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.

On Hibernation

“It’s just that the cause wasn’t real. The cause was imagined. The cause…was fear. Let’s think of a minority, one that goes unnoticed if it needs to. There are all sorts of minorities. Blonds and people with freckles. But a minority is only thought of one when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority - a real threat or an imagined one. And therein lies the fear. And if that minority is somehow invisible, then the fear is much greater. That fear is why the minority is always persecuted. And so you see there is always a cause. The cause is fear.” – Colin Firth in ‘A Single Man’

I have always hated this time of year. Watching out my windshield at the scores of people celebrating the end of another year just punctuated by abandoned resolutions. Moreover I loathe the overwhelming sensation that I ought to be ‘out there having fun’ when I know perfectly well that all my pleasures are solitary or should I say selfish. Is there a difference?

It has been an astonishing year, this 2010.  And I am oddly proud of the fact that I have managed to spend it almost entirely ensconced in my own personal cornucopia of books, movies, discographies and procrastination. If ever a human being were capable of hibernation, I have elevated the exercise to an art form. What is proving a tad disconcerting is how easy it all was in the end. I have realised that for me to essentially avoid all human contact (save the acquaintanceships I have cultivated at work) took virtually no effort. Head down, heart closed, mind ambivalent…and there you have it. I have concocted my very own emotional anaesthetic.

At present, I cannot even cling to the justification that I needed a year off and away from…people because I am well aware that I will always need that. While heartache and mind burn are legitimate excuses for many, I cannot –in good conscience – apply them to myself. That would require moping and crying and I haven’t really done either of those things this year. I have simply moved forward…but I did it in a circle so it doesn’t really count.

I thought of a story today, as I sat stuck in a New Year’s Eve traffic jam from Hussain Chowk to Sherpao Bridge. Something silly and naïve to paint my predicament with a stroke of literary flourish: Two sparrows sitting on a tree stare at a cluster of their kin fly by. One says to the other “My greatest consolation is that our first flight will be with the group. That way everyone will keep an eye out for me and I won’t have to think about how I’m doing.” It asks the other whether he is apprehensive about taking to the skies. “My greatest fear is that our first flight will be with a group. That way everyone will keep their eyes on me and I won’t be able to think about what I’m doing.”

All of my thoughts have been splintered and the shards are scattered along the wall of my mind. It has been a year of random, idle, occasionally piercing thoughts smashing all around me and myself scuttling after them trying to keep them in order, sequence and in check. My days are a loop-de-loop: Up at 2pm, shower, change, drive to work (collect scattered thoughts I meet along Defence Road; at the turning for Liberty; in the expressions of the average six to eight beggars that appear at my window over the 14 minute drive; in the leer of the men who do not have the decency to stay behind their car window while ogling me; at the office security guard who tries not to notice my odd outfits every morning), at work read two papers and log into the Guardian, Telegraph and New Yorker, edit district stories, post articles on to my face book (lest the people I never meet forget I exist), edit more district stories, get a coke and a packet of chips (the highlight to my days), make the pages, leave the office, pick up something to eat on the drive back home (collect more scattered thoughts while waiting for a meal to be delivered, cooked or brought to my car window. Thoughts I gather while reading whatever it is I am reading those days under the tiny car light. Thoughts that pinch me while random passersby try and stare into the car at the girl reading in the dark), get home, sit with Nano and Abbi for a while discussing how ‘nothing new’ happened, walk upstairs, change, eat, watch television, read for a few hours, sleep.

That was my year, give or take seven evenings spent with a few friends; a dozen afternoons spent with mom and four dinners spent with my father. And I didn’t exactly hate it. I no longer even crave companionship the way I once did because I am quite confident in the fact that I would be tired of it quite soon. People annoy me, the little ticks, the guessing games, the backstabbing, the tantrums… the issues. Why would anyone want to take on someone else’s neuroses when there is so much to fix of oneself?

So instead, I am taking comfort in open-ended questions that I can pen down in my journal and save for someone to answer later on. This helps keep all the smashed, scattered shards of my thoughts out of the way and I am no longer afraid of stepping on them or losing them altogether. These conversations with myself are fast becoming my salvation and I find myself placing an ellipsis at the close of every idea I pen down. A ‘what if’ to mark every deliberation; my very own grammatical guardian angel. Still, I can’t help but think I may need a few full stops sometime, somewhere in the future. Life simply cannot continue like this, an inimitable see-saw of conflicting opinions lived amid constricted parenthesis. I want a full stop now. Give me a last word so I can finally write a first sentence. But there are never any last words, not really.

