Me – Page 2 – Sindhi Sandals

January 14, 2014

Fitted Bed Sheets

I had the opportunity to go on a youth retreat this past weekend with my church youth group. After sitting on the noise-filled bus for nearly three hours, we finally arrived at the camp where we would be staying. That evening, after more noise and activity, the three boys in my room got their beds ready to sleep on. “What’s this?” one of the boys asked, as he started to unfold a fitted bed sheet he had pulled from his bag, holding it from his fingers as if it was a banana peel he had picked up off the ground. Another boy, obviously well schooled in his sheet classification, knew a fitted sheet from a t-shirt and was proceeding to pull it over his bed. Putting one corner just over the mattress, he would move to the other side, pulling the sheet off of where he had just put it in the process. Another, on the top bunk, was having the same trouble. Barely laying the sheet over the corner of the bed, he would then expect it to stay there as he pulled the remainder of the sheet over the far side of the mattress. Apparently, putting fitted bed sheets on a bed isn’t common junior-high-boy knowledge.Thankfully, a couple tips and a helpful hand later, I did manage to show them how putting the corner of the bed sheet under the corner of the mattress would stop the sheet from popping off the bed again and again.

I moved into a boarding school in sixth grade. Fitted sheets? No problem. I did start struggle later on in my years, as my sheets began to shrink with years of washes. This only got harder as my boarding school mattresses were eventually replaced by the larger, thicker mattresses I experienced once I got to Canada. Fitted sheets were quite normal, and I quickly got used to making up my bed, again and again. I’m thankful for my years in boarding. It’s experiences like these, watching anxious boys crawl into foreign beds that make me realise what a blessing it was. I understand. I understand what it’s like to be in a strange room. I forget sometimes, that not every junior high boy moves into a new room, with a new room mate, and has to try to fall asleep on a new bed each year. In boarding, life would hit the reset button again every few months, as my siblings and I would readjust to our beds at home for a couple weeks over break. Then we would be back to school again. The strange beds became familiar — the familiar became strange. And I would find myself lying awake in the dark, trying to drown out the silence of the fan that wasn’t turning above my head. Silence is one of the hardest sounds to ignore.

I don’t mean to make my experiences sound all rosy. Boarding had it’s downsides too. There aren’t many better ways to learn how much you dislike about people than having to live with them year after year. However, before long, the rough edges of my own selfishness did start to wear down. They had to — since they were constantly scraping into someone else and their selfishness corners. Thankfully God works in these years of friction, ensuring the little pieces that are chipped away simply smooth the edges, rather than leave gaping holes of trauma and bitterness. I’m thankful. I’m thankful that my parents were willing to let go when I asked. I’m thankful that I had friends who cared about me, and who made my experience a valuable one. I’m thankful God orchestrated good things out of what could have so easily become a mess. On top of all this, I’m thankful I know what a fitted sheet is and how to put it on a bed. I still may not know how to fold one, but not everyone is perfect. I’ll save that magical skill for the mothers of us silly boys.

January 7, 2014January 7, 2014

A Night with Turtles

Every year my family goes to the beach near Karachi, for a week of rest and escape. We stay in a small and rustic beach hut with weathered and peeling blue and white paint. Away from the phone and doorbell, this week is a time for my parents to kickback, relax, and mostly to read. In the past, for us kids it has been almost a week of non-stop digging in the sand and getting seriously browned – or just sunburned. This year it was the first time, since my high school graduation, that I was able to join our family beach week. And though my sister couldn’t be with us this time, my brother and I did manage to keep ourselves busy.

Our very first night at the the hut, my brother, my dad and I decided we would take a walk after dark, up along the beach, to enjoy the waves and the stars, and hopefully to see some sea turtles. At this time of year female sea turtles, laden with eggs, will make their way out of the water, up onto the sand, and dig a nest for the eggs. With their strong flippers they will scoop sand out from around them till they are deep enough to lay their precious cargo.

As we made out way along the beach that night, we came across turtle after turtle (close to a dozen), coming up from the dark ocean. Some halfway up the sand, others having just made their way out of the the water. Each time my dad would tell us to be quiet and coax us past, trying not to scare them. And each time my brother and I would be desperate to stay and catch a better look at the turtles up close.

With sea turtles, it’s important to make sure you don’t scare the females as they come up to make their nests. Tired and heavy, the last thing they need is to be scared back into the ocean. We always try to stay out of their way until the eggs are laid, and only after they begin their trip back into the water, do we try to get close to them. When we made it back to the hut again, my brother and I decided to stay out, quietly watching two turtles nearby, only a few huts apart from each other. A couple times we had to throw stones, as the dark shapes of dogs moved along the sand, some below us toward the water, and others up further, almost attacking on of the poor mother turtles as she dug her nest. Each time, the turtle would move a few meters from where she had been been, frightened by the dogs, and would begin digging again in the new spot.

