Melody of a Tear

By Haroon Khalid Akhtar and Haroon Khalid Akhtar

Melody of a Tear takes imagination to the next level. Zara, the suicide-prone protagonist of ambiguous gender, is raised as a son by her father. She has never been able to cry and so when she meets Zaid, a former college-mate, she is immediately curious because of the tear she sees streaming down his face. Thus begins a quest to understand this wondrous facility of easy tears. Her search for answers leads her to a crumbling mansion where she encounters Waris, an ailing repository of ideals and wisdom who moonlights as a children’s mystery writer, and Sheila and her brood who live behind the mansion, treating poverty as their religion. Here with Waris as her guide and mentor she unravels the spool of Zaid’s humanity to resolve the befuddling mystery of his tears and in the process reaches deep into the heart of her own dilemma as well. The plot, with elements of magic realism, is never what it seems and springs stunning surprises at key moments of the tale. Who is the victor in this story? Who is the real narrator? Do some people die or merely change forms? Whose figment of imagination eventually makes love to Zara? The answers are as intriguing as the surreal questions themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Niyogi
• Release date: Jan 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9789386906779

Book preview

Benefactor

PROLOGUE

In matters of private suicide, a woman in particular is really her own advisor, from planning to execution. Unlike a would-be-bride seeking wedding-day perfections, she can’t consult anyone on the finer details of the big occasion and on its ‘complex’ selection dilemmas such as choosing between formal and casual wear for the limp body that the woman will leave behind, or picking apt words and tone for the explanatory note that she may consider placing on her pillow or even finalising the saddest shade of lipstick. In my case, a chic, low-neck attire and some loud lipstick is in order to make me appear a complete woman at last, un-conflicted and easy on the eye, truly ‘dressed to kill (herself )’. ‘A tidy end at least, a curing death to a diseased existence, ’ they’d murmur. On the flipside, such bold choices may offend some hard-nosed relatives who believe death must remain a sombre affair. Pleasing everybody is tough, especially in demise.

Those were my last-minute thoughts on the day I was supposed to finish myself.

Except for deciding on those aspects, I was all set for the ultimate departure at the age of thirty-one. ‘Ifs and buts’ stood dispelled, determination mustered, bonds overcome. The time to slog through life seemed over. If anything, I was a few years late as it had taken a long dilly-dallying journey to arrive at this conclusive state of mind. I became truly suicide-prone somewhere in my early twenties when the sporadic dread of a long, enervating future started to eat away at my imagination—a trusted vastness—gradually reducing it to grave-like space that suffocated every delusion I tried conjuring. Already spiritless, genderless and tearless, I resorted to sedatives in panic but even in sleep I could feel my bedroom walls marching on me from all sides the moment I dozed off. And even the landscapes of my favourite paintings stopped looking like havens I could seep into one day. To counter the enveloping distress, my spiritual system threw up a dark response, a forbidden tickle of fatal temptation which over time matured to become my private little lust for escape. It was like having a secret back door ajar for my fidgety self to slip out when the walls would squeeze me eventually.

The history of my family, disappointingly, had no disclosed case of suicide. Ancestors were generally in the habit of dying greedily of old age, most deaths being peaceful and timely in unenviable, rotten bodies. Thus no ancestral endorsement could be acquired in the matter. All that time my discomfort with life kept manifesting itself in different forms—from frequent flare ups to recurrent bouts of depressions. In the mirror, I began to see someone I could no longer stand.

Then, after my mid-twenties, I hit a limbo which lasted a few years—a period of realisation that I was not committed enough to the cause of undoing myself, my case for dying perhaps still not watertight. At that time I didn’t realise what I lacked was a sip of life itself. In order to die, I needed to live first. Only the dispossession of a true life could turn death into an overpowering, spiritual desire.

That celebratory time came my way unexpectedly once I crossed the threshold of thirty years. In that brief chapter of my existence spanning a year, my dark longing for death gave way to a flickering desire to carry on. But that period proved ephemeral and soon dispossession struck like lightning, turning the nascent expectations to rust and handing me that irrefutable loss that could defeat any life.

After that deprivation things became straightforward as I could see a fitting resolution of all my woes through my final act that now appeared more like natural death due to the sense of decay flowing through my veins. A genuine, justified closure did matter after all to my somewhat religious conscience which was fond of murmuring the adage ‘life is a gift’.

Asif Medico across the street offered an array of over-the-counter sedatives that could be conveniently misused by the desperate. However, after stepping into the shop, I asked for a familiar one often used by mama to curb her nervous breakdown. This time it was a bulk order.

‘Ten strips you said?’ asked the suspicious shopkeeper who knew my modest household bought medicines in terms of tablets not strips. To him I must have always appeared a dishevelled woman looking for excuses to die.

