Metamorphosis in Rawalpindi

As Almas Bajwa woke up from uneasy dreams one morning, he found himself transformed in his bed into a young woman. He lay on his back, the mattress hard underneath him, and glanced at the curves of his body that were as unfamiliar as the bed. His body was clad in a red lawn kameez that had yellow flowers dispersed on it. The shalwar was plain black. No blanket covered it. The room did not have a feminine touch but it was as tidy as a newly furnished place. However, the narrowness of it and the lack of ventilation created a suffocating feeling. 

No windows broke the monotony of the walls, the half-white paint peeling off the edges of the roof in the periphery of Almas's vision. There were no pictures on the walls and no air conditioning either. What had woken him up was the sweltering heat of Rawalpindi's summer, coupled with the buzzing of blood-sucking mosquitoes.

I have had dreams like this before, he thought and closed his eyes to go back to sleep. A pinching sensation at his nape made him shift. The sweat on his body produced a cooling sensation just for a few moments and then it was back to heat. It was almost impossible to go back to sleep. His mind took him to his office which had to be furnished today. 

What a nuisance, he thought. His father, on looking at it from the passenger seat of his Honda BRV, had commented on the wooden plank covering up the front entrance, blocking the gaze from the sight of the place. 

Get that away and make it more presentable like the ones beside yours, he had said, noting the clear names of the property developers in blue over glass doors that belonged to his work neighbors. He knew that starting a business was always a risk, but he couldn't think of anything nowadays that was not a risk. He turned and rubbed at the itching at his back. His eyes had just grown heavy when a strong knock on the wooden door startled him awake.

Almas sat up in bed. Like a slow movie, the dream was not ending anytime soon. He might as well play an actor and wait for it to reach its conclusion. He moved to the mirror and touched the reflection of someone that he knew. It was a girl he used to study with at the university. Dreams had a strange way of manifesting themselves. The girl looked different. She had aged since he last saw her. 

He opened the door of the room. A fat middle-aged woman stood outside. He could see a large mole on her chin as she spoke. The words were making only half of sense. If he had to guess it was something close to Punjabi.

"I don't know," he stuttered in Urdu.

The woman paused and looked at him in surprise and confusion. The dream was becoming quite tangible. He could feel everything, he could hear the horns and birdsong outside, and he could be completely logical at the same time: sensations that were usually absent in his dreams. A boy followed the woman inside the room.

"Api, you are going to get me late."

At least he spoke Urdu. After some more words, the woman closed the door of the room, diving him into dimness. He turned on the light and decided to get ready. When he had dressed himself in clothes that were hanging in the closet, he looked at himself in the mirror again. If he ignored the colors, he could imagine himself dressing like this. It was not much different from men's shalwar kameez. However, he couldn't bring himself to wrap the dupatta around him. It felt like the simple rumpled article would suffocate him.

The door opened again, and the 12-year-old boy was ready with a big bag hanging off his left shoulder and his striped uniform shirt tucked neatly in his pants. 

"You still are not ready," he said in disappointment.

Sometime later, Almas was dropped off at the metro station by a rickshaw driver, and he knew the name of the school where Fatima worked. It no longer felt like a dream. The streets of Rawalpindi were too detailed to not be perceived as real. The nuisance of the sweltering weather, the rushing of the traffic, the young girls and boys hurrying to their educational institutions, and men and women driving towards their workplaces made Almas remember his grueling routine.

Getting into the women's section of the Metrobus was not a pleasant experience. To retrieve some normalcy, Almas stood at the segregation line. He could feel all the men assembled at his back. The women stood in front of him. It had been two years since he had traveled by Metro. He did not have his car back then. He would sometimes take the bus to the nearest station to his university and ride with his friend on a bike the rest of the way. The routes had not been extended to all major hubs of the twin cities yet. He was glad to have his car and not to have to touch unknown people every day. He could feel the back of his shirt dampening under the sweat. 

The dupatta wrapped around him awkwardly added to the heat and Almas took it off his head, hanging it off his shoulder like he had seen some women do. He had glimpsed the conservatism in Fatima's mother's eyes. To avoid scandal with her, he had covered his head but in a Metrobus, all kinds of women travelled. Women in jeans and T-shirts, women in abayas, women in full niqabs, women with half sleeves, women with their dupattas hanging from their necks. Almas's mother was somewhere in the middle. Having not abandoned her rural honor, she did not give up her chadar, but she never wore a niqab. Almas would not have been that kind of a woman.

