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And I Ask Myself What It Is About Me That Makes This Wonderful, Beautiful Woman Return. Is It Because I'm Pathetic, Helpless In My Current State, Completely Dependent On Her? Or Is It My Sense Of Humour, My Willingness To Tease Her, To Joke My Way Into Painful, Secret Places? Do I Help Her Understand Herself? Do I Make Her Happy? Do I Do Something For Her That Her Husband And Son Can't Do? Has She Fallen In Love With Me? As The Days Pass And I Continue To Heal, My Body Knitting Itself Back Together, I Begin To Allow Myself To Think That She Has.

-Mohsin Hamid

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And I Ask Myself

Mohsin Hamid

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And I Ask Myself What It Is About Me That Makes This Wonderful, Beautiful Woman Return. Is It Because I'm Pathetic, Helpless In My Current State, Completely Dependent On Her? Or Is It My Sense Of Humour, My Willingness To Tease Her, To Joke My Way Into Painful, Secret Places? Do I Help Her Understand Herself? Do I Make Her Happy? Do I Do Something For Her That Her Husband And Son Can't Do? Has She Fallen In Love With Me? As The Days Pass And I Continue To Heal, My Body Knitting Itself Back Together, I Begin To Allow Myself To Think That She Has.

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I Think I've Always Been Drawn To The Second Person. When I Was Growing Up And Playing With My Friends, The Usual Way We Interacted With Imaginary Worlds Was As Characters: A Bench Was 'your' Boat, Leaves On A Lawn Were The Fins Of Sharks Out To Get 'you.'

The Ethnocultural Connotations Of The Burkini Ban Are Very Strong. It's As Absurd As Mandating That Women Have To Go Topless On The Beach. If I Were A Woman, I Definitely Would Not Want To Wear A Burkini Or A Headscarf. But It's Not About What I Want.

I Have A Funny Relationship To Language. When I Came To California When I Was Three I Spoke Urdu Fluently And I Didn't Speak A Word Of English. Within A Few Months I Lost All My Urdu And Spoke Only English And Then I Learned Urdu All Over Again When I Was Nine. Urdu Is My First Language But It's Not As Good As My English And It's Sort Of Become My Third Language. English Is My Best Language But Was The Second Language I Learned.

Funny Relationship

Religion Is Not Something I Like To Talk About Publicly. One Reason Is The Politics, But Also I Think Spirituality Is Deeply Personal.

When The Machine Of A Human Being Is Turned On, It Seems To Produce A Protagonist, Just As A Television Produces An Image.

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All Over The World, The Nativist Perspective Is Being Privileged Over Those Who Are More Recent Arrivals.

Think That The External Situation Has Also Changed Somewhat. The Reduction Of U.s. And Nato Forces In Afghanistan Has, In A Sense, Reduced How Inflamed The Situation On The Pakistani Border Regions Was And Is.

Time Is Our Most Precious Currency. So It's Significant That We Are Being Encouraged, Wherever Possible, To Think Of Our Attention Not As Expenditure But As Consumption. This Blurring Of Labor And Entertainment Forms The Basis, For Example, Of The Financial Alchemy That Conjures Deca-billion-dollar Valuations For Social-networking Companies.

Our Countries Are Weaker: They Cannot Protect Us From Imported Goods, They Can't Protect Us From Climate Change, They Cannot Protect Us From Epidemics. These Things Cross Borders. But The Kind Of Cooperation That Would Protect Us From Those Things Was Completely Lacking And Because Of This There's Been A Backlash. People Feel Vulnerable.

Growing Up In Pakistan In The 1980s, I Lived In The Shadow Of A Tyrannical State.

I Think Massive Migration Is Inevitable. As Sea Levels Rise, As Climate Change Happens, As Fertile Fields Become Arid, As Wars Are Fought, People Are Going To Move. They Always Have.

It Is Remarkable Indeed How We Human Beings Are Capable Of Delighting In The Mating Call Of A Flower While We Are Surrounded By The Charred Carcasses Of Our Fellow Animals.

