Daily Times

June 12, 2016. Dubai. As my last Turkish lesson ends, Naslin, my Turkish teacher in Dubai smiles and says, ‘don’t run away after three weeks, Sharmeen. It will take you time but don’t cancel your UAE visa either.’ It takes its time and I am ready to run away from Istanbul many times. By the end of December I would have experienced countless delays in registering my residency, lost shipment, mind boggling whirlpool of language difficulties and one very emotional day spent at Bayrampasa’s IKEA physically attached to its sole English speaking employee, bawling. Turkey would have been a subject of twenty two terror attacks and one failed coup and by end of 2016, people would be calling this year as one of the worst in Turkish’s recent history. (In the first hours of 2017, Istanbul’s popular district Ortokoy was hit with another grisly attack where gunmen opened fire in the nightclub killing 39 people.)

June 28th 2016, Istanbul. As my three day look-see visit is coming to an end, I ask to delay my flight because I haven’t found my home yet. By evening there has been a terror attack on the Ataturk Airport which kills 45. I get an alert from Emirates saying all flights out of Ataturk Airport have been cancelled until further notice. I try to find a flight out from of Sabiha Gokcen. My boss calls me and asks me if I would like to reconsider this move and I say no. My child is now admitted in the British School Istanbul. I have sold my dining table in Dubai and lightning doesn’t strike twice, right? Next day, I find a lovely ground floor apartment in Etiler.

The next few days are a whirlwind of flights back and forth Dubai, Istanbul and Islamabad; my mother has chosen this time to go through a major surgery and I have to also be in Islamabad while ensuring I get my landing permit in Istanbul and somehow close out the lease, banks in Dubai at exactly the same time. So during all this confusion, come July 16th 2016, I am in Islamabad, having just landed when a hysterical friend from Dubai calls and says “Will you put on BBC?” and I do and there is news of an attempted coup. I am not a full-fledged Istanbul resident yet and not even on location but in part, it feels like President Musharraf’s Coup in 99; same blackout, as BBC reports it, same military tanks on civilian turf, general panic, sounds of planes. Next morning, I again get a call from a panicky colleague in headquarters asking me if I would like to abort this relocation. “Not at all. I am a Pakistani, I was conceived, born and will probably die during a coup”. My Istanbul based colleagues look at me baffled when I joke about how none of the coups in Pakistan have ever been called ‘attempted’.

Back in Istanbul, one evening my local friend Canan takes me to Nisantesi’s House Café and she orders wine and mezze. We sit in its garden and it is lush with trees and other diners drink and revel. Three months later, the same café no longer serves alcohol due to the local mosque’s complaint.

On this trip back the immigration official had asked me why do I live in Istanbul as it so unsafe. I think of thousands of civilian casualties of Pakistan; I say nothing. In Istanbul office I complain to my colleague about Pakistan’s PM and Panama leaks. I tell her that we call him Mr. Potato because in the entire history of his political legacy, he has not shown a single cognitive skill higher than a root vegetable. She laughs and says ‘we too have many vegetables in our political sphere but we dare not mention them.’ When I was moving to Dubai I was advised never to speak of religion, the ruling family, Saudi Arabia, labor laws. In Turkey, it seems to be a visceral reaction and I refrain from opining about the local political scene. By September 2016, I have witnessed a few hurried shhhhs in corridors of my office, in elevators. I hear of arrests of thousands; journalists, teachers. I follow an Istanbul based BBC correspondent on Twitter but I have not truly tapped in any indigenous sentiment because of lack of language skills. Despite Naslin’s best efforts, and sixty hours of rigorous Turkish lessons, all I can truly say is ‘to my home I go.’ Turkish sentences end with a verb as in Urdu which shares vocabulary and linguistic idiosyncrasies with Turkish. In fact, ‘everything is possible’ is said in the exact same way in Urdu and Turkish. ‘herseymumkin.’

Pakistani Turk kardesh, my taxi driver tells me. Yes we may be brothers but then I wonder if that isn’t so much a compliment as it is a curse and if yes, for whom.

Seasons change. Central heating comes on in my apartment. My daughter experiences her first snow. I discover the joys of hamams in winter and restaurants on Kadikoy. I discover the surreal feeling of taking one turn too early and ending up in a different continent.

December 11th, 2016, my daughter and I go to ‘Speech Bubbles, December Pantomime.’ It is ten minutes from my home so we walk to it. We have Christmas candy and the performance is warm and we sing all the way back. As we reach our home, we hear a massive explosion. I ask the guard what that may be and he gestures he doesn’t know. We think it may be a power generator. It turns out I am wrong. The sound was from a blast near Besiktas Stadium; 44 police officers and others have been killed. It is Karachi on  speed, I tweet.

My organization tells me they will support me if I want to move out. Mostly because of that concern shown by my colleagues outside of Istanbul, I start having mild anxiety attacks; but these may as well have to do with the fact that I eliminated all sugar. A friend cancels his trip when the Russian Ambassador is shot dead in Ankara. I wonder how that could impact his travel plans, a Pakistani, with no connections whatsoever to Kremlin, but he does not tell me. I tell my Polish gym instructor that it feels like we are experiencing Turkish existential crisis and she says she is moving back to Warsaw in  two months.

The writer is a lawyer, living in Istanbul also tweets with @sharmeenalikhan