#78: Finding Myself In A Faraway Place

It was when I saw Christopher Columbus pointing towards the pier that I decided I wanted to study Literature.

I was in Barcelona at the time. Leaving my family in the mall that stood on the quay I chose to wander into the city without so much as a map for guidance. Keeping my back to the sea, I had only a general sense of where I was heading, only remembering which direction the sea, and hence the pier, was, as I wandered through crisscrossing alleys with high Gaudi-an balconies and narrow European streets.

Though at first my only aim had been to explore the city- I had always wanted to visit Barcelona as a boy- very soon, I found direction in my journey. Crossing a busy intersection, I was forced to stop and read one of the blue road signs that showed what lay beyond which avenue and it was there that I read the three words that would shape my future: ‘Arc De Triomphe’.

The arrow pointed diagonally into a different section of the city. Thinking, at first, that it would probably not be too far off and that I would most certainly regret not seeing it if I turned back, I changed course and walked without thinking- instinct my only guide. In the course of the hour that followed, I walked a long way without success. At the height of my disillusionment, I felt that I probably wouldn’t be able to return because I had come such a long way off.

However, the strange thing is, everything was still beautiful. The air was still cold and comforting and the sun radiated hope. As I turned the corner- the last of many I had promised myself before- there it stood in all its red-bricked glory: The Arc of Triumph. I couldn’t believe it. For ten minutes, I just stood there- the sun shining on my shoulders.

As I turned to my wristwatch, I learned that it was bordering on six at the time, and within a half hour at most, the sun would set. Out of sheer practicality, I had to return.

My journey back wasn’t as straightforward as one would imagine at first. Though I had kept my bearings, I hadn’t accounted for the intermediate dead ends, or the meandering streets, and at one instant, was almost lost again. I had been walking for a long time and, in truth, begun to worry if I’d really be able to find my way back.

That was when I saw Columbus. Perched atop his two-hundred foot pillar, his right index finger pointing towards not only the sea, but as fortune would have it, the very quay I had abandoned only hours ago.

It was in that one evanescent instant that I understood the significance of everything that had happened that day. Of my instinctual wandering eventually finding purpose, of my will in pursuing that purpose, and its fulfillment embodied within the Arc of Triumph itself. It was then I realized I had to trust my instinct. To let my heart guide me in my endeavors.

While my wandering reminded me of how I had never been sure of what I had wanted to do until I was in senior year, the manifestation of the Arc at the height of my despondency taught me that, if I stuck with it long enough, I could convince my parents to let me pursue Literature- the subject of my choice- and not Medicine, as they had proposed for me. But, perhaps, it was the arrival of Columbus that proved the most significant of all, for, even after I had found my own Arc of Triumph, I had become lost, and though I had at the time, in some small part of me, regretted my decision to venture on my own, he had brought me back and reminded me that, as long as I followed my dreams, everything would turn out all right in the end- I didn’t have to worry- and, this is why, even now, as the better part of my extended family urges me to study medicine, I insist Literature is the only field I wish to go into.

Grey and outstretched, it was beneath the finger of the man who had become famous for getting lost that I found myself.

Upon mapping my route in the hotel that evening, I discovered that I’d covered more than six kilometers in my journey. And yet, the most important step I took that day, was deciding where my future lay.

Fin.

#77: Finding Rushdie

The other day, just yesterday in fact, I walked into one of the local bookstores at Liberty, wanting to find a copy of Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’. Whatever reasons I wanted it, I could not and had not been able to find it anywhere in the city. As I climbed up the stairs to the second floor of this particular shop, where their English section was kept, I felt I really wouldn’t be able to find it there either. I lolled around the large floor- it really was huge- looking through categorized shelves, hoping to find it perhaps ineptly left concealed in the corner of the literary, or maybe the much more obvious ‘R’, section.

I had no such luck though and just before I was preparing to leave a clerk finally came away from the busying telephone conversation he’d been having in the corner for twenty minutes and sat at the computer containing the store’s directory, which happened to be right at the mouth of the staircase. In passing, I asked him whether they had a copy of Midnight’s Children lying around and he took in what I said as a matter of course, beginning to type in the title before it struck him and he paused to stare back at me.

