Gizmo’s Great Adventure

In which Gizmo, resident pet Angora Hamster at 786 Hilal, escapes his cage and is awol for a whole week.

Every summer the kids and I visit my parents abroad. Abbas usually manages to join us for part of our summer sojourn, but during most of this time he remains in Karachi at work. One summer, he was not alone, for our niece, Alia, was still living with us. Alia had moved into 786 to be with us for the last 18 months of her fine arts degree at Indus, since her own family had just moved to Islamabad and  transferring wasn’t an option or desirable. Abbas’ mother was also installed with us until the dust had settled on her oldest son's move and would then join Ali and his family later in Isloo.

Daily life at 786 was chugging along at a steady and stately pace as usual. Then Ali came down from Islamabad for work and was esconced in the guest bedroom on the lower ground floor (this house has three floors).

Alia was delighted to have her father back in Karachi. She fell asleep in his room while snuggling up to him in her kittenish way. Little did he know that he would also be sharing his room with another, albeit unwanted, guest.

Having repaired for an early night, Ali was woken up around midnight by strange sounds.  He got up to open the door. Outside the door were sprinkled large black uneven shaped ‘droppings’. What kind of creature could poop like that, Ali wondered? I doubt it occurred to his sleepy mind, however, that a cockroach may have mutated into a giant size capable of such feces. Karachi cucarachas can indeed grow to creepy proportions with menacing tentacles. The puzzle was later resolved, however, as we shall see.

He went back to bed. Sounds of scrabbling woke him up again. Switching on the light showed there to be a fluffball perched on the bed with shiny black eyes beaming out of the golden fur. Gizmo! My son Joshua’s pet hamster had escaped.  

Not Gizmo - he was cuter.

But Gizmo proved elusive.

Eventually Ali caught the blighter and marched him up to his cage, which was then residing in the dining room. I had left it there rather than in my son’s room out of fear that he would be forgotten and neglected in our absence. We did not want to return from our holidays to read funeral rites over Gizmo. Josh would be heartbroken.

Finally, thinking the problem solved, Ali went back down to sleep.

What Ali hadn’t realized was that by merely pulling the cage door down, he had not safely incarcerated Gizmo, merely relocated him temporarily. Gizmo soon discovered that the latch had not been clipped shut and once again absconded. Following the same route as before, Gizmo deftly scarpered down 17 giant Aztec steps, braving a possible attack from Sushi, resident cat but heretofore feeble mouser, and back into Ali’s bedroom.

This time, however, Ali was at a loss to locate him and suffered a disturbed sleep.

Days passed with no sign of Gizmo. Nor did Ali hear any more nocturnal scrabblings.

The lower ground floor was searched thoroughly by Chacha and Fatima. There were three other rooms on this floor: a laundry room, a library-cum-majlis (prayer room), and a huge storeroom. No sign of Gizzie. Not a fluff.

It was soon noticed, however, that Sushi, resident cat, was also unaccounted for. No one had seen him for a couple of days either. With two of 786 Hilal’s pet population missing, Chacha was beginning to have sleepless nights himself. He barely slept for 4 hours as it was. This was truly a turn for the worse and he worried about what I would say and how Josh would react. Josh had sometimes declared Sushi to be his younger brother – a show of fraternal affection that worried me whenever invoked. Some time back, Josh’s reaction to losing the garden’s resident chameleon to some marauding crows had stuck in my mind: weeping and wailing, Josh had declared, ‘He was my best friend int he whole world!’ Heart-broken and bereft, he mourned its passing for several days. With Sushi enjoying the status of ‘brother’ – largely fed, I’m afraid, by Abbas’ fondness for our handsome feline which would prompt him to occasionally declare him a third child  - it beggared the imagination to think of Josh’s possible reaction to the loss of Gizmo.

Were the disappearance of hamster and cat both connected in some way? Was Sushi skulking around unseen in a funk of guilt? Or was it coincidental? Chacha pondered over these questions anxiously.

Gizmo in my mind's eye

The storeroom’s high window looked out onto the servants’ quarters. One afternoon Chacha had retired downstairs to have a post-prandial puff on his Hookah, he suddenly noticed Sushi sat in inside the window sill of the store-room. He made an instant connection: cat-in- ambush-pose in storeroom equals pet hamster-soon-to-be-victim.

Chacha swiftly retrieved Sushi from the storeroom and took over Sushi’s watch. An hour of patient squatting was eventually rewarded when Gizmo peeped out from among the boxes.

Chacha was very careful to secure the hatches. And thus did Gizmo’s great adventure come to a peaceful end.

