Observations of a twisted mind

No, it’s not my birthday. It’s not the beginning of a new year. Well, yes, it is the first month of the Islamic calendar, but that is not the reason for this post. Or is it? It may be that spiritual times make one contemplate the nature of truth and belief systems more deeply. Or perhaps, more appropriately, these are merely random ruminations of a twisted, convoluted mind.

So here are six lessons that life hurled at my head. Whack! Ouch.

1. Everything can be questioned.
   Everything in this world— every belief system, every value system, every tradition, all feelings of pride, belonging and origins—all of these can and should be questioned. All heroes can be deconstructed and looked at from critical perspectives. Ideas, narratives, events—all of them have changed forms numerously before they reached you. It is naïve to imagine that all the information reaching you is pure and undiluted. No question is ever right or wrong, though the answers may be. The truth, if at all such a thing even exists, can only be sought through greater and greater probing. The surface of the ocean scarcely reveals what lies within the depths.
2. Questions are not always expressions of doubt
   Isn’t that what teachers in classrooms ask: any doubts or confusions? Perhaps that’s where we internalise the idea that questions are related to doubts and confusion. In truth, questions are merely related to thirst, to seeking. To learning. The word ‘question’ is an answer unto itself; for it hides within it the word ‘quest.’ Every question is a quest for knowledge. Every question is a quest for the truth. It may not necessarily be an indication of doubt or scepticism, it may not be, as we tend to believe, an act of casting aspersions on an entity, tradition, idea or belief system. It may just be a desire to probe further and know what lies in the depths. Particularly in relation to religious and national identity, it is possible for one to live in harmony with those systems, be comfortingly and safely ensconced within their embrace, and yet question them incessantly—perhaps only with the intention of distilling and distilling until one finds the purest version. Or perhaps one would find that no such thing as a pure version exists. Sometimes when you peel off the layers, you find… nothing. There is no core. No centre. The centre is a void, a nothingness—much like the dark nothingness that fills up the universe; the nothingness we refer to as outer space. It stays there, a vacuum with its own existence, a blank that doesn’t feel the need to be filled. That is where questions are supposed to lead us: into the vastness of the universe.
3. Sometimes one may choose, temporarily, not to enter the depths.
   The depths can be frightening. It may not be absolutely necessary for me to know what lies in the depths of the ocean—though it would be good for me to find out. And yet, I may choose only to swim with the waves, I may choose only to see what appears on the surface. Perhaps I’m not ready yet to enter the depths? It is possible. Perhaps I tried and what I found scared me? It is possible, too. Perhaps I tried and was saddened by what I saw? Perhaps I tried and what I saw wasn’t beautiful? Perhaps it horrified me to the extent of destroying the wondrous, serene image of the ocean I had been carrying with me for so long? It is possible. And that may lead me to halt my quest and content myself with swimming in the outer, buoyant waters, full of radiance and joy. And that’s alright. There is a time for everything, and perhaps my time for getting closer to the truth has not yet arrived.
4. Sometimes a lie may give life.
   Ironic, isn’t it? Sometimes a false hope, a false belief may inspire you to move forward to victory. Sometimes an imaginary ideal may lead you to be the best version of yourself. Sometimes a lie may lead you to believe in the truth of your own ability. Pretty contorted, right? Sigh. This world is such a contorted place. Always spiralling inwards, folding in on itself.
5. No one will ever be one hundred per cent in agreement with you.
   Nope. Not your best friend, not your sweetheart, not your sibling, not your parents, not your children. The only one who will ever agree with you one hundred per cent of the time is yourself. No—not even you. You won’t always be in agreement with yourself either, for there will always be internal conflicts, confusions, rebellions within. That would be your own self disagreeing with you.
   Still, the only one who comes close to being always in agreement with you, is you. And that is because every person is unique. There’s only one of every person on this earth. Each of us has a unique mind with distinctive thoughts, and has lived a distinct life with experiences unique to us. Our thoughts and behaviours are modelled by those life experiences, and since no two people ever lead the exact same life, no two people will ever entirely agree with each other. So, dear overgrown child-woman, stop trying to convince people so that they agree absolutely with you or see the world the exact same way that you see it. And stop trying to find people who think the exact same way as you do. No such person exists. That person could only be a clone of you. But you would find it very, very difficult to get along with a clone of yourself, because then you would see, well and truly, how awful a person you are. Seriously.
6. Everyone you’ve ever met in life for some significant moment has become a part of you. The things people do, the things they say, the things you agree with or disagree with, all of it is within you and comes out at some point in life, in the form of a thought, an action, an emotion. Every person who forced you in some way to think, to act, to alter course, or made you decide to remain on course—all of them are within you, for better or for worse. You will never ‘forget’ any of them, though you may perhaps forgive. Stop trying to fight them. Make peace with them. They could have hurt you or pleased you from outside, but from here, from within you, the only person hurting you or pleasing you is you. Don’t hurt yourself any more.

