On Hibernation

“It’s just that the cause wasn’t real. The cause was imagined. The cause…was fear. Let’s think of a minority, one that goes unnoticed if it needs to. There are all sorts of minorities. Blonds and people with freckles. But a minority is only thought of one when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority - a real threat or an imagined one. And therein lies the fear. And if that minority is somehow invisible, then the fear is much greater. That fear is why the minority is always persecuted. And so you see there is always a cause. The cause is fear.” – Colin Firth in ‘A Single Man’

I have always hated this time of year. Watching out my windshield at the scores of people celebrating the end of another year just punctuated by abandoned resolutions. Moreover I loathe the overwhelming sensation that I ought to be ‘out there having fun’ when I know perfectly well that all my pleasures are solitary or should I say selfish. Is there a difference?

It has been an astonishing year, this 2010.  And I am oddly proud of the fact that I have managed to spend it almost entirely ensconced in my own personal cornucopia of books, movies, discographies and procrastination. If ever a human being were capable of hibernation, I have elevated the exercise to an art form. What is proving a tad disconcerting is how easy it all was in the end. I have realised that for me to essentially avoid all human contact (save the acquaintanceships I have cultivated at work) took virtually no effort. Head down, heart closed, mind ambivalent…and there you have it. I have concocted my very own emotional anaesthetic.

At present, I cannot even cling to the justification that I needed a year off and away from…people because I am well aware that I will always need that. While heartache and mind burn are legitimate excuses for many, I cannot –in good conscience – apply them to myself. That would require moping and crying and I haven’t really done either of those things this year. I have simply moved forward…but I did it in a circle so it doesn’t really count.

I thought of a story today, as I sat stuck in a New Year’s Eve traffic jam from Hussain Chowk to Sherpao Bridge. Something silly and naïve to paint my predicament with a stroke of literary flourish: Two sparrows sitting on a tree stare at a cluster of their kin fly by. One says to the other “My greatest consolation is that our first flight will be with the group. That way everyone will keep an eye out for me and I won’t have to think about how I’m doing.” It asks the other whether he is apprehensive about taking to the skies. “My greatest fear is that our first flight will be with a group. That way everyone will keep their eyes on me and I won’t be able to think about what I’m doing.”

All of my thoughts have been splintered and the shards are scattered along the wall of my mind. It has been a year of random, idle, occasionally piercing thoughts smashing all around me and myself scuttling after them trying to keep them in order, sequence and in check. My days are a loop-de-loop: Up at 2pm, shower, change, drive to work (collect scattered thoughts I meet along Defence Road; at the turning for Liberty; in the expressions of the average six to eight beggars that appear at my window over the 14 minute drive; in the leer of the men who do not have the decency to stay behind their car window while ogling me; at the office security guard who tries not to notice my odd outfits every morning), at work read two papers and log into the Guardian, Telegraph and New Yorker, edit district stories, post articles on to my face book (lest the people I never meet forget I exist), edit more district stories, get a coke and a packet of chips (the highlight to my days), make the pages, leave the office, pick up something to eat on the drive back home (collect more scattered thoughts while waiting for a meal to be delivered, cooked or brought to my car window. Thoughts I gather while reading whatever it is I am reading those days under the tiny car light. Thoughts that pinch me while random passersby try and stare into the car at the girl reading in the dark), get home, sit with Nano and Abbi for a while discussing how ‘nothing new’ happened, walk upstairs, change, eat, watch television, read for a few hours, sleep.

That was my year, give or take seven evenings spent with a few friends; a dozen afternoons spent with mom and four dinners spent with my father. And I didn’t exactly hate it. I no longer even crave companionship the way I once did because I am quite confident in the fact that I would be tired of it quite soon. People annoy me, the little ticks, the guessing games, the backstabbing, the tantrums… the issues. Why would anyone want to take on someone else’s neuroses when there is so much to fix of oneself?

So instead, I am taking comfort in open-ended questions that I can pen down in my journal and save for someone to answer later on. This helps keep all the smashed, scattered shards of my thoughts out of the way and I am no longer afraid of stepping on them or losing them altogether. These conversations with myself are fast becoming my salvation and I find myself placing an ellipsis at the close of every idea I pen down. A ‘what if’ to mark every deliberation; my very own grammatical guardian angel. Still, I can’t help but think I may need a few full stops sometime, somewhere in the future. Life simply cannot continue like this, an inimitable see-saw of conflicting opinions lived amid constricted parenthesis. I want a full stop now. Give me a last word so I can finally write a first sentence. But there are never any last words, not really.

Rimbaud and I know this life to be an act. That  ‘farce which everyone has to perform’. It is getting harder and harder to convince people that while I make no claims to being ‘happy’ I am most certainly content. Agreed, it is rare, to enjoy ones own company more than that of others and it is perhaps not entirely ‘normal’ to want to keep up the solitaire. But it is what it is.

This is where I covet minority status without shame. Sadly, there has never really been a club or even some trite support group for a minority such as I.

All those lonely people out there and not one who enjoys being alone. 

The Road to Aletheia

Heidegger defined the Greek word for ‘truth’ as  ‘unhidden-ness', 'un-concealment' and 'that which is no longer lost'

I can no longer count the number of times that I have encountered the expression ‘finding oneself’. The term is liberally thrown about by those who think the process specifically entails adorning floor length skirts, a cluster of beads and chanting inside a makeshift candlelit shrine. Having been born with the natural inclination to gravitate towards beads and colourful skirts I recently found myself being told that the answer to all my problems lay in a ‘prophet’s circle’.

This imaginary sphere involves visualising oneself in the centre of a prayer circle surrounded by different prophets on the periphery. One is asked to envision the sages of varying theologies ensconced in beams of coloured light that somehow correspond with paranormal pressure points set along ones' spine known as ‘chakras’. Having always been inherently averse to confrontation I pretended to go along with my ‘guru’s’ advice. To keep myself from collapsing in a fit of cackles I took great liberties with the exercise.

If Maya, the vedic notation for illusion, must be exhumed by the mind and spirit than mine lies amid the pillars of inquiry and philosophy. If there is a multiplicity that conceals true meaning and the world of our experience does not really exist then so be it. I would rather spend my time in search for Archimedes’ utopian fixed point…and I have no desire to move the earth only of seeking Kant’s noumenon- that one ephemeral thing-in-itself that makes all the other nothings worthwhile.

All my quests, metaphysical and otherwise, began when I was seven. And so, this particular odyssey had a seven-year-old me thrust in a maze of metaphysical black holes in search for the titans of thought. A mad little girl alternating the alleys of her mind carrying her daimon with her at every turn as a tedious woman dressed in monk orange robes yammered on about the complex ‘science’ of inhaling and exhaling metaphorical tendrils of rainbow smoke.

Landing in a typically uncomfortable spotlight, I was greeted with a warning. Pyrrho with his pointy beard and spindle spine started me off with words of caution “Remember the importance of opposing claims. No yes’ and no nays…suspended judgment at all corners, child. That will keep you safe.” And so I had my map, my course acatalepsia and my ability to withhold opinion in favour of intonation. The ataraxic unknown was liberating and if I concentrated hard enough I could even make out the faint strains of Bob Marley’s ‘Don’t worry, be…” in the background of the nothing I was stepping into.

