On Care, Strangers & the Fifth Metatarsal

In July, I slipped and fell down two steps of stairs and fractured my fifth metatarsal — a bone that runs along the curve of your feet, caging and protecting all the other bones. (I think. Excuse my attempt to explain medical jargon.)

The next four weeks were spent in restless agony, bed stricken with a cast around my leg. Not for the first time in two years, I yearned to be taken care of — acts of service being a love language I had long ago begun to identify with. It seems much easier to practice love then to articulate it.

Perhaps it was due to luck, divine intervention or a combination of both, but I happened to be staying in a student housing with eight other tenants and one of them decided to step up (fitting, since I literally could not stand on my own two feet at the time, so, pun intended, I guess).

This person was from the same country I had come from and that alone, I believe, was the reason for the unexpected kindness that followed. The Person had only moved in a month ago and was a bright, young woman around my age, who had, up till now, been spending her time holed up in her room, surviving mostly on a meal of instant noodles and an assortment of juices.

While the rest of my flat mates joked about how I should go hiking and traipsing across the hills of Lisbon, The Person started cooking, cleaning and running errands for me without me having to summon up the courage to ask. More than anything, it was reassuring to be able to talk to someone in Urdu, to say “yaar” like a prefix in most sentences, even though she was anything but — as the colloquial “yaar” in Urdu translates directly to “friend”.

For me, friendship has been a lifelong, emotional affair, wrought with its fair share of heartbreak that most people associate solely with romantic relationships. As someone with a very small circle of friends, now scattered across different continents, any new addition to this circle requires a great deal of introspection, judgement and decision making. As friends dwindle and fade away or (more painfully) choose to part ways, I continue to think long and hard about what friendship means to me. The definition has changed over the years and will continue to change evermore but I remain convinced that the cardinal rule of friendship is that it requires two people to be political in a way that does not question the other person’s right to live, express and be.

Not for the first time, I found myself in close contact with someone whose primary love language matched mine but whose politics and praxis woefully divergent.

For the next four weeks, I woke up to breakfast— eggs in variations of boiled, scrambled, sunny side up — and lunch and dinner made from scratch. The Person discarded her instant noodles for pots of mattar pulao, karahi, daal, nihari, haldi doodh and fried chicken — food that was homely, healing, generous and symbolic of gracious care.

During these meals, the topic of conversation ranged from the mundane (what her work was like that day) to the political (the plight of the Afghan refugees, the case of Noor Muqaddam and so on)

Over time, I learned that her political beliefs different wildly from mine: Pakistan should not take in more Afghan refugees who are responsible for the terrorism in Pakistan; women are responsible for their own safety and protection, the Quran mandates muslim women to cover and that is the Ultimate Truth etc etc etc.

The weeks that followed weighed on me heavily. Not for the first time in my life, I felt it necessary to remain silent. I was dependent and indebted to someone who believed that I was blindsided by the throes of feminism and anti-nationalism. There were talks also of “these people” who drink, dine out and go clubbing. Again, I stayed silent and muted but sometimes nodded my head in hypocritical agreement— an act of self defense or cowardice?

As time went by, I began to think more and more of the politics of care and the communities that care, driven not by transactional love like in small, close knit heteronormative structures but by a sense of duty and responsibility. I question therefore what it means to feel beholden to a stranger who has cared for you as an act of grace. Especially if the connection with the stranger is temporary, severed by physical distance and geography. Perhaps the obvious conclusion is to pass it on; to extend care and grace to other strangers with a belief in cosmic karma and in the hopes of creating a kinship network that is devoid of the burden of debt.

For now, I find myself grappling with feelings of gratitude and what feels like uneasiness and anger. I am finding, increasingly that these emotions, despite what self help gurus may tell us, can and do exist together — at loggerheads perhaps, but both equally potent.