Contemporary Culture In Pakistan, Just Like In America, Is Continuously Hitting Us With Scary Stuff. And So We Are Utterly Anxious. I Think That It's Very Important To Resist That Anxiety, To Think Of Ways Of Resisting The Constant Inflow Of Negative Feelings, Not To Become Depoliticized As A Result But To Actually Work Actively To Bring Into Being An Optimistic Future.

I Think That We Live In A World - And This Is Something Which Living In Pakistan, Perhaps, Has Taught Me - And, You Know, We Live In A World Where There Is A Constant Feed From Social Media, The News, Etc., Of Things That Can Scare Us. And We Become So Anxious Because Human Beings Are Meant - Are Designed To Be Sensitized To Dangerous Stuff.

I Was 30 When 9/11 Happened And I Had Lived Exactly 15 Years Of Life In America, So I Was Half American. I Was A Full-fledged New Yorker.

Artists Are In The Imagining/ Prototyping Business. Society Needs People To Be Out There Thinking Of What Might Be. That Cannot Be Something We Just Delegate To Politicians Or Technologists.

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You're Never Rude,' She Said, Smiling, 'and I Think It's Good To Be Touchy Sometimes. It Means You Care.

India To Someone Who Lives In Lahore Is Like Queens To Someone Who Lives In Lower Manhattan - It's Not Far Away, And Yet It Doesn't Exist.

I Believe One Can Gauge A Book's Impact Only After About 10 Years.

I Took A Couple Of Creative Writing Classes With Joyce Carol Oates At Princeton University, And In My Senior Year There, I Took A Long Fiction Workshop With Toni Morrison. I Fell In Love With It.

I'm Often Surprised That, You Know, You Encounter All Types Of Humanity. And Very Often, There Are Some Very Decent People Who Don't Stereotype Even When You Might, In Your Own Mind, Have Stereotyped Them To Think That They Will.

I Think Fiction Allows You To Inhabit New Domains And It's You, The Reader Living In That Domain For A Few Days That Results In A Deeper Understanding As Opposed To The Novel Proclaiming This Is What It Is Right And This Is What Is Wrong.

I Think That Right Now, The Global Political Crisis That We See All Over The Place Has To Do With Virulent Nostalgia. Everywhere, People Are Talking About Taking Us Back To The Good Old Days. Whether That's The "caliphate," Or Britain Before The Eu, Or "make America Great Again." But, We Can't Go Back And Many People Wouldn't Want To Go Back Even If We Could.

I Did Not Grow Up In Poverty. But I Did Grow Up With A Poor Boy's Sense Of Longing, In My Case Not For What My Family Had Never Had, But For What We Had Had And Lost.

I Think That People Are Going To Move. They Always Have And That's Going To Continue. The Question Is, How Are We Going To Deal With It?

I Actually Feel That Personal Matters, Like Religion And Spirituality, Are Things That I Really Discuss Only With Intimates. I Think It's, In A Way, Like Sexuality, Something Where It Touches Upon Something Very Private.

When I'm Really Plugged In I Find It Difficult To Write. It's Like Digging A Well. If You Make A Void, Something Moves In To Fill It. Writing Books Is Like That. It's Mostly About Freeing Up Time, Doing Nothing, And In That Time Some Writing Starts To Happen. We Need To Figure Out How To Maintain Those Voids.

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If You Have Ever, Sir, Been Through A Breakup Of A Romantic Relationship That Involved Great Love, You Will Perhaps Understand What I Experienced. There Is In Such Situations Usually A Moment Of Passion During Which The Unthinkable Is Said; This Is Followed By A Sense Of Euphoria At Finally Being Liberated; The World Seems Fresh As If Seen For The First Time Then Comes The Inevitable Period Of Doubt, The Desperate And Doomed Backpedaling Of Regret; And Only Later, Once Emotions Have Receded, Is One Able To View With Equanimity The Journey Through Which One Has Passed.