My journey began at the beginning with an ugly old man walking up to me with eyes full of questions. It appeared that Socrates always knew he would be condemned to death for his curiosity but his compulsion seemed to outweigh all sense of self preservation. He stood right in front of me and he was tall, which meant that the warts on his face were all the more vivid as he bent down to ask me our first question. “Are you sure you want to do this child? You know that once you start asking you will never stop” he said it with the rapscallion self satisfaction of a man who already knew the answer but wanted to luxuriate in the magnanimity that came with offering a victim a choice. There was no choice, as we walked through his ghastly utopia, criss-crossing between the broken streets where he had pestered his lesser contemporaries about everything he could think of. Our daimon’s in hand, we easily skipped along on the yellow brick road of ‘knowing we knew nothing’. He was the most beautiful ugly man I ever saw and I could see why Nietzsche, in his moment of petty jealousy had tried to reduce him to a mere ‘monstrous face and monstrous soul’. We shook hands outside the doors of a dusty old library, where I told him that his pupil Plato didn’t do him justice in his recollections. “Yes, well. He was never quite as comfortable with self-doubt. He could never put the question above quintessence. Can you?” And so I left, with another question tucked carefully in the back pocket of my dirty jeans.

The library was an ancient, crumbling structure. It was really more of a study than anything else. Certainly not Borges’ maze or the Agora but I could place him immediately. Bent over his desk, with a magnifying glass fixed on a set of scrolls, he beckoned me over with a hasty wave of his left hand. Feuerbach’s long beard was interfering with his untidy notations and he handed me the quill making me write down random observations on scraps of paper. “What exactly are we doing?” I looked at him directly, perched uncomfortably on a set of papers scattered at the corner of his desk. “Why I’d have thought that was obvious. We are looking for the essence of religion and God by inflection. I know you’re interested in all that stuff,” he said, without looking up. “You can find that out from a book?” I suddenly felt I had wasted far too many years looking in the wrong places when I should have lived in a library. “Not exactly, you can find the first part in a book, the religion part…you just need to keep going back further. Anthropology 101…soon enough you’ll find where god makes an appearance and almost every time you can tell who made him up,” he said with an ironic laugh. “God is Us. We make him every day and we project on to him what we wished we could be,” he said in his professorial monotone. “Yes, but what about the real God, the one that doesn’t make an appearance in the books,” I asked. “Oh that one…well that one you have to look for somewhere else.” He started talking about how I needed to battle my chimaeras’ on this quest before I could even begin to ask the questions I needed.

I walked out of the library in a daze only to realise two steps later that I had landed in a gallery. An endless hallway of thought…idle and otherwise. The books I had read; how and where I could find a bathroom here; whether or not it was better to be happy, smart or successful and whether getting answers was a better goal than asking questions. Descartes stood in front of a foggy mirror, staring at his all-too-elegant reflection. He was a tall man, intelligence oozing from every pore along with a detachment he seemed to have earned after decades of effort. “How do you like Cartesian alleys?” he inquired of me with a smirk. “It’s a tad self indulgent don’t you think?” I responded, completely out of turn. If he was offended he didn’t show it, we both were there because we were still thinking about things. “Does it still bother you that they misquoted you? I mean you never meant for there to be any inference. It wasn’t meant as a syllogism was it? There was no major premise to be had and the ‘therefore’ killed it," I whispered. “Thank you for that and no there wasn’t. They never really apologised for it either. I didn't want any dependence just ‘I think, I am’ but that seemed hard for them to live with,” he muttered bitterly.

The gallery cut a razor sharp corner as Ockham merely stood at the fringes watching me stumble onward. There were no words of wisdom, no condemnations and no warnings from the sly, Moorish man. This was the person who chased after the root of all things: the ‘blueness’ that made the sky blue, the ‘taste’ that made tasting possible. He was too busy peering at me out of the corner of his eye and perceiving to comment on my failings and I was grateful for being let go with mere oblong glances. After all, he had already deemed god to be unnecessary merely because the world could be explained without him. I didn’t need telling that the world would be better off without me.

I tripped over a huddled mass crouched beneath a tree. The mass turned out to be a hermit, an agoraphobe who shrieked and yelled at my having invaded his ‘personal space’. So he carved a circle in the grass around himself, a nucleus of protection that would keep everyone at a safe distance. I sat cross-legged outside of it as Spinoza refused to look at me. “Why are you here?” he asked, his chin pinned to his chest. “I am on a quest,” I told him, bursting over with false bravado. “No you’re not. You have no say in these matters. You didn’t choose any quest. So don’t adorn it like a mantle! You were thrown into this and are trying to smile your way out to the other side,” he replied, shivering. “Is that a bad thing?” I wanted to know. He didn’t answer me and only warned that I must always look at the infinite and unalterable whole rather than trying to divide it into parts that I found easier to cope with. “Does it help? I mean, you said knowing our emotions would help us master them but you obviously feel lonely. Is that because you didn’t know it or because you couldn’t master it?” He didn’t answer me this time either but I could tell it was a bit of both as he turned around to look the other way.

The next stop was Night. A lit up city, ugly and neon, trying far too hard to construct the flicker of a lost dream. There was a gambling den with poker tables lined up to infinity as scores of lost souls placed bets on their conscience. I walked my too short, too self-conscious seven-year-old self to the head table to place my wager as the dealer spread the cards. Pascal had the eyes of a slut and the smile of a cheat but everyone knew him and everyone laughed at all his jokes. Absolutely everyone took him up on his bets. He laid out the odds, stating clearly and curtly “Fate is a prison and an empty abyss. Reason does not have the answers and we are lost. So bet on a cosmic ‘what if’ and leap because the truth is ugly and the lie might not be.” It was a cheap hand.

I met Kant standing beside a merry-go-round. He was childlike in his brilliance and spoke to me about space and time, about predicates in analytical and synthetic statements and about how everything was uncertain and empty. “Then why bother?” I asked, and he smiled the smile of a man who was comfortable ‘just looking and never buying’. “It gives us something to do,” he murmured bashfully, embarrassed that he didn’t have any real answers and far too many surreal ones. He told me to act the way I wanted everyone around me to and that was I stopped laughing with him. That was when he lost me completely. Why would anyone, ever want to act like everyone else?

I was pushed into a dark alley of despair. Ugly self-loathing and silicone layers of pessimism coated the brick walls of Schopenhauer’s dead-end metaphysics. The man himself comprised of a bag of bones woven together by a network of bulging navy blue veins spread out on grey, ashen skin. No child should ever have had to meet him. His vision was far too easy to buy into. “We all depend on something that depends on nothing. Doesn’t that scare you child?” he looked at me in earnest. It did scare me. I knew I that I needed to tune him out but he began shouting at the top of his flailing lungs over the music “No one cares, no god, no soul, no free will. We are stripped of all consolation prizes,” and I began to sob just looking at him. Freud had ripped off every one of his ideas and sold them off as a cutting edge foray into the mind he called psychoanalysis, but while Freud's treatise remained laughable, this old man was terrifying in his truth. “There is only one inborn error: and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy,” he said as the accordion rose to a crescendo. I ran from him screaming, tears pouring unchecked from my eyes and I could make out the faint strains of Wagner wafting through the air.

I sprinted straight into the arms of a saviour, a hero. The kind one finds in books where dreams are endless because there are no dead ends and every sentence carries on forever with a colossal ellipsis. The kind one waits for to make an appearance at the beginning of every novel and hates saying goodbye to by the end. Kierkegaard petted my back and stroked my hair as I cried out onto his freshly penned pages. He told me not to dwell on the past, or the future, or the present. He painted a world beyond all ‘isms’ and we sat imagining ourselves as pirates in one story and pan in another. “You do know that they call you the father of existentialism now,” I sniffed and he scoffed. “They are idiots and can’t possibly know me or even themselves. Remember child, there is no I. It’s a letter that couldn’t possibly fathom or describe us. Isn’t that what you’ve always said too?” he looked at me and smiled. He was right about one thing, faith is born at the lowest of pitfalls, where paradox meets reason.

