Eastern Vagabond

Essays on travel, cities, memory, and the unnoticed textures of the world.

Category: Musings

  • Metaphor

    Metaphor

    I search the mundane, looking for metaphors for life. Partly because life, in all its mind-numbing variety, is otherwise too complex to get a handle on. Partly because those who get to the end of it and see it for itself are no longer interested in coining a metaphor because it has no utility for them. To me and John Green and all those who have a life ahead of them, however, metaphors are important.

    We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.

    John Green

    A metaphor, I think, is like a pretty-faced road-hostess employed by the Daewoo bus service in the early aughts for the first time in Pakistan in an attempt to offer the luxury of female companionship to the middle class man who could not afford to travel by air. The poor girl had the difficult job of serving meals from a two-feet wide bus-aisle (which became narrower with the protruding shoulders of wildly entertained men who had never before enjoyed such intimacy with a presentable woman) while scrambling for balance on a bumpy ride sponsored by the typically pot-holed roads of Pakistan. Too often, she would spill a drink on an angry passenger or fall herself in the lap of an elated one. Just like that, a metaphor has the capacity to upset or delight; and it never serves the meals alright but that’s not the point anyway.

    In the early aughts, the Daewoo bus service climbed to the very top in Pakistan by offering the luxury of female companionship to a conservative, middle class gentry.

    BTW did i just coin a metaphor for the metaphor?

    In the past, I have compared life to the experience of reading an old book for the second time. This metaphor is about the cluelessness of us all in the face of life’s exoticity and the value of experience. I also found rusting cars by the roadside dumps too metaphorical for life’s evanescence. Today, I am here, because I think I have found yet another metaphor. While going through my archives on Google Photos, I came across this video I shot of Bahawalpur Station as the train slowly chugged out of it.

    The vaults and arches accentuated by sensible lighting revive the dated glory of Mughal architecture in a magical summer Bahawalpur night. As the train whistles out of the station, it almost looks like a scene from Alif Laila. But it’s neither for the beauty of the railway station nor for the spell of the Cholistani summer night that I am recalling that moment rather for the accuracy of the metaphor that this fleeting glimpse can offer for life.

    Life is continuously drifting away, or maybe, it has always been there and it’s just us that are chugged away. Nevertheless, life’s heart stopping beauty is but there for a fleeting moment; never to be possessed but just to be beheld and wondered at. Its mysterious, colorful characters would remain shrouded in mystery and draped in colors and you would never be able to tell you know any of them completely even if they happen to be someone you’ve grown up or spent your life with. There would never be enough time to seek the hidden treasures the majestic palace across the platform seems to offer, unless you want to risk letting the train leave without you.

    The best way to live, if you go by this metaphor, is to look out the window, inhale the warm air laden with moisture and the sweet aroma of traditional South Punjabi food, wonder at the walking stories and be in perpetual awe. May be ask yourself if you wish to disembark and be lost among the Alif Lailvi characters for a while since there will always be the next train for you to catch.

  • Inconsequential

    Inconsequential

    There’s nothing more contemplative than the quiet weekend mornings of my grandmother’s home where the solemn silence is only broken by the occasional distant bark of a stray dog or the delightful chirps of house sparrows inhabiting the twenty-year old Evershine tree in her front yard. It’s been over an hour since the fast has closed, everyone except Nani Ami and I has gone back to sleep off the weekend morn, and the sun has risen from somewhere you cannot tell since there are several-storeys-tall residential complexes all around our small, independent house, perhaps the only one left in the rapidly commercializing neighborhood now.

    Nani Ami’s iconic grille gate and Evershine tree in one frame

    I lean on one of the many wooden takht beds placed artfully around her house and think that there are really just two ways of getting older in life; allowing the currents of time to deepen your convictions and mold you into a person with a very specific identity or letting experience wash over the rocky cliffs of Belief, defacing the defining features to turn you into an observer of events having no desire to participate in making things happen and only a vague desire to watch them take place. With every passing year, I’m drifting towards the latter way and I’ve come so far that, traditionally right or wrong, it all appears the same to me.

    As someone with historically religious inclinations, my reaction to Joyland, a Pakistani movie hailed in the West and banned in Pakistan for exploring the taboo of transgender love, even shocked me too. In the aftermath of the movie release, I remember failing to take a side in the debate that ensued over the ‘morality’ of the movie’s content in particular and the legitimacy of LGBTQ movement in general. I watched in fascination as friends and family attacked it vociferously for promoting vulgarity, and wondered if they had derived all that passion from their faith, upbringing, education or experience. For me, it was a story that was artfully narrated; and stories are simply above right and wrong. For most people though, this comment of mine was merely an escape from a conversation that demanded one to pick a side, and that I lacked original opinions on complex subject matters.

