Will There Be More Ocean?

Things go wherever they need to go; they go missing from home and are never to be found again. I think of the things I have possessed and now they’re sitting somewhere unknown to me. I don’t wonder if they’re happy because only mortals die and impending death makes us measure our happiness. One teaspoon, a bagful, a quarter of a pound, a kiss, a chocolate cake. But no, things live on for ever. I was washing the utensils I had used for breakfast and realised that someday, I will be no more, six feet under ground, but that bottle of dish wash on the counter will exist for ever. It doesn’t, obviously, sit there thinking about whether its life has amounted to anything. It doesn’t agonise about the hereafter. It simply goes on being a bottle.

Do I feel wistful about my life enough to write about it? No, I write about it just as it is — without irreverence, with impatience and delay. I am trying to write without putting a name to events and occurrences. Nomenclature is not overrated, but I suppose it should be because it is taken too seriously. We know everything by its name, not by what it actually is. This also applies to people, I am starting to think. We know people by whatever names and labels we have given them. We don’t really know people for who they are. We know people for the diseases they have but not the way it wraps itself around them, seeps into their lives, and makes a home for itself. We know them for their political stand or the lack of thereof, but not for the way they were turned away, laughed at, made to feel like they don’t belong.

I read Hanif Kureishi’s latest update about his condition and wondered why do hospital wards for those with advanced mental health diseases have to be steely and dank. What does that say about us as healers and humans? Why is the unknown feared so much when it is the human condition? Why is steely and dank steely and dank? I instantly felt better when we entered the orchard of date trees after days and days of staying in a desert and seeing nothing but dull gold around us. My spirit lifted a bit, a huge breath of air settled inside my lungs, and I felt hydrated. I sent TFB a video of the swaying date trees as if being tickled by God herself. I marvelled at what was possible if you just let a tree grow, leave it to its devices, move on with your life, go to a completely different country, follow the sermon about treating your neighbour right, look after the little wound on your knee, and say a small prayer of thanks before you start to eat. What would happen then?

Last December, I bought a book from the Seattle Public Library for one dollar. They were having a little book sale by the gift shop. I bought Rachel Cusk off the little, makeshift table where a congregation of books was milling. In it Cusk’s alter ego is on a plane to Athens. I went back to find my electric scooter that I had parked in front of Bank of America and it was another day of me going to the post office having found it closed so many times before. The day was overcast, a blackness hidden in the sky, me wearing my powder-blue trench coat going in search of postage stamps. When I travel, I buy a book because it’s like finding an old friend in a foreign land. I have many books that I’ve bought from different cities. I’ve not read any of them. They come home with me all the same. I also go to the post office and send mail to friends back home. There are elongated routines of reaching out to friends. A text message on a whipped out phone, a letter written in purple cursive, a plan to meet that you’ve been making for 45 business days. Why don’t we pick the phone and call them anymore?

So much technology and calls are about work now. I want them to be about friends calling each other out of the blue because they saw something that reminded you of them. Or to discuss what fruits they should buy. Or to talk about the most banal question that they probably know the answer to. Or about the sky and how it is beautiful today, but our hearts are still broken under it, and it is okay, because we’ve got each other. What do words feel like inside our mouth? We will never know. What do words feel like inside our minds? They hurt. Phone calls are now manufactured, designed, and come at predicted times. No one calls you out of the blue in an unguarded moment of yearning, only in times of emergency. In our culture, love is not an emergency.

In the desert, my life felt very far away from me. I call it a desert but the buildings are very tall, beige, and hot on the outside but cool on the inside. Water sprinklers everywhere spray fine jets of water and I hope God is amused by this imitation. Most of my life on the road felt like I was trying to recall what a room looks like in the dark. Like you could remember it only if you touched it. But I couldn’t touch it and therefore, I forgot about it for a while. Until I came back and I was reminded. How we live in decadence and in the illusion that there will be more, something else will happen, our dreams will come true. That someone will save us, and the rain will heal everything it touches, but does it? At least in the desert you have the promise of nothing. It is a promise that is delivered. I would much rather take a promise that is fulfilled than one which never comes to pass. That way, I can know with certainty what had to come has come. I can go back into the house, draw an outline on my jeans, embroider it under sunlight because now my eyesight is failing, and not have to wait for a promise to knock on the door.

There was extreme heat and dryness in Mecca. There is extreme humidity and water in Mumbai. My days are a contrast to each other. I dream about both of them in ways that they get intertwined in my mind. Sometimes I wish we didn’t talk about the weather so much, but maybe it is code for how much we love the planet we live on, but we can’t say it aloud. Our present is reaching out to the future with hope and I wonder if that’s what we’re doing wrong. It’s like being on that walking escalator where the illusion of movement is below our feet and we think there will be more. More of everything because life will keep coming at us. There will be more fruit, more money, more sex, more love, more friends, more text messages, more economy, more snow. It’s a travelator! Oh that’s what it is called! We keep moving and think there will be more. But I don’t think there will be.