Catharsis I

I remember....

I remember, when I was 3, I toddled up to my Chachus bed at around 3 am and insisted that he take me to the park. He said no.
My other Chachu said no too. So did my dad. They had work in the morning, and it was time for me to sleep.

I went to you and nudged you awake.I asked.
Without a word, You drove me out and placed me in the swing. You pushed me back and forth till your kindness weighed heavy on my tiny brown eyelids, and I fell asleep.

Next morning you lectured your sons for Callous Insensitivity.



When the Gulf War happened, you called my father in Saudia, and told him.' I dont care whether you stay there or not or what happens to you! send me my grandaughter or I'll come and get her myself!'
My mum and I eventually flew out. Dad stayed behind during the war.



When I was 1, I had a splinter that needed to be removed. While I was crying in pain, I drowsily muttered your name.
1300 miles away, you heard me. You called mum and asked her if I was okay, you had a feeling I was in pain.



You sent me cartons of Go-Go masala overseas because I had a special fondness for it.

You cooled your chai in a little saucer and let me have all of it because I would bug you that I wanted some too.

You let me sleep next to you between you and dadi, even though I kicked you and punched you out in my sleep. You laughed about how difficult it was to extract yourself from beneath me in the mornings, but you never complained.



One night I had a nightmare while I was sleeping with ammi and abbu. I must have been 5 or 6. I woke up, grabbed my blanket and instinctively walked to your room. I took one look at your sleeping face, and lied down, and went to sleep.


I would give you your medicine every night before I went to sleep. I would sit at the foot of your bed and press your feet.


During very hot summer days you would sit with me on your lap outside the house. You would have a big cooler of ice-cold juice next to you, which you would give out to random passers-by as they walked past us. You would tell me that above all, kindness is what makes us human.



They carried you in on a metal/wood casket. They laid you down in the middle of the drawing room, as if making a public demonstration of you sleeping.


You were draped in white, like an angel. Like a halo your frail white hair. You were smiling, like the kind of smile you'd give me before you tapered off to sleep. The quite shy smile and the twinkling eyes.
But your eyes were closed. I couldn't see the twinkle.


It must've been something sad. Why was it sad? You were just sleeping weren't you?
Everyone was crying. Abbu was crying too. Abbu never cried.


Somebody told me that you were going away, but that couldn't be true. You would never do that to me. You, who would fly out to the other side of the world to be with me,
you, who named me and made me who I am,
you, who could not bear to see me disappointed,
you would not disappoint me.


They took you away, You didn't come back.
and I cried because everyone else had. I didn't know what forever meant.



After a few days, dadi gave me a handkerchief that belonged to you. Silken brown with green swirls. Subtle, yet full of life.
You.


I have carried You around with me since then. I keep You in a small white box with a red lid and gold engraving on the cover.
I take You out to hug You to myself when I'm happy. I take You out to wipe my tears when I cry.


You and I have grown old, traveled, learned and lost together.
for You and I are sown of the same crisscrossing green-brown threads.
You are the green shadow, i am the interwoven brown soul.


January 2009
Karachi.


All this I told you as I stood before you.
The concrete pavement beneath my feet, the marble canopy above your eyes.
The lush red rose petals, the fragrant joss-sticks, rose-water drenched soil,
the sights and scents I associate with you.

My tears ran amiss and sunk below me to touch you. I came here to see you again Dadu.
It's been a while, and i know i can't wake you up to take me to the park at 3 am anymore,
but I still really miss you.



....

Dadu. It's been nearly 14 years, and I'm turning 20 very soon. It's been a while, but there are somethings that become imprinted on your soul, more familiar to you than your own name.

As I'm sitting here staring at the red and gold box sitting on top of my dresser facing blankly at me, I confess that I haven't forgotten a single bit, and that dealing with your loss is something that still stings me sometimes.
This was my attempt to seek to remember the beautiful in you,
the beautiful in you which is now a part of me.


-eeda.

Growing Up and Growing Old is
Not the Same Thing.


December, 2008.
Karachi.




The sheer humanity of a train station.

The people are the journey.
The people are the stamps, the tickets, the scars.
Life stories of poverty and misery, arriving on Platform 11 at a quarter to two.
The certain pervasive hopelessness that blackens the broken gate signs, the ticket booth,
the red stamped seat 41, carriage 20.
The glittering dream has unraveled away from them,
like snipped nails.