    Increasingly, I have come to believe this to be true. In order to have an opinion on something, you have to have a compass which, like all functional compasses, should tell you one direction instead of several. I had that compass once but it was so self-righteous and intolerant (also, it broke a precious heart) that somewhere along the way, I think I just chucked it. There’s a cost to it though: if you’re too sympathetic of a kaleidoscope of opinions to pick one and eliminate the rest, you’re simply just inconsequential. As mortals, shouldn’t we all afraid to be precisely that, inconsequential?

    Am I?

  • On Lost People

    On Lost People

    Some people just vanish into thin air after you’ve come to fancy them. Others don’t exactly vanish but they let something die / break / crystallize in them which makes them unrecognizable. Either way, you lose someone you cared about, a part of yourself and a possibility of being someone different through them.

    There was this one guy from university hostel who used to be up early morning jogging and sparring (Muhammad Ali style) along the Bolan Rd / Indus Loop just when I stretched before my usual 5-miler at the Iqbal Square. On my tempo runs, I would pass him by, grunting out a salam while he carried on boxing with an imaginary rival. Later, our interests converged on a religio-political philosophy thanks to an active proselytizing circle on campus. He was different in some really fundamental way that I can vaguely recall now since it’s been a decade I have seen or talked to him. One thing that I do remember is him being very passionate about Robert Pirsig’s book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which struck me as quite an odd thing, and hence, charming. A guy training as an electrical engineer has to be quite extraordinary to find passion in a philosophy book. And to vanish so completely in this age as to not leave a trail.

    Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance quickly became my favorite book too. I am onto reading it for the fourth time as of March 2026.

    I have known other remarkable people who have stuck around only to change so much that they might as well be total strangers. They are old colleagues, fellow bloggers, class fellows, and sometimes, even family. At the risk of appearing needy and clingy, I think you should keep prodding them until you get your person back out of them. Your attempt to connect / reconnect can be spurned or worse, ignored hurting some self-esteem (or whatever it is they call it these days which keeps people from connecting with other people). Doesn’t the myth that most valuable treasures are guarded by most poisonous snakes teach some valuable lesson? One must ask oneself what’s more important in the long run; false satisfaction of a misplaced ego or a cherished life-long connection. That’s coming from an introvert btw if that adds any more weight to it.

  • Androidless

    It’s been five months since I have dumped my android phone. It just now occurred to me that my unplugging, though inadvertent, is an odd thing in a world embracing increasing connectedness and immersive technologies. Suspecting that this could be an important milestone of my life, I reflect here on how this change came about and has played out so far.

    It started when my phone screen died and unlike the last time, would not revive by tinkering the LCD flex cable. I was told that I’d have to have my screen replaced and should not expect to find a cheap or an original one. The idea of a pricy, unoriginal screen for my phone put me off so much that I postponed the job altogether, and decided to use my Nokia set for all practical purposes until I found a way out. Leaving the mobile repair shop without my phone fixed felt like I was botching my entire life over a silly Quality concern (yes, Pirsig’s voice from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has been a loudspeaker in my head over these past couple of months – more on that later). But like a lot of my life’s decisions that I have taken against my better judgment and that have taken me places, I decided to venture into the great dreaded unknown of the android-less existence anyway.

    Since my workplace applications run on internal servers and networks, it didn’t hurt professionally to not have a handheld device 100% of the time. With no professional obligations at stake, I realized my life was not that botched as I had thought after all and the practical purposes the Nokia set was to suffice were not coming out of Pandora’s Box either. Soon the day’s routines were being met through good ol’ messages and calls. What followed from there was a gradual, convenient resettling into old, familiar ways. Considering that I had bought my first android phone in 2015 which I was also robbed splendidly of the very first day, I didn’t have decades of addiction to feel substantial withdrawal symptoms. Though I now felt ’emptiness’ at times, it only led me to think more independently; something that I now realize I had hardly been doing anything of lately in the notification- and ad-driven frenzy that even a tech-conservative like me was not totally immune to. At the risk of sounding like a tech-cursing twentieth-century ancestral spirit, let me just say here that life is not a dopamine-fueled dragon ride all the time and one must learn that at some point in one’s life.

