{"id":5622,"date":"2022-03-03T07:05:36","date_gmt":"2022-03-03T07:05:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wowvirtual.pk\/?p=5622"},"modified":"2022-03-04T17:04:00","modified_gmt":"2022-03-04T17:04:00","slug":"pockets-of-intimacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wowpakistan.pk\/wow2023\/pockets-of-intimacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Pockets of Intimacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maryam Ahmad writes about how the act of oiling one\u2019s hair opens an intimate space for sharing and bonding for women.<\/span><\/p>\n

Every Sunday at 2:00 pm, Ammi and I sit under the blistering sun, her on daadi\u2019s charpai, while I find space between her legs on the floor. Now add two different bottles of hair oil to the mix. Ammi pours some on her left palm, rubs it between her hands and starts to massage my scalp. We sit silently for the first few minutes and then she reminds me of her distant cousin\u2019s daughter, who is getting married next weekend. <\/span><\/p>\n

Pasand ki shaadi hay [it\u2019s a love marriage], she says.<\/p>\n

She goes on about how she\u2019s getting old and that according to the teachings of Islam; it\u2019s her duty to marry off her girls.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I exasperate a half-hearted\u00a0 \u201cfine\u201d and that I\u2019ll think about it in a few years (she knows that I won\u2019t), hoping it would end the conversation but it\u2019s only the beginning of a conversation of another kind. An innocent love affair, a secret long kept until now.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cListen we\u2019re very open-minded, your father and I. If you like someone, just tell us.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

She stops to tilt my head to the other side, \u201cWe\u2019ve all done this\u2026liked somebody. I did too, back in college\u201d. Never in my life had I thought I\u2019d listen to my mother talk about a man who wasn\u2019t my father.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I rotate my head at a 270 degree angle to cross-check if the woman oiling my hair is my biological mother; she rotates my skull back to confirm that it is, indeed, her.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBlue eyes, tall, a little muscular, funny also\u2026 he was almost always at our house\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat happened?\u201d I ask impatiently. \u201cYour nana found out and got me married off as soon as possible\u201d she chuckles.<\/span><\/p>\n

So many questions, concerns and thoughts compete for attention inside my mind, I try to form a coherent sentence but end up comfortably blurting out, \u201cDid you try? Did you even fight for it?\u201d almost forgetting that I\u2019m asking for details about my own mother\u2019s love life that does not include my father.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOf course, he and I both did. He was a friend of your mamu\u2019s. Poor lad, he even sent a rishta and everything.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWait, I don\u2019t understand. What was the problem?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At this point, I wonder if she\u2019s reevaluating whether or not she\u2019s told me more than she should have but she grins, \u201cThey say it was because he was Punjabi but deep down, we all knew it was because he had dared to ask for my hand in marriage. You see, he had challenged the status quo, my brother\u2019s friend, a frequent visitor –\u00a0 almost a\u00a0 family member to say the least.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

She starts to twist my slick oily hair into a braid, \u201cWe did try, you know. Even after the whole fiasco, we\u2019d write letters to each other\u00a0 without the guarantee of receiving an answer given our households…maybe it wasn\u2019t meant to be\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