Like snipped nails this train station: old and dirty,
forgotten and forsaken.
Weary eyed travelers, weary eyed visitors,
like the odorous, cramped waiting room of a hospital
collectively receiving news of death.

Like a collective hopeless sigh this train station.
Trains to go places except each place is like this place.
No 'anywhere but here', for everywhere IS here.

Faded green camouflage-print carriages,
carriers of people's souls
holes.
The monster rolls in, a lazy serpent.
Snaking its ways through the dirt and mud and murk,
hissing stress,
steam.
Rolls in and closes its weary tired eyes.
Despaired wrinkled faces sigh out in swishes of black chadors,
dusty blue shalwars.

Here is like Everywhere,
anywhere else like Here.
there is no destination.

It cannot be a journey, if it does not have an end.

Amidst tired eyes are orbs,
Gold young eyes cradled in weary arms.
Gold young eyes that find glitter
in the cobwebbed eaves, the mildewed ceilings,
the shattered television, the bent metal mug of chai.
Gold young eyes shimmering
like pearls.

Like pearls this train station: like an oyster this world.
Like an oyster, their tiny leather seat
on an overcrowded, overburdened train carriage.
Like a pearl, the 5 rupee coin clutched between small fingers,

like Hope,
their innocent faces.

..............................

so how can it be the end?

I wrote this on the train station waiting to pick up somebody, while I was in Paki over the winter.
To say I was overwhelmed by the palette of colors, the diversity in people, the vivacity in their faces..is an understatement.
I cannot come close to capturing that feeling, but if i could,
I would like to go back sometime and sit on the desolate, broken green bench, perhaps occupied on the other end by a homeless malang, drink chai straight from the nearby dhaba,
and write about the poor lost souls that wander around me.

Yeah.
Now that i've had my calling, ima head to bed.

cheerio,
(not the cereal, I prefer good ol' Nesquick like the spoilt lil kid that I am.)

-eeda

i wait
for you
because
it
gives me
a reason
to live
outside
of my
own
existence.



i feel
i
can then
justify
the other
two-thirds
of
my day
full of
my own
petty
indulgences.


and when
finally
the sleep
overcomes
my brain
to a point
that i'm
dizzy
incoherent
unreal,
i
type to you
a few
gentle
words.
'it's okay
you probably
fell
asleep.'


more for
my own
selfish
comfort
than yours.


................................


and ill always wait,
that won't change.
-eeda.

convo between drug and his mum on their way somewhere..


drugs mom-so, eeda's birthday is coming up...
drug-wait, what! how do you know?
mum-a mother always knows. what are you getting her?
drug-i dunno yet.
mum-okay, ask your sister, she's a girl she'll know what eeda wants. don't get her something stupid okay?




Baaaaahahahahaa...
dude.
i lovez the momz <3 <3 <3.

even thought it's more than a leeeeetle creepy that she knows my birthday. :S
-eeda

..and yet..

You find in me the girl I lost to the hands of time and eyes of men and
eyes of time and hands of men.

I lost myself to use abuse and scarlet
tattoos
of scars and wars fought, forgiven
and not
forgotten.

but you make me forget and you make me hope and hope
is not the thing with feathers but the bird of stone that
weighs me down and wakes me up and makes me wonder if
this bird of stones can fly.


i soar on these dreams and find the world
flying beneath my weary feet.



that is love. maybe. not like seahorses at any rate.
-eeda

Essays on dystopic societies with too many screenwriters one of which who never read the book, one who is an actor, three of which whose scripts never got included and whythefuck shouldicare and whythefuck amiwriting about this?

Just the epic confusion with their screenwriting is dystopic enough, forget the movie itself.

The movie in question is Children of Men.

Rant. paper in 12 hours. fuckinghell. mar gayee.
*shoots self in head*

I feel like I love you but when I see your face you are someone I do not know.
and I peer at you for hours hoping I will find something in you that I find in me that I can relate to.

Right in the wrongest kind of way.

Love. funny word.

reminds me of seahorses.
slippery, elusive, bobbing up and down and never stabilizing in place.


I don't want to leave.
i DONT I dont i donotwanttoleavepleasemakeitstop.

The casual comfort with which I can sprawl in Hinny's lap while Lammy makes me pizza and we talk of sexual innuendos of the gruesomest kind.

the circle to my stick.

