these days

نہ نماز آتی ہے مجھ کو نہ وضو آتا ہے سجدہ کر لیتا ہوں جب سامنے تو آتا ہے

i got this laptop some time during my sophomore year and i have been doing all my work on it for the last few years, which kind of goes without saying because this was the only laptop i had. then a few weeks ago, i got a bigger, better laptop from work, which supposedly runs twice as fast, and i’m only allowed to write code for work on my work laptop, so it has somewhat become my default laptop. i keep my own laptop tucked away somewhere in my room, go to work with my work laptop, and then when its dinner time and i have to watch youtube, i pull out my work laptop again just because the bigger screen is nicer. but today i opened my old laptop for the first time in a while to write and was a little thrown off when suddenly it felt much smaller than i remembered, almost like it was a toy. everything on the screen looked a little crowded, the text too small, and even my hands felt too big for the keyboard. i should have just said “oh” and moved on, but instead i sat there for a minute in the corner of my go to cafe during the weekend rush while everything i have been inwardly whining about for months rushed back to me.

to admit out loud that yours is a small life is, primarily, a little embarrassing, and secondly, probably a little unkind to everyone else around you that is leading the same exact life. it is undoubtedly, a depressing headspace to be in, and as they say, a shared sorrow is half a sorrow, but in consideration of the greater good, you have to keep this one a secret and not talk about it. because there is outwardly nothing wrong with your life that you could point towards, so anyone living a different life somewhere else probably can’t see that your daily commute drains the color out of everything and makes your world look like cardboard, and you can’t even turn to your fellow commuter and ask if this is all there is to life, because then you run the risk of turning a normal, obliging commuter into a questioning, self-conscious commuter. it is just like when you feel bad about your grade and you tell someone how terrible you feel about your grade, and then they turn out to have the same exact grade and ask “should i feel bad too?”. harboring such a feeling, in private or in public, turns out to be terrible fuss.

however, what is a much bigger fuss is having a big mouth like mine. sitting in traffic, i asked my fellow commuter if this is all there is to life. actually, i’m glad i did, because i was met with a question that, for someone that complains about life so often, i do not think about enough. what do you want from life? so i thought about it, and my answer is, not much actually. i already have a lot of the things i wanted, and every day im grateful for them. it helps that i have a poor memory too, because sometimes i think i wish i had a vape, and then i remember i actually do have a vape, and i get to experience both the joy of being a disposable vape owner and the instant gratification from the yakult flavored nicotine all anew. but there are still a few have-nots that bother me in the background of it all. i wish to be alone and go unnoticed for some time, i wish to live in a walkable city, and i wish for a quiet cafe to sit in. obviously these are nice things to have, but not having them is sort of an unobtrusive thing as well. and i wonder if i’m only complaining about not having them because i used to have all of these things at some point in time, and now i don’t anymore. you’ll get used to it. this is something i have heard a few times now. maybe i will get used to it. maybe in the same way that i got used to my new laptop, or maybe in an act of rebellion. maybe i just have to let some time pass before i switch seats on my commute.

on the weekends, i go to my cafe, which has become my go to study spot in these past few months and has these long tables where people sit with their laptops and try to look like they’re really busy working. i found this place without much trial and error since there aren’t that many in my neighborhood to choose from anyway, but i became a regular because the long tables happen to be raised to just the right height, so the ergonomics somewhat made up for the below average tasting coffee. the patrons here keep asking the baristas to lower the ac temperature, chatter loudly among themselves, and stare out the big floor to ceiling windows, and in this regard they sort of bring a parisian lunch break ambiance to the cafe. they sit at the cafe as an end in itself, not to achieve anything beyond just sitting at the cafe. a distinguished and astute individual, were they to pay a visit, might observe that this is in fact a practice in sartrean existentialism, and in this way these people allude to the french in a second, more ontologically complex manner.

there is one person here who is not french presenting. this girl who is always at the cafe at the same time as me, sits at the same spot one table away, and speaks really fast on the phone in urdu, so i actually think she might be pakistani. secondly, she exhibits severe locked in syndrome as she takes notes from her outsized textbook and reads her own tiny handwriting under her breath, although from time to time she does get up to take a walk around the table. once when i saw her walk in and see her usual spot taken, she went to find another empty chair in a different, faraway corner looking visibly upset, but this outcome might have actually upset me more than it upset her. one time she asked me to watch her phone while it charged at the outlet beside me and she addressed me in formal personal pronouns in bengali, but i got so inordinately flustered in that moment that when i later got up to leave, i couldn’t even bear to tell her that i was leaving her phone there. she hasn’t spoken to me again and im trying to figure out how to telepathically drain her phone battery.

when i leave the cafe, i watch out for the overhead telephone cables that characteristically hang low over the sidewalks in developing nations. for the first time in my life i have my five year plan nailed down and it would be a little inconvenient to get electrocuted right now, with the potential injuries born of high voltage electricity easily setting me back a few weeks or even months. then there’s the whole infrastructural disavowal of traffic lights, so every time i cross the street i have to kind of wing it. it’s tough out here; the whole city is booby trapped. i used to be a supervised teen here, but to make it as an unsupervised adult i need to start building street credibility, and to this end i’ve started aggressively people watching. on the pavement, a woman my mother’s age trying to fight back late afternoon tears. a man selling fish outside the mosque kneeling down beside a tub of melting ice to smoke a cigarette. i think i see my old quran teacher from kindergarten, but i don’t say salam because he used to hit me when i read the arabic wrong.

in a city that exhibits little commitment to preserving life, it probably becomes really easy, if not urgent, for the citizen to believe in god. when he needs to look up to someone, because he cannot look up to his mayor or anyone in the ranks of government, he has to look further up the chain. otherwise, it would take enormous courage for him to just wing it and go about his day without some assurance of protection, and mustering the courage for this would constitute such an unnecessary act of rebellion that the average person simply cannot rationalize the whole drama of it. a popular argument among athiests happens to be notion of the god of the gaps, wherein theists fill in god in places where they themselves are impotent. the theist says, “i cannot explain it, so it must be god,” and the atheist laughs. but if god is what you name your claim to life, then it must be a necessary god, just or otherwise. so in my city, faith comes easy, even if you’re not really keen on accepting all the terms of faith, such as love for the fellow man, it helps to know that if your mayor won’t pay you restitution if you get hit trying to cross the street, at least god will. i’ve been listening to a lot of qawali songs, and in one of them, these two lines kind of ring the loudest.

نہ نماز آتی ہے مجھ کو نہ وضو آتا ہے

سجدہ کر لیتا ہوں جب سامنے تو آتا ہے

Neither I know prayers nor ablutions

I prostate whenever you come in front of me

i suppose this is my life, at least for now. i go to work, try to look mysterious, find people to go on smoke breaks with every hour, and if no one wants to go, i stand in the sunlight and enjoy the few quiet minutes, and on the weekends, i go to my cafe. and i think about god. not really in a religious way, but whatever it means when you look up. and even though i spent the last few hundred words complaining about things, i am compelled not to go before i say this because it is true: i’m happy.