Solitude City—Lahore Diaries

Fatima Ijaz The author visits her parental house in Lahore, and witnesses the kaleidoscope of memories and musings that her stay unleashes.

1.

There’s a door that leads to the heart of the matter. I left it open, so you could come into the sunlight, which is filtering in steady, sturdy. I am inside my parents’ house, after some years in America. Would you care to visit me here? Where my belongings are scattered in rays of hope and bewilderment intertwined in objects. My father made tea in the morning in a small silver pot. He offered me boiling water to pour into my cup of coffee beans. My mother has been laughing with her maid over how the maid sleeps in multiple blankets all night, alternately sharing with her children and husband.

Earlier this morning, when the sting of waking up fell upon my senses, I realized I was alone. It was a trick of time, a shade of violet disquiet. I looked for my phone with hands that thumped on an absence, several absences. I realized later it was plugged in to the switch some distance away from the bed. I sighed into the pillow. This time, I really woke up.

I have been thinking of how a cat survives alone inside her black body. Just physical sensations—hunger, strolling or the like—keeping her intimate company. She moves on from the encounter with the black-blue big male cat a few nights ago. She comes of her own. She is more drawn to the ball of thread, more inclined to playing with the sun on her glistening black body.

Conception by Sana Arjumand

Winter has just softly approached the house in the smog city, being called the ‘world’s most polluted city’ at this time. My mother believes that the sunlight filtering in through the crevices and shadows of the house, proves that the smog is over. She says this with absolute conviction. Even the smog would be afraid to question her words—or raise an alarm for its own well-being.

I have quit smoking. It’s been a while. Not that I was ever an avid, addicted smoker. It was a dalliance with select occasions. Like such a moment, as right now – when the heavy smog has been lifted from the city’s heart. I’d do it to celebrate, to meditate, to take in this solitude that comes in like spirals of smoke.

2.

As I sit here and let writing consume me, I’m bothered by the routine morning ‘dusting’ that is going on in the lounge. You cannot question this daily ritual, God forbid. But it breaks my rhythm. It disturbs my flow of thoughts. A movement that I can witness from the corner of my eye, pressing close in my visual and sensual frame. An action so detached from where I am. I wonder what would happen if I called it out. If I were to say: “I am writing right now, please stop the mopping and dusting.” It could be registered as absurd talk. My mother could become serious, very serious. She could question my very mind. So I dare not disturb the disruption.

But I would really like it to stop. There’s nothing to do, but to wait. All the while, skittle-candy words in full disarray in my mind. The inspiration to write, leaving me. Should I quit for the day? I ask myself, knowing that I’d exchange my soul with the devil to rather stay and drink that Blackstone merlot of writing.

I switch to different music, playing on the blue midnight of my headset, I try to grapple with the broken fantasy. The dusting and mopping has left my mind squeaky clean, bereft of ideas and words. But thankfully, it has stopped. I am alone again.

3.

The deeper you go into the creative realm, the more the iridescent purple butterfly flutters her ruby wings. You must set fire along the way, you must lower your foot into the waters of temperance. You must let yourself go. This letting go is akin to letting go of your boat in the stream of consciousness. It is when you are body swimming into the fantasy realm, that you meet yourself as the writer.

It doesn’t really matter if you don’t come to visit the house. I am soaking in the being and nothingness on my own. There are moments, nothing matters. There are others, when everything does. It is this fluctuating dance that causes alternating peace or distress. I think back to the house in Karachi, made of childhood and teenage and so, raw like a spontaneous hug. I can’t help but compare it to this house, which holds the soul of the previous house in an invisibility which is made of familiar objects. But this house carries a grace and magnitude far beyond the years of the Karachi abode. I keenly wonder what it wants to say to me, gift to me, want from me.

4.

My mother’s voice, giving cooking instructions, floats into my world now and again. On the same register, Sinead O’Connor’s soothing voice sings “Sacrifice” to my ears. It is like a closely held azaan that reminds me of God’s supremacy. Just last evening I heard the muezzin’s call to prayer in the vicinity of the house. The intermixing of sacred and song seem to me a life-saving necessity. A cousin’s wife told me that her children’s piano lessons were now aligned with religious melodies. This strikes me as absurd, as I think back to my own childhood piano lessons with Tony and Katherine. They were Christian but playing the piano was never a religious activity. I find it alarming that music can’t exist without religion. However, I have known bliss in Hildegard’s hymns.

