It was raining very hard. She was very happy for the rain.
It hit her petals hard, and the pain it caused soothed her pain in an odd way.
It hid her tears, her warm tears against the cold rain.
She cried for him; and for them.
She had feared this pain, but not in this form.
She had thought, believed, her star would not be affected.
Yet, it had finally happened; worse than she had expected.
She thought she'd break only her own heart. but she'd broken his too. What was worse, with her love.
He had dimmed, had lost the twinkle she loved.
The twinkle, she now knew; she had given him.
So she let the breeze sway her without complain.
Stealing her fragrance.
Hurting her, easing her tears.
Each tear made her love him more. Each hurt her more to have caused him to be hurt.
Hurt through loving her. Simple, pure undemanding love.
She cried till her heart became cold, lost all the warmth of his love in those tears.
Tears as cold as the rain.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Friday, July 30, 2010
brittle ties
Her name was common. Common to all households, to the world. They all knew her by it, except the one for whom she was, her name….mama. she knew this was her identity. But she knew it not, she liked it not, behaved it not and definitely excepted it not. She was mama. The one who gave her birth. Brought her daughter into the world, and made her hate it. Used a sword invisible, to cut through love and respect. She used insult to kill her own effort, and those that were her own.
She knew what would kill another woman; the words, the acts, the manipulation. These weapons, parts of her, she knew well to use. Perfect timing and precise aim. She used them till she killed her. killed mama; and became….just another woman.
She knew what would kill another woman; the words, the acts, the manipulation. These weapons, parts of her, she knew well to use. Perfect timing and precise aim. She used them till she killed her. killed mama; and became….just another woman.
Money
On the 3rd of November, she died, after a long illness. She had passed many tests of endurance. Tests of patience. Lost the precious, yet persisted. In the face of opposition. Stood, stood her ground and firmly so. Undeterred by whatever hardship was thrown her way, she had to of course. She was love. Love of the material. Love of money. Wealth being health; and when the funeral was, she was discussed and what she had and what she could afford. Afford to feed on her funeral. Feed her hungry sympathizers – richly.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Pigeon Island
As I sit here on pigeon island, the reef on the beach making my ass sore, I experience the feeling of being just blank. Just watching the sea passively and moving back each time the sea reclaims its territory from me, wetting my feet in the process. Absorbing the bubbling sound of the water as the waves pull it from between the rocks, before another wave comes crashing back with a fierce vengeance. The water hits the broken reef on the beach and and splashes, spraying on me, right through the leaves of the tree I’m perched under; holding my cap to keep it from flying off of my head. The bubbling, crashing, washing and the spray of the water become music together. A song with ever-changing meaning despite the same lyrics each time; in a repreat loop fashion. An orchestra led by the maestro herself, the beats; bubbling, crashing on the reef and washing and trickling off the rocks, all an obedient servant.
Bubbling
Crashing
Spraying
Making the sea… sing!
Bubbling
Crashing
Spraying
Making the sea… sing!
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Disobedience
It was her disobedient little heart; which kept fluttering, skipping beats at the nuances of his presence; his twinkling. It tickled her, the fluttering. Made her smile, unreasonably. Smile a genuine, genuinely pleased smile. She knew it was not right but she liked it. It made her feel pretty, it made her feel wanted. The garden envied her, and craved a star to love. There was a forbidden thrill about these smiles that she smiled to herself. It was the thrill itself that she was growing to love. It wasn’t him anymore. He was just the sparkling, glimmering excuse for her to get thrilled. No more. No less. She felt abliss. Safely content, with nothing to lose.
She had never felt her heart so light before. Light as a bird, floating on the wind, so effortlessly; seamlessly gliding from one cloud to another. She was living in a dream. It may not have been hers, but a dream it was; and she knew it. It was this knowledge that made it even more pleasant, and even more lucrative. She knew it wouldn’t last long, and decided to live it. Live in this dream. Enjoy it while it lasted. Embrace it while it let her. Embrace the dream each night she saw him, do what he did best; Twinkle, and love him for it. Just do what she did best, love his twinkling. Not let what was best about it – the thrill of impermanence – hurt her. For once, let go; just let go.
