Every human being on this
planet has certain desires which he wants to achieve and fulfill. There are
always some vows taken and sworn. Nature keeps on pouring expectations, realities
and dejections which circumfuse life. Expectations are generally linked with
optimism, realities are linked with pessimism and dejection may lead to masochism.
Wishes are being granted at the same time when Résumés are being rejected,
hearts are being broken when marriages are being performed. A very simple world
has been turned into a systematic chaos; a chaos created by us and yet being
sustained by nature.
But away from this chaotic
world, on the corner of the Alph Street, every night I saw Aaminah play her
purple colored violin. Watching her play I noticed a strange thing, the
violinist in an orchestra always holds the violin around her neck while she
always held it against her heart. It seemed as if she made a connection of her
heart directly to the strings and may be that was the reason I never saw her
use the tuning pegs to adjust the strings.
The music she used to play
was never bound to styles; it was always unchained and untamed. The way her bow
stroked the strings of the violin clearly showed the caress she held in her
heart for someone. Every stroke of that violin seemed to bruise her heart and
every next touch was harder than the earlier.
People
saw it as passion and I saw it as a suffering.
I used to work at the Veron
Hotel as an accountant and every evening when my shift ended I walked to the
Eastern corner of the Alph Street and drank coffee. There was never anything
special there and ordinary life jumbled up all around me with accountants,
lawyers, shopkeepers, waiters and sometimes lifeless drunks.
I
preferred the drunks being around me as at least in their hearts they were
capable of doing what they wished for.
Life kept following time and
every night I ended up at the same corner drinking the same coffee.
The biggest problem of
ordinary life is that people start to dream ordinary and the few who try to
dream big are dependent on miracles. Even love for the ordinary people like me
is dependent on miracles. A boy loves a girl her whole life and instead of
telling her wishes that some day she will come forward herself and say that I know
you love me and here I am all yours for eternity and vise versa. Spoil and
filth are also there only for the ordinary. You will never see the rich going
to pubs or brothels.
Some people are capable of
transcending the rest of the ordinary and with them they take the whole
surrounding to an astral journey. They are those who are either blessed by a
miracle in their ordinary life or those who realize soon that there will be no
miracle for them and they start to build a whole new universe for themselves a
universe which is surrounded by their soul and is controlled by the
unfathomable energy of their hearts.
Aaminah was amongst the
later. 12th October, 2004. It was the first time I saw her at the
Alph Street Corner. I was busy in faking my ordinary life into an extraordinary
one by opening up a bundle of accountancy files and trying to do calculations,
even when in my heart I knew that the manager would not even bother looking at
them till the time the time the hotel was in profit. There were a very few people
there because of the winter rain that had now been there for at least 5 days. Out of nowhere
a girl appeared. She was wearing a pink shirt and black jeans. Although pink
color is the allegory of feminism but I was never fascinated by it. I always
saw it as a gender boundary which clearly stated “stay away”.
She stopped near the lamp
post, placed her violin box beside it, picked up the violin and started
playing. The drizzle suddenly started to shift into a heavy downpour, the few
people around were now running around to find shelter and the thunder was
giving visual and sound effects to this already dramatized event for an
ordinary person like me.
The signs were there clearly
stating that a miracle was about to happen. The elements were complete and the
only thing left was the recognition. This is generally the point at which the
ordinary leave the stage and the extraordinary take over. I too just like
others, on the spur of the moment put my files back into the briefcase and was
about to leave when I looked at her again; a girl ignorant of rain speaking her
heart out in the tunes of her violin.
I waived to her and said
“hi, it’s raining heavily and I think you should find some shelter or else you
will catch cold”.
This was the moment I came
to know that she was there just physically and I got no answer to my advice.
A universe was being created
by her at the Alph Street Corner and I was becoming a part of it. I stood there
watching her play in the rain without even realizing it that I had crossed the
gender boundary, suddenly the pink color was becoming a symbol of love for me
and the miracle had happened.
When that moment ended, when
she left the corner and when the rain stopped I could not realize as I had
become a part of her universe and in that part Alph Street Corner was still a
celestial place. For others it was a miracle and for me it was the energy of
her heart that was binding me to her soul universe.
For a miracle to happen doesn’t
necessarily mean that there has to be the existence of the unusual. It is just
a matter of perception. We the human beings are bounded by dimensions. We are
always accustomed to look for directions, references and orientations. For us the
sun rises from the east and sets in the west and the sky has always been above
us.
Witnessing
of a miracle is a journey undertaken from known to the unknown.