The following conversation ensued:
“Salman Rushdie?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“We don’t stock him.”
“Why not?”
“He’s banned.”

I could see he was beginning to lose patience already, eyeing me as if I were asking for erotica from a roadside vendor outside a mosque and not literature at bookstore. Disgust colored his face.

‘But I thought only The Satanic Verses was banned? Midnight’s Children is not.’ I said, admittedly because a part of me wanted to provoke a reaction, but even so it was the first thing that came to mind.
He went mad.
‘Do you want to get us killed?’ he said. ‘The maulvis would have our heads! One time they even broke the windows and-‘

He was clearly agitated, but I stopped him from his raging diatribe, saying I’d only asked and that he should relax. I spuriously looked at the bookshelf closest to me, then left.

Now while the man’s reaction was undoubtedly the least warranted of things, this entire incident made me think. Ignoring absolutely everything else, the crux of the matter was: should a book be banned if, though in itself it contains no objectionable content, but it’s author has, elsewhere committed what would be dubbed as transgressions within our society? I can’t help saying that it saddened me that I could not find a Rushdie novel anywhere.

Granted, physically he may well be the incarnation of the devil himself and to some, might even have proved it through The Satanic Verses, but, for me at least, that does not warrant banning his other works, especially one that has garnered as much literary praise as ‘Midnight’s Children’. Dubbed ‘The Booker of Bookers’ in 1993, I for one cannot resist trying to get my hands on this book.

And so I trudge on.

Fin.

#76: Vicissitudes

Life’s been so strange lately. There’s always been good days and there’s always been bad days, but, lately the two seem so intertwined I don’t know where I’ve been at all. It’s sad because you feel so happy and contented one minute, and, without any real reason, your entire day gets upended and you wish you could just go to bed and forget anything ever happened and that you were still alive and breathing and taking up space the next.

Plus: the work. There’s so much of it. In the past month, I can say that there’s literally been only one day when I’ve gone home and haven’t had stacks upon stacks of work to do. Reports to finish. Essays to check. Forms to complete or tests to study for. And, on top of that, there’s so many other things that dictate whether or not I’ll even be able to do them all or not. People. Parents.

Feelings.

It’s almost as if one thing goes my way then two others certainly must go the other. If one thing makes me happy then a second, almost necessarily, must make me feel like shit. At the same time. Only more so.

Why is that? Why can’t I be completely happy for longer than a day, two or three at most? I don’t know- maybe it’s just God’s way of teaching us to grow up.  To focus on the things that ‘matter’ as if that’s some sort of absolute. Or maybe, to not mess with things which we we’re not ready for yet and might not ever be either.

And yet, I could swear I was.
Am.

Fin.

#75: Purpose

Since I haven’t blogged in a while and because I’m three-quarters of the way to a hundred posts, I think it’s about time I give this blog something it really hasn’t had despite it being a year since I started it: context. To be very honest, as far as I recall, my intentions for blogging weren’t exactly the purest. The very first blog I started was a sports blog. Football, to be precise. I wanted to be a sports journalist at the time and, well, as naive as it sounds, I thought I’d start a blog. Write about my favourite team. People would recognise my incisive insight just like that and I’d be writing columns for 4-4-2 by next Tuesday. Yeah. I was one of those kids.

The same went for my second blog, too. Though it was alot more personal than the old one, I wrote it because- and I feel slightly childish admitting this- I wanted a book deal. I’d heard about so many people who had been offered deals to write books based on the content of their blogs that I felt it would be easy. It was in my blood to be famous, after all. To be successful. Wise. And writing, too, at that.
Oh, naiveté.

It wasn’t really until I started this blog that I wrote for myself. For things I actually thought and wrote about because I had something to say. Because I had to get something out. To be honest, I’m not the most open of people. At least not about the things that matter. And I know that. The only way I can really say the things I want to, even if it isn’t anonymously, is through writing. The things I can never say in person, I can say on paper. And easily, too.