Rimbaud and I know this life to be an act. That  ‘farce which everyone has to perform’. It is getting harder and harder to convince people that while I make no claims to being ‘happy’ I am most certainly content. Agreed, it is rare, to enjoy ones own company more than that of others and it is perhaps not entirely ‘normal’ to want to keep up the solitaire. But it is what it is.

This is where I covet minority status without shame. Sadly, there has never really been a club or even some trite support group for a minority such as I.

All those lonely people out there and not one who enjoys being alone. 

The Road to Aletheia

Heidegger defined the Greek word for ‘truth’ as  ‘unhidden-ness', 'un-concealment' and 'that which is no longer lost'

I can no longer count the number of times that I have encountered the expression ‘finding oneself’. The term is liberally thrown about by those who think the process specifically entails adorning floor length skirts, a cluster of beads and chanting inside a makeshift candlelit shrine. Having been born with the natural inclination to gravitate towards beads and colourful skirts I recently found myself being told that the answer to all my problems lay in a ‘prophet’s circle’.

This imaginary sphere involves visualising oneself in the centre of a prayer circle surrounded by different prophets on the periphery. One is asked to envision the sages of varying theologies ensconced in beams of coloured light that somehow correspond with paranormal pressure points set along ones' spine known as ‘chakras’. Having always been inherently averse to confrontation I pretended to go along with my ‘guru’s’ advice. To keep myself from collapsing in a fit of cackles I took great liberties with the exercise.

If Maya, the vedic notation for illusion, must be exhumed by the mind and spirit than mine lies amid the pillars of inquiry and philosophy. If there is a multiplicity that conceals true meaning and the world of our experience does not really exist then so be it. I would rather spend my time in search for Archimedes’ utopian fixed point…and I have no desire to move the earth only of seeking Kant’s noumenon- that one ephemeral thing-in-itself that makes all the other nothings worthwhile.

All my quests, metaphysical and otherwise, began when I was seven. And so, this particular odyssey had a seven-year-old me thrust in a maze of metaphysical black holes in search for the titans of thought. A mad little girl alternating the alleys of her mind carrying her daimon with her at every turn as a tedious woman dressed in monk orange robes yammered on about the complex ‘science’ of inhaling and exhaling metaphorical tendrils of rainbow smoke.

Landing in a typically uncomfortable spotlight, I was greeted with a warning. Pyrrho with his pointy beard and spindle spine started me off with words of caution “Remember the importance of opposing claims. No yes’ and no nays…suspended judgment at all corners, child. That will keep you safe.” And so I had my map, my course acatalepsia and my ability to withhold opinion in favour of intonation. The ataraxic unknown was liberating and if I concentrated hard enough I could even make out the faint strains of Bob Marley’s ‘Don’t worry, be…” in the background of the nothing I was stepping into.

My journey began at the beginning with an ugly old man walking up to me with eyes full of questions. It appeared that Socrates always knew he would be condemned to death for his curiosity but his compulsion seemed to outweigh all sense of self preservation. He stood right in front of me and he was tall, which meant that the warts on his face were all the more vivid as he bent down to ask me our first question. “Are you sure you want to do this child? You know that once you start asking you will never stop” he said it with the rapscallion self satisfaction of a man who already knew the answer but wanted to luxuriate in the magnanimity that came with offering a victim a choice. There was no choice, as we walked through his ghastly utopia, criss-crossing between the broken streets where he had pestered his lesser contemporaries about everything he could think of. Our daimon’s in hand, we easily skipped along on the yellow brick road of ‘knowing we knew nothing’. He was the most beautiful ugly man I ever saw and I could see why Nietzsche, in his moment of petty jealousy had tried to reduce him to a mere ‘monstrous face and monstrous soul’. We shook hands outside the doors of a dusty old library, where I told him that his pupil Plato didn’t do him justice in his recollections. “Yes, well. He was never quite as comfortable with self-doubt. He could never put the question above quintessence. Can you?” And so I left, with another question tucked carefully in the back pocket of my dirty jeans.

