Homeless

Our motorbike was stolen last week, one and a half days after we bought it, right out of our locked compound. It was our first mode of transport in this country, and we were super excited. Didn’t even have time to insure it. Should we have done it the same day? Probably. But then you usually think you'll have at least a week.

We've had a lot of stuff happen to us in the last five years, also known as The Trial Years. I suppose if you looked into our life from the outside you might say we have some pretty rotten luck. At my first job, for which we had to relocate, we found out that not only was my husband expected to work with me, but that he had to report directly to me, and would only be paid from my salary. In case you were wondering, that one’s right on top of the disaster handbook for newlyweds who’ve barely got their footing in the marriage. We could have refused and considered relocating back, but there will be consequences; that’s a direct quote from my boss. What would be the consequences? I still do not know; but as newlyweds who had spent whatever they had on the relocation, we weren’t sure we wanted to know. That my marriage survived the year and a half that followed was for me the surest sign that there is in fact a God.

We relocated from that place as soon as we could, and before we knew it, this had become a pattern. The armada of landlords, about two per city, shall not be gone into detail. The arguments you have about broken door-glass and rental agreements when you’re still learning the language of that country shall be left to your imagination. There must be renters in my audience.

This was before the jobs we worked from hell that were technically 9 hour days but actually 13, not counting weekends and nights and events (it was a hotel); but after we had to leave my husband’s family home because I was expected to dress and impress and do little else, and my husband was expected to not care. When we went looking for an apartment to get some semblance of privacy, we were made to understand that leaving the country was the only way we could escape this situation. How will we face the family otherwise? That’s a direct quote, too.

But nothing's been stolen from us before. Somehow, in the giant cosmic joke that has been our life, theft was not in the list of the happenings of the Trial Years. Until last week, that is.

I was kind of beat up about the theft, especially considering I have a fair amount of anxiety around security and trust. I'm not paranoid, even though I do sometimes feel watched or followed, more than likely because of the eyes that follow you when you don’t fit in wherever you've chosen to live that year. I never fit. But the point is that I was finally on some kind of healing journey, actually trusting my therapist who had almost managed to convince me that this was relatively a very safe place, that the fear was in my head, and that nothing ever happens around here.

The irony.

Still, my husband was the one the theft hit really hard. It wasn't about the money; we would never have bought something we couldn’t afford. This is one of the rules of being eternal foreigners, right below the one about no taking loans; from people or organizations, or installments. No, it was about the audacity of stealing a locked motorbike two days after we bought it from our very own compound. It was about the time and effort and mental exertion you go through, after a year and a half of public transportation, crying children with sticky hands and crowded bus stops - only to start traveling by bus a day and a half after you buy the bike.

It was also about the how the hell of it all. How does a bike locked both manually and electronically, hidden under the overgrown bush of a locked compound with wall spikes on all sides get taken two days after it was bought, when no one even knew about it yet, except the four building tenants? How does nothing else get taken, despite the not just unlocked but actually open French windows of the ground floor apartment, and the other (unlocked) bike that’s been standing in plain view for the last 20 years?

Do we suspect the neighbors? Do we suspect whoever sold it to us from the local buying/selling app, because the agreement had our home address on it? Or are we to imagine that someone in the neighborhood was watching us and went through the trouble of either picking the lock or making a copy of the key? It's a whodunit right out of a Sherlock Holmes story. Which of Holmes' mysteries did he never manage to solve? I forget.

And so my husband now wants something he hasn't wanted since that day five years ago when we left his country: he wants to go home.

But it probably won't be safer than here, I tell him.

This was an isolated incident, that's what I want to believe. It could happen anywhere. What good would going somewhere else do?

It doesn't matter, he says. If we get robbed, I'd rather it was a fellow countryman that did it.

I want to laugh at this, and not in a funny ha-ha way. I don't understand this. But then I've never had a home.

Do you know what that is like? To not have an origin? People meet you, and after your name, it’s their next question: where are you from? It's supposed to be an easy question, one of those polite ones that are okay to ask; supposed to be small talk.

I wish they'd start with anything else. They could ask me if I've ever been in love. They could ask my weight (55 kilograms).

When news of the pandemic hit us, all the other foreign students were gone overnight. Turns out it was a good move because all travel was banned, airports closed and flights suspended for at least a year after that. It never even occurred to me to go anywhere. One of my friends asked me why I was still here.

Shouldn't you go back home before you can't anymore? he asked.

There's no back to go home to, I told him.

His frozen expression said very clearly that not having a home was like not having a limb, or one of your five senses.

You're welcome to my home, he said finally.

But not having a home is part of who I am, what makes me me, just like having a home is part of other people. I mean sure, for the purposes of practical paperwork and things, I have a nationality. I was eight when I asked my parents (who had no idea what to say), why does a piece of paper get to decide where I'm from?

Where are you from? I'm from the world. I'm a person from person-land. I'm from nowhere. I'm temporarily from everywhere that wants me, that takes me. I'm not picky.

I can tell you where I’m not from. I'm not from Pakistan. I was born there, but only because tradition sends a woman to her parents’ house to give birth; because my mother still hadn't figured out how gone she really wanted to be when my father and her left the country after they were married.

My younger sister wasn't born in Pakistan. I had seen sense by then, my mother would say. Being born somewhere seems to make you belong to that place, which is ridiculous because you have as much control over where you're born as you do over being born at all. When I was a child I heard about a baby who was born on an airplane, and I wondered if part of his identity would be tied to an airline forever.

So here I am, belonging to a country I've never lived in, whose culture and language is as foreign to me as it is to you. Wearing their clothes feels like a full time job that should come with benefits. Their social norms all seem to be on the theme of conforming and against individuality, something I can never quite swallow.

When on Eid Qurban, the Eid of sacrifice, the city smells of all the animals brought home, fed and then sacrificed, I prefer to be out of the country. At my wedding I wanted to wear frosted gray instead of the terrible red brides should wear and greet the 500 guests I had never met instead of sitting on a stage like I was an exhibit. Unless, of course, I was allowed to elope. I image I’d like their beautiful northern towns, but I doubt the air of the Hindu Kush mountains will smell any different to me than the top of the Alborz mountain range.

I'm not from Oman, even though I grew up there. This could be because at twenty-two, I had to start looking for a different country to call home because I was too old for my two-year residency to be renewed anymore. It's also the place that my Dad gave his youth to, and at 60 now has to find another home because the country needs the space for its own people.

I love the Omani shuwa, the tender steamed camel meat seasoned with spiced oil and wrapped in banana leaves, cooked for days in a makeshift oven under the ground. But I could never replicate it myself. Neither would I be able to survive staying 40 days at my parents’ home after I give birth, a tradition of unknown origins (and purpose).

I'm not from all the other countries I've lived in, either, because despite wearing their clothing and speaking their language carefully, you can never really be one of them. So where am I from?

Our bike got stolen. We've been digital nomad-ing it for five years and my husband wants to go home, but even if he did, there's no place that would be my home, and maybe that's who I am; who I'm supposed to be. I'm the girl who doesn't have a lens, who doesn't see the world through anything. I'm a foreigner and an expatriate wherever I go.

They say you can never go home again. And it's true, isn't it? Especially if it never existed in the first place.