Essays on travel, cities, memory, and the unnoticed textures of the world.
There is a fable that once upon a time, right after the town-clock struck midnight, the gangsters gathered in the town-hall and fired pistols at moon. The suburban sky lit up, the stars faded in the brilliant firework and a sweet smell of sulfur filled the damp night air. The moon bled silver that night. The gunshots rhymed. The bats fluttered back and forth through the bullet holes in sky and sang:
“Watch out. The gangsters make symphony tonight!”
3 am:
Like an uproar of stray dogs
in the quiet, shady downtown;
irrational, wild, intense.
Your remembrance.
Treading the backstreets,
On the hopscotch-chalked sidewalks,
And in the strings of strange Trennbare verbs
Of a stranger language,
I have often secretly tried
To trace your immaculate form,
Connecting the invisible dots
That lay all around,
Scattered,
Like silver mercury on earth.
Now that you’ve hurled the stone, you turn on your heel and walk away.
Somewhere far down, there’s a splash.
Under the orb of night, little silvery beads of water try defying gravity, creating ripples, gyrating spirals in spirals. The murky waters quiver; your stone fades somewhere in the dense amalgam of dirt-brown and gloom. An endless army of ripples sets out to pillage the unbounding shores of consciousness – the ravaged shores just beginning to move on so long after the storm.
The stinking memories surface like rancid corpses in canal. A wound slowly begins to open up and an old, perverted yearning seeps out silently. I look into the streaming lymph. It’s long since kept; now it’s not going to stop. At least not for a while. I’ll shatter bit by bit, piece by piece with the hands of clock, ticking their circle tirelessly, endlessly.
But you just hurled a stone.
My professor’s neckties hypnotize me. Some of you might like to call them ‘absurd’ for they’re very richly painted in colors too bright and patterns too strange that one gets lost in the weird tapered world. Trees, snowflakes, flowers, worms all splattered together in a mysterious cocktail. And while i am totally fine with his other equally eccentric neckties (except they make me think he is a Martian), i do take offence when he wears this floral one. And it’s not just about those brightly colored martian flowers curling and snaking all over either. There is an old-fashioned wooden ladder too that starts from the bottom and spirals up to his Windsor knot with all kinds of slimy worms hanging from its every nook and cranny. And the fact that he wears them in autumn makes his neckties look more like blooming off-season creepers which would soon wrap around his wrinkly neck and choke him to death. His withering hair look like waves in a tempest and you can’t stop theorizing how his space-ship might have abandoned him after a secret surveillance mission on Earth.
When he threatens, his necktie swings ominously like a pendulum as he says “No cross talks or i’ll switch into another role. And you won’t like it, i am sure you won’t.” And then comes my favorite: “If you be nice to me, i’ll be nice to you and if you trick me, i am Satan.”
Every time he says that, his deep voice trembles and for a tiny moment, a fraction of a second so small that one wonders if that was just a figment of one’s imagination, his eyes blaze, a wild flame gushes forth and blows out in eternal oblivion and what always follows is a long pin-drop silence and the reverberation, “I am Satan.”
He has a knack of talking in a tone that nobody can understand. He speaks fine English though, is very audible and prepares his lectures quite well but he can still appear like calling out from the other side of our world, in a long forgotten language, in a tone that’s so typically martian but strangely soothing to put the whole class to sleep. And once that happens,
It’s then he sings a martian song
in a language that is long forlorn
the birds with him do chirp along
for no one knew where he came from.
Reading a book for the second time makes a good metaphor for life.
