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?

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?

This one’s for U

It so happens that when I’m least pulled together, I run into U.  Because this is either a textual encounter via our cell phones or a virtual one, he can not sense the sadness or agitation on my end and often goes off in his usual chirpiness.  It does surprise me though that despite all these years, he still can not pick from the tenor of my replies that I’m out of sorts.   It usually takes my telling him in explicit words that I’m upset, confessing which in any case takes a lot out of me, for him to be receptive to the fact that something’s amiss.  Once he knows that though, he always wants to know what the matter is.  He has gradually learnt however to let me be sometimes.  For a good long while though, until I learnt to recognize that he is not so in sync with my insides to know my distress and to learn to accept my vulnerability to him by asking for some space, most of our bad arguments ensued in such moments.  It was largely my inability to cope with my own grief or stress and to admit my lack of composure to him that made me go on the aggressive.

After this realization there were times when I allowed myself that window of vulnerability with him and U, being wired the way he is, tried to logically reason me out of my distress which sometimes came across as him trivializing my situation or tried to distract me with other things.  All the while I have known that he was sincere in wanting to help and yet neither of the two approaches worked for me.  I ended up more irritable or sadder by the end of the conversation.  I grew to understand that U could not comfort me when I was losing it.  I accept this inadequacy in our “relationship” because he is a friend and to expect beyond his capacity is unfair in the platonic dimension.  I deal with it by way of avoiding him when I’m out of it so I do not damage my ties with him.

A couple of days ago my plans of avoidance weren’t quite so successful because when I found my way to what I thought was the quietest, loneliest corner, guess who was already there?  U.  I demanded some space but I don’t think that kind of straightforwardness is very palatable for U.  I think he construes it as a rejection of his sincerity for which he is off sulking somewhere in his closet.  I’m sorry that it is the case because I can’t help the fact that when I’m emotionally ravaged, I either need to be with someone who understands the particular wiring of my brain or be entirely alone to wait it out till the phase passes.  It’s not the kind of wiring that I can explain either.  I don’t like hurting him but I can’t help being me.  I hope he’ll come around to figuring that out and accepting that between the two of us, we are certainly more than fair weather friends but on dark, cloudy days, we are more likely to and better off spending time apart.

Confessions of brit_bastards_need_a_lyf

I was 23 and falling out of love after 2 years of waiting for someone.  The object of affection had been a British Pakistani and hence the nick: brit_bastards_need_a_lyf.  For the next two years Brit, as she became known in Yahoo chat rooms, made a lot of friends who she never saw and never met but who were a lot of fun and very helpful at times. In another two years that phase too reached its expected end.  Today, yet another 3 years down, I logged on to the Msngr and lo and behold, Bmw was online!

Bmw was one of Brit’s brood of 17-18 year old children.  He’s a big guy now, married with a four month old and has done his Brit mama proud. Funny, he confessed he had a crush on me once. lol.

Irshs, the most prized child, had got married during those first two years of knowing him.  He was the sweetest kid I’ve ever known.  He was the only one who had my phone no. and half our conversations were either venting his frustration over not being able to get thru to some girl or other or him trying to convince me to fly with him to Washington to see ashiq and propose marriage to him.

Then there was Sid and he was another little darling.  Unlike the other two who were in the US, sid was in some rural area of punjab.  He had a twin sister and his father was a religious man.  Sid was always super respectful even in his humour.

And Sheri!  How could I forget Sheri, who had a crush on Brit and got quite obsessive about it.  He was in Lahore at the time but ultimately ended up in the UK to study I think.

Shenni, the youngest of the gang, and a bit of a pain at 15.  Ashiq and Brit bailed shonu out of many an unholy brawl with some punjabi moron or other belting out vituperative.

Of course the father of the brood was the promiscuous ashiq himself.  Long conversations, for hours and hours on end, cheap Indian music and online snooker…ashiq was Burhan all over again — a seasoned player who let you think you were his best friend but was always really a lone operator.   Brit was quite taken up with ashiq for a while, the thought of it still makes me smile.  Good looking guy and total harami but there was something quite genuine in his friendship and he did look out for Brit on days when Brit was utterly morose. He’s probably married with two kids of his own by now.

There’s no way of writing about these people with literary finesse.  In fact, because they existed in a dimension of phonetic truncations, no upper case and devious smileys, it’s hard to express the unexpected sincerity of these virtual connections in proper english.  I almost feel the need to go into the chat dialectic to convey who they were in their complete three-dimensional humanness.

Brit no longer exists.  She became Foxy and then Foxy became detached from Msngr.  Perhaps they too have evolved into alter egos and ultimately disconnected but hugs to each of them who made the years 2004-2006 liveable in that tiny yellow room with no airconditioning and no television, and sometimes a week on end of grilled cheese sandwiches.

Hmm..

I never thought I’d hear myself saying this but I don’t want to work anymore.  I’m tired of working.  I don’t know how people pull through the same job for years on end.   I on the other hand have been fortunate enough to keep switching projects on a six monthly basis and yet I’m thoroughly disenchanted with the prospect of working to sustain myself.  The trouble is I’m also unhappy when I’m mooching off siblings.  Ijust don’t see why one can’t just get money without doing anything.  After all Allah miyan has promised everyone their share of food, if only He could have added clothing and shelter to it as well.  The other issue is He did promise food but He didn’t mention anything about the kind of food.  So in essence if grams and bread suffices one for the rest of one’s life, great! but if in case one craves Dominoes one fine day, no dice.  Life is complicated.  Besides with all of these travails, if perchance one is not doing Allah’s due, then too there’s no promise of any of this mess letting up in the Afterlife.  I think Allah miyan expects way too much of His people.

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.

And again..

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Retracing memory semantically requires a distance from the immediacy of events passed — their passing turns them into memories while retracing them is to experience the same events without the psychosocial framework that accompanied it. This is to acknowledge that retracing brings a new set of feelings which may not be skewed along the same axes as their precedents but may still be charged and dislocating in and of themselves.

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.

Reminiscence

I just read the MS Word version of my old blog which I wrote all through my last year in the US.  I miss the abilities of thinking intelligently and writing inventively.  I had made myself believe that skills of critical thought and reason when acquired could not erase themselves from one’s pallette.  I was wrong.  It is indeed possible to hold on to those skills provided they get an environment where they find room to flex their feelers.  I was wrong also to think that I could create for myself such an environment if I didn’t find it.  Many of us who returned have been smothered and stifled into silence long enough to have forgotten how to get on the way we used to, the way we enjoyed doing things, many of us have forgotten to be ourselves.

I can barely talk articulately any more and I have no more stories to write.  I am tired of pretending everything is fine and I am tired of cribbing and yet there’s no reconciliation to the status quo.  The status quo may be described as: “ungainfully” employed, social outcast, stagnant.  In less literary terms, a loser.  Loser by the definition of those around me because they have no idea of the fact that I’m running on low-oxygen and because they have no clue of the limited oxygen supply to their own brains!   Loser by the definition of those who stayed abroad because in all American-positivity, if that is not working for you, why don’t you just come back?  Now who is to explain why I can’t come back!

I wish I could just figure out how to deal with this rut.  The residues of American positivity in me say, there are solutions which I have not yet discovered and yet, I can’t seem to find them.  Resignation is too far from my leonine spirit for me to suck all this up and yet .. and yet…