Elegy

Ejaz is a daunting little creature.
Subdued, laconic, COLD to the point of filling your veins with ice.
A conversational wizard too, his subjects varying from glib to immodest to the garrulous grotesque.
Choosing him over Yousaf Sahab is like choosing the grand sequoia mousse cake over a cinnamon roll.
Yes the cake does sound jazzy, luscious. Bittersweet chocolate mousse with tints of hints of orange wrapped in chocolate bark and crowned with gold dust. It sounds so rich, so much so that my mouth waters every time I merely hear someone mutter the scrumptious words.
But then again, all things that sound so are ephemeral.

A cinnamon roll in forever.
A cinnamon role is everyday. A cinnamon roll you can live on.

You cherish people who give you a place on their desk, set up a little computer for you and ask you to get cracking. You cherish them because they squish you into little corners but still help you feel big inside.

Someone holds a door open for you. You step in, warily, suspiciously. You feel like a knight without his armour. You feel like a caged cuckoo.
But that’s all you have; a little space, crumbs of freedom and an embittered soul.
A little space in which to dust and shine and cloak your soul with spirit.
Until one day someone holds the door open for you again; you step out, freely, unstintingly. You feel like an eagle going for the kill. You feel like a man with a mission.

Yousaf Sahab opened the doors, so many of them, so unselfishly.
He pushed me in, urged me to take a peep, at least.
After months and months of cribbing about editing someone else’s work, if there comes a time when you think: “I pick up a piece of paper, I rewrite it and I make someone else’s day”, then you know that you have changed.
Selflessness creeps into you in odd ways; disguised as the short-lived surge of satisfaction that you experience when someone hands you back a copy and says, “Well done”.
Yes for exactly 30 seconds you feel as if a piece of literature that was your doing had just received international acclaim.
Until you look back at the paper and it reads, “By Ghafar Ali”.
If you clench your fists and your teeth - if you let your heart plummet into despair - you haven’t learnt anything.
But if you set the paper in the basket entitled “used”, crack a joke about Bilal being a useless piece of shit and smile at the page maker whose name you never asked but often wanted to, then it’s all worth the while.

This is an elegy written on blogspot.com.
Here I stand, reading the final rites to my days at the Daily Times.

When the rhetoric about the learning and the gaining gathers a storm and the clichés about trying and winning settle down into a gentle melody, what’s left behind is imprints in the shadows.
What is left behind are shadows meandering in lightness, escapading confusedly and looking for tangential questions.
Never waning, always always looking for permanency in the dew.

- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 1:43 PM