on 29^th April and here I am, 8^th May with no sign of them. I haven’t been thinking specifically about it but I’ve started becoming more careful. I’m even afraid to sneeze loudly! And it’s time I stopped jumping off beds and other high places.

My friends know and they’re very excited. Mansoor knows of course and he keeps asking me everyday how I feel. He keeps telling me how to carry myself now, how I should walk, and how I should even sleep! He is so tender, sweet and caring, that sometimes I can’t believe it.

Ammi said that we should go to the doctor on Monday. I’m anticipating it excitedly. At the same time I’m nervous and scared. It’s like beginning a journey together. A journey that starts with something so small and lasts a lifetime.”

Reading this made me smile. Eleven years seems like a lifetime in which I’ve grown up, a little too much I feel at times.

I’ve written this when I discovered I was pregnant with Saboor. And at that time I do remember wondering what my baby would be like. There was so much excitement and anticipation! There were times I couldn’t believe I was about to become a mother. And I was just twenty! Saboor is now ten years old, mashallah, and there are times when I look at his face and cannot remember the baby he was. There’s so much fighting going on between him and me regarding his studies and exams that I guess I needed to read this to realise that he’s still my baby and will always be.

It’s also nice to know that at one time in my life I did not feel as jaded as I feel sometimes now. At times I feel that that girl is still there inside me. Just that in my busy life, I have pushed her out somewhere and don’t even want to think of her. Anyways, I’m glad I decided that blogging about this was not a waste of time when I could have been doing thousand different things that need to be done. Another ten years later that scrap of paper may not be there but this will remain.

Almost there

Phew! We are almost half way through the exams and I cannot wait for this month to get over! I never felt this way about my own exams so its a surprising and annoying thing to feel.

Everyday Sab comes back from school saying that he left a few questions and I inwardly dread, wondering how many of the questions he has attempted and actually got right? Gosh…

People whose kids study well or who sail through school look like they’ve got it so easy. But they probably have problems of their own.

At times I wonder if Saboor has ADHD which is some Attention Deficit H-something Disorder….i don’t know much about it and I probably ought to read up a little more. But I think most kids suffer through that agony during exams when one thousand and one things other than their studies will seem fascinating to them.

Well, we’re almost there now, just four more exams left and then the agony of waiting for the results! Gosh, there are times when I wonder if he’s writing his fourth std exams or his ICSE board exams….the way I have been after him! I have completely gone back on my own principles of not pressuring him because being laid back and taking it easy has not been very helpful at all.

100 Books we’re supposed to read…or supposed to have read???

Ok Lubi, this one’s from your blog. I’m not up to blogging much these days, too much going on to document here, but this I can manage.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – Yes

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – No

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – No (but I have it with me!)

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling- Yes

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – Yes

6 The Qur’an/ The Bible/ Your Holy Book – Yes

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – Yes

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell – No

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman – No

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – Yes

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – Yes

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy – Yes

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller – No

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – No (not complete)

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – No

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien -No

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk – No

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger – Yes

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – No

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot – No (have this one too)

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – Yes

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald – Yes

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens – No

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – No

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – No

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh – No

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – No

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck – Yes

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – Yes

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame – Yes

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy – No

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – No

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis – No

34 Emma – Jane Austen – Yes

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen – Yes

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – Yes

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini – Yes

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres Mais – No

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden – Yes

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – Yes

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell – Yes

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – Yes

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – No

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving – No

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins – No

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery – Yes

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy – No

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood – No

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding – No

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan – No

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel – Yes

52 Dune – Frank Herbert – No

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons – No

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – Yes

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth – No

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon – No

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens – Yes

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – Yes

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Yes

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – No

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – No

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov – No

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt – No

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold – No

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas – Yes

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac – No

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy – Yes

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding – Yes

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie – No

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville – No

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – Yes

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker – No

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – Yes

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson – No

75 Ulysses – James Joyce – No

76 The Inferno – Dante – No

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome – No

78 Germinal – Emile Zola – No

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray – No

80 Possession – AS Byatt – Yes

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – Yes

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell – No

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker – Yes

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro – No

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert – Yes

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry – Yes

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – Yes

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom – No

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – No (not all)

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton – Yes

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – Yes

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery – No

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks – No

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams – No

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole – No

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute – No

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – No

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare – Yes

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl – Yes

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo – No

Some days…

All days are made by Allah. They become special to us because of the significance we attach to them because of the events that take place on those days. Birthdays and anniversaries are like that. Just some days, ordinary days, turned into something important.

On March 5th, it was my birthday. My 31st birthday. I got up feeling low, not because I was getting older, but because Mansoor had not been keeping well and had a kidney stone problem resolved just the previous day. And to top it all, at 2 am in the night, my mother in law called and told us that Muneer chacha was not feeling well, and she wanted me to open the door and give the car keys to Parvez bhai so he could take chacha to the hospital.(They live upstairs only and chacha’s house is very close from ours)

So, all this was weighing heavily on my mind and I wasn’t even in the mood to receive birthday wishes. For the first time in my life I was not completely happy on my birthday and for some moments I realised that wishing someone on their birthday seems so fake. I mean, what did they do to get born? People should wish the mothers who brought them into the world…and so what if its your birthday? big deal….you’ve just used up one more year allotted to you in this life….yeah i know..depressing right? That was my frame of mind when Mansoor and I went to see Chacha in the hospital.

The drive to Wockhardt was long and tiring and when we reached there, we couldnt take kids inside so we went inside in turns. Chachi was sitting outside looking weary and worried. I was surprised when the guard outside the ICU let me inside. Chacha had suffered from a massive heart attack and he was apparently better. But when I popped in, he looked tired and was sleeping, so I didn’t disturb him. I crept back outside and then after sometime we got back home after picking up Sab from the school.

That afternoon Mansoor gave me three gifts and although I was pleased with the perfume(J’adore), wrist watch (don’t recall the name but it was a fancy Paris brand) and a pair of sunglasses by Versacce. I know!!! I’m thrilled with the gifts but again there was that feeling of heaviness which I tried to subdue by yelling at Sab to get down to studying.

Ammi called and said that she was going to the hospital again and Jun, Sidra, Uroosa will come to my house. Since there wasn’t anything at home, I went to nearby Anand Sweets with Mansoor to get something. He was in the car and I was inside when he messaged me saying that chacha was critical. I was shocked. I decided not to buy anything and just went back home with Mansoor where we decided to go to the hospital.

On our way there, we heard that Chacha passed away. It was a big shock to all of us because none of us expected it to happen like that.

In the hospital, I saw ammi and my mother in law (chacha is her brother) crying and I went inside the ICU. I can never forget the scene I saw there. Safwan(chacha’s younger son) was holding chacha’s head, he covered chacha’s head with his body and he was blubbering, ‘Abbu, abbu’, and chachi looked stunned..she was holding chacha’s hand, she was touching his feet, touching his chest, and finally she put her head on his feet. She refused to let anyone comfort her.

We went to Vellore that night with everyone and the funeral was yesterday. The atmosphere was very emotional and all that crying has left each one of us exhausted. Chacha was buried early this morning, after his older son Ovais arrived from Australia. I cannot begin to describe how the situation was when he came to meet his mother.

Anyway, we got back here this morning and its back to life for us. For chachi however, it seems like life has come to a standstill.

It is so odd, how some days become important for us simply because someone was born…and because someone died.