The first time I heard of Harry Potter is from my then teenage cousin. I, a self-proclaimed intellectual who used to read Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five, refused to associate myself with “Disney princess nonsense such as witches and fairies and magic vands.”
ASCENDIO
The first time I heard of Harry Potter is from my then teenage cousin. I, a self-proclaimed intellectual who used to read Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five, refused to associate myself with “Disney princess nonsense such as witches and fairies and magic vands.”
“Wands,” my cousin corrects. “And it’s not like Disney.”
“It’s vaaands,” I emphasize the mispronunciation.
At the time, I would take pride in setting myself apart from the crowd; I was the tween girl with a short bob (cringes) who would race boys and avoid sundresses like the plague. So when all my friends and their mothers were reading Harry Potter, the one thing that stopped me from jumping onto the bandwagon was the fact that it was a bandwagon. Until Nismah, my best friend in sixth grade, told me: “Yeah, it’s good. You should read it.” Her opinion mattered, so in August 2006, I started with Nismah’s secondhand copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. The rest, as they say, is history.
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That same year, my father was posted to Padhar, a remote rural town near Kharian. The power outages were horrific there; sometimes there would be no electricity for up to 14 hours at a stretch. Lizards often fell from the ceiling onto your face during the night. But Padhar was an 11-year-old’s dream. Baba had a German Shepherd, Milo, and a majestic pair of peacocks that danced every morning, and giant potted plants took up an entire wall in the front lawn. The small orchard out in front of his cottage had green fruits and white flowers. Behind the house, a stony path led through a patch of woods, and on to a massive jogging track and playground with rusty swings and a merry-go-round.
For the next two years, each summertime visit to Padhar meant eating piping hot eggs on the sunlit veranda while the peacocks danced, and climbing up my favourite tree in the lazy afternoons to nestle against the leaves and read.
It was during the Monsoon in Padhar, when we were without electricity for more than a day, that I finish reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
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Seven summers later, I was struggling to carry three overstuffed suitcases down three flights of stairs (I would later pay 50 dollars in extra baggage fees at Logan Airport). I was close to tears because it’s the end of my first year of college and I had just had a falling out with some Pakistani upperclassmen who had picked on me since I first landed in Nowhere, New Hampshire. Feeling flustered and alone, I abandoned the suitcases at the bottom of the lowest staircase and walked across the courtyard to the dorm opposite mine to see Elisabeth. Elisabeth and I had very unaligned schedules, but once in a while we would take a walk around campus or sit on the dock beside the Connecticut River to swap stories and catch up. She lit a vanilla-scented candle and introduced me to A Very Potter Musical. Her room was full of light, and we laughed and sang our way through the musical parody without a care.
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By the fall of my sophomore year at Dartmouth, I had befriended other students in the Muslim Student Association. Sometimes we would go grocery shopping at seven in the morning, before classes started for the day, and cook together in the evening. Every Friday night, we would order cheese pizza and unsuccessfully try to watch a movie or show. Iman would recommend An Idiot Abroad (we started groaning 10 minutes into the episode); Saaid recommended some BBC show (it was too intense for a weekend night); Hamza recommended Veer Zaara (Iman didn’t know Urdu and we couldn’t find decent subtitles for her). At 1 a.m during the last week of November, I insisted we watch A Very Potter Sequel, even though I had to catch a bus at 6 a.m in the morning for my flight to Florida. I’m glad we did because by the end of the year we would drift apart and get busy with our lives - and, well, there’d be plenty of time to sleep on the plane.
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On a rainy night, my fiance and I were stuck in a bumper-to-bumper traffic with red tail lights glaring from every direction. We were among thousands of people returning from a Coldplay concert in Boston; at this rate, it seemed unlikely that we would be able to get to the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on time, something I had been looking forward to for months. At a gas station where we stopped to fill up the tank and get some snacks, we saw dozens of people sitting on the sidewalks like they’re waiting for something. After filling up, my fiance found me at the checkout line in the tuck shop. The people outside were stranded because they took Ubers and taxis to the concert, he explained, which are now priced at four hundred dollars because of the traffic - four times the price of the concert ticket itself. There’s a Pakistani guy who requested a ride to Cambridge. “Absolutely not,” I said, fearing a stranger in our car.
“Just meet him.”
The guy turned out be a young college-aged person like us. His name was Abdul Karim. On our way, he talked incessantly. His wife was a graduate student at Harvard; they’re both from Karachi and met in college. They had been living in Cambridge for a year now, and were pregnant.
By the time we left their apartment after an hour of chai and chit-chat, it’s too late to go to the book release. It’s just as well, because when I picked up my copy of Cursed Child the next morning, I was too emotional to read it for days.
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The winter of my last year at Dartmouth found me in a chaotic state of mind. A friend confided in me that she was sexually assaulted, and some days, we would stay up late. I was taking a heavier-than-usual course load, which included a class on designing and analyzing algorithms that sucked up 40 hours a week. Every week, I had a phone interview with potential employers, but only a few that I was excited about. One weekend I went to California for an in-person interview, sleep-deprived and exhausted; another weekend I was invited to Boston, and so on. There were information sessions and networking events with companies, 8 a.m interviews with alumni over coffee, a thousand seniors searching for an entry-level position. I was unsure of what I wanted for a career; most of the time the job search felt like guesswork, and I didn’t see an end in sight. “It’s like hunting for Horcruxes,” I complained to my fiance.
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Six months later, I was standing in an apartment of my own at Cambridge, surrounded by boxes and suitcases and crates. There’s a stick of butter and some bread in the fridge. Two drab, artificial potted plants sat on the desk. Five dull yellow bulbs that I would replace with glowing white light. I was caught in yet another transition, much like the past 21 years, but it didn’t faze me anymore. I had learnt to recognize the bits of familiarity in every change: the sense of adventure, the knowledge that I had done it before and I would do it again, memories of sunlit mornings and late nights with friends and family, and the same tattered copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that I read on every flight to an unknown place and time were some of things that sustained me. In time I would get a bike, hang up a Pakistani flag next to my bed, learn to cook chicken karahi, aloo ki bhujia and hotdog sandwiches, and start my first job. For now, I put on a Harry Potter audiobook and started to unpack.
