Diamonds on the Soles of His Shoes

“Treat each other like human beings? Of course, for the other great apes have no class hierarchy.”

-Bauvard, Evergreens Are Prudish

‘Le lo na’

On auto-pilot loop, he keeps saying it, over and over and over again. He repeats the same phrase every 15 seconds for ten minutes straight almost in the sibilant semblance of the Gaytri Mantra. I wish I were in a car right now, simply because he’s made it impossible for me to drown him out. I have no windows to put between us right now. Wasn’t it Audrey Hepburn who said ‘Life is like a limousine. There’s a front seat, a back seat and a window in between’? One has to admit Audrey practically invented class and she elevated it to a thing of beauty …. 'Le lo na, Baji’…ugh. There is no way, at present, of relegating his presence to just an irritant *tap* tap* tap* on a rolled up window. He stands right in front of me making it nearly impossible to escape his line of vision… or my line of vision, depending on which end of the spectrum one is speaking from or of or to. 

This one is better dressed than most street urchins ever dare to be if they still want to deserve some empathy from their would-be, could-be benefactors. He’s toeing a precarious line, trying to balance being ‘felt sorry for’ by still looking like he doesn’t really need the actual pity that accompanies it. It takes a certain kind of gumption, if one thinks about it. A more technically inclined individual might even posit that this one ranks lower than his peers on the empathy-equivalent seeing as he does not possess in spades, the obvious adorab-ility of the whiter, bonny-cheeked beggars who do not need to dress down to tug at the tightest wound heart strings. One might even say he was taking a risk; either that or he had somehow miraculously managed to maintain a shred of self-esteem regarding his own appearance. Either way, he was an anomaly and anomalies are always uncomfortable in social standards. My mental ministrations are heightened in an attempt to keep his pleading at bay…I picture him as James Dean for a split second and I snort at my own musings.

Rebel without a Cause, indeed. 

He wears Bubble Gummers, only slightly torn and frayed at the edges and his shalwar kameez is barely even patchy. If anything, it looks pressed and it matches. The embroidery at the cuffs and collar is only slightly faded, which seems inexcusably presumptuous. He wears a Lakers baseball cap and it affords a bright flash of fierce violet roped in with mango yellow to shade his patchy skin. His face is an odd conglomerate of contradictions. There are two oozing pimples, two dry patches marking the edges of his lips…one would imagine they would be concealed perfectly if he smiled. There is the customary lake of dried snot settled beneath his left nostril. The contradictions are afforded in the handsomely high cheek bones, the perfect nose and the eyes. His eyes are a stunning aqua, the kind with an odd golden flake thrown in here and there to attract even the most dismissive of onlookers. The fact that he’s better off than most street urchins I’ve ever seen actually makes him harder to dismiss and this is an odd prefix. I am uncomfortably aware of the odd bout of empathy I am experiencing and cannot quite place. This isn’t exactly a social setting I am comfortable with: turning off our ‘humanity switch’, as The Vampire Diaries would have us believe , is a pretty standard practice when confronted with bitter realities. He is becoming uncomfortably human in his persistence. Human enough to want to clean up and ‘save’.

‘Le lo na. Le lo na Baji’

Somewhere, in the last 5 minutes, he just elevated himself from the legions of ragged and patched children I was comfortable ranking as sub-human enough to ignore. What troubles me is I do not know how he did it and it makes for a dangerous precedent. This one is getting under my skin and that scares me. This one elicits feelings.

He lingers stubbornly on the periphery of five women (myself included), waiting to board a bus to Murree. All of us, safely hiding behind our sunglasses. All of us oozing annoyance and holding empathy at bay, as practice has perfected us to do.

‘Le lo na. Le lo na Baji’

He’s been told to leave at least fifteen times, two of us even gave him 5 rupees each but he persists, and while this would otherwise make him more annoying it somehow makes him compelling in this suspended moment on a random mountain. Perhaps it is the fact that he looks me in the eye until I have to look away. He is disconcerting and he is moving closer…too close. He seems to have skipped the subliminal social training that prohibits one of his kind from touching one of mine. He tugs at my sleeve and I shoo him away as if he’s stung me. The woman sitting next to me, assumes a mantle I did not endorse, for fear that she might be next. She points at his cap and comments about whether he even knows what it says. Another one points at his shoes and laughs. The left sneaker is still flickering softly with each step, the red lights embedded in the rubber sole blinking out their final gasping breaths as he backs away.

 He is finally aware of himself. Finally aware that he has transgressed and penetrated an invisible layer of placenta that cocoons us from the likes of him. Look but don’t touch.

