Of Counting Coppers

Statues made of matchsticks

Crumble into one another

My love winks, she does not bother

She knows too much to argue or to judge

                                                                                                     -Love Minus Zero/ No Limit by Bob Dylan

I seem to recall having been here before but I cannot recognise myself or this place. Although, the feeling is familiar enough, a former best friend…Desperation, born of long-term detachment. This has to be that odd point I always recede to when the world and those in it disappoint me or fail to live up (or down, as the case may be) to my expectations. It’s also the same holier-than-thou-hill I’ve set my fortress on since I was ten.

The past few months have been spent in a boiling, broiling cesspit of rage. That, is a place I do not recognise and so I haven’t really been able to process it or write about it until I was cool enough to try and compartmentalise and deflect properly. For some reason the only expression that keeps coming to mind to describe my place is ‘I’ve been played for a fool’ and I cannot understand why I haven’t questioned the semantics of this particular phraseology before. Who play’s a fool? The use of verb is completely misleading here, the fool is born to play and be part of play. A fool ought to take comfort in the familiarity of deceit and abandon, surely? I suppose that is my way of saying I have completely lost faith in the likes of ‘family’, such as it may be. And the romance of the Tarot deck is giving way to the reality of feeling small again. One that has hit me back with its usual ‘and why, you idiot, were you expecting things to turn out differently. Have you not learned ANYTHING?’ For once I am ashamed to say I have not taken any of the aftermath in stride.
I have cursed and cussed my way through the streets, while safely locked in my car.

I have screamed into my pillow a plenty and yet the tide of rage persists and keeps rising, rising, rising.

That is when I rebuke myself. ‘All that reading, all that practice, all that pretence at patience. And what is it for, if I too, can collapse and bitch like all the banshees I have grown accustomed to hear baying for blood at the slightest provocation’. My mother tells me ‘anger is healthy’ (go figure) because it has provided me with some odd form of initiative and drive to self-start my life trajectory at 28. This always brings to mind that somewhere along the line I lost 10 years of myself. Years that I could have spent being young, stupid and petty were spent being patient, stoic and stolid. They were spent in a refrigerator and now I feel like one of those musty ice cakes that Bashir used to bring out for the horses in Tarlai when I was 14.

Dry ice. The kind that never melts.

I’ve also jumped head first into a new - old obsession ‘Fantasy fiction’ and in one short month have finished six (average 700 page) volumes of the Game of Thrones. The obsession also appears to have extended itself to my recent penchance for employing terms like ‘ser’, ‘jape’ and ‘betwixt’ quite liberally. I find myself particularly admiring a coping mechanism used for the angriest, hapless, female character in the series, Arya. I am beginning to appreciate Arya’s ritual nightly recitation of a list of death warrants that she whispers to herself each night before falling asleep. I have now compiled my own list and even though all my years of fabricating tranquillity have not been washed away enough for me to pray for beheadings and spikes, I have begun praying for retribution and on occasion even, revenge. As much as I wish there weren’t, there is a perverse pleasure in what most people term ‘justice’ or my mother ‘what goes around comes around’ and I find I am not above relishing it. This scares the shit out of me but it beats purgatory any day. Then again, I don’t have the faintest clue who it is I am praying to so that might be moot.

Even more shameful, is my newly awoken greed. For the first time that I can remember, I have begun to miss … money. That security of having not to work for it should I choose. The lazy, ugly, hedonistic self-satisfaction of knowing I can leech off some sire, or spouse in stead. I used to dream of low-budget adventures, journal pages well worn in, concerts and backpacks but now I find myself dreaming about hefty bank balances, foreign accounts and first class travel. Small wonder, I haven’t reached the stage where I crave diamonds and cars but that might come some day too and that day, I fear I wont be able to face my mirror.

