Read Online Everything Is So Political by Sandra McIntyre - Free Book Online

Europeans holding up the peace-sign as they drove to Kathmandu in green Cortinas and sky-blue Rovers. Those were the days of “Kung-Fu Fighting” and “Greased Lightning” and Abba and the Bee Gees. Those were the days of American neighbours with whom we exchanged pleasantries and food and lives and stories long before we drew our swords and took them hostage, and long before they called us terrorists and threatened to sort us out. Those were the days when women were not stoned for being in love, and men were not hanged for having opinions, and backs were not lashed for being exposed, and hairs were not pulled for being beautiful, and dreams were not nipped for being dreams, and wings were not clipped for wanting to fly. But I was not there to see any of that, I was born after. By the time I had opened my eyes to the darkness of this world, a dynasty had been pulverized. A slate was wiped dirty and a state was robbed clean.
    I was born captivated. I heard all those stories from the nostalgic lips of those around me and took them all for bedtime fiction. I churned in my bed, ready to sleep, cuddling with a teddy bear that was as eager to hear Scheherazade’s modern religio-political retelling of a past of pretty clothing and funny hairdos, where things came in more shades than black, white, and gray. A Night among many in the history of this country’s a Thousand and One. In this new version the vizier’s daughter was modestly dressed and pious, and spoke in a low and timid voice, because, well, a woman’s voice was a thing of shame. In this version, Scheherazade didn’t care much if she lived or died.
    â€œOurs is a land of fiction, of frictions. And no story is too old to be told time and again,” my mother would whisper to me in accidental rhyming. She would pull out of her cupboard some articles of clothing to show me: father’s polyester shirt, gold-sprinkled halter tops from the days she went night-clubbing. Night-clubbing ! I used to close my eyes and try to imagine my saint-like mother in a pink and pleated mini retro dress with platform-soled shoes, chewing the olive of her martini and eyeing the man who would whet her lips that night, and who, months later, would become my father. My mother who, throughout her life, looked and smiled at everything with the indecision of the Mona Lisa; am I happy or am I sad? Is this what a smile should look like? I am the something, the in-between that has yet to be named. Whenever I opened my eyes and glanced at my teddy bear, it too was smiling its threaded Mona Lisa smile, its eyes wide open, truly shocked. My mother was a teddy bear.
    â€œBut here are pictures!” My mother and my aunt Bahar would shove photo albums of proof in my face, pointing at their exposed shaved legs or their maxi dresses and their coiled exposed puffy chignons, painted nails peeping from the slits of their sandals.
    What they said and what I saw just didn’t add up. I’d hold the square pictures in my hand and wonder to myself while looking out of my window: “How did we go from that to this ?”
    My mother would tell me, “It actually happened. We actually had that life of Azadi; that life of Freedom.”
    Azadi. Azadi… That word gave me nightmares. It meant nothing and everything. It was an ideal that couldn’t be grasped, like Perfection and God and True Love and Home. It was an ideal that had to be seen, touched, tasted and experienced, it had to be lived through to be proved. It had to be loved through to be true.
    â€œWhat did it feel like?” I used to ask them.
    â€œIt felt… it felt—” they would stammer not knowing what to tell me, language having left them. Only their eyes articulated what their tongues no longer could.
    I was born a captive. And now I am not sure anyone is born free.
    3
    Yeki Bood, Yeki Nabood,
    Gheir az Khuda Hichkas Nabood
    That’s how every night my mother started all her