I was tangibly nervous as I knocked on the tall brass doors that would lead me into the vortex. I could hear the manic ravings of a lunatic from within. A beautifully tainted and broken mad man - a nihilist and narcissist that I loved to hate (or was it hated to love). Nietzsche was smashing dishes into the wall as his Zarathustra stood behind his shoulder and smirked knowingly. He didn’t seem at all upset and asked me to join him. “You see what we are doing here?” he smashed an antique Chinese teacup into the wall. “Not really,” I said. “And I thought you were smart. We are dethroning the despots; breaking their pedestals from under their sickening selves. God is dead. No one will save Him after I’m done with Him,” he cackled. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he seemed the one in need of saving because I knew his despair sustained him. It made his exits much more poignant and my heart cracked for the fact that I could not own him or even return him to himself. He was right though, no one could have contained him - not the socialists who tried to adopt him or the anarchists who tried to embody him. They would only ever see the half they could observe and destroy.

I carried my broken heart in my other pocket past the Austrian kindergarten classroom where a precocious Wittgenstein sat at his desk perpetually outwitting Hitler; past the Nominalists interlocking their Humean principles on rocks and beyond the verbal pyrotechnics of Locke, the ascetic, preaching to anyone who would listen to tales of a tabula rasa that offered up second chances. I saw a Neoplatonist arcana being carved into a wall by Epictetus as he asked me to affirm my amor fati to myself and the world but I politely declined. I purposely avoided Hobbes standing beneath a podium and kissing the feet of all the kings he could find. I stopped just outside Plato’s cave so that I didn’t lose the sun of my passions only to be shackled in the shadows of empty power.

By the time the crazy guru’s chanting came to an end, I saw myself being led back to the beginning. The overwhelming perfume of scented candles began to permeate my nostrils and the flickering light danced outside my eyelids but I held on a moment longer. I sensed that I was walking in a giant’s shadow. The shade stretched across for miles and it was twilight. Just before I opened my eyes, I turned around and Aristotle gave me my first and only answer.

“Eudaimonia," he said.
And I was happy to stick with the questions after that.

Dystopia

Alas! All music jars when the soul's out of tune - Miguel De Cervantes

It has been said, that according to the teachings of the idealists the words ‘live’ and ‘dream’ are rigorously synonymous. I must admit that I subscribed to this belief for as along as I can remember. Perhaps it all started the day I was eleven and wanted to jump off a balcony but my grandfather handed me a copy of The Hobbit as an alternative and told me that ‘reading’ would make everything better. “Only if you have an aptitude for it,” he warned and I didn’t understand his meaning until now. Being hurled into a world of perennial fantasy is extremely perilous for those that can adapt to it as easily and comfortably as I.

In retrospect, I believe I mistook my grandfathers meaning. I thought he meant that cultivating and constructing multiple utopias was a gift when it’s more likely he actually meant the opposite. That the illusory ‘aptitude’ was actually about retaining the ability to keep the worlds opening before you at a safe distance. To delve but not dive. Sadly, my realisation comes far too late - the damage is done and the illusion shattered.

My expectations regarding ideal company skyrocketed as a child and I have never been able to find even a close substitute in life. ‘Real’ people are boring, terribly ordinary, petty and predictable. ‘Reality’ is a self-perpetuating disappointment and loneliness is a pinnacle. Naturally, there are consequences and my loneliness isn’t always enjoyable, especially not when all those around me appear to possess that ‘ordinariness’, that ‘regular people’ ability to converse, coerce and crave company without doubting and deliberating absolutely everything that crosses their emotional spectrum.

And yet, I have come to realise and admit finally that observation is enough for me. I have discovered that I am not as jaded as I would hope to be or as, perhaps, I need to be. That my Valhalla is intact. I merely recognise that it is solitary and this is admittedly, a painful realisation.

A few days ago, I was trying to explain to my grandmother why I could not see myself ‘settling down’ as it were and it took me a long time to finally locate the words. “I think, Nano, that I am an unfailing, diehard romantic who knows perfectly well that romance is dead,” the words, while prolific were hard to choke out and to acknowledge. It was bittersweet to finally capitulate and admit that I was built to be alone.

 I have been accused of being stubborn and unbending in the face of ‘reality’, which apparently requires a supple soul to manipulate. This is undeniably true. I find that I have an innate inability to ‘settle’ or ‘bend’ for others, perhaps cultivated over a lifetime of taking care of just myself. And it is becoming blatantly obvious now, at this precarious catch-22 corner of inconvenience where my age, my family and my culture requires me to affect a need that I simply do not feel. A need for a partner and for love.

But the viper in me refuses to accede an inch. I have always thought far too much about far too much and always in the way of incomplete anagrams. I have been called the ‘ice queen’, who feels only for strangers, lost ideals and an over-achieving standard of self-righteousness. I simply cannot resent the title and if I’m honest I wear it proudly. I do lack an ability to feel for the ‘feelings’ of others, I can empathise with their problems and trials but never their feelings. It was there when I was a child but it was quiet then. It is still quiet but no longer so because I am afraid. Rather I am alone now because I am far too sure of myself as well as my thoughts and not at all of others.

Also, my recent forays into the reality of heartbreak has shattered the many urban myths about the supposed ‘merits of companionship’. I am no longer looking for someone’s antique cousin to rescue me from myself, to hold my hand only when I need it held and to laugh with me for ‘as long as we both shall live’.

I have always had an overzealous imagination and I can create those men from hazy blueprints I encounter in person. The real men in my life have always, always, always been bullies. I have never met a man who wasn’t one, be it in the intellectual, emotional, physical or spiritual sphere. Truth be told women are bullies too but they are more subtle about it…I believe their employed variant is called ‘badgering’.

“But what is wrong with him,” my Nani implores me for the umpteenth time about the umpteenth candidate and I fail to understand how to explain that there need be nothing wrong with a man for him to be the wrong man for me. I am wrong for them! I was never one of Austen’s women, my imagination rapid though it is, never did jump from ‘admiration to love and from love to matrimony in moments’. My exegesis in masochism is a life style choice as I have circumvented the latter at all costs.

 I shall remain, forever, unfinished. It is the only way I can keep myself.

The Gift of Grandparents

“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle” – Jane Austen

It is an odd sensation to finally recognize that what I am most grateful for in my life is the fact that I have seldom been able to depend unequivocally on familial security.

Traditionally, broken family syndromes tend to swing one of two ways: they can make you or break you …so to speak. In my case they have done both. I have mended, after meticulous effort over the years, what was once broken and whether or not I can admit it to myself yet I have had plenty of help in the more recent past.

There has been plenty of pity too but I have discovered that even I am able to summon enough bite to deflect pity when the need arises. Mostly I have been blessed over the past eight years with the presence of grandparents. I realize that this is an odd thing to feel grateful for when one happens to be a twenty-something forced to abide by curfews and eat the blandest food known to man. By some odd lilt of serendipity my battered and bruised soul managed to find its particular flavour of chicken soup in the company of an independent, artistic, eternally concerned polymath of a grandmother and a quiet, contemplative, bashful yet brilliant grandfather.

Like all mismatched pairings it took a while to get used to; the occasional fight; the one-off tantrum and many a frustrated sigh but years later I know better than to be glib about this entirely unanticipated gift  that I finally received after years of loneliness and tears. A gift of being loved simply because they needed someone to love and I happened to be there.

 I don’t know of many people my age who seek company outside their own age, beyond parties and crowds in a quiet home with two people so different from one another they might as well be opposing magnetic poles.  There is definitely something to be said for the distance that old age provides though. All the cliché’s of guidance and experience aside, the real gift lies in the fact that every single thing out of both their mouths comes with a story set in a time I know nothing about. I am thereby a perennial student of split accounts pertaining to a rather one-dimensional version of history, philosophy and home keeping.  I have always loved old things. Having been raised on a steady diet of classical literature where all good things are set amid antiquity I still find myself seeking beauty and meaning in old buildings, old clothes, old music, old furniture and occasionally old ideals. Ironically though, I am told that my ‘thinking’ is far too 'modern' ...excusing everyone but myself.

