The Pain and Comedy of High School Girls

It was 2008! I was a 16-year-old girl, who spent half her day bent on the janamaz, who had been raised gender segregated to the point of seeing men as aliens, who was scared of the forward boys at Karachi Grammar School, whose brain was nice and smooth like a shiny marble. I tried hard to read lots of books to be smarter, but at some point I had to admit I was fighting genetics.

We were in the last year of high school. College entrance exams controlled our lives. We were still young enough to see the future as luminous, to think we would be the pride of our families, to see ourselves as the saviors of our nation, to feel life was on an upward trajectory, and that upward trajectory was on merit and drive alone. 

I said it was 2008! Remember? Social media was brand new, we were only just getting over Orkut, we TypEd lyk ThiszZzz on facebook “walls”. Kurtis came with rhinestones, the colors teal and magenta were everywhere, nylon-jersey-blend western clothes flooded Gulistan-e-Johar’s cheap shops, and Johar shut down by 8 pm under the iron hand of the Mutahida Qaumi Movement. Bakra Eid had coincided with the new year, and we still openly slaughtered animals in the streets; some of the stomach and intestines lay on the streets for weeks into February, and the blood bred mosquitoes which swarmed my apartment complex. 

I thought, “it won’t be forever. I’ll go to college abroad soon.”

Everyday at dawn, I took a bus from Johar to DHA, seated next to an extremely beautiful girl named Amna. I would read Surah Yasin as she would sleep beautifully. On the way back, I listened to pop music, and Amna would split earbuds with me, playing AKON and Sean Paul. 

At school, the first period was General Education, where Ms Nadia groaned at our college entrance essays, saying “I better not read another one saying that you’re like a donkey tied to a cart, a suppressed woman of Pakistan. You’re rich! You know nothing about a hard life!” Yes, a lot of KGS kids were the sons and daughters of businessmen and diplomats. They could wield the tragic circumstances of Pakistan for white sympathy with ease. Many of them would go to Ivy leagues.

My background was not quite as decorated. I had spent life in dangerous areas, racking up many traumatic experiences. At 16, my history of childhood rapes and gunpoint robberies and knifepoint kidnapping and violence were too confusing to put into a college essay. These incidents had left me with the dazed and defeated IQ of someone recovering from a lobotomy. You could call it PTSD, or stupidity, but whatever the label, the results were the same- bizarre essays with no awareness of the world outside my school and my bedroom, with a hundred bismillahs blown onto the Windows Vista computer screen they were typed on. I couldn’t use my trauma for a college application, because I wasn’t sure what use it was. I know NOW what to mine it for- call myself resilient, a survivor, an unstoppable being, someone irrepressible- but it would have been lies because I was none of those things.

I’d write college applications like crazy, awake all night worrying about getting rejected, irritated by the back-alley gunshots, awakened at 5 am by the pious man who would walk through the whole apartment complex crying “fajar ka waqt hogaya hai! Behenon aur bhaiyon namaz ka waqt hogaya hai!”. Strikes and terrorist attacks had killed around 3000 people last year, but would only kill in the hundreds in 2008, and in the lulls between each incident, we would forget them, and resume thinking of our studies and crushes and clothes and friends and going to college abroad on a full ride. I had the same dreams as the wealthy kids.

Our school had a suicide bomber drill where we gathered in the auditorium and crouched, and the boy I had a crush on yelled “yeah make it easier for them to get us all in one shot!” 

BUT- all the violence was background noise. The here and now were the student elections! The last chance to be heads and prefects to pad that college application! The principal had to flag to us in an assembly that we had to stop using sex appeal for house slogans. “I don’t want to see signs saying ‘Hoor wants you’ to get someone to join Streeton.”

Just in case I could not get in anywhere abroad, there were the elite local colleges IBA, LUMS and Indus Valley School of Art. My mother said a flat no to Indus Valley, advising that only stupid people with bad grades went there, even though my dream had been art school. 

To get away from my family, all my hopes were in the achievable LUMS, which was in Lahore.

I took their entrance exam, the LCAT, at the Agha Khan University Hospital. The Aga Khan was a med school and hospital fused together in a sprawling wine-marbled campus of slanting pyramids, which factory produced its own doctors. I needed a breast biopsy here once, but mom said surgery is a scam, and she cried and said nobody actually needs their body cut open for a fibroid and that I would “ruin my beauty”  (code for my boob). Like a dutiful daughter, I opted for surprise breast cancer rather than making my mother cry. So far so good. 

The LCAT reporting time was 730 am, and I was late. A spinal cord of cars stretched for miles down Stadium Road, until my driver (who was very invested in my education) swerved illegally, cut lines, went the wrong way, and broke through red lights to get me there in time. He himself was never able to send his girls to school.

