The Resurrection

“And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”- Milan Kundera

It has been a slow few months and for once I find it heartening to realise that life always does move on. I am no longer seeking romance in a cup of coffee and a bite of pizza or even in the weather. I am not even reading poetry the way I used to. Instead, I have switched to political satire because it is apparently a more easily marketable personality moniker. I am consciously shutting down that idiot in me who feels a desperate need to archive and poignantly demarcate every silly, tween-time minute of the day before dampening it in soul-sucking majesty. I am breathing for now… shallow, staccato in-takes that move me forward in a straight line so I am not confused or confounded by Beentherella knocking inside me telling me that none of this is really me. 

I am meeting people and my shrill laugh and awkward self-deprecation actually seems to be coming off as endearing, at least I like to think so. I am also grateful for this on some level. I have always been somewhat of a verbal fidget: talking too much around people I don’t know and would probably prefer to avoid and sulking in silence or silly satire with those that I do, who would probably prefer to be elsewhere. Still, this whole socialising thing…it seems to be working. If nothing else, it passes time and makes me feel like some of my former self still exists. Like if I try hard enough to get to know people, I might end up finding some validation and almost feel normal outside of my head. I could fit…not fit in per say, but settle…like a congealed mass of jelly that feels utterly vulnerable but is slippery and sluggish enough to persist in its environment.

There is also some solitary sort of comfort to be sought in the fact that one can return to a completely un-changed place and have become an entirely new amalgamation of self. I feel as if I am living my life in iambic meter, skipping over all the ugly and diving into the busy with little consideration for everything in between. I moved to Islamabad a few weeks ago for work, temporary work, but work nonetheless and it has been a decidedly odd experience. On the one hand, having my own place and my own schedule does afford me some peace and alone-ness which is much appreciated. On the other hand, I hate this city. I always have. It carries a cesspool of shitty memories, lousy blood ties and bad karma. It doesn’t help that I now find myself constantly looking over my shoulder for fear of seeing my father in some random restaurant or walking next to me towards the nearest khokha. This is an odd reversal of the love I have always sustained for Lahore, where I spent my teenage years looking over other peoples shoulders hoping to catch the slightest glimpse of my Mom at every street corner. It is an odd paradox, knowing that the one city awarding me single-freedom in this god-forsaken country happens to be the city I always associate with prison. After all, any place you don’t leave is a sort of prison and there will always be a small part of me that can never leave this place. Such is the brittleness that comes with self-sufficiency.

A caveat: Living alone in Pakistan is not for the faint hearted. And I always was faint-hearted, wasn’t I? Strong minded, iron willed, brutally silent and acerbically amusing but ever, ever faint-hearted. I somewhat miss that girl, who launched her personalised crusade against society and silently flitted through each day terrified and shy. Now as I cross hallways in my apartment building followed by strange gazes and haggle with people at counters, I feel nothing. I still search for it though, that odd piercing tingling at the back of my neck alerting me that I am being leered at and each time I brush through it I feel an odd imbalance. As if I have gained and lost something simultaneously. In social conversations, I race at warp speed through every random subject I can envision just to avoid a silent swamp I might potentially sink in.

I am striving for success this time. I am aiming at wealth … at eventual power even. Or at least pretending hard enough to want to. I still haven’t learned to switch off my brain though, and I am beginning to fear I never will. That is what will always get in the way, the consistent self-critique that psyches me out from doing something before I have even fully contemplated doing it. That is why I have never really been able to write, even though I pen down over a thousand words on a daily basis. I find that my words are safer on paper and this is by far the most degenerate incarnation of cowardice.

I wish I could unlearn now.

With all the undercurrents I am riding on, it’s still somewhat surprising to find that it was all so easy in the end. I always knew I could not keep myself and succeed in life. It was a most unrealistic and selfish aspiration, to not only relish the challenge of a life that resists perfection but to expect to profit from such an existence. Still, it has been depressingly easy to forgo Beentherella. I always assumed that when the time came and my illusions were finally shattered and reality confronted, there would be a break, a collapse, a maelstrom of misnomers and memories but it never came. All it took was a short-lived, short-loved, ill-conceived marriage. All it took was finally making a mistake and acknowledging it. It took me 28 years to find a fairytale and storm the Bastille of my phobias only to realise that I really am one of those girls. Girls who are impossible to forget but hard to remember.

