The #cookiemonster's Cave

There's nothing more faithful in life than a jar of cookies. Munch on.

[thecookiemonsterscave]

Ordinary Extraordinary

Ordinary. It was an ordinary day. The crows squawked overhead, the sun shone with full ferocity. They were ordinary people. She woke up in the morning like an ordinary person, dressed up, went about her day. He woke up in the morning like an ordinary person, dressed up, went about his day. 

Ordinary-extraordinary. The call to prayer is heard, first from one mosque and then from another, and another, until an entire chorus is reached. One person ignores it as being ordinary - it happens five times a day, every day, what can be special about it? Another person hears the same and on this very ordinary day, feels something deep inside - a sudden connection to the unknown, the force of the universe, an inexplicable understanding, a oneness - it seems ethereal. Followed almost immediately by this understanding is a deep well of sadness. Where it comes from, where it goes, nobody knows. Is sadness a finite resource doled out by the universe to every being, the ordinary, or does it swallow only those who dare to peak inside, never to release them, the ordinary-extraordinary?

The nothing. Does intrinsic sadness have to do with an individual, emotional perception, or does it have ethnic origin making one race more susceptible than the other? How is it that a populace can laugh anything off by surrounding themselves with Quora questions and Reddit trolling as the ordinary thing to do, go home and sleep peacefully no matter what, never be able to latch on to another person’s emotional needs, while some are looking for deeper conversation and a bond that transcends into the emotional sphere, people literally asking for vulnerability in their lives when they should seek solace in the predictability of Quora to enlighten them, Reddit to make them laugh, and secret tip: StackExchange for the most authentic ordinary experience? Where have the days of personal understanding gone? Where has human camaraderie gone? Where did the days of emotional embracement go? When did dreams and the perfect world get replaced with planning, accounting, health insurance, and more planning?  Why is being sad not ordinary? Why is being upset not ordinary? Why is feeling not ordinary? Why is depth not ordinary? Why is religion not ordinary? Why is asking for plain connected conversation not ordinary? Why is storytelling outside of writing on your iPad not ordinary? Why is asking for a little human attention and perception not ordinary?

Extraordinary. This is to the smart people out there, the ones who justify everything to the ends of the earth with their superior reasoning skills and have very good reason to simply not listen and try to understand, and maybe at the end of the day lend a shoulder to cry on or a body to hug just because? The Nothing beseech you to help them answer their questions with your intellect. Then again, asking those questions is not ordinary, but not extraordinary either. There is a reason The Nothing are where they are, right in the middle of nothing. Reason out, crush, eliminate, control, tout normality - that is extraordinary.

Yeh hai meri kahani,   (This is my story) Khamoshi ki zabani    (As narrated by silence, the nothing) - Strings

[thecookiemonsterscave]

The best story ever

During a tricky conversation today, someone stood in the doorway of my office telling me about their dreams. Not the sort where you build castles in the air or become a billionaire by the time you hit thirty (which, incidentally, is not too far into the future), or own a yacht and sail into the unknown. These were very practical dreams - to become a renowned scientist, and start a family.

Soon it was my turn to answer the question - what is/are my dream/s?

It was early afternoon, the time of day when your mind is torn in the struggle between a sense of luxury brought on by a sumptuous lunch overlooking the mountains, and the workman’s tug to run the mill. All those years of thought and fantasy, combined with the increasingly insistent workman’s tug, should have made the answer spontaneous.

Instead, it was anything but. In fact, to my own amazement, I had no answer to give at all! It is true that I wanted to travel the world, visit as many cities as I could and absorb them into my being so that each place formed a small, physical part of me but now that I had to think about it, it did not seem like a dream at all. I wanted to be a doctoral student but that was not a dream either. Financial independence was not a dream. Family was not a dream. Wealth was not a dream. Freedom came close to being one. Science was not a dream. Going out of this world was quite close too. Being part of the stars would not be bad. 

By this time I had almost exhausted my list of believed dreams and come up with nothing. It felt wrong, really wrong, a disappointment to myself. How could I not have a dream? Had I forgotten my childhood fantasies and all those years of schooling that taught the importance of weaving your dreams and working from early childhood to achieve them?

Much later, as I was struggling with a piece of code, all the while imagining how  make believe dancers must swirl around to the tune of a Greek instrumental I was listening to, I found myself wishing to belong to the very reverberations that made them move so gracefully. 

I wanted to be the perfect twirl in a flowery dress to the hand that spun me to beautiful music, I wanted to be the perfect phrase in your story. I wanted to be the echo of your beautiful laughter into inifinity, I wanted to be that split second of connected gaze over a flickering candle where everything in this universe instantaneously makes perfect sense. I could only dream what it must be like to be the curve of a Persian alphabet as the calligrapher put me on browning paper curling at the edges, with love that has seen no parallel in this world and a pen that will never be the same again.

I dream of being that space between words that makes you pause, pause and look up, pause and think, pause and ponder over what was before me and what is to come after me. 

I want to be a story. Yes, that is it. My dream is to be a story. A collection of free thought, the best story ever.

[thecookiemonsterscave]

Merry-go-round, an idea?

