Sharmeen

Sharmeen, on the first of April 1992, the universe pulled its finest April Fool's trick: it convinced everyone it was an ordinary Wednesday, then quietly delivered you to Islamabad. Nobody in the city could be blamed for being distracted. Pakistan was still floating a week after the greatest cricket match in its history, horns were still being honked on Jinnah Avenue out of sheer habit, and into this happy chaos you arrived, which is a very dramatic entrance for someone who would grow up loving a good story.

The world you landed in was rearranging its furniture at speed. The Soviet Union had dissolved only three months earlier, leaving maps out of date and diplomats squinting at new flags. Next door, Afghanistan's government was teetering, and within weeks Najibullah would fall. Yugoslavia was coming apart, Britain was eight days from a general election John Major was expected to lose (he wouldn't), and George H. W. Bush was discovering that a young Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton would not go away. At home, Nawaz Sharif was Prime Minister in his first term, sharing an uneasy house with President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and the famously sharp-edged Eighth Amendment. For a future lover of politics, you could not have picked a juicier front page. Islamabad, the tidy, tree-lined capital, was where all that drama was being drafted, argued over and, occasionally, printed in very small type.

Culturally, the air was thick with Bollywood melody. Saajan had turned Salman Khan, Madhuri Dixit and Sanjay Dutt into a love triangle half the subcontinent had opinions about, and its songs were playing from every cassette deck, rickshaw and wedding tent. Two days after you were born, Beta would arrive with Madhuri's 'Dhak Dhak Karne Laga', so the timing was impeccable. Over in Hollywood, The Silence of the Lambs had just swept the Oscars on 30 March, proving a film could be terrifying and dignified at once. Shah Rukh Khan hadn't yet made his big-screen debut; that was a few months away. Music meant rewinding tapes with a pencil, television meant PTV and whatever the antenna allowed, and 'creative tools' meant a notebook, a pen, and a stubborn imagination. You would have fit right in.

Snapshot facts are AI-generated and may occasionally contain inaccuracies.

And the sport? Oh, the sport. On 25 March in Melbourne, Imran Khan's cornered tigers beat England by 22 runs to win the Cricket World Cup, with Wasim Akram's magical deliveries turning a nation briefly delirious. You were born into a country still smiling about it. Islamabad itself was in its loveliest mood, spring easing toward summer, the Margalla Hills green, days warming to the high twenties, and the city's poet-in-residence of sorts, Parveen Shakir, writing verses about fragrance and longing in the very same streets.

So that's the world that greeted you: a capital full of arguments, a country full of pride, cinemas full of songs, and a poet's spring in the air. Much of it has changed beyond recognition, the cassettes are gone, the maps redrawn, the politicians rotated more times than anyone can count. But some things carried straight through from that Wednesday to now: a love of a well-told story, a good tune, and a world worth having opinions about. Happy birthday, Sharmeen. The joke was never on anyone. The best thing that happened on April Fool's Day was entirely real.