For My Love

Musty attic sorrow blinked from their eyes, like a drunk with a weak lantern stumbling about in an ashy ally,
as pre-mature wisdom revealed unto them the immutability of their lives. Opiating under a pallor of
procrastinated homeworks, the jump start TV bytes had long ago monotonized into predictable variety.
Lethargic hammers bouncing off rubber-ed minds.

My sisters’ kids were especially restless today, so this evening we took them to an amusement place
they've opened up at Hill Park, near our house. Although the rides are Spartan compared to the
elaborate gaiety in other countries, they've tried very hard to make it a fun place for the kids, which really
is the sincere cause behind the whole place. In that forest of lights there were no predators, only buxom
squirrel kids scurrying, bustling about from ride to ride, wild with delight at the merry-go-rounds, the magic
carpets, the cotton candy wallah, dodge 'em cars. Never stopping in one place (like proper adults) to enjoy
their fruit fully, they nibbled on each rides’ flavor before some fresh glimmering, swinging ride snatched
their attention. Each ride was a harlot, hawking its light-painted wares, and their innocent full-blooded hearts
responded with laughing embraces to the garish seductiveness (unlike proper adults?). Eyes dilated with
ever-rising tides of excitement, hands and arms twirling with ecstasy, cavorting, running, squealing with
delight. Hearts born to blaze with joyous activity finally coming into their own. The terror of violence,
marauding fear of judgment, and suffocating dream-crushing hypocrisy all far away in an adult, gravy
brown world.

Intensely refreshing though it was to live the sheer passionate mirth of childhood through all the darling
spitfires, there dawned a tranquillity as well, oceanically deep, mysterious in its strong subtlety. The gently
simmering frothing peace of realization. But let the scene be its own oracle.

It being a week day, the park was nearly deserted. Just a few scattered small families here and there
giving the substance of hot-flesh rushing-blood life to otherwise impostor colorful illumination. A middle
aged, high-shalwared, topi wearing, bearded, plump guy with a tasbeeh and two kids, his wife covered from
tip to face to toe in a black burqa. The casual paan redness of his lips and the taken for granted furtive
submissivensess of the wife were typical.
Typical too were the kids, dressed in cheap, gaudy western
imitations, hand me downs from well-off relatives or ancestors past. The sallow black brownness of fragile
bony bodies, oil plastered hair revealing minutely scarred foreheads, snub noses and disproportionately
small eyes…..yes, all typical to the last horrifically thick line of kohl in their eyes. Shrieking, frivolously gay
music set off images of organic material inhabiting a gray shalwar kameez beating his wife, putting his
children in parrot roting religious mosque "schools", gorging himself on salan from the local
restaurant-cum-kiosk sitting cross-legged at the counter of his small shop….. talking ridiculous, ignorant,
hypocritical bilge with other similarly amputated souls.

Typical too was the young, obviously newly married couple, ostentatiously dressed in desperately ornate
clothes, yearning to pass as middle class only to reveal shabby poverty all the more - the husband's extra
shiny shoes, the wife's thick makeup with intense shades of red, pink and fuscia. Typical shame at their
devoid of sophistication life-station, seeking to drown out a sense of inadequacy and inferiority in the
hysterical, screaming, over acting, insistent, vehement laughter of their nakedness-coverings. Images of the
young man’s perplexity, as one day a stranger suddenly becomes attached at the hip after a tinsel
ceremony. Perplexity and incomprehensibility translated into frustration....frustration with this woman who
is emotionally too scarred, too repressed and under exposed to writhe and scream with ecstasy like well
nourished women in porn tapes he and his friends drool over. Helplessness as this still hot blood and flesh
besides him stales into wrinkled, dried antiquity or humid obesity before his very eyes with the rapidity and
certitude of a paper graying black under the hungry licking swallowing of a flame.

All, my love, all typical like a rush of air as the branding seal of doom hurtles down on a crouching, silently screaming, dry-throated heart.

