Beentherella

Your Kids Are Okay

2025-09-27T15:22:00.000-07:00

(I started teaching at LUMS in 2014 and needless to say dealing with people and public speaking has never been my comfort zone, it still isn't but practice has made it bearable. I threw up twice on my first day of classes, once before each Writing and Communication class. However, towards the end of my first semester, I penned this poem for my students. I recently came upon it when sorting through my old folders and thought I would share ... )

So, one of your kids

… And, yes, you call them ‘your kids’ now

Because there are just so many of them

and you don’t have any other word for it yet

and it makes you feel oddly invested

Perversely paternal, even.

Anyway, so one of your kids asks you to sit in on them SLAMming poetry,

And you agree because you haven’t yet learned how to disagree

But you dread it

You’ve read their work and it usually involves a host of acronyms you don’t understand

OMG'S, LOLs, Y.O.L.Os & Whatevs

It makes you feel irrelevant, decrepit and not quite ‘with it’

you’ve never really been ‘with it’ but this just leaves you without…

You go anyway.

There they are, working with words

Real words…

in complete, incomplete, inchoate,

off-key, hackneyed, ugly, pretty, petty and everything-in-between sentences

And it reminds of you of Cohen yelling at a studio hand “Yeah but there are no dirty words…ever”

And you are pleasantly surprised, and it is surprisingly pleasant

You find yourself justified in all those silly, lofty ideals you keep constructing around them

The unknown pressure of giving you purpose

Of justifying your time spent pouring over papers

Of dreaming up interesting misnomers and thought exercises

Of wanting them to stay silly rather than self-effacing

Of hoping they stay awake during your class

And suddenly it doesn’t matter that these kids aren’t yours

They’re the same, gaffing and riffing their way through

Extemporizing, elasticizing, euhemerizing

They remind you of the one who never stops talking

That other one who pontificates

The one who can’t help but dramatize everything

That other one who never speaks but pens the most beautiful opening sentences

The ones who always sit in corners and hang on your every word without ever adding their own

…no matter how hard you beg them to

The one who reminds you of yourself at 19

and you think ‘oh you poor, poor thing’,

The one who judges you and you always fall short

That one who loves to improvise

The other one who tries to get you to listen to Pantera

The obsessive one who forced you to watch countless videos on Particle physics so you could hope to understand his paper,

The girl who needs to discuss every paper three times before she pens a paragraph

That one always waiting outside your office before you even get there

The one who never spoke in class but suddenly launches into a soliloquy that validates your entire existence

The one you will never reach

The one who says ‘But Ma’am your uninterpretating me’

And you say Trust me kid, I couldn’t even if I tried.

The one who shuts your office door behind them and cries

The one you shut the office door behind and cry for

And you know you’re being especially sentimental because term is ending

And they are the first people you’ve ever been paid to talk to

And yet it doesn’t feel like it

… At least not always

And you don’t know how to thank them for giving you hope

and purpose and all those gooey, toe-tingly things

that a person like you needed without knowing it

And you don’t know how to punish them for occasionally pushing you around

And you don’t know what appropriate teacher protocol is

Or appropriate student protocol

Or appropriate

Or protocol

So you just say, ‘let’s talk’

And you soon realize how much there is to say

And how badly someone needs to listen to them

And, sometimes, how badly they need to listen to each other

So you bluff your way in and out of it all

thinking you are capable of teaching them anything

And they are kind enough to let you

And you hope you can teach them to make the most of this

This odd moratorium on both life and reality

this place where learning is contagious

and there is no warranty on the watershed of ideas

That this is the only time in life that they will get to do this

Have big ideas and not have the world shoot them down

Think big thoughts and believe them to be big enough

Make friends and mayhaps keep them

And you hope they will remember you

As that nutty lady who

for a tiny moment

was the one who told them

exactly what they needed to hear on a bad day

that it will all be okay

That they will all be okay

Tomorrow

2023-10-27T15:34:00.002-07:00

I watch it all

It's the least I can do

I let myself be

Bombarded with images

Bombarded with feelings;

Tears coupled with Rage

All marked by helplessness

I find myself here again

weeks later

Still watching ...

Still Bombarded with the

Stale, polaroid aftertaste of Death

Charred bodies and the severed feet of children

Still drowning in bitter waves of Rage

All while somewhere

on a tiny strip of land

they die.

Bombarded.

Bombarded,

with rockets, missiles, and fire

Sulphur and gas

raining down on them

from orange, apocalyptic skies...

Bombarded with

flying, white arrows of apathy

Targeted pellets of PR venom

Bombarded

and Classified:

'Terrorist.'

'Towel Head.'

'Human Animal' dying.

Not even worthy of being killed.

Just dying...

There I go again

Using Their words

Because those are the only words I was given

to talk about

Bombardment.

Words,

fed to me in a language

made to kill me

Crafted to leave us all dead

Even before they kill us:

'Both Sides.'

'Humanitarian Pause.'

'Self Defense.'

'Conflict.'

Tomorrow will come

with the Sun

Just like it always does

Tomorrow I will go to work

I will order a burger and fries

Tomorrow I will make sure

I don't order McDonalds

That would be insensitive

And despite all these Bombardments

I still have enough feeling left

in me

to feel that.

Another Tomorrow

And I will teach a class

on how to make sense of a massacre

I will use words like:

'Decolonization.'

'Radical Empathy.'

'Resistance.'

'Apartheid.'

All words in Their language

Because me and mine

Don't belong to ours anymore

Not for this

Not for what They do to us

We never had time to make our own words

while we were Bombarded with Theirs

Tomorrow I will say that

History will remember Today

That I will remember

That we must remember

But my Tomorrow

will already be their Yesterday

And that is why

None of my words

will matter

in the face of Their word

'Bombardment.'

A Letter to My Rapist

2022-06-24T16:35:00.049-07:00

****Trigger Warning****

(This is a recounting of sexual assault, please do not read it if you think you may find it distressing)

I’m not sure how one begins such correspondence.

Am I expected to be polite during this exchange?

Do I say ‘Hello’?

After all, you didn’t exactly introduce yourself, as you clamped your hand over my mouth and dragged me behind a dumpster while I was waiting for my bus home a little over a year ago. I am willing to admit that in retrospect, I am somewhat relieved that I didn’t see your face. Then again, not seeing your face also means that you could be anyone, anywhere, and that notion is particularly terrifying in how unavoidably real it is and has been this past year.

Now you are everyone. Now you are everywhere.

I am still unsure why I am choosing to finish writing this letter today, after I began writing it a year ago. Perhaps, because I feel that writing the words and acknowledging to myself and others what happened will finally release me from carrying it and having to relive and deconstruct it in silence every single day. Is this what they call catharsis? I don’t know, because I don’t feel lighter or clean. What I do feel is rage, a sense of rage that I can finally admit and openly acknowledge to myself. A rage that I can quietly store at the center of who I am and feel alive with as it replaces decades of fear. Perhaps I am seeking solace with all my #MeToo sisters who have the same story - regardless of how it happened, where it happened, when it happened and who did it to them. The thing we all share is that someone took something from us that they had no right to. Someone thought that our body belonged to them when it didn’t. Or perhaps, it’s because your side is winning now as it always has and I just want to be with those of us who are feeling overwhelmed, scared, and enraged.

I honestly don’t know why I am writing this today or whether I will share it.

I only know that I can’t carry it alone any longer.

Perhaps the reason I am writing this today is purely pragmatic, because today the United States Supreme Court overturned RoevWade. You will be surprised to know that this matters to me at all. After all, why should it, really? I am not American and in a little over a month my visa will expire, and I will leave this country after five years of having lived here and studied here and yes… despite you, having felt safe here. It matters because I am from Pakistan, where my body was never mine in the first place, even the idea that it could be was an aberration that was shredded in real time for me every single day - either as a child with blows and gropes that I didn’t know how to name or recognize; as a teenager with the stripping gaze of hundreds of men staring through car windows, leering in markets or stalking me in the short walk it took to get from my car to the gated safety of my school. Growing up and working only compounded that reality, where my body became a free zone for perverts masturbating publicly in the street while staring at me sat utterly horrified in my car or old men lazing behind large, imposing desks deluding themselves that their young female employees found their dirty jokes and sexual innuendo appealing. The constant fear that took root in my skin back home was shed somewhat in the United States and I am embarrassed about admitting that. Profoundly embarrassed, because I know better than most, that people like you exist everywhere - that rape happens everywhere, to anyone, at any time and in any place. It happened to me here, even though my body had been primed for the insecurity that accompanied it since childhood. Still, despite you, I can walk here, out in the open. I take up space without shame. And after months of being paralyzed I still take the bus. Perhaps, the reason this RoevWade thing is so jarring is because it affirms that you and those like you will always be protected at my expense, no matter where I am in the world or what I am doing. Perhaps it is because, after that night, numb and disoriented as I was, my first thought the following day was to run to the pharmacy and take a morning-after pill because I was terrified of getting pregnant and having to seek an abortion. Perhaps, it is because I now know that thousands of women in that position will no longer be able to do that.

Perhaps, I am just tired, and this is all I can do to finally exorcise you.

I don’t really know how to speak to you. But I guess I will choose to be polite. It’s something I’m known for, not that it has ever protected me from the impoliteness of others. All it really allowed me was a faux sense of superiority in the face of bullies. That I was somehow better than them because I had not reduced myself to their level. Then again, that’s also something those that get bullied must tell themselves. I have spent my life surrounded by bullies, and the knowledge that I didn’t stoop to their level afforded me a semblance of self-respect, even if that has never served as a real form of protection. Politeness has its place, but it doesn’t have power. Also, in the days following what you took from me, I don’t want to give away any more pieces of myself than the ones I lost in those eight minutes and 39 seconds.

I know that it took exactly eight minutes and 39 seconds for you to take a person waiting alone at a bus stop and make them something else. I know it took you that long to bring my very fragile and meticulously constructed world down around me in the dark, near a dumpster that smelled of sickeningly ripe bananas and sour milk cartons because I somehow still managed to catch my bus home after it had all happened. You pulled apart my body, in slightly over a dozen angry thrusts and I couldn’t scream through the clamped tightness of your hand on my mouth or fight in the face of your enormous size, so I froze. I continue to tell myself that freezing was my ‘choice’ but no reaction born of desperation is ever a choice. A reflex is not a choice. I remember you licked the side of my face before running away and I didn’t even have it left in me to scream at that point, so I just waited for it to be over. After you scurried away in the dark, I was numb and too scared to turn around and confirm that I was finally alone. When I finally was able to turn around, I waited. I waited patiently for the bus and then I swiped my bus pass, found a seat in a well-lit middle section, all the while wondering if anyone could tell what had happened to me. I wondered if my rumpled clothes gave me away or my scratched face or my knotted hair. But no one really looks at other people directly here. It’s considered rude, impolite – I can’t quite decide whether that is a blessing or a curse. I got to my stop and then walked the last nine-minute stretch home in silence. One breath before the next, one step before the next. It must have been the first time I’ve exited the bus in three years without yelling a "Thank you! Have a good one" back over my shoulder at the driver and for some ridiculous reason, that’s what I chose to fixate on during that walk home. I was worried the bus driver must have thought me rude. I’m pretty sure most bus drivers don’t even register those greetings in their days punctuated by the miserable consistency of a rotating roster of strange faces but still, it’s the smallest courtesy extended to someone whose life is considerably harder than mine.

It still bothers me that I forgot to do that.

Like I said, I’m polite.

Here’s the thing though, I know what this is supposed to be. I’ve made a career out of teaching young women about surviving abuse and pain. I study and teach feminism as a discipline. I spent several years speaking on a near daily basis to survivors of abuse – gang rape victims, acid attack survivors, women shunned for the crime of not bearing sons … all the multitudes of women who have survived the multitudes of men who devise multitudes of ways to punish us for the offense of existing and having bodies that they consider perpetual provocation. I’ve heard countless stories and I’ve shared some of my own but somehow the ability to know, recognize and catalogue all the signs of what I felt at that moment did not help. If anything, my need to rationalize my rage only fueled it further. I asked myself all the questions that I knew never to ask a woman – Why was I there when it was dark? Why didn’t I leave campus earlier? Why was I wearing a sleeveless blouse with a shrug over it and not a t-shirt that hid my neckline? Why was I humming a song under my breath? A song you would never have understood both because it’s in Urdu and because if you could understand it, you wouldn’t be who you are. It's based on a Faiz poem called ‘Aaj Bazaar Mein’ sung by Nayyara Noor. The irony that this was what I was listening to when you grabbed me from behind will never be lost on me. Needless to say, I can’t listen to that song anymore not that I’ve tried. I’m still too scared to try. I asked myself all the questions a female body is trained to ask when it is violated even though I know those questions are wrong and that they have no place being asked. EVER.

On second thought, perhaps that’s why I am writing this, because I still carried the guilt of existing loudly and largely enough to be raped by you. I was too comfortable in my confidence that I was finally safe and I lost sight of all the invaluable knowledge my skin had harvested over decades – to shrink itself, to contract when others were near, to constantly be on alert.

I have always hated my body – which is easy enough to do when all the stimulus surrounding me confirms that it is wrong. Television tells me it’s not white enough, magazines tell me it’s not thin enough, tik tok videos tell me my eye color is all wrong. For what was left, well Pakistan was kind enough to cover all those bases. I have large breasts and hips, always have had. There is no bigger curse than having a voluptuous body in a land where even three-year-old girls and corpses are blatantly sexualized. Also, having been poked, prodded, and subsequently pounded to a pulp during my childhood helped establish with absolute, unwavering certainty for me that for men (I reject the qualifier ‘most men’), women are bodies first and the people occupying them second. If ever. Some men are capable of aligning the two, others can only focus on the former. I am therefore completely conditioned and resigned to the default state of thinking the worst of ALL men until proven otherwise. This is the less stressful alternative to hoping to find the good ones and being consistently proven wrong. It is just more practical and efficient to be pleasantly surprised by a genuinely kind and thoughtful man who doesn’t have an ulterior motive than expecting kindness from most men and living with the constant disappointment, fear and trauma that accompanies being terribly, dangerously, fatally wrong.

It took me decades to begin to learn to occupy my body somewhat comfortably, to view it as a tool that carries my brain and my person from point A to point B. Learning to focus on the things my body could do – climb, run, walk and dance rather than how it looked doing them has been a lifelong struggle that you reversed in eight minutes and 39 seconds. I have spent the past year seeing a therapist, occasionally, and when my insurance can cover it. I’m not sure it has helped as half the time I have to contextualize my brown-ness for a very white, very sensitive and very well-meaning woman who is very bad at hiding how traumatized she is by my traumas. The process of assuring someone literally being paid to make you feel better is exhausting and it ultimately leaves me feeling more resentful than relieved.

Instead, I have found solace in female friends online who share the same or similar struggles and it is impossible to quantify how desperately women need to be each other’s support systems. How grateful I am to these voices on the internet belonging to bodies I have never encountered that have helped heal me in ways I cannot even begin to fathom. I’ve taught this notion of sisterhood for years but experiencing it and healing with it has been something that makes me think there is a place where you don’t and won't matter. That’s probably why you and yours are so terrified of us when we speak about the things we have survived at your hands. When we are together in our pain and in our healing and in calling you out.

