Weekly Roundup – Earthquake Hits Pakistan, India Raises Interest Rates

This week’s roundup — with stories from Pakistan and India. Watch the video above to see how much shaking a security camera over 50 miles away captured during last week’s earthquake.

Another car almost hit me tonight.

Stopped literally one foot short of my door, lights shining bright into my eyes. Didn’t hit me until I started driving again how horribly that could have ended.

I can’t wait to get away to Karachi tomorrow so I can forget that this happened.

Please, please, always wear a seatbelt. Remain alert at all times. Eliminate distractions. Thank God that you make it home safe every night.

Can’t shake this feeling; think I’m going to bed.

Kartography, Kamila Shamsie

Cover of Kartography

I like to read on the train. I picked up Kartography by Kamila Shamsie — a woman who went to grammar school with my mom’s cousin in Karachi back in the day — on a whim. It was sitting on my dad’s desk; I had just finished The Alchemist the day before. I needed something.

Whenever I read about Karachi, I feel something awake in me. It’s like the first moment of stepping into Karachi International Airport. That overwhelming sensation that everything around you is orange — even though my visit last summer proved that memory wrong. It’s that smell of dust and rust that everyone hates except the one who feels she is returning home. The Karachiite. Kartography tells me “Karachiite” is a Western word, but, then again, I’m a Western girl.

How can you feel a connection to a place you haven’t lived in since you were a year old? How can a life so utterly unlike your own feel more like home than the place you grew up? That’s not a unique thought on my part.

“What is it that makes a place feel like home, even when it is entirely removed from the neighbourhood you’ve grown up in?” Kartography, p. 165

Even more than that, what it is about reading about someone who shares nothing more with you than a birthplace and an ethnicity that makes you feel like her story could be — and in fact might be — your own? Why is Raheen’s pain more salient to me than Hester Prynne‘s or even Juliet‘s?

I struggle with the fact that something as superficial as skin tone and time zone could be enough to link me to a fictional person but even as I write this, I know it’s not superficial at all. If it were, I wouldn’t have cried through the last 30 pages.