A Closet Full of Conversation

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded – Fyodor Dostoevsky

It appears that I am incapable of exorcising you and so I have decided that in the vein of a lost La Mancha, I too shall be content with my scars. My months in Lahore, drudge slowly now and as the accolades I had collected during my time in England slowly fade away, it appears that Oxford and you must have been a twisted dream. A dream that I am too scared to awaken from. Still, as Rimbaud put it “I am intact, and I don’t give a damn.”

I believe, I am spending my time re-living conversations, creating them, coveting them…mostly just talking to myself. It is becoming increasingly obvious now, enough so that I can occasionally catch people gawking at me through my car window and have bought myself window screens. I wonder if you have forgotten me already and I altercate daily between whether or not I would be grateful or gutted knowing that truth.

Living with the random swirling of my brain is exhausting: tweaks in time for a perennial plagiarist who never knows if she actually lived her life or is only now weaving it into view. Voices echo both in the back of my head and outside it but I still them by composing conversations, some that I have stocked up from childhood; others with you; yet better ones that I someday plan to have with someone who I am determined will not be you.

“Must you always pretend?” you asked me once.

I’m not that interesting when I don’t

“Have you even tried it?” you pushed.

I don’t need to, they were perhaps the most honest words I ever shared.

Is that the composite of human judgment then, conversation? If so, I can confidently claim that this year has been one of self-indulgent compositions for me. I have always been a voyeur of language and the only way to get my mind to stop tinkering its way into madness these days seems to involve rollicking off random nonsense both in and outside of my person.

“I will take care of you, you are my daughter after all,” my father tells me, after nearly eight years of my having lain eyes on him. I don’t have a ready answer to my skepticism, my bitterness or my regret and so I smile in response. I suppose that is what ‘forgive and forget’ is meant to mean but it doesn’t. I try to wash it down, in utmost benevolence to ‘forgive and forego’ but I am not sure if I am strong enough.

He asks me “What I wan’t to do with my life” in the same breath that he employs to ask me whether I would prefer pizza or Mexican for dinner. ‘Oh I don’t know, happiness might be nice. Love, even better,’ I muse to myself.

Get a PhD, I say instead. I know it isn’t a choice he would appreciate over marriage but I also know it is one he wouldn’t  begrudge me now.

It is disconcerting how all of my silent ministrations are directed at or around you – as if you have replaced one of the many incarnations in my head that I used to share myself with. Every minute detail; every odd lilting tail end of a half-formed world-changing philosophy; every unsolved epigram; every shoe purchase and song choice goes through you… they are all dedicated to you. You, who aren’t there anymore and were probably never there even when you were. 

Most of my days are spent writing letters to you in my mind… 

“My dear failed, festering excuse for persistent heartburn

I just watched the Matrix again with my kid brother. I wonder why all the references are Alice and Wonderland references? Ever think that there might be some credence to the fact that life is a giant, self-perpetuating computer game? Is that why you quit? Do you suppose I should, because I’m pretty sure I am playing against myself.

Remember how Cipher said ‘ignorance is bliss’, why couldn’t we have tried that? What’s so great about the 'Truth' anyhow, after all Dylan said ‘all the truth in the world adds up to one big lie’ and he’s pretty smart. Even you agreed with me on that. We never really pondered the merits of denial, perhaps we should have."

But I know, even as I say it that it isn't for me. I’m not one of those people beating the shit out of themselves to keep from asking a real question or worse getting a real answer. My denial travels a far more twisted trajectory. It makes mountains out of morals, gods out of men that I admire and molehills out of a god I cannot possibly love because he so desperately needs to be loved all the time.

“So why are you upset?” the voice -that I can never stop searching for- asks me as I paint my nails a bright fire-engine red, perched on my bed watching Yul Brynner grimace at Ingrid Bergman daring her to admit she loves him without giving anything away. Typical.

Did you know this is Oprah’s last year doing her show? I whine.

“And that is particularly upsetting to you because?” it presses on.

Well, she could at least have waited for me to make something of myself, called me on and then quit, and I was not being sarcastic.

My narcissism is humble enough to recognize that it has not yet achieved anything to claim a stake in the ego it could potentially develop. Which is why I am determined not to ever achieve anything.

“Why don’t you ever put any of your ideas down on paper?”Asma asks me.

Because, then I can’t change them and I’ll have to do something about them. Why don’t you apply for a theatre programme? I counter.

“I don’t buy it," she dodges. "We need to do something with our lives, move in some direction. Take on the world, stop being embarrassed about ourselves, lose the weight,” she’s on a roll as we both reach out for another chip, another pakora and another glass of coke.

You’re right but don’t we have to change to do all of that, I am apprehensive.

“Not necessarily, there must be SOMEONE who will like us exactly as we are?” she looks at me and we go on to compare lists that we have been drawing for the six years we have known each other only to crawl back into ourselves the moment we’ve digested the fries.

Still, I am patient and my patience is a pattering of images that I must pause and pillage without preference. There are conversations with the sprites in my head about fantasies that I could live in: my own personal reverie of a solitary walker, in a forest with a cabin, a lifetime supply of books, a typewriter and a coke fountain. A career that allows me to backpack around the world on a shoe-string budget but with ample material to fill several lifetimes worth of journals. A quaint ranch in the middle of nowhere...Wyoming mayhaps, where I can ride in the rain, read in the sun and write all the days in between. Occasionally there are conversations with an eight-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl, both of whom have my hair and your eyes. They enjoy my company and think I’m an amazing mom. We watch every single animated release in the theatre; eat skittles; recite Dahl and Dr Zeuss with all the HOoo voices; take an infinite number of road trips; host midnight costume parties and dance. They love me and I don’t construct them beyond that…ever. 

Then there are conversations with my dead 80-year-old saviour, Baba Faiz.

“Maria Saib, aap ko hum ka yaad aati he?” he smiles at me from the beyond.

Sara waqt aati he baba, baarish mein kabhi aap ke bagher pakore nahin khaaye, I sob.

“Raat ko neend aata he na saib, dar to nahin lagta,” hand on my hair.

Nahin, I lie.

But it always seems to come back to you. You, who I sometimes wish I hadn’t met or fallen in love with until I remind myself that there are no victims in our particular equation. Until I remember that I did this, that this is my story not yours.

“What does this ‘Paimona Bede’ thing mean?” you asked me.

No idea, it isn’t Urdu its Persian, as I hastily email my mother to find out for you.

“So?” you press on.

Forget it, it’s a love song, I scoff.

“And I’m not allowed near those?” that smirk again.

You shouldn’t be. If you must know, it means ‘please fill my empty cup with love so I can breathe again’, I try and fail at affecting a snort.

“That’s cheesy…desperate actually. I wonder why all love songs are so damn desperate?” you ask me.

I didn’t answer you, did I?

To Ramona

Ramona, come closer
Shut softly your watery eyes
The pangs of your sadness
Will pass as your senses will rise

The flowers of the city
Though breathlike, get deathlike at times
And there's no use in tryin'
To deal with the dyin'
Though I cannot explain that in lines.

Your cracked country lips
I still wish to kiss
As to be by the strength of you skin
Your magnetic movements
Still capture the minutes I'm in
But it grieves my heart, love
To see you tryin' to be a part of
A world that just don't exist

 It's all just a dream, babe
A vacuum, a scheme, babe
That sucks you into feelin' like this.

I can see that your head
Has been twisted and fed
With worthless foam from the mouth
I can tell you are torn
Between stayin' and returnin'
Back to the South

You've been fooled into thinking
That the finishin' end is at hand
Yet there's no one to beat you
No one to defeat you
'Cept the thoughts of yourself feeling bad

I've heard you say many times
That you're better than no one
And no one is better than you

If you really believe that
You know you have
Nothing to win and nothing to lose
From fixtures and forces and friends

Your sorrow does stem
That hype you and type you
Making you feel
That you gotta be just like them.