I pretended counting money. Then I looked anxiously at the expiry date on the strips, as if expired medicines prevented one from dying. Once the change was handed, I swiftly stepped out humming a cheap tune I knew I hated and did not waste much time to decide on the dress and lipstick. Yes, it was going to be a low-neck prêt wear with loud red lipstick, an agreeable combination to make me appear deeply feminine to my lifelong detractors. I decided against the suicide note simply because I believed my reasons were too obvious to state, and had been so for the last many years.

My soul was all set for flight, my body about to feel that quiver of excitement usually felt before take-off.

I waited for nightfall and, then after carefully arranging the tablets in neat rows on my pillow, I thought about the afterlife, particularly in one context.

Will God be as obstinately invisible over there? Lurking somewhere in my decision was also a desperation to be pleasantly surprised. I had remained confused about God’s existence all along and suicide somehow seemed the swiftest way to settle the issue.

The process of dying took effect after an hour or so of taking the pills when blurry images started circling before my eyes, revealing a balding, married-looking god in a long coat, flanked by plenty of whispering wives in holy white, holding glittery instruments. They were probably done with my circumcision and were now readying to savour my exasperation. Before they could inflict any further piety on my person, a siren wailed and, dropping their weapons, they suddenly started taking turns to slap me, probably trying to extract voluntary confessions out of me in the interest of time. I tried remembering my sins but somehow could not go beyond stealing a library book occasionally or smoking privately. These sins seemed embarrassingly minor to share. As the slapping continued, I was convinced they had mixed me up with some chain-smoking, cross-dressing whore who too perhaps considered her sins too trivial to share.

I wanted to continue dying beyond doubt so I did not resist the brutal assault. Later, it turned out they were a bunch of redeemers from the local hospital whose job was to shove escaping life back into the human sack. The next day, I was unceremoniously handed back alive to my relieved mother who brought me back in a garnished rickshaw to the same old dungeon of discontent I had tried relinquishing. The ride was bumpy and poor mama, probably expecting a relapse of my desire, kept requesting the rickshaw driver not to hurry. Once home, I accepted the fact with dismay that my maiden suicide attempt was a few tablets short.

Diminished and sheepish, I did not step out of my room for two days, preferring to be surrounded by the unattended accumulating chores that I had been prolifically producing like a series of desultory siblings born of a frequently raped wife, all having something of their mother in them. While in bed and still feverish, I successfully invoked delusions to get through the afternoon.

I imagined I was back at Sufaid Kothi and was being treated to its customary, exhilarating buzz, my senses getting manipulated once again by that stuttering story teller Waris, who somehow still dwelled there. He was holding my hand on the Kothi’s rooftop, ready to whisk me towards the tiny dancing flame of the distant refinery tucked behind numerous concrete structures—the form of reincarnation he longed for himself, the distillation of all his receding hopes—appearing as the heartless metropolis’ low-lying conscience on some nights, weak but manmade, more believable than the stars. No amount of Nature could snuff it out. The backyard of the Kothi, like an ignited hearth, was full of chatter too, of the Hindu children; Gupta’s in particular who finally appeared to have found the missing Parsi treasure trove in the crumbling mansion which, to his mind, could elevate his mother to the level of a rich, clothes-washing Hindu deity.

Was scavenger Zaid back too in that fleeting realm, sifting through the slums of Karachi for tragedies he could make his own? I failed to feel any affirmation.

The brief ‘delusion of grandeur’ evaporated soon, giving way to new fears. Death had just grazed me, leaving me alive and now I was a person with no remedy left. In panic, I got off the bed and stumbled out of the room.

Outside, the apartment was cleaner and indifferent. Mama was standing in the kitchen like she continually had, instructing the maasi.

‘Go check the fridge for garlic. And close the door properly.’

What a devoted lady she had been all her life, always focused on feeding our stomachs. Food was her chosen medium for passing love to her family and this was where the problem lay. Her love was scrumptious, and smelled like a cure to all hunger but turned off by a mere flick of the chandelier switch on the dining room wall. She was a mother constrained by her medium, its victim.

In her simple heart, she must have been convinced that the new brand of spices in the food caused me to become suicidal, and if not the spices then definitely her negligence to open my room’s windows. Always quick to assume blame for everything that went awry in the family, she had managed to look like an octogenarian. But mercifully, dementia was setting in; that divine gift that sucked away worry, replacing it with a benign déjà-vu. Sadly, it required loads of living; it had to be earned.

‘Arre beta, why did you not keep to your bed? Should’ve called me,’ a visibly concerned mama spotted me while wiping sweat off her face with her dupatta.

‘I am all right now. The smell of curry drew me out.’

There was not a grain of truth in my words. Lying was my medium for loving her back; it kept me from disrespecting her. All my truths were made up of anger now and they came out like poisoned arrows at the slightest pretext.

She gave me a worrisome smile that I accepted gratefully and returned after replacing all its concern with a somewhat life-loving glance at the sunny day beyond the window.