And that’s about it. None of the above ideas are expected to motivate, inspire or guide anyone else how to lead their life. They are random observations, things I happened to learn till now—and may have to unlearn, moving forward. They are notes to myself; meant only to be read and pondered over. And deconstructed.

To make way for the new.

Old school love

Image: http://www.deviantart.com

A fortnight ago, I was pottering around the house rifling through my book collection, scrolling through Amazon Prime, looking for something to read, something to watch. Something that came with a whiff of old-school, slow-breathing love.

I’m a romance addict. Anyone who knows me knows that. I could make do with very little food but I couldn’t make do with very little romance. I’d been cranky and angsty all week, for no apparent reason, and I was looking for the one thing that would calm me down.

And then, late at night in the darkness of the bedroom I read on my phone Natasha Badhwar’s Mint Lounge column for that week. Suddenly, there it was: a slice of romantic nirvana.

Small intimacies.

The tiny, mostly unnoticeable details in a marriage that carry a subtle, soft undercurrent of romance. Like the tucking back of torn-off buttons. Natasha used this example from old Hindi movies to illustrate her point: “From Hindi movies, I had internalized other aspirations of domestic togetherness. Like the scene in which it is discovered that the man has a button missing in his shirt just when he is ready to leave for work. The woman steps in to deftly sew on a button while he is still wearing his shirt. She moves her face close to his chest to cut off the thread with her teeth, because real women don’t use scissors.

Unmoved by my romantic yearnings, my husband’s shirt buttons have remained steadfast and immotile over the years.”

As soon as I read this line I blushed a furious red.

Despite not possessing the qualities of the sanskari sewing-darning woman in the least, I have to confess that it is with quite a degree of fondness that I stitch together my husband’s kurtas that begin to come apart at the seams. And no, not when he’s wearing them. Merely the act of having this mundane piece of white cloth—his kurta— in my hand and putting the quick four-five stitches to mend it, or tuck the odd button that has fallen off, evokes a deep, familiar sort of affection, a feeling akin to sitting face to face at the dining table and talking long past the food is gone.

This whole love-through-sewing thing was probably internalised by me through the very cinema that Natasha speaks about. Drat those movies!

She then goes on to narrate an anecdote from her aunt and uncle’s life, of them doing their daily puja (prayer) together. “When she is pouring oil into the lamp, she needs his presence to prepare the wick. He holds the prayer book open as she reads out the verses. From a distance, one can see them instructing each other to do what is so routine for them, you wonder why they are speaking at all. They close their eyes together and go silent, probably praying for the same thing. Their temple room is full of images of deities but they seem like they are in communion with each other.”

The image seemed to fill my room as well. Fill my heart, lighting it up like a diya for the puja.

For the past few days or so, ever so slightly, I’d been feeling a wave of restlessness, a wave of irritation at myself.

My husband and I come from diametrically opposite backgrounds. East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet, said Rudyard Kipling. But he only needed to see us together to know how the twain doth meet. All these years, my guy and I have been constantly juggling his intensely traditional background and my decidedly modern one, keeping it together by sheer will power and force of love—and umpteen recalibrations.

Sometimes it overwhelms us.

Sometimes I end up asking myself why I got into this at all. How could I have dumped myself in this mess? For that entire week, I’d been reeling under one of these spells of unexplained restlessness.

And then along comes this. This little paragraph about a couple that lights a diya together and prays side by side.

Takes me back a decade in a swish.

Prayer.

When Sajjad and I were still waiting to get married, one of the most romantic things I imagined with him—much longed for and anticipated—was prayer. Together. With this man who brought immense peace and spirituality to my life.

We would imagine the time when we’d be together in one room—our room—offering our namaz with our prayer mats spread out before us.

Joined in prayer. Joined in soul.

“In communion with each other.”

Suddenly, just like that, I remembered precisely why both of us had dumped ourselves into this ‘mess’.

It’s what we had wanted.

We married each other because we had wanted exactly what our other half brings to the table.

I had wanted him, a deeply spiritual man, a calm man. A man who possessed the capacity to listen. A man I could trust. And I, I was what he wanted. A thinking woman, a woman with a mind and a voice. To quote him verbatim, “A woman whose brain is the most attractive part of her body.”

Had he wanted a more traditional woman to match his traditional background, he could have had his pick from the dozens around him. Had I wanted a more modern man to match my modern background, I could have chosen from the dozens that tried to woo me. The reason we were here, together, wading through these frequently-turbulent waters, cutting through the foliage and battling it out together, was because we had both wanted it.

There are times in every couple’s togetherness, when we begin to wonder how did we ever come to be here? The present, the future and the world around gets too much for us. We resent the sacrifices we made, the life we had to give up in order to live this one. Was it even worth it?

In times like these, it makes sense to close our eyes and remember what it was that we’d wanted in the first place. Why was it that we made those sacrifices at all?

That might, perhaps, bring back the answers we already know, but often forget. The answers that sometimes hide within the smallest of things–the things that make up the essence of old school love.