The library was an ancient, crumbling structure. It was really more of a study than anything else. Certainly not Borges’ maze or the Agora but I could place him immediately. Bent over his desk, with a magnifying glass fixed on a set of scrolls, he beckoned me over with a hasty wave of his left hand. Feuerbach’s long beard was interfering with his untidy notations and he handed me the quill making me write down random observations on scraps of paper. “What exactly are we doing?” I looked at him directly, perched uncomfortably on a set of papers scattered at the corner of his desk. “Why I’d have thought that was obvious. We are looking for the essence of religion and God by inflection. I know you’re interested in all that stuff,” he said, without looking up. “You can find that out from a book?” I suddenly felt I had wasted far too many years looking in the wrong places when I should have lived in a library. “Not exactly, you can find the first part in a book, the religion part…you just need to keep going back further. Anthropology 101…soon enough you’ll find where god makes an appearance and almost every time you can tell who made him up,” he said with an ironic laugh. “God is Us. We make him every day and we project on to him what we wished we could be,” he said in his professorial monotone. “Yes, but what about the real God, the one that doesn’t make an appearance in the books,” I asked. “Oh that one…well that one you have to look for somewhere else.” He started talking about how I needed to battle my chimaeras’ on this quest before I could even begin to ask the questions I needed.

I walked out of the library in a daze only to realise two steps later that I had landed in a gallery. An endless hallway of thought…idle and otherwise. The books I had read; how and where I could find a bathroom here; whether or not it was better to be happy, smart or successful and whether getting answers was a better goal than asking questions. Descartes stood in front of a foggy mirror, staring at his all-too-elegant reflection. He was a tall man, intelligence oozing from every pore along with a detachment he seemed to have earned after decades of effort. “How do you like Cartesian alleys?” he inquired of me with a smirk. “It’s a tad self indulgent don’t you think?” I responded, completely out of turn. If he was offended he didn’t show it, we both were there because we were still thinking about things. “Does it still bother you that they misquoted you? I mean you never meant for there to be any inference. It wasn’t meant as a syllogism was it? There was no major premise to be had and the ‘therefore’ killed it," I whispered. “Thank you for that and no there wasn’t. They never really apologised for it either. I didn't want any dependence just ‘I think, I am’ but that seemed hard for them to live with,” he muttered bitterly.

The gallery cut a razor sharp corner as Ockham merely stood at the fringes watching me stumble onward. There were no words of wisdom, no condemnations and no warnings from the sly, Moorish man. This was the person who chased after the root of all things: the ‘blueness’ that made the sky blue, the ‘taste’ that made tasting possible. He was too busy peering at me out of the corner of his eye and perceiving to comment on my failings and I was grateful for being let go with mere oblong glances. After all, he had already deemed god to be unnecessary merely because the world could be explained without him. I didn’t need telling that the world would be better off without me.

I tripped over a huddled mass crouched beneath a tree. The mass turned out to be a hermit, an agoraphobe who shrieked and yelled at my having invaded his ‘personal space’. So he carved a circle in the grass around himself, a nucleus of protection that would keep everyone at a safe distance. I sat cross-legged outside of it as Spinoza refused to look at me. “Why are you here?” he asked, his chin pinned to his chest. “I am on a quest,” I told him, bursting over with false bravado. “No you’re not. You have no say in these matters. You didn’t choose any quest. So don’t adorn it like a mantle! You were thrown into this and are trying to smile your way out to the other side,” he replied, shivering. “Is that a bad thing?” I wanted to know. He didn’t answer me and only warned that I must always look at the infinite and unalterable whole rather than trying to divide it into parts that I found easier to cope with. “Does it help? I mean, you said knowing our emotions would help us master them but you obviously feel lonely. Is that because you didn’t know it or because you couldn’t master it?” He didn’t answer me this time either but I could tell it was a bit of both as he turned around to look the other way.

