Amnesia

Rooftops make me dizzy.

But he stood on one with a smile. Arms confidently crossed the way in which Superman posed on screen just after vanquishing a super-villain. It must have been the suit. Sherry’s thin body, framed by the stiff angularity of the red cloak and the defiant yellow lines of the “S” on his blue t-shirt, looked at once frail and powerful. Preparing for flight he stretched his arms before him, ending them with two strong fists suitably accompanied by a tightening of his smile. Face hardened with determination, he chose his landing place on the garden down below and swam through our broken patio table, jagged edged glass still lining its sides.

He lifted himself slowly. Though the impact had unnerved him, his primal instinct to preserve his dignity, even as a boy of six spurred him enough to pull himself together and stand on his jittery feet. Unfortunately, this pulling together required that he half-disgustedly, half-desperately try and hold his right ear in place. For it had been just about severed off the side of his head by the broken glass still wedged on the borders of the table. Trickles of blood slid down from his dangling ear to his frozen face, settling finally as purple pools on his superman t-shirt.

Sherry walked silently up to Baba, his face streaked with salty blood and saltier tears. Of course, the dignity of his heroism ended here and he became a child again. A horrified father pulled himself together, sensibly sidestepped the screams of a fainting mother and rushed to the hospital in true superman style.

The last stitch to the side of his face produced miraculous first words from the small marvel’s mouth, “Ahhh! Theek ho gaya!” Mummy and Baba heaved sighs of relief, releasing nightmares of left-eared-only children. A fear that had been nagging them during those 47 minutes marked by a fainting mother, an agile father and emergency nurses calmly filing their nails at their stations, directing lazy fingers towards the hospital dispensary, unperturbed at the sight of a six-year-old superman with a hanging ear. Their hearts back in their chests they clung to their first-born with rapturous joy.

‘Super Stitch!’

That’s what we started calling Sherry. I don’t remember who named him. No one does … often such namings are so far in the past we forget why and even what the names mean. But it was appropriate. He had earned it. And, at least, we remember why. Pretending to be a super-hero he became one. I guess then it is possible to live our fantasies, to become the heroes we dream about, even if it means letting a doctor’s stitches redefine us. Or we may learn how to remember, although our memories twist our reality, coaxing us to believe in glorified histories…

I have no memory whatsoever of the incident. But the powerful voice of my father brings it alive every time. And if I drift away by the power of his words, Baba finds encouragement in my wide-eyed wonder. In the telling his thoughts become real. More real than if I could have remembered them myself. And through the curious amazement that he sees in my eyes he is able to relive his painful memory.

I have so many memories – memories more cherished and more vivid than real ones for they were transferred to me through his eyes and words. Constructed memories, even of the day I was born. So powerful were his words and so honest his eyes, when he recounted our early days that I distinctly remember the incubator in which I lay as a new-born, my eyes following the naughty smile and playful blue eyes of my father. He proudly tells me that I had been able to identify him in those first moments of my life – how he had been able to recognize me as his own by my singular gaze. A gaze of wonderment, of curiosity; of eyes that search for their reality; that seek to coax out the truth of their beginnings. Eyes that spoke to him. Eyes that still hold their power. My real memories are thus mixed with recollections of my brother’s heroic deeds and stories of my searching eyes in an incubator in a pink hospital room.

I saw my super-heroic sibling shimmy up the side of our two-story house, set atop a partially demolished hill, aided by pipes; I saw him jump upon the rusting barrels that stored the filter pumps for the swimming pool from the boughs of the boundary-defying mango tree that grew in the neighbors yard - he had simply jumped and grabbed the sturdiest possible bowing branch, motioning me to follow – I had not; I saw him scale walls, using holes left by loosened bricks as footholds (I suspect he had loosened them himself) and expertly hurl himself up onto the awning from which he had earlier taken a near-fatal plunge.

But I never ever saw him twist his ankle upon a particularly daring jump back to the ground from the sturdy pipes; and I never saw him jam his thigh onto a jutting metal plate obscured by the leaves of the mango tree; or dive from the awning through the metal table with hanging shards of glass.

These I learned to remember.


THE IRONY OF ROOFS

No. I did not cause the accidents. Nor did Sherry climb aided by the focused iron gaze of his little sister. He did not fall because I slipped away after goading him into high awnings and bent branches. This is not a story about undiscovered magical powers that burst through unsuspecting young vessels. This is a story about transference.

It is a story about planted memories and absorbed fears.

Rooftops, as I said before, make me dizzy.

And it was on a particularly high rooftop – far away from my hometown – battling anonymous kites in busy skies, during the celebration of an ambiguous spring, that I was struck at how high I stood…and simultaneously, how low.


BLACKENED RAINBOWS

The skies were brilliant that week although everyone insisted that this was nothing compared to the flying rainbows of the old city and those nothing compared to how they used to be. Never-ending reminiscences and never-ending laments. A time before televisions and air-conditioners, when children were children and invented worlds – children who did not waste their childhood playing violent video games and chatting with strangers across insecure borders.

But how to do all this when strings that fly kites are stronger than cords that carry power?

When the glass-lined dore neatly slices power cables and plunges us all into 47-minute nightmares?