Postscript: The mystery of the mutant cockroach droppings was resolved when it was realized that the droppings were in fact bits of the rubber strip attached to the bottom of the bedroom door to keep out tropical nocturnal insects and retain the cold air-conditioned temperature which had been gnawed away at the corner and spat out by our daredevil hamster. The small hole was a perfect match for Gizmo’s girth.

A Ramadan Tale - Chacha & the Tapenade

In which Chacha’s alacrity exposes him to my inner control freak

In Ramadan our lives are turned upside down. The general idea is to reduce outer distractions so inner interactions can take centre stage. Its not just food but a whole slew of other worldly activities that are restricted. Life in Karachi often gets to feel like a runaway train, so when Ramadan comes round I welcome it with the relief of one who’s found the brakes.  I am forced to stop, take stock and narrow down. The simple act of proscribing any form of alimentation during daylight hours lends inner muscle to the deeper ‘authentic’ self.

As I settle into the rhythm of the fast, I find a blissful inner silence starts to descend and infuse throughout my being. The usual mental white noise is hushed by the lack of blood sugar and by the cessation of constant taste-bud stimulation. There’s a distinct shift away from worldly pleasure to inner treasure.

Which is not to say that fasting isn’t a challenge! Fasting in Karachi brings with it its own peculiar pressures, pleasant and unpleasant, both. Heat and long busy days easily erode one’s energy levels.  Possibly the most stressful and conflicting aspect is iftaar. Well, not the act of breaking fast itself, but the accompanying culture of fried foods and over-eating.  Once upon a time iftaar was a matter of a few dates, water or milk, and maybe a warm beverage or light soup. While dates still appear on the menu in Pakistan, iftaari, as the fast-breaking is known here, is a much grander affair: the common comestibles prepared are pekoras (spicey gram flour fritters), samosas and chaat (spicy salads of chickpeas or fruit). There are of course many other delectables but almost every household would have these as the core of their fast breaking.

A Pakistani Muslim prepares to distribute food stuff among the people for 'Iftar', a time to break the fast, at a shop on the first day of holy fasting month of Ramadan, Sunday, Aug. 23, 2009 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. During the Islamic holy month of Ramadan observant Muslims throughout the world refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and sex from sunrise to sunset. (AP Photo/Anjum Naveed) http://newshopper.sulekha.com/pakistan-ramadan_photo_945169.htm

I grew up in an Arab/European family that broke fast with dates and water, prayed and then ate dinner starting off with a light soup. A far simpler affair. Every year since I moved to Karachi I would declare my home a pekora-free zone, as I also harbour a morbid fear of re-using oil (heating oil releases those nasty free-radicals & carcinogenic peroxides). And every year I have started to succumb more easily to the expectations of fried, toxically tasty morsels. While virtuous low GI chaats help feed the higher centres of one’s being, the greasy stuff just drags the energies down. But that, it seems, is what the punters like!

Ramadan meals,therefore, often become a big deal.  Even sacrosanct. During the first few days the day long deprivation is often rewarded upon fast-breaking by a heightened awareness of how Nature’s bounty is a banquet of pleasure in taste and texture, usually taken for granted.  In my case this gratitude is accompanied by a strong streak of nutritional self-righteousness and keen moral aspiration. The demon fear of starvation is also manacled as you realize you can go through a calorie free day without collapsing.

Nevertheless over-indulgence always threatens – let’s be honest here! As my husband and I have grown older, however, we find that after the first few days of preparing Ramadan ‘treats’, we tend to retreat to safe, nourishing, digestible food. In order to function optimally, you cannot indulge in eating what you like in any amount you like. Post-iftaar indigestion threatens to obviate the whole purpose of the fast. I start to obsess about what I put into my mouth and fear invitations to other people’s homes where banquets of fried foods and other delectable dishes that one wouldn’t normally dream of eating for 'break-fast' are served. Pekoras and samosas are, in the final analysis, hard to resist. At least in my own home I have greater control. What you put into your body becomes as important as what it tastes like in your mouth. It’s a happy day when a liking for the two coincide.

Made from olives, capers, garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, herbs to taste. http://dico-cuisine.fr/news/tapenade

So now let me wax lyrical about tapenade. Breakfast in general – even outside the ‘fast’ -  has long posed a problem for me. Sugary cereals are out – can’t deal with the post insulin surge-slump. Toast, butter and jam is another slippery slope, particularly here where we cannot get real whole wheat bread or pure rye. I never grew up with a British-style ‘fry up’ so its not in my culinary vocab. The early pre-dawn meal of Sehri demands just the right kind of nourishment, light and savoury. And skipping to the heart of the matter: there is no substitute for a good tapenade on toast, preferably with the cooling and sweet counterpoint of fresh yoghurt on top, with a few fresh mung bean sprouts sprinkled on for crunch and living enzymes. A close second would be my father’s famous breakfast mixture – based on za'tar (eastern thyme) and yoghurt.

