Mr. Frandshipper

The sun is setting. If I concentrate hard enough, I can see the air move. It is the last meal we intend to serve Mother Nature. A gelatinous soup of industrial waste, carbon, dust and disease. The phlegm of progress, industry and mankind’s achievements. Here, in plain sight, is the embarrassing foot-note of our species’ history: air abhorrent even to itself. Air so putrid one can clasp its wispy slivers, hold one’s fist to the sky and declare, “Here, Pandora, is what your curiousity released: disease, famine, death, corruption, poverty, evil. Everything but hope. This is what you have brought us to. Even the elements conspire to murder.”

This is not my home. Home is where my family is and my family does not live here. My family lives in a two bedroom house with cakes of cow dung on the outside walls. My family lives near wheat fields and, luckily, near a government school. Also luckily, my parents are idiots. They chose to spend hard-earned money so that their son could get an FSc degree, rather than make the lazy but able-bodied child work and bring in some money instead. Fortunately my parents were not so idiotic as to leave the matter of me getting a government funded scholarship in the hands of God. My brother in law worked at a bureaucrat’s house as a driver. He groveled, and my sister wept, and the bureaucrat pulled some strings so that I ended up going to Punjab University. Three years later I was the first university qualified electrical engineer my village had ever produced. Of course this is not my home. Here, I’m forgettable, ordinary, useful but dispensable. Here, I’m just another human foot stool. Back home, I’m a celebrity.

After all, what did I expect from a city that feeds, breathes and intimately mingles with treacherous gruel and labels it as air?

What did I expect? I did not expect work to involve polite nonsensical chatter and needless phone calls where the only established punctuation is ‘Sir’, ‘Please’, or some form of self-humiliation. I did not expect girls to rebuke my advances by rolling their eyes and belittling me in English under the assumption that I wouldn’t know the language. I did not expect a nightly coagulation of melancholy, desolation and despondency so acute that I would invent remarkable and intimate conversations out of the most mundane of everyday encounters. And I definitely did not expect myself to become one of those farigh, oversexed, lafanga jahils with too much time and mobile credit on their hands.

I have become the man who calls you too much, whose attention is suffocating and unnerving. The man who has caused Ufone to introduce its 420 service, who has caused Warid to introduce the cheapest SMS packages possible, who has popularized pornographic MMSs, who has founded and popularized an entirely new genre of contemporary literature – romantic SMS poetry. I have become exactly what girls I used to approach used to call me in English: fucking frandshipper.

It has helped, though. Girls in their late teens and early twenties have talked to me night after night – detailing the adventures of their day. They have talked to me about everything: from their ideal husbands and boyfriends, to their favourite hindi movie tune. They have advised me when I’m ill on which herbal concoction would best cure my ailments and they have called me up to cry about disputes they have had with their parents and friends. They’ve told me their life stories, and I have told them mine.

I have made friends with married women, who have stealthily called me up to vent and share their daily frustrations. Stories about nosy mother-in-laws, abusive husbands, stealing brother-in-laws, children that cry too much and spend too little time studying, maids that slack off work, cooks that cannot cook, I’ve heard them all.

Some women call only to say absolutely nothing.

There is a difference between strangers seeking the comfort of each other’s silence and lovers seeking solitude together; the presence of one does not discount the absence of the other. I only seek to fill either vacuum.

In this city, there is no humanity. Its hollow creatures are filled with nothing more, or nothing less than the fetid air that surrounds them. And from their fetid insides, I seek humanity – with no ego and no restraint. I have refused to be merged as one with this rancid atmosphere and with the sub-human sheep it breeds. I am not one of the sheep that curl with and nurse that heavy all consuming lump of despondency, self-loathing, and loneliness rather than seek its dispersal, and their own release. In your eyes I might be despicable, annoying and pitiful, but, like it or not, you envy me.

In Winter Time

It would start right below her breasts, where the frontal centre of her rib cage would be, inside. It would be the shape and size of a tennis ball.

