Mira Sethi pens down post-wedding struggles for Vogue

KARACHI: Sharing the article, titled ‘A pandemic, a Marriage and a Life on Two Continents’, Mira Sethi recently tweeted about the piece. “I wrote a personal piece after a very long time: It means speaking relentlessly in English, communicating the clutter of my inner life in a language that houses my intellect more than my heart.”

The article is a peek into her everyday life and her love-hate relationship with Karachi and San Francisco. On her move to the USA, she explains that leaving Pakistan was not something she had imagined because “before getting married, my notion of home has been tethered to Pakistan.” She opened up about how after graduating from college in the States, she broke up with her then-boyfriend “not because we had lost interest in one another but because we couldn’t find a middle ground between Karachi and Oakland, where he lived.” On the fact that she ultimately did make the move for her husband Bilal who works in San Francisco, she writes, “the irony of getting married in the Bay Area was not lost on me.”

Sethi also openly spoke about the backlash she faced from family back home, for her decision to split her time between Pakistan and America. “After I got married, an aunt got wind of my ambitious plan. ‘What is this I’m hearing?’ she said. ‘Why can’t you just go to San Francisco and be with him like a normal person?'”, she recalls the conversation which went on, “‘You’re married now,’ So? ‘So go and be with your husband!’”

Sethi, who is currently starring in Chupke Chupke, further talks about how a huge reason for her to stay close to Pakistan is her career. Continuing on the conversation, she writes, “but what about my acting career? I asked. ‘Take a theatre class in Frisco.’ Nobody calls it that, I wanted to say. I’m a television actor, I said. I can’t just give it all up and start again. It’s a very competitive industry.”

In her piece, Sethi acknowledges the support her husband has to offer for her need to stay close to Pakistan and her work. She shares how happy he is that she is continuing with he career  and how he tells her “it’s a delight to be around you when you’re working,” yet how “when you have nothing to do…I worry.”

On her love-hate relationship with Pakistan, she writes that despite the pull it has on her “I dislike, for example, the growing dogmatism of Pakistani society; the polluted air; the patriarchal norms that provide cover for and justify all kinds of violence against women.” Sethi might not miss the judgmental people in Karachi “but my work, my friendships, the meaning of my life, resides in Karachi—Karachi makes me come alive.”

Many Pakistanis who live abroad can definitely relate to the feeling of being what Sethi calls “permanently displaced!”