There are many children stories that begin with once upon a time and end with happily ever after. The interesting part is that the pattern continues even when we grow up. The vocabulary enhances, perhaps the sentence formation changes; the writer writes with an arrogance of a mature mind and the reader reads with the pride of a profound intellectual but the naivety of the story remains the same: a story that begins and ends in a fairy land where we witness grief in transient phases. Here, grief stands as a reluctant relative that everyone avoids yet their brief visits upset our charming patterns of routine redundancies. A make believe world replicates itself into our lives and we live as we are supposed to, as if dictated by some guardian writer, we spur our lives into the same pattern again and again.
Apart from the fact that our stories grow with us, the more compelling fact is that most of us get rid of stories as soon as we start to perceive ourselves as big and mature. The land weaved by letters seems too impractical and foolish as we slowly transcend into the land weaved by numbers. The magic of paper-ink is no longer enticing in a world made by paper-notes. What purpose can stories serve us anymore? Perhaps for a laugh here and there, or to escape in its irrelevance as we try to woo someone? The once-upon-a-times and happily-ever-afters sigh in their own insignificance. Stories leave us as surreptitiously as they once came.
But do they really leave? We can get rid of stories written by men but can we get rid of stories about men? Our lives sketch from these stories and continue to grow in their own predicament, defined by our own manner of existing. And here comes grief, the protagonist of this blabbering, not the one we are vaguely familiar with but perhaps its distant ancestor that carries the potent of every shade of sadness in a mix of naive joyfullness. It comes in this unawareness of our own selves, our own stories. A grief that challenges the human self in a now robotic sculpture that weaves through monotonous procedures and tailored relationships. A grief which does not even have the pleasure to be seen as a distant relative because its existence itself is unacknowledged. This grief, this human grief, lurks around the shadow of the unconscious-conscious life of this new human race.
It lurks from behind the paintings of Van Gogh that have now ironically surmounted the world, from beneath the dusty pages of a Russian novel that tries to hold our hand in our toughest battles, from behind the cinematic frames that shadow the self in its unique way, through the sound of the breeze that coaxes our silence as we wander through, through the laps of the waves that unfurl the boundlessness of the infinite, from within the eyes of the sculptures of history that stand tall in the mediocrity of modicum. It lurks through the stars and the dust alike, in all the intersecting minuscules of soul and life.
This grief is how, even when the artificial world engulfs us, the human part survives in its many nuances; that shadows us and occasionally tries to come out and help us through the very subtleties of our lives. It is a companion for the few lost souls who find themselves alienated in a land that is supposed to be their very own.
I saw it today in a cafe as I sat alone with my thoughts, my book and a writing pad. This fictitious cafe that I am travelling through the realms of words is one of my favourites, for unlike the real world, there aren’t any eyes prying on the eccentricities of an isolated life and most importantly my anxiety can rest in its numbness for a while as I control my travel through this cafe. The vague control which I hold now, where I can weave a world so similar to my own, yet so intricately mirroring the fabric of the happiness of my soul, allows the brief screen of reality, that meddles through with its vicious pangs, laugh its sad defeat (for a while).
I had no idea what I was about to write. I was mumbling and pretend reading Milan Kundera’s The Joke, lost in an array of uncertainties, trying to find something that would stop the ticking of the bell and for once in my life sigh a relief without a pang of grief swallowing me from within. (Ironically, the two would end up meddling together in a moment’s time. Isn’t that what life is all about, bringing in unprecedented challenges even to its most prepared soldiers?) So, it was then when I realised the very topic that defined this amateur art of words. I was sipping my coffee when something attracted my attention. It was not some random fight or some noisy collapse which normally attracts people’s attention and dramatically gives them the support of the muse to create their own story. On the contrary, it was silence, absolute silence.
Living in Mumbai, if there is one thing you would learn to sacrifice is the sound of silence. Apart from the late night hours of absolute nothingness in your own room, silence hardly appears in this city of hustle and dreams. So when in the middle of the day when normally the road is bustled with automobiles rushing towards their own destinies, ignorant of the grief that comes along with the self-immolation of one’s soul, there was a silence so beautifully haunting that it attracted my attention.
I was sitting facing the road in a small corner seat of this open air cafe. Sipping my coffee provided me the opportunity to break contact with my attempted reading of Kundera’s effortless brilliance, and then paved the way for my attention to get attracted towards the strange silence of the road. Not a single horn was blaring in the futile race of mankind, no dog was barking, not even the college students were stumbling in their ecstasy of youthful ingenuity. In that minute, it felt like that peculiar scene from sci-fi movies where time stops as something magnificent reveals itself. I listened to this sound of silence with utmost acuity for I realised the value of its rarity and the possible ending of it at any second.
And that is when grief revealed itself, this grief that brought a relief, an uncanny relief. In that silence, there was a meadow of beauty normally unnoticed because of the hustle of human selves; there was acceptance towards the rejection of every emotion I had ever emoted to a rare few fellow humans, who perhaps, appalled by the eerie semblance of my unfamiliar naturalness have never understood it; there was courage in stepping up and dealing with the real grief that pains through most of the nights; and there was this companion of a thought that eventually personified itself in the form of this blabber.
The subtlety of its existence was so endearing, something as usual and overlooked as silence showed itself in its most rare form, transforming into grief that brought joy for the brokenness of the soul, a paradoxical answer to the paradoxical question of life.
And then it disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, as a car raced across with its swoosh waking me up from this wakeful state. I went back to my book, this time reading for real and realising why I was unable to read earlier; for the book presented a sentence translating and encapsulating a fraction of the emotions I had just felt, though the context in which the character spoke was opposite to mine yet our grief remained intact…
I felt at the time that I’d been overrun by a desert, I was a desert within a desert, and I wanted to call out to Lucie.
