Hence, You!

One wrong person can mess your whole life. True.

But to reach the right person, you must pass through a couple of wrong persons. Else you will never realize happiness without sorrows.

Just like the prerequisite of divorce is: marriage. I know. Deviation. It’s an art and it’s not always out of the context.

Anyway. Back to that person.

So, you may find the right person but s/he may not be in a position to claim the same.

Your right. Yet not vice versa. Zero sum.

Then you see your wrong one matching perfectly with someone else. Syncing. Algorithm.

Just like your worst enemy is someone’s best friend. And your best friend is someone’s foe.

Tell her to go! Deviation! Leave!

Perhaps, it’s after the existential crisis itself that tells you the crux of the whole journey. And the crux is: it was you.

You were the wrong person all along. The entire dot in your universe was you.

You.

Hence, you.

Hira

You talk to a girl – let’s call her Pari – for some time. You haven’t happened to see her, yet you talk to her daily on the phone. Then she disappears. She disappears because she was unable to own you.

After some months, you talk to another girl – Hira – and she is exactly the same person you talked to before. But not entirely the same. The identity is different. And this time, you happen to meet her.

You talked to two different people; perhaps the same. Yes. No. She was the one.

You talked to one, met another one; and both were the same.

You know, men want variety. They talk about it all the time. ‘Change’ and ‘biryani’; not ‘daal chawal’ every day. But then, men are always looking for the previous one. “The one who got away.” They are forever striving for nostalgia. Maybe they live in nostalgia too. Who knows their psyche?

Always trying to get a whiff of the breeze they inhaled a decade back at the beach.

Back to Pari. Oh! Hira. The same person. She knows you already. And as is likely, she disappears again. Because you could not be owned. You were not conquered. Her agenda was to own you, and your agenda was to escape.

Such a clichéd story: A random call. Random sharing. Random meetup. Random disappearance. End of story. No? No.

There is something to be said about being nostalgic in the present. Sensing and fearing a future without the beloved. You are going to lose this person right in front of you. Who you just met. For the first time. And for the last time. After the first touch. After the first kiss. After the first breath. That’s it. Nothing to follow. No seconds. No second touch. No second kiss. No second breath.

Are these lies? Like everything else. This life, this breathing, this space, this whole coding in a virtual platform? Oh! Pain is real. It can be felt. It nurtures and evolves on its own. We all have our share of pain in different shapes. And we are kind of addicted to it. Because that is the only thing we own. And sometimes that is the only thing we know. Pain. Very personal pain.

But even pain is nothing more than some angry brain cells.

See the other side of the human spectrum: special people. Above all of us. Above politics, above consumerism, above religion, above philosophy, above love, above lust, above everything. They are happy. Just happy. They don’t have eternal pain, like us who are actually handicapped and mere consumers.

Rooh / nafs / soul is dependent on a body. Complete human body. Religion simply dismisses differently abled people as they will not be judged in the Hereafter. Fine. But there are questions. Rooh depending on a body completely rejects the idea of soul. There is no soul perhaps. Just a system. Working and evolving.

One cell splitting into two. Two into four. Four into eight. Myopic microscopic evolution.

Or one cell is ordered to split into two. Two into four. Four into eight. The design.

Sigh! Don’t want to drag to the point where a story becomes blasphemous.

Eyes see a person. There is a chemical response in the brain. Curiosity. Love or lust, whatever, is a biologically intrigued chemical reaction. Mood, mood swings, temper, very intelligent anger, everything, is a chemical reaction. And then a whole human body, an object not to be objectified, is talking to you on the other end of the receiver. From chemical reaction in the brain to frequency signals on the receiver to decoding of wavelengths by the ears; love is born. Give yourself a break.

Reminds me of Merovingian’s causality scene of the Matrix. Everything is coded and hence can be manipulated, accordingly.

Back to her. Pari. Or Hira. Or whoever’s Zia she was. Two persons. Two cities. Two names. Yet, one.

How does it feel that you talked to one and met another one; who are exactly the same? That was the story that caused chaos in a dead sea. Some phone calls, and some social media snapshots – welcome to the modern world. What remain are some pictures to see. Sleazy pictures. No second touch but a possession forever.

The pictures remain, the person does not. The story remains, the voice does not. The stories have evolved. Now Ranjha isn’t running madly to save Heer. Romeo is already dead with nothing in hand. Now, the modern-day-Ranjha sneaks onto Instagram, takes screenshots, and keeps on reliving the past. Eating himself like the tail of a snake.

Why do men need to relive and die again and again, yet looking for variety at the same time? Are they still in an early evolutionary phase? Will they ever be stable? How they long and strive to see someone naked for months and then keep on reliving the moments where they were able to save some sleazy shots? Isn’t this digital-lust pathetic?

And the person you see in the picture is the same, yet not the same. The body is the same, yet the soul is different. What would have been a future of such a story? Only unfulfilled love stories are complete. Fulfillment follows disaster. And mutilated stories are not even worth telling. But here it is. As it was. How else to write such a weird story?

Maybe in another life. When they both are cats. Animals.

P.S. I know exactly what I was writing initially but kept on adding some words / fragments randomly in this piece. And look what I made? Noodles! May you make some sense out it. I couldn’t. Maybe in another piece.

