letters to various addressees

positive diss tracks or whatever the opposite of hateful writing is called

during the nationwide curfew and internet shutdown of the last few days, all my private grievances, resentments, and indignation felt so small. i thought about everything one could possibly bring to mind, and with the remaining time, of which there was plenty, i read a few books, played the chrome dino game, made a pong game in p5.js, and wrote prolifically. each of the letters below were written in one stroke of inspiration and are tokens from probably the most ascetic period of my life.

my readers

language at zero degree is precisely this: the conjunction of two bodies. as such, the pleasure for a writer with even the smallest audience lies in seeing how the audience connects with his words, what new words emanate from the audience in reaction to his. i have always been dismayed at my capacity for speech, but i forever have all my friends to thank for keeping up with my writing here and validating my exercise of language. on the way back from a trip to 7/11, all four of our hands swinging bags of instant noodles, rishit once told me that my words on summer at home felt like his own. i write for no higher purpose than this.

myself

at the end of all this, i am left to look at myself with a certain bewilderment: almost like when you look at a person and you wonder what breadth of experiences had made them the way they are today. except it is myself that i am curious about, and i already know all my life experiences, yet i am bemused. of all fictional characters, i see most of myself in voltaire’s candide, and i am convinced beyond contention that were sartre alive today, he would have loved to sit down with me for coffee at le deux magots. i say this because i have the ineffaceable lens of an existentialist: i am naturally predisposed to see beyond the essence of things. in this regard i might take after my father, but it could also be a consequence of my poor memory. for example, i still find it hard to understand why a wild bird from australia is flying around in my room right now and pleading for head scratches. the “blue pill” is that cockatiels have been bred as pets for years, but the sartrean response is only a nauseating mystification. or how it used to be a source of constant bewilderment that all my friends went to the same university as me (what are the odds!) until someone pointed out that we are friends because we go to the same university. i just tend to forget the all the essentializing facts. how silly everything is without goggles of habit! human desire and suffering included. sometimes i look back on things and cannot fathom why i did what i did, but at least it was cinematic when the lights went out and i told this 33-year-old i loved her; she said i was too young and walked away into the dark street. last summer i learned about the lebanese civil war and burst into tears: why did no one else seem bothered about the fall of beirut? this time around, i bear a certain nonchalance. i don’t really care about lebanon anymore, plus i doubt anyone in lebanon is counting on me for anything. there will always be things to cry about, but you have to be conservative with your tears. i used to be so distraught about the fate of the prisoners in guantanamo bay, but i have decided to zero in on freeing myself for now until i can help the prisoners later in some meaningful way. i barely smoke cigarettes anymore, because i don’t like the smell and apparently it is bad for your health (they got me). people always say things so definitively, but i know that it depends. the most important thing is to be nice to people. i used to take kindness to be a quality, but i have since been told that being kind is the bare minimum for a human. i giddy up when i randomly recall when a friend was kind to me. i wish the same feeling upon everyone, all the time.

manal

my shifty nature has made it so that each person i know in return knows me slightly differently. for so long i have done the utmost to maintain a generally amicable air, which meant that i have had to stylize my persona differently throughout the day. but manal feels ahistorical in a way that annuls the possibility of such trickery. i first started liking susan sontag so much because i was reading the benefactor, under the impression that it was sontag’s autobiography. i was drawn to the narrator in an almost indecent way: she just seemed to float through life and seemed kind of lost. i suspect the narrator was autistic, but i never got to find out because manal let me know that the benefactor is a work of fiction. when i was 20 and an overzealous philosophy reader, doing more for the brand than for anything else, and i was struggling to finish the myth of sisyphus because the writing was so painfully undulating and self-referential, manal said i didn’t have to finish it because she could just tell me how it ends. i sometimes wonder how our interests managed to naturally develop in parallel for all these years. the other day i let on that i might have outgrown car seat headrest, and she said she also doesn’t have a place for it anymore. manal has born witness to every single one of my romantic pursuits, and although unbeknownst to them, her invisible counsel has guided me and each of these women quite a bit. she recently told me that i cannot lose hope. maybe she is right, and i believe her in part because i want to but mostly because she has rarely been wrong. i suffer terribly from a poor memory, so that sometimes the way i feel about things happen to be inconsistent with my lore. i am set on the right track only after confessing to her my suspicions, having been reminded of the events from my own life that have escaped my memory. sometimes i struggle to see her as real, beyond an orator with untapped wisdom who also happens to be my friend. this is not entirely my fault, since most of the things that happen to her seem pretty absurd. how she started levitating in the bathroom, why she was on abc news, or why she had to comfort the operator when she called the suicide hotline, is still a little unclear to me. her cat seems exactly how one would imagine her cat to be, so that when god wrote in his book we made you in pairs, he might as well have been talking about manal and her cat. i am glad that she lived through that car accident, although i am not sure if she has insurance now and if there is another one i will be at a severe loss.

redacted

i am at once a child before you. the way a child scrambles to stand his ground, to find words to defend himself or to make his point. you come to me with an openness that i hardly find in anyone else, but your openness finds in me little warmth. i retort, and you are patient, but the anger you find in my voice is meant less for you than it is for myself. i betray a secret wish for this quality of yours to be reserved only for me, because everyone else you talk to seem to give you hopes that i am afraid i can never help you realize. perhaps the reason the people you talk to give you only the good side of things because they too can sense your genteel aspirations, your modest hopes. london is not a modest place, and i still cannot fathom moving there with you, but it is not lost on me that every month when you visit your friends in those small muslim communities in leeds, who only move between work, the mosque, and tesco, you so badly wish for a life like theirs. your views, bred by an innocence that bring to mind the picturesque that i was never a part of, are no match for my own corrosive, cynical outlook, hardened by having to do so many new things on my own. to talk to you is to confront all the years i have been alive, and by some obscure psychological mechanism i am too often reminded of only the bad ones. i have put in much work, since the bad years of bygone, to bury them deep in memory, because i am not the same thirteen-year-old and you too have crept eleven years closer to retiring from work. i have, in the meantime, read so many books, and i have talked to so many people from all these places, and i have been to cities you never have, but i cannot tell you about any of it. you don’t even know i was in lahore last december. the fog was so dense, and my teeth was clattering in the back of the rickshaw at six a.m., and i might have been a little scared. i rolled cigarettes for the guards on night duty at the hotel, and i almost missed my flight but at the airport i wanted to bring a souvenir back home, but i doubt you would want any of that. when you leave for work, i linger uneasily around the door because on a bad day you might never return, and i wish i could give you all my perfumes. i am certainly not as fearful of you now, and i know you want to hear from me too, although sometimes i still have nightmares that could not have been seeded by anyone other than you. i stutter because i am still afraid, albeit not as much, but mostly i just can’t find any words. there are often long pauses in my sentences, until i resort to using an english word, and then i am back to my usual stutter. i wish i had read more books in bengali instead, so that i knew how to speak to you with as much emotion as i do with my friends, but this will probably never happen. the other day i picked up the copy of the bengali translation of kafka i gave you a few years ago, but the translation is so bad that i could not read more than a few stories. if i could speak bengali, i would tell you what i don’t like about london, and that i will probably go to lahore again.