The state of affairs

Nowadays my personal growth from the last couple of years over self love and other elements of love seems to be culminating over a certain break point. I have learnt through persevering words and actions of others love and through introspection and identification plus fulfillment of my own needs that I do not have to necessarily hate myself. And that there are redeeming qualities in me that make me half decent. Even if all of these were false and I am completely rotten to the core and have only managed to delude myself into thinking otherwise I still have the ultimate failsafe of claiming that I am a human.
Loving myself has also allowed me to more than just tolerate others. Words like empathy, care and compassion that previously felt bookish and only found in the dictionary now reside in quiet corners of my heart waiting to unleash themselves at the appropriate instances. So yes, love has been dumped onto me but I have eked out measly portions of it to others, still greedily holding most of it but occasionally dishing it out. Which has also made me much more sensitive to emotions. Maybe half a decade ago I would’ve said that such sentiments make me weak. In fact I still have similar notions. But they’re weaker now. This amalgam of emotions makes me privy to other’s mood and makes me read too much into their meaningless actions or words. I give them too much worth sometimes and it ends up hurting me.

I am writing about this very hurt. I think one of the worst possible things that can happen to a person is to not be loved unconditionally. Not being loved at all is still tolerable. There is room there for some sort of improvement. A complete absence denotes to the possibility of a potential presence. Self hate isn’t imposed by others but is done by the self and hence cannot be the worst possible thing because the self always acts in its own self interest, sometimes it manifests in nihilistic masochistic ways. The tragedy of modern times is that all of us are more or less loved. It would be hard to pin down a person and ask them, do you think no one loves you? Images of better halves, children, parents, siblings, friends, pets, that one relative who resides on an echelon above others, all of these entities and more just flash past your eyes and even if you are compelled to say ‘Yes’, you still hesitate. And that hesitation is enough of an answer.
Parental love is conditional. They have their own interests and suppressed self-expressions that they either mould you into achieving or expect you to stay true to their guidelines. The very act of birth and conception is selfish and stinks of a yearning for legacy in the face of mediocrity and pressure of evolution or the continuity of the entire species. Love from an offspring is ‘pay back’. The love from romantic partners has the potential of being fueled by lust. And the love from siblings stems from shared experiences or a more visceral way of putting it is ‘blood’. Most other loves including friends, companions, relatives and pets have much more materialistic conditions associated with their love that I do not need to necessarily list down. Neither will I generalize these assumptions for fear of rare individual experiences. And don’t get me started on God.

The trouble with no unconditional love is the lull that hits you in between bouts of normalcy. The smallest sign of distress or mental fatigue, any predilection towards mental instability is a harbinger for much more serious and worrying thought processes.

You aren’t allowed to say no one loves you.

And at that exact moment, you cannot also quite pinpoint who loves you.

A quantum state.

There is an impulse to lash out and stop fulfilling all the conditions that allow you to be loved. To really and truly become the ‘bad boy’. But then the scary prospect of being alienated and in the cold grasps of an emotionless cruel world terrifies us.
The other more sane, typical and thus the cowardly option is to take a big gulp and just swallow whatever ego you have, to not pay any heed to any distress or any disruption in your precariously balanced on the tip of the needle relationship. Just continue it. Keep fulfilling whatever conditions that you must. Consider it a task if you’ve to.

Remember what crumb you get of love, by whatever means necessary and at whatever steep price is worth it at the end of the day, in this soulless piece of rock that we have already been doomed to live on.