5.

Father tells me how last night’s dream predicted the rise in the ‘wave.’ The wave theory predicts currency and stock values. When he woke up, the reality of the risen wave, confirmed his dream. We are both sitting in the spacious lounge with soft-white, burgundy-brown and deerskin colored sofas. There’s nothing else to do as the electricity is out, and UPS after providing some connections has also run out of its power capacity. I wonder why we can’t have waking dreams, enough to predict the future. Perhaps the creative life is a waking dream. I turn in my thoughts, towards Sinead O’ Connor’s magical voice. Father walks over to the altar of family photographs, places one in the right order. He spends some time studying the images. I wonder what he is looking for.

Conception by Sana Arjumand

We wait together. It makes me think of different times we’ve waited together – at restaurants for the arrival of food, at bookstores for the turn with the cashier, at boring weddings for final release, that long year we waited for miracles.

6.

Mother’s maid has three bright little girls. The first day I came, they dressed up in their best clothes and waited to meet me all day. When I finally woke up, jet-lagged and in a devilish disarray of mind, I was told that finally they have started crying that they couldn’t see me, their brand new clothes going to waste. I found this amusing and laughed wholeheartedly despite my haggard state. Several days have passed since our first meeting, and yet, they look at me as if I’m a prize they’ve each won. They become happy when they see you, everyone keeps telling me.

Since I’ve arrived in Lahore, I have met seven children, who were eager to show me their toys, their new clothes or their speaking skills. I have in turns been fascinated by a pink doll house, a blue and grey police-station Lego, the modern version of knots and crosses called Connect 4, an intricately scissored sleeve design, sparkling silver buttons, and the board game called Game of Life which incorporates dumb charades with a modern twist.

7.

The skin of an alphabet, I think it’s the letter “P”, and how it morphs into a visual penguin by first turning it into a “B” then providing a beak. It’s one of my first teaching memories of my mother. I can see the little red penguin on the page and my amazement doesn’t seem to end up to this day. My mother teaches the maid’s three little girls the alphabet now.

So this is the home of firsts—the first sunlight, first warmth, first moon shot brightening the dark night, first unruly desire to curse, first ability to take a step into the world. The smog has cleared again somewhat, and the first of winter’s sun days are upon us. Father turned on the heater in the morning; it is run on both gas and electricity. His brother-in-law, who lives next door, visited him wearing a jacket. I checked the temperature; it was 23 degrees Celsius. But the house turns moodily cold, given there is no central heating.

Would you care to visit me here? And live in these long, meandering days in the house with me?  I haven’t spent a single day here without wondering. The thickness of solitude is wrapping itself around me, giving me sweet succor. Slowly, I am tuning out of the cocoon of dependency. Slowly, I am becoming alone; a song that rises into the air on its own. 

8.

Yesterday I played Ludo with my parents. Their closeness and camaraderie showed itself in their taunts and teasing of one another. I almost played by myself, watching their frenemy vibes with some interest. I wanted to take a turn and be hounded by both other team players—I almost ached for this kind of closeness. But the game moved swiftly for me, pretty much left on my own. When I was outed it was with a sense of apology. They took out one another’s pieces with skill, verve and spontaneous commentary.

Though I wonder if there wasn’t some play put on for my benefit. Sort of a spectacle for me to enjoy. In this way, both my parents were actors playing display enmity.

9.

The house is wrapped by the shawl of the dark blue, cool night this late November. A year is ending, again. Last I visited I used to step onto the balcony and take in the seldom stars of Lahore’s skies. The stars are separated from me now by smog and glass windows, yet the cool seeps in, kissing me all over. I look for my shawl amidst my scattered clothes on the dim-gold sofa. Just when it is in reaching distance, I abandon the idea. I’d rather feel this raw cold on me. The house has yet to give up its secrets to me.

