Guriya

Long before Abbottabad makes itself known to the world as the final hideout of a wanted

terrorist, before its name lands in anglophone mouths and breaking news segments, it is the

sleepy little town of my childhood. Its striking landscape becomes my first images of the

world—mountains dotted with slender pines cradle thinly-populated valleys, roaring streams

coil, dip, surface and swell, breaking their busy journeys only when winter descends like a soft,

white blanket.

This is where time begins for me—in a house with a pebbled courtyard that I cross in the blue

light of frigid mornings. Over to the kitchen on the other side where Dad prepares our bowls of

Fauji corn flakes, while my older sister and I fight for the chair nearest the stove’s heat. This is

where I first encounter things that get long-term leases in my life, like Pakistani pop music in the

form of Mom’s Nazia Hasan tapes, the pariyan—fairies— in Dad’s stories, and school with its

commute in a green army truck on zigzagging roads.