To Sarajevo

In the city of Sarajevo, the girl fell in love. It is such a cliché, she muses, to anthropomorphize every city, to fall in love with spaces and objects as if the very act was a natural embodiment of the mind and heart.  To punctuate and to make statements of city as if it’s very proclamation makes the emotions stone-hard real. Strawberries, thrifts, sufi mosque and meat burek. In the city, she stood – soaking the flavours, rustiness and soul and all its broken stories and wrecked lives and damaged zones and rich history – and said nothing, and wrote nothing because what could words and speech do to describe the complicity, the paradoxical temporality and reality of the very moments?  She doggedly stared and observed the circular urban and spatial planning; everything leads and spans to nooks and corners of the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque  - or is it merely her illusions, a trick in a mind that each turn reveals pieces of Gazi Husrey-beg that had never been, as if it was the sun and every turn illuminates a different plane and angle and light of the sun-bathed mosque.

A certain serenity envelopes her -was it God’s plan or her mere folly? -  as she wandered into a Sufi mosque during prayers. It happened fast; there were strings of incomprehensible Bosnian which she could not catch, and fingers pointed by the Muslim man. A group of young Bosnian Muslims kindly and gently wrapped the confused girl in a makeshift hijab and led her into the mosque. There – prayers, spirituality, chants - enclosed.  Should she leave?  Her postures are wrong, her hands a floundering mess; her prayers null. It’s awkward to leave. You will break the silence. No. Stay but what? An outsider/ clearly aware of her Otherness.

Brightly lit eyes with a florid, excited visage spoke animatedly. Where are you from? This is how you pray. Hands fumbling and grasping and willing, the girl imitates another. Their English limited and the girl’s tongue speaks and knows no Bosnian but there is communication; there are attempts and it’s better than nothing. Another of her friends scrutinises, discerns and judges – you can see it in the faint twitch and slight reveal that she is not impressed with the Other - but it’s a holy place and her lips are stitched. The girl tries; the position awkward, the hand gestures unnatural and the Islamic prayers foreign.

Allah, Christ, God/ are they not the same? 

What’s your religion? Christianity? Huh? The language barrier grows. Wait, we wear the Cross. A sudden recognition - a light! (And there is a legacy in the form of a crack, a civil war that scars and impresses. A city recently marred by religious and ideological conflict. The crack grows bigger.) She smiles and it’s the last prayer. It ends, people stand and they leave. The moment is bursting and shattering. The sacredness is diffusing. Her friends pull her away and before she could leave and before everything becomes another moment, another memory lodged at the recess of the mind; she breaks the illusory moment and cements it. “You will make a great Muslim.”

Allah, Christ, God/ are they not immanently the same? 

Are the people not the same?

The Curse of Wanderlust

 

Travelling has its setbacks because you are plagued with an insensate, festering emotions of longing. When you have not touched and stepped on the land of your desire, you are brimming with a pulsatile longing for the land. When you have stepped foot, breathing in the moist air, listening to the arrays of unfamiliar tongues and observing the idiosyncrasies of other cultures, you are filled with a weird tickling sensation of ecstasy and also, a lingering longing (yet again) for people you hold close and dear, for home. The process of longing never tires. For you have left indiscriminate fragmented pieces of yourself in the place you have departed and you are infused with another form of longing.

This should not have happened but it did. The traveller, held back by her companionship. I wonder how the Doctor bids farewell to his companion (heavy and laden with the possibility of never meeting them ever again, heavy and laden with the possibility that the emotions of the past would never be the same; infinite and changing) 

The thirsting for greater lands and experiences, the ever-changing longing for adventure will never cease for it will continue to transform to other indescribable longing or strands of emotion. This is the curse of wanderlust - a life afflicted by immense longing. 

Dear Dead Poets,

Dear friend(s),

Yes, my friend you, the one welling with insecurities, uncertainties and fears. The little girl and boy trapped and cloistered in her limitations of the mind. I have an advice for you – go on, go and take that adventure and quest that you have always dreamt of. Go on, fly.

Nobody is stopping you, but your mind. Our little minds are an aegis for the unknown, a fatuous substitute for our fears: such easy preys to the hawks of excuses, of the “I couldn’t, I wouldn’t and I shouldn’t. We are in the prime of our youths, wings infant, soft and fluttering with all the potential and hopes of the world. The chimerical are real, only if you dare to believe in it. The sword in the stone, the warm toasty Butterbeer and Firewhiskey, the scattered rings, the sailors’ songs of promised adventures – they reside in you, have always been.

