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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.
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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.
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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.
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On Sea and Nostalgia
The Nani Ami’s house turns dark and cold in Karachi’s winters. Back in childhood, I could not imagine that sunlight would ever go scarce in a house that had large open verandahs on its front and back. When we visited from South Punjab during summers, the image of white curtains and bedsheets fluttering in the seawind breezing through Nani Ami’s west-open house that lay before us drenched in a nice warm tinge always cast a spell on me and promised a summer filled with adventure.
Times have changed and Karachi’s uncontrollable Frankenstein of commercialization has successfully turned the diverse neighborhood of low-walled houses painted in sprightly colors and adorned with trees and leafy plants into ominous uniform megastructures whose bold edifices look cold and alien, and block all the sunlight from the sparse independent houses that still remain. Wrapped in blankets, trying to fight off the melancholic gloom that accompanies the cold darkness, we curse the tyrannical manifestations of capitalism at our doorstep and long for freedom. Someone said, ‘Hawkes Bay?’ and we all responded in unison, ‘Hallelujah’.
Thanks to a rapidly piling list of epic adventures that our group of maternal cousins including their families had been logging lately, we were not afraid to pitch the idea to them first and see if it garnered interest. Their keen response sent us in a flurry of preparations necessary for a picnic on the beach. The night before, a Hiace had been rented, attires decided upon, a football packed in, and we were pretty much go for the day ahead. The cousins joined us the next morning with a cricket bat, badminton rackets and an assortment of indoor card and board games. Soon we piled up into the Hiace which, despite our doubts, proved spacious and sufficiently comfortable for our purposes. The formidable driver glided over the potholed roads of Karachi. A fateful turn towards the Turtle Beach proved disappointing with its nondescript beachfront and pocket breaking hut rents. We now turned to the Hawkes Bay, missed it once, almost barged into the French Beach but were fought off by the valiant guards protecting elite interests from commoners, returned once again to the Hawkes Bay and eventually found a budget-friendly hut with an exotic beachfront (after at least half a dozen hut evaluations). Without wasting a second, we offloaded, tiptoed over the round ocean stones and ran off in the warm sand to the shimmering blue calling waves.
The sun shone brightly and we were so deprived that the kids rolled on the sand and made sandcastles, couples walked hand-in-hand along the waves lapping up against their feet, then we all played cricket and dodge-the-ball, and juggled some football. The fair ladies shrugged off the looming threat of sunburn and turned the beach into a show of colors with their spectacular cricket performances. The Biryani from the nearby hotel shack tasted delicious and so did the evening tea with baqir khanis. From the beach, a long brown rock pier trailed away from the sand and the civilization behind it, into the majestic sea now reflecting a deeper shade of blue in the slanting rays of the sinking sun. As it began to cool off, we all headed to the rock pier to spend our final moments reflecting on the nature and capturing it in our camera frames.
Since Nani Ami believes in leaving a place better than one entered it which also strikes a chord with me, we did our bit in cleaning the beach and picked some 25 kg of plastics and fishing net out of the sea.
The city remained in turmoil that afternoon as more protests erupted due to mass killings of an ethnic minority last month. I reached home safely thanking God for being given another day and wondering if all Karachiites develop some sort of religious disposition and learn to be grateful for, what the first world may consider, ‘as little as’ merely survival. As I continue to reflect on where I want to settle and put down my roots, Karachi remains a formidable candidate in a list of international cities. May be I can live and thrive and escape harm my entire remaining life in a city fraught with violence as I did yesterday. Regardless of what the future holds, this fantastic trip has largely allayed my crippling fear of moving with the family in Karachi for now, not because the security situation has gotten any better but because I’m finding it home.
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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?
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On Lost People
Some people just vanish into thin air after you’ve come to fancy them. Others don’t exactly vanish but they let something die / break / crystallize in them which makes them unrecognizable. Either way, you lose someone you cared about, a part of yourself and a possibility of being someone different through them.
