Sculpting Stone Giants

How do you carve the soul of a soul-less stone beast?

How do you step into the heart of a heartless giant?

You cannot fit into his shoes, they are too big and heavy for you. You are not heartless. You try in vain to plot his motives: why would he do the things he has done? A stroke of the paintbrush in an imaginaut's mind, a canvas stretching from horizon to endless horizon. The horizons that cannot fit a giant.

You sit in your chair and try to imagine your way out. To rise out of the dreamscapes you've been trying to create. A movie about dreams within dreams comes to mind. You yearn for the darkness, but you fear it too. What if you get hopelessly lost? Too lost to find
your way back to the surface of sanity?

But were you ever sane?

You are pacing endlessly in your room in the light of dawn, cursing yourself that you are late to start the day. The shade of night has lifted, but the day is not yet here. You want to make the best of both worlds, so you can connect worlds. To fill the shoes of a giant. You keep trying to make him speak, fill speech bubbles with dialogue in an empty mass of stony flesh. But it is artifical. There is no life in your creation, and your attempts at resuscitation have failed.

Soul-less giants cannot live in the light of the sun.

You sit down again in the darkness of the night, and turn off the lights. All you can see now is the road of destruction your beast has plowed through your narrative. But why would he do that? It does not make sense. You picture the beast in the hazy distance, a mutated and fragmented piece of your imagination.

You wish it were real.

You decide to depart for a walk in the dark. You wish you had a blindfold, but all you can dig out are headphones. They will have to do.

You've never had drugs before but you suddenly know how it feels to get high. Self-conjuring spells of madness. The neighbors watching from their windows don't understand why a shadowy figure walks  up and down one street, round one corner and back. Down one street, up another. In circles, rectangles, skips and diagonals. Chiseling, sculpting, painting, traversing, charting... A world all on its own. Almost epileptic fits of ecstasy.

You size up the beast as your world opens up. Those men at the end of the street will do, and you try crushing them between your fingers. Three fingers in front of your eye to match the guy fifty feet away. You want to scale up the beast a little bigger. As big as a mountain you say. You try to pound him with one finger, and you take the trees behind him with two fingers.

He seems large enough now. Too large for you to fit into his shoes. You are content at carving him from the outside instead, trying to look into his red slits of eyes, which are lost somewhere high, high above the tallest apartment buildings around you. His stony head has blotted out the waxing moon.

Your spell is abruptly broken as you hear a man over the blaring instrumental scores playing through your headphones. He is asking for directions and you discover that you are not irritated, but in an elevated state of sharing neighborly spirit. He asks you where one gate leads, instead you give him the bearings on what lies beyond all three exits of the apartment complex. You plug the music right back in and face your dead creation once more, down an alley, gazing up at the sky and into his eyes. The lifeless pupils of a new Frankenstein's monster.

The car whizzing past you has no chance of making it past his protruding toe. You suddenly know how he will treat the world around him. From the outside, you decide that you don't need to understand everything he has done. He is one who inspires fear and that is explanation enough. You have stood your ground against the beast and discovered his ultimate weapon. The core emotion that rests in the heartless cavity of his breast.

Suddenly, you feel much more alive. Mad and alive in the darkness. A mad man in love with his own designs, too lost in his world to care what the people walking past him think. You believe you can make the giant curl up on the side of a mountain to sleep, breaking off a slope as a blanket. He is a glacier of rock, lost in the clouds.

He is coming to life.

Pleasant neighbors

The kid grazing past you on his bicycle carries with him a gust of wind. You realize you are feeling hot on a relaxingly cool evening. You have been flying, running and talking loudly to yourself without hearing your own voice when no one was looking. There are lights, falling shadows of trees. China randomly comes to your mind, but maybe that's because of the chink in the music in your headphones. But you suddenly want to fly over Jerusalem. Not today but back in the 12th century. And stop somewhere in the streets of that old city for a rest in the shade. You spot a beautiful ginger-furred kitten on the sidewalk instead, and you sit down to stroke her, rising out of your inebriated self. 

You have just created your soul-less beast. But you are all soul, all heart. You are in love and wish you had hung on to that kitten.

Impossible?

Pigeons, their beady orange eyes stare inside the window with furtive, curious looks. Their proud breasts ringed in feathers of purple and green, reflecting the early morning sunlight. Perched on the weather beaten window sill, they silently stretch themselves and ruffle their feathers. Their teal blue bodies a welcome splash of color amid the dreary background of dull, splotched building panes which are in dire need of cleaning.

I sit at my workstation in the partial darkness before the first of my colleagues arrive, the only bulbs on in the office space shining above me. The hour is premature as I try to spill out the words on an endless document on my laptop; my mind imagining, reminiscing, aching, almost retching to grasp the exact thoughts and words, trying to do justice. Around me is darkness, I am in an ocean of my own mind, drowning in my own consciousness.

It is night time. I am in my room and the day is almost over. Something continues to tick inside me, the morning’s desperate struggle at reminiscing and painting words on a canvas yielded something. Hope. The lights in the office space switched on one by one, the people started filing in, and the work started piling up. I clung on to the little hope I had conjured from seemingly thin air. The challenges mounted, task after email after meeting after presentation in waves charging at the hope I set ablaze in my heart. The fire dimmed, it flamed again as the gales thawed, it dimmed once more. I returned home, to comforting company. They don’t know, and I can’t speak but they unknowingly lull the bruises, soothe the aching and throw a few more torches to the flame. It is night time, and I warm up to the flame and churn out a stream of words.

