Islamabad’s Summer

This sweltering heat of Islamabad has caused an unexpected disorder in my life. 

December last year, I packed two bags mostly with warm clothes thinking nothing could beat the heat of Dubai. Little did I know I was living in a bubble, a dream that I was about to wake up from, after thirty three years of my life. I do not disregard, any of my years, but to experience being in a different land, for a given amount of time that determines I am ‘living’ in that place, with different principles and priorities means one must conduct themselves differently. Mostly, it is still a man’s world with oscillating levels of liberation here and there for women, as I only begin to learn.

This sweltering summer has ripped off all my sense of probing inside. I find myself lost and I say that repeatedly, I am in tatters. This sweltering summer has caused me to scavenge and scour what lies beyond, in other realms, in other worlds within this world. I must not limit myself. There is a hunger. If only it was simple, and maybe in this quest, this quest of the utopian world I might find that season of my life that I have lived out of, all these years. 

It wasn’t the winter or the mountains that gave me refuge from the world I parted from. Islamabad’s summer however has brought me something else. Islamabad’s summer brought me friends. Kindred souls to spend hot summer days with. Hot summer nights to give me company in. People to eat good food with, sip on chais and share a different kind of life with each other for each other. It’s not that I didn’t have friends before. I am the luckiest girl that way. I have been blessed with the greatest of human beings around me. Yet, I discover as I move through one place to another, that it is after all the people around you that make your time worthwhile. Despite, all my needs of solitude. My self-imposed isolation and quarantine. 

The world is constantly changing. It has since its inception. There is no stopping that. It wouldn’t be ‘ideal’ you see, if it did not constantly change. What doesn’t change, is the hope of humanity. People who reach out to us, when we are alone. When we lose or win. When we are good or bad. When we are happy or sad. When we are at our best or worst. Whatever the seasons of our lives be. 

I will always remember the summer of Islamabad in the year 2021. 

– N.