Sixteen Candles, One Prankster.
I was cheeky before I knew the word for it. A twinkle-eyed little troublemaker, harmless but relentless, always testing the edges of what a good girl was supposed to do.
While other pre-teen girls sat inside with their books, I climbed the trees in our garden, chasing fruit I hadn't earned and didn't need, just to feel the bark under my palms and the wind at the top. My mother would call my name from the veranda. I would stay one more minute, just to prove I could.
Indoors, I found other mischief. I dragged a chair to the wooden cupboards and wrote across them in chalk, little messages nobody asked for, erased and rewritten until the wood carried the ghost of every word I'd ever ambushed it with.
At my father's gatherings, when he and his friends set their drinks down mid-conversation, I slipped between them and swapped the glasses, then watched from a corner, waiting to see who noticed first. Nobody ever did. That was the whole point of the prank, the not-getting-caught, the secret staying mine.
My uncle let me sit beside him for hours soldering motherboards, wires and circuits spread across the table, while my homework sat untouched somewhere in another room. I loved the smell of solder more than I loved being told what a girl my age should be doing. I didn't know it yet, but I was falling in love with machines.
That love found its outlet in June 1996. I was newly married, living in Lahore, and my sister was turning sixteen in Karachi. The internet had just arrived in Pakistan, still new enough that you bought prepaid CD-ROMs to get online at all. I sat at my computer and sent her sixteen separate emails, one for every year of her life. A teddy bear with a birthday wish. A bouquet with a birthday wish. Sixteen candles with a birthday wish. Each one a photograph of a card, slow to load on that dial-up connection, arriving one after another like a girl who refused to send just one gift when she could send sixteen.
I never asked if she opened them one by one or all at once. I like to imagine her sitting there, watching the screen crawl to life again and again, sixteen times over, wondering what her cousin in Lahore was up to now.
The same hands that wrote on cupboards in chalk were the ones that typed those messages years later. The same girl who swapped drinks at her father's table was the one who dialed into a screeching modem just to make someone smile. Mischief, it turns out, doesn't disappear as you grow. It just learns new tools, new distances, new ways to say I was thinking of you.
The prankster never left. She simply found new machines to charm, new hearts to reach across whatever miles stood in the way.
Dare, I claim, Cheeky is thy name.
