by Shadab Zeest Hashmi
I felt in the pit of my stomach the proximity to my school as the car approached the Air Force base and the diminutive Air Force planes in (almost pretty) earth tones became visible on the runway through the large gates. The car would now turn into the school lane and another day, the stuff of nightmares, would begin for me with the tension stomachache known in Urdu as “twisted stomach.”
The daily assembly at P.A.F school started with the music master leading an uninspired rendition of Iqbal's famous poem “lab peh ati,” a powerful lyric utilizing the classical metaphor of the devoted moth desiring the candle of knowledge; Iqbal's passionate verses warped into the whiney trill of children interested only in live experiments of their own vocal range, utterly oblivious to the poetry. The national anthem was sung, which, being mostly in Farsi, was beyond us Junior School students. In class five I would understand the anthem and admire the beauty of the words, and wonder why it had to be written in the high Urdu that no one understood, not that I would ever want to change the song; the clipped monosyllabic “qom,” “mulk” swelling into a crescendo with the lofty “sul-tan-at,” and drowning into the high note of “Pa-inda ta-binda baad” and then the decrescendo, the softening into a prayer “shaad baad manzil-e-Murad,” roughly translated as “may you happily find your noble destiny,” a prayer like a broken thing, open in its cracks to let in endless sadness— the sadness of an endlessly breaking people.
I was in Prep A, the kindergarten room with the overwhelming aroma of French toast (Pakistani French toast is much “eggier” and sweeter), and Rooh Afza, the super sweet herb drink in little chubby flasks. The smell came from a mountain of lunch boxes in a corner that the ayah arranged and fussed over. Here, in this room I spent one whole year learning little other than the fact that I was too fat to be selected for the role of the coveted “Dolly” for the class play on the annual Sports Day, and I must come to terms with the fact that the role of Miss Polly was good in its own way.