The first time I heard her American tongue barely handling the workload of Urdu I should have laughed. Yet linguistic deficiency had not been sexier before this. What was she doing in Karachi? Couldn’t her parents send her to a nice public school in Georgia County instead of P.E.C.H.S.? But that didn’t bother me. What mattered was that she was beautiful. Her Urdu was worse than Benazir’s yet that didn’t stop me from dreaming about her – in English.

Yes ladies and gentlemen this is what I had to go through in high school.

In the US we have people like me - fobs and we have our abcds, but I was exposed to another phenomenon in a Karachi high school. Young American-Pakistani students shipped back for some godforsaken reason. What the bloody hell man! They got most of the attention. They were rich spoilt brats and bratnis most of the time so you’d sit and watch them in their designer wardrobe dispensing their extraordinary knowledge on American pop culture -

I only had fucking PTV in my house until just before I went to college. They pranced around with their accessories making the rest of us jealous. As I look back now maybe that’s why I had my international Mamo bring me a trapper keeper. Really I could have stuffed my loose papers into a made-in-china-good-for-nothing binder, but noooo, I needed those special ones. With a special notepad that you couldn’t find refills for in Urdu Bazaar. He ended up getting me a purple-colored trapper keeper with these gaudy psychedelic designs. A Bart Simpson one would have done fine but oh well I could compromise for his shitty choice. I will forever harbor resentment for getting a trapper keeper just so I could look cool. It didn’t work by the way.

Next came those awful designer clothes. How cool was it to wear a certain banyaan under your school uniform so fellow students could get a vague impression of the letters: A R M A N I. For all I care you could have bought it from Zainab Market, but since you spoke butchered Urdu I was more than likely to have believed that you bought it from Lord and Taylor.

This social distinction was created such that it was plausible to put a dozen or so random people wearing these designer shirts together and they’d know each other pretty well. And also they wouldn’t mingle with bumpkins like moi. You know how I coped with this: Caterpillar jeans (yes the company who makes heavy machinery, hey their brand is pretty well known) and Nike t-shirts. Oh shit! I just realized, friggin Nike t-shirts were considered iconic in high school. Blasphemy! They weren’t quite in the league of Tommy’s and Armani’s and CK’s but hey you could pull a minor upset with an image of Ronaldo on your backside molesting a swoosh. And you guessed right. Some relative made the mistake of calling my house before leaving on a jet plane to Karachi. Beta app ko amreeka say kuch chahiye? Heck yeah, I don’t know who the fuck you are uncle but hold on let me get my list. I was pathetic.

Caterpillar boots. How could I forget them? I still remember paying a premium in Sheikh Zayed’s (toilet)paper for them at a shoe store in Abu Dhabi. I could have bought a gazillion Shawerma’s and perhaps a hand job from a Russian whore in Dubai but hey Cats were IN. If you had the steel toe, the translucent cat logo on the sole and the main corporate logo at the back of the shoes, you were a made man. I look back four years later and realize – they didn’t really do much. Or anything for that matter except make walking challenging. Lest I forget I should also mention my collection of Nike footwear. Who put this filth in my head? Why did I for one minute believe that brand endorsements would help my sorry ass gain acceptance from the dudes and honeys? But yet such things made the socio-economic culture that was high school. Or at least I thought so.

Considering I’m in the mood of unloading crap from my brain unto yours, listen up! Now don’t get me wrong. I never will or ever plan to hate my hiatus from reality in high school but this is how we did it. The gangs, the bodyguards, the brand spankin’ new Honda civics Exs and later Vtechs, the Toyota corollas 2.0 Ds and 1.6 GLIs , the occasional BMW, sigh….those were the days. As I send off my resume to anyone who would look at it, plan what to do for the next crucial months after my graduation I look back at my time in high school and come to the realization that I had one heck of a time wasting my parent’s money.

And as I ponder buying the 78-cent Dannon peach yogurt and or 38-cent Wal-Mart brand that almost tastes like peach, I think I’ll do the Walton’s this small favor. After all I should start saving for my kid; who knows I might be shipping him off to Karachi someday.