Così fan tutte : Remember, Remember the 5th of November

It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.”   

-DH Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

I find myself flummoxed by life at present. It is an odd place to find oneself in, especially seeing as it’s November and this has traditionally been my month to wind down, consume inordinate amounts of coffee and listen to disproportionate dealings of Dylan. I reserve my annual existential crises for this particular season but my personal and professional clocks seem to have miscalculated my gestation period this year. There is just way too much to do and this means that my self-prescribed procrastination must be held at bay and I am making do with small snippets of existential angst as I drive to work each morning.

Mind you, I am not depressed. I have never thrown about that word as casually as most people do, whenever things fail to go their way. Having battled with genuine depression, I can generally distinguish between melodrama, the odd funk and full blown-out doldrums. I suppose this current state is best categorized as a rather portent blend of aggressive ennui. I am finding that ennui makes me pretentious. It has got me listening to Opera again. And, for those of you who haven’t tried it, it is a particularly nocuous negotiation listening to Puccini or Beethoven in Pakistan. The magnanimity of the score coupled with the surreal gritty road-side-miseries somehow render poverty poignant without meaning to. It is the most uncomfortable mingling of opposites that I can think of and that is perhaps why I find it all heartbreakingly beautiful.

My current playlist includes Massinet’s Meditations; the more robust Ode to Joy and when I am feeling particularly vindictive…Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Wagner, in particular, should come with a warning label and an R-rating. Beware: Contents are liable to cause overflow of latent phobias and passive-aggressive angst. I can trace all this back to four days ago, as I casually sifted through my mail to stumble upon my divorce papers. Ordinarily, I should be glad seeing as I have hardly given my misnomer-of-a-marriage much thought over the past few months, devoting most of my energies towards overcoming it with politically-incorrect pizzazz. Still, there is an odd power to a piece of paper, formally drafted in a language you cannot comprehend announcing your freedom from your biggest mistake. I spent the first two hours pretending I hadn’t seen the papers; another two hours rejoicing over them and the next few days trapped in a miasma of ‘what ifs’. Not about the decision to get divorced so much as the repercussions of having put my emotions on the line and realizing that I should have stuck with my original instincts and kept to my own company.

A friend recently visited my house and upon seeing my room whimsically remarked “Wow, your room seems really well-inhabited”. It was one of those odd, offhand, too-precisely observed comments that one cannot help but deflect with humor in the moment. My room has –for the most part- been my periphery planet. When I was ten, it was another room with ten years of being locked from the outside. The last ten years have meant a perverse sort of decadent independence but it didn’t change the fact that I still located my life within a room, this one locked from the inside.  I suppose, it all boils down to a Stockholm Syndrome conflation of being imprisoned and eventually learning to enjoy it. Both prisons lead to a locked door regardless of whether or not it is of ones own choosing. That is the odd place I find myself in right now, negotiating between being a person I wish I was –one that I now find I am rather good at affecting – and the person that I am. The former has friends and the latter resides in a cocoon of literature, music, films and sonnets composed to a conglomerate of fictions that require no justification. I have always been one of those people who lacks balance. I can ‘act’ balanced better than most people I know purely because I am all too aware of how vulnerable my innards are on this score.

That is perhaps, why, my new job may just end up saving me. For the first time, I am bound by contract to interact with other people… in droves. And while, people are still not my primary choice of company, they are no longer the last on the list either. Armed with self-deprecation, I think I can deflect any particularly pointed judgments thrown my way. My pathological fear of people is amplified a thousand-fold as a teacher, especially as I recall how my friends and I used to mock our own teachers. Setting them apart as a different species, flawed, formidable and frivolous - infuriatingly peppered with the presumptuousness that they were capable of ‘teaching’ us anything. So I hope that laughing my way through two hours and overt obsequiousness will make my students ‘not-hate’ me. And then there is also the charm of being on a campus again. University campuses provide an odd moratorium on both life and reality. Places where learning is contagious and there is no warranty on the watershed of ideas. I wish I could tell my students that this is the only time in life that they will get to do this, have big ideas and not have them belittled; think big thoughts and believe them to be big enough; make friends and keep them. I have recently taken to walking on campus after wrapping up my classes with my headphones plugged in and listening to the closing act of Swan Lake. Now THAT is November at its best, coupled with the occasional chili prawns from the cafeteria soaked in just the right consistency of unpalatable grease; grading that unicorn-ian brilliant essay plopped onto a cushion in my office, toes basking in my uggs with a steaming cup of coffee.