I'd forever talk to you
But soon my words
They would turn into a meaningless ring
For deep in my heart
I know there is no help I can bring

Everything passes
Everything changes
Just do what you think you should do
And someday, maybe
Who knows, baby
I'll come and be cryin' to you.
                                     - Bob Dylan

Ad Meliora

Towards Better Things

I have never really had to cope with a loss that I didn’t know was mine before. The other kind of loss I tend to expect, anticipate even.

A 24-year-old boy died recently. Ironically, he didn’t die in a bomb blast, which is the norm these days but while waiting for a ball to approach his cricket bat at the crease outside the Daily Times office. They say, his heart gave out. His heart gave out at 24. I suppose in some measure I envy Saad Anwar. He knows now, he has answers. And I sit and sulk in his absence with even more questions.

I wish I could say that he was my friend and that life is empty without him but he wasn’t and it isn’t. I found out he was gone, purely by accident. My friend Mighty called me randomly and even more randomly slipped out with “Oh didn’t you know, Saadi died.”

I didn’t know because Saadi wasn’t my friend, he was an 'acquaintance'. I have never really understood the meaning of the term in a modern context before. One of my cyber-acquaintances tends to employ the expression with reference to me in our occasional interactions and the usage always irked me, because I felt this person placed far too much value on labelling relationships. Especially, if casually calling someone a ‘friend’ was so obviously taxing that they needed to both physically and verbally be kept at a safe distance at all times. I know better now.

I never really let Saadi become a friend. I’m not particularly apt at making or keeping friends but I knew him. I had smiled with him, exchanged the one-off joke, and a few months ago I even exchanged Christmas pudding (that I had helped my mother bake) with Saadi, who insisted on hoarding the last three slices. About seven months ago, he asked me why I wasn’t taking an editorial position at DT for the opinion pages.

I replied haughtily “What opinion, Saadi, this paper is a rag now. It’s a gover-nerial (we snickered at that) mouth piece, nahin?”

He called me a ‘Befqoof Aurat,’ adding that I needed to think ‘shark-like and screw the principle of it for the money’. The fact that he said it with his rather typical, trademark grin, eye-brows skewed akimbo ‘grinch’ style’ only made me laugh.

He joined in and said, ‘theek he, theek he, raho malang. Dekhte hein kitni der dora chalta he faqeergi ka’.

I responded with “challenge?”

And he gave me a thumbs up sign.

That was my last encounter with Saadi and I don’t think it is one I’m likely to forget any time soon.

At this juncture, I actually wish I could believe in God or religion.It might be comforting to have some kind of false sense of peace or hope regarding this perennially optimistic kid who got dealt a sour hand, or sweet one, depending on how one looks at it. I am sad for his mother who lost her son too soon; for his and my friend Mighty, who I know will not get over this but as is typical, I am saddest for myself.

I am sad that it took Saadi dying for me to recognise that he may well have been one of the 18 people I have encountered in my life that I actually would have liked to know better. The count has now dropped to 17. I am also bitterly amused by the fact that I appear to presently have over 200 ‘friends’ on facebook, and I have no idea what that means anymore.

They don’t have an ‘acquaintance’ tab on facebook.

But I can count the friends I have in life. There are two, my mother and my friend Asma. There used to be three others, cousins in another life where we were four corners of a demented, dilapidated but integral square. A composite element that faced the outside together, each corner with its own baggage and issues but with the others’ back. An element called 'Maria+Ahsan+Salman+Fatima' but that has passed too. Then there is the outer circle I occasionally hang out with, whose company I enjoy enough to take in but never to indulge myself enough to genuinely depend on or worse let depend on me. Then there are people I know of and who know of me. Last of all, there is family, which is and always has been a cesspool swamp of maybe’s, mayhaps’ and mishaps.

There are a few who I would have liked to know, but never had the courage to come out and say, in my third grade avatar of a Forever Friends card “will you please, please be my friend?”. To have and to hold, till mutual idiocy do us part!

I suppose much of it comes with being a displaced person. Having the kind of personality that doesn’t take brackets all too well, makes it nearly impossible to find like-hearted-spirits. Then again, it also makes that finding and the process behind it, more poignant…or so I must constantly assure myself. But I am alone now and I am beginning to feel that I have let it go on for too long to want or be able to alter the predicament. It is a rather cruel twist of rapscallion fate, to finally want to find another half- not a romantic one- just….one, but no longer have the ability to do so.

The thing about relationships, especially friendships, which are more permanent than romances I suppose (not that I would know the difference) is that they pose emotional epigrams. I am completely incapacitated in affecting a suitably likable persona to bridge this seemingly insurmountable gap. I have begun to fear that I have taken to forming only ‘acquaintances’, that friends pose too much of a disappointment because I always let them down or bore them or don’t give them enough attention or give them too much attention. But mostly I am beginning to fear that my narcissism is approaching its peak - that no one is allowed to come close enough because no one deserves to.

They say, it is loneliest at the top.

They neglect to mention that it is the same at the bottom.

Tea trauma

It is an odd sense of displacement, being a journalist and not being addicted to tea.

Let alone not liking tea. But I now worry that my inherent debilitation in avoiding 'chai' and having replaced it with that 'other' foreign cultural export 'coke' may pose overarching consequences for my personal life (sic).

You see, I can cook. Well even, when I want to. I can clean and mend things. But I am inherently incapable of making a decent cup of tea. The reason being that since I don’t drink tea and don't like it, I have no idea what a decent cup of it tastes like. I don't know what makes tea too strong, weak or milky or simultaneously what makes it ‘karrara’ ‘hitchi’ or ‘pisti’. This, according to my grandmother, means that I will probably never get married.

Then again, I'm sure there are other reasons for that failing.

Oh-my-GOD

“Do you believe in God Andre? No, neither do I, but that’s a favourite question of mine. An upside down question, you know. 

What do you mean? 

Well, if I asked people whether they believe in life, they’d never know what I meant. It’s a bad question… it can mean so much that it really means nothing. So I ask them if they believe in God and if they say they do – then I know that they don’t believe in life.

Why?

Because, you see, God- whatever one chooses to call God, is one’s highest conception of the highest possible. And whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself and his life. It’s a rare gift you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible: here now, for your very own.” – Ayn Rand

I find it disconcerting how often complete strangers or mild acquaintances will pester you about your views on ‘god’ once they discover you to be a non-believer. Ironically, the trend seems to be the reverse on challenging believers regarding their feelings about their God (then again most believers hardly require an invite to broach the subject.) Perhaps, that is why the brazen-ness of believers irks me so.

I find myself repeatedly being asked to ‘define’ my disbelief and I grow tired of the exercise of elaborating upon how I am not an atheist ‘as per I don’t believe anything’ but I am an a-theist ‘as per I do not believe in an anthropomorphic god or in religion’. This is usually met with a raised brow and ‘surely, agnostic then?’ to which I must sigh and say ‘no, ignostic if anything’. It is generally around this precarious juncture that my opponent smiles a derogatory ‘oh so you’re not clear and are deflecting’ smile and I am forced to dismiss the subject on grounds that raising the point ‘I don’t think one can be clear on anything pertaining to the numinous, I’m very clear about that’ doesn’t usually bode well in dogmatic duels.

