Vomit

Today you feel like being selfish. You feel like letting out all that is pent up inside you—the bitter twang of rejection, the sharp red hot slap of embarrassment, the jumpy high of excitement and the strangling hold of tension. The way you feel right now is nothing special. It’s just the result of twenty one years of mistakes, disappointments and careless excitement that constitute your existence now.  It’s just that right now, you feel a little choked—pressed for some peace of mind. All of this needs to somehow come out and come out now.

Let’s take a journey through your mind. You are a twenty something wannabe writer from a high-end institution in Pakistan who has too much to say and too little time. Think about it. The clock ticks and worldly matters that need your selfless attention loom at the back of your mind more dangerous and large than ever. But let them be just for now. For just a few minutes it’s only you that matters-- what is it that you want?   

You want to write. You want to trace your fingers across your abused keyboard and type furiously until the incessant tick-tick of the keyboard becomes a muffled wail.

Tick-tick-tickTicktickitcikticeeeeekkkkkkkkk.

You want to relish the shriek of the plastic keys and derive some sadistic pleasure as words come to life on an achingly white screen. You want your fingers to connect with your heartbeat and each inky black word to speak only the sincerest of tales that you know are hidden in some corner of your muddled mind. You know that once you start writing, the tangled ball of emotion, cantering up and down inside of you will come to rest. For the umpteenth time you’ve realized that the world is a shitty place--you need salvation so badly right now and writing is what always makes you feel better.

You are a twenty something, undergraduate student, already tired of all the challenges life loves to throw at you. You’ve been told that you’re lucky— obviously some have it worse than you. Instead of complaining, think about the hungry children in Africa; their concerns revolve around finding enough to eat and having a place to sleep. And here you are with your insensitive complains of heartbreak and disappointment. Instead of whining about some boy who you say ‘used’ you, you should write about the bigger questions in life.

The bigger questions in life?  This question rolls itself in your mind as you try to begin writing—what does that even mean?  You suppose that one of the bigger questions in life is love-- what is love? Love is what melts faces into the softest of expressions and gives rise to the sweetest of sighs—at least that’s what the various films and books you’ve devoured all your life tell you. But you are wary of being convinced of what Hollywood tries to coerce you into believing. Your twenty one years have taught you that a red lipped beauty with no cellulite on her thighs, in the arms of a six foot muscular hunk does not necessarily entail love. So what is it like in real life? Friends around you say that they know what love is. “It’s knowing instantly who you want to spend the rest of your life with. You can pick them out of a crowd with your eyes closed,” gushed your ex-best friend once. What does that mean? That love is a map? It’s a GPS system?  You notice the oblivious smirks on the faces of your girl friends when their boyfriends nudge their toes or silently, secretly hold hands under the table when they think no one is watching. You found out when one of them grazed your fingers instead by mistake, all the while eagerly looking across at his inamorata hoping for some indication of a positive reaction. You could have told him about his mistake but you didn’t. You just didn’t want to.

***

(Excerpt)

Stories are like a canvas which break through the private prisons of the mind and bring out the deepest of thoughts using paint of the imagination. Ordinary feelings take life on this plain, infinitely long sheet of beige felt, using brushes of the finest hair from mystical creatures that exist only in the mind, threaded together with wisps of dreams, edged on scented rosewood more delicate and fragile than a sliver of glass. The canvas is built of what we are all made of and what makes us human. Light brushings of color with carefree rapture blended with the deep scarlet of passion and the well watered solidness of trust and loyalty. Love has its own patch on this vast, unending canvas. One would think that emotions like love are pure and free from the greed that is likened to human nature, but when they look beneath the paint; barely noticeable splotches of dark that bear testimony to the times of jealousy and the rare hurt that go along with every relation that has ever existed in history.
But is every love story built upon this imperfectly beautiful canvas?
This is a story about a boy and a girl. This boy and girl thought that they were building a canvas that was unconventional. They thought were a part of a relation that one reads about at in the movies but they were nothing more than ordinary teenagers having their first run with puberty.

***

You snicker wickedly but then stop yourself.  How can you write so satirically about something you don’t know much about? Shrug off that feeling of inadequacy as you realize that people have loved and been loved whereas you aren’t even sure what the feeling entails. You’re just a twenty something wannabe writer who can cover up your insecurity by writing stories to poke fun at those who dare to call hormonal rushes-- “love”. You secretly yearn for that feeling, the very same that you’ve read about in books and seen in the movies, because you so badly want to believe that it exists.  You want to know what love is and you want to feel it gush over you like the warmth of a first sip from a mug of hot chocolate on a winter night. Once you thought you almost had it-- you were the one who paid secretly paid his phone bills when he told you about his overdue bank draft and his multiple financial problems. You had hoped one day he would realize that you had always been there for him and then on that one day he would vow to never let you go. Eventually he found out-- you ended up paying for his lunch too the next day.  

It’s not the fact that he let you pay for his phone bills and his lunches—it’s how happy you felt doing it. You know that there are hungry children in Africa who are trying to find enough to eat and don’t have a clean space to sleep; it’s just that this seems to hurt so much more than you can handle, so much more than you conceive any pain in the world to be.  Now it seems that this pain will only flush out of your system if you can somehow transfer in onto paper.