Perhaps what I love most about living with Nano and Abbi is how they wear every one of their days in the folds of their skin. Odd as it is, I relish the glaze that covers their eyes every time they recall a past that might put them somewhere in the same temporal vicinity as me.

My grandmother is what anyone would call a polymath. A woman who knows far too much about far too much; a tireless worker; a stubborn survivor and very often bitter about the hand she has been dealt by a life that was too slow to catch up with her. She had to wait for me to love her though and it has taken me years to get there. My grandmother needs to be loved and told it often, which is a small price for the sheer showering of affection she constantly directs upon my ever-reluctant person but it is still something I have trouble expressing even though I have felt it for years. 
She is a 73- year-old woman who has spent the past summer making quilts out of old silk shirts, shalwars and dupatta’s. She has managed over 33 quilts in the past two and half months and each masterpiece embodies the sheer stubbornness of her inextinguishable talent. I have watched her spend entire nights piecing together scraps of ancient fabrics simply because she cannot sit idle and her talent and intractability often leave me ashamed.

She and I are finally able to have conversations that span entire nights where nothing is left unsaid. I recognize how odd it is to live with a woman nearly four times one’s age who wants to hear the details of your consistently vacant love life; your research interests and your opinion on her latest colour scheming as she hangs on your every word just to make you feel important.  Perhaps, what I love most about her is the fact that every time she sees me get into my car she says “Beta Ayat-ul-kursi parh lena.” Then as I watch her through my review mirror, she sighs and murmurs it under her breath on my behalf.

Then of course there is my Abbi, the man I consider in large part to be my moral compass. An old, frail and quiet being who lives almost entirely in a world he has created from his books which I have always dreamed of doing some day…to the eternal dismay of my grandmother. He and I seldom need words to have conversations. It is the best thing about living in the same house as him - the conversation is ever-present and ever-evolving.

Perhaps it is the rather morbid pitiable juncture of being back in Pakistan that has led me to question and contemplate nearly everything that surrounds me, above all the misery of somehow having been pushed back in time and experience. It has made me re-evaluate what is real and what is surreal in this mid-life I now lead.

But for once I am sure about something. I am confident of these most unexpected constants in my life.

Which is why the fact that they may not be here for long terrifies me more than I can admit ... or accept.

Post-its and Final Goodbyes

“My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.” Jorge Luis Borges

How does one deconstruct disorientation? Is it an emotion, a sensation or merely an adverb running along the sentences that a person is unable to frame correctly at the juncture when they are most required? I suppose in some measure it is an awakening of the mind…one that the body refuses to acknowledge as it shuts down around you. 

Today, I spent at least 17 seconds on Abid Majeed Road waiting for a car trying to overtake two other vehicles to crash into me. It was the most surreal conflagration of moments, knowing that the collision was inevitable and waiting in anticipation is the oddest sensation. One finds the mind shift into hyper-drive as the carcass shuts down to let it complete its laps around your memories. One can see and say a lot in 17 seconds. 

I, for example, managed to write my mother a blue goodbye post-it in purple ink thanking her for giving me a reason to live again; I managed to hug my grandmother willingly in my mind - something I have never quite managed in person even though I know she craves it; I ruffled my brothers hair; stared into my fathers eyes and tried to find a smile there; told my best friend her new play was genius and I was oh-so proud of her and saw both my grand fathers sitting on a bed in grey shalwar kameez’ as I – Beentherella, at age seven - sat between them gazing up in wonder. I managed to spare an afterthought to why ‘this was the reason I hadn’t bothered getting up early to head for the gym more often…it got me killed’ and considered why I didn’t bother running back up the stairs to retrieve my fil-o-fax from my desk before gunning the engine buying me by a few more minutes. 

I didn’t spare a single thought to god though, for which I am profoundly grateful. In some measure I feel like surviving a ‘near death’ experience without feeling the inclination to pray, sacrifice a goat or re-align my entire existential etymology means I have passed some kind of unspoken test. Amid the scores of voices that surrounded me in the aftermath where I temporarily lost my vision, the most overwhelming chorus was definitely ‘Allah ne bacha liya’ and for the first time I recognized the temptation to simply fall back and say ‘yep, thank you Allah ji.’ Until, I realized that this logic would also make him the guy responsible for ensuring that a newly recruited driver decide at that precise juncture in time to try and overtake two cars, smash into mine and conveniently feign fainting (according to the Rescue 1122 reps) for the rest of the ambulance ride to the hospital. 

I find that I have dodged some cosmic loophole that I would have had to experience at some precarious point in my life of ‘still not being quite sure’ and have emerged finally secure in my over-arching skepticism regarding luck and all things fate-oriented. Dostoevsky said, “Realists do not fear the results of their study.” Not that even the most seasoned connoisseur of methadone would ever mistake me for a realist and granted I haven’t yet ‘studied’ anything of consequence but I finally am clear on intent. And that alone is a …relief. 

Speaking of which, I am surprised to find myself having benefitted from the sugar-sweet kindness of strangers and estranged alike today. A lovely woman who stepped into my broken car held me from behind and told me what was happening around me, collecting my things and calling my family to cart me away to safety. A woman, whose name I wish I knew and whose face I wish I had seen. And on the other hand a gush of familial faces, who after years, came up to my room and smiled at and with me. Today, I am ever-grateful for both. 

What is proving to be the most astounding, however, is the survivor’s guilt. The fact that I made it out of a bashed car with only scrapes, bruises and a particularly nasty case of whiplash. The adsum essence of not having earned that clemency now persists…as I see and listen to the scores of stories of the thousands that aren’t this lucky and fail to comprehend why. The ones who fall into ditches, are bitten by snakes, are drowning in their sleep and are blasted to shards without any more notice than the three sentences I pen down for them in tomorrow’s news edition. The thousands dying whose existence before the end was hell to begin with.

I got whiplash and it merited visits, food offerings and …hugs. 

I am not sure I am handling any of this well or even if I am processing it correctly. What can I say ‘life and death have been lacking in my life.’

A Closet Full of Conversation

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded – Fyodor Dostoevsky

It appears that I am incapable of exorcising you and so I have decided that in the vein of a lost La Mancha, I too shall be content with my scars. My months in Lahore, drudge slowly now and as the accolades I had collected during my time in England slowly fade away, it appears that Oxford and you must have been a twisted dream. A dream that I am too scared to awaken from. Still, as Rimbaud put it “I am intact, and I don’t give a damn.”

I believe, I am spending my time re-living conversations, creating them, coveting them…mostly just talking to myself. It is becoming increasingly obvious now, enough so that I can occasionally catch people gawking at me through my car window and have bought myself window screens. I wonder if you have forgotten me already and I altercate daily between whether or not I would be grateful or gutted knowing that truth.

Living with the random swirling of my brain is exhausting: tweaks in time for a perennial plagiarist who never knows if she actually lived her life or is only now weaving it into view. Voices echo both in the back of my head and outside it but I still them by composing conversations, some that I have stocked up from childhood; others with you; yet better ones that I someday plan to have with someone who I am determined will not be you.

“Must you always pretend?” you asked me once.

I’m not that interesting when I don’t

“Have you even tried it?” you pushed.

I don’t need to, they were perhaps the most honest words I ever shared.

Is that the composite of human judgment then, conversation? If so, I can confidently claim that this year has been one of self-indulgent compositions for me. I have always been a voyeur of language and the only way to get my mind to stop tinkering its way into madness these days seems to involve rollicking off random nonsense both in and outside of my person.