In the last year, you sent me hurtling back to when I was fourteen years old - hiding in closets and behind locked doors from pounding fists and the sound of screams – some mine, some theirs. Things that I had spent decades, deconstructing, compartmentalizing, and overcoming came flooding through my pores and were reincarnated as terrifying, familiar phantoms in my lonely Buffalo apartment. You, were easy enough to forget because I never knew you and I’m grateful for how inconsequential you are in retrospect. What you unleashed within me; however, I don’t know if you can ever be forgiven for that. Not by me, at least. People, systems, laws, and twitter, of course, will most definitely forgive you. They will even advocate for your mental health, your problems and your circumstances at the expense of mine. In my country, a woman ‘gets herself raped’, so the idea of holding men accountable is rather farfetched. But here, there is at least the acknowledgement of the fact that you raped me and it wasn’t my fault. That the hemorrhaging of self occurring in the wake of what you did is all on you. Still, there are many, ever rising in number, that believe at the core of their being (enough to scream it from tv screens and social media scrolls) that you shouldn’t have to pay or suffer for your actions. That what you did to me was a ‘mistake’, an 'accident' even. That men are allowed their mistakes when women aren't even permitted their experience. I now carry a pepper spray that a friend, who lives in a different state, bought me as New York State doesn’t allow them. This makes me angry. It doesn’t allow tasers either, that makes me angrier.

So many protections for you.

So many loopholes… all for you.

None for me.

I guess that’s where I am right now, studying how people - some who I don’t know, some who I do and some who I care about - shape the discussions around abuse and their sympathy and excuses for those who commit it. How people talk about #MeToo and women’s bodies. I am used to hearing despicable things from strangers on the internet and in life; I am wary of hearing them from people I know; and I am both scarred and scared to hear them from those I care about. But I’ve decided it isn’t worth arguing with any of them over or trying to convince them otherwise. It's just too exhausting, and I am so tired of constantly seeking allies who will refuse to defend my destruction at your hands. I have arrived at the point where every time someone I care about refuses to recognize what happens to women at the hands of men because they are too busy trying to protect them, or each other or too guilty to confront their own pasts or whatever - a door in my mind slams in their face. I close a chapter on them. I still smile and speak politely but they are no longer someone that I can afford to ‘care about’.

Of all the things you have taken from me, I will admit, you gave me clarity.

But even I am not polite enough to thank you for that.

When I got home that night, I locked my door and walked straight into the tub and turned on the shower. I didn’t even have it in me to take off my clothes. I just needed to wash you off me. I spent over an hour under the spray of water trying to process what to do NEXT - the next minute, the next hour, the next year and next in my life. To have a ‘list’ of survival tips that would keep me away from that other ‘list’ of reasons for not wanting to that I reflexively used to turn to when I was much younger and stupider. A lifetime later, I swapped the shower for my sheets and I slept until I woke in terror the next morning to run to the pharmacy for a pill that would ensure, that my body at least, could expunge you completely and fully.

But there is such a thing as skin memory and it is both eidetic as well as photographic.

It is also permanent.

Skin remembers.

I know this from experience, and it took me over a week before I could make my way to the police to report what happened. Lucky for you, I really had nothing to give them. I hadn’t seen your face, there was no DNA evidence left and I could only describe how you smelled and what you said. I told the cops that you said, “Just keep your mouth shut and it will be over” and in recounting those words, I was mortified that you and I had shared the exact same thought during that terrible moment.

How could that be?

What did that mean?

That I told myself to 'keep quiet and let it be over' to save myself and my sanity in the same moment you told me to 'keep quiet and let it be over' as you were violating my sense of self and breaking my sanity?

I am finally realizing that this is the reason why I am writing this today.

To let myself know that I am not ashamed of what you did. That what people think or say or how they will now view me is all on them or perhaps on you but it’s not on me.

It is not mine to carry anymore.

It never was.

So, No.

I won’t 'keep quiet and let it be over' for your benefit.

The Bureaucracy of Hope

2018-04-03T10:18:00.000-07:00

For My Abbi Ji

* These are my impressions and thoughts about my grandfather and our love story. If anyone has problems with any of it, feel free to skip over.

a) This is not about you. b) Fundamentally, I do not care.

I suppose it is customary after someone dies to try and make sense of how they lived.

I have been trying to do so this past week in the wake of my grandfather’s death, who in every way that counts was a kindred spirit and guide. I am bogged by the fact that I couldn’t be there to tell him so in person during his last days and some part of the displacement I now feel is a byproduct of not really knowing how to mourn him. Mourning is difficult when death is wrought by old age, disease and pain and where a huge part of your love for someone warrants that you seek relief on their behalf. Mourning is further complicated when one doesn’t ascribe to a framework that helps articulate it. I refer here, to religion, or lack thereof. Ironically, this is something I feel only he ever really understood my opinions on. In some ways, I feel like I lost my Abbi a couple of years ago when his memories began to fade in a fundamental way and we could no longer converse with each other. Not that we ever conversed much with words but there was always a silent understanding in those odd hours where we sat side by side, each buried in a book. We were always surrounded by words, my Abbi and I, and so there was little need to ever actually word anything. But before I left Pakistan, those silences became crippling and far too quiet for comfort. Being alone, away and reading, they are proving to be even more so. Still, there is a finality and emptiness that comes with death, no matter how prepared one feels for it. Death always prompts a conversation about what life means.

I suppose, that’s why religion exists in the first place.

My Abbi and I spent long hours debating the Occam’s Razor-edge that might explain why he always agreed with me on the futility of divinity and its accompanying strictures but still never missed a single prayer. There never really was much of an explanation for it but he used to put it along these lines ‘Ohho Beta, ki pata. Kuch nahin he. Lekin agar hoya, te fir meri tarfon koi kasar nahi rahi’ (Ohho, Beta. Who knows? There’s nothing in the end. But if there is, then I’ve done my part.) My Abbi brought me to Urdu, in fact his exact words on the subject were ‘Tu mere ghar ich reh ke Urdu parhna vi nahin jandi? Te mein te fir fail.’ (You’re living under my roof and you can’t even read Urdu properly? Then I’ve failed.) In part because I really wanted to be able to understand him and in part because I couldn’t let him fail, I let Abbi bring Urdu back to my life. He would sit back somewhat patiently, flinching, as I read him the paper at an excruciatingly broken and glacial pace and then over verse that flowed a bit easier until it finally began to sink in and take root. It was poetry that offered him solace and comfort in seeking out all those pesky questions that plagued us both and I am drowning myself in his poem these days while I cocoon myself among his favourites - Faiz and Ghalib. We never did manage to agree on Iqbal.

On some deeply discomforting level, I know that I take after my grandfather in very fundamental ways. That is not necessarily a good thing but I always sought pride in it anyway. My poor Nani often bemoaned how ‘tussi dono bilqul ik jese o, kamreyan te kitaaban vich band’ (You both are just the same. Locked in rooms, buried in books) and while I wished I could offer her the companionship she craved and deserved from me, a part of me secretly relished being likened to my Abbi. But I also recognize the pitfalls of being inherently uncomfortable in one’s own skin and navigating the world simultaneously crippled by an inferiority and superiority complex. Not wanting to ever be upstaged by anyone but also loathing the tedious conversation offered by most company because far better company lay in quiet corners buried amid frayed bindings. It sounds romantic and Lord knows we tried to make it seem so, but in truth it’s probably much closer in scope to narcissism. I know why we preferred our rooms, it wasn’t because they were comfortable...it was because they were safe and because we were scared.

I have also been trying to make sense of what my Abbi’s life means, not just for myself but in the larger scope of ‘things’. He was a lifelong bureaucrat and he knew what it meant to ‘serve’, as few of us today do. He rose, an orphan from a small village steeped in poverty and carved out a future by teaching himself and those around him in schools shaded by trees and little else. He realised very early on that his only real asset was his mind. He scored a series of scholarships and ended up at Government College and then in the Civil Service. He was a historian, poet, jurist and philosopher. He wrote two books - one public ‘An Agrarian History of Pakistan’ and the other private ‘Fard e Hayat’ and all I have ever heard said of him and about him is that he was unflinchingly honest in his work and in his dealings. I have heard that he ‘never compromised on his principles’. And I am trying to contextualise what this means now beyond casual epithets we throw around like we do words such as ‘khaandaani’ and ‘izzat’ that mean so little owing to their ubiquity.

What does it mean to be ‘honest’ beyond sense and saving grace and what does it mean to not compromise on one’s principles, ever? It meant that he was transferred from pretty much every posting he ever held because he was impossible for his seniors to contend with; it meant that he didn’t toe lines that were designed to be ‘toe-ed’ and those that most of us toe simply to survive and succeed at pretty much anything. It meant that he did not make friends easily because he lacked the skill to praise people, be pliable or stroke egos that desperately needed stroking. It meant that even though by his own measure he lived a life of integrity, it was never a life of plenty. It meant that he was, by definition, not a practical man. It meant that he was always aware of the success he could have achieved, had he been willing to toady up (or down, depending on how one looks at it) to his superiors but settled for the success he could account for having earned on his own. It meant he loathed all pomp and circumstance.

I’ve been sitting here, all the way in Buffalo, trying to be ‘honest’ with myself about how I would fare against such a standard and it doesn’t look good. One would like to blame it on a generational default designed to cater to self-gratification over duty and ‘individuality’ over service but I think it goes beyond that. After all, self-interest isn’t specific to any generation. I keep trying to reconcile an image of self where I don’t constantly need validation from something or someone: from likes and shares on Instagram photos or pats on the back for ‘thinking’ and ‘communicating’ grand ideas and/or ideals online or at conferences rather than having to ‘act’ and ‘live’ them day in and day out. On some level, our generation is stifled by saturation – of information, of ideology, of self-gratification and of self-righteous rage. I wouldn’t even know where to begin being content with learning for learning’s sake or reading for reading’s sake or having lived and struggled without due acknowledgement or rewards for doing one’s ‘duty’.

I don’t understand how he did that.

I know with unflinching certainty that I couldn’t do it.

And I’m not saying his life was in any way small because it was lacking in pomp and circumstance. If anything, it was all the grander for not needing it. I think of my Abbi, and it brings me back to why Don Quixote has always been one of my favourite books. He never read it and yet it feels like he lived it in so many spaces:“If Chrysostom's impatience and violent passion killed him, why should my modest behaviour and circumspection be blamed? If I preserve my purity in the society of the trees, why should he who would have me preserve it among men, seek to rob me of it? I have, as you know, wealth of my own, and I covet not that of others; my taste is for freedom, and I have no relish for constraint; I neither love nor hate anyone; I do not deceive this one or court that, or trifle with one or play with another. The modest converse of the shepherd girls of these hamlets and the care of my goats are my recreations; my desires are bounded by these mountains, and if they ever wander hence it is to contemplate the beauty of the heavens, steps by which the soul travels to its primeval abode.”

For now, I am just sad. I am sad for endless debates over the evening news where he would ask me every night as I returned home from hours of editing hopelessness in newsrooms “Batao aaj koi achi khabar thi?” (tell me, was there any good news today) and I never understood how a lifetime of serving could still leave one with such resilient hope for a country that I often found to be hopeless, even though I hadn’t put in the time to earn any right to such an opinion. I watched on in frustration and despair as he drowned himself in the evening news and panel pontification of self-proclaimed ‘experts’ that I always knew would come to nothing because those of us who work as journalists know how journalism dies each day as we try and cover something real over the pantomime that entertains millions for money no amount of honest reporting could match. I always marveled at how someone who stood up to military dictatorships and lost family in blood-soaked trains during partition could see something good come out of all this death and despair but he did. His entire generation still waits each day for ours to give them a spark of that ‘achi khabar’ that might be delivered by some beleaguered Messiah they still insist on waiting on. My Nani always asks me ‘Beta, phir humain kaun bachaye ga?’ (Beta, then who will save us) and how do you tell someone who earned that question after a lifetime of service that no one saves those who don’t save themselves and very few of us are interested in saving anything anymore? I don’t know how one can have served the time and still die having hope where so many of us have barely begun serving ours but already consider hope to be nothing short of naiveté – burdensome at best, broken at worst.

I have been reading Abbi’s poem each morning since he passed on and every time it brings me back to the realization of why he and I are kindred. In his life of honesty, honour and duty, it was my own father who shamed him brutally and so publicly that it forced him into hiding, in his room and behind his desk and it is this verse that speaks of our parting. I believe, from the bottom of my heart that I was meant to return to my Abbi, and that is why I am grateful for our final decade together. I am grateful to have known him and to have found in him a quiet, shrouded integrity that I hope I can live up to someday. I am grateful for random moments before his early morning walks where he would come up to my room and say ‘Tu huni tikar jaag rahi e? Chal hun meri jaagan di baari aa gayi e, te tu hun saun ja.’ (You’re still awake? Well now I’m up so it’s your turn to go to sleep) and I would see him out before I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and made my way to bed at 6 am. I remember him pausing over my bookshelves and randomly pulling out volumes and putting them back asking me to recommend a book as he did the same from his shelves. I remember him and my Nani waiting up for me each night as I made my way home from putting the paper to bed no matter how often I told them to go to sleep because I could let myself in. I remember him recounting over and over again my childhood stories, told while perched on his shoulders in the Monkey Forests of Bali where I kept telling him ‘Dekho Abbi, aik haur kamaal’ or asking him in lieu of my best Tanhaaiyan recollections ‘Abbi, Kya aap vaaqi samjeeda hein?’. I remember him guarding my bookshelves as if they were his own when I left for England. I remember him always restlessly double and triple checking if our main gate and front door was locked. I remember him cheating at cards, so heartily and happily, because it was the only place he ever allowed himself to cheat. I remember him and I sneaking in spicy food when my Nani was asleep and us agreeing to keep it our secret. I remember him, on very rare occasions, singing in an unfathomably beautiful baritone. I remember him jumping up and down buzzing with excitement reading out my Oxford acceptance letter before I even knew I had gotten in.

And now I remember to remind myself that I must learn from him to have hope in the face of all this hopelessness.

‘Chalo Abbi Ji, hun meri jaagan di baari aa gayi e, te hun tussi saun jao’

-->

And now, Abbi Ji, it’s my turn to wake up and it’s your turn to go to sleep.

Skin Memory

2016-10-13T13:38:00.000-07:00

My skin is splitting at the seams

Too tight

Too broken

Too rigid

…Too tight

My skin is splitting at the seams

Swelling with the weight of expectations

Memories, far too heavy for it to harness

People, far too crude for it to contain

My skin is splitting at the seams

Collapsing under the power of possibilities

And all those untold stories I tell myself

…about myself

My skin is splitting at the seams

Sans warranty

Sans return policy

Sans damages

Such poor packaging for a person

28 Days - A Posse Ad Esse

2015-10-11T22:31:00.003-07:00

"Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end"-

Jack Kerouac

It’s been a while since I’ve been here. And I mean that in every sense – of both word and world. It’s been a while since I’ve been back to my most basic – outside of an image I have been trying very hard to construct over the last few years. A watercolour visage of a person who fits – with people, with places with a priori performance. Career settled and casually self-effacing. This is decidedly not who I am. It never has been. I have never enjoyed company for too long, nor have I ever been able to be casual about myself, my work or my wants. I have always been inherently uncomfortable with the idea of comfort. Recently, I have felt myself lost in the camouflage because it has been oddly convincing. Enough, for me to buy into it myself... or to want to.

