ABOUT UMAR
A life lived across different worlds.
The experiences behind my books and writings
Henry L. Stimson, at the age of seventy-eight, held a position of significant influence within the U.S. government during the height of World War II. Serving as the U.S. Secretary of War under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, his leadership extended to a project of monumental consequence that would forever reshape the world—the Manhattan Project. As Secretary of War, Stimson exercised enormous influence over the Manhattan Project and the deliberations surrounding the use of the atomic bomb. Stimson was a proponent of using Little Boy as soon as it became feasible.
In mid-1945, a U.S. targeting committee presented Henry L. Stimson with a list of five Japanese cities as potential targets. These cities met specific criteria, including being strategically important within urban areas exceeding three miles in diameter and deemed susceptible to significant damage from a blast.
The initial list of potential target cities included Kyoto, situated in the central part of Honshu Island, followed by Hiroshima, Yokohama, Kokura Arsenal, and Niigata. However, Henry L. Stimson promptly removed Kyoto from consideration as a potential target, offering official reasons that appeared contradictory. In the end, the United States did drop two atomic bombs on Japan, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki being the chosen targets.
Subsequently, insights gleaned from Henry L. Stimson's diaries unveiled the true motivations behind his decision to exclude Kyoto as a potential target. While official explanations were secondary, the primary factors were deeply personal. Stimson had encountered Kyoto during his youth and held such a fondness for the city that he chose it as the destination for his honeymoon. As the individual entrusted with the ultimate decision, he found it impossible to contemplate the destruction of a city that held such personal significance and had become so intertwined with his cherished memories.
My own life has been an accidental journey through many such Kyotos.
Two decades ago, I set out to write A Children’s Playground. Over these twenty years, I ventured on an international journey, which provided me with uncommon life experiences of residing in seven different countries as an adult: Pakistan (my country of birth), Canada (my country of citizenship), the United States (my country of residence), UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Malaysia.
I also lived in Iraq as a child for a year and a half, with recollections of the modern city of Baghdad preserved through my parents’ photographs and stories. My father, in his thirties, loved to connect history with objects and lands. Our family frequently journeyed to the sacred city of Karbala, and we explored the historic city of Samarra, sadly marred by destruction during the recent Iraq War.
Seventeen years later, the United States Air Force Academy granted me a distinctive scholarship, an honor bestowed upon only ten foreign students annually. This remarkable opportunity afforded me an inside view of the U.S. military. I flew and jumped out of airplanes with future U.S. Air Force officers, forming lifelong friendships. Among my classmates, I now count individuals who held command positions within the U.S. military during the Afghan, Iraq and Iran wars.
I had the opportunity to share my college living space with a Jewish roommate who was regularly engaged in his religious community's activities, providing me with unique insights into his faith. While pursuing a master's degree, I had an Indian-American Hindu graduate advisor in his thirties. Our academic interactions were frequently laced with conversations weaving the threads of our common Punjabi heritage. For my Ph.D. dissertation, I was guided by a septuagenarian Shia Muslim Iranian-American professor who was a globally renowned researcher in finance and a recognized Islamic scholar.
Interestingly, after completing my initial degree in the USA at twenty-three, I stood at the precipice of adopting atheism. Twenty-five years later, back into the fold of religion, I authored a book on Islamic finance.
As a child, I rode in my father's car as our family embarked on a road trip that took us from Najaf–the burial place of Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib– in Iraq to a slum city in Kuwait, to vibrant Tehran and onward to a lovely inn in Kabul (with a lot of colorful music and food). We continued our adventure through the historic Khyber Pass, traversing the entire length of Pakistan until we reached Karachi (with memories once again preserved through my parents’ photographs and stories).
A decade later, I found myself in the backseat of a car, much like Asad in A Children’s Playground years later, “captivated by the world passing by, staring outside with my nose plastered against the car window,” as we drove from Orlando to New York, from Disney World to the Statue of Liberty.
During my teenage years, I regularly ventured to the remotest regions of Pakistan through pre-B.C. era villages, navigating broken roads in buses packed to capacity with the poorer passengers spilling over onto the roof.
Along the way, I visited numerous Hindu temples in India, from Jaipur to Ooty. I spent an entire day at the Darbar Sahib Gurdwara in Amritsar, serving food in the langar, walking into the Golden Temple, listening to verses from Guru Granth Sahib, and trying to understand a religion deeply connected to my native language.
Two weeks later, in Delhi, I poured my heart into translating Bazeecha-e-Atfal (A Children’s Playground), the poem that gives my novel its title, from its original Urdu into English while sitting inside the historic residence of my favorite poet, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib.
My father and five uncles fought in the 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan wars. My father found himself launching air raids on airfields in cities where he had spent his pre-Partition teenage years a mere eighteen years earlier. Until the end of his life, he wanted to visit those cities to rekindle his childhood memories, yet he could not do so due to strict visa restrictions. Ironically, his only post-Partition visits to those cities were limited to the cockpit of his bomber airplane during the two wars.
