Tick Tock Tick T...

Adil studied Business Law all semester exceptionally hard. He topped both the mid terms, passed his quizzes and assignments with flying colours and was all set for an ‘A’. Today, the final exam day, he wakes up in his bed and his yawn turns into a piercing shriek. He finds out that he has overslept and missed his final exam! Imagine his state.

Hareem took her 4-year-old cousin to the shopping mall and left her with the salesman for a minute while she tried out a pair of drainpipe-jeans in the trial room. When she came back both the salesman and her cousin were nowhere to be found. She can now do nothing but sob.

Ali was crossing the road in a hurry to catch the IBA point. His cell phone rang, he lost his concentration for a split second and … *HIT*. His parents call that split second back everyday but in vain.

Time is time. Whether it is an hour, a minute or a split second, its value is immeasurable, unquantifiable, inexplicable and undeniable. They say time is money, I say it would be ridiculous to even attempt to compare something as infinitely valuable with something as limited as money. Can that split second Ali lost his life in be ever evaluated?

If time is not just money, what is it? Being humans and therefore bearing an erring nature we can not solve this mystery ourselves. Hence, we recall what our Creator has told us. He said,

“By the time, verily Man is in loss, except such as have Faith, and do righteous deeds, and in the mutual enjoining of Truth, and of Patience and Constancy.”- Surah Al Asr

Hence, time for us is the only chance to save ourselves from being among the ‘men in loss’. Furthermore, we have to use it the right way. Surah Al Asr tells us that we should use our time to work upon our faith in the Creator who cares for every single cell that we are made up of instead of staying up all night long playing games, to apply Islam to our lives the Kaizen* way instead of wasting our precious hours sleeping till two in the afternoon, to spread the truth ( after having acquired it ourselves off course) instead of endlessly delving ourselves deep in frivolity that gives us neither worldly nor spiritual gain and along with these efforts to practice patience in the face of hardships instead of resorting to vailing, complaining and therefore ending up neutralising the thawaab earned earlier.

If a certain act does not fit in one of the four categories – faith, good deeds, truth and patience –then we are clearly killing time and therefore putting our whole eternity at stake. Remember, we are immortals!

Boo and Loo - The Two beggars

Boo was a 10 year old kid. He was kidnapped at the age of six, his left arm was amputated and he was forced into beggary by the biggest mafia in the city.

Every morning he is woken up early by the supervisor of his gang of fellow beggar-kids. They are given half a ‘bhusi-tukray-wali-roti’ each and driven to Pity Road’s signal where they all beg. Now, Boo’s specialty is not his arm-less-ness but his facial expressions. No, they are not fake. They are a combination of real hunger, fear and desperation. Hunger because he hasn’t had a stomach full of food since he doesn’t remember when; fear because failure to the bring back home two hundred rupees a day results in a half an hour long session of caning on his back by his supervisor; desperation because he thinks that the people in those fancy cars are so rich that a ten rupee note would be nothing for them and that they should give him one already.

Most of the time people just ignore him and move on; however, Pity Road is a good place for Boo because almost everyday he comes across a few drivers at the signal who take pity on him so much that they give him a twenty rupee note in a go. Yes, rare luck he has got. Anyway, it ends up in the pocket of the mafia’s head, Mr. Gutter.

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Loo is a ten year old kid too. His father died when he was six and that was when his mother was kicked out of the house by her in-laws. They forcibly kept Loo with themselves and made him work all day long. But more than even missing his mother he felt worse about something that happened every night when he went to bed with his unmarried uncle. He had no name for it but he knew it was something very wrong; even the thought of it during the day made him sweat badly.

One night, almost a year after his father’s death, he was awoken by someone pulling his hair. It was not his uncle – he was snoring as hard as everyday –but someone else. He looked up and saw; it was a woman’s hand coming from the window directly above the bed. Soon enough he realized it; it was his mother’s hand! In a thunder he stood up on the bed to see his mother face to face. It was the best moment of his life. She was back, his mother; his loving, caring, sacrificing mother; his only friend in the entire world. She reached out to him and pulled him out of the window that opened towards the main road. Off they ran. They hid, they travelled, they did everything that could take them farther from that house. Later on, they settled at the outskirts of the city. His mother became a maasi and Loo went along with her house to house as a helping hand.

Today, three years later, his mother falls severely ill. She has a high fever. She has had it for a few days and it has kept increasing. Loo goes to the neighbourhood’s doctor, explains his mother’s condition and exchanges a hundred rupee note for a prescription. The doctor tells him that she should immediately be treated or it will be too late while the pharmacist asks him to get seven hundred rupees first to get the drugs. Seven hundred rupees! It is the last day of the month and the hundred rupees he paid the doctor with was all that was there in his mother’s gullak. He runs off to the aunties whom his mother works for but they shoo him off and scold him for not turning up for the past couple of days. He goes to his neighbours but they turnout to be almost as penniless as himself.

He feels the same emotions as Boo’s –hunger, fear and desperation –just in a different way. Hunger for something as essential as medicine for his mother; fear that failure to get the medicine might result in something he can not bare to imagine; desperation because time is running out with each breath. These emotions lead him to Damn Road’s signal, somewhere his father had once given fifty rupees to a beggar just because the beggar had told him how sick his mother was and that he needed money for her drugs.