That is how I stumbled upon Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, K588 day before yesterday. The Italian opera buffa literally means ‘Thus Do They all’ (or The School for Lovers) with the latter libretto penned by Lorenzo Da Ponte. Technically, the title means ‘Thus do all Women” and the music was scored to try and capture the duality of women, sung by men who could never comprehend them. I’ve been listening to it on loop and while my mind has trouble agreeing with the intonation of all the silly things women are meant to symbolize, my heart cannot help but melt at Mozart’s rendering. Especially given the fact that the man in question generally fell far below the standards of what anyone would consider a gentleman. It is almost as if a Lost Boy, perhaps even Pan himself, composed a song for a girl and lacked the courage to play it. I can relate, especially, because I am finally meeting and mingling with women and ironically, not loathing the experience. As someone, who has generally found it difficult to cultivate friendships with my own sex, it is a relief to scratch some very brittle surfaces only to discover kindred souls struggling with the same emotional see-saws.  I have been trying to incorporate these people in my life on a semi-regular basis and it has proven to be a fruitful but formidable task. This is perhaps the best of any worlds I have ever experienced. I hesitate to call it so, but it is almost a state of grace: Aloneness…with options.

While I am enjoying the company immensely, I know myself well enough to recognise that I will never enjoy it enough to submerse myself in it completely. I have and always will be one of those ‘periphery-friends’. You know, the ones people remember as an afterthought

‘Whatever happened to her?

Where is she these days?”

I will never be someone’s somebody because I can’t reciprocate that need. That isn’t to say I don’t ever feel such a need. It is an appealing thought, this theory of having ‘your person’ in the world: pro-choice, at your beck and call to complete your sentences, thoughts and blanks. My failing lies in a fatuous self-love cloaked (or cloaking / have never been able to really figure out which) as self-loathing. I somewhat relish the romantic table scraps of being that girl who is hard to forget but even harder to remember.

Bricoleur Du Dimanche : Of Sacred Spaces

“The Guide says there is an art to flying,” said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss"

                                                                       - Douglas Adams, ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’

I’ve never really considered my life in the context of time and space before. For the most part, I tend to view existence as a series of consequences and my reactions to them. These days, however, I find myself seriously contemplating the subtle dynamics of the time-space continuum…not so much in commonly contrived trekkie terminology involving cylindrical beams of light, rather as my own personal bubble of actions, reactions and timing. If I think about it hard enough, I can easily divide the past ten years of my life into alterative spikes and pitfalls on a sonogram. I’ve peaked in some years and plummeted in others.

I wouldn’t exactly call it a balance but it helps keep perspective. I am presently enjoying the idea of a personal reboot. Every time I find myself facing a large group of people sitting and listening to me speak (and not falling asleep), it is a colossal validation of …something I can’t quite capture anywhere else in my life. It feels rather powerful and I suppose that is somewhat perverse. I never really saw myself as a teacher before, mostly because I haven’t really considered anything I know worth teaching. Still, it is proving to be an odd form of release …almost as if one is able to forgo personal ambition without experiencing guilt. There is a colossal sense of relief in this, given that I was never much good at self-actualization.  Teaching offers up the chance to feel ambition on behalf of other people, wanting, even craving their success without having to worry too much about ones’ own anymore.

It is the least selfish I have ever felt.

It is also the most free I have ever felt.

I find myself suddenly absolved of the weight of ‘perfection in possibility’ leaving behind simply…possibility. I am finally contemplating writing my novel and just writing in general because I am no longer terrified of not being good enough to meet my own standards. I am finally willing to let others judge me and I am able to not collapse under their criticism. I suppose that is the greatest lesson I could have learned in the last year and it seems to finally be sinking in somewhat.

