Disenchanted

Blearily fumbling back and forth and yet … Slumber beckons and the will impales itself on the threshold of mismatched frequencies.  Cycle interrupted.  Again and again and again.  Leave.  Be gone!

Maniacal laughter resounds in the crevices of brains minced neath the butcher’s knife.  Who are you?  State your business!   Take heart, your Diaphanous Frailty!  There’s much time yet, I promise.  Hush!  Hush now for she’s on her way with tresses long, splayed over purple nipples.

A spark in the dim fuzziness, the sear of a scarlet blade and rivers course, unbridled.  Over?  Already?

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.

How much can 3 seconds really betray?

Flicker of recognition.

Amusement.

Confirmation… as her eyes hastily dart away.

An inward smile, a word to the woman standing familiarly next to him, and taking the little girl from her arms, he looks towards the crowd yet again to see if she will steal yet another furtive glance at him.

She does. Silly girl.

He’s grown a moustache and yes, that’s his wife standing with him in the green outfit and of course that’s their little girl. She had spotted him long before she had caught his eye. Many infatuations had piqued and faded since she was that shy, little girl of 11 and yet, there was something particularly hurtful about encountering him in this way and being reduced to vulnerability in seconds. She was at his sister’s wedding, and was the only one of her friends to not be married.

Given the choice now, would she marry him? Probably not. She couldn’t have found in him the measures of pleasurable requitement that had sufficed her elsewhere. It only stung that in that one instant, of three brief seconds, she was still not spoken for while he had a wife and a child. And she stood, nose pressed on to the window of his picture-perfect life.

Chacha

I am lying in the bed where they came to visit him. The pate of my shoulder blades and swell of my bottom rest on the very impressions his body left in the wrinkled sheet. Death was in this house, this room and this very bed. The body was bathed in this room and the bier left that very door I see before me.

It is too impersonal to write a eulogy for someone who has lived under one’s own skin for a month and a half and yet if it were someone I loved dearly, emotion would have defied articulation altogether.  I did not love him but I was related to him not just by blood but by the human connection I shared with his predicament – that of a sick man, who was too afraid to be alone and suffocated when he was with people who wished to alleviate his fear. I write this because I feel it necessary to honour his life and his absence in some way.

Sundays were his days with us. They had to be meat days because he was coming for lunch. I always thought that Ammi’s insistence on meat was part of the rituals of serving a man in this culture. I understand now that it was borne out the cognizance of his adversity. Sometime around noon or latest by 1:15pm, the doorbell would ring and in he’d come bearing a bag full of chips and candy for Foofy. It was his way of acknowledging Ammi’s meat days, perhaps. Foofy and I seldom sat with him and usually inched to our room after lunch but Ammi and KK, sensitive and considerate women as they are, sat with him for a couple of hours and prodded him into conversations he’d saved up for the whole week.

These past two months we all tried mending our fences but he wanted so badly to not be with us. It was his turn to rub in our faces that he was closer to taya’s family than to ours and that he had hated our parents for too long to be able to appreciate their efforts for him. I don’t remember the early years of the marriage but I have always seen my parents extending themselves beyond their means for that family and always being disregarded or dragged into webs upon webs of politics.

Allah forgave him all that when He summoned him that Friday and eased his final moments so quickly. Allah was kind to him…that gives me hope that our follies will too be waived with the same magnanimity as products of an overwhelming time.

I do not pray for him anymore. I believe he rests in peace.

In fear and hope

Fingers pressed on the pulse of the soil, inhaling its strength from the connection forged between generations of dead and living souls, lies s(he) face down. The fevered body assailed by zips and zooms of synaptic activity, breathes its pallor into it, desperately seeking shelter within the source that bore its seed.

La il’a ha illAllah -There is no god except Allah …sighs the liver, declaring its faith to the tongue which devours the flesh of the brother.

The forefinger rises to state its testimony against the masturbating neighbour.

Hack!

Justice has prevailed. Neither the perpetrator nor the witness are left standing. One acted, the other spread the word, and hearing him the rest imagined its deliciousness more than the reports proclaimed. They indulged.

Look! There go the monkeys, resplendent in their unknowing bestiality.

La il’a ha illAllah – There is no god except Allah…trembles the down that laces the midriff. The chin upturned that spurned the mendicant bows low this instant. Perhaps the horn will blow now, this very instant!

Afraid yet shameless, the rosary turns, mouthing ambition and gluttony.

The floating kerchief whisks past the head, resting nought till it completes its trajectory to the ground.Propelled by seconds and minutes and days, it pleads “Mercy!”

But once had its soul whispered in its infantile crib, “La il’a ha illAllah – There is no god except Allah”.

For that night of unhindered remembrance and untainted humanness, there came unbounded clemency.

Aspiring for the devotion of that one remembrance, cries the soil to the face pressed in to its bosom,

“La il’a ha illAllah – There is no god except Allah.”

“Group therapy?”

she asked.

“Not formally but so many of us have gone through it that a volley of emails serves the same purpose, I think”

“Really?”

“Yeah, you remember my German friend, who came over for Thanksgiving?”