One can tell that he used to be proud of those sneakers. It seems to be the one thing he didn’t yet realize, that they were outdated and even worse…local. He cracks. His confidence and borderline cockiness melts off his face, down his shoulders, filters into his thighs and congeals heavily in his knee caps. His step falters slightly as he backs away from us. He’s a fighter, but no one can win against a machete taken to their ego. Laughter breaks barriers well enough but it breaks people much quicker. Still, he juts out his chin as his eyes pool with tears. He can’t get away fast enough now as the giggles cascade over his back and his shadow stretches across the road growing larger and larger as he diminishes with each step.

I finally feel.

I think.

Moreover, I feel that I need to acknowledge this feeling as I sit amidst the other women, writing in my notebook.  Something tells me that if I don’t feel this, I will remain ‘this’ person. And at this particular precipice, I cannot swallow my own saliva for fear that it will poison me.

I head over to him a few feet away, as he sits with his head hunched over his small box of ‘Chilli Millis’.

‘Kitne Ka he?’

He is pouting and proud but he still needs to make a sale. In that moment, I envy him his social shield for I am completely naked and I can feel the whispers of the women wash over the both of us. I realize I am the target this time. It was to be expected, I suppose. I am not sanctimonious enough to begrudge them their apathy but apparently I am sanctimonious enough to need to distance myself from it. It is an uncomfortable tangent either way.

‘10 Rupe Ka.’

‘Tum Ne to Pehle 5 Ka Kaha Tha. 5 Ka Nahin He?  I’m not going to lose ground that easily.

‘Nahin! 5 Mein ne Kamana Hai!’ Apparently, neither was he.

Like I said, rebel without a cause. Still, I had to admire his moxy, especially since he didn’t even use it as a sales pitch. I give him Rs110, five for his kamai and an additional 100 to assuage my guilt. I pause for a second to absorb the fact that in this particular exchange, the cost of guilt is 100 rupees. Quite the bargain. It didn’t make him happy though, he doesn’t even look up to acknowledge the red note over the green. His ego is costs more than my guilt. He is a beggar with principles and I am a brigand without. In that moment, we are both social reprobates but his misdemeanors are honest, while mine are self-aggrandizing.

In a moment of latent humanity, I realize that the only way to correct my former offense is to touch him back, so I stick out my hand. He looks at me, measures me, makes me wait…rather pathetically, but finally takes it. This time I am relieved at his touch. His name is Bilal, he informs me. I rustle his hair, and it’s that odd, sun burnt, straw texture that is the cumulative product of mountain climate, street dust and lack of conditioner.

‘Mujhe hasna nahin chaahiye tha. Tumhare joote bahut pyaare hein.’

‘Doosre wali light ko kya hua?’ I try to make conversation before I head back to face the firing squad.

‘Woh bujh gayi.’

I return to my flock only to be met with soft glares. I can feel them even through their sunglasses. I turned tides somewhere in the last three minutes and it was a far greater offense than occasionally refusing to share my lunch with the womenfolk during lunch break. I had shamed my own.

I sit down to read a book and find myself periodically glancing at Bilal in between skimming pages. He has moved lower down the hill and is waiting outside a school boundary for his friends to finish their day and finally come out to play.

For now, he and I, share the same social periphery.

It is a beautifully overcast day and I feel beautifully outcast.

Let Us Compare Mythologies

“It was called ‘The Traitor’ because it was about some feeling that we have of betraying some mission that we were mandated to fulfill. Being unable to fulfill it and then, coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it. That the deeper courage was to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you now found yourself.” – Leonard Cohen 

I am beginning to fear that I orchestrate my mistakes in search of the desperate emptiness that follows the crescendo. Almost, as if I am seeking out extreme tangents that will allow me the respite of a recovery period. Something that I can finally relish without guilt. I fear that I’m one of those people who attract drama just so I can thrive in the silent, hateful aftermath and succumb to the hard shell of solitary confinement engrossed in soft cushions of Cohen, Borges, Dylan and Kafka. I suppose one could make the hard choice and live the shell, but that seems far too courageous a move to weave into my life’s morbid aesthetic. 

