Connections

Borders may divide us, but land connects us.

This I realized the morning of January 26, 2001, when I woke up at about eight thirty in the morning to the sound of rumbling glass. I knew, immediately, that it was an earthquake. We'd had one about two years ago in Karachi, much worse than this one; I had woken then to the sensation of being thrown around from one side of the bed to the other.

This morning, it was less intense. No sounds of an airplane taking off in your ear, no birds screamed their panic after moments of death-laden silence. "Go back to bed," I sleepily told my father, who had bounded upstairs to see the chandelier swinging back and forth. "I can't stop the glass from shaking," he replied, as he stood next to a door, pressing his hand to the glass. Would that he could stop the earth from moving with his hands; as a child, I used to think he could.

I followed my own instructions and tried to fall asleep, but was unable to - there's something about being woken up by earth tremors that won't let you go back to the land of Nod all that easily. Still, I dismissed the quake as a mild one, comparing it to what I'd witnessed two years ago.

Later the same morning my aunt called me with a hysterical warning that the BBC weatherman said there would be more quakes in 30 minutes, so I flipped on the television. It's funny how natural disasters remove all thouhts of logic and science from your brain, leaving only fear and superstition behind.

I learned that the quake's epicenter was in Gujerat, in the Rann of Katch. That it had been felt all the way from Islamabad to Nepal. That two people in Hyderabad, Sindh, had already been found dead when their house collapsed upon them. That Ahmedabad had been worst hit. I watched as a camera crew interviewed frightened people in Delhi, their faces grey with shock. They had run out onto the streets in fear. The buildings had swayed, cracks appearing in the walls. One woman described her bed rotating in the middle of the room, the ceiling fan turning eerily all by itself. More tales of disaster would surely follow.

All the people who had relatives in Gujerat, whether they were Mohajirs in Karachi or Hindus in Calcutta, would be feeling the same stomach-waves of nausea, the same trembling hands and jelly legs. Phone numbers would be shakily dialed, and all would speak the same language to ask about the whereabouts of those loved ones; syllables and consonants would cut across years of "tu-tu-mein-mein".

I am a Pakistani, and yet my heart that morning was in India, with my sister, who had just the day before left Ahmedabad for Jaipur on a school trip. She was fine - we'd spoken to her just after the earthquake, her groggy voice the most beautiful sound in the world in that moment. And yet others lost sisters, mothers, grandmothers to 6.9 on the Richter Scale. They were all my sisters, in that moment.

We are not all that different. Fear is the same color on all our faces. Love is the same emotion in all our hearts. Our tears bleed the same salt. We have connections that go deeper than boundaries, futher than politics, longer than history.

Your pain is our pain, for have we not always been Siamese twins cut in two by the heaving separation of land?