The Mobile Phone Is Very Dangerous. If You're Walking And Looking At Your Phone, You're Not Walking - You're Surfing The Internet.

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Black And White

I Think Writing Is A Very Political Act. I Think That Any Writer Who Says It's Not, Is Simply A Writer Who Is Disavowing The Political Connotations Of What They Write.

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I Think There's Really Strong Social Stratification In South Asia.

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When We Aren't Collectively Imagining Hopeful Futures, Then The Way Things Are Going Almost Invariably Seems Negative And Frightening.

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Readers Don't Work For Writers. They Work For Themselves.

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I Don't Know If I'm Truly At Home In Any Language.

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I Think Wars, Climate Change, All That Stuff Is Going To Move People. And So I Wanted To Say, "what If The Migration Apocalypse Occurs And It Isn't An Apocalypse At All?" Maybe We Will Still Find Ways To Be Happy And For Our Children And Grandchildren To Thrive And The World To Move On.

As A Society, You Were Unwilling To Reflect Upon The Shared Pain That United You With Those Who Attacked You. You Retreated Into Myths Of Your Own Difference, Assumptions Of Your Own Superiority. And You Acted Out These Beliefs On The Stage Of The World, So That The Entire Planet Was Rocked By The Repercussions Of Your Tantrums, Not Least My Family, Now Facing War Thousands Of Miles Away.

Being A Writer Is Not The Point. Writing Is.

Literature Helps Us Transcend Ourselves.

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I Don't Listen To Music When I Write. I Need Silence So I Can Hear The Sound Of The Words.

Novel Writing Is The Slowest Art Form In The World. It Is Not A Sprint. It Is Not Even A Marathon. It Is A Series Of Marathons That Stretch Over And Over Across A Continent.

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When People Talk About The Death Of The Novel, They Are Speaking Of The Need For The Birth Of Something Different.

If The Dominant Political Expression That We're Seeing Right Now Is Of Nostalgia And We Know That Nostalgia Won't Really Work Out, What Happens Is, We Become Depressed As Individuals And Societies - When We're Depressed, We're Much More Vulnerable To Be Taken Advantage Of By Demagogues And Xenophobes.

Living In A Place Like Pakistan, Very Often You Meet People Who Are Migrating Abroad. And Sometimes You'll Ask Their Parents, You Know - You Didn't Try To Stop Them? Like, Why Didn't You Say, Don't Go - I'll Miss You? Stay With Me. And, You Know, People Say, Well, It's Best For Them. They Have To Go. And Parents, You Know, Take On That Sadness Because They Know It's Better For Their Children If They Leave.

When The Uncertain Future Becomes The Past, The Past In Turn Becomes Uncertain.

Uncertain Future

I Push Against The Tree And Run Away, Stumbling, The Unreal Night Playing With Me, Gravity Pulling From Below, Behind, Above, Making Me Fall. And I Run Through A World That Is Rotating, Conscious Of The Earth's Spin, Of Our Planet Twirling As It Careens Through Nothingness, Of The Stars Spiraling Above, Of The Uncertainty Of Everything, Even Ground, Even Sky. Mumtaz Never Calls Out, Although A Thousand And One Voices Scream In My Mind, Sing, Whisper, Taunt Me With Madness.

She Was Struggling Against A Current That Brought Her Inside Herself.

In A World Of Intrusive Technology, We Must Engage In A Kind Of Struggle If We Wish To Sustain Moments Of Solitude. E-reading Opens The Door To Distraction. It Invites Connectivity And Clicking And Purchasing. The Closed Network Of A Printed Book, On The Other Hand, Seems To Offer Greater Serenity. It Harks Back To A Pre-jacked-in Age. Cloth, Paper, Ink: For These Read Helmet, Cuirass, Shield. They Afford A Degree Of Protection And Make Possible A Less Intermediated, Less Fractured Experience. They Guard Our Aloneness. That Is Why I Love Them, And Why I Read Printed Books Still.