Growing up in Islamabad, I observed the Soviet-Afghan War unfold before my home (with the playground that would inspire A Children’s Playground as the backdrop). I saw injured and orphaned, poor Afghan refugee children housed in a newly constructed neighboring madrassah (across the street from the house with the big Alsatian). Decades later, as an adult, I observed the NATO-Afghan War from that very same playground, watching the ordeal of the next generation of injured and orphaned, poor Afghan refugee children. This time, the misery was augmented with injured and orphaned Pakistani children (children like Samina in A Children’s Playground).
That playground, and the generations of children who passed through its world in the shadow of different wars, eventually gave A Children’s Playground its name.
I was in Riyadh during the Arab Spring and Beirut during Lebanese-Israeli skirmishes.
Almost every nation I have referred to has, at some point during my lifetime, been involved in conflicts, whether against each other or in alliance, leading to the tragic loss of millions of human lives.
Amidst these varied experiences, one overarching observation became clear: there is a pervasive kindness among individuals transcending religions, races, and nationalities. However, it is inevitably overwhelmed by the collective conflicts that arise between these very religions, races, and nationalities.
This raised a profound question in my mind, and I have been on a lifelong quest to find its answer: Why do compassionate, well-meaning people across the globe perpetually find themselves ensnared in the turmoil of wars?
This question is one of the driving forces behind my writing. Across my books and other writings, I return to questions of uncertainty, competing perspectives and the ways people and systems respond to change.
Can we find a way to prevent all these wars?
Perhaps not. But perhaps we can make it a little harder to hate those we have never taken the time to know.
My encounters with friends and adversaries have solidified one belief in me: anyone who visits their respective Kyoto will find it exceedingly challenging to contemplate dropping a nuclear bomb on such a place. Regrettably, it's disheartening that not enough individuals try to experience their Kyoto firsthand before casually considering its bombing and destruction.
I hold lifelong friendships with many individuals symbolically represented through the diverse characters in A Children’s Playground across numerous conflict-ridden borders–Mark Mannings and Saminas, Rahman Babas and Annas, Johans and Fakhars.
Amid the recent Afghan War, some of my American friends carried out bombings, while some of my Afghan friends found themselves as the targets of these same bombings. I struggle to discern substantial distinctions among them. I have eaten Big Macs with the former and drunk chai with the latter throughout my adult life, leading me to firmly believe that if they were all to meet in one place, they would likely appreciate each other's company, just as I cherish their presence, and they would part as friends.
So, what should we do?
In my opinion, the greatest gift one can give someone is to make them laugh and to make them think. I hope my books and writings make you laugh and, more importantly, make you think. I hope they push you out of your comfort zone and challenge your definitions of global rights and wrongs. Most of all, I hope they help you realize that entrusting life-and-death determinations solely to governments and the media can reduce one to a mere pawn manipulated by external forces.
It is straightforward to hold negative sentiments toward individuals one has never encountered and perhaps even simpler to harbor animosity toward places one has never visited. However, it becomes exceptionally challenging to nurture hatred, let alone contemplate the destruction of people and places woven into the fabric of our memories.
If you find yourself in a position where you wield the power of life and death over another person, you at least owe that individual the courtesy of sharing a meal together (if not celebrating a honeymoon in their homeland). If, after that, you still feel they do not deserve to live, at least you made an effort to give them a chance.
In the words of the precocious Mashal in A Children’s Playground, “How will you ever do anything if you don’t know anything?”
When I submitted the manuscript of A Children’s Playground for initial reviews, my intent was to ensure it was concurrently assessed by friends hailing from countries and groups that have been at odds with each other–Americans and Russians, Indians and Pakistanis, Jews and Muslims, Pashtuns and Tajiks, Serbs and Croats, Shias and Sunnis, to mention a few. I aimed to determine whether they could grasp the novel’s core message despite the constant barrage of opposing narratives from their respective media and leaders. Without exception, each one of them understood the essence of the message.
In that sense, my books and writings are for those courageous enough to place their faith in the common human ideal—hope; those who endeavor to see the enduring individual virtues of others, irrespective of collective national faults; those who are ready to forgive, convinced that one day humanity will find its shared North Star even if we repeatedly wander off the path. I write for the optimists among us.
I must thank all my friends who spent time reviewing and commenting on my writing, line by line—a task I have personally found far too tedious to undertake for others. Any wisdom and insights in my books and writings are yours, while all errors and oversights are mine.
Shukriya. Dhanyavaad. Hvala. Spasibo. Mulțumesc. Shukran. Mannana. Toda.
Dhonnobad. Merci. Thank You.
To you, the reader, I offer my sincere gratitude for taking the time to read my books and writings, with the hope that you may embark on your own personal Kyoto adventure.