It’s one thing that when you go back to your hometown after a year abroad, people are surprised you know not only how to fluently speak the native language but also write it. What a surprise one and a half year of college in the US hasn’t made me forgotten the Arabic script Urdu embodies, a language I practiced everyday for thirteen years! It’s a whole other thing, when one of your own friends abroad tells you you aren’t a true representation of your hometown because you haven’t spent enough time there during your teenage years.
I have always envied, and seldom admired people my age, who live outside of their hometown, don’t face identity issues. Maybe this is just an assumption I draw because they never share the issues they may have or because they are simply insensitive towards the issues other people might be facing. This animosity rises from the fact that most youngsters I meet perceive the whole notion of searching for an identity as foreign. Hometown means different things to different people, and I associate mine with the place where I was born, where I made the most special memories of my life. The city where I started school, where I got my first period, where I listened to my first album, where I got my first pet, where I had my first kiss, had my first cigarette, where I wrote my first journal entry, took my first photograph, where I smoked my first joint.
As someone who moved around a lot, I still pause and think for a while when a stranger looks me in the eye with sheer curiosity and asks “what is home for you?” Sometimes home is merely a state of mind; a place I have known for several years can feel like home, and sometimes cities I have never been to feel like home.
But my hometown, that, is ingrained in me. It’s felt when I crave Kashmiri Chai in the middle of the night, when I mistake a bird flying for a kite and I’m reminded me of the scorching summer afternoons I spent on the roof holding the reel while my elbow ached, waiting desperately for my turn to fly the kite, it’s felt when I look at graffiti in the alleys of New York and nostalgia about my the cold nights my cousins and I spent sneaking out vandalizing public property in my grandma’s neighborhood washes over me, and it was definitely felt when crude swear words I hadn’t uttered since the summer of sixth grade when I had spent way too many days hanging out with the bad neighborhood kids bounced and smacked against the walls of my cranium as I stormed out of the house tonight after arguing with a friend who had tried to taken the city out of me. “You aren’t a true Lahori,” he had asserted.
Is anyone a true Lahori? Who is a true Lahori and what makes me any less Lahori? The fact that I would prefer pasta over chapati any day? I think what makes Lahore so beautiful in the first place is the vast variety of individuals that live there, have lived there, or dreamed about living there. If everyone dressed the same and ate the same food it would be boring and mundane. And this idea of not feeling a sense of belonging because you don’t fit into a certain stereotypical image of that place, simply stems from insecurity and ignorance. Everybody has their own notion of a hometown and it doesn’t have to be a place where they spent the most time, or made the most wonderful memories, it doesn’t have to be a fixed place either. My version of Lahore might be different from the next person’s but that’s because we all have different experiences, and choose to interpret them in different ways, and some selective ones that we very consciously create in order to set our mark upon the city, in order to honor the city with a certain rite of passage. It’s true, I don’t go to Lahore often, sometimes I actively avoid going there, but each time I do visit my hometown a tacit exchange established over the years takes between us. A spark to revive our love story. I give the city something to remember me by, and it gives me a memory I can hold on to till our next reunion.
Helsinki Marcel 