Americans Need To Educate Themselves, From Elementary School Onward, About What Their Country Has Done Abroad. And They Need To Play A More Active Role In Ensuring That What The United States Does Abroad Is Not Merely In Keeping With A Foreign Policy Elite's Sense Of Realpolitik But Also With The American Public's Own Sense Of American Values.

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I Don't Want To Be A Michael Moore-style Artist, Which Is Not To Disparage Michael Moore. But He Seems Rather Unsuccessful At Winning People Over Who Don't Already Agree With Him.

I Come From An Enormous And Very Close Family. I Have Over A Dozen Aunts And Uncles In Pakistan, Dozens Of Cousins. I Have Many Close Friends. I Have Received So Much Love In Lahore That The City Always Pulls Me.

Which Is Stronger, Politics Or Love? Is Like Asking, Which Is Stronger, Exhaling Or Inhaling? They Are Two Sides Of The Same Thing.

I Don't Want To Be Anxious On My Day-to-day Life. I Want To Try To Imagine A Future I'd Like To Live In And Then Write Books And Do Things That, In My Own Small Way, Make It More Likely That That Future Will Come To Exist.

We Need To Start Imagining The Future Or It Will Get Imagined For Us, And The Ways That It Has Been Imagined Thus Far Don't Seem Very Attractive.

Imagining The Future

Capitalism Is Like The Law Of The Jungle With A Few Rules. There Isn't Another System That Works For Our Society But Left Unchecked, Capitalism Can Have A Dehumanising Effect.

Yes, Manila Had Its Slums; One Saw Them On The Drive From The Airport: Vast Districts Of Men In Dirty White Undershirts Lounging Idly In Front Of Auto-repair Shops - Like A Poorer Version Of The 1950s America Depicted In Such Films As Grease.

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I Feel Engaged With Young People In Pakistan. But That Said, It's Still A Small Minority That Reads Novels, Literary Fiction. But It Isn't Necessarily A Small Minority Of The Wealthy Elite In The City Of Lahore. It Can Often Be And I Often Do Meet At Literary Festivals Students Who've Ridden A Bus 12 Hours From A Very Small Town Just To Hear Some Of Their Favorite Writers Come And Speak.

It Is The Effect Of Scarcity; One’s Rules Of Propriety Make One Thirst For The Improper.

It's Important To Have A Non-nostalgic View And Say, Let's Look Forward, Because If We Don't, All We'll Hear Are Voices Telling Us To Go Back.

If Differences Can Be Hidden, Perhaps They Aren't Differences At All.

I'd Rather Create A Miniature Painting Than A Taj Mahal Of A Book.

Pakistan Hasn't Been Cast In The Role Of... Interesting Cultural Place Or, You Know, Land Of Great Comedians.

I Commit Her To Memory. When I'm Alone, I Feel A Strange Yearning, The Hunger Of A Man Fasting Not Because He Believes But Because He's Ashamed. Not The Cleansing Hunger Of The Devout, But The Feverish Hunger Of The Hypocrite. I Let Her Go Every Evening Only Because There's Nothing I Can Do To Stop Her.

I Was, In My Own Eyes, A Veritable James Bond — Only Younger, Darker, And Possibly Better Paid.

I Felt Suddenly Very Young - Or Perhaps I Felt My Age.

As A Child I Read All Kinds Of Stuff, Whether It Was 'asterix And Obelix' And 'tin Tin' Comic Books, Or 'lord Of The Rings,' Or Frank Herbert's Sci-fi. Or 'the Wind In The Willows.' Or 'charlotte's Web.'

Childbirth Changed My Perception Of My Wife. She Was Now The Bloodied Special Forces Soldier Who Had Fought And Risked Everything For Our Family.

With Movement, Families Get Split. With The Politicization Of Religion, Spirituality Gets Diluted. With People Intermarrying And Falling In Love Outside Of Pre-existing Defined Groups, The Tribe Is Disappearing. I'm Not In Favor Of Going Back To Those Things, But You Can't Take Those Things Away Without Putting Something New In Its Place. So Finding A Way To Make Transience More Acceptable, Even Beautiful Is Key.