I presently find myself at a détente between dream and disillusionment. I miss much of my old self – before I had time for all this impromptu ‘adjusting’. I don’t read anymore. Sure, I read articles and philosophy books but I don’t delve or dive in the way I used to. I don't spend time beside my bedside before I sleep. Tragically, I now sleep mostly to the sound of the television. I haven’t touched the long novel in years. I don’t drown anymore. Since my divorce, I have been very careful not to. This detachment has led me to question my direction again... I desperately want to be one of those practical, calculating individuals who know what they want and scorch their path to success getting there. They are well adjusted and enjoy the company of friends and family. They balance work, pleasure and play and always aspire for more. This is how I see myself. This is also the polar opposite of who I am and that has finally begun to pose a problem. ‘The truth will out’ as they say, or as Cervantes puts it "The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water".

And so, I presently find myself in the process of readjusting my ‘Ikigai’ 生き甲斐 . I came to this term via a facebook meme and literally translated it means ‘a reason for being’. Put in practice in Okinawa cultures, it constitutes ‘a reason to get up in the morning’ i.e. a reason to enjoy life. It is the most fundamental of value monikers, used as a barometer for what one considers mental or spiritual stimulus that enriches their existence. Wikipedia tells me that ‘Behaviours that make one feel ikigai are not actions which individuals are forced to take – these are natural and spontaneous actions’. I suppose the ultimate goal then is for them to become subsumed as aspects of one’s personality to the point where the ‘iki’ (life) and ‘kai’ (the realisation of what one expects and hopes for) inherently complement one another. To cut to the chase – mine don’t. What I want is a centre that I have control over and can define and my actions of late have mostly involved uninterrupted hours, sometimes even days, of sleep. My time over the past year or so has been navigated between work, eat and sleep. Emphasis on the latter.

And this is what brings me back here I suppose. For the bulk of my life, when things get muddled in my mind I tend to seek clarity by meandering through the muddles in language – on paper and then pixel. It's why I need to write again I suppose, because as much as I thought turning 30 meant finally abandoning ‘childish things’ such as maudlin musings and wistful, wishful thinking about what I wanted out of myself - it appears one is never truly done with any of that. Nor should I be. Only, I hope that this time I can learn to write with a purpose. To

that end, I return ‘a posse ad esse’ (from being able to being) determined, this time around, to weave possibility into actuality.

I am opening with what can only be deemed one of pop-psychology's worst fix- its – 28 Days. Plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz devised that, generally speaking, it takes a person 21 days to coin or break a habit. Some say 18, some 32 and others 28... the idea being that a specific number allows our cognitive cowardice to locate a scapegoat and believe we can change. The routine, whatever it may be, serves as the placebo. The key is the drive that this very ‘achievable’ sounding trigger can offer and so many of us finally ‘try’. Trying is all that is really needed but having a strategy grounded in faulty logic and Anonymous inc focus groups helps one ‘trust the try’ this time around. I am ‘trusting my trying’ with the number 28, because given the variables of personality and performance - it doesn’t really matter anyway and mostly because I like how it sounds.

There are so many things to change and consequently there so many places to start. The starting itself has been a revelation. I have been particularly self- indulgent and begun re-reading Cervantes. This is my second time reading Don Quixote, the first time I read it I was 15 years old and I finished the entire novel in two days. I used to read like that back then, at a blurring pace born out of desperation in order to seek some sense of inner salvation. Often, I would read out loud to drown out the voices in my head and the toxic ones that surrounded me. I didn’t really read to drown myself or to feel but I still remember some sentences. I remember knowing that this was perhaps one of the most beautiful things I was ever likely to read, because it was naïve and kind and foolish and wise and ...Quixotic. Recently, a friend of mine faced a terrible tragedy that overturned his entire existence and in the aftermath we spent hours watching The Newsroom as some kind of pathetic temporal tranquilliser. The premise of the show rested on someone being handed a copy of Don Quixote to allow for idealism in the face of common sense.

I feel I need some of that right now and so this time, I am determined to drown. Cervantes’ passage on sleep has ironically proved to be an awakening “All I know is that while I’m asleep, I’m never afraid, and I have no hopes, no struggles, no glories — and bless the man who invented sleep, a cloak over all human thought, food that drives away hunger, water that banishes thirst, fire that heats up cold, chill that moderates passion, and, finally, universal currency with which all things can be bought, weight and balance that brings the shepherd and the king, the fool and the wise, to the same level. There’s only one bad thing about sleep, as far as I’ve ever heard, and that is that it resembles death, since there’s very little difference between a sleeping man and a corpse”.

Now that I finally find myself somewhat awake, I am resting on my second step to lead me into some kind of objective absolution. Stage two of my 28 Days involves detoxing and I was brought to this point a few months ago when I watched a video by Uruguayan ex-president Jose Mujica, whose people affectionately call him Pepe. There is so much in his words that cuts me and the worst is, I cannot identify why. I have never truly been able to ground myself in ideologies, I only ever skirt around them – occasionally dipping my feet or washing my face. I do not want to drown here - not even swim, truth be told. There are purer waters and safer shores for that. So I’m no socialist. I'm not brave enough for that. That said, I do long for a perspective out of the one I have cultivated for myself, wrought in trying to belong through my belongings. “I’m a reader – look at my overflowing bookshelves. I love music, look at my pretty playlists. I love art – can’t you see it splattered all around me?” To be clear, I don’t arrive at this point out of guilt. I enjoy the rush of purchase as much as the next person but I have discovered more and more that it is followed less and less by process. I buy something and forget to use it, far too focused on buying my next something. In that vein, I now rule for a reprieve. I am giving myself these 28 days to not buy anything new, to use everything I have and in that enterprise, hopefully re-discover how much that is. I have logged out of facebook and twitter so that I can finally find and fix time – for reading, writing, studying. I am presently applying myself to my applications and Cervantes. I've thrown in a lot of archiving – some days I take out all my shoes and clean them, remembering which ones I haven’t worn in ages; other days I do the same thing with earrings. Yesterday, I organised my make-up. It gives me the chance to re-discover and finally USE all these ‘things’ I once bought while buying into that oh-so familiar delusion that they would solidify me because they were just ‘so me’ that I had to have them. That without them it would be hard to define myself completely somehow.

Detoxing, has also meant dragging my body along in an attempt to awaken it from its long held stupor. I have gotten too comfortable with folds of fat serving as my security. Because that is what they really are. When eating one’s emotions, the goal is to ensure you don’t have to run the race. You don’t have to exist or appear for anyone else. The latter is generally a good thing. It wouldn't matter worth a damn if I was fine with the way I looked but I never have been. That only renders this cellulite crutch as the excuse I have to not bother trying. I haven’t even been able to do that properly, because I still have an audience. Only now it’s an audience into my anxiety. Anxiety I carry on my hips and my belly, layering my shoulders and weighing me down every breath each time I try to (literally) run away from it. Which is all to say, I’ve hired a trainer. Someone to push me into pushing myself.

It has been three days since I’ve been on this particular life-detox and after the initial vertigo, I now find myself finally enjoying the endless possibility. Living in the real world, as opposed to one where we are all caricatures of ourselves, has its rewards. I have bought plants and I spend my morning watering them, as opposed to staring at inspirational quotes on facebook inscribed on pictures of plants. I am taking on tasks with the express purpose of finishing them. This means that more and more post-its on my wall make it to the bin by the end of the day. Pepe says “And this is what I discovered: Either you’re happy with very little, free of all that extra luggage, because you have happiness inside, or you don’t get anywhere! I am not advocating poverty. I am advocating sobriety. But since we have invented a consumer society, the economy must constantly grow. If it fails to increase it’s a tragedy. We have invented a mountain of superfluous needs. Shopping for new, discarding the old...That’s a waste of our lives! When I buy something, when you buy something, we’re not paying money for it. You’re paying with the hours of life you had to spend earning that money. The difference is that life is one thing that money can’t buy. Life only gets shorter. And it is pitiful to waste one’s life and freedom that way.”

I am beginning to understand this better.

The idea of not locating myself in the illusion of myself. An illusion created and forever cyclically grounded in possession. We all need things but it is odd that we want to need them. I suppose this prevents us from both wanting and needing more for and from ourselves. I see myself finishing things now; reading the books I own; writing in my pretty journals; cooking rather than ordering; luxuriating in multiple cups of coffee and tea and mat'e – in slow, languid sips, like molasses. I am not planning new outfits but rummaging through my closet taking out old ones I no longer fit into and deciding to do so.

In the first book of de La Mancha, Cervantes opens with “I know who I am and who I may be, if I choose.” What’s really funny is that often the latter comes back full circle. You re-discover what you always wanted and shed the baggage of expectation like barnacles of the mind. You vanquish rose-tinted spectacles and trade them in for regular anti-glare ones.

And you realise that this is enough. It was always enough.

You just never allowed it be.

Song

2014-03-01T07:48:00.001-08:00

The girl with the beautiful face

is gathering olives.

The wind, that gallant of towers,

takes her by the waist.

Four riders passed

on Andalusian ponies,

with suits of blue and green,

with long dark cloaks.

'Come to Cordoba, lass.'

The girl pays no heed.

Three young bullfighters passed,

slender of waist,

with orange-coloured suits and

swords of antique silver.

'Come to Seville, lass.'

The girl pays no heed.

When the evening became

purple, with diffused light,

a youth passed bringing

roses and myrtle of moon.

'Come to Granada, lass.'

And the girl pays no heed.

The girl with the beautiful face

goes on gathering olives,

with the grey arm of the wind

encircling her waist.

- Frederico Garcia Lorca

(Translated from the Spanish by J.L. Gili and Stephen Spender)

Verbage - Looking for the Librarian

2014-02-09T13:12:00.001-08:00

“You," he said, "are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.” Emilie Autumn

I’m a writer who cannot write.

This is a hard admission to make considering the fact that words are pretty much my only currency and comfort in this world. It is words that have saved me time and again from both myself and my feelings by opening up a sidelong segue into a blind alley of thought. And yet, it appears that words are the very things that fail me now. I find myself cornered by people who can manage and manipulate words far more efficiently and proactively than I, rendering my efficacy rather redundant.

And yet, I am rediscovering my relationship with words as I catch myself exploring newer kitsch schemes to motivate my students with their writing. I find myself writing under the influence quite often. Currently I am writing under the influence of oranges, post-run adrenaline, Sunday morning sidewalks and lingering guilt. Such alchemy forms a jittery, jarring sort of high that is rather difficult to navigate with any sort of clarity.

I am living on a university campus again, though not as a student this time around. This distinction is important, I find, because it is one I often need to remind myself exists. I feel I am finally at a stage in my life where I could let myself succeed at something. Ironically, as it happens, being surrounded by perpetually positive and self-assured people is proving to be a good thing. I have often been told that whereas most people suffer from high or low self-esteem I suffer, unequivocally from what can only be described as ‘no self esteem’. Often enough, I find it a gift. I used to think that it allowed me to take a microscope to things rather than a mere magnifying glass because I never feared the collapse of my own ego. Sadly, it also means that the things I am searching for seldom come to light. They live in a sad little laboratory, neatly labeled and bottled away from light, dust and…life.

The realization that I have been living most of my life on tomorrows and yesterdays is hankering. I suppose, in some way most people do this to some extent- live amid the flimsy glands of postponement and atonement. But I seem to have mastered it: my mind is riddled with masterful schemes and plans of my future…all doable ideas but all irrevocably marked with one lowest common denominator: tomorrow. I can almost never meet deadlines unless they are about work and this is why my writing suffers perpetually. I can never consider it work, even though a part of me recognizes like Cohen says ‘that I needed to go to work at it everyday’.

I am also living with and among people again and this is oddly exhilarating and debilitating in equal measure. I am judgmental. Did I tell you that? Or have you surmised as much by now? I judge and measure everything. I suppose the only saving grace is that I judge myself more than anyone else and certainly the harshest but my philosophical underpinnings reiterate that this is the wisest course. A course that allows me to cut through the layers of narcissism and pandering in given conversations to the core of people thereby deleting most of them out of my minds ‘to-know-list’ and yet this leads me to believe that having a refined bull-shit censor may not always be such a good thing. I have never been able to claim I am ‘fabulous’ at something or even moderately ‘talented’ or ‘smart’. Having maintained throughout my life that people who do so lack a very basic sense of scale and sensibility…after all, what does it matter how good ‘I say I am’ at anything. Doesn’t quality control and peer-review define the standard of all things? And yet, in a culture where self-aggrandizement dominates the curve and self-deprecation is no longer in fashion, I am perpetually struggling with my sense of both selves. I am a narcissist who is perpetually humble - it is the worst sort of contradiction to live with because one can’t luxuriate in the superiority of either.

Currently, I am enjoying the long-forgotten sensation of having a crush. It is rather refreshing because amid all my confusion and paranoia it has allowed me to construct a fantasy around someone else other than myself for a change. I enjoy crushes, mostly because I am acutely aware of their limitations. I never get involved and religiously avoid the subject of the crush because it destroys the illusion, which is the whole point of having a crush really. I am spending a disproportionate amount of my evenings at the LUMS Jammin Java café reading David Foster Wallace and subtly spying on someone else reading something else. It is comfortable. I always maintain that the easiest way to cure a crush is to speak with the subject. The same is often true of relationships as well.

I suppose my downward spiral began three days after I shifted to my new apartment. At the time, I was alone and neither of my flat mates had arrived. I was perfectly giddy about all my New Year changes and suddenly one silly, Saturday evening I found myself over-estimating my coping capabilities and decided to Google my ex. Suffice it to say, that Googling your ex is always, always, Always a bad idea. We all tend to operate on myths of closure and then we construct waiting periods, coping periods, healing periods and getting-back-out-there periods for relationships purely because we need all experiences to be time-bound. This allows us a construct to move in and on from. In truth, there is no real science to moving on and how one does it but I can unequivocally say that discovering how much better your former half is doing without you is not one of them. Even if the same is equally true for you.

I am working hard this month, this particular February, on being less afraid. Afraid of wanting things I feel I don’t deserve. Afraid of being more than I currently am and afraid of not being who I may regret not becoming at some point in the near future. Wading through ennui is disconcerting but necessary at a point in one’s life where the precipice isn’t so much about discovering who you are anymore but rather about being comfortable with who you are or revising the status quo. Sometimes I feel I was born afraid and then I recognize that this isn’t the case…I see pictures of myself as a child, cheeky and facile and I realize that I am no longer the person that child could have grown up to be. Instead I am this mass, mess of floundering feeling encased in frost and humor. It’s a sickening realization.

One of my friends recently told me that perhaps I needed to ‘start at the beginning’.

