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I am
diseased. But not that of a physical kind. It is more in my consciousness, in
my heart, in my memories, and in my past. It effects how I perceive life, how I
behave, how willing I might feel to participate in life. I have tried to cure it
by going to certain kinds of doctors: the psychiatrists, the therapists. But
they’ve rarely worked. I have put personal effort into getting well as well,
since I do want to be rid of this disease, even if it has come to seem like it
is a part of me now. But who knows, maybe it is a part of me. I have read books
to educate myself, but not in a traditional sense. Reading fiction is hardly
considered a kind of education. But what people miss is that for abstract
things like wisdom, love, pain, purpose, grit, the textbooks or the life-hacks
hardly work at all. There is no direct and clear way of learning how to be
wise, or how to love, or how to heal a heart break, or how to muster motivation
continuously. As abstract as they are, so is learning them. What novels do is
present the author’s such abstract pieces of advice into a story other than
your own, and helps you learn things without ever feeling like you’re learning
them. To understand how we feel, the things we think, the ways we act, and in
light of them, how a life turns out to be – fiction is the only place where we
can reflect upon ourselves and, maybe, get a bit closer to understanding who we
are. The nobility of reading isn’t in having read the classics, or a certain
number of books, but in being successfully awakened to your own self, to the
abstractness of your own consciousness. Fiction sensitizes us to the world
within and without us: we start noticing the fleeting yet commanding emotions
inside us, and to certain small happenstances that brings about a reaction in
us.
But the
consoling effect of a good novel is its sacrifice for the sake of the reader.
Reading a story that might in parts reflect your life and your tendencies, and
you not having to live through with them, but rather be a mere witness to the unfolding
of the eventual consequences. In a novel a life completes, and you get to see
what you cannot in your own life. You witness how the true might then be Oscar
Wilde’s damning confession that ‘Of the only two tragedies in life, there is
one that you do not get what you wish for, and the other where you get it’. And you
witness still how exceedingly and more punishingly tragic the latter case is:
to have been given what you so desperately desired for and for it to have
turned out to hell. You sigh a relief when you close down the book and reflect
on the heights of what you just went through – a sigh of relief that it wasn’t
you, and an almost revelation that ‘it doesn’t have to be you.' (I am thinking
of you, poor Adolphe). When most of our lives we are bur desperately blinded by
the presented and continuously tormented by the past, how pitifully little we
know how to act, let alone act well. A novel gives you admirably and enviously
detailed and pointed stories, that real life could never do with its uncertainties
and muteness, where you can see, for yourself, the multiple realities being
lived through and their consequences with them. I am not implying that novels change
fates, maybe they do, but it very subtly, from one book to another, from one
story to the next, from one insight into the following, nudge you and change
you, rather subconsciously, in becoming aware of the dangers of passion, of the
importance of human connections, and on the perseverance of hanging on.
I can name
my disease many things: loneliness, lack of love, inability to love myself, the
absence of the other, or the many failures of finding that other. Also, in
keeping them. Ambitions hardly fuel my life now, and it never did so while
growing up either. I didn’t live in poverty, so I don’t ambit for money; in
my shyness, I hardly wanted people to see me so I was never much destined for
fame; in my desperate attempts to avoid being on my own, I clang to my friends
and their company provided much of the substance in filling my days and years;
then my friendship grew more beautiful, we broke our hearts and shared our
pains, created merry memories, and took on intellectual endeavors; we tolerated
each other and each one of us made us feel worthy of living
despite our ow never ending confusions about life, and the ever increasing
pressure to prove that we will one day make a family and living of our own.
Books came and it thrusted me into more lives, and therein I found the
grandness of it, its miseries and little bounds of joys, its possibilities
and how consoling their effects were on my own aloneness and mediocrity. Books made
a better person out of me. I matured prematurely and those around me came to
respect this about me. I’m not an exceptional student, but I am honest,
respectful, and true to myself – and my teachers have loved that about me
and so have my friends. Where I am now in my life, I have an easy-going nature
with the people in my life, both new and old, and even easier nature about
myself: for I have stuck with me, gazed at myself, and have accepted whatever
I’ve found therein while holding on to the parts of me that make me a beautiful
person.