Falling In Love

I Really Do Believe That People Surprise You. And One Of The Powerful Things About Novels Is That They're About Characters, And Those Characters Live Their Lives.

The Ruins Proclaim The Building Was Beautiful.

For Me, Language Is About The Impossibility Of Communicating What We Precisely Wish To Communicate And This Gorgeous Attempt That We Make To Do That Anyway. I Love That We Will Never Say Exactly What We Mean, But We Will Forever Keep Trying.

I Take Six Or Seven Years To Write Really Small Books. There Is A Kind Of Aesthetic Of Leanness, Of Brevity.

If It Takes You Seven Years To Write Each Novel, You Need A Patron. And I Would Rather Have My Corporate Self As My Patron Than Any Arts Council Or Bestower Of Grants.

Sufi Poetry Is, In A Sense, Self-help Poetry About How To Live A Decent Life, How To Deal With Your Mortality.

The Animosity Between India And Pakistan Is Deeply Unfortunate And Dangerous, And It's Something I've Long Campaigned To Reduce. But Right Now, When There's Artillery Being Exchanged In Kashmir - Which Is Not For From Here, Either - And There Are 100-ish Nuclear Weapons On Each Side Of The Border, There's Never Really Been A Case Like This Where Two Nuclear Armed Countries Are Happily Shelling Each Other.

India And Pakistan

But When You Read A Book, What You See Are Black Squiggles On Pulped Wood Or, Increasingly, Dark Pixels On A Pale Screen. To Transform These Icons Into Characters And Events, You Must Imagine. And When You Imagine, You Create.

Walking Is Very Good For Writers. There's Something Fundamentally Useful About Not Talking To Anybody, Not Looking At A Screen, And Being In Nature - Even If That Nature Is An Urban Environment.

Chance Plays A Powerful Role In Every Life - Our Brains And Personalities Are Just Chemical Soup, After All; A Few Drops Here Or There Matter Enormously - But Consequences Often Become More Serious As Income Levels Go Down.

Like Many Of My Friends In The Pakistani Diaspora - And Many Of My Friends In Pakistan Itself, For That Matter - I Have Sometimes Looked At The Country Of My Birth And Wondered Whether Its Future Will Be One Of Steady And Sad Decline.

I Think We Should Be Prepared, Given Environmental And Political Change For Large-scale Migration. If Sea Levels Rise And 200 Million People In Bangladesh And 300 Million People In Indonesia Need To Move, And The Entire Chinese Seaboard, New York City - That's Going To Be Huge.

The World Seems Concerned With Pakistan Primarily As An Actor In Global Attempts To Combat Terrorism.

I Think The Idea Of Migration Through Time Is Very Important Because Every Human Being Does That And It Unites Us With People Who Migrate Through Geography.

Pakistan Now Is Like A Horror Film Franchise. You Know, It's 'friday The 13th, Episode 63: The Terrorist From Pakistan.' And Each Time We Hear Of Pakistan It's In That Context.

Sometimes We Are Looking For Somebody We Can Connect With On The Basis Of A Shared Past Or A Tradition Or Experience. And So Finding That You're Sitting Next To Someone Very Much Like You In Terms Of Where They Come From Is Enormously Reassuring.

How Many Big Businesses Don't Resort To Underhand Means?

Islamophobia, In All Its Guises, Seeks To Minimise The Importance Of The Individual And Maximise The Importance Of The Group. Yet Our Instinctive Stance Ought To Be One Of Suspicion Towards Such Endeavours. For Individuals Are Undeniably Real. Groups, On The Other Hand, Are Assertions Of Opinion.

Only In Novels Can We Take Another Human Being Into Our Head And Create Something Jointly.