I’m walking around like a mousy Dorian Gray these days. Thinking the thoughts that ought to make my portrait pock faced and patchy but my cowardice to actually act on said nuggets, prevents that from happening. There it is again, purgatory…except now it’s this ugly, dank room filled with flies and reserved for ‘cravens’ (another GOT relic to reuse) that only means I didn’t even have the guts to be good at being bad.

That’s what brought me to ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’ again. According to Clinton Heylin in ‘Revolution in the Air’, Dylan wrote the song when he himself was drowning in coppers and dimes. He tried to mock the obsession that was taking hold and I can sympathise with the urge. The 1985 ballad, also one of his many portraits of Sarah, rode on the coattails of his other ‘mathematical songs’ like Dime Store, Bank Account Blues and Worse than Money. When asked about his references to Sarah as holy he said “What I mean by ‘holy’ is crossing all boundaries of time and usefulness”. Which certainly puts most of my pretty premises on the back burner. The song offers a mental balancing act, in the style of Keats, and recalls the latter’s notion of ‘negative capability’. What Keats called ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact, reason…or comfort’.

I live that.

It’s called patience.

And it blows.

But I was so much older then...

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet - Bob Dylan

I suppose I’ve been postponing this particular tribute for nearly fifteen years. Having touched upon my love for Dylan in tidy snippets before I didn’t really know how to take it on in full. Over the years, I have most certainly opened and closed many a sentence with one of his lyrics but it’s hard to really express the debt I owe the man. Still, it’s his 70^th birthday today so I figure there was no better time to try.

There has been far too much written about Bob and far too many labels used to describe his genius, so I think I’ll skip all the fan mail. I first discovered Dylan when I was thirteen and that may or may not necessarily have been a good thing. By then I had raised myself on a steady diet of John Denver, Tina Turner, the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen, so one might say I was primed for Dylan. I’ve always known that I was an old soul and admittedly a purist when it comes to art, it didn’t help that discovering Dylan kind of cemented that.

Naturally, it was the words. Words matter to me - they matter a lot. How they sound, how they move and how they affect me is one of the few pleasures I will always be grateful for in this world. The first Dylan song I ever heard was ‘Desolation Row’ and for a thirteen-year-old, only child with a penchant towards escapism and conversing with a troupe of imaginary friends that song was like a guidebook. It was the ‘How to’ manual for the hopeless romantic and I remember being frozen while walking in my driveway listening to FM100 through my headphones.

Now Ophelia, she's 'neath the window

For her I feel so afraid

On her twenty-second birthday

She already is an old maid

Something about those words continues to stop me in my tracks, it’s oddly flattering in a perverse way. Then again, I suppose everyone finds something for themselves in Dylan’s words. A tween-time nuance that is so obtuse and ironic that it allows people to fool themselves into believing it was written for them. For me, it was the fact that he operated beneath the surface of the truth. That made his words subtle enough to be true and trite at the same time…it was breathtaking. When you’re listening to Dylan, you’re mocking the world and you’re doing it in code far superior to anything Hammurabi might have conceived. Above all, you’re not doing it alone.

I remember the first time I cried listening to a song was to ‘Shelter from the Storm’ because I understood the perverse impulse to be free to take care of someone and make them fall in love with you while doing it. The rather jingle-jangle feminist in me cringes at that a little today. But that doesn’t stop the song from still making me cry.

To her, death is quite romantic

She wears an iron vest

Her profession's her religion

Her sin is her lifelessness

Then of course came the obsession, where I was glad to finally find one artist I would never be able to pin down or comprehend which guaranteed it would last forever.  That the romance would continue. That is perhaps the most beautiful thing about loving Bob Dylan, the fact that not understanding him and always wanting to remains a constant in one’s life.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m a bit of a musical purist so my personal Dylan avatar will always be the 60’s troubadour…not to say I still don’t loyally preen on everything he comes up with. But it was the awkward, shy, messy twerp with crooked teeth, strumming an acoustic guitar and yodelling ‘Hattie Carol’ outside a cotton plantation in the Mississippi that I fell in love with. I’ve never been comfortable with how success and money look on a person. In my experience money has a tendency to make people quite ugly, quite fast. Coupled with fame it’s just a play by play of every verse in ‘Disease of Conceit’. And even though Dylan wore it uncomfortably enough for me to still love him, I always liked him best in flannel.