But then I also see things very strange, very out of place in the typical pictures of reality in my mind. I see
the souring-with-frigidity mullah wife gadding about in a dodge 'em car, quaking with full blooded mirth despite
encasement in a stifling shroud of black death. Finger-tips flying the steering wheel this way and that, a
soul completely losing itself to the moment, powerfully sincere in its absorption, in careless, honest
nakedness. I see too, the mullah standing behind the iron grill, smilingly lost in the passionate pleasure of his
wife. I make out the dewiness of his eyes, and there begins a procession of fresh images cascading down into the mind. Enveloping, melting and ingesting into new, everything in their path. I see a
person simply trying to make it, going through the institutionalized Hades of his efforts just to keep the
motorcycle running everyday. Tired and cracked as the spider web of semi shattered glass under hot
power-failing mosquito-biting routine, at the end of which is no horizon higher than more routine, more
efforts at mere sustenance of body, stagnant suspension of soul. And I see the courage, the sheer breath-gasping sinew-straining effort with which they keep a tiny window open in their minds and souls. Through
which they let flutter in ideas and hopes such as spending an evening just having fun at an amusement park,
taking a chance contrary to their entire socialization and allowing themselves to just have a good time.
Despite all the black purdahs, all the sanctimonious hypocrisy, all the sweaty anger in yellowed eyes and
seared passions, despite all their sins and sins of the world. Determined to win for themselves a small piece
of utopia, their right and ambition as human beings after all - no matter how plastic, how shabby this
transitory carnival beholden to the flick of a switch might be.

And how dare I think love to be the private property of only those liberated by and into sophistication of
education, dress, mannerism, "correct" ideas and self designed definitions of what is "appropriate" and not
gaudy, not cheap, not over done ? I had missed the shimmering affection in the young couples’ squeals of
laughter, as they exaggeratedly held on to each other for support on a ridiculously slow ride. The
unabashed enjoyment in each others existence they are living right now. In the face of such divinity, of
such crystalline tinkling laughter love, why do I automatically assume their marriage must have been an
arranged one? That all such marriages by their very definition are devoid of love as felt between two
intellectually, emotionally, economically, socially "free" persons? Why do l let streaks of make-up cast
suspicion on the simple reality of two people having a good time. And why did I conveniently forget, naive
as it may sound, that simply having a good time has been a very large part of the drive towards civilization
as we know it, that it is what I do every time I am with my lover?

Yet somehow its different when
someone wearing too shiny shoes and the desperately disguised shame of poverty tries to feel the same,
and succeeds in rising above a choking existence of almighty THINGS. Despite ogling, "superior" eyes,
despite all the tacky clothes and pretentious pathetic glamour. Simply making love in the middle of an
amusement park and feeling thrilled, alive, charged with the lust for life. True, I still see a ridiculously tacky,
flashy insecure "lower class" couple. But I also see the unique delicacy, the holy elegance of two people in
love.

I saw something so evergreen and vibrant, lover, that no matter how many times it is revealed, I still feel as
humbled by its awe-inspiring beauty as a "distant watcher of the skies, when a new planet suddenly swims
into his ken (Keats)." The sacredness, the grandeur, the power of innocence. How it transcends the ever-strong fortresses of wealth, patronizing stereotypicality, and my own myopic judgmentalism. So let us not
over value complexity by "look(ing) at life through a nomad's comb (Auden)", let us not take love, life, and
people, "fix and pin them wriggling to the wall…and measure (them) out with coffespoons (T.S. Eliot)." If
(and its a very big if) the quest for perfection is natural, why isn’t it natural to seek it in simplicity rather
than complexity? To see the simple, intense, passionate joy in people, one need only make a leap of faith in
the face of prudent suspicion and trust in sincere open heartedness. Does all the courage, all the sacrifice,
all the nobility, all the effort of those who seek to make a difference and succeed make any sense if they
didn’t have faith in the basic goodness of people?

Many times I hate people, but then I keep trying, despite defeats, to love them as I love you. This is my love.

Its as selfishly selfless, and as simple, as that.