For Ramadan a few years ago Abbas had brought back with him from South Africa a small but costly jar of gourmet tapenade from a delicious deli.  And so it was with a sense of self satisfaction that we would spread a thin layer of this ambrosial paste onto our toast at 4 in the morning.  The earthy aromas and unctuous texture rendered the usual insipid ‘bran’ toast more than just edible, but delicious. Noble, even! So sparing were we with this treat that it seemed we’d be able to eke it out over almost the entire month. We were set!

Five days into the fast the jar disappeared. I let its disappearance go uncommented – after all we could eat other things too. I wasn’t too perturbed and enjoyed delaying the gratification. But the following day I searched throughout the kitchen for it. Finally, after a few puzzling hours of mounting frustration, I discovered the jar in the pickle cupboard. Suspicions aroused, I twisted the lid off to take a whiff – not entirely forbidden by the fast. Instead of that rich, olivey aroma, a sharp smell of vinegar scented with Iranian Angelica seed (golpar) assaulted my nostrils. What?! I was stunned. Some leftover Persian pickles had been decanted into this more appropriately sized jar. How could this have happened? As I googled my mind for all logical possibilities, one rapidly emerged. Chacha must have smelt the tapenade and thought it was off. And...thrown...it...out! Horrors! But he had saved the jar as he knew how thrifty I am with jars (well, they are very useful whenever its jam-making time).

I was apoplectic.

After a brief inquisition with Chacha, our tireless bearer-cum-chowkidar, he sheepishly acknowledged that he had indeed discarded the offending material as it had been left by the sink – an obvious indication to him that it was meant to be discarded. And besides, it did smell bad. To him. Needless to say, Chacha has never eaten an olive in his life, much less nibbled tapenade on melba toast. I’m not sure he even knew they feature in the Qur’an on that magical list of holy fruit and veg. After his admissal he first looked chuffed with himself, and then, as he saw my face cloud over, his eyebrows swiftly contorted into a spasm of mortification.

‘But Chacha!’ I remonstrated futilely, ‘it wasn’t supposed to be thrown away. It wasn’t bad!’ 

‘But it was left near the sink!’ he cried in dismay.

Too late. In my fulmination I thoughtlessly trotted out another dagger for his heart.

 ‘And it was expensive! Sahib had brought it from abroad!’ 

Having thus imbued this absent paste with even more unattainable mystique, Chacha’s mortification was complete. He hung his head in shame. The pain of failure and the embarrassment of ignorance radiated from his every pore.

His rueful demeanour slammed the brakes on my juggernaut of annoyance. I immediately castigated myself: how could I indulge in such indignation in the face of such innocence? Remorse reached down and in and whacked me one.

To see Chacha thus pained iced my ire in a jiffy, for Chacha is our resident Man Friday, our ‘salt-of-the-earth’.  And without salt bread tastes bland.

Respect!

The King of the Castle or Guru?

In which we learn about Sushi, the resident cat of 786 Hilal … and a bit about Kimchi, his nemesis.

Sushi is without doubt the king of the ‘castle’ that is 786 Hilal. In spite of his fishy name, he is, in our naturally partial view, a most splendid example of feline creatureliness.  

Of desi (native) stock, Sushi shows no traces of any exotic breed like the luxurious pelt or squashed face of pernickety Persians or the smoky aloofness of slinky Siamese. Sushi is a plain, common or garden variety, grey and white tabby. He’s not even especially handsome as the often pleasing symmetry of stripes in a tabby is, in his case, broken up on his snout by a small brownish coloured patch to the right. If one didn’t know better, one might be tempted to scrub this stain clean off his otherwise white fur. I somehow appreciate this half-hearted patch of colour, however, as if this minor blemish keeps Sushi within the realm of the mortal. For at times, Sushi reveals his alter ego as the resident Guru.

Sushi’s arrival was fraught with trauma. His mother had been a domesticated cat belonging to my sister-in-law’s daughter-in-law. As she was moving home she had to rehouse her cat and its litter of kittens, so we committed to taking in one and left the choice up to her.  While bringing him over to us, Rubina had kept him on her lap. Needing to swing by her old flat for a moment, as she opened the car door, Sushi shot off into the garage and disappeared. Rubina alerted all the residents to contact her should he be found. He managed to evade detection for two days before someone found him and called her. When he reached us, scrawny Sushi was plastered with car oil. Hissing and spitting, he was in no mood to accept any TLC, so we left him in my son Joshua’s room for a couple of days to acclimatize and calm down.