There is a waft of perfume as you absent-mindedly walk along the road. With a knee-jerk reaction you turn around just as a flurry of images completes a merry-go-round around your head. The road is empty and silent save for you and the sound of your feet crunching on pre-fall leaves. Whoever was wearing the perfume has long driven by but has left a little too big, a little too goofy, a little too mischievous, smile on your face.

A few minutes pass and the smile has not dissolved, the merry-go-around is still spinning out fragments of stories. While it might be true that you have spent the better part of the day in a dream-like state brought on by the heat, nothing compares to what is happening right now. A series of half-spoken, half thought out questions blooms out of the smile but one stands out among the others: are you smiling at the ‘idea’ of something, or are you smiling at an ‘actual’ something?

Quite often, in the muddled world of the brain of an overthinker, ideas become confused with reality. Smells, sounds, colors, snatches of music, become associated with a certain, very charming, idea in this brain - an idea that flirts dangerously with your log of ‘material’ memories. The merry-go-round is perfectly orchestrated, it’s fluid movement symbolises the birth of an untainted bond. Or does it? What if the merry-go-round of memories in your head is nothing more than an idea your brain has insidiously fused with some form of imagined reality that stems from being too fictional?

Being a true overthinker you cannot help asking, where is the line between the idea of something in your head, and the real something? How do you know if you are smiling at any given moment based on a notion, and when at something that has actually gone down in the annals of your insignificant history? How can you be sure if the idea, once brought to life in flesh and blood, will be as beautiful as it was while it still breathed only inside a web of neurons?

Life is beautiful if the fiction in your mind has any ground whatsoever in ‘material’ memory. Only time can tell but maybe that, too, is just another idea.  

#idea #fiction #reality #overthink #think #life #beauty #perfume

[thecookiemonsterscave]

Some thought on thought

In a recent interesting conversation, a friend remarked: ‘The more depressed I am inside, the more social I become outside. Is it common?’

Is it common? We all have a different way of dealing with depression. Some people go into hiding, some people become visibly more visible, some people begin screaming more color than a rainbow can handle, some people drink to forget. Why? The four ways (a small subset of a much larger block) might appear disparate at first, but maybe we deal with dark thoughts and our fears in a way that is actually a combination of approaches, and not one in particular. Because no matter which approach or combination thereof you take they always all lead to a common end: being with yourself.

The friend’s comment made me ask myself if it indeed is common to become more social when you’re depressed. While it held true for both of us, does it hold true for others? And if you ultimately are going to be by yourself, alone with your thoughts, in the end, why take separate or any circuitous way at all instead simply of getting there by the most direct route and dealing with it as quickly as possible?

That is because, I realized, there is no way to deal with it. There’s no breaking out of the loop of thought once you are in it, almost like being in a hyperloop without end and a roller coaster and a wormhole all at once. Once the lights are out and everyone has gone home, once you sit in bed and prepare to sleep, once the alarm is set and the coffee mug drained, once the pillows have been adjusted for comfort, once all the main events of the day have made a mark in your memory, once you have smiled at all fresh good memories, once the effect of that ‘extra socializing’ you did begins to wither away, comes the thought. 

The thought. That same one you have been trying to run away from the whole day. The reason you went out of your way to socialize and talk and laugh and eat and drink and avoid caffeine for a good night’s sleep. The reason you are pushed into the hyperloop-roller coaster-wormhole conundrum. The reason you continued running the whole day in an attempt to reach the speed of light and morph reality so that it ceases to mean anything, ceases to be real anymore. Ceases to be singular.

Behind all that socializing is all that running. Behind that louder than normal laughter is the scream waiting to be released. Behind all that drinking is the fear of opening your eyes to reality.

So, is it common? Is it normal? You tell me. Think the thought.

[thecookiemonsterscave]

The old man without a past

A few streets down our house, on a road that rises steeply up, stands a government school. Its walls are covered in graffiti and the same old messages common to school walls across the city. Expressions of a generation feeling a desperation whose source they cannot point, writing words on walls in an effort to peel some of the shame they feel off of themselves and deriving perverse satisfaction from making the walls look as dirty as they feel.

In front of this school sits an old man. Time and something else has stripped away even the threads of his already thin clothes and shrunk him into a bundle of bones clutching a bonier chest. No matter what time you pass by this school, the old man is always in the same place, the same position. Still except for the rolling of a rosary and the movement of lips in prayer.

Looking at the old man makes you feel raw, exposed, like the cloak that was covering your share of shame has been whisked off. He couldn't always have been this way. There was probably once a family, children, laughter, chai, friends, work. There were once reasons to laugh, reasons to feel happy, reasons to share others' joy, reasons to wake up with a smile every morning, thankful to God for another day. There was probably a child he scooped up in his arms and kissed before heading out for work, the reason for the faint smile on his lips all day long from where they lightly brushed the child's cheek, confident in the knowledge that those legs would come running back to him when he returned home at night, those arms waiting to be picked up again, a wife waiting with steaming roti and a bundle of love.

