Ahmed Bilal

Yes, I am getting married. Really.

Of all the things people have said about marriage, this resonates with me best:

You can start a new life, with the people you love, and live the way you want. If you take this as ‘settling down’ then you’ve already made a mistake. Everyone has a choice in creating the best possible life for themselves.

This is mine, and you’re more than welcome to join me in the celebrations

When? January 2011. First week to be exact. Dates on the wedding invitations.

Where? Lahore. Venue on the…you’re catching on.

Who? My precious.

Pop open the can. Take a swig. Light another smoke. Keep an eye on the floor – make sure no one’s pushing the stripper too hard. Yea, it’s all good. Time to make the rounds.

Three years is a long time for many, for me it passed by in a blink of an eye. Sure; the seconds turned to hours and the minutes to days, but on a whole, I remember the last three years as a blur. There are patches of memory which seem to shy away from attention, and there are those that stand out far too strongly for comfort.

And of course, there was my muse.

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Sharing your birthday with someone (in)famous, or anyone else, only matters if you believe that people born on the same day share certain personality traits. (If you’re skeptical, my extended family is living proof of astrology – you can spot a Cancerian a mile away).

So when I found out that Antonio Cassano was born on the same day as my sister, it made me smile. It’s bad enough that my girlfriend shares the same birthday as my sister, but for the greatest primadona of modern-day football (let’s say he makes Cristiano Ronaldo look angelic) to be born on the same day was just too good.

And it makes sense too, although in my defence my sister and my girlfriend are wonderful people and I love them very much – just as Cassano is a great guy too.

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Ever since I started working online, I’ve had trouble answering a very simple question – what do you do?

In university it was easy – you could tell them you were studying computer science and while you never wanted to write code again in your life, people would have no problems in attaching a convenient label to you (computers in this case).

But after university, things got complicated. Saying ‘I write for a living’ was exotic but invariably followed by the question ‘but what is your real job?’ or ‘when are you going to get a real job’. Apparently earning twice as much as my fellow graduates while working half as much was considered cheating and without a future. Maybe it was, but what did I know?

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