The next stop was Night. A lit up city, ugly and neon, trying far too hard to construct the flicker of a lost dream. There was a gambling den with poker tables lined up to infinity as scores of lost souls placed bets on their conscience. I walked my too short, too self-conscious seven-year-old self to the head table to place my wager as the dealer spread the cards. Pascal had the eyes of a slut and the smile of a cheat but everyone knew him and everyone laughed at all his jokes. Absolutely everyone took him up on his bets. He laid out the odds, stating clearly and curtly “Fate is a prison and an empty abyss. Reason does not have the answers and we are lost. So bet on a cosmic ‘what if’ and leap because the truth is ugly and the lie might not be.” It was a cheap hand.

I met Kant standing beside a merry-go-round. He was childlike in his brilliance and spoke to me about space and time, about predicates in analytical and synthetic statements and about how everything was uncertain and empty. “Then why bother?” I asked, and he smiled the smile of a man who was comfortable ‘just looking and never buying’. “It gives us something to do,” he murmured bashfully, embarrassed that he didn’t have any real answers and far too many surreal ones. He told me to act the way I wanted everyone around me to and that was I stopped laughing with him. That was when he lost me completely. Why would anyone, ever want to act like everyone else?

I was pushed into a dark alley of despair. Ugly self-loathing and silicone layers of pessimism coated the brick walls of Schopenhauer’s dead-end metaphysics. The man himself comprised of a bag of bones woven together by a network of bulging navy blue veins spread out on grey, ashen skin. No child should ever have had to meet him. His vision was far too easy to buy into. “We all depend on something that depends on nothing. Doesn’t that scare you child?” he looked at me in earnest. It did scare me. I knew I that I needed to tune him out but he began shouting at the top of his flailing lungs over the music “No one cares, no god, no soul, no free will. We are stripped of all consolation prizes,” and I began to sob just looking at him. Freud had ripped off every one of his ideas and sold them off as a cutting edge foray into the mind he called psychoanalysis, but while Freud's treatise remained laughable, this old man was terrifying in his truth. “There is only one inborn error: and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy,” he said as the accordion rose to a crescendo. I ran from him screaming, tears pouring unchecked from my eyes and I could make out the faint strains of Wagner wafting through the air.

I sprinted straight into the arms of a saviour, a hero. The kind one finds in books where dreams are endless because there are no dead ends and every sentence carries on forever with a colossal ellipsis. The kind one waits for to make an appearance at the beginning of every novel and hates saying goodbye to by the end. Kierkegaard petted my back and stroked my hair as I cried out onto his freshly penned pages. He told me not to dwell on the past, or the future, or the present. He painted a world beyond all ‘isms’ and we sat imagining ourselves as pirates in one story and pan in another. “You do know that they call you the father of existentialism now,” I sniffed and he scoffed. “They are idiots and can’t possibly know me or even themselves. Remember child, there is no I. It’s a letter that couldn’t possibly fathom or describe us. Isn’t that what you’ve always said too?” he looked at me and smiled. He was right about one thing, faith is born at the lowest of pitfalls, where paradox meets reason.

I was tangibly nervous as I knocked on the tall brass doors that would lead me into the vortex. I could hear the manic ravings of a lunatic from within. A beautifully tainted and broken mad man - a nihilist and narcissist that I loved to hate (or was it hated to love). Nietzsche was smashing dishes into the wall as his Zarathustra stood behind his shoulder and smirked knowingly. He didn’t seem at all upset and asked me to join him. “You see what we are doing here?” he smashed an antique Chinese teacup into the wall. “Not really,” I said. “And I thought you were smart. We are dethroning the despots; breaking their pedestals from under their sickening selves. God is dead. No one will save Him after I’m done with Him,” he cackled. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he seemed the one in need of saving because I knew his despair sustained him. It made his exits much more poignant and my heart cracked for the fact that I could not own him or even return him to himself. He was right though, no one could have contained him - not the socialists who tried to adopt him or the anarchists who tried to embody him. They would only ever see the half they could observe and destroy.

I carried my broken heart in my other pocket past the Austrian kindergarten classroom where a precocious Wittgenstein sat at his desk perpetually outwitting Hitler; past the Nominalists interlocking their Humean principles on rocks and beyond the verbal pyrotechnics of Locke, the ascetic, preaching to anyone who would listen to tales of a tabula rasa that offered up second chances. I saw a Neoplatonist arcana being carved into a wall by Epictetus as he asked me to affirm my amor fati to myself and the world but I politely declined. I purposely avoided Hobbes standing beneath a podium and kissing the feet of all the kings he could find. I stopped just outside Plato’s cave so that I didn’t lose the sun of my passions only to be shackled in the shadows of empty power.

