Eastern Vagabond

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

Tag: relationships

  • 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.