As the bus neared Fatima's station, he felt something on his body. It was a hand that he felt reaching from behind him, the men's section. He turned around. He could not see anyone looking at him. Dismissing it as an accident, Almas gazed at the passing trajectory of the city over multiple women's heads. He felt the unpleasant invasion being repeated. The hand was there again. This time he took hold of the hand before turning around, not having the same shame as a woman would have, not feeling hesitant about open physical interaction with men. He reacted as a man would. The culprit was an old man. He glared at him, before pushing him, the stranger colliding with other passengers.

"At least have some shame at this age," he said angrily.

Some people looked at them. A woman asked, "What happened?"

Almas did not wait for the tension to escalate and left as soon as his station arrived. The dream had dived into a dark place. Almas no longer felt ready to play along with it. He wanted to wake up now. The face of the old man was printed behind his eyes.

The school was not huge but the building and the gardens transcribed it as an elite place for elite children. Almas tried to imagine the amount that Fatima earned. Maybe fifty thousand if she was experienced.

When he entered the building, he could see some registers lying on the table near the entrance. He opened the first one. Names and occupations of teachers were written above the arrival and departure times. The last register that claimed to be for elementary teachers finally yielded Fatima's name. Almas marked the arrival time and noted Fatima's class and section as well as the subject that she taught. Urdu for Grade 1.

When Almas arrived at the classroom, his breath was swelling, and he wiped his neck with his dupatta. The students had not arrived yet. It seemed that Fatima's rickshaw arrangement made her early to school every day. When a teacher entered the room, Almas sat up straight and stared at her.

"Assalamualaikum," she said, a little startled.

"Walaikumasalam," Almas replied and shut his mouth tightly.

It was a risk to say too much. Almas did not know what the relationship between this teacher and Fatima was and he did not want to act strangely in front of her. An urgent fear overtook his heart. If it was a dream, why did it matter?

The woman folded her abaya and placed it in a plastic bag, before enclosing it in the cupboard. "It's my period first." She stared at his hair. "It looks like you are trying a new style." He did not respond. He had not known how to deal with the long hair.

The students started trickling inside the room and they seemed younger than he had imagined. After the departure of the first teacher, it was Almas's turn to teach. A quick glimpse through the drawer rewarded him with the planner. He glanced at the date on the board and looked through the day's plan. He knew now which chapter had to be taught. It was a reading day. By the time he was done with his perusal, the class had dived into disorder and chaos. Every student was out of his seat. Some were laughing, talking, and pushing at each other. Almas felt his head spinning.

"Please quiet down," he said.

The voice did not reach the ears of the children. He took a duster and started banging it on his desk. All sound stopped. The kids started looking at him.

"Go back to your seats immediately," he shouted.

They listened.

Urdu used to be his favorite subject when he was young. Not as young as these children. It used to be difficult in elementary school, but once he had become proficient in the writing part, it became the easiest subject. He did not have to study for it. The only subject not requiring proficiency in English to understand it, he would just read everything once and comprehend it easily. What was even better was that he could create his answers from his mind. For English, Social Studies, and Sciences, he had to memorize the parts he did not understand. Of course, English no longer remained a problem when he had reached a certain age, but the middle years had been a struggle for him.

By the end of the period, Almas felt deeply appreciative of all the teachers. He remembered his own younger days more acutely. Spending time in proximity to young children reminded him of himself at that age. He could look at the faces of the boys and see some of his old friends in them. The distance of almost two decades between himself and the students remained irrelevant. All the cries of the times changing and everything with it, too, rang hollow as he spent those 45 minutes with them. He had heard that children were no longer children. Were the adults attributing and projecting the filth of their minds on the young ones? This question assailed him as he sat in the staff room listening to the discussion between two teachers who talked about strange events in their class and the imitation of adulthood in children influenced by the internet. 

"You are quiet today," a university-going girl told Almas. "If you had brought your diary, I could at least have copied your activities for the next period."

Almas found out that her name was Abrish. He quickly learned which section she taught, during which periods they needed to return to their classes, and at what time they needed to come to the staff room. He was surprised to find out how much a person could learn just by quiet observation. From what he remembered of Fatima from her university days, she had been an introverted girl, never talking freely, always looking over and fading into the background. He was surprised that he had even recognized her after all this time. 