To undertake this journey
one has to free himself from the boundaries of the earth, the society and most
importantly the boundary of the ordinary. Then it’s up to him whether he takes
the route bound to the soul of the world or away from it. Both of the journeys
share a same destination “MIRACLE”.
Once we have detached
ourselves from these boundaries we are introduced to different dimensions and
finally a destination arrives which is free of references. This is the place
which makes us realize that the static elements we see around are made of
electrons protons and neutrons revolving around the soul of the world; The Nuclei. We are introduced to the fact that it is the earth that is revolving
around the sun. We also come to know that life actually means keeping yourself
attached to the soul of the world like the electrons to the nuclei like the
earth to the sun. It also makes us understand that the events we call as
miracles are actually the realizations of the dreams of the extraordinary.
Those
who are capable of dreaming are also capable of realizing them.
Before that day Alph Street
Corner was a place where I came daily to drink coffee, to mock the self
conceived sufferings of my ordinary life and to fake love that never really
existed in my life. But now it had become a place of longing for me; a place
where love had happened.
I had travelled to a
different dimension of life which was bound to no limits and I had found the
source of my life “her love”. Ordinary life had become a dream for me and I wanted
to wake up from it as soon as I could to travel to my world; a world that
existed at the Alph Street Corner. I was an element of this world whose soul “Nuclei”
was Aaminah and together we had to build a universe.
Love
is capable of performing transformations and I felt its signs very strongly
with her arrival.
It had almost been 3 months
since my fiancée had left me. She ended our 9 year long relation in a matter of
seconds by just saying that I wasn’t meant to be the one for her. I will not
mention who she was or describe her because whatsoever the circumstances turned
into I loved her and that was enough for me. I will not talk about her past
because in the past she was mine and her honor was mine and I will not tell
about her present because now she is a stranger to me and I have no right to
ridicule the respect of a woman.
Love happens and I don’t
deny that but it’s just a seed that has been planted. It has to be grown, it
has to be caressed and it has to be nourished. A few people think that it will
grow on its own and soon meet failures & separations while the other few
try to nourish it but forget that it will grow to be what they have planted
initially and desire for outcomes of fairy tale endings. The real life love has
a different meaning to life. In real love happiness & sorrow, pain &
joy co-exist. But if this struggle for love dies down, the outcomes are anguish,
people turning into murderers, suicides, lifeless, wasted, life turning into obscurity
in a matter of seconds. I had read somewhere that love can happen twice even
thrice but I never believed it till I met Aaminah.
It had only been three days
and I was already enchanted by her sensation, her presence. October 15 2004. On
this day I decided to finally talk to her and tell her the truth. Because of my
profession it becomes very important that our talks and our dealings much intended
and we always assume that the person in front is the auditor. I myself am
amazed sometimes to see that even nature might fail to represent balance but an
accountant never does fail. When you are about to express your feelings to
someone, the few hours before the meet are very important. That is the time
when we are on the peak exploitation of our minds and are being frowned by so
many ideas.
Someone wants to surprise
his/her loved one by taking him/her to a romantic dinner followed by a dance
and during that dance he/she wants to find out the perfect moment to speak
his/her heart out. Others want to show their love by fulfilling some long
awaited wish of their partner. A few exploit their mutual friends to convey
their feelings. Whatever the mode one uses, we are in fact building planning a
game of dominoes in those moments and one wrong placement of events, words,
choices, places becomes contrition of a lifetime.
For me the choices were even
less. Neither I had any mutual friends to involve nor did I know any wish of
her that I could fulfill. I could not even go to her and tell her lets go for a
dinner or say would you like to accompany me for dinner.
Since 10am in the morning
till 6pm, the only words and ideas that came into my petite mind were;
“What if she….”
“Will she…does she?”
‘Maybe she will…” and lastly
the vicious words of my heart were “you moron! Look at the time you are already
late, you stupid…”
I literally smacked my head
on the table and sprinted towards the rest room to freshen up. I put on a White
shirt, black trousers, red tie and almost unbearable intensity of Dunhill
Desire .
A
typical appearance.
I was taking long strides to
reach the Alph Street Corner and at the same time slowing down my pace so as
not to ruin my outfit. I was never so much startled or nervous before, neither
had I felt hope and torment co-existing before today. But still I was happy
because the only thing I felt around my fiancée for 9 years was agony of being
a common man in front of her royalty, the despair of my love being lost around
her somewhere and unable to find its way back to me ever and the dejections of
being blamed to be wrong one all the time.
Finally when I reached the
Corner, Aaminah was already there, wearing purple overcoat and black jeans with
long shoes. She was truly a woman worth fantasized, dreamed, wished, longed and
loved.