What I am perhaps most grateful for to Dylan and his catalogue is the solace in knowing that being a hobo was a legitimate existence. That the nonconformity and misshapen-ness of ‘Quinn the Eskimo’ had a place and above all that the quiet of the mind in ‘Going to Apaculco’ could move mountains if it was enough for you that the landscape resided in your head. That was a relief like no other. Also, the man introduced me to pretty much everyone else that I live to listen to: Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Woodie, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, The Clancy Brothers, Mercedes Sosa, the beats, Muddy, Kristofferson, Haggard, Tom Waits, Hank Williams and with Theme Time Radio Hour, the journey and the moods continue.

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood

With his memories in a trunk

Passed this way an hour ago

With his friend, a jealous monk

In 2009, I finally got to see Bobby in concert. I was lucky too: to get the cheery, hoppity-hoopla Bob rather than sandpaper sulky Bob that often changes the guard in concert. For some reason though, I simply couldn’t pay any attention to the music. My three hours were spent stalking his every step and zooming in on every tip of the hat. I needed to constantly pinch myself that the man was real and not a phantom sweeping through the conscience of the O2 arena. By the end, I managed to creep up quite close to the stage, close enough to see his face and his expression. The only time I thought I spotted a wistful quarter smile on his face was during ‘Visions of Johanna’. Which is as it should be.

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world

Inside of a leather cup

But all his sexless patients

They're trying to blow it up

On some level my continuing adoration is a tad frightening at this juncture. I fell in love with the likes of Dylan, Cohen and Baez when I felt the need to escape from myself and my surroundings on a daily basis and the fact that this need continues to persist is proving dangerous. On some level, still being in love with Bob, as he turns 70 and as I approach 30 means that I may have just missed that sacred bus to Adultville. It also means that I will always persist on surreality to surpass reality and never give in to practical precision and penny counting. That is not the best move for a romantic who’s life is anything but rosy and who doesn’t have the skill, the resources or the talent to merit a never ending tour.

Given Dylan’s notorious media fright, people have stopped referring to him as a prophet, a messenger, a revolutionary or a troubadour. They appear to finally be toeing his line and refraining from labels. This development is perhaps a step forward for political correctness but frankly it hankers hollow. After all, the reason why no single word was appropriate to sum up Dylan’s genius was because he will always be better at manipulating words to describe what he sees in contrast to those who try to see him.

I have always maintained that Art is the only religion I am comfortable with keeping and artists tend to be my only prophets. If there is a conception of the sacred, the holy, the numinous, the soul or redemption I have always sought it in literature, in music, on canvas or behind the veil of the concrete and bitter folly of absolutes. That idea was born for me at the age of 15 when I first heard 

‘A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall’.

So I suppose the reason I still insist on believing Dylan to be a prophet is the fact that he never claimed to be one. I know I would lose my faith if he ever did. 

A Second Stab at Daughterhood

Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken - Jack Kerouac

Recently, I find myself contemplating the misbegotten exercise better known as ‘Eudemonia’. It has been nearly ten years since I took my first selfish stab at self- realization and the course has rendered mixed results.

Still, the question persists…Is happiness possible amid emptiness? Further more, is it possible to be flooded with guilt and guile simultaneously? It appears that I have been mistaking numbness and delusion for happiness for a while now. It has been over two years since heartbreak and it has also been two years since I had one of those days where one wakes up with a song in their head and hops around the bathroom while brushing their teeth. One of those days when it’s just good to be alive and for a fleeting 24 hours, there is no need to justify that.