The funny thing is, I think in writing so much over the last year I lost sight of what my aims were. In the beginning, I honestly didn’t care about the number of views I got in a day. Just writing a post and publishing it would get me that high that we get from doing the things we love. But, lately, actually no, for the past few months or so, I’ve felt different. I couldn’t feel content without having checked my statistics, and then too only when they were… acceptable- to say the least.

I’ve seriously considered quitting blogging over it. It made me sad. Just thinking about how no one really cared about anything that I wrote. Today, though, I was going through some of the posts I’d written over the past year. And they brought back so many memories. And, well, I felt some were really well written too. So, yeah. That really was when I realised something. I write for myself. It might not have been the way I’ve always written- I’m not going to lie about that. But that’s the way it is now and hopefully always will be. If writing still makes me happy then there’s really not much else that counts, to be honest.

I’m very selfish sometimes.

Fin.

#74: Futures

I get worried sometimes. And most of the time I get worried, it’s when I think about the future. But, then again, I get excited sometimes too. And, more often than not, that’s when I think about the future too. To be honest, right now, I have no idea where I’ll be a year on from here. I’d like to think I’d be studying English or Journalism somewhere abroad. But, I don’t know. It’s a possibility, yeah, it is, but even then I can’t ever let myself believe in it, because if I do, I might begin to expect it- and you know what they say about expectations.

It’s kind of funny how none of us know where we’ll be a year from now, actually. It would be amazing if all of us were admitted into our dream colleges, but that doesn’t really happen. Even then, what makes me sadder is how we might all be miles apart. University is like starting life all over again. You barely know one or two people beforehand, and, as far as you know, your closest friends are hundreds, if not thousands of kilometres away- maybe even in a different country altogether. Making friends again is exactly the easiest thing in the world. I like my old friends just fine, thank you very much. And, what’s more: I’ve got memories with them- good and old- and I don’t think I could part with them for the world.

But I suppose it’s all a part of growing up, isn’t it? Losing things and people and leaving places behind. Being on your own and being responsible for yourself and having no one to lean on when you’re feeling weak. There’s a feeling of romanticism about it, yes. About being in a foreign country, seventeen, independent and alone. About taking care of yourself, washing your own clothes, cooking your own food, cleaning up after yourself not because you want to or anything- but because you have to. It’ll be an experience to remember, sure, but, sometimes, when you think about how hard it’s going to be, you just don’t know anymore. And that’s where things get weird.

Life’s strange when you don’t even know what you want anymore.

Fin.

#73: Years

The other day as I walked into school, I saw a gathering of kids around the notice boards. They huddled together, talking excitedly, and as I walked past them into the building, I realised they were standing beside the class announcement list. Just then I felt a strange mixture of sadness and happiness. I remembered the first day of my O’ levels and everything that went along with it: the new school, the naiveté and the excitement that came with slipping your finger down the class lists, looking for your name and then counting up and down to see how many of your friends were in your section and how many not. It was the same day they were going through then and it was the thought that someone else was feeling exactly what I had felt so many years ago and making those same memories I’d made without even knowing all that time past, that made me happy.

But what made me sad was knowing that I’d never feel the same thing again. That I was too old for something. Today, in fact, was our college orientation, too, and we welcomed the Class of 2014. The class that’ll be graduating the year after we do. And it was today, as I sat at our desks, signing up people for our societies, that I felt this feeling, of being old. Of being last year’s model, so to speak. And that’s what made me really sad. That, everything special that I’d felt: the first day of college, my finding new friends, developing interests into new things and what not, were all meaningless insofar that they happened every year. What I had been feeling all through last year wouldn’t be anymore special what they’d feel, or what the batch after them would feel and so on.

When you think about, you realise how cyclic everything must really be. How, every year, there’ll be another you, another of your best friend, another of that group in the cafeteria whom you’re not too fond of, of the one’s in the ground you play football with, of those in the common room you talk with each morning, and, most of all, of the ones you love to walk through the halls with, or sit in the library with and just talk to until an hour’s passed and it’s time for class and you still don’t feel like going.