But the fact remains, he didn’t really leave-- he just showed that he wasn’t who you wanted him to be. Disappointment is a bitch. It leaves you stranded with the failure of yourself and your faith in other people and has you pondering continuously over insignificant details until you feel half mad. You remember how he was shorter and skinnier than you and even though you said it didn’t bother you, you felt yourself hunching over, willing your body to become smaller so that you didn’t look fat sitting next to him but rather the picture-perfect couple that you fantasized about your whole life. t

Shudder. Enough is enough. It’s in the past. You tell yourself again and again to let it go but a weird ache has wrapped itself around your heart in an iron squeeze.  You know that this wasn’t ‘love’ because you know for sure it needs to be reciprocated from both sides.  Then why does it seem to have left you shell-shocked and so bewildered? No matter how much you will it to go away, it seems to have lodged itself permanently making you as uncomfortable with yourself as your wet socks feel right now in your closed boots.  Cheer up, you. You’re not the only ill-fated, one-sided lover on the planet. Make yourself feel better—you just need to write and let it out. Maybe you could pen a poem! After all most of the great poets were lovers who died too young. This will be your big break—that’s exactly what you can write about. You’re a twenty something wannabe writer and if you hang on to that pain, you can utilize it to create something beautiful. Bitterness seems to leak from your fingers, not from your heart as you begin to write in a furious scrawl that gets even more untidy as words fade away and you recognize your own self seeped into paper. 

***

(Excerpt)

Songs of love and words of truth

Once mingled with heart and freed from soul

An imitation of love, a stage-show mime

Blessings on me-- too good to be true

Moments of bliss, too brief a time

I ask you now. Did you ever know?

How much it took-

I wrote this for you

***

There you’ve written your poem and you feel much better. You wonder—do you really want the world to read this? You will let them assume you cry heartbroken over an ex-significant other/somebody (you hate the label “boyfriend”-- it’s just so mainstream and you pride yourself over the fact that you don’t do commonplace titles) who you’re not sure even exists. Of course you can’t just keep this piece of writing to yourself—it’s your piece of art and it is meant to be shared! What to do-- you’re just a twenty something writer is proud of her work but you care about what other think and say about you. You can almost just hear their scathing voices in your head:

 “Is this about him who spends hours laughing with her in the LUMS Super Store windows? I swear I saw them last night in the parking lot looking so guilty,” “Are you sure it was him?  Wasn’t it the famed man-whore from ‘A’ levels whose name she's been associated with on every Lucas[1] post? I swear I saw them together last week in Gloria Jeans,” “No it can’t have been him, I swear this is about the crush she has on the guy who’s younger than her—why else would they hang out so much?” “Nope can’t be him. He’s much better-looking than her in any case.”

The voices in your head make you shudder. You know romantic-lovesick poetry will get you into trouble with the people you know including your mother who will barge into your room demanding you tell her who the poem is about. Because that is what people do—take your work and limit it to personal confines only. 

Draw a deep sigh. You’re a twenty something wannabe writer who has the talent in its rawest form but no audience that inspires you. Writing is a luxury that you have never paid attention to. You’ve taken it for-granted and now as you struggle almost painfully to achieve perfection in your style-- you draw a blank.  Recall the tips you’ve picked up in Creative Writing class. They told you write honestly. Write from the heart—that’s where the voice is! Tap your heart and listen to your new favorite song. Does it help?

Silence is all you can hear. Silence and the beat of your heart that is driving you mad with its steady “lub-dub”. Frustration overwhelms you. Tell yourself that the heart is overrated-- what’s going on in your mind instead? Work. Friends. Family. The Future. All are stacked into your mind into onerous piles that you try to sift through and sort every single day. Sometimes it gets too much. Sometimes you think your mind will explode from everything that is thrust into it. The pressure of keeping up grades while juggling family dinners with people you neither know or like, applying to graduate school without a clue of what you want to do in your professional life, keeping up with extra responsibilities that you thought would do you good, dealing with friends calling you in the middle of the night while you struggle to write an essay just to squeal you about how a cute boy winked at them—all that squeezed in with eyebrow threading appointments.. People around you drive you mad. Enough to drive anyone mad. Sometimes when your brain wants relief, you find yourself opening your blog and using your keyboard to surgically remove unwanted thoughts from your brain.   

***

(Excerpt)

Superwoman. That’s who she wanted to be. A Superwoman.

The woman who has it all—the looks, the grades, the friends and the social life.  Maybe she does have it all-- an undergraduate from LUMS who pulled up her GPA impossibly high in a span of three months, is vice-president of the science society and has a group of seven beautiful girlfriends who by some stroke of luck have the same definition of fun that she does. She can cook too. At least that’s what her parents tell the many strangers who waft in and out of their drawing room to dine on samosas, rolls, dahi bhalay and the special dessert that her mother made her make to create an “impression”. “She’s our sweet girl who has been told she’s impossibly nice”—that’s what your parents say peering at you proudly while the faceless strangers look at you up and down measuring your waist size, your bra size and seeking out the barely-there grey hairs hiding amongst your blonde highlights. “She also writes poetry!” your parents hastily add before the strangers silently reject you for being too tall or too fat or having a pimple near your nose.

She knows her reality. Her GPA is spiraling down as she tries to juggle her extra-curricular chores in a college society which is chock full of boys who refuse to honor the female opinion with due importance, her job that that she works ten hours a week pays only a measly 6000 rupees per month (lower than the minimum wage) and the fact remains that she loses a best friend every single year which makes her think there is something wrong with her ability to make friends. Last week, she cried uncontrollably alone in her car in the middle of the road with ten unknown men watching her when somebody crashed her bumper from behind, yelled at her and then zoomed off when her car refused to start.

***

Watch yourself get incredibly naked on to paper. Why are you telling the world that you are a mess on the inside? Why don’t you just smile and wave like you always do? You know you’re all right-- everyone has their weak moments. Just because you like to think of yourself as a writer doesn’t mean that you absorb yourself in gaining the pity of the world. You’re a twenty something wannabe writer who happens to be female and Pakistani. You’re expected to get married soon—this is what you were raised for your whole life so why should you fight it?