The old man once loved, and was loved back. He makes you feel like the cowering animal that you are, that no matter how much you try to hide behind the façade of life's commonalities, one day, everything will be taken from you. There will be no love, no joy, no sorrow. There will be nothing. No past, no present. He strips away the face of the hunter you put on for the world and exposes the real, hunted you for a while. When the past was already creeping up unannounced on you threatening to break all walls, he gives a physical manifestation to your shame.

In his silence and from behind closed eyes he screams, no matter how much you try to outrun your past, there is no running away because the walls you built are pure fiction, a story your mind has conjured up to give you a faux sense of new beginning. There are no new beginnings. There is no line dividing the past from the present for they are one, mirror images of the same delusion, we are all old men deep inside. We are all huddled bundles of self pity and love lost, we are all hunted by a past that is our present.

[thecookiemonsterscave]

The shawarma guy

In our local market, wedged between a pharmacy and a grocery store, is a shawarma stop. This tiny contraption of aluminium and glass blends perfectly into a permanently shuttered shop right behind.

If the shawarma stop is tiny, the man who runs it is no less. With hunched shoulders, a standard attire of khaki shalwar kamiz with flowers embroidered around the neck and matching brown slippers, he would be difficult to make out against the din and noise of the market were it not for the smoke and sizzle from his hot plate as he heats the bread and roasts the shredded chicken.

What differentiates this shawarma guy from the one at the opposite end of the street or the one a couple of shops down, is the sheer love he puts into every shawarma he creates. What's even more astounding is the fact that he faces away from the road and has his face toward the shutters behind instead of opening up on the road like everyone else. As you place your order and wait for the steaming shawarmas to be piled into a shopper, you have ample time to observe the guy. Every move, every gesture of adjusting the fillings he piles systematically onto the bread, is graceful. After working on the fillings he ever so carefully rolls up the bread and wraps a butterpaper around it, careful all the while of not hurting anything inside.

He has his back to the world and in that moment of creation, all he cares about is the shawarma he is working on. The love he puts into each one is palpable and you feel a surge of something akin to brotherhood for him. Standing there watching him, you begin to think: is this how perfection is achieved? Perhaps the secret to producing works of art is love, and turning your back on the world as it rushes past in all its ignorance.

[thecookiemonsterscave]

je suis reel (i’m real)

People walking with their eyes glued to their smartphones is a common sight. No less common is people bumping into other people as they walk in the street, people forgetting to shut car doors, people you narrowly miss hitting a car as they make a miscalculated move while crossing the road: all because they can't take their eyes off their screens.

If I were to ask you, how many meaningful conversations do you have in a day where you truly feel that what you're saying is being heard? One? Five? Seven? Probably zero. Because though you may be sitting not five paces away from someone, they are listening only half-heartedly to you as they would rather talk to you on WhatsApp instead while simultaneously checking your Facebook statuses. As if you weren't real.

Have you ever thought how it is that every other person nowadays loves to tout about his/her 'large social circle', and yet you find them reluctant even to head out for lunch because they think being with people wastes time they would rather spend with their phones? Where is this 'social circle' that apparently keeps having so much fun whether it is day or night, without excuse, without biases, while all you ever see these people do is sit stuck to a chair and have Facebook open on their PC monitors while typing away SMSés on their phones? Where does this fun take place?

It all boils down to 'contacts'. Not the ones where you know someone who knows someone else and you follow the chain to dig out insider information. I'm talking about the contact directories in your phones.

Whether it is your first time in a new class, whether you had a small, impromptu, chat with someone at a coffee shop, or whether you asked someone a question neither of you will remember by the next day, there is an exchange of numbers. You give me your number and I will SMS you mine. We might need to talk about something some day. MIGHT. Period.

With time, the phone directory keeps expanding. Ten contacts, your friends. Thirty contacts, university colleagues. A hundred and seventy contacts with fifteen Ayeshas, seventeen Fatimas', seven Sabas. Who are all these people? Start renaming the important Ayesha, Fatima and Saba so you know whom to dig out when you actually need to talk to. Enter the underscores: _university, _mama, _neighbor.

So with the one hundred and seventy contacts in place, people begin to feel connected. They can ask anyone anything at any time. Somewhere along the way, life has become all about being able only to ask someone something and we have forgotten what a real, focused conversation feels like. This is why, when you get an SMS from someone saying 'hi i needed so-and-so, are you around?' or 'can you please take a snapshot of this-and-this, i need it urgently but am really busy. you know my e-mail' or 'how was so-and-so teacher when you studied from him three semesters ago?' when the last time you met them (a month ago?) they only returned your salam and excused themselves and the time before that, you were talking to them but they were busy memorizing their Facebook feed, you feel like asking them: are you talking to me the contact or to me the living human?

Maybe this is the new pace of life and a consequence of living in a 'connected' world that we will all have to succumb to. But some of the more old-fashioned souls like me out there will understand when I say that I want only to ignore this person who doesn't see me, doesn't hear me, doesn't remember who I am except as a contact listing in their phone. Because, I am not just a contact. I am not just another directory listing inhabiting your phone for you to punch me open and type a stupid SMS to or to delete away when your memory is full. I am not part of your social circle that is just a linear arrangement of bits in circuitry so that just because you can see a picture next to a name, it's me.