Now, I have to impress it upon you, I was VERY stupid. I got excellent grades but I was an idiot. My family prized “innocence” and kept me in an extended childhood. I consumed no media but cartoons (because they had no profanity) and the Quran, and read only classic literature, proper early 20th century books where lewd acts could not exist. I had no Sex Ed (but had already been raped in a dark street) or political awareness, I had no mentors or experience with jobs, I didn’t know what a marijuana was. When I finally learned what sex was, it was from Naruto fanfiction. When I was out in public, I was always lost and confused. In the massive Aga Khan campus, I had no idea where to go for the exam, and my mother scuttled by me, equally confused, an adult sharing my stopped-at-adolescence state.

I asked a curly-haired boy for directions. He said, “What’s your ID? Yeah, that’s for the sports stadium.” I had already married him and had his children in my head. The gender segregation of my life made me romanticize any interaction with a cute boy as much as it made boys sexualize any interaction with friendly women.

Finally, I reached the students-only area and left mom behind, my mom who never wanted me to grow up. I knew she would immediately whip out her sipara in the waiting area, and recite it loudly, rocking back and forth. I turned to the crowd of students. It looked like every teenager in Karachi was there. Neons and prints, nike sneakers, rainbow headscarves, metallic pumps, long rectangular shalwar kameez, gelled spikes, loud laughter, yellow entrance slips. In that moment, the future of Pakistan was this endless ocean of color. Of course, I’m writing this sixteen years later. Statistically, most of them would fade into an unwitnessed adulthood, and Pakistan hasn’t been saved yet.

I found my friend Sana, and she spun me deeper into the crowd to look for her best friend Berjees. She was standing alone, revising, until Sana leaped into her face with a shrill “hiii”. As always, we exchanged “I’m so scared’s” and “I didn’t study anything’s”.

Sana and Berjees were two of the smartest girls I had ever met. And yet, all the smart girls were always terrified of underperforming, in a country where even the “cheetis” had an uphill battle to amount to anything.

Berjees was also the first person I ever knew who owned an iPhone, and she had passed it around on the school steps as we touched it in awe. Beautiful, green eyed, kind, smart, iphone-owner Berjees was an aspirational figure for many. “Let’s sit down.” she said now, and we followed her lead to plop down on the stone floor. She was popular, so lots of other girls found their way to her, growing our circle.

The LCAT had a vocabulary component. We fretted over the words “vitiate” and “lugubrious”. Friends talked, laughed. The sun was golden heat in my eyes. If anyone was confused, they would ask where Tabish was, for she had all the answers.

Reminiscing, I am amazed at how sharp those girls were. Not just book-smart, but strategic, street-smart, self aware. In the future, they would disappear into marriages and motherhood, varying degrees of success, into the everyday toil of the world. But back then, those girls glittered with the promise of greatness, ascension, transcendence. All our dreams were possible. Even I, stupid as I was, socially inept though I was, fool that I was, embarrassingly naive though I was, felt that the world could belong to me. I felt it because I sat in the glow of those girls, and they let me.

The exam was in the Aga Khan basketball court. They used the LED scoreboard as a timer, which Maria called tacky. The exams came, their sections garishly color coded. Maria whispered “ew”.

An invigilator announced “If anyone wants to go to the washroom, go now. We will not let you go afterwards unless it’s an emergency.” Some poor soul stood up, and we snickered at him.

Holding in my piss, I looked through the English section, which was unhinged. Each question tried to test grammar, syntax, comprehension and vocabulary all at once. There were phrases like “regulating officials for good cognizance atrociously”.

I passed the LCAT!

After this exam, I had a surprise- I was shortlisted for a prestigious scholarship at Cambridge University, for English Literature. They had said they were impressed with my writing portfolio and wanted to conduct an interview. My parents were in awe of me. They could not understand how I had done this. Only 50 people from Pakistan were shortlisted, and the scholarship could only go to 2 people. But to my parents, this was it. This was the moment my life would change.

Unfortunately, major university reps would not travel to the reputedly dangerous Pakistan. They told us that we would have to fly for an interview to Dubai. My parents went with me, and it was my first international trip. At our hotel, I was not sure how to use the bathtub, as I had always bathed with a bucket. I didn’t draw the bath curtain on the inside, and so got water everywhere, and then grabbed all the extra towels and put them on the floor to soak it up.

When it was time for the interview, the interviewers said they thought my writing had a depth and sadness that they had rarely seen at my age. They pulled out one of my poems called “Street Cricket”. I don’t remember it anymore, but it was about watching the boys play cricket from my window, while I cut bhindi, and I felt like I was celebrating with them when they won.