So now, I rest among latent chidings begotten with affection and as I slither in my degradation hoping to reinvent myself as a ‘strong woman’, I can’t help but wonder what that means anymore. I still don’t want to be of the world or belong to it. I have far too much of myself invested in surviving on peripheries and playing in platitudes. But I need to. For the first time I need to sublimate and socialise, make friends even. No matter how much I resent the interaction, I find myself manipulating circumstances to maximise the plausibility of it. The soul should not have to compensate for what the body needs and for what the ego wants …but it does. So that is where I am now, compensating, compromising and decidedly congealing into a state of ordinariness desperately needed to thrive among the living.

I am trying as hard as I can to be as hard as I can.

Exodus

“What have I to fear now that there is nothing more to be done?

Since they can make things no worse for me,

they can no longer alarm me. "- JJ Rousseau

There are so many things people tell you at the onset of a divorce. They tell you it will ‘All be okay’, they tell you that ‘you did the right thing’, they tell you that you should be ‘grateful, you got out in time’ and they tell you to ‘get back out there and move on as soon as you can’. Armed by your own helplessness, you follow each piece of advice as it trickles into your consciousness to frame whatever the latest version of you is bound to become after you are done hibernating in your most recent version of hell.

For the first time, I am realizing, that I am somewhat grateful for people. Even, the silent support of complete strangers that always grated my ego before this happened. It has been a month since I was pushed to pack up all the scattered particles of a life I had tried to build over a year; box it all in cargo and fly home 18 hours after I filed the papers. It now reminds me of that Diane Lane film, where buried under a heap of hyperbole and melodrama, Lane remarks “The surprising thing about divorce is that it doesn’t actually kill you”.

In retrospect, what I feel above all the resentment and disillusionment is embarrassment. A deep, permeating sense of utter ashamed-ness at my own person for having known better and not acted otherwise. Most people enter into marriage armed with a dream but I entered into it in spite of mine. Most women, after having gone through a divorce, realize that their lives are so much better on their own but I knew that beforehand. So what grates me above all, isn’t the fact that I ‘ought to have known better’ but that I always did. An entire childhood plagued by the same problems that I eventually sought out for myself just the same. I am utterly, utterly disappointed in myself. And that hurts most of all, because the one time I actually did follow my heart, my head completely exited the premises and everything was shot to hell.

These days I find myself grasping desperately at the humour in all things. I wade my time through a series of cheap Pakistani films on television and old Austen adaptations. I swear at the television and cry as I scroll through the idle vignettes in my journals and the shoddy, over-posed pictures of my former-lesser half. I am told this is perfectly normal etiquette for a modern-day divorcee. Tears are overrated and always to be forsaken in favour of gumption, which is the order of the day. I think I’ve done well on the latter score, having already put in two weeks of consultancy work and received a good fat paycheck to prove that my mind hasn’t gone completely stale in the year I was forced to shut it down to appease the company I was keeping. Company that happened to believe in alien landings, impending holocausts that one actually needed to stock up for and Illuminati conspiracies that prevented me purchasing toothpaste, lotion and shower gel among a myriad of other things. I am beginning to somewhat appreciate the irony in the fact that I chose to marry a person who believed in the idea of ‘belief’ just as vehemently as I clung to the idea of 'doubt' as life's ultimate exclusion clause. It just goes to show how far opposites can detract.

I knew, a month into my marriage, that I was not meant to survive in it. What kept me stringing on was that quaint notion that marriages are made in compromise and fortitude and that the institution is not to be trifled with. The following months saw me perfecting my spouse-savant; cooking, cleaning, baking, fucking…and whatever else it is wives are derived to do. All the while, limiting my conversation to grocery lists and ‘how was your day, dear?’ Every sense of personality wiped clean after being categorically told how  pesky and pervasive mine was. Brain locked firmly away, conscience in a corner and words held at bay…that was marriage for me. Odd, the manner in which life chooses to choke the poetry out of us.

