It’s good to be back

 

Its good to be back

After an uncomfortable last month in Penn, peppered with a mystifying illness and qualms about returning back to a homeland that had become conspicuously dangerous, I can rest on my comfy sofa now and say that it’s good to be back. I had my doubts on whether I would be able to settle down in Pakistan after having spent two good years in a place with high standards of living and an easy and fast-paced life. Surprisingly, it didn’t take long for me to get into the desi groove. I remember that on my way from the Lahore airport, I had started absorbing all the familiar sights and sounds of the colorful amalgam that Lahore is and my mindset was suddenly re-programmed in a way that Penn and America all of a sudden seemed liked a blurry memory.

I can’t really pin point each and everything that has changed over the past two years in Lahore since I’m still in the assimilation phase but I’ll try to list down some. First, where the headlines of newspapers talked about Musharraf’s latest moves, now have changed to become scorecards on the death toll in the Swat conflict. Market prices of nearly everything have shot up manifold such that a bunch of Rs. 1000/- notes don’t seem heavy in the wallet anymore. Lahore seems more crowded on the road and in the bazaars. Load-shedding, obviously, is on a 12-hour rampage everyday but the gross usage of a UPS (that can power fans and lights during an outage) is also new to me. Nirala Sweets was the king of the valley when it came to bakeries two years ago but now the landscape has changed such that Gourmet bakeries has completely annihilated competition to an extent they are now eyeing to take Nestle out of the Pakistani market. And I haven’t even gotten to the plethora of new cafes, restaurants and outlets that have erupted in the city. On a more personal note, my family shifted to a new house right after I left for the US so seeing my new abode was a pleasant surprise.

Two years is a long time, and things are bound to change. What was of more interest to me was what did NOT change. For example, my family was still the way it was and it was great to see good old friends in the same high spirits. Home still had to offer a five-star hotel service where you can everything from breakfast in bed and multiple helpings of any lavish sub-continental cuisine you desire. The passion for cricket remains the same as you see numerous cricket matches going on as one passes by parks along with the hype of the ongoing Twenty20 World Cup. I got to see the same impatient attitudes of people breaking queues and lines reinforcing the theory that Pakistan was all about the ‘survival of the fittest’. Cell phones were still as cheap as cheap can be and incoming calls are still free. I got to see the same brand of cars (Toyotas and Hondas galore) on the road along with our humongous and cloyingly colored buses that make those ‘Teedi Papa’ noises. DHA still was pretty clean and some other parts still were left decorated with plastic litter.

I guess I was ambivalent about coming back to Pakistan for no reason at all. After all, it’s home. Coming back has made me realize how much I really missed this place despite its imperfections. However, I wonder whether I will have the same sentiments once I start a job here. I guess time will tell. But yes. It’s good to be back. Alhamdulillah.