She had never felt her heart so light before. Light as a bird, floating on the wind, so effortlessly; seamlessly gliding from one cloud to another. She was living in a dream. It may not have been hers, but a dream it was; and she knew it. It was this knowledge that made it even more pleasant, and even more lucrative. She knew it wouldn’t last long, and decided to live it. Live in this dream. Enjoy it while it lasted. Embrace it while it let her. Embrace the dream each night she saw him, do what he did best; Twinkle, and love him for it. Just do what she did best, love his twinkling. Not let what was best about it – the thrill of impermanence – hurt her. For once, let go; just let go.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Ignorance
She saw it from her spot in the night. The dark, silent night; twinkling away. It was love at first sight. She loved the way he twinkled, different from all others. As it grew darker, she felt closer to him. He was also drawing closer. She was sure of it. She adjusted her petals her petals to look prettier, and swayed more gracefully to the wind. They were about to touch. But the light was approaching, and made her see. See the distance between herself and her star. The distance that the dark had been shielding uptil now. She knew she had to ever-share him with the night. It was her that he belonged to. It was she who made him twinkle. Her painful solitude came to her rescue. Her only comfort. He would only twinkle in her eyes now and she would wait for the twinkling to dim and become the pearls commemorating the sublime moments where her love blossomed and perished before full bloom.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Day 1 Colombo
Our first day here began in a state almost of transit. In my mind, the day began the minute I boarded the plane for Colombo via Dubai; this was at 10.30 pm on Tuesday the 22nd of June. From then on, the day that continued from that morning, extremely gradually turned into the day I landed here, the beautiful island that I had marveled at from my wing-window seat.
Being on that flight had been a major experience in itself, never before had I eaten such satisfying plane-meals; or watched three movies in one night on two planes! It was truly a taste of luxury- in economy class ;). My friend stared wide eyed and poked me when I broke into peals of laughter while watching those intensely silly romantic comedies: the rebound, when in Rome and Valentine’s Day. The rebound was the funniest, and in fact the one that also made me cry.
When we got off our flight, we were greeted by this long looonngg line in front of the immigration. It is without doubt that we were overwhelmed by this great tear jerking event. In an almost defensive-mechanism fashion, the thought that struck of us was, “we are Pakistanis, we can slither through the queue at the drop of a hat!” turned out the queue was full of similar resumes, so many other Pakistanis! While we lugged our laptops and counted the number of heads in front of us, there was a constant background bore of an identity crises behind us. An old tall man kept speaking to another in a frenzied combination of an American and a srilankan accident, oops! I meant, accent!; and we made deductions as to why the line we were in was the slowest and why that man was discussing medication rules in USA when the hot – and appropriate – topic was obviously the glacial pace of the line!. It was here that the architecture student in me screamed, “The line weight is too much!!”
However painfully, we got to the immigration counter eventually. We had landed at 9.00 am and hit the counter at 10.30 am, took another two minutes to give the politically correct answers and yet another thirty minutes to find our luggage. Once we began dragging our suitcases, we realised how heavy they actually were. Anyways, now came the best part of our airport experience. It was like we were in a movie, a man stood there waiting for us with our names on a placard! We got so excited we bared all our teeth to him together, not even half bothering that we were giving our best smiles to a driver!
Exhausted, yet running on our adrenaline-rush energy, we got into a huge car, wondering aloud why only two people had been sent that huge vehicle. Actually, we were extremely grateful to our employer for making this arrangement for us. The idea of finding transport when I was that tired still makes me shudder. So, Thank you so very much Sir!
The drive from the airport to our hostel seemed to never end, even though it was just two and a half hours. On the way we asked our driver to stop somewhere we could buy a phone sim. He did. We got off, excited that it was drizzling and entered a shop where we asked the shopkeeper which connection had the cheapest rates. He informed us we couldn’t buy two of the available srilankan connections, because we weren’t srilankan; we were left with two choices, out of which he told us that one had signal issues. Obviously, we chose the one he said had the better coverage, the next thing we knew was that was the most expensive connection, 600 SLR!!. We had just been thugged.