He stands there at the signal. Each time the cars stop he begs by them. Hours and hours pass but he doesn’t come across one pitying person. Tears well up in his eyes, his mind panics and his body grows numb. The signal stops again. He goes to this really big car and tries his luck for the umpteenth time. The posh-looking man on the driver’s seat ignores him and starts talking to the lady on the passenger seat. Loo notices it’s him he is talking about. The man tells the woman how these professional beggars are controlled by mafias and that giving them alms is like a crime in itself. Loo turns back to him and tells him how he is not a professional, showing him the prescription slip. The man says the slip proves his being a professional even more.

Loo comes back home empty handed to find his life too has gone empty forever.

I wish there was a tool I could use to recognize Boos and Loos at the signals I stop at.

Arab-Bee

The golden sand dunes are all around me, hills and hills of them, as far as my sight can reach. I can see it, smell it and even feel it. It’s in my shoes, my hair and even a bit between my teeth. Wondering specifically what it is that makes me feel like getting lost in the grandeur of the desert, I walk on and on and completely lose track of time. With each step, my feet sink into the sand leaving their deep marks behind. Up and down, many a hill I cross.

After I don’t know how many hours when I do wake up, I fail to find the mighty gold sun on my head and the pale cloudless sky above the hills. Instead I see the sky a deep indigo at the eastern end of the horizon and peach-pink at the western one where the reddish-orange sun is about to completely set. The hot humid air that beat cruelly against my skin at noon is at peace with the desert now. As it grows darker, a few tiny specs of light come to life at some distance.

I move in the direction of the light. As I move on more, the handful of specs grows into a huge pool; a whole city is out there. I can now see it because the hills have flattened out into a sandy plain and ceased to be an obstacle in the view. I grow nearer to it and the air starts smelling of baked bread; there is life in a desert too.

- Part 1.

I Fell Ill & Felt Awesome!

Though it is hurting a little typing with a cannula stuck in a vein in my left hand, I think it is worth recording the awesome-ness I have been through in these two days of sickness before it fades away. No, I am not being sarcastic.

It all began on 30^th of January with the daawat at our place. I spent the following night expecting the discomfort, a little bit of rumbling in my stomach, to go away on its own but my expectations crashed the next morning. Whether it was the sheermaal, the cake or the baklaawaa that caused it, I don’t know; but what followed was clearly identifiable.

I was sick, terribly sick with food poisoning. All the minerals had drained out of my body and I was alone upstairs in my bed, too meek even to call my nani or masi downstairs. So, dear cell phone came to the rescue, as it had countless other times. I called my mom instead ( I have been living with my nani for over a year and my mom lives a three-minute-walk away ) because it’s easier to explain her things especially when you don’t have much energy to spare. Then, she called up my nani and I was sent breakfast upstairs. Too weak to wake up and brush up my teeth and too disgusted to eat the breakfast without doing so, I fell asleep again trying to get myself out of the bed.

The next time I woke up, the clock told me it was six in the evening. I saw my breakfast, marie biscuits and a glass of ORS, still lying there. I seriously needed help. Coincidentally, my nani, who was out of the house all the while, came to check on me that very instant. The next thing I knew; I was being taken to the hospital. Dearest nana, who is over eighty, drove me to a nearby clinic. I got a drip for a couple of hours on the clinic’s bed with my mother and nani taking turns being with me.

Objectively speaking, they weren’t actually doing anything to me to make me feel better but their presence… that’s something I can’t explain. Just then, I remembered a friend whose mother had passed away when she was 14 and imagined how I would have felt if I didn’t have a mother who could be with me when I was sick, who would comfort me when the nurse injected the drip in my vein, who could engage me in random talk to distract me from pain. More than I was feeling sick, I felt depressed at the thought. Right now too, it pains me to imagine how my friend must feel at such times.

I came back home, my mother helped me go to the restroom, with the cannula still stuck in my vein for future drips. She made me khichdi and laid my bed in the drawing room so that my nani could check on me every now and then. She sorted out the many pills the doctor had prescribed and wrote the directions for me to follow. She even watched a part of the show at DawnNews which I badly wanted to see and then left for her home just before midnight.

The next day, a Monday, a working day, was even more awesome because I even got to miss IBA and that too without using an absence! My mother brought me a nurse at home to fix me a drip from the railing of my curtains. She gave me khichdi again and set off for her job. Three hours later she left the kids at her tuition centre and brought another nurse to remove the drip. Yes, my mom’s a super mom. Then I watched The Addam’s Family and Facebooked a lot. For some strange reason, I felt like a second grader who had skipped school after pretending to be sick and was enjoying the day with Cartoon Network.

The day turned out to be even more awesome when I found out that all my classmates had ended up doing nothing at university because the campus portal wasn’t working and that disabled them from doing what they were supposed to do; registering themselves in courses of their choices for the current semester. Lucky I had got to be in bed with my supermom’s lovely love, tasty khichdi and later at night a burger, The Addam’s Family and hours of Facebooking and intermittent sleeping.