A ghazal

 

A concerto of wistfulness in froggy croaks arcs and laces in my ghazal

Flowers of lexically bastardized ideas imbibe the verses of vases in my ghazal

One legged belle-lettres written piping hot for the beloved with no prowess

At risk of sedition, ironically, for the janu burger there will be no praises in my ghazal

 

Bees marshalled like beady seeds onto the rim of a slice of watermelon

Poetry wrangles to sham such rife notions at myriad places in my ghazal

 

If the white escorts green, the green must always whelm the white

In camaraderie with reality, I relegate the minorities to the cramped spaces in my ghazal

 

At my familial home, once dangling crystal balls are now crushed to shards by modernization

No profound image in any couplet, this sentimental singularity was the chassis in my ghazal

 

My strife with writing is the muted nature of the endeavor, the product never speaks its meaning

Or maybe the silence speaks of the mediocre nature of phrases in my ghazal

 

A Happy meal of apocryphal serotonin valued higher than the celibate happiness in a tablet of Esglit

In this land, of my country in decay, a cynical picture I’ve painted in stages in my ghazal

 

Near the end, the mind itches yet again to hold the beloved by ink between index and the thumb

Albeit a tenet’s infringement, her presence will break the fast; serve as an oasis in my ghazal

 

My mahi will spend another Eid away from me and my bewailing, not for much more years

K defeats M to live before -iss in a mental Manichean heresy, as words turn into kisses in my ghazal

 

Mehwar, of these slippery toad-like warty words, takes your leave gratefully now

Before my newfound ardor, craft, contentment disjoint the homeostasis in my ghazal

Identities

                                         

I have always felt a sincere aversion to the mainstream. And I do not think I am unique to harbour such emotions. The truth is that one of the many paradoxes associated with the human condition also includes the reality that all of us are unique in our own way and yet all of us know that too, rendering our uniqueness a little less potent. As if the shared knowledge of an intrinsic exoticness takes away some part of it. Therefore, I have no qualms in admitting that my hesitancy to embrace the mainstream is not exclusive to me. In fact, I would venture farther in demeaning myself by saying that this strive to shun what the common man embraces jets out of a need to carve an identity that doesn’t overlap with someone else. Because that’s what an identity is after all, something that is exclusive to us and helps us stand out from others. Something that when mentioned would immediately swivel the metaphorical compass in someone’s mind towards us.

However, there is only so far you can resist the temptation of mediocrity and not fall into the hum-drum of the machine of society, giving into all base desires of belonging and camaraderie. You end up like others and you can’t even be blamed for it. In the cold Bifrost of the world, any semblance of a warm fire and company must always be acceptable and appreciated, even the ones that stab you in the back, especially the ones that do that in fact. Thus, you find yourself at a juncture, where your identity is not solely formed out of a matter of principle of exclusion where you could base your entire personality off what you are not. Having entered the society of man willingly, almost out of compulsion, you must find other ways to build an identity.

This identity, or the word identity is such a lose term here. It is the ‘it’ I have considered in all the philosophies I have read. It is what I want to believe is at the crux of all of it. What I love about philosophy sometimes is the fact that I do not need to completely understand it. I can read the words and sentences strewn together by all these great men and understand it in whatever form that feels right to me. Obviously, I must always then stay open to correction, for my interpretations will rarely be complete and seldom correct. But they lend a more logical progression to decision making in my life. Now when I stand at this crossroads wondering where my identity stems from, I can always look at patched pieces of philosophies I’ve acquired like trinkets over the years.

Freud would say our identity starts building at birth and it is a combination of sorts of extrinsic factors from the environment, our cultural ingrained biases and some repressed emotions acquired over development period in life that find other outlets as we become adults. This sounds very plausible and convincing to me, but it doesn’t help me now. It gives too much power to the past and to what has already happened and leaves me at the mercy of someone’s help who will help me deal through this apparent cementing of problematic behaviours. Compare that with someone like Nietzsche who was very nit picky with words, so much so that he believed that there were no good or bad words or deeds till the toxic mismatch between an altruistic morality rose within society giving birth to a motivated ressentiment where labels were ascribed to previous neutral acts so that society could function. That such an overpowering act of reshaping definitions was a Will to Power is what Nietzsche claims. And only through such wills can we hope to change the world for the better. And why would we do that? Because for Nietzsche there exists an ultimate self, the ubermensch, the over man, who will exist in the future and be the product of generations of humans practicing self-realisation: the act of exercising their will to power, in simpler words: going and getting it, while at the same time embracing whatever fate and destiny throws at them aka amor fati. Nietzsche himself is sceptical whether an ubermensch can exist but he believes that it doesn’t matter if we continue to strive for it. This makes Nietzsche’s perfect idea of a self an abstract concept. The kind of concept of ‘Self’ he refuted himself in the form of ‘soul’. What credibility does that leave to his entire philosophy? I don’t know. But self realisation expressions although liberating are much harder to perform when you are yourself unsure of what your identity is. If you do not know the self, what are you realising? and if all impulse must be realised, how is man not becoming more of an animal than an ubermensch for man shows restraint that beasts don’t. No. Will to power is helpful but only once you know who you are and where you stand can you use it justify and make your decisions. It doesn’t help you in starting the process.