Driving through the traffic ridden and sometimes empty roads of Colombo, with my friend sleeping on my lap; we finally reached our destination – the YWCA Hostel. Here we had to wait for another half an hour before we were shown into our room. We, like finicky mummies checked everything from the bed sheets to the window latch and door lock to the socket, the only single one that was there, to our great dismay. Finally out of the two rooms that had been shown to us we chose the more practical one, instead of the more beautiful one, because the socket there wasn’t working, and the lock was also fishy.
Glad to have reached a place we could call “home”, we dropped on the beds and broke into an architectural discussion about the ventilation of the room, which was actually so well designed that even when we kept the window shut, there was a constant circulation of cool air in the room. Later we found out that, that our hostel, is a bawa building! Well bawa certainly knew how to provide comfort without air conditioning.
Soon, we joined our so-called male counterpart to drop in to the office to meet our bosses. Even though we were so tired, we walked all the way to the office, through a twisted path of lanes and alleys. It had strange looking men in lungis checking us out. Thankfully, we did not take that route on our return. It was a twenty to twenty five minute walk to our office, depending on the traffic.
We reached the office to find it a pleasant wooden floored building with a cheerful bunch of people greeting us. Each kept asking us our names, and if we had had lunch. The people were very warm and welcoming, and so were our two bosses, Jennifer and Madhura Premetillike – together, Team Architrvae. After having met all the employees, we finally met our boss, Madhura; someone with a great sarcastic sense of humour, and a presence which felt like that of a combination of a father figure and a teacher. Jennifer too, was very jolly and approachable. Madhura joked about how we didn’t have to do any work now, as Murtaza has already done all the work; and I just looked surprised and looked from madhura to Jennifer. Both, to our surprise, asked us to have fun and absorb srilankan and take trips. They asked us to read about bawa, to which I confidently replied we already had and that was why we were there; in response Madhura exclaimed, “oh they’ve come because of him not meee!”. Everyone laughed loudly, while I blushed.
Madhura told us that we will be cataloging in the room he called “the sweat shop”. I just asked him if there were power cuts or load shedding in srilanka; when he said there weren’t I gave him examples of the scheduled and un- scheduled load shedding that we suffered in Karachi. Obviously, sweat shops were neither new nor a big problem for us – me atleast.
One very interesting character that we met in the office was chaturanga. It took us a while to get his name right, especially the last syllable, but he was very considerate about that. He had learnt a lot of hindi and kept conversing with us in that language. He understood most of what we said and the rest of the office kept cracking jokes on this event of him finding natives of urdu to speak to in Sinhalese. He explained to us very carefully that he learnt hindi from bollywood, and not only movies, the primary reason had been the songs. To my great disappointment, his favourite singer was himesh reshammiya.
At our office we were also served tea. Our first tea in srilanka, and it was great. I was beyond glad to know that I wouldn’t have to suffer drug-tolerance-symptoms the way I had to on my turkey trip. I was also told that are three rounds of tea in the office. Murtaza almost disowned me because I clapped.
Being too tired now, we begged our leave from the office people and left for our first walk back home. On our way we decicde it wasn’t too far or long so we should walk to the office everyday; not only would that save us money, that would help us lose weight. Wow! What a slimming program!. We took a different route back and on our way saw this shop which apparently sold “biriyani”, “kuruma”, “nann” and “roti”. For reasons named in inverted commas in the previous sentence, we eagerly entered the shop, and asked about those items. The only thing actually available was parathas the size of a slice of bread – 10SLR – and a very repulsive looking biryani, the price of which we didn’t bother to ask. Afer asking the price of everythi ng that was visible, we came out with a loaf of bread – 40 SLR and me with the special satisfaction of knowing that tea was avialble – 25 SLR.
While we were walking down Galle road, we were suddenly shouted at by the police. We wondered why they were calling our attention. We had not been here even a day, and yet?. They were telling us to go to the other side of the road. When we were at the office, moses, one of the architects working there had commented that we were living next to the president, and what more could we want. We hadn’t understood that comment then. Now, we did.