But yesterday, I woke up with "Darling from the 7 Khoon Maaf" soundtrack in my head (It goes without saying that taste does not factor in particularly well with my subconscious). This recent foray into ‘Walking on Sunshineville’ ironically owes to my renewed relationship with my father. Forgiveness or forget-ness, and I’m not sure which comes first, is an odd thing. It has taken me years to fully admit to myself that I love my father. The sentiment has always been present but the admission has always eluded me. After all, how does one express love for someone who stands opposed to everything you represent simply because the person happens to have sired you? It has always been that way between him and I, an ever-present incomprehensibility regarding the other. He has always stood like a Titan over my literal and metaphorical shoulder …judging and I have always cowered under the gaze, all the while erecting harsher barricades in my mind.

Things appear to be shifting now, the ice of his disapproval seems to have thawed considerably. In retrospect, I suppose it is a waste that it has taken us half a lifetime to get here but it would be tragic to dwell on that. At times like this I am ever grateful for being granted the soul of  The Fool, who cannot digest tragedy for too long. I am programmed to delve into distractions and while my emotional and artistic setting may never be practical in the established sense, it serves its purpose. Our present conversations, Baba’s and mine, seem to me like the first level playing field we have ever pitched our hopes on. There is conversation and for once, there is disagreement (on my part) which is allowed (on his part). That is perhaps what I am most grateful for at this juncture, the fact that I can finally show my father who I am without the paralyzing fear of being shunned.

Our shy shuffling back and forth between phone calls and dinner dates is something I am coming to treasure and my nerves are no longer getting the better of me in the process. I am also developing a new found respect for the gentle, unassuming coding of Xeno’s second paradox. Because re-establishing one’s daughterhood after a near decade of silence means much shifting between time and mood zones. And Xeno’s “To get from A to get to B one would have to make half the distance between both points and then half of that half and half of that and so on” is proving to be a source of constant comfort. I suppose the romantic in me would like to think I am finally waltzing with Baba.

Our recent conversations have run over some turbulent waters: money and matrimony. The former is something I feel guilty about discussing and the latter seems to be something he feels guilty about broaching. All the while my own mind wrestles with those disastrous Freudian anagrams of girls who search for their father in all the men they meet and he seems to feel the need to reassure me constantly about how he will always provide for me. It is an awkward premise but at this point I am grateful for any foundation I can get.

There are times when I wish I could think about money, the future and security like other adults but it appears I am not built for such things. My moments are made simply by his silent approval of something I have said or done that in-turn allows me to turn a blind eye towards our silent disagreements.

Recently, he casually offered me one of my dreams over a platter of mushroom steak at Gymkhana.

“You want to go to Europe? Fine, you plan it. I’ll pay for it,” he said.

And what I felt wasn’t something as perforated as glee over the chance to finally travel and explore on my own-some, as I have always wanted to or the fact that I didn’t have to worry about how I would foot the bill. The feeling was nauseatingly primitive and rather obtusely Darwinian. It has been a long time since I haven’t considered myself as my own caretaker. Granted, it is quite liberating to know one is capable of taking care of oneself but it is even better one to know that one has Dad if and when one can’t. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I missed that.

“You can’t keep planning things and not living them. You need to stop letting all this ‘what if something bad happened’ nonsense stop you from doing what you want in life. Life is short and you don’t want to look back and think you didn’t do anything because you were too scared to even try and because you were too busy being perfect,” he says to me, oh-so casually.

The following minutes encompassed nearly three decades, where Schopenhauer’s time fractions split apart and an entire foundation I had constructed for my sanity shook me silly. Schopenhauer tells us that the shape of our intelligence is time, a thin line that only presents things to us one by one. And once upon a time, Time told me that I needed to be perfect for my father to love me. I knew I wasn’t. I knew that I was the soft, slobbering, quiet, romantic, troubadoring hobo to his unmovable, workaholic, stoic, brash and brilliant watchman. He knew it too.

But in those minutes I looked across the table and found that ten years had taken their toll on both of us. He –for better and worse, and admittedly much to my discredit – has stooped a little at the shoulders, his hair is grey and he occasionally laughs at my fumbling attempts at self-deprecation disguised as humour. I have learned to speak up for myself with some conviction and keep quiet only when required. I tell him things now, far from everything but some things. And he lets me.