The problem is you’ve been told not to trust men. Men come in your life and they only want one thing from you. Something that you’ve been told you need to reserve for the one man who will buy you with a 22 carat diamond and circle it around your finger for eternity. You’ve been told if he finds out, if his family ever finds out that you frolicked around with someone else, lest it just be simple flirting around that didn’t even mean anything to you, he has the ability to divorce you and ruin your reputation forever. So be a good girl. Stay away from men.

But what do you do about that man who wasn’t from your kin but was allowed to pick you up and walk you around the street? What about the man who cooked meals for your family, went out to buy you ice cream and spent long hot afternoons babysitting you and your brother as you watched an Urdu dubbed version of Disney’s The Jungle Book. You remember those long, hot afternoons when your mother was sleeping and his fingers snaked inside your skirt and you were too absorbed in the chronicles of Mowgli to even notice properly. There was always something tempting hidden in his room which was in a corner at the furthest end of your backyard: an ice lolly, the book you couldn’t find, handmade dolls his wife back in his village made for you.  You remember going there and coming back with the buttons of your jeans loosened. Everything else is just a hazy blur that you’d rather not try and recall now.

Will you tell him? Will you tell the man, that you will let your parents choose for you, that you’re not sure if you fit in his definition of ‘chaste’? Will you tell him about this or do you think he’ll be more interested in hearing about who you were previously engaged to. What did he do? Why did it break off? Did you ever touch him? Do you still have feelings for him?

Once you knew what sex was at age 12, once you had scoured the Oxford Dictionary to understand what this phenomenon was, the mention of which drove your friends into fits of giggles and made your parents hurriedly change the direction of discussion—the pangs of realization hit you hard and fast. Bewilderment overtook you and you wondered what was it that was so special about you at age 8 that made someone want to seize you so intimately. You didn’t even have a chest then and your upper lip was lined with a feathery down. You were cute yes, but cute in such an androgynous way-- there was nothing remotely sexual about you. So why did a man, a married one at that, feel the need to use you as such?  Was his wife not satisfying him the way he wanted? Or did you at age 8, playing with your mother’s golden eye-shadow and tissue paper stuffed high heels, lead him on in some way?

The unfathomability of this made you uneasy but since you didn’t remember much of what happened, it didn’t bother you as much as you wanted it to. Once you realized that you had been sexually abused, when you learnt all the fancy, scientific words that describe what happened, you tried telling people about what happened. But they didn’t seem to grasp it well and most of them just ignored you—including your mother. But you suppose that’s okay; even you don’t still understand it either. You secretly sought professional help, asking whether this will affect your future, your married life. The counselor at school told you to relax. Happens to one in every ten girls she said. It’s okay. What if I’m not a virgin? Then lie, she said. Men don’t understand this usually. Just say you went riding one day and your hymen broke because of that. Don’t ever let him find out because he’ll assume you did something to provoke such a thing. Other than that, don’t worry. It’s okay. 

It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.

***

(Excerpt)

Child sexual abuse is not uncommon in Pakistan and ranges from harassment to incest. According to Sahil, an anti-child abuse NGO based in the capital Islamabad 2,303 cases of child sexual abuse were reported in the national press in 2011, including 56 cases of incest (Pakistan: Coming Clean about Child Sexual Abuse - or Not). With such large reported numbers, one is forced to wonder about the larger, more secret numbers which go unreported every day. Some traditional leaders, however, deny even that sexual abuse happens. “Look, these things don’t happen here. It is all Western propaganda. Muslim women here are safe at home, and I always advise people to ensure their daughters, wives and sisters stay home - except for school, or maybe to visit a close relative. They are unsafe beyond their homes,” said Maulvi Abdul Haq, a prayer leader at a local mosque (Pakistan: Coming Clean about Child Sexual Abuse - or Not). This denial is usually common to all families in Pakistan where child sexual abuse comes from domestic help, family members and even brothers and fathers. What are the intricacies behind a child being sexually abused? How are the tormentors who molest the innocence of children and why do they do what they do? This paper will attempt to decipher the psychological motives behind child sexual abuse and uncover why this problem looms large in the Pakistani society.

***

You’re a twenty something wannabe writer and you’ve made it this far. See this is recipe for writing in your opinion-- Whatever life throws at you, swallow it in with your mouth wide open. Chomp on it slowly and surely. Grimace at the bitter taste. Try to gulp it down with every fiber of will in your body even as you feel your eyes tearing up. Then vomit it out again—elegantly of course-- and watch how shards of painful residue morph into black, neat words on to pristine paper.

Whatever you write, give it to the world to read. How pretty, they will say, how original.

They will print your short story in an international magazine. They will ask you to read your poem at the sitting of college intellectuals. They will read your academic paper and give it an award. They will ask you to blog about yourself, anonymously of course, and have the world giggle and laugh at your attempt to be a ‘superwoman’.

But that’s okay, this is what you live for and this is what you crave—the definition of success for a writer. Take what life gives you and turn it into something that speaks for itself. Take the lemons, make lemonade. Take the experiences and churn out tales. Take the pain and make it into poetry. Take disappointment and turn it into a story. Take life and write a piece that can bring about change. Just remember on the way that it’s not what you ‘should’ write-- it’s what you want to write and what affects you the most.

You’re a twenty something wannabe writer and in every piece you write, you see hints of yourself, your experiences lurking behind every page.  

You’re a twenty something wannabe writer and you’re almost there. Give yourself a pat on the back. Well done, you.

Tou kia hua?

The evening is just as beautiful
Even without your presence
Just so very beautiful.

Now this journey, incomplete
Remains just as it is
Will have to walk it anyway

So what happens?
If you went away
So far away

Broke my heart.
You went away.

So far away.