By the time the crazy guru’s chanting came to an end, I saw myself being led back to the beginning. The overwhelming perfume of scented candles began to permeate my nostrils and the flickering light danced outside my eyelids but I held on a moment longer. I sensed that I was walking in a giant’s shadow. The shade stretched across for miles and it was twilight. Just before I opened my eyes, I turned around and Aristotle gave me my first and only answer.

“Eudaimonia," he said.
And I was happy to stick with the questions after that.

Dystopia

Alas! All music jars when the soul's out of tune - Miguel De Cervantes

It has been said, that according to the teachings of the idealists the words ‘live’ and ‘dream’ are rigorously synonymous. I must admit that I subscribed to this belief for as along as I can remember. Perhaps it all started the day I was eleven and wanted to jump off a balcony but my grandfather handed me a copy of The Hobbit as an alternative and told me that ‘reading’ would make everything better. “Only if you have an aptitude for it,” he warned and I didn’t understand his meaning until now. Being hurled into a world of perennial fantasy is extremely perilous for those that can adapt to it as easily and comfortably as I.

In retrospect, I believe I mistook my grandfathers meaning. I thought he meant that cultivating and constructing multiple utopias was a gift when it’s more likely he actually meant the opposite. That the illusory ‘aptitude’ was actually about retaining the ability to keep the worlds opening before you at a safe distance. To delve but not dive. Sadly, my realisation comes far too late - the damage is done and the illusion shattered.

My expectations regarding ideal company skyrocketed as a child and I have never been able to find even a close substitute in life. ‘Real’ people are boring, terribly ordinary, petty and predictable. ‘Reality’ is a self-perpetuating disappointment and loneliness is a pinnacle. Naturally, there are consequences and my loneliness isn’t always enjoyable, especially not when all those around me appear to possess that ‘ordinariness’, that ‘regular people’ ability to converse, coerce and crave company without doubting and deliberating absolutely everything that crosses their emotional spectrum.

And yet, I have come to realise and admit finally that observation is enough for me. I have discovered that I am not as jaded as I would hope to be or as, perhaps, I need to be. That my Valhalla is intact. I merely recognise that it is solitary and this is admittedly, a painful realisation.

A few days ago, I was trying to explain to my grandmother why I could not see myself ‘settling down’ as it were and it took me a long time to finally locate the words. “I think, Nano, that I am an unfailing, diehard romantic who knows perfectly well that romance is dead,” the words, while prolific were hard to choke out and to acknowledge. It was bittersweet to finally capitulate and admit that I was built to be alone.

 I have been accused of being stubborn and unbending in the face of ‘reality’, which apparently requires a supple soul to manipulate. This is undeniably true. I find that I have an innate inability to ‘settle’ or ‘bend’ for others, perhaps cultivated over a lifetime of taking care of just myself. And it is becoming blatantly obvious now, at this precarious catch-22 corner of inconvenience where my age, my family and my culture requires me to affect a need that I simply do not feel. A need for a partner and for love.

But the viper in me refuses to accede an inch. I have always thought far too much about far too much and always in the way of incomplete anagrams. I have been called the ‘ice queen’, who feels only for strangers, lost ideals and an over-achieving standard of self-righteousness. I simply cannot resent the title and if I’m honest I wear it proudly. I do lack an ability to feel for the ‘feelings’ of others, I can empathise with their problems and trials but never their feelings. It was there when I was a child but it was quiet then. It is still quiet but no longer so because I am afraid. Rather I am alone now because I am far too sure of myself as well as my thoughts and not at all of others.

Also, my recent forays into the reality of heartbreak has shattered the many urban myths about the supposed ‘merits of companionship’. I am no longer looking for someone’s antique cousin to rescue me from myself, to hold my hand only when I need it held and to laugh with me for ‘as long as we both shall live’.

I have always had an overzealous imagination and I can create those men from hazy blueprints I encounter in person. The real men in my life have always, always, always been bullies. I have never met a man who wasn’t one, be it in the intellectual, emotional, physical or spiritual sphere. Truth be told women are bullies too but they are more subtle about it…I believe their employed variant is called ‘badgering’.