Burning bridges and looking back. I have never really ‘looked back’, it’s not how I’m…built. And yet, for the past few days the temptation has been alarmingly great. Perhaps it’s because there are no good films to watch and I can’t seem to read at the same pace I once could. So at present, I am merely letting my fingers clap at keys with my mind numb. According to Sean Connery in Finding Forrester, it sometimes serves the purpose of beginning an actual thought. Just ….typing. I am working - surprisingly hard - at creating a moment at present and I have never had to work at it before. The music selection is sublime for scaring up some sentiment: unhealthy dealings of Dylan, Cohen and the occasional Joni Mitchell. There are also culinary conduits…cheese and wine, no going wrong there. I’ve even painted after years…I’ve scribbled thoughts and yet for a change I want to be nakedly honest and I am afraid that is too scary. I want to write out something that isn’t pretty, poised and poignant…or forever attempting to be. I want to write something visceral, brutal, hurtful…to lash out at all the fucking assholes who have stomped over me simply because I was stupidly considerate enough to not stop them doing so. It is no life-altering recognition acknowledging that one is a pushover after 30 years or having been one, however it is alarming to discover that one has lost the ability to side-step the default position carved out to stick into.

It’s a cruel fallacy folded in flawed familiarity.

Sometimes I wish it were still a noble aspiration to be a librarian. To be satisfied merely being a keeper of books without needing to be a great reader or writer. Do you ever feel that? Watching some garish, sappy romantic comedy where a single, happy, healthy female protagonist lives in some ridiculously romantic setting running a book store…isn’t it sublime…until she recognizes her life still isn’t complete because she’s single. Sadly, I can’t even aspire to being a book-store manager in Pakistan because my education dooms me to far more lofty aspirations but I wish I could move away and live in a rinky-dink town someday running a bookstore…not one of those Barnes & Nobles, Borders behemoths but a tiny nook-in-the-corner shop, with old musty smells and tight corners one could hide away into. Just enough customers to keep you going but not enough to keep you well.

I wish I had just enough ambition to allow me to write one book and no more. I have been told that it is only the first book that belongs to an author, everything that follows is tainted by expectation…someone else’s expectation. I now know that my book will be about the books I have read and the person they have made me. My only consistent companions in life and my only solace, the only geniuses who do not judge me and in whose company I feel secure and not stunted. Each chapter an o’mage to a novel shaping a person into another person and searching for all the ‘something missing-s’ to fill that layer of a character.

I have my first sentences:

This is a book about …other books. Better books. This is a book that will shamelessly borrow and covert the best turns of phrases, plagiarize the most sibilant philosophies and romanticize the un-romantic. This book is borrowed from all the books that have written it because She borrowed from all that she read.

They say write what you know. Well I am a reader…that is really all I know I know. I am hoping, once again, that it will be words that will bring me out of this mess if only I would have the courage, conviction and dedication to keep writing them. I am perversely inspired by DT Max’s eulogy for Wallace in The New Yorker, published a few years after his death in September 2012, he said “…What all these residua of his life have in common is that they are testaments to Wallace’s belief in the power of words. Even when things were at their worst, as, sadly, they often were for him, David was writing; if not poems, then fiction. If not fiction, then letters. He used words to wound, words to heal, words to persuade, words to enchant. But in the end, despite their potency—never more compelling than in his hands—these symbolic representations of thought and feeling couldn’t save David: not from his mental disease or from his ambition to be more than just another remarkable writer… So today, on the anniversary of his death, on September 12, 2008, it seems right to echo the narrator of his late, brilliant suicide story, “Good Old Neon,” on a copy of which he annotated, “Ghosts talking to us all the time—but we think their voices are our own thoughts,” and end, as he did, with: “Not another word.”

One would think that this would put me off from telling my own stories - perhaps equally sordid- but it doesn’t. If anything, wherever, I am. Words are always good company and I could use more of them. I could construct some kind of meaning in and about myself through them and I have always needed ‘meaning’ more than anything else in this world.

Wallace once said that “The purpose of fiction is to combat loneliness” and yet it has been ages since I have read a novel. It used to be the only thing I was once capable of doing. I would even dream in voice-over dialogues because the words were always prettier than people. Come to think of it that still hasn’t changed. And I am lonely. Comfortably lonely.

That is finally beginning to scare me.        

Così fan tutte : Remember, Remember the 5th of November

2013-11-09T08:48:00.003-08:00

It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.”

-DH Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

I find myself flummoxed by life at present. It is an odd place to find oneself in, especially seeing as it’s November and this has traditionally been my month to wind down, consume inordinate amounts of coffee and listen to disproportionate dealings of Dylan. I reserve my annual existential crises for this particular season but my personal and professional clocks seem to have miscalculated my gestation period this year. There is just way too much to do and this means that my self-prescribed procrastination must be held at bay and I am making do with small snippets of existential angst as I drive to work each morning.

Mind you, I am not depressed. I have never thrown about that word as casually as most people do, whenever things fail to go their way. Having battled with genuine depression, I can generally distinguish between melodrama, the odd funk and full blown-out doldrums. I suppose this current state is best categorized as a rather portent blend of aggressive ennui. I am finding that ennui makes me pretentious. It has got me listening to Opera again. And, for those of you who haven’t tried it, it is a particularly nocuous negotiation listening to Puccini or Beethoven in Pakistan. The magnanimity of the score coupled with the surreal gritty road-side-miseries somehow render poverty poignant without meaning to. It is the most uncomfortable mingling of opposites that I can think of and that is perhaps why I find it all heartbreakingly beautiful.

My current playlist includes Massinet’s Meditations; the more robust Ode to Joy and when I am feeling particularly vindictive…Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Wagner, in particular, should come with a warning label and an R-rating. Beware: Contents are liable to cause overflow of latent phobias and passive-aggressive angst. I can trace all this back to four days ago, as I casually sifted through my mail to stumble upon my divorce papers. Ordinarily, I should be glad seeing as I have hardly given my misnomer-of-a-marriage much thought over the past few months, devoting most of my energies towards overcoming it with politically-incorrect pizzazz. Still, there is an odd power to a piece of paper, formally drafted in a language you cannot comprehend announcing your freedom from your biggest mistake. I spent the first two hours pretending I hadn’t seen the papers; another two hours rejoicing over them and the next few days trapped in a miasma of ‘what ifs’. Not about the decision to get divorced so much as the repercussions of having put my emotions on the line and realizing that I should have stuck with my original instincts and kept to my own company.

A friend recently visited my house and upon seeing my room whimsically remarked “Wow, your room seems really well-inhabited”. It was one of those odd, offhand, too-precisely observed comments that one cannot help but deflect with humor in the moment. My room has –for the most part- been my periphery planet. When I was ten, it was another room with ten years of being locked from the outside. The last ten years have meant a perverse sort of decadent independence but it didn’t change the fact that I still located my life within a room, this one locked from the inside. I suppose, it all boils down to a Stockholm Syndrome conflation of being imprisoned and eventually learning to enjoy it. Both prisons lead to a locked door regardless of whether or not it is of ones own choosing. That is the odd place I find myself in right now, negotiating between being a person I wish I was –one that I now find I am rather good at affecting – and the person that I am. The former has friends and the latter resides in a cocoon of literature, music, films and sonnets composed to a conglomerate of fictions that require no justification. I have always been one of those people who lacks balance. I can ‘act’ balanced better than most people I know purely because I am all too aware of how vulnerable my innards are on this score.

That is perhaps, why, my new job may just end up saving me. For the first time, I am bound by contract to interact with other people… in droves. And while, people are still not my primary choice of company, they are no longer the last on the list either. Armed with self-deprecation, I think I can deflect any particularly pointed judgments thrown my way. My pathological fear of people is amplified a thousand-fold as a teacher, especially as I recall how my friends and I used to mock our own teachers. Setting them apart as a different species, flawed, formidable and frivolous - infuriatingly peppered with the presumptuousness that they were capable of ‘teaching’ us anything. So I hope that laughing my way through two hours and overt obsequiousness will make my students ‘not-hate’ me. And then there is also the charm of being on a campus again. University campuses provide an odd moratorium on both life and reality. Places where learning is contagious and there is no warranty on the watershed of ideas. I wish I could tell my students that this is the only time in life that they will get to do this, have big ideas and not have them belittled; think big thoughts and believe them to be big enough; make friends and keep them. I have recently taken to walking on campus after wrapping up my classes with my headphones plugged in and listening to the closing act of Swan Lake. Now THAT is November at its best, coupled with the occasional chili prawns from the cafeteria soaked in just the right consistency of unpalatable grease; grading that unicorn-ian brilliant essay plopped onto a cushion in my office, toes basking in my uggs with a steaming cup of coffee.

That is how I stumbled upon Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, K588 day before yesterday. The Italian opera buffa literally means ‘Thus Do They all’ (or The School for Lovers) with the latter libretto penned by Lorenzo Da Ponte. Technically, the title means ‘Thus do all Women” and the music was scored to try and capture the duality of women, sung by men who could never comprehend them. I’ve been listening to it on loop and while my mind has trouble agreeing with the intonation of all the silly things women are meant to symbolize, my heart cannot help but melt at Mozart’s rendering. Especially given the fact that the man in question generally fell far below the standards of what anyone would consider a gentleman. It is almost as if a Lost Boy, perhaps even Pan himself, composed a song for a girl and lacked the courage to play it. I can relate, especially, because I am finally meeting and mingling with women and ironically, not loathing the experience. As someone, who has generally found it difficult to cultivate friendships with my own sex, it is a relief to scratch some very brittle surfaces only to discover kindred souls struggling with the same emotional see-saws. I have been trying to incorporate these people in my life on a semi-regular basis and it has proven to be a fruitful but formidable task. This is perhaps the best of any worlds I have ever experienced. I hesitate to call it so, but it is almost a state of grace: Aloneness…with options.

While I am enjoying the company immensely, I know myself well enough to recognise that I will never enjoy it enough to submerse myself in it completely. I have and always will be one of those ‘periphery-friends’. You know, the ones people remember as an afterthought

‘Whatever happened to her?

Where is she these days?”

I will never be someone’s somebody because I can’t reciprocate that need. That isn’t to say I don’t ever feel such a need. It is an appealing thought, this theory of having ‘your person’ in the world: pro-choice, at your beck and call to complete your sentences, thoughts and blanks. My failing lies in a fatuous self-love cloaked (or cloaking / have never been able to really figure out which) as self-loathing. I somewhat relish the romantic table scraps of being that girl who is hard to forget but even harder to remember.

Bricoleur Du Dimanche : Of Sacred Spaces

2013-09-30T06:47:00.000-07:00

“The Guide says there is an art to flying,” said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss"

- Douglas Adams, ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’

I’ve never really considered my life in the context of time and space before. For the most part, I tend to view existence as a series of consequences and my reactions to them. These days, however, I find myself seriously contemplating the subtle dynamics of the time-space continuum…not so much in commonly contrived trekkie terminology involving cylindrical beams of light, rather as my own personal bubble of actions, reactions and timing. If I think about it hard enough, I can easily divide the past ten years of my life into alterative spikes and pitfalls on a sonogram. I’ve peaked in some years and plummeted in others.

I wouldn’t exactly call it a balance but it helps keep perspective. I am presently enjoying the idea of a personal reboot. Every time I find myself facing a large group of people sitting and listening to me speak (and not falling asleep), it is a colossal validation of …something I can’t quite capture anywhere else in my life. It feels rather powerful and I suppose that is somewhat perverse. I never really saw myself as a teacher before, mostly because I haven’t really considered anything I know worth teaching. Still, it is proving to be an odd form of release …almost as if one is able to forgo personal ambition without experiencing guilt. There is a colossal sense of relief in this, given that I was never much good at self-actualization. Teaching offers up the chance to feel ambition on behalf of other people, wanting, even craving their success without having to worry too much about ones’ own anymore.

It is the least selfish I have ever felt.

It is also the most free I have ever felt.

I find myself suddenly absolved of the weight of ‘perfection in possibility’ leaving behind simply…possibility. I am finally contemplating writing my novel and just writing in general because I am no longer terrified of not being good enough to meet my own standards. I am finally willing to let others judge me and I am able to not collapse under their criticism. I suppose that is the greatest lesson I could have learned in the last year and it seems to finally be sinking in somewhat.

More recently I find myself contemplating sacred spaces. Crusty crevices marked in my day that I cannot quite capture but that might prove golden if only I could hold on to them long enough to let them be born. As it is, they are mere figments, conceived and aborted during my breakfast coffee or as I return to my office from class. I find all my good ideas, gentle hopes, idle quests melt away into one giant sieve of ‘wanting’. I’m not quite sure what it is I want anymore but I do feel that I am finally in that particular personal time-space continuum that relishes moving forward. I suppose it was a long time coming. Do you have that? That sweeping knowledge that you managed to think at least a dozen epic thoughts before lunch but that they’ve all dissolved by dinner? In Sanskrit they call it Bhrantapratavakavakya, the room into which we go on putting our hopes and dreams and desires. I can’t help thinking that at some point, it is beyond time we started looking for a key to the door, rather than an extended lease that allows us to add on more space to its piling proportions. Perhaps carpe diem is the order of the day

…or at least this day.

I have discovered that my car is a sacred space: all the in-between mandatory conversations I need to have with myself cloaked in the midst of music, traffic and idle stalkers on the road. I’ve always loved driving. The hellish traffic of Lahore; the familiar streets and the perfunctory juice waala’s at chowks are a constant source of pithy inspiration, idly composed tweets and wry smiles. Driving allows me sanctimonious security shrouded in the illusion of momentum. Even if I’m only moving forward in a circle that always leads back to the same place. I find that I do some of my best thinking while dodging motorcyclists and navigating traffic, listening to Rafi and stopping for nimboo-naaryal at Hussain Chowk. It is why I love this city - when the weather is right; the traffic optimally erratic and the playlist particularly profound, one is able to tap into a personal frequency that is never accessible amid the complacency of home. Of to-do lists, to-go places, to-meet people and to-eat foods. It’s a composite of colour and alive-ness that cannot really be captured in words properly, so I will stop trying. But it is there. And it is sacred.

Another sacred space, I am discovering, is the toilet seat. Funny how little credit we give our personal thrones as if it is somehow improper to acknowledge that our brains tend to function and philosophize at their best when our bowels are moving in the opposite direction. My own bathroom is its own odd little oasis. The rickety exhaust fan window opens sounds to a completely different world. From the servant quarters of my neighbours’ house below I can often hear the voice of Isa Khelvi and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan wafting through. Other times I can hear the tail ends of Bollywood film one-liners, the old ones, mixed in with snippets of crowded conversation that tells of a too large family crammed into a too small room. So far I’ve archived one-liners from Bobby, Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar, Chandni and on several occasions Namakhalal and Sholay. Sometimes I can smell parathas and other times I can hear potent Punjabi swearing. I know, for example, that ‘chote saab’ is a ‘chootya’ and ‘Shauki’ (one of the children) is a climber, given the number of times his mother says ‘Abe Haram Deya, fer taun deevar tappan laga e. Khasma noo Khaa, Shauki, thalle aa’. The intensity of developing mystery that is my neighbours’ household staff waxes and wanes depending on how boring my bathroom book is.

