... Of Six Days...

“Lo! your Lord is Allah Who created the heavens and the earth in six Days, then mounted He the Throne.”
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AL-ARAF: 54

It takes my Lord, Allah, to create the cosmos in six days. And adorn it with lights and the firmament and all that is beyond insinuations of language. Six days is just an expression, perhaps… not a scrupulous measure of one hundred and forty-four hours.

For God.

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For me, Six Days is a scrupulous measure of one hundred and forty-four hours…ticking away into a pathologically compulsive tick-tick-tick of the skinny needle of seconds’-hand. Only that in Six Days, I must deconstruct my own cosmos.
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The act of building spaces around oneself, demarcating them superfluously … standing on them and screaming defensively: “Mine!”; guarding them in less-colorful terms than pieces of land are guarded… but guarding, still. The act of collecting words and ideas and self-glorified sacrifices in that personal chamber and shooting untrusting glances at every passer-by.

But at times like these, it is best to return to the basics. Yes, after all these stunts and ceremonial indulgences into the worlds of powerful intellect and philosophies… this is the lesson I have learnt: To give in to the simple, sometimes. Pomp and extravaganza may not echo my real self … loud noises, bold colors and crowded, steaming halls are not my cup of tea. But at the core of all these noises and people and their pomp – there is simplicity.

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A certain Basic-ness.

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And so, what is required is to accept this as a novice amongst the novices. Social psychologists celebrate role-playing as if it’s an accomplishment of human civilization. And there is no need for me to become icy-critical about these masks we must wear for our progressive, social Darwinism. These are all basic acts, not base. And not dull. Simplicity is, really, a luxury… a luxury known to many, celebrated by very few, very rarely. The only problem with it is its addictive quality, and hence … the withdrawals.

Six days to teach myself all this.
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Six days to sit down and meticulously undo many eccentricities, those that cannot survive in another nook.

Six days to mould the malleable eccentricities.

Six days to learn to take each bout of life with a sense of wonder and the subtle joy of going through the unknown. You don’t need knowledge or insurance or even reassurances for ventures like these… you just need an enormous capacity of energy… you need acceptability and in the silliest ways, even suggestibility. And redundant as it may sound, you need faith in the One who created “everything” in Six Days.


Human biology is sometimes enough to learn the checks and balances Allah has kept, to ‘maintain’ our existence. If something goes wrong in the body, pain is the signal … to help you identify the locus of injury. And when that pain reaches a threshold, your brain squirts endorphins (natural painkillers) to tame that pain. And so, with that simplistic perspective, nothing can go wrong… there are too many back-up band-aids.
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“Un kahee say durtay ho,
Jo abhi nahi aee, uss gharri say durtay ho?
Uss ghari ki aamad ki agahee say durtay ho!” .
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Hah. What a sermon. Here’s to this six-day-self-indulgent evangelism …
Cheers.

... Depersonalization ...

They call it the ‘writing behavior’, the psychologists do, when the schizophrenic writes in delirium. Some theorists believe it is just the label that makes one a deviant, nothing is really "wrong" with pseudo-patients. Since my recorded history, I have manifested this writing behavior under stress – who is to diagnose the frequencies of sanity, then. But no tick-tack-toe, cross-checking correlation, everyone in the world knows more statistics than I do.

I remember the real spooky Little Days, staring in the mirror for a hundred seconds and feeling this loss of existence. When the hands, the head and all limbs were no longer a part of the self. It used to happen, and I would run to Api that I was scared. She never understood, I never tried hard enough either. Now Umair tells me he used to experience that flight of the inner being too, when little. It does not happen any more. Wordsworth says in verse that the Child in us celebrates his intimacy with Divinity, which diminishes as we grow older. But Siddhartha learned to carry it across age, perhaps, transcending from the waters to the trees to other organic entities.

It cannot happen any longer. It hasn’t happened in a long time, and it will not happen again – and so, it is not possible any longer to depersonalize, to move through the four dimensions of existence and convey, let alone reach? Or is it?




It is not.

We are limited beings. We do not whistle like the dark birds, where one shrill note narrates the tales of migration. Only rarely, very rarely, can we attempt to live through people, see life through them – or pretend, at least. It is what ambitious mothers call “singing through their sons”. I have attempted that too, with my brother… by sending him to places where I could not go… to speak to a lone, deranged man lying across a railway track, singing to himself. It works for a while, just a spark of a moment of self-gratification. But no, not a melodramatic Shakespearean character, ‘seeing joys through other eyes’, not that. Just to ‘sing through’, that ‘Symphony’…

Those are roles God hands down to us. We are born with labeled relationships.

Narratives cannot be easy things, eyes closed or open. Even as the ‘writing behavior’ was manifest in earlier days, I always believed speech to be better than scribbles. And too, God verifies this, that the greatest sign of His mercy is that “He taught eloquent speech to man”. Yet, to communicate with us, He chose the writing.