She hadn’t started playing
yet, like she was waiting for someone. Me?
Another
indication of hope. A sigh of relief.
Whether it was true or not
but I could see those questioning eyes asking me, where have you been? Seeing
me arrive she started to play.
Nervousness generates
stupidity.I forgot to buy coffee and sat down on the table in front of her like
vagabonds. Even before I could focus on my miserable condition I saw that my
red tie was busy in swallowing all the spilled coffee and tea on the table and
in an even more stupid effort of cleaning the tie I spilled the glass of water
over my shirt.
“Aghhhh….you are pathetic” I
yelled in my heart.
Agony was overcoming hope.
In the most desperate way I looked up slowly, wishing in my heart that she
might not have seen all of this. But the moment I met her eyes I received the
most precious gift someone could have given to me ever.
A smile.
That smile carried a world
of hope inside of it. A lifeline, just like a pair of lights appearing in the
distant on an empty road for a dying person, like a donor beep of a bone marrow
patient, like the rope pull of a bungee drop.
I recomposed my inner
strength and walked straight to her, took her violin from her hands, placed my
hand around her waist and kissed her lips.
The world became motionless
for a moment, a time jump for one travelling towards love, then the ticks
started to come back firstly in the form of few distant claps slowly turning
louder and clearer, and then the voices shouting and screaming “say yes”.
I looked in her
eyes and said “you created a world of desire and love at this Alph Street
Corner and I want to be with you in this part of the world. If your love is a
destiny I want to be the road leading to it, if your love is an illusion I want
to be the trick to it, if your love is a miracle I want to be an element of aspiration
in it.”
She smiled back again
and I saw a tear roll down her cheeks, she said “what if my love is angst?”
I held her face in my hands,
wiped her cheek and told her that it didn't matter what she thought about love,
she is my wild flower. I further told her that even if her love was meant to be
a suffering I would be happy because it would be the only suffering I chose
myself.
She put her violin in the
box, put its strap on her shoulder and said “ walk with me I want to show you a
place.”
I hurriedly picked up my
shoulder bag and followed her.
She became quiet suddenly
and it felt like the world had stopped or as if it was about to end. Only two
things are capable of controlling time; love and fear. Together they can
perform miracles and destroy worlds. The time gap between my heartbeats seemed
so long that with every gap I feared that there will be none now.
“It’s here” her words
finally brought an end to my suffering.
In a paradigm shift from
pain to reality I found myself standing at the Old City Canal Bridge. It was
the only bricked bridge left in the city and was now mostly used as tourist
site rather than a traffic crossover. I had been there a few times before but
today that bridge seemed to me as the railway siding which had saved me from
crashing into the silently approaching suffering.
I was literally feeling
tongueless rather than speechless till now. She took my hand and led me towards
the far end of the bridge. Love gives us a fair idea of the After-world, it
kills us and again brings us to back to life. That’s what I felt when she held
my hand. She stopped at the edge and said” come down and be careful”. In all of
my visits to the bridge I had never noticed that there were stairs which gave
access to the underside of the bridge and further into the canal.
I stood near the edge for a
second and saw her take off her shoes, fold her jeans and put her feet into the
water. God she was looking beautiful.
“Come down, what are you
thinking” she yelled.
“Ummm, nothing” I nodded my
head, stepped down the stairs and sat down besides her.
“Why are we here” I asked
her?
She cleared her throat and
said “ I have seen rejection of love on your face and it is very obvious that
you have seen mine as well. How it happened or what your or mine past was doesn't matter at this point. Once we have been introduced to failure in love we
become contagious and carry this virus with us all the time, a virus with
no containment---the living dead.”
She swirled her hand in the water and continued” loving is complicated,
getting together is complicated, marriage is complicated and the contagion we
are carrying inside of us gives us a false impression that we have played our
part for love and its our time to be loved. This kind of love can only be found
under some extraordinary circumstances.”
“Why to live a life of
compromise and lies?” She said looking towards me.
I put her head on my
shoulder in an effort to comfort her and said“ love is not that complicated
Aaminah. It can be found on traffic signals, bus stops, cafes, restaurants and
like in my case in Alph Street Corner. All we have got to do is to accept it---embrace
it. No extraordinary circumstances needed.”
‘Your perception
is very wrong about this Waqas, the way you see it and the way I see it have
nothing in common. You think of me as a hope a harbor, where you can anchor
your sinking ship. But I am just a distant shore. The more you will try to come
closer to me the more you will damage yourself and eventually you will destroy
yourself and what’s left of me as well’ she looked persisted in her point of
view.