That is why, I have always grasped desperately at the humour in all things. As if the making of ugly things into sadistically sarcastic ones somehow saves them from still being cruel. It doesn’t really, Funny doesn’t trump Fate…it only clouds it over for a while. It is somewhat different this time around though, some wordless, weightless, want-less expectation has been lifted from my shoulders and my conscience. And no, it isn’t as basic as “marriage” or “coupling” or “companionship”, but more the faint glimmer of the dream of all those composite 'some day in the future' things that I no longer feel. On some level it has become easier to talk to people now, because I have lost my self-propelling greed to be liked, to be considered better than I could be. Some might say my pride has finally flitted through the cracks of my fidelity. I don’t really think that’s it. It’s more as if I no longer care about conclusions as much as I used to. Sadly, I still care about process. This means that my particular brand of Stockholm Syndrome has me equivocating my words enough not to offend anyone but not enough to lose all sense of opinion.  Like one of those exotic pet parrots who pretty much always says what you want them to but once in a blue moon manages an original thought only to blurt it out in front of your guests so it can shame you. It’s oddly liberating to finally be on the giving end of that spectrum. For those who know me, it’s a milestone I could never have anticipated and yet I still cannot escape the sense that I am a fraud. I suppose we are all frauds, each pontificating at their own podium to an imagined audience who couldn’t be bothered to give a shit. My fungibility rests in the fact that I cannot help but self-aggrandize and self-deprecate in equal measure. No podium could ever hold against the pressure of dogma awkwardly coupling with doubt.

As Kant put it, I am presently in a state of ‘arbitrary self-defilement’, I know my excesses aren’t really my natural setting and they most certainly don’t fit but I am determined to wallow in them anyway because on some level I’d rather be saturated than sorry. This is why I am determined to write this time around-without being conscious of the garbage that I shall regurgitate in the process. I am determined to bleed toxins of the mind and finally let my garbles fall wherever and however they may. Art without frame and words without will…but words nonetheless. I miss my typewriter.

I know that some of it has to do with being in this city again. This place makes me angry and seeing as I have never really learned how to be angry, I am seeking solace in the familiarity of being flippant about the important things. I am dedicating time and energy to listening to music, systematically: album by album and playlist by playlist. Currently, I am submerging myself in ‘Death of a Ladies Man’, reading The Aleph again and contemplating the merits of French toast. I spend ten minutes a day, examining the layers of cellulite on my thighs and belly with a glare so curious it could peel paint off walls but appears helpless in the face of fat. I then proceed to plan whether I shall cook my pasta in white sauce or red. 

Once upon a time, when I lived in a moribund bric-a-brac prison not far from here, I used to compile letters. I was ten when I started and I vaguely recall my first letter to the judge who decided my custody case and sent me to stay with my mother (on my request). I remember I posted the letter and since I didn’t know his address I invented a name (I’m quite certain it was a Mohammad Something or Other), conflated a house and street number and put it in the mail box without a stamp.

                                                                                            

May 19, 1994

Dear Mr. Judge,

Thank you for helping me the first time and sending me with Mama.

I’m back in Islamabad now.

I made a mistake.

I need your help again.

                           -Maria Amir

The point was to write it and send it. Not for it to be received or returned. It was a therapeutic enterprise and I suppose on some pathetic, panoramic level the internet and blogging now serves the same purpose. That is why, there seems to be no better time than the present to take up the practice all over again. 

Dear To Whom It May Compel,

It seems particularly easy to talk to you. Mostly because I can neither observe nor imagine your face. This is a good thing, since it prevents me from activating and deactivating my impressions and analogies to suit your particular pallet. You may find my wordiness to be an indicator of an amalgam of social superiority complexes.

 I can assure you it isn’t.

I like big words and if anything my taste for them is born out of an inherent inferiority complex. That said, you may now argue that both of these complexes are the same and if you do, you are much smarter than either of my complexes allow me to be. I shall enjoy this, now that I have already projected on to you a mind of my own making. Rest assured - you are under no compulsion to accept this attribution.

You are one of those odd foibles of nature that cannot rest until and unless they have proven a point over mine. My need to sound whimsical is exceeded only by your need to appear illustrious, guarded and contained. I hope here, that you shall excuse both my familiarity and my flippancy. I trust that I am making up for it by awarding you a pedestal without your even having had to have worked for it. This is indicative of a deficiency in my own character and I would terribly appreciate if you did not read too much into it.

I shall tell you about my present, which is a congealing mass of arbitrary observations: the fact that security guards in Islamabad appear more liable of scoring women on a decimal point-scale than men who actually have a chance of dating them; The fact that decimal-point scoring of women’s attributes somehow never translates to men – and why is that I ask? Why do women not score men on attractiveness with the same sense of purpose and brutally-banal honesty that they allow to be directed at themselves? Why is it so hard to stop wanting…everything and so infernally easy to need… nothing? Have you ever found yourself being comforted by the random racket of construction work in your building and if so why? Do you live in a country where men piss on the edge of a street and if so, can you help yourself looking at them while trying to simultaneously condition your mind to ignore them? Do you wish you could see the world without having to be a part of it? Do you believe backpacks are monikers for a personality type? What is your favourite cliché? Do you aspire to Be your favourite cliché?

Do you ever find yourself stopping in the midst of several eternities buried beneath the dancing masquerade of a lonely minute and really believe in God, just for a split-second?

Yours Sincerely

Who Cares

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.