I pride myself in being an extrovert. But the last two years in Kuwait, have made me recoil a little bit. I keep to myself, I have really started enjoying hanging out by myself. I accord myself the joy of becoming a more independent, self-sufficiently happy person. But then somewhere in the corner of my heart the feeling nags me, that perhaps I am not good enough, good enough to belong.
If there is one thing about Kuwait, that stands out more than anything else, it is the system of cliques. This is a country with a wide variety of nationalities, from every walk of life and yet somehow it remains segregated. The white with the white (please don’t give me that thing about political correctness), the brown with the brown (further segregated by region and community), Arabs with the Arabs, so on and so forth.
Then there are cliques which comprise young individuals, the ‘mixed race’ as I would like to call them. They are usually modern, well dressed (grunge, boho, chic – take your pick), they apparently don’t care about social norms and to me seem like a modern version of the hippies from the 70s. This also happens to be my aspirational group. But if you thought being different is all you need to belong here, you would be wrong. A desirable accent, clothes to match, being up to date with pop culture, and having friends who already belong to these groups is quintessential. You see nothing in Kuwait really works without you having a connection into circles – A waasta!
If you are not of a desirable nationality then getting a boyfriend/husband with the right set of friends seems to be the most logical way to go. Because a woman on her own in this region is sort of an anomaly.
I can’t deny that sometimes I wish I was at fancy embassy parties hobnobbing with the elite. The people who have friends with the right passports. I wish I was spending weekends in the dessert in winter but then I don’t fit.
I don’t have children woes to discuss. I don’t even have boyfriend woes I can cry about. I never had too many friends in the country to begin with. I had two to be exact (who as luck would have it moved to greener pastures). Most people belong to the acquaintance category, acquaintances I meet at varied intervals, based on their lack of plans or my willingness to get out.
I have a tendency to flee when the going gets tough. I usually tend to pack my bags and get going. It has taken every ounce of energy for me to stay back and hold my ground. The last two years have been a different kind of hell. A convenient, comfortable, complacent kind of hell.
But on some mornings, mornings like these, I wish my noisy friend from a life gone by would drop in to surprise me and start updating me on life in a voice louder than mine.
On mornings like these, I wish I saw the familiar face of my best friend at Churchgate station, hustling through the busy crowds and crying out in shock, as I grab her from behind and scare the living day lights out of her.
On mornings like these I wish I was elsewhere, and then on mornings like these I dismiss everything I just said, because who knows maybe I am feeling all this only because of my hormones.
Zahra Husain likes to live and think in ways she is not supposed to and she blogs at http://www.zahrasays.com