bundu khan in lahore taught me something about life

I have of late been thinking about Nikolai Gogol’s short story, The Overcoat; one of those rare pieces of literature that is sublime owing to something more than its layers of irony and tragedy. It’s the author’s quiet understanding of the human condition that makes it so personal. Akakiy Akakievitch, a lower class worker, lives a small life as an insignificant titular councilor in an unnamed Russian government office. He’s portrayed as someone without a silhouette: light or dark, Akakiy always just blends in. “When and at what time he entered the department and who appointed him, no one could recall. However many directors and other superiors came and went, he was always to be seen in one and the same place, in the same position, in the same capacity, as the same copying clerk, so that after a while they became convinced that he must simply have been born into the world ready-made, in a uniform, and with a balding head.” The premise is Akakiy’s lack of position in the world: he garners no respect from anyone around him and is rather treated in a peculiar offhand manner throughout the story. “In the department he was shown no respect at all. The caretakers not only did not rise from their places when he passed, but did not even look at him, as if a mere fly had flown through the reception room.”

The Overcoat starts with a description of its shabby main character, goes on to have a climax and a resolution — just like every other story. But you could take out those finer details to leave me with the unremarkable Akakiy, and I bet I would still marvel at the story just the same even years after reading it. It’s how small Akakiy really is that stuck with me: his entire life made so gentle a ripple that the rest of the sea took no hesitation to smooth it out. In his oblivious charades I saw my own younger self’s biggest fears manifested: the utter desperation not to live a small life like his. With Western media at home I never lacked a sketch of life’s grandeurs in the back of my mind, and I couldn’t think of possibly letting myself lying low in my third world country. I’d look around and see people whose lives were contained in such small spheres, their worlds being so small that I was afraid of living out my life like theirs. My worries being ever so small and insignificant, my pleasures being so close to earth that they grow among potatoes. It stirred up an insane drive in me to start over somewhere else, so I could get bigger worries that could only come from a bigger playing field. 

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

In hindsight, my whole outlook was a manifestation of voyeurism, a belief that a hierarchy was prerequisite for a good life, and contentment was the right of only those above a certain rank. I’m not proud to have borne such condescension, but if I can write this post today I can also forgive myself. In my formative years I consumed media that fed on this feeling. When I was 14 I was morbidly obsessed with the John Green novel The Fault in our Stars. The main character Augustus Waters dies of cancer, but before his passing he profusely expresses his fear of the ‘oblivion’, of not leaving his mark on the world. Life had to be pleasant, it had to be grand, and most of all it had to be remarkable to be worth living — that was the belief I fostered. It took me to reach the age of 22 to realize that sometime back then I had stopped living a teenager’s silly, inconsequential life, but I was always running a race to make it out of there, to exchange my world for something bigger. I wasn’t smoking after school or telling white lies to my parents because I needed a perfect score on the SAT so I could move out and live it big someplace else. At the root of all my discipline and conscientiousness at school was that fear, which I now reckon to be fatal, I shared with a fictional character.

I am not the first person to ask what makes a good life or what makes life worth living, but I am the only one who can ask what makes my life worth living. Given the fact that I have been on antidepressants for almost two years now it’s no surprise that I have often assumed the negative about life’s meaning. But as I am now on a serious hunt for a true answer, I’m choosing to temporarily thwart my mental illness to the best of my capacities so it does not affect my reasoning, and I can produce something meaningful that I can believe and hence rely on, at least for a while. So now we come to the question that after moving abroad, has the 22 year old rid himself of his juvenile fear of living it small? In truth the grown adult in question is terrified, is chronically unsure of the future and even of his day to day prospects. I am relentless in my feelings of anxiety of better grades, better status, better friends, so on and so forth. However, once in a while, when I am in deep, I think of that Carl Sagan quote, The Pale Blue Dot, and catch myself in the act of wallowing in my smallness. How small are my problems, how petty, in contrast to the grandeur of the universe. My worries being so minute, and my brain being too preoccupied with the content to notice the size of it. It is at those moments that I realize, the fears that I harbored as a teen are still festering within, unabated.

Since I was 14, I’ve read many other works of fiction, and it is not a few authors that deal with the smallness of being. To name a few, Franz Kafka, Sylvia Plath, and Fyodor Dostoevsky all explore similar themes in some of their most famous works. I was reminded that some of the most popular TV shows and movies of the earlier decades also have main characters who are just regular people. All of them took place in the same setting, with the same people for years. But the reason why these characters and their stories earned so much love from people was because they brought new meaning to still lives. As opposed to the men and women from Hollywood, the millionaires on Forbes 500, and the kings and aristocrats of the works of Homer, grandeur is but the farthest thing from the conception of happiness of these characters. Instead of depicting far reaching, extravagant and exclusive lives that most of us will never lead, the sitcom Friends renews in our minds the truth that things can be both ordinary and good. Most people in the real world will probably never stand at the top of the Burj Khalifa or ride a private jet. Nevertheless, in the seemingly unremarkable lives of all these ordinary people, if we could look at them without looking down, there exist stories that are worth telling, and retelling.

Long before I did, over 2,300 years ago, Aristotle asked the same question of what makes a good life. He defines eudaimonia, happiness, as something “that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.” Unlike pleasure or wealth, happiness, Aristotle argues, is an end in itself. Aristotle, it seems, had a solid conception of life’s true meaning, that which I haven’t fully grasped yet and also honestly don’t bother to realize myself. But I see his point in highly valuing friendship, so much so that he says one cannot have too many friends, for the sheer amount of work needed to build truly meaningful relationships. He even goes so far as to say that friendship supersedes justice and honor. “Being loved, however, people enjoy for its own sake, and for this reason it would seem it is something better than being honored and that friendship is chosen for its own sake.” Insofar as Aristotle’s philosophy is concerned, and since he also says that life can only be judged as a whole and not by discrete moments of happiness, I would say that up until this point, I have lived pretty well. Smoking on the tarmac outside my university campus, riding the bustling metro in Istanbul, or eating at Bundu Khan in Lahore — I have, in all of these scenarios, been accompanied by people I love. I might have not lived big, to the dismay of my 14 year old self, but as a 22 year old who can look close enough to find things to venerate in his own life, I would say I’m doing alright.