There was this one guy from university hostel who used to be up early morning jogging and sparring (Muhammad Ali style) along the Bolan Rd / Indus Loop just when I stretched before my usual 5-miler at the Iqbal Square. On my tempo runs, I would pass him by, grunting out a salam while he carried on boxing with an imaginary rival. Later, our interests converged on a religio-political philosophy thanks to an active proselytizing circle on campus. He was different in some really fundamental way that I can vaguely recall now since it’s been a decade I have seen or talked to him. One thing that I do remember is him being very passionate about Robert Pirsig’s book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which struck me as quite an odd thing, and hence, charming. A guy training as an electrical engineer has to be quite extraordinary to find passion in a philosophy book. And to vanish so completely in this age as to not leave a trail.
I have known other remarkable people who have stuck around only to change so much that they might as well be total strangers. They are old colleagues, fellow bloggers, class fellows, and sometimes, even family. At the risk of appearing needy and clingy, I think you should keep prodding them until you get your person back out of them. Your attempt to connect / reconnect can be spurned or worse, ignored hurting some self-esteem (or whatever it is they call it these days which keeps people from connecting with other people). Doesn’t the myth that most valuable treasures are guarded by most poisonous snakes teach some valuable lesson? One must ask oneself what’s more important in the long run; false satisfaction of a misplaced ego or a cherished life-long connection. That’s coming from an introvert btw if that adds any more weight to it.
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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
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 the maestro, JS, himself. What I said in response might be misogynistic by contemporary standards but it’s so hard to say anything worthwhile without hurting certain sensitivities that I usually don’t care. Besides, in my defense, I would say that gender characterization was not the objective and one could conveniently flip the two genders without much effect on the meaning.
Women are classic, tantalizing milestones in a man’s journey of Love. The destination of Love is someplace else. 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
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.
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The Lake
My mother-in-law had been pining for a trip to the lake since the day she had arrived so we finally decided to drive her up there and spend a night by the lakeside this weekend. It had been a while since I and Fatima had visited the lake anyway so I pushed my workout up from the usual afternoon to early morning and planned to set off after the Friday prayers.
I like to keep my travel prep simple. The ritual involves going over three things: book, food and dress. The perk of traveling with my wife (apart from her cherishable company, of course) is that she takes care of everything else so I only have to worry about the first – a book that would go with the clear lake and skies, in this case. My bookshelf here is in a bit of a crisis since I’ve been lending out more books lately than I’m buying so it was to be a challenge to pick something uniquely suited to the occasion. But I soon realized I was mistaken when I noticed The Sheldon Book of Verse, an anthology of poems, tucked away in a dusty corner for God-knows-how-many years. I plucked out the paperback and took a moment to appreciate its handiness and vintage aesthetic appeal. Published in 1957, no wonder it was a relic from the past.
As I drove down the M-9, the scenic Kirthar Mountains appeared on the driver’s side. It’s hard to ignore the distinctive mesas (i.e. flat-topped hills) standing solemnly in the barren wilderness. While I saw their distant figures behind the haze of smog every day while commuting back from work, it was a totally different experience to see them up close by the roadside. Ancient vagabonds riveted in space but traveling through time, I thought. For some reason unknown to me, the sight of these mountains in particular, and nature in general, is immensely liberating and awe-inspiring to me, offering a sense of humility and freedom from all that’s trivial. I rolled down my car window to take in the fresh winter afternoon.
Stock photo of Kirthar Mountains Soon the wind turbines were visible on the passenger side. Hashir would be excited to see them but he was already asleep in his grandfather’s lap. As I got off the motorway and headed towards Jhampir, we realized we were snaking through the vast fields of wind turbines on both sides, their blades and towers now too imposing to take in a single glance. It took some five minutes of gentle patting on Hashir’s face to wake him up from the slumber he had drifted into during the past half hour, but the surprised smile that plastered itself on his dazed, still-sleepy face once he saw the giant structures made it worth the effort.