Why The Brevity? Because I'd Rather People Read My Book Twice Than Only Half-way Through

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My Dad Had This Outlook: It Doesn't Matter What I Want To Read - Reading Was A Good Thing. So Whatever I Was Curious About They'd Get For Me From The Library. Books Were A Kind Of A Resistance To Reality. I Liked To Imagine Worlds That Were Different. I Still Do.

America's Strength Has Made It A Sort Of Gulliver In World Affairs: By Wiggling Its Toes It Can, Often Inadvertently, Break The Arm Of A Lilliputian.

In Italian, The Word For Novel Is Romanzo, "the Romance." The English Is "novel" - Something New. Both Of Those Elements, Experimentation And Love, Are Fundamental To The Form.

Certainly, Historically, There Has Been More Attention Given In The International Media To Indian English-language Writers Than To Pakistani English-language Writers. But That, In My Opinion, Was Justified By The Sheer Number Of Excellent Writers Coming From India And The Indian Diaspora.

Farmers And People Who Make A Living From The Land Are Finding It Impossible To Survive. So The First Step Is To Get Out Of That Place. Come To The City Where There Are Opportunities.

The Anger Is Useful Too Because When Things About The World Upset You, That Is Really A Fertile Feeling To Channel Into Fiction And To Put Out Into Books.

If We Try To 'protect Ourselves', Our Nation-states Begin To Look Like Prisons.

If An American Teenager Were To Come To Lahore, They'd Have Wildly Different Experiences Depending On Whom They Met. They Could Party And Get Drunk And Smoke Hashish With Some, While Others Would Say, "let's Get Some Religious Instruction."

I Would Have Bet Money That Britain Would Not Vote To Leave The Eu, And I Would Have Been Wrong. I Would Have Bet Money That Trump Would Not Have Been The Republican Nominee, And I Would Have Been Wrong And I Certainly Would Have Bet Money That He Wouldn't Win The Election.

I Think The Most Effective Forms Of Critique Are Ones That Establish A Common Ground For People To Occupy, And Then Appeal To The Best Nature Of People On That Common Ground.

I Think There's A Natural Link Between The Fact That Our Self Is A Story That We Make Up And That We're Drawn To Stories. It Resonates, In A Way.

We Think Of The Romance Novel As A Lesser Form Of Literature, But I Don't Think That's True. Love Is A Very Important Aspect Of Human Life And Worth Exploring.

I Don't Think The Function Of Writing, At Least For Me As A Fiction Writer, Is To Say To People, "here's The Answer." It's Not An Op-ed.

The Monolithic View That Many Americans Have Of Pakistani Culture Is As Inaccurate As The Monolithic View That Many Pakistanis Have Of American Culture.

American Culture

Walking Is A Meditative Act. It's So Rare That We Allow Ourselves Just To Be.

Well, One Thing That Has Changed Is The Number Of People Killed By Terrorists In Pakistan. Civilians Killed Has Gone Down Really Quite Dramatically. There Was A Newspaper Article Here About A Month Ago That Got Big Headlines Which Said That Civilian Deaths From Terrorism Were Down Something Like 80 Percent Or 90 Percent From Their Peak Of Two Or Three Years Ago.

Time Only Moves In One Direction. Remember That. Things Always Change.

A Beard Is Something That Is Almost Like A Mirror To The Viewer. When Someone Sees You Wearing A Beard, They're Seeing Something In Their Own Imagination Because It's Still Me Whether I'm Bearded Or Not.

Empathy Is About Finding Echoes Of Another Person In Yourself.

Some Of My Relatives Held On To Imagined Memories The Way Homeless People Hold Onto Lottery Tickets. Nostalgia Was Their Crack Cocaine, If You Will, And My Childhood Was Littered With The Consequences Of Their Addiction : Unserviceable Debts, Squabbles Over Inheritances, The Odd Alcoholic Or Suicide.

Oftentimes I Deliberately Put Ambiguity Into My Books So That... The Reader Is Left With An Echo Of: 'how Much Of This Was From Me?'

I Am A Strong Believer In The Intertwined Nature Of The Personal And The Political; I Think They Move Together.