She pats my back and gets up, signaling the end of both our\u00a0 oiling session and our discussion.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Still sitting on the ground, I realize I have never seen my mother like this. So naive yet confident, almost proud to have committed to something as brave as loving someone she didn\u2019t end up with.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s no coincidence that the ancient Sanskrit word, \u201csneha\u201d or \u201cto oil\u201d also translates to \u201cto love\u201d and I reflect upon how one can only truly love in safe spaces.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So what was it about the mere acting oiling that made my mother open up to me, unprovoked? Was it because of the physical closeness of the act itself or was it because South Asian women lack access to spaces where they can open their hearts and truly be themselves? Or is it simply the absence of men in such situations and places that allows for other worlds to blossom?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Last year, during my sister\u2019s COVID wedding, our relatives started coming over unannounced every night just to sing, dance and occasionally comment on how well or badly the wedding festivities were going. In brown households, while preparations start early on, so do <\/span>dholkis <\/span><\/i>and<\/span> ratjagas<\/span><\/i>, to mark the start of wedding festivities. Two days before the wedding, Ammi had invited all the women of the family for a mehndi [henna] night, which was supposed to be spent applying mehndi on the palms and feet of all the women folk of the household.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But after dinner, something magical happened. The\u00a0 women from my mother\u2019s generation sat down with henna cones in their hands and bellies full of food\u2026..and stories.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When it was my turn to get my mehndi done, I sat crossed-legged,\u00a0 opposite to phuppo (paternal aunt) as she shows me the designs on her phone.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m making this for you,\u201d, she says pointing at one, \u201cYour hands are too small anyway.\u201d She laughs and I laugh with her.\u00a0 \u201cYou know, I\u2019ve been dreaming about her so much lately.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m confused, is she talking to me, or my mother who\u2019s sat beside me. She looks up to at my mother, their eyes meet for a second and she goes back to the pattern on my hand. \u201cI still remember, the night I went to the hospital, the new doctor kept saying it\u2019s nothing. It\u2019s a routine checkup.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This woman, my aunt, has practically brought me up. She knows things about me my own mother doesn\u2019t and yet, I can\u2019t seem to put a finger on what she\u2019s talking about. Whatever it is, it\u2019s making her visibly sad.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMiscarrying really does scar you, especially in the 9<\/span>th<\/span> month. You\u2019re basically going through the pain of childbirth, without taking the child home at the end of it.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My eyes widen as I look at her face, she\u2019s smiling but a tear trickles down her left cheek.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou know I was practically forced to look at her, I didn\u2019t want to\u2026\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At 24, this is the first time I\u2019ve heard someone say the word \u201cmiscarriage\u201d out loud, let alone speak about it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n


\n<\/span>Ammi slides closer, \u201cYou know, I also wonder, had Dr. Zeenat been around maybe things would be different\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhy? Where was Dr. Zeenat?\u201d I ask Ammi rhapsodically, because I cannot, for the life of me look at my phuppo.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOn her annual leave\u2026 When she came back, she called me up, said it was totally avoidable\u201d, says phuppo \u201cHere, all done. Tell me if you want any additions\u201d she adds as she holds my palm out for me to inspect. The conversation soon jumped to something much more banal yet lively but the something quiet but beautiful had settled within me.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, as I sit in my room alone, trying to copy a henna pattern by myself for my friend\u2019s wedding, with my work laptop open in front of me to not miss out an important email; I can\u2019t help but wonder how many such conversations didn\u2019t take place simply because there were never enough comforting women around.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The emotional wellbeing of South Asian women is often placed at the peripheries of their own homes, while being expected to labour from and within its very center. The women in my generation have lost some of these spaces in our\u00a0 lives, to dwell, cherish and giggle at suggestive stories from our mothers and grandmothers and to simply exist as openly as men do. Perhaps our lives are far too fast-paced to go back to sitting together for hours, chatting away. But even then, losing traditions might not be as scary as living with the thought that you never truly know the people you love, not closely enough to be able to understand their afflictions and accept them at their wholest self.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Maryam Ahmad<\/span><\/h2>\n

Maryam\u2019s a Communication and Design major and an English and Comparative Literature minor from Karachi, Pakistan. She writes about art, pop culture, society and work that highlights women of colour. She thoroughly enjoys reading South Asian Literature and is a 1947 Partition Literature enthusiast, who is often found admiring the origins of cultural theory.<\/p>\n

While one may occasionally find her at events catering to art and culture in Karachi, she would much rather be home binge-watching British comedy.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s a freelance writer and an occasional artist, get in touch\u00a0@maryamahmad_1@hotmail.com<\/a>. Follow her on twitter @retrokajol.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maryam Ahmad writes about how the act of oiling one\u2019s hair opens an intimate space for sharing and bonding for women. Every Sunday at 2:00 pm, Ammi and I sit under the blistering sun, her on daadi\u2019s charpai, while I find space between her legs on the floor. Now add two different bottles of hair […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6026,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wowpakistan.pk\/wow2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wowpakistan.pk\/wow2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wowpakistan.pk\/wow2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wowpakistan.pk\/wow2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wowpakistan.pk\/wow2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5622"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wowpakistan.pk\/wow2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5628,"href":"https:\/\/wowpakistan.pk\/wow2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5622\/revisions\/5628"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wowpakistan.pk\/wow2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wowpakistan.pk\/wow2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wowpakistan.pk\/wow2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wowpakistan.pk\/wow2023\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}