The link road leading to Jhampir had several cattle farms belonging to Palari and Jakro tribes. A shrine (مزار شریف) would pop up every few kilometers reminding me of what M. A. Yusufi wrote about the shrines of sham saints in Sindh in his book, Aab-e-Gum:
ان سے متعلق ہر چیز شریف ہے سواۓ صاحب مزار کے
The road is surprisingly fine compared to what you expect a link road in interior Sindh to be like. But it gets deceptive further ahead as you find suspicious speed breakers in the middle of nowhere that can cause serious damage to your car if you aren’t vigilant. The link road culminates at a bridge over the railway crossing at Jhampir station. We were even able to show Hashir his first train up close while stopping by the same bridge on our way back.
From there on, it’s a narrow 6 km road to the motel. The road is lined on both sides by acacia and sometimes, date-palm trees particularly as you head closer to the lake. Parchoon shops set up in tiny cabins and manned by stout, thick-mustached Sindhis donning traditional Sindhi caps make for an interesting sight. The peculiar, familiar scent associated with the sea for a Karachiite becomes noticeable much before the lake is even visible. Soon we are driving through the non-descript motel gate. The sun is still well above the horizon. We have managed to reach in time.
The sun sets opposite the lake which means you can’t photograph the majestic lake sunsets you might have thought to capture on your way here. This can be a bit disappointing until you realize that it also means the sun would rise right above the lake the next morning. After a cup of tea and dinner, and a lot of sky- and lake-watching and mosquito-fighting in between, I snuggled up in bed with my book hoping to wake up to catch the first ray of sun the next day.
I woke up in the morning twilight an hour before sunrise and headed straight out into the cold in my T-shirt and pajamas, anxious not to miss a single moment of the miracle that is a false dawn. Soon the fishing boats start to appear in distance; fishermen starting their day, rowing and setting up nets. Despite the biting cold none of us was prepared for (except me since my wonderful wife had packed in a hoodie), we gathered on the lawn in anticipation of the sunrise.
The sun came up slowly and majestically from under the lake. Picture and video credits go to my sister-in-law who is a shutterbug and maintains an impressively artistic social media presence. Everybody basked in the warm sun while I and Fatima made breakfast in the rickety motel kitchen. In just a couple hours, the sun was high up in the sky and the lake began to simmer sending us back to our rooms. With the monumental event of the day over and the temperatures rising steadily, there was little else to do at the motel except pack our bags and get going.
While the narrative of the story ends, the reflections, too many to recount here, demand a sequel which I will be writing shortly. Until then, Ciao!
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Paper Boats
I have four tabs open in Chrome. A Google Slide for a presentation coming up at work next week, a paper on macro-human factors in aviation maintenance that’s going to help me with that, a dense Cambridge university publication exploring the relationship between Marxism and Islamic Mysticism that I might give up reading halfway through, and Ghulam Ali’s rendition of Nasir Kazmi’s ghazal Dil mein ek leher si uthi hai abhi on Youtube; his vocal cords doing justice to the word, leher (wave), in eight different styles sweeping me away as if on eight musical waves.
It’s already 10.30 pm; this day will end like all others. I just want to remind myself that it was a splendid day. What could be more splendid than a bowlful of Nihari for dinner with all its traditional condiments anyway? And a lovely family who’s visited from across the other side of the country to put some life into your painfully expansive apartment?
I just wish I had spoken up at work when it mattered. When the self-righteous seniors were decimating the junior first-timer on the rostrum, my appreciation of his presentation could have gone a long way for him. But it was too hard to speak up then. And it’s harder still to forgive myself now for having taken the easier path. I think I’ll remember this pain and do what’s right the next time it matters. The world suffers a lot. Not because of the violence of bad people but because of the silence of good people. If not for myself, then for the world out there. I. Will. Speak. Up.
I have an early morning speed workout with the boys. The competition will start Dec 2 so we don’t have much time left. Every mile is counting now. I have not been in such great shape in the past 5 years and if I sail through the 10,000m race, which I very much hope to, I am packing my bags for the Naltar marathon coming up in Jan next year. That would be exquisite; the master of all adventures. There are lots of ifs and buts at the moment. That I remain injury-free. That my boss understands what running the highest marathon in the world means to me at this point in time and spares me for the month-long high-altitude training preceding the race. They say when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Whatever happens, I have something to look forward to and that should suffice for a good night’s sleep.
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In the Nuance of Light 