“I will take care of you, you are my daughter after all,” my father tells me, after nearly eight years of my having lain eyes on him. I don’t have a ready answer to my skepticism, my bitterness or my regret and so I smile in response. I suppose that is what ‘forgive and forget’ is meant to mean but it doesn’t. I try to wash it down, in utmost benevolence to ‘forgive and forego’ but I am not sure if I am strong enough.

He asks me “What I wan’t to do with my life” in the same breath that he employs to ask me whether I would prefer pizza or Mexican for dinner. ‘Oh I don’t know, happiness might be nice. Love, even better,’ I muse to myself.

Get a PhD, I say instead. I know it isn’t a choice he would appreciate over marriage but I also know it is one he wouldn’t  begrudge me now.

It is disconcerting how all of my silent ministrations are directed at or around you – as if you have replaced one of the many incarnations in my head that I used to share myself with. Every minute detail; every odd lilting tail end of a half-formed world-changing philosophy; every unsolved epigram; every shoe purchase and song choice goes through you… they are all dedicated to you. You, who aren’t there anymore and were probably never there even when you were. 

Most of my days are spent writing letters to you in my mind… 

“My dear failed, festering excuse for persistent heartburn

I just watched the Matrix again with my kid brother. I wonder why all the references are Alice and Wonderland references? Ever think that there might be some credence to the fact that life is a giant, self-perpetuating computer game? Is that why you quit? Do you suppose I should, because I’m pretty sure I am playing against myself.

Remember how Cipher said ‘ignorance is bliss’, why couldn’t we have tried that? What’s so great about the 'Truth' anyhow, after all Dylan said ‘all the truth in the world adds up to one big lie’ and he’s pretty smart. Even you agreed with me on that. We never really pondered the merits of denial, perhaps we should have."

But I know, even as I say it that it isn't for me. I’m not one of those people beating the shit out of themselves to keep from asking a real question or worse getting a real answer. My denial travels a far more twisted trajectory. It makes mountains out of morals, gods out of men that I admire and molehills out of a god I cannot possibly love because he so desperately needs to be loved all the time.

“So why are you upset?” the voice -that I can never stop searching for- asks me as I paint my nails a bright fire-engine red, perched on my bed watching Yul Brynner grimace at Ingrid Bergman daring her to admit she loves him without giving anything away. Typical.

Did you know this is Oprah’s last year doing her show? I whine.

“And that is particularly upsetting to you because?” it presses on.

Well, she could at least have waited for me to make something of myself, called me on and then quit, and I was not being sarcastic.

My narcissism is humble enough to recognize that it has not yet achieved anything to claim a stake in the ego it could potentially develop. Which is why I am determined not to ever achieve anything.

“Why don’t you ever put any of your ideas down on paper?”Asma asks me.

Because, then I can’t change them and I’ll have to do something about them. Why don’t you apply for a theatre programme? I counter.

“I don’t buy it," she dodges. "We need to do something with our lives, move in some direction. Take on the world, stop being embarrassed about ourselves, lose the weight,” she’s on a roll as we both reach out for another chip, another pakora and another glass of coke.

You’re right but don’t we have to change to do all of that, I am apprehensive.

“Not necessarily, there must be SOMEONE who will like us exactly as we are?” she looks at me and we go on to compare lists that we have been drawing for the six years we have known each other only to crawl back into ourselves the moment we’ve digested the fries.

Still, I am patient and my patience is a pattering of images that I must pause and pillage without preference. There are conversations with the sprites in my head about fantasies that I could live in: my own personal reverie of a solitary walker, in a forest with a cabin, a lifetime supply of books, a typewriter and a coke fountain. A career that allows me to backpack around the world on a shoe-string budget but with ample material to fill several lifetimes worth of journals. A quaint ranch in the middle of nowhere...Wyoming mayhaps, where I can ride in the rain, read in the sun and write all the days in between. Occasionally there are conversations with an eight-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl, both of whom have my hair and your eyes. They enjoy my company and think I’m an amazing mom. We watch every single animated release in the theatre; eat skittles; recite Dahl and Dr Zeuss with all the HOoo voices; take an infinite number of road trips; host midnight costume parties and dance. They love me and I don’t construct them beyond that…ever. 

Then there are conversations with my dead 80-year-old saviour, Baba Faiz.

“Maria Saib, aap ko hum ka yaad aati he?” he smiles at me from the beyond.

Sara waqt aati he baba, baarish mein kabhi aap ke bagher pakore nahin khaaye, I sob.

“Raat ko neend aata he na saib, dar to nahin lagta,” hand on my hair.

Nahin, I lie.

But it always seems to come back to you. You, who I sometimes wish I hadn’t met or fallen in love with until I remind myself that there are no victims in our particular equation. Until I remember that I did this, that this is my story not yours.

“What does this ‘Paimona Bede’ thing mean?” you asked me.

No idea, it isn’t Urdu its Persian, as I hastily email my mother to find out for you.

“So?” you press on.

Forget it, it’s a love song, I scoff.

“And I’m not allowed near those?” that smirk again.

You shouldn’t be. If you must know, it means ‘please fill my empty cup with love so I can breathe again’, I try and fail at affecting a snort.

“That’s cheesy…desperate actually. I wonder why all love songs are so damn desperate?” you ask me.

I didn’t answer you, did I?

To Ramona

Ramona, come closer
Shut softly your watery eyes
The pangs of your sadness
Will pass as your senses will rise

The flowers of the city
Though breathlike, get deathlike at times
And there's no use in tryin'
To deal with the dyin'
Though I cannot explain that in lines.

Your cracked country lips
I still wish to kiss
As to be by the strength of you skin
Your magnetic movements
Still capture the minutes I'm in
But it grieves my heart, love
To see you tryin' to be a part of
A world that just don't exist

 It's all just a dream, babe
A vacuum, a scheme, babe
That sucks you into feelin' like this.

I can see that your head
Has been twisted and fed
With worthless foam from the mouth
I can tell you are torn
Between stayin' and returnin'
Back to the South

You've been fooled into thinking
That the finishin' end is at hand
Yet there's no one to beat you
No one to defeat you
'Cept the thoughts of yourself feeling bad

I've heard you say many times
That you're better than no one
And no one is better than you

If you really believe that
You know you have
Nothing to win and nothing to lose
From fixtures and forces and friends

Your sorrow does stem
That hype you and type you
Making you feel
That you gotta be just like them.

I'd forever talk to you
But soon my words
They would turn into a meaningless ring
For deep in my heart
I know there is no help I can bring

Everything passes
Everything changes
Just do what you think you should do
And someday, maybe
Who knows, baby
I'll come and be cryin' to you.
                                     - Bob Dylan

Ad Meliora

Towards Better Things

I have never really had to cope with a loss that I didn’t know was mine before. The other kind of loss I tend to expect, anticipate even.

A 24-year-old boy died recently. Ironically, he didn’t die in a bomb blast, which is the norm these days but while waiting for a ball to approach his cricket bat at the crease outside the Daily Times office. They say, his heart gave out. His heart gave out at 24. I suppose in some measure I envy Saad Anwar. He knows now, he has answers. And I sit and sulk in his absence with even more questions.

I wish I could say that he was my friend and that life is empty without him but he wasn’t and it isn’t. I found out he was gone, purely by accident. My friend Mighty called me randomly and even more randomly slipped out with “Oh didn’t you know, Saadi died.”

I didn’t know because Saadi wasn’t my friend, he was an 'acquaintance'. I have never really understood the meaning of the term in a modern context before. One of my cyber-acquaintances tends to employ the expression with reference to me in our occasional interactions and the usage always irked me, because I felt this person placed far too much value on labelling relationships. Especially, if casually calling someone a ‘friend’ was so obviously taxing that they needed to both physically and verbally be kept at a safe distance at all times. I know better now.