The fact that people so easily accept absurdities that drive their lives and thought has always made me uncomfortable. We, as a species, generally tend to question and nitpick everything in our lives to the nth degree and yet I often find myself surrounded by people who can spend hours deliberating the merits or demerits of an outfit or video game but come to the subject of religion (not even belief, just the pure semantics) and suddenly everything flies, including flying ponies in seventh heavens! I do not question the efficiency of this model, however. The idea, that there is this cosmic space - where all this ‘stuff’ that you don’t know or understand or can conceive of - rests and congeals into one great, big, omnipotent GOD is awfully convenient. It allows a person to move on with their hour, their day, their year, their life. It affords us the chance to look at the sky and not wonder about how many galaxies there are; whether the craters on the moon have changed shape or whether we will eventually be eclipsed by the theoretical lip of Hawking’s black hole to witness ourselves in all tenses of time. It allows us to merely muse ‘oh the sky is so pretty today (insert a synonymous Inshallah, Mashallah, Alhamdullilah)’ and sigh. Religion takes this God fellow a step further, it markets Him and it has done so from time immemorial by stripping his subjects of their freedom to think.

The truth is, I find GOD fascinating (who wouldn’t find ‘all that is unexplained’ fascinating) and I always figured His space to be the pinnacle for inspiring quests and glorious metaphysical journeys into and outside of the soul. I thought the answers were so many and so diverse that one could spend ten lifetimes in search and not be any closer to the one-colossal answer (one I don’t believe exists) but have acquired so many ‘perspectives’ along the way that those lifetimes would have had ‘meaning’. That I would have stood in line with Descartes’ glorious maxim Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) and have proven my own existence rather than having over-reached far beyond my capacity attempting to prove that ‘existence’ exists.

I was always the girl who did what she was told. I never really spoke up against anyone, I listened when I could and I certainly manoeuvred my entire life to suit those around me and not cause inconvenience. I figured that none of it really mattered, since I had my mind – this near infinite blank space to fill and ferment as I saw fit. Then I learned about Allah, who said that ‘obedience’ extended to all of me. That my mind too needed to conform; that ‘thinking’ was all well and good as long as it was the kind of thinking that He approved of. I was thirteen when we first threw down the gauntlet and I demanded to keep myself. So, naturally I did what any Muslim girl questioning the basis for her existence would do. I tried to be the best Muslim I could be.

Theistic logic dictated that if I was Muslim enough, my doubts would fade away and I would be rewarded with blissful ignorance and blind faith once more. I enrolled in Al-Huda, with a friend of my aunt who (in her genuine good will and faith) worked to bring me deeper into the fold. I read the Quran daily; I memorised surah’s; I prayed five times a day; fasted the entire month of Ramazan and attended taravis at Faisal Mosque in the evenings; I even did the tahajjud (for two months) but it did not detract from the questions or the doubts that had led to my taking up being a zealot with such zeal. I suppose the fact that I was vociferously imbibing Dostoevsky and Rand at the time did not help matters much. As my final test and coming of Islamic Age gift to myself, I wore the hijab for approximately a year and a half. The latter was a public proclamation of my commitment to seeking God’s clemency. I don’t really know exactly what point it was when I discovered I had been pretending far too hard but I feel it was when my aunt’s friend gifted me with a volume of the Sahih al-Bukhari bearing the note ‘To Baby Maulana, here’s to ensure you spread the ‘light’’. The realisation that I was apparently required to ‘spread’ all this nonsense that I myself was affecting for an audience was the deal breaker.

Since then, I have had many conversations with friends, acquaintances and complete strangers about this infernal edict of the Nicene creed (to believe in one God) and it is hard to separate the basis of our disagreement. It isn’t just that we disagree on God per se…the real offence seems to knowingly disagree on god.

“Have you read the Quran?” they ask.

“Yes, several times, with translation, tafseer and commentary,” I clarify.

“How then, can you not believe?” they wonder.

“How, then can you believe?” I respond.

“Meaning?” they ask edgily.

“Have you met Allah, he has 99 names: some of the names are lovely others are brutal, petty and mean. This would intimate that he is both Lovely and Brutal. He forgives all but wipes out entire nations because they happen not to be favoured ones…etc,etc”

“That is not true, you haven’t read the real Quran” they ALWAYS say.

I have searched determinedly for this ‘real’ Quran the believers invariably allude to but cannot locate it. I find, that it is usually the same text- only it is read through the misty haze of a devotee who can skim blindly, deafly and determinedly over any passage that might force a pause in faith or trouble in conscience. Faith will always be justified by the faithful and will always be attacked by its sceptics. I fear this is the nature of thought being pit against belief. The former requires information and the latter intonation. The sceptic is often labelled a ‘reactionary’ or a ‘subversive’ for merely presuming to disagree with the believer. The only real difference between a believer and I is that we both read (heard of, were told about etc) the same books, they agreed with them and I didn’t. The trouble arises in the fact that the ghost writers and publishers of said books don’t take to critics well…or at all.

Something that truly disturbs me is the fact that I am born into a country that by its very definition I cannot love. Sure I can feel the frequent pangs of nostalgia and patriotism while watching a cricket match or listening to sufi music like all the rest of my generation but I, the kafir, could never really love this country. Pakistan, literally the ‘Land of the Pure’, was not made for me and it has no place for me. It was constructed as a box marked ‘Islam’ to contain only one brand of person. Sure some smaller, inconsequential, low-end brands have managed to trickle into the market and thereby we have our token Christians, Ahmedis, Parsee’s, Sikh’s and Hindus but there is no room, whatsoever, for the brand-less. For the creed that thrives on carving identities from the outside-in rather than the other way around. I will always resent this country for forcing me to state a falsehood on my passport, for having to confirm the lie in person and speech at every desk I ever sit behind or in front of on punishment of death.

God is a figment of the imagination. It is not enough to say that He is ‘man made’ because He is ‘me made’. Every one of us has a point where we will say ‘well my god doesn’t do that’. That crevice where someone brings up a theological trip-up that even a believer cannot go along with and which forces them to play on their back foot and bring up their god. That is where we all stand, with individual ab aeterno (from the eternal) constructions of a divine we cannot and will not every truly understand but one that some of us still care to want to ‘get to know better’. That thing; that anima that frames the breath around us; inspires in us creation and navigates the planets is never really to be boxed in, no matter how hard we try. The fellow the books call ‘god’ is a bastardised shadow of what mortals can comprehend of the incomprehensible, without having the courage to admit their incapacity. That thing prevails and will always remain outside our grasp. I am grateful really, that mankind will never be able to taint the truly numinous nature of whatever it is that spurs all creation, for we would ruin it as we have ruined pretty much every thing else.

In Pakistan, I was offered my first flighty taste of absurd freedom when I made my Facebook account and was able to state my true metaphysical leanings on a public forum. Some have mocked my usage of ‘Ignostic/ Pyrrhonist / Fanatical Epicurianist/Secular Fundamentalist’ under the tab of religious affiliation. I have been accused of trivialising the issue, whereas it is the exact opposite. I have tried to pick the ‘brands’ closest to the ones I might occasionally wear. There are just so many to choose from: atheist, agnostic, pyrrhoist, ignostic, nihilist, fallibilist, determinist, theist, solipsist, sceptic, humanist, relativist, gnostic, laicist etc.

When the truth is, in this most particular and pertinent life-style choice, I hope to stitch my own apparel and define my own wardrobe. I can only pray (sic) that more people would look outside the belief brand, box, label and tag.

A Story of Six

An aphorism is born...

It emanates from that subtle spark of self inherently ill at ease within its surroundings. A moment later it finds itself lost in the seamless scope of its own potential, scattered and fermented by doubt and deliberation. All that remains is a frail shard of the illustrious ‘what if’. Only the illusion lingers.

I wish I could say that it represents a resilient glimmer of hope but I cannot.

The days never end anymore. Nothing ends. Nothing begins.