“But what is wrong with him,” my Nani implores me for the umpteenth time about the umpteenth candidate and I fail to understand how to explain that there need be nothing wrong with a man for him to be the wrong man for me. I am wrong for them! I was never one of Austen’s women, my imagination rapid though it is, never did jump from ‘admiration to love and from love to matrimony in moments’. My exegesis in masochism is a life style choice as I have circumvented the latter at all costs.

 I shall remain, forever, unfinished. It is the only way I can keep myself.

The Gift of Grandparents

“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle” – Jane Austen

It is an odd sensation to finally recognize that what I am most grateful for in my life is the fact that I have seldom been able to depend unequivocally on familial security.

Traditionally, broken family syndromes tend to swing one of two ways: they can make you or break you …so to speak. In my case they have done both. I have mended, after meticulous effort over the years, what was once broken and whether or not I can admit it to myself yet I have had plenty of help in the more recent past.

There has been plenty of pity too but I have discovered that even I am able to summon enough bite to deflect pity when the need arises. Mostly I have been blessed over the past eight years with the presence of grandparents. I realize that this is an odd thing to feel grateful for when one happens to be a twenty-something forced to abide by curfews and eat the blandest food known to man. By some odd lilt of serendipity my battered and bruised soul managed to find its particular flavour of chicken soup in the company of an independent, artistic, eternally concerned polymath of a grandmother and a quiet, contemplative, bashful yet brilliant grandfather.

Like all mismatched pairings it took a while to get used to; the occasional fight; the one-off tantrum and many a frustrated sigh but years later I know better than to be glib about this entirely unanticipated gift  that I finally received after years of loneliness and tears. A gift of being loved simply because they needed someone to love and I happened to be there.

 I don’t know of many people my age who seek company outside their own age, beyond parties and crowds in a quiet home with two people so different from one another they might as well be opposing magnetic poles.  There is definitely something to be said for the distance that old age provides though. All the cliché’s of guidance and experience aside, the real gift lies in the fact that every single thing out of both their mouths comes with a story set in a time I know nothing about. I am thereby a perennial student of split accounts pertaining to a rather one-dimensional version of history, philosophy and home keeping.  I have always loved old things. Having been raised on a steady diet of classical literature where all good things are set amid antiquity I still find myself seeking beauty and meaning in old buildings, old clothes, old music, old furniture and occasionally old ideals. Ironically though, I am told that my ‘thinking’ is far too 'modern' ...excusing everyone but myself.

Perhaps what I love most about living with Nano and Abbi is how they wear every one of their days in the folds of their skin. Odd as it is, I relish the glaze that covers their eyes every time they recall a past that might put them somewhere in the same temporal vicinity as me.

My grandmother is what anyone would call a polymath. A woman who knows far too much about far too much; a tireless worker; a stubborn survivor and very often bitter about the hand she has been dealt by a life that was too slow to catch up with her. She had to wait for me to love her though and it has taken me years to get there. My grandmother needs to be loved and told it often, which is a small price for the sheer showering of affection she constantly directs upon my ever-reluctant person but it is still something I have trouble expressing even though I have felt it for years. 
She is a 73- year-old woman who has spent the past summer making quilts out of old silk shirts, shalwars and dupatta’s. She has managed over 33 quilts in the past two and half months and each masterpiece embodies the sheer stubbornness of her inextinguishable talent. I have watched her spend entire nights piecing together scraps of ancient fabrics simply because she cannot sit idle and her talent and intractability often leave me ashamed.

She and I are finally able to have conversations that span entire nights where nothing is left unsaid. I recognize how odd it is to live with a woman nearly four times one’s age who wants to hear the details of your consistently vacant love life; your research interests and your opinion on her latest colour scheming as she hangs on your every word just to make you feel important.  Perhaps, what I love most about her is the fact that every time she sees me get into my car she says “Beta Ayat-ul-kursi parh lena.” Then as I watch her through my review mirror, she sighs and murmurs it under her breath on my behalf.

Then of course there is my Abbi, the man I consider in large part to be my moral compass. An old, frail and quiet being who lives almost entirely in a world he has created from his books which I have always dreamed of doing some day…to the eternal dismay of my grandmother. He and I seldom need words to have conversations. It is the best thing about living in the same house as him - the conversation is ever-present and ever-evolving.

