I have lived and worked in San Francisco for thirteen years; I am a Mughal historian at the University of San Francisco. In 2019, for reasons I can’t explain, I felt the need to take a year off. I traveled for months, to different cities on the Mediterranean. I painted, swam, walked, struck up friendships with strangers, picked up bits of other languages. Then the impulse burned itself out and I’d burned through my savings too, so I came home to Karachi, to the house in which I grew up. By January 2020, I had a temporary visiting professor gig at IBA, teaching Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal history to undergraduates. This class is my home base, no matter which country I teach it in. For many students, it’s a door to another world, and I tell them we’ll go there together, forget the present, and come back to ourselves changed. We’ll meet poets and dervishes and I’ll tell them why I don’t care about nations or passports and why they shouldn’t either. I’ve taught it for thirteen years and it’s a class whose alums often come back–they wander into the classroom years later, pull up a seat, and grin. Welcome home, I say.
I am currently living with my parents and sister in DHA, Phase 5. I am forty years old. My sister Jawziya is three years younger than me and my parents are in their mid-70s. The lockdown was the culmination of a slow process. On February 27, I went to IBA ready to teach my class. I was excited. We had finished studying the Ottoman Empire and it was that moment in a class when things begin to come together; students do the readings, discussions flow smoothly, and I have learned how to read the room. We were excited to begin studying Mughal India. As Pakistanis, the Mughals felt like they were ours, in a way the Ottomans didn’t; We’d read the Baburnama and we were going to read the writing of Babur’s daughter, Gulbadan Begum. I’m always happy when this happens because students are finally reading a primary source by a woman.
When I arrived, the mood on campus was uncertain. The Sindh government had closed all academic institutions until the end of the week. Would IBA comply? I remember speculating about this with colleagues in the faculty lounge. A half hour before class, I ran into a few of my students in the hallway. They too weren’t sure what was going on. Then we were told we all needed to go home. Classes were suspended for two days. Well, this isn’t going to cost us much, I thought. We’d just reconvene on Tuesday, March 3 and I’d cover two sessions’ readings in one. But over the weekend, it became clear classes were suspended for longer and we were all told to teach online.
I was horrified. How was I supposed to keep teaching when teaching isn’t just about texts or lectures; it’s about a hidden flow of energy that moves between people in a room who are changing their minds, changing others, and letting the past speak to them? I love all of it; the moment students’ eyes fill with recognition, or when the students in the back row exchange glances they think I can’t read but can, or when I see a student connecting words in a book with a story her grandmother told her. We are entirely distanced from the Mughal past in Pakistan and in this country, magic happens when we study Mughal India. Was I really supposed to reduce all this to Zoom sessions on a computer screen?
I abhor technology. It makes me feel incompetent. But I had to teach, so I dived in. I recorded audio lectures, put my PowerPoints online, and wrote emails to my students. I scheduled online sessions and stayed up all night before a session because the thought of it was terrifying. The students responded well and we began building another kind of community. After two shaky online meetings on Microsoft Teams, we had a good session on Zoom on March 19. We’re back in business I thought. And then IBA suspended online classes for two weeks. The administration needed time to formulate a policy that was fair to all students and faculty members: We could not assume all students had access to the internet and we could not assume faculty with childcare obligations could hold sessions at their allotted time.
Following that, on March 23, Karachi went into lockdown. Newspapers have already recorded what we know happens in times of crisis: People run to stores and begin hoarding, necessities sell out, and prices rise. This has all been true. The same day, I found I had fever and panicked. What if I had COVID-19 and infected my parents? I stayed in my room, ate separately, tried not to interact too much with my family. By the time the fever went down it was a week later and then my sister had to quarantine herself. She went to Macchar Colony to give money to some families in need, got surrounded by people, and my khala, a doctor, told her she now needed to be in quarantine. Everyone in this house is losing their minds. Breath, this thing that separates the dead from the living is suspect, because it carries particles that can enter someone else’s lungs and kill them. So we stay away from each other and worry all the time; why did I pick up my mother’s phone, should I disinfect the groceries, should we wipe down all surfaces? Every morning there are new statistics in Dawn about how many are infected or dead and the numbers are skyrocketing.