A new space I am discovering is the class room. I find myself trying to empathize and emphasize with and for my students in equal measure. To make them have fun but not too much fun. To make them ask questions but not too many questions. To teach them what I feel they ought to know and to resist teaching them what ‘I know’ instead. It’s self deprecation meets self actualization. But I know I am enjoying it more than I ever enjoyed anything else. I crave the adrenaline of entering a room full of people every day and not knowing for a split-second before I open the door if my voice will fail me. I love the sheer star burst of relief and ideas that follows when it doesn’t. There is a word in Japanese, Ikigai, that the people of the island Okinawa derived to mean ‘a reason to get up in the morning’. I understand it a little now. This is not to say that I feel ‘teaching’ is my calling or something. I’m so far, not sure I am any good at it and a part of me will always seek a self soaked in words. But it is, so far, my best use of words.

Perhaps I am one of those cobblers that the French call bricoleur du dimanche, an ingénue with an undiscovered calling who starts building always without clear plans, always adding bits on the fly.

A flight risk, with a purpose that can only be sustained when there is a pitfall in sight.

A glitch with a chip on her shoulder but a smile on her face.

A cobbler, whittling together the prefect pair of shoes, improvising madly each time the heel collapses and she finds herself stumble.

Qarrtsiluni: The Storm Before Calm

2013-08-25T03:50:00.003-07:00

“He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.” – Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Lately I am discovering that it is perfectly possible to congeal and compound simultaneously. I appear to be driven presently by this odd, portentous and rather stubborn sense of self that I have acquired ad hoc during the past year. In some respects, I feel that I am rather too pig-headed about ‘picking up the pieces’ of my life following my divorce and that I may have overreached far beyond my capacity. I find myself somewhere in the middle of constructing an entirely new existence. I am terrified of anything in myself or my surroundings remaining the same as before because this may lead me down the same inevitabilities I chose last year. I have always been at odds with my own person but it is different this time. In the past my personality and my surroundings have generally remained inversely proportional but now I scour the edges of an odd prefix trying to fight myself and my surroundings simultaneously. I suppose this is how one whittles a new self into being. Kind of like instant coffee, Divorce can give you enough of a belated caffeine kick to motivate instant personality.

You may or may not have gathered this by now but I have always been one of those people who knew what they didn’t want from life much more clearly than what they did. This approach served me well so far because it was constructed out of the confusing confetti that was narcissistic, nihilistic and needy in equal measure. Most people aren’t like that are they? After all one can deduce that self love and self loathing are parallel emotions but there are few who acknowledge both simultaneously. I now see myself trying to actively look for things that I ‘do’ want from my life with a rather forced sense of desperation. I find myself rudderless which pushes me into pretending I am ready to weather any storm simply because I cannot abide acknowledging how terrified I am of just floating through life.

It’s rather amusing if one is inclined to appreciate irony in the face of crippling doubts. I hope you are such a person, I find being able to laugh at one’s misery adds a somewhat endearing brand of gravitas and whimsical idiocy to ones personality that is oddly affable. I know I always enjoy the company of people who are equal parts self-deprecation, self-doubt, genius and absurd. I always believed that the key to my own survival has been the fact that I do not expect happiness from life. My childhood set me on a default path where I don’t just expect things to go wrong. I know they will. This has almost never phased me. It has always been joy that surprises and lifts me purely because of how unexpected it is. I recall my therapist once telling me that this was ‘such a cynical way of going through life’ while begrudgingly acknowledging the sheer titanium durability of my coping mechanism.

The way I figure it, people who are ‘naturally’ optimistic have much more cause for disappointment and are frequently crippled by the fact that life, does in fact, often suck. On the other hand, those of us who work from within the reality of that premise have a much better shot at enjoying the small pleasures life affords when and where we get them. We are not perpetually tip-toeing around the pitfalls of expectation. And who is to say that ‘real’ optimism isn’t born out of that peculiar brand of perennial pessimism that can occasionally laugh at life when offered the chance, rather than the hackneyed one-liners about silver linings, and ‘God has his reasons’ that are much more likely to lead to emotional collapse? I always come back to the pre-Socratics during these proceedings. Heraclitus teaches us that everything in nature changes. Parmenides, on the other hand warned us that the only things that are real in this world never change. When you pit both ideologues against their ideas, you are soaked with one reality: Nothing is real.

And that is why I make lists.

When I was a teenager, on the throws of dramatics, I attempted to kill myself for a third time. My therapist suggested perhaps the most kitsch, hackneyed cliché as a coping mechanism for what I was going through. He told me to immediately list 15 things that would make me happy. I recall, I started with a villa in Santorini and he immediately haggled me down to 15 things I could do ‘right there and then’ that would make me happy. My first was a cold glass of coke; my second was strawberry ice-cream; my third was an animated Disney feature; my fourth was buying key chains; my fifth was waiting for rain; my sixth was Dylan’s ‘To Ramona’ ....my last was simply the colour Blue. To this day, all my dark days, are held at bay by the same list. I maintain - as strongly as my grandmother does that Arnica-250 is the cure for all of life’s diseases – that a glass of coke is the cure to all of life’s problems. It is the pithy, pesky absurdity of the exercise that serves the formula for its success. Naturally, such silly measures are no adhesive for soul-crippling complexes and yet the fact that one tries, every time, to not give into the black holes that seem so determined to suck you in is what saves us. It is the effort and choice to not ‘want’ to be depressed that outweighs living in the dark.

It has worked well for me so far but now I feel it fading. I suppose it is my unwarranted ambition that is at fault. I have never really wanted much from life beyond the attempt to do what makes me happy. I worked towards that right, I fought for it and I recognize its value far beyond the new-age idiocy if self-help books. I learned long ago that small goals were the only key to a steady happiness quotient. This recent break in my emotions seems to have messed with that fundamentally. I feel myself moving in and out of my comfort zones, trying to wrestle myself into a person who can do anything she sets her mind to. I am not that person. And yet, there is this pesky little voice inside my memories yelling at me that I will never amount to anything. I remember it from years ago and I thought I had stopped listening to it but it has amplified. Nabokov described it as ‘Toska’. There is no English word that truly satisfies all its nuances but at its depth, Toska is a sense of great spiritual anguish usually without clear cause. He used to call it ‘his longing of nothing to long for’. I am presently in the midst of trying to create an antidote. Although I fear that I do not know how to live with the weight of expectations. I have always remained so blissfully empty of them. It is a bleaker canvas but at least I have copyrights to it. Colouring in things, eventually means attracting an audience and adding layers. I fear my inability to contrive such an elaborate deception and live it.

Recently, I have taken to teaching. It is something I always wanted to do but never thought I’d be able to do. I never tried it for this very reason. Mine is not a personality I generally consider worth inflicting on the general populous. Yet, I am enjoying it. It has made me feel oddly powerful and in control. This scares me infinitely, as I do not relish the idea of informing other people’s opinions as much as some people do. If anything, I have always resented the notion that it is anyone else’s job to do so. Which is why I am trying desperately to push my puns into profundity in class and serve up only a platter of wit. One cannot really measure or critique irony and I am counting on this clause. I have patented my faux penitent’s rabbinical voice, unleavened tones spread out with wry smoke, pasted with self deprecation and induced with enough subversive wit that my class laughs a lot. This keeps me from hyperventilating and I hope, them, from slipping out of consciousness. I have been privy to a picture of myself spending my mornings meditating over what I shall say to a group of strangers each afternoon; my afternoons combating their questions; my evenings wrestling with my muse and my nights seated in café’s where I eat and drink and speak to actual, corporeal people rather than the phantoms in my coffee cup.

Sometimes I picture my future at the helm of a class room in qarrtsiluni. Iñupiaq dialects of the Eskimo employ the word to classify ‘the act of sitting together and waiting for something to burst’. I feel this is always an apt analogy for Pakistan. It has only been a week but I am beginning to see myself here. Finally, engaging with people in groups. The epitome of the social animal that has a corner to cave into whenever the need arises. I am looking for housing on campus and I am hoping that this is finally my calling. To teach and spread what I have spent my life learning: doubt.

I have my pedagogues. I have my pulpit.

All I need now is my own self-fulfilling prophecy.

In-Betweens : A Strange Correspondence

2013-06-27T04:54:00.004-07:00

"What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?" –Allen Ginsberg

It appears you are still here. I do not know if this goes against you or whether it falls in my favour but I shall take it. I apologize in advance for wasting your time but it appears that I am somewhat of an expert in the art of time suckage. Only, this is the first time I have coveted an audience for my ministrations. There are so many nothings to discuss I don’t quite know where to start.

I have recently been musing the merits of singledom in Pakistan. I confess this is an odd sentence for me to type in, given that the words ‘single’ and ‘Pakistan’ have seldom been permitted to co-exist peacefully for extended periods of time in my vocabulary. And yet, for the first time I can truly relish the idea of being alone. I suppose I can sustain the thought long enough because it now exists without pithy, petty qualifiers of what my life ought to look like. This is an odd, unpredictable, upside to divorce. The fact that if one is able to survive the harrowing experience intact, the potential reward is an unprecedented sense of self wrought in self-reliance. I am experiencing for the first time that I may just well be enough. Perhaps not for someone else but certainly for myself. This is new for me, feeling content in my all-too obvious contamination. Not overjoyed, mind you, just complacent. For once in my life I don’t find myself running against something: time, tradition, expectation, potential or love. The downside of this ‘settling into my own skin’ has been accepting my failings ad hominem ad infinitum.

It has meant my mind and my matter finally agreeing on a few things. ‘Yes, I am insecure. Yes, I talk either too much or too little dependent on company, condiments and convenience. Yes, I am judgmental and simultaneously polite. Yes, I resist speaking to you because a cauldron of crazy comes out of my mouth when I speak for over 2 minutes at a stretch. Yes, I will always favor food over my figure. Yes, I am not as smart as I will always try to sound. Yes, I am an aesthetic purist and I hate myself for not managing genuine bohemian-ity. Yes, I need to dress like a post-apocalyptic Rainbow Bright at least five times a week. Yes, I am c-o-m-p-l-i-c-a-t-e-d.’ It’s a bit of a stretch to swallow so late in the game. Especially, considering my overwhelming need to retrospectively deconstruct every aspect of my being in the light of some missing mantra or posthumous philosophy. Accepting one’s failings is tantamount to admitting a complete lack of will and/or ability for self-improvement. It sounds kind of kitsch but I’ve never really been a quitter. Many mad things but certainly not a quitter.

This brings me back to this letter, my current state of between-ness and you. I find myself in the midst of my शून्यता or Buddhist emptiness and it finally feels good. For the Buddhists, Shunyata reflected the observation that everything we encounter in life is ultimately empty of soul, permanence and self-nature. It’s actually meant to be a good thing, kind of like a tabula rasa from expectation. Being back in Pakistan has brought me to this place and for the first time I can appreciate its peaks. I have been hoping to escape this country for as long as I can remember. When I was a child, I used to think that if only my parents hadn’t returned to Pakistan they wouldn’t have gotten divorced. As if being in this country, is what made my father what he was rather than him carrying his country everywhere in his shirt pocket. I used to think if that if we stayed in Bali, the sheer spectrum of colour and flavor would somehow supplant itself in our skins through its own lyrical osmosis. I used to think places made people rather than the other way around. I hung on to that premise for the longest time and more recently it was about freedom.

I thought that I would only begin to think and feel and practice accordingly when I left this place and yet my marriage taught me the exact opposite. I learned, in perhaps the most humiliating way conceivable, how much people ‘can’ matter if you are stuck with them. I recognized that I had learned to think and be myself in opposition to my surroundings my whole life. Somehow, the sheer complacence of Europe was somewhat jarring and oddly debilitating. Us Pakistanis, we’re used to operating in opposition to something…ideas, individuals, ideals, ideologies. Hard as it is, there is an odd sense of redemption to be gleaned from belonging to the fringes in a country where those fringes constantly need cloaking. It’s harder to be put in a box when you’re already anonymous. A friend of mine recently scolded me for being ‘one of those’ perpetual Pakistan-se-zinda-bhag types. Earlier, I wouldn’t have felt any guilt in wanting a better aggregate experience for myself but for the first time I am realizing that my criteria for a ‘better life’ may well be skewed.

I am alone.

I am alone in Pakistan.

And oddly enough I am liking it. Sure, it is a narrow, noxious, nullifying existence in the larger, accepted happiness quotient but I am recognizing that there may be some merit to working from ‘within’ my identity crises than 'without'. There is a perverse magic to scraping a self out of constant contradiction; of pushing a pun into profundity and pretending that rain is only romantic when it cools sizzling side-walks; that independence only ‘means’ something when you can stand in a sweltering line and pay your own bill or that conversation is more profound when you can recall a black and white and brown all over background to fill in all the neo-colonial blanks. There is something to be said of seeking friends who are equal misfits hexed by the lowest common denominator of scope vs scape; mixing our lawns and denims, our kurtis and jeans and our English and Punjabi. There is a constant self-awareness button being charged in this melting pot and even the apathy is oddly electric, purely because it cannot afford to be complacent.

The absolute freedom I am immersed in at present is by itself somewhat exhausting. I suppose the most likely outcome of completely being oneself is to trip on the premise of purist expectation and self-delusion. I suppose that is why I have sought you out again. I have long been in the market for a stranger to bounce my paltry platitudes off of. It sounds delusional and unhealthy and yet it is way more productive than me talking to myself enough to rule out talking to actual people.

I suppose anything I tell you here will serve as an alibi for something else. In some ways speaking to you, whoever you are, serves as my life’s ultimate exclusion clause. Your still being here in some ways serves as evidence of your being privy to the secrets of the universe, mine and yours. You, or the idea of you, a person who’s presence makes me aware enough of my own to not need to impress you, may well be my only remaining connection to my former self. That version of me that believed in public infatuations and personal flirtation to a quasi-surrealist degree. I suppose you, who read this, also relish that elliptical algorithm in your DNA that renders you incapable of enjoying perfection. Yours is a voice raked raw in sulfur by the claws of Cupid, either in the shot-of-bourbon rasp of Tom Waits or the bitter-baked syrup of Ella or perhaps the sad, best-friend comfort of Cole. Or mayhaps your voice is marinated in a post-barfi-bite that only works for ubiquitous Urdu, like Noon Meem’s or perhaps you are boisterous and burlesque in Punjabi puns, pontificating in colloquialisms like Lohar.

I wonder how you and I would talk, if we could, for tone is everything. I suppose it would be trite for me to deny here, that what I am actually cultivating is my own script for infallible romance. One of those vignette in-the-margin one-night-stands with no one and everyone in particular. Something with absolutely no real dialogue but countless conversations constructed in lip-synced lines and borrowed catchphrases. I imagine you reading this by a window, on a cloudy, overcast day (rather unlike mine) hopefully overlooking a large body of water. I would paint the water cobalt blue and put you somewhere in Santorini but that would kill the lack-of-plot line I’m going for. I hope you have your feet up as I cannot abide people who read or watch television …or do anything that gives them pleasure with their feet firmly planted on the ground. It reflects a cold, calculated sense of propriety. I sincerely hope you are as improper as they come.

