I was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, but for the last ten years I have lived in London. Since compulsion formed no part of my decision to move here, I am at ease in this lively cosmopolitan city. I speak the language; have a wide swathe of friends and sufficient resources to partake of London’s many attractions. I feel at home here, and yet it is not my home in quite the same way as Pakistan. My connection to Pakistan is visceral. It is the Eden of my childhood. It is the setting of my earliest memories and perhaps my most profound experiences. It is my home by birth. It is where my ancestors are buried, where my parents live. London is my home by adoption. It is where I met my husband and where my children were born.

I accommodate claims of both places on my heart by describing myself as an expat, at liberty to come and go as and when I like. It is this flexibility, this freedom that underpins my happiness here. Had I been unable to return, my attitude to London would have been very different. I would have considered myself in exile. My life here would have been a sentence, with every day an eternity. But fortunately, I am not in exile.

And yet, one October morning three years ago, I received my first bitter taste of exile. I realised that day, that it didn’t matter if I considered myself free to visit Pakistan. What mattered was that I could not, had not, been there when I should have.

In the early hours of that Saturday morning, while I had slept peacefully in London, Pakistan had been ripped apart by an earthquake. My children hadn’t risen yet, and the house was quiet, except for the low murmur of CNN in the living room. My husband had switched on the television to catch the morning news.

“There’s been an earthquake in Pakistan,” he called. “It’s on the news.”
By the time I’d woken and made myself coffee, 50,000 of my countrymen lay dead, over three million were homeless and another 50,000 had been injured. The earthquake had measured 7.6 on the Richter scale, with its the epicentre in the mountainous country to the north. There were no official estimates of the casualties but thousands were believed dead. And then the images started to roll: shattered villages, shell-shocked survivors and desperate parents clawing at the steel girders of a collapsed school trying to reach the children trapped underneath.

I left the images and stumbled to the phone. My family lives in Lahore, hundreds of miles from the epicentre, but surely they could not have escaped unscathed from such an apocalypse? My hands shook as I dialled my parents’ number. The line seemed dead. I tried my sister. Again, I heard a faint buzz instead of the normal ringing tone. Later I was to discover that thousands of panicked Pakistanis calling home had jammed the lines. But standing in my empty kitchen clutching a mute phone receiver, I thought the worst: the phone lines were destroyed, which meant that Lahore had been destroyed. I imagined my parents’ house on an average morning; my parents at the breakfast table, my father reading the papers, my mother sipping her tea. In my mind’s eye, I saw the French windows shatter, the roof collapse, crushing the dining table. And then the phone rang. It was my mother.

“Yes, yes, I am all right. No of course, I’m telling the truth. All of us in Lahore are fine.” They’d been having breakfast when the earthquake struck and had rushed into the garden while the ground roared and bucked beneath their feet. “We’re fine,” she said for the third time. “But pray for the dead, for the dying.”

Thanks to the coverage afforded by 24-hour news channels, the suffering of the survivors was beamed daily into my living room. I sat on my comfy leather sofa, in my snug flat, sipping coffee while watching my homeless countrymen sheltering under dripping tents on exposed hillsides where the temperature dropped every night to zero. The coffee was bitter in my mouth. My countrymen’s lives had been crushed while halfway around the globe I hadn’t felt the slightest tremor. My friends in Pakistan, I knew, had hired trucks to take food, water and medicines up into the mountains. While they’d all pitched in, I’d sat thousands of miles away watching a TV screen, feeling stranded, useless and guilty.

Since then, there have been other losses, other griefs, other disasters. Some such as floods, and a more recent earthquake in Balochistan have been natural, some like the bombs that rip through the cities of my country almost on a weekly basis now are not. Some like the death of my uncle have been personal losses, others like Benazir’s assassination have been national disasters. Over the last twenty years, due to a combination of short-sighted, opportunistic leadership and the fall-out of the Afghan war, Pakistan has been split apart by sectarian strife. Religious disputes and ethnic tensions have fragmented civil society. I sit in London and wince every time Pakistan comes up in the news for the wrong reasons. Over the last three years in particular, as religious intolerance has grown and spread like a poisonous dye through the country, political violence has become a daily fact of life. Each time I hear of yet another bomb, a cold fist closes around my heart. My hand reaches automatically for the phone.

The worst aspect of living away from my country is the nagging fear that I will not be there when I should be. Whenever the phone rings, some part of me expects that it will be bad news from home. Every time I go back, my parents look older, their movements a little stiffer. In the past, I comforted myself with the thought that home is only eight hours away. All I have to do is jump on a plane. But I realise now that this comfort is illusory. It took the earthquake only 30 seconds to wipe out a whole generation of schoolchildren. The young men who travel to the nearby cities to earn a living did not get back in time to bury their families.

I moved to London ten years ago. Though my siblings and I were educated in the west, I am the only member of my family who lives abroad and that too because my husband works here. With my years of school and college in the UK behind me, I had thought I would slide effortlessly into my life in London. But leaving your country temporarily is different to settling abroad. It requires a mental shift, an emotional relocation.

As a student, I’d marvelled at things I liked here and shrugged at the things I didn’t. Now I can’t afford the luxury of disengagement. I’ve voted in every election since I moved here. I’ve invested in my relationship with places I value. I’ve participated in anti-war demonstrations and raised funds for local charities. But the relocation cuts both ways. Over the years my links with Pakistan have weakened. I do not have any relationship with the children born to my friends since my departure. I don’t know the names of new soap stars. Many of the landmarks of my childhood – my grandparents’ house, my favourite bookshop – have been razed or altered beyond all recognition. I feel a lingering sadness at this loosening of ties. I see it as a loss – perhaps a foreshadowing of a greater loss in years to come.

But I love my life in London. I value the cultural vibrancy of this city, its political tolerance and social freedom. But what I love most about it is that it allows me to love Pakistan. England does not demand total and absolute allegiance from my heart. It is too civilised, or perhaps too cynical a society, to attempt to make rules for as lawless an entity as the human heart. It even allows my children, both of whom were born and bred here, to cherish Pakistan. Ever since they were old enough to understand, I have told them they are twice blessed for they belong to two countries – England and Pakistan. Every Christmas and Easter, I take them back to Lahore. They spend just two months of the year there and yet they love it unreservedly, for their relationship with it is uncomplicated by disappointment. They associate it only with sunny skies, huge family gatherings, overwhelming hospitality and unquestioning acceptance.

And slowly over the years, I too have come to terms with the fact that although I can belong to two places, I can only really inhabit one at a time. So I have learnt to let go. I know now that I cannot preserve the landscape of my youth forever. And I also know my affinity with Pakistan is strong enough to survive the disappearance of the odd remembered bookshop. I still cannot claim to be prepared for the sudden death of a loved one, when it happens thousands of miles away, but at least now I can contemplate the possibility. Perhaps these are just the inevitable emotional adjustments one makes as one grows older. But I think that the seismic shift under the Himalayas that October morning produced a mirroring shift in my thinking. Three years on, I have come to realise that home is not necessarily where you come from; home can also be somewhere you find yourself. It is a place where you feel at ease; a place of mooring, of layered affinities, experiences and memories. It is a place that shapes your perceptions and defines your identity. As such, I am equally at home in Lahore and London. Like my children, I am twice blessed.

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