Your pocket money runs out and you don’t have much options apart from dusting off your bulging shelf and digging out an old piece from a long assortment of pale, dog-eared books. You start off cockily, thinking you are few steps too ahead and before long, you feel the need to take a break. So you walk out and hang around a local bookstore, eyeing and drooling over their new collection. You walk down the lane to a nearby cafe, peep inside the coffee-shop next to it, and pass a bus-stand along the way and strangely enough, all you can see everywhere is glossy paperbacks and buried noses within. Some people, out of their general courtesy, make a special point in shoving their new books up your face such that you could almost smell the typical off-the-press aroma and you wonder why God chose you for the misery. Soon the night falls and you find yourself back home, lying in your bed, staring the humdrum ceiling with a pair of bloodshot eyes, trying to count the revolutions of a fan which mysteriously transforms itself into a Frisbee just in time in an attempt to conspire with the universe to make you feel perfectly miserable about your impoverished, insomniac existence.
You think you were better off with the book you had started for the second time so you pick it up again anyway and suddenly there is that missed link, a cryptic clue you thought in your first-rush you quite got it but as it turns out you hadn’t really, that catches you completely off-guard and the whole story, almost dramatically, starts to fall perfectly into place, making a lot more sense making you believe it was all worth it. And you begin to think what a chicken-head you had been to be so stupidingly sure of yourself when the game had just begun and are in complete awe for the roller-coaster ride your journey turned out to be. It’s about time you have an incredible experience and some very wise words to tell the world out there when sleep gets better of you and your weary eyelids draw shut only to let every single detail of that marvelous night dissolve into a dream, a forlorn triviality in the worm-hole of time.
I saw a fleshy little insect on my study table today – an animate, miniature Sarcosuchus with a glittering tail full of scales or maybe i am imagining things. Couldn’t shake it off my head for a long time. It reminded me of how I once had a strange fascination for insects. When i was little, i would tirelessly sit through quiet, hot afternoons of our desert town in the living room without even turning on the fan, silently observing the ants as they slowly marched by. I often wondered why they moved in a single line and why they wouldn’t give way to another ant coming the opposite way without bumping into it first. I remember doing a running commentary on their funny “accidents”, sitting on the cool marble floor and my giggles reverberating in the living room. Laughter wasn’t an option back then because everybody else in the family was sane enough to sleep through the burning desert siestas and if i were caught laughing, Ami would get up to tuck me in the bed next to her, and a beautiful afternoon would be wasted.
Back then, i was free to wonder and theorize anything and everything i saw or hear. There was nobody to tell me ‘hey, you have to have a PhD to have a say in that matter’ [which becomes more of a cliche as you get to the university]. I remembered how i loved to be a scientist. But unlike all the scientists, i had a deep fascination for fairy tales and mythologies. No wonder that of all the nursery rhymes, Dadi amma kehti hain, chand p paryan rehti hain was my favorite. The night-sky always triggered a spirit of unearthing the worldly secrets in me. I’d look at the planets, imagining how the life there’d be like and all sorts of imaginary alien life from abominable monsters to cute little rabbits would spin in my head like socks in a dryer until i’d sink into a tranquil sleep.
Back then, life was serene. A gift to be treasured. An excitement that must not be lost. Though each day was placidly same, it would always unearth new mysteries and consequent thrills. There was no such thing as ‘boredom’ in life. Every summer we had that strange craze of inventing something. So we would set off with a bottle of Vicks and fill it with everything we could lay our hands on after much thought and determining the right proportions pretending to be some damn serious scientists at work. I remember one time when my bottle filled up to the brim, i brought it to my study table and pulled it open to see what the new invention was. The kids surrounded the table in excitement and anticipation. After a long analysis that included spilling it in the garden (to see if some unheard-of vegetation sprouts up), smelling and even tasting it (yuck!) when i couldn’t make out what it actually was, i declared it to be a perfume (FYI, the thing smelled like shit). My younger siblings made a whoopey and painted the town red with their noisy, innocent celebrations. I was a bit let down when Ami, like always, was too busy to feign any interest in my invention. But for as long as i was the star-performer among my siblings, there was little heed i paid to the rest.
Summer semesters are horrible because:
1) Days are freaking hot.
2) You have your classes in SEECS – school of robotic people with crooked sense of humor.
3) It’s been almost seven months since the last time you went home.
