وَطَن Vataan: Tracing Gold Dust
What is an abode of relevance? A question that rustles like wind through tall grass, unsettling the dust of memory. The glint of gold dust—tiny, shimmering particles—catches the morning light, hinting at the multitude of identities within me, each facet a reflection of places I’ve called home. In that shimmer lies a beating pulse: warm, insistent, rooted in the soil I once trod barefoot.
I remember ploughing through the earth, my small palms pressing against layers of dirt, sifting out stories like seeds from the soil. The scent rising—a heady mix of sun-baked clay and the distant perfume of jasmine—spoke of my father’s fields in Sahiwal, a place as fertile in legends as in harvests. Fragrances brew in that heat: buffalo milk cooling in clay pots, mangoes ripening on trees, and the hush of an afternoon so scorching that the horizon quivered, ghostlike.
Even now, in the hush of dawn or the quiet seconds before sleep, I taste a memory: mango murabba. This is no ordinary preserve. It’s a treasury of saffron-gold, a slow-cooked confession of sweetness and regret. I was seven the first time I tasted it—Sahiwal, 1996. Our lunch was spread out in the courtyard: rotis warm and pliant, dal steaming gently, and that single jar of murabba shining like an offering. One bite and the world tilted: the mango’s syrupy flesh yielding to my tongue, cardamom a perfumed whisper of sharp citrus cutting through the sweetness. Beneath all that honeyed warmth lurked a hint of something raw, a tart echo of the mango’s wild beginnings. I savoured it like a secret, aware even then that true sweetness never exists without the memory of bitterness.
Or the crunch of mishri—crystal-like sugar dissolving on my tongue, carrying me back to another summer, another place: Pakpattan. My eyes, faded by time, strain to remember the green ceremonial cloth, the weight of aboo’s hand in mine, the way he guided me through a labyrinth of families gathered from across the country. The air hummed with voices, prayers weaving in and out of each other, a tapestry of dialects and devotions. But what my heart remembers most is the vastness, the overwhelming sense of belonging within difference—the way diversity cradled us, held us close.
Isn’t that what diaspora is? A rope of scattered threads—twisted together by memory, by longing, by the inescapable tether of homeland. Vataan, that abiding concept of “home,” bleeds through us even when we are oceans away. It’s the taste of mango murabba that sweetens a Scottish winter morning, the childhood sermon heard in the echo of an Edinburgh mosque, or the comforting recollection of dust underfoot in Punjab.
Each moment is woven into a larger tapestry, a cloth shimmering with gold dust—each speck a different identity, all pulsing with the same hidden heartbeat. In that tapestry, we plough the soil of memory, we smell the incense of old stories, and we stand shoulder to shoulder, even when scattered across continents.
And in the end, what is an abode of relevance but the place that holds our many truths—the pungent heat of a Pakistani summer, the solemn hush of a Friday congregation, the sweetness and tang of a single mango preserve, the cold clarity of mishri dissolving like time itself? We carry it all within us, braided tight, an unbreakable bond that calls us back in every breath, every prayer, every ghostly aftertaste on the tongue.