Now, I find myself on the verge again. Of another exhaustive beginning, going it alone, as I knew I always would. Dhammapada’s disciple a la’ ‘If in your course, you don’t meet your equal, your better, then continue your course, firmly alone. There’s no fellowship with fools’ and yet it doesn’t quite fit this time around because it is not the reality of loneliness that irks me as much as the idea of it. I fear, the bitterness, that such splitting inevitably brings. I fear the brittleness of growing into one of those women who begin by hating men and evolve into hating pretty much everything else. Who spend their days frowning and who have all the means for happiness but lack a taste for it. I fear that fate because I can feel it approaching every day and I have resisted it all my life. I resisted it as the abandoned child, as the charity case, family fuck-up and as the adult wanderer and I am still not ready to assume it. But there is something to be said for the power of heart break - there is an odd poignancy to having personally witnessed a machete taken to a dream one spent a lifetime constructing. It is a temporary colossus that never was, and while for everyone else the fact of it will fade away in time, for me the break will remain. From now on, my life will be classified from this point on and I knew better than to let this be my opus. So yes, I fear, bitterness because I have only ever calculated my life’s achievements to meet one lowest common denominator: Happiness. Eudaimonia is why I always return to Aristotle, even as I bunk-in with Feuerbach and Nietzsche from time to time.

I find myself raking my nails over my face in rage over my stupidity for having been that woman, one who thought herself born to forgive a man his mistakes. I wish I had smashed plates and sworn to my heart’s content but it was not prudent. Maintaining decorum during divorce meant that I silently pack my life, leave without a cent (as is becoming quite a trend with me) and not so much as squeak a solitary defense because I still couldn’t conceive of  ‘stooping to that level’. I couldn’t sift through emails and swear to my heart’s content because I just never chose to learn how to (not for dearth of material and/or inspiration, mind you).   It is quite perverse, this moral mathematics of the mind; an analogous equation that demands propriety of me, even at the most inopportune moments. How I wish, that I had inherited a truck load of venom from a gene pool soaked in salt.

For now, I have several logical anchors set in place. I am rabidly searching for work in a different city so I can deconstruct and reconstruct... alone, this time. I am making and keeping friends because I realize how much I missed them, and not just the mere idea of them. I am surviving to the staccato heart beat of reminiscing over old songs, planning new paintings and dreaming of another life that I can actually work for in this second act. I am relinquishing old appendages, wherever I find them creeping up. I am shedding weight and bleeding toxins of mind, body and mannerism. I am finally writing; constructing metaphors for missing moments spanning a year of both silence and supple salience.

So here's me clearing out barnacles of the mind

and hoping to finally spackle some flesh on the bones of my dreams.

A Precautionary Tale

In a banal setting
At an inconvenient time,

Would beauty transcend?

Or would it struggle still

Trapped in an open wound

Festering in an unrealized dream

Would it rebuke, rebuff or remember

That silly, stately girl

A fateful glitch in perpetual resistance of perfection;

A lonely wretch never to melt under an honest kiss;

A sad sage never to shimmer under the glow of a real compliment

That silly, sodden girl
carrying her bundle of incongruities
Dancing with her platoon of personal ghosts
Trapped by her quest for the one
 
A man deep enough
A man shallow enough;
A man hard enough
A man soft enough;
A man high enough
A man low enough;
A man dark enough
A man light enough;
A man, man enough
A man, woman enough

That silly, forever sorry girl

Trading in her pumpkin carriage

For a putrid cage,
 a stable quadrant in a dizzy world

 

Could Beauty ever forgive such a betrayal?
See her settle for a man who wants her
Only so she can beat herself bloody
in the memory of the one she wanted
 

A Happily Ever After Autopsy

"A lady's imagination is very rapid, it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment" - Jane Austen.

I suppose it goes without saying that no self-respecting feminist of this or any age wishes to live down to a Jane Austen summation of the 'fair sex' and yet I must admit to having done so. In a big way.