It was of course the nineties and the inimitable BBC Hardtalk’s presenter Tim Sebastian could be heard interrogating his guest in baba’s room. That was how baba began his mornings, switching on the dish TV to watch the ruthless Tim—his superhero—pulling down the pants of people in high places, holding them to account once again in the morning rerun. I positioned myself outside his room so that he could see me.

Till late last year, he would certainly have called me inside. ‘Come, Zara beta. Watch how Tim is spanking the hypocritical British FM.’

But since my return two months back from a private pilgrimage, undertaken (failingly) to eternalise the fleeting celebratory phase, he had chosen to quit speaking to me altogether, declaring me dead-on-arrival and terming my cherished outing a shameful elopement. Apparently not even my attempted suicide had softened him to understand my reasons and grant clemency. Perhaps my termination might have bestowed upon him enough relief to recover from his bedridden state. I paused outside his room and waited just in case. But he didn’t call me in. I hoped he was still ignoring me rather than not seeing me at all.

In my mind, I heard him blurting out a callous question. ‘Couldn’t you have chosen a more definite way to die?’

Meanwhile the British foreign minister was beginning to jumble up words and baba could exclaim any moment.

‘Mind if I drive to the British Council? I badly need some books,’ I returned to mama.

She gave me her typical concerned stare but before she could try talking me out of it, I hugged her and quickly picked up the keys of the old Beetle. That hug too was a big lie.

Climbing down the stairs of the apartment building, I kept thinking of ways of forgiving baba myself.

His mild mannerisms and meek persona were responsible for his ‘also ran’ fate in both professional and materialistic races of life. To absorb those failures, he raised his children in the way a blind recluse would raise his pet: wild and vicious, argumentative, like a wolf; a Labrador in denial. That kind of upbringing needed masculinity to succeed. Wajid, my elder brother, reacted quite naturally to this handling and came through as headstrong and selfish as planned but I lost sense of my very gender in toiling to mould myself as baba’s second son. Alienated at school and college for being bitchy and moody, I could not secure lasting friendships at any level. My botched upbringing took its toll on every facet of my life including academic performance.

His method was simple. All along, I was supposed to believe him and not my body. Through small things he rigged me.

‘Little Raja, you look so much like that boy in the movie Home Alone.’

‘My boy, look what I bought for you! A cologne.’

‘I am a proud father of two strong lads.’

‘Stop sulking and do some push-ups for me.’

This was how he conditioned me in my formative years as his foot soldier to fight his lost causes. I was barred from shedding tears no matter how painful the injury or tragedy was. Sometimes, it made my eyes weigh as heavy as my newly formed breasts that seemed like lumps growing out of some sickness; treatable.

Ancestral reasons were also at work for the imparting of this fatal orientation. In the past couple of generations, his side of the family rarely witnessed daughters’ births. And the precious few who did arrive in this world left embarrassing trails later. Baby Sadiqa, his niece, eloped with a Hindu before turning eighteen, causing such shame to her father—an inveterate socialite—that he had to die of hibernation. The last nail was my maiden aunt, Baji Aunty, who lived a pitiable life of loneliness before her heart stopped chugging inside the Khyber Mail, over the criss-cross bridge; the last touch deliberately added by family elders for children to make it sound like a fairy tale ending to a truly miserable life.

Occasionally I visualised him seated on a hospital bench, fidgety and clammy, hoping to be informed of a second son that could round off his family nicely. And when the nurse finally broke the news, he stared foolishly at her as if she was mixing up fathers. Then he slowly ran his hand upon his balding head like a man mugged.

When one tries playing God, the peril lies in success. But to be fair, he wasn’t trying to hurt my interests; he was just too absorbed minding his own.

To please him, I contrived a gruff voice for myself in my teens, played cricket and climbed trees amid a shrinking circle of friends and an emptying soul. As the years wore on, fixing pipe leaks and fuses and paying utility bills became my sorry sources of fulfilment. Before long, my grades also started slipping as I grew more confused about myself.

The dangerously extended tomboy run was disrupted in my twenties when mama gave me my first pep talk on marriage. That was when I heard an inviting creak of a back door behind me.

Driving through the vehicular anarchy after leaving home, I reached Race Course Road and then soon after, Sufaid Kothi, or whatever was left of it. It was a site where life had flirted with me for a year, pushing me into a blind alley where I could undress and come out wearing a persona to go with my body and repressed identity. The premises were a dimension of space-time where the past could be betrayed, and where remaining stoic was not an option.

The gateless pillars of the decrepit mansion were still revealing the rusted iron hinges on either side, jutting out like the half-buried horns of some animal. Ahead, the dusty, winding pathway was showing wheel marks of ominous patterns that appeared sacrilegious to the place.

Last year, standing before the gateless posts for the first time, I had hesitated for the whole evening, unsure about the reasons for entering the premises. Back then, I was stalemated between life and death but had spotted a sensitive flicker in the blusters of my thick-skinned city that was too mystical to set aside, its pull leading me to the threshold of the old house. The glimmer was not entirely interpretable,