The Heebeejeebies

I want to write.
I want to write.
I want to write.

Write what? The pangs of survivor's guilt that sink into my gut every time I catch sight of the naked druggie under jinnah bridge? He's been naked for four days now. No one bothers to give him a cover. Least of all me.

Or write about that fantastic idea for a short story tucked away into a corner of my mind? The story of hormonal love a 14 year old girl and a 16 year old boy who smooch on Facebook and go to HotSpot and have the satisfaction of having a "relationship"?

Maybe even pen a poem-- a pathetic love poem tinged with sorrow under a pretense of happiness. Then have the world assume I cry heartbroken over an ex who doesn't even exist. Was it he who spends hours laughing with her in the SuperStore windows? I swear I saw them last night in the parking lot. Or was it the famed man whore from A levels who's name she's been associated with on every Lucas post? I swear I knew they had never called it quits.

Or maybe write about what we think is the meaning of life? Where do we go from here? Do we even know what here is? Then again what exactly is here? If we get here how will we get there? Is there just an illusion of here?

So much to write on.

Lack of willpower you say?

Maybe just maybe write on all four.

Touche. 

Therapy

When  you want to write, you want to write beautifully. When you want to think, you want to think aloud with a whole gush of blood to your brain. When you want to give, you want to give with wide hands and a careless heart to hold nothing back. When you want to laugh, you want the sound to fill every room till your gut echoes the guffaw that escapes from your lips in mad, throbbing pulses that finally disseminate into soft waves of nothingness.

So when you want to feel, you want to feel with every nerve in your aching body. A dull ache that spreads from somewhere in the middle of your neck and moves down to the tips of your fingers, the nails on your toes. Your ankles seem to twist during the transmission of pain and your wrists writhe on their own accord—an intermission of the lazy jolts of pain that nest within you.

 Try to fight—push your limits, crack your neck, snap your fingers and blink hard. Nothing works. Try to distract—watch glimmering lights, tug at unwanted hairs and stare blankly at a shut screen.

Nothing works.

Try to write it down.

Hands hurt.

Head hurts.

Heart hurts.

Give up. Walk away. 

Waxing Lyrical

Turn up for work in the hazy hassle of a bumpy rickshaw ride combined with the insistent buzz of the twenty missed calls on your cheap Nokia cellphone. Know without even looking at the blue screen that all calls are from the same person. Absently press the red button on the soft plastic keys as you haggle with the fat rickshaw wala over a fare that you know he has already underpriced for you—his regular. The continued buzz of the Nokia cuts into your conversation and you thrust some rupee notes into his hand with a muttered cuss.

Harami.

The rickshaw wala puckers his lips in an air-smooch, makes a thrusting movement with his right leg and splutters the engine back into life. Ignore his insolent flirting and waddle away obstinately, hoisting your obese black leather satchel on to your shoulder.

Sweep through the street of Defense Phase Five, too clean for your taste, with the subtly expensive houses boasting of merry green lawns competing with each other over extravagant wastage of space. Somehow you are reminded of the cramped alleys where you come from. A row of crooked, building block-like houses placed together in an uncomfortable huddle of unfinished brick and cheap cement could easily fit into any one of these lawns. 

Stop in front of the house that you remember not by house number but by the bronze gate that is too low to hide the expensive glass doors and too flimsy to hold back intruders. But why should that a problem? The iron barriers that flank each entrance to the streets of Defense are barricaded by security guards who yawn lazily while asking you for ID and then let you in without even looking at your face.

Debate whether to hop over the gate and test the feeble security. Picture yourself waltzing through the glass doors in victorious mirth without having to wait for someone to answer the doorbell. Deny yourself a glorious moment. You remember they have a harami kutta loose in the grounds.

****

Be greeted unceremoniously by the shriveled up old husk of the khansama. Nazir Baba grunts you into waiting in the hallway for Bibi Ji. As usual the house isn’t ready for your waxing appointment--the phone calls were just a ruse by the Bibi Ji to rub your tardiness in your face.

****

Refuse the glass of Rooh Afza that is offered to you by the patronizing, wrinkled Nazir baba as you wait for Mrs. Javed’s call in the hallway. He ignores your feeble protests and crashes the glass on the marble top side table and exits muttering a constant stream of abuses. Stare for a moment at the artificially bright red drink crowned with large chunks of ice—the drink itself occupies less space than the cubes. Shake your head in disgust.

I can afford this cheap drink myself you old fool.

Reluctantly give into the call of your throat, parched with the dust from the rickshaw and reach for the sweating glass tumbler to take a long cooling sip. Feel your fingers graze letters on the bottom of the glass. Take a closer look and wrinkle your nose in distaste.

Marhaba Pure Honey from the Swat Valley says the peeling sticker at the bottom. The back of your skull heats up as you realize your significance in this house being thrust in your face. An old honey bottle. That’s what you get to drink from.

I bet the bhenchod kutta in the house has its own special plate too.

Scratch the glass furiously with your cinnamon colored fingernails until the wet sticker comes apart in the palm of your hand. Place it back on the table nonchalantly. Second thoughts— you are too thirsty. Take the glass back and drain it noisily until you hear her shrill and rude-- ‘Nasreen foran andar ao!’

Decide what to do with the glass. You don’t want to be served in it ever again. Look around to see if anybody is watching. Deftly toss the tumbler on to the floor and hear the satisfying crack of substandard glass, muffled by the thick maroon velvet rug on the floor.

There you go.

Pull up your plump leather satchel more firmly on to your shoulders, yell back, “Agayi Madam” and walk through the teak doors into the master bedroom, your head held jauntily high.

