When I carried five kilos of onions and another five kilos of potatoes from the markaz back to my house, I actually felt what it was like to carry the burden of a lifetime with you. As the polythene bag handles bored into my skin and when my fingers were sore due to the cold wind and the heavy bags, I felt like no other. It wasn't just the weight of onions and potatoes, it was so much more, but I just couldn't put a name to it. As I walked down the streets, I felt like I was walking in a gel..so slow, struggling to walk faster, walk smoother...As the sun started to go down and the entire sector became a tadbit darker, it felt like everything was just leaving me so alone little by little. The cold winds adamant to pull the dupatta off my head, the heavy bags of groceries, the weight of a million effervescent thoughts colliding in my head, the dust-laden streets which seemed to lead me to a place I was supposed to accept as home. I see a huge pile of dry leaves right ahead and I have the sudden urge to throw off my groceries in the middle of the street and jump into the heap...to keep stomping every little leaf until my lungs would collapse and my breath would fail to come to normal...I wanted to grind each leaf to a gazillion fragments, picture each leaf as a major source of pain in my life, hammer it out of my life, excise the tumor. But unfortunately, I couldn't do that, I could just gaze at the dry leaves, which rustled against the dusty road, and pretend as if they didn't exist. I shuffled the grocery bags around, trying to calm my screaming muscles, but I failed miserably. Who said pain was only physical? My aching deltoids were nothing compared to the massive aches that I was encountering deep inside. I don't even know whether it was my heart or my mind that was aching. But there was pain. I just knew it. As I said earlier, I just couldn't put a finger on it. I tried to divert my mind. I concentrated on the sound of my own footsteps on the road. The silence around made it so much easier to do that. Each "thud" felt like a little betrayal to me. I was walking as if I knew where I was headed, but I didn't. I was pretending all this time. Everything was so wrong, so alien, so strange. When I reached home, I climbed the stairs, dumped the groceries in the kitchen, then I literally dragged myself to my bedroom. I was sick and tired and super-saturated. I threw myself on my bed. I lay there for ten minutes staring at the ceiling. The fan stared back at me and I wondered whether it ever got fed up of witnessing everything from up there, at such a distance. Things blurred, so I just closed my eyes. That was the best I could do. I once read, you can close your eyes to things you don't want to see, but you can't close your heart to things you don't want to feel. Funny how quotes can so aptly describe your condition, but do nothing to improve it. I reached out to my side drawer and pulled out my scrapbook. Its incomplete-ness bugged me. I had planned so much- to fill it up, I had collected leaves, pressed flowers, cut out templates, and piled up accessories to fill up the empty pages. But save the first few pages, the rest of the book was staring back at me with a blankness so penetrating, that it made my hands tremble. I flipped through the first page- graduation, the love, the drama, the tears, the farewells, my parents, my friends, the pain of parting ways..second page, summer fun, eating at china grill on July 20, a day of revelations. Once happy events seemed to have a little fragment of pain attached to them in some way or the other. Pain was so inevitable. Fearing needles, blood tests, and driving out of the fear of pain was pointless. Pain still got to you. It had its own ways. It could sneak up behind your back, enter through a small nick in your soul, grow inside, pulsate, put you in a fix, make you want to cry all your body fluids out. I passed my hand over the shells that I had collected from RT beach before leaving Saudi for college...Each shell, a little bump under my fingers, felt so cool and so tranquil. They had been relocated with me. I had deprived them of their abode- the warm beachy sands of Arabia. I was cruel. I had picked them up from the depths of the sands, stored them in a used plastic cup, washed them again and again until I was sure there wasn't a single algae stuck to them. I had subjected them to so much. Stuck on a page in my scrapbook now amidst glitter-laden and smiley faces, the shell looked so out of place...like me. I closed the book shut. Everything seemed to be going through a little tragedy.
A million moons could do no good,
to lighten up my world,
what to talk about those dainty stars.
One by one each candle collapsed,
failing to show me the way,
it was me and darkness, for eternity.
Feb 1, 2009