Consent

Consent. The big argument. Yet, we are thrown in this world without consent. To suffer without consent. Emotionally. Physically. Psychologically. Financially. Socially. Suffer. Till last breath. Without consent. And then there are threats after death. Threats of eternal suffering. But where is the consent? Would you have consented to born in this world, if asked? Have you seen a 3-year old crying with pain in a hospital? Have you seen severe pain on an innocent face? Have you imagined a sexually abused 5-year old being stitched? Have you seen kids born with major health issues? Heart surgery at the age of 2? Dialysis at 10? Have you seen someone finding Operation Theatre in a public hospital with a bleeding girl in hands? Have you seen a son taking his unconscious mother on his shoulders from ambulance to stretcher? Have you seen people taking dead body out of the emergency room? Suffering emotionally and hurt financially and broken potentially. Have you seen the ordeal of people praying outside the ICU or CCU? Have you observed people lined outside emergency counter in public hospitals, while their loved ones bleeding on an stretcher in scorching heat? Have you seen pain in the eys of your kid? Or your mother? Or your father? Or a stranger? Have you stared into such eyes? Have you seen a very familiar gaze – like of your mother – looking at you for one last time? Getting stranger by passing time? Dying with all the unfullfiled wishes? And… have you seen request / plea for death? Verbally / non-verbally? People consenting to die? People trying to die? Wishing to die? Praying to die? ‘You don’t know Jack’ perhaps. I do. And I agree with him. But not allowed. Misery is allowed, freedom isn’t. Painful beats are allowed, free absence isn’t. Killing is allowed too in certain cases, suicide isn’t. Suicide is also allowed in certain cases, if benefiting a king or a barren land or a gory war. However, there is no concept of consent in nature. Not at all. Nowhere. A tiger kills any animal he wishes. One has the power to drill his teeth while the other is only born to be eaten alive. Nothing is consented. Except pain and suffering. We want the weak ones to give consent to the powerful ones. Isn’t diat / qisas consent? From the miserable to the powerful? Freedom denied. Suffering legalized. Questions and questions. Without solutions. Right? Read again. There is no solution. Because there is no consent. Or you can denounce. Denounce everything. That exists and that doesn’t. Maybe then you will see a light at the end of this miserable tunnel of being. Or maybe that will lead to another tunnel. Who knows? Were neither asked nor told. Post Script: Schopenhauer believed that the only way to avoid suffering is not to be born at all. For him, death was the only way to peace. Nietzsche tilted from Schopenhauer’s philosophy and blamed suffering to religion. Like Marx. But Marx mentioned it as an ‘opium’ too to ease the pain for the masses. But this way or that way – you suffer without consent.

She. H! Scented. Unnamed.

When do you stop taking your chances? Well, there are no chances. You try and you exhaust yourself for nothing.

She was a blonde. No, not a real blonde. Dyed blonde. Blue lens. Cleft chin. Little mascara. Neatly manicured. Glossed lips. And silken voice. No, he didn’t notice these details until she left.

By the way it’s ‘blond’ for guys and ‘blonde’ for girls.

Anyway, there are over 7 billion people on earth. 3.5 billion is the opposite gender. Of those 3.5 billion, you get to know and meet around 500. Of those 500, 400 won’t either consider you or you won’t consider them. Of the 100, you won’t think of 80 as a long-term partner. This leaves you with 20. You get your fling, settle with one, and that’s ‘I love you’.

‘I love you too.’

Or, you get this done through a matrimonial service. Dreaming to make fairy-tales come true with a complete random stranger.

Apart from that, you get your chance of love with only living humans. Not from Roman era, or medieval times, or renaissance. I know it’s scary to think but I’m trying to make a point. You don’t choose time. Or anything. You think you choose, but you don’t. No one chooses here. No one chooses you. You don’t choose anyone.

It’s an algorithm, based on possible chances, with your vested interests in mind, infatuation, and bingo… you are married. A step away from divorce.

Chances of divorce are zero if you don’t get married. But you do.
Chances of domestic abuse and psychological torture are zero if you don’t succumb to “settling down”. But you do.
Chances of seeing your love story ripped apart are rare if you leave on time. But you don’t.

Only half fulfilled loves stories are forever. They are worth imagining and re-living. Because they don’t see their eventual demise, and you can dream about them anyway you want to.

And here comes the woman with the cleft chin.

She was in love with an idea of someone ideal. An image. But she fell in love with someone not-ideal. So, she used her imaginative powers and imagined him ideally. She thought about him as she wanted to.

She built her love story around lies. She lied about her name, her city, her everything. So as to build a love story in accordance with her ideal idea of a love story.

That guy knew nothing real about her, except her cleft chin… with her hair dyed, eyes lensed, lips glossed and mascara; cleft chin was the only real her he knew.

She was so afraid of the world and its eyes and its questions that she camouflaged herself in her own manipulated love story.

So what? Her love was real. Her idea was real. Her manipulations for love were real too. She was the one who chose him. She actually exercised the ‘choosing’, unlike the rest of the world which only have an illusion of choosing.

A dimple on chin. A devil within.

And then, she left. She gathered enough memories to have an imagination forever. She gathered enough words from him to imagine his voice for the rest of her life. She chose him. She left him. She disappeared from his life without a warning. She left before the question of ‘forever together’ or death of the whole affair.

Because she knew that only half fulfilled love stories are forever.

He for her. Forever.