Eastern Vagabond

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

Tag: literature

  • Surreal

    Partly because the sleeping beauty resting in the snowcapped mountains looked stunning in her new white wardrobe, partly because the low hanging clouds huddled together to look like a giant fluff of cotton candy from the cockpit, partly because the piercing though strangely welcome cold was vaguely reminiscent of all the places I could have been and partly because the dome-shaped Gol Canteen’s hearty breakfast of anda channa and creamy tea with rainbow-colored froth warmed me up to the cold outside, I descended into a reflective, almost meditative mood after landing in Quetta and felt the urge to write. Sitting in the heated room with a vase-shaped lamp lit up dimly in a corner and an expansive window overlooking the dark, overcast day and a giant mountain just standing grimly and letting gray clouds float above it, I feel a mix of many emotions which, were they to be defined in a word, could be summed up in nothing short of ‘gratitude’.

    Strange how an encounter with Beauty makes one want to worship or at least, be grateful to some higher entity that afforded that encounter. It’s almost an involuntary reaction, as swift and natural as scrambling for balance when falling or crossing your arms when cold. I know the excitement is going to wane in my weeks of staying here, the welcoming cold would start to bite, the snow-capped mountains would become drab, and the sleeping beauty and her outfit would no longer look stunning, if I still trace her figure in the mountains at all.

    In fleeting moments like these, when there is no rush to get anywhere, the cognition of the surrounding beauty is overpowering, my mind is not drifting elsewhere and I don’t desire anyone or anything that’s not right before me, that I truly feel in the moment right where I actually am. I hope as the years go by, this blog entry reminds me of my early enchantment with the wintery Quetta and helps to preserve it for a little longer.

  • Beyond

    A younger cousin asked me this week.

    After school, graduation, a job, marriage, a child… Have you scratched the bottom of the well? I’m curious because I haven’t thought about much after marriage and a child. You’re already past that so what are you looking forward to now?
    Hope that all makes sense.

    Of course it does make sense. It’s hardly been a decade since I have crossed the threshold of teenage and this was pretty much all I could think of too. Back in the days, I visited Sufi meditation cults, joined discussion circles of idealogues planning on reviving the caliphate and attended resident workshops of a LUMS’ professor working for Muslim Renaissance in order to find my own, unique calling. I now miss those days for my cynic, firm and passionate religiosity but more so, for the freedom I had to pick a path and then change it. The freedom we all lose a little with every passing second by virtue of the very nature of time itself. The future looked daunting to me but also equally enthralling. I could be anyone and be anywhere. The advertisment of Turkish Airlines on the Readers Digest back cover always had me daydreaming of the future:

    Too many places to be
    Too many faces to see

    In spite of those days tinged with the delicious flavor of infinite freedom, I secretly yearned to settle down. I saw my university professors hard at work through their lab windows at nights and ached for a job to consume me and pay me well for it. Yes, it has been an eventful decade in that I managed to check off quite a number of items on the success-checklist (if there exists such a thing at all). Having scored a decent job and started a family of my own, it may seem like I have ‘scratched the bottom of the well’. Yours is an interesting question asking me what’s next. To be honest, I haven’t given much thought to it myself.

    I think as you move on in life, even if you get lucky and everything turns out to be amazing for you as it did for me, unfortunately you don’t get to stay there as you’re still moving on after all. The happiest moments soon become a thing of the past as the euphoria of an achievement gives way to a new normal, raising the bar. You realize happiness is a mirage and find yourself wondering if there’s a deeper purpose to life than chasing it. Plus, as time goes by, happiness too is harder to come by.

    As you climb up the career ladder, your job starts to encroach more on your family time and you basically find yourself juggling between that and family and any of your personal interests (for me, these are fitness and literature). Weekends become your only refuge from this tedium and exhaustion when you can actually give time to the latter two. Yes, sometimes, during a morning run while running on a splendid dirt trail into the rising sun, as the sky erupts into red flames raging in blue ocean, life does seem beautiful and intriguing. Even lovable, perhaps. You start to live from one such moment to the next.

    I once looked forward to ‘settling down’ but the routine is gradually wearing me down. The cost of my static, well paying job is starting to outweigh its charm. I find myself dreaming once again of traveling the world; of a stylishly dressed Turkish air hostess wearing a red beret and head scarf on an old Reader’s Digest back cover with a poetic tagline reminding me what I had forgotten for long – there were too many places to be and too many faces to see.

    I also think I have discovered a lot of things I’m good at but I’m yet to discover the one where I’d produce excellence. The very excellence that my university professors produced working like a bee in their labs. Their faces gleamed with a strange expression I could never put a finger on as they locked their labs each night and ventured glowing into the darkness. I think it’s the eternal search for the unknown which keeps us relevant; gleaming. The voyage is important and the destination, perhaps, just secondary. I’ve been waiting too long at the destination for miracles to happen. Now I need to plunge. From all kinds of comfort. Into chaos. To find my very own voyage and more so, the courage to embark on it. And for that, I believe, I’m ready.

  • Protected: Between the World and Me

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  • 43 Notifications

    There was a time
    when a seductive, blood-red
    Facebook notification
    would trigger in me
    waves of dopamine
    which flooded my bloodstream
    like amiodarone, lidocaine
    and a handful other
    difficult-to-spell drugs
    which i hope
    you never learn to spell,
    as they enter my papa
    through an IV cannula
    while he lies sedated
    amidst beeping, blinking screens
    and a flock of apathetic doctors
    desensitized by
    too much disease
    too less equipment
    and too often death.
    For too long
    I have been addicted
    to that dopamine
    while aching for interactions
    meaningful enough
    for a homosapien
    to carry on
    the futility, monotony
    called modern life.
    But now I ask
    if that really is “enough”.
    If, in my ten days of inactivity,
    43 notifications
    of a virtual book club’s activities,
    of the memes I have been tagged in
    made by sullen,
    self loathing, suicidal teens
    that are ironically intent
    on making their viewers laugh,
    of unreferenced, unverifiable anecdotes
    no better than oldwives tales,
    of pandemic-related quackery
    both religious and secular,
    of birthdays of people
    I haven’t seen in years,
    of friend requests by
    people I don’t recognize,
    really mean anything.
    It’s silly how important
    we think we are,
    when we are nothing
    more than
    43 notifications.

  • On life and reading a book for the second time…

    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.