The news of the coronavirus had emptied out T3, giving it the kind of eerie feeling you get during off hours at airports when there’s only one flight and the people working behind the counters are mentally checked out, their glazed eyes and monotone speech the key signifiers of their zombie-like appearance. Arriving at Zurich was no better: people responded to directional signs as if someone had programmed them, the silence throughout the airport was deafening. I was nervous, as I usually am around immigration counters, as people with my skin tone and passport usually are around immigration counters, although perhaps a tiny part of me would be relived if the Swiss Immigration Authorities rejected the year-long expedition to collect this piece of paper stamped on my passport and sent me back to Dubai, back to waking up with the bright sunlight on my mattress in Maaz and Tania’s flat surrounded by not one, not two, not three, but six fluffy llamas smiling at me from the window, from a pillow case, from under the coffee table on a fuzzy pink slipper.
But here I was, in a cold new country, where instead of ducking into the men’s room and tipping the attendant a bit extra to have a smoke in the stalls, Yannick now had to walk past the smoker’s lounge, shaking his head at the timings written outside the door. “It’s a whole new world” I felt like singing the Disney musical ironically, especially when I felt a twinge of embarrassment at having to open my suitcase out on the street to hunt for my phone charger and got curious stares from onlookers. I remember giving similar stares to people who did the same thing in Pakistan, people that opened up their suitcases to reveal embarrassing hordes of underwear, mountains of clothes, and stacks of dessert boxes that makes you think, why on earth do Pakistanis travel like this? As I rifled through my shoes and books, hunting for my elusive iphone charger, an image of a guy we had seen earlier floated into mind, with the following slogan tattooed in cursive: Only God Can Judge Me.
To fight off the gloom that was settling in shades of indigo-blue around us, we went into the town centre to buy a sim card, and ran into Jules, an artist wearing patchwork jeans and the kind of embroidered bag around his chest that wouldn’t be remiss on a Turkish büyükanne. He spoke with a strong British accent and had dots tattooed under his eyes like the Shikari smiley face logo. He complained about how expensive everything is and how he needs to get out of Fribourg, but I was just relived to have met someone our age who was speaking in English, getting tired of nodding along while people conversed in French. I hadn’t realized how much the language barrier would get in the way. I wanted to talk to everyone I met, ask them what keeps them going, what they make of the absurdity of life. Instead I felt like I was sitting in a French film without subtitles.
Jules dove animatedly into how his mother was the housekeeper for a Russian millionaire, eventually saving enough to start her own restaurant in Fribourg - (“The best fried chicken in town,” Michael punctuated) until she became bankrupt and the man she was with stole it from her (“You can buy someone’s life for a dirham,” Michael nodded in agreement). Jules and his four siblings grew up on social welfare. The first time he watched a movie was when he turned 16. He pulled out a cream-colored flip-phone and joked about how a girl came up to him at a party recently and asked him if he sold drugs.
We bid farewell to him and were off to meet Patrick, a shy farmer who pulled out a “Respectometer” from his pocket - a dial that teaches young adults about consent and the tricky grey area when behavior goes from acceptable to uncomfortable. I told him about the Aurat March that happened in Islamabad a few days ago, and how a bunch of religious extremists showed up and started showering the female marchers with stones and shoes. A girl with a thin blonde braid and piercings on either end of her nose-bridge apologized for not speaking in English, and had a long emotional conversation with Yannick while she braided origami swans into a piece of thread. I was enjoying drinking absinthe from a dainty teapot, the kind that wouldn’t be out of place at a tea party in an Enid Blyton, all cream china and a garland of pink flowers around the hem. Three adults were braiding origami swans with the children, and the whole place had a commune feeling. I could see why they lived like “hippies that shower” (Patrick’s words). With the rise of the nuclear family, friends have stepped in to take the responsibilities usually reserved for extended family members. What I was seeing here was exactly how Phuppo and Dadi had raised me, and how Maaz and I had given company to Aneeb and Anushe as they traversed through their first few steps of life. I don’t know which is better - friends or family. You get to choose your friends and not your family members, but the kind of unconditional-veering-on-toxic-love you get from family members has no replacement as far as I know of.
As everyone seems to be stocking up, Yannick went to buy some weed from his friends last night and told me I should’ve come along because they talked about books for a long time. It’s strange to me how none of my friends, with the exception of Ahmed Ali and Mashall, share a similar proclivity for literature and the arts as me. It would have been nice to talk about books with a bunch of strangers in Fribourg, but Jack Kerouac beckoned instead, I took the introvert’s cowardly way out and stayed in bed reading page after page of On The Road to the soft jazzy soundtrack of Spotify’s Daily Mix 2.
We watched The Two Popes the other day which was unexpectedly hilarious. I thought it would be similar in tone and subject to The Young Pope, but I was proven wrong: the high-brow, low-brow mixture of the two popes kicking back, eating D’iavlo pizza, drinking neon orange fanta, and watching a TV show about a friendly dog is enough of a delight to watch this movie. It had me craving to write a screenplay about the Muslim cleric Nouman Ali Khan, who I’d been forced to watch and listen to by Phuppo every time Ramadan rolled around as compensation for me not fasting. I didn’t mind him so much because he seemed to have a sense of humor and talked about things Millennials could relate to, while bridging this back to our faith. It’s not easy to make ancient religious texts relatable so I’ll give him that.
Much to my surprise, a year or two ago, whatsapp conversations emerged where he is flirting with multiple women, along with a couple of pictures of him with his shirt off. I can’t describe how I felt when I saw this. A heady mixture of disgust, relief and impish schadenfreude, I suppose. Relief because now Phuppo would see I was right and she was wrong. Listening to someone lecture about how men and women shouldn’t date, then finding out he sends topless selfies of himself to women in his religious institute! Ha!
On the other hand, he’s only human and thirsty like the rest of us. I shouldn’t be so harsh on him. But digging deeper into a Buzzfeed expose revealed that he has a pattern of flirting with women, pretending to marry them, then paying them off and bragging about it. If this is true, then a Harvey Weinstein-style Ronan Farrow-esque screenplay has to be written. This is too good not to pass up. A man representing Islam and all that is holy, betrayed by his basest urges. There’s too much ambiguity and religious crisis in this story for me not to write it. The only fly in the ointment is that this would never get made. Even the fictional film The Lizard wasn’t allowed to be released in Iran because of its controversial religious content. But if you’re not poking the box, what’s the point?
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