I am a real person outside your contact entry and your comments on my posts and pictures. We all are. We are not bits that get moved around, shifted, deleted but have true forms made of flesh and blood with voices full of laughter and sound.

je suis reel!

[thecookiemonsterscave]

the half spoken sentence

I am only a man with a candle to guide me, I am taking a step to escape what's inside me.

Goes the new song by Imagine Dragons in your headphones. One push of the volume UP button. The music seems too loud. Volume DOWN. The dream from last night comes flooding back in. UP. UP. UP. Up till your ears begin to produce a ring of their own and adding to the drumming. Karma wouldn't leave even your headphones alone. UP. UP. Drown out karma. Drown out those pleading eyes.

Drumming. Thump thump goes the drummer. Thump thump goes your heart. Everything around you seems a little too light, not dark enough. Not nearly dark enough. The monster inside is clouding over your eyes, taking over the drums, taking over the guitar, taking over your subconscious, taking over your fingertips. The darkness is ubiquitous. Why then isn't it? Why is the darkness outside not as dark the darkness within?

What is truth? Is it a sentence, an idea, an unformed thought, a phase, a phrase, a pleading look? Where does it hide? Why does it hide in half spoken sentences strewn carelessly about, leaving many unconnected ends hanging in the middle and joining together ones that were never meant to be together? The ends need their proper connections. When then don't they have them? Why does the truth have to be so scared of the truth?

If I told you what I was, Would you turn away from me?

Karma overtaking your headphones. You jam buttons on your device but karma keeps repeating its screechy sentence, over and over again. She laughs at your helplessness, lulls you into a deep, dream induced sleep. I am that half spoken sentence, she says somewhere in that state between sleeping and waking. I am that unfinished sentence. I will not leave you in peace till you put a full stop to me. I am misery.

But it's not my fault, you scream. I was shouting what no one wanted to hear. Why does everything have to be my fault? Why do I deserve punishment for all the things I haven't done? But she has gone quiet. Leaving you hanging in the middle for the umpteenth time.

You cannot get the feeling of holding those hands out of your mind. But you never held them. The sentence remains half-said. The thought remains half-formed. The blog post remains half written. UP. UP. UP. 

[thecookiemonsterscave]

scratch

The glass slips from your hand and breaks when it hits the floor. You bend down to pick up the pieces. There is an uncomfortable feeling on the underside of your foot and you pause your picking process to look at it. A drop of blood is blooming where a small piece of glass is precariously protruding from your skin. It hurts, but the clean entry of the glass, breaking your skin ever so neatly, impresses upon you the beauty of tragedy.

You reach across the kitchen counter to get some tissue to wipe off the blood after you have gently plucked out the shard of glass. You forget about the foot and instead, bring the shard up to the light. The blood that looked so red on your skin is but a faint smudge on the glass. It is darker in a few places and lighter in others, giving the snaking feeling of lines on a map. Lines that are meant to signify something. You turn the shard over to take a different look but this is the curved, smooth side and refuses to reveal anything.

The nagging feeling of missing out an important omen stays with you. Nonetheless, you bend to carry on clearing the kitchen floor. And then, you feel new pain in your other foot. You yell out and that’s when a new wave of pain elsewhere on the same foot hits. Then another, and another. This is getting way out of hand but the glass keeps puncturing your skin at different places. The pain is growing unbearable and the puncturing keeps growing till you can feel your very veins burst open. You begin to yell and scream about the unfairness of life but there’s no one to listen.

You wake up in a cold sweat. Your feet look completely normal, their usual brown selves. What was that dream about, you think. And then you remember. That conversation from last night that sent you reeling into shock. You always hated that place, hated the people, but she was different. The rest of the world could act as mean as it wanted but she would always be there. Till yesterday. A sharp bolt of pain hits you deep within the brain and then you remember your migraine from last night. A short conversation and two hours of staring into space. Losing, losing everything. Cutting the last remaining ties to that place. Spacing out. Sliding off into sleep.

A blood vessel near your shoulder begins to prickle. It is a scratch. You reach over and scratch the scratch. Your brain pulsates. A scratch. It’s telling me something. What is it?

It clicks. This scratch is what I am, she thinks. This is what I am to everyone around me. A minor itch, a nuisance, that goes away once you’ve scratched it. You've found the analogy you have been searching for since last night.

I am that annoying scratch on your back. Maybe different from the glass shard scratches, maybe the same one. You bury your head in a pillow and send out a long, long curse. To whom, you’re not sure. Maybe to the ‘scratch‘. Maybe her. Maybe the glass in your dream

[thecookiemonsterscave]

harf

حرف: the Arabic word for alphabet. Alphabets that can be strung together in an infinite number of orders to phrase out words as disparate as they are similar.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if the words you read in books, magazines and newspapers, could fall off the pages and into your lap? What would it be like if you could collect these fallen words and arrange them in different ways to form sentences that may or may not hold some meaning? What would the words feel like to the touch? Would they be soft or hard, have a particular kind of smell, be bendable or like expert stone carvings? Would they be able to hold their shape for long or melt away into the space-time continuum, to become one with reality that isn't of this world? Or would they rise up into the sky in golden splendor and join the other words whose meaning is so beautiful they have no place in this filthy world? Would the huruf in the words be able to change places and signify new meaning once off of paper or would they be static, their meaning forever gilded into the dictionary of every feeling that ever existed?