More recently I find myself contemplating sacred spaces. Crusty crevices marked in my day that I cannot quite capture but that might prove golden if only I could hold on to them long enough to let them be born. As it is, they are mere figments, conceived and aborted during my breakfast coffee or as I return to my office from class. I find all my good ideas, gentle hopes, idle quests melt away into one giant sieve of ‘wanting’. I’m not quite sure what it is I want anymore but I do feel that I am finally in that particular personal time-space continuum that relishes moving forward. I suppose it was a long time coming. Do you have that? That sweeping knowledge that you managed to think at least a dozen epic thoughts before lunch but that they’ve all dissolved by dinner? In Sanskrit they call it Bhrantapratavakavakya, the room into which we go on putting our hopes and dreams and desires. I can’t help thinking that at some point, it is beyond time we started looking for a key to the door, rather than an extended lease that allows us to add on more space to its piling proportions. Perhaps carpe diem is the order of the day

…or at least this day.

I have discovered that my car is a sacred space: all the in-between mandatory conversations I need to have with myself cloaked in the midst of music, traffic and idle stalkers on the road. I’ve always loved driving. The hellish traffic of Lahore; the familiar streets and the perfunctory juice waala’s at chowks are a constant source of pithy inspiration, idly composed tweets and wry smiles. Driving allows me sanctimonious security shrouded in the illusion of momentum. Even if I’m only moving forward in a circle that always leads back to the same place. I find that I do some of my best thinking while dodging motorcyclists and navigating traffic, listening to Rafi and stopping for nimboo-naaryal at Hussain Chowk. It is why I love this city - when the weather is right; the traffic optimally erratic and the playlist particularly profound, one is able to tap into a personal frequency that is never accessible amid the complacency of home. Of to-do lists, to-go places, to-meet people and to-eat foods. It’s a composite of colour and alive-ness that cannot really be captured in words properly, so I will stop trying. But it is there. And it is sacred.

Another sacred space, I am discovering, is the toilet seat. Funny how little credit we give our personal thrones as if it is somehow improper to acknowledge that our brains tend to function and philosophize at their best when our bowels are moving in the opposite direction. My own bathroom is its own odd little oasis. The rickety exhaust fan window opens sounds to a completely different world. From the servant quarters of my neighbours’ house below I can often hear the voice of Isa Khelvi and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan wafting through. Other times I can hear the tail ends of Bollywood film one-liners, the old ones, mixed in with snippets of crowded conversation that tells of a too large family crammed into a too small room. So far I’ve archived one-liners from Bobby, Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar, Chandni and on several occasions Namakhalal and Sholay. Sometimes I can smell parathas and other times I can hear potent Punjabi swearing. I know, for example, that ‘chote saab’ is a ‘chootya’ and ‘Shauki’ (one of the children) is a climber, given the number of times his mother says ‘Abe Haram Deya, fer taun deevar tappan laga e. Khasma noo Khaa, Shauki, thalle aa’. The intensity of developing mystery that is my neighbours’ household staff waxes and wanes depending on how boring my bathroom book is.

A new space I am discovering is the class room. I find myself trying to empathize and emphasize with and for my students in equal measure. To make them have fun but not too much fun. To make them ask questions but not too many questions. To teach them what I feel they ought to know and to resist teaching them what ‘I know’ instead. It’s self deprecation meets self actualization. But I know I am enjoying it more than I ever enjoyed anything else. I crave the adrenaline of entering a room full of people every day and not knowing for a split-second before I open the door if my voice will fail me. I love the sheer star burst of relief and ideas that follows when it doesn’t. There is a word in Japanese, Ikigai, that the people of the island Okinawa derived to mean ‘a reason to get up in the morning’. I understand it a little now. This is not to say that I feel ‘teaching’ is my calling or something. I’m so far, not sure I am any good at it and a part of me will always seek a self soaked in words. But it is, so far, my best use of words.

Perhaps I am one of those cobblers that the French call bricoleur du dimanche, an ingénue with an undiscovered calling who starts building always without clear plans, always adding bits on the fly.

A flight risk, with a purpose that can only be sustained when there is a pitfall in sight.

A glitch with a chip on her shoulder but a smile on her face.

A cobbler, whittling together the prefect pair of shoes, improvising madly each time the heel collapses and she finds herself stumble.

