Balls going purely based on vibes I assumed you were (a fellow) Pakistani for the first six months I followed you and this has been a lesson to me about how our two countries are more alike than not. That is all.
AJDJDJJDJD to be fair I certainly get what you mean by the ‘our two countries are more alike than not’ thing, any nationhood derived in opposition to another is an inadvertent twinhood, IndoPak is within us all etc etc… but on the demographics, language and culture front, that applies more to North India than South. Kerala is very different culturally and linguistically (that being one of Maglor’s points in Prayers, re ‘Pakistan or qabristan’ slogan being used against Indian Muslims) and while Kozhikode is culturally Muslim, said cultural Islam manifests in a very different form to North Indian/Pakistani Muslim cultures because it arrived via the Gulf trade route rather than Mughal route.
However, you are absolutely correct that I probably give off ‘fellow Pakistani’ vibes and I have actually heard that all my life. Amusingly, it has literally nothing to do with anything cultural or regional and everything to do with the fact that my mother, a kathak dancer also from South India who has never been north of Bombay, is the biggest Pakistan-weeb to ever exist. She has PTV on for at least 3 hours a day. Her Spotify is 99% Coke Studio. She knows every Pakistani celebrity and can from memory recite every single plot point in Khuda Aur Muhabbat or Kaisi Teri Khudgarzi. She is almost natively fluent in Urdu. Guess which cricket team she cheers for.
She knows more about Bilawal Bhutto than Rahul Gandhi. She has a PhD in every sordid detail of Imran Khan’s life. She has probably sent hate mail to one of the Sharifs at some point in her life. Her bucket list item is Old Lahore. I was named after a character in some fucking 1990s Pakistani serial. So was my brother. One of my dad’s longest running jokes is that she chose to marry a Muslim guy at the cost of alienating her entire Christian/Jewish family because she wanted to give her children said Pakistani TV serial names. Don’t ask me why she is like this because I don’t know, but according to my granny it was because when my mother was a young child, some relative riddled with the rampant colourism gripping the heart of the nation (and the specifically Kozhikodan admiration of ‘Arab features’, driven partly by the region’s history but also by a second dosage of colourism), told her she looked like she was from Pakistani Kashmir or something and her five year old ass probably ended up internalising that for the rest of her life.
And this cultural leeching has probably seeped into our upbringing, and considering she spent much of her adult life in diasporic communities, was probably not helped by the fact that the Indian diaspora tends to be very Hindu in its performance of nationhood and my parents’ interfaith marriage meant they were pretty much blackballed and thus only hung out with Pakistani diaspora even though the rest of us don’t speak Urdu. Outside of friends I have in India itself, most of my South Asian friends growing up, including my very best friends, are from the other side of the border.
Which is to say, the vibes I give off have little to do with our respective nations and everything to do with my mother being the subcontinental equivalent of a white girl from California naming her kid ‘Naruto’.