One of the interviewers was misty eyed over it, which confused me. 

“You seem like such an outsider in this.” she said sympathetically. 

“No, I think you’re reading into it.” I told her, annoyed by her tears.

“But what’s the deeper meaning? What were you feeling?” she asked encouragingly.

“There isn’t really any deeper meaning.” I said defensively, sensing pity. “I always watch the boys play cricket.”

“But why don’t you join in?” she said.

I had no idea how to explain the context to this foreign woman. That I wasn’t allowed to go outside the house. That I wasn’t allowed to hang out in the streets. That I wasn’t allowed to talk to boys. That I wasn’t allowed to play sports, couldn’t play and never had. That the boys would laugh at me and reject me if I tried. It was too big, too much, and it turned my poem SAD, when I wanted that poem to be happy.

So I told her “It’s not that deep. I like to watch them play.”

She was very disappointed in me, and didn’t ask any further questions.

My interview was terminated much earlier than everyone else’s.

Of course, I did not get that scholarship. While my friends went to college, I took a gap year to work a 9-5 and earn money to pay for it. In that gap year, the school forgot to send ahead my college applications. They were paper applications, cried over, prayed over, slaved over, and they sat on their desk all year, unsent.

So, I could not go abroad. 

LUMs, in Lahore, remained an option, but my parents said not to go to another city. IBA was cheaper, and near my house. I went there to study business, a field I hated.

I have often regretted IBA, and think of it as the only part of my life I made a regrettable choice. It meant I remained in one city, Karachi, for 28 years, and Karachi developed as slowly as I did. I entered my twenties and stagnated with my family, who kept me as a child, with a curfew at sunset.

IBA was draconian, adding to my regression. The registrar took a dislike to me, and told me I’m not allowed to “socialize” on campus and should be in class or go home. The dress code was obsessively enforced at the entry gates, over things like exposed shoulders. I was once almost expelled for my boyfriend putting his head on my shoulder. A few teachers sexually harassed me, including one who asked about my masturbation habits, one who kissed my hand, one who found all my social media accounts and messaged me on all of them asking for a private meeting. The boys at IBA called me “doodh ki dukaan” or “mumoon”, would send bizarre dirty messages out of nowhere, once rated my ass on a scale of 1-10 while I was walking in front of them, among other things that are so damaging that I have a do-not-go-there box for them in my brain. It was the era of sandwich jokes, and the word “feminazi” was everywhere.

The only good thing I got out of IBA was a very interesting friend group, most of whom I am no longer friends with. They were all a little damaged, so the dynamic felt like we were raising each other. We burrowed into art and literature for comfort, feeling misunderstood and having the sense that our chance to “be the future” was over.

The hope and power we felt in high school was extinguished almost immediately into IBA. All my hoop-jumping, straight-A’s, and entrance exams turned to ash. Nothing really changed in my life. I didn’t get any taller or fatter, my hair stopped at my hips, my mind felt the same. I realized the promise of a dazzling upwards trajectory was an illusion- instead time accumulated like dust. 

Then, my sisters managed to go abroad for college. They disappeared into foreign countries, and I lost touch with them. My aunt said “you got left behind, because you are the sort of person who will always be left behind.” 

Gone was the worship I would get from my family for my academic excellence. Instead I was left with their contempt; I could not leave the country, unlike my sisters. I was still rotting in my childhood bedroom. I was 23 before my family allowed me to close my bedroom door for privacy and 25 before I could leave the house after sunset. I was losing my faith in Islam, but my mother and father policed me so fiercely and scolded me so harshly if they suspected disinterest, that I had to say fake prayers five times a day.

Godless, aimless, sitting by the eggshells of my early life, I grew deeply unhappy. I had spent 15 years in this bedroom, in this apartment complex. At night it was so dark that I felt like I was in my coffin. 

At 24, I got a job, but life remained relatively stagnant. There was a certain zombification from the routine of work.

What was next? The next big milestone would be marriage, then a child, and then watching the child rush through the championships and celebrations of academia, break through the ribbons at the end, only to return full circle to the starting line, like me.

That’s how a Pakistani woman grows up.

The fire of competitiveness at school, the possibility of seeing the world, the sense that you could fly, all slowly dissolve into your mundane domestication.

The days pile on, you age but remain the same, and unless you marry you live in the same house, the same room, under the same level of parental control. 

There are no more class prizes to win, nobody evaluates your academic thoughts, and you never really have to understand a book again.

There is no big group of girls dreaming of a future, starry-eyed and shoulder-to-shoulder. 

You will now be alone, sometimes even if you are married, even if you have a child.

Then you can smile ruefully at children, and sincerely tell them “cherish school. These will be the best years of your life. That’s when you can still dream.”