The Grand Multi-Continental Epistolary Adventures of Kaku & Happu. Letter #II.

Grey. Clouds. Grey. Sums it up.

Dear Happu,

Your letter smells of the samosa chaat of Main Market. Might I suggest you get into the habit of washing your hands before wielding your pen? Science has proven that washing your hands before and after every meal decreases your chances of contracting a multitude of ailments, some of which can be permanently debilitating. If you dare to visit the scientific journals section of the Library, and can be bothered to part with your Progressive Writers and Beat Generation rubbish for a few minutes to go through the aforementioned scientific journals, you will find that out for yourself. You will thank me.

Regarding your troubling discovery: you are ten and eight years old. What’s ailing you so? You are but a babe utterly wet behind your ears and you come to me with these heavy philosophies that seldom become your age. The book theft and the incessant fixation upon Salman’s Mustang are both understandable and acceptable conditions of youth – but grief is a country you must not visit just yet. Or, may I suggest, never? Through your words, you have naively put grief in the nooks and crannies of human physicality, painting it as something romantic that God bestowed upon us by design so that we would remember our exit from Eden. Such are the trappings of youth that you feel anything untoward or sad that occurs must’ve been pre-ordained, forgetting in your drawl that where there is grief, there is also history weighed down by tragedies that have chipped away at any semblance of an escape. We have not yet reached that pit. Not yet.

You pretentious little twerp.

Talk to me about the length and breadth of the home that we are finally going to have, where there is enough room for all of us to keep our own counsel and not blindly stumble into each other’s beds at night because they are all within a twenty feet radius of the  bedroom us five brothers share(d?). Before you start writing to me about how grief is set like gelatin within the joints of the human skeleton or some other colourful variation upon that line of thinking, I would like to draw your attention towards the fact that I am hundreds of miles away, in a place where the sun seldom shines and it rains as if I am in a post-colonial re-enactment of Noah’s Flood. I am in a place so grey that, if I chance upon a bright, primary colour, I have trouble recognizing it. I am so terribly entangled in the struggle to survive that I cannot tell where my day began and where it ended. If it wasn’t for the dou sunnat, duo nafil of Fajr and char sunnat, char farz, dou sunnat, dou nafil, teen witr, dou nafil of Isha’a, I would not be able to tell the difference. I am so far away that Aba Jaan’s roar of a voice can’t reach me, and I can’t see Ammi sitting in the sunlight in winter, reciting Surah Yaseen, her graying hair oiled and wound up in a tight braid. On that note, stop referring to Aba Jaan as ‘The King’. He’s Aba Jaan. And you’re no more a prince than Ayub is the rightful President of the Country.

Moving on – is it cold there? I keep missing news bulletins on the radio and the reception for the Urdu Service is absolutely ghastly here. I guess you will be able to tell it is really winter when Choti religiously starts her visits to Landa Bazaar near the Railway Station. I think she thinks that we don’t know, but she doesn’t know that you and I have always known. It is commendable, though, her ingenious trick to buy the coats and the jumpers for their beautiful buttons, and stitching them onto the things she herself knits. Those long forgotten trinkets become beautiful and necessary once again. The cast-offs of random gora sahibs and mem sahibs serve her purpose and pride to a certain extent, and who are we to find fault in this?

Be kind to her. She is a disgruntled artist. I dare not compare her to the other Disgruntled Artist we know (the one who started World War II, if you are forgetting) – but it would be wise to be cautious. And considerate. The next time you commend her on her mustache fuzz being as prominent as yours may be your last. I will not be there to save you.

And so we come back to grief.

It is an acquired state of mind, Happu. We nurture it out of masochism; perhaps hoping someone would come and save us from whatever it is that ails our beating, bleating hearts. But no one will come. Why should you presume you would matter enough to someone else, when you have not extended that courtesy to yourself? Apa may be the happiest out of us all; so contained she is in the universe of her own making. She has accepted her fate and so she has mastered it. There is neither shame nor sadness in that.

The only thing stitched to our seams like our shadows is our desire to keep moving forward, past what may hold us down. Think about that during one of your bicycle rides around the Gates of the City and write again to me.

Again: I prefer unscented letters, even if the scent is of the samosa chaat that I once loved so much.

Practically shaking my head at the places your imagination drags you to,

Your Brother,

Kaku.

______________________________

*Photograph by Anis A. Siddiqi. Touched up by Khurram A. Siddiqi.

The first letter in the series can be read here.