Familiar/Familial/Unfamiliar

Yesterday I spent an hour on Tariq Road looking for a shop that sold knitting needles. And in this process of traipsing around, using bakeries as landmarks, I found myself in the kind of shop I would have had to wait in with my mother: full of neatly labelled boxes of buttons, thread, the dozens of tiny little objects that go into making a finished garment. Even amid the crush it felt slightly jarring. I always wonder in Karachi: am I trying to relive my childhood? Am I treading the familiar because that’s all I know? But the reality is that just because I am amid familiarity doesn’t mean I am copying what I saw an adult do. I can make that landmark, that routine, that place, my own. The way I am in that place doesn’t have to be the way they were, it can be mine. And it is. Even if it is weird to turn around in a shop and realise you’re the adult.