Still there are some who choose to carry out the appearance of a life and she tries desperately to sit among them. The morning wakes in fear and she opens her eyes to a rattling window. The six minutes that follow are spent amid crumpled sheets with eyes screaming shut and senses as tightly tuned to the outside as Liszt’s piano strings. Then the sirens call, signalling time to switch in to the world and know again.

She is awake now.

Days, months, years are spent in contemplation. Odd recollections and impressions of what it means to be her, stuck inside this space. For the longest time she thought herself a writer; then she aspired to be a great reader and now she wants to be a martyr. The last, she figured as having been flushed out of her system, with her scepticism but life has a way of sticking to its plans in spite of the living, often only to spite them.

She had planned to nurture the spark in spite of life, the living and the loving. She would write words that would make strangers want to know her. She would plan her world without money or diamonds or people or ‘lookisms’. She would make it without any ‘isms’. She would sit in some secluded cabin in some god forsaken mountain with a sign on her door screaming ‘Utopia Under Construction’ to ward off all the nobody’s happening to hope of knocking on her door.

It all changed in a split second a year ago, in that horrifying city cut from glass and sky scrapers. She sat outside herself seeing things clearly for the first time and was surprised to find that all the grey still managed to produce crystals. She caught sight of a woman dressed in a rainbow-bright costume twirling six hoola-hoops, while a short man painted from head to toe in silver recited Shelley. She noticed a Japanese comedian improvising in a corner as the un-Asian crowd uncomfortably smiled in a joint attempt to find him funny. A woman in the corner played ‘sweet thing’ by Morrison as she realised that she may have misjudged this particular concrete jungle. It brought to mind the terrifying premise that perhaps she had misjudged all concrete jungles. That maybe she had limited the power of ideas and romance to confounded location and literacy.

For there, sinking in capitalist capitals, she had managed to stumble upon an underground. It had only escaped her notice because it was located amid jarring technicolour that only the irrevocably damaged could appreciate. But she found it, that circus of beautiful nightmares not cemented in foreign soil but floating to a frequency she could tune into whenever she held on to her delusions and splinters of hope tight enough. She was forever vacillating between joining the freaks and puppets and staking her days claim at benches where she could observe them from a distance. She would wait patiently, until their act was up and Tin Man and Rainbow Bright stripped down to their skins as they joined the crowd.

It scared her, the ease with which they morphed back into humans and killed all the magic. It terrified her how calmly they all soaked back the solace that ordinariness allowed. Suddenly they were the cruellest imposters she had ever encountered - traitors to magic, to hope, to dreams...ingenious, inglorious bastards of convenience.

That tryst with magic gave her something to carry back home. It offered her a tiny pearl of wisdom that echoed ‘hope and happiness and joy for all’. It kept up a streaming whisper that if she only tried hard enough - she would change something. If she was good in this old homeland which had always made her the ‘other’, she would manage. She was led to believe that she was the exact, extreme, mismatch that the place needed to challenge tradition, convention and conclusions. She never really believed it but she did hope for it. Hoped desperately in the vein of old Aesop’s fables her father used to read out to her in better times. Hoped like the ‘Frog who desired a King’ and said ‘let no man belong to another who can belong to himself.’ Hoped that the aphorism could include a woman.

She had been back for six months and the pearl had slipped silently through the seams, the screams, the solid, stoic surrender of new voices into a Somewhere she could never find. Others would always remain others in this other land of hers. And she was sitting on a slippery seat wrapped in tentacles wishing she was different; wishing this place was different; wishing these people were different...wishing everything was different. Her father told her to try making it so, but immediately recanted when he heard about the thundering thoughts that had taken root in her head. He told her that hers’ was a Muslim country and no matter how much better it got, or worse, it would remain one. He told her “If you don’t like it or you aren’t it, leave it” and his words splintered the shard completely with their unavoidable, implacable, impenetrable accuracy.

Check mate- brown and white and blown all over.

And now the fear and the anger and the apathy persists, it prevails, it even begins to pacify. She discovers a morbid sort of beauty amid the slums and shrapnel but it exists only for the freaks. The rest are drowned in a sea of plastic or dogma, dressed head-to-toe in latex or turbans. She silently bides her time all over again for an escape and this time there is nothing to come back for because this land doesn’t want others and it doesn’t need her ... it wasn’t built to stomach her. She searches the rubble for idle conversations behind all the screams that she can plagiarise for her self-serving prose.

And the story that started with shards ends with it. The day began with two deafening explosions that imploded her heart, her head and her faith and it ended with a story of six others. The others gave her something to replace her losses with.

A story of six cracks in human conscience, designed specifically to drill a point.

That there are no maybe’s and no midways. That she had lost.

Muss Es Sein?

Must it be?

“I have seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it” – Salvador Dali

I have been told that I possess a lens people wait for: the stolen secret, that elusive key into people’s faces. It isn’t all that surprising really, I have been reading faces and pre-empting my responses in accordance to what they share for quite some time now. I no longer even need to make an effort because all I see when I unlock them is the Ugly.

It is why they terrify me still.

There are no honest faces, mine least of all.

It is rather tiresome to realise that I can affect almost anything by making people believe what they want to about themselves. All people want, really, is to be validated. I suppose, if I am honest with myself that is what I have wanted practically all of my life. A silent, salient nod of approval from Them.

This year finds me working on myself, which is something I have never really admitted to be doing before. I have, in the past, sought great solace in the pretty premise that my flaws make me unique and are therefore a worthy foil to drag around for the rest of my life. I am revising that assumption now, only because I find myself alone again at much the inconvenient juncture to be alone. Confronted and caught by that catch-22, bouncing up and out of its perimeter again, I must deal with an old adversary: 'Marriage'. Having been asked by too many to consider ‘where I am going next' has made me recognise that this proposed hypothetical tangent certainly doesn’t involve an altar or ruining some poor, normal, innocent, human’s life. For some reason, those I meet do not find my carefully cultivated empathy for the happiness and welfare of strangers to be as endearing as I had hoped. 

My family has expressed collective relief over my abandoning my antiquated notions of fidelity, love and soul-mate-ship as pre-requisites for matrimony. But are rather upset at my insistence that my recourse lies in working my way back out of Pakistan, hopefully on a more permanent basis this time around and hopefully towards a PhD.

I often feel bad for them, because they haven’t managed to ‘fix me’ and Lord knows they have tried with the best of intentions. I am currently nurturing a most constant guilt for insisting on being ‘that girl’ who just won’t settle and be and want like everyone else. Who is ‘headstrong’ and ‘stubborn’ and ‘wrong’ because she felt abandoned at some twisted trajectory by two parents who both managed to move on with their lives but couldn’t possibly figure out what to do with this thing they’d created. Sure, it doesn’t help that she read herself into a cemented, unshakeable skepticism, unwilling to settle for anything less than a fairytale that the fore mentioned doubting default knows to be, well…a fairytale.

I have been presented with a long list of ‘musts’ for life, and depressingly (but unsurprisingly), my own musts completely circumvent it. The list is pretty standard: Marriage, Money, Children, Stability and Society, the latter pertaining to the opinion thereof (sic). Mine reads something like this: Writing, Studying, Working, Adopting (alas a compromise of wants) and …Alone. I am also presented with an ad hoc alternative: find a friend. Because, of course, finding friends has always been my strong suit. Let alone the kind of friend I could convince to covet my neuroses ad nauseam.

Recently, I stumbled upon a film called ‘Immortal Beloved’, a superb depiction of Beethoven’s life and love for the woman he alluded to in his will merely as ‘beloved.’ The film struck several chords with me and I now find myself listening to ‘Ode to Joy’ on loop every day as I drive over Cavalry Bridge on my way to work on Ferozpur road. There is a perverse magic in listening to a deaf man’s epic dance as one drives past cracked pavements, starving children and scuttling amputees. It makes for bitterness that I feel, he would have appreciated, nay …cultivated.

