Zain Mustafa drawing the Indus Valley Civilization’s 7000-year-old timeline in the sands of Mohenjodaro, Sindh, Pakistan
Where are you from?
A question that has shadowed me all my life. A mysterious identity which intrigued others more than it did me. Why were the boundaries defining me so interesting, from afar, I often wondered. My identity, this amorphous creature, this symbiotic parasite was my home. She lived within me, so I suppose I didn’t think about us often. Or the nature of our ubiquitous relationship. I didn’t consider often the existence of my dancing sun dial shadow or what it hid from me. It was an unspoken language at this home within me.
Who am I?
Who knows. Even I don’t know. Why do I need to know? Why does anyone need to know? Not easy linear questions, nor easy linear answers. No knee jerk response ever sufficient, nor a comfortable place to call home. It didn’t matter where I lived, what age I was, what profession I pursued, I lived in this uncomfortable home riddled with cracks of unanswered questions. A journey of Kintsugi bound by the magnetic edge of some distant, unattainable, untouchable horizon.
Wherever I walked, the earth stirred up clouds of invisible dust from under my feet and as I moved from geography to geography, it always took its own chronology for this dust to settle. Giving life to a scent of where I was in that particular moment of home. A continuous reflective walk through millennia of cultural genetic bread crumb trails, an evolving family tree embedded in layers of rock, sand, silt, shimmering rivers, operatic skies, the muscular sun and oceans of stars connecting past to the future while only revealing the present. The now.
I am now.
I am the 7,000-year-old River Sindhu, the mother to all my cells, every cell in my blood soul, the flow of all my energy from my sperm to her mountains through her alluvial plains, her feeding floods and her open arm gifts into the Arabian Sea.
I am home.
-by Zain Mustafa