Sitting on the roof of the farmhouse where my father grew up, about four hours outside of the hustle and bustle of Karachi, we stared at the moon and the starry sky. Eating sugar cane stalks with our teeth so that we greatly resembled a herd of panda bears that had discovered piles of bamboo, I celebrated Eid-al-Adha among scores of family members, some of whom I had not seen since I was fourteen years old.
Thinking as I drank quite literally the best cup of tea in my life, I realized this is what Eid is all about. Playing Pakistani playground games like Khokho and Kings, all of my cousins and I forgot how old we were. We told scary stories and visited haunted barnhouses, looking for jinns in the middle of the night. We pushed and shoved each other as we played the Pakistani versions of freeze tag and hide-and-seek at two in the morning as our parents slept. We grossed each other out after the qurbani, or the sacrificing of the goat, by hanging the disembodied head by the rams and dangling it in each others' faces. And we went roaming by the tributaries of the Indus River, watching as water flowed to give nourishment to mango trees and cotton plants nearby.
And here, back in Karachi, with the Indian Ocean breeze, the brightly painted buses, the graffiti, and the auto rickshaws, I realized something. Despite the fact that not a single cell phone worked in the little village our parents grew up in, or that the electricity periodically disappeared, or that we averaged four families per bathroom, I had the best Eid ever, if only because I was with dozens of family.
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