New Coastie – Going home

I will travel to Pakistan in April. It has been three years since I was last in the country of my birth. It is compulsory travelling because last year my father almost died due to a bout with Covid-19. I will be landing on the last day of Ramadan, just in time for the great festivities of Eid al-Fitr, which is a celebratory three days marking the end of Ramadan. I haven’t been with my family on Eid al-Fitr since I came to Aotearoa. Imagine not being with family on Christmas for 12 straight years. I am very excited.

It is never an easy task travelling to Pakistan. The gift buying process has already started. Half our luggage will be going with goodies for the whole extended family. Gift giving is essential for Pakistani culture. From New Zealand chocolate to All Blacks apparel, this bag will be full of tokens of proof that I am living a successful life in New Zealand. 

There are always two different categories of gifts. One set is of special requests. This privilege is only awarded to immediate family, so they get what they want. The other set is generic gifts which I hand over to my mother. She then becomes in-charge of distributing gifts to those who have not been on the naughty list within the extended family. If I were Santa Claus in this scenario, my mother is my stern administrator, deciding if someone gets a generic milk chocolate bar or the coveted Whitaker’s Dark Ghana. I have no say in that distribution process. She runs her empire with an iron fist and if you agitate, you end up in the metaphorical exile without even a measly chocolate bar. I exaggerate for effect, but the truth is that there has to be some criteria considering the huge family size and I trust my mother to make the right decisions.

Waiting at the airport also brings with it some peculiar experiences. I almost never read books written in my own language of Urdu which looks like Arabic in written form. I am deterred by all these social media videos of people getting kicked out just because they were reading or speaking something non-English and the other passengers felt unsafe. I recently broke that mould, when I was reading the Ibn-e-Safi Imran Series waiting at Christchurch airport. It is a racy spy series from my younger years. A woman waiting next to me asked with confidence, “that’s the Quran you are reading, right?” Weird to assume that any Arabic looking written word, written from right to left, is the Quran. My answer was ‘yes’. I didn’t want to break her confidence. Next time I see someone reading a Lee Child, maybe I’ll ask them if they are reading the Bible?

I love international travel. The tiny bland meals, the tiny screen movies, tiny drinks in tiny plastic cups, and the swollen feet. I still find it amazing that I can travel 14,000km by flying at 40,000 feet in a pressurised box with a whiskey in my hand and Goodbye Pork Pie on the screen. If I can offer one humble suggestion; the safety videos can be shorter. That’s all.