Eastern Vagabond

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

Tag: spirituality

  • Mevlana

    I’ve an unresolved affinity for Maulana Rumi (Mevlana in Turkish) – an intuition that he might be the only saviour I will ever have. I taught myself basic Persian 3 years ago only to read his Masnavi and I still haven’t read it.

    What if he doesn’t live up to my expectations of him? What if I fail to live up to his?

    Konya is home to Rumi therefore, it was hard to come to Istanbul and forget Konya. Though I couldn’t visit it during my first layover in Istanbul while traveling to Italy, I made sure I see it on my way back. If you’re traveling to Europe from Pakistan and are interested in visiting Mevlana, Turkish Airlines will be your cheapest bet. After landing in Istanbul, you’ll have to take domestic flights for Konya and back because it is not an international airport.

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    Landing in Konya on an overcast day. Taurus mountains can be seen in a distance.

    Besides being a small public airport, Konya is also a military base so I could spot Turkish Air Force’s C-130s on the tarmac while my plane taxied to the terminal. I had already booked a motel room near Mevlana Türbesi (Rumi’s tomb) earlier while departing from Milan. Soon after I had landed in Konya, i realized my European sim wasn’t exactly functional here and the natives wouldn’t understand English. I could very well see a disaster unfold – how on earth was I going to navigate my way to my motel and then to Mevlana’s tomb if not with the internet or a local guide understanding my language? Thanks to Mevlana though; he became my guide, my host. All I had to say to the passport control at Istanbul airport, the bus driver, the pedestrians, the random strangers, the beggars and the prostitutes of Konya, was the word “Mevlana”. It seemed to be a word from some universal language. A word powerful enough to warm up a stranger to another, a host to a guest, a guide to a lost traveler. Not long after, I was in my motel with Mevlana just 400 meters east.

    I spent that night in conflicting emotions. It was not exactly spiritual, to say the least. The room next to mine was occupied by a couple who started to let off their steam right after I unlocked the door to my room. I flipped open the Masnavi in my phone to distract myself and tried to read it over the loud thrusting and moaning but eventually had to give in, put my phone aside and wait for them to finish.

    Next morning, I set off early before sunrise. Remember I had no internet so I navigated my way in the morning twilight like ancient wayfarers and caravan guides with the rising pinkish hues on the horizon being my sole sense of direction for east. I went about my usual way, preferring narrow streets over wide roads every time I had a choice. This might have taken me long but led to some hidden treasures too.

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    Nar-i-Ask – a small streetside art gallery I came upon. Nar-i-Ask is a Persian word, written here in Latin and Arabic script, meaning “The fire of love”

    Eventually one of the streets left me at a wide traffic-less intersection and a huge structure stood in the middle of it. I knew I had reached somewhere important. My heart skipped a beat – it could be Mevlana Türbesi.

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    The western front of Cami Selimiye – a minaret of Rumi’s tomb can be seen at it’s back (to the right)

    I soon realized it was not. I walked past the intersection and around the building to reach the courtyard in its front. The wall inscription beside the door read “Cami Selimiye”. The architecture was similar to the mosques of Istanbul and the tiled space stretching in front of it seemed more like a public square due to its vastness.

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    I was confused. Though magnificent it was in its own right, i was too close to the Rumi’s tomb to be happy for finding Cami Selimiye. Mevlana was nowhere to be seen. Or so I thought. Upon my inquiry, the street selling woman sitting on the stairs outside the Cami, told me what I saw to my left was in fact my destination. I zoomed out and yes, there it was. I had probably mistaken it to be an extension of Cami in spite of its very distinct architecture.

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    It was a moment of epiphany, regret, happiness, sadness – quite a turmoil of emotions. I wanted a close up of Mevalana’s final resting place.

    20190629_063809.jpgMy return flight was 1000 hrs and the tomb was to open for visitors at 0900 hrs so this is the closest I got to Mevlana. I could see a series of small minarets of Mevlana’s tomb from the courtyard and wondered what life would be like for dervishes in the cells underneath them.

    Perhaps I was too impure to be let inside. Mevlana might have wanted me to read his Masnavi first before visiting him. So be it. I turn back.

    I’ll see you again, Mevlana.

    I took some steps then turned instinctively, one final time, perhaps to etch the memory of this place forever in my mind.

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  • The Melodrama of Glass

    First time i discovered that glass had an amorphous structure on a microscopic level, an infinitely disordered, messy arrangement of molecules, it was in my science class in grade 8 and i remember to have felt defrauded, even betrayed. It was a weirdly emotional moment. Glass was the most sacred thing to me before, a symbol of perfection, beauty and purity. It was hard to believe that it’s fabric, just like everybody and everything else, had it’s own unholy patches.