Those light green tennis balls she had so many memories attached to. They would all wrap them in black or red tape, forming a thicker band around the centre. "This is the seam. Here, hold the ball like this. Now, Mushtaq Ahmed plays it like this. Waqar Younis plays it like this. No. Not like that. That's a vata."

It would start off the size of a tennis ball, below her breasts, the frontal centre of her rib cage, inside. Icy. Heavy. It would palpate and, like a fist uncurling in to fingers and a palm, grow tendrils. Each one, icy and heavy. The tendrils would cling to her arteries and mimic their size and shape, growing finer here, thicker here. Visibly traceable here, microscopic here. They would reach the inside of her lungs and contract. Now, her breathing would become shallow, her arms would wrap themselves around her chest, her hands would massage and rub her shoulders. She would crave warmth.

"Menopopo, you are my dodo. Hug?"

It would continue growing and she would feel the icy heaviness spread to her shoulders and throat. In her throat the tendrils would seek one another and clump in to a knot. Their growth would cease and she would feel their weight increase. Her breathing would still be shallow, her body cold and weak, her throat and shoulders heavy. Now, between shallow breaths she would hear herself choking.

"How many times must I tell you not to talk while eating? Here. Drink some water, you'd feel better."

From her shoulders it would spread to her face. Two thick tendrils would spread upwards from her jawbone. Their progress would be unbearably slow, and halting. Now, they would reach her eyes. And finally, release. Wet, salty, warm and light.

"But, dude, something has to be wrong. What is it?"

She would not know.

Moon Chacha III

"It kills me when things break. Or pretend to. When things refuse to progress or evolve from the state they are in. When there is talk of erasure, of regression, of return. It kills me when we refuse to acknowledge time, and the inevitable constant change and motion it brings to things, and us. And it kills me when acknowledgement is simply not enough to dictate what is."

Today she follows her short ramble with an aggressive silence. She observes the moonlight mute all colour around her to mere variations of grey, silver, blue and white. Without colour the truth of form is starkly exposed silhouetting, defining, and even inventing the nature of objects around her. A neem tree to her left ceases to shoulder clusters of bitter tasting spindly leaves and instead resembles the silhouette of child drawn clouds. Colour, she notices, masks the innumerable subtleties of form only. Colour makes it easier to ignore a frown, a wrinkle, a scar, and the ladder like contours of ribs caused by emaciation, for example. She resumes.

"Why would anyone want that? Why crave such a magnificent delusion? Why can't the present be enough to reach that sense of purity?"

Again, she pauses. On the floor that she lies on a neem leaf scampers closer as if seeking shelter from the chilly breeze.

"I read a story. In it a person falls in love with a tree. It's a tree with green leaves and white flowers. His, or her, lover cannot fathom what is so glorious about that tree. It's an ordinary tree with white flowers and green leaves. It isn't anything special. The story ends with both of them lying under the tree, silently, at night, watching the green leaves and the white flowers move in the wind. It is such a gorgeous story. What could be better than that? What could be better than lying under a tree?"

Moon Chacha who had grown used to such monthly monologues realizes that this time, he is required to speak. "Why?"

"Why what, Moon Chacha?"

"Why could nothing be better than lying under a tree?"

"Not just lying under a tree. I love the idea. Both of them are refusing, subtly, silently, to do anything more or less than what they want to do. Both of them are just being. One is in love with a tree, and enjoying the feeling of being with his, or her, beloved. The other cannot relate to the cause of such devotion, but she, or he, can understand the devotion, the reverence, itself just the same. For as long as they both are lying under the tree, that gap in experience is insignificant. I don't just mean the tree. I mean the idea."

"And I suppose I am your tree?"

"Of course."

Beyond the neem tree to her left cars, rickshaws, buses, vans, all manner of auto-vehicles zoom by. As each vehicle passes by, its light filters past the neem tree's branches and momentarily returns colour to her hand, then her arm, then her neck, and finally to her face before disappearing. However, it is tainted by the shadows of the neem tree. She sighs and then begins to talk.