Must be funny being a teacher and watching everything happen all over again every year. I wonder what they think about when they see every new batch coming in on the first day of term. Maybe they search the classroom as the kids walk in, silently sorting out the ones who’ll be smart from the ones who might not be. Maybe, as they turn to the board and scribble their name and subject across it they wonder if this class’ll be better than the last one they had. Maybe, as they have everyone introduce themselves, they hope they can remember all the names and not embarrass themselves the next day as they did the year before. Yeah, maybe they do all that.

Or maybe they just smile.

Fin.

#72: Fall

As I type this, I’m sitting across the room from my granddad. It’s his birthday. He’s sitting on one of those maroon La-Z-Boy recliners, reading the paper and you wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary about him, even if you try. His face is shaved, though, and he’s showered and clean and even this may not seem to be of any significance until you know the details of what happened in the morning. At eight-thirty, my mom woke me up, telling me he’d slipped and fallen in his own room and couldn’t get up. For someone older than eighty, it’s not the easiest thing in the world. I ran to his room, finding him sitting up right against his the side of his bed, not yet fully dressed, and pulling him by the shoulders, I got him up onto the bed, eventually helping him with his clothes.

He seemed shaken from the entire episode and sat in bed till afternoon. According to him, he’d wanted to get up early, since it was his birthday, and shower and shave and get dressed. However, as he had been in the bathroom, about to take a shower, his legs just ‘gave way’ beneath him and he fell to the ground. That was six-thirty in the morning. We hadn’t discovered him till eight thirty. He then apparently dragged himself from the bathroom to his bed, which was about 7-8 feet away and tried to brace himself up onto it. He couldn’t, despite all his efforts, and sat there for two hours until we went into his room and found him there. Even as he sat up on the bed, he kept staring at his feet, saying how ‘he just couldn’t understand’ what had happened, talking of how his legs didn’t have any strength in them and in his stare, you could see the certain wistfulness that only old age can know.

I stayed with him for a few hours in the morning, just sitting by his side and reading. Eventually, he dozed off and I left him there to sleep in peace. That was at least three hours ago. Right now, as I came to the lounge a while ago, he’s sitting before me. The weakness of the morning seems long gone and he’s bathed and shaved. Just like he intended to in the morning. He watches TV and you can see the news mirrored in the thick glass of his spectacles. When I look at him, I can’t help but smile.

Fin.

#71: To The People You Never Met

After so many days, I’ve actually felt the need to get up and write a post. Not the want to, not the desire to, you know; I mean the proper need to, the I-can’t-go-without-saying-what-I-have-to-say feeling that’s always been what inspires good writing. Right now, I feel like talking to you. About people, and, more specifically, about the people you haven’t met yet.

It’s so amazing how people you’ve never known before, never seen before, slowly become a part of your life, first by that perchance meeting, then a few minutes each day, then eventually always having an hour or two that becomes entirely theirs, and, somehow, over the course of a few months, they are your day. Isn’t it? You fall asleep talking to them, you wake and they’re there in one way or another- a message, a feeling, somehow, they are there and you thank God every waking moment that they are.

And, after you meet them, you change. For the better. And then you wonder what would have happened if you hadn’t met them. Sure, hell, you wouldn’t have noticed it but now you do notice it and you think how sad and depressing your life would have otherwise been without you even realising it and then you thank God again for not letting life stay the same way it was because even though you hadn’t known it this was exactly what you wanted and what you needed and He was sure one hell of a guy to give it to you without your asking for it and you wouldn’t be surprised if it were really all a dream because it was just too good to be true but it was real and I might be crazy but that’s what makes it so unreal this oh god oh god thank you thank you so so so much feeling which is really what it’s all about.

I find it funny just how impossible it is for us to choose the people we meet. You can’t really strike up a conversation with every other person you meet. You can’t really be nice to every person on the street, say hi, shake hands and hope they’re exactly the sort of friend you’ll always need. It’s funny how we rue the people we never met.

Fin.