Qarrtsiluni: The Storm Before Calm

“He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.” – Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Lately I am discovering that it is perfectly possible to congeal and compound simultaneously. I appear to be driven presently by this odd, portentous and rather stubborn sense of self that I have acquired ad hoc during the past year. In some respects, I feel that I am rather too pig-headed about ‘picking up the pieces’ of my life following my divorce and that I may have overreached far beyond my capacity. I find myself somewhere in the middle of constructing an entirely new existence. I am terrified of anything in myself or my surroundings remaining the same as before because this may lead me down the same inevitabilities I chose last year. I have always been at odds with my own person but it is different this time. In the past my personality and my surroundings have generally remained inversely proportional but now I scour the edges of an odd prefix trying to fight myself and my surroundings simultaneously. I suppose this is how one whittles a new self into being. Kind of like instant coffee, Divorce can give you enough of a belated caffeine kick to motivate instant personality. 

You may or may not have gathered this by now but I have always been one of those people who knew what they didn’t want from life much more clearly than what they did. This approach served me well so far because it was constructed out of the confusing confetti that was narcissistic, nihilistic and needy in equal measure. Most people aren’t like that are they? After all one can deduce that self love and self loathing are parallel emotions but there are few who acknowledge both simultaneously. I now see myself trying to actively look for things that I ‘do’ want from my life with a rather forced sense of desperation. I find myself rudderless which pushes me into pretending I am ready to weather any storm simply because I cannot abide acknowledging how terrified I am of just floating through life. 

It’s rather amusing if one is inclined to appreciate irony in the face of crippling doubts. I hope you are such a person, I find being able to laugh at one’s misery adds a somewhat endearing brand of gravitas and whimsical idiocy to ones personality that is oddly affable. I know I always enjoy the company of people who are equal parts self-deprecation, self-doubt, genius and absurd. I always believed that the key to my own survival has been the fact that I do not expect happiness from life. My childhood set me on a default path where I don’t just expect things to go wrong. I know they will. This has almost never phased me. It has always been joy that surprises and lifts me purely because of how unexpected it is. I recall my therapist once telling me that this was ‘such a cynical way of going through life’ while begrudgingly acknowledging the sheer titanium durability of my coping mechanism. 

The way I figure it, people who are ‘naturally’ optimistic have much more cause for disappointment and are frequently crippled by the fact that life, does in fact, often suck. On the other hand, those of us who work from within the reality of that premise have a much better shot at enjoying the small pleasures life affords when and where we get them. We are not perpetually tip-toeing around the pitfalls of expectation. And who is to say that ‘real’ optimism isn’t born out of that peculiar brand of perennial pessimism that can occasionally laugh at life when offered the chance, rather than the hackneyed one-liners about silver linings, and ‘God has his reasons’ that are much more likely to lead to emotional collapse? I always come back to the pre-Socratics during these proceedings. Heraclitus teaches us that everything in nature changes. Parmenides, on the other hand warned us that the only things that are real in this world never change. When you pit both ideologues against their ideas, you are soaked with one reality: Nothing is real.

And that is why I make lists. 

When I was a teenager, on the throws of dramatics, I attempted to kill myself for a third time. My therapist suggested perhaps the most kitsch, hackneyed cliché as a coping mechanism for what I was going through. He told me to immediately list 15 things that would make me happy. I recall, I started with a villa in Santorini and he immediately haggled me down to 15 things I could do ‘right there and then’ that would make me happy. My first was a cold glass of coke; my second was strawberry ice-cream; my third was an animated Disney feature; my fourth was buying key chains; my fifth was waiting for rain; my sixth was Dylan’s ‘To Ramona’ ....my last was simply the colour Blue. To this day, all my dark days, are held at bay by the same list. I maintain - as strongly as my grandmother does that Arnica-250 is the cure for all of life’s diseases – that a glass of coke is the cure to all of life’s problems. It is the pithy, pesky absurdity of the exercise that serves the formula for its success. Naturally, such silly measures are no adhesive for soul-crippling complexes and yet the fact that one tries, every time, to not give into the black holes that seem so determined to suck you in is what saves us. It is the effort and choice to not ‘want’ to be depressed that outweighs living in the dark. 

