by Jeanne Supin

Jeanne Supin with her daughter Maddy, watching a snake charmer in Islamabad in 1993. I was afraid the film The Kite Runner would butcher a delicious book, but my husband rented it anyway. The movie begins in Kabul, Afghanistan, with two boys with broad, clear faces and shining dark eyes. Men in dusty sandals and subdued shalwar kameez (loose tunics and trousers) stand among market stalls. The beige stone buildings are tightly staggered across vast moonscapes, and the hills beyond roll toward the vast Himalayas, arguably a border between one side of the world and another. Fifteen years ago, I lived in that other world—in Pakistan, a mere pebble’s throw from The Kite Runner’s images—and the film conjured old memories as if they were forged last week. I suddenly reconnected to all those foreign vistas, but mostly I remembered how close the other side of the world really is. 

My husband had a one-year faculty appointment teaching political science at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, so I took leave from work, packed a ridiculous amount of toys for our toddler and flew 36 hours into radically unfamiliar territory. I was prepared for wild contrasts, of course, as we were stamped through customs—strange continent, strange languages, strange culture, along with a governmental structure fully entwined with a religion that was also new to me. So I was surprised when we first drove through Islamabad, the sparkling Pakistani capital built as the country’s governmental showplace a mere 30 years earlier. It was laid out in a grid, and its broad streets and tree-lined boulevards felt spacious, manageable and safe. I would quickly learn how sterile it was compared to the rest of the country, but as a young Western mom suddenly living in an Islamic nation, I appreciated the familiarity of English street signs, friendly sidewalks and obedient traffic. The weather suggested Phoenix or San Diego, even if the city’s size and traffic was more like Dayton’s. The architecture, however, clearly spoke Arabic.

As a Fulbright scholar, my husband enjoyed amenities unheard of for middle-class folks back home. We had five large bedrooms, gorgeous marble terraces and a sweet front yard behind a tall, white stone wall where our family played soccer and parrots chattered in the trees. For less than the cost of American day care, our main servant Yacoub and our full-time nanny Rose gave me gifts unknown before or since: a spotless house, fabulous meals and plenty of time to play with my daughter. I could wander wide-eyed and untethered through the bliss of an unscheduled life. I had no job, no volunteer work, and I had full-time help. I set no goals to write a novel, paint a masterpiece or learn a second language. Instead, I chose simply to have a leisurely existence in that lovely place, to abandon the Western obsession with achievement long enough to realize I prefer to let curiosity, not clocks, structure my day.

Created in 1947, modern Pakistan was carved out of India as an Islamic homeland after the subcontinent’s independence from Britain. As a result, Pakistan remains an odd mix of highly distinct regions and cultures, woven together by religion and only barely flying under a unified flag. Sindh province harkens to India, with fiery spiced food and wiry people with dark, finely-chiseled features. North-West Frontier province shares culture, tribes and the Khyber Pass with Afghanistan. Its residents are light-skinned with broad flat features and kind brown eyes. Punjab’s Lahore feels like the true heart of the country, a vibrant, teeming eclectic city of millions who seemed to all bustle on the streets at the same time.

But I was not in Pakistan to do a comprehensive study. I was there solely to wander unbounded and take trips with my family, absorbing random moments in a foreign country that felt both extremely exotic and somehow familiar. I paced myself according to the melodic prayer call, broadcast five times daily from the Shah Faisal Masjid (mosque). An a cappella voice woke me up at dawn in a foreign language but with a familiar allure—to begin my day with a sense of wonder and awe. I visited the mosque, a glistening, white angular structure nestled at the base of the picturesque Margalla Hills. And I felt the same hushed reverence I’ve felt at Notre Dame, Buddhist temples, my childhood church or on trails through the Appalachians—peace and stillness, this time with the luscious feel of stocking feet on plush carpets. I surprised myself by loving the serenity that seemed to accompany overt religion.