I suppose Russel Brand puts our in-between-ness well in his Booky Wook “I hope it is not necessary for me to stress the platonic nature of our relationship – not platonic in the purist sense, there was no philosophical discourse, but we certainly didn’t fuck, which is usually what people mean by platonic; which I bet would really piss Plato off, that for all his thinking and chatting his name has become an adjective for describing sexless trysts.” Lucky for you and I, Plato also called love the ‘most serious form of mental disease’, which renders our particular brand of sexless trysts perfectly romantic.

Shibboleth שִׁבֹּלֶת

2013-06-18T03:38:00.004-07:00

"I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin." - Leonard Cohen

I sometimes feel as if I am living my life in reverse, as if existence is an exercise in infinite regression and I somehow missed the F-train exit I was meant to get off at to finally start moving forward. I have spent the past week feeling simultaneously haunted and hunted by phantasms of my own making. Family phantasms that I have amplified to ghoulish proportions that I now recognize are slightly silly. Ever wonder why there are certain people who have the ability to break you even in their absence? When, the mere mention of their name or a slight communication on their part propels you beneath the layers of ‘growing up’ you thought you had managed over the years. When it has you revisiting that terrified adolescent hiding from the world in a book; behind a locked door in a tiny box; hyperventilating in a pink room on the sixth floor of a house that imprisoned you for a decade and that your pretend you cannot spot every day from this vantage point in the post-independence Valhalla of your new self. I feel like I am locked in a self-perpetuating game of Boggle which I am constantly playing against myself.

That’s what brought me back to this word. I recall coming across ‘Shibboleth’ when I read the Old Testament, and it refers to ‘a word or custom that a person unfamiliar with its significance may not pronounce or perform correctly relative to those who are familiar with it’. Essentially, Shibboleth was a sort of social-marker used to identify foreigners, because it was the Hebrew word they could never pronounce correctly. I feel it serves as a metaphor for my entire life in some ways. I have always felt like a foreigner, especially amidst my own. I am a foreigner in my family and I have never felt more foreign than I do in my own country. In the Book of Judges (12), the Gileadites employed the term to identify the Ephraimites preceding a military defeat upon the tribe. When surviving Ephraimite refugees tried to cross the River Jordan they had to pronounce the word correctly or their captors would exact a toll.

'Let me cross'

The men of Gilead would ask, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he said, 'No,' they then said, 'Very well, say "Shibboleth” If anyone said, "Sibboleth" because he could not pronounce it, then they would seize him and kill him by the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell.-Judges 12:5–6, NJB

I suppose I can relate to those Ephraimites. Only my jailors are everywhere and most don’t even care to jail me any longer. My particular brand of Stockholm Syndrome has just taught me to appreciate the comfort of closed corners and the familiarity of bars and rules I no longer ascribe to. I never did. I suppose my ‘Shibboleth’ would be ‘Freedom’.

Sometimes I think that all I need to complete myself is a new word each day. On good days, I can manage a sentence and on better days I can write. Whatever that means. Five or more words that mingle together perfectly enough to leave me content with the fact that my life was worth the effort it takes to exist. That I have created something that is enough to sustain me through the remaining hours. It’s a small existence but it is fruitful. I was always that person…one who read the dictionary for ‘fun’ and poured through books of quotations hoping someone could loan me a mantra to help manage myself into an actual person. I suppose I am a fetishist. Only, my fetish is boring.

I have spent the last week feeling simultaneously haunted and hunted by my doppelganger; a parallel existence that seems to shadow me in this city. And that is what brought me to the realization that it was time to cut cords that did nothing but pull me into a pit I no longer even fit into. I refuse to live life in the reverse any longer, only ever moving forward in an incandescent waltz, which always leads me two steps back but still allows the illusion of whimsical progress. I am done pretending that people, who don’t matter in my life, ‘should’ matter in my life. It is a very odd, broken back-flip of the soul, trying to attain a version of yourself that cannot exist but you somehow feel ‘ought to’. My ‘other’ family recently tried contacting me through several venues and this sent me into a peculiar down spiral because it took me 30 years to scrape my way out of that morbid whirlpool of expectation, disappointment and salutations that constituted being someone’s daughter. It is a somewhat paralyzing realization that for every parent feeling ‘disappointed’ in their daughter; there is a daughter somewhere feeling disillusioned with the idea of parenthood altogether. I am finally allowing myself to reject those that have never accepted me. I finally forgive myself for not being able to forgive people who neither deserve nor ever sought redemption.

The sensation is immensely liberating. Yet I am slightly miffed that my coping crises has not altered one bit since I was eleven. The moment I felt the past creep up and rope me in again, I found myself frantically pouring over online quotes sites, listening to ‘Most of the Time’ and resenting the fact that I could not close the doors to my past by banging them. I am discovering that I simply do not belong to a generation that can register subtleties or cultivate propriety. I find myself being caught in analogous arguments because I do not have the courage to tell most of the people who deserve to hear it, to simply F*** Off and leave me be. It is an important lesson to learn to acquire an appellation of ones’ self and I have so far resisted learning it.

I always felt that a person could not afford to have a dramatic life and be simultaneously dramatic. It ruined the plot and there is nothing I like less than a poorly plotted story. There is a colossal either/or to choose from and one can’t have both. My genes pretty much made the choice for me and my parents pretty much wrote the script. It has meant living an 80’s style Bollywood, savitri-masochistic life that could not afford a Sri Devi to play the chest-beating-bleating lead. I needed to laugh at my life and so I did. What pisses me off about it ten years later is that other people presume this as an invitation to shit their life-woes all over you. There is nothing I hate more than people who assume their issues give them the excuse to make other peoples’ lives hell. As if we all don't already have our own hells to contend with.

Up to last year, I was surrounded by such people.

I am hoping to finally learn to cuss and cut them away.

I have recently conducted a personal plebiscite of sorts and I have decided to weed out the people in my life I don’t need so I might finally bloom, hackneyed as that sounds. It is the time for मोक्ष, Sanskrit for Moksha or Mukti. The process refers to a general liberation that cannot take place without some sort of life-living-death-rebirth cycle. In Hindu transcendentalism, it refers to surpassing your former self by cleaning the cobwebs of the soul, so to speak. Hindu Moksha is not necessarily a soteriological goal for redemption as much as an excuse for reinvention. A breaking of the ego and overall nama-roopa (name-form) to recreate yourself as you see fit. I owe my Moksha to several people. To my parents, the one who broke me and the one who put me back together. My grandparents who just took each piece separately and loved it back to health and most recently...to friends.

It is the latter that has been the most surprising solace in a lifetime spent alone. Having friends this year has led me to conclude that family is such a defunct word and also, that it is a recyclable concept. I have learned that it is possible to recycle a bad legacy into a majestic legion and that it’s never too late to do so. I realized this, while fleeing my feelings in a black, survivor-mobile, sitting with a friend belting out ‘Break it Down Again’, chomping down on mis-spelt macaroons. This friend, You know who you are, is someone I owe my Elpis to this past year. For both silent support, loud confidence in my inabilities and for giving me an #201 island to cave into. I am brought back to that Frost quote ‘In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It Goes On.”

So ‘Welcome to the Land of Misfit Toys, Lost Boys and Broken Things’

It may be just the best place to get fixed.

Finifugality

2013-05-31T02:33:00.000-07:00

“So therefore I dedicate myself to myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger – because I cannot dedicate myself to any human being” – Jack Kerouac

It’s finally gotten quiet up in my head. I cannot help but welcome such silence supplemented by acceptance. My mind no longer seems to be racing to meet some crazy summit of success and I feel that I can finally shed the weight of needing to be my very own self-fulfilling prophecy. I am loving this particular adjective: ‘Finifugal’ means ‘hating endings’…of someone who tries to avoid or prolong the final moments of a story, relationship or some other journey. It’s taken a while too, I got on to this colossal segue of needing to be ‘anybody else’ nearly eight months ago but I finally seem to be settling into myself again. The fact that my ‘self’ may have altered dramatically, is largely encouraging. My 30-year-long diagonal swamp finally seems to be deviating into a learning curve of some sort. Besides, it’s just too hot to try anything… let alone something as exhaustively all-encompassing as a personality overhaul.

Oddly enough, the oozing summer laziness is somewhat soothing this year around. I realise this feeling will pass in a week or so, which is why I am trying to revel in it while I still can. While I can still appreciate silly, subtle idiosyncrasies like 2-hours of running air-conditioner, iced-mangoes and black and white Shammi Kapoor films watched on my laptop over the weekend when the afternoons are too sticky and salient to warrant any sort of initiative. I can’t yet jump on the bandwagon of all the load-shedding woes and summer bashing that I know is part of my lot in the near future. I think I still have a week or so left in me to relish the fact that I am broiling among a den of like-tempered misfits rather than mentally suffocating in a year’s compound of silent treatment in a cool flat in Copenhagen. I am perfectly content in taking my happiness piecemeal – in the form of a dubious, daily tablet of bliss pocketed beneath the minutes where the water pressure in the shower is at full; when I get an extra hour of electricity in the morning; the fact that I have finally learnt to cut up a tarbooz all on my own and that I am simultaneously writing and painting again.

Then of course there are off moments. Sitting on my bed alone and listening to Rafi can prompt an un-invigilated minute where one catches oneself thinking ‘Well, wouldn’t it be nice if there was someone sitting here beside me, sharing my thoughts and anticipating all my needs and desires’. It passes quickly enough, once I remind myself that all that would ‘really’ mean would be my having to share my mango; put on some shorts and probably even have to shave my legs. Screw that. I am presently determined to spend my time accentuating the idea that I am more than enough for myself to deal with coupled with the illusion that I do it well. That said, I am hoping that this whole reactionary ‘fresh divorcee’ phase of my life will be over soon because I cringe every time I have to laugh at my latest fuck up in passing.

I am presently in search of a word that encapsulates people who prefer to live amid the glory of their own destruction. Ones’ who are defined by a constant lack of definition; have lives that are far too dramatic to be treated with anything but derision, self-deprecation and humour and people who relish their own nihilistic mythology more than the sum of their attributes. Sadly, I would have to factor in the fact that such individuals are by no means self-reliant and that their entire self-sufficiency only operates in the presence of an audience. Self-reliance is such an odd, post-modern, post-feminist, post-human precept, isn’t it? The idea that our constant demands to be regarded as individuals need to be supplemented by a sense of alone-ness is such a reductionist view and yet I suppose I must now buy into it wholesale based on the life I have chosen.

A few days ago, I met a childhood friend and while detailing my last year she remarked “But you’ve always been brave about this stuff.” It’s somehow more jarring to hear that from someone who has observed your most candid ‘Before’ and ‘After’ selves. I experienced an odd minute where I wanted to pick up a baseball bat and break windows, vent, cry and…dramatize to my heart’s content because it suddenly occurred to me that I had always just laughed at it all simply because I couldn’t decide on a politically correct, socially acceptable alternative that would still allow me to vent. It seems that a dramatic life cannot afford to be played by a dramatic lead. One must always choose between either content and characters when writing out the life one wants to lead while coping with the life they happen to have. I suppose in some measure I must be grateful for my pesky persistence to shovel my way deeper into my mind each time I feel the need to laugh at myself.

“You need to stop over-bloody analysing everything. And this whole wordy, philosophising, numinizing thing…it doesn’t dispel reality, it doesn’t delay it either. Why do you stick with it? Is it because you think it makes you interesting to people?” N once asked me.

“No. It’s because it makes me interesting to myself. Tolerable, at the very least,” I recall saying.

I certainly wasn’t lying. I have always felt cursed by that odd, ever present sense of self-loathing that is only matched by the fact that I perhaps feel a greater loathing for nearly everything else in the privacy of my thoughts. In the final settled sum, I suppose I still come out enjoying my own company better because I always seek to improve it and because there is less guilt associated with judging oneself than others. The latter involves a not-so-merry-go-round of cynical syntax. First judgement about something another person says/ does/ tries/ wants; followed by judgement for being judgmental about someone I hardly know and concluded by judging whether I am even qualified to hold court over anyone else’s actions given the cowardice that confines my own.

I have discovered that the want for more does not make a mind. My mind, in spite of all the self-deprecation and farcical caricaturising, seems to be failing at the one thing it’s good at: pretence. Funny, how when I finally want to cry I no longer appear capable of it. I am no longer laughing at my circumstances for survival. I’m doing it out of habit and on some level I wish I was beyond that. That said, I suppose there are worse things to be cursed with than a fool-proof coping mechanism that ensures you will almost never break down in the face of piling personal crises.

I am trying to puzzle myself out these days. I’m not sure any more if I am trying to define myself, redefine myself or free myself from definition altogether. Logically speaking, it cannot be all three… much as I wish it. My ‘Qualia’ hinges on whether my sense of self comes from my life, my mind or my making. I want to be normal now…ordinary even. Riddled with silly, girl problems; taking them as they come and not needing to tweak them. The philosophical qualia is relegated to concepts that occur in vocabulary and practise but require perception for final framing. It helps cut out the physical from the metaphysical and see which comes first. The noumena association is meant to come naturally but I am not there yet. I am not at that juncture where what I am corresponds with who I am. Perhaps I never will be but it is irksome to have identified this gap and have no bridge to cross it. It is even more jarring that the disconnect revealed itself when I was contemplating sex. Qualia is a fitting philosophical allegory, I feel, because it resonates with real physical realities being held hostage to the representation of what is impressed upon the senses. The concept implies that the latter stage, noumena allows us some agency and that if we were aware of our perceptions, we might ration them differently. Meaning that my loathing for my tangible physical self could somehow mesh with my tolerance for my subliminal self. Where sex is concerned, I could finally stop worrying about what I am thinking/feeling/saying/doing and actually follow course on the thought/word/action/emotion.

I’m not getting my hopes up.

My latest self-destruction is helping me deal with this slightly. I suppose not being conscious of my actions for even the few minutes that I can muster is a relief of some sort. It is respite sought in stupidity and I am finding it oddly satisfying even as I recognise that it cannot last. I am seriously contemplating shifting from the Pakistani equivalent of the Arizona-Native Papago tradition where girls never spoke to men so as to be able to decipher a mate when they felt a compulsion to the Natchez variety of women amassing dowries composing presents from all their lovers when they came of age and still choosing to remain single. It’s a strangely tempting notion, and divorce somewhat propels a woman in this country into a world where the pressure to ‘prove something’ is off. Relationships no longer need to have tags or goals attached to them. The expiry date of self and relationships is somewhat less relevant and they can finally just be about the people in them.

Cohen once categorised love as the fire that burns everyone and disfigures everyone. “It is the world’s excuse for being ugly,” he said. Even then, I know I am still talking about dating more than contemplating it seriously. I am still more comfortable with the idea of substances than actual substance.

I am not sure which is uglier.