The mornings now are steeped in sun-gold. The house wakes up before any of us, simultaneously cradling us in our sleep and watching the sun as it appears on its page floors. The earliest hour scribbles itself alive. By the time we wake up, the scribbling has become a wash by gold-light paint. Each part of the house wakes up, but doesn’t call on me till I arise from sleep all on my own. In this way, the house doesn’t touch me, and yet I live inside of it.

10.

The days pass by, slowly, as ambient music unfurling itself in your senses. I gaze into these days and a blurred mirror appears; I look at my reflection and see you there unexpectedly. Most of our lives are marked by routine and rigour, but these are floating days. They take me far away from the humdrum of ordinary life; I am witnessing something deeper in these pages of music. It is akin to the singular moment of actually catching a fish in the vastness of waters. The scales are scintillating, she is alive.

Though the reflection revealed your face, it was a temperamental showing. In reality, I am at long last, with myself. Perhaps in these long, fabled days you too assumed one of my expressions. Thus, the mirror is working.

11.

I am leaving behind so much in these vagabond, musing moments, like letting go beads of mint light one by one from my hands. These funeral beads are whispering good-bye to unwanted people and memories. Sometimes, there are aggressive entries into your life, which you don’t know how to weed out for a long, long time. The influence of such aggressions leaves scars on your kiwi-delicate wanderings. This is a time to disentangle myself from these monstrosities.

Picked out a Tabu starrer from the movie options available on Netflix, and a song from it now finds itself stuck in the corridors of the house in which I move. Juldee vapis jana ho toh mat aana. (If you are to leave soon, don’t come) I wonder if the house has been waiting for me at all. My parents weren’t expecting me; I am somewhat of a surprise visit. However, after I’ve arrived they seem despondent that I am leaving too soon. Perhaps we grow used to solitary life, and then a surprise involvement of the heart bemuses us, leaving us wanting in that old way, all of it again.

12.

In the far off distance there’s talk of a curfew; roads are being blocked to limit the call to action by an incarcerated politician. I listen to the cons of this activity, with a short-termed, wavering interest. Otherwise it is Sunday – a day of long life and much wonder. While politics consumes much local debate, I discover my old keyboard. It’s been years. I practice an old Indian song suddenly on my mind Ek ajnabee haseena se yun mulaqaat ho gayee (the tale of how I met a stranger, a beauty). After I have mastered the right hand keys, I delve into some two-fingered chords to give it completion. Soon, I am singing along.

The world is changing, all year last year, the world has been turning ugly. The election in the USA just announced a new president; a president who swears on ‘mass deportation’ of illegal immigrants. I am a new immigrant in the USA, I don’t know how to feel about all of this. Instead, I listen to raga Reethigowlai and transcend, transcend.

A chakra of the magnitude of tidal waves, threatens to overtake the city. It is the chakra of soul. It is the chakra of ships. I let myself be carried, I let myself be swayed.

13.

I light a candle. It sways in the dark. It reminds me of your dark gaze upon my lonesome figure in the smog. The Air Quality Index has once again reached 353, after hitting a low of 200 for a few days. It is not as hazardous as 1200 that Lahore has been known to have experienced. You are not here, of course, of course. I am alone in the dark of the approaching night. The house turns many shades of evening blue, before it settles into a comfortable night’s reaching black.

Last evening saw games of Rummy, best of five with dad. We both had not played the game against each other for years. He was more interested in Rummy than in Two, Three, Five, which seemed somewhat easier of the two. Whilst games while away the time, they also show us different sides to the players; these sides are not usually apparent—and become visible uniquely at a game frequency. I saw that my dad was patient when he played the game in silence, but when he spoke the tranquil trance was broken. I wonder what he observed about me.

After the evening’s fun and games, I return to my solitary floor. There are four rooms at this level, and I am the sole guest? Visitor? Family member? I wonder what we become once we move on from our parent’s house, which is our first house. This whole conundrum started in my head when years ago and well before my marriage, my aunt had remarked: “When are you going to go to your own house?” This single markedly careless statement of hers, shattered something inside me—since then I take turns saying, “My house, I mean, my parent’s house!” A schism has been created in my own relation to my own first house. I suspect her tone had some seedling of patriarchal significance, but it also scathingly questioned my sense of independence.