It has worked well for me so far but now I feel it fading. I suppose it is my unwarranted ambition that is at fault. I have never really wanted much from life beyond the attempt to do what makes me happy. I worked towards that right, I fought for it and I recognize its value far beyond the new-age idiocy if self-help books. I learned long ago that small goals were the only key to a steady happiness quotient. This recent break in my emotions seems to have messed with that fundamentally. I feel myself moving in and out of my comfort zones, trying to wrestle myself into a person who can do anything she sets her mind to. I am not that person. And yet, there is this pesky little voice inside my memories yelling at me that I will never amount to anything. I remember it from years ago and I thought I had stopped listening to it but it has amplified. Nabokov described it as ‘Toska’. There is no English word that truly satisfies all its nuances but at its depth, Toska is a sense of great spiritual anguish usually without clear cause. He used to call it ‘his longing of nothing to long for’. I am presently in the midst of trying to create an antidote. Although I fear that I do not know how to live with the weight of expectations. I have always remained so blissfully empty of them. It is a bleaker canvas but at least I have copyrights to it. Colouring in things, eventually means attracting an audience and adding layers. I fear my inability to contrive such an elaborate deception and live it.

Recently, I have taken to teaching. It is something I always wanted to do but never thought I’d be able to do. I never tried it for this very reason. Mine is not a personality I generally consider worth inflicting on the general populous. Yet, I am enjoying it. It has made me feel oddly powerful and in control. This scares me infinitely, as I do not relish the idea of informing other people’s opinions as much as some people do. If anything, I have always resented the notion that it is anyone else’s job to do so. Which is why I am trying desperately to push my puns into profundity in class and serve up only a platter of wit. One cannot really measure or critique irony and I am counting on this clause. I have patented my faux penitent’s rabbinical voice, unleavened tones spread out with wry smoke, pasted with self deprecation and induced with enough subversive wit that my class laughs a lot. This keeps me from hyperventilating and I hope, them, from slipping out of consciousness. I have been privy to a picture of myself spending my mornings meditating over what I shall say to a group of strangers each afternoon; my afternoons combating their questions; my evenings wrestling with my muse and my nights seated in café’s where I eat and drink and speak to actual, corporeal people rather than the phantoms in my coffee cup.

Sometimes I picture my future at the helm of a class room in qarrtsiluni. Iñupiaq dialects of the Eskimo employ the word to classify ‘the act of sitting together and waiting for something to burst’. I feel this is always an apt analogy for Pakistan. It has only been a week but I am beginning to see myself here. Finally, engaging with people in groups. The epitome of the social animal that has a corner to cave into whenever the need arises. I am looking for housing on campus and I am hoping that this is finally my calling.  To teach and spread what I have spent my life learning: doubt.

I have my pedagogues. I have my pulpit.

All I need now is my own self-fulfilling prophecy.

In-Betweens : A Strange Correspondence

"What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?" –Allen Ginsberg

It appears you are still here. I do not know if this goes against you or whether it falls in my favour but I shall take it. I apologize in advance for wasting your time but it appears that I am somewhat of an expert in the art of time suckage. Only, this is the first time I have coveted an audience for my ministrations. There are so many nothings to discuss I don’t quite know where to start.

I have recently been musing the merits of singledom in Pakistan. I confess this is an odd sentence for me to type in, given that the words ‘single’ and ‘Pakistan’ have seldom been permitted to co-exist peacefully for extended periods of time in my vocabulary. And yet, for the first time I can truly relish the idea of being alone. I suppose I can sustain the thought long enough because it now exists without pithy, petty qualifiers of what my life ought to look like. This is an odd, unpredictable, upside to divorce. The fact that if one is able to survive the harrowing experience intact, the potential reward is an unprecedented sense of self wrought in self-reliance. I am experiencing for the first time that I may just well be enough. Perhaps not for someone else but certainly for myself. This is new for me, feeling content in my all-too obvious contamination. Not overjoyed, mind you, just complacent. For once in my life I don’t find myself running against something: time, tradition, expectation, potential or love. The downside of this ‘settling into my own skin’ has been accepting my failings ad hominem ad infinitum. 

