From Mount Holyoke to Pakistan: Global perspectives on home

If not for pollution, the sky would be South Hadley purple: soft but bright at the same time. But Karachi air is thick with oxides and buildings; in some places, you’re lucky if you even see a strip of uninterrupted sky. At Mount Holyoke, I would hunt for things that reminded me of home—the occasional Eid dinner with desi food, the South Asian dance party, lectures on political affairs in the subcontinent. Back in Pakistan, I don’t look for reminders of college. They interrupt my days, and pleasantly so, but leave shortly after. There is no reason for them to stick around, no bitter goodbyes. I am home.

Still, it takes some navigation to move around a world you haven’t visited for almost two years. People go about their days for reasons other than classes and careers, and digesting all this takes a while. There isn’t time to deconstruct everything into an academic discussion, and often, not even the effort. Women occupy spaces differently. Language dictates a different set of political correctness. Filters regarding social norms and how to behave vary — that they even exist is oftentimes frustrating. There are reminders that I inhabit a different mental and physical space, and that I could have been in another one.

But despite foreseeable frustrations, I am able to process home in a refreshing, almost relieving way. Three years in the United States has adjusted how I view my own country. While college introduced me to liberating ideas, it has also been a recent source of claustrophobia: readings focus around a U.S.-centric world, activism with its emphasis on action, lectures and talks on issues they were physically removed from and the idea of progress as understood in American, democratic, First Amendment terms. Consciously or unconsciously, I had begun to pick up on these, particularly in conversations of religious extremism and cultural conservatism. I had begun to process one world through the methods of another.

Landing home made me realize why this was so. In my criticisms, I had forgotten that my own learning and un-learning takes place in a context far removed from its roots.

Coming home, then, hasn’t been as much of a challenge as a re-grounding. That my frustrations with home, from a distance, had a lot to do with how I had been approaching them was something I realized soon enough. But Mount Holyoke and its people also taught me not to make excuses for myself, and for the things closest to me. When I find myself unsettled by a conversation or an encounter, I call it out. But I remind myself that whatever faults hang among hot Karachi days, these faults may not always be dismantled through Western prescriptions. I can trust my familiarity of home as long as I am willing to identify its imperfections, too.

It took several years in another country to realize how much I appreciate the mechanisms of my world. The thing is, nothing else comes easier. In South Hadley, I was eager to rid myself of whatever ruts I had fallen into in Pakistan. But my Western independence didn’t come by itself; it was accompanied by wistful thoughts of the way things were back home: the ways community and everyday relations functioned— more openly, more mutually invested; how people understood the world around them—less bubbled, more resilient; a language that hit instantly home. That was where my center lay.

Now at home, I realize this again. Mount Holyoke has taught me to critically view my surroundings, but it has also taught me to accept them where they make sense. There is no place in the world I can fall back into so easily, write about so easily—this wearisome sky and landscape is what I know best, even if I don’t always understand it.

 

Khatri is a Mount Holyoke student from Pakistan. She is taking a semester off and reports for MHNews from her home country.