Hiraeth and the Hosteen Coyote

2013-05-01T16:08:00.007-07:00

“It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way” – Rollo May

I find myself in a frenzy that I cannot forgive away at present. My mouth tastes like bile, my face is numb and the whimsical wi-fi signals adorning my apartment walls are oddly amplified in this perversely self-affirming instant. And so I write, to preserve a sense of sanity and sanctity in a moment utterly devoid of both. My thoughts are switching trajectories at a moment’s pace: I marvel at my ability to put one foot in front of another even at the most inopportune moments; I relish the idea of finally beginning to enjoy the company of women, who earlier seemed to shrink even my sizable mass into parochial protoplasm in their intimidating circumference. I find I might even make female friends, which should prove to be an interesting adventure. I have identified that I am attempting to redefine myself in the light of anticipation and conversation…granted, it is odd realizing ones’ own reflection in another and hearing our opinions pour out for the first time in reaction to someone else's. It is a nefarious beginning, although not entirely unpleasant. I find that I intensely dislike the color pink, I had always withheld judgment on colors but at this present precipice, I can observe my complexion and I must pronounce -Pink is most definitely not the new ‘black’.

I believe the elders have identified this stasis as somewhere between a state of absolute euphoria and acrid panic. ‘Hiraeth’ is Welsh, for a homesickness that pertains to a home to which one cannot return, one that perhaps never was. It alludes to the nostalgia and yearning, for a grief reserved for the lost places of a past one tries to recover but never can. Hiraeth is a unicorn, only it is black. The kind one clearly remembers meeting and having ridden even, but one that can never be spotted again. Tonight, Hiraeth is a series of disjointed misnomers…it is Islamabad’s oddly poignant nonchalance towards the entire enterprise of existing; it is a bitter-half frozen glass of coca cola; it is the smell of the last wisps of Imperial Leather soap and the sounds of Amitabh Bachan singing ‘Khaike Paan’ still slapping around in my head. It is the summer afternoons that I know will come, where the only thing to rescue me from hyper-awareness regarding each individual stream of sweat running down my back will be a Sindhri Aam fished out from a steel tub of dry ice. Hiraeth is watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the afternoon, to the sound of an old air-conditioner that still needs a knob to be turned to #4 on Auto-cool and it is repeated trips to Audio City with penciled lists of songs that will someday grow up to be a cassette that I pay Rs200 for. There is a sequence in North and South, where Gaskell has Margaret finally acknowledge the loss of home “No matter how we were, no matter how much we wish it, we cannot go back”. I suppose this is my Margaret moment. I feel as if I must finally give up my search for Mitchell’s bon-bons, Country Pine-cool and that long-lost reviewing of the Tiny Toons finale, because even if I find them I recognize that they won’t taste the same.

This is an odd, lilting loop I presently find myself trapped in, almost as if I am constructing myself in retrospect. There is an odd god-liness about this motion that I find simultaneously liberating and licentious. In some manner I am beginning to view the latent Sanskrit warning Koyaa Rusqatri as a positive tangential for endless possibility carved in layers of spite. The Koyaa Rusqatri, literally refers to the ‘balance of a life out of balance’. The notion alludes to those off-shoot individuals who are incurable, un-fixable and irredeemable in their essence. It offers up a platitude for all the plebian bandits and social banshees of the world - alienated and alliterated by their personal conundrums to a point where they no longer seek redemption but rather respite from the expectation of being every idle relative’s concerned after-thought. The collective ‘Oh, Him’s/Oh, Her’s’ finally looking to live a life beyond the ‘But what will become of …’ that shadows their very presence and just BE. The Rusqatri was devised as a caveat from expectation and exultation alike. It is the lost-soul’s life raft that does not seek any sort of shore. It allows un-balance as a legitimate life-style choice and I fear I may be very close to admitting into it.

These days, I am longing for the comforts of home and my city, while simultaneously adjusting to the idea that remaining here and battling my demons may be a worthwile venture in the long run. There isn’t much I find redeeming about this city except, mayhaps, the Jacaranda trees that currently line my street. These trees bear a stunning purple blossom that may just be pretty enough to keep me invested in the idea of my own individuality born of independence. If they were Cherry Blossoms, the struggle may well have been considered moot. I wish I could just settle the matter of myself and be done with it once and for all but I seem to relish the challenge of a life that perpetually resists perfection.

In Native American mythology, there is a spirit animal reserved for the self-defeating savant. A creature that caters to the glamour of self-destruction that appeals to those of us who savor the art of self-combustion and consider ourselves more poignant, just for pragmatically snipping away at ourselves piece-by-piece. The most infamous trickster in Native American lore is the Hosteen Coyote, some consider the coyote an anagram for Prometheus in Greek mythology, as he too brought fire to his people. Others liken him to the Norse god Loki in temperament and constitution. The Hosteen holds nothing sacred and thereby everything is equally important and simultaneously recyclable to him. The Hopi hold that, to be granted a wish by the Hosteen, is at best dubious but immediately self-serving. It is said that each granted wish follows an exclusion clause that guarantees that it will not be granted in the manner of one’s choosing. The legends of the coyote, Loki and Mercury circle around myths of cunning and do not operate at an intellectual but on a purely instinctual level. They are the unconscious will. And yet, in every legend, where the Hosteen has appeared to the Hopi or the Pueblo, no one has been known to have resisted it. I seem to be running with the Hosteen at present and for the first time I comprehend the charms of surrender more than self. It is an odd conglomerate of values operating in reverse. I am my own Saint Teresa, and I myself am begging to be rid of all my saving graces. It is oddly liberating.

And yet, there is a junction where this liberation becomes suffocating. I find that my moral monitors are all the more stifling because I was the one who oh-so laboriously erected them and now find myself tearing them down. I suppose this is the down-side of constructing one’s ethics outside of a God and thereby taking responsibility for every thought and action as it is cemented in habit. I am presently struggling with my multiple choices. I suppose this is better framed as the steady decomposition of the construction, production and definition of my thoughts. I catch myself playing with Molyneux here, who asked Locke whether a blind man restored to sight, would be able to distinguish between a cube and globe that his blindness had conditioned him to identify. In the epistemological sense, I see myself sympathizing with Ibn Tufail’s Hayy ibn Yaqdhan , as he consorts with colours rather than shapes in this regard. How do I quantify my person here… as what I am? What I was? What I want to be? Or is it who I am becoming as I am becoming her? Molyneux further leads me to Agrippa and his Münchhausen Trilemma, where all truths are essentially impossible to prove, even by the likes of logic. Trilemma denotes that circular reasoning, infinite regress and unproven axioms counteract any real value in moral rectitude and thereby the idea is a hopeless endeavor from the onset. Even if it does offer me hope. Is my person a product of what my mind wishes it to be or of my neurology and physicality? I suppose, loathe as I am to acknowledge it, I must carry my carcass around with me for the rest of my journey. I finally rest with Sorites, where I can make some sense of my selfishness as well as my self-loathing. The heap-paradox rests in deterioration giving rise to liberation…from definitions. What is a person? Am I a whole, or a conglomerate or an assembly line of features and facets, which if split up and taken away one by one, will free me from the burden of being the me that binds me. The bale of hay that depletes straw by straw until it isn’t a bale of hay.
Can the same be true of a person?
And if so, what needs diminishing?

Where do I start to deconstruct and detonate?

When can I finally dissolve into the person I think I could be?

“Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.”

- - Women, Charles Bukowski

Sombremesa

2013-04-24T15:13:00.000-07:00

"To Live, would be an awfully big adventure" - Peter Pan, JM Barrie

Dear Stranger,

This seems to be an opportune time for odd lilting conversation, not that there is ever an inopportune time for subjectivity. I find myself at a new beginning today and for some odd reason I feel the need to share this one with the likes of a likeness I cannot fully deconstruct. This beginning comes in the form of a document, emailed to me this morning, a document in a foreign language that proclaims the finalizing of my divorce. Seeing as I currently lack a confidant, I now find myself constructing one in this letter. You might think this a morbidly rococo juxtaposition on my part and you would be right. I am seeking attention, as loathe as I am to admit it. That said, I do not know whose attention it is I am soliciting and on some off tangent this anonymity awards me a small measure of comfort.

I am twisting my mind around this loveliest of Spanish words 'Sombremesa'. It makes reference to times spent around the table after dinner, talking to the people one shared the meal with. It is time spent digesting both the food and the fragile foundations of friendship. I am unsure about whether I can classify my recent socializing around tables as 'the sharing of meals' in any genuine sense of the word but it would not be dishonest of me to assert that somewhat-edible or better put, perishable, items were consumed. And sufficient time was taken to savour them sufficiently. Perhaps classifying the subtle stringing together of loose-ended misnomers and post-substance metaphysics as the beginnings of a friendship may be a stretch but whatever the cumulative repercussions of this Sombremesa, they appear to be favorable. They are certainly compelling and jarringly, cripplingly honest. I do not know if this is how one cultivates a friendship, by cloaking ones' self at the onset, imbibing several social facilitators in the middle and stripping bare at the end? Is this the basis of an acquaintance-ship that lasts? Or is it a peer-ship? Or is it merely an almost-recognise-her-face-ship?

One might think of this particular variant of letter writing as a bout of triviality but I feel that the importance of saying things and having them matter to someone can never really be under or over estimated. That said, there is no way of knowing whether any of what I shall say here will matter to anyone, but in some part this disinterest is also oddly consoling. I shall never know, who you are, who I am addressing or how you are being addressed and that means we can converse freely. Or that I can vent freely, whatever Kafkaesque parable better suits your purpose. I suppose in some manner, I am setting this fictive conversation against real ones I have just encountered trying to test the boundaries of my own limitations as both a wordsmith and human-oid. I fear that I have indulged myself beyond my capacity for self-indulgence. I fear too that I have educated myself beyond my intelligence. I fear finally, that I have experienced a sense of complacence. I fear most of all that I am enjoying it.

“They took it for granted that if they went he would go also, but really they scarcely cared. Thus children are ever so ready, when novelty knocks, to desert their dearest ones.”

Perhaps you are bored already. This is, after all, a purely selfish catharsis on my part and will afford you nothing of value in exchange, no vindication, no valor...not even a pedestal. I have always envied people their chance to compose long intimate letters in films, the kind one finds being superimposed at the preface or conclusion of a historical biopic. I wish that I could compose these words on an aged papyrus scroll with a quill and scratchy, blotchy ink to preserve the perverse nostalgia and neologism I am attempting to bring here, while my defenses are down enough to award me the indulgence. Silicon screens and clacking keys are so utterly unromantic but they cannot be helped. If I were given the choice I would have employed pencils. This is something you actually should know about me…I adore pencils. Ever since I watched that magnum of romantic comedies, ‘You’ve got Mail’, I have relished the idea of someday receiving a ‘bouquet of sharpened pencils’. I would write you this letter in pencil if I knew who you were and I assure you it would serve more poignantly than those crass love notes composed in blood by clumsy lovers.

I am not sure if I am going about this the right way, or if there even is such a thing. After all, how does one construct an intimacy? In normal situations people consider approaching a curious stranger and striking up a conversation, others employ that age-old art known as flirtation. Some stalk people on Facebook and Twitter…whichever method one employs, there is a subtle loss of self that is demanded of the enterprise. The twisted waltz of socializing requires one person to initiate the exchange, invent an approach and meticulously cultivate an opening. There are moments in between, where every perverse slip-of-tongue and every arbitrary hand gesture is superimposed in the idle vignette of ones' clouded retinas and encased in the hazy short term memory one is desperately trying to wipe clean with a hyperbolic blend of potent substances. Each layer added, removes a layer of self-consciousness and superimposes something about the self one was unaware of in their own capacity. I find I talk too much, so I try to pace myself. That pace allows me the time to think and then I find I am thinking too much and immediately switch to talking again. I discover I can be crass, and this is an odd jolt for me. I have always been quiet and polite, you see, now I am discovering a boorish element in my jip-jive conversation that occasionally leads me to question whether my current choice of social conduits will cause lasting damage.

"Stars are beautiful, but they may not take an active part in anything, they must just look on for ever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was. So the older ones have become glassy-eyed and seldom speak (winking is the star language), but the little ones still wonder."

In my mind this involves a loss of power or ego or something that I know I do not possess in any case, but the idea of losing it is overwhelming enough to hold me at bay. This is why I have never triumphed in matters of the heart…or the libido, if you belong to the school of thought that prefers to distinguish between the two. I have no one to be intimate with, so I have ascertained that in such times it is best to muster up all of ones’ creativity and invent a confidant. It is not so difficult really, inventing intimacy. All the enterprise really requires is cause enough to warrant confession. In our case, somewhat of a soliloquy wrought in affection. The inventory for intimacy essentially rests on three things, I find. The first involves the right number of 'others' to cloak your conversation in sufficient banality so that the few sentences you mean to make poignant can be identified in contrast to all the nonsense. This is paramount, for conversations that try to be important in their entirety inevitably fail from the fall-out of sheer expectation. The second, is a viable target. Someone you are capable of surprising with your odd sensibilities but someone whose reactions you are not too invested in. This ensures that if a transient intimacy is actually struck, it will be equally surprising for both parties and then promptly dismissed as a serendipitous fluke. It is essential that it be dismissed so as not to become dangerous. The third and final premise for inventing intimacy is eye-contact...or the lack thereof. This is as much a science as an art...one must measure connected gazes meticulously against stolen ones and disconnects. No one should be too aware of being the subject of your scrutiny at any given point of time but someone actually must be the subject. It is a perverse scavenger hunt for smiles and sibilant undertones. So here, I shall address you as an old friend and pick up an imaginary conversation left at the tail end of our previous encounter, one that I shall construct as we go along.

But where do you live mostly now?"
With the lost boys."
Who are they?"
They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expanses. I'm captain."
What fun it must be!"
Yes," said cunning Peter, "but we are rather lonely. You see we have no female companionship."
Are none of the others girls?"
Oh no; girls, you know, are much too clever to fall out of their prams.”

The last time we met we were contemplating the merits of the term ‘spiritual’. You were dressed casually, as you are wont to do, sitting cross legged on my sofa and denigrating me for my desperate need to find ‘meaning’ in ‘meaningless things’ that I stumble upon. I suppose, in this construction and this particular letter, you are a man. I have known you for years, long enough to experience an odd, compulsive possessiveness with regards to you and simultaneously long enough for me to be all-too-aware of your romantic failings to let this attraction manifest beyond the odd tingle in my toes or the flutter in my chest when you laugh at something I have said. One is told, that this degree of a physical charge is biologically predetermined and does not really warrant much deeper consideration on either of our parts. We are friends - in that overtly comfortable sense of the word that does not really necessitate the validation of a facebook request or a regular phone call. We are in the habit of watching films on the telephone after having discovered that it is one of the few television clichés that actually does translate beyond Gossip Girl. We do not open conversations with 'Hello's and Goodbyes' but rather with pithy one-liners that ensure the illusion of a stream of thought flowing without interruption in spite of all all the interruptions that life necessitates for us both. I find that I'm always doomed to construct you in my head as Pan. It is a most unforgivable pathetic-ality on my part. A perpetual, perennial itch to save and savor the act of loving rather than the person I am loving. The irony, of course being that, of perhaps all literary heroins I have never loathed any more than Wendy. She is the constant touchstone of every woman's underlying need to rescue and rehabilitate a man or woman or beast, and for lack of opportunity, to construct a Pan that needs saving in every stray that crosses her path. Wendy is Freud's very own thing-that-goes-bump-in-the-night of tremors and testosterone.