Descartes said "I think therefore I am" to which Ayn Rand quipped "I am therefore I’ll think". One renders the act of existence of self hinged on the consciousness. Almost blaming consciousness for existence. The other is a little proactive and instead provides consciousness as a tool bestowed to wade through existence. Whereas it’s true that all living things think and are conscious, what is not true is the fact that we are compelled to think just because we exist. Saying I am therefore I’ll think, puts the heavy burden of thought upon every living thing, which quite frankly I am better off not doing mostly. And yet, every passing moment of my life I am compelled to think. It’s almost like my consciousness is what birthed me and what makes me. ‘I think therefore I am’ makes more sense to me. Blaming consciousness for my self and my existence feels right to me. I think we can build up on that.

Nihilists specially love consciousness. It is their favourite shit-bed. They defecate on it with a nonchalance that only herd animals show to a patch of unsuspecting grass. Once you hold consciousness as the root cause to all your problems it is easy to become an anti-natalist and argue that life is bad because it begins with consciousness, even if it’s latent at start. And that an unconscious world would be better to live in. This makes nihilism appealing too, for it is not the hate of life, or a refutation of bright sunny things. Instead, it is the knowledge of existence that makes the self miserable. Were it not for this knowledge, life would be great, and were it not for this knowledge, there would be no life. What if existence is our exile and nothingness our home? It is easy for me to drop everything here and now and hug nihilistic ideas about self. Or nonideas. Of abandoning any search for a greater meaning because life which bequeaths self has no meaning. But I could only be a nihilist if I weren’t born, or if I weren’t alive. Being an alive nihilist, of any school of thought feels hypocritical. A denial of any purpose to life snatches away so many luxuries that I enjoy having and would rather have more of. My greed and ingratitude know no bounds.

What now then?

Sartre says there is no 'I'. Instead, ‘I’ is only a cumulative product of the experiences, actions and deeds that make the ‘I’. ‘I’ only exists when the self is conscious of it. When the ‘I’ is examining itself, and thus no other activity is happening at that moment except the self awareness, or rather no other activity can be said to be happening. This idea of my self being derived of all my experiences actions and life does make sense, but it too is not helpful in developing it in the first place or rather finding it after having lost it. But maybe it is not worth finding. Because Kierkegaard says that self is directly linked to despair. And to despair is the biggest sin. It gets complicated fast. But to sin is not a problem, but to despair over that sin is a grave mistake. Instead, despair must be considered the natural order of things for it is tied in with the self. And the more self aware we try to become the more despair we will feel. Then is life nothing but despair? Is that too not nihilistic and not an existential notion? And is not considering that existential a little masochistic? It would be all those things, if it weren’t for the fact that despair is both good and bad. That with increased self awareness comes more strength. And the stronger one’s self is the closer one is to God. Thus, all despair vanishes away when one is closest to God, when one has put his entire faith in God. Therefore, one must undertake a leap in faith, of increasing one’s self awareness in the face of increasing misery and at the very zenith jump into God’s lap without knowing where it leads, but to find themselves despair free.

Wow I almost sounded like a religious scholar there. The idea is alluring, and it feels right. It would also be embracing the mainstream yet again. Religion is the most subscribed to service on this planet after Netflix, but there’s just one tiny teeny problem. The leap of faith. The cessation of all logic at one point and just accepting beliefs for lifestyle. I cannot do that. Maybe I am not ready for it yet. Maybe in the future. For now, I’ll continue running tracks up and down the hill of self awareness sometime underground even till I am ready to leap and accepting things for what they are.