I never really let Saadi become a friend. I’m not particularly apt at making or keeping friends but I knew him. I had smiled with him, exchanged the one-off joke, and a few months ago I even exchanged Christmas pudding (that I had helped my mother bake) with Saadi, who insisted on hoarding the last three slices. About seven months ago, he asked me why I wasn’t taking an editorial position at DT for the opinion pages.

I replied haughtily “What opinion, Saadi, this paper is a rag now. It’s a gover-nerial (we snickered at that) mouth piece, nahin?”

He called me a ‘Befqoof Aurat,’ adding that I needed to think ‘shark-like and screw the principle of it for the money’. The fact that he said it with his rather typical, trademark grin, eye-brows skewed akimbo ‘grinch’ style’ only made me laugh.

He joined in and said, ‘theek he, theek he, raho malang. Dekhte hein kitni der dora chalta he faqeergi ka’.

I responded with “challenge?”

And he gave me a thumbs up sign.

That was my last encounter with Saadi and I don’t think it is one I’m likely to forget any time soon.

At this juncture, I actually wish I could believe in God or religion.It might be comforting to have some kind of false sense of peace or hope regarding this perennially optimistic kid who got dealt a sour hand, or sweet one, depending on how one looks at it. I am sad for his mother who lost her son too soon; for his and my friend Mighty, who I know will not get over this but as is typical, I am saddest for myself.

I am sad that it took Saadi dying for me to recognise that he may well have been one of the 18 people I have encountered in my life that I actually would have liked to know better. The count has now dropped to 17. I am also bitterly amused by the fact that I appear to presently have over 200 ‘friends’ on facebook, and I have no idea what that means anymore.

They don’t have an ‘acquaintance’ tab on facebook.

But I can count the friends I have in life. There are two, my mother and my friend Asma. There used to be three others, cousins in another life where we were four corners of a demented, dilapidated but integral square. A composite element that faced the outside together, each corner with its own baggage and issues but with the others’ back. An element called 'Maria+Ahsan+Salman+Fatima' but that has passed too. Then there is the outer circle I occasionally hang out with, whose company I enjoy enough to take in but never to indulge myself enough to genuinely depend on or worse let depend on me. Then there are people I know of and who know of me. Last of all, there is family, which is and always has been a cesspool swamp of maybe’s, mayhaps’ and mishaps.

There are a few who I would have liked to know, but never had the courage to come out and say, in my third grade avatar of a Forever Friends card “will you please, please be my friend?”. To have and to hold, till mutual idiocy do us part!

I suppose much of it comes with being a displaced person. Having the kind of personality that doesn’t take brackets all too well, makes it nearly impossible to find like-hearted-spirits. Then again, it also makes that finding and the process behind it, more poignant…or so I must constantly assure myself. But I am alone now and I am beginning to feel that I have let it go on for too long to want or be able to alter the predicament. It is a rather cruel twist of rapscallion fate, to finally want to find another half- not a romantic one- just….one, but no longer have the ability to do so.

The thing about relationships, especially friendships, which are more permanent than romances I suppose (not that I would know the difference) is that they pose emotional epigrams. I am completely incapacitated in affecting a suitably likable persona to bridge this seemingly insurmountable gap. I have begun to fear that I have taken to forming only ‘acquaintances’, that friends pose too much of a disappointment because I always let them down or bore them or don’t give them enough attention or give them too much attention. But mostly I am beginning to fear that my narcissism is approaching its peak - that no one is allowed to come close enough because no one deserves to.

They say, it is loneliest at the top.

They neglect to mention that it is the same at the bottom.

Tea trauma

It is an odd sense of displacement, being a journalist and not being addicted to tea.

Let alone not liking tea. But I now worry that my inherent debilitation in avoiding 'chai' and having replaced it with that 'other' foreign cultural export 'coke' may pose overarching consequences for my personal life (sic).

You see, I can cook. Well even, when I want to. I can clean and mend things. But I am inherently incapable of making a decent cup of tea. The reason being that since I don’t drink tea and don't like it, I have no idea what a decent cup of it tastes like. I don't know what makes tea too strong, weak or milky or simultaneously what makes it ‘karrara’ ‘hitchi’ or ‘pisti’. This, according to my grandmother, means that I will probably never get married.

Then again, I'm sure there are other reasons for that failing.

Oh-my-GOD

“Do you believe in God Andre? No, neither do I, but that’s a favourite question of mine. An upside down question, you know. 

What do you mean? 

Well, if I asked people whether they believe in life, they’d never know what I meant. It’s a bad question… it can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God and if they say they do – then I know that they don’t believe in life.

Why?

Because, you see, God- whatever one chooses to call God, is one’s highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It’s a rare gift you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible: here now, for your very own.” – Ayn Rand

I find it disconcerting how often complete strangers or mild acquaintances will pester you about your views on ‘god’ once they discover you to be a non-believer. Ironically, the trend seems to be the reverse on challenging believers regarding their feelings about their God (then again most believers hardly require an invite to broach the subject.) Perhaps, that is why the brazen-ness of believers irks me so.

I find myself repeatedly being asked to ‘define’ my disbelief and I grow tired of the exercise of elaborating upon how I am not an atheist ‘as per I don’t believe anything’ but I am an a-theist ‘as per I do not believe in an anthropomorphic god or in religion’. This is usually met with a raised brow and ‘surely, agnostic then?’ to which I must sigh and say ‘no, ignostic if anything’. It is generally around this precarious juncture that my opponent smiles a derogatory ‘oh so you’re not clear and are deflecting’ smile and I am forced to dismiss the subject on grounds that raising the point ‘I don’t think one can be clear on anything pertaining to the numinous, I’m very clear about that’ doesn’t usually bode well in dogmatic duels.

The fact that people so easily accept absurdities that drive their lives and thought has always made me uncomfortable. We, as a species, generally tend to question and nitpick everything in our lives to the nth degree and yet I often find myself surrounded by people who can spend hours deliberating the merits or demerits of an outfit or video game but come to the subject of religion (not even belief, just the pure semantics) and suddenly everything flies, including flying ponies in seventh heavens! I do not question the efficiency of this model, however. The idea, that there is this cosmic space - where all this ‘stuff’ that you don’t know or understand or can conceive of - rests and congeals into one great, big, omnipotent GOD is awfully convenient. It allows a person to move on with their hour, their day, their year, their life. It affords us the chance to look at the sky and not wonder about how many galaxies there are; whether the craters on the moon have changed shape or whether we will eventually be eclipsed by the theoretical lip of Hawking’s black hole to witness ourselves in all tenses of time. It allows us to merely muse ‘oh the sky is so pretty today (insert a synonymous Inshallah, Mashallah, Alhamdullilah)’ and sigh. Religion takes this God fellow a step further, it markets Him and it has done so from time immemorial by stripping his subjects of their freedom to think.

The truth is, I find GOD fascinating (who wouldn’t find ‘all that is unexplained’ fascinating) and I always figured His space to be the pinnacle for inspiring quests and glorious metaphysical journeys into and outside of the soul. I thought the answers were so many and so diverse that one could spend ten lifetimes in search and not be any closer to the one-colossal answer (one I don’t believe exists) but have acquired so many ‘perspectives’ along the way that those lifetimes would have had ‘meaning’. That I would have stood in line with Descartes’ glorious maxim Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) and have proven my own existence rather than having over-reached far beyond my capacity attempting to prove that ‘existence’ exists.