Back and forth, my brother and I would patrol, toward to the water, making sure the dogs stayed far away from both turtles. It was just after checking on one of the mothers that a dark mass further down the beach caught our attention. We stood, and squatted, trying to see in the moonless night. Between the black bunches of seaweed on the shore, we could see the silhouette of a head and shell, making its way down toward the water. Quietly we walked up, standing close behind it on either side. Softly we ran our hands along its large smooth shell — such a contrast to the small shells of the newborns, with their minute ridges. We felt the mother’s large flippers as well, thick and leathery beneath our fingers, whispering to each other in excitement as we followed her along. I wanted so badly to swim in with her — to see her in the water, but in the dark and with the water being so cold, going in deep seemed pointless. Instead we walked with her, resting our hands on her shell.

Soon we reached the wet sand, where the little waves washing up onto the sand began to catch the turtle’s body, pulling her as they washed in and out. Her slow and steady crawl continued as the water swirled its way around her. And then there was a moment — with one wave carrying a little more water than the last — where her body rose slightly, and her thick front flippers found the room they needed to swim. When a turtle gets into water, one quickly learns the difference between bodies made for the ocean and bodies made for the land.

My brother and I splashed into the dark surf, trying to keep our hands on her shell. But after that single moment, there was nothing holding her back. In seconds her dark, glossy shell disappeared beneath the surf and she was gone, leaving two boys grinning at each other in the dark, knee-deep in the water.

December 26, 2013

Home

Home. There’s something refreshingly normal about being home. Within a few seconds of making my way out of the airport in Karachi and into my parents’ warm arms, everything became so very familiar. Sitting in the back of the car as we pulled out of the airport, I had to remind myself that this is not ‘normal’. You’ve waited to be here, Josh. Now enjoy it and appreciate it like you waited for it. But I do enjoy it. I do enjoy being home. I just enjoy the normalcy of it.

Somehow the familiarity of home adds to the enjoyment, or reflects it, at least. If I was constantly reminded how strange it was to be home, it wouldn’t really be home, would it? But instead, it’s in the places where everything is as expected that I often experience the most joy.

I do feel the shock of transition when it comes to driving here, as we slip though the gaps between trucks and cars, with motorcycles flying by on all sides. Driving feels more like a chase scene out of a James Bond movie – the only difference being that here most of it takes place between forty and fifty kilometers an hour. In these cases, speed and excitement do not necessarily correlate. What, in Canada, would be a slow residential speed turns into a breath-taking and white-knuckled death race amongst the streets of Karachi, dodging the potholes, pedestrians, fruit carts and animals.

However, the rest of my time is so very regular – sitting around the dinner table, or being in the kitchen. The smells, the sounds, and the tastes are all so beautifully familiar. Aching sides seems to be a fairly common ailment while with family, as we bring ourselves to tears laughing at each other’s expense, and usually without any real explainable reason. Already I’ve had to rub my sore cheeks from spells of smiling too long. In some ways I’m glad my time here is interspersed with the occasional argument with my brother, just to make sure my angry, frustrated and annoyed facial muscles get some exercise as well. But that’s all quite familiar too. Quite normal.

Home is normal. Normal is home.

November 23, 2013

Leaves

My sister sent me a leaf from Germany. The little splotches of green in it are slowly giving way to the orange and brown of the rest of the leaf. On a small pink sticky note, she wrote “Here’s a tiny bit of Germany for you, Josh!” I have another leaf on my desk from earlier in the semester. I can’t even remember why I brought it in. I just remember bringing it up to the house and putting it on the table, saying to one of my flatmates, “here, have some nature.” When it was doomed for the garbage, I laid it amidst all my little reminders and notes scattered on my desk – almost like small white leaves themselves.

There’s a leaf in my room at my Grandparents’ house – they framed it after I sent it to them several years ago from Pakistan, in a letter, as a last minute addition to the envelope. The strangest part is that the words I wrote to my Grandparents were almost identical to my sister’s. “Here’s a little bit of Murree,” I wrote. So as I opened up my sister’s envelope to find this leaf, I felt a strange sense of happy déjà vu. I guess there’s no doubt that we are definitely siblings, and that, for some reason, we see a leaf as a valuable and meaningful token of our love and care, and a representation of a place we enjoy. Perhaps we’re just strange.

