Origin Story
1
All origin stories are in fact love stories.
Or lack-of-love stories.
My city was the result of a woman searching for her husband.
A storm claimed him & she settled
where the storm had claimed him,
convinced she will find him nonetheless.
Faith is an awful thing. Mai Kolachi did find her husband near
the delta of the Indus.
I imagine the couple falling asleep under the river’s
lullaby, its blue-green ebb & flow
the perfect background for a new dwelling.
2
No one has held me like you have, Karachi.
It has only taken me my whole life to escape you.
(It is only myself I have wanted to escape from.)
All origin stories contain indigeneity
& indigeneity eludes me.
Our people call each other muhajir.
(I am an immigrant in my own city.)
3
I chased open skies under your mothering.
(Smothering.)
What being born on the wrong side of the bridge
can do to someone
is what I’ll spend my entire life answering
(& failing at.)
Even your mountains prefix torn. (I will not speak
about your men.)
4
Your eucalyptus, bamboo,
peepal, banyan.
The forgiving shade of your neem,
the cool of its leaves when rubbed
against my reddened back.
5
Devi, devi, devi, devi, devi.
(The only god you worship.)
6
Two years before I left,
razing rain.
Dazzling rain. Baba’s pants soaked
knee-length rain. He walked two miles
over your regolith body to reach home.
Massaging his blistered feet with warm mustard oil, eyes flooding—I lost all faith.
7
Mai Kolachi was dispossessed. Her tribe made an enemy, now an entire province.
Her name pruned & made something plastic.
Look your origin story in the eye, Karachi. You were mothered in violence.
It is no surprise gunshots became your destiny.
How you loved the same boys I loved.
(How you reached them before I could.)
8
The tomb of Abdullah Shah Ghazi faces the sea.
(No hurricane has ever hit you.)
To believe in a myth is to be
faithful.
(All origin stories are myths.)
9
I am trying to untangle where you end & I begin.
The streets of Nazimabad are as much me,
as they are you. Your alien-fished
potholes
I kept skipping & skipping
& skipping.
(9)
& one day, fell,
face-first
& saw only my own face.
10
Another riot. Another round
of gunshots
blowing from every part of your ground.
Bhaiya limping back home.
(So many boys limping back home.)
(So many boys shot—hurried into jute sacks,
thrown into the Lyari river.)
11
Can one ever speak
about someone,
without thinking
of their mother?
O Lyari!
You were meant to be the tree
of a graveyard,
not an entire
graveyard.
12
Two years after the limping incident,
Baba sent Bhaiya to the Middle East.
(To be away from you meant our boys lived
longer.)
13
Mother of my mother,
I do dream your joy.
I memorize your rap,
dance to your disco,
watch my sister dribble football
with your boys.
(& we see the ghosts of boys playing with them.)
14
All origin stories abandoned you.
(& me.)
15
Your river will be my resting place.
Javeria Hasnain is a Pakistani poet and writer currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She is a Fulbright scholar in the MFA program at The New School, NY. Her poems and prose have appeared/are forthcoming in Poet Lore, GASHER, Isele, Mascara Literary Review, among others. She was a runner-up for the 2022 The Bird in Your Hands Prize and received an honorable mention in the 2022 Penrose Poetry Prize. She is an alum of the International Writing Program’s Summer Institute. She tweets @peelijay.