The Arrival

He felt that the poison in his blood had begun to mix at a slower rate, gradually even slower a few moments later. The world around him seemed to begin to fade into grayness. It was as if he was driving in his car only that he could not see clearly ahead beyond the windshield.

And then his body shuddered as if some invisible energy had begun to shake him to unleash within him spasms. And suddenly, as if a dramatic paradigm shift took place in the space-time continuum, there were flashes of brilliant lights around him.

His heart felt as if it would tear his chest apart, and right then his eyes opened and he began gasping for breath. As his vision cleared, he saw an alien figure in black extending his arms towards him as if demanding something.

He sat up straight, wiped the sweat from his face, reached in his pocket and handed the conductor his train ticket. The New Jersey Transit trains had for him become a part of his life, as crucial as wearing clothes.

Something about his rides, to and from work, from Edison, New Jersey to New York City were as paradoxical as they were enigmatic and cathartic.

Muhammad Yusuf moved to the United States at the age of 6, leaving behind a Pakistan where he left those he loved, those that were his, those, most notably his grandfather, who gave meaning to his dreams once.

The military government had ceased power and his family had to flee the country as his father was accused of industrial espionage by the powers that be.

Yusuf, as everyone called him, never really felt sure of his ethnic identity. His formative years were spent in Karachi, studying in elite schools, being chauffeured in air-conditioned cars, having a few maids tend to him during the day.

While being in the US he did not feel as exclusive, even though he was pampered luxuriously. He felt out of place, as if he did not really belong here. The people, the pace of life, the technology, the culture were dramatically different.

Perhaps he had always subliminally sought to find a balance between the people and the culture and the norm that he left behind for the one he found 2 days after his family fled.

He sometimes had nightmares about that last week during which his father and mother would huddle close to their children and stay awake till late at night, while they were living at a secret location at the outskirts of the City.

Everyone was told to stay indoors, lock up the doors, and no curtains were allowed to be drawn. There was a general aura of silence, and the only thing that mostly bound the 4 siblings was an air of paranoia.

He could still smell the damp, rusty air in Amar the munshi's basement. He could taste the of smuggled chapatis, warm daal and fried ladyfingers  He had begun to acquire a distaste for ladyfingers after those few days of excess.

Now, at 22, graduating from New York University he was a young architect. His train rides, to and back from work, were always soothing episodes, where steal and concrete and the structures they created comforted him.

He would find every opportunity to spend countless hours studying the works of Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid, where their structures they designed were as extension of something Yusuf represented as a human, as if these buildings sanctified his existence.

Architecture was his passion, the air that kept him able to breathe, the objects that evoked the sense of beauty in him. The world seemed bearable because of this, and he could hope of a better world for the generations to come.

But as soon as he closed his eyes, he was transported to a different world where there was confusion and disillusionment. Once he had a dream where he was watching t.v and the screen was filled with static and a school of black and red angel fish were roaming within the screen.

Another time, he dreamt that he was lost in space while working on the space station. He was in his space-suit when strange creatures surrounded him and began to nibble on his suit. Moments later as the vacuum was exposed, his flesh began to tear from his bones. He awoke screaming.

“Who am I?” he sometimes wondered, “And what is my place in my world.” He consumed liquor, delve into smoking marijuana, and also went to the Masjid on Fridays for prayers. He had a girlfriend, Cynthia, whom he often brought home. He could not find a justification for what he did, just as he did not find a justification for what he did not do.

And sometimes he felt like a tightrope walker, where anything and everything depended on creating a balance; just being out there, not thinking but just being; walking without thinking about walking. “Someday, I will find my place, my Nirvana, “ he thought, “Some day I too will arrive.”

For the most part life for Yusuf went by, day to day, and he grew as a man, as a person, as an architect, as an American, as a Muslim.

Awakening to the gradual completion of his self he gradually and in insignificant parts 'arrived' over the years, He embraced everything, and perhaps he embraced nothing at all.

Eternal Love

And down they fell, swirling and swooping. They descended as used up fireworks cutting across a greyish violet sky; tacitly shivering melancholy blobs of salt water, tears. Splattering violently on a barren ground, they dug minuscule dints of insignificant craters into the soil, and even smaller puddles of crystalline liquid evolved.

Clasping his dilapidating hands together, pressing them to his wrinkly bowed forehead, and kneeling in a reverent posture, he prayed to God, “Give me the zeal to live on, tilting upwards to gaze at the quiet sky.” The night suddenly went quiet. Hurt, he thought, begets pain which in turn begets agony and which in turn begets anguish. What begot anguish, he wondered. He subliminally and wilfully diverted his being’s dispersed energy to its center.

In-letting an icy breath, he let one last opaque bubble fulfil its destiny before he scrubbed his warm thumb across and beneath his moist eyebrows. He knew that he must live. He knew that he must go on. He felt empty, existentially vacuous. He knew that he must rise tomorrow to become one with the eclectic universal energy that is existence. But he could not face the night, tonight. He did not want to.

Only if time could stand still, he pondered, if only. And he clenched tight his fists, stopped his shaky breath, shut tight his shrinking eyes, and lay freezing still as an oak after a dead storm. Letting go of his captivated breath as a sigh, and gently loosening his tense posture, he calmly whispered, “If I embraced this night, I might elude myself; I might dim her memory in me; I might begin to forget that which was her.”

He felt simultaneously innumerable sharp stabs by recalling ecstatically wonderful moments he had spent with her, as lucid tactile idiosyncrasies. The pale pink and moist, soft petals of a ripe rose, as semblance to her once living presence, in his garden of joy had turned fungi green, mossy. And his face resembled an ancient stone statue that as once animated mortal was frozen in time by God, as when that once alive man wept, now lifeless.

Life now as mesmerizing Black Death plagued every healthy corner of his consciousness. He heard her echoing laughter. He almost instinctively jerked his head after the voice only to find her portrait gazing at him from within a simple frame hung on their home’s entrance annex wall - her eyes so full of dreams and hopes, of aspirations, and filled with glistening true promises of better tomorrows. Against a still backdrop, he felt empty resonating beats within himself.

She was no more. “God is unfair,” he barked, “You took her away from me.” Tears flowed from his eyes like warm wax, and he murmured painfully, “You are unfair. Incinerate me now with a bolt of lightning or resuscitate her.” Saliva dripped from his lips like diluted molasses. His torment as millions of scattered pixels of an obscure image seemed to become complete and whole; he could visualize his maturing grief.

They had been married fifty years. They relentlessly as poetic soldiers endured and scoffed at and fought her sickness for three years. And now she left him with a momentous grace of a salute. Vestiges of her candid laughter, he imagined. He recalled the first time as a confused young man he had read her love poem and fell in love with her. He remembered her making silly faces to tease him.

Her once vibrant uplifted life had now shrunk to an epitaph, a gravestone, and six feet of lonely earth. Apparitions of a bygone youth, she now remained alive in him as memories. And he heard her fading gasps whispering, "If anything happened to me, you will live. Promise me." Once again he wiped his sleeve against his eyes.

Putting the pistol down, he gathered himself as a singular cohesive mechanism and standing up from the once blooming terrace lawn walked over to their bedroom. Her aura was intact and fresh, still, after two years. He lay on her side of the bed, pressing his emaciating face to her pillow, his body feeling numb. "You will keep me alive in your memory. Promise me," she said. She had comforted him in a semi-hollow shriek, entangled in wires and chained to a heart monitor.

He had always felt her presence. She was there with him, in him, by him. He was, he thought, an epitome of them, their lives. He was them. She was inside of him. She was him. And he was her. Collectively, they were a living green that which becomes, or is, with a natural unavoidable union of blue and yellow. It was written; it was meant to be.

She died, but never was she gone, he thought. If she was him, he must live, fight, rebel, and charge dauntingly into the murky river of a restless life; treading as hours crawled a day; slowly; very slowly. That he was to her and to her not nothingness; he was not entirely convinced that she had completely gone; that a part of her was still around, watching over him.

Together, they were two smoky cubes of resting ice frozen in eternity; him as waiting for the door to her abode to open and she awaiting his arrival - in some far away dimension, at an infinite distance. Both of them waiting for Him, God, as season to grant them warmth for then they shall flow as two streams to become one, forever.