Speaking of it is what it is, the stoics have a very dismembering view of the self. It’s not very unlike what I said in the beginning about uniqueness. Like all stoic beliefs, this too stems from wants and desires and works towards the betterment of society directly without much ado about abstract ideas. An experience that may be harrowing for us may not affect another person the same way, and an experience that would be intense for someone else wouldn’t affect us the same way. We would thus agree that at the very base level we are all interchangeable, except ourselves. This illusion of knowing that the self belongs to the group of homogenous species yet believing it is not interchangeable is what leads to feuds now and then. If this belief was realised that we are just one of many, in all senses of that phrase then our selfish agendas would no longer be of any use to us, instead the betterment of society would take preference. How idyllic and utopian and emasculating. It sounds good on paper but what use is my constant self sacrifice when the rest of the society doesn’t compensate? How long can I realistically call my contentment my reward till I am fed up, irate and want more than just metaphorical gifts? This just doesn’t hit for me.

Maybe this pursuit is dumbfounded. Maybe I should be like an ambiguous Kafka-esque protagonist with vague aims and rigid lifestyles, or an Outsider or just tell myself that the pursuit of such questions is philosophical suicide.
But it’s not.

It has lately become important to me to figure out who I am again. I am not quite there at mid-life but I’ve already got the crisis. Unforeseen problems have a way of finding me out suddenly. I cannot seem to love myself even though I can easily love others. And even though I can see myself through their eyes occasionally and see the parts of me that they love. It is still hard for me to coalesce all those little stars into a bigger nexus. I feel like I am missing pieces, and everyone else in comparison feels much completer and more put together. I understand that such a feeling may be universal. That even expression of such a sentiment takes away the sting from my melancholy but I am not here to measure the prognosis of my disease. I am here to get rid of the ennui that haunts me.

Hence, it is vital for me to figure out who I am. I know what I am to people. But maybe, and just maybe if I know who I am to myself, it’ll be easier to isolate parts of me I don’t like, cordon them off from the rest of me and let them occlude, shrivel up and die, while I caress and let others tenderly care for the rest of me. Thoughts of not being enough are held at bay by countless hounds of reasons and experiences telling me that the worth of one man’s value varies so much from others and let’s be real, life despite having no problem apparently can always easily go south and it shouldn’t have existed in the first place, but it does and here we are now, and I can curse it all I want, but if I have it, it must be thoroughly used. If I can jolt down some ideas of self maybe I’ll feel content knowing something about myself and this restlessness of not knowing what’s exactly wrong but knowing something is, will go away.

Who am I then? I am the product of my sad consciousness which sprouted out of nothingness and has stemmed into what it is today because of the collective synergism of all deeds thoughts environments and experiences it passed through. There isn’t much point in delving into complexities as they only needlessly perplex, what is far more important is realising that I am here now and that there are people who depend on me and people I depend on. There are people I want to be around even if there aren’t a lot of things I want to do. And that’s okay. Not everyone will do everything. Surviving is just as important. It is the bare minimum but your bare minimum could also be at a higher threshold. I must pick up the rock I put somewhere a month or so ago, remember that where parts of my name start with M and A, some nonliteral aspect of it starts with S too and begin pushing the boulder while relishing in the act alone. Considering that this sole act is the purpose of my existence without being ungrateful of its nature for it is all I have. And maybe
Just maybe someday I’ll push the boulder just enough and I’ll find myself at a peak, and there will be a chasm, and the space across the chasm will be filled with fog, and I’ll close my eyes and leap with complete faith into the unknown.

Only to be greeted by another boulder, another uphill steep.