It was said of Beethoven, that he was a proud, boorish fellow. So consumed was he, with his genius that he deemed answering people’s casual greetings in streets as a common courtesy far beneath him. It took twenty years before he was vindicated and excused for having been deaf and thereby…a tad defensive. I can love him for this, for my disability lies in a floundering mind, a feeble tongue and a defensive heart. I would rather choose my failing though, so I have to add an element of cowardice to the collective crutch I use as an excuse to shun others.

If only it were all real! I wish I could mean my mind. I wish that I did not crave a friend. That I did not dream of a home and a false sense security that came from knowing that money had little place in happiness but a large part in the appearance of it. That I could somehow, transcend my need to look for broken people to be with and around, simply because I felt that they would not judge me.

Which is nonsense, of course, the broken thrive on judgment.
I should know.

At the end of the day, I recognize that there is a surreal sibilant romance in seeking after the crutch, the scar, the spill, the smash and the corner. As Cohen put it “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” While my rational self rebukes and reviles me for still cradling those shards, my mind must give way to habit. For it is said, that of all the Greats: Mozart, the Prodigy; Bach as Gods Violin; Tchaikovsky, the Weaver of Beautiful Nightmares; Vivaldi, the Romancer and Liszt, the Thunderer…there has only ever been one, whom they call, simply ‘Maestro’.

Es Muss Sein. It must be.

Es Muss Sein. It must be.

Mea Culpa

What is the approved conversation for a man or woman caught between the crevices of this place, where each clings to their own shard of debris?

What ought to be our greeting as we pass each other in this flood?

Meted out in minutes, condensed in colour and composition… I am saturated, it seems. There are times when I wish I was merely lost but I have come to realise that is not it. I know exactly where I am and I choose this misery every day. It is all my fault and my patience is the pattering of images that I must constantly pause and pillage through without preference.

Did I mention I miss you?

I still feel the bitterness of our encounters linger across the tunnel of my mouth and I spend my days drowning you out of my mind. I plunge through the moments with my head held high because I refuse to let you relish this particular victory; of having broken something in me that I cannot identify well enough to work around.

I have never really been pathetic before, at least not like this. Somehow, I manage not to wear my bruises openly but I find myself waiting for you every morning in my mirror, dear foe. I wait for you to batter my words against as I drive my way to work. I wait for you to slip your smirk across my desk as I edit hours of ad hoc news nonsense for pages that will never see the light of print. I wait to know myself, once again, in your impression of me.

I hate that it is only you who can tell me who I am.

I hate that it is I who let you.

I shall work around it though, I shall bury you soon enough. Presently, I am listening to Piaff and trying to comprehend why you classified her as ‘bitter’.

“All I feel when I hear this woman is barren waste lands, they are idiotic to think her bitterness beautiful.”

You were wrong, I hear only frailty, but then again you loathe that more.

Of course, I couldn’t possibly understand, could I? I am small, you said, ‘with potential’. I cannot even condemn you for your judgment of me, when I so crave it still. I wish I had asked you to elaborate my demerits because I no longer see anything when I look in the mirror. All I see is what you showed me and while it leaves me feeling incredibly small, it is all I seem to have.

I shall never laugh again, at the sad sufferer. A broken heart truly is a terrible curse: the pins that claw at the insides of your cheeks every time you smile; the scars you wear like medals; the laugh that never quite sounds like it belongs to you anymore. It is excruciating.

You have no idea what nakedness of the mind is like, do you? The kind where a stranger speaks of you, for you and to you and wins on all counts. No one has ever seen your mind naked, unmasked and unprotected and my feeble attempts to unearth it were fumbles at best. I recall they made you laugh.

Looking back makes me realise that I failed you in the worst way possible. I let myself become ‘known’ to you, so completely, enough to become boring. That was it, wasn’t it? You spoke of honesty, but what you were alluding to was a truth that was both capricious and coy. I should have guessed. I ‘know’ nothing of you except what I was hoping to find. You reside everywhere except in that corner.

Now, I find myself brutally raped of emotion. I am broken and I forgive you. I will always forgive you.

You were right, I shouldn’t.

You were right, I will always fall and never rise.

Little Mermaid Diary Entry

6th February, 1993
Afternoon

Dear Diary,

Baba wore a suit today.
I hate it when he wears suits. It is like he is someone else.  They make him look rich.
They are also neat and straight and it takes me more than 11 minutes to iron them.

There are no colours or rumples and the ties are extremely stupid.
Why do people want to hang themselves with coloured silk stripes just so they can look like everyone else?

I don’t think I hate anything more than a suit.
Except diamonds.
I really, really hate diamonds.

Maria

An Amicable Divorce

“He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife”
                                                                                                 – Douglas Adams

I just invented God.

Again…

Granted, I am by no means the first to do so and the idea isn’t exactly original but it always surprises me when I catch myself in an act of ‘creation’. It goes without saying that it is much easier to want to believe in my versions of god, while recognizing with perfect clarity that these are figments of my imagination.

The way I figure it, better mine than someone else’s.

I am currently working on deciding whether I am going to bother planting It with a gender this time around, seeing as I still haven’t forgiven Its predecessor for having invented such a blasé mechanism to segregate the species ala carte. In fact, I haven’t forgiven that one for feeling the need to segregate any species in the first place. Suffice it to say, we both had our issues, they were many and they were mangled. We have parted ways now and it has been described by most as an amicable divorce on all counts. The primary reasons cited for the proceedings have been: irreconcilable differences and a gross misrepresentation of facts. Custody battles over my soul and his rights to said subjective/neo-modern abstract currently ensue en' masse.

To be fair, He had His reasons too. I was simply unwilling to believe everything He said without evidence, reason or reason-ability. I openly flouted most of his rules and adamantly refused to extend respect He took for granted He deserved. I took ‘nothing’ for granted and never relinquished my mind and will to His dogma. My infidel-ity knew no bounds as I actively scavenged for alternatives to replace Him with.

In short, I was a miserable failure at being any kind of subject.

Rather like an obtuse Keirkegaardian Ironist.

I shall expound a bit on where this new incarnation stems from and where it might be headed. It is an odd business, this exercise of ‘designing’. I feel powerful already…and I hope I know better than to fall down that particular rabbit hole. This new -yet un-named - avatar springs from a composite of colour, impressions and the remnants of a broken heart. I believe the latter feature might render It more sympathetic to the human condition but I cannot yet offer any substantial guarantees on that score. I’m afraid that is the trouble with creating anything: there are never any guarantees. The act of creation is always subservient to how it is perceived and that function is always carried out by someone or something else.

The functional merits of the new prototype, for convenience lets call it ‘gOD’, are yet un-determined and I am quite liking the idea of them staying that way. I am hoping to avoid the usual strains of 'human projecting ‘omnipotence’ into the atmosphere that in turn allows him/her to control all other agents partaking of said atmosphere' business! As any invention of the mind, gOD will ideally remain a work in progress, a lot like Baskin and Robbins ice-cream. The range of ice cream flavours remains endless as empty canisters are perpetually on the look-out for the next curious taste bud to create its own variant. A God/ Ice-cream analogy, I find, makes as much sense as a God/burning bush analogy; a God/ Holy Spirit that-makes-god- ‘God’ analogy or a God/God’s son-in-one analogy. For one it is chirpier and much more aesthetically pleasing. I also feel that with the sheer volume of authorship he/she/it commands, gOD is unlikely to find favour among the ‘belief’ audience. I think that rules out proselytizing of any kind.