Once he was cleaned and able to eat, Sushi started to delight us all with his kittenish antics and friskiness. He soon endeared himself to us with his playful swipes and keen intelligence. His sense of humour was subtly elegant. Teasing the geckos was a favourite pastime of his, though he was far too gentle to actually eat them. Or far too spoilt. Or too chicken. Or an advanced practitioner of Ahimsa.

I soon realized that in comparison with other friends’ kittens which had been adopted straight off the street, Sushi had been advantaged in the pet stakes by being the son of an already domesticated feral cat. This was what lent him such an agreeable air of nonchalant domesticity. And being the only indoor pet he had the run of the house – barring the bedrooms – and soon came to regard 786 Hilal as his territory. 

Naturally we would all give him the appreciation due to the territorial sovereign. Kindness and respect to domestic animals is an Islamic ideal my family grew up with. In the traditions of Islam we hear tales of how the Prophet Muhammad respected cats, to the extent of once cutting his robe so as to leave a cat that had been sleeping upon his lap in undisturbed peace. Wherever my family had called home, cats would soon move in, unannounced and uninvited but always welcomed. It was easy to extend this courtesy to Sushi, so amenable did he seem to us.

In spite of his high status Sushi found himself unpleasantly upstaged a few years later by the arrival of Kimchi. Kimchi was another scrappy thing that had barely been weaned from its mother before its owners, some dear close friends, had to move abroad. This kitten had been earmarked as Sana’s pet but she had hardly had her for any length of time, and now, having to leave, I felt sorry for the little thing, ugly as she was. And so Kimchi came home to 786 Hilal.

To cut a long and sorry story short, oriental food names aside, the two cats had nothing in common and Sushi took an immediate and intense dislike to little Kimchi. Kimchi had zero feline social skills. She also unfortunately did not respond positively to our attempts to civilize her  - she was never able to welcome human stroking or trust us enough to hold back on hissing and spitting after one or two tickles behind her ear - and it began to dawn upon me that Kimchi’s fate was probably to become the outdoor cat and live in the garden and garage. 

Nonetheless Sushi went into an emotional tailspin and sank into a marked depression. He lost weight and his zest for life and took to moping around miserably. He made his displeasure known however by leaving his bowel evacuations everywhere. Gradually he became a shadow of his former self.

It took the eventual banishing of Kimchi to the garden and an entire summer’s worth of TLC from my husband Abbas to restore Sushi’s confidence in being king of his castle. While I was away with the children over the summer holidays, Abbas made sure to indulge Sushi by allowing him every night  into the bedroom, heretofore off-limits, talking to him and stroking him lovingly. When we returned from our holidays, Sushi had been restored to a credible reflection of his former self. And Abbas had been blessed by his feline presence, not to be sniffed at, in the absence of his own loved ones. Furthermore, Kimchi’s new status as ‘gata (cat in Spanish) non grata’ suited Sushi just fine!

One of the most loveable things about Sushi is that quality he shares with all felines: the ability to sleep and laze around, unperturbed by the hustle and bustle of the day.  And this quality is not just lovable but instructive. Whether it’s a lion digesting his fill of a kill in the Kalahari, or Sushi’s post-prandial napping, their ability to repose in utter stillness is something I envy. It takes a lot to slow me down and make me stop. And as Sushi has grown older and less frisky, I regard him with awe and appreciation for reminding me to stop and be still, to merely observe and do less. It’s a lesson I need to continually learn, so addicted am I to action. 

Sushi shows me how he gets what he wants simply by being true to his nature, effortlessly. Its this instinctual quality of beingness that his feline nature exudes that makes me elevate him to the status of a domestic Guru. His mode of being is to be totally in the moment - what the Sufis call ibn ul-waqt. And sometimes I even find myself pressing my hands together in a namaste salutation to him as I catch the ‘lesson’. But don’t tell the neighbours: they may think I’m apostasizing!

Reality Check Route

In which I share three poignant observations that strike me on my daily morning trip to the gym.*

Every morning after I’ve dropped off the children to school I make my way to the gym across Phase Four and Two. The route my driver takes ensures that every day we pass  through the same backroads of Defence. The familiarity is hypnotic. The grey boxy concrete structures do little to stimulate the senses. Occasionally new configurations of craters and cracks appear in the roads, but mostly we drive through these streets on autopilot. And occasionally the silence is punctuated by a sharp intake of breath as a car pulls out before us from a side-road, the hapless driver giving nary a glance around him or her. My driver has long since wisely learned to quell his fight or flight reflexes and maintains a dignified, if smoldering, silence.

