I don't know what this is
supposed to be. A requiem? A lament? A 'minute of applause'? Maybe none of the
above, maybe all. All I know if my own words will not be sufficient, and I must
use those of others to help me along the way.
Aaj ke naam, aur aaj ke gham ke naam...
...Zard patton ka ban Jo mera des hai, dard ki anjuman Jo mera des hai
Faiz Ahmed Faiz
I never knew Sabeen, not really. She was just someone that I saw at T2F most days; we would exchange the kind of smiles that people do when they don't know each other but still feel it polite to acknowledge the fact that their face is familiar. There was a part of me which was never too sure about her. She looked so much like what a Google Image Search would pull up if you looked for 'Pakistani intellectual' that I wasn't sure if she was playing at it for a while before returning to whichever Ivory tower she belonged. After all, who has ever met a Grammarian that actually cared?
But still you'll never get it right
Cause when you're laid in bed at night
Watching roaches climb the wall
If you called your dad he could stop it all
Jarvis Cocker
It's not easy to admit someone is better than you. It's harder still to admit it when the reason you are having that conversation with yourself is because they now have four bullet holes in them and it is that very lead-lined reality that has brought into stark focus the other reality: that all that shit you have been feeding yourself about the triteness of "alleviating intellectual poverty" and how having earnest conversations about "issues" in an air conditioned DHA cafe is about as relevant as putting a band aid on a levee breach.
Well, someone whose sword could slice through a pen with ease certainly didn't think it all an irrelevance.
Lots of us care. How many do anything about it beyond retweeting stuff, changing our profile pictures to black or some other such palliative? Then we get back to our petty, self important lives, onwards and upwards to the next PowerPoint presentation, the next Budget planning session, the next conference call, the next career move, ideally overseas so I can make/save more money or just plain get the fuck out of Dodge.
It was reading a passage from Kamila Shamsie's 'A God in Every Stone' that brought it all into stark focus for me. We doubt the intentions of others and find ways of highlighting the inadequacy (perceived) in their ventures because it helps us to stop ourselves from looking our own inadequacies in the mirror. I wrote a piece on Kamila's writings a few years ago, where quite a bit of it was pointing out the bits where she gets it wrong. I now see it was out of envy. As were my snide remarks about the iMacs at T2F.
I envied Sabeen. Plain and simple. She took her education and her skills and put them to the use that most of us delude ourselves we will one day, soon, when the mortgage is paid off and we have finally seen Angkor Wat; making Pakistan a better place in whatever tangible way we can. Can I give it all up? Quit my job, let the mortgage slide, give up this semblance of financial security and a holiday every year to make my country slightly better or die trying?
The short answer is no. The long answer is a series of justifications. Abeer's schooling, people depend on me, there is more than one way of contributing. Et cetera. It's easier to say all that than admit your own, there is no polite way of putting it, cowardice.
You will
never understand
How it feels
to live your life
With no
meaning or control
And with
nowhere left to go
You are
amazed that they exist
And they burn
so bright
Whilst you
can only wonder why
Jarvis Cocker
Je Suis Sabeen. If only. It's an insult to her bravery for me to equate myself to her. This is yet another punctuation mark in our increasingly desensitised lives. Give it a day or so and we will move back to bashing Waqar Younis, Reham Khan or whatever else pops up on our timelines. Twitter activists and Facebook intellectuals, please do her memory a favour and don't drag it down to your base level.
…watch your
life slide out of view
And then
dance, and drink, and screw
Because
there's nothing else to do
Jarvis Cocker
What am I going to do next? Why, go on holiday, what else? I will take lots of pictures, post them on social media so that others look at my life (Facebook version) and see how happy and successful I am, and bury that voice which has an uncanny gift of popping up in the most unguarded of moments and speaking the truth to me. Which this note is but a pale shadow of, for the real beast may never be shown, not even to those closest to me.
Hai shaam na
savera,
Andhera hi
andhera,
Hai roohon ka
basera.
So jao
Gulzaar
There is nothing left to
do now, but to say goodbye. And to admit, in that dark corner of your heart
whose existence you dare not admit to anyone, that things will never be the
same. And that it is your fault. You coward.
The rest is silence.
Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet
prince:
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
William Shakespeare