#70: To Have and Have Not

Recently, I’ve started interning at a local hospital pretty close to where I live. For the most part, it’d really been pretty ordinary, up until today. Usually, we’d just listen to talks, tour the hospital, talk with doctors, patients and, well, just get an overall feel for what the hospital’s about and how it functions and all. Today, though, was much more thought provoking than that. Today, we had our case studies. Our job was to interview specific patients, to ask them about their illnesses, diseases, life, anything we fancied, really, and to form a report from the information we gathered.

To be honest, I didn’t expect too much from the case study. I thought we’d go into the wards, talk to someone with a mild, much less than debilitating illness, write a few points, convert them into a report and then cross another thing off our to-do list for the day. But, as it turns out, I was wrong. The patient I met, Muhammad Awais, was a dark, aging man of about fifty, with greying stubble around his chin and cheeks- an almost beard- and eyes that were slightly yellow, that continually looked up at the ceiling, even as I talked to him.

“Excuse me,” I said, “We’re doing a report on the patients in this hospital and the treatment they’re receiving. Would you mind answering a few questions for me?”
“No, no,” he said, “Ask me whatever you want.”

And so I did. I asked him about his illness. The man had diabetes. He had high blood pressure and, on top of that, as if God were adding the cherry atop some sick twisted apple pie, he was blind. I don’t know what, but, something compelled me to keep on talking to him.

“Umm. Do you work, by any chance?” I said, realising the stupidity of my question the instant I’d posed it.
“No, of course not,” he said. “I can’t do anything like this.
I’m like a living corpse now.”

And here’s the thing about what he said. Sitting wherever you are, reading this, you’d feel that it’s just another cliche, but, it’s when you’re there at bedside, and a person like that is lying right there on the bed in front of you and you experience everything for your own self and you see the truth of what they’re saying, manifested in the form of an actual bed-ridden man who was probably at one time or another healthier than either you or I, incapable of doing anything and everything that he once could without the help of another person and in doing so becoming an unbearable burden upon the person and realising it for himself and who really wants to live that way, after all?

So, I guess, the point of me telling you all this is, that, well, you really never know what’s going to happen to you, is all. Like, Awais himself didn’t know he had kidney problems until he went to get his eyes checked because of the pain he’d felt in them owing to his high blood pressure and all. And, then, even when he did, it wasn’t early enough to do anything but begin dialysis as they began to fail completely.

So, yeah. I suppose you never should feel you’ve gotten the short end of the stick in life. As unsettlingly reassuring as it seems, there’s always someone worse off than you.

Fin.

#69: Two Things

When I tend to be alone, most of the time, I think. About a lot of things. I really shouldn’t be left alone. And, well, sometimes, I think about things that are so above my understanding that it’s silly of me to even think about them. But, well, I’m stubborn like that, so I do. One of the things I’ve thought about often is what do we, as people, really want from life. Not what we’re meant to do, no, not that. What do we want, for ourselves, from the life that we’re given?

Well, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can say that I’d like to think that there are two things we all live for, things that we might work for, but at the same time, are things that we wait for to come to us by themselves, by fate, because God knows its our right to have them. The first of these, is happiness. Even in one of my older posts, I quoted Anne Frank, when she spoke of how “We all live with the objective of being happy“. And I stand by it.

It’s true, you know. Happiness is the one thing you will always want, no matter who you are, wherever you’re from, or whichever century you’re living in. It’s universal, like that, because, after all, if you don’t live to be happy, what do you live for? Why do we work? Why do we study? Why do we do anything? To get a job? For money? Why do we need money? To live comfortably? To provide? Why do we feel the need to do this? Because in the end, that’s what will make us happy, as convoluted it seems.

The second thing, well, is to be remembered, and, I don’t know, but I think this could possibly be the greatest thing you could ever hope to achieve. To be remembered, and be remembered in a good way. After all, that’s what most people hope to achieve, anyway. To, somehow, leave a mark on the world so profound and indelible that it ensures they are never forgotten. It’s what Columbus did when he discovered the Americas, it’s what Edison did when he invented the lightbulb, it’s what Shakespeare did when he wrote Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest and so many other plays. I think this is because we’re all greedy things. We want to live forever. And, knowing how it’s not possible physically,  and knowing man’s folly itself, I’m not surprised we’re stupid enough to try.

Fin.