“I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads on the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with sex elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate-pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine threepence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still."

You are in a habit of pointing out my sentimentality as a fatal flaw. You warn me repeatedly that my romance with the idea of romance is more doomed than any star crossed cupidity available on a book shelf or to be found on screen. Spirituality, you tell me is what people call their need to connect the inanity of their existence with the majesty of the stars. “There is no connection but we want one. So we have made it up. Whenever we find ourselves boring, we fake ourselves some majesty like pixie dust.” I can never seem to argue you away but I know I disagree with you. My mind knows you can be dis proven but only by someone who can articulate my own arguments far better than I. I resent this charge of plagiarism because I fear there is an obvious truth in it. And while I am willing to be proven wrong, the idea of being 'obviously' wrong grates against my skin.

You tell me one doesn’t need any of these labels and that life can be spent merely on the peripheries of the events that live us. We can just be, you say. There is no cause for spirituality in that. There are times when I feel you are a nihilist who only associates with me because you find my fanciful nature amusing. Or perhaps you are lonely enough, to want to live vicariously through someone who feels as much of everything as I do, so you can keep numbing yourself and retain the upper hand. I find that I miss our conversations after they end and therefore I am trying to plagiarize the tail end of them in this exhibitionist venture. Naturally this is a misnomer, considering there was no conversation to begin with and you (who read this) are in all probability, not the person I am trying to speak to because I am not trying to speak to someone but for them. This is through no fault of your own but rather because of my colossal failings as a perennial verbal and emotional fidget.

“Peter: Oh, the cleverness of me.
Wendy: Of course, I did nothing...
Peter: You did a little.

Wendy: Oh, the cleverness of you.”

I suppose for this letter to be truly two-sided and honest, neither of which it is, I am obliged to ask after your health and general well being. I hope for your happiness. Moreover, I hope that you are one of those individuals who do not expect happiness in general and are therefore pleasantly surprised on the odd days where you find yourself contemplating the meaning of your existence in a good, strong cup of coffee and find your faith, sitting at the wheel, waiting for a traffic light to change in the middle of the rain. I hope that you are not the narcissist I am dreaming you up to be and I hope that I am not in love with you already. I hope you are a firm, solid, stable quadrant in this dizzy world and I hope you resist all of my melodramatic ministrations and not-so-subtle manipulations on this forum to render you otherwise. I hope you are able to forgive me my desperation.

"You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.” "

I pray, dear Stranger, that you will excuse my clumsy attempts at keeping this archaic romance alive, not with you per se, but with the idea of you. I am afraid that most of my ideas are the dying legacy of some long-lost antique cousin and that I should let them pass peacefully but I find that I am not quite prepared to lay you to rest yet.

You, who speak in sublimation's as I do.

You, who struggle with premises and prefaces alike,

You, who also, are forever incomplete.

And wish to remain so….

“There is a saying in the Neverland that,every time you breathe, a grown-up dies."

侘寂 Wabi-Sabi

2013-04-21T23:43:00.000-07:00

“It's too late to be grateful. It's too late to be hateful. It’s too late to be late again…Everywhere I looked, demons of the future [were] on the battlegrounds of one’s emotional plane.” – David Bowie

It felt like the kind of high you never come down from… until you hear yourself saying that out loud shattering the jelly-laced bubble boosting your ego to a spectrum you had hitherto only conceived of conceiving. You know it can’t last. And there you have it, a split-second in and you’ve sunk so low, you’re practically scraping the sea-bed for a warm shore. Bowie once said something along the lines of “it’s not the side-effects of the high, I’m thinking that it must be love”. Ironic how one learns to love themselves in the forgotten minutes of riding a high you don’t deserve on a substance you shouldn’t substantiate.

The Japanese hold sacred an 'aesthetic of the flawed', which is paramount in their understanding of the human mind. The Wabi-Sabi is seldom explained but is revered in intonation, of both the Samurai and the layman, as that perfection in imperfection…often alluded to as the beauty of the imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. The same lifeline also prevails in the Buddhist first noble truth of the Dukkha, Kanji that beleaguers perfectionists as being without spirit and clinging to tattered emotional and logical anchors to preserve a sense of self. I have a bit of a reputation for being quite guarded about my anchors and I have always coveted their presence in my life. I must confess I am a complete stranger to the Wabi-Sabi but I am finally beginning to appreciate its undertones.

These days, I appear hell bent on living without myself. I am making it a point to abandon all senses and tenses of the I, that I affiliate with myself, every time I walk out of my front door. It seems to be working… whatever that means. I no longer recognize my reflection. I suppose that was the point, to elevate my personality from its previous peripheries along the art of time-suckage to actually experiencing hedonism in its essence. It is said that in some cultures it is considered good luck to wear one’s socks inside out. I am testing this theory at elevated modules by wearing myself skin-side out for the first time. Open to experiences but closed to letting them truly penetrate lest I buy into the farce that I know I am operating in at present. It is an odd arithmetic, all even numbers and nuances removed. All self-effacing shadows held at bay. I know it couldn’t possibly last. My three-month sabbatical is nearly up and I am still unsure about whether I want to stay on in this city and look for work. I fear I will lose that girl I once recognized who saw life trickle through the sieve of precariously measured do’s and don’ts that she would allow herself. I am not that girl at present. This simultaneously scares and sustains me. A Wizard of Was skips hand in hand with me each time I find myself transgressing against one of my many moral monitors. They seem to be cross with me and I am luxuriating in that pool of bile.

At present I am riding the tail-end of my first high located alongside a thin, crooked line. I am not sure if this is my act of reticence or revolt. In all honesty, it seems to be an odd blend of both. I feel powerful - invincible even, for a few moments - and this is something I cannot comprehend. It lasts a split-second and the Id cultivated by this high descends as the guilt for experiencing self-satisfaction sets in. I seem to be programmed against self-confidence but I have faked it often enough to recognize the real thing when it slams into me.

I could get used to this, I feel.

I can’t get used to that feeling.

There is a perverse Modus Ponens operating around my guilt as I feel the words rush through my mind quicker than my hands can keep up with them. In propositional logic Modus Ponendo Ponens, is Latin for ‘the way that affirms by affirming’ – it is the implication elimination that rests on simple argument formations and the rule of inference. M implies A, and if M is asserted to be true, so therefore must A be. It is logic that dates back to antiquity but is in no way antiquated. If the me I am cultivating with foreign experiences and foreign substances abound (M) is actually proven to be a true variant of my personality, so must the me I have relegated on pause (A) be true of that setting. I am not sure if I am disproving my former self, or re-affirming her. I am slightly disoriented by the algorithms of this social experiment I am conducting on my own person. That said, I take some comfort in the fact that Modus Ponens is not a logical law, instead it is a construction and an anchor for defining and confining substitution. It is art as much as math. I feel I can play with the art of mathematics, as long as I keep my bearings enough to not let this logic run the other way around.

I am beginning to fear my ability with regards to contriving such an elaborate deception effectively. This is foreign terrain, and yet these tiny, flaky crooked lines elicit surprisingly potent emotions. I have never before witnessed so complete a submission by so many people at once, to something that never demanded it. Perhaps it is just a metaphor for many missing moments and I am trying to fill in my own blanks but I am brought to Sherlock Holmes’ musings about emoting and demoting certain vices in ‘The Sign of Four’.

“A seven-percent solution. Would you care to try it?” He asks.

“No, Indeed,” I answered brusquely. “My constitution has not got over the Afghan campaign yet. I cannot afford to throw any extra strain upon it.”

He smiled at my vehemence. “Perhaps you are right, Watson,” he said. “I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendentally stimulating and clarifying to the mind

that its secondary action is a matter of a small moment.”

I know, I shall move forward from this and not return to this juncture. If the point of this particular sabbatical-sojourn-social experiment is to try everything (addendum: almost everything) once, than I have been here. I shall not visit again. I hope.

Still, I cannot deny the clouded illusion of self-love I recall having experienced. I can see why this would bring people of a certain constant self-loathing back again. I can see why it would keep them here. I am tempted. Or perhaps I am merely addicted to the act of saying things and having them matter to someone.

Vini. Vidi. ~~Vici~~ Victus Fuero

I came. I saw.

...I am conquered.

Diamonds on the Soles of His Shoes

2013-04-21T06:15:00.000-07:00

“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

2013-03-10T12:47:00.002-07:00

“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

2013-03-06T01:16:00.001-08:00

“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

2012-11-22T06:32:00.001-08:00

“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

2012-11-22T04:27:00.004-08:00

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

2012-05-11T00:58:00.007-07:00

"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

2011-08-25T15:37:00.000-07:00

Statues made of matchsticks

Crumble into one another

My love winks, she does not bother

She knows too much to argue or to judge

-Love Minus Zero/ No Limit by Bob Dylan

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

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

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

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

Dry ice. The kind that never melts.

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

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

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

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

I live that.

It’s called patience.

And it blows.

But I was so much older then...

2011-05-23T15:40:00.000-07:00

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet - Bob Dylan

I suppose I’ve been postponing this particular tribute for nearly fifteen years. Having touched upon my love for Dylan in tidy snippets before I didn’t really know how to take it on in full. Over the years, I have most certainly opened and closed many a sentence with one of his lyrics but it’s hard to really express the debt I owe the man. Still, it’s his 70^th birthday today so I figure there was no better time to try.

There has been far too much written about Bob and far too many labels used to describe his genius, so I think I’ll skip all the fan mail. I first discovered Dylan when I was thirteen and that may or may not necessarily have been a good thing. By then I had raised myself on a steady diet of John Denver, Tina Turner, the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen, so one might say I was primed for Dylan. I’ve always known that I was an old soul and admittedly a purist when it comes to art, it didn’t help that discovering Dylan kind of cemented that.

Naturally, it was the words. Words matter to me - they matter a lot. How they sound, how they move and how they affect me is one of the few pleasures I will always be grateful for in this world. The first Dylan song I ever heard was ‘Desolation Row’ and for a thirteen-year-old, only child with a penchant towards escapism and conversing with a troupe of imaginary friends that song was like a guidebook. It was the ‘How to’ manual for the hopeless romantic and I remember being frozen while walking in my driveway listening to FM100 through my headphones.

Now Ophelia, she's 'neath the window

For her I feel so afraid

On her twenty-second birthday

She already is an old maid

Something about those words continues to stop me in my tracks, it’s oddly flattering in a perverse way. Then again, I suppose everyone finds something for themselves in Dylan’s words. A tween-time nuance that is so obtuse and ironic that it allows people to fool themselves into believing it was written for them. For me, it was the fact that he operated beneath the surface of the truth. That made his words subtle enough to be true and trite at the same time…it was breathtaking. When you’re listening to Dylan, you’re mocking the world and you’re doing it in code far superior to anything Hammurabi might have conceived. Above all, you’re not doing it alone.

I remember the first time I cried listening to a song was to ‘Shelter from the Storm’ because I understood the perverse impulse to be free to take care of someone and make them fall in love with you while doing it. The rather jingle-jangle feminist in me cringes at that a little today. But that doesn’t stop the song from still making me cry.

To her, death is quite romantic

She wears an iron vest

Her profession's her religion

Her sin is her lifelessness

Then of course came the obsession, where I was glad to finally find one artist I would never be able to pin down or comprehend which guaranteed it would last forever. That the romance would continue. That is perhaps the most beautiful thing about loving Bob Dylan, the fact that not understanding him and always wanting to remains a constant in one’s life.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m a bit of a musical purist so my personal Dylan avatar will always be the 60’s troubadour…not to say I still don’t loyally preen on everything he comes up with. But it was the awkward, shy, messy twerp with crooked teeth, strumming an acoustic guitar and yodelling ‘Hattie Carol’ outside a cotton plantation in the Mississippi that I fell in love with. I’ve never been comfortable with how success and money look on a person. In my experience money has a tendency to make people quite ugly, quite fast. Coupled with fame it’s just a play by play of every verse in ‘Disease of Conceit’. And even though Dylan wore it uncomfortably enough for me to still love him, I always liked him best in flannel.

What I am perhaps most grateful for to Dylan and his catalogue is the solace in knowing that being a hobo was a legitimate existence. That the nonconformity and misshapen-ness of ‘Quinn the Eskimo’ had a place and above all that the quiet of the mind in ‘Going to Apaculco’ could move mountains if it was enough for you that the landscape resided in your head. That was a relief like no other. Also, the man introduced me to pretty much everyone else that I live to listen to: Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Woodie, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, The Clancy Brothers, Mercedes Sosa, the beats, Muddy, Kristofferson, Haggard, Tom Waits, Hank Williams and with Theme Time Radio Hour, the journey and the moods continue.

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood

With his memories in a trunk

Passed this way an hour ago

With his friend, a jealous monk

In 2009, I finally got to see Bobby in concert. I was lucky too: to get the cheery, hoppity-hoopla Bob rather than sandpaper sulky Bob that often changes the guard in concert. For some reason though, I simply couldn’t pay any attention to the music. My three hours were spent stalking his every step and zooming in on every tip of the hat. I needed to constantly pinch myself that the man was real and not a phantom sweeping through the conscience of the O2 arena. By the end, I managed to creep up quite close to the stage, close enough to see his face and his expression. The only time I thought I spotted a wistful quarter smile on his face was during ‘Visions of Johanna’. Which is as it should be.

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world

Inside of a leather cup

But all his sexless patients

They're trying to blow it up

On some level my continuing adoration is a tad frightening at this juncture. I fell in love with the likes of Dylan, Cohen and Baez when I felt the need to escape from myself and my surroundings on a daily basis and the fact that this need continues to persist is proving dangerous. On some level, still being in love with Bob, as he turns 70 and as I approach 30 means that I may have just missed that sacred bus to Adultville. It also means that I will always persist on surreality to surpass reality and never give in to practical precision and penny counting. That is not the best move for a romantic who’s life is anything but rosy and who doesn’t have the skill, the resources or the talent to merit a never ending tour.

Given Dylan’s notorious media fright, people have stopped referring to him as a prophet, a messenger, a revolutionary or a troubadour. They appear to finally be toeing his line and refraining from labels. This development is perhaps a step forward for political correctness but frankly it hankers hollow. After all, the reason why no single word was appropriate to sum up Dylan’s genius was because he will always be better at manipulating words to describe what he sees in contrast to those who try to see him.

I have always maintained that Art is the only religion I am comfortable with keeping and artists tend to be my only prophets. If there is a conception of the sacred, the holy, the numinous, the soul or redemption I have always sought it in literature, in music, on canvas or behind the veil of the concrete and bitter folly of absolutes. That idea was born for me at the age of 15 when I first heard

‘A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall’.

So I suppose the reason I still insist on believing Dylan to be a prophet is the fact that he never claimed to be one. I know I would lose my faith if he ever did.