He quickly learned that he had to sit in the staff room for his free periods and that only the English teacher was to stay in class. There was a reason behind that, or that's what they said. English teachers were the homeroom teachers. No Urdu or Maths teacher was allowed to be that. English was the language of the present and the future. So he earned less than the English teacher. Almas wondered if it was just an inferiority complex. Languages were like humans. Oppressors sometimes became oppressed. He thought of Punjabi and how he had avoided speaking it at home in favor of Urdu. The same was happening to Urdu now, making Almas fear for its gradual disappearance like Punjabi.

When the last period was over, Almas left the school. This time he took the metro and arrived at the closest point to his house amid the crowded roads, taking double the time than usual. 

It was his house and not Fatima's. 

The ringing of the bell did not earn him any answer at first. He thought about his mother and wondered if, in this dream world, she would be worried or if she would be undisturbed in her usual routine, making breakfast for the family, helping the maid with dinner, looking after Almas's niece, and feeding her. His father was in Dubai so he did not have to worry about him.

He knocked on the door. The maid finally opened. He tried to enter but felt the consternation on her face and stopped. She did not recognize him.

"I want to see Faiza aunty."

He didn't want to alarm her unnecessarily. He could act as was expected of a strange young woman in such circumstances.

"Come in," she said and brought Almas to his family's drawing room. His mother was in the kitchen, throwing the roti on the wok, and wiping her face with her dupatta.

"Assalamualaikum," he said as he would every time he entered the house from the outside, even if it was just to bring milk and eggs from the shop. It was considered rude in his house to not greet the elders every time you entered it.

His mother covered her head properly, answering his salam and looking at him strangely. The complete unfamiliarity in Almas's mother's eyes made him feel a prickle in his heart, rendering him almost speechless. He could not think of a worse feeling than the fact of your mother being unable to recognize you. The feeling of suffocation overcame him again. His mother must have found his long silence strange. She gestured for him to take a seat and he automatically took the comfortable black sofa that had deflated and sunk over the years after being used roughly by Almas and his siblings.

"Amna, take Almas his lunch. I will make more roti after I am done here."

The maid nodded and prepared a tray. The name Almas, taken in her usual tone, made him stiffen. The maid left with a tray overflowing with utensils of food in the direction of his room. Someone had already taken his place. An impostor. The despair was suddenly replaced with anger.

"I am here to see Almas."

His mother frowned. It was unusual for Almas to invite his friends to the house, especially people who would approach his mother first. Sometimes, they would wait outside and message him, and Almas would take them to the well-furnished study with bright lighting and lock them up. However, it was never women who came to the house. It had always been men. Almas could imagine his mother reaching some strange conclusion and his cheeks heated.

"I am from work. I was called to discuss some deals with him but I wanted to greet you first."

His mother relaxed. As a woman who had not been educated, Almas's mother was not prone to ask questions about issues that she felt were for literate people. Her sense of blindness to these things rendered her unsure of even the most basic matters that did not require a person to be formally educated. He did not like taking advantage of his mother's insecurity but the situation warranted such an act on his part.

When the impostor Almas entered the study that he was sitting in, he felt a shock run through him. It was disconcerting to see himself in 3D, different from how he saw himself in the mirror. He could see his walk that was not his own on the other figure.

"Who are you?"

The impostor widened his eyes as if he had not been expecting this question. Was it him inhe in that body in a strange twist of the dream? Was his soul divided in half and residing in two bodies now?

"I am Almas," he said finally.

"No you are not. I am Almas."

The figure's lips twisted. It could not be Almas in there, he thought to himself. He did not come across as rude to people he just met. Most of them usually foundthem found him quite likable usually. The person inside Almas's body had to be an impostor.

"Are you Fatima?"

The impostor Almas strangely smiled at this. "No. You are Fatima."

"No," Almas said. "No."

"Yes. I think you are feeling unwell. You should go home and rest."

"This is my home."

"No, it is not."

With those words, the impostor Almas left the room, not responding to Almas's voice calling him out. Almas took the metro again and reached Fatima's house. It was the first time in his adult life that Almas got beaten up. He did not need to know her language to understand what she was saying.

"Where were you? Tell me honestly. Is it a boy? Are you seeing someone behind our backs?"

A man that Almas could only imagine was Fatima's father intervened and stopped the mother. He calmed her down and took her out. He looked at himself in the mirror. There were no bruises. He wanted to cry. He was no longer a man so he allowed himself.