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.