Wish List

I've realised email is a curse. When people write you're not happy and when people don’t write you are down right miserable. Either way no win. I need more personal mails and less work-related mails. Am sick of reading generic things. Am lacking the warm and individual attention that comes from 'real' people. I want to go home and have my mother fuss over me, I brothers fawn and flatter me and people in general talk just about me and my life. Am lying at the bottom of an abyss, feeling murky and terribly self indulgent with pity. Want people to recognize me and share a smile because they know who I am and where I come from. I want aunties loaded in diamonds and wearing fake LV shoes and bags to judge me as to why I am wearing this or that, if I am happily married or not and why I still don’t have a child. I want Ashraf's Tikkas and chomps, where Moeed and Shanza go often with their friends. I want the pseudo atmosphere and pretentious appreciation of all the drug addicts littering the mosque, seen from Cuckoo's roof top. I want zouk and its salads and stir fried oyster vegetables. I even want the expensive food at Alanto's and the not so expensive chat at Chatkhara. I want lots of the chat. And I want Robiyya ki ice cream, and the traffic and the tension and lots of family and fussing and complaining about making it to many lunches and dinners at the same time on the same day. I want to watch the sun go down over the Sherpao bridge. I want the chirping of malnutrition Lahori birds. Damn the rest of Pakistan, Lahore is Pakistan for me. (Even though I do want the Margalla hills and shade of the trees near Kohisar market). I want tiddi's and lizards and cockroaches. Fans running on low voltage and electricity cut outs. I want rain. Lots and lots of rain. Thunderstorms and more rain. Water on parched gravel and the fresh smell of 'meray des ski mitti.' I want the cuckoo bird that ONLY sings in Alipur and no where else. All others are imitations and only a reminder of that first one. I want big gardens and bigger gardeners. I want relatives planning and plotting. I want lakri ki cooked chicken curry...only made to perfection in Alipur. I want a computer on the floor, with a keyboard in front of it, stained with tea and custard coffee overspill. It should even have some chocolate biscuits (with a glaze centre/circle topping) crumbs. And flat Spite, none of this oil-money high fizz stuff. I want beggars and lying cheats. Cyclists and rickshaw drivers who know of no tomorrow. Wagons with people falling from the side. Busses with youngsters hanging from them, who still find something to smile about in the face of so obvious a death. I want flooding and mosquitoes. I want a chance to use candles. I want people who have too much time to read into things, to interpret, reinterpret, dissect and re-dissect everything.
I want to bake the cake and eat it too, sharing only with the people I want to.
is it honestly too much to ask?

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