Funnily enough, my mind can’t help but dipping into Jesus’ last words on the cross at such a juncture of metaphors and rebirths and all that rambling new-age lunacy. ‘Consummatum est – It is completed.’

 I believe I can finally close a book that I have lived in for a long time. I can finally move beyond a story, where I was the daughter who had to turn her back on everything she knew to feel alive.

I’m hoping starting a new chapter means we both can.

The Story That Should Be

Once upon a time there was the dream of the perfect bedtime story. An arousing fairytale to be told to a little girl tucked in bed awaiting delusions of grandeur she would come to call ‘dreams’. A heroic account of new beginnings and fabricated fortitude. A story where good always triumphed and the prince always kissed her princess awake and alive in the end. And where the princess still retained the satisfaction of being saviour.

The story would feature time as a spatial nuisance, given no more consideration than an empty container and solitary continuum. A space, where beginnings and ending could randomly occur in a tangential loop of ideas. Kafka’s clocks colliding with Kubric’s consequences.

The story would showcase life cemented in post-modern witticisms and ironic sharp turns that are somehow always fortuitous. A tale with an ever-present score flitting through a background of smug repartee’ and credulous conversations. The strains effortlessly shifting from Under the Sea to Beethoven’s Elise and from James Horner’s I Am Gladiator to Eminem’s Lose Yourself. No moment left undernourished, overturned…subdued.

In the story, the saviour will struggle. She will survive and she will always, always, Always win. She will get the guy, who will be crafted into so many layers he will virtually iron himself off the page.

A check-list of idle wish fulfilment fit for the most discerning of princesses:

Wit – check

Idiocy - check

Smarts – check

Smiles – check

Scowls - check

Kindness- check

Cruelty - check

Handsomeness – check

Ugliness- check

Perfection – check

Flaws - check

Success – check

Failure – check

Independence – check

Desperation – check

And in the story she will always be enough. More than a match for him and occasionally fashioned to outshine him completely.

The fairy tale will be a contrived tragedy composed with a hint of suspense, a dash of drama and only a deliberate sprinkling of laconic comedy. With a surprisingly happy turn right before the end. Cohen bros meets John Hughes; with a set designed by oompa loompas; a score by Tchaikovsky and lyrics by Dylan. Scripted by Woody Allen (the Hall years), directed by Jack Warner and shot at Dream Works Studios for unavoidable realisation.

The story is beautiful.

And it is beautiful because it has no beginning and only a Happily Ever After at the close… which never comes.

The story is pristine.

And it is pristine because it hasn’t been told.

The story hasn’t been told.

And it hasn’t been told because the little girl meant to believe in it has yet to be born.

Haphazard Haiku's

So a friend of mine is leaving for the mountains.

It makes me sad in a way because we won't be 'being friends' over sporadic samosa chaat's and literary gobbledygook any more. He saves lives, travels a-cross country and somehow still finds time to make copies of films and songs for me. He also lends books that I can't read because I have to refrain from defiling the margins.

Still, he seems to have a knack for picking the exact volumes I can't refuse, at least, attempting to peer through like a normal person. He appears to have taken to composing Haiku's to avert boredom and the wait. I think it a fantastic idea, enough to plagiarise.

