Some Small Things I Couldn’t Tell You

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

—E.M. Forster

Dear son,

I am writing this in a hurry. I have tried to be as elaborate and sensible as possible in the time I have stolen from your mother to write this. Since she is off to get morphine for me and since we have sent you to your grandparents’ home for sometime to keep you as much unaware of my health as possible, I am using this opportunity to write to you.

Dear son, I’ll be gone when you read this. You will inherit all the books in my library—perhaps you will find this letter then.

There are a few things I have not told you, partly because you were too young to understand them. I will tell you those things now.

What’s going to happen to me doesn’t make any difference to me. I died the day when certainty dawned on me. When I wished I were illiterate … I could read all my reports … (most of the times ignorance is better than awareness, more than bliss; reminds me of Kant: ‘whosoever increaseth knowledge increaseth pain’).

In the beginning, after I came to know about the lump in the right lobe of my lungs, I wanted to beg desperately of everyone: save me! I didn’t want to sound childish. Even when at the same time I knew I had become a child within myself. I can’t swing between avoidance of people and a need for engagement, can’t tell you how absurd now the television in my room appears to me, how abstract the programmes. At the time when one knows that one isn’t going to see a certain thing again, one wants to hate looking at it, but at the same time you can’t avert your eyes for the thing, the sight, a scene engages you—the reddish characters in the flawed soap operas. I swing between the avoidance and engagement. I want more and more people to come and meet me back to back, even if they talk nonsense. I’d now enjoy that too. Earlier it was hard for me to tolerate the irrational and superficial commentary of my ordinary neighbours and naïve colleagues over petty things. Now I want to be engaged all the time, by anyone, without a break; I want to be absorbed in talk and save myself from brooding on my death and its certainty. (These days I am frequently reminded of Jack Nicholson’s dialogue from The Bucket List: ‘Somewhere, some lucky guy is having a heart attack …’ What a precise calculation! Never watch the movie, please.)

The other day, after your mother learnt that the lump in me has begun to spread its agents to the other parts of my body and certain things have sprouted in my brain, she slapped her face and beat her chest. Then, wearing a fake smile, pretending otherwise—the rashes from the slapping still visible around her neck—she quickly came over to where I was lying and asked me if I’d like to have a cup of kahwa. I agreed and ignored her beating herself. I knew that ignoring her self-abuse was the wisest course for us, otherwise she might just do it in front of me and punish us both that way. But, vaguely, I still tumbled into morose utterances, told her that the little pillow she wanted to slip behind my head to keep my neck upright and relaxed and easy was of no use, as I had already begun heading to have a sunbaked brick as my pillow inside the dark vault of my grave.

My spasms are gradually subsiding under the morphine these days. I can’t tell you how terrified I am of the night, of dreams and sleep.

My oncologist is scarier than my cancer. He shocks me more than any news of death. The way he shakes his head from side to side and sucks his lips when he looks at my reports—it kills me a thousand times. I want to tell him to counsel me even though I know how ineffective any counselling is for a patient like me. So I’ve told your mother that I no longer want to visit the oncologist. I want to die in peace.

Today, I went for the final dose of chemo. Your mother began discussing ifs with me, starting with if I hadn’t smoked, I wouldn’t have been going to the hospital like this. If I had accepted the financial help of her paternal cousin, I’d have been all right. (By the way, do you remember the toys Syed Hishaam-ud-Deen Naqshbandi, your mother’s paternal cousin, the then Deputy Superintendent of Police of Srinagar, had brought for you? Toys that you found broken into pieces later?)

I was born into a farming family. My mother was illiterate, my father semi-educated. But my younger sister (your aunt) and I received an adequate education. I couldn’t thank God enough for the social background he had given me. It gave me perspective of the kind that someone born into a protective, elite family never receives. That kind of background allows you to be grounded in the realities of life, I feel.

I grew into an earthy boy, surrounded by the smells and scents of our family farm: of vegetables, grass, soil, well water and sweat. I have not learnt as much at school as I did at the baker’s, the barber’s and the butcher’s shops. Those were the real sites of knowledge. I did enjoy my share of pampering. I was the first boy in the neighbourhood to have a red Hero Ranger, with side-mirrors on both sides of its straight steering, the spokes of its wheels embellished with multicoloured plastic beads—things envied in the entire locality. I was so lucky to not become like Aarif, our neighbour’s only son, always locked up in his house, never allowed to play with the neighbourhood kids, never allowed to venture out. He eventually grew into a sissy, listless about the world, easily intimidated by gangs of rowdy kids on the street or even by the sight of a calm dog. Every kid’s childhood at least includes catching butterflies, attempting to trap sunlight, splashing water, jumping off trees—and countless other nonsensical things. But I doubt Aarif had any such joy.