I find that I am quite comfortable with the idea of not having to preach.

I have always regarded it as a tiresome business.

Now on to the mythology. Every deity needs some kind of ‘back story’ to lend it ‘credit-ability’. Believers who claim that a mythology lends their deity any kind of credibility are high on holiness. It is hardly conceivable that flying horses; seven gates opening up to legions of virgins in some warped brand of  Valhalla; God's dead progeny not-dying to save humanity and parting of bloody seas can actually legitimize any creed of creator.

What it does proffer is ‘market value’.

It allows one to ask Charlton Hestern to ride chariots in a skirt and flail large sticks about on screen; it sells gold crosses and several strings of ‘last supper’ paintings; it introduces new and increasingly complex methods to wearing head scarves; permits blonde bimbo’s like Anne Coulter to appear on TV and actually command a considerable audience and let us not forget: IT SELLS BOOKS! Imagine any religious text without the android half man/half elephant deities or without burning bushes and sporadic, apocalyptic wiping-off of species to spurn angrier species that will repeat the process et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
* (apropos my new Gentile friend QN)
Oh, and on that note, how come no one bothers to ask this: If the creationists did get it right then Adam and Eve came on earth and had kids, and their kids had kids…and ...wait- a- minute.

Can anyone spell ‘incest’? And to think people take offence at being regarded as Ape-descendents a thousand times removed. I’d take a monkey grandpa over a perverted manage'-a-million any day!

It is this marketing of mythologies as facts that drives religion and the religious to unimaginable ends. The new brand of faithful subjects like the Scientologists and Mormons have jumped on to this particular band wagon with unprecedented fervor and the nonsense about magic underwear and reiterated stigmata’s are practically a requirement these days considering – to quote Bill Maher – “All the good shit is already taken!”

On a slightly more neutral note: I have to state that personally my beef lies more with Belief than the Deity it ascribes to. The distinction between ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ is an important one and it desperately needs to be made. In today’s vernacular ‘belief’ is a business and it pertains to God as he appears in religious dogma and text; the more benign ‘faith’ is a term employed by the apologist who often wants to distinguish his or her views regarding the god-subject as 'personal'.
 The latter expression holds considerable merit when it pertains to a deist and/or mystic perception of god. In its mind-logic incarnation this strain of ‘faith’ often revolves around the Einstein/Epicurus/ Spinoza perception of an ultimate designer that we cannot know or define but ‘could’ ‘possibly’ exist. In its heart-love incarnation it tends to seep into the mystic’s devotion towards ‘the indefinable, ecstatic Love’ component. I’m definitely open to the idea that god, in the benign sense of the composite Greek Muse; the Hermit Sage or Elpis could 'possibly' exist. However, I am certainly not on board with the prevailing monotheistic definitions of what that entity is; what He wants from us and how He will get it. Not to mention all that confounded carrot-stick business in the present for the infernal, eternal ‘What-if’ End of World/s where we wont even be allowed to ask -the entity condemning us for actions committed on Its behalf -why It chose to put us in that position to begin with?
I find this strain of ‘belief’ to be completely lacking in any semblance of humility.

Ironically, it is always the skeptic who is accused of arrogance regading the 'god gamble'. Figures, the believer is allowed certainty regarding the un-certifiable, extended full license to proselytize, pressurize and promote that certainty and the skeptic who applies doubt towards all enterprises is accused of brash, rude and abrasive offence! Durant was on to something when he said “Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith, tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty.” This brings me to the ‘Respect/ Offence’ glitch.

Let me be clear: Nor I, nor anyone else is under any obligation to ‘respect’ anything without basis.

We are encouraged to respect the ‘right’ of other people to hold their own views regarding all things (a preciously fragile enterprise, which we often hope to command ourselves) but we are by no means required to respect those views. I can respect that an individual H has the right to be homophobic and consider gay people to be cursed by God, but I certainly don’t respect H’s homophobia or dogmatic assertion. The religious seldom fail to employ the ‘respect’ trump card, demanding the right to criticize others on all aspects of their lives while conveniently cordoning off their own lives from any kind of criticism on ‘dogmatic’ grounds.

This curious game of ‘Operation’ is utterly absurd.

If religious people are ‘offended’ by my opinions regarding their dogma then that is their problem (at least until they threaten to murder me for having an opinion and make it my problem). I am equally 'offended' when nine-year-old boys are brainwashed to stick knives into their back because someone who was related to Someone who narrated a book died a thousand odd years ago! What about ‘respecting’ my right to be offended?

When I was six years old, I believed, quite literally that Colonel Sanders (The Kentucky Fried Chicken Mogul) was god. I remember expressing this opinion to my mother who had a hard time concealing how disturbing she found the insinuation. She was right to be concerned. At the time, I thought the only pre-requisite required for omnipotence was kindness. Sanders had - and to this day continues to have - one of the kindest faces I have ever seen. The only alteration I affected to my god was his wardrobe. I always saw him in rainbow stripes and blue tap dance shoes. I had assumed that god was a happy fellow and that the deity was naturally (sic) inclined to sponsor magic, music and laughter. He loved happy endings and always remembered to reward polite-ness. Admittedly, I may have been a tad naïve regarding my subject matter.

This is still where I find myself - back at that beginning.

It seems the literal mind can never understand or adapt to the ironic mind. I have never been able to reconcile myself with God, because He – as He appears in monotheism- is distinctly un-lovable. Unless, one happens to be an irredeemable masochist who only falls in love with sadists that command you to love them; revere them and beg them for their mercy even when they are responsible for your being the You that you are; the You that you can be and the You that you will be. In my book that makes them responsible for all of your actions in equal if not greater measure.

I have never been comfortable with the word Atheist either, not because of what it actually means (which is, ‘not a theist’) but because of how it is perceived. The term has come to be equated with a barren disregard for the numinous, which for an artist such as I…is everything. Granted, this is through little fault of the authors of the term but over the years the word 'Atheist' has adopted a silent synonym: scientist. Atheism is largely equated with logical, critical and deductive reasoning (not that this is a bad thing). The term seems to alienate the subjective, intuitive, contemplative, artistic component that yearns for an 'unexplainable' component in their lives but have no particular need to call that x factor 'God'. 
For the artist or the bohemian bandit, if there is a god to be had, it is to be had in that space of serenity that commands everything. That veil between conception and realization that nurtures our thoughts and dreams right at the precipice before they appear out of the unknown and surprise us with the immense power we are capable of. The power of thought; of compassion; of song; of spirit; of art and yes of something as hackneyed as Love perhaps. While I sometimes do take Poppers claim of the absolutes seriously, I do have 'faith' in exceptions making life worth living. “If something that explains everything inversely explains nothing” than there is definitely some character to be ascribed to that ‘nothing’ dangling on the fringes of that particular absolute...

The last time I saw gOD, I was on the F-train in Queens headed towards Manhatten. A seventy-something year old man sat across from me in the sparsely populated cabin and he was playing the violin. He played Beethoven’s rendition of Symphony 9 ‘Ode to Joy’ and he never opened his eyes or bothered to look at his audience. I did, because I was it. The four other people in the cabin either had their headphones to distract them or a novel to drown out any need for audible stimulation.

In that moment, he was Holy.
Partly because he was magic, partly because he didn’t care and partly because I was the only one listening to his revelation. I rode the subway with him all the way to Soho, until he finally looked up.

Then He was g-OD.

When the doors opened, he packed up his violin and left...

And I knew I would find someone else, somewhere else tomorrow.

Little Mermaid Diary Entry

Late Night Time

8th November, 1992

Dear Diary,

I really wish I had a brother or sister. It gets very lonely being alone all the time.