It has meant my mind and my matter finally agreeing on a few things. ‘Yes, I am insecure. Yes, I talk either too much or too little dependent on company, condiments and convenience. Yes, I am judgmental and simultaneously polite. Yes, I resist speaking to you because a cauldron of crazy comes out of my mouth when I speak for over 2 minutes at a stretch. Yes, I will always favor food over my figure. Yes, I am not as smart as I will always try to sound. Yes, I am an aesthetic purist and I hate myself for not managing genuine bohemian-ity. Yes, I need to dress like a post-apocalyptic Rainbow Bright at least five times a week. Yes, I am c-o-m-p-l-i-c-a-t-e-d.’ It’s a bit of a stretch to swallow so late in the game. Especially, considering my overwhelming need to retrospectively deconstruct every aspect of my being in the light of some missing mantra or posthumous philosophy. Accepting one’s failings is tantamount to admitting a complete lack of will and/or ability for self-improvement. It sounds kind of kitsch but I’ve never really been a quitter. Many mad things but certainly not a quitter. 

This brings me back to this letter, my current state of between-ness and you. I find myself in the midst of my शून्यता or Buddhist emptiness and it finally feels good. For the Buddhists, Shunyata reflected the observation that everything we encounter in life is ultimately empty of soul, permanence and self-nature. It’s actually meant to be a good thing, kind of like a tabula rasa from expectation. Being back in Pakistan has brought me to this place and for the first time I can appreciate its peaks. I have been hoping to escape this country for as long as I can remember. When I was a child, I used to think that if only my parents hadn’t returned to Pakistan they wouldn’t have gotten divorced. As if being in this country, is what made my father what he was rather than him carrying his country everywhere in his shirt pocket. I used to think if that if we stayed in Bali, the sheer spectrum of colour and flavor would somehow supplant itself in our skins through its own lyrical osmosis. I used to think places made people rather than the other way around. I hung on to that premise for the longest time and more recently it was about freedom. 

I thought that I would only begin to think and feel and practice accordingly when I left this place and yet my marriage taught me the exact opposite. I learned, in perhaps the most humiliating way conceivable, how much people ‘can’ matter if you are stuck with them. I recognized that I had learned to think and be myself in opposition to my surroundings my whole life. Somehow, the sheer complacence of Europe was somewhat jarring and oddly debilitating. Us Pakistanis, we’re used to operating in opposition to something…ideas, individuals, ideals, ideologies. Hard as it is, there is an odd sense of redemption to be gleaned from belonging to the fringes in a country where those fringes constantly need cloaking. It’s harder to be put in a box when you’re already anonymous. A friend of mine recently scolded me for being ‘one of those’ perpetual Pakistan-se-zinda-bhag types. Earlier, I wouldn’t have felt any guilt in wanting a better aggregate experience for myself but for the first time I am realizing that my criteria for a ‘better life’ may well be skewed.

I am alone.

I am alone in Pakistan.

 And oddly enough I am liking it. Sure, it is a narrow, noxious, nullifying existence in the larger, accepted happiness quotient but I am recognizing that there may be some merit to working from ‘within’ my identity crises than 'without'. There is a perverse magic to scraping a self out of constant contradiction; of pushing a pun into profundity and pretending that rain is only romantic when it cools sizzling side-walks; that independence only ‘means’ something when you can stand in a sweltering line and pay your own bill or that conversation is more profound when you can recall a black and white and brown all over background to fill in all the neo-colonial blanks. There is something to be said of seeking friends who are equal misfits hexed by the lowest common denominator of scope vs scape; mixing our lawns and denims, our kurtis and jeans and our English and Punjabi. There is a constant self-awareness button being charged in this melting pot and even the apathy is oddly electric, purely because it cannot afford to be complacent. 

 

The absolute freedom I am immersed in at present is by itself somewhat exhausting. I suppose the most likely outcome of completely being oneself is to trip on the premise of purist expectation and self-delusion. I suppose that is why I have sought you out again. I have long been in the market for a stranger to bounce my paltry platitudes off of. It sounds delusional and unhealthy and yet it is way more productive than me talking to myself enough to rule out talking to actual people. 

I suppose anything I tell you here will serve as an alibi for something else. In some ways speaking to you, whoever you are, serves as my life’s ultimate exclusion clause. Your still being here in some ways serves as evidence of your being privy to the secrets of the universe, mine and yours. You, or the idea of you, a person who’s presence makes me aware enough of my own to not need to impress you, may well be my only remaining connection to my former self. That version of me that believed in public infatuations and personal flirtation to a quasi-surrealist degree. I suppose you, who read this, also relish that elliptical algorithm in your DNA that renders you incapable of enjoying perfection. Yours is a voice raked raw in sulfur by the claws of Cupid, either in the shot-of-bourbon rasp of Tom Waits or the bitter-baked syrup of Ella or perhaps the sad, best-friend comfort of Cole. Or mayhaps your voice is marinated in a post-barfi-bite that only works for ubiquitous Urdu, like Noon Meem’s or perhaps you are boisterous and burlesque in Punjabi puns, pontificating in colloquialisms like Lohar.