I had fun with my cousins, stealing fruit from the plum orchards. We relished the chase and abuse of the owners. Sometimes we would bunk school to go swim in the local stream, basking and gossiping on its sandy banks. Once we were startled by our parents wielding long sheaves of nettle, all set to punish us. We were taken naked to our homes, paraded through the neighbourhood. The shame it brought was worse than the lashes we received later. We tried to earn our own money by ploughing other people’s land and making five rupees per bed; once I made forty rupees in a single day. We’d make paper bags from old newsprint and sell them to shopkeepers. We collected the remains of copper wire, burned off the insulation, wound the bits around pebbles into balls and traded them to Ghulam Muhammad Misgar, the neighbourhood coppersmith.

We’d even make kites, display them on the facades of our houses, attract the other neighbourhood kids and then sell them at an enviable profit.

I thank God for the gifts of curiosity and creativity that I inherited from my mother. I had a toolkit of my own: a small hammer, a saw, rusty fragments of an hacksaw-blade, an awl (which I’d use for binding books too), a hand drill, a multipurpose screwdriver, pliers, scissors, a pouch full of nails, screws, tacks, nuts, bolts, valves of different sizes. I’d go about our house, or sit in the attic, making and mending things. I’d make chowkis, wooden table lamps, writing desks, ironing boards, coops (for our chicks and ducklings) and guns too. I miss all that sorely, all those little wonders, those bruises, those blisters and gashes on my hands. There truly is nothing like childhood.

Enjoy yours as much as possible.

You’ve had a different upbringing from mine, a little more sophisticated than mine. Even though you don’t wander into the same classrooms as I did—the baker’s, the butcher’s, the barber’s—I hope you will walk barefoot when nobody is looking, feel the pebbles and the coarseness of earth prod your soles. This will relieve you of your worldly pains. Do it while you are still a child, before reality tries to push you into a new phase where weaknesses and handicaps are not forgiven. Where you have to sound more accountable than reasonable. The real love is less emotional, more mechanical and constant and sustainable enough. The second name of love is responsibility. It is above sacrifice. Rather, it’s sacrifice itself.

I got married to your mother soon after I found a job with a good newspaper. Syed Hishaam-ud-Deen Naqshbandi, your uncle, didn’t support our relationship (don’t ask me to go into the details of how we came to know each other; confessions mostly ruin and rarely help anyone), but he couldn’t do anything to stop it. He could have made me ‘disappear’ in police custody or simply kill me, but my profession saved me. Once your mother and I were married, he changed his strategy and behaviour, and started to patronize us. Your mother wouldn’t believe what I told her about him then, but now, like every second citizen of Srinagar, she does. That he is a killer, a mass murderer. There was a time when your mother wanted you to become a police officer like him when you grew up. But I’d say, let Afzal become anything, even push a cart in Lal Chowk, but don’t ever wish for him to become anything like his uncle. Your uncle will outlive me, maybe he’ll outlive all of us (we saw him on TV the other day, giving lectures on social morality, ethics and Islam; he still looks younger than me, doesn’t he?), and he doesn’t even smoke.

Your mother and I got along very well. She turned out to be a very loving, possessive and adamant wife. She sold all her jewellery to expand our one-storey house into a three-storey building. I insisted on not expanding the house, said that I didn’t want it to become like a typical house in a posh colony, a house which looks like an extension of the inhabitant’s mindset: opulent, extravagant, expansive, obscene. But she said that she was doing it out of love, lavishing all her savings on building a home for us.

In a second instance, she took up arms against the neighbours opposite ours over a stream that once ran between our compounds. It belonged to both of us and ought to be equally divided between the two families, but they had claimed the whole thing. It was now dry and we could no longer divide it. They had sown poplars along its length. I had never felt compelled to solve this dispute. Your mother, however, was not so easily deterred and she filed a case in court. But she also prevented me from tending to the ornamental garden I had set up on what should have been our side of the stream. She still doesn’t allow me to work there, and wants me to wait for a legal decision on the property. But I am asking you now: please do tend the garden after I go, no matter how long it takes to settle the dispute. Just because one doesn’t live to see settlements and solutions doesn’t mean that you should quit striving for better things on your side.

Son, many of us are consumed by our egos. The day we conquer our ego is the day we win ourselves and that is when we win the world. But we should take care not to compromise on our sense of justice. Being humble doesn’t mean you have to please all.

I think your mother is back, for I can hear her parking the car. If you’re still wondering how those toys your uncle brought for you broke and became defunct, let me tell you … No, it wasn’t our loyal maid, though we blamed her every time. It was me who broke them. Yes, I broke those toys. It would have been difficult for you to understand why I destroyed them secretly; it would have struck as being odd to you. You might have despised me then. But now I hope you are mature enough to understand that I was trying to protect you from the shadows of evil love.

May God protect you! May you live long, spread justice and love! But however long you live, never lose yourself to the pleasures of life. Remember that one day we all have to die and justify our lives before Allah. Innaa lillaah’i wa innaa ilai’hi raaji’uun. To God we belong and to Him we shall return.