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Sadequain's work on classical literature with Ghalib's verses |
“He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.” Shakir put the newspaper back on his table and telephoned his home, for the 12th time since morning. “So, how did she die?” he asked. They explained to him, also for the 12th time, how his sister died.
“Gabriel Garcia Marquez influenced the entire planet,” he began to read the piece again, also for the 12th time. “Nobel prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez has died in Mexico aged 87, his family says. Garcia Marquez was considered one of the greatest writers of his time, best known for his masterpiece of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
“He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard,” Shakir repeated the quote from Love in the Time of Cholera.
“It was easier to mourn when people died individually and were not killed in droves by suicide bombers,” he thought, recalling recent collective deaths: “24 perish in a bomb attack at a vegetable market, blast kills 50 inside a mosque, 12 die in random firing inside a busy market.”
His sister died quietly, at home. It was a slow death, from cancer which was discovered too late to be cured.
“She saw sea shells on a sea shore, repeat with me,” his sister said to him, laughing as he struggled with the tongue-twister.
“Try this one,” she said: “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.”
“You know, you have this habit of scratching your head when you want to stress a point, just like our sister,” his brother once told him. “And she learned it from our mother, I guess.”
“Yes, and you hum, like our father, when you think,” Shakir said to his brother.
Those who die continue to live within us, he thought. “Time was not passing...it was turning in a circle.” Was it? Perhaps, we are all moving in a circle, he thought. But if we are, why don’t we bump into each other after death?
“Perhaps, we will meet those who went before us when we die,” his brother said to him, also for the 12th time when he called him. “Perhaps,” he said and put the phone down.
But this thought did not stay with him for long as he recalled another of his favorite quotes, from T. S. Eliot: “Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future. And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable.”
“Incorrigible, incurable, irrecoverable, irredeemable, irremediable, irretrievable, unrecoverable, unredeemable.” He chuckled as he opened the dictionary to find a meaning that was not there.
“She asked about you before she died,” his brother said to him. “Yes, and I was thousands of miles away,” he replied.
“Don’t feel bad. You could not have come. It was so sudden,” his brother said. But he was feeling bad, upset that he could not feel the intensity of this personal loss.
“Individual deaths do not look significant in the time of the Taliban,” he said to his brother.
“What did you say?” his brother asked.
“Never mind, nothing significant, not when scores are killed in a single blast,” he said.
A four year child was among more than 80 gunned down by a rival religious group. His mother now cleans and combs the boy’s teddy bear every morning when other children go to school.
“Hey, come here.” His sister always called him back when he was about to go out for the school bus and combed his hair. And it always irritated him.
“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist in this moment … And both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday and eternal reality was love.”
Yes, he was floating around in a mist, but wanted to escape from it and go home.
The mist softly touches his toes, moving up. Out of the cloud emerges a face. One moment it is his face. The next moment it is someone else’s. Was it his sister’s? Garcia Marquez’s? That of the 4-year old child? An unknown face from hundreds slain in the time of the Taliban?
He tries to touch the face, hold it, but it melts away. Many faces appear. He feels around, trying to hold them but they slip through his fingers and disappear in the fog, slithering around his body.
He is tense. He wants to scream. He wants to hold onto something. But all faces, all images disappear in the haze as he stretches his hands. Shadows dance on the wall. Broad, bold shadows, leaping around in a rhythmic chaos.
They whisper to each other and laugh; a full-throated laughter fills his room. His skin prickles with fear. He tries to escape to the comfort of past images.
He seeks refuge in narrow, warm streets, away from a cold Washington morning. Familiar smells of closed rooms, sweat and herbs wander in the streets, getting stronger as the heat increases.
He sees people pushing, shouting, laughing and jostling. The muezzin calls for the evening prayers. A soothing shadow slips down the minarets. The sun is plucked from the sky.
The night drops from the clouds. But the streets are not deserted. They are now filled with the faithful smell of summer evenings. People still move around, laughing and shouting.
He extends his hands, tries to coax them into his existence. But they slip off out of his hands. The mist licks his fingers and the shadows moving on the wall scare him. He reaches out but only touches the cold, slithering mist.
He wanders like a lost soul through the images that fill his mind. Sometimes the images look familiar to him. Sometimes they float through his mind like strangers. But as time passes, these strangers also become a part of him, he sees his face in them. Yet, the confusion continues.
Sometimes he sees himself in a valley full of both familiar and strange images. He sees people, buildings and trees slowly emerging out of the mist. He sees cars, buses and trains.
An airplane flies over his head. He sees shops and office blocks. He sees people working on their computers, lifting telephones, talking to those thousands of miles away in foreign languages.
Then the muezzin calls again. “Allah is great, Allah is great,” he reminds the faithful. It soothes him. He spreads the prayer mat and prays.
But then he hears a blast, which echoes around the world, shown live on TV. “Another suicide blast, scores feared dead.”
“You cannot mourn an individual death in the time of the Taliban,” he says to himself. “You cannot even pray for your dead.”