But what is it that is so special about a leaf? Why do I find them so meaningful? Perhaps it’s just an attempt to bring the world into my room, and to try get nature to be where it can’t be. Perhaps a part of it is the fact that it was once living, attached to a strong and rooted tree – permanent, connected, and growing. It bears memories of something far larger and far more sedentary. But, disconnected and detached from its place, it’s suddenly transient and momentary, holding its last hues of green only until they drain from its patterned veins. Leaves are marked by change. From the fresh brightness of their first growth to the burlap brown of their death, they fill the branches above with ever changing colour and vibrance – nature’s mural, hung above our heads. And yet when winter arrives, the trees simply shake their beauty to the ground in a sea of orange and brown, soon to be covered by a thick blanket of snow.

There’s something magical about a leaf. There’s something amazingly beautiful about it’s humble and simple colours. And it’s comforting to know that I have a sister just as crazy as me, who sends leaves with her mail as a symbol of her love for people and places.

Thanks, Liz.

November 10, 2013

What I Will Remember

With Remembrance Day tomorrow, I find myself faced with a mixture of emotions and feelings again, as a part of what seems to be a yearly mess of thoughts. It’s with a certain amount of timidity that I even write about my feelings at all, since I know that at times the ideas I entertain would perhaps disappoint and hurt people who are close to me – people who have been a part of these wars in the past, and who are personally invested in Remembrance Day. With so many emotions felt on all sides, as my American friends observe Veterans Day, or others Armistice Day, or Poppy Day, I honestly begin with some fear. These feelings run deep in people’s hearts, and I write not meaning to hurt or make light of the loss that people have suffered.

I hate war. Justifying bloodshed and killing has been a complex, messy, and emotional debate that has gone on for centuries, and I think will continue to do so. Very rarely has there been a just war. Not only that, but even in wars that are deemed ‘just’ by society and history books, there is no shortage of sorrow and death. Try to explain to the woman who lost her child that it was for a just cause that a foreigner took away her child’s life. Or explain to a wife that her husband died holding up the unjust end of the fight, and that the man operating the machine gun who killed him, was doing so out of just sense of duty. War is loss. It is filled with grief, regardless of whether it was deemed just by the people that wrote the history books after.

One of the core purposes of Remembrance Day is to honour and respect those who have died in the conflicts that my country has been involved in. However, along with this, there seems to come an underlying sense that I need to somehow honour the wars in which these people were killed. I know this may not be the case for everyone, and many might disagree; But in honouring someones death for a cause, I do in some way, honour the cause for which he died – something that I really, in right conscience, cannot do. I don’t think that every war Canada has fought in has been an honourable one. Most were far from our soil, and most resulted in the deaths of all kinds of people – both for its own men, those on the other side of the conflict and even those caught in the middle as well. Do I honour these wars? I grieve over them.

Another clause, if you might call it that, of Remembrance Day is the reason we honour these people who died. Time and time again the phrase is repeated, “for giving their lives to preserve the freedom of this country.” Again, I just don’t feel that I can be a part of that statement. I realise that even as I write this, I enjoy freedoms that were given to me as a result of events in the past. I don’t want to cheapen the lives that were lost, but I just don’t feel right about it either. Was the freedom of this country worth the lives of people from another nation? Was my freedom more important than theirs? Even the freedom of this country can be debated as well, seeing as the vast majority of Canadians essentially sit as invaders in a land that we have claimed as our own, from people who enjoyed freedom in this area before its colonisation and occupation. Yes, we have freedom, but we have it while we sit on someone else’s.

At these times I ask myself the question: how would I observe Remembrance Day if I spent it with my German friends, or anyone from the other side of the war? I have lots of friends from Germany. We’re not enemies, yet somehow we are called to honour the lives that were lost while killing people from the opposite side of the conflict. How would I observe Remembrance Day if I spent it with those who had lost family members and had been Canada’s “enemies” in the past? Would I talk about how glad I am to have my freedom and that their ancestors didn’t occupy ‘my’ land? I think I would simply grieve. And I suppose that’s where I have come with regards to Remembrance Day.

I will remember. I will remember the lives that were lost on all sides, in all our wars. I will remember that life is not cheap, and that victory is often simply a label placed over countless heartbeats that have been silenced and broken-hearted people who have lost those they love. I will remember the thousands of stones that stand in countries, marking where humans like me were buried – both those who were fighting and those who weren’t. I will remember the grief. But more than anything, I will remember the true sacrifice that was made, and the singular life that was laid down that “whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life”(Jn. 3:16). Because this was the ultimate act of love, shedding Christ’s own blood rather than our own, though we made ourselves enemies to Him. This is what I will remember.

For me, Remembrance Day is grief; for lives lost on all sides, for humans in any uniform. This is what I will remember.