    Have I become a tech-hater now? Absolutely not. I think that tech has helped us understand and solve complex problems, reduce social disparities and elevate lifestyles in general, and to discard it altogether because of its latent dangers would be unfair, at best. Instead, a more sound approach would be to approach technology in a selective way. You pick all that’s good and leave out all that’s not. For that, you need to analyse what works for you and hence, is good for you and what doesn’t, and hence, is bad. For me, immersiveness is the true villain in the tech-story. As long as we are at the wheel, technology can be a pretty exciting and empowering friend to have. The whole problem of tech is its control issues because it doesn’t let you be at the wheel for long. Soon a notification pops up here and an ad there, and poooof, you’re an Alice in Wonderland. Once you remove mobile phone from the context, you take away half the tech’s immersiveness, making it an acceptable bargain.

    What difference has going off-the-grid made for me? I think this is an important question and I am still crafting a reply to it. Without a phone, I have loads of time on my hands that I’m still figuring out how to use constructively. Connectedness is going to be the chief challenge, I guess, since I am still struggling to keep in touch with people I really care about five months out.

    But I am certain I’ll find a way.

  • A Conversation on Love

    Just wanted to post a tiny snippet of a conversation I had with my grandmother today. It may look like a trivial thing but quality conversation is so rare these days that I really cherish and try to preserve it when I have one.

    We were listening to Jagjit Singh’s ghazal,

    ہوش والوں کو خبر کیا بےخودی کیا چیز ہے

    عشق کیجئے پھر سمجھیے زندگی کیا چیز ہے

    “The sensible will never grasp the state of ecstasy;
    Dive into love, and learn what life can be.”

    when she exclaimed how volumes of timeless poetry had been written by men head over heels in love but when some of the same men eventually found or married their love, they were unable to live up to the romanticized unions of their own poems.

    I agreed with her acute observation and marveled at her ability to note such an objective point while listening to, and appreciating, the lyrical rendition of Nida Fazli’s celebrated poem. I responded,

    Women and men make classic, tantalizing milestones in each others’ journey of Love. The destination of Love continues to be someplace else though. In a higher calling than flesh and blood.

    She fell quiet for a moment then responded aptly with the following verse of Iqbal:

    متاع بے بہا ہے درد و سوز آرزو مندی

    مقام بندگی دے کر نہ لوں شان خداوندی

    “The true treasure glows in longing’s secret blaze;
    I spurn the loftiest rank, preferring humble ways.”

    I think all great poets and philosophers have pondered upon the remarkably evident thirst that women and men fail to satisfy in each other in the name of love. Love, like unquenched fire burning in the very center of one’s being, demands desperate action. Iqbal, in this verse, holds this suffering dearer than any material or spiritual wealth. Knowing its subject (God, woman, etc.) though cannot alleviate the pain, it can certainly impart the sense of it being worthwhile thus, making it more tolerable, and even, enjoyable for some as it’s in the case of Iqbal.

  • Paper Boats

    I have four tabs open in Chrome. A Google Slide for a presentation coming up at work next week, a paper on macro-human factors in aviation maintenance that’s going to help me with that, a dense Cambridge university publication exploring the relationship between Marxism and Islamic Mysticism that I might give up reading halfway through, and Ghulam Ali’s rendition of Nasir Kazmi’s ghazal Dil mein ek leher si uthi hai abhi on Youtube; his vocal cords doing justice to the word, leher (wave), in eight different styles sweeping me away as if on eight musical waves.

    It’s already 10.30 pm; this day will end like all others. I just want to remind myself that it was a splendid day. What could be more splendid than a bowlful of Nihari for dinner with all its traditional condiments anyway? And a lovely family who’s visited from across the other side of the country to put some life into your painfully expansive apartment?

    I just wish I had spoken up at work when it mattered. When the self-righteous seniors were decimating the junior first-timer on the rostrum, my appreciation of his presentation could have gone a long way for him. But it was too hard to speak up then. And it’s harder still to forgive myself now for having taken the easier path. I think I’ll remember this pain and do what’s right the next time it matters. The world suffers a lot. Not because of the violence of bad people but because of the silence of good people. If not for myself, then for the world out there. I. Will. Speak. Up.

    I have an early morning speed workout with the boys. The competition will start Dec 2 so we don’t have much time left. Every mile is counting now. I have not been in such great shape in the past 5 years and if I sail through the 10,000m race, which I very much hope to, I am packing my bags for the Naltar marathon coming up in Jan next year. That would be exquisite; the master of all adventures. There are lots of ifs and buts at the moment. That I remain injury-free. That my boss understands what running the highest marathon in the world means to me at this point in time and spares me for the month-long high-altitude training preceding the race. They say when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Whatever happens, I have something to look forward to and that should suffice for a good night’s sleep.