******

Miniature Mrs. Javed is still in the bathroom. You used to wax Mrs. Javed too once. Ever since she decided she was menopausal you only do her jawan daughter—the miniature Mrs. Javed. You don’t mind losing a regular customer though. You find it ridiculously amusing that Mrs. Javed is menopausal at 48. You used to wonder why the feminine Mrs. Javed was so content at having lost her prized ‘womanhood’.  Then you figured it was just so that she would have an excuse to not sleep with the 200 pound over weight Mr. Javed anymore. Snicker.

Rich people and their problems.

****

Lay down your arsenal of waxing paraphernalia onto an old newspaper spread wide over the marble floor. The Malee pineapple tin that constitutes for the pot of wax goes on the left, the fraying strips of denim to the right and the unusually large butter knife on a ceramic plate to the side of the tin.

Survey your handiwork. It looks like a setting for a solitary dinner party. Reach into your deflated black, leather satchel, pull out a bottle of Johnson’s baby powder and place it smack in the middle of the newspaper—the centerpiece.

Much better.

You can hear the bathroom door being unlocked. In she walks, the miniature Mrs. Javed wearing black men’s boxers, a pink camisole and a sparkly ring.   

That’s new.

As she ties up her hair into a floppy knot atop her heart-shaped face, she tells you she’s getting married.

Bahut bara aadmi hai. Citibank ka head hai. Nahi Nahi, Lahore mein nahi. NewYork mein. Haan mein bhi waha shift ho rahi hon. Shaadi ke baad. Visa lag jaye buss. Visa aaj kal kisi ko nahin milta.Tumhein kya pata. 

She stops to give you a sharp glance.

Achi si waxing karna aaj. Dinner party pe jana hai meinay.

Nod your head. After all, you know that rich men don’t sleep with hairy women. Imagine miniature Mrs. Javed being rejected in bed by her fiancée for having un-waxed armpits. Hold back a peal of laughter but then immediately sober up.

Congratulations to you. You lose another regular.

Debate whether to tell her that she will need to take off her ring to get waxed. Decide not to. After all you might just enjoy accidently spilling hot wax all over her ring finger. Maybe even destroy those insolent sparkles in the process.

*******

Grimacing, miniature Mrs. Javed lowers herself on to your level. Gingerly she holds out one leg, covered with soft, dark fuzz. You know what to do.

Dip the butter knife into the pot of wax. Blow on the golden syrup to cool it. Feel the tension in her muscles as you lather the honey gel on to the slim calf in a well-rehearsed rhythm.

Slather. Slather. Swipe. Swipe.

Lay a denim strip on to the hair suspended in the hardening wax. Feel her boring gaze on the top of your head as you squat over, pressing the tips of your fingers into the rough denim to make it stick to skin. Pause. This is your favorite part.

Look at her in the eye for a split second.

Tear away the strip of cloth in one fluid move.

Hear a yelp of pain in the distance but ignore it.

Slather. Slather. Swipe. Swipe. Ripppp. Slather. Swipe. Rippp. 

The ritual has begun.   

*****

Drop the last denim rag on to the newspaper and breathe heavily. Miniature Mrs. Javed staggers to her feet. Her legs curving into the black cotton boxers, now hair free, are rosy pink—a testimony to the pain. Busy yourself with packing up your satchel but watch her out of the corner of your eye. She wobbles dizzily to her mahogany dresser, her footsteps making a sticky crunch as remnants of wax stick to the marble floor.   

Get used to pain. You’ll get plenty of it on your wedding night when your Citibank husband fucks your skinny ass to get his money’s worth.

She seems too tired to haggle and hands you what you ask. Tuck the money she offers you securely into the strap of your second-hand brasserie, satisfied. Wipe your hands on a spare denim strip instead of asking for permission to use the bathroom. Pack your leather bag in a hurry, ignoring the spill of wax on the side of the tin. You want to leave. The expensive beige walls are suffocating you now by boasting of the money spent on them.

****

Take the bus home instead of signaling a rickshaw. Stagger into the stench of sweaty bodies cramped into blue carpeted seats emblazoned with graffiti left by lustful hands. You are in your territory now. Clench your feet, pressing the tips of your toenails into the hard plastic of your chappal.  The floor seems to loll away from beneath your feet. Look for your favorite spot but it’s gone; invaded by a woman with massive thighs that jiggle merrily as she hands out Country juice-boxes to impossibly tiny hands that try to clutch at every inch of the faded, rumpled lawn print spread over the mounds of shapeless, drooping breasts. Make a disappointed clucking sound that seems to escape from your dry throat on its own accord. The juice-box woman doesn’t notice. Just like she doesn’t notice the streak of an artificial yellow that has made its way onto her shalwar, snaking down a river of thin cotton, marking rivulets between individual rolls of fat and turning a nonchalant white into a naked brown as liquid touches skin. Compare that to the image of miniature Mrs. Javed’s pale brown thighs turning pink and then finally milk-white after shedding a layer of skin and hair.

Debate whether to tell her or not and even rehearse a quick patronizing conversation in your head, (Maa ji, andhi ho kya?! bachay ne shalwar pe juice gira ke nanga kar diya hai!) but then decide against it. After all, she did take your seat.

The bus gives a tremendous lurch as if it’s going to vomit it’s passengers out. The juice-box woman’s thighs wobble dangerously. There are no seats left for you and you have no choice but to grab a side pole where you will stand in clear view of every passenger.

