Participation Trophy for the Thing That Was the Whole Thing

Sana is on the phone with her mother and I am putting the plaque in a drawer.

Not hiding it. Putting it away. I got it a few hours ago at the AGM of the UAE chapter of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Pakistan, a bronze plate with my name engraved on it. It says I have been a member for fifteen years. She has now told her mother, her sisters, my mother and a WhatsApp group I don’t remember joining. From the next room I hear her say “award” again.

All the while I have been trying to decide whether it’s an award or a receipt. Fifteen annual membership fees, paid on time, and the Institute sends you a plaque. There is no exam and no panel. Nobody chose me. I stayed.

I close the drawer and feel like a fraud for having wanted it. Because I did want it. If Ali, who qualified a year after me, had been given one and I hadn’t, I would have noticed, and I would have been irritated. So I stand there with my hand on the drawer trying to feel the pride that isn’t coming. What I have instead is the absence of disappointment. Is that the same thing? Is absence of disappointment what achievement feels like from the inside?

I don’t get an answer. What I get, standing there, is another room.

I am eighteen and sitting across from my parents in our house in Islamabad with a rejection letter in my hand. My father tells me he cannot afford to send me to university. I should enrol in a government college and get a degree there. Until this evening I had no idea there were money troubles. Now there is nothing else in the room.

I enrol. Then I stop going. I leave the house every morning and go somewhere that isn’t the college, and this works until the college calls my parents to say I’ll be repeating first year. I drop out instead. What’s left is chartered accountancy: cheap to register, cheap to study, and a stipend after a couple of years.

I wouldn’t call it a decision. It was the only door left after I’d shut the other one myself.

Six years later I am pacing the balcony waiting for the result. My father is no longer in the picture. The house is my grandfather’s, and we live in it because he lets us. The income is my mother’s teaching salary and my stipend, and that is all of it. I am praying under my breath when the phone chimes with an SMS. The results are out. I have cleared. My mother and I are screaming on that balcony, both of us crying, and the feeling is there before I have finished reading the message.

That is the morning the plaque is counting from. Fifteen years ago the feeling arrived before I’d asked for it. Today I can’t find it with both hands.

And here is what I couldn’t see with my hand on the drawer, and could only see walking it backwards. The letters after my name get me an interview at PwC. PwC is hiring chartered accountants out of Pakistan, so the letters become a visa. The visa becomes Dubai. Dubai is where I meet Sana, and Dubai is where MAF finds me at PwC, and the ICAP credits get me most of the way into a masters at Northampton, and the accounting built up over those years is why the CFA exams felt easier than they should have.

The first dollar saved compounds the most over a lifetime, even though the later dollars are larger. Take away the ICAP admission and the path changes. The interview doesn’t happen. No interview, no visa. No visa, no Sana on the phone in the next room saying “award” again.

I am not saying the Institute did this. That’s the wrong claim and I’d cringe reading it. I am saying it happened in this order, and the order is the whole point, and it is gratitude for that order that makes me pull out my credit card every June to pay the fee. I know what my life was before that August in 2010, and I know what it looks like after.

So I open the drawer again and put the plaque on my desk.

It says fifteen years of membership. Of participation. And in 2004, participation was the only thing I could afford. Not excellence. Not choice. Showing up to the one door I hadn’t closed, and then not leaving. That turned out to be the whole thing. Everything I’d call an achievement sits downstream of it. I’d been weighing the plaque against merit and finding it light. It was never weighing merit. It weighs duration, and in a life that only runs in one order, duration is where the compounding happens.

Sana comes in and sees it on the desk.

“I thought you put that away.”

“I did.”

I haven’t put it back. It’s been on the desk three days now, which is longer than I planned, and I still can’t tell you whether what I feel is achievement or the absence of its opposite. I’d have paid the fee without the plaque.