Tag: Pakistan
-
The Auburn Fall and a Verse
Here’s another October heralding the onset of perhaps my favourite season i.e. autumn. While taking a leisurely stroll in the front lawn of our apartment building, as I walked over the withering, auburn leaves accompanied by the music of their melodious rustle, I took this photograph to save the beauty and timelessness of the fleeting moment and reflect on the nature’s eternal cycle of life and rejuvenation in the busy coming days as I was soon leaving home yet again for another job assignment that would finish by December.
Photograph: The Auburn Fall I shared the photograph with a friend who commented on it with an Urdu verse which I thought was very apt and when he told me it was his own and he had just come up with it tout de suite, I was almost surprised and fell in love with it.
یہ تیرا بکھرے پتوں کا ذوق
میری بکھری زندگی کی داستانYour taste for scattered leaves,
(Explains) the story of my scattered lifeThat man has been my friend since early school years and that he had a poetic side to him was never known to me even after our countless conversational night walks through the narrow, partially paved streets of the desert town where we both lived and contemplated the meaning of life and it’s various themes for quite a number of years.
This just gives me another reason to suspend my judgements in a world full of surprises. Being ephemeral beings, the comfort of the certainty of knowing someone or something completely is simply not for us. Let’s bask in this fundamental limitation of all our knowledge and help create a better, more tolerant world.
Happy October!
-
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.
-
The Professor
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.
-
Once A Runner
“From the crucible of such inner turmoil come the various metals, soft or brittle, flawed or pure, precious or common, that determine the good runners, the great runners, and perhaps the former runners; for those who can not deal with successfully (or evade successfully). The consequences of their singular objective will simply fade away from it all and go on to less arduous pursuits. There has probably never been one yet who has done so, however, without leaving a part of himself there in the quiet, tiled solace of the early afternoon locker room, knotting his loathsome smelling laces for yet another, jesus god, ten miler with the boys. Once a runner…”
It was a usual December evening. The darkness fell early and a light crisp breeze sent shudders down the spines. I remember following the ritual, the same old ritual i’d been following for the last eight years; warming up, stretching, doing a couple of strides, looking down on my stop-watch marveling the vastness of one, tiny second and the eternities it seems to hold, inhaling a lungful of pollen-rich winter air of Islamabad and bursting out. It was a great run. I remember feeling the high. Everything felt wonderful except my shin – i had returned with a stress fracture!
It took four months to heal. And as much as it seems, four months is a real long time especially when you can’t stop yourself from staring morosely at your neatly hung track suit and nike shoes in a dusty corner each day, convinced running is no more your thing. And when i was finally back on the track, though I could still plod miles after miles, the furnace was ice-cold, i knew, maybe the runner’s spirit was lost somewhere along the way. I’d look at my room’s walls and the training routines glued to them and wonder if that really were the same flesh and bones who could undertake such animalism once.
But in the near-past, things have worked out one after the other in quite an unusual manner, making me think if some miracle is underway.
Firstly, I found my long-lost registration form for membership of Islamabad Sports Complex. Training on the international track has been kind-of an old dream. Never knew it would realize all of a sudden some day!
Plus, i learnt mid-foot running which obviously made me faster, taking lesser toll on my body which implies lesser injuries as well. Before that i thought only a duck could run like that. Now it feels natural.
Thirdly, I came across former Pakistani Beijing Olympics Athletics Team Coach who happened to do his evening-walks on the same loop i chose for my daily runs and told me he saw in me what it took to be a pro. He even offered me his coaching services!
Maybe Paulo Coelho was right about when-you-want-something-from-all-your-heart-the-whole-world-conspires-to-help-you-achieve-it thing. In the past few months, I too have been feeling like giving it a final shot, just needed a single little push and the fate gave me three massive ones. Looking forward to a new beginning as i leave for my home tomorrow. That marks a perfect start. Doesn’t it?
It’s only when you’ve stopped doing something that you realize how hard it is to start again, so you force yourself into not wanting it. But it’s always there and until you finish it, it will always be!”
-
On Karachi, Monsoon and Catharsis…
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.