    Growing up, as it happens with all the children, I started off with the imagination of a perfect world created in the image of a perfect god. Slowly and gradually, as the reality hit home, I realized that perfection or absolute divinity is rather a rare thing on Earth if it exists after all. I saw that my nicest class fellows cheated in exams, teachers were ignorant, parents were distant, things stood way inferior to their imaginable ideal selves. It was like ideals were bugs and my experience an efficient insecticide. As my ideals diminished with time, the greater was the force I held on to those left. Fast forward to grade 8 where glass was pretty much the last thing I was left with. Giving up on it would mean, giving up hope, if ever, of catching the reflection of God because if not in the glass mirror, where else could you catch it! Though I was too small to enunciate it back then but I knew it in my heart of hearts that it was religiously important for me to establish that glass was divine/beautiful in its own way.

    So i looked closely into its molecular structure, surfed through the internet, downloading all the possible images that I could get my hands on of the striking, though still not ordered, molecular arrangements of the glass insides. I realized beauty does not have to be ordered. Perfection is not averse to messiness.

    Life is probably hard for an honest, thinking man. As long as I hated glass, I broke my fair share of it and now that I love it, I feel bad for all the fragments I have left behind in my path. If that’s a sacrifice life calls for, I think i have paid my dues in full. If there is one take-away from this melodrama of glass, it’s that perfection is over-rated and idealism is unrealistic and needs reality to pivot on to make any sense. All things are beautiful in their own right. Absolutely nothing in this world is totally impure, and if you find one, check the lens you’re viewing the world with. That might just be the only dirty thing around.

  • Sb Maaya Hai

    Yeh ishq bhi ajeeb hai
    Kabhi saccha kabhi jhooṭa
    Donon taraf se mann mera mann tera looṭa

    The song Sb Maaya Hai catches attention with its generous understanding that love essentially remains armed with its characteristic capability to devastate whether or not it’s ‘true’. With it’s rather surprising opening, it calls into question the conventional connotations of ‘true’ and ‘false’ love, tacitly implying that they are but meaningless, irrelevant adjectives that don’t and can’t dampen the severity and vulnerability called love. The song might come as strangely uplifting to anyone who has ever engaged in a love that didn’t eventually turn out to be the ‘ultimate’, and hence what’s conventionally known to be ‘true’, love. The importance placed on the singularity of the beloved in the journey of True Love is perhaps overamplified; love can still be true (or if we discard the meaningless adjective, love can still be love) if each beloved is thought of as a step in a thousand miles journey, a moment in an infinity, a vanishing mirage giving way to a new one in a distance, along the same path.

    I like to think I haven’t overanalyzed the lyrics. Here’s the link to Coke Studio’s version of the song:

    https://soundcloud.com/cokestudio/attaullahesakhevi-sanwalesakhelvi-sabmayahai

  • The Last Warrior

    Not until i had actually plunged into that untouched valley, did I know there could exist such a divine beauty in the heart of the metropolitan. It’s quite hard to imagine an outback bordered by commercial city area on one side and a state-of-the-art university on the other. In my hunt to run and explore beautiful places around, i had almost given up on the idea of treading a hinterland ever. But last week just after Asar, as i casually walked towards one of the lost gates of the university which was more like a tall, rusty scrap of cast iron and opened to nobody-knew-where, i suddenly found myself face to face with that baffling phenomenon; you know, a-herd-of-cows-grazing-in-a-pasture-right-in-the-middle-of-an-urban-world phenomenon!

    I ran through the huge meadow, mud-houses and grazing cattle and climbed up a hill overlooking the buzzing city. The contrast was painfully stark. Just across the road, the icons of the civilized world stood tall. The meadow on my back was perhaps the last retreat of the handful warriors who were yet not ready to give in to urbanization – and if you get a chance to run through the scarcely inhabited settlement, you’ll know why. Urban life-style maybe too catchy for some, there still are people who just can’t resist the charms of primitive living. Standing there for a moment, i felt just like Jaguar-Paw when he stood facing the sea looking at conquistador ships anchored off the coast and Spanish people moving ashore. He had to decide whether he wanted to embrace the unknown, dazzling civilization ahead or retreat to his woods. Without a sign of remorse, he had quietly turned back. The setting sun that day, saw me doing the same.

  • A Weekend Out Of My Little Universe

    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.