"But it isn't aggressive. It isn't an attempt to rein in time. There is no pretence of breaking away to a time now gone – of return. It's merely an acknowledgment that while time cannot be presently reined in, it is entirely possible to refuse to participate in the flurry of activity that time is supposed to inevitably bring. This isn't aggressive confrontation; this is graceful refusal to confront."

The chilly breeze and scampering neem leaves bring Moon Chacha's response.

"Up here, I have a lovely view of how things progress around you – day and night. And I have been here a very long time. Maybe, just maybe, things break, or pretend to, when the craving for predictability, for ritual, becomes overwhelming. Maybe things break because people run out of metaphorical trees to lie down under. But on the other extreme there is always this city of yours."

Her lips are coloured in for a fleeting second. A Honda motorbike had just zoomed by. "This city?"

"It kills you when things break because nothing is worth breaking for in this city you have grown up in. The Heer has moved from charpois in the inner city to PowerPoint slides in lecture rooms. If adaptation is a whore, this city of yours is her most loyal client. As a whole, your city is a violently rippling, cacophonic, orchestra; your city, like many others, is one I will blame if I split (as the story goes) in two, again."

She laughs and realizes, yet again, that she will crumble, and so will her Moon Chacha.

And hence, till dawn breaks, she lies under her metaphorical tree.

Comic

Happy

I'll have the sun on my face and I'll lie on grass. Its blades would be bright green and would glint gold and white at certain angles. I'll stretch my arms above my head, and spread my fingers outward. I'll stretch my legs down to my toes and I'll simultaneously breathe in deeply. I'll scrunch up my eyes and smile. And I'll stop stretching. And I'll breathe out, slowly. I'll open my eyes. I'll have the sun on my face and I'll be lying on grass.

Right now, I'm happy.

Hello

I tried a cigar today.

They've been some moon chacha nights. I'm trying to come up with funny cartoons. And, that's about it.

Gargantuan

3 stories:

So, one day I decided to murder my parents. It was a brutal decision, but one that had to be made. I realized that I was their life. That it was important to them that I get a good education, that I get a good job, that I get a good husband, have a family, etc. etc. And, I wasn't going to do all those things. Not as they would define 'good' in any case. I tried breaking it to them gently. But I guess I was too subtle. Then, I stood, naked, in front of them, shouting: "This is the monster you've created." They looked away. Well then, I thought that killing them was the only way to go.

I considered my options carefully. I could

1. stab them.
   
2. shoot them.
   
3. poison them.
   
4. inject them with an overdose of adrenaline.
   

Then I made a list of the pros and cons of each method. I was killing my parents here, so you can guess how much I valued my life relative to the rest of humanity; I was not going to be caught – so any method that was too dramatic, too typical and too bloody was out of the question. So a. and b. were immediately crossed off my list.

Poison is not hard to procure. There are disinfectants and detergents. There are floor cleaners and toilet cleaners. There's bleach and there's phenol. BUT poison is unpredictable. There's the practical question of how much would have to be poured in to their tea every day to poison them slowly. It would have taken me research on Google and Wikipedia to figure out the exact quantity to be used to poison them for guaranteed and positive results if I was going to poison them in one go. Also, I'm not a huge fan of pain. I love my parents. It doesn't appeal to my sense of aesthetics to see them trembling and thrashing around on the kitchen floor after sipping their morning tea, vomiting blood and gurgling out pathetic 'helps'. That's just messy.

For option d. I did do my research. I researched online and found out how exactly I could procure enough of the drug to kill them off. Local pharmacies are least bothered about prescription slips so all I had to do was come up with a plausible disease, or condition that would require the drug if prompted by the pharmacist. I went to the pharmacy I used to go to as a teenager to buy prescription drugs to get high, and caffeine pills for my exams.

The next day, I went to the nameless stationary shop near Qadri General store and bought two syringes. They're usually available in stationary stores because they're used by people who use fountain pens with refills to fill the plastic refill cartridges with ink. They're cheap and extremely easy to come by. No worries. Soon after, I smuggled them in to my room and hid them under a stack of files resting in my bedside table drawer.