Story Bazaar

When I was little, every time there was load shedding at night and when we had done our homework and couldn’t yet sleep because of the heat or the general feeling of insecurity in a house surrounded by giant trees and illuminated by a single candle, my mother would tell us stories. Usually, they were stories from the Quran or old Siraiki stories that my mother had been told when she was my age or even younger. A lot of the times, me or my siblings would interject to ask questions and Ammaan would answer, or try her best to do so. But if there’s one thing children are good at, it is being insistent in their unending curiosity. Inevitably our questions would lead us to a metaphorical cul-de-sac which Ammaan would jump over by either saying that asking too many questions regarding religious characters isn’t advisable or that she simply didn’t know because when she was a child, the mere telling of a yarn was a luxury and the thought of interrupting it by asking questions and threatening to hinder the activity had never been a matter of consideration. And that is the trouble with stories. They mustn’t be questioned.

As humans, our lives are dictated at every passing moment by stories. We tell each other anecdotes to pass the time and break the ice. We tell fictional stories to others for entertainment, and fictional stories to ourselves to make up for our own inadequacies. The moment we are born, our parable begins writing itself, in the book of Fate by the ink of your actions and the hand of…well not us for sure. But that isn’t the only story associated with you. Your story overlaps with others’ stories. And there are stories of you that others have written conveniently for you, sometimes out of good intention, mostly out of some need of their own. Our parents write our stories for us. After miscalculating plot points and ending up at a rather anticlimactic ending, they wish to erase the unassailable ink that swells the characters of their story. But it cannot happen. Our stories only progress linearly in one direction. And so, in a desperate attempt at reconciliation with their ego, they push and prod and try to write our stories for us. We, too, are criminals of similar natures. Envisioning stories for ourselves in clouds, when the paper is crumpled and the pen is quite frankly not in our control. We escape from our stories with more stories. In dreams and nightmares, our suppressed stories come to fruition. Plot holes that we pay no heed to enlarge and coalesce to form absurd dreams, amorphous characters living on the fringes of our imagination take shape into nightmare creatures and recurring references to an old tale keep coming back to us in the form of the same dream again and again.

It makes me happy in a guttural sense to realize how aspects of old mythologies are fundamentally the same if you squint for long enough. The Earth goes through geographical cycles that appear the same, and thus there is a possibility of multiple Great Floods occurring. But the romantic plausibility lies with the event happening only once in the history of humankind, and then being retold as different stories over the millennia. The idea that ‘Everything changes but nothing is truly lost’ is common to many philosophies and stoics have reflected on it too, specifically talking about how the world has always been the same. How humans and human emotions, virtues, and vices have remained the same since time immemorial, only the exact mechanizations have changed. And that such changes can easily be considered and shouldn’t hinder the application of a philosophy or a general understanding of human nature for it always remains the same. The emotions of grief at the death of a friend echo similar sentiments through the Epic of Gilgamesh as they do in Greek mythology and as they would today in real life. The characters from Norse mythologies may have been streamlined into digestible superhero characters but it doesn’t take away from the fact that they are still remnants of stories told from generation to generation and their foundations exist in the names of everyday appliances like weekdays. What makes all mythology so succinct isn’t the might of a god or two or the entire pantheon, but it is their power reflected against the mirror of humanity. Therefore, these stories still live today in our hearts and minds. For they are not stories only of gods and ancient beings, but they’re stories of humans. Despite all his strength, Zeus is never the protagonist of the story. It’s Achilles or Hercules or Jason or Odysseus or Helen. It’s humans. Or well, half-humans if you want to be itty gritty about it. But humans nonetheless show the same spectrum of emotions that we are capable of if prejudiced to express.

