On Being an Ex-Expatriate

If you want to convince people that you're insane, tell them you're moving back to Pakistan.


When I told people that I had come back to Pakistan after six years of college, graduate school, and work, I always
received one of two replies. "Yes, I know, life out there is tough, especially for girls." The other: "Are you crazy?!?!"


So my decision to come back to Pakistan was based neither on logic, reason, or simple desire. It was either that
something was fundamentally wrong with me - I wasn't tough enough to brave it out - or that I was mentally unstable.


I went to America at the age of seventeen, kicking and screaming the whole way. Dammit, I was going to go! Everyone
else in my class was going! I wanted the freedom! I was smart, I deserved to go! Nothing could hold me back. I had
enough energy in me to propel a rocket to the moon. I fought my conservative zamindar father, my overprotective
nervous mother, and I made it to America.


Four years of college became one year of graduate school became a full-time job and a house and a car. I was living the
American dream. Except that sometimes the dream, which I'd worked so hard to make a reality, wasn't so pleasant. I
found myself alone on holidays. I found myself lonely. I was cold all the time. I burst into tears for no apparent reason
in the evenings, right after the sun had gone down. When I was sick, I had to take myself to the doctor all by myself.
This despite the mountains of friends I'd made in school? Things changed once I was working and commuting and living
in a cold impersonal apartment block.


I was stubborn, and more than a little foolish. I would never have admitted that I was sad and missing home. But when
things went really wrong for me - two significant relationships in my life failed, among other things - home was the
first and the only place I thought of going. It took one month to wrap everything up and then I was on a plane out of
Logan Airport and on my way home. Did I make up my mind too quickly? Did I make a mistake in leaving so fast? I
didn't think so. After six years in 'exile', the need to return home - to my family, to my country, to people that looked
and thought and felt and worshipped like me - was instinctive, unshakable, and utterly true.


But everyone around me here in Pakistan questioned my reasons. "I wanted to come back" just wasn't good enough for
them. Who would want to come back to Pakistan? And why? They seemed even more astonished when I told them no,
there was no family pressure, no, not to get married, no, no boyfriend here. So in addition to the not insignificant task
of adjusting back to living with my family, making new friends and reestablishing contacts with old ones, and finding
a job, I had to contend with a lot of very weird attitudes which probably said more about them than it did about me and
my reasons for coming back.


I became aware that Pakistanis living in Pakistan carry a feeling of failure with them. If you have made it to the West
and to America, you have "made it". If you are trying to go, your life is on hold or in limbo until you get the anxiously
awaited call from the Embassy. If you go and come back, you are undoubtedly the biggest jackass that ever walked the
earth. This is true whether you are the richest family living in Defence or a lower middle-class one from Gulshan. No
matter how powerful your connections and how influential your reach, if you don't have some sort of connection to the
West - a child studying abroad, an apartment in London, money in a bank account somewhere overseas - you have
failed.


Not only this, but there is a bad feeling between Pakistanis that live here and those that are there. Whenever someone
overseas criticizes Pakistan and its inhabitants, the immediate reaction is "Who the hell are they to say this? Why don't
they come back here and then they'll have a reason to talk." The feeling behind this being that if you are living in the
West, you are enjoying all the amenities denied to us back here (especially after you have gotten your education, your
funding, and all your emotional support from this country). If you have running water, electricity on a regular basis,
and can go to work or school without fear of getting shot or bombed, you have no right to criticize anything in your
country of origin. There is a deep-seated and little-admitted jealousy of the riches that expatriates have. In Pakistan,
we try to cover it up with claims that we have a better family life here, a better culture, higher morals. This
compensates for the low standard of living.


Some days I woke up agreeing with these ideas, other days I fought them and told myself they were irrational,
mean-spirited, and untrue. All this contributed to my nagging fear that perhaps I really had made a mistake coming
back here. Things were taking longer than I expected to settle down. A year on, I still hadn't made many friends, I
hadn't found work I really liked, and conditions in Pakistan were incomprehensible to say the least.


I did feel from time to time that I had failed; that the purpose of my entire life - to get to America and stay there no
matter what - had been thwarted. It's hard to give up a life purpose and start all over again, especially when your own
mother says to you, "I wish you had stayed on in America". I heard about other girls that were still in America,
working dream jobs, engaged to suitably lovely desi boys. I saw them at weddings and engagements held here in
Pakistan for the benefit of adoring families. They had succeeded. I hadn't.


But something in my head - or maybe it was my heart - told me to have patience, to stick it out, to wait and see. Three
years on from my return, I am sitting here at my PC at work, typing in this article (don't tell my boss). I've been a
journalist for about two years now, and a lot is working out for me career-wise. My circle of friends has grown from
two to three to seven to fifteen and more - and that's not counting relatives either! I enjoy my nights out, whether it's a
meal, a play, or a trip to the beach. I'm not married, but I don't really care. Same things I had when I was in America,
give or take a few entertainment venues.


And I have something that I never had in America - I can get up in the morning, tease my parents as they try to rub the
sleep out of their eyes and argue with each other over tea and the newspapers. I can watch my baby nephew laugh in the
bath when my cousin pours the water over his head. I can hold my sister when she cries over something someone said to
hurt her, instead of just hearing it over a very expensive telephone call. And I can kiss my brother goodnight every
night - even though he's fourteen and really getting too big to be kissed by his elder sister.


Coming back to Pakistan? I may be crazy, but at least I'm happy.