|
a space for youth writing on mental health & identity
|
|
a space for youth writing on mental health & identity
|
I think the moment it fell apart was when I realised there was no God. And if there was a God, he died the moment Cain’s stone hit Abel’s head. He’s all knowing, so merciful. I can (and I do) write essays and essays on the glory of God. I’ll see him in hell though, even in his misery, I’ll see him relish in the splendor of his capabilities. God, if you’re so great, why do you need to be worshipped? My mother says God doesn’t need us, we need him. But the creator of the universe, He (capital ‘H’ in ‘He,’ always a capital ‘H’) who made us, made us to need him, so doesn’t he need us too? I have no one to turn to when my forehead burns up and palms get sweaty, no one but him. If God’s real, that one thing, that need to be needed, makes me want to be his friend. Is there no one left on earth? God and women. God and that little baby girl of two or three sleeping under her mom’s faded dupatta on the sidewalk in front of the boat basin food street. Sleeping under glaring citylights, sleeping despite the onslaught of turbulent traffic less than an inch from her little feet like cracked earth. My little sister’s next to me in the car, slurping her faluda and designing an image of a princess with butterflies nestled in her hair on her ipad. I love her, and yet I keep imagining what would change if I replaced her with the girl on the sidewalk. If the girl on the sidewalk was all I’d ever known, I would love her too. What kind of God leaves everything up to chance?
My mother is like a puzzle, the more I can gather of her, the more I can put together, the more I stand a chance of understanding her. I write of her own mother, and when her mother’s mother hurled a pair of scissors at her. I think of the small scar on her forehead that makes her skin look like pale mud someone dug into for a treasure that was never there. In this home, our love and abuse meld together. One can not exist without the other. Mama, your old diary, I read it. You sound happy, to be married at 17, to have your first child at 19. You sound like you love it all, the rishtas, the restaurants, the lipstick on aunties withering lips to celebrate this newfound union. Did you sit on the makeup seat of whatever parlor you booked for the wedding day, and as they powdered your face thirty shades lighter and your lips thirty shades more dark think, ‘is this it? Is this all life is?’ I wonder, did you have the opportunity to hate it? Or did your God tell you women have the ability to give birth, consequently having children is your moral responsibility? I know you love me, and my sisters, and my brother, but if you regretted us, I would never blame you. If you wanted to throw your middle finger to the sky and run away and appeal every decision pre planned for you, everytime you were given the illusion of free will, I would never blame you. I want to love you as someone more than my mother. ‘Dear god,’ I sometimes smirk (at a bad joke) I sometimes gasp (at a moment of realization) I sometimes giggle (at a moment of pleasant surprise).I think there is nothing dear about God, except for when people need someone to love and so they make Him something he’s not. That God is lovely, because good people make him. An argument against idolatry in my islamiat textbook is, God created man, and man created idols. Worship the creator, not the creation. If I believe in anything, I believe in people. I believe in the people who have created a God in their minds who is kind, caring, and a God who is trying. Who is not broadcasting himself to be perfect, and complete. We both believe in a God that is human. A God that is creation, not the creator. Women, especially the women of Pakistan aren’t monoliths. Their kaleidoscopic problems can not be understood by any mere man. Yet at the root of everything, over and over, we discover God. God is the man who marries them at 17 and gives them three children before they can deign to discover who they are (mother, when I was born, did you know you loved Sidney Sheldon novels? Or singing ghazals in the rain? ) God is the entity who thinks a thin brown dupatta, on a broken sidewalk is what that little girl must deal with for her reward in the hereafter. What about my older sister though, the sister who has an unwavering, unshakable faith in you and is a good person (you may equate those, I do not) but has led nothing if not a comfortable life? The largest problems Pakistani women face are their own lives reflected back to them from a celestial mirror. So God, as per your rules, the little girl and my sister (despite the gargantuan disparities regarding the respective worlds you thrust them in) will meet at heaven’s gate, for they have both lived lives that are acceptable to your all knowing fire. When that happens, when they both luxuriate in the rivers that are whiter than milk and sweeter than honey, and when they both stumble upon each other in that labyrinth of beauty you’ve made, I hope that little girl takes one long look at my sister, and spits in heaven’s face. Comments are closed.
|
Categories
All
* = Editors' Choice work
Unless otherwise noted, all pictures used are open-source images in the public domain. Archives
March 2024
|