“Yes”

“Well hers was precipitated by her identity crisis.  When she discovered herself as a man in a woman’s body, the social  unacceptability put a constant pressure on her that she could not handle.  To top that, none of women she liked reciprocated her affections so she became an outcast in all facets of her life.”

“That’s sad.”

“Yeah.  And then one of my very dear American friends was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and just went through a series of hospitalizations because of self-harm incidents spurred by fear of abandonment and perpetual paranoia.”

“Wow. And then there’s me of course, your Japanese friend, who has battled with depression as long as you have and been on death row at least thrice.”

Smiles. “Well there’s a couple of Pakistanies too, who I went to art school with.  Both bipolar and one on medication for life now.”

“This is turning into an international club of people with mental illnesses.”

Laughs.  “Yes, so it seems but you know, the odd thing is I did not know of each of their afflictions until I had my last episode.  You somehow sixth-sensed it.  The American girl just randomly shared her own life.  The friend from art school, I dreamt of and wrote to, and it turned out the dream was true.  The German I knew from long before, but she was always the most tenacious of us to not have hurt herself ever, despite her inner turmoils and baseline depression.  It is almost as if, because noone in my geography could relate to my predicament, a support network of similar experiences just grew out of cyber space all around me.”

“What about your psychiatrist?”

“He prescribes medication which I know I need and am doing well on, but doesn’t offer psychotherapy or even cognitive behaviour therapy.  He doesn’t help me scramble back to life by reasoning with myself, he focuses on neutralizing the chemical imbalance in my brain that caused the episode, but he doesn’t not address the emotional ramifications of having gone through the episode and having lost a lot of myself on the way.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. My psychiatrist lets me talk about a lot of things but we never work around them either.  I miss my therapist in the US too.”

“Plus there is the taboo factor: here attempting suicide is a legal crime because it’s a sin against God.   Mental illness in particular is only understood as insanity not as treatable diseases with specific medical basis.”

“It’s different in Japan.  It’s still associated with the traditional hara kiri in that it is a death of honour; but yes, mental illness as a whole is not very well-received because of the stoicism that is ingrained in the Japanese psyche.

Anyway, I best be off now.  Take care and keep writing.  Love you.”

“Love you too sweetie. Bye.”

Control freak

I’m back on contraception and ironically it makes me feel empowered. For a sexually inactive woman the idea of preventing pregnancy as an affirmation of control over the body and self holds no currency. However, it regulates my period and clears up acne. By adding more estrogen to my system, it reduces my mood swings considerably and functionality is restored to a more predictable pattern. It is also comforting to think that because my ovaries’ performance is substantially reduced, I’m producing (and wasting) fewer eggs every month. What that means is that I am likely to be able to bear children beyond the average healthy production span of the ovaries. Hitting 30 in eight months, and still single with no chances of sex in sight, all these things need to be weighed out carefully.

Since so many posts have been consistently falling in the meandering and geometry category lately, my struggle for control must be evident. I reflect on my airborne moments and hope to never be buoyant to the point of such madness and transgression again. Being airborne requires relinquishing all control and letting yourself drift with its headiness. As long as the agency of control remains, happiness is possible but not unfettered buoyancy. I felt so complete those days that I was walking on air. I had something which I had patiently and conscientiously denied myself even in all my years of living by myself without any checks. I allowed myself to be led beyond permissible boundaries and I wasn’t ridden with guilt. So overcome was I with the lightness of my being that when the cliche situation came full circle the triteness of it all was exceptionally unbearable. Having been bred on the sole principle of integrity, the loss of face and loss of self was most damaging.

Still reeling from the aftermath, I read:

“Sin has this horrible ability to chase one throughout life.” – Khaled M. Abou el Fadl.

Does el Fadl mean that having sinned once, one is likely to fall into again and again? Or does he mean that it’s repercussions follow a person throughout her/his life.  I was intimate with a man and it was as much out of my love for him as it was out of a desire to let go of all reason and logic, to soar above everything imaginable. I did not sleep with him. For a woman who had only kissed once even until she was 28, morality is sacred in each of its facets. Intercourse then is only the nth stage of intimacy. Preclusion of just that can not uphold the principle in its purity.  I have transcribed the past few months onto my slate and even if Allah forgives them, which I believe he has by bringing me back, they can never be disowned. If asked about my past again, how will I hold my head up high in a besmeared body?

To be seaweed would be infinitely more liberating than being a bird. Birds, like people, have places to go and the will to get to those places. Seaweed is a wanderer and content being so, because its life does not depend on its going somewhere.

F was right

February 23rd, 2007

F always said: Home is where you live.

I always countered: Home is where your family is.

F was right. The individualist self-seeker is honest to himself and everyone else when he looks only for his own self-interest. The collective selflessness fed to us is a farce at best.

Anonymity

January 21st, 2007

If all characters were mentioned in the third person pronoun, including the author, then the virtue of cyberspace would be preserved – absolute secrecy and inconsequential interaction. The dividers between fact and fiction, fiction and fantasy, narration and commentary would all collapse. She mulls over the idea and settles on this course of action.