 I wonder how you and I would talk, if we could, for tone is everything. I suppose it would be trite for me to deny here, that what I am actually cultivating is my own script for infallible romance. One of those vignette in-the-margin one-night-stands with no one and everyone in particular. Something with absolutely no real dialogue but countless conversations constructed in lip-synced lines and borrowed catchphrases. I imagine you reading this by a window, on a cloudy, overcast day (rather unlike mine) hopefully overlooking a large body of water. I would paint the water cobalt blue and put you somewhere in Santorini but that would kill the lack-of-plot line I’m going for. I hope you have your feet up as I cannot abide people who read or watch television …or do anything that gives them pleasure with their feet firmly planted on the ground. It reflects a cold, calculated sense of propriety. I sincerely hope you are as improper as they come. 

I suppose Russel Brand puts our in-between-ness well in his Booky Wook “I hope it is not necessary for me to stress the platonic nature of our relationship – not platonic in the purist sense, there was no philosophical discourse, but we certainly didn’t fuck, which is usually what people mean by platonic; which I bet would really piss Plato off, that for all his thinking and chatting his name has become an adjective for describing sexless trysts.” Lucky for you and I, Plato also called love the ‘most serious form of mental disease’, which renders our particular brand of sexless trysts perfectly romantic.

Shibboleth שִׁבֹּלֶת

"I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin."  - Leonard Cohen

I sometimes feel as if I am living my life in reverse, as if existence is an exercise in infinite regression and I somehow missed the F-train exit I was meant to get off at to finally start moving forward. I have spent the past week feeling simultaneously haunted and hunted by phantasms of my own making. Family phantasms that I have amplified to ghoulish proportions that I now recognize are slightly silly. Ever wonder why there are certain people who have the ability to break you even in their absence? When, the mere mention of their name or a slight communication on their part propels you beneath the layers of ‘growing up’ you thought you had managed over the years. When it has you revisiting that terrified adolescent hiding from the world in a book; behind a locked door in a tiny box; hyperventilating in a pink room on the sixth floor of a house that imprisoned you for a decade and that your pretend you cannot spot every day from this vantage point in the post-independence Valhalla of your new self. I feel like I am locked in a self-perpetuating game of Boggle which I am constantly playing against myself. 

That’s what brought me back to this word. I recall coming across ‘Shibboleth’ when I read the Old Testament, and it refers to ‘a word or custom that a person unfamiliar with its significance may not pronounce or perform correctly relative to those who are familiar with it’. Essentially, Shibboleth was a sort of social-marker used to identify foreigners, because it was the Hebrew word they could never pronounce correctly. I feel it serves as a metaphor for my entire life in some ways. I have always felt like a foreigner, especially amidst my own. I am a foreigner in my family and I have never felt more foreign than I do in my own country. In the Book of Judges (12), the Gileadites employed the term to identify the Ephraimites preceding a military defeat upon the tribe. When surviving Ephraimite refugees tried to cross the River Jordan they had to pronounce the word correctly or their captors would exact a toll.

'Let me cross'

The men of Gilead would ask, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he said, 'No,' they then said, 'Very well, say "Shibboleth” If anyone said, "Sibboleth" because he could not pronounce it, then they would seize him and kill him by the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell.-Judges 12:5–6, NJB

I suppose I can relate to those Ephraimites. Only my jailors are everywhere and most don’t even care to jail me any longer. My particular brand of Stockholm Syndrome has just taught me to appreciate the comfort of closed corners and the familiarity of bars and rules I no longer ascribe to. I never did. I suppose my ‘Shibboleth’ would be ‘Freedom’.