Perhaps it is the rather morbid pitiable juncture of being back in Pakistan that has led me to question and contemplate nearly everything that surrounds me, above all the misery of somehow having been pushed back in time and experience. It has made me re-evaluate what is real and what is surreal in this mid-life I now lead.

But for once I am sure about something. I am confident of these most unexpected constants in my life.

Which is why the fact that they may not be here for long terrifies me more than I can admit ... or accept.

Post-its and Final Goodbyes

“My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.” Jorge Luis Borges

How does one deconstruct disorientation? Is it an emotion, a sensation or merely an adverb running along the sentences that a person is unable to frame correctly at the juncture when they are most required? I suppose in some measure it is an awakening of the mind…one that the body refuses to acknowledge as it shuts down around you. 

Today, I spent at least 17 seconds on Abid Majeed Road waiting for a car trying to overtake two other vehicles to crash into me. It was the most surreal conflagration of moments, knowing that the collision was inevitable and waiting in anticipation is the oddest sensation. One finds the mind shift into hyper-drive as the carcass shuts down to let it complete its laps around your memories. One can see and say a lot in 17 seconds. 

I, for example, managed to write my mother a blue goodbye post-it in purple ink thanking her for giving me a reason to live again; I managed to hug my grandmother willingly in my mind - something I have never quite managed in person even though I know she craves it; I ruffled my brothers hair; stared into my fathers eyes and tried to find a smile there; told my best friend her new play was genius and I was oh-so proud of her and saw both my grand fathers sitting on a bed in grey shalwar kameez’ as I – Beentherella, at age seven - sat between them gazing up in wonder. I managed to spare an afterthought to why ‘this was the reason I hadn’t bothered getting up early to head for the gym more often…it got me killed’ and considered why I didn’t bother running back up the stairs to retrieve my fil-o-fax from my desk before gunning the engine buying me by a few more minutes. 

I didn’t spare a single thought to god though, for which I am profoundly grateful. In some measure I feel like surviving a ‘near death’ experience without feeling the inclination to pray, sacrifice a goat or re-align my entire existential etymology means I have passed some kind of unspoken test. Amid the scores of voices that surrounded me in the aftermath where I temporarily lost my vision, the most overwhelming chorus was definitely ‘Allah ne bacha liya’ and for the first time I recognized the temptation to simply fall back and say ‘yep, thank you Allah ji.’ Until, I realized that this logic would also make him the guy responsible for ensuring that a newly recruited driver decide at that precise juncture in time to try and overtake two cars, smash into mine and conveniently feign fainting (according to the Rescue 1122 reps) for the rest of the ambulance ride to the hospital. 

I find that I have dodged some cosmic loophole that I would have had to experience at some precarious point in my life of ‘still not being quite sure’ and have emerged finally secure in my over-arching skepticism regarding luck and all things fate-oriented. Dostoevsky said, “Realists do not fear the results of their study.” Not that even the most seasoned connoisseur of methadone would ever mistake me for a realist and granted I haven’t yet ‘studied’ anything of consequence but I finally am clear on intent. And that alone is a …relief. 

Speaking of which, I am surprised to find myself having benefitted from the sugar-sweet kindness of strangers and estranged alike today. A lovely woman who stepped into my broken car held me from behind and told me what was happening around me, collecting my things and calling my family to cart me away to safety. A woman, whose name I wish I knew and whose face I wish I had seen. And on the other hand a gush of familial faces, who after years, came up to my room and smiled at and with me. Today, I am ever-grateful for both. 

What is proving to be the most astounding, however, is the survivor’s guilt. The fact that I made it out of a bashed car with only scrapes, bruises and a particularly nasty case of whiplash. The adsum essence of not having earned that clemency now persists…as I see and listen to the scores of stories of the thousands that aren’t this lucky and fail to comprehend why. The ones who fall into ditches, are bitten by snakes, are drowning in their sleep and are blasted to shards without any more notice than the three sentences I pen down for them in tomorrow’s news edition. The thousands dying whose existence before the end was hell to begin with.

I got whiplash and it merited visits, food offerings and …hugs. 

I am not sure I am handling any of this well or even if I am processing it correctly. What can I say ‘life and death have been lacking in my life.’