I met Saba in my sophomore year as I trotted into office hours to get feedback on my essay idea. One particular aspect struck me about her approach to education: she took my narrative and helped me develop it, rather than attempting to change it into something more conventional. Today, as I am writing this, I am honored to reverse the roles: to take her narrative and do my best to capture the absolute joy, inspiration, introspection, and immense pride that I felt while doing this interview.

Born and raised in Karachi, Saba joined NYU Abu Dhabi almost a decade ago, supporting armies of students across the SRPP department. Her source of inspiration, however, remains Karachi, where she debuted her new documentary WRAP (We Really Are Pakistan) on Sept. 24, following the story of three boys who work in the service industry by day and pursue a rap career at night. When asked about her inspiration for the film, she said: “I always associated rap as a western trend, filled with language of resistance and subversion, with a revolutionary texture to it, but still as an association to the West.” When she stumbled upon the Indian film Gully Boy, the spark to engage with Pakistan’s rap scene emerged. As an anthropologist, Saba’s interest has been to see how “culture moves the needles”, and as a storyteller she has realized “even a few lives can push the needle”, which her storytelling beautifully captures.

Saba met the three boys by complete coincidence — sitting in a cafe, telling a friend about her documentary idea. That friend then called up two employees from the kitchen who gave a mini performance on the spot. What struck her about their story was their dedication towards rap amid their daily struggles in life — growing up close to hunger, anarchy, and violence.

“As a storyteller, I’d struggle to tell a story that’s devoid of hope. This film is showing the darkness, but it tells a story which shows the victory,” Saba said. As one of the boys put it, “The person with the pen has purpose and is respected, and people listen” — this makes the audience realize this is more than just freestylers — it is skilled writers, artists, and music technicians who are producing the art. Saba remarked, “They’ve been taught to downsize their dreams to fit their reality, but they end up expanding reality to fit their dreams.”

During the premiere, she explains the mixing of social fabrics in the screening room: privileged academics, artists, writers who came to watch, but also the boys themselves with their friends. The Karachi screening entangled the two in a powerful way that captured the nuances of the city, wrapped up in a performance by the rappers.

When she is not telling stories through film, or helping students tell their stories, Saba is a writer herself, with a rich background that ranges from novels and journalistic pieces to her newest book “Home #it'scomplicated". Having engaged with literature, films and narratives about home, she grew angry at the “cookie-cutter narratives about Pakistan.” “I would look at my bookshelf and I’d feel frustration and rage, but I took that rage and galvanized it into making meaning, which makes the rage a necessary step”, she commented.

“But how do you begin a conversation [like this] in a place like Pakistan, when you don’t want to kill the complexity of it?” was the question that guided her through curating the book, taking an unapologetic approach in defining what makes home. For Saba, her book is an invitation to a co-creation process with the reader, with different pieces speaking to different people, “its power is in its versatility”, as it represents the internal diversity of Pakistan.

The curation of stories was intentional, writing into life the stories of 8 people who are entrepreneurs, homemakers, theatre and film actors, and academics from a wide range of life experiences to truly encapsulate Pakistan in a three-dimensional manner.

This complexity is what engages the reading — both in the stories of Pakistan, but also in what it means to call a place home, no matter what that place is. Saba designed this storytelling as “an invitation for the reader to start a conversation”.

In a way, as impressed as Saba was talking about the rappers, I hope she realizes her art is also subversive, rebellious and thought-provoking, although in a different form.

The title of the book was inspired by an essay written by Omar Shahid Hamid, a Pakistani police officer by day and a writer by night who in “A Letter To My Son” discussed his relationship to home: “I haven’t done a very good job of explaining my relationship with Pakistan. It’s because I don’t really understand it myself completely. Let me try again, in a more succinct manner, in terms that are more recognisable to the social media generation. If this were a Facebook page (apologies in advance to my son, who believes Facebook belongs in the same generation as the transistor radio), my relationship status with Pakistan would read: it’s complicated.”

If you take Saba’s book from the bookshelf and accept her invitation for a conversation the way she accepted mine, it will make you reflect upon what story you want to tell. For today, I am happy I got to tell hers.