I keep telling myself that this will be a new begginning, but that sounds too familiar.
It's like a chant I play in my head like that eeeeeee sound you suddenly hear inside you that doesn't want to go away I tell myself I'll repent and reinvent.

I told myself that when I moved to Vancouver.
and to Tripoli.
and to U.S
and to Karachi.

I'm a small little dot fixated in space, of incandescent vermillion shades.


'And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit-out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?'

-Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock, by T.S Eliot.

...and that dear friends, is why I do not write very often.



You, drug, are everything I wanted to be.
Everything that the essence of me wantedto become, but was too scared to do.
You rid me of my shackles and tell me...


' I love your piercing eyes.'
'Why?'
'The white of your eyes is so...white.'

'and I love your bubble nose.'
'and I love..and I love..and I.''


I.
You are everything I am not,
everything I never wanted to be with,
everything I never can and never will be.
and Yet.

You are the fish that I would

Throw back

But for some reason

As opposites,

We attract.

-Why I love you, Shanelle Gabrielle.

And when you
tell me you would
Do or die.

I dontknowwhattodo.


melodramatic exclamations of love can be
deceivingly touching and unrealistic.

which does not make it insincere.

and yet.

i wonder if this.is.it
-confuzzled-

but i love him and i love him and i
question mark.


I spin in a endless haze.
School, papers, lawyers, forms, transcripts.


A spectator watching my own life on a remote t.v screen I am
too far to even try and come close and
reach out and touch myself to
feel me and pinch me and stare me in the eye and see
if i am real and i
am me.


coffee. 5 hours of sleep in 2 days courtesy you drug.
i need to get back to this goddamn paper on scriptwriting scandals and globalization and why the hell britian keeps immigrants in immigrant removel centres like nazi concentration camps.

no I didnt make the last part up. its true its happening and its not getting publicized
see here..


let's think of happier, simpler things.
like love.
Not.

watch this.



all for now till i get my fried brains to work again.
-eedumdidums

he loves me he loves me not he loves me he loves me not.
he loves me he loves me he loves me....

'No ting tong in your ding dong?'
-Late night Dostana.

Bahahahaha..
*chuckles slyly*

-eeda

December 2009.
Karachi X-Rays,
Pakistan.





Garbed in this stiff blue surgical gown, I feel like I have been stuffed in a garish Halloween costume
which leaves me empty, bare, hollow.
Stripped of any piece of cloth, any accessory that defined me, belonged to me,
could be claimed as mine.

Blue blurs wander around like lost souls.
Apparitions of people past, people present, people that they will become.
Apparitions like clues,
memories.
I have been here before.


A blue blur among others, I want to scream at these rigid-faced nurses, these doctors that nod at me cursorily.

Bring me back my blue robe of 2 years ago, my discarded skin.
It might still have some traces of me, my faint perfume,
some preserved warmth of skin
which I can hold touch breath
reclaim as myself.

Let me inhale those rags and pour into my lungs the same fears the same happiness the same little quirky insecurities that congealed to form one broken whole.


Bring me back my discarded skin.
so that maybe I can recollect those pieces of me.
Maybe I can wrap them around my arms as shimmering bangles and drape them over my skin as golden ornaments and wear them with pride and add to my self like how sometimes clothes accessories and plastic little nothings define us as who we are and who we become.

Maybe in those blue discarded stitches of skin, I can find myself again.

-eeda

p.s.
photocredits Skin deep by chix0r, modified by memememe.. :P

I know what a terminally ill patient feels.


The hushed silences that surround them as they walk around.
The air of exclusion.
The not belonging.

To maybe emphasize their transience.


I am about to leave this world
my world here as I know it.


No I'm not moving onto heaven or paradise, but already I'm being subtly erased from the highschool-esque cliques at university, summer plans for hiking trips,
tea-parties past my departure.

As if everything revolves around the before-she-leaves and after-she's-left.

As if all my days here are numbered.

-eeda

'A failed marriage is the most humiliating confirmation of the transitory seduction of the flesh.Lovers can explore every line, every curve and hollow, of the beloved's body, can together reach the height of inexpressible ecstasy, yet how little it matters when love or lust at last dies and we are left with the disputed possessions, lawyer's bills, the sad detritus of a lumber-room,when the house chosen,furnished,possessed with enthusiasm and hope has become a prison,when faces are set in lines of preevish resentment and bodies no longer desired are observed in all their imperfections with a dispassionate and disenchanted eye.'