I was always the girl who did what she was told. I never really spoke up against anyone, I listened when I could and I certainly manoeuvred my entire life to suit those around me and not cause inconvenience. I figured that none of it really mattered, since I had my mind – this near infinite blank space to fill and ferment as I saw fit. Then I learned about Allah, who said that ‘obedience’ extended to all of me. That my mind too needed to conform; that ‘thinking’ was all well and good as long as it was the kind of thinking that He approved of. I was thirteen when we first threw down the gauntlet and I demanded to keep myself. So, naturally I did what any Muslim girl questioning the basis for her existence would do. I tried to be the best Muslim I could be.

Theistic logic dictated that if I was Muslim enough, my doubts would fade away and I would be rewarded with blissful ignorance and blind faith once more. I enrolled in Al-Huda, with a friend of my aunt who (in her genuine good will and faith) worked to bring me deeper into the fold. I read the Quran daily; I memorised surah’s; I prayed five times a day; fasted the entire month of Ramazan and attended taravis at Faisal Mosque in the evenings; I even did the tahajjud (for two months) but it did not detract from the questions or the doubts that had led to my taking up being a zealot with such zeal. I suppose the fact that I was vociferously imbibing Dostoevsky and Rand at the time did not help matters much. As my final test and coming of Islamic Age gift to myself, I wore the hijab for approximately a year and a half. The latter was a public proclamation of my commitment to seeking God’s clemency. I don’t really know exactly what point it was when I discovered I had been pretending far too hard but I feel it was when my aunt’s friend gifted me with a volume of the Sahih al-Bukhari bearing the note ‘To Baby Maulana, here’s to ensure you spread the ‘light’’. The realisation that I was apparently required to ‘spread’ all this nonsense that I myself was affecting for an audience was the deal breaker.

Since then, I have had many conversations with friends, acquaintances and complete strangers about this infernal edict of the Nicene creed (to believe in one God) and it is hard to separate the basis of our disagreement. It isn’t just that we disagree on God per se…the real offence seems to knowingly disagree on god.

“Have you read the Quran?” they ask.

“Yes, several times, with translation, tafseer and commentary,” I clarify.

“How then, can you not believe?” they wonder.

“How, then can you believe?” I respond.

“Meaning?” they ask edgily.

“Have you met Allah, he has 99 names: some of the names are lovely others are brutal, petty and mean. This would intimate that he is both Lovely and Brutal. He forgives all but wipes out entire nations because they happen not to be favoured ones…etc,etc”

“That is not true, you haven’t read the real Quran” they ALWAYS say.

I have searched determinedly for this ‘real’ Quran the believers invariably allude to but cannot locate it. I find, that it is usually the same text- only it is read through the misty haze of a devotee who can skim blindly, deafly and determinedly over any passage that might force a pause in faith or trouble in conscience. Faith will always be justified by the faithful and will always be attacked by its sceptics. I fear this is the nature of thought being pit against belief. The former requires information and the latter intonation. The sceptic is often labelled a ‘reactionary’ or a ‘subversive’ for merely presuming to disagree with the believer. The only real difference between a believer and I is that we both read (heard of, were told about etc) the same books, they agreed with them and I didn’t. The trouble arises in the fact that the ghost writers and publishers of said books don’t take to critics well…or at all.

Something that truly disturbs me is the fact that I am born into a country that by its very definition I cannot love. Sure I can feel the frequent pangs of nostalgia and patriotism while watching a cricket match or listening to sufi music like all the rest of my generation but I, the kafir, could never really love this country. Pakistan, literally the ‘Land of the Pure’, was not made for me and it has no place for me. It was constructed as a box marked ‘Islam’ to contain only one brand of person. Sure some smaller, inconsequential, low-end brands have managed to trickle into the market and thereby we have our token Christians, Ahmedis, Parsee’s, Sikh’s and Hindus but there is no room, whatsoever, for the brand-less. For the creed that thrives on carving identities from the outside-in rather than the other way around. I will always resent this country for forcing me to state a falsehood on my passport, for having to confirm the lie in person and speech at every desk I ever sit behind or in front of on punishment of death.

God is a figment of the imagination. It is not enough to say that He is ‘man made’ because He is ‘me made’. Every one of us has a point where we will say ‘well my god doesn’t do that’. That crevice where someone brings up a theological trip-up that even a believer cannot go along with and which forces them to play on their back foot and bring up their god. That is where we all stand, with individual ab aeterno (from the eternal) constructions of a divine we cannot and will not every truly understand but one that some of us still care to want to ‘get to know better’. That thing; that anima that frames the breath around us; inspires in us creation and navigates the planets is never really to be boxed in, no matter how hard we try. The fellow the books call ‘god’ is a bastardised shadow of what mortals can comprehend of the incomprehensible, without having the courage to admit their incapacity. That thing prevails and will always remain outside our grasp. I am grateful really, that mankind will never be able to taint the truly numinous nature of whatever it is that spurs all creation, for we would ruin it as we have ruined pretty much every thing else.

In Pakistan, I was offered my first flighty taste of absurd freedom when I made my Facebook account and was able to state my true metaphysical leanings on a public forum. Some have mocked my usage of ‘Ignostic/ Pyrrhonist / Fanatical Epicurianist/Secular Fundamentalist’ under the tab of religious affiliation. I have been accused of trivialising the issue, whereas it is the exact opposite. I have tried to pick the ‘brands’ closest to the ones I might occasionally wear. There are just so many to choose from: atheist, agnostic, pyrrhoist, ignostic, nihilist, fallibilist, determinist, theist, solipsist, sceptic, humanist, relativist, gnostic, laicist etc.

When the truth is, in this most particular and pertinent life-style choice, I hope to stitch my own apparel and define my own wardrobe. I can only pray (sic) that more people would look outside the belief brand, box, label and tag.

A Story of Six

An aphorism is born...

It emanates from that subtle spark of self inherently ill at ease within its surroundings. A moment later it finds itself lost in the seamless scope of its own potential, scattered and fermented by doubt and deliberation. All that remains is a frail shard of the illustrious ‘what if’. Only the illusion lingers.

I wish I could say that it represents a resilient glimmer of hope but I cannot.

The days never end anymore. Nothing ends. Nothing begins.

Still there are some who choose to carry out the appearance of a life and she tries desperately to sit among them. The morning wakes in fear and she opens her eyes to a rattling window. The six minutes that follow are spent amid crumpled sheets with eyes screaming shut and senses as tightly tuned to the outside as Liszt’s piano strings. Then the sirens call, signalling time to switch in to the world and know again.

She is awake now.

Days, months, years are spent in contemplation. Odd recollections and impressions of what it means to be her, stuck inside this space. For the longest time she thought herself a writer; then she aspired to be a great reader and now she wants to be a martyr. The last, she figured as having been flushed out of her system, with her scepticism but life has a way of sticking to its plans in spite of the living, often only to spite them.

She had planned to nurture the spark in spite of life, the living and the loving. She would write words that would make strangers want to know her. She would plan her world without money or diamonds or people or ‘lookisms’. She would make it without any ‘isms’. She would sit in some secluded cabin in some god forsaken mountain with a sign on her door screaming ‘Utopia Under Construction’ to ward off all the nobody’s happening to hope of knocking on her door.

It all changed in a split second a year ago, in that horrifying city cut from glass and sky scrapers. She sat outside herself seeing things clearly for the first time and was surprised to find that all the grey still managed to produce crystals. She caught sight of a woman dressed in a rainbow-bright costume twirling six hoola-hoops, while a short man painted from head to toe in silver recited Shelley. She noticed a Japanese comedian improvising in a corner as the un-Asian crowd uncomfortably smiled in a joint attempt to find him funny. A woman in the corner played ‘sweet thing’ by Morrison as she realised that she may have misjudged this particular concrete jungle. It brought to mind the terrifying premise that perhaps she had misjudged all concrete jungles. That maybe she had limited the power of ideas and romance to confounded location and literacy.