But to be honest I didn’t
hear a word at all after she took my name for the first time. I was stuck in a
moment of self-joy.
She got up and started to
climb the stairs, I clutched onto her hand and tried to stop her but she pulled
her hand away in a resilient way and said’ don’t stop me now please, I will
eventually fall in love with you at some point and then we both will witness
the outcome I told you about. We will try to find the lost love in each other
which no longer is there. You will fake your love and I will fake my orgasms
for you and life will keep getting miserable.’
She paused midway on the
stairs and said’ I had brought you here to tell you that what you witnessed
that day on the Alph Street Corner was never a miracle. It’s just when two
negative forces come closer which in this case were us, the positive has to
intervene, not for us but for the others to keep the hope alive. We are just
the flag bearers of hope not the hope itself.’
In that small meet she
introduced me to loneliness and the idea that people leave you, come back and
then leave you again.
At points like these life
brings forth various perspectives like loving again or at least trying, dying,
moving on and so and so---. When no perspective is left a switch is flipped and
a person migrates to another world owned by the mad. On the contrary I thought
of that world as another perspective where people understand each other better,
love others, care for others and everyone is free to build his own world.
It seemed as if I had been
left with only a few options. I could sit there all night and mourn my hopeless
life, I could jump into the canal and end up this misery or I could leave this
place this city forever and go far-far way.
I had an advantage of being
Unknown. If I died today or left this place no one would be there to mourn me.
I had ended the only relationship I had, I never had as many friends. Yes,
parents are there but they live in a distant village. By the time they would come to
know of my death or the fact that I am missing I would be long gone. They would
mourn my death for a few days, months or even years maybe but the kind of
personality I presented to them my whole life would at least assure them that I
did not commit suicide. They would think of my death as an accident or murder
and I would get a place further close to their hearts.
But then I thought to myself
whether death would be a solution.
My body will die of course,
the physical pain would end but what about the soul. I had already learned to
endure physical pain but there is no meter to measure the pain suffered by the
soul and no remedies to endure it. When we are going through a physical pain
our nerves send a signal to the brain and the signs of life are felt. On the
other hand when the soul is hurt, the heart cuts out from the brain and marks
the death of the soul.
My heart was still sending
out the signals to the brain. I still wanted to live and to be loved.
I kept sitting on the stairs
empty minded, lost---staring at the shadow of the grim yellow lights hanging
over the pillars of the bridge. Why everything that brightens others has to
burn itself? I thought to myself. There was a very funny note written under the
bridge by the municipality workers or at least I found it funny. It said’ if
you able to read this note it is only because you are stupid enough to climb
down the stairs, these are just for the maintenance for the bridge. So please
go back and don’t increase our work load by dying out here’.
I smiled for a moment and
broke down into tears all of a sudden. I mourned over my previous relationship
for the first time maybe till now I was living with a false idea that the she
had gone only for a while ad would come back. I kept shedding tears into the
flowing water hoping that it would carry away my dejection and some day it
would reach her and she would come to know that I mocked a life.
At about sunrise I went back
to my apartment.
When I was opening the door
my landlady Khadija saw me. She was startled to see my torn up condition. She
came inside the apartment, asked me to rest on the sofa and headed to the
kitchen.
“What happened to you?” I
heard her distant, old voice from the kitchen.
“Nothing, it was just work”
I replied throwing my head back on the sofa.
I never got to know about my
landlady. The only words I had ever exchanged with her were the negotiation for
the rent of the apartment. All I knew about her was that she was married once
and her husband was a merchant. One day her husband told her that he was
travelling to Europe for business proposals and he never came back. Since then
she was living alone and never married anyone else.
I always admired how she
kept the hope alive in all these years.
A few moments later Khadija
came back, she was holding two cups of tea. She offered me one, which I
accepted thankfully and she sat down on the sofa besides me.
After few minutes of silence
she spoke” Son, I have no right to ask you about your problem. Though I may be
just a landlady for you but I am an elderly woman and I want to give you an advice.
Women can easily differentiate whether a man is love struck or burdened by
work.”
She took a sip of tea and
continued” the burdens of lost love are the dead leaves which are no longer
part of us and yet we keep on collecting them right under us. An outsider comes
for his own pleasure, rests under our shades, finds his comfort, lights a fire
and goes away. A wildfire starts and burns not only us but the others around us
as well.”
I started to sob again and
told her the story of my fiancée and Aaminah. I told her that I have given away
all the love I had in me and I think I am not capable of loving anymore or at
least my love has lost its strength.
