"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.
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