14.

At the doctor’s clinic I browse through the books set aside on a wooden shelf for the benefit of patients. No other patient bothers to glance through the titles. I am amused by the selection: short stories by Saadi, intermingled with religious books amid a poetry book by Parveen Shakir. I arrived twenty minutes early thanks to a malfunctioning clock at home.

Saadi’s stories are titled Gulistan (Flower Garden). I read two; the first one is about the dialogue between a king and a dervish who refuses to greet the king. The second one is of a poet who walks into a town of thieves. The moral is that there was no point in the poet expecting that a thief would not act as a thief.

I turn my gaze towards the pink hard cover, Khushbu (Scent) by Parveen Shakir and soon a queasy feeling settles inside of me. It is rather a delicate world of blue waves and poisonous branches. I find the poems I read rather aligned with Fahmida Riaz’s statement that Parveen Shakir was apolitical, soft. I consider my own poems in this harsh light.

I wonder about the impression holding a Saadi or a Parveen Shakir would create for spectators. I fear the Shakir book would perhaps leave a sentimental impact, whereas the Saadi one would be deemed as a curious reader? A thinker? Not that anyone is noticing at all. The goldfish shimmer in the low aquarium, as if they are part of moving walls.

Conception by Sana Arjumand

15.

There are times the power of words has the ability to undo any calm resolve and unburden me of all artifice. It can make me reach a physical feeling of dissolving into sheer sensation. Of late, Ocean Vuong conjures these singular lines at regular intervals in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous that leave me in a state of pure wonder. Just a few moments ago I read this: “You spoke carefully, as if the story was a flame in your hands in the wind.” He is speaking of his mother; to whom he’s just disclosed his identity secret, and she in turn, is confessing an abortion she had before he was born. The idea Vuong captures effortlessly here is that a confession invites another, so better be careful! I wonder if these entries are akin to a revelation of this sort? Will some reader want to discuss his own solitude with me some day?

I have been waiting for months for Murakami’s City and its Uncertain Walls. I just read the first chapter which has made me want to savour it a little longer. So I’m playing certain lines again in my head, like you’d do with a musical tune that has suddenly captivated you. His character says: “That’s right. The me here with you now isn’t the real me. It’s only a stand-in. Like a wandering shadow.” Later, Murakami expertly weaves in her wish to be known as her ‘real’ self, which can’t be accessed unless you are in the city behind the wall. This is a typical Murakami motif with its puzzled sense of amusement, however, this time it is constructed with new bricks.

16.

Discussing memory with dad, I mentioned Borges’ short story, Funes the Memorious, about the man who could not forget any shivering detail whether it was heartbeats or the ticking of a clock. Nabokov in Speak, Memory recalls vivid meticulous details, down to synesthetic exactitude from his earliest years. Dad laughed it off, recalling Nietzsche: “’sometimes it’s better to forget!’” he said. I felt like a joker who had lost a grip on his juggling act. “Yes, too much memory can be a curse, I think Borges would agree in that story…I myself have spent years forgetting.” I tried to say all this at once, so the words overlapped. Dad can turn a conversation alive for me.

My ex-best friend once said in our A level’s year, that I should stop using the ‘em dash’ everywhere. It was ugly, she said. I had taken her comment in with stubborn silence. I did not grasp the sudden frown on her expression. I still kept the ‘em dash’ close, and some years later found a companion in one of the dark romantics—Emily Dickinson. This is a memory I have wanted to forget, but it still hovers on the page unexpectedly, on its own. It’s some twenty years old, and is washed in sepia overtones visually by now. And yet, it lingers. How does one decide what becomes a memory? It is when the impact of a word, or a line of vision strikes one’s very heart, registers deep in the bones. I guess neither the memory-giver nor the receiver can decide how this alchemical process takes place, and in what dark room of the psyche.

But my stay at the house is an act of forgetting, as much as it is an act of remembering. I am forgetting the turquoise blood of the sky, yet recalling the ability to be on my own. Wasn’t it the color of your shirt? Isn’t this the colour of my being?