Could it be that you could dissolve these words with beautiful meanings into the water that the people who give meaning to your life drink, to make them understand what you want to say? The concoction would become one with them, flow through their veins mixed with their blood and travel up to their neurons. The now aqueous huruf would ask to gain entry into their realm of thought and the brain barrier would have no option but to bow down to the ethereal beauty of the letter and let them in. Once inside, the huruf would carry out their ancient ritual of understanding, replete with sacred music of the second voice and the dance of significance and in the process, become one with the person's thought. Become their I, their الف (elif).

It is said that the Book of Doom begins with a harf too, a single one. It contains all the darkness and evil of this world and all it needs to encompass everything is just one letter. Sometimes, no matter what order you arrange the fallen huruf in, they read just one word. The same word. You do not know if it starts with a ﺱ or a ص but it is the same word no matter what. And when you look up at the faces in the labyrinthine streets of bazaars and the twisting corridors of universities, all faces carry the same hidden meaning. All the letters on all faces integrate to the same word in various angles of rotation and length.

And every time you look down into your lap, the fallen letters quiver and arrange into the same collage like it was destiny guiding them on, one by one.

[thecookiemonsterscave]

the story of the box

The box was lying on the table. It had four sides painted blue, just dark enough to resemble the sea on a clear day. From some distance the top looked like a plain, hard surface painted pink but on coming closer you could see that it was in fact slightly soft. Like a play mat. Skin colored.

A kid comes running into the room and his foot hits the table hard. The box is about to to topple off the tabletop but stops just at the edge. It sounds like something is knocking around inside the box as it teeters. It wobbles but doesn’t fall over.

It lies there for a week until someone comes to give it a dusting; nobody moves it. Nobody disturbs its position on the table and even later, someone comes in and places a cup on it with a thin film of coffee pooled in the base. The ceramic base was hot and it burns a tiny circle into the black top. 

Someone comes in and turns the lights off. Three kids are playing catch in the dark and the sound of their giggles as they jump on and over furniture can be heard in the corridor. One of the kids fishes out glow-in-the-dark pens from somewhere and looks around the room for something to write on. The only thing he can make out is the dark silhouette of the box so he goes over and etches in two dots with discernible symmetry, and the other two kids huddle around to watch. One of them picks the box off the table and rocks it gently. Seems like there’s something inside, he says. Their eyes are bright with excitement and they’re about to open the box when the kid who has been quiet all this while asks to please try out the pen for himself too before they open the box. He picks the green pen and draws out a small bracket in the lower portion of the circle, beneath the eyes. He draws a boundary around the box and says, there you go, our little ritual is complete. Lets open this box now like Captain Cook’s treasure chest.

It’s still dark and they slide the box off the table. The shape they’ve drawn smiles eerily back at them like an ET. It takes them just a few seconds to pry open the top. They peer into the box but there’s nothing inside. They look at each other, bewildered. But the box was so heavy! Says one. Lets look around the room. Maybe we’ve dropped what was inside?

They turn on the lights and look around the room for the lost object. The object that should have been there by virtue of its weight. They search and search but in vain. Who kept the box there, asks one. No one knows. They look some more but there’s nothing. Their ET looks on at the carpet which it is facing now instead of the ceiling. It smiles on at the other shade of blue beneath. Maybe some things, when once lost, can never be found again. Maybe all it takes to give weight to something is feeling. Maybe this feeling has tiny wings of fleeting memories. Maybe it is only a memory

The open box remains staring at the ceiling, ever so silent.

[thecookiemonsterscave]

thousand

‘I just can’t concentrate! I always have a thousand thoughts on my mind’ ‘Wow, what are these thousand things you think so much about? It’s quite a lot, you must be really smart’

A thousand thoughts you said. A thousand thoughts converging into one, like a giant obelisk rising up among the nine hundred and ninety-nine tiny pyramids dotted around. It is that one sharp point of focus but feels like it is scattered about a much wider area. Perhaps that is because sharpness in its entirety encases everything into one. An act of atonement and dispersion in one.

In this world we have created for ourselves, man has devised ways, words, anecdotes to console for every loss, every failure. The most common of these is this: it’s alright, at least you haven’t lost everything. It could have been much worse! Two short sentences, a lifetime of regret. Why do we say this? All through our days we try not to use other people’s bad experiences against them, try not to make them feel like whatever it was that happened to them, did actually happen. It is among the unspoken rules of being ‘nice’ not to. Yet every time we say those two sentences, we are inadvertently telling someone that someone else out there (and people usually have a particular name in mind) has had a worse experience and yours pales in comparison. Therefore, following the dictates of logic, you need not cry because you’re not at the worst point.

