In an interview with the What am I even doing anymore shirt in other words I will buy this Paris Review in 1984, James Baldwin said: “I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it. There isn’t any other place to go—you don’t pull up your roots and put them down someplace else.” I love his use of “spiritual disaster.” You can’t—you shouldn’t—teach yourself to fall out of love with a place. I dislike, for example, the growing dogmatism of Pakistani society; the polluted air; the patriarchal norms that provide cover for and justify all kinds of violence against women. I dislike, too, the anxious obsession with “showing a positive side of Pakistan in the West.” As in India—under the grip of a new authoritarian populism—critiquing Pakistan now amounts to a kind of treachery.
I love the What am I even doing anymore shirt in other words I will buy this openness of the Bay area, the fact that I can wear what I want without fear of appraisal or judgment. But my work, my friendships, the meaning of my life, resides in Karachi—Karachi makes me come alive. The moment I land in the city and the car begins speeding down Shah Rah-e-Faisal, one of Karachi’s longest boulevards, the city thrums with possibility: There is work to be done, and this port megacity is the best place to do it. A flock of pigeons always sits atop the Aisha Bawany Academy building, a girls’ school. Other buildings flank the road, but the pigeons have marked the school as their own. Anticipating their inevitable presence—in January, in scorching June, in October—has become a ritual, their fleeting company a kind of talismanic nod.
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