How will the hornbills fly?

*NOTE: Why am I posting my journal entries? See my inaugural post: Beyond journalism

(*artwork by Incé Husain)

I didn’t make it to Lahore this December.

“It’s just as well,” X quoted his colleague. “You wouldn’t have been able to breathe in Lahore.”

This is not metaphorical. I’m told that the pollution and smog in Lahore is now so bad that the city shuts down at noon because there’s too much smog to see the person in front of you. IQAir ranks an “air quality index” above 150 as “unhealthy”, above 300 as “hazardous”. Lahore’s reading is 1,100.

“It looks like night in midday,” Y quoted my aunt. “It is so depressing.”

People who go outside wear masks to protect themselves against the manmade air.

I have an image of Lahore smeared in black cloud. I think of how massive and thick it must be to kill the red midday sun.

I think: how will the hornbills fly? The grey raptor with red eyes and a horn on his razor beak that snaps up all the red berries from our tree with his fluffy mate? I chased this bird with my eyes and camera all across the garden and all across the skies since I was nine. I tracked his movements - when he’d come to my garden, how many berries he’d eat, which direction in the horizon he’d fly away to, neck outstretched and wings streaked with a red stripe. I thought he was prehistoric and so majestic. I caused such a fuss about him in the family home, with my photos and retellings, that the whole house knew of him or began to watch for him. There was an instance when someone saw him in the front yard, on a new tree, and soon the whole house came outside to watch him daintily eat. They were Incé’s hornbills, my brother’s hornbills.

Will those red eyes pierce through the smog now? Will those wings become heavy and crusted with it? Will they find my house and its berries? I imagine them somewhere in the black cloud.

There’s more.

What about Swift and her kittens? This white cat with an orange tail and green eyes who carried a new litter in her mouth every year. Kittens the size of my outstretched hands, pawing each other in the garden or sleeping beneath trees or climbing them. I saw and photographed their childhoods. I saw Swift lounging by the kitchen door, watching the cook slice meat. Sometimes she’d sleep there. Swift never left our grounds; greeted us yearly like a relative; we theorized that she killed our rabbit, found limp from fright in an unopened pen while she sauntered, taunted, growled. Once she came into her house when the garden door was left open, ran into the living room and up the stairs. When I was 17, I wrote a poem about her for Mirror, Mirror, anthropomorphized and embodied her:

The night is so gentle on my fur I am softened into a ghost,

White and creamy, like milk;

I haven't had milk in so long; my mouth spasms and hurts

as the girl with eyes as green as mine

lays a bowl before me -

I drink and drink till I feel less like a ghost;

my fiery curl of a tail flicks;

I look up at her and she watches me,

her inky hair drizzles down pale arms -

She's afraid of me.

Her hand shakes as she lays down a piece of meat. My stomach churns -

She turns her face, and I see the scar;

A paralyzed snake, white and searing,

arcing from her chin into her hair;

it still hisses at her in the night.

I eat. She still watches me,

I can't say I'm sorry I gave it to her.

I didn't want to be stroked then;

I want to be stroked now -

I purr and rub my head against the window pane;

But she doesn't touch me. She only watches.

In my poems my eyes are often green and Swift never scratched me in real life.

How will she find her kittens in the smog? Will they play Marco Polo with meows? I imagine her footsteps on the sunroom roof, her lithe milky body shrouded in smog. Will her new litter take their first breaths choking?

How will the lizards cling to walls? I was scared of these lizards - their gooeyness, their speedy scurrying. It all began when I stepped on one when I was five in the sunroom; its terrorizing gooeyness against my pink-socked foot. My cousin and I bonded over a fear-based hatred of them. We never wanted them in the house. We would run screaming from bedrooms with lizard walls. We refused to sleep there.

Will the smog dement their tactile little bodies? Will the black cloud fill their eyes and their tongues?

They can have my house, I sobbed. They can have my house and all its walls if they need to hide from the smog.

“I’m sorry. We tried to give you two countries. But now you only have one,” X said. “We tried to bring you every year and show you. On paper you have two countries. But you really have only one and that’s this one, that’s Canada.”

I’ll go back and rebuild.

“Impossible,” he shakes his head. “Too much corruption.”

He tells me the country is dying. Everyone wants to leave. The ones who stay are those too old to leave or too implanted. Instead, they make sure their children leave and never return. He says Pakistan is in decline from every measure of decline.

“I don’t know how the country got to this point,” he says.

I start to think: why was I so certain that I would go back there, someday, to live and to stay? Was it a certainty made only of yearning?

And then I think: why didn’t I plan ahead?

X continues to talk of decline, and I think: did I press a leaf from my lemon trees into any of my journals? Did I write about the red sun on my face? Why didn’t I collect leaves and twigs from my garden? Why didn’t I press the pink flowers twining the terrace into books? Why didn’t I take a fistful of dirt?

What do I have photos of and what do I have only in memory? Why didn’t I take a photo of every room in that house?

Why was I so certain? When did the certainty begin? Was it always there, since I was five?

I have a shawl from the foothills of the Himalayas. It’s with me in London - black, red, embroidered. The merchant had unfolded it for me, in the misty mountain village flanked by horses, monkeys, hawks perched on shoulders; he’d folded it again, wrapped it.

“How much?” I’d asked. The tag said 1950 rupees.

“For you, doll?” He’d winked. “1200.”

I press it, now, to my face.

“You can’t go back. This is your home now,” X says. “But the important thing is to keep the language. Language is the most important thing.”

Language? My mother tongue, the first language I learned, that cracks and sputters at the ends of my sentences?

I start listening to Urdu songs again on YouTube, madly, with a real fear that they might disappear if I’m not fast enough.

When the lyrics begin, the land opens before me again, proof of life. It swarms my vision.

But Urdu does come back. It is the first thing that came back, the lightning rod of bond, when I wrote about the Pakistan floods in 2022: I had pored over the reality of 33 million people adrift or dead who spoke my language.

I had quoted a headline that said: ”Climate Apartheid”: Pakistan, Contributing Less Than 1% of Global Emissions, Ravaged by Floods.

I had written: This is what it means to be “from” a place: to mourn its pain by sacrificing identity and filling the gap with facts for anyone who will listen. It’s an all-consuming clarity.

“I have memories of Pakistan,” I said, as if that would change everything.

“Me too,” X said. “I was born there. I lived the first seven years of my life there. It breaks my heart.”

Y shared a poem that compares Lahore to heaven.

“There’s a heaven BEYOND Lahore?” it asks.

I always told everyone: “Lahore is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.”

My bond to Pakistan is never valid. It is interrogated, dissected, belittled, disregarded, vandalized, ignored, erased.

You didn’t live there, you just visited, they say. What do you know, really, what do you know?

I can’t defend myself from this family, these locals. I don’t even try.

All I think is: Don’t you see that history stole it from me? I was supposed to be here, too. Why are you comparing us?

What I know and what I can defend is this: no one loved those hornbills more than me. ♦