Few in this world have been blessed so much.

Writer's Block Time!

There are a hundred ideas in my mind. I go to my laptop to vent out and feel lighter. Eyes on the screen, fingers on the keys, wait for it to strike. I scan through the many things I had thought of writing about at different times in the day. It feels like swimming in an ocean. Yet, when I come out of it I have no fish in hand, no one single idea to dwell upon. It’s like being lonely in a crowd; like being in a situation about which Taylor Coleridge said, ‘Water water everywhere nor any drop to drink’.

I think harder which makes things even worse for the harder I think, the more my thoughts get jumbled and more difficult the task becomes. The situation is quite similar to one in which one tries to remember a certain thing which is at the edge of one’s mind but the attempt at recalling pushes it away from the edge. So, knowing the causality, I try not to think and I focus on not thinking anything… don’t think… don’t think… don’t think. Something asks me what not to think and I start telling it all about the ocean of ideas thus defeating the whole purpose of not thinking.

Now, in an attempt to divert myself, I go downstairs sneakily, the time being three in the morning, and stand in front of the fridge hoping to engage in some foody delight. But the writing-ghost apparently is in love with haunting me. The bread reminds of how I could write about poor people starving and us apathetic, selfish people fulfilling our desires indefinitely, my cousin’s leftover bottle of Coke hints me to write on how stupidly we have fallen in love with these intestine-eating, calcium-draining, liver-and-kidney-destroying concoctions, the potatoes and tomatoes in the vegetable box remind me to write that list of dishes I had to compile for my mother which would help her decide what she could cook everyday, the cans of water call me to remind my couple of loyal blog readers to save fresh water reservoirs and just as my sight falls on the cookies there and before they could make me think of eating disorders, I slam the fridge’s door shut and turn to the T.V.

Flipping the channels doesn’t help either. The news channels make me want to rush a post in CAPITAL LETTERS about how they create hype about everything. Big bold letters say ‘News Alert’ making us expect something really important, and are followed by the same old mundane news of how I-don’t-even remember-what happened a minute ago. The music channels make me feel like pulling my hair out and hammering it all down on the keyboard that if one has the capability of analysing trends one might pretty much foresee porn being shown on these channels soon. Before the Indian channels could remind me of how we are totally forgetting all the reasons we call ourselves Muslims and Pakistanis for, I kill the machine and run back upstairs.

Since, my ultimate happy place is my laptop I come back to it like a faithful dog. With myself lying diagonally across the bed, my head resting on my unfolded blanket’s hill and my laptop on my thighs, I come back home to facebook but for some strange reason it doesn’t satisfy me. Yes, I then realize I won’t be at peace until I have fulfilled the writing-ghost’s desire of me writing something a little more mature than a facebook status. So, I here I am writing exactly what a poor writer goes through when going through a block, something that can happen to anyone anytime.

Accidental Life

When I was a kid, in my science class they told me how my forefathers were apes and the world had seemed to grow dark. I always thought of my past as bleak. Now as life moves on, the present seems even worse.

They tell me everything is a product of an accident. A bang echoed in the universe, the earth sprang up. Then came water and with it popped microbes. Microbes evolved into bigger and more intelligent species. The apes entered the scene. And then there came a time when apes turned into human beings one day. And yes, I am one of the grand-grand-grand-daughters of one of these apes who used to pick lice from her daughter’s hair and eat it up. No wonder I get lice in my hair too sometimes…

The thing that has driven me to pen down my feelings is the evilness of this world. Yes, this world, this accidental life that we have is wicked to its core.

Look at me for example. I am obese and mentally slow. My father left my mother when I was 10. The cherry on top of the cake; my mother now has leukaemia; I’ll practically be an orphan in a couple of years. Imagine my emotional and financial future.

Let’s look at another example. It’s this girl in my class, Hania. People think she is hot and she gets the golden academic trophy every year. She has a perfect little family which goes to Europefor vacations twice every year. The cherry on top of the cake; she is ultra rich and will head her father’s textile company pretty soon so she doesn’t have a care in the world about money.

Click on the picture to enlarge it

So, cruel accidental life happened to both of us and for some reason liked her more than me. In the end we will both die and ants will eat our bodies up. Where’s the justice? What? C’mon don’t tell me justice does happen eventually. What about those serial killers who kill hundreds and get to die only once? That’s not justice. What about the great pharaohs who lived on a ‘heaven-on-earth’ by savagely enslaving their people and using them brutally? What about me and Hania? Will I ever be compensated for what I did not have, something Hania had out of no effort of her own?

I feel so pathetic, so sorry for myself and all those to whom accidental life has been cruel. I think the couple of classmates who told me I seemed suicidal were right. I think I am going to escape this unrewarding existence today, why procrastinate? May be I can help a few others in my part of the world too before I go. Hmm… stabbing can be a mess, I don’t think strangling will be easy for me… Ya, I think a bit of chloroform and a pillow to suffocate are the best ingredients. As for me I think I’ll go for slashing of my wrists; hope the pain will cloud my hatred for this horror world as this accidental life of mine drains out of my body.