Shareef

1997

My school sends a letter addressed to my parents that states girls beginning fourth class can no longer wear navy-blue, knee-length frocks with red belts cinching the waist. Instead we will be required to wear navy blue shalwar kameez with white sashes. The letter also lists out the different stores my parents can buy the uniform from, and promises that the school logo will be pre-stitched on the kameez. I, my mother’s oldest, am ten years old that year. She forgets about this letter, though she does go to Karachi Company to stand in line at the bulk stationers so she can buy plain brown paper and notebooks for my younger brothers and me. She spends the night before the first day of the new school year covering our notebooks neatly with the paper. The next day she sends me to that all-girls school without the shalwar, tying the belt instead around a hand-me-down kameez from one of my cousins. And even though the kaaj at the sides flap open to reveal my 10-year-old legs, my mother thinks it really will not matter if I wear this approximation of a frock, though this is tantamount to sending a young girl to school in just a long-ish blouse.

The next morning, while driving me to school, my father stares at me in the car and says, Something looks off, before leaning over to smooth down one of my eyebrows. That’s better. My new classroom is populated with all the girls from last year—Saba, Hira, Shafaq, Sumaiya, etc. In the excitement of lining up by height and trying to see if anyone has grown taller or shorter after the summer holidays, opening our crisp new notebooks, and rubbing the ends of our erasers to soften them on our desk, no one says a word about me in just my kameez and my bare legs. All day, shalwars around me—standard cotton-polyester blends, elasticated at the waist—billow easy and free. At home time, though, when I am exiting the school gates to step towards the honking red Mehran in which my khala—my mother’s older sister—sits waiting to pick me up, the security guard sitting on a stool by the gate calls towards my back, Beta kal se shalwar pehen ke aana. My khala hears him tell me to wear a shalwar tomorrow and laughs the whole way home, continues to laugh even when she repeats the story to my mother as she drops me off, and my mother laughs too. They nearly split in two over it, the orange Tang