It was a challenge to cross thease roads with raging traffic and no traffic signals. We would have to put ourselves on the death-zebra-crossing and then do the multi-tasks of walking fast and praying to not get hit. When we reached home finally, we opened up one of our packed-in-pakistan Pakistani-food-cans. A curry of potatoes and hungrily gobbled down half of the loaf which I had sliced irregularly, with a 3” knife. The same that made my luggage look suspicious at each airport security check.
We were extremely tired, yet I wanted to bathe so I left the room, for the shared hostel bathrooms, happily unaware of the ordeal that awaited me. The ordeal of bathing in cold water, oops! freezing water. I bathed, shivering; clothed, shivering and ran back to my room, shivering more than ever.
Exhausted beyond explanation now, I just collapsed on bed and fell asleep.
One thing we felt great about was the fact that we ranted on and on in Urdu and people couldn’t understand most of it. Of course they understood the basic, thanks to bollywood.
Being on that flight had been a major experience in itself, never before had I eaten such satisfying plane-meals; or watched three movies in one night on two planes! It was truly a taste of luxury- in economy class ;). My friend stared wide eyed and poked me when I broke into peals of laughter while watching those intensely silly romantic comedies: the rebound, when in Rome and Valentine’s Day. The rebound was the funniest, and in fact the one that also made me cry.
When we got off our flight, we were greeted by this long looonngg line in front of the immigration. It is without doubt that we were overwhelmed by this great tear jerking event. In an almost defensive-mechanism fashion, the thought that struck of us was, “we are Pakistanis, we can slither through the queue at the drop of a hat!” turned out the queue was full of similar resumes, so many other Pakistanis! While we lugged our laptops and counted the number of heads in front of us, there was a constant background bore of an identity crises behind us. An old tall man kept speaking to another in a frenzied combination of an American and a srilankan accident, oops! I meant, accent!; and we made deductions as to why the line we were in was the slowest and why that man was discussing medication rules in USA when the hot – and appropriate – topic was obviously the glacial pace of the line!. It was here that the architecture student in me screamed, “The line weight is too much!!”
However painfully, we got to the immigration counter eventually. We had landed at 9.00 am and hit the counter at 10.30 am, took another two minutes to give the politically correct answers and yet another thirty minutes to find our luggage. Once we began dragging our suitcases, we realised how heavy they actually were. Anyways, now came the best part of our airport experience. It was like we were in a movie, a man stood there waiting for us with our names on a placard! We got so excited we bared all our teeth to him together, not even half bothering that we were giving our best smiles to a driver!
Exhausted, yet running on our adrenaline-rush energy, we got into a huge car, wondering aloud why only two people had been sent that huge vehicle. Actually, we were extremely grateful to our employer for making this arrangement for us. The idea of finding transport when I was that tired still makes me shudder. So, Thank you so very much Sir!
The drive from the airport to our hostel seemed to never end, even though it was just two and a half hours. On the way we asked our driver to stop somewhere we could buy a phone sim. He did. We got off, excited that it was drizzling and entered a shop where we asked the shopkeeper which connection had the cheapest rates. He informed us we couldn’t buy two of the available srilankan connections, because we weren’t srilankan; we were left with two choices, out of which he told us that one had signal issues. Obviously, we chose the one he said had the better coverage, the next thing we knew was that was the most expensive connection, 600 SLR!!. We had just been thugged.
Driving through the traffic ridden and sometimes empty roads of Colombo, with my friend sleeping on my lap; we finally reached our destination – the YWCA Hostel. Here we had to wait for another half an hour before we were shown into our room. We, like finicky mummies checked everything from the bed sheets to the window latch and door lock to the socket, the only single one that was there, to our great dismay. Finally out of the two rooms that had been shown to us we chose the more practical one, instead of the more beautiful one, because the socket there wasn’t working, and the lock was also fishy.
Glad to have reached a place we could call “home”, we dropped on the beds and broke into an architectural discussion about the ventilation of the room, which was actually so well designed that even when we kept the window shut, there was a constant circulation of cool air in the room. Later we found out that, that our hostel, is a bawa building! Well bawa certainly knew how to provide comfort without air conditioning.