  • Abandoned Cars

    Abandoned Cars

    My love for abandoned cars is fed by my running in urban areas. These neglected cars parked often in the leftover construction rubble, outside bodywork shops, or just in the roadside garbage dumps Karachi never seems to run short of, make for strangely nostalgic sights. These remind me of the fleetingness of the elaborate drama around us that would someday end without so much as a warning or fanfare, leaving us frozen in time like these rusting cars. When I’m not running against the clock, I like to pay them one final tribute before these are eventually dismantled or sold sheet-by-sheet and part-by-part by street addicts who thrive on such thrilling scavenger hunts abandoned cars can often provide.

  • Saturday

    Ever since I have ramped up my workouts and started a clean diet to get back in race shape (six-pack and all, for laypeople), my cheat day is stretched over an entire weekend during which, given my wife is very skilled at cooking, I can consume anywhere north of 2500 kcal per day. This also means a very regimented diet for the rest of four and a half days of the week (comprising eggs, chicken, minced beef, seasonal fruit and raw spinach leaves) which I survive only because I can see the light at the end of the long dark tunnel i.e. Bombay Biryani in Friday lunch.

    Chicken steaks with white mushroom sauce

    This weekend, however, was not just about biryani, ras malai, steaks, and other delectable treats because I had quite cleverly planned a long run on Saturday to make up for the ravenous eating and manage the guilt for my extra-long cheat ‘day’ (read: weekend). The track where I ran my 15 km is basically a dirt trail in the middle of nowhere which I have been running on, and meaning to write about, for the past two years.

    Chicken bread masterfully baked by my wife and Netflix

    The trail is lined on both sides with wild grass and thick green shrubbery which is home to flocks of mynahs, crickets, jackals, and at times, Russel’s vipers and sand-colored scorpions. Evidently, with so much wildlife around, the track can only be run with your natural human instincts on guard. Usually, I run the trail in evenings, and sometimes, when I fail to finish a long run before sunset, I can see giant lizards slithering out of the thick bushes on both sides into the open. When a cool breeze blows through the wild grass, it makes a sweet sound – a mixture of the hissing of a snake and the melody of a running stream. A long, deviant branch of a stout shrub that extends onto the trail can often look like a cobra ready to uncoil on its victim and, hence, startle me in my tracks. Apart from these thrills, however, the trail is otherwise beautiful. It offers expansive, unobstructed views of the dramatic sunset skies and its earthy quality makes you want to return for more joint-friendly runs.

    Posing shyly on the trail. Shrubbery starts a few miles ahead of this point.

    Needless to say, I like this trail; it allows me to unplug for a while and get a feel of what it must be like to be a prehistoric man. As I have been shaking off the bonds of technology lately, I am finding myself being more mindful of my surroundings. These exhilarating trail runs, I believe, are a continuation of the same pursuit of freedom that I have been hoping to instill in my 30s.

    More on this in some other blog. Ciao!

  • Longing for Kashmir

    Upper Neelum

    It was 8 Oct, yesterday. Exactly a year ago, we had left Islamabad for a fantastic trip to Kashmir. From my son to his great-grandparents, there were four generations of my family packed in a 14-seater brand-new Mitsubishi coaster that sailed effortlessly through the scenic mountains of the Northern Areas. The memories of that trip have recently been tantalizing me to plan another trip to the North. As a tribute to the Kashmir trip, my sister-in-law made a melodious montage and I translated my poem, Cooling Vesuvius, into Urdu. I wrote it while having a cup of tea with my wife in a ramshackle dhaba by a road in Muzaffarabad that snaked up to the tomb of St Chinasi.

