D. Saeed
It was close to election time in 2013. I was walking my son home from Qur’an class when I spotted a group of youngsters heckling passers-by at the end of the road. Feeling uneasy, I decided to change the route and turned into the nearest lane. This was a different route from my usual one and it wasn’t a path I was familiar with. The narrow street was deserted
except for a young man smoking at a doorway half way up the street. He appeared to spot me and come to a stand-still. Moments later, he sprang into motion, dropping his cigarette and rushing up to me. He stopped right in front of me, blocking my way.
‘Hey, I have been wanting to meet you for a long, long time and I have been messaging you on fb for ages but you never replied’ He said accusingly. And then he asked, ‘Can I have your no?’
I hesitated a little, taking in his blood-shot eyes, oily unwashed face, wild hair and unkempt clothes. It was noon and this guy had clearly just woken up. He must be a drug addict wanting legal advice on some case, I thought. I sometimes got waylaid by his kind near the court building and in my experience, it was always best to humour them. So I gave him my no and hurried off, yanking at my son’s arm in my haste to get away from the deserted backstreet. Just as I entered my apartment, my mobile beeped with a message.
It would be a week later when I would hear from him a second time. I had just come back from voting when that familiar beep notified an incoming message. It read, ‘I saw you walking past the President’s Office just now and you looked just perfect.’ I ignored it.
A week passed by and I was spending a weekend with my family at a nearby retreat. It was a Friday morning, quiet and peaceful in the way only Friday mornings are. I was lounging in a joali, alone with my thoughts when the peace was punctuated by a beep in my hand. I glanced at my phone.
‘I love you and I want a relationship with you. What’s your answer?’ the text read.
It was an impudent message, inappropriate and way out of line from someone I didn’t know at all. And yet, the directness of that message hit some corner inside me where the heart intersected with the mind. I felt anger but the anger was also criss-crossed with pity. In the late afternoon there was another message.
‘I am at the Hulhumale jetty, still waiting for an answer,’ it said.
Conventional wisdom whispered that it should be ignored but I was neither conventional nor wise. I decided to reply.
‘What you are asking for is impossible. Please forget it,’ I said, hoping that it would put a firm end to the young stranger’s insolent and impossible delusions.
Life went on as usual for about a week. Then one fine afternoon, I received a call from my mom informing me that a cousin, taken ill unexpectedly the previous day and air-lifted to Male, had died a few minutes earlier. She was to be taken back to Huvadhu for burial. It was sudden and unexpected and naturally, I was upset but I had collected myself and was reasonably calm by the time I boarded the plane that took her body on its final journey to
our shared home.
My cousin had been far older than me and had lived all her life in Huvadhu while I had lived most of mine in the capital. The age gap, distance and a bitter family history meant we hadn’t been particularly close so I didn’t expect her death to hit me hard. More than anything, I didn’t even feel that I had a right to grieve but as fortune would have it, grief did not know bitter family histories and the language of rights and expectations.
Back from her funeral, I found myself being sucked fast into a gloomy world filled only with memories and regret. Decades ago, when I was a child, I had a spent a year with my cousin and her mom, my mom’s sister and now, memories of her that I didn’t even know I had surfaced, creeping in and filling all the spaces inside me with a heavy blackness. It wasn’t in my nature to show weakness so I found it hard to allow anyone to see how broken I was inside. Day time was manageable but the nights were really hard. Every time I closed my eyes, my cousin’s life unfolded in slides; of her sitting at her sewing machine turning out beautiful dresses, handing me pieces of doublenet fothi to be stretched, fluffed and rolled into roses, as a young bride, headstrong, marrying a man of her choice, wanting a chance at happiness. And always, there was that horrible image of her corpse shrouded in white and being lifted into her coffin, of her two long-feuding brothers, one in the final stages of a terminal illness, holding hands and crying, united in their love for their sister. And then the worst, that of my aunt, old and frail, standing over her only daughter’s body and saying, ‘I should climb in and lie down next to her. It’s time for me to go, isn’t it?’
It was on one of these nights that I invited two of my closest friends for dinner in an effort to throw off the heavy shroud of depression. We had a reasonably good time filled with bouts of laughter but when they left, the depression was back. I tried to sleep but sleep proved elusive. Finally, in the deep hours of the night, I decided to talk to my best friend and supposed confidante. I reached for my phone and dialled. He answered on the third ring. I was lucky that he answered so quickly, that he answered at all but if I was hoping for a heart to heart chat, I was very quickly disabused of that thought. I managed to shut myself up and promptly listened to what was coming from the other end. By the time I hung up, I was seething with anger, frustration and despair. For a long time after that call, I sat
cross-legged in bed, crying in the dim room lit only by the glow of a light cast upon the window by the building in front. The images were coming thick and fast now and they weren’t just behind my eyelids. They were here, there and everywhere, floating inside the room. It was no use shutting my eyes, either.
It was then that I reached for the only human contact I could think of. I dragged my laptop onto the bed, opened it and logged into fb. Instantly, a dozen windows lit-up asking to chat. I’m on fb as much as the next person but I had never ever chatted. However, on this night I wanted to hold the images of the past in abeyance, to put space between myself and the dead, to free myself from the vice-like grip of grief. I clicked on a blinking box and said, ‘Hi.’ It was a young man working at Customs as can be seen from his unformed self in the profile picture. Immediately a torrent of words poured out from his end. He was sure that I would hate him for being in the government and he apologised for that but Male was an expensive place and so to survive, one needed a well-paying job and Customs paid well. It
was funny, the way this young man assumed that any antipathy I might have for the government would automatically be transferred to anybody working in the public service. In spite of myself, I found myself smiling. I told him that I bore no ill-feeling, that I didn’t usually chat but that I was unable to sleep thinking about a recent loss. We chatted on, talking about living costs, politics and life in the public service. Sometime through the night, he told me he was the boy who had asked me for my no that day when I had walked my son back from class and decided to vary my route and who had later sent me that insolent message. He was sorry that he had been impudent and asked whether we could be friends. For a long moment, I sat stock-still, wondering what stroke of fate had directed me to click on that particular window from all those that had blinked with requests. Then I spoke. I told him I had assumed that he was a drug addict wanting free legal advice and how pleasantly surprised and glad I was, to find him a law-abiding, hard-working and god-fearing young man.
He kept me company until I heard the muezzin call the faithful to fajr prayer and told him that I thought I would be able to go to sleep then. He had one thing to ask of me before I disappeared back into the land of the living, one little request – to have a coffee with him, one single time. I told him that I would be going abroad the very next day and that I would be away for some time but I promised to call him and have that coffee when I was back. He might have thought my sudden trip was a lie, a pretext to turn down his invitation but I was in fact, telling the truth. At some point, during that night I had made up my mind to go to my hideout in neighbouring Sri Lanka, a place that I visited whenever I needed to lick my wounds, think and heal. And so the next day, I left.
Ten days later, I was back. I touched down one day, late afternoon, having spent all my time, reading, exercising, listening to music and shopping – all the things that I loved doing. I was no longer broken. I came home and called that boy straightaway and told him that if he was free for that coffee, I was. At precisely, nine o’clock, I walked out of my place to a nearby coffee shop, dressed in my finest back, to keep a promise, to pay back an act of
immense kindness and to honour the boy who had kept me company on a bleak night when I had been filled with nothing but despair, when in the process of grieving, I had realised that I had lost not one love but two, one among the dead and one among the living.