No matter what we do to help others–zakat, donations, volunteer work– the well of need is endless. Twice, I’ve left the house and come home crying. Once I was at the vet’s and there were rescue animals in cages, brutalized beyond recognition, abandoned at pet stores and left to die. Another time, it was the sight of children starving on the streets. I can’t stand cruelty to children and animals. I’m crying in Jawziya’s room and she reaches out to hug me and then thinks better of it. As of today, April 7, classes are back online and it took me days to write a lecture because my concentration is shot to hell and my sleep schedule is off too. I spend too much time online or I find myself in a painting frenzy where I’m painting like a crazy person–deranged self-portraits, blobs of ink and coffee that become imaginary birds, other splotches of color I crumple up and throw away because they add up to nothing at all.
The world seems to be returning to a time when we didn’t have text messaging and people are actually calling each other just to talk. I have friends in the city who I have known since I was 13; we used to come home from school, call each other on the family landline, and then our parents would get annoyed because they didn’t understand what we were talking about for hours when we had seen each other in school. Relatives would complain that they tried to call but the line was busy. It’s strange and comforting that here we are, twenty-seven years later, back in Karachi, calling each other on the phone to share details about the everyday. When I wake up, despite everything, I thank God that I’m home and there’s nowhere else I want to be.
Some mornings I read Urdu poetry with my father. I go to Rekhta.com and look up a verse. Usually, he knows it because his phuphi made him memorize volumes of poetry when he was a child. He draws out the nuances in the meanings of words, and then gives me more verses. My mother says that she remembers how in 1965, they went out during the day but had to stay home at night because there were air-raids. “We knew the enemy then and our parents had lived through the founding of Pakistan,” she says. “So there was this spirit of patriotism. Now it’s as though the enemy is unseen and unknown and it’s different.” I miss hugging my mother. I spend hours learning how to use technology the way I’ve devoted myself to learning languages and this language is the most challenging of all. My sister and I watch movies or talk about authors. Our parents’ mortality comes up because we are both worried about them and they think we are being ridiculous. Of late, we’ve become addicted to KitKat and we bought a whole supply two days ago but she’s gone and eaten it all. She says it just happened. I don’t want to think about my sugar consumption. I don’t want to think at all, to be honest, and I just want to wake up from this bizarre reality. But I’m a writer, I tell myself, and everything is raw material. I have to write. And I’m a historian, so I have to record what’s happening, and I have to remember even though I’d rather forget.
–Taymiya R. Zaman
April 7, 2020, Karachi.
COVID-19 Ramzan
May 21, 2020/27 Ramzan 1441
It comes for your lungs. It attacks your heart. All your organs fail and then you die. You get rashes. Your toes swell up. You get fever. You can’t move. You lose your sense of smell. You cough up foam and your chest’s on fire. If you have it and suddenly feel better, it could be a sign you’ll die soon. It kills your elders but your children are safe. It kills children. Malaria drugs are useless. Malaria drugs can work. Don’t take Ibuprofen. It’s fine to take Ibuprofen. You can have it and not have symptoms but then everyone around you can get it and die. Don’t leave the house. It’s time to leave the house. Outdoor spaces are better than indoor spaces. The wind can carry it everywhere outdoors so stay inside. Always carry hand sanitizer. Half the hand sanitizer in the market is fake. Wear a mask. Masks are useless. You can protect yourself. Nothing can protect you.
Every day, there are new statistics, new ways COVID-19 can kill you. The news is divergent half the time. Conspiracy theories abound, as does magical thinking. This is a list of what I’ve heard:
1. Bill Gates invented COVID-19 (I am not making this up)
2. We won’t get it because God protects Muslims
3. COVID-19 doesn’t exist and all the deaths are fake deaths.
4. A lab invented COVID-19 as part of a biological warfare plan.
5. COVID-19 came here on a UFO and it’s creating alien DNA (I made this up but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone, somewhere believes it)
There are videos circulating of experiments with gobs of blue ink that glow fluorescent in the dark. The blue ink represents snot or spit and the experiments show how quickly that stuff can spread in a room and infect everyone. I read an article about what travel now looks like: everyone scurries around airports armed with disinfectant spray and sanitizer, spraying themselves and the air, and screaming if anyone gets within six feet of them. All other humans are possible vectors of disease who must be neutralized or held at bay. Pakistan just started domestic flights and flight staff look like space cadets, decked out in plastic from head to toe. With the facemasks, everyone’s a niqabi I’m entertained that men too must cover their faces. And then there are people in Pakistan who—now that the lockdown is largely over—are out shopping and praying and socializing even as infection rates skyrocket every day.