Some people peddle stories too. And it’s not always the worst thing in the world to buy a story. When faced with the unending void of free will and choice, the nausea takes hold of us and we are forced to attach labels to ourselves in the hopes of never having to face the consequences of our decisions and have them dictated to us based on the spiel we believe in. It only gets troublesome when you start thinking your story is better than someone else’s. That your story is the only real story and all other stories must not exist. Maybe then it isn’t a story after all. For all stories maintain a figment of fiction, and to believe so completely in fiction demands a lack of logical countenance, a predisposition to stupidity. The best stories are the ones that never end. That is why a lot of tv shows with good stories end up being shit because they do not know when to stop. The human mind loves to jump to conclusions. It loves playing detective. We observe stories and continuously experiment in our own heads about how they will end. How a movie will end? How a book will end. How a race will go. How we will score in an exam. How we will die. To us, the neat ribbon-tied packaging of the ending is the biggest indicator of how good a story is. When someone dies in a less than ideal manner, there is always speculation about how they unpleasantly met their end. We ask God to take our lives peacefully, in our own lands, near our loved ones, in our home, rooms, beds, of old age, hand in hand with our beloved. Because to us, the destination matters more than the journey.

And so, the open-ended stories always hold more allure. Therefore, religion is such a hot seller. Nobody knows what happens and nobody can confirm, or deny the claims that can be made. So, you can choose to believe a story about what happens at the end of the end, and avoid the anxiety of the emptiness. Or you can pull your hair out one by one trying to figure out a narrative for yourself, one that you can believe in.

But that is the trouble with stories.

They cannot be questioned.

Must not be questioned.

For if you question them too strongly, they fall apart at the seams and you see them for what they are: charade by a master swindler. A menagerie of stereotypes and ambiguous plot points. The stories you make, are the ones that are easiest to question. Because you made them. Like an artist you know where the faults lie and where the strokes of the brush careen over the frame into reality, indistinguishable. And the stories you buy from the bazaar are less likely to show such unreliable behaviour. Simply because they’re bought. There has been an investment in them. There is less contentment in a bought story, but you have the guarantee of countless others and amazing as well as scathing reviews of the same product. We hesitate from questioning these mass manufactured stories because if they worked for hundreds of others, they should work for you too. If they don’t, maybe you’re using it wrongly. Did you read the user manual? Read it again. Read the 52 translations. And then the transliteration at the end. The fine letters between the lines. If it still doesn’t work, some repairmen will fix you. Not the story. The story is perfect. It worked for everyone else. It should work for you.

If God forbid you to find yourself in an alleyway, with the realization that the story doesn’t work. That too much of life has passed and your imagination has leaked out of your pockets. And you lack the ambition to make stories and crave too much autonomy to loan it from your parents or your friends. You find yourself at this pathway, envying the believers who in their naivety have at least the comfort of companionship, an end to gesticulate about, a journey filled with struggle compliant with their character arc, and a neat conclusion as the dessert. Then it might be too late for you to buy stories anymore. Check your pockets once more for any spare change. And if you find any, go buy the cheapest, easiest chronicle. And believe in it. Because writing stories for yourself is hard.

I would know because I haven’t written any this year. Only poems of wistful passion borne out of necessity and the comforting scourge of love that knows no outlet.

Anything goes

 

 He scratched the under side of his bulging belly by putting his hand under his shirt which had come loose on the walk home. The unshaved hair there were clumped up by the sweat, moisture and gunk that had accumulated throughout the day. Almost as a reflex, he then sniffed his hand that had just been there and then put it back on his side as if nothing had happened.

Bashir yawned as he took the last steps to his home where his ravishing wife and his two adorable daughters would be waiting for him. The thought of them made him smile and then as an after thought made him nauseous. He looked at his hands before he rang the bell; the calluses were not enough to show the burden of the work he did. But he had to do it. For his family.

He didn’t need to ring the bell because his daughters were already there waiting for him on the other side of the door. Espying some presence outside, they had peaked through the slit in the side of the gate and opened it hurriedly. They hugged their father as he walked in. He pinched their cheeks and kissed them. Then he washed his hands and walked into the kitchen. His wife knew he came home tired from work and always had dinner ready. She saw him enter and meekly smiled. He smiled back and greeted her. He wished he could hold her close and fuck her as he once had when they were newly married; before Alina and Alishba had been born; before the shit had hit the metaphorical fan and before his belly didn’t come in the way of all of his hugs. Now he couldn’t do that, because if he did, he would break down and tell her everything, which would cause ruination.

