Eastern Vagabond

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

Tag: love

  • 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?

  • My Batman

    My batman is not perfect.


    When he comes over to deliver groceries,
    he calls me enthusiastically to the door
    to ramble about his old travels,
    majestic places he’s been to when he was a truck driver
    in the wild west of Pakistan,
    repairs that my old car perpeptually needs,
    or simply to tell me he saw me on my way to office,
    while returning from his night shift,
    with a sparkle in his eyes and a childish smile—
    one that I don’t return, and can’t,

    as if I were his friend and not his boss,
    as if I could ever be anyone’s friend.


    —

    And yet, my batman is flawed.
    Sometimes he borrows and forgets to return,
    fails to clean the house and water the plants when I’m away.
    Sometimes I catch him staring at my wife’s butt
    when she turns in the kitchen or walks away.
    He steals from the refrigerator too—
    a spoonful of leftover kheer or stale rice from the night before.

    But that’s just about the list of his petty crimes.


    —

    The way his eyes crinkle around the corners when he smiles
    reminds me of a childhood that seems so distant now,
    of the days when I could smile and mean it too—
    when I had friends who saw me as a friend,
    before I had drifted into the shelter of solitude.
    Sometimes when he worries that my status might shield me
    from the universal Experience of a common man,
    he shares the simple truths he’s picked up
    on his truck journeys, inn stays and broke days,
    wrapped in exotic tales and queer jokes
    that he delivers with a slap on my thigh.


    —

    On summer afternoons, when he lifts his arm to lean on my door,
    his lack of body spray becomes noticeable,
    and reminds me of the class difference between us,
    making me wonder if it’s all cosmetic—
    if we are indeed the same beneath our clothes and perfumes,
    and spend so much and entire lives to forget that.


    —

    His ability to see me as a person before his boss,
    and his courage to entertain the possibility
    of so much as a friendship between us,
    is something I deeply admire,

    because it’s something I lost long ago.


    —

    My batman is not perfect. But maybe I never was, either.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Cooling Vesuvius

    Having a cup of tea with you

    in a ramshackle dhaba by the road

    reminds me of Frank O’ Hara’s iconic poem,

    ‘Having a Coke with You.’

    The cold dusk has just fallen

    upon the October Himalayan mountains

    casting their shapeless silhouettes against a lavender sky,

    and upon us

    as we hold our cups

    over the glittering city of Muzaffarabad

    and gaze into the darkening cirrus afar,

    a new moon rising above them and the majestic North star,

    reflecting on the beauty of this fleeting moment.

    The gray steam rising from our porcelain cups

    merges in the condensation of our winter breaths

    creating patterns envied by

    jet contrails and shooting stars.

    The metallic road by our side

    snakes up to the shrine of the Saint of Chinasi

    reminding me of a similar road in Naples

    that leads up to Mount Vesuvius’ top

    whose raging volcano once buried

    the debaucherous Pompeii alive.

    Perhaps you think

    that in our three years of togetherness,

    we have slowly cooled off

    just like Vesuvius

    that the bustling Naples

    no longer takes seriously as a threat

    even though the geologists still call it ‘active’.

    What good is an active volcano after all

    that nobody dreads, you might think?

    Likely to blow its top or not, I think

    Vesuvius is still Vesuvius

    towering solemnly over the Naples’ shore

    along the still waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea

    in no need to erupt in ash and flames

    every now and then to prove its power.

    Either that or may be

    you are right after all –

    we have transformed

    from ardent lovers to really good friends.

    I don’t mind if it’s true, in fact,

    I really like it better.

    Don’t you?

  • Your Laughter

    My dirty laundry is strewn all over the place,

    and the dishes in the kitchen sink rot so much

    that I have to go check each night

    if there’s a dead rat in there.

    Still, I miss you

    not for the clean dishes

    nor ironed uniforms

    but

    for your peals of laughter

    more musical and sacred

    than a Buddhist temple’s

    on a distant mountaintop.

  • Protected: On Unknowing

    This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

  • Your serpentine curls

    When fresh from the shower

    your black serpentine curls

    fall down to your waist

    like hot Icelandic springs

    And your fragrance spreads

    like Mongols on fire

    When your chapped winter lips

    quiver with sadness

    and you rush to the kitchen

    to hide your tears

    When your shores

    are gently washed

    with waves upon waves

    of musical laughter

    When you speak Urdu

    with an intonation so lovely

    and infinitely Punjabi

    I could listen, captivated,

    for eternities on end

    When you’re strong and ripping apart

    When you’re vulnerable and falling apart

    I fall in love with you

    quietly; like you and I,

    our love cannot be much different

    from us.

  • Hashir

    Meet Hashir. The tiny owner and CEO of the Shit and Spit Factory (my wife came up with this comic name tonight). Born in turbulent times amidst fears of an impending nuclear war, outbreak of the deadly nCov virus and subsequent global recession, he can currently afford to be blissfully ignorant of the turmoil around while his father (i.e. I) takes the brunt of war deployments, salary cuts and overtime hours. Regardless, Hashir has been a bundle of absolute joy for me and taught me more about love in the past 6 months than Pablo Neruda ever did. That love is effortless. That its incremental and sacrificial. One day, I understand it will be painful. And maybe Neruda will be helpful then. But for now, I’d rather bask in its pleasure than wait for the inevitable pain. Did I just talk about the taboo on the eve of my son’s half birthday? Yes, I think the prospect of separation (death or otherwise) brings perspective to communion. It reminds us that humans can still commit to love when they’re aware of its devastation.

    I love you, son. And I thank you for restoring my trust in my ability to engage in unconditional love. Happy half birthday!

    Hashir – Day 180