Turn and see an uncomfortably, flabby man in the opposite aisle, staring at the juice-box woman a hungry look on his face—blank eyes and slightly parted lips. First you think that he’s just thirsty, like you after spending hours grunting, squatting poring over every inch of skin looking for unsightly hair. Another look and you realize that instead of reflecting the lurid, mango-yellow plastic of the juice box, his pupils are following the movement of juice as it stealthily creates splotches of dark on a white shalwar. Note how the blink of his eyes is attuned to the jiggle of the juice-box woman’s thighs in a rhythm that you can mimic in your head:

Jiggle. Blink. Jiggle. Blink. Jiggle. Jiggle. Blink. Blink

Suppress a reluctant giggle and wrap your hands firmly around the pole. The pole is rusty and chipped just like the cheap, cinnamon nail polish on your toes. The ride is only twenty minutes now. You’ll make it home to drunken Pa and mousy Ma in time before the evening news.

This is your place. You belong here.

Tighten your grip as the bus grunts noisily to a particularly difficult turn. Your hands still feel uncomfortably sticky with wax. Invisible scraps of shabby paint graze the palm of your clammy hand and obstinately lodge themselves beneath your fingernails. You hardly notice. In the awkward space where thirty five seats are carrying forty passengers-- two sets of hips squeezed into the space of one, you can only feel an unwanted presence creeping up your spine. Pretend that the tight bun fixed atop your head needs fixing and sneak a look from the corner of your eye. See a man at the back undressing you in his eyes, your naked shape clearly visible in his dark irises. Clench your hips trying to make them look smaller and look again. You snicker--he’s got your measurements wrong. Instead of the 32 A that you are, in his eyes you can see the 36 C of the woman sitting on the seat opposite your pole pasted on top of your 24 inch waist.

Maa Behan in chutiyon ki. They don’t need boxer shorts and pink camisoles to get a fucking erection.

Debate whether to turn around and disappoint him with your actual chest. Rehearse a dramatic movement (slip off your duppatta the next time the bus coughs violently, bend down nonchalantly to pick it up and see his eyes frantically search for non-existent cleavage around the V-neck of your kameez) but decide against it. After all, you had always wanted to be a 36 C.

Suck in air until your breasts strain against the buttons of your kameez. Drop your leather satchel to floor. Place it strategically between your slightly parted legs. Stealthily hitch up your shalwar to reveal more than just a slim ankle. Rub your wrists together in a heat of friction that gives off a warm, faintly dry smell of the fake Nike perfume you got from the Sunday bazaar. Forget that you remove hair from people’s bodies to make a living. In the musty air of the bus comprising of hundreds of breaths squeezed out from behind dirty, yellowing teeth--you feel beautiful.

Candles but no Cake

HBTY 6243. Early present.

I paint a picture of you, you from my dreams

So brightly, 

while you shied away

Only to see, Fleeting smoke 

that fades across blue skies

I have wrenched out those kisses, those I stole

So hurriedly,

while the world slumbered

Only to see, a Sliver of breath 

That fogs up cold glass

I have traced down the words, the ones you spoke

So gently,

on only some nights

Only to see, Bitter flames 

That ravage sweet memories

I think of you.

“Loving is so short,

Forgetting is so long”

and All that was?

Not but seemed

A part of what is our reality 

The Fantastic Four

Prologue: In my nineteen years, I have come across various testosterone-fuelled individuals many of whom have left their mark and scarred my once flattering perception of the opposite sex. The world tends to group together all men as a single identical unit with homogenous emotional capacities and an identical ‘world-view’ (read ‘female-view’). In the course of my first-hand experiences I have realized that this in fact is a monstrous lie; men are ever-changing and inconsistent with varying tendencies to handle emotional stress. I like to believe that there are certain ‘shades’ to the opposite sex that can be grouped together under a few broad categories. Henceforth, I take my pen and bring forth in first-hand accounts, the colorful chaps that have shattered my hopes of ever finding a Prince Charming who will sweep me off my feet and take me off into the sunset to a land where the unromantic traumas of in-laws and bawling off-springs do not exist. But before I do so, I believe brief introductions are in order:

1.      The Sappy Flirts: After watching a series of gyrating Munnis and Sheilas on the telly, they have foolishly been lead to believe by Bollywood that women are epitomes of perfection underneath their Gul Ahmed and Generation outfits. They pine for true love and believe that a perfect relationship or happy marriage is the key to a blissful life. Did I say ‘relationship’? Oops. Sorry I meant ‘relationships’-plural please.

2.      The Chauvinistic Bastards: A female looks good on their CV. To enter the choosy executive world is their hearts desire. However they realize that they cannot do this alone. After all you do need a female who will clean up after your mess, provide you your daily nutrition and then dress up to look good on your arm at executive dinners where your Boss’s wife requires company. Girlfriends are too much of an inconvenience so they jump straight to marriage. Enough said.

3.      The Self-Injured Neurotics: They did believe in love. Once. Unfortunately their world shattered soon after their lady love ‘gracefully’ declined their advances. Unable to accept reality or give other more sensitive females a chance, they spend the rest of their life chasing and then discarding random ‘chicks’.

4.      The  Enticing Untouchables: Living examples of ‘life isn’t fair’, these men have looks the likes of Richard Geere, mental acuity comparable to that of  Steve Jobs and the sincerity that can only be likened to Prince Charming. These sadistic individuals are almost ALWAYS ‘taken’ and are happily committed to females that have been blessed with the beauty comparable to the legendary Greek Goddesses.

                                                     **********************************

1.        The Sappy Flirt:

Well aren’t you the ego-booster? We met only a few hours ago and already I have a FaceBook friend request from you, ten text-messages in my cell phone and more than just one random ‘bump-in-to-each-other’ on campus.  Dare I venture into the content of your messages? You have lauded the texture of my hair, commented on the ‘mystery’ of my eyes and quite wrongly remembered and then complimented the color clothes that I wore when we first met. Well, well you’re quite the ardent admirer aren’t you?