They lived in a small city where not much happened, and whatever did happen was dissected and talked about for months till the next big thing that happened. His job too was simple albeit a little morbid one. He was responsible for dissecting the bodies in the autopsy room in the local hospital. He wasn’t really a mortician or a forensic scientist. He wasn’t qualified for the job. His only merit was assisting his father when he would go slaughter people’s animals during the Eid-ul-Adha. That had helped him learn how to use the blades deftly and without much fuss. He didn’t know in what capacity he performed the dissection, just that the goody-two-shoes doctors of the hospital didn’t want their abstract white coats sullied by the blood and shit and piss of the dead. Or maybe they just didn’t know how to do it. In any case, he was responsible for doing it, and it was alright. He got paid by the daily work and it was just enough to keep the family fed and his daughters to study in a decent English medium school. He got financial bonuses for every autopsy performed, as his task on other usual days was paperwork and running errands and maintaining the state of things. This bonus is what he looked for and what he also dreaded. Every time he had to lift the shroud from the face of the dead to begin the verification process and set the machinery of autopsy into motion, he felt like he was cheating. Bashir felt like earning money in this way was wrong, as if earning off of the dead was wrong and morally questionable. But then he thought of his wife, and his children, and his much more successful brother, and he knew he had to do whatever he could.

Right on cue, as Alina brought out the clothe they were going to spread and eat their food on, the bell rang. He didn’t pay heed to who it would be at this time. He was too tired and mentally preoccupied. He was taken aback however to see his brother stroll into the room.

He was as usual dressed in a crisp white shalwar kameez that he had changed into after work. His brother worked in the same hospital as him, but in a much better position. He was a clerk of sorts but everybody respected him, and at the end of the day, he didn’t have to scrape out the half digested slog from someone’s intestines out of his nails. His brother was also very generous and loving towards his nieces. It was always harrowing for Bashir to see his brother bring gifts for his daughters. He tried to smile and offer gestures of gratitude with exuberant displays of annoyance on why his brother had bothered again with the gifts. He liked to think that his brother saw through his facade. He did, obviously he did.

“Chachu, chachu what did you bring for us this time?”

A bat. He brought a bat for Bashir’s little girls. He didn’t bring a ball, and didn’t care that his girls had never shown any interest in cricket. He had brought a bat for them, and it looked slightly rugged near the handle, and scratched on the face. But in the dim light of a single energy saver and the droning of the fan on the UPS, the details died down. And at the end of the day, it was a gift. His daughters thanked him and started running around with the bat in the small room, till their mother chided them and told them to play with it tomorrow after school.

Bashir exchanged pleasantries with his brother. Some small talk of here and there. They had started eating dinner, which was as always a little too bland. But Bashir didn’t complain. He couldn’t complain even if he wanted to. He looked at his brother and saw a devilish snarl appear on his face.

“Guriya, where did the necklace go that I gave you a few months ago?”

A few months ago, his brother had brought a real gold necklace for Bashir’s elder daughter, Alishba. Bashir had insisted, nay, demanded that he take it back. He couldn’t bear the burden of gratitude of such an expensive gift. The girl’s mother had half jokingly confessed that they wouldn’t be able to gift Alishba such a gift even on her wedding if they were to start saving now. But his brother had insisted, and at the end of the day, he had left, leaving the necklace on the table. The girls didn’t understand the true value of it but knew it was a great gift. They gave it to their mother who put it in her jewellery box beneath the bed. And that would have been the end of the matter, but Bashir knew his brother better than anyone else.

Now, his wife explained that they had packed it in a sandook with other important stuff, and they would give it to Alishba when the time was right. She kept glancing at Bashir as she said this. So his suspicion was right. She had heard him get up that night, open the jewellery box and take the necklace with him outside the house. Oh well, he hoped she understood, and even if she didn’t, his conscience was clear. It was all for his family’s welfare.

His brother chuckled, licked his finger clean and burped. Suddenly, Bashir was nauseous again. He couldn’t look at the food on his plate. It looked half eaten. Like it had been inside someone’s body. He looked at the bowl of salan and it looked like human offal to him. He pushed the plate aside and got up.