Yet I
remain tormented. My years of early adulthood have either been marked by
loneliness, sense of being a failure, or in pain of heart break. There is, as
of now, a melancholic regret of having ended up the way I am. To quote Jaun
Elia: ‘Apne Mayyar Tak Na Pohncha Mein / Muj Ko Khud Par Badha Bharosa Tha’
(Failed I to meet my aspirations / Such confidence I had about me). But a lot
has to ensue and unfold, hasn’t it? The growing up of my nephews, the death of
my parents, the aging of elder sister and Sir Khadim, the weddings and children
of friends and my own, the weddings of our children… Dastaane Daraaz Hain Tu! (A
very long story you are, life). Yet there is a sense of damage about me, a
deadening of the source of life, an accumulated sense of loss and having
failed. To live in continuous loneliness with an always alert lookout for
company, and finding but normal friends has put a diminishing effect on my
quality of life. The desire to meet a humble, honest, and defiantly cheerful
company, well versed in poetry and with a sense of wisdom about himself, full
of witty aphorisms and anecdotes divine, and with a heart of compassion and
generous kindness, and with a habit of checking in on you and asking that very
essential question: are you okay? And then doing that most healing of acts:
listening; followed with tender, humorous, and uplifting advice. I’ve failed
miserably to find such a person. Most of my friends have a sense of arrogance about
them, some are humble but too deprived of any good advice, and none of them
have read Kundera, which makes them immediately hopeless. To be replied to,
after a moment of watering eyes and mourning of one’s fate, with a couplet of
Ghalib or of Jaun, then with followed with a widening view of the tragedy that
is life, beginning in: Oh Ejaz, poor you! ‘Ibn e Maryam Huwa Kare Koi / Mere
Dukh Ki Dawa Kare Koi’ (Let be someone the Son of Mary / To console this
sadness of mine). Ghalib
I will only
touch briefly on the sense of failure that I now and then feel, for they are
torments not of my own but of a life that’s unceasingly demanding. I don’t know
where to begin a career of mine. I wish I had opted for the big fish studies:
medical, law, or programming. Business Administration, while wide in its
applications and scope, require a lot of choosing, a lot of expertise, and a
quite a few connections to get started on. And even then, a sheer dedication to
keep climbing the ladder. As of now, I don’t know how my career life will
eventualize, which is an alarming sign. When you don’t know where to go, it is
easy to feel lost at every step. It is not as much about success as about
building a sustainable life that you can at least endure, how better enjoy,
alongside your life as you wish to live it: a house, a worriless source of
income, healthy family, and occasional vacations. The verdict on this remains a
long time to be declared, and I am but cautiously afraid that I might mess it
up.
To have
someone by your side, a romantic permanence, a loyal partner, a sharer of grief
and a maker of happiness, and a reason to do well: that might have eased the
burden of it all together. But where I have miserably failed is to bring out
very opposite results in pursuit of this ‘other’. I’ve petted myself a disease
of painful memories, years marked in agonizing pain, and a debilitating effect
that has left me disheartened and yearning with ache. My first ex, now happily
engaged, felt hurt by my confession of a childhood love. But she shouldn’t have
distressed about not being the first, it is our last love that usually gets it
all. The preluding encounters are but a preparation, of not only finding the
right one, but remaining with someone who also wants to remain with you. Maybe
this too is an infliction of my times: to be coupled and to have someone by
your side. Whatever the case, I have internalized it, and it remains with me
day in and day out: that search, when in general loneliness for the other, and
when in absence, in search of who was. It is to a certain degree in our hands
to decide who our final love would be, should we understand the fact that every
other relationship that we might in imagination seek refuge in, would just be
as disappointing. It is about salvaging the good parts, holding on to that
earnestness of sticking together and putting labor into a love that has lost
the excitements and promises of its earlier days, and to make it more
sustaining, enough. I desperately wanted my recent, and also now happily engaged,
ex to stick out these years of confusing and incompleteness with me. I still had to ‘stand
on my feet’ and we still had to learn to love each other despite our grave
flaws. But while she felt slipping out of love against my complains and
regretful attempts to come closer, I grew more obsessive and ruined whatever
hope there remained of such a prolonged and labored love. The irony remains,
though only for me, that I can’t imagine to have lived a peaceful life with her,
not because I would’ve been narcissistically unsatisfied, given how many
scarring wrongs we had done to each other in the three years, but because I
wouldn’t have been able to bear the disappointment and, even resentment, she
would’ve felt at choosing to marry me. Just last night my friend reminded me to
be respectful about her when I remarked that her fiancé, whom I don’t know,
might’ve been with her all this time, without my knowledge. That reminder, like
an earlier one from another of my friend, when she desperately wanted out, to
understand her situation as well and be less stubborn, put me into my senses
that she has now chosen to move on from me, and has done so handsomely. It
is demanded of me as a decent person, let alone a recent lover, to respect her
decisions and quietly let myself and my memories obliviate from her life, so
that she might begin to live a happier one with whom she chose as her ‘other’.
As for me,
I have been left alone in the relationship, and from how I see it, I will dwell
in the darkness, pain, and ruins of for quite some time to come. Albeit,
quietly, very quietly, without ever a word or a whisper, or an ‘ahh’ reaching
her. I can. I have grown used to misery. Towards the end of Ibsen’s play ‘The
Doll’s House’, Nora while leaving her husband for good, who too like me was
unaware of the damaging effect he was having on her, says something quite
profound and fulfilling of her duties as a lover and wife: ‘As I had to beak
with you, it was my duty also to put an end to all that you felt for me’. She
wasn’t no Nora, she wasn’t delicate or so caring outside of herself, yet I
loved her despite of it. For when she was loving, I, for those too few too short
moments, felt complete, at peace, and in the right place. I was asked for her
write something for my closure, so that it should at least help me stop the bleeding:
her remarks included but all my faults that I knowingly but unhelpably
committed against her. Confess I shall, and do every day, the very deeds I did
come to haunt me every now and then, regardless of how mutual they began and
cruelly isolated I remained with it and yet ever so deprived. In all honesty and
sense, I was no perfect boyfriend. I was one with too many flaws which needed to be ironed out; she wasn’t patient enough to wait that long. Yet I would,
defiantly, champion my good sides as well, for they made me a lover to her that
she had seldom had before. It is not a morality tale. It was a tale of passion,
first in union, then in very conflicting circumstances. I know it now: she is
Latifa Rehmat, and that isn’t going to change. I asked myself in a recent blog
that how does one decide when something has ended: the answer is, you don’t. It
ends, and you can know without ever being able to do something. That is, you
know it too late.
This is a case of ‘life is bitch and then you keep on living’: that is my due punishment. Without her and without the future that never was; yet with the painstaking memories that always will be. But at least I have sad songs, and the tears that still flow, and the nose fluid that always ruin the crying, but I also have tissues to wipe away the wetness and moist the eyes again. And when the tears cease to flow, I have cigarettes to light and smoke away. And then pills to take few too many to help me sleep an uninterrupted sleep, dreamless most hopefully. And then when I wake, I have friends to call, and go for tea, and smoke some more, while pouring my heart with poorly chosen words and metaphors, and then having to listen to their painfully misdirected advices, and being reminded of how deprived I remain of ‘Ibn e Maryam’. And then I return home, and the loneliness begins. The forged activities, then, are all that’s left for me attend to: reading that book, writing that review, watching that movie, planning the day tomorrow, and then waking up alone to live it all again.