Then, I started planning. I observed their routine, meticulously taking cryptic notes on my laptop when I made any useful observation. I expected to not be surprised by my observations: subconsciously I'd been observing them since I was born. But, I was. My father would, for example, never have one entire piece of toast before munching on another at breakfast. He toggled two pieces – one spread with something savoury, like sardines, the other spread with something sweet, like honey. They did not have predictable sleeping habits either. Some days they would be asleep by 9.00. Other times I could hear the television blaring till two in the morning. They still made love too. I knew that because my mother used to take birth control pills regularly till one fine day my dad got a vasectomy. Some nights I would want to walk in to their room to get a DVD and find the door locked. They'd certainly been very quite.

So, you can imagine how hard it was to pick a date to kill them.

I'm waiting, now. For the date. I've researched on police investigation methods in Pakistan. I've researched on the kind of forensic evidence that might be uncovered if by some evil twist of faith the family allows an autopsy. To avoid that I'm planning to make it seem like a strangulation, which isn't too hard if they're already dead and I'm quick about it. All I have to do is leave marks around their necks, and the police will lap that up as the cause of death. I plan to disappear money, jewellery etc. too. Just the right amount to make it seem like the job of a particularly vindictive robber.

It's also convenient that I live alone with my parents. A maid comes at 9.00 in the morning. She does the cooking, dusting, cleaning, etc. for the day. We just leave the dishes for her to wash after lunch, and dinner. We heat it up and serve it ourselves. My siblings don't live with us anymore and my grandparents are all dead and gone. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, etc.

So, I am not going to get caught. I'm not stupid. I was one of the top students in school. I was great at everything – sports, debates, community service, you name it. I went to a top ranking American college for my bachelors. Right now, I have an awesome well paying job, a promotion on the horizon. People like me don't get caught. Or even suspected. I've had a really steady boyfriend for two years, and a great life overall. I'm not just going to throw that away. In any case, I haven't killed them yet. I might just change my mind.

If my parents are only living for me, if I am their life, then I have the responsibility to take it away from them before I cause them any more pain or disappointment. But I want to be sure about that. They also love each other. And live for each other. If I'm killing them together, than I guess I'm bypassing the question of causing one more pain than the other. But, you know. They have their cute little delights. My dad cares about his work, my mom about hers. They care about the house they've built, and all the material possessions it holds. They care about their cars, their Rolexes, their hi-tech gadgets and their appearance and social standing. They like to watch television, listen to music, plan trips to places like Fiji and Phuket.

I don't believe in guilt. I like to think that if I'm going to do something fully conscious of what I'm doing, then there is absolutely no point in feeling guilty about it. I want to scream at people who feel guilty about the things they did knowing fully what they were doing. I want to ask them "Who are you running from? This is who you are. You are your decisions. How can you function and be comfortable in your own skin while feeling guilty for who you are?" So I like to be sure before I do something. If I do kill them, I'm not going to feel guilty – that's a decision I've made. I'll hurt my siblings and all the people who my parents have been close to. And I've come to terms with that. But, I'm not sure. Yet.

---

With her right hand's index finger she slowly traces a spiral around her navel. As the borders of her invisible spiral expand, so it seems does the blackness of her navel's centre. It swallows the invisible arches she drew moments earlier and advances in an expanding circle towards the most freshly traced loop.

This isn't the blackness of her navel's deepest recession, or the blackness of Indian ink, or of unlit lovers' points in parks and alleys. This is a miniscule slice of the absolute nothing. This is blackness that cannot be defined by what it is, since it isn't, but by the infinite list of what it is not.

Three inches below her cleavage she stops drawing her doomed spiral and with the help of her left hand ties an invisible knot and contains with it the, now stagnant, pool of black.

If she were to lie, in a manner of speaking, on her stomach, you could seek, feel and see the small of her back and her sides - intact and entirely human. It was only in that 'small' lack of a centre that she (ironically) had that the never ending cavity was omitted a window. It could, like the magical rucksacks of heroes in fairy tales, have the capacity to hold worlds and not fill up.

A teaspoon of what proton stars are made of can weigh more than the weight of our entire planet, she absently thinks.