The word marriage has always terrified me, more than the institution itself, it is all the fringes of the fairytale attached with the concept that always disturbed me. There is a certain elusive 'un-attainability' to matrimony that is never really achieved even after all the papers have been signed, the 'I do's' uttered and the proverbial aprin donned. Couples are never really complete, no matter how much they affect the illusion of being so. There is always something to reach for, until there isn't and that is perhaps an even more terrifying prospect. For me, personally, the word always carried with it the myth, the mirage, the miracle...all followed by the manifestation of the mind-numbingly and soul-crushingly mundane.

There is much more to it, I am discovering. Having gotten hitched at what most would call 'break-neck speed', in many ways I am still reeling from the ride. Often, my partner and I spend hours marvelling over how we only met last December, got engaged three weeks later, married in February and now I am here. Here, in a new country; among new people; seated on new furniture; eating from new dishes; typing on a new computer and wondering if I am still the old me. That's one thing about marriage that I have observed, if you happen to be the woman leaving home and everything you know for the 'fairytale' then you are surrounded by the 'new'. So much so that one longs for the familiarity of all the frustrations that made one take the leap in the first place. I grant you the paradox.

Moving beyond the fairy tale beginning of meeting someone in a foreign country; on a bus; during a journalism conference; spending a week together; being proposed to and finding oneself unable to refuse despite all former logic that compelled a somewhat 'default' state of singledom, there is now the rather taxing and unexpectedly rewarding exercise of cohabitation. For those who know me, this state is as far from my natural habitat as possible. It is alien for me to share ...anything, really, with the occasional exception of DVDs, shoes or clothes. Sharing a life, a bed, a bathroom, a closet, a kitchen, a TV, a thought and a feeling is by no means a natural inclination and yet somehow, the days pass and one achieves new 'natural' states. It often makes me wonder if I am still the same person, if my mind is still my own or if I have inadvertently swapped it for a stepford bride caricature who bakes and cooks and cleans and folds underwear. Underwear that don't even belong to her, mind you! The sheer grounding of gender roles in marriage often grates my nerves and the 'singular' in me blanches at some of the things I now find myself 'volunteering' to do. It itches and it irks, all until I see my partner mopping the floors at my side, cooking at my side, folding laundry at my side and waking up in the middle of the night to make me Chinese food because I mumble something about having a craving during my sleep. Suddenly, then its okay to be less ...singular.

And yet, I am singular. I always have been. It is ingrained in how I think and how I view the world. I have always prided myself for 'not' fitting in; not buying the brand everyone needs to feel worthy of ...whatever it is brands bring; for not needing to be popular or indeed, even liked. I have relished the freedom that comes with dispensing of that very base need for approval. I used to view marriage as that damned Occam's razor matrimonial option that only ever oscillated between either being somebody or being with somebody but sometimes the simplest answers aren't really the best ones. Especially when concerning relationships. One can do both, although, granted it isn't easy to embrace differences and suddenly accept that everything one does now requires a sounding board. That one can no longer navigate each whim to its illogical conclusion and that every decision, every tabletop purchase, every grocery item and every life decision now needs validation from someone other than 'just me'. There is that ugly word 'compromise' that keeps cropping up and it leaves a distinctly un-feminist taste in ones mouth every time it does. Which is ridiculous, considering the taste of compromise is mostly just bitter and not everything bitter has to be linked with feminism, at least not as a rule.

Then again it IS un-feminist too. I always took great care to separate the rhetoric about choice with some basic rules that feminism did initially aspire to achieve before it forayed into its present dark alley of dada-ist and gaga-ist absurdities. Yes, feminism is about choice but one needs to be honest about the fact that it is also about making certain types of choices, whether or not we like to admit it. Putting a burgeoning career on hold for love is by no means a 'feminist' choice and I would refrain from calling it one. Neither is putting off a PhD for several years because one wants to start a family first. These are choices and women must be free to make them, but no, they are not feminist choices. It would be childish of me to try and take the course many women do of trying to defend their choices by labelling them as feminist just to feel better about themselves. It is counterproductive and it confuses the discourse, and frankly, feminism is a confused enough discourse to begin with! I suppose what it boils down to is accepting ones choices for what they are and still taking pride in the face that one made them.