But I didn’t love its oppression, which was also evident everywhere. As a woman, I had freedom in this Islamic nation because I was obviously American. Even so, I remember only rare occasions when I was not securely flanked by my husband, my daughter or both. Another woman and I went out to lunch once—only once—and while we were not overtly hassled, our mere presence caused a cascade of silent rustlings and suspicious glances, as if we haughtily broke the law. Or threatened the principles of gravity. Or came from Mars.
I kept searching for the women during those months, always in vain. We saw many young girls, walking to school, playing in the parks. But they disappeared with adolescence, only to reemerge later as mothers or wives, and always buttressed by large, boisterous families. I saw no waitresses or businesswomen or female shopkeepers. No rowdy clusters of girls on a night out, regaling dating horror-stories or work woes. It felt stifling to me, this woman-less world. I missed them terribly and grew to believe their absence caused the landscape’s pervasive pall. Women are the keepers of laughter, it seems, and the air whistles lonely without them.  
I loved the hiatus from my professional stress as a business consultant, but I also loved having an identity larger than traditional assignments as wife, mother and homemaker. “Why should I work outside the home?” one middle-class Pakistani woman asked me. “Why would I want two jobs like you American women?” I laughed appreciatively at her point, but I still preferred bickering with my husband over toilet scrubbing rather than relegating that task permanently to myself.

Mostly I remember broader tapestries about Pakistan that offered more complex textures than single sexist threads. We took a wild drive up the 500-year-old Grand Trunk Highway, sharing our thin lane with cars, trucks, scooters, bicycles and oxen—all pushing their own form of transit as fast as possible, passing and swerving like video game junkies. Relieved to be alive, I stumbled from the van on the Peshawar streets only to be overwhelmed again by the gray, the dust, the hoards of men in drab-colored shawls selling open-fired meats and thick teas, along with anti-aircraft missiles and heroin if I’d had a need. 

The next day, friends and I traveled the gorgeous, yet ominous, Khyber Pass with a paid driver and his companion, who was armed with a rusting Kalashnikov rifle that he absently laid across his lap until we gestured for him to point the barrel at something other than us. We wound through endless desert hills dotted with heavily reinforced compounds where we saw women tending to children, goats and scrabbled gardens while their husbands, we were told, conducted international trade in arms or drugs. Two extremes of the absurd global economy sharing one roof. I was never certain if they were making such deals—or, in fact, if the Kalashnikov was loaded—but it was clear that, in these mountains, such questions were beside the point. This was a place of stark extremes—rich in physical, cultural and historical beauty and one of the most dangerous and impoverished places on earth. I was content to drink in the images and accept what I was told. At the Afghan border, we were greeted by the breathtaking Hindu Kush range of the Himalayas and a ten-year-old boy selling chewing gum. I smiled at the sad disparity, like buying T-shirts at the Grand Canyon. Until I remembered this was not a flagship national park. Atop this magnificent desolate mountain, in a place where one war seamlessly bled into another, this boy’s next meal undoubtedly rested on me.

We had less heart-rending excursions too. Taxila is an ancient Buddhist site with tall statues and lingering structures from a once thriving city. I remember my daughter playing in the same front yard in 1993 as other children must have done in 200 B.C., oblivious that the dirt she was digging had archeological significance. Later, as we admired one of eight vessels that supposedly contained the original Buddha’s remains, I watched three Muslim men rest their foreheads on the ground nearby as a daily prayer time approached. I found myself more awed by this simple routine act than by the revered relic before me. 

So much of those months differed from my daily life back home. I do not pray or dress or think or work or express myself in ways recognizable to most Pakistanis. Yet we share the essentials: we love our children, support our families, protect our own, relish beauty, find solace in our comforts and culture, and search for joy and meaning with equal passion. We can certainly measure the distance between us through vast continental divides, tense political wranglings or disparate religious beliefs. But in the end, the other side of the world is as close and familiar as a simple, quiet moment in everyday life.