I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out how to start this, and the truth is, I don’t think you can really “start” writing about Pakistan. It just spills out. You say the word once, and suddenly you’re twelve years old again, standing barefoot on a warm floor, hearing someone shout your name from another room. That’s the effect this country has. It doesn’t wait for you to organise your feelings first.
Home is not the postcard version, it’s the small things like chai
The strange part is, when I think about home, I never think about the postcard version. I don’t picture minarets against a sunset or some sweeping mountain view. I picture the smaller, sillier things. The scrape of a plastic chair being dragged across a rooftop on a summer evening. The specific pitch of my mother’s voice when she has told me three times already that the food is getting cold and she is genuinely about to lose patience. Cousins I only see twice a year, immediately behaving as if we grew up in the same room. The way the doorbell rings differently when it’s a guest versus when it’s someone from the family, and how everyone in the house somehow just knows which is which.
And chai. I have to talk about chai for a moment, because I don’t think outsiders fully understand. Chai in Pakistan is not a beverage. It’s a whole social contract. A cousin drops by unannounced, chai appears. Bad news arrives, chai appears. Good news arrives, also chai. It rains, and suddenly the entire country is frying pakoras with an instinctive agreement that no problem is truly serious as long as there’s something hot in a cup nearby. I know it’s just tea. But love usually arrives in small packages.
Pakistan Independence Day
Then, of course, there’s 14 August. I don’t think any of us realise as kids how much that day is quietly shaping us. Weeks before it arrives, the streets begin changing colour without asking anyone’s permission. Vendors appear out of nowhere selling flags in every size that has ever existed. Kids walk around with green and white paint on their faces, looking like they’re carrying a piece of the sky in their hands. Motorbikes rip past you with flags flapping so hard they sound like they’re applauding. And somewhere in every mohalla, in every lane…there’s that one house that has clearly overcommitted, strung with more lights and buntings than the local wedding hall. I used to be embarrassed by those houses.
Now I think those over-the-top houses are exactly who we are. We’ve never been ones for restraint. We do it loud, proud, and with way too many lights. And honestly? That’s the heart of it.
The land is generous, nature has it all
The land itself is almost too generous, when you really think about it. One country was given mountains, deserts, valleys, and coastline as if someone decided it deserved everything. Up north, peaks that humble you, and then make you glad to be humbled. Valleys so green they look filtered even when they aren’t. Then, without much warning, deserts that shift from gold to rust as the sun moves. Farmland that stretches until your eyes give up. A coastline that most Pakistanis don’t visit nearly enough.
When a traveller or a guest from abroad asks me what Pakistan looks like, I never quite know where to start, because the honest answer is, which one? We have several countries all resting in one, and yet it all feels like one place.
It’s the people I love most
But if you asked me the real reason I love this place, it wouldn’t be the geography. It would be something no travel documentary captures. It’s the fact that a rickshaw driver will call you “beta” (child) without knowing your name. It’s the way strangers argue with each other about the price of tomatoes and then, minutes later, help each other push a broken-down car off the road. It’s the aunties who ask deeply invasive questions at weddings, and yet, if you were ever actually in trouble, would be the first to arrive at your door with food and a hundred opinions, freely given.
It’s a country where people will complain about each other constantly, and then defend each other the second an outsider tries the same. That contradiction is us. That’s the part you have to taste to know.
Pakistan has given me so much
Pakistan has given me things I didn’t even realise were gifts until much later. My language, which carries jokes that don’t translate into any other tongue. A childhood scored by cricket commentary, the sound of Qawwali drifting from someone’s speakers, and the sound of a ceiling fan on a July afternoon, spinning away the hours. I don’t carry these as memories. I carry them like things I slipped into my pockets years ago and forgot to take out.
And our flag. I don’t know how to describe what happens when I see it moving against the wind. It’s not a cheer. It’s a hand on my chest. It’s a feeling that reminds me, in a single second, that no matter where life eventually takes me, a specific part of me is not going anywhere. That part belongs here. It always will. There are wealthier countries, better organized ones, ones with smoother roads and shorter queues. I know. But there is only one place where every street somehow already knows my name, where every prayer feels like it’s landing on the stove, where chai is always brewing, where someone’s always pouring without being asked.
Mera pyara Pakistan – My dear Pakistan
Mera pyara Pakistan is not perfect, and honestly, that’s part of why I love it the way I do. We don’t stop loving our families the moment we notice their flaws. We stay. We show up. We pray for their better days, and we try to nudge things in the right direction. That’s how I treat Pakistan too, like someone I’m not giving up on. I want to love it without hesitation, but I also want to be someone who helped make it lovable.
This land gave me my name. My memories. My dreams. My home. And for that reason alone, no matter how many places I see in this life, it will always, always be the most beautiful one to me.
All pictures by Yumna Zahid Ali.
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