-Children of Men, by P.D James.

...and that my friends, is the reason why the thought of marriage petrifies me.
Not the lack of lust, but the eventual disenchantment, the love that is nothing more than perfunctory at best.

*sigh.
-eeda

piece of writing that touched me.
This one is for dadu. ( my grandad)

Borderline Nostalgic
-by Estallidos

i used to stand in the middle of the railroad track on sundays, one foot on either side of the county border line, just so i could tell you that i was in two places at once.

you would shake your head in that disapproving, familiar way, and tell me that no one could be in two places at once, and besides, standing on railroad tracks was illegal, and i had better watch it or else i was liable to get ticketed.

i informed you that wanting to live a little was not illegal.

the day you died i rode full speed down the nearby hill with my bare legs on the handlebars of my mother's bike, the sun shining full in my eyes. i swear to god my hands lifted off the handlebars and flew away, and to this day i still can't find them, but you, you know where they are.

i got a ticket for walking on those railroad tracks and two weeks ago i rode down that hill remembering you, and when i crashed at the bottom i thought i felt you hold my hand.

but no one can be in two places at once.



No, but I try not to believe that.

I have a patterned brown handkerchief of yours that Dadi gave me after you passed away.
Whenever life is overwhelming, I bury my face in that satin square interwoven in silken threads and your scent,
as if they were your palms.

How can you not be here with me,
when even a simple piece of cloth retains you in its very essence, each fiber of its existence vibrates with the intensity of your gaze, the colours of your soul.

and I am human after all...


I miss you dadu.
14 years and counting, I haven't forgotten.

I wonder if you would understand.
I wonder if you would forgive me.


Paisa phekh, tamasha dekh,
Duniya isi ka naam hai.
...lekin meri potti sahee ja rahee hai.
-dadu.
.....and then that smile.


i miss u.
love,
-eeda

mein na mil sakun jo tumko
meri justujo na kerna.

the stream of nigthmares/ horrible dreams continues.
is it reflexive of my life? the quiet before the storm?
im so very anxious about khala's silence. about the fact that she knows im still talking but doesn't do anything about it.
about the fact that she walked in on me while i was on the phone, but never said a word to me, never asked me who it was, never snatched the phone away.
has she really changed? or will she burst after im in libya? will she tell ammi? has she told ammi?

or is she really being nice?

the anxiety is nerve-wracking. the wait, torturous.
i have been blessed with an overactive imagination, and fragile optimism.
i cannot help but worry.

which makes me lose sleep.
and appetite.
i might have the begginnings of peptic ulcer.
yay.

calmthefuckdown please?

i need to pick up yoga again.
i need to turn to God.

im too ashamed to. dont we all have that one unforgiveable sin that makes us cower in His presence? Id rather be shattered and smitten to dust.
my sin.
lies. secrecy.

that is NOT me. im the A-grade student, the school nerd,
valecdictorian, pride of the parents, cultured and well-behaved,
modest, humble, religious,
the well travelled well versed...liar?

its suffocating either way.
but one way i please them and this way i please me,
and this way seems so...selfish.

run run run away. go to another place, be another person, create a new you
yet again.
no distance is far enough.

no matter how harshly you uproot yourself, how diligently you sow yourself again seed by seed,
why is it never you? why do you always get moulded, shaped, restructrued?

i am like the sculpture that created itself.
i do not want to be sculpted anymore.

but you're a desi girl.
aur humari larkiyan...dont.

...

to do or not to do,
that is the question?

-eeda

why is it that guys suddenly realize they love you and always have done so
AFTER they've treated you like shit and you've moved on ahead?

'Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example,'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'
-Pablo Neruda

write for example, that it has been snowing all day..
and the entire cityscape outside my 2 by 3 ft window
slumbers under an ephemeral white mist.


there is something invigorating in sticking your head out your window in the middle of a snow blizzard, and catching snowflakes, like cotton moth balls, in open palms pink with cold.


there is something invigorating
in this self-erasure by the blinding cold whiteness that envelopes you.

consumes you.





snow makes me so HAPPY! :D
cheeni moment,
-eeda.



photo credits snowfall by littlemewhatever on deviantart.com