I was born at the darkest moment of the night. The time before the night lightens for the first glimmerings of dawn. The time that is totally still, waiting...always. And now I drift here, in this darkness. A darkness that makes the hour of my borth seem like day. So thick, so impenetrable, so comfortable. Effortlessly I turn in this womb of death and I am happy. Happy? Just a word that I always wanted to really understand for so long. A goal never attained.
How tenaciously I had clung to life...how pathetically. I clearly remembered now, that other womb that had thrust me, crying, to meet the world. I believe now that I had cried with good reason. Perhaps I already had known of the life that would be mine. No matter how I struggled, it wrapped its coils around me. Looking back, I see the tears that were never shed, the necessities gone without, so that I lived. My mother, abandoned by her husband, even as I swelled her belly. No proud father to attend my entry. Just sadness and a desperate hope that I would wipe the tears of the past for the woman who was my mother and for my grandparents. My grandparents who became my parents, as my mother worked for a pittance as a teacher in Mirzapur. That dusty, colorless town puts its stamp on that woman, until it and she were indistinguishable.
Just as I am with this beautiful dark. Velvet, yet rough, so black that it is bright...and so inexplicable. Wait...I must explore this further. I twist this body that I cannot see. Does it even still exist? Or is just a phantom presence? I do not care. I think of it still, am still conscious of it, a remnant of the being I used to be. Not who I am now. Who am I now?
A whisper, a dream, a nightmare, a thought that stirs in someone's mind? A feeling that streams down my mother's cheeks as she stands in the bed-room that once I lived in. An uncomfortable memory for the friends, some of whom felt sorry for me; but for all of them I was an oddity. I, with my oil drenched hair, my thick glasses. Still I can hear their voices coaxing me to sing, not that I needed coaxing. They wanted me to sing for them, so I would. Not because I sang well, not because my reedy, off-key voice amused them, but because I wanted to. They laughed. But I did not care. Fools! I sang because I loved to. And that was it.
Now, I return to the dark again. The fragments of the being I used to be, forces me to be curious.
My voice wrapped around me. The dark was too thick for it to break through. Did I even have a voice anymore? And if I did, whom would it reach anyway? I am here alone. Is it going to be forever. I do not know. I do not know...how often do I say it here? And yet there is no desperation to know, to gain knowledge. Somehow, I know that somewhere, in some dimension are all the answers that I longed for. But you know what? I do not even care. To put it clearly, I have all the time in the world. Or...all the time not in the world.
Time. Forever. What does that mean? Words that try to harness the power that can never be understood. And yet how I had tried to use those tools. Words, books, I had pored over. I knew that one day I would make. I had to make it, for my mother, for my grandparents, to show that man. I would work in the government, be an officer with all its attendants of money and power. All that had been missing from I had. But I would get them, and share them with the people who had brought me up. 'Those people.' Already I lose the connections of blood that had always been. Strange!
Now, here I am, adrift in the dark and I am content. My birth into this dimension had been much more excruciating than my birth into the place called the world. These latest birthing pains had taken the gift of my life, such as it had been. The cancer had eaten at my body. That which one day would have let me bear children had now taken up residence in some unknown land-fill. The children, unseen and unknown, to whom I had promised a real childhood vanished into thin air.
The agony grew unbearable, as the parasite, surrogate child took residence in my womb. And it grew and fed, greedy and hungry. Until finally, it took over and ended that terrible, physical pain. That agony, that in my new stasis I cannot even comprehend. I cannot, because all I feel now is this soft, thick darkness. I had heard and read that people went through tunnels, saw cool lights. I saw nothing. Felt nothing.
Like a cloud but darker. Like a caress but deepers. Like a vision but forever. I drift. My consciousness is acute and yet somehow numb. From somewhere, I get images. Disjointed, but they tell a story. I see tears. I see fire. I see my body contort as flames lick at it. I see an empty house that used to be mine. And I can see, actually see emotions. I see the darkness that fills the womens' hearts. The women...my mother and her mother. In the smoke that lifts from my pyre, they see my birth and my life, and my death.
And further away, the man who had been but an instrument of my birth. He has some sadness too, but also bewilderment and even anger. Anger, that I had not signed over the house my grand-father had left me, to him. A month before my death he had asked me to give it to him, since I would die anyway. But I gave that heap of stone and mortar to the woman who had given me life.
And the smoke fades away from me. And the darkness becomes more absolute. Again, I feel like I must question. How reluctantly I shed the skin of my mortality. For the first time here, I really panic. The darkness fails to soothe me.
My voice echoes in my own ears. There is no one else here. No one to ease my passage into this life, or death, or after-life, whatever it is. And what does it matter anyway, what I call this place, this state. My voice reverberates inside my head, hammering into my consciousness. Still nothing...nothing but stillness and silence.
"There is no one here, Jaya, only you," I tell myself. For the first time I am alone, totally, wholly, absolutely alone. Through those years of privation and hard work and jeers and pity I had never, ever been along. Wait. Then whom had I been speaking to here? Who had been this unseen confidant I feel compelled to speak with? Who? No one but me here. Me, I, just me. My eyes close against the dark. I move my hand until it grips the other. I must know whom I talked with. I must know. I concentrate, harder, deeper. And I connect.
The darkness explodes into beauty. And everything dissolves. The ravaged body I had clung to disintegrates. The hands, the feet, the eyes the mind that had felt a part of me, even here evaporate. And there was nothing. And there was everything. And now I know everything there is to know. I....
Copyright Jawahara Saidullah, 1995. All rights reserved.
"Where am I? Tell me." "Who, what am I?"
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