When I found the man I knew I wanted to marry I decided to forego, perhaps, the biggest career opportunity that had ever come my way...a stint at the New York Times as part of the Daniel Pearl Fellowship. The latter required that I return to Pakistan and work there for a year and that would have meant risking my relationship. It was not a feminist choice and yet it was a woman's choice, made by a commitaphobe who always said that she would only ever get married if she found someone who made her want to get married. She did and it came down to finally taking that chance which has been every bit worth it. The decision, however, has made me reconsider many of my 'rules' about what I used to want for myself. While I still agree that marriage is an inherently patriarchal institution, I also recognise now that most of marriage is what you make it. So I am choosing to work out of that set up from within...it sounds convoluted - I know. And yet, all it takes is a partner willing to work with you.

Lately I have discovered that much of marriage involves the 'appearance of being happy'. So much rests on having the right furniture, the right bathroom rug and the right crockery. Because heaven help us if we serve dinner to strangers in boring, plain coloured china and they end up thinking we are not the 'perfect couple'. As if there is such a thing! The myth about perfection is debilitating because, while in truth something that doesn't exist cannot really hurt you, in essence it can unravel your entire premise. At the end of the day a woman will always want more than she has. For better and for worse. And she will also always aspire to perfection in this regard. I have come to believe it is the curse of our sex.

While my husband seems perfectly content watching a game of football, taking a walk down the marina and planning vacations; I always find myself fretting over job prospects, whether our house 'looks' clean enough for guests or whether I have the right clothes to match that adorable shoe. Protecting and preserving the prototype of a fairytale can be exhausting. Especially when one has no idea who invented the fairtytale and why and when it achieved such coveted sacred status. I mean, who really is to say what an ideal marriage looks like? Is it really the picket fence and three bedroom house complete with golden retriever playing in the yard or is it the confused and confusing mesh of peaks and valleys, fights and make ups, kisses and curses that fill all the crevices in to colour real people and real lives?

When is it socially acceptable for a newly-wed couple to shed the skin of a 'good looking' marriage to a real-looking marriage and be the prouder for it? I believe I have finally stopped my quest for achieving this supposed perfection. The initial exercise in sublimating the perfect meal, the perfect outfit, the perfect picture frame shots capturing the perfect blissful smiles simply became far too exhausting. My husband and I now spend our evenings watching Game of Thrones re-runs on television, chomping down on cookies and ice tea, while he tells me my eating habits will lead me to an early grave and I chide him for having the palette of an octogenarian with diabetes. I read with the bed site lamp on for hours after he's fallen asleep and he still wakes up at the crack of dawn to pray and then watch some 'Danish a.k.a light' news. We squabble over remote rights and how often to visit family and it is finally all 'real'.

And while I can by no means claim perfection, I can officially state that in an honest balancing of scales where independence means complete freedom to do whatever one wishes but do it alone and dependence - or the more politically correct 'interdependence' - means rearranging some life goals to make space for new ones or harder still, someone-else's goals -the latter wins. It wins in spades because you love someone enough for none of it to really be classified as a 'sacrifice'. It wins because there really is 'that much' to be said for having someone to hold your hand when you're walking down the street.

Marriages require a premise, and the initial phase involves looking happy because feeling it comes in episodes featuring valleys of misery and peaks of magic. This naturally forms a framework of subtleties often lost on the outside world and so 'looking the part' can sometimes take precedence over feeling it. All justified in the attempt of reassuring all those around us that ...yes, this really can be the Disney version of Anderson's fairytale and the Little Mermaid doesn't despair and die, she lands her prince and they live...wait for it, happily.

Of Counting Coppers

Statues made of matchsticks

Crumble into one another

My love winks, she does not bother

She knows too much to argue or to judge

                                                                                                     -Love Minus Zero/ No Limit by Bob Dylan

I seem to recall having been here before but I cannot recognise myself or this place. Although, the feeling is familiar enough, a former best friend…Desperation, born of long-term detachment. This has to be that odd point I always recede to when the world and those in it disappoint me or fail to live up (or down, as the case may be) to my expectations. It’s also the same holier-than-thou-hill I’ve set my fortress on since I was ten.