Her hand hovers over the hole she has drawn – it hovers because even she would not risk penetrating the nothing she has revealed – and she asks, naively, absently, "And what would grow here?"

---

How do I begin to narrate what it feels like to be marked so deeply by another person – by their love, their hate, their ego, their insanity, their desire, their addiction – that the invisible, intangible organ within spills out stories to the external reality of flesh and skin. And flesh and skin babble; they tell insensitive tales comprised wholly of facts.

Here on my torso I was punched seven times.

Here on my shoulder blade are five stitches because of a particularly large shard from china that broke once it hit me.

Here on my knees are scratches from when I fell down on the gravel surrounding my house.

Here on my forehead a bump from when I hit my head on a marble table top.

Here is a cast for a fractured arm.

But he begged, and he groveled. He loved me and he held me at night. He held ice to my wounds, and took me to the emergency ward. He apologized with poetry, flowers and tears. He fed on my forgiveness and worked so I would give more of it to his tiny child like soul.

So when my skull cracked open and I died, I didn't lose the usual twenty one grams. A small silver worm emerged from my mouth, and seemed to convulse, cough and then vanish to where the rest of my invisible intangible organ went: to service his.

What can I say? He groveled.

-------------

Most of my Saved Text Messages:

Baryani at Hunza. Nightmare before Christmas. Gilgit and stay at karakoram rooms again.

Rakha poshi restaurant. Hunza… Walking on road… Baltit Fort. Ice cream. Local food at mulberry hotel. Holoi gaza noodles with spinach. Chupp suro naan samosa. Doudo noodle soup.

Gilgit… Shopping, dinner at serena's, sunflowers. Afghani tikka. Naltar… Trekking, dried flowers, dog, sun room, stars. Lots of stars… Being thankful.

Miltary person and his ambitions. Lcd tv… Guest house for gpo, gym.. Local population rant, on america and india.

Ideas.. Nazim rant. Elitist girl scot… About gods, glue sniffing raped 12 year old girl beggar, dawkins, and high Harvard gpa's.

Satpara lake, Dosai plane, lake sosher, chilum, minimarg, astor, potatoes, posh mess.

Skardu… shigar, kharpaacho, desert, palapu, local soup, butter cream, apricots, apricot nut sauce with chicken.

Why wait any longer for the world to begin? You can have your cake and eat it too. (Dylan)

Plutonic will become lovetonic. (Lovely convincing me)

Fewer advertisements! You've sold your soul to the corporate white man!

Truths are illusions that have forgotten that this is what they are. (Nietchze)

A struggling cockroach in a window sill.

Stop drop and roll will not work in hell. (Bumper Sticker)

People are strange. And marriage is an absurd idea. And we are not characters from books or movies. I don't know what that makes them then, though.

Why can I smell durian here?

We all live in a yellow submarine. (Beatles)

Aaj kal client intizaar nahi karte. (A prostitute on a long play on Hum TV)

It's as hot as vulcan's dick. (From Rome)

I will stand on the ocean until i start sinking. (Dylan)

Take care of him or I'll use your children's eyes as beads. (From Rome)

Arithmetic has no mercy. (From Rome)

Happiness is a freshly baked cookie. (Subway advertising their cookies.)

Dasht aashna – desert ko janien wala.

So you might as well prepare yourself for some full fledged battle with disappointment.

-------------

Quoted. (So very literary)

' Give up on me,' he begged her. 'I don't like people dropping in to see me without warning. I have forgotten the rules of seven-tiles and kabaddi, I can't recite my prayers, I don't know what should happen at a nikah ceremony, and in this city where I grew up I get lost if I'm on my own. This isn't home. It makes me giddy because it feels like home and is not. It makes my heart tremble and my head spin.'

---

But you bastard you rummage in my drawers and laugh at my stupid poems. The real language problem: how to bend it shape it, how to let it be our freedom, how to repossess its poisoned wells, how to master the rivers of words of time of blood: about all that you haven't got a clue. How hard that struggle, how inevitable the defeat.

