The Little Tug

With a lot of hiccups and pauses, I am trying to read literature from 100 years ago. I pick up a page or two and life, usually in the form of a notification or a chore or a thoughtless distraction, gets in the way. My mind is like a room full of scattered belongings strewn on the floor, and I wade through it knowing the musty smell comes from a time in the past reminding me of something I can feel but can’t name. What’s interesting is how the past crowds the present — always in the form of a to-do that begs my time. Yet, whenever I read words from 100 years ago, I find myself wanting to stay in the present moment. For two days now, I have proverbially been curled up with the Virginia Woolf book that TFB bought for me because I wanted it. Proverbially curled up because the truth is I was reading her sitting up in my ergonomic chair placed next to the window and listening to the sound of rain outside. Turns out, reading while listening to the rain fall is as therapeutic as they say it is. Mercifully, I didn’t need my earphones. Urgently, I need an offline life. Virginia Woolf’s words from 94 years ago wrap like a ribbon around my brain and all I want to do is make space in the scattered room, adjust my skirt to sit down on the floor, and open A Room of One’s Own to page 28 and continue listening to her echo through time. Whether it be Virginia or Gilbert, I can’t help but wonder about the liminality of what persists through time and space, of what echoes last, and what murmurs of sadness ripple though the continuum of human existence.

I don’t believe that creation is orderly. There’s a reason why they describe it as a big bang or that people want to be untethered from everyday consciousness to create. Creation is probably a fever dream. For me, though, I don’t know if my body is able to currently support that kind of weightlessness. I feel like Woolf’s overcoat when she walked into the River Ouse (except that I am weighed down by love and even that is heavy). Since then, we have found her death looming in pop culture as if the nature of death is to be enshrined in art and artefact. I can’t say, really, because death is the one thing I’ve not been able to accept about living, despite its eventuality. Still, I think about my rakhi brother’s fatal car accident, my building friend’s unnamed passing, my close friend’s younger brother’s terminal illness, my uncle’s passing away in his sleep. Still, I think about the auto driver who was driving me to a place two weeks ago when he got the phone call that his mother had passed, he slowed down his driving, veered to the left, and he was overcome with emotion. Still, my friend AS and I talk about her dad’s passing recently and how she’s coping. Still, I wondered last night, when I was terribly unwell, will I die when I am alone, and maybe no one will know?

But people don’t forget, do they? I don’t forget, do I? Time remembers and maybe the sky remembers because the fable is that’s where people go. The more I experience living, the more I want to believe in the unknown — the overgrowth that hides a magical house, when some food tastes of nothing but love, the identical tales of different cultures, the memory of water and trees, and the ancient prayer in an ancient language. While I was trying to get the logistical hang of prayer in Mecca — what stairs go where, where wazu places are, and the general layout of sites — I stood in the congregation one day when the imam started a prayer I didn’t know about, my sister standing next to me also didn’t know about. We watched the others and prayed it all the same. It lasted less than two minutes, but with the usual pin-drop silence in a crowd of over 2 million people. Then, we found out it was the funeral prayer. We knew of the existence of this prayer which is performed after a person’s body is prepared for burial, they are taken to the mosque, and the gathering stands in prayer for the departed. After which, they are buried. Being women and living in a desi society, we had known of it but never participated in it. It was something new and with all things new, it took me a while to process this new information, new ritual.

One evening, my father and I went together for Maghreb prayer. (This is a thing I had never done in my life before with my dad.) We got separated while trying to find a place to stand as the entire arena was full of people. I found an opening next to a really old Egyptian lady who was sitting on her newly-bought prayer rug. Dusk was falling and in some strange way, while standing under an open sky, I understood the reason why the pagans worshipped the sun. Within a few minutes, the sky would become pink, and purple, and dark blue, and black. I stood right at the back, over 2 million people ahead of me, and like clockwork, the imam started the funeral prayer of someone right after we had finished Maghreb. And all of us, in absolute quietude, prayed for the person who had passed away, not knowing who it was — whether adult or child, man woman or other — and just like that 2 million people stood in remembrance of someone we never knew. I recall that evening as one of the most powerful moments I’ve experienced in my life. It is closest I’ve come to being a part of the fabric humanity in life and in death.

When GM and I co-wrote a script inspired by Before Sunrise, our opening scene was set in a cemetery. After some initial context setting, the hero says to the heroine overlooking a funeral that the rituals of death are for the living, the dead have no need of it. Many years have passed since we wrote that script where a boy and a girl fall in love over conversation. Now that I think about it, love as a verb for a small shared experience might be an overreach. Of course, romantics (which is also me) would disagree. The measure of love is the reduction of it. Isn’t that what we do? We measure love. A list of things we have done. Such and such thing, that you haven’t risen to. The burden of the past onto the future. Bottling it into a magical potion arrested in time. When, in fact, the concept of time is the concept of change. Love, as I have recently discovered, is an ever-changing emotion between ever-changing people. Whether I read literature from yesterday or from 100 years ago, love is the mainstay of every story. Be it a love of nature, of language, of large halls in which one has elaborate meals, of kneading dough for cakes, of the growth and decay of plant life, of the stars, of engines and wheels, and of everything else that humans have embraced and poured themselves into. It is a gift and a burden. It is a calling to rise to the occasion. But sometimes, you bid for it to be simple, and everything in between.

If reading 100 year old literature has taught me anything, it is that we are dealing with the same structures and problems in new garbs. It used to surprise me how relevant this writing was, until I realised, it is the past reaching into the future. It is the elasticity of those ideas that have remained. Sure, the world has changed, zooming ahead in a time capsule. Overall, I find myself to be in a handshake with the past, suspended in a space where the two of us are on nodding terms with each other. Gilbert is handing me ideas to send to old friends. And Virginia waits for our next excursion. I have got to go.