Soon, we joined our so-called male counterpart to drop in to the office to meet our bosses. Even though we were so tired, we walked all the way to the office, through a twisted path of lanes and alleys. It had strange looking men in lungis checking us out. Thankfully, we did not take that route on our return. It was a twenty to twenty five minute walk to our office, depending on the traffic.
We reached the office to find it a pleasant wooden floored building with a cheerful bunch of people greeting us. Each kept asking us our names, and if we had had lunch. The people were very warm and welcoming, and so were our two bosses, Jennifer and Madhura Premetillike – together, Team Architrvae. After having met all the employees, we finally met our boss, Madhura; someone with a great sarcastic sense of humour, and a presence which felt like that of a combination of a father figure and a teacher. Jennifer too, was very jolly and approachable. Madhura joked about how we didn’t have to do any work now, as Murtaza has already done all the work; and I just looked surprised and looked from madhura to Jennifer. Both, to our surprise, asked us to have fun and absorb srilankan and take trips. They asked us to read about bawa, to which I confidently replied we already had and that was why we were there; in response Madhura exclaimed, “oh they’ve come because of him not meee!”. Everyone laughed loudly, while I blushed.
Madhura told us that we will be cataloging in the room he called “the sweat shop”. I just asked him if there were power cuts or load shedding in srilanka; when he said there weren’t I gave him examples of the scheduled and un- scheduled load shedding that we suffered in Karachi. Obviously, sweat shops were neither new nor a big problem for us – me atleast.
One very interesting character that we met in the office was chaturanga. It took us a while to get his name right, especially the last syllable, but he was very considerate about that. He had learnt a lot of hindi and kept conversing with us in that language. He understood most of what we said and the rest of the office kept cracking jokes on this event of him finding natives of urdu to speak to in Sinhalese. He explained to us very carefully that he learnt hindi from bollywood, and not only movies, the primary reason had been the songs. To my great disappointment, his favourite singer was himesh reshammiya.
At our office we were also served tea. Our first tea in srilanka, and it was great. I was beyond glad to know that I wouldn’t have to suffer drug-tolerance-symptoms the way I had to on my turkey trip. I was also told that are three rounds of tea in the office. Murtaza almost disowned me because I clapped.
Being too tired now, we begged our leave from the office people and left for our first walk back home. On our way we decicde it wasn’t too far or long so we should walk to the office everyday; not only would that save us money, that would help us lose weight. Wow! What a slimming program!. We took a different route back and on our way saw this shop which apparently sold “biriyani”, “kuruma”, “nann” and “roti”. For reasons named in inverted commas in the previous sentence, we eagerly entered the shop, and asked about those items. The only thing actually available was parathas the size of a slice of bread – 10SLR – and a very repulsive looking biryani, the price of which we didn’t bother to ask. Afer asking the price of everythi ng that was visible, we came out with a loaf of bread – 40 SLR and me with the special satisfaction of knowing that tea was avialble – 25 SLR.
While we were walking down Galle road, we were suddenly shouted at by the police. We wondered why they were calling our attention. We had not been here even a day, and yet?. They were telling us to go to the other side of the road. When we were at the office, moses, one of the architects working there had commented that we were living next to the president, and what more could we want. We hadn’t understood that comment then. Now, we did.
It was a challenge to cross thease roads with raging traffic and no traffic signals. We would have to put ourselves on the death-zebra-crossing and then do the multi-tasks of walking fast and praying to not get hit. When we reached home finally, we opened up one of our packed-in-pakistan Pakistani-food-cans. A curry of potatoes and hungrily gobbled down half of the loaf which I had sliced irregularly, with a 3” knife. The same that made my luggage look suspicious at each airport security check.
We were extremely tired, yet I wanted to bathe so I left the room, for the shared hostel bathrooms, happily unaware of the ordeal that awaited me. The ordeal of bathing in cold water, oops! freezing water. I bathed, shivering; clothed, shivering and ran back to my room, shivering more than ever.
Exhausted beyond explanation now, I just collapsed on bed and fell asleep.
One thing we felt great about was the fact that we ranted on and on in Urdu and people couldn’t understand most of it. Of course they understood the basic, thanks to bollywood.
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