On the street corner with Gloria Steinem
“At my age, most people are dead,” she said to a thunderous applause. “I am 82.”
Gasp!
You just took another look at that photo, didn’t you?
I had walked out of the 900-seat auditorium, wishing I could have seen her a little closer. And who do I run into at the street corner!
Is she pretty? Is he tall?
While in Pakistan, I was hanging out with friends when her phone rang. She excused herself and returning, apologized:
Matchmaker (MM): Sorry, it was a rishta call.
Me: What do you mean rishta call? [Rishta is ‘match' in Urdu]
MM: I am a matchmaker.
Mummy never left me;
She smiles at me through the framed photo on my shelf;
She watches me through my grandson Omar’s oval eyes;
I feel her hair when my granddaughter Asha brushes against my cheek;
Only last week: Jash-e-Baharan in the park
Saba Masood was marked safe in Lahore’, flashed on my Facebook.
Another earthquake?
My fingers got ahead of me as I pulled up the news. A bomb blast had killed dozens in a park where Christians were celebrating Easter.
I was just there—in Lahore. I was in the parks,
A man is executed for murder. Some believe that justice was served; others memorialized a hero. What no one disputed was that he had pulled the trigger. I am beyond disbelief that the act of murder is debatable.
Read moreDefinitely not! Today is International Women’s day, I am in Pakistan, and women are cheering – at least those I have spoken to. ‘What is there to celebrate?’ I ask. Only a week ago Pakistan’s Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy won her second Oscar for her documentary on honor killing. ‘Precisely for that reason,’ they tell me, ‘and more’.
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I am up at 4 am, jet lagged after a twenty hour flight to Pakistan. I pull myself out of bed, wobble down to my sister's kitchen, and brew myself a cup of chai. In the stillness of the night, I curl up with my tea and tasbeeh, reciting the names of Allah. The house is quiet, the night quieter. And then I hear it. The lone man's voice, beaming off the minaret somewhere in the vicinity,
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Image credit: Getty Images
You bet. For Muslim women, every day is a leap year day—to propose, that is. I am not proselytizing. Honest! Just relishing my Muslim feminist moment.
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Why did I marry my husband?
On the treadmill this morning, I clicked open David Brook’s Op-Ed ‘Three Views of Marriage’. Hmmm! Did my decision to marry Khalid fit into any one of those views?