Why don’t people just let you be yourself? Why are we eternal disappointments to out family, our friends and our teachers if we are not their exact replicas? Why are we nobody if we’re not trying to be someone? Not somebody, but someone. What do people even know about your thoughts and what you’re going through, what you want and don’t want? Why don’t they keep their show of ‘concern’ to themselves and stop categorizing you as this or that kind of person in their mind when they see you sad, and then consult their internal log of remedies vs people type stored and bring out a solution that is just sure to work because people in worse situations have tried and succeeded? Why don’t they just stop wanting to carve you into the likeness of someone they know, or phrase you out in words and think their description is more real than your true self? Why are you alive only in people’s words in a horrendously abstract sense and not have a solid I am who I am? Why do you have to fit into a personality model and become a slave to its description? Why does no one realize that you can’t be a thousand different people living inside one body, and that you are just one? One person with a thousand facets but one all the same.

There are a thousand thoughts, and there’s a collection of stories called A Thousand and One Nights and another one called A Thousand Splendid Suns. The lyrics of songs and countless poems love to say, for you a thousand times over to convince whoever they are intended for of the extremes to which they are ready to go to make them happy. And of course, the line may a thousand curses be upon you for what you’ve done.

Thousand is everywhere. In your thoughts, in the words you read, in the water you drink, in the music you hear. It is the number of lines emanating from a point of sharpness, the many radii sketched out with tidy spacings. Making the one what it is. Thousand is what makes you, you, my reader, not the other way around. One reader with a thousand thoughts.

[thecookiemonsterscave]

pink life

Kashmiri chai has color the pink of strawberry milk. The chai is enjoyed best with cardamom and boiled milk, extra sweetened. It is very rare to find a restaurant that serves the best one with just the right tinge of pink to it. Most just fluke customers by making plain ceylon tea with added food color.

Preparing kashmiri chai is a delicate process. The tea leaves have to be boiled for just the right duration; the soda added has to be just the right quantity. Too much and the tea will look more maroon than pink; a little less and it will look like green tea just with milk added to it.

If you look closely enough into the saucepan as you beat the tea with a small ladel, whipping it up fast in a repetitive cycle, you can see tiny regrets floating inside. Some of these are more recent while some are from the past. A past just within your reach to grasp but unattainable just because. Settling to the bottom of the pan.

You add a little of the tea into some milk to check if the pink is appearing. As the tea drop spreads beneath the think layer of cream on top, you can suddenly see yourself in the liquid cloud. The dispersion pattern look so much like how your brain works, the way it correlates things where no relation exists and where it entirely fails to see the most obvious facts screaming out. A tinge of regret, a molecule of salt.

Once you have decided the tea ready to finalize, you get ready to pour in the milk measured out. This step will decide if you have failed or succeeded in making that perfect cuppa. It’s a small step forward yet with such gargantuan results.

There’s a gentle splashing sound as the milk goes in, a hand whips it up. A ladle goes in and comes out, in and out.

There’s some pink in the pan. You will yet live. There is hope yet and you inhale the aroma of this thing you have prepared deeply, hoping for the answers to your silent questions to manifest themselves to you in a moment of clarity.

It’s still only the floating question marks so you inhale once more but the aroma is fast fading, the ceramic of the cup growing warmer to the touch. Nothing.

Another day it will have to be. Another day of whipping and waiting, whipping and waiting. Waiting for the pink.

[thecookiemonsterscave]

red&blue

The unfinished novel lies open on her bedside table. There is an empty cup with stains from the coffee in it earlier on. A pair of yellow and black flats lies where they were carelessly taken off over some pencil shavings thrown equally as carelessly onto the blue carpet.

Blue, the color of rotting cheese. The color sadness could probably take on were it possible to give it such expression. Blue, the color of the ocean and the sky, the color of softness beneath her feet.

She bends over from her perch on the couch to run her finger over the carpet and trace out circles in darker blue. The sadness of the world feels heavy upon her heart and she wishes there was a reason, a person, she could stamp it on. Someone to blame for the way things were, the way her shoulders felt so laden down, like living through histories since the beginning of time. She could feel the weight of a thousand unsaid goodbyes. She could hear the words of deep apologies that weren't even deserved. She could hear the slamming of doors as a father stomped out on a mother while the children watched in terror. She could feel the tremor of the earth in her nerves as countless armies marched onto each other in history so old it survived only as legend. She could smell the smoke from fires as villages burnt to the ground, feel the hand that helped a lady off her carriage.

Another finger reaches over to press her temple trying to constrict the pain coursing through her head. Whether the migraine was the result of the situation, the sadness, or the other way around, she did not know. The pain does not go away and her finger presses in deeper, deeper into the blue. Wishing it were the ocean with a tiny red boat in which she could sail away and become part of the history she could feel. She couldn't live in this reality that required too much of her. She was a warrior in heroic battles, she was the crazed philosopher who sat up all night looking at the stars; she was the sailor with a toothless smile and the tiny red boat, she was the girl who played the guitar at the train station with a straw hat to collect pennies in.

She was the girl who dug her fingers into the carpet trying to make sense of her world as the effect of aspirin coursed through her veins. She was the girl who drew circles hoping they would come alive in their various radii and illuminate her world. She was the girl who rode upon words written by someone else and lost her way in the spaces in between.

