Inspired by a true story.
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You will not find any of them speaking about his underworld life with such hushed whispers as long as he is breathing. But just wait till he dies and those whispers will reach your ears: the whispers you hear when one aspect of a person’s life, however dormant it was during his breathing hours, is casually associated with the end of his time. Those whispers, that is all you’ll hear about him afterwards. It is as if all that remains of him is his name, that one aspect and then, of course, his death. So he smoked? Hence the fatal cancer. So she wasn’t careful with fire? Hence the burn to death. So he rode a motorbike?
But that is the thing.
He did not just ride a motorbike. He approached that machine with deference, learnt to ride it with devotion and gradually rose to make it his hinds, his wings, his slave. He lived through it and to whatever extent poetic aesthetics justify his death through that motorbike, deaths are seldom clean or quiet. With a faded, red baseball cap on his head and nineteen breezy years on his back, he died early morning or so was estimated by the surgeon since his body was discovered later that night, next to a broken pavement, and a broken motorbike.
Years after his death, friends and relatives still talk about that one aspect of his life that led to his death, but not in front of his mother. Mothers seem to have a biological resolve to view their offspring in a bubble not shared by others.
Especially mothers of teen-aged offspring.
Or a teen-aged, dead offspring.
Her bubble remains filled with myriads, like a rainbow, from his first step, multiple spankings, never-ending flu, to matters no writer can fathom to know. The son’s motorbike does not figure so distinctly in her bubble, at least not as graphically as it does for others.
Thirteen years after his last morning, his mother visited a marketplace, far from the place her son was born at, grew up at, or disappeared from. The boy behind the counter recognized her. Unlike others who still condemnably discuss that one aspect in whispers, this boy remembered him with half-forgotten, half-remembered awe. With that unguarded awe, he speaks to her.
This boy mentions some of the things from her bubble, what an unusual sense of humor her son had, how sensitive he was about his family, how good he was with numbers. And how good he was the motorbike. It is not like she had never heard anyone say that, but certainly not with this candidness. A secret, unknowable nudge inside her forces her to probe a little more.
With the motion of his hand, and that age-old fascination, the boy says, “he could slide with his bike under a moving trailer and come out.”
No one had ever told her that.
That one aspect.
That one piece of information, one that would make her bubble swell and pant, unable to break or contain. All the years she spent in an unspeakable loathing of an imagined person who she believed had killed her son suddenly forms into interchangeable specters, from the unrecognizable image of her son at this death, to hazy images of his black motorbike.
Human beings with metal inside meet sensational endings, perhaps that is why there is metal there to begin with. Some clatter, movement, some damage. The rest of the creation is programmed to watch and remember them with a secret admiration, an element of fear and overt condemnation.
But these philosophies can never be a part of her bubble, a re-opened, wound. The only metal she could come to seeing, of his, would be the clamor of the metal around him that slid him to his last breath.
She is alive. Her bubble is kicking.
That one aspect resonates in there.
That one aspect.
I wish I could celebrate something else about that life.
You will not find any of them speaking about his underworld life with such hushed whispers as long as he is breathing. But just wait till he dies and those whispers will reach your ears: the whispers you hear when one aspect of a person’s life, however dormant it was during his breathing hours, is casually associated with the end of his time. Those whispers, that is all you’ll hear about him afterwards. It is as if all that remains of him is his name, that one aspect and then, of course, his death. So he smoked? Hence the fatal cancer. So she wasn’t careful with fire? Hence the burn to death. So he rode a motorbike?
But that is the thing.
He did not just ride a motorbike. He approached that machine with deference, learnt to ride it with devotion and gradually rose to make it his hinds, his wings, his slave. He lived through it and to whatever extent poetic aesthetics justify his death through that motorbike, deaths are seldom clean or quiet. With a faded, red baseball cap on his head and nineteen breezy years on his back, he died early morning or so was estimated by the surgeon since his body was discovered later that night, next to a broken pavement, and a broken motorbike.
Years after his death, friends and relatives still talk about that one aspect of his life that led to his death, but not in front of his mother. Mothers seem to have a biological resolve to view their offspring in a bubble not shared by others.
Especially mothers of teen-aged offspring.
Or a teen-aged, dead offspring.
Her bubble remains filled with myriads, like a rainbow, from his first step, multiple spankings, never-ending flu, to matters no writer can fathom to know. The son’s motorbike does not figure so distinctly in her bubble, at least not as graphically as it does for others.
Thirteen years after his last morning, his mother visited a marketplace, far from the place her son was born at, grew up at, or disappeared from. The boy behind the counter recognized her. Unlike others who still condemnably discuss that one aspect in whispers, this boy remembered him with half-forgotten, half-remembered awe. With that unguarded awe, he speaks to her.
This boy mentions some of the things from her bubble, what an unusual sense of humor her son had, how sensitive he was about his family, how good he was with numbers. And how good he was the motorbike. It is not like she had never heard anyone say that, but certainly not with this candidness. A secret, unknowable nudge inside her forces her to probe a little more.
With the motion of his hand, and that age-old fascination, the boy says, “he could slide with his bike under a moving trailer and come out.”
No one had ever told her that.
That one aspect.
That one piece of information, one that would make her bubble swell and pant, unable to break or contain. All the years she spent in an unspeakable loathing of an imagined person who she believed had killed her son suddenly forms into interchangeable specters, from the unrecognizable image of her son at this death, to hazy images of his black motorbike.
Human beings with metal inside meet sensational endings, perhaps that is why there is metal there to begin with. Some clatter, movement, some damage. The rest of the creation is programmed to watch and remember them with a secret admiration, an element of fear and overt condemnation.
But these philosophies can never be a part of her bubble, a re-opened, wound. The only metal she could come to seeing, of his, would be the clamor of the metal around him that slid him to his last breath.
She is alive. Her bubble is kicking.
That one aspect resonates in there.
That one aspect.
I wish I could celebrate something else about that life.
1 comment:
Knowing the owner of the "metal" and his mother, I have to say, "Very moving and very well written mashallah."
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