 Journalising gems

Typos, tall tales and technocrats

I need to find a new job

         ~

Days on end

Drive-thru’s and American Idol reruns

Series of unfortunate events

        ~

Spilling guts

Retractions, restrictions, ramifications,

All because she said I should talk to someone

         ~

Applications

waiting by gate, breath catching, envelope slitting

phone bill

           ~

Stranger spotted

Dark eyes, lazy grin, flashy car

Rear window: “Gujjar”

          ~

 

Grandparents on prayer mats

 

Theist, Deist, Atheist et al

 

God cheers on India in the semi-final

Little Mermaid Diary Entry

My Birthday, 22 July 1992

Dear Diary,

It's been a horrible birthday and I haven't been able to call or speak to mom yet. Besides, I didn't get any of the presents I wanted. I wanted to go horse-back riding and spend the entire day with Baba, camping somewhere in the mountains.
I hate my birthdays because everyone always acts kind to me but they never ask me what I want to do. If they had I would have told them that I just wanted to spend my birthday talking to Mom and spending time with Baba. I don't know why people are always pretend-nice before they say something really hurtful. Why do they always say "I dont mean to be rude" just before being rude?
Baba wasn't here today but he bought me a camera. It looks expensive and is pink. I don't think he knows that I don't really like pink and that blue is my favourite.  I have taken 19 pictures so far, of my book shelf, Pepsi (the dog) and the three strawberries that are the only ones left in the vegetable patch.

I don't like taking pictures as much as writing words. I'm sure that is why I want to be a writer. Because writing words is a lot harder and I would still much rather do that than take pictures. But to be a writer I will need to learn how to write poems. All the writers in movies write poems in their journals when they are sad, which seems to be very often. So here is my first poem:

Ravenge (sp) by Maria Amir

I know I’m small

And you don’t really like me at all

You keep pushing me against the wall

And I always, always fall

But I promise you something

I will grow a little bit each and every year

So, the next time you call

I’ll be standing tall

And you’ll seem quite small

 

Oh, and Happy Birthday to me.

Maria Amir

Love and Peanuts

Peppermint Patty: What do you think love is Chuck? 

Charlie Brown: Well, years ago my dad owned a black, 1934, 2- door Sedan.

Peppermint Patty: What does that have to do with love?

Charlie Brown:  This is what he told me... there was a real cute girl, see. She used to go for rides with him in his car and whenever he’d call for her he’d always open the car door for her. After she got in and he closed the door, he’d walk around the back of the car to the driver’s side but before he could get there she would reach over and press the button locking him out. 

Then she’d just sit there and wrinkle her nose and grin at him.

That’s what I think Love is. 

Peppermint Patty: Sometimes I wonder about you Chuck.

Charlie Brown: *sigh* Me too.

In the inimitable wisdom of the late philosopher Charles M Schulz in "Snoopy, Come Home".

Serenades and seating charts

"I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does."  Jorge Luis Borges

She no longer knows what bothers her more, artifice or avarice. Or was it just the emptiness, overwhelming and ravenous as it engulfed every crevice of her soul?

Perhaps it was merely the fact that she was a prude playing the game. Ever defensive, overwrought, a highly strung muse to so many... lurking in corners waiting for some inspiration of her own. Always on the lookout for the one roguish, gypsy, genius with means in want of a quirky woman over an easy one. It was the wait that truly crippled her. That state of expectations piled one on top of the other. It corroded all optimism and all passion, leaving in its wake a jaded desperation best illustrated by the slogan buttons  she wore pinned to a girl-scout sash 'practical', 'sensible', 'settle' and at the very top 'compromise'. 

She pretended she was past all that now. Older and wiser, experienced enough to no longer relish the infantile - and decidedly unfeminist notion - of a saviour to rescue her from her hollow cries of independence or her carefully cultivated status quo titled "self reliance".

There were fleeting moments when she felt that being a woman was perhaps the worst possible curse and others where she praised herself for being evolved enough to keep men in their rightful place: wanting. Still, she sifted through the scores of men who now appropriately pretended to care about the words coming out of her mind while simultaneously praying for them to give way to drunken demands of hasty one-night stands. Something they could both forget in the morning. She, so that there was an excuse for her own weakness and they, so that they could move on to a far less convoluted subject. 

She belonged to an odd, angry generation forever pretending to hate the men who kept trying to shackle her kind, while finding herself incapable of dismissing them completely. It was an ugly, sordid, bitter pill to swallow. But she still found herself seated at yet another bar stool, next to yet another man pretending to be enthralled by her treatise on Tchaikovsky; forcing conversation on the most recent death-toll in Gaza, all the while wondering if her breasts were larger than his ex-girl friend's and whether she was prone to screaming bloody murder during sex. 