---

'Anybody ever tries to tell you how this most beautiful and most evil of planets is somehow homogenous, composed only of reconcilable elements, that it all adds up, you get on the phone to the straitjacket tailor,' he advised her, managing to give the impression of having visited more planets than one before coming to his conclusions. 'The world is incompatible, just never forget it: gaga. Ghosts, Nazis, saints, all alive at the same time; in one spot, blissful happiness, while down the road, the inferno. You can't ask for a wilder place.'

---

Us fairies haven't a fucking notion what's going on. Then how do we know if it's right or wrong? We don't even know what it is.

---

In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life?

---

A real bag of allsorts, Salahuddin thought; but marveled, also, at how beautifully everyone behaved in the presence of the dying man: the young spoke to him intimately about their lives, as if reassuring him that life itself was invincible, offering him the rich consolation of being a member of the great procession of the human race, - while the old evoked the past, so that he knew nothing was forgotten, nothing lost; that in spite of the years of self-imposed sequestration he remained joined to the world.

---

We acted the cliché. We melted with laughter. Not the prickly melt that comes from sitting on a hot stove but the cool relaxing melt, in defiance of chemistry, like dropping deep into a liquid feather bed. We did not know or remember the reason for laughing. There was a film, yes: a dumb sad man with hair like wheat and round eyes like paddling pools; another man with a mustache like a toy hearth brush; and many other people and things—blondes, irate managers, stepladders, whitewash, all the stuff of farce. And there was a darkened opera house growing cardboard trees and shining wooden moons.

I shall never know why we laughed so much. Perhaps other films had been as funny, but this one seemed to contain for us a total laughter, a storehouse of laughter, like a hive where we children, spindly-legged as bees, would forever bring our foragings of fun to mellow and replenish this almost unbelievably collapsing mirth.

Nor was it the kind of laughter that cheats by turning in the end to tears, or by needing reinforcement with imagery. It was, simply, like being thrown on a swing into the sky, and the swing staying there, as in one of those trick pictures we had seen so often and marvelled at—divers leaping back to the springboard, horses racing back to the starting barrier. It was like stepping off the swing and promenading the sky.

---

My taste had been central to my identity. I'd cultivated it, kept it fed and watered like an exotic flowering plant. Now I realized that what I thought had been an expression of my innermost humanity was nothing but a cloud of life-style signals, available to anyone at the click of a mouse. How had this happened?

I couldn't understand. There had to be something else. What was a personality if it wasn't a drop-down menu, a collection of likes and dislikes? And now that my possessions were gone, what would I put in their place? Who was I without my private pressings, my limited editions, my vintage one-offs? How could I signal to potential allies across the vast black reaches of interpersonal space?

---

After Corwin dropped me off, I sat outside with my grandfather Mooshum, drinking cool water from tall galvanized water cans. It occurred to me that I'd be all right. I didn't have to do anything, not right away. I didn't even have to record my sensations in a diary. I could just sit with Mooshum, drinking water.

---

This was blue-sky white, heat-haze white, the white of the sheets that you bring in from the line in the garden dry after hardly any time because the air is so warm. It was the white of the sun, the white that's behind all the colours there are, it was open-mouthed white on open-mouthed white, swathes of sweet smelling outheld white lifting and falling and nodding, saying the one word yes over and over, white spilling over itself. It was a white that longed for bees, that wanted you inside it, dusted, pollen-smudged; it was all the more beautiful for being so brief, so on the point of gone, about to be nudged off by the wind and the coming leaves. It was the white before green, and the green of this tree, I knew, would be even more beautiful than the white; I knew that if I were to see it in leaf I would smell and hear nothing but green.

-------------

I've been reading. I'm off to Islamabad in a few days. My best-friend is flying off to another country. I'm reading the stranger by albert camus. I've finished reading satanic verses and le grande meaulnes which I call the French book because I don't know how to pronounce the name. I've abandoned memoirs of a mangy lover because it's not good. Gormenghast is in hibernation. I watched a few movies I loved and I want grey's anatomy's fourth season.

I'll miss the bitch. A lot.