Sometimes I think that all I need to complete myself is a new word each day. On good days, I can manage a sentence and on better days I can write. Whatever that means. Five or more words that mingle together perfectly enough to leave me content with the fact that my life was worth the effort it takes to exist. That I have created something that is enough to sustain me through the remaining hours. It’s a small existence but it is fruitful. I was always that person…one who read the dictionary for ‘fun’ and poured through books of quotations hoping someone could loan me a mantra to help manage myself into an actual person. I suppose I am a fetishist. Only, my fetish is boring.

I have spent the last week feeling simultaneously haunted and hunted by my doppelganger; a parallel existence that seems to shadow me in this city. And that is what brought me to the realization that it was time to cut cords that did nothing but pull me into a pit I no longer even fit into. I refuse to live life in the reverse any longer, only ever moving forward in an incandescent waltz, which always leads me two steps back but still allows the illusion of whimsical progress. I am done pretending that people, who don’t matter in my life, ‘should’ matter in my life. It is a very odd, broken back-flip of the soul, trying to attain a version of yourself that cannot exist but you somehow feel ‘ought to’. My ‘other’ family recently tried contacting me through several venues and this sent me into a peculiar down spiral because it took me 30 years to scrape my way out of that morbid whirlpool of expectation, disappointment and salutations that constituted being someone’s daughter. It is a somewhat paralyzing realization that for every parent feeling ‘disappointed’ in their daughter; there is a daughter somewhere feeling disillusioned with the idea of parenthood altogether. I am finally allowing myself to reject those that have never accepted me. I finally forgive myself for not being able to forgive people who neither deserve nor ever sought redemption.

The sensation is immensely liberating. Yet I am slightly miffed that my coping crises has not altered one bit since I was eleven. The moment I felt the past creep up and rope me in again, I found myself frantically pouring over online quotes sites, listening to ‘Most of the Time’ and resenting the fact that I could not close the doors to my past by banging them. I am discovering that I simply do not belong to a generation that can register subtleties or cultivate propriety. I find myself being caught in analogous arguments because I do not have the courage to tell most of the people who deserve to hear it, to simply F*** Off and leave me be. It is an important lesson to learn to acquire an appellation of ones’ self and I have so far resisted learning it.

I always felt that a person could not afford to have a dramatic life and be simultaneously dramatic. It ruined the plot and there is nothing I like less than a poorly plotted story. There is a colossal either/or to choose from and one can’t have both. My genes pretty much made the choice for me and my parents pretty much wrote the script. It has meant living an 80’s style Bollywood, savitri-masochistic life that could not afford a Sri Devi to play the chest-beating-bleating lead. I needed to laugh at my life and so I did. What pisses me off about it ten years later is that other people presume this as an invitation to shit their life-woes all over you. There is nothing I hate more than people who assume their issues give them the excuse to make other peoples’ lives hell. As if we all don't already have our own hells to contend with.

Up to last year, I was surrounded by such people.

I am hoping to finally learn to cuss and cut them away.

I have recently conducted a personal plebiscite of sorts and I have decided to weed out the people in my life I don’t need so I might finally bloom, hackneyed as that sounds. It is the time for मोक्ष, Sanskrit for Moksha or Mukti. The process refers to a general liberation that cannot take place without some sort of life-living-death-rebirth cycle. In Hindu transcendentalism, it refers to surpassing your former self by cleaning the cobwebs of the soul, so to speak. Hindu Moksha is not necessarily a soteriological goal for redemption as much as an excuse for reinvention. A breaking of the ego and overall nama-roopa (name-form) to recreate yourself as you see fit.  I owe my Moksha to several people. To my parents, the one who broke me and the one who put me back together. My grandparents who just took each piece separately and loved it back to health and most recently...to friends.

It is the latter that has been the most surprising solace in a lifetime spent alone. Having friends this year has led me to conclude that family is such a defunct word and also, that it is a recyclable concept. I have learned that it is possible to recycle a bad legacy into a majestic legion and that it’s never too late to do so. I realized this, while fleeing my feelings in a black, survivor-mobile, sitting with a friend belting out ‘Break it Down Again’, chomping down on mis-spelt macaroons. This friend, You know who you are, is someone I owe my Elpis to this past year. For both silent support, loud confidence in my inabilities and for giving me an #201 island to cave into. I am brought back to that Frost quote ‘In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It Goes On.”

So ‘Welcome to the Land of Misfit Toys, Lost Boys and Broken Things’

It may be just the best place to get fixed.