Hiralious

It's 3-o clock in the summer afternoon and we are all sitting in the verandah, the ice cubes that Naani-ma (grand-mother) took out from the Rooh-Afza sherbet, are melting in the tray.
By her side, Ammi is knitting a woolen sweater for the first-born of my Maamu (Uncle)  . Her gold bangles make a sound with each turn of her hand. There is a tin-box of imported butter cookies in her lap, in which she stores an assortment of her spools of thread.
  The peace of the situation is so sedating, I lie flat on the charpoy and look at the sky. The clouds are moving slowly in a swirling pattern, a dance you can only pick if you look at them for a long enough time. Likewise, you can miss the beauty in people if you only look at them only with hurried glances. Having thought this, I turn to look at Naani-ma, intentionally for a longer time than I usually do. Her brown eyes are surrounded by deep wrinkles, but there's a glint in them. 'Haters will say it's glaucoma'. An inward joke, rises and dies within me. But there IS something remarkable about her face. Gravity turns the smiles of people upside down if they live long enough, but it has not been able to undermine her smile entirely. It's that feature that trickled down from her to my Aunt, and then to me in the next generation, making me look more like my Aunt's daughter than I ever looked like my mother's daughter. I feel so much love for Naani-ma in my heart. But as soon as the word 'love' enters the canvas of my mind,I feel perplexed by a quandary.

 Naani-ma loves my mother, but she also admonishes her often and expects her to do a lot of things she does not want to do for the sake of keeping appearances in front of people. It makes my mother different from how she usually is, lively and spirited. And the same Naani-ma who is the kindest possible person to all of us, can be very unkind to my Mumani (Uncle's wife).  It's confusing.  People display different shades of their character with different people in the same room. There is not one universal body of love that we can all go to and expect love and fairness from . Up until some years ago, I would have thought that Only God could offer that. But It is foolhardy to believe that anymore. Every other evening, Maulvi Sahab told us about the ways God likes to punish people for the crime of loving, or worshipping him in a different way than the one he approves. Love.... surely, it must be too much to expect that even the highest ideal that human beings could come up with, is so stringent about offering it. 

 

 'It's so frustrating when you cannot separate these threads from each other'' my mother's voice interrupts my thoughts  ' The more you try to yank them apart, the tighter they get''  In her hands are lying the two hopelessly intertwined spools of thread, red merging into blue going into red, an infinite appearing mess, a chaos.

 'That is why you should be careful where you put them when you put them' Naani shakes her head at my mother. 'If everything is neatly aligned from the start, you don't reach this point''.  She takes the spools of thread from my mother's hands and gives them to me.

' Now it's your job. You are the young one with better eyesight. Try to solve this mess for your mother'

  I feel that the prophet has spoken.

 I stare at the mess in my hands, the big junk that I have to figure out, the red that I have to separate from blue, a task akin to prising apart the intermingling patterns of love and pain in one's life, all of one's life.  Out in the verandah, there is a cupboard where Abbu stores the operating manual for every thing that exists in the house and sometimes, even the things that don't. That is the place where I run to, when I want to crack a problem in a systematic way. Sometimes reading a manual helps me crack a problem that does not even have anything to do with machines. 

   But there is no manual for disentangling stuff, because only the one with his fingers around the knot realizes the complexity of it. There are techniques which can help you, but they can only offer you a minimal guiding light. The judgement and the decision regarding when to pull, and if to pull is mine. The responsibility of knowing when to give up and cut the knot, instead of trying to resolve it, is mine too.  With my fingers around the heart of the knot, there is only this idea, that there is a way for this knot to not exist, which makes me take up the task in the first place. It's only this idea that makes me want to deal with it in the first place.

 Otherwise I see the hopelessly enmeshed pools of thread, forgotten inside the imported tin-boxes lying around, everywhere, in the house, and in people’s lives.

 

Do you understand what I mean?