    تمہارے ساتھ ایک کپ چائے
    مجھے فرینک او ہارا کی مشہور نظم یاد دلا رہی ہے
    ‘‘Having a Coke with You’’
    اکتوبر کی یہ خنک ڈھلتی شام
    دور نارنجی افق پر
    ہمالیہ کے عظیم پہاڑوں کے نقوش ثبت کر رہی ہے
    اور ہم
    تاریکی میں ڈوبتے حسین سائرس بادلوں
    اور ان پر دھیرے دھیرے طلوع ہونے والے  نۓ چاند
    اور شاندار شمالی ستارے کے  نیچے
    اپنی پیالیاں تھامے
    جھلملاتے مظفر آباد سے کوسوں اوپر
    مسحور کھڑے ہیں
    ہمارے چینی مٹی کے برتنوں سے اٹھنے والی بھاپ
    ہماری گرم سانسوں کے سرد دھوئیں میں ضم ہو کر
    خوبصورت خط و خال بنا رہی ہے
    جیسے دور کوئی ہوائی جہاز
    ایک کہنہ مشق مصور کی مانند
    آسمان میں سفید لکیریں کھینچ رہا ہو
    ہمارے ساتھ سے گزرتی، بل کھاتی یہ سڑک
    جو پیر  چناسی کے مزار تک جاتی ہے
    مجھے نیپلز میں واقع
    کوہ ویسوویئس کی چوٹی تک جاتی
    ایک ایسی ہی سڑک کی یاد دلاتی ہے
    وہی ویسوویئس
    جس کے آتش فشاں نے ہزاروں سال پہلے
    بدکردار پومپی کو دفن کر دیا تھا ۔
    شاید تم سوچتی ہو گی
    کہ ہمارا تعلق بھی
    اسی ویسوویئس کی طرح
    دھیرے دھیرے سرد پڑ رہا ہے
    جسے اب اس کے دامن میں واقع
    نیپلز کا پر آ شوب شہر بھی
    کوئی خطرہ نہیں گردانتا
    اگرچہ ماہرین ارضیات اب بھی ویسوویئس کو ‘فعال’ کہتے ہیں۔
    ایک فعال آتش فشاں کیا ہی اچھا ہے
    اگر اس سے کوئی ڈرتا نہیں ، تم سوچتی ہو گی ؟
    مگر میرا خیال ہے
    ویسوویئس بہرحال  ویسوویئس ہے۔
    ٹیررھنین سمندر کے ساکن پانیوں کے ساتھ
    نیپلز کے ساحل پر ایستادہ
    ایک منفرد، دیو مالائی پہاڑ
    جسے اپنی عظمت ثابت کرنے کے لیے
    راکھ اور شعلوں میں بھڑکنے کی ضرورت نہیں ۔
    یا ہو سکتا ہے تم ٹھیک سمجھتی ہو
    ہم شاید واقعی بدل چکے ہیں
    جوشیلے محبت کرنے والوں سے  اچھے دوستوں میں ۔
    اگر یہ سچ  بھی ہے تو اس میں کوئی مضاُقہ  نہیں
    مجھے واقعی یہ زیادہ پسند ہے۔
    کیا تمہیں نہیں ؟

  • Quiet

    Lately, I have been running out of things to write. I am drowning in my own daze. It’s almost peaceful, like death. I guess it’s one reason why people drift towards it; one less word at a time. Until their radical thoughts have dumbed and their wildest imaginations cowered into utter silence, or whimpering Yes, sirs. I’m not talking about the physical death here, of course; it’s not a choice anyway. But the death that most of us meet in our lives; that stills us, turns us into observers, into the audience of a fascinating match, of a scrolling screen, of a rolling routine, of a mindless race that never ends before its runners.

    Bukowski’s thundering voice just got me this weekend. Loathing life is, perhaps, not enough of an excuse to stop living it.

    You can’t beat death but

    You can beat death in life, sometimes,

    And the more often you learn to do it,

    The more light there will be.

    So I have decided to write more frequently about anything that catches my attention, intrigues, bores, repels or fascinates me. I’m no longer seeking to write a blockbuster poem or a scholarly essay or a literary piece anymore. It only inhibits the process of expressing which was also the founding idea behind my blog.

    Today, I want to write about Nadir. He works menacing afternoon and night shifts. People are mean to him. He gets plenty of mouthfuls at work. Yet that doesn’t seem to impact the positive energy he carries around him. His cheerfulness has miraculously survived the most discouraging of circumstances. He is original, straightforward, and not afraid to speak the truth. He is a true embodiment of what my grandmother says about happiness, Don’t search for it outside; it springs up from within you.

    Yesterday, I ran into him while his afternoon shift was nearing the end. The sun had long set but he was in his usual high spirits as he greeted me with a powerful, singsong salaam. I could tell it was not like dozens of other loud, constipated salaams that my subordinates had reluctantly showered at me during the day to confirm their servitude. It was a genuine greeting that one extended to someone, one was pleased to meet. After signing off some documents, I asked him what date it was. He said, It’s 6 Oct, sir. My birthday.

    I was startled at his openness. He had turned 31. We were age fellows. I did not tell him that I was surprised to see in him the remarkable positivity a 31 year old, working menial shifts away from home could preserve. He gave me hope in myself and faith in my grandmother’s wisdom. I sent him a cake wishing that he would keep his torch burning in the darkness that engulfed us. Just like the bright half-moon illuminating the sky outside.