When I was traveling back to Boston from Los Angeles, I got patted down three times. Twice by the security line while my bag was searched, and once again in a private room where I was asked to remove my headscarf and a TSA agent felt me up and then smiled and told me to have a good flight.

The thing I’m sick of most isn’t the way I’m being treated, because it’s so obvious to me how easy I have it. The thing I’m sick of most is my reaction to it, the horror, the panic, the self-disgust, the self-blame, the smallness, the way I felt like an animal, the way I wanted to start biting. The thing I’m sick of is how much space it takes for me, constantly, the way I’m tired of thinking about it, the mundanity, the stupid pointlessness of even talking about it.

It used to be worse, I think. I remember it being worse. When I was a kid traveling with my parents, our entire family would get pulled over. That was still when they were bothering to call it random. They smiled as they did that too.

I’m visiting California again now. On my way here, while they were patting down my headscarf, the TSA agent stopped to explain to me exactly what she needed to do, and I just kept nodding impatiently so she would just get it over with. She noticed. She smiled at me. She laughed and said, oh, you’re used to this, aren’t you?

I am.

Stop laughing.

My roommate is an immigration lawyer, white. She was outraged when I told her about being patted down. I asked her what my legal rights were in this case. Was I being detained? I was in a windowless room, but I asked to be put there rather than having to undress in public. She asked, did I feel free to leave? I guess I could have left. I could have decided that having a stranger’s hand on my crotch wasn’t worth getting on a plane for. But the agents wouldn’t even let me touch my phone or my wallet until after I’d been cleared. They took my shoes and left the room with them to have them scanned. I did not feel free to leave. It was so easy to walk into that room. My first instinct was to laugh as I was led there, like it usually is for all troubles. I did not leave that room laughing.

Some people, well-meaning, suggested that I pay for TSA pre-check to avoid this in the future. First of all, if I was against paying TSA to treat me like a human being before, I’m doubling down now. Second of all, my parents, who both have TSA pre-check, still got pulled aside from the security line on a recent flight. Maybe it happens to everyone. Maybe they were just unlucky. Maybe it was random. But there was nothing in my father’s shoes. There was nothing in my mother’s suitcase.

It’s so stupid. The agents, who were able to smile at us without guilt, were just following protocols. Who wrote the protocols? Someone in an office, who wrote rules that predominantly inconvenience and humiliate Black, brown, and trans people. It’s so stupid. I don’t want to think about this. I don’t want to write about this. I have flights to catch. I have weddings to go to. I have family to visit. I will be on another airplane soon. I only have so much energy for outrage, and I would rather not use it on my own behalf. It’s a pill I must swallow, and in the end, it is an inconsequential pill. It doesn’t contain insinuations on my morality, or death threats, or being pushed into train tracks. It’s better to think about something else. I want to think about, I don’t know, baseball. I want to think about movie theaters, and coral reefs, and poetry.

The Faiz Ahmed Faiz poem I’m currently obsessed with is called “Mujh se pehli si muhabbat mere mehboob na maang” or “My love, do not ask from me the love we shared before”. It is translated here by Mustansir Dalvi, and most famously sung by the exquisite Noor Jehan. In the way of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, it is political commentary disguised as love poetry.

No, that’s not right. It’s still a love poem. It’s the decay of love for his country. It is disillusionment and distrust. He acknowledges that he loved Pakistan. You cannot deny that this love existed. “Had I only found you, the fates would be enthralled.” But being jailed multiple times and witnessing mass oppression and stark inequality will certainly break any poet’s heart.

“My eyes cannot look away, what should I do?/ Your beauty still allures, but what can I do?”

He can’t look away. He still loves it, even though it sickens him. What can he do? What can he do?

And then when I get tired of trying to painstakingly translate individual words of Urdu to try to grasp the untranslated meaning of Faiz’s ghazals, I start reading Agha Shahid Ali, who brought the ghazal to English from Kashmir, and who also wrote about this sense of loss, this sense of time passing and changing everything, inexorably. The present happens while we still grapple with the past, and meanwhile every passing second takes away a memory, adds a memory. In Snow on the Desert, which the title of this newsletter is from, he writes about driving his sister to the airport.

“I realize that the earth/ is thawing from longing into longing and/ that we are being forgotten by those arms.”

One feeling I had reading this poem wasn’t regret of the loss, but an appreciation of the transience. That even in these fleeting moments, you can still capture the thousand year passage of a celestial body. You lose and you lose, and the earth thaws from longing into longing. It’s a poem that brings me comfort, even though it’s a poem about massacre. The last section of it brings you to the air raids in New Delhi during the Bangladesh War, on a stage where the lights have just gone out, and Begum Akhtar sings into a dead microphone, “and her voice/ was coming from far/ away, as if she had already died.”

The poem ends just before the lights come back on. It lingers in that dark in-between moment, which will surely be forgotten once the sirens are silent and the lights come back on and Begum Akhtar’s voice is amplified again. The poem doesn’t let you forget. It stays in

“A moment when only a lost sea   

can be heard, a time

                      to recollect

every shadow, everything the earth was losing,

a time to think of everything the earth   

and I had lost, of all

                      that I would lose,   

of all that I was losing.”