Each day is such a blitz that even if I manage to crawl out of it alive, later that day, i end up thinking about the most philosophical things in life. To begin with, what’s freaking me out is this recent realization that for an unreasonably huge part of the day, i am forced to stop being me. I am helplessly stuck in things which don’t really matter to me and my idea of life is only growing more and more obscure. I am not saying it’s not important to study or memorize the loathsome formulas or worse still, be a true nerd. It definitely is. Interviewers are often keen on asking such impossible little details of the four year degree program and then sneer at your miserable face. You ought to teach them a lesson and save the world. But if that makes you forget there’s more to life, you really need to think if it’s a life worth-living.
I want to believe that the world i live in is a lot more bearable than it actually is. Plus, i seriously need to rediscover my lost self, to find my own little space in the universe around. My room also gets stuffy by night due to poor ventilation leaving me terribly cringing for some fresh air for my worthy lungs which let me complete my excruciating runs to allow me the only high through an otherwise miserable day. So a mishmash of all these reasons brings out the Buddha in me and so i set off for a post-dinner stroll to find a solution for humanity. Okay, a solution for myself. After all, that’s the most i can do for humanity.
As soon as you come out you can’t quite resist the unmistakable monsoon charm suspended in the air and fall for it at once. Plus, the road is lovely. It runs up the hill to its very top. Yellow street-lights let out subtle, silent calls as if trying to bring back something to me; maybe it’s a memory that hasn’t yet surfaced but my heart at least speaks to me and for now i am content that it’s not dead not at least yet.
Islamabad is always breathtaking from this hill-top and you wonder why it’s not the same when you’re down there commuting to work or bazaar. The city had to be buzzing with noise at this hour of night but standing on a hill in the outskirts saves you that part and what reaches you is only the sprightly colors of night.
Sitting in a cafe at the hill-top, I had a flashback about how every year papa used to load all us four siblings in the back-seat of his Corolla 86 and so we traversed the most joyous of the journeys – the beloved annual trip to our homeland i.e Karachi.
An airplane takes off far away and fades away in the countless constellations above. ‘Like a diamond in the sky’, a faint memory whispers in my ears as I try to hum the right tune. Few attempts and I’m there. It’s funny how sometimes ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star…’ is the only piece of poetry you seem to remember and still it has all the romance and nostalgia you want to fill a fleeting moment with. So you sing it to the city from the hilltop like a mad-man.
And just then, a train chugs its way through a far-off meadowy suburb leaving behind a deafening silence. The whole world quietens down. Even the frogs down the valley stop croaking.
And the only thing that runs through my head like a never ending song is Karachi.
It’s not just everyday that you get to spend your weekend in so much peace away from the babbling about the upcoming assignments and the looming OHTs or the nerds ranting how smart they were to not fall for the glitch in the last quiz in spite of all the odds stacked against them, and the Gilgiti roommates just down my corridor who would never let go of those same gut-churning traditional tunes that have been flying about the corridors of the hostel for the last two years; perhaps they feel good pretending to be the last surviving comrades of an almost extinct civilization.
The workshop was held in Quba Mosque, Humak Town. As soon as you step in the mosque, you enter some sort of parallel universe which defies all the theories of this physical world. Time seems to have slowed down. Some branches of a tree in the yard creep up to the old-fashioned window-sills and you can see the setting sun through the rusty grills that weave through it (and that makes me nostalgic for some reason). That window perhaps serves as a calendar and a clock because neither of the two did i find in there. The leaves can tell the season and sun, the hour and that is actually more precise of a time than the people there will ever need to know. Time goes by as slowly as does the sun and the concept of quantification of time fades away as does the tick-ticking of the clock. And so in a little niche of the modern world, time still exists as an infinite entity. The building seems to hold a peculiar medieval academic air, which almost magically vivifies the scholar in oneself emanating a yearning for knowledge. There was so much tranquility all over the place and on the faces of Mudarrisoon that i have never wanted more to quit everything else in the world for that.