The Gun Of The Father Is Always The Undoing Of The Son.

The Notion Of Love As A Potentially Destructive And Potentially Redemptive Human Force Is Something That Comes Across In All My Books.

What Used To Help Us To Cope With Transience Was Stuff Like, Extended Families All Living In One Place, Or Very Strong Religious Beliefs, Or A Tribe That Would Outlive You. That Stuff Is Getting Weaker.

For Me, Writing A Novel Is Like Solving A Puzzle. But I Don't Intend My Novels As Puzzles. I Intend Them As Invitations To Dance.

In A Subway Car, My Skin Would Typically Fall In The Middle Of The Color Spectrum. On Street Corners, Tourists Would Ask Me For Directions. I Was, In Four And A Half Years, Never An American; I Was Immediately A New Yorker.

If We Want Things To Be Okay, We Will Have To Make Things Okay.

Many Boys, Probably Most Boys, Have A First Love Before They Fall In Love With A Woman. It Begins The Moment Two Boys Realize They'd Die For One Another, That Each Cares More For The Other Than He Does For Himself, And It Lasts Usually Until A Second Love Comes On The Scene, Because Most Hearts Aren't Big Enough To Love More Than One Person Like That.

Falling In Love

Lived Religion Is A Very Different Thing From Strict Textual Analysis. Very Few People Of Any Faith Live Their Lives As Literalist Interpretations Of Scripture.

You Know, You Get A Bad Review As A Writer, You Remember It For 10 Years. You Get A Hundred Good Reviews, You Forget Them All. You Say Hello To A Hundred People In The City And It Doesn't Mean Anything To You. One Racist Comment Passes By, And It Sticks With You A Decade.

What Else Is Belief But Direction?

The Fruits Of Labor Are Delicious, But Individually They’re Not Particularly Fattening. So Don’t Share Yours, And Munch On Those Of Others Whenever You Can.

The Ban On The Burkini, Which Is Basically A Wetsuit, Seems Particularly Ridiculous.

All Human Stories Are Migration Stories Because Everyone Is A Refugee From Their Own Childhood.

My Aunt Used To Say, "it's Between Me And My God; It's Got Nothing To Do With You." It Was A Good Enough Answer For Me As A Snot-nosed College Kid Angling For A Religious Debate, And I Still Think It's A Good Way Of Putting It.

What Did I Think Of Princeton? Well, The Answer To That Question Requires A Story. When I First Arrived, I Looked Around Me At The Gothic Buildings - Younger, I Later Learned, Than Many Of The Mosques Of This City, But Made Through Acid Treatment And Ingenious Stone-masonry To Look Older.

I Think That Things Were Getting Really Very Bad A Couple Of Years Ago, And There's Been A Very Significant Change In Response To That On The Part Of The Security Forces And The Government, But Particularly The Army. And You See Pakistan Actually Fighting Terrorism And Terrorists In A Much More Wholehearted Way Than Had Been Occurring Previously. It's Not Anywhere Close To Over Yet, But You've Seen A Big Change In The Antiterrorism Campaign Here.

Islam Is Not A Race, Yet Islamophobia Partakes Of Racist Characteristics.

There Really Still Is A Deep Wound, You Know, In The Collective Psyche Of Pakistan. And The Violence Has Left Enormous Human And Emotional And Psychic Damage. That's Not Going To Go Away. But That Said, I Think I'm Cautiously Optimistic That We're Looking At A Better Future.

I Think The Beard Helps Offset - It's The Only Hairstyle I Can Really Pull Off. But I'm Often Clean-shaven. I Think, You Know, For Me, It's Not That Signifier. What's Interesting To Me Though Is Although The Beard Isn't A Signifier Of That To Me, Other People Very Often Think That It Is. And So People In America Might React Differently. The, You Know, Border Agents Might React Differently. The Guys At Airport Security Might React Differently.

I Responded To The Gravity Of An Invisible Moon At My Core, And I Undertook Journeys I Had Not Expected To Take.

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