But there is a catch; all the promised adventures and quests can only arrive if you seek them with your heart. Only when you free the monasteries of your mind. Only when you actively pursue your Holy Grail. And remember, not all adventures turned out to be heroic, marked with dazzling zealously and achievement., and that most quests had never succeeded; the Holy Grail was never found and the bullions of gold sank to the deep dark, lost to the endless sea.  Do not cry though; never do, because the Holy Grail was never the rewards of adventures and quests. The camaraderie: friends, mates, companions - the elite fellowships, Dead Poets Society and the Marauders – and the merry laughter and shed tears and marked dolorousness and the drawn adumbrated blueprints of our future, those elusive, beautiful memories are the rewards of life, of shared adventures. And when you grow old and frail, let the memories fill your swelling heart, let the warmth and rush of familiarity embrace you, let the love you have experienced transpire and fill every pores of your soul.

So, here I am, my friend, standing at the beginning - the prime of our youth – timorous with fears and uncertainties for our future, clinging and hoping for the rough vague blueprint to turn stark clear and bright. Our maps may never be written, may never be drawn for the demarcations are fluid and always changing, for our perceptions of the world will always be changing. We will always be uncertain.

I will always be the little girl, uncertain, wide with fear, afraid to offer my hands for fear of rejection and afraid to walk the adventure alone. But now, with my shivering cold hand, I offer them and offer you an adventure where we will battle the demons and monsters, where we will laugh at our own silliness, cook under the glow of the stars, where we will cry and split our knees and break our hearts, where we will eventually grow old, tough and loved.

I am afraid, of the downs of life, and so are you, but with you, my friends, all the ups make the down tolerable and beautiful.

So come along, friend(s). Let's fly together. 

*
(Image source: violentwavesofemotion)

Don't Regret, Child

28 June 2011

-

Someday,

You look at yourself in the mirror.

Qui est la? Qui est la? Qui est la?

And overarching words and promises spill out of your lips, fragile feeble and failing. The assonance, the vowels, the formed ‘w’, ‘h’, ‘o’ and every words and every ‘a’ , ‘m’ ‘i’ crashes into the tides of incoherency. We hang paltrily to cold, banal words. shackled, waiting boats that promises an adventure of a lifetime, but we are Gulliver tied down by our fettered threads of promises and we are Persephone consumed and caged in our flames of hell.

They say, “The seeds of pomegranate rages in her”. The eternal flame and the winding threads will hold you down while you wait for the tsunami of a lifetime to consume you.

But the unravelling tides of time makes the harshness of the cold becomes your familiar, and you forget, you forget the summer solstice and Gulliver’s travels. You live your existentialist lives, a blur, a meld, and when the elegiac strain of your heart cries, ‘Qui est la?’

It’s too late.

on days like wind

On days like winds,
you stare at the dots forming in the scrubbed bare wall,
Pondering your conception. Who will I become?

*

Because we are fine and so fucking fine at that you do not see the pallid, the lacklustre crawling beneath the thinly veiled flamboyance; cracking under the pressure of their 'could be'. They say, you were the hint of genius; mad, insane and so brilliant in their conception because you are going to be the first in a long generation of failed successes, the diamond child with the sparkling potential of a misshapen gem. The first. The virginal sacrifice. You are going to bring them so much glory. Do it for yourselves. Don't you see your own light? And no, you don't. You can only hear the myriad of their voices, never your voice, because what is your voice in the drowning sea of multiplicity - screaming and vying for attention. Dying.

*

On days like wind,
you wish for the expanse of the galaxies and her stars to fall into alignment, into the right places. And you trace the outlines of the stars, hoping. The Ursa Major and the multiple legends that follow; King Arthur, Callisto and the tales of chinese dragons all crashing and melding into an incoherent whole.

You wish the stars would chart the story of your life.

And on days like wind,
when the world grows quiet and soft,
careless and free,
you disappear into stardust, into myths and legends.

flames and shooting star

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though, by your smiling, you seem to say so.

Hamlet, Act II, scene ii

*

1914 - 1939

Once upon a time, there lived a young boy. Eyes bright like the shimmering stars that spanned the Earth. He was a peculiar kid, lanky thin, lips pursed into blood red rose petals, his skin a sickly white.

One day, he heard something. A very peculiar thing indeed, for in his short minuscule lifespan, he had never heard of it, and never would. This was a foreign sound. Foreign and new, like that rickety rackety toy Mom brought back home from work. A rubbery seat stuck on two wheels, a handle broken beyond repair, but it was new and foreign and it made him merry.

This sound was a peculiarity and an animosity. His curiosity was piqued. He silently crept out of his rickety rackety bed and stalked into the blanketed darkness of the night. He gasped in awe at the sight that was unravelling before his very innocent eyes. Never in his life had he saw such a pulchritudinous sight.

Flames, lights and … shooting star.

Unforgiving human eyes rarely descry a meteor shower. He is starry eyed, blessed and merry. The stars are shining for him, he makes a wish. He wishes for more loaves of bread. The stars are getting nearer and nearer. His hands are clasped into a prayer, his starry eyes are closed.

*

Rickety rackety roar of flames, it devours, burst into nothingness, into thick choking air of smokes and deaths.

Eyes no longer reflect the sparkle of the stars.

The flames devour and a prayer lingers.