It’s another afternoon of blowing smoke rings out of the first floor window, watching men lay out prayer mats in the parking lot below.  He has probably left for the airport by now.  When the Friday khutba emphatically resounds through the premises he may already be comfortably seated in the lounge waiting for his flight.  What lives are these that seek respite with children in other countries rather than with significant others of many long years?  Marriage is a terrible thing, it can only be tolerated once, they say.   I smile because I know that most who say that are truly committed to their families but too consumed with bravado to admit as much and yet I wonder about this need to get away every so often.

So she asked me what it was that I really wanted and for a second I had nothing to say.  I thought for a minute but I still didn’t have anything to say.   So I thought a little longer and still nothing!   She wonders how I survived on autopilot for 2 years, with absolutely no goals in mind, no desires, nothing to wish for and I tell her I don’t know.  I really don’t.  What is unsettling for me is that I have yet to resurface from the limbo.  I know that the time is now but how does one do it?

Metaphor

The cybernetic oxymoron pumped with self-induced helium risks falling flat on its face.  Will it bleed painfully when it perishes?  Or is perish quite the word?   Like most products of the post-human age it has had a life without existence.  Can it then perish without being?  The endless nothingness that hovers between me and you, you and me, me and him, him and her, her and you — is it the same nothingness of emptiness?  It is a full nothingness, full of tender touches and gluttonous orgasms.  It is full, brimming with the fullness of your person, my person, his person, her person.  It is so very full of the impersonalities of our persons.  It is a labrynthine negation that looks for an affirmation of the self through the hyperself, knowing all the while that the hyperself is a construct reconstructed to infinity.  Their numbers increase through multiplication and division, growing by the droves becoming many of each and one of many and they seek comfort in togetherness, happily unremembering the nothingness of the space in between. 

Foofy’s experiment

watching: one hundred thousand little legs
scale the wall of the jam jar
squirming onto the dried up twig
and leaves so many
and peas so many
laid by a little hand of nine odd years
to make a caterpillar’s forest.

when will they ball themselves up
into cocoons of waiting?
sighs the fog of breath on the glass between them,
longing to grow wings of her very own.

i watch her watching and wonder
if we too, are caterpillars in a jam jar
or are we, perhaps,
little girls
being watched watching
and longing to grow wings?

Letting go

Praying for someone else to be forgiven can actually help in forgiving the person oneself. And of course, forgiving helps forgetting.  I wish I could spend more time with sufis.  They’re the only people who seem to have it right.

People mourned and people missed

It was an Eid bereft of many: Chacha, Syeda Aunty, Zainab Aunty, saamney wali Aunty.  May Allah forgive them their sins and help us all find our way to salvation.

We visited the aggrieved families in the neighbourhood and it struck me that mourning is a very solitary experience.  We miss seeing Zainab Aunty in her balcony in the morning but none of us mourned her absence in the way her daughters did this Eid.   Mourning comes from a deep sense of loss that can seldom be shared with empathizing visitors.

In contrast, Chacha left noone behind to mourn his absence, or perhaps not in our house.  We missed being begrudgingly called from Bhaijan’s at 4pm because he had arrived but none of us felt terribly sad over his not being around.  Syeda Aunty, too left no children but we almost felt a sense of duty to actively remember such a wonderful woman who had braved such a difficult life and died so very self-reliantly.  She was Ammi’s friend and not related to us at all and yet I felt a greater grief sitting by her bier than I did by Chacha’s.  Perhaps my grief over her loss is more of a grief for my mother who is left friendless, without a confidante at this age.  Perhaps my love for her is but an extention of my love for my mother.

I think of Umair and I wonder if I were to lose a parent, would I be quite as endlessly disoriented as he seems to be without his father?  It is strange how when K and I talk about Ammi and Daddy dying, we think of more of the logistic issues we would be confronted with rather than the unimaginable loss Umair seems to feel.  It makes me wonder if we have turned into hard, callous women.

And despite the sadness, there was a family reunion of unthikable proportions.  All of Bhaijan’s sons were together and as much as we love them as brothers, we were happier for them being together than for them beign with us.  Reunions come laden with so much nostalgia and so much wanting to relive old times that the present which has moved on, can be disconcerting.  It has taken much effort to put all that behind and enjoy what we have for its own sake because in spite of all that has broken away since their mother’s death, we love them dearly and at the end of the day, that’s really all that matters.  The other two of the four of us would have completed the family and they were missed, again more by Ammi than by us, who wanted to make the most of what was available at hand.

It’s paradoxical to miss what you know never existed and yet, even without the yearning, there is undeniable sorrow.  There, Ali Akbar Bhai, I admitted it.  I did and do miss him.  I may hate him and know him to be a loathsome, despicable asshole and may not want anything to do with him but I do miss him.

Rambling…

…cures writer’s block, or so they say.  The pressure to write coherently in neatly strung sentences seems futile and burdensome because no matter how articulately something is phrased, at some point words either lose meaning or change meaning altogether.

Jade just tumbled off my lap.  Who is Jade?  Is she an extension of Foofy or is she a wishful projection of the fantasy of having a baby sister?  Who is Jade to me and how much of that is affected by what she is to Foofy?  Jade’s her one doll that I really like.  Perhaps because she is an 8-yr-old doll unlike teens-plus Barbies and 20-something Pollys that  I think Jade being left on my lap is like Foofy sprawling her kitten limbs over me and nuzzling on my arm.

