Somebody Once Told Me

 

Are stories narrated better in first or third person? In my brief time playing computer games, I could never stand first-person shooters. The only perspective that made sense to me was third-person. I had to be able to see the playable character as if he too were removed from my agency. I think in a story, first-person narration is more honest about the reliability of the person telling you the story. When you read something where the pronoun ‘I’ features a lot, you are conditioned to imagine the narrator might be wrong about a few things. A third-person narrators carries a veneer of objectivity that is not necessarily borne out in the way the story is read. The story is still told from the partisan view of the person deliberately choosing to share it. By externalizing their own person from it, they supply a level of ostensible disengagement that is supposed to make us trust them more. It is not unlike a news headline that clearly wants you to read it one way while not wanting to be responsible for your interpretation.

I find this device to be quite useful in daily life. When you narrate a story, embellishment has value in the qualities it reflects on you as storyteller. Independent of this, however, I think we have the agency to engineer a story towards a desired reaction. Sometimes when I come up with an idea, I share it as if it were passed down to me by a person whose advice carries value. I am convinced this lends it a credence that simply giving advice would not. I have, on more than one occasion, invented sayings that I attributed to a grandparent, teacher or someone of similar stature. The idea that someone external to the situation and universally recognised as a possessing a measure of moral authority was the originator of the thought I am sharing makes people take it more seriously. So I find myself sharing my own thoughts in third-person. There is a measure of dishonesty in it, but it makes for good conversation. Talking feels like the most dishonest way for us to speak to each other, except for all the other ways.

When Does it End Robbie?

 

I was reading an old journal entry recently. I describe myself as being a stranger to my own emotions. I think the idea is of an escapism inherent in observing your own life as if a you are not a participant. It manifests very clearly when I am uncomfortable. Every time I am talked about in the presence of people I do not want to reveal myself to, I default to an acquiescing smile. I might also interject with harmless quips that offer nothing. I can see myself from the outside; I am trying to appear palatable without leaving an impression. I am whatever they want to project on to me. Whatever values they feel most comfortable imputing.

This deep-seated desire to avoid being known (or even perceived) goes back almost as long as I can remember. I have always wished for a measure of anonymity before feeling comfortable with the idea of being myself. It explains, to an extent, my proclivity for running away from excessive familiarity. Not so long ago, I found myself wondering if it made me sad to feel loved. I treated the question as not worth investigation, but not before it reminded me of another question from a loved one: do you not feel joy anymore?

Ennui is a weird emotion. It is cancerous, oppressive, and unbearably light. It lays bare conflicts I have with my sense of self-worth; that I ask myself if I will ever contribute anything of value. That running away at some point has to turn into running towards. That for all the moves I make I keep ending up in the same pit. That my dissatisfaction and despair are borne out of having harboured ideas beyond my station. That I dreamed of a life and personality beyond the strength of my documents. Of having tried to militate – in my own way – against the constraints of a social order I do not identify with. Of having decried a faith I feel politically compelled to hold on to.

The important thing about running, however, is that sometimes you just get to the other side. Sometimes you power through a stitch and notice not one kilometre. Regardless of how I suffer this evening, it will take its course and make way for another. Even my ennui might take flight and land one someone else smiling for today’s hopes and dreams. Not that it will arrest me intellectualizing when I could experience.

There is something to be said for typing into the void.

The Tradition of All Dead Generations

 

I like to think of my complicated relationship with religion as being informed by both my quarrels with its theology and also with its social manifestation. When adhered to faithfully, there is an undeniable relegation of women to a passive (if not secondary) status. Where I do find meaning in religion is in its instrumentalization as a call to action. During my religious education, I remember the explicit discouragement of living the life of a recluse. Retiring from society, and being unbothered about what ails your fellow citizens was considered inherently unislamic.

The privilege of disengagement is obviously something only afforded to the more well-off sections of society. Islam, as a religion born from a call to action, makes sense as one refusing to endorse such disengagement. Prayer, to the believer, is as much about standing up to injustice as it is prostrating before God. There is, of course, the story of Abu Dharr expressing shock that a man who finds himself hungry does not immediately take up arms against the society that leaves him to this fate. Ali Shariati drew lessons from that; an important part of being Muslim to him was to be able to respond to injustice with action. A thread of liberation theology is visible there. If you pull at it, you might end up in the present day and able to understand why someone would start a losing war against one of the world’s most sophisticated militaries in response to their colonial project.