It would also be easy to be special then because I would be older.

But what if my brother or sister were special-er?

That would make me invisible and not in a fun way like a fairy or something.

And then I would never ever be alone.

I think I will think about it.

Maria

The Phoenix and the Unicorn

“The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable” – Arthur Rimbaud

I suppose I am finally beginning to realise why intelligent people often fumble back upon the expression ‘never say never’. As opposed to initial appearances the 'never' doesn’t betray false bravado rather it provides an air-tight exclusion clause for the perpetually misguided. Not taking a stand (whether good or bad) allows us the ability to recant, change, deny and even fabricate where we are and what we feel. I suppose my previous post precludes me such luxuries but then again, I figure Beentherella is inherently born of contradiction and that remains the one fail safe I can always employ. Maria Amir simply figures that seeing as this is her blog, specifically constructed to nurture her phobias and delusions, she is at liberty to throw as many tantrums as she likes and take it all back whenever she wants to.
I, quite simply, miss being able to write the truth because I find I am no good at all at speaking it and doing neither is suffocating all three of us.

I have been back in Lahore for over a month now and I am quite terrified to report that not all that much has changed. Neither the city nor Maria have truly evolved and I suppose this was to be expected given the persnickety natures of both. However that isn’t to say that there aren’t tangible shifts. Maria is spending her time conscientiously avoiding both her family and her swamp-full of memories and is forging ahead trying to be simultaneously practical and optimistic. She is working towards taking her GRE so that she can apply for PhD scholarships, leave and avoid being ‘matched’. Lahore is somehow lonely this time around. It seems to be scared of itself and for some reason Maria can no longer tap into that innate sense of ‘belonging’ when she drives on the mall on lazy afternoons listening to ‘Mera Piya Ghar Aaya’ in her dinkie.
Beentherella is quite adamant that the two factions: ‘practicality’ and ‘optimism’ are mutually exclusive to begin with. She believes that Maria is adamantly avoiding all songs, films or literature that can exacerbate her malen-coma simply because she is missing N more than she cares to admit. Beentherella insists that Miller’s formula of the ‘best way of getting over a woman/man is to turn them into literature’ is the only solution to their mutual predicament. I, ever the faithful trapeze artist, am simply trying to manage both parallels as equally and faithfully as I can. And yet, while I know that I can hold in a great deal and that I have no problems being a social pariah, I realise that I value beentherella much more now. I feel that as much as we have tried to obliterate her in practice, she tends to crop up in job interviews where Maria will refuse a perfectly wonderful opportunity on the basis of some perverse standard of idealism that I feel they both still need to uphold. Luckily, neither of us have any qualms about employing Beentherella’s regular assistance to circumvent rishta’s on that same principle.

Being back in Pakistan is proving to be rather surreal, perhaps because it is alarmingly easy to ignore everything that surrounds us once again. We are driving around the city these days simply to avoid being in company for very long and I am spending the rest of my minutes reading Pyrrho and ‘actively procrastinating’. The latter contradiction referring to the fact that I am consciously choosing to ponder for hours on end about general nothings I feel we ‘ought’ to write about but have somehow lost the courage to. I am seriously considering writing letters to strangers as I used to when I was younger, it was certainly a less volatile method of communicating with people without actually ‘communicating’ with them. Perhaps I shall search for an address, somewhere that sounds lost…like Bavaria.

Maria is writing up lists these days, scores and scores of lists: shopping lists, goal lists, life-lesson lists (sic), grocery lists and lists of things she wants to try learning. She has started a diet-plan recommended by a nutritionist that diverts much of her attention towards missing things like coke, cheese and Abbot Road ke channay which help her to avoid missing other ‘things’. Beentherella is spending her hours perfecting her caricature of an imaginary friend that can fill in for the tangible best friend she has not yet managed to locate and I spend my time marvelling at how one person can manage to avoid them self in so many mirrors.

We have always been fascinated by two mythical contradictions: the Phoenix and the Unicorn. I find that at present both creatures manage to capture Maria and her doppelganger quite effectively. Maria is currently steamrolling her way into the appearance of maturity and some odd notion of ‘re-invention’ that she feels may vindicate the mess she has made of herself. She is labouring under the apprehension that she can fundamentally re-align who she is if she acts the part of the cold, practical, adult who -after having been burnt and reduced to ashes- can emerge triumphant. The odd thing about the mythology of the phoenix is that after its thousandth year no matter how productive the life of the bird, it is destined only to live as long and as 'like' its old self. This tends to negate all ‘reincarnation’ paradigms where redemption is ultimately offered up as a cosmic bribe for correcting one’s flaws, failings and the breaking of patterns. The only guarantee the phoenix myth proffers is the perennial presence of a pattern.
Beentherella on the other hand is flexing her elusive might to see how far she can push us all into obscurity. She has always considered loneliness to be a pinnacle and now seems to be settling in with the concept much more completely than she ever did in the past. She knows that we will not find him again. We, none of us, will manage another beautiful nightmare that is simultaneously true and terrifying enough to keep us morbidly intrigued; challenge our flailing convictions and allow us to jump again. I cannot honestly define whether the unicorn encapsulates beentherella or the elusive friend that she survives to seek. Marianna Mayer in ‘The Unicorn and the Lake’ describes the creature as “the only fabulous beast that does not seem to have been conceived out of human fears. In even the earliest references he is fierce yet good, selfless yet solitary, but always mysteriously beautiful. He can be captured only by unfair means…”

All I really know is that I have managed to get both of them in the same room, huddled in the same corner, sat on the same bench and writing on the same page. Of course, it is all artifice at preset: a cross between Dali’s assertion of false memories and true ones being akin to jewels. The false ones always appear the most real. And yet, it is better than the gaping 'nothing' that preceded it.
So for now I shall be content with the busy business of making something out of all of us.

The End

“The palace of crystal may be an idle dream, it may be that it is inconsistent with the laws of nature and that I have invented it only through my own stupidity, through the old fashioned habit of my generation. But what does it matter to me that it is inconsistent? That makes no difference since it exists in my desires, or rather exists as long as my desires exist.”
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And so I have reached my pinnacle, only to discover that it was always destined to be my demise. I have spent my two months of purgatory in New York and am now back in the glorious, languid heat of Lahore. I have also realised the futility of any attempt at trying to be myself; of actively coveting this sad repository of imagination. Many would say ‘I have been found out’ and mayhaps I have. Beentherella has been discovered, brutally raped, publicly ridiculed and put to shame by the vilest of all foes. I am told that my thoughts are offensive and hurtful to those around me and that I must apologise for them to no end. I have done that too…and yet, I cannot help but think them. The thought still persists, it still plagues. I can - in no sincere measure - summon up genuine guilt for this one exercise that has offered me solace over the past five years: writing for an audience. Much like Plath's journal, my blog- this trite, cream corner in cyberspace has been my ‘Sargasso’: my litany of dreams, directives, imperatives and ideal-isms.

Still, my experiences in the past month have taught me the weight and value of a poker face; of the silent spirit and of the repressed thought. Perhaps it was an inexcusable vanity on my part to assume that my feelings and my truths could remain my own. That my idle stream of perpetual procrastination could continue un-interrupted and that my casual corner would be frequented only by complete strangers. It has been the most asinine attempt at self-regression, this perpetual monologue of barely-contained melodrama that I had longed to continue clear of consequences. It was all bound to collapse and so it has.
Beentherella has left the building. And I shall turn once again to scribbling in waiting blank pages and to my type writer that has never betrayed me with delicious illusions of an admiring audience. This, whatever this compulsion is or has been: to be known, read, understood and perhaps even identified with is a whimsical, pathetic exercise at its very core.
It is pure, primitive need.

