Samia Altaf is a public health physician with an M.P.H. degree from the University of California at Berkeley. She was the 2007 Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. and is the author, of So Much Aid So Little Development: Stories from Pakistan published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 2011. Her social commentaries on the role of older women in South Asia aired on WUNC Chapel Hill, a station affiliated with National Public Radio. Email: samiaaltaf [at] hotmail.com
by Samia Altaf My son, it was reassuring to talk to you. We’re lucky that communication has become so easy, though I’d rather hold your dear face in my hands. They’re quite a miracle, aren’t they, these phone calls, especially in these terrible times when one does not know what is going to happen to…
by Samia Altaf “Will we survive this?” my husband asks me as we lounge around the living room, glued to our laptops. “We are in the vulnerable group.” I look up at a bald man with thinning gray tufts over his ears, peering anxiously at me over black-rimmed glasses. Yes, we are certainly in the…
by Samia Altaf Over the past week, Pakistan has been consumed by the Aurat (Women’s) March, which was held today, March 8, International Women’s Day, in all the major cities of the country. The march’s aim is to highlight the continued discrimination, inequality, and harassment suffered by women. There are some people against it who…
by Samia Altaf Some months ago, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I went to my bank’s ATM in the main market close to where I live in the Defence Housing Authority, Lahore’s latest fancy suburb, which is organized and managed by the military. The market, usually bustling, was quiet that day. There was barely anyone…
by Samia Altaf When we were young and living in Sialkot, we went frequently, almost once a week, to Lahore, the grand and hip city just a two-hour drive away. The trips were ostensibly for some real work—father, a district court lawyer, was appearing in a case being heard in the High Court or, his…
by Samia Altaf Baiji, my grandmother, was the custodian of standards of behavior of young women in the family. How to comport oneself — sit, stand, speak, eat—were strictly prescribed according to her rules of what was “proper” practice for girls. These rules did not apply to young men and boys. Although I found most…
by Samia Altaf I could not believe my luck when I woke up this morning. It had rained last night, but this morning the sky was blue the breeze gentle,and the wild grass along the smelly sluggish, open sewer that meanders through the swanky Defense Housing Authority—home to lush golf courses and palatial villas—past the…
by Samia Altaf I was perhaps ten years old when I had unending cups of Eatmore’s fresh handmade mango ice cream while sitting on the lawns of Services Club Sialkot. It was one of the brightest days of my life, with my parents all to myself, undistracted by the demands of their daily doings, and…
by Samia Altaf Last night I dreamed I was on my way to the tailor’s in the H-Block market to pick up the outfit that Mrs. Obama was to wear at President Obama’s second inauguration. The State Department official who was to transport it in the diplomatic pouch was on the tarmac waiting in the…
by Samia Altaf Soon after President Obama moved into the White House, Mrs. Obama set up her vegetable garden. She planted tubers like carrots and turnips, leafy veggies such as spinach and kale, and herbs—thyme, sage, mint, and whatnot. But she did not plant beets. Why? I was quite perplexed and tried to find out…
by Samia Altaf In May 2014, a young man beat his twenty-year-old sister, Farzana, to death by hitting her head with a brick. He did this in broad daylight just outside the High Court building in Lahore, the cultural, artistic and academic capital of Pakistan. He did it as local policemen and passersby looked on,…
by Samia Altaf After an anxious and grey winter, the gloom of an unraveling economy, topped by the ominous beating of war drums, spring arrived in Punjab and Lahore’s academies and activists put aside their concerns to celebrate Women’s International Day on March 8. Amidst the blooming of flowers and the heady fragrance of newly…
by Samia Altaf “Let’s go look at the flowers outside,” I say, as I sense Dad sinking into the recesses of his fading memory. I wheel him out. Look at the petunias. What a riot—purple, pink, white, that ordinary pedestrian flower in such abundant glory. I hold a bunch to his nose and he takes…
by Samia Altaf In October of 2014, a bunch of young men and women did their university proud. A couple of engineers, two finance graduates, a biology major, some finishing accounting and business degrees, and a clutch from the school of humanities and social sciences; Muslims mostly, two Christians, a lone Hindu, one Buddhist wannabe,…
by Samia Altaf Mandra health center, outside Islamabad, on this spring morning, without the cacophony and confusion of health centers in the city, was the picture of serenity. An emaciated woman of indeterminate age sits coughing in the corridor, in a chair that bears the logo of the United States Agency for International Development, next…
by Samia Altaf Actors come to each role in a new film bearing the stamp of their old ones so they are richer and more interesting in the new incarnation—the whole more than the sum of the parts. Just last week one saw Nargis as the innocent and naive mountain girl pining away for the…
by Samia Altaf Part 1 of this essay is here. Pakistani cinema of the nineteen-sixties was active and vibrant, its death knell still a decade away. Memorable movies were made and ran for weeks—Do Ansoo, a silver jubilee hit from fifties, Heera Aur Pathar, Ghunghat, Chakori amongst others, and, of course, the great hit Armaan.…
by Samia Altaf In the 1960s, in the sleepy little city of Sialkot, almost in no-man’s land between India and Pakistan and of little significance except for its large cantonment and its factories of surgical instruments and sports goods, there were two cinema houses, all within a mile of our house, No. 3 Kutchery Road.…
by Samia Altaf “This girl will never be able to find a husband,” declared Baiji, big mother, my maternal grandmother, soon after she took her first look at me. “Hai hai,” she almost beat her chest, “look at her, just look.” She points at me holding herself back as if from a contaminant, appealing to…
by Samia Altaf Six months before she died, Saleema, my 85-year-old mother, still in relatively good health – she did have breast cancer and Hepatitis-C, the one in remission, the other inactive – became obsessed with the quality of her grave. “You will throw my corpse on a rubbish heap for all I know,” she…