Of course, it is just as possible (if not easier), to instrumentalize religion as a form of social control. Its historical function has been to maintain social order. Individual behaviour is controlled and kept in place – for the most part – at the site of the family. Religion continues to be an incredibly potent tool to that end. Its revolutionary potential and ability to move a people to incredible bravery in the face of injustice has historically also given way to the imposition of an unjust world order that instrumentalizes (or at least hides behind) religion to justify it. It is, I believe, reasonable to maintain that no part of this  instrumentalization is inherent to Islam, but a result of the material conditions and the deliberate intentions of the actors who got to wield the religion at particular historical moments. As a wise man once said, men do make their own history, “under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Invalid

 

I stare at a screen. I have been staring eleven hours. Sifting page after page, looking for the mildest indication that the next call might offer personhood. I cannot feel my legs just now. It is sunny outside, but I prefer the natural invisibility of my room over the pronounced one of the outdoors. Sounds of everyday life are at my window. Children calling out to each other, the booming laughter of men, music blasting from a speaker somewhere. Every single one of these individuals must possess the right documents to prove they exist. I have no recollection of how I got here. But when I did, it was without the means to announce my arrival. Day and night pass and people live their lives; not unlike how they did where I came from, but with more to live for.

I have not been able to determine how I can get noticed, but something tells me it is by proving my utility to whoever is in charge. I think it has been two years since I started trying to make myself so useful. Even a measure of hostility would not be unwelcome now. I would know I was being perceived. I cannot always believe that I am completely invisible to every living thing that I see on this planet. The alternative – that they are all in on an elaborate plan of being indifferent to my presence – is, however, even more improbable. Why do I think there is a way to get noticed? Where does this faith in integration and assimilation come from?

I pause for a second. This call seems promising. ‘Planetary onboarding for Invalids if applicable,’ the last line says. That sounds like me. I take a deep breath. At least the rest of the day will feel like meaningful work.

Nothing Works Out

 

Nothing works out. I feel like the defining way in which I think about myself is that I cannot belong. I am not from anywhere and they want me nowhere. There is a level of hyperbole in this. This is hardly the biggest tragedy. But I do feel immensely jealous of everyone who gets to be from somewhere, who gets to recognise a place as home, and have people tied to that place they can go back to.

As I stare into being forced to the first place I have enjoyed living in, I have to ask myself, ‘where to?’ Go back to where I came from? I literally cannot. Go back to where my parents are from? How is that going ‘back?’ The only thing I can say for sure is that wherever I end up, there will be no sense of ‘return’ in that journey. I will be going to another unfamiliar (if not unwelcoming) space, and be made to start from zero again.

I remember reading a James Baldwin book earlier this year which contained the sentence ‘There is a home for you to go back to, as long as you do not go there.’ It made me feel something. There are several places I can look at in this way: Kuwait, Patiala, Kasaragod, and soon, also the Netherlands.  

Nothing works out, there is nothing to look forward to.

My lot

 

The trajectory of most of my life’s worries revolve around not having a place to call home. As I stare now into yet another forced farewell from somewhere I looked forward to calling home, I am reminded once again how me and my kind are not wanted here. In one of the lame afterseasons of Arrested Development, Lucille tries to let her son know the police is no longer looking for him by adding ‘un-‘ to the ‘WANTED’ posters all over town. It’s what employers do the moment you admit you come from a lesser nation. The unpleasantness of stepping outside to realise that the barriers to full realization of your personhood do not really apply to most people is hard to convey. I remember this story I read as a child; a man walking in the cold sees a snake freezing to death. Taking pity on the poor animal, he puts it inside his shirt. The rejuvenated viper bites the man and wriggles its way out. Dying, the man asks “ Is this my reward for saving your life?” The snake replies “you did what was in your nature, and I what is in mine.” I always wonder about the moral of this story. It is deeply conservative and unmistakeably casteist. Everyone has their lot in life, determined by the accident of birth. Any attempt to live outside your station comes at your own peril. Perhaps my lot is to live in a succession of states as a perpetual outsider.  

Waiting

 

During Covid, it used to feel like you spent all your time waiting. Waiting at the public health centre, at the village office, at hospitals, in the car. Even being at home often felt like waiting.

There is always some waiting going on. A permanent impatience to already be done with whatever it is that has you engaged. Not unlike moving the cursor to check how long is left on the video, no matter how interesting it is. As if the knowledge that things must end prevents complete engagement with them. An easy avenue is the mobile phone. But disengagement does not always require external stimuli. You could just as well be staring into space, willing time to skip ahead to the next plot point. Everything that happens happens while waiting for something else.

Today I was at a conference where most of the attendees knew each other. Every lecture had you waiting for the break, naturally. Every break had you waiting for the next lecture, perhaps less naturally. Ramadan had me waiting for Eid. You could extricate this sentiment from 94:7 as Pickthall read it: “So when thou art relieved, still toil.” The exhortation never to be ‘done,’ so to speak, does resonate. Something Jeff says while shooting the alien movie in the last season of Community.