What a coincidence that I too remember the first time we met. Standing there, dressed in a too-tight T-shirt to emphasize what nature has endowed you with, wildly patterned shorts to show off tanned, hairy legs and with hair mussed to perfection, you made quite the pretty picture. As a common friend (‘incidentally’ female as well) introduced us, the drifting odor of your SetWet ‘Sexy for Men’ hair gel and the engulfing scent of your generously applied ‘Eternity for Men’ by Calvin Klein seemed to thickly saturate the air between us into an invisible wall that reeked a message that I can now decipher as: ‘Keep Away-Danger’.  Well, I suppose you’ll be happy to know that there and then you did catch the eye of every female in our vicinity and attracted quite a few ‘comments’ on your prominent attire. 

Our next conversation, barely two days after our formal introductions went something like this:

You: Hi Sanniah! Kaisi ho?   

Me: I’m okay! How was your day?

You: Buss yaar. Tum nahin mili aaj. Din kaisay acha guzarta?

Me (quite flattered but not willing to admit): Aisi bhi koi baat nahin hai.

You: Kyu nahin ho sakti? Buss tum mujhay kisi din milo aur mera din poor ka poora badal jaye.

Me: Umm. I’ll talk to you later. Bye.

Him: Chalo I’ll see you tomorrow (insert random nickname). Tum ne meray liye time nikalna hai buss. We’ll write poetry together under the trees!

I admire you. I really do. Your inconsistency to adhere to social norms and proper decorum is fascinating and inspiring. Rather than follow the unspoken code that applies to modern-day relationships, you quite obstinately follow your heart’s desire to say what you want and whenever you want and to whomever you want:

(Two months after our introduction)

You: You’re pretty.*wink*

Me: Haha, that’s kind of you. Thanks J                   

You: You’re nice too. You know something? We should get married.

Me: -----------------------------------

You: Nahin tum meri baat ghalat samjhi. We owe it to the world! With your

personality and my good looks, the world will thank us for producing the perfect kids!

Yes, bold, daring and insanely reckless is how I would describe you. Bravo you deserve a hearty applause. For a second there, you almost had me reeled in; a man who proposes marriage in the first two months that I have known him is a rare find and a man who talks about his ‘good looks’ while proposing to the object of his affections? Let’s just say we’ve hit the jackpot, haven’t we?

If only not too long ago you hadn’t used the exact same lines on my best friend, then on her friend and then again on her friend of a friend and then again on her friend of another friend. Tsk tsk. You’re quite the player aren’t you? Surprised I know? Let me share a well-known fact; most women don’t keep quiet when someone uses the words ‘you’, ‘marry’ and ‘me’ in the same sentence. Time to buy a thesaurus you say? But, of course.

2.        The Chauvinistic Bastard:

Well hello there. We met yesterday to discuss our ‘prospective’ marriage as you may remember. Our eyes met for a second over the translucent cloudy steams, teetering in graceful convulsions above rim of your delicate china teacup.  As our fingertips brushed you probably thought that you felt my heart flutter as the tip of your manly, calloused fingertip lingered over my not-so-feminine stubby fingers. You graced me with a hello, your deep voice resonating in the room that had gone momentarily still because our mothers were watching our every move. You looked at me deep in the eyes and watched me demurely lower mine and ask you whether you take sugar with your Earl Grey. You seized this moment to graze the ends of my hair with your broad palm to whisper: ‘You look beautiful-head to toe, lips to fingernails, feet to eyebrows.’

 It might just have worked. I might have fallen for the faint scent of Hugo Boss drifting from the inside of the collar of your primly pressed Ralph Lauren button-down, your platinum cuff-links and your BlackBerry blinking with the thousands of emails you had to put off just for me. Why thank you, I forgot to tell you I was touched.  What a coincidence that my phone was blinking upstairs with a hundred text messages inquiring details about you from your hair color to your shoe size and other indelicate physical features.

But here’s the thing, if you say that you believe in love at first sight, I know that you’re lying. I know about your previous hooker girlfriends, tanned and blonde back at the university in California who you proclaimed undying love for just to get them into bed. Surprised I know? You should have cleared out the lusty comments left by Rachel, Jennifer and Naomi on your FaceBook page before sending me a friend request.

Now I’ve probably made you uncomfortable by knowing too much. Your mother won’t like that will she? Shhh. Don’t worry. My uncanny observational skills can be our little secret. After all, in our life together, there will be plenty of secrets I will be privy to including your little drinking habit. Surprised I noticed? Your mother doesn’t probably know this, does she? Yesterday when she taking me in, everything from the color of my hair to the quality shoes I was wearing she mentioned that the apple of her eye prays five times a day and condemns sharab in society. Taubahtaubah. How can people even think of indulging in such sin?   Yesterday, when I lowered my eyes and asked you if you wanted sugar, I saw your BlackBerry screen wink up at me with a wallpaper of you and your college pals toasting your ego with Black Label Vodka raised to your lips. Don’t worry. Our secret. But you probably should change that wallpaper. As a good future biwi I seek to protect your untainted social image.

Today I got a haircut in preparation for our next meeting.  Tomorrow you just might notice the change and then will rack your brain as to what exactly is different in my face. When you won’t figure it out you will say, ‘You look beautiful-head to toe, lips to fingernails, feet to eyebrows’. You will forget that you used the same line yesterday.

Then what is it that makes our ‘contract’ agreeable to me? Is it the red Deepak Perwani jora that your mother promised me because ‘red is my color’? No it’s not. Is it the huge Damas diamond ring that you plan to get me so you can show off my hands to your executive friends and get them back for laughing at your bald head in high school? No it’s not. It’s the designer clothes that hang in your closet. No seriously. You know that I’m from a middle class family that couldn’t afford designer clothes. I relish in the fact that I shall get to wear your Ralph Lauren’s, Calvin Klein’s and Gucci shirts and model them for you at night before bed in an attempt to look ‘appealing’ and ‘alluring’. I’ve heard that men like to see their girlfriends- sorry, wives I mean- in their clothes. There’s something incredibly appealing in it for them that a woman is attempting to get to the top in their shoes. I’ve always wanted to know what designer men’s clothes feel like and you provide the perfect opportunity.  If you don’t have a problem with that then we are in short- made for each other.