[thecookiemonsterscave]

For a few words

The sound of the rusty engine fills the air. It is loud enough to drive a normal person deaf but not a Pakistani: they're built to tolerate shit, and that's the only thing they can do faithfully too.

I do not need to give a name to the the owner of the truck, it's driver, or its make, the exact city it is standing in or what the main road is even called. The fact that it is a chammak-challo painted Pakistani truck standing somewhere in Pakistan about to be driven by a Pakistani is enough.

So, there's this girl who it totally crazy. In all the time she has lived on this planet, she hasn't understood either herself or the world or for that matter, her fellow homo sapiens. She sometimes wished the sapiens hadn't climbed up the evolutionary tree for they were better off as apes. At least there was freedom, and why not stay stupid like them if despite having more neurologically advanced brains, all your life's purpose is exactly that of the apes: be born without will, live without your will, get old and start a family that's ultimately going to leave you, eat, drink, fight, sleep, cry, die. And that's all. So why not just go back to the trees? And this is only the first reason people think her crazy. And her mama deems her an utter danger to humanity. Humanity? Hah!

So anyway, she's standing beside this nameless truck at a nameless place. She rolls up her sleeves without caring what her arms look like, pulls up her pants and hoists up her small frame into the driver's seat. The truck is huge compared to her frame and she loves this feeling of being tiny. The cabin reeks of stale air and diesel mixed with cigarette smoke and everything her mama would deem totally unsuitable for a healthy person to breathe. So what. She slams the door shut and gets the truck moving.

She drives it out onto the main road and joins the sparse traffic moving in some direction, She doesn't know where it's going but till it keeps moving to somewhere, she really doesn't mind. All she cares about is being on the road. She puts on some of the Punjabi music cassettes the previous truck driver had left, matching the totally shiny red of her truck's snout and the garrulously colorful sides and back. The lion painted on the back with unnaturally large eyes and some Urdu poetry go along perfectly with the music and she puts it on, lets the shrill female voice screech on. And soon, the Punjabi words can be heard in time with the jingle of the metal coins hanging from the front.

She drives on for God knows how long. She meets fellow truck drivers on the way but totally avoids them for the yellow teeth and bloodshot eyes are too much for even her to bear in all her stubbornness. As night falls and the birds begin to caw their last for the day, she pulls over and rolls out a prayer mat, prays maghrib in a field. She doesn't know where the qiblah is but she asks God to forgive her the error and starts. For God is understanding in his infinite love, not like the humanity on earth which all but human.

After she has finished her prayer, the sky looks too beautiful to be ignored so she just lies there in the field, staring up and dreaming. Dreaming about everything with her hands folded beneath her head. And then she remembers her paperbacks in the truck and brings them out. Picks one up and begins to read. A nameless book in a nameless place being read by a nameless person. It's beautiful.

She reads on for quite a while and then feels the need for some caffeine push. She looks around and there's nowhere to grab some but she's sure there has to be some chai available somewhere. She puts her books back in the truck, locks it up with a huge metal lock that leaves her hands smelling metallic for quite a while and begins walking along the nameless road, in search of a dhaba. She walks on and on along the nameless road, passing nameless, faceless people and traffic on the way. She finally finds a chai khana and enters with a smile. The crowd inside seems flabbergasted to see a girl enter but who cares. Tonight, she will have that cup of chai. She orders one and sits on a lonely stool in the corner, watching the small CRT color TV with the others. The crowd is getting raucous and she's beginning to enjoy it. She can shout and jeer and laugh at the stupid comedy show on without appearing stupid for laughing on stupid things. Her mama would definitely have a problem with this kind of wild laughter. So what.

She asks for another chai and then another till she's got too much sugar in her bloodstream for her to hold her brain together. She heads back to the truck and gliding her hand along the bumps where the brushstrokes meet on the sides, makes her way into the cabin. She feels sick from so much sugar and she can taste grit on her tongue from all the dust outside. Her clothes are covered in mud from the ditches she walked through to make it back to the truck and her ankles hurt from praying on the stony ground. Her hands feel rough and one of her nails is chipped. And unsophisticated wreck. So what.

She had lived a day of entire freedom, where nobody instructed her not to this and to do that instead, where she didn't feel like being constantly under the watch of some kind of Big Brother that breathed down your neck all the time instructing you that everything you do is actually wrong, there's only the one way to live and that is to live without your will and just submit. But to whom, she always asks? And Big Brother always replies, to whoever has an opinion about you. To whoever says you're not good enough because the roti you prepare isn't gol enough. Insanity.

But today, there has been no Big Brother for there have been no names. Today was all about freedom.  She stretches herself as far as she can, takes a giant yawn showing her full set of un-brushed teeth and looks for something soft to rest her head on. She sees a small pillow lying on the base and picks it up. Pats it a little, jumps to the back of the truck and lies beneath the starry sky. Soon, her snores can be heard for quite some distance around.

The next day, the truck is back in the green, waiting for another driver to come and take is somewhere for the day.