17.

Solitude is a city I carry with me now; accessible by a heart-beat, or by music, or a moment alone. It spreads its voluminous, feathered iridescent purple and glitter grey wings, reaching, reaching—till it encompasses my moods, plays like sunlight on the blades of grass of my intuition, takes in any unsettling and morphs it to starry night skies.

I roam in this city, forgetting the initial jet-lag of arriving here; those unruly, agitated times. Incidentally, this time Lahore too has been an eventual salve to my wounded mind. The heavy smog of the beginning coloured further the spirit of hibernation, and led me through the dark labyrinth of Lahore memories—long periods of heart-break—till finally by some miraculous solitude city, one fine day I recovered. I opened my eyes after an eternity, and witnessed for myself a brightness of deep soul.

The solitude city is now in my being, but it also, by extension seeps into any book I hold, any song I listen to, any conversation I may have. It is a necessary and deliberate path, appearing in the pauses and silences like creeping wildflowers. It keeps me intimate company—it is a breathing, it is a listening.

I did not always have access to this invisible city; it is perhaps a gift of the gods who finally had mercy on me, or it’s the result of an acute desire to look for it and a belief that it exists somewhere, somewhere. 

18.

So what was the secret of the house? It feels like it was waiting for me for an eon to discover it. Perhaps it was to place myself on myself, as if the shadow had drifted. I once attended a ceremony at a new age store called Path Finder, where a woman’s scattered bodies were aligned to the deep tones produced by a Tibetan singing bowl.

Maybe placing my body inside the house caused a process to begin. The upper floor lives in waiting, with no one occupying it for years. Maybe my coming here stirred its carrying powers. Are spaces affected by human presence and movement? Like a soul entering a body of rooms.

The house was perhaps in a deep sleep, and thus when I came, I too fell into its slumber. We woke up together slowly to the early mornings and the late nights. We matched solitudes but also, perhaps instead of the house waking me up, I have woken up the house.

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Fatima Ijaz is a writer, educator, and literary scholar with a deep passion for storytelling and language. She is the author of Last of the Letters (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and The Shade of Longing (The Little Book Company, 2021). Her work spans poetry, literary essays, and reviews, featured in many journals and newspapers. Ijaz holds an MA in English and Media Studies from Rutgers University (2024) and has taught English 101 and 102 at Rutgers. She has also taught Composition (including creative writing, personal narratives) and Speech Communication at IBA Karachi. Her educational journey includes degrees from Hartwick College, York University, and Eastern Michigan University. Her poetry and prose have been widely published, appearing in Kyoto Journal, Pakistani Literature, Poetry in English from Pakistan—a 21st Century Anthology, Ideas&Futures, Azure, Unbroken Journal, Bombay Review, The Aleph Review, among others. Her memoir For Old Friends was longlisted for the Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize (2022). Her forthcoming projects include a collaborative book with Liberty Publishing.

Sana Arjumand is a contemporary multidisciplinary visual artist with a focus on painting. Born in Karachi in 1982, She currently works and resides in Lahore, Pakistan. She has received the Nigaah award in painting, shown her work in museums and held solo shows in Italy, Korea, New York, Sydney as well as in major cities in Pakistan. She participated in the 2019 Karachi Biennale as well as group shows in London, New York, Hawaii, Seoul, Amman, Delhi, Ahmedabad and Mumbai. 

Her work will be represented in 2025 at the Dubai Art Fair. In the past She has also been represented at Asia Now Paris, Indian Art Fair, Abu Dhabi Art Fair, Art Basel Hong Kong, the Flux Festival, London and the University of Sunderland, U.K . Her NFT show with TheUpsideSpace is her first foray into this emerging art space.

Her work has been mentioned in Blouin Artinfo as one of the ‘Top Ten Rising Stars In Pakistan and India.’ Other international publications that have reviewed her work include Time magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, Art Now, Asia Art Pacific, The Huffington Post, Art Quarterly (Christie’s publication) and Monnaie de Paris, to name a few. Her work has also been discussed in several international blogs and forums. In 2009, Sana was a resident artist at the prestigious Art OMI residency in New York.