3.        The Self-Injured Neurotic:

There is something horribly wrong in the balance of the universe when men who are not in their right state of mind and are only on the lookout for a little bit of ‘playboy’ fun become insanely attractive.

Last month, we met in a boardroom full of stiff people whose every breath resonated with proof of an impressive IQ and an intelligence surpassing that of ‘normal’ people like me. As I squirmed restlessly on a faded green, once-plush chair worn down to threads, afraid that any suggestion I was to give to this ‘productive’ meeting would give rise to a collective snicker that would vibrate through expensively beige-painted walls, you took the stage with your hands in your distressed, faded denim jeans and a hint of a smile. With a few words you managed to maneuver the conversation and dispel the tensed up atmosphere with carefully placed jokes. I felt my heart beat pick up, my palms become moist and an uncontrollable quiver of feminine pleasure made its course through my body as you turned to address me directly in front of a difficult-to-please audience.

Seconds turned into minutes, minutes merged with hours and hours churned out days and ‘somehow’ we were talking every day for hours into the night as professional topics of conversation melted into more personal ones. Your text messages to me were tinted with obvious attraction and mine to you were gushy and full of adoration. As our paths unwittingly crossed in University, I could not hold back the red hue that colored my cheeks every time you so much as glanced at me. Invisible birds were chirping musically and the world seemed to coo as we playfully continued our little escapade on electrically transmitted signals.

Yes a nice little story we had going on there. Sadly all good things come to an end and you turned out to be, in a word- crazy. Let me recall the text-message conversation that shattered my little fantasy:

You: Can I ask you something?

Me (fantasies of a proclamation of undying affection and running off into the wilderness already playing in my mind): Yes, of course?

You: Why do we talk so much?

Me (utterly bewildered): I don’t know. Does that bother you? =/

You: Yeah it does. Just don’t fall for me =P I’m only going to break your heart.

Me: O.o. I think I can manage?

You: I didn’t want to tell you this but I’m in love with somebody else. She is the most amazing person I have ever met in my life and I can never stop thinking about her. But I can never be with her. She says she’s getting committed to someone else…family pressure....I want to be just friends with you.

So there we have you; the heartbroken, unstable male that I like to call the Self-Injured Neurotic. Rumor has it, that you have ‘broken’ the hearts of many other tender-hearted, un-suspecting females by first ‘falling’ for them and then pulling back with a ‘guilt’ of insulting the untainted, ‘pure’ love that you entertain for your unreachable beloved. Wow. You’re full of drama aren’t you? You certainly would give Bollywood serials a run for their money.

Am I heartbroken because of you? Certainly. Are you worth the trouble? Probably not. Am I insanely jealous of your lady-love? Maybe. Are you a lost cause? I like to believe not. See, I may be a hopeless dreamer yet at the same time I am sensible enough to safely predict that someday you will wake up to the stench of heartbreak as your beloved spends her life happily in the arms of her betrothed. A word of advice: it’s time to purchase the much needed dose of pure caffeine at Life’s very own Coffee-House before it hurls itself at you in a swirling, murky mass of steamy despair and unbearable, hot disappointment.

4.        The Enticing Untouchables:

I’ve known you since the day my mother handed me my first Lady-Bird reader labeled ‘Fairy-tales for Children’. You are Prince Charming; you are the knight in shining armor that saves the day when all hope is lost and you are the inspiration behind the lead male role in every Hollywood romance. You are also very much unavailable to the likes of me; a healthy, mentally-stable, purely heterosexual and very much single female because your heart has been ensnared by a ravishing creature whose very mention sends a spear of jealousy through my possessive heart.

What is it that makes you so special? Is it the fact that your deep bass voice resonates with the frequency of my heart when you speak? Is it how even the brief minutes of our conversations leave me light-hearted and relaxed? Is it how every time, you step back and open the door for me when we step into class? Or is it because I believe that if I googled ‘perfect’ I’d end up with a picture of you? Combine the above and we have you- the reason why my faith in men still persists.

Your affair with She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named bounces off in gossip and seeps through the cracks of our University walls. But instead of bashing your relationship as ‘fling’ or a ‘time-pass’, gossipmongers’ take your name with a reverence and feed stories of your adoration for your lady-love as fodder to love-starved and highly imaginative individuals, filling them with hope that their ‘perfect’ romance is just around the corner. We are told that after a friendship of two years, you declared undying affection for the object of your desire and proposed marriage to her all-too-willing parents. Now her hand is weighed down by a ring that you saved up to buy after slaving at teaching tuitions around the city, just because you wanted her to have physical proof of your devotion to her. That Damas diamond ring shimmers and sparkles every time she raises her delicately small, white hand to show it off her female minions, not only blinding them temporarily but also cutting through their hopes of ever landing you and shattering my all-too-similar dreams into a thousand little glimmering pieces.

Since your amore for She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named does not allow you to spend more than five minutes talking to any other attractive female, I do not have any snippets of conversation to allow me to delve more fully into your character. However the portrait of you in my mind, allows me to escape into self-constructed fantasies where my Self-Injured Neurotic miraculously adapts your persona and adores me with the same ardor that you honor your inamorata. Till then, I continue to ramble on a personal grudge, lament on shattered dreams, muse about a disappointing reality and carry around the hefty guilt of a low self-esteem.