Of Dark Beauty and Light Betrayals

I spy with my little eye something that begins with the sound of stillness.

It is rather beautiful… this time, this winter, this overwhelming sense of quiet. I believe I am even grateful for the constant power outages in Lahore these days, because there is a lot to be said for forced nostalgia brought on by the company of grandparents sitting by a fire in a candle lit room for two hours every evening. We talk about nothing and everything, as my Nani ‘tch tch’s’ and my Nana and I spend our daily load shedding interval debating religion and bashing it to bits with rhetorical philosophy, poetry and prognostication. I am also morbidly aware of the feeling of dread that lurks under my skin as I ‘truly enjoy’ myself talking to him, because I know that he might not last too long and that this moment, this particular quandary and this particular monologue might haunt me in the future.

I find myself studying his face while I try to argue with his mind, hoping to somehow simultaneously learn from both. I find that his face is a better teacher than his mind, because his mind can seldom entertain arguments, but his face contorts every time I stump something up there in that world he lives in. I love seeing it happen.

I have discovered that I genuinely love the dark - that I always have and perhaps always will. A few years back I used to think this was part of my para-literal quest to appear ‘mysterious’ whatever that means, but now I realise that I have always found darkness comforting. I can never understand it when people mention how pitch-blackness is foreboding. I always find bright lights foreboding. Light enhances every flaw and underlines every hidden thing, putting it out there in the open for everyone to see. Light uncovers a good deal of effort spent keeping secrets, and I have never been one for sunny days or brightness. Give me grey skies and impending storms any day. Contrary to what people presume, I dont enjoy darknes because it is morbid, but because it is soft, unsure and hazy. I am also partial to dim lit rooms and I never light more than one light-bulb.
Ironically enough this realisation comes at a time where I am re-reading Kundera’s ‘Unbearable lightness of Being’ and I am quite sure that he didn’t mean for his words to be taken so literally, it probably kills the romanticism of his impressions. I am well aware that had this been my novel and my title, I would take offence to a reader not delving deeper into my supposed sentimentality.

I can never figure out if I like Kundera, if I think that his subjective abstractness is genuine or put on, which is why I tend to re-read him a lot. It’s not like Kafka, where I know that re-reading the words will re-reveal revelation. But this time around there are a couple of quotes that pinned me “From that time on she knew that beauty is a world betrayed, the only way we can encounter it is if its persecutors have overlooked it somehow” and “Betrayal means breaking rank. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown”.

I have been thinking a lot about what I find beautiful and the fact that it almost always contradicts the accepted perception of beauty. I find scary ‘beautiful’. Any and everything that I know intimidates me or that I find myself incapable of assimilating, I find beautiful. This can’t be good. Such a masochistic notion of beauty only means that one will be disappointed by it. This means that I set myself up for disappointment and mask it in the poetry of proposed beauty. What a load of shit!

The second thing that the combination of winter, quiet, procrastination and blues has brought to the forefront is ‘betrayal’. Ever since I regained some semblance of confidence in myself by getting into great grad schools and being short-listed for full scholarships, I have been battling betrayal. All this, all my chances and all of my freedom can be pegged down to the betrayal of a father and ‘the breaking of ranks'. Is that really a good starting point? Is the fact that I can’t stand - or seem to follow- rules a curse? There are two kinds of people that really, truly bother me… the ‘Too’ people and the ‘Just’ people. People who can’t help but throw in a synonymous ‘Its too cold, its too high, its too long, its too easy’ and the ‘Its just a cold, its just a building, its just the sky’. One eulogises and the other trivializes and I can’t stomach either. The problem is that the world can largely be segregated into these two people and their flock. The variables are few and far between and I am growing tired of searching for someone who I don’t need to explain, defend or sell myself to.

I just read a post on a blog I tend to frequent where the writer said “… I wondered at their stupidity for having allowed themselves to love someone so unreservedly” and for some reason that I cannot fathom, I feel horribly embarrassed.
I feel terribly Betrayed by my search for Beauty.


Well, now time passed and now it seems

Everybody's having them dreams.

Everybody sees themselves walkin' around with no one else.

Half of the people can be part right all of the time,

Some of the people can be all right part of the time.

But all the people can't be all right all the time

I think Abraham Lincoln said that.

"I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,"

...I said that.
– Bob Dylan (Talking World War 3 Blues)

The Business of Breaking Hearts

He was eighteen years old, when she was eight and all she ever remembered was having fantasies about him paying her a compliment.
She had navigated all of her movements towards attaining this one, ever-elusive goal. She followed him around like a faithful puppy, bought his drinks from the kitchen even when he didn't ask for them and laughed at all of his jokes.

And finally here she was…
Perched next to him on top of a park bench in the midst of a warm summer afternoon. She alternated her time by glancing periodically at the peonies she had gathered and sneaking a peek at his profile, which was at least three feet above hers. He looked down at her and smiled.

“You, kiddo, will break many-a-heart when you’re older”.

She couldn't’t help but feel let down. It probably showed on her face too, but she was clever enough to bow her head so that her bangs covered her eyes in a shroud of ebony foliage. She had been longing for something simple, nice, warm…something articulated just for her. Just one sentence that she could pocket and keep forever. A quote about her eyes perhaps, or her smile, but this….well this wasn’t even really a compliment.
It was nothing really, just the promise of something …someday.

She was heartbroken, utterly desolate, as she flashed a cheeky smile up at him.

“But I don’t want to break hearts.”

“You will. Every girl wants to break hearts when she grows up.”

She decided then and there that she never wanted to be noticed or praised.
Never wanted to have this power.
Never wanted to deal with hearts.

Hearts were a messy and tiresome business and she wanted no part in it. Ironically enough, the more she denied her emotions, the clearer it became to her that she could break hearts if she chose to. That sentence stuck in her head like a salacious spell cast in skin “Every girl wants to break hearts when she grows up”. Did this mean that every girl was wicked or did it mean that every girl was weak? Why did love always require that something or someone 'break' or 'fall' or 'die'? Why were there no happy synonyms?

No, she wanted no part in the ‘heart business’, she didn’t want to 'break them' or 'capture them' or 'change them' or 'keep them'. Most of all she was scared that she might begin to like it if she started. That she too might begin to derive the same perverse pleasure she had seen streak the faces of so many girls her age. The coy glances, the batting of eye-lids, the perfectly timed flashes of pearly teeth…all designed and choreographed meticulously to break hearts.

Killing with kindness, they call it.

She couldn’t want that could she? The facade of emotion to mask emotions that were already hiding from themselves.
But a part of her still thought she might be good at it if she ever tried it.
She might even learn to like it.

This part was, predictably, the heart.