If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

by Carla Power

Many people mourn every day in America, but it is often a lonely place to do so. There’s a heavy pressure to heal, to get back in shape to pursue happiness. Death is forced underground, or into encounter sessions with grief counselors or priests. Death felt too irrevocable, too unfixable, for the land of the people who tend to look on the bright side, home of the self-helped and self-made. In Pakistan, death was allowed out of the closet. Because I was looking for it, I found it everywhere. In grisly newspaper headlines about tribal wars and honor killings. At the cocktail party, where a socialite told me how her fiancé had gone out for cigarettes and never returned, killed in a car crash. At the Lahore Museum, in a statue of Buddha, rendered so skinny that the stone carver had seemed to place the bones outside the flesh. At night, I found myself telling a casual dinner companion about my father’s death—and even as I did so, I knew that such talk from a near-stranger was as irrelevant, intimate, and unappetizing as finding a hair in your soup. Yet my date was polite, dipped his bread into yogurt, nodded, chewed, swallowed: “Ah, yes. My own father was killed in a tribal war when I was six. Luckily, my uncle raised me.” And then he craned his neck to find the waiter, as though being an orphan was as minor an inconvenience as a dish without salt.