In the dimming twilight on the dusty plains, I always knew I was almost home. Like the lights on an airport landing strip, the multicolored fluorescent bulbs of Pakistan’s roadside chai shops guided our silver station wagon home. I watched them in the dusk as the evening turned to darkness, the bright pink and the blue, the yellow and the green, and the rumble of the wheels on the rutty road taking me home, home, home.
There was never a greater sense of safety during my childhood than these moments, one hour, two hours, three removed from our boarding school. Away high up in the mountains, it was where I both slept and studied, separated from my mom, from my dad, from my younger sister, from my dog, from my home.
If home felt like safety, that’s because boarding was decidedly not. I was never unsafe in a physical way. My life itself wasn’t threatened. But everything else was.
It wasn’t safe to feel homesick, to cry and let everyone know about it, or to wet your bed as a result of it. You would be ridiculed.
It wasn’t safe to get on the queen bee’s bad side, say by expressing a different opinion from hers. You would be excommunicated from the playground games and have no friends for anywhere between one day and forever.
It wasn’t safe to eat the food. You would gag over a lump of salt as big as a walnut in your breakfast muffin. And choke from the boiled vegetables or watery noodles getting stuck on the lump in your throat (the homesick lump). And quite possibly throw it up later in a very public and humiliating display.
So to finally be at home meant:
A) I didn’t feel homesick, so I didn’t have to choke down the feeling or let it out very quietly into my pillow at night.
B) I didn’t fear the queen bee. She wasn’t there, so I was free to like what I liked and play what I pleased with the best playmate of all, my sister.
C) I could eat, eat, eat! With no lump in my throat and my mom’s home cooking, I could finally feel full and not go to bed sucking the corner of my baby blanket and rubbing my tummy over and over until the nausea faded into slumber.
And thus our home in the Mission House on Jail Road in Attock City in the Punjab province of Pakistan became my Eden. It could have been any place in the world where I could have lived full time with my family and edible food, but it was special in its own magical way as well.
The Mission House, a large colonial-era bungalow built by British missionaries long ago, sat in the middle of a small compound, protected from the outside world by a wall covered at the top with shards of broken glass. One end of the compound we called The Jungle because it was so lush with overgrown grass and trees that we couldn’t see the end of it. On the edge of this, lay a dirt-packed court for badminton and basketball and a large garbage pit where my sister and I would forage for treasures to stock the kitchen of our tree house nearby.
Grapefruit trees bathed another side of our house, wrapped in thick hedges and surrounding a swing so well used that all signs of grass beneath it were long gone. In the back, you might find our mom hanging laundry on the clothes line, and on the side by the front gate stood our Christmas Tree. A giant version of its namesake, it was the ultimate challenge for tree climbing children. And on all sides ran a wide dirt road perfect for riding bikes and bordered by rows upon rows of flower beds that overflowed with poppies and pansies and sweet peas, their fragrance floating in through the screen of the kitchen window, mingling with simmering spices and the sweetness of yeast rising.
But then it was gone. Just like that. The Bible college that lived on the compound with us, my dad’s job, was moving to the city, and therefore we would be moving to the city. I lay in bed our last night in my Eden and traced with my fingers the green leaves and pink grapes my mom had stenciled on the whitewashed walls of our bedroom. It was impossible that I would never sleep here again, that these walls we had marked as ours were no longer to be ours. Moving to the city meant living in a house with a small yard and no trees. No trees meant no tree house, nothing to climb, no branches to hang a swing from. My heart was completely broken.
The years passed, two in the city, before Pakistan itself was wrenched away from me. We ended up in Indiana, where high school and college felt only nominally better than boarding. More years passed until finally, 11 years after my last touch of Pakistan, we were going back. Just a short visit, just to say the goodbye we never got to say before, but there would be a day to visit Attock and see that old compound and the Mission House once more.
The day was hot, Pakistan hot, 115 degrees, humid air too thick to breathe, no air conditioning, sweating in the numerous yards of fabric layering my body because I was a fully grown woman now and needed to be adequately swathed.
Our van puttered through town, and I strained to see out the front window, looking for the familiar stretch leading up to the compound. But all I found was a skeleton.
The compound was barely recognizable, shrunken and barren, just another part of the dusty landscape. Something terribly important was missing. And then I realized what it was. There were no trees.
The Christmas Tree that had shaded the main entrance and one whole side of our house – gone. The Jungle – gone. The tree with our tree house, the tree we loved to climb by the carport, the tree where our swing swung, the grapefruit trees, and the hedges, and even the flower beds – all gone.
The land had been converted to a drug rehabilitation center where the inmates farmed peanuts. Everything had been cleared away to make room for these peanut fields, and our house had been converted into a dormitory. I could only recognize it by the bay window with the window seat where once we had played games of house with our dolls.
Returning outside to an unbearable, unshaded sun, the homesick lump in my throat reached its boiling point. The tears spilled hot and fast. I turned my head away from the group, pulled my dupata over my face, buried my silent sobs in its fabric as once I had cried into my pillow at night. I was homesick again, this time for the very soil I was standing on, and once again I couldn’t feel these feelings safely. No one else was crying. Was no one else homesick for this long-lost Eden?
We took a photo in front of the house before leaving. But this photo means nothing. I never want to look at it because it reflects nothing of my home. Instead I will pour through the family albums and remember this house and this compound as it was – bursting with green life, trees so thick, flowers so full, bougainvillea on fire with its fuchsia flames. That was my home. That was my Eden.
I’ll never be able to go back again. All that’s left is photos and memories. But every now and then, on a day when the temperature is just right – a cool, windless Attock winter temperature – when the sky is the same sort of gray, and the starlings swoop through the trees singing, for just a second or two, I’m home. I can taste it and smell it, and the surge of joy in my chest is almost too painful to contain. I breathe deeply and soak up the seconds of bliss, of the feeling of homecoming, of the sanctity and the safety of that special place, before it all fades and I find myself back in Indiana on a mild winter day. But I carry it, like a locket around my neck, just waiting for the next time it will crack open and give me one more glimpse of Eden.
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