I never saw Osama again after that summer. Our communication dwindled after I won a scholarship to the A-level program of a prestigious school, while Osama enrolled in FC College’s FSc Program. Two years later, I heard from Mosquito that Osama was headed to a private medical college. Despite the humiliation he suffered once he started begging the boys in our class to sleep with him, his father’s wealth landed him safely into a reputable college.
Though I did well in A-levels, I didn’t place into any of the public medical colleges in Lahore due to the unfair formula the Higher Educational Commission uses for students in the Cambridge system to calculate their “equivalence” for public universities. My name did appear in the list for Quaid-e-Azam Medical College at Bahawalpur, but leaving Lahore was not possible me at the time. Ammi had started chemo at Shaukat Khanum. I eventually graduated with a bachelor’s in computer science at FAST—a solid program, but housed in the same institute that so many others from my school had ended up in despite the differences in our grades. After a lifetime of teachers convincing me that I was “conceptually stronger” than others… well, what could’ve been done about that? I know people who still brood over twists of fate and bitterly remind you of promises made to them in the early days of their lives. I’m sure my small uncle does that in whatever godforsaken pub or hookah parlor or mosque he finds himself at in Cork. As for me, watching my mother recover from a hysterectomy, then undergo chemo when the cancer came back, obliterated my own ambitions for a while. For that brief time when everything felt like it was in free fall, I gained immunity against all my personal fears.
In a way, a weaker kind of immunity remains. For a lifetime now, I can repeat, “I gave up everything for you,” or “I stayed in Lahore for the sake of my mother,” and not lose the currency of those words. When I got my job at SPATech, for instance, my family was alarmed to hear about the four months a year I’d have to spend at the company headquarters in Manchester. When Ammi complained about how difficult it would be for her to manage without me, I told her, I stayed up next to you all night even when the nurse told me I should sleep.
More than those sleepless nights, I remember the early mornings in the hospital. Once my aunt arrived for her shift, I was free to trudge down to the main cafeteria, dig my spoon into a plate of cumin rice and survey the weather-beaten faces gathered there under swaths of clean sunlight. I wondered, Is this the most pain we’ll go through in our lives? How eviscerating it was, and how ordinary—it would have been too much to bear if it wasn’t so commonplace. Other days it was more manageable, and cups of tea alone could momentarily wash off the haze. We might approach each other those mornings and, by way of introduction, dole out stories of disease, complaints against the negligence of nurses. Soon I could predict nearly everything anyone would tell me before it came spilling out of them. Old men who had never left their towns before told me they had ridden in diesel-choked wagons for hours, had haggled fiercely in broken bits of Urdu for a bunch of bananas. Always in the cafeteria was the sickening smell of fruit. Mothers peeled oranges and pushed slices into their children’s mouths. I met Afghans who had bribed their way into Pakistan to come to Shaukat Khanum in the hopes of qualifying for free treatment. Some people were too poor to afford a hostel and slept in the cafeteria until prodded awake by the staff. They stirred with a start, looked stunned against the stainless steel of the kitchen. Then they shuffled out to sleep on the hospital grounds, wrapping themselves in heavy shawls.
Half an hour of this each morning was enough. I finished my cumin rice, my cup of tea, left my plastic tray on the table, bought another cup of tea to take up to my aunt. Don’t get me wrong—I learned nothing from these mornings. I learned nothing from cancer, its healers and its victims. I picked up no gusto for life, no fear of the afterlife. This time in the hospital only dulled the passion I had to compete, to prove something to someone. In the end my mother came home. I left those cafeteria people behind and never thought about them again.