“Alhamdulillah”

Everyone else had finished by now. His wife offered tea to his brother but he refused it on the grounds that he had somewhere else to be. His brother was not married. And perhaps marriage and family were the only exclusive luxuries that Bashir had and his brother didn’t. This sole thought kept greater feelings of jealousy at bay. But then he thought, maybe this is why his brother was so kind to his nieces: they were his sole family. The girls retreated to their combined room; finished their homework and slept. Bashir didn’t have the heart to do anything else but lie down on the bed and wait till his wife was asleep. She told him of the finances of this month and eyes closed he cursed himself for never letting his wife finish her education. He once again lusted for her embrace but knew such ideas were fanciful when he had other more important matters to attend to in the night once she had slept. His wife could only go on for so long talking to a log, and so she too fell asleep.

Bashir kept his eyes closed and waited for some more time.

It wasnt hard to not fall asleep, but it was hard to keep his mind off of things. He kept on imagining his brother’s hands over his daughters. He imagined them feeding their fat uncle the intestines of a goat, except the goat had the head of a human. And the bat was bathed in a coat of blood, and his brother kept on gilding it in gold and handing it to Bashir’s wife. He couldn’t stop thinking about the necklace. Or the clothes he had brought. Or the envelopes of money as gifts. Or the mobile he once brought which they had to sell because they didn’t want their daughter’s minds sullied. Deep down he knew that he was just projecting his own suppressed thoughts in a crooked way and that he should calm down. And yet every time, one shuddering thought brought him thudding back to the same state: they were all indebted to his brother one way or another, and he had a lot of influence and repute in the area. What would happen if one day he came to collect all his debt? And what would the payment be? How long could this possibly go on till people became wiser?

With these thoughts still trailing in his mind, he got up and walked outside the room, into the courtyard. He saw the bat leaning with the wall, and picked it up. He carried it in his hands as he walked out of the door of his house into the grim darkness of the eerie night.

----

He was on time to duty next morning, as always. As he was getting into the rhythm of work, one of his colleagues called him over and told him that they were waiting on him to perform an autopsy. Bashir nodded mechanically and went over to the autopsy suite, where he cleaned himself and got ready to perform the dissection. There were some people watching, and a bunch of doctors saying something but to Bashir’s expert hands and eyes none of that mattered. Not because he was proficient at what he did, that too was true, but it was because the only thing that he could see was the battered face of the victim, as if someone had beaten his head to pulp with a large blunt object. He heard one of the doctors say:

“It’s almost like the trauma to the face is from something like a cricket bat.”

After the autopsy was over and all the conclusions that had to be drawn were drawn, mainly that the body was that of an unknown beggar on the street, Bashir stood outside an office smoking a cigarette. He only smoked after autopsies. It helped calm his nerves. He saw his brother walking by with a file tucked under his armpit. Almost out of revulsion and hatred he called out:

“Razzak!”

The one who provides sustenance, Bashir thought and scoffed.

His brother looked vaguely surprised that someone had called him but the expression of surprise molded into a grin at the sight of his brother as he ambled towards him.

“I heard there was an autopsy today.” He said as he stopped to stand in front of him.

Bashir didn’t reply. He didn’t want to.

“I was thinking you should buy the girl’s some tennis balls to play cricket with.”

“I threw the bat in the landfill outside the airport.”

The look of mirth evaporated from his brother’s face.

“Why do you keep on dispensing away with my gifts like that?”

Bashir could barely keep his eyes open. He wondered if his wife had made qeema today. She might’ve. The food always looks like the bodies. It always does.

“You know, I really have to struggle to get those gifts for you.”

Why does the food look like the bodies? Why was he still fat if the thought of the food at home made him want to throw up?

His brother put a hand on Bashir’s shoulder, sighed and with genuine sincerity and calmness said:

“Come now brother, someone has to help you get those pay bonuses. Someone has to put the food on the family’s platter.”

Right then, Bashir threw up last night’s dinner.