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.