It is a Saturday afternoon, and I decide I need a change of setting. I drift into place on a comfortable wooden chair with my bottom firmly pressed on a cushion. Music flows through my headphones, as I take in the ambiance of the small café, observing others for a moment as they work, study, chat and discuss. The music keeps the energy running, as I shift gears. I go blind to those around me, driving on my own highway, my head in my laptop screen. The thoughts come as signs on the roadside, and I faithfully follow the directions, the road stretching for miles before me, melting into the horizon. I keep driving to the melody of music, the notes giving me company on the road trip. My playlist ends, and my car starts drifting off the highway, my eyelids drooping. I order coffee… and brownies, to keep the fire going.

It is Sunday morning. The sun is yet to rise and the biting winter cold gnaws at my freezing toes in bed. I am scared of failure, it springs me out of bed. I struggle to warm up to the fading embers from last night’s flames. My heart wakes up as I shuffle out into the living room and open the window blinds, trying to re-ignite the flames, to keep the fire going in the cold. In the darkness, my imagination takes shape before my eyes, the thoughts darting around the living room like wild doe as I struggle to catch them on to paper. Golden rays filter in through the window blinds, stupefying the doe as they jump about. I catch them and finally get my thoughts flowing. The living room grows brighter as the minutes pass, and the warmth starts to come back again. My parents are bemused when they discover me up so early, but they don’t know since when.

I don’t want to become a phantom caught in my own limbo. I decide to meet some friends, to socialize per se. I need a change of setting, I feel. We go out for lunch, and talk about the world. They don’t know, and I dare not speak but I collect some fuel wood for the fire, to keep it going in the darkness of the night. One of them asks me, he knows. The wild doe jump across the highway as I drive through the ocean of my thoughts, the hope sparking up once more. I dare not answer there; let’s watch the movie for now, I say. The show ends, we discuss the antics of the characters, the sheer dastardliness of the villain, and laugh our way out of the theater. I pocket the hope like a thief and disappear back to my room. I burn through the firewood all evening, challenging the tempests of winter outside, the cold zephyr to breach my stores. I retire in triumph, confident of the dancing flames as they lick the stars in the night sky.

I wake up cold, the embers but a fading glow, jolting me up as I sleepily rouse myself. I struggle in the zephyr’s icy waste, warming my fingers as they strike at the keyboard in the cold office. I am the sole soul on the floor, the fool who comes way too early. The fool sitting in a halo of light in the corner near the window, they say. I give up as the fire goes out, my head in my hands. I hear a peck… Peck, peck, pecking at the window.  Yellow, beady eyes are looking inside the window as a head shifts from side to side in spontaneous bursts of motion. The winter bellows in ferocity outside, the faded, cloth awnings from the window panes flowing in the freezing wind, but the beak continues pecking. I shift in my seat to stare outside, the pigeon’s neck flashing in brilliant greens and purples. For a moment, our eyes meet. A flutter of wings echoes in the somber silence of the empty office, an azure angel taking off in the morning chill.

I turn back to face the endless ocean ahead. Something else lights up inside, something that burns without the firewood. It’s warmer than hope, it’s brighter than the sun. Something glows inside, something that keeps me chasing after the impossible.  

105th day of the climb... The summit is beautiful; the fall, treacherous!

Postcards

My blog has been silent for a while… actually, I think this has been the longest silent stretch ever. But that does not mean I have stopped writing. Ever since my last tour up north in the country a couple of months ago, I have come back and started to work on something. The blog’s real purpose was meant to be a stepping stone and while I can’t say that I utilized my blog’s potential to the fullest, I have taken a leap of faith.

It is quite extraordinary that while I try to chronicle the odyssey from Peshawar since my return, I have found myself being hurtled with stories from the city...At times, they come out so unexpectedly that they leave me in wonder. Was that a coincidence?. Today was another such incident, where someone painted a snapshot image from their past.

It was a bright Sunday morning and my father pushed open the door to the neighborhood barber shop. I caught sight of the owner behind the counter shaking hands with my father as I entered after him. Filled chairs and busy barbers met my father’s gaze as he looked around for a moment before turning back to the owner for a chat. I stood next to him and listened to their conversation in the constant, rhythmic snip and clip of scissors around me. The talk went to touch the subject of the extravagant VIP protocols all over the country and the sorry state of our nation as usual, but in that chatter something unusual happened.

The elderly owner started to recount one of his own experiences and he addressed my father, “Sir! I was a young boy, less than eight perhaps when I was in Peshawar with my younger brother.”

My ears followed his story as he continued, “the year was 1948 and we were standing on Mall Road in the early morning. There was hardly anyone else about on the road, and I saw the Quaid-e-Azam pass by in his car.” He looked into my father’s eyes and added, “It was a black Chevrolet with an open top, and Fatima Jinnah sat next to him. There was only one other car in his protocol.”

“Really?” exclaimed my father, “Just one car?”

“Sir! That is not all… When I saw him, I recognized his face. My brother and I gave him a scout’s salute and he responded back to us as his car passed, returning the salute.”

It was at that moment when I noticed the owner’s eyes had turned blood red and he was close to tears. My father and I shuffled uncomfortably before he regained his composure. “Sir! It was that moment from my childhood and the protocols you see today. Has there been any leader like him in this country since then? Not one.”

The owner being a retired army man, I guessed it must have been his patriotism that drove him close to tears… Maybe.

But for me, he painted a snapshot… Another portrait from the city of Peshawar. While I try to write her story, she continually sends me these erratic postcards from different people and sources.

But today, as I share this postcard with you, I can comfortably say that I have taken a leap from this stepping stone of mine, this dear blog which has helped me hang on to my dream of writing under the most challenging of situations. 

Now I wait with my wings spread out, not knowing whether I will land on the green banks of the river or drown in the rapids which lie between this stepping stone and the haven beyond.

On to our dreams...