I am told (now that I have navigated my own personal minefield of damage control) that no one really has the ‘right’ to tell a truth that is lucid enough to illicit a reaction from another being, any reaction. I feel far too much like a mutilated, dilapidated Howard Roark, for I too ‘have no sense of people’. And I have not yet had the luxury of stumbling upon any treasure trove of ‘harmless, simple, benign’ personal truths that I can convey without fear. I must admit in turn, that I cannot even crave such hollows. In this particular instance I cannot help but agree with Rand, and I refuse to accept 'anything except what seems to be the easiest for people: the halfway, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.' Because Beentherella, despite all her pretty-isms was bold beyond measure in this one capacity: she never lied. I have finally felt the full brunt of ‘Them’ and ‘Their’ ability to cripple even the smallest of self reflections with a finality that both she and I are unable to disregard. So I shall bow out with the last shreds of my dignity precariously intact to once again traverse the pinnacle that is Loneliness.

My lesson remains to return to my former silence. It shouldn’t be too difficult to revisit a state of perpetual placidity, for I was quite adept at it not too long ago. A lesson, I now feel quite foolish for having ignored for so long, in some naïve attempt to tell my truth and finally discover myself. I have wallowed shamelessly in the delusion that harsh lessons gleaned from the past can be discarded in better times for humorous ones. It is always, always, always safer to remain locked. No one has ever paid a price for keeping silent...at least not in public.

So I shall leave you now - friends, foes, strangers, acquaintances and fellow Hobo's to move on to the bitter business of ‘Being’.

Beentherella was the figment.

Maria Amir is the fact.

Solitaire

“The best is the deep quiet in which I live and grow against the world, and harvest what they cannot take from me by fire or sword” – Goethe

I have taken up an old habit once more and it is oddly refreshing to discover that I can re-visit past trivialities with such ease. I am playing solitaire again and remembering how much I used to enjoy not needing to surf the web, type up resume’s or worry about checking my mail box for emails that never arrive. It is a relief to re-discover the simple pleasure of still finding myself capable of whiling away the hours mind-numbingly playing solitaire. My aunt recently noticed my new past time and commented on it.

“It’s the word I can’t stand ‘Soliatire’,” she said with a shudder. And I shall always treasure this fundamental difference between us…on her behalf, for it gives me hope that one of us seeks glorious hope over the oddly bitter, blandness of truth. You see, it is only love of the word that makes me love the game.
“Yes, but that’s just because the name represents a morbid sort of truth,” I said.
“Absolutely not! That isn’t truth. No one is all alone,” she added vehemently.

I became silent at that, which is my usual response to any conviction that I hold but simultaneously realize I cannot convince (nor do I want to) another of. I am incapable of arguing about ‘the big things’ because I recognize that our views on all the big unanswerable’s stem from individual experience and yet I can carry a conversation about them with relative ease. Perhaps it is an irrational fear I harbor of accidentally proselytizing. I loathe the pulpit tradition of preaching answers to unanswerable questions. I do not think I could stomach that in myself.

Yet, I long for such conviction and I am envious that I cannot find it or even want it. After all, if we human beings are the sum of all that has happened to us; the people we have encountered and the way we are wired to perceive those dualities, then by definition ‘conviction’ cannot be taught or passed on or somehow triggered. Whether or not one appreciates the word ‘Solitaire’ for what it means, is in a similar vein to whether or not one can inherently view and measure the world in a proverbial glass of water that is either ‘half full’ or ‘half empty’. Sponsors of the latter metaphor will never really admit or embrace their position because it ‘sounds’ wrong, even if it is true as the case may be. I, for one, know with reasonable certainty that the only limited freedoms I have ever known, I have found in loneliness. It is a twisted impasse to navigate: Solitaire. Because the word rests, not on belief or perception but rather on …countenance. It is that lingering query that rests on the fringe of all things. One can rationalize it away but one cannot revolutionize it.

Does one believe that life is spent alone, surrounded by people who can never know the ‘you’ that lurks in the corner of your skin; your address; your bank account; your diploma’s and your photographs?

Or

Does one believe that we all tend to think we are special and that is precisely what connects us into an intricately woven tapestry of souls, spaces and the side-effects of solipsism? If everyone is special then by extension no one can be special.

Those that tend to believe the former (whether or not they admit to it) fall largely into that odd fixture of never knowing how to live in this world without being of this world. They tend to be quite comfortable living outside the world. It is ‘the world’ that is uncomfortable with their existence, with their innate ability to function outside of the social and sociable premise. Minorities of all varieties always offend majorities because they provide a constant reminder of how the latter has not yet completely ‘won’. How any majority will always just be that, a majority, persistently at the precipice of becoming a monolith but never quite managing it. They know, they recognize invariably that they are always alone and that ‘people’ must always be kept at bay lest the tide of their emotions, their needs, their wants and their …issues swallow the individual. That the frail spark of self, having sprung up in spite of all that surrounds it shall be squelched. And so they defend it ferociously in their fortress. They are that misshapen, congealed puzzle piece that is left behind once the picture is made and complete. They are unnecessary and yet that is their only claim for clemency… that they do not aspire to be more than what they ‘are’. Embracing the word ‘solitaire’ means knowing that you are enough for ‘you’ to survive and also knowing that this admission somehow bars you from the world outside and those that live and flourish in it. To flourish in the world requires the pretence of mimicry, of marginalization, of momentary, monetary couplings that mean nothing.

The other creed that learns to detest the word ‘solitaire’ tends to prosper, simply because they are able to seek solace in society. They can love and also be loved (in my experience, it is the latter that is trial some). They have learned to walk among the sea of faces and not trip in the tide, to dust themselves off and move in unison with the battalion. They march for progress, for the constant illusion of movement and money. They learn to survive and to do it well. They travel through time in the perpendicular, tangent North and they grow old in so many mirrors bearing the same reflection.

I presently traverse in terrifying limbo, knowing that much as I would love to delay all decisions, life is all about knowing your take on that infernal glass; on this confounded word; on those blasted rose-tinted glasses. Life cannot be carved or commissioned from within this in-between layer of time and perception that rests uncomfortably wedged beneath the real, above the unreal and beyond the surreal. This place reminds me of the 24th century story of Chuang Tzu, who dreamed of a butterfly and was unable to decide if he was the man who had dreamt of being a butterfly or a butterfly who now dreamt of being a man. Was it the dream that lived him or the other way around? And yet for both of them, the dreamer and the dreamed one, the conflict lies not in awakening but rather of choosing how to keep dreaming.

The need to choose this premise, and quickly, stems primarily from the fact that I have decided to go back to Pakistan in October and work again, while applying for my PhD. It also rests in the undeniable ‘solitaire’ truth of having turned twenty-six this year and realizing what this means back home. It means that re-joining my grandparents will mean being unceremoniously thrust back into the Lahore marriage-market as ‘soon-to-be-going-bust stock’. Sadly, it does not do (in Pakistan) to insinuate that one may just not be suited for constant companionship, much as there may be times when one craves it. To be honest, I am not even sure whether I am arguing for or against marriage most of the time. I am perfectly clear, however, on the fact that the institution terrifies me either way. If I am lucky enough to be happily wed, housed and family-ed then I must re-discover who I am (a tedious re-evaluation) or where I shall pocket Beentherella and her whimsical, beautiful nightmares. If I am not and grow old and alone then I will have to live with Beentherella forever and that is an equally petrifying proposition. I am told this particular catch-22 is really supposed to hit home at 30. Apparently, I have four more years to self-combust.

“You’re a girl. Girls get married,” my grandmother tells me flatly.

I know better than to argue with a seventy-seven year old woman who has raised five ‘girls’.