The idea of dating someone terrifies me. Partly because I want that whole experience so much that it borders on obsession, and partly I suspect because even if I were to date someone, I’d live in perpetual fear of losing him to someone else who’s better-looking or smarter or funnier, or you know…not me. It’s paralytic.

Not that I genuinely expect anyone I date–and we’ll be theoretical here, since speculation’s all I really have to work with–to spend the rest of his life with me right off the bat. I know that romance and love and partnership and all that jazz is a bit of a trial-and-error process with no real guarantees, but I can’t help feeling that on some level, the decade of solitude since I became legal (so to speak, given the theocracy in which I live) has set me up for some serious karmic reward. You know: find boyfriend who’s absolutely perfect, and never have to go through the process of hoping someone likes you and the courting and the panic attacks centred around fears of rejection and the potential heart palpitations ever again. Ever. Because you’ve sort of served out your sentence of being alone, and really, what the hell?

Then comes the paralytic fear of ever letting said person out into public, and I go all Misery, because if after all of this shit I wind up meeting someone, only to lose him to someone else at a club or bar or even a friend, I’d be forced to have some sort of psychotic break. I’d probably make Britney look like the poster-child for stability by comparison.

When I was younger, I didn’t ever anticipate a future of looking back at my life and grimacing in horror at the amount of emotional emasculation I seem to have (sometimes voluntarily) undergone. Unfortunately, with my mother rapping on my door like some maternal avenger and a cowering gay man in my bathroom doing his desperate best to cover himself in a pile of discarded laundry, I was forced to confront some unpleasantly harsh truths about myself in less-than-ideal circumstances.

“What is it?” I asked somewhat testily.

“Don’t take that tone with me, you’re my son,” she started, displaying a remarkable grasp of the obvious, “and I’m your mother, and you shouldn’t talk to your mother like that.”

I sighed heavily and apologised, doing my desperate best to head off the litany of her difficult pregnancy caused by me, the years of trial she endured in relation to my upbringing and of course the latest drama in the saga that was her life insofar as it involved ungrateful servants who had the audacity to demand eight weeks of vacation just as visitors were scheduled to arrive.

“I wanted to ask if you wanted breakfast,” she said, artfully positioning herself to maximise the view of my room afforded from the half-inch of space between my torso and the bedroom door.

“I don’t, thanks,” I said hastily, before the conversation degenerated into a lengthy debate over omelettes and brioche versus more traditional halwa puri and cholay, because this, you must understand is what keeps my mother alive, the constant second, third and fourth-guessing of any decision made by any blood relative. “I’m going to just go out for a late brunch instead.”

“I don’t see why,” began another one of her salvos, “it’s not as though the food at home is bad for you or anything. Why should you waste money on going out?”

“Absolutely,” I agreed, preparing to deploy my most potent conversation-killer. “I don’t have to, but I want to. Not quite as badly as I want to go to the bathroom right now, but quite close.”

The very mention of bodily functions causes my mother’s eyes and lips to narrow and her nostrils to become thin and pinched. It’s a wonder none of us grew up with severe colonic diseases or kidney malfunctions. And to date, it’s always been a great way to bring one of her diatribes to a close.

I was thinking about that tonight, as I drove back from a farewell party for a friend who’s moving to Vietnam in a week. Much as I enjoy being able to instantly cut off conversation with the woman who somehow raised me, the last decade or so has been spent in figuring out ways to cut the apron chains, to break away and establish my own life independent of the Pakistani family unit. And watching my friend throw everything she has to the winds so she can get out of Karachi, away from riots and bloodshed and uncertainty…it’s impressive. And while I’m (mostly) happy for her, there’s a hefty component of envy involved as well.

I want to leave here. I want to drop my responsibilities, my duty to take care of my mother, to my household, to my home, leave them all by the way-side and just go far far away from all the people here. From the houses, the gardens and the servants.

I want to cook my own food. Make my own bed. Iron my own clothes.

When it comes to being domestic, I’m something of a Viking.