I barely leave the house. My horizons have shrunk. It’s unbelievable that I used to do things like get on planes and fly back and forth between Karachi and San Francisco. It’s stressful to go to the grocery store, so I can’t fathom going anywhere further right now. Every ten days or so, I make a grocery trip with my sister. We line up outside Ami’s, men in one line, women in another. Then we walk through a sanitization tunnel where we get sprayed with disinfectant. Sometimes we get to skip this part; the logic behind this is never clear. After the tunnel we get handed gloves. Everyone already has a mask on because you can’t enter the store without one. Someone takes our temperature. Then we’re let into the store. One time, the line outside wasn’t moving so I sat down on the pavement. This breach of protocol caused a minor kerfuffle. Three guards darted around and brought chairs—Defence bajis can’t do this sort of thing—and I kept refusing them because I prefer sitting on the ground. Then one guard sensibly said hum sab ko zameen mein hi jana hai, tau kiya masla hai, baji ko baithnay dau. I nodded my assent, thanked him, and told him he was a samajhdar insan for pointing out that we’d all be buried in the ground anyway. He mock-saluted me and we nodded at each other in solemn comradery.
It’s nearly the end of Ramzan. Classes ended a couple of weeks ago. By the end of class, all boundaries had vanished. I taught in the T-shirts I sleep in and didn’t bother washing my hair or doing anything to my face. One of my students turned his camera on to show us his lockdown beard and then he pressured his friend to do the same. Another student had bangs and another grinned at me sleepily because she’d just woken up. Many didn’t turn their cameras on and I didn’t ask why. I’m on a WhatsApp group with the hatchlings, and texts fly back and forth at all hours, including right before sehri. Some of them are obsessed with a Turkish serial called Ertugrul, which I try to watch but can’t because dudes and swords literally put me to sleep. They have a long discussion in which colonialism is compared to shit (because colon), and I maintain a studious silence while chuckling to myself. I pray for them and their families and I worry about the world into which they will graduate.
We are living through this strange Ramzan together. There are successive heatwaves in Karachi, so everyone is hot, hungry, and exhausted. The upstairs of our house is a furnace and I’ve decided that I’m going to be awake for only 5 hours of the fast. I stay awake till sehri (some students do too because texts fly back and and forth at all hours) and then I sleep from 6.00 AM until 2.00 PM. Between 2.00 PM and 6.00 PM I either read COVID-19 stories on the internet, waste time on Instagram, or make a menace of myself and bother whoever happens to be available in this house. Or I nap. In the hour before iftar I go for a walk, armed with food that I give to strays. This is fun because random things happen. One time I made friends with a woman, her dog, and a puppy who was following her. Another time it was with a woman who also feeds strays. The best was when a woman I’d never met before said I needed to meet some Grade 19 officer who was looking for a wife: Nothing doing, I said, because only Grade 22 would do for me.
I used to have this other life a year ago that seems more and more distant. I lived in San Francisco. I had an office from which I could see the bay, and my friends and I would go for walks around the city, through parks, and we’d see dolphins from Land’s End. I would host dinners where I’d cook in my kitchen with music on and someone or the other would spontaneously start dancing. People would come for dinner and leave the next day, or sometimes the day after that. When I talk to my colleagues in San Francisco I catch glimpses of that other life—I recognize their offices, know the people they talk about, and I speak their language—but it’s hard to translate Karachi to them. In my parents’ house, I’ve reverted to a younger self; my sister and I stay up late watching She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, the parents text us from downstairs to tell us to come down for iftar, and the four of us feel suspended in time, as though the other lives my sister and I lived never happened and it’s always been just the four of us. It’s strange living outside of time in a state of gratitude all the while being intensely aware of transience and the constant threat of loss.