Foofy looked like a little Sikh boy yesterday with the cut off strip of my track pants pulled over her head, close around her ears.  I enjoy the genderlessness of her pre-adolescence: her sense of humour perpetually revolves around butts and farts and while she loves bangles and mehndi, she’s quick to chase after the boys who dare try to beat up on her.  Yep, that’s my girl growing into a permutation of her fireball aunt.

Am I really a lioness?  How can I proclaim regality when half the time I’m too lazy to defend my turf?  I let it go for fear of the ugliness of sustained confrontation.  The trouble is confrontation is never perceived as a channel for conflict resolution.  Instead it ends up becoming the beginning of an end.

It’s too cold to go to class today but K will beat the living shit out of me if I don’t.  I should go too because that class affirms the productivity of this break from life.  It means taking a shower and ironing clothes though.  I miss my bathroom in the US, particularly my tub.  I miss my hour long baths with lemonade on the side and body shop aromatherapy salts.

I’m glad I’m in touch with Sameer again.  He makes me happy and he’s been very good this time around.  He’s one person who likes me for who I am and that’s comforting because he’s so old that I know it’s not infatuational liking, it’s genuine appreciation.   I’ve learnt a lot from him over the years and he’s one person I hold dear despite many things.  I think it’s because he provides a link between undergrad, grad school, and the present.  The content of our communication almost verges on small talk sometimes but the triviality of it is almost like the kind I have with my cousins: not contrived, just the casualness of knowing that there really isn’t anything new or exciting to report.  It’s funny though how some of relationships that are dearest to you can never be expressed to the next person because it would most definitely be construed as something else and change the very thing that you like about them.  I think though that the persistence of some relationships over the years ensures that people know that they are appreciated and cared for by another without it being expressed concretely.  Like I can never go and tell Oshi Bhai that I love him like I tell my brother, but I can go kiss his bald head and he knows I do.  I’m lucky to be surrounded by so much love.  Indeed it’s ungrateful of me to look for more of this or that.

Decompressing

I realized yesterday how burdensome it had been to have bottled all that for the last few months. The end had been clear much before yesterday but the articulation of it seems to have liberated me from the uncertainty that kept binding me to an illusory past. I’m trying to fill the emptiness that surrounds me. The effort brings on inexplicable anxiety but accomplishing every little feat is affirming. I’m yet to go into full battle-mode to make my way through this but I’m beginning to accept that this paralyzed state over a horrible mistake is graver than the mistake itself. I have to return to life. I may not be able to erase memories but I can bury them deep under so many new ones that they are unable to raise their impeding tentacles to the surface of my consciousness. I’m not brooding anymore but I am still frozen, waiting to thaw out.

 

 

Epilogue:

Someone held my hand so tightly once that they left their lines imprinted on mine. Our lines remained enmeshed till the end of the drive, then faded as we returned to our realities.

November

Drawn out to maximum tensile strength in a sound proof chamber, the body hovers in timeless vaccuum. The automaton veneer struggles to keep up with the expectations of the mundane routine. Within the shell, the core unawakened by anti-depressants responds only, and that too silently, to the missed calls on the cell phone and text messages rare. Beeps and uncommunicative silence alternate like soutures, pricking and piercing the sentient surface to pull broken skin back together. Between cognition and impulse, long conversations surpass. The inertia prolongs and persists, obediently, quietly and yet restlessly. Prodded by memory: satiate then bereft, the intertwining of faith and unbridled lack thereof, the manacles of circumstance, defenseless vulnerability, soaring so high and then forsaken unwillingly but compliantly in a bottle marked, “obsession”. Can time be forgiven for eight months of resistance, of illusion, of God and godlessness?

October

I was trying to remember and write every detail of how it all happened and then it occurred to me, does it matter how it happened?  Doesn’t the only thing that really matter is the fact that it did happen.  Truth be told, it is too painful to relive all the events that culminated in what happened on October 7th and whereas I might be able to distance myself enough from it that I can write it all down as poignantly as I experienced it.  For now, it is only important to remember that it wasn’t all a dream, that it did happen.  The bare facts of the story are:

I went to the beach all set to drown myself.  I overdozed on 4 strips of Panadol to keep me from being afraid of the water. It was a very hot day and when a few hours later the medicine started kicking in I collapsed on the stile.  In my semi-consciousness I sensed fishermen gathering around me and was afraid of getting raped.  I had wanted to die painlessly and being raped was nowhere in that muted seemingly accidental death I had imagined.  At that point I called my sister.

I did not want to desecrate my parents’ house with something so ugly, which is why I wasn’t at home od-ing in the first place.  I asked her to take me to the hospital.  She did, knowing all the while, without my telling her what had happened.

I went into the ER and had an NG tube inserted in my nose which pumped charcoal into my stomach for the next 4-6 hours.  I can’t remember how many times I threw up in the SICU.

I have very little recollection of the next 48 hours except little flashes:  IVs being inserted into my arms and blood being drawn every so often; periods of unconsciousness interrupted by shortness of breath – I was later told that I was consistently slipping into a state of apnea, that I was doing about one and half minute of no oxygen to the brain where at 3 minutes of no oxygen, you become vegetable;  the woman next to me being resuscitated and my complete oblivion to it; the antidote burning my arm as it coursed through my veins, I still have streaks on my arm plotting its journey from the IV up my arm.

My liver was badly damaged.  I was close enough to dying that my sister and brother flew in from the US.

4 days in the SICU, and 2 days in the ward.  Then I was home.  Back to the same house I had left the Sunday before, never to return to again.  I am alive.  I have walked to very edge of life and back.  I don’t know how I feel about it.