Dec 23
lele park. i’m not sure what took me there. it was 2013, i did not believe in god, or afterlife. i was in nepal. lele park, a three hour bus ride from kathmandu during which i read arvind adega’s white tiger and remember liking it very much, usually i fall asleep on bus rides but i read the whole thing through. it took me in the way a good book makes you forget where you are so everything new registers with the shock of raingreen. i was awake when the landscape shifted and suddenly we were in green green foggy hills, near the sky not just climbing toward it, it was actually drizzling, actually raingreen, and the conductor told me my stop was here. there was no signboard, nothing.
it is a graveyard. a memorial. a remembrance. there are no bodies underneath the earth. but what would you know walking upon it. meaning we ascribe. meaning i felt as i walked hillward, still more upward to this delicate little shrine dedicated to all the people who died in the PIA crash of … I don’t even know the year. a plane crashed. from pakistan to somewhere. it crashed here, so the memory of their death is here.
yesterday i was in the shower at my mother’s. the warmest shower i have had all year, the most luxurious, because here are multiple shampoos and conditioners to choose from, and a bathroom so wide, and uninterrupted hot water. and in the hour before sunset if you shower amidst these white tiles, the way the light breaks sun into each of the water drops. and they fall on your skin a shattering magic. you forget everything. like a good book. just like a good book. i was standing there, wet, everything forgotten, water magicking on skin, and a voice erupted from the neighbourhood mosque: salman, father of x, son of y, brother of z, has died. the dua e maghfirat will be at xx time. prayer.
here we announce death on megaphones so you cannot close your eyes to the magicks that have suddenly closed. a whole life. holes that people leave everyday, bodily holes, breath holes, movement holes, hold on do you mean that . . . brother of x father of y someone named salman has died and the water drops on my skin like magic still. but there is a salman shaped hole now in the neighbourhood, in the tiles, in the light. i will forget about salman but right now i remember him, my whole body does, every bit of me lit by water. the water that touches my skin tells me i am here but salman is not. the loudspeaker reminds me. thank god for the loudspeaker, for the curious ways religion manages to get instruction right, for God says Look, God says Name, and Look—this is Lele Park:
Jan 10
Reminders of death ; mother’s call, dad’s tasbih, so much heavier than all the other tasbihs; the plant that’s def gone but we can’t bring our hearts to take it out, but its soil looks so alive; water, in the shower, gone before you’ve blinked at it; the end of a street; the beginning of a street; a bird, there, then gone; a bird its wing gone; my heart its wing gone; the stairs, that last one i always forget; when the sun sinks completely, and now even the water is gray; the look on the gardener’s face when he says those two baby elysiums are on him, no, that’s the look of life;
Reminders of life; the light so sharp on the curtains at 12pm, pay attention we are seething; lemon against the cuts on my palm, the cuts are from last week’s kitchen accidents, my mother says i don’t take care of my skin, i would like someone’s skin to take care of my skin, these are all reminders of life like the uncle at P’s now where we buy all the groceries, he always says to me, aap writer loug and there is life growing between us, the helper’s birthday is on the 15th this month, he’s a capricorn, we exchange Whatsapps, signs of life. If no one else he checks in on me. Aaj samaan nahi chahiye? My reply to him, a sign I’m alive. Then death life-signs sweeping in where they did not exist before, in Capricorn-guy telling me they’re out of candles, in the food I am cooking because I did not, I did not ask my grandmother for that last halva recipe, and now the food is springing forth all these memories I did not know I had, I mean they frequently appear when I am cooking, the two things are connected smells and memories. Another reminder of life is each smell I avoid; a certain bergamot perfume, a certain smoky terrace Karachi evening smell. I used to avoid the smell of the pages between the Quran, like some Medina-baked plastic, but now I don’t;
Think of the language of the prayers that dance above the air of lele park, how faith is just the names we acquire from a chosen god on our path to grief.
Thank you to everyone who’s come on here through the first By The Sea essay. This is really what this substack was originally for—journal entries. I kinda freaked out when two hundred new subscribers signed up, so it’s taken me sometime to feel comfortable sending one of these out these again. That one’s readership has widened is not, as it turns out, a particularly reassuring thought when one sits down to write. One freaks out. One has to take a time-out. One must write, not for the reader, but for the thing, etc etc etc … I’m trying to be patient with my craft, to slow down and resume study without worrying what I publish.
I’ll be back with the essay series in February 2021. And maybe these journal excerpts too. Till then, blessings to you and yours. I hope last yr’s curtains closed upon you with the yellowest light; that the new year’s rays are sitting kindly upon all the dust of the days past and gathering, and you get to choose which bits you keep on your skin.
meanwhile, here are some friends i love reading & encountering—
Amna Chaudhry - thisisthemodsquad
Poorna Swami - Export Rejects
Zahra Mastani - night journeys & heavenly ascensions
Zahra Malkani - »A garden among the flames!«
Aesha Munaf - 6:28
Mahreen Sohail - Hair (short story)
Rega Jha - Notes from a young woman’s attempts to find a Self (essay)
Shreya Ila Anasuya - Begum’s Ghazal (poem)
Dur e Aziz Amna - Writing into and out of my long-distance grief (essay)