It had gotten to the point where no one could remember who switched on the music for this moribund session of musical chairs, where no one ever won but everyone got laid. Perhaps it was better when there were good night kisses to be had and wedding vows to bind, she thought but dismissed the idea immediately. The only difference there was that the music was perceptibly slower. Was that where they now stood, perched on a pedestal overlooking a colossal  answer that rested on whether women preferred acapella and  blues to rap and techno?

She first had sex when she was thirteen and during the proceedings she managed to compose an entire sonata staring at a spider's web on her third-period lab partner's ceiling. She could no longer count the number of eyes she had gazed into while looking for that one pair that made searching worth it. It'd been twenty years since she started and she was still waiting for the music to stop. 

For that pair of eyes. 
For that first kiss. 

The scariest thought of all was that she might not recognize it when it came...if. 

We should get together some time...

He says to me “write what you know,” as he leans over the dinner table and surreptitiously tries to stare down my shirt.
He asks me to look outside the legions of hypocrisy lacing every thought that surrounds me as he pedals the gas harder to avoid being caught dodging a red light.
He says to me “You never get angry, baby. It’s like you're tip toeing around me. Why do you act like you’re scared of me?” And proceeds to call me a prude for telling him how much I hate being called ‘baby’.
He tells me that my pretty philosophies will never bring me happiness and that he’s at peace because he has everything 'people' could possibly want. The house, the car, the cash. Then he bemoans how his life will never be complete until he's sitting in a penthouse in Manhattan and driving a Ferrari.
…
“Here is what I know”
I know that man is the ugliest animal there is. Especially, when he is beautiful.
I know that bitterness is somehow poignant and smiles are simple and often offensive.
I know that sex is a ritual people perform to avoid loneliness. That lovers often brew their bitterness in ceramic mugs to write poems about the sex they could have been having if they weren't so busy posing as poets.
I know that I am lost and floundering in a sea of crimson couples staring at our table and whispering about 'which one of us could do so much better' behind my back.
I know that I am living in the grip words that lack faith and that echo nothing more than accomplished vocabulary wrought in syllogism.
I know that I seek the approval of the very degenerates I abhor.
I know that I hate my mirror. Especially, when it approves of me.
I know that I cannot believe in the unfailing mercy of a creator who fails to forgive the one child forever struggling for his attention and approval.
Sad, sad Satan…I know how you feel.

Above all, I know that the next time you call I will say "No. I am busy"
 ...doing nothing.

The Vault

“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”  - Fyodor Dostoevsky

I suppose it is okay to finally admit at this solemn stage that I was always an odd child. Recently, I have been reading over my Little Mermaid Diary and this particular entry caught my attention.

Summer, June 11, 1994

Dear Diary,

Today Sana, Kiran, Tania and I were playing truth or dare after school because our cars were late. I picked truth and they asked me who I had a crush on. I told them about Rehan and they laughed at me for over an hour. Then they told me that people couldn’t get crushes on servants and that it was very wrong.

I feel very ashamed. Mostly because I still think that Rehan is the kindest and handsomest boy in the world.

Maria

I remember that day quite vividly. It rests among those one-off memories from middle school that one carries around in their conscience as some poignant remnant of a life lesson. I never told anyone about Rehan again. And I am ashamed to admit that I still feel 'ashamed' about my first crush.

I don’t really believe in guardian angels, or angels …or guardians for that matter but I know that I have had one. His name was Faiz – Baba Faiz, to be precise - and he saved me from my life for nearly 7 years as I struggled to retain my humanity in the face of an all-too-appealing numbness. He died when I was seventeen and the numbness returned full force after that, it set in and congealed. It has never really left me since.