Along the way to the gym and from there back on towards home there are three checkpoints  I  pass through. These are not military ‘checkpoints’ per se, though we are in Cantt (short for Cantonment - Raj nomenclature persists in the lingo), but have been designated thus by myself.  In case my inner state may be slightly off kilter, going through each one of them recalibrates my inner compass to 'Gratitude' in the north and 'Humility' in the south.

The first is the blind man who stands, come rain (and when is that?) or shine, along X street. Clad in shalvar qameez, his longish hair kept in place by a cap, he stands there for hours with one hand outstretched, the other leaning on a cane for support. I’ve never seen him arrive or leave. He’s just there. Every day. Under the baking sun, near the corner of his street and Sunset Boulevard. His blank expression seems dignified, maybe even aloof. Unlike other beggars working the traffic junctions in the Defence/Clifton area, he’s not being led around by a scrappy child, thrusting unseeing eyes into your car window. No: he just stands there and waits for whatever comes his way – not ever knowing whether it may be a car careening towards him out of the control of  some spotty underage driver (of whom there are shamefully far too many in our city), or if someone is giving him coins or notes.

His otherwordly demeanour is a daily salutary reminder of the most obvious fact in my life: there but for the grace of God go I.

The second checkpoint is a short strip which I’ve come to call the Conference of the Babas. Again, every day between three to eight bearded Babas with topis on their head gather along a street corner, united by the fact that they are all either paralyzed from the waist down or limbless. Each one sits perched in his own wooden cart, leading me to wonder whether there’s a hierarchy of models and add-ons to this range of vehicles.

What fascinates me is how does each individual earn their portion of the sadaqah distributed by the passersby. It’s a conundrum: do they band together in musketeer fashion and share out whatever is given equally? Or do they take turns to pocket the baksheesh? Do passers-by familiar with this group take this into account and make sure to give each and everyone of these hapless mendicants a portion?

Each Baba seems to pitch up without any guarantees of how much he’ll earn on a day. But pitch up they do. They banter. They smile and laugh. As they sit there they commune in a brotherhood that gives them hope and purpose in life. They've even planted chillis and corn behind them, homesteading this corner in a symbolic way.

The last checkpoint is the rows of itinerant workers – karigars – that line Gizri, that attenuated medieval version of ‘Homebase’. They line up along this strip of hardware stores like ribbons of dusty brown crows. Hunched up before colour charts with small piles of tools neatly stacked up beside them, they are doing what every humble creature does: testing providence. The hadith (sahih or da'if its the meaning that counts, not the soundness of provenance) comes to mind ‘Does a sparrow know from where it gets its sustenance of a day? And yet every morning it wakes and flies off in search of it.’ And finds it of course. 

Slightly less active than sparrows, these skilled and unskilled menfolk hunker down hoping for a day’s work that will give them honest bread. Sometimes I want to be able to tell all of them, ‘Come! I’ll give you work!’ But alas: neither am I in the construction industry, nor fortunate to be building my own home, nor so unfortunate that the home I live in requires massive daily maintenance (though I have invited the plumber to move in with us as we seem to need him on an almost daily basis!).  They sit there day in day out with trust and good expectation.

The Gizri flyover now obscures the row of hardware shops and the day labourers lining the street.

All three checkpoints remind me of what Allah says: ‘I am with my slave’s good opinion of me’. This was my grandmother’s mantra – may Allah rest her soul in peace. She took stock from this hadith qudsi and overcame disappointment, fear and anxiety through it. Like her too this teaching is one of my own pillars of faith. Have the best expectation of Allah – not of creation, but of the Creator. The Creator’s agenda may differ from yours, so best delegate even the expectations to that power that knows what is ultimately best for us.

Daily I am humbled at these checkpoints. Daily my heart is prevented from becoming blasé and cynical. Daily these reminders invoke in me profound gratitude that is purified of any complacency or smugness. And daily I say prayers that these folks may find the sustenance they need. While the gymming gives my body the workout it needs, this reality check route is a daily tonic to my ego-self’s outlook. And I always return home in a cloud of humble reverence.

*This was written in about 2008/9. Of the people I mention here,  only the blind beggar has moved. My kids have since moved onto other schools and I no longer gym at the same place. Any foray into those areas still invokes the same effect, however.