Khadija spoke putting her
cup on the table’ life is created out of balance. The sun shines equally, the
rain falls without distinction, the day and night are the same for everyone
similarly everyone gets equal opportunities to love and to be loved. Love is a
continuous struggle. If it is not accomplished from one person it doesn’t mark
the end of love or the struggle for love.’
She took me in her lap and
started stroking my hair.
I thought of my mother at
that time, of how I used to lye down in her lap whenever I was upset or scared,
of how she used to stroke my hair, of how I used to fall asleep in moments like
there was nothing wrong and the world around was the most peaceful place on
this universe.
I thought of going back to
my village to my mother leaving everything behind.
Khadija mentioned that she
was happy to hear that my love was pure even in this time of the world. I
opened my eyes and asked” how?”
She said” we have been and
still keep misusing the love offered to us by others and this misuse has given
birth to a new kind of dilemma—frustration. Appearance matters more than what
lies inside the soul. Love has been replaced by lust, desire and sex. Today you
will see girls wearing outfits that attract men sexually rather than by their
deeds and men like wild dogs keep on increasing their frustration. The more the
bones the more lust there will be.
Dear she said continuing’ we
have ended up in a society where a husband and wife entering a café are tagged
outlanders. Every witnessing eye says go home whereas a cheapster entering the
café with 2 or 3 girls around him is welcomed as a celebrity. The girls beside
him are also very well aware of the fact that they are just the toys of
pleasure for him but they fake their smiles and laughs because their physical
needs are being fulfilled.
Love is an emotion that
rises in our body and the stimulus is the person who gives us this feeling. The
appearance is just a catalyst to emotion but we have given so much importance
to this catalyst that we have forgot what love actually means. The emotion
always lives within us. It is very important for the continuity of life. But
its purity is even more important because after a while that love transforms
into a new life---children.’
When I fell asleep and when
Khadija left I couldn’t know. I woke up late in the afternoon. Life seemed
blurry and dying. I had to preserve what was left of my rotten life. Till the
time Khadija was in the room my options of going back home or pursuing my love
for Aaminah both seemed as if I had found two Aces and I could play any card. But
now it seemed as if game of life had handed me two more Jokers.
I thought that if I went
back to my parents they would try to counsel me and I would die with each
memory of my fiancée they would bring forth. When she left me, I could not go
to any shop or café we visited together, I could not listen to any song we
listened together, she was the reason I left my town so how could I go back now
to the same place carrying yet another grief?
When you spend so many years
with someone you love, you start to breathe the same life. Somewhere I was
still stuck in my past and Aaminah knew this fact very well. She was right, how
could a person love someone else while he is still in possession of all the
gifts, cards, pictures and memories of his previous love.
I got up and walked to the cupboard where I had
kept all the gifts of my fiancée. I opened the drawer and picked up a diary. There
were a lot of smileys on the cover of the diary and a smiley held the key hole
for the lock. I unlocked the diary and started to read it. She had gifted me
this diary on our first engagement anniversary. It contained her pictures and
ours on various occasions. She had captioned every occasion. I scrolled through
all the pages of the diary and on the last page was my most favorite picture of
hers. It was captioned “I have given you all of my life with this diary, keep
it safe and close to your heart just like you want to keep me safe.”
Moments before walking to the drawer I had
made up my mind to collect all of her stuff and burn it or throw it away and
now suddenly here I was thinking of burning myself to death. My love for her
was an accomplished one and I could not at all separate myself from it even if
it meant spending the rest of my life without her just with her memories and
her diary.
For the first time in months I finally knew
what I had to do and there was a sensation of satisfaction in me.
I had to meet Aaminah.
I took shower, got dressed and went to Alph
Street Corner. I was a bit early so I sat down on a table and ordered tea. The corner
was surrounded by the usual people. I kept staring at the lamp post where she
used to rest her back while playing violin. I kept thinking about the conversation
that I and Khadija had this morning. I was phrasing and sorting out my words so
that I could clearly tell Aaminah what I was going to do with my life.
Time kept on strolling gradually and
eventually started to slow down. It was midnight and she was not there yet. I started
to worry and asked around if someone knew where she lived. I got different
locations like hotels, hostels, and apartments where people had seen her. I spent
the whole night wandering from hotel to hotel street to street hospital to
hospital but I couldn’t find her anywhere.
Till morning I had exhausted all of my
energies and ideas to find her. From that day onward till now I have always
been going to Alph Street Corner. First few moths I went there with a hope that
she will come back and now I go there to mock a life, a life from which I inherited
two types of love; love for my fiancée which is complete even without her
presence and the love for Aaminah which could never even start.
