“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.’