Into blackness?

When desperate students struggle to finish dead-lined term papers on the computer (borrowing a little here and there, for time is of the essence and there isn’t a lot of it!) and frantically call the Water and Power Development Authorities, asking with polite gruffness, “Bijli kab aaye gi,” (we cannot anger them – our lives are hostage to dead lines), only to be told by a sleepy linesman,
“Kaam pura jaari hay. Aap complaint number lay lain,” who will only get to work when he receives a call from a Minister’s house (only if we are lucky however, for most have state-sponsored generators).

When power failures plunge us into nightmares of failing children in a flailing nation.


SPINNING CRESCENTS AND CRUSHED WHEELS

The Crescent in Urdu. Not left to right as I used to draw in art class but right to left, the star perched a little more towards the outside than the star of my imagination, which had always nestled comfortably in the womb of the new moon. The crescent of Hukoomat-e-Pakistan. Of the one-rupee coin, minted in 1983.

That was the crescent that had dared me into mounting 23 narrow steps on one landing and 24 on another before reaching the rooftop. The stairs were threatening in themselves: uneven and steep. Traffic upwards, hungama downwards. Impatient people in impractical heels and soiled boots, clutching greasy paper napkins, on their way down, demanded room in front of me. And behind me, clumsy people with difficult-to-negotiate kites, agitated to move quickly ahead.

Not daring to look down, I focused on the acrobatics of an indigo kite, watching it drop. And soar and soar till it touched the tip of the sky, merging forever into the cloudless shell. There was a white one – plain white on a sturdy khaki frame – cutting effortlessly across the wind, dodging this one, executing that one. In the streets below lay countless frail wooden frames with tattered paper coverings - green, brown, saffron - proud crescents in the mud, promising no more full moons. Spinning wheels crushed under horses hooves, buried under mounds of their fresh droppings. Once-happy kites now the victims of the white queen of the undivided sky.

I turned away.

From somewhere lunged a dying kite. The winds were strong. It cut the white … I turned again and saw it fall dizzily onto the roof.

Down … it tumbled lazily towards me. For a defeated creature, it was in no hurry. Perhaps its slow tumble was a carefully designed maneuver, telling the bystander that this relinquishment of power was voluntary. That the dying kite with the crescent and the star which slashed the invincible dore in its’ final breath was a happy coincidence. That the spinning wheel and its bleeding workers lying dead in the streets of long-ago grandeur were merely incidental to its grand plan. Tracing lazy lines in the restless sky, as carelessly as emergency nurses filing their nails at their stations at the sight of bleeding children desperately trying to keep themselves together. Tracing lazy lines in the restless sky separating the crescent and the spinning wheel forever.

I picked it up. Escaping the broken bottles and trundling cars that claimed its broken enemies on the snaking streets of the walled city it fell into my hands … perhaps it was my iron-gaze that willed it towards me? But I have told you before, I have no magical powers awaiting discovery. It just fell towards me. That is all. This is not a story about magical powers. This is a story about transference.

And constructed memories.

And when that white kite fell into my hands, it all came together.


UNDERLINGS

The struggle of kites in bright spring skies … the most innocent and most deadly of struggles….

The players are anonymous and so there is no possibility for developing hatred and enmity at the outcome of battles between dore and dore. The focus is on quickly unrolling the glass-lined string so that the tension in the wires doesn’t cause us to break and fall…. It is a delight to cut an adversary’s kite and still sport when we find our own kites flailing in the busy skies alongside so many others … and still there is the great chance of falling flags slicing off some particularly tense dore that glides in the air proclaiming itself supreme. In the sky there are no rules, no rulers. There are no boundaries and no borders … there cannot be. We do not have that control over the humbling enormity of the sky … at least not yet!

But innocent struggles easily turn bloody. In the name of abstract causes, of invented loyalties, of the-national-interest, the line between an adversary and an enemy quickly blurs. The anonymity of kite-fights and the remoteness of battlefields create a distance so complete that truth becomes elusive. A distance that can only be compared to the inscrutable space between past and present. A space that is only negotiable through memory.
And yet how elusive can memory be? How well may we trust something as malleable, as fleeting as associations in a mental map? Where are the lines of control? Where are the neutral observers? The moderators of our scarred histories?

When the players are hidden, when motives are shrouded behind the safety of apparently open skies how easily can the histories of nations be written … how conveniently can official pens re-write their inadequacies and turn them into heroic achievements. How effortlessly can truths be written off? Just as easily as doctors stitch back ears, and fathers re-tell originary stories to their daughters…just as easily as linesmen shrug off our complaints in our hours of darkness…just as easily as we fly kites in spring and battle anonymous enemies…just that easily are our memories modified. And just that easily do they come to define us even when they speak of times when we were born and cannot possibly remember the truth of our beginnings.

Thus we become the authors of our own misfortunes. We are lead to believe that we can fly by the very voices who have clipped our wings. To believe that alien histories are our true inheritance. We salvage the remains of kites that are not ours, of flags that will never give us shelter while our own voices, our own blood and tears, our own flags lie scattered on the ground.

Standing on a rooftop, afraid to look down at the massacre of my people, I realized how high I stood … and simultaneously, how low.