Faiz was in his sixties, a pathaan and from ‘way up north’. The kind of north that one sees engraved in bonny pink skin, grey-blue eyes and an accent that can never, ever affect gender properly. He was the first person to ever call me ‘Maria Saab’ and he spent his time preparing secret meals for me; listening to my heavily fabricated accounts of the novels I was reading as he pottered around in the kitchen and pretending to appreciate my musical sensibilities as I forced him to listen to the Beatles, Dylan, Abba and (I am ashamed to admit) on occasion, Ace of Base. He had the patience of a saint because he never let me believe for a second that he wasn’t hanging on every word I said, even though most of those words happened to be in English.
Once, he even let me comb his beard, which I am told is a patriarchal sore point for the pathaan.

I never really operated within the pretty little boxes people construct to keep the classes at bay and in their 'proper' place. Perhaps this was because I was always surrounded and serving with the serfs. They were my people in many ways because they humoured me. And no one ever humoured me. Faiz was my ideal man really. He was beautiful, kind and brilliant and his being illiterate always struck me as a blight on society rather than on his person. I could never really hold it against him. I always figured that we all were the cowards and that we needed him to stay in the kitchen. Because if he could speak like us and sit with us then no one would ever look at us. He would shine too bright and we would fade out to being the dark splotches set in the backdrop.

That’s kind of how I felt about Rehan too. That summer Faiz’s nephew from ‘way up north’ came to work near him. Rehan occasionally stayed with Faiz in our servant quarters after his work ended. He was fourteen and more beautiful than anyone I had ever seen. He was everything I wasn’t…fair, tall, brilliant at every single sport he took up, adept at calligraphy and  sharp and incisive about asking all the questions that I was too terrified to contemplate. He adored reading and learning and I remember him asking my cousins and I to help him learn English in exchange for teaching us how to make Afghan jewellery, climb trees, improve our cricket and tame our dogs.

I remember spending a lot more time with Faiz in the kitchen that summer hoping to catch a glimpse of Rehan and finding any excuse to impress him with my English. I didn’t pass any chance to gloat about the only thing I had over him. A language he had never really had the chance to beat me at. It was a sad balancing of scales. Faiz always made it a point to stop our conversations just when I got the feeling he was beginning to laugh at my jokes.

I have never really experienced that thrill since. Of meeting someone, I so desperately wanted and somehow I never realised how ugly my first crush was outside of that kitchen, that swing-set and that gate. But now I realise how ugly it must have seemed to people. Ugly enough that I pretended it didn’t exist.

As for Rehan, his face always remained locked, like a safety vault. A myriad of ideas and valuable expressions closed away so that people couldn’t see him. I remember trying my utmost to flirt with him and his polite dismissals aimed at reminding me of my place. A place, ironically above him on the crush-o-meter, despite the fact that I hardly measured favourably in any light he cast me in.

When he left after two months, Rehan gave me a paazeb and a pair of jhumkis he and his brother had made and I remember feeling for just a glimmer of a moment that he may have liked me too. I remember his departure being the first time I ever cried over a boy. It was an uncomfortable right of passage for my first failed almost-romance and I don’t really know who to blame for that one failure that set the pace for all future failings. I was reminded of it today completely by accident until I went searching for it in my archives.

I had cut my finger on a blade in the kitchen and on my way to work I was still nursing enough self-pity to lead me to treat myself to garam cholay from a cart outside Raja Market. As I sucked on my finger prudishly, I noticed the sores and burns on the vendor’s hands. Blisters and boils that he had collected over years spent making channa’s for the likes of me for a farthing. The man smiled at me as he handed me a Rs20-pack and he had Faiz’s eyes and accent. And suddenly Faiz was there and he was still the most beautiful man in the world and I still didn’t understand why I was not allowed to say that out loud. This new avatar was also far too beautiful to keep locked up in his life.

I found myself choking on the winter air and I couldn’t swallow a single grain as I grappled once more with a problem I have spent my life trying to skip around.

The real tragedy is that I know I will get over it.