For there, sinking in capitalist capitals, she had managed to stumble upon an underground. It had only escaped her notice because it was located amid jarring technicolour that only the irrevocably damaged could appreciate. But she found it, that circus of beautiful nightmares not cemented in foreign soil but floating to a frequency she could tune into whenever she held on to her delusions and splinters of hope tight enough. She was forever vacillating between joining the freaks and puppets and staking her days claim at benches where she could observe them from a distance. She would wait patiently, until their act was up and Tin Man and Rainbow Bright stripped down to their skins as they joined the crowd.

It scared her, the ease with which they morphed back into humans and killed all the magic. It terrified her how calmly they all soaked back the solace that ordinariness allowed. Suddenly they were the cruellest imposters she had ever encountered - traitors to magic, to hope, to dreams...ingenious, inglorious bastards of convenience.

That tryst with magic gave her something to carry back home. It offered her a tiny pearl of wisdom that echoed ‘hope and happiness and joy for all’. It kept up a streaming whisper that if she only tried hard enough - she would change something. If she was good in this old homeland which had always made her the ‘other’, she would manage. She was led to believe that she was the exact, extreme, mismatch that the place needed to challenge tradition, convention and conclusions. She never really believed it but she did hope for it. Hoped desperately in the vein of old Aesop’s fables her father used to read out to her in better times. Hoped like the ‘Frog who desired a King’ and said ‘let no man belong to another who can belong to himself.’ Hoped that the aphorism could include a woman.

She had been back for six months and the pearl had slipped silently through the seams, the screams, the solid, stoic surrender of new voices into a Somewhere she could never find. Others would always remain others in this other land of hers. And she was sitting on a slippery seat wrapped in tentacles wishing she was different; wishing this place was different; wishing these people were different...wishing everything was different. Her father told her to try making it so, but immediately recanted when he heard about the thundering thoughts that had taken root in her head. He told her that hers’ was a Muslim country and no matter how much better it got, or worse, it would remain one. He told her “If you don’t like it or you aren’t it, leave it” and his words splintered the shard completely with their unavoidable, implacable, impenetrable accuracy.

Check mate- brown and white and blown all over.

And now the fear and the anger and the apathy persists, it prevails, it even begins to pacify. She discovers a morbid sort of beauty amid the slums and shrapnel but it exists only for the freaks. The rest are drowned in a sea of plastic or dogma, dressed head-to-toe in latex or turbans. She silently bides her time all over again for an escape and this time there is nothing to come back for because this land doesn’t want others and it doesn’t need her ... it wasn’t built to stomach her. She searches the rubble for idle conversations behind all the screams that she can plagiarise for her self-serving prose.

And the story that started with shards ends with it. The day began with two deafening explosions that imploded her heart, her head and her faith and it ended with a story of six others. The others gave her something to replace her losses with.

A story of six cracks in human conscience, designed specifically to drill a point.

That there are no maybe’s and no midways. That she had lost.

Muss Es Sein?

Must it be?

“I have seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it” – Salvador Dali

I have been told that I possess a lens people wait for: the stolen secret, that elusive key into people’s faces. It isn’t all that surprising really, I have been reading faces and pre-empting my responses in accordance to what they share for quite some time now. I no longer even need to make an effort because all I see when I unlock them is the Ugly.

It is why they terrify me still.

There are no honest faces, mine least of all.

It is rather tiresome to realise that I can affect almost anything by making people believe what they want to about themselves. All people want, really, is to be validated. I suppose, if I am honest with myself that is what I have wanted practically all of my life. A silent, salient nod of approval from Them.

This year finds me working on myself, which is something I have never really admitted to be doing before. I have, in the past, sought great solace in the pretty premise that my flaws make me unique and are therefore a worthy foil to drag around for the rest of my life. I am revising that assumption now, only because I find myself alone again at much the inconvenient juncture to be alone. Confronted and caught by that catch-22, bouncing up and out of its perimeter again, I must deal with an old adversary: 'Marriage'. Having been asked by too many to consider ‘where I am going next' has made me recognise that this proposed hypothetical tangent certainly doesn’t involve an altar or ruining some poor, normal, innocent, human’s life. For some reason, those I meet do not find my carefully cultivated empathy for the happiness and welfare of strangers to be as endearing as I had hoped. 

My family has expressed collective relief over my abandoning my antiquated notions of fidelity, love and soul-mate-ship as pre-requisites for matrimony. But are rather upset at my insistence that my recourse lies in working my way back out of Pakistan, hopefully on a more permanent basis this time around and hopefully towards a PhD.

I often feel bad for them, because they haven’t managed to ‘fix me’ and Lord knows they have tried with the best of intentions. I am currently nurturing a most constant guilt for insisting on being ‘that girl’ who just won’t settle and be and want like everyone else. Who is ‘headstrong’ and ‘stubborn’ and ‘wrong’ because she felt abandoned at some twisted trajectory by two parents who both managed to move on with their lives but couldn’t possibly figure out what to do with this thing they’d created. Sure, it doesn’t help that she read herself into a cemented, unshakeable skepticism, unwilling to settle for anything less than a fairytale that the fore mentioned doubting default knows to be, well…a fairytale.

I have been presented with a long list of ‘musts’ for life, and depressingly (but unsurprisingly), my own musts completely circumvent it. The list is pretty standard: Marriage, Money, Children, Stability and Society, the latter pertaining to the opinion thereof (sic). Mine reads something like this: Writing, Studying, Working, Adopting (alas a compromise of wants) and …Alone. I am also presented with an ad hoc alternative: find a friend. Because, of course, finding friends has always been my strong suit. Let alone the kind of friend I could convince to covet my neuroses ad nauseam.

Recently, I stumbled upon a film called ‘Immortal Beloved’, a superb depiction of Beethoven’s life and love for the woman he alluded to in his will merely as ‘beloved.’ The film struck several chords with me and I now find myself listening to ‘Ode to Joy’ on loop every day as I drive over Cavalry Bridge on my way to work on Ferozpur road. There is a perverse magic in listening to a deaf man’s epic dance as one drives past cracked pavements, starving children and scuttling amputees. It makes for bitterness that I feel, he would have appreciated, nay …cultivated.

It was said of Beethoven, that he was a proud, boorish fellow. So consumed was he, with his genius that he deemed answering people’s casual greetings in streets as a common courtesy far beneath him. It took twenty years before he was vindicated and excused for having been deaf and thereby…a tad defensive. I can love him for this, for my disability lies in a floundering mind, a feeble tongue and a defensive heart. I would rather choose my failing though, so I have to add an element of cowardice to the collective crutch I use as an excuse to shun others.

If only it were all real! I wish I could mean my mind. I wish that I did not crave a friend. That I did not dream of a home and a false sense security that came from knowing that money had little place in happiness but a large part in the appearance of it. That I could somehow, transcend my need to look for broken people to be with and around, simply because I felt that they would not judge me.

Which is nonsense, of course, the broken thrive on judgment.
I should know.

At the end of the day, I recognize that there is a surreal sibilant romance in seeking after the crutch, the scar, the spill, the smash and the corner. As Cohen put it “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” While my rational self rebukes and reviles me for still cradling those shards, my mind must give way to habit. For it is said, that of all the Greats: Mozart, the Prodigy; Bach as Gods Violin; Tchaikovsky, the Weaver of Beautiful Nightmares; Vivaldi, the Romancer and Liszt, the Thunderer…there has only ever been one, whom they call, simply ‘Maestro’.

Es Muss Sein. It must be.

Es Muss Sein. It must be.