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Stories have this funny way of letting you say through characters' mouths what you can't say out loud. It is this way of making your thoughts come alive through the thoughts of someone else. There lies giant solace in knowing that these persons and settings aren't real and you can make them live however you want. There is comfort in knowing that nobody would be checking up on the smallest detail to see who those people are and then reprimand them for stepping out of 'the line', being nonconforming to norms and not hygienic enough and being too far too brainless to associate with. There is no fear, just freedom.

She is I and I am her and we're both free. At least for the few thousand words that make the truck come alive.

[thecookiemonsterscave]

Reality for real?

It makes you wonder sometimes, what is reality really? I mean, we share the same space in an infinite universe against the odds, we breathe in the same atmosphere, eat the same organic stuff, grow up the same way with similar appendages on our torsos, the same number of teeth, share more than 90% of our genome, yet the way we experience reality is different.

My reality is so different from yours, and so is yours from mine and any of the other billions of people on the planet. Clocks tick at the same speed and there's ample math and physics to prove that. How then do we each experience each tick so differently? How it is that we share the same reality yet we don't? How is it that what I think of you as in my mind may be heavens apart from the way you think about me, and yet neither of us is aware of the difference since we are each convinced of our relative realities?

My writing this post is real and my brain is thinking over each word, each alphabet I'm writing. My hands are experiencing a multitude of nervous vibrations as my fingers tap tap tap on the keys. My heart is patching things together by bringing my experiences to my brain and helping guide my fingers as to what combination of letters should be typed to portray as closely as possible what is within me. All this is very real to me.

But you will not know the background I'm building up on while writing this when you read my sentences. Yet this post is real to you too, as much as it is to me. While my brain has gone through a huge data set of unmatched memories and words and vocabulary learnt and how my day went past and what I love to do, what happens in your brain will not be the same. You will experience my writing in your apposite ways and your brain will also lead you through a whole process of deciding whether you like my post or not, or even if you think I'm some crazy person who has got nothing better than to write stuff that's nonsensical.

But is it? Someone may also think it has potential to be something better. My post is equally real for every reader yet the way each will perceive things will be unknown to me. And my reality unknown to you. In the same fabric of time and the internet, the same DNS address.

Your mind is a beautifully intricate thing. It is amazing how long it can simulate a completely non-existent reality for you yet the experience is so real that your own cells end up believing it is reality. You share the same bubble of time with people yet the reality that exists in your mind doesn't really in theirs. They just don't know it and neither do you.

Karma is cruel and the best simulator of fake reality that exists within reality. It will show you that face on the road right inside a van when you have been running away from the place you first saw it. The experience was so intensely real for you that it threatened to tear your conscience right away and nobody would have been the worse for it. For again, this is just your reality forming apertures of broken feelings around you. Your eye may have twitched a little as a result of getting propelled mach speed down the road of nostalgia and misery, but that is as real as it got for those around you. It was the same road, the same van, the same face but it remained unconnected. And bobbed gently on with sleep.

Unaware that there exists a parallel reality that is tearing apart. It's just not theirs to feel real.

[thecookiemonsterscave]

Goodbye, sky lantern

A gentle breeze was blowing and the sky was overcast. The first drops of rain began to fall as she stepped with the dispersed crowd of students out into the open. Happy faces looked at each other and laughed as the rain grew heavier and straightened hair turned frizzy, skin with foundation began to get mushy. Students huddled together in groups of threes and fours beneath single umbrellas trying to get some protection from the whipping wind and rain but instead only just jostling each other in excitement. Shirts flapped hard and hands clutched at the sides to hold them in place. And the wind with its even greater excitement just turned the umbrellas inside out sending up even louder peels of the free laugh.

As some of the pink and black and blue dots with smaller black ones beneath bobbed up the gentle slope toward the giant auditorium, she shared an umbrella with a couple of girls too. But it didn't feel right, to cut the cord would be to start something new, to completely let go of as much as she could. Wash away what had burdened her for what seemed like eternity. So she stepped gently away and let the rain come over her. She let the wind whip her already frizzed hair even more, let her bangs curl into funny wisps, let the wind whip her skin into ripples with sheer force. She let the collecting rain rush into her sandals and though the squishy feeling would have made anyone with the slightest vanity feel disgusted, not today. Today she needed to give voice to her pent up rage and torrents of something else as thunder clapped in the skies, she needed to let the rain wipe away the tears she couldn't shed to her own self. She needed all the force of the wind and the rain and the laughter to stop wishing on the sky lantern she had wished upon with so much earnest in another lifetime. She had silently received the message that her lovely sky lantern had actually become part of the cosmic error she had feared it would and had been lost to insanity. 

This was a new beginning, a new life. She needed to bury the lantern and start anew. And though some things are meant to never die, the torrent would be hushed and encapsulated into prayer of a kind different from her lantern's message. So she clutched at her shirt, held on tight to her bag and began running toward the auditorium's entrance with the other laughing faces. She had laughed and she had cried. She had soaked herself wet and she had run dry.

But not again.

Next time there would be an umbrella. Of that, she was sure. Another lantern lit. Adieu, lovely lantern. You will be missed but I wish you remain part of the stars forever and keep twinkling to let her know you're safe. Goodbye.