Thorns

You stand back and lean on your dirty shovel, wiping sweat off your forehead with the back of your free hand and stare at the patch of freshly upturned earth a few paces ahead. The deed is done.

And then, one day, your hard work pays off. The vivid green finger of the seed you had sown pokes out of the soil, extending day by day as it struggles to touch the sky. You immediately begin nurturing it. Soon, it unfurls a leaf, and then another one and then one more.

But things begin to go wrong.

You watch in horror as the seedling, tainted by the touch of some fell force, begins to transform into something twisted. Sharp spines and midnight black thorns sprout all over it until it seems jagged enough to cut the very air surrounding it. It grows - fast - but at odd, horribly contorted angles. The flowers it sends out in the dead of winter are dark red, black even, and give off the unmistakable, metallic stench of blood.

What do you do?

What do you do when you begin to grow into the wrong sort of person, the kind of person you never wished to become?

Williams Supplement

Imagine looking through a window at any environment that is particularly significant to you. Reflect on the scene, paying close attention to the relation between what you are seeing and why it is meaningful to you. Please limit your statement to 300 words.

I can feel myself slowly drifting off to sleep as my knees fold to my stomach and my arms curl around them. Without gravity, I am floating, adrift. I am a fetus in the womb again, except this time the womb is a giant construct of steel and circuitry, except that it is hurtling through space, and except that it has windows – no bigger than those in an airplane.

I stare out one such window, as I always do in the moments before I lose myself to sleep. The inky black nothingness provides me with a strange mix of comfort and exhilaration. The sheer sense of scale, the fact that the slice of the universe I can see through the window is enough to fit a few trillion Suns into – an understatement, that – is enough to make anyone dizzy. It is an attestation of the insignificance of what we know about the universe, about the world, about ourselves so far. The endless reaches yet to be explored and the infinite possibilities make my mouth water. I lick my lips just in case; globules of floating saliva are unseemly.

My gaze might as well be sweeping indifferently across my own home-planet, somewhere amid the smattering of white pinpricks. The scale of things dazzles me again. I realize how tiny we really are, how the light from everything humanity has ever known is not even registered by my retina.      

We are microscopic and so are our petty affairs – dirty politics, greed, war. No amount of bloodshed will ever make the universe pause for even a breath. Look at us, squabbling over the speck of dust we inhabit, not seeing all there is to explore, to learn, to understand. We must focus our energies into becoming what we’ve always had the potential to: great. 

I remember how, when someone was looking for something they couldn't find, my grandmother would say, "Look for something else." And sure enough, the moment the house began being dismantled in the search of something else, instead, what had formerly been lost would be immediately found. I remember, also, how I'd be amazed by this phenomenon.

Words, I've learnt, aren't any different from a missing earring, a particularly tattered book, or that one specific pair of woolen socks. You never find the words you need, until, of course, you don't need them anymore.


Edit: Happy New Year, everyone! Here's to a better year, one with more frequent blog-posts.

Me

Words. They're good for description, for describing a character. A character like me. I am male and slightly shorter than average. The eyes behind my glasses, which have rectangular lenses, are brown. Although my ears are finally proportional to my head - which had a lot of catching up to do in terms of growth not too long ago - they still earn me the occasional snide comment or two. I guess they're just different, despite the fact that I cannot exactly say how. I like my teeth. It would be sad to be dissatisfied with your teeth after having them caged in metal braces for almost two years. I dislike my voice. At least it doesn't normally sound as bad as it sounds over the phone. And through a microphone. And in video recordings.

Words. You can paint pretty pictures of people with them but that is all you end up with - an image, two dimensional and lifeless. Words cannot define people. The fingers of our experiences and the actions we consequently take shape the wet clay that we are. They mold us as they brush over us, leaving the eternal proof of their passage behind for all to see, etched in our character.

I am defined by the sound of a camera shutter as it opens and closes and by the time that stretches between the two clicks, time that is both not more than a heartbeat and longer than several deep breaths. I am defined by the reassuring feeling of the pen in my hand and by the ecstasy it brings when cruising along a sheet of paper. I am defined by overcast days when the trees look greener against the granite grey sky and when a single breeze can be both warm and cool at the same time. I am defined by the smell of rain, of freshly brewed coffee, and of bookshops, pine trees and toast. I am defined by crisp winter mornings with dust motes dancing in the sunlight. I am defined by chocolate and ice cream, how they melt in my mouth, and by cheesecake - only during the time between when I cut myself another slice and when I scold myself for eating it. I am defined by the happiness that comes from getting the amounts of ginger, soy sauce and wasabi just right while eating sushi. I am defined by the manic passion that grips me when I find an interesting book, by how it causes me to cease existing in this realm for a time as it pushes me to read on and by how it suddenly gets replaced by overwhelming emptiness as soon as I turn the last page.

An undulating mass of people, vehicles and bloated shopping bags throngs the street, every square inch of it. We're all looking outside the windows of our car, our eyes sweeping for a potential parking spot. No luck. There's no space at all.

"We shouldn't have come this early."

I check the digital display of the clock on the dashboard. It's 1:30 AM.

My parents stare wide-eyed at all the activity going on around us. I hear someone mutter the word deewanapan. I sigh inwardly. After living in Karachi for so long, I wonder how anyone could still be amazed by this. This is Karachi. The city that never sleeps.

We find a place to park in some random gali and then proceed to pick our way through the muddy, post-rain streets as we walk towards the restaurant (read: dhaaba). It's a shabby place. Only men lounge about on the ground floor. There's also some tables upstairs, 'for families only.' We make our way up a flight of marble steps. The din of people and cutlery meets my ears. There's no space to breathe. It's 2 AM now. A family of about seven suddenly gets up from their table, done with their food. We rush to grab their seats.

The table isn't exactly a pleasant sight. It's littered with used napkins, spilled water, bits of bread and the occasional squeezed lemon. A waiter appears and hurriedly sweeps the stuff aside with a dirty wet rag. We take our seats, careful not to rest our elbows on the table and order our food. Another waiter brings out a silver pitcher full of water and some glasses. We look at each other and order mineral water; small bottles so nobody has to use the glasses. The food arrives almost instantly. The steaming hot nihari and the crispy naan fresh out of the tandoor are delicious. Of course it's not easy eating while making sure nothing touches the table.

I look about the room. Most people sit comfortably cross-legged, with their slippers on the floor and their plates in their laps. I feel out of place with my bright green Converse shoes and my thoughts forming in English.

It's funny, in that utterly un-amusing way, how life suddenly steps in and forces you to change your perspective. It's funny how one minute you're bitching to yourself about how tough life has become, about how hectic your A2 year is, about how college applications, SATs, the tons of homework you get, and the many extra curricular activities you've somehow wound up with are slowly tearing away at your essence and then the next minute you realize how trivial and petty your grievances are and how you cannot even begin to imagine what some people might be going through that day.

It's also funny how no one is laughing.

Food eaten. Dishes done. Chairs pushed back, squealing in protest, until they hug the dining table once more. We wait.

The smell of fried eggs hangs in the air. The dark sky won't turn blue until the sirens announce dawn. All is still. We wait. 

The wind playfully tousles a tree. A lone car glides along the street outside making soft splashing sounds as it wades through a small puddle reminiscent of the last time Karachi pretended to have a tropical climate. All is silent once more. We wait. 

Stress does not exist in this limbo between yesterday and today. It would be nice to wait here forever.    

Apologies From Us

Happy birthday, Pakistan. Another year has gone by and you've pulled through. You're sixty-three now, but only in age. You haven't really made any progress in these past six decades. And for that, I - no, we - are sorry.

We're sorry for not seeing problems while they unfolded, for not nipping them at the bud, and for letting them grow into the thorny, parasitic vines they've become today. We're sorry for not seizing power away from the feudal elements right at the beginning when we should have. We should have been suspicious of them from the start. Most of them had been Unionists only until the Congress declared that it would abolish all princely states and what not. Was it not obvious that they would choose to cling to their power until hell froze over? But we put up with them at the time, perhaps because we needed their support, which was fine. But we should have taken action afterwards. The descendants of these very people still hold the country in a deathly vice-grip, denying those under them basic human rights and considering themselves above all forms of law. We should have foreseen this.

We're sorry. Sorry for not having our priorities right, for keeping our heads down and minding nothing but our own business. True, many of us had left everything we had in India and needed stability. Stability is important, agreed, but is there such as thing as financial stability in a land teetering at the precipice? We're sorry for screwing shut our eyes, ears and mouths and ploughing on while the ignorant were left to twist our religion, our beliefs, and our traditions beyond recognition into something brutal and horrifying.

We're sorry for turning you into a training ground for a war that wasn't yours. That really was a boneheaded move for us.

We're sorry for becoming numb to the crime and corruption around us, for accepting it as part of who we are for 'this is Pakistan, this is how it is here' and for only worrying about the taint ruining our clothes and that within our boundary walls.

We could list hundreds of grievances you have every right to hold against us; one meager blog post couldn't contain it all. The point is, we're sorry for pointing our fingers anywhere but towards ourselves. This is our fault, all of it.

I love standing by the large window in my room after sehri with my ear pressing again its slightly damp jaali as I try to separate the sounds from the kitchen and the fan whining about the fluctuating voltage from those coming from outside. Are those the first sounds of the azaan? No, you idiot, that's just a plane.

I love the deep, intoxicating sleep that embraces you once you've stuffed your face at 4 in the morning. I hate waking up from such a sleep to go to school. It is the hardest part of fasting for me. 

Dates are overrated. The eating kind, I mean.

Monotonous

The moon and sun rise and sink

In a never ending cycle

'Tis their fate to live a thousand lives

And die as many deaths

Forever onlooking the earth

And the humans' self-destruction