The past few months have been spent in a boiling, broiling cesspit of rage. That, is a place I do not recognise and so I haven’t really been able to process it or write about it until I was cool enough to try and compartmentalise and deflect properly. For some reason the only expression that keeps coming to mind to describe my place is ‘I’ve been played for a fool’ and I cannot understand why I haven’t questioned the semantics of this particular phraseology before. Who play’s a fool? The use of verb is completely misleading here, the fool is born to play and be part of play. A fool ought to take comfort in the familiarity of deceit and abandon, surely? I suppose that is my way of saying I have completely lost faith in the likes of ‘family’, such as it may be. And the romance of the Tarot deck is giving way to the reality of feeling small again. One that has hit me back with its usual ‘and why, you idiot, were you expecting things to turn out differently. Have you not learned ANYTHING?’ For once I am ashamed to say I have not taken any of the aftermath in stride.
I have cursed and cussed my way through the streets, while safely locked in my car.

I have screamed into my pillow a plenty and yet the tide of rage persists and keeps rising, rising, rising.

That is when I rebuke myself. ‘All that reading, all that practice, all that pretence at patience. And what is it for, if I too, can collapse and bitch like all the banshees I have grown accustomed to hear baying for blood at the slightest provocation’. My mother tells me ‘anger is healthy’ (go figure) because it has provided me with some odd form of initiative and drive to self-start my life trajectory at 28. This always brings to mind that somewhere along the line I lost 10 years of myself. Years that I could have spent being young, stupid and petty were spent being patient, stoic and stolid. They were spent in a refrigerator and now I feel like one of those musty ice cakes that Bashir used to bring out for the horses in Tarlai when I was 14.

Dry ice. The kind that never melts.

I’ve also jumped head first into a new - old obsession ‘Fantasy fiction’ and in one short month have finished six (average 700 page) volumes of the Game of Thrones. The obsession also appears to have extended itself to my recent penchance for employing terms like ‘ser’, ‘jape’ and ‘betwixt’ quite liberally. I find myself particularly admiring a coping mechanism used for the angriest, hapless, female character in the series, Arya. I am beginning to appreciate Arya’s ritual nightly recitation of a list of death warrants that she whispers to herself each night before falling asleep. I have now compiled my own list and even though all my years of fabricating tranquillity have not been washed away enough for me to pray for beheadings and spikes, I have begun praying for retribution and on occasion even, revenge. As much as I wish there weren’t, there is a perverse pleasure in what most people term ‘justice’ or my mother ‘what goes around comes around’ and I find I am not above relishing it. This scares the shit out of me but it beats purgatory any day. Then again, I don’t have the faintest clue who it is I am praying to so that might be moot.

Even more shameful, is my newly awoken greed. For the first time that I can remember, I have begun to miss … money. That security of having not to work for it should I choose. The lazy, ugly, hedonistic self-satisfaction of knowing I can leech off some sire, or spouse in stead. I used to dream of low-budget adventures, journal pages well worn in, concerts and backpacks but now I find myself dreaming about hefty bank balances, foreign accounts and first class travel. Small wonder, I haven’t reached the stage where I crave diamonds and cars but that might come some day too and that day, I fear I wont be able to face my mirror.

I’m walking around like a mousy Dorian Gray these days. Thinking the thoughts that ought to make my portrait pock faced and patchy but my cowardice to actually act on said nuggets, prevents that from happening. There it is again, purgatory…except now it’s this ugly, dank room filled with flies and reserved for ‘cravens’ (another GOT relic to reuse) that only means I didn’t even have the guts to be good at being bad.

That’s what brought me to ‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’ again. According to Clinton Heylin in ‘Revolution in the Air’, Dylan wrote the song when he himself was drowning in coppers and dimes. He tried to mock the obsession that was taking hold and I can sympathise with the urge. The 1985 ballad, also one of his many portraits of Sarah, rode on the coattails of his other ‘mathematical songs’ like Dime Store, Bank Account Blues and Worse than Money. When asked about his references to Sarah as holy he said “What I mean by ‘holy’ is crossing all boundaries of time and usefulness”. Which certainly puts most of my pretty premises on the back burner. The song offers a mental balancing act, in the style of Keats, and recalls the latter’s notion of ‘negative capability’. What Keats called ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact, reason…or comfort’.

I live that.

It’s called patience.

And it blows.

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.