I was considered as someone heretically nay blasphemously secular and politically über-active during my university years. Friends, acquaintances, teachers, right-wing-Taliban-praising-18-inch-beard-sporting-parachute -clad-Mullah-Omar-to-be- engineering undergraduates who were more often than not at the receiving end of my lashing tongue: All of them took me as someone who was heavily tilted in favour of the WEST. Somebody who was so annoyed by the emptiness and the incapacity of his own culture to provide catharsis that it had turned against it by accepting it to be inferior to the currently dominant European cultures that carry, at least in name, the values of egalitarianism and social justice for European people, if not the Humanity.

The fact of the matter is that they were not wrong at all. The constant downfall of the Orient in the face of incessant Occidental onslaught plus the failure, rather in-existence (when separated from endemic Arab history) of an Islamic social theory and hence a revival plan, viewed with the historical flow that tended heavily to favour the Occident had thoroughly alienated me from the religion, Islam that is: In all its forms and manifestations and practices, be it the Indianized interpretation and implementation (as we see it in Pakistan), or its Arabian nascent form preservation (as we see it in India and Afghanistan). Overly sensitive perhaps but that’s how I was.

Time passes however and pass it did. Graduation, Job, Post-Grad and pre-Marital dabbings into that “dangerous-irresistible-pass-time”, that has a moral toll of it’s own on both parties in our Middle-Class Indo-Pakistani societies, and then marriage. Then came the chance of a lifetime. A job in New York in a reputable company. I was at that time of such a state of mind that had they proposed me a job without salary I would have accepted it.

Dear Readers! Since I had never been outside the land of the pure, I had my own visualization of New York. New York for me was the New York of Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese. New York of Fifth Avenue, New York of Central Park, New York of Broadway. The merry people of New York worked by day and sung, danced and dined in its more than enough and classier than anything restaurants, theatres and bars. Of course I knew of Bronx and Brooklyn but why should I concern myself with trivialities. While living in Defence I never considered the plight of those living in Railway Colony or Garhee Shaho so why burden myself with Brooklyn and Bronx. To this extent I was right, in my theoretical calculations and my fantastic extrapolations, about life in New York but only to this extent my dear readers.

Arriving in New York and finding an apartment in a decent neighbourhood, two of the biggest problems encountered by the majority of the incoming crowd were taken care of by the company. You may wonder what might be the problem if the big two have already been eliminated. Moroseness my friends, is just the depiction of a particular state of mind. It has got nothing to do with surroundings or human interactions or ambience although there was a reason behind my perpetually turned-off state of the mind but since it couldn’t be eliminated and hence out of control and since I am much too stubborn for my own good sometimes, I just tried to find other ways of finding “Bonheur”.

The job started. I was good at it, I liked it and the pay was generous. The best of all the worlds. A loving wife, prime of my youth and plenty of money should have automatically been translated into “the best days of my life” but it wasn’t so. What happened was that I had consciously shunned my own culture, my own society and my own religion while being in Pakistan and had tried to embrace the Western one. What I had forgotten was the fact that how sham or how hypocritically nonsensical my religio-social heritage might be, it was my mine and the two of us were inseparable, how hard I might try. On the other hand, no matter how hard I try to integrate myself to a foreign culture, there would be minute details that would continue to escape my attention plus that biggest factor, “GORA doesn’t care”.

In fact GORA is soooooo cool that it really doesn’t bother him if we have achieved a seam-less integration or we are trying to preserve our identity. GORA lives on a social, mental and philosophical so elevated and hence so detached from ours that our little fartings of imitation don’t even reach him. We are a crowd of “Invisible Men” working as Investment Bankers, Software Writers or Telecommunication Engineers. For GORA we are just cogs of a well-oiled-moolah-erupting machine: And sadly cogs don’t have any social significance or have they?

Of course I did not know that. I was a GORA in my country. Acting like a GORA brings bonus points in our countries and I had accumulated plenty but that I would be reduced to the status of a non-entity I hadn’t imagined. I had, like almost everyone of you I suppose, a social life, friends and relatives and colleagues. Dinners and Tea-Parties. Weekend sorties with family and all the other bonding stuff. All of that dried up instantly. GORA does not invite you. Since we are on different social-planes the spheres of his social-connectivity are as elevated as his social being and hence isolated from the “coggish” forms of life, like ours.

This lack of social exposure took its toll. First of all the breathing space that a married couple requires as individuals vanished since we had only each other to talk to. The frequency of our domestic skirmishes, that had hitherto bordered just on expressions of displeasure now spilled over into verbal onslaughts, took an alarmingly sharp rise. Secondly I had to, since GORA was displaying his “Sang-Froid”, look for Indian/Pakistani couples with the same social/job backgrounds: Just to have some sort of social existence. That had its own drawbacks. That severely limited the choice of company that I could keep. It took away a huge part of the fun in the way that politics, religion and cricket, the three favourite topics of a Homus Sub-Continentalus, not precisely in the same order, when treated simultaneously by an Indian and Pakistani carry the seeds of third, fourth, fifth and successive global conflicts in them. Lastly the most dreadful thing was the sub-continental right winger in New York. Saviour of the culture who bemoaned all the time the fact that “New York da mahool bara kharab hay gee, meri tay 2 bachiyaan jay”. This type had the extra-ordinarily astonishing capacity of making me throw-up without administering any of the recognized puke-agents.

So after one year, I decided to leave the land of my dreams and go back to the place that I deserved; not the place where I belonged, if you’d ask me. From my 88 years old grandmother to my 4 years old nephew and several “relations-familiales” that have settled in various nooks and corners of the country and globe expressed their utter disbelief and demanded, in their respective capacities to demand, an explanation.

All I could tell them was , “Bus gee, Integrate nahin ho saka”.

While Farhan bhai who has been living in California for the last 25 years perhaps and who sports a beard, I am sure, that is longer than that of OBL could only comment, “Khair, Itna mushkil bhee nahin hay. GORA bahot khulay dil ka hay”.

And I could only look at him like a fool and nod in agreement.