How Red Sneakers Changed My Life

Frere Hall, Karachi There’s something unforgettable about Karachi. There’s something raw and sensuous about this city, something that unfailingly tugs at my heart and always manages to hit a nerve. It is my home town after all. The sight of a familiar restaurant or just the sun setting over the city is enough to draw out memories I thought I’d had enough of. When we’re driving down Shahrah-e-Faisal, past the surprisingly tidy roadsides and the palm trees swaying in the ever-present Karachi breeze, and we pass the PAF Museum flags fluttering in the cool air and the railway track beyond which is easy to miss (unless of course, if there is a train barreling down it) and the green shrubbery-probably the only greenery you’ll be seeing for a while-then on past the formidable Air Force Base gates flanked by armed guards and the Quranic verse inscribed on one of them ‘…prepare any strength you can muster against them’ which never ceases to impress me, I feel an overwhelming emotion r

I feel I should go to Norfolk Virginia and drink gin with sailors on leave from the Alabama , talking baseball and Polaris missiles and Steve Martin movies, another gin with lime juice, then Balto, Balto, hitch-hike in and out of Baltimore for days back and forth for days in a row discussing the jobs of whoever gives me rides, salesmen, shippers, small-time dispatchers of the much that can be dispatched. For the ACTUALITY of it! Books dominate my head. I read in them, I read at them, I'm well into my thirties. What about real life? The woman in the light-blue skirt on the cigarette billboard has such big thighs! What is it about thighs? Smooth and weighty, weighty and smooth: you can tell there's really something there. And to think that the woman must really exist, it's a photo after all not  a painting, she is somewhere in America - and to think that some guy gets to lie down on her and her thighs…She's a model, she probabl

Today is the 25th of December, the Quaid-e-Azam's birthday and Christmas. I've gotta admit I haven't been feeling too good today. I'm trying to be optimistic, I'm trying to think positive, I'm trying to convince myself there's hope for this country yet. But maybe I'm being a gullible fool, thinking that this country can miraculously pull out of the downward economic, lawless spiral it's gotten sucked into.  Consider this,11 people died in Karachi today according to Dawn.com ( http://dawn.com/2012/12/25/karachi-violence-claims-seven-lives-3/ ), but that's nothing unusual, right? Pick up the City News ANY DAY of the week, and rest assured you'll find at least three or four violent deaths (murders? target killings? Is there a difference?), if not more. And it's always the same 'two unknown armed men on a motorcycle' who descend out of nowhere, do their dirty work and always manage to 'escape', to 'flee the scene of the

Where to begin? I haven’t written about anything that’s happened for too long. I’ve probably been MIA from my own journal for a year or so, okay, fine at least half a year. Sometime during 2012, I stopped turning my thoughts and emotions into words. I suppose this implies that I’m not an emotional wreck anymore.  At least, I’m more stable than I used to be, Alhamdulillah. My emotions aren’t much of a rollercoaster ride either, and that’s because I made a much-needed internal change. I made an effort to return to Allah SWT and THAT has made all the difference in the world. Obviously, I’m not the person I used to be. And I slowly begin to see the pieces of my life falling into place, like a clouded up picture that’s beginning to clear. I won’t say I’m in a position to see it completely, but I perceive the